Colin Harrison: The Havana Room

" Are you going to find a job?" Judith finally asked one night.

"Of course."

"No, I really mean it, Bill."

"I will find a job, okay?"

Judith had lost a few pounds, five perhaps. There had been some long, unexplained lunches, and she'd lost a few pounds.

"I understand that you may subconsciously need to do this to yourself, because you feel so bad. But you don't have to do it to us."

My son had taken down his Derek Jeter posters and given them to me, saying I could sell them if I wanted. There's nothing subconscious about any of this, I thought.

"I've contacted twenty-something law firms in the city, Judith. I've been to six search firms, I've been through the alumni directory, I've lunched with everyone I know." But I was damaged goods. The word had gone out. It was in my face, my eyes, my posture. Even though I tried to hide it and wore nice ties and talked about needing "new challenges." When you're desperate they can tell, and they pity you and hire someone else. It's monkey-logic, it's human nature.

"You were Yale Law Review, you were top-drawer!" Judith cried. "What's going to happen?"

"I'm waiting for the bounce," I confessed.

She almost laughed. "The bounce?"

"I won't break," I promised. "I'll bounce."

"When?"

"I don't know." It was the truth.

Judith's voice was nakedly bitter, dismissive. "How far down do you go before you do this bounce thing?"

I didn't answer.

"It's pretty far, isn't it?" she said, her own voice bouncing off the white ceiling.

I thought I knew you, I muttered to myself.

"And what makes this so-called bounce happen, anyway?" she cried. "What do you hit that makes you come back up?"

I loved Timothy. This is what I wanted to say. He had a nice motion with a baseball, he was sloppy eating his cereal, he brushed his teeth haphazardly, he was learning script and made funny errors with his capital K's, he could listen to an entire Yankees game on the radio and tell me how every run scored, he never picked up his towels or his underwear or dirty socks, he donated his allowance to the World Trade Center charity, he got carsick in taxis, he loved Bart Simpson, he practiced holding his breath in the tub, he was a boy. He was a boy I loved, every last molecule, and there had been another boy who was loved just as much, and I had caused his death. The bounce would come when I had forgiven myself as best I could, had earned some fragment of peace, but not before then. That was what I knew, deep in my own lost boy-self, but I could not tell Judith that.

"Listen," I said, "we'll sell the apartment. I'll do whatever I can. You know that. I can work for the government. I'll sell real estate. I'll drive a cab, I'll teach high school. We can move to another city and I'll work as a lawyer there. You know I'll do anything to support this family."

Judith didn't reply. Instead she tilted her head, adjusted her angle of perspective. What she did next scared me. She blinked. She was thinking. Understanding something- if not about me, then about herself. "I don't know, Bill."

"What don't you know?"

"I don't know if I can do this."

I nodded supportively, I thought. "It's a tough time. But we'll make it through."

Judith crossed her arms. "I feel very uncomfortable about everything. We're becoming poor." She waited for me to react. I didn't. "Poor!" she screamed.

"I would say we've dropped down no farther than what's politely called the upper middle class, Judith. I don't think you or I have the first goddamn idea what real poverty is."

"Well, I feel poor."

"That's a perception, not a fact."

"I also don't feel good about us, Bill, I don't feel good about you." Her voice was shrill, fearful. "Because I don't think that you can fix everything. I know how much you blame yourself. But it was a fucking accident! But you believe you have to suffer because of it! That's what's in your head. And I don't want to suffer with you! And I don't want Timmy to have to suffer! Why can't you just shake this off, why can't you just sort of pretend it didn't happen?"

Pretend that Wilson Doan Jr. hadn't died in our son's bedroom? I didn't have an answer. I could only watch Judith's gaze dart around the apartment- as if all we owned were burning before her- and then back at me, her expression furious, her beautiful eyes filled with resolve, even hatred. Yes, she hated me now, and wanted me to know it.

"You're not going to stick around and find out, is that it?"

"I don't think you under-"

"I understand that you're embarrassed by the fact that I'm not making any money right now. I understand that your sense of security has been assaulted-"

"Shattered- fucking shattered, Bill."

"And I understand, Judith, that you have withdrawn all spousal affections until such time as money has returned to your hot little hand."

"Oh, fuck you!"

"Well, that's my point. You won't."

"That's right, and why would I want to?"

"Because you used to like it."

"Yeah, well, I used to do a lot of things and now I do other things," she said, coldly. "And you might as well understand that."

Judith moved out less than a month later, after badgering me into letting her sell the apartment. Yes, she moved out- to San Francisco. We didn't know anyone there, so far as I knew. The giant yellow moving van came while I was out buying coffee, and the two of them left that evening, Timothy holding his empty baseball glove. No fight, no tears, even. As if it wasn't really happening. The real estate agent will be here in the morning, Judith said, everything is taken care of. All you have to do is leave. I nodded dumbly. You'll have to find yourself a place to live, Bill, okay? Her arms were folded in front of her. Lips rigid. Voice firm. You understand why this has to happen. I think she had Timothy on some kind of tranquilizers, because he didn't protest or cry, not at that point anyway, and when they were gone, when they had actually left me, forever and ever, I — well, I fell apart.

I know this is ugly, I know this is sad. If you see a minivan crash off the highway, engine smoking, windshield a bloody mess, rear wheels in the air, you slow down for a good look and then stomp on the gas to get the hell out of there. I do, too. After all, there are so many pleasant entertainments. The sitcoms and the cyberfrolic. It's all great. Go to it if you must. Flick and click and disappear. You won't get that here. This goes somewhere else. This is about waiting for the bounce.

For a time I rented a two-bedroom apartment in one of the anonymous new towers on the West Side of Manhattan, bright and clean and charmless, faced with pink granite- a bakery confection of an apartment building. The real estate agent, a man who carried three cell phones, sensed my aloneness and distraction and announced that the place was "a guaranteed babe magnet, let me tell you." But that didn't interest me so much as the fact that the building seemed far removed from my old circles. No one I knew would imagine that I'd moved to such a place. The apartment, which faced west toward New Jersey, as well as California, where Judith and Timothy now lived, was large enough that Timothy would have his own room, and I duplicated as many of his possessions as I could remember- clothes, shoes, video games, Yankees posters- keeping alive the dream that my boy might soon be sleeping in the bed or flipping through his baseball cards while listening on the radio to Derek Jeter foul off curveballs. But I quickly found that I was unable to step foot into the room, that doing so filled me with dread, as if Timothy himself had perished, the room merely a shrine to his memory.

A few months into my time there, one of the residents, a woman of about forty with bluish lipstick, frowned as I passed through the lobby. "Excuse me?" she called.