Eric Lustbader - The Testament

Spagna opened the double doors, the murmur and aromatic smoke drifted in from the larger room, and the four, their business completed, headed briskly for the door. The last of the group was the American. As the others departed, he turned back as if in afterthought and, strolling back to Jordan, whispered so only he could hear: "You know what you have to do, don't you? What is it the English say?" He grinned. "Oh, yeah, 'Off with her head!'"

"So how is it with you, son?" Dexter Shaw said.

Bravo looked down, then away. "Oh, you know. The same."

"We haven't seen each other in over six months. You've been at Stanford and I've been away."

Father and son were sitting at an outdoor Burmese restaurant off M Street. It was summer, and Georgetown was cooking. Bravo had come up to see him, and Dexter had taken the afternoon off. That evening, they were scheduled to hear the Washington Philharmonic, sitting in the president's box.

"Anyway," Dexter went on, "what I meant was girls." He sought to catch his son's eye. "Do you have one-a special one, I mean?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?" Dexter cocked his head. "Surely you can't mean that." Then, after a long beat, "Ah, I see. You don't wish to tell me. It's all right, Bravo, if you don't want to share-"

"Share? Why should I share?" Bravo blurted out. "When have you ever shared anything with me?"

Dexter blinked. "I can think of any number-Anything important, Dad." Bravo had been unable to keep the exasperation out of his voice, "And, come to it, when have you ever come out to Stanford-"

"A year ago October, I believe it was."

"Sure, you were on your way to, where was it?"

"Bangkok."

"Right, Bangkok. We were going to have lunch, go to the theater. I got tickets, and then-"

"My schedule changed. I told you, Bravo. I'm very sorry, but there was nothing I could do."

"You could have stayed."

"No I couldn't," Dexter replied, "I don't have that sort of job, I never have."

Lunch came then, and they both fell silent, grateful for the distraction of eating. Fragrant smoke from the charcoal oven wafted through the leafy garden, strung with colored paper lanterns. Laughter and the murmur of other voices, the clink of tableware against plates, traditionally garbed waitresses silently coming and going.

At length, Dexter put down his fork and said, "Honestly, I would be interested to hear about anyone special in your life."

Bravo looked up, and his father smiled at him, an expression that brought him back to when he was younger, to the best days of their relationship. Still, doggedly, he said nothing. He felt keenly the spite his father's on-and-off attention brought out in him, the disappointment at his long absences, his father's refusal to talk about them.

"All right," Dexter said, "then I'll tell you about my first love." He took a sip of beer, his expression turning even more thoughtful. "She was smart and quite beautiful, but the main thing about her was that she was going out with my friend. I'd met her at a party-a pretty drunken affair-and we'd started talking while my friend was in a stupor, head in the lap of another girl who was also unconscious.

"Anyway, we hit it off. We were both so embarrassed we didn't know quite what to do, for days after walking around in a painfully pleasant haze-you know the sort I'm talking about, neither of us could sleep or eat. All we could think about was, well…

"Finally, we couldn't take it anymore and we met on the sly. Afterward, I wondered whether that was what poisoned the relationship. It was rather fierce, not that it lasted very long, but it felt like forever."

Dexter's ironlike hands sat atop the table. "One might have thought that the deceit necessary to sustain the relationship would have worn me out, but, really, that was no problem for me. But what I found out… you see, as a young man I was lonely as only young people can be. I had temporarily-and rather thoughtlessly-severed my relationship with my parents, I was never a joiner, and so I was alone. This girl-I saw in her a way to make a connection, to come in out of the cold, as it were." He laughed. "Human beings are so stupid sometimes, they think that sexual intercourse will alleviate their essential loneliness. In fact, sex only reinforces reality-it's a vivid reminder of how truly alone they are.

"You see, Bravo, it's not a question of whether one is alone or not, it's a question of what one does with one's aloneness." He cocked his head again. "Does one give in to sullenness and despair, or does one begin to learn about oneself? Without that knowledge, how can one begin to make connections with anyone else?"

"Is this another lesson?" Bravo said boorishly. "I'm not ten anymore."

"No lesson intended or implied, Bravo. I was only trying to tell you… to do what you wanted me… to share."

Bravo looked away, biting his lip.

"What I mean to say, Bravo, is that you and I… we're different from other people. We're… well, I guess you could call us outsiders-it's far more difficult for us to find ourselves. Sometimes I ask myself what I have to do in order to be saved."

"Saved?" Bravo's head swung around to engage his father's eyes. "Saved from what?"

"From evil," Dexter said. "Oh, I don't mean the kind of evil encountered in the Crusades, at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Hiroshima, in Angola and Bosnia, I don't mean the astonishing cruelty of mankind. This evil grips the mind and won't let go. It is a nausea of the soul, when you think nothing you possess can save you. 'What am I doing here?' you think. 'What is my purpose?'"

He held his glass of beer between his powerful hands as if it were a stalk of wheat. "You and I, Bravo, are not what we had assumed ourselves to be. It's natural, I suppose, to ask, Why? The answer is: because there is a power inside us. Are we supermen? No. But perhaps we are like artists; we are not hollow men, as Eliot so accurately termed them, though that may be our first reaction. Like all artists of every stripe, our desire, then, is to escape-escape the horror of the mundane, to become something better, to lead others along the same path-to, in a sense, save them from themselves."

Bravo was held spellbound. He understood every word his father said, understood it with every fiber of his being, understood down to his very soul. The knowledge shook him to his core.

Dexter shrugged. "If you don't get it now, I trust that one day you will."

But I do get it, Bravo thought, and was about to tell his father as much, when Dexter glanced down at his watch.

Jesus, Dad, no. Don't do it…

"I'm sorry, Bravo, but I have to get to the airport. I'm afraid I'm off again." Dexter pushed over two tickets along with a pass richly embossed with the presidential seal. "You take your girl-the one you won't tell me about-to the Philharmonic. Trust me, she'll love sitting in the presidential box."

Fuck the presidential box, don't leave me again…

Glimmers on the water seemed to follow them in the gray churning wake. Sky and sea were painted the same shades of purple and black. The low islands of the lagoon were strung out like a gigantic cipher. It seemed to Bravo now, standing beside his Uncle Tony, the motoscafo's engine thrumming through the soles of his shoes, moving through this dark and misty lagoon of antiquity, that Venice belonged to his father. Lights of unknown origin played over the water, refracted and reflected into shapes of cold flame that illuminated the shallow inky waves, smooth as glass.

Bravo took out the SIG Sauer. He tried not to think of Uncle Tony snatching it from him, firing at Zorzi point-blank. Perhaps in the Voire Dei it had been the right thing to do, he didn't know. "I don't understand," he said, wrenching his mind away from black thoughts. "I checked it after Zorzi gave it back to me."