Robert Wilson: The Affinities

“Seriously? She never mentioned any of that to me.”

For obvious reasons. My grandfather had venerated Barry Goldwater, and there had never been a word of dissent from Grammy Fisk. By the time my father was born, her Charlie Parker and Bob Dylan records had gone into permanent storage. But she saw things the other Fisks were blind to. If the world was a puzzle, she was drawn to the pieces that didn’t fit. “You know how she was.”

“Yeah.”

Jenny was five-foot-three in stocking feet and dressed as if she wanted to be ignored: jeans and a cotton shirt and blond hair tied back so tightly it hurt to look at. A mouth that gave out smiles like party favors but had been made somber by Grammy Fisk’s illness. She cocked her head at me. “How are you really doing, up there in Canada? And what happened to your face?”

I told her about the incident at the demo. At the end she said, “So are you a cop-hating lefty now?”

“Honestly? What I remember about that cop is how he looked. Pissed off, obviously, you know, all wound up, but also scared. Like what he did to me was something he might not be proud of. Maybe something he wouldn’t mention when he went home to his wife.”

“Or maybe he was just an asshole.”

“Maybe.”

“He had a choice. He could have told you to move on.”

“Sure, but the situation was pushing him hard in one direction. Which made me think about how fucked up and really arbitrary it is, the way we conduct ourselves with other people. There has to be a better way.” And because this was Jenny, to whom I could say almost anything, I told her I had taken the Affinity test.

After a pause she said, “Those Affinity groups … they’re what, some kind of dating service?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” I explained about Meir Klein and InterAlia. “Basically, I was tired of not having anybody to talk to except a couple of guys from my classes at Sheridan.”

“So they sort of design a social circle for you?”

“Not exactly, but yeah, you end up with a bunch of new friends.”

“Uh-huh. And it really works?”

“Supposedly. I don’t know yet.”

“Well, well, well.” Which was classic Jenny. It meant, I don’t like what I’m hearing but I’m not prepared to argue about it. “Maybe I should join one of those groups.”

“There might not be any in Schuyler just yet.”

“Mm. Bad luck for you, then. When you move back home.”

“Which won’t be anytime soon.”

Her eyebrows went up. “But I thought—”

“What?”

“With Grammy Fisk and all—”

“I’ll be here a few days more, but I can’t stay much longer than that. I need to set up a summer internship, for one thing.”

“But Grammy Fisk was paying your tuition.”

Because my father had refused to. He didn’t approve of what he called my “artistic side,” and he considered any degree that wasn’t an MBA a concession to limp-wristed liberalism. But Grammy Fisk had fought him on that one. She couldn’t dictate how he spent his money, but she had money of her own, and she had been determined to spend it on my education, even if that caused trouble in the family—which it needn’t , she inevitably added, if my father would take a step back and allow her to do her youngest grandson this simple favor. What was wrong with Adam setting out on a career of his own, even if it did involve drawing pictures?

Jenny put her hand over mine. “I’ve been at the house. I hear the talk. I don’t know what arrangements Grammy Fisk might have made. But she’s not legally competent anymore. She signed a power of attorney after the gallbladder thing. Your dad’s in charge now.”

I drove Jenny home. Visiting hours were over and Grammy Fisk had been left alone with the night nurses and the cleaning staff at Onenia General. Jenny’s house, a dozen streets away from my father’s, was dark except for a single light in the office above the garage. Ed Symanski must have been awake in there, doing his accounts, maybe reading or watching Netflix. Jenny’s mom was probably asleep. “Drunk by eight, dead drunk by ten,” as Jenny had described her. But that didn’t preclude the possibility of night events: unprovoked midnight arguments, objects thrown against walls. “You can sleep over at our house tonight,” I said. I knew she had been doing so for the last few days, on the grounds that the Fisks needed a hand with their family crisis.

She shook her head. “I have to be here sometimes. My dad can’t handle it all by himself. But thanks.” And we shared a half-hearted kiss.

Back at the house I checked my phone for messages and found an email from a name I didn’t recognize: Lisa Wei.

Hi Adam. My name is Lisa and I’m hosting the next Tau get-together. You’ll be invited in a general mailing, but since you’re new I wanted to introduce myself and make the invitation personal. The time is two Saturdays from now. Show up at 4 if you want to help set up, 6 if you want dinner, 8 if you just want to socialize. The tranche house is close to the Rosedale subway station and details will be in the mailing. Anyhow, please come!!! The first meet-up always seems intimidating but it’s really not, take my word for it. Can’t wait to meet you!

It was nice, and under other circumstances I would have welcomed it. But given the question mark hovering over my future, I had to send a noncommittal response.

I grieved for Grammy Fisk in my sleep that night. I couldn’t grieve by daylight because she wasn’t dead. But in my dream the loss was complete. I woke up calling her name. No one heard me, fortunately, and the sound of the wind at the window was lonely but oddly comforting, and eventually I was able to drift back to sleep.

Grammy Fisk’s presence had operated in the family the way carbon rods function in a nuclear reactor: she damped down a potentially explosive force and turned it to useful work. Without her, we were bound to reach critical mass. The unstable radioactive core was, of course, my father.

But most of my week in Schuyler passed relatively quietly. Each day began with a trek to the hospital, some visits longer than others because my father was getting briefings about options for Grammy Fisk’s extended care, either in a dedicated facility or at home (an option he ruled out pretty quickly). The sessions by Grammy Fisk’s bedside grew more brief as the reality of her situation began to sink in.

She never registered our presence in any meaningful way. Her eyes were motionless behind the papyrus of her eyelids. Still, I talked to her. I told her about school, I shared my ambivalence about Jenny and our future, I even mentioned the Affinity I’d joined. These were the kinds of things I had once discussed with her and with no one else. Sitting beside her vacant body, I was able to imagine her responses. She spoke to me the only way she could, through the medium of memory and longing.

I also made a point of spending time with my stepbrother, Geddy. Grammy Fisk would have approved, but I didn’t need to be pushed. I liked Geddy. At twelve, he was chubby and quiet and easily intimidated and more bookish than he liked to let on, all of which reminded me of how I had been at his age. (Except for the chubbiness: I had been one of those kids who needs to be encouraged to eat.) On the Wednesday before I left, Geddy took me up to his room to see the posters Mama Laura had grudgingly allowed him to tack up on the wall.

Geddy would probably have placed on the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, had he ever been diagnosed. His serial obsessions (which included kites, architecture, LEGO, stories about heroic animals, and the band My Chemical Romance) were what he preferred to talk about, which was why my father had banned all these subjects as dinner table conversation. The posters Geddy had been allowed to put up were a picture of Rockefeller Center (“It was designed by the architect Raymond Hood. He also did the Tribune Tower in Chicago.”) and a concert photo of Gerard Way. A small wooden bookcase housed his subscription copies of Popular Mechanics , the only magazine my father let him read, and a few ancient Albert Payson Terhune novels, also donated by my father. In one corner was the meticulously tidy desk on which Geddy did his homework. He owned a laptop for school purposes, but he was allowed Internet access only an hour a day and under supervision. He cherished an old click-wheel iPod, which neither my father nor Mama Laura had yet learned how to police for forbidden files, loaded with slightly out-of-date goth and emo bands.