Lily King - Father of the Rain

I hug her and she whispers, “I can’t believe you’re leaving me in this hellhole.”

I laugh, because I’m not. She landed a job at the University of New Mexico and is moving to Albuquerque in two weeks.

Jonathan wraps his arms around me from behind, kissing the back of my neck as I cut the cake. “Can you make them all leave now?” he says in my ear. “We only have a few more hours together.”

“This was your idea, Magoo.” He is nearly a foot taller than me and I can feel him pressing against the base of my spine. “Get ahold of yourself.”

We aren’t going to be separated for long. He’ll come out to California as soon as he finishes teaching the first summer session next week. I still can’t quite believe he’s coming with me. At the last minute Jonathan Fleury, who, as Dan likes to say, planned his bowel movements three years in advance, took the job at San Francisco State and turned down the one at Temple. Now it’s up to me to screw the whole thing up.

“You’re not going to screw it up,” Julie said a few days ago.

“How are you so sure?”

“Because it’s Jonathan. He won’t let you. He’ll be eight steps ahead of you.”

“You’re right. He will.” It felt a little suffocating, actually, when she put it like that.

When everyone has a piece of cake, Dan lifts his glass in my direction. “Here’s to Daley,” he says, “who soundly rejected me five long years ago in the middle of our first date.”

“Second,” I say.

Dan lowers his wine. “What was the first?”

“Coffeehouse.”

“Oh. Right.” He raises the glass again, resumes his stentorian tone. “All because my car wouldn’t start.”

“Not because your car wouldn’t start. Because you started pounding on the steering wheel and screaming fuck fuck fuck about fifty times.”

“I was trying to impress you with my manly bestiality.”

“Beastliness. Bestiality might have impressed me. Why is it that writers have such a lack of precision when it comes to the English language?”

“By the way, can you shut up? I’m actually leading up to saying something nice about you, so stop heckling me.”

“It’s so hard. You remind me too much of my brother.”

“So you have said. Many times. Just what a rejected suitor wants to hear. Anyway, despite your strange and inexplicable impulses”— he looks over at Jonathan, who grins at me; Dan introduced us: by accident, he always insists—”you have been a comrade to me through dark times and light, and I will miss you more than I will ever let on.”

Dan reaches across the table to hug me. His BO is as strong as always, and the grass smell of his hair brings back that first date when he kissed me in the middle of a conversation about Saul Bellow and my stomach spun for days at the memory — until the second date, when I had to get out of the broken-down car and walk away.

Julie clears her throat dramatically. Since Mallory, she’s the closest thing I’ve had to a sister. We’ve shared an apartment for four years. Even the way she holds up her glass now, crooked, as if she doesn’t care if it spills a little, is familiar to me. “I think we all know that Daley’s name will soon be in textbooks, so this may be our last evening with her as a humble mortal. Anthropology professors at Berkeley rarely fade away.”

“But they do get washed away,” Dan said. Last year one of them jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

“She’ll have Jonathan to hold her back.” Julie looks down into her glass. The sentimental part is coming. “I just want to say how impossibly proud I am of you, Daley. You’ve been working toward this moment from the day I met you. And here it is.” Her big smile rearranges everything else on her face. Even her hair shifts. She has the most amazing ability to reveal her emotions without embarrassment. She cried when I got the call from Berkeley about the job. I’d never seen anyone actually cry for joy in real life. And there Julie was, crying for mine. “I wish you, as my father used to say to me every night”—her smile twists suddenly and her voice frays—”the sun, the moon, and the stars. You deserve them all.” I glance at Jonathan then. I can’t help it. We have a joke about how often Julie mentions her father. But he won’t meet my eye. He probably doesn’t think we should enjoy an inside joke about Julie at this moment.

Nico says he will miss eavesdropping on my conferences. “You wouldn’t believe the things her students tell her. It’s like sharing an office with Sigmund Freud.” He’s not comfortable speaking to a group, even this small group around Jonathan’s table. It makes me wonder how he gets through his lecture classes. “But the real testament to your character, Daley, is that you got the best job of all of us and nobody even resents you for it.”

“I do,” Jonathan and Dan say at the same time.

Kira says she wishes me the best but will not raise a glass because of the ritual’s patriarchal roots. The concept of toasting, she explains, evolved from the custom of flavoring drinks with spiced toast, and when the toast ran out, she says, a woman’s name would be called out to flavor the drink. “Yet another example of men attempting to consume women,” she says. Dan pretends to slit his wrists with the cake knife, which he often does around Kira.

When it’s Jonathan’s turn, the room gets quiet. People tend to listen to Jonathan a little more closely. When I accused him once of having this effect, he said that white people in academia always have to pretend they’re listening to the black man. He pulls a piece of paper out of his back pocket, glances at it in silence, then stuffs it back. He turns to me and speaks quietly. “I wrote down some things. I even had a quote by Bronislaw Malinowski for you.” He laughs. “But what I really want to say is that I just feel so glad that, that somehow,” he rubs his finger on the tablecloth, “you showed up in my life. I didn’t expect that. As you know.” He smiles. He tips his glass over to tap mine. “Here’s to you and me and our unanticipated future.” I’m surprised by the emotion in his voice. He’s usually so controlled in public. I put my arm around his neck and he pulls me tight against him. I feel how fast his heart is beating and I think, briefly, the smallest pulse of a fear, that I am not worthy of that heart.

It’s true that Dan introduced us by accident. Nadine Gordimer came to campus for a reading last fall, and there was a reception afterward at the chancellor’s house. It was crowded, everyone hoping for a closer look at the writer, who was tucked away in some alcove at the back. Dan and I were at the buffet table when he saw a woman he was interested in across the room.

“We gotta get over there,” he said, and yanked me smack into Jonathan. A few cubes of cheese from my plate bounced off his shirt.

“Oh, shit, she’s leaving,” Dan said, and since he knew Jonathan from a writing class, he introduced us.

I’d noticed him before, the lean body, short dreads, round glasses, angular face.

“You still writing?” Dan asked him.

“Just my dissertation.”

“On what?” I asked.

“Hegel and Gramsci, supposedly.”

“Not going well?”

“I’d rather be writing stories.”

“You should,” Dan said. “You were good. That story you wrote about the two boys and their dying uncle. I can still remember whole sentences of it.”

We picked at the food. The room was hot. I told Jonathan I’d thought he was one of those precocious seniors who took graduate courses. He laughed and said he was thirty. I didn’t believe him.

“Let me see your license,” I said.

“I don’t have one.”

“What do you mean?” Dan asked. “It get taken away?”