Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

When I open my arms to embrace him he takes a step backward.

“What’s the matter?” I ask. Here is my child wary of me in a strange kitchen in California, his mother’s ashes spread long ago over the Potomac, the objects of our lives together stored in boxes or sold.

“You actually came,” he says.

“I’ve invented a new bicycle,” I say but this seems to reach him like news of some fresh death. Eric hugs Graham there in front of me. I watch my son rest his head against this fellow’s shoulder like a tired soldier on a train. “It’s going to have a self-charging battery,” I say, sitting again at the table to review my sketches.

WITH GRAHAM HERE my idea is picking up speed and while he’s in the shower I unpack my bags, rearrange the furniture in the cottage, and tack my specs to the wall.

Returning to the house, I ask Eric if I can use the phone and he says that’s fine and then he tells me, “Graham hasn’t been sleeping so great lately, but I know he really does want to see you.”

“Sure, no hard feelings, fine.”

“He’s been dealing with a lot recently. Maybe some things you could talk to him about and I think you might—”

“Sure, sure, no hard feelings,” and then I call my lawyer, my engineer, my model builder, three advertising firms whose numbers I find in the yellow pages, the American Association of Retired Persons—that market will be key—an old college friend who I remember once told me he’d competed in the Tour de France, figuring he’ll know the bicycle industry angle, my bank manager to discuss financing, the patent office, the Cal Tech physics lab, the woman I took to dinner the week before I left Baltimore, and three local liquor stores before I find one that will deliver a case of Dom Perignon.

“That’ll be for me!” I call out to Graham as he emerges from the bedroom to answer the door what seems only minutes later. He moves slowly and seems sapped of life.

“What’s this?”

“We’re celebrating! There’s a new project in the pipeline!”

Graham stares at the bill as though he’s having trouble reading it. Finally, he says, “This is twelve hundred dollars. We’re not buying it.”

I tell him Schwinn will drop that on doughnuts for the sales reps when I’m done with this bike, that Oprah Winfrey’s going to ride it through the halftime show at the Super Bowl.

“There’s been a mistake,” he says to the delivery guy. I end up having to go outside and pay for it through the window of the truck with a credit card the man is naive enough to accept and I carry it back to the house myself.

“What am I going to do?” I hear Graham whisper. I round the corner into the kitchen and they fall silent. The two of them make a handsome couple standing there in the gauzy, expiring light of evening. When I was born you could have arrested them for kissing. There ensues an argument that I only half bother to participate in concerning the champagne and my enthusiasm, a recording he learned from his mother; he presses play and the fraction of his ancestry that suffered from conventionalism speaks through his mouth like a ventriloquist: Your-idea-is-fantasy-calm-down-it-will-be-the-ruin-of-you-medication-medication-medication. He has a good mind, my son, always has, and somewhere the temerity to use it, to spear mediocrity in the eye, but in a world that encourages nothing of the sort, the curious boy becomes the anxious man. He must suffer his people’s regard for appearances. Sad. I begin to articulate this with diamond-like precision, which seems only to exacerbate the situation.

“Why don’t we have some champagne?” Eric interjects.

“You two can talk this over at dinner.”

An admirable suggestion. I take three glasses from the cupboard, remove a bottle from the case, pop the cork, fill the glasses, and propose a toast to their health.

My niece’s SAAB does eighty-five without a shudder on the way to dinner. With the roof down, smog blowing through my hair, I barely hear Graham who’s shouting something from the passenger’s seat. He’s probably worried about a ticket, which for the high of this ride I’d pay twice over and tip the officer to boot. Sailing down the freeway I envision a lane of bicycles quietly recycling efficiencies once lost to the simple act of pedaling. We’ll have to get the environmentalists involved which could mean government money for research and a lobbying arm to navigate any legislative interference.

Test marketing in L.A. will increase the chance of celebrity endorsements and I’ll probably need to do a book on the germination of the idea for release with the first wave of product. I’m thinking early next year. The advertising tag line hits me as we glide beneath an overpass: Make Every Revolution Count.

There’s a line at the restaurant and when I try to slip the maitre d’ a twenty, Graham holds me back.

“Dad,” he says, “you can’t do that.”

“Remember the time I took you to the Ritz and you told me the chicken in your sandwich was tough and I spoke to the manager and we got the meal for free? And you drew a diagram of the tree fort you wanted and it gave me an idea for storage containers.”

He nods his head.

“Come on, where’s your smile?”

I walk up to the maitre d’ but when I hand him the twenty he gives me a funny look and I tell him he’s a lousy shit for pretending he’s above that sort of thing. “You want a hundred?” I ask and am about to give him an even larger piece of my mind when Graham turns me around and says, “Please don’t.”

“What kind of work are you doing?” I ask him.

“Dad,” he says, “just settle down.” His voice is so quiet, so meek.

“I asked you what kind of work you do.”

“I work at a brokerage.”

A brokerage! What didn’t I teach this kid? “What do you do for them?”

“Stocks. Listen, Dad, we need—”

“Stocks!” I say. “Christ! Your mother would turn in her grave if she had one.”

“Thanks,” he says under his breath.

“What was that?” I ask.

“Forget it.”

At this point, I notice everyone in the foyer is staring at us.

They all look like they were in television twenty years ago, the men wearing Robert Wagner turtlenecks and blazers. A woman in mauve hot pants with a shoulder bag the size of her torso appears particularly disapproving and self-satisfied and I feel like asking her what it is she does to better the lot of humanity. “You’ll be riding my bicycle in three years,” I tell her. She draws back as though I had thrown a rat on the carpet. Once we’re seated it takes ten minutes to get bread and water on the table and sensing a bout of poor service I begin to jot on a napkin the time of each of our requests and the hour of its arrival. Also, as it occurs to me:

Hollow-core chrome frame with battery mounted over rear tire, wired to rear wheel engine housing, wired to handlebar control/thumb-activated accelerator. Warning to cyclist concerning increased speed of crankshaft during application of stored revolutions. Power brake?

Biographer file: Graham as my muse, mystery thereof; see storage container, pancake press, tricycle engine, flying teddy bear, renovations of barn for him to play in, power bike.

Graham disagrees with me when I try to send back a second bottle of wine, apparently under the impression that one ought to accept spoiled goods in order not to hurt anybody’s feelings. This strikes me as maudlin but I let it go for the sake of harmony. Something has changed in him. Appetizers take a startling nineteen minutes to appear.

“You should start thinking about quitting your job,” I say.

“I’ve decided I’m not going to stay on the sidelines with this one. The power bike’s a flagship product, the kind of thing that could support a whole company. We stand to make a fortune, Graham, and I can do it with you.” One of the Robert Wagners cranes his neck to look at me from a neighboring booth.