Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“Women’s prison,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Book publishing.”

I pointed out the window, where, from up the block, 40 Wall Street was casting its stony stare at the sidewalk. “Then I suppose I’m in men’s prison.”

“Here’s to the inmates.”

When we set down our glasses of mineral water, I said, “I’m just wondering — how does a girl in book publishing manage to eat at Le Pinceau?”

“Carefully,” she answered. “And occasionally. And using a little secret.”

“Which is what?”

But she only smiled. She took another look around and asked if I minded going for a walk.

Minded?

I called Lorenzo (discreet nod of approval as he shut the door behind her) and had him bring us up to Central Park, where, sitting on a rough stone archway alongside the apple-scented horse trails, eating an oversalted pretzel from a cart, she told me about: (1) the collapse of her engagement (older man, a professor at her college); (2) her Hill Country childhood (rattlesnakes, imaginary friends); (3) her current dreams (children, a literary salon); (4) her family (brother, older, drying out for the third time).

She asked me about: (1) my own childhood (not much that I wished to recount); (2) my parents (the mulberry tree, the Art Institute, the cabin in the woods); (3) my sister (MIT, now Caltech, on faculty); (4) my work (the Shores-Durbans); and (5) my dreams (I’d never actually come up with any).

Like my father, I didn’t want to talk about my life. Like my father, I fell in love with the first girl who asked me about it.

—

UNLIKE MY FATHER, however, I married her.

* For those who care for an approximation of the tilt and bend: for y  = 0…180, x  = 170 e −.00016(y − 23)2− 9.4 e −.0025(y − 47)2.

DAD SHOWED UP in New York City one more time, a couple of months before the wedding. Audra thought I should have dinner with him alone, but she offered to join us for dessert. Le Pinceau again — his choice. The same five whiskeys with the same appetizers and the same main course. Then another couple of Laphroaigs as we waited for her to arrive. I’d seen him in his cups before, on plenty of occasions, but now he seemed to be pushing himself up one last, terrible hill.

By the time she joined us, the dessert plates were on the table. At that point Dad had finished off an Irish coffee, too. Not five minutes later, as he was telling her about his early years at Princeton, he knocked a newly arrived GlenDronach onto the floor, lunging for it and nearly going over himself. The waiter was there in a moment, but he didn’t bring another.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dad said gruffly. “They’ve been watering them all night anyway.”

I could see him fighting somebody. His head was circling. His chin had dropped, and he was looking out at the two of us over the tops of his glasses. Audra asked him about the Fields then, which warmed him for a moment. He was bred to charm any woman he met, and I understood that my fiancée was no exception. But when he finished telling the story of his trip to Warsaw, the head dropped again.

I leaned to Audra’s ear and whispered, “I’m sorry about this.”

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.” She opened her hand on the table, and I took it.

“You’re lovely,” Dad said suddenly, reaching for her other hand.

She let him take it.

“You remind me of someone I used to know,” he said. “Look at her, Hans. Isn’t she a vision?”

“She is, Dad.”

“Whom do I remind you of, Mr. Andret?”

He looked right at her, his eyes fixed on her face. This didn’t rattle her in the least.

“Dad?”

He snapped his glance away. “It doesn’t matter.”

Then he descended into the true dark. He’d been picking at the cookies at the center of the table, but now he pushed them away and let his head fall all the way to his chest. He mumbled something. Then he snored. He woke cursing.

“Dad?”

“What?”

“Audra and I have to go now. I’ll get you a cab.”

“Good riddance, then.”

But he got up with us and pushed back his chair. As we crossed the room, I had to take his arm to steady him. The last thing he said, after we’d made it past the bar but before we reached the door, was “Fuck you, Hans.”

“Fuck you, Dad,” I answered, patting him carefully on the back.

But he hadn’t said it like in the old days. This time I could barely make out the words.

At the door, he stopped and made an attempt to gather himself. He tugged at his jacket, pulled his arm out of mine, and leaned heavily against the door to open it. Just after I went through, he said, “You two go wherever. I’m just going to sit at the bar for a moment and finish up some thinking I’ve been doing.”

—

THE WEDDING WAS at the Winston Club in Sagaponack. Next to the grass tennis courts was a slate patio that turned out to be a landing pad. On the morning of the ceremony, four helicopters set down on it: Physico people, naturally, in their charcoal suits with slightly brighter ties. A couple of them might have been called my friends, but the rest had come mostly because they were beholden to me — to an underaged, corrupted mathematician who couldn’t help observe that the distribution of monochromatic attire around the bar was further evidence of the Shores-Durban nonrandomness of profit-motivated entities. Together, we’d been trimming the world of its shaggy billions.

Almost all the rest were Audra’s people, including the priest. Her people could be described as genteel, astute, and Texan. Country folk who read plenty of books and discussed them as though I’d read them, too, but who also knew how to mend a cattle fence. She and I had known each other not quite a year, a fact that seemed to worry half of them and please the other half.

Mom came by herself, and Paulie with a young man who might or might not have been a boyfriend — I could see my mother trying to arrive at a hopeful conclusion. By then, my sister had grown into a rather formal young woman. She was an associate professor now at Caltech in Pasadena. Homological algebra. She hugged me and kissed Audra on both cheeks, but I could see that she was no longer the girl who would catch a frog in her bare hands.

Well, I guess I wasn’t the boy who would do that anymore, either.

As the ceremony approached, I calmed myself with some Shores-Durban extrapolations, and just before I went into the anteroom I indulged one last therapeutic pull from the gangster-style hip flask that had been offered to me by one of my charcoal-suited pals. Then I walked back out to the tent. A few minutes later, Audra stepped up the well-mowed aisle on the arm of her father and took her place across from me on the platform. The priest leaned forward and caught my eye, as if to say, Are you all right in there? The next thing I noticed was Audra lowering her chin, also to catch my eye, edging it lower until I smiled. She winked.

My mind cleared.

There are several possible explanations for why our marriage has lasted. Audra is forgiving, for one. In the end, I’m as impulsive as my own father; but like him, also, I’m obliquely hoping to be led.

Also like my father, I’ve always known when the solution is at hand.

—

DAD, AS YOU might have guessed, didn’t make it to the wedding. I called him a week before, but all he said was “Yeah, I thought I answered that already.”

A LITTLE MORE than half a decade later, on a warm afternoon in September, Lorenzo drove me out to LaGuardia to pick up Mom. I’d offered to come get her myself in Ohio, in one of the Physico jets, but she’d assumed I was joking. I’m not sure why. The winter before, when I’d flown out in one of those same jets to help her prepare the house, she’d watched from the front seat of a sporty new Ford Focus as the pilot taxied me right up to the parking lot fence. (It had been hard enough to get her into that car in the first place, I should add: the salesman from the dealership had to promise her he wouldn’t try to sell the Country Squire to some other, unsuspecting soul — although my own guess is that by that point the old thing could barely have been sold for parts.)