Christopher Hacker - The Morels

This was the idyll of motherhood, of the family life of Penelope and Arthur and Will.

I’d emerge from these talks at the diner confused. My friendly crush on Arthur’s wife had flared into a chest-burning ache, and with it came an equally hot jealousy of Arthur, who clearly didn’t deserve this woman’s love. I felt guilty. It was like we were having an affair, meeting clandestinely twice a week. We’d sit in our “reserved” smoking booth, and Penelope would go through half a pack of my cigarettes while she talked.

On Halloween, we all put on suits and homemade FBI badges and followed Will’s flashlight trail down the long corridors of the building looking for unexplained phenomenon , which mostly took the form of Reese’s Pieces. Penelope played Scully while Arthur sat by the open apartment door with a large tray of her homemade peanut brittle. There were apparently four other kids who lived in the building, somewhat younger and with whom Will had no interest in playing. These kids and their parents, all in Rite Aid costumes, tagged along with us warily, not sure what to make of our little mafia clique. We went around ringing bells to mixed success. A few on any hall were anticipating our arrival with a cobwebbed door or a red-lit foyer, generous with the treats. Others we’d catch genuinely by surprise, a look of panic on their faces — was there a fire? — until they processed who we were. But mostly, nobody was home.

By the first week in November we had a final cut of Dead Hank’s Boy . I set Suriyaarachchi up with a fellow composition student I knew from conservatory. She was getting her DMA now in Ann Arbor and agreed to score the film for very little cash and a bullet point on a résumé. We collaborated over the course of weeks via Express Mail. With a darkly atmospheric sound track, trimmed to within an inch of its life — a lean eighty-seven minutes from title card to final fade — the movie was more than watchable: it was downright entertaining! Suriyaarachchi went out and bought a giant dry-erase calendar on which to mark the deadlines of every film festival we were eligible to enter, and two, as it turned out, we weren’t — being neither Latina nor Canadian. We put together a “press packet,” with synopsis, production stills, headshots, and résumés. We went at this project with painstaking care, spending hours on these ancillary materials to accompany the tape in the mail, as though these things might make up for any unexcisable failures the film still bore.

On one of my errands, juggling an armful of stuffed envelopes, I ran into Arthur. He invited me to Thanksgiving dinner. His in-laws were coming up for the long weekend. Penelope wanted me there, he said. “She thinks we can use an ally.”

That afternoon Will came over. The central heat in the building hadn’t kicked in yet, and we were all sitting around in our coats. Dave said, “My man Will! Is it three o’clock already?”

Will said, “Where are you guys going?”

“We’re freezing.”

Will noticed the hardcover on the couch. “That’s my father’s new book,” he said.

“Have you read it?”

“Not yet,” he said ponderously. “I plan to, one day, but I decided it would be better to wait awhile. And anyway, I already know what it’s about.”

“And what’s it about?”

“Art. And Mom and me.” Will sat down by my side. His puffy jacket wheezed a smell of banana and ham sandwich. He picked up the book and flipped through it.

“Your hands are filthy,” I said.

“I’m eleven years old. That’s what happens when you’re eleven. I don’t like the cover.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it’s kind of clever.”

“Is that supposed to be us? Art’s hair isn’t blond, Mom’s hair isn’t blond, and my hair isn’t blond either. What were they thinking?”

“So you’re not the least bit curious to read what your father’s written about you and your mom?”

“I mean, I could. I told you, I make my own decisions. It’s called delayed gratification .”

I arrived at the Morels’ empty-handed, something I noticed only as Penelope was welcoming me in. Seated on the sofa was an older woman with a square crop of coiled hair and an embroidered velvet jacket.

Penelope said, “This is my mother.”

“Mrs. Wright,” the woman said. She did not hold out her hand for me to shake. “Tell me, dear, is this a convertible sofa I’m sitting on?”

“Yes, Mother, it’s a convertible.”

“I was just wondering — it’s very comfortable.”

“Why don’t we get you a drink,” Penelope said to me, rolling her eyes with her back turned so that only I could see. I followed her into the kitchen. “ ‘Is this a convertible’! Meaning, why couldn’t she and Dad have stayed here?” She poured out some champagne into a fluted glass and told me that this was the first time her parents were visiting since the move. They didn’t understand why they couldn’t stay with Penelope and Arthur. Her mother was hurt; her father was angry. “It’s not Queens, for crying out loud! But that means nothing to them.” They were used to a certain kind of hospitality — and budget — from living below the Mason-Dixon Line and were put out to be spending so much on a hotel when they could be staying with family for free. And indeed when I sat down with Mrs. Wright, she spent a good ten minutes comparing their hotel room with her daughter’s “three bedroom.”

“It’s a one bedroom plus den, Mother.”

“It’s a palace compared with where we’re staying.”

The patio’s sliding door opened, and Arthur entered with a stocky older man. They trailed a distinct whiff of cigar smoke. Penelope’s father, who introduced himself to me as Frank, crew cut and upright, looked like he had kept up a twice-daily regimen of sit-ups for the past forty years excepting no holidays. Frank regarded me with a certain amount of suspicion. His questions about who I was seemed less to do with getting to know me and more to do with getting to the bottom of what my motives were, intruding on this family gathering.

He said, “So what was this fella like back in his school days?”

“He hasn’t changed much,” I said.

“Once a troublemaker, always a troublemaker. Could have used you around a decade ago, warn us what we were getting ourselves into.” He didn’t crack a smile. If he was being humorous, the humor was of the driest sort.

“It would have been too late,” Penelope said, going around the room with a platter of deviled eggs. “He already knocked me up.”

“Okay, now,” Mrs. Wright said. “Not in front of the boy, surely!”

Penelope gave me a wink.

It smelled good in the apartment, juices caramelizing in a roasting pan. The air was steamy, festive. Cinnamon candles flickering on the windowsills, doorways trimmed with lights and pine branches. The dining room table was set and twinkled like a department store display. Holly shaped rings coiled around each red cloth napkin.

The first part of the evening was pleasant. Penelope’s mother proved easy to talk to, despite the frosty first impression. She asked me what I did, and for the first time, I was honest. “I work at a movie theater,” I said.

“My friend is being modest,” Arthur said. “He’s also a movie producer. He and his cohorts work here in this building, down the hall from us.”

I told a couple of anecdotes. Though Frank remained cool to me, Mrs. Wright warmed up some — she was an eager listener, or at least an obliging one, responsive with a gasp or a laugh, with wanting to know what happened next. I was aware of myself in her eyes as Arthur’s long-lost childhood friend — it seemed Penelope had billed me as such — and right then I allowed myself to indulge the illusion.