Long Summer Nights (15 page)

“Not interested. Are we done?”

Roxanne looked at Aaron. Aaron nodded, and the boy ran off, his departure punctuated nicely by the slamming of a door.

“Are you going to come back?” she asked.

“He hates me,” Aaron stated, surprised by how much it stung. It was the ultimate human irony that the most expected response could hurt. If a man saw a knife aimed for his throat, he instinctively ducked. Yet if a man saw an icy shard of glass heading for his heart, he could only watch, wide-eyed and frozen. As a child, Aaron had picked many shards from his heart, and frankly he didn’t like picking at them again.

“Are you going to come back?” Roxanne repeated.

“I’d like to, if it’s all right with you.” He met her eyes, and managed a poor imitation of a civilized smile. At first he thought she was going to refuse him, which would give him a fine excuse never to visit again. “Forbidden,” he could tell Jennifer, accompanied by a helpless shrug. Of course then Jennifer would pester him until he dug in and tried again, beating his head against a brick wall while icy shards pierced his breast. If Aaron’s sigh was long and heartfelt, it couldn’t be helped. He was a man resigned to the pain of the human condition.

Frankly he’d rather be a zombie.

Roxanne glanced at the pictures, then looked at Aaron. “You don’t have to. He’s not your son.”

A strange stillness settled over him, and Aaron told himself that he should be relieved, but it wasn’t relief that
he felt. Instead, it was as if someone had wiped his slate clean, erased the prior bad chapters of his life. Yet for some reason he was attached to that prior version. Or perhaps it was the idea of having someone that was his.

“You’re sure?” he asked in an oddly disappointed voice.

“His father was a waiter at the hotel. It was either you or Mark, and you were the better choice. When he turned six, I knew. The eyes are his father’s.”

“Mark’s good at math?”

“Yes.”

Mentally Aaron picked another shard from his chest. He only wished Jennifer could appreciate it. “You have miserable taste in men,” he complained.

“I know.”

“Does he want a father?”

“Every boy wants a father,” she stated, and it was true. Every boy wanted a father, a teacher to explain exactly how to be a man. Aaron was thirty-four years old, and he still wanted a father because he still didn’t know how to be a man. However, he was learning.

“I can’t pay you back,” Roxanne added as if he cared about the money.

“You don’t need to. You’ve already paid enough.”

Nervously she glanced toward the back rooms where the boy who was no longer Aaron’s son resided. “Will you ever tell him?”

“I don’t know. He should know the truth at some point in his life.”

“I know, but then he’ll hate me. Right now, it’s you he can’t stand. If he’s going to hate somebody, better you than me. I’m all he has.”

She sounded worried about the possibility, but Aaron knew better, and he attempted to reassure her. “He won’t
ever hate you. You’re his mother. You’re his sun, his moon, his entire world. You can make all the mistakes in the world, and he won’t stop loving you, won’t stop needing you. A child is a very simple thing.”

F
OR THE NEXT WEEK,
Aaron spent the mornings riding the train into the city, and then haunting the various coffee shops of Manhattan. He didn’t want to go to
her
coffee shop. He didn’t want to disturb her work, but he needed to find a place to write because the cabin wasn’t cutting it anymore. It felt too small, too isolated, and it made his skin itch like some metaphysical rash.

Unfortunately a typewriter was impractical for a commuter, so he used a Moleskin notebook and pen. He missed the visceral euphoria of crumpling up his pages and hurling them across the room, but he discovered a certain physical satisfaction when scribbling a particularly worthless paragraph into oblivion. While he was in the coffee shops, there was an energy and a solitude that he liked. He was a part of the world, and yet not. It reminded him of her, the buzz and hum, and he had discovered that with sound-reducing headphones, you never had to hear anyone talk at all.

He didn’t tell Jennifer that he was making these commutes, although sometimes he picked her up after work, bought her dinner, and then took her back to his hotel where he could strip her naked and pour his body inside hers. Aaron told himself it was biology. Considering his
lengthy isolation, an overactive libido was logical. Of course, he also created imaginary worlds where the sun had exploded, freezing all mankind, devolving the human species into something that more resembled an animal than man. Wisely Aaron chose not to delve further into the paradox of his own psyche.

He wasn’t the only one. When they were together, Jennifer stopped asking her questions, which he thought was strange, but he wasn’t one to complain—about
that,
at least. There were times when he suspected she was waiting on him to emote or communicate, neither of which were very likely, but they were working themselves into a companionable detente.

She called it a relationship.

The next night, he showed up at her apartment. “I know you’re off tonight. I asked,” he announced, quite proud of his detective work.

“You could have called and made arrangements. In advance.” And of course, Jenn would always leap to the fast-track path, but Aaron liked his own, more pedantic pace, and besides, he had the perfect alibi.

“I don’t have a phone.”

“Come on, Aaron. How hard is it to buy a phone?”

“The coverage is really bad upstate. It’d be a waste.” Phones were an unnecessary evil, chaining people to other people 24/7.

“You hate technology.”

“There are links to cancer,” he argued.

She leaned against the door frame and watched him with skeptical eyes. He didn’t mind. “Oh, and now you become Mr. Current Events. When it’s convenient.”

There was a silent lull in the conversation, when she expected him to respond, but sometimes he couldn’t. Sometimes he merely wanted to stare at her stupidly. In
his writing, the protagonists didn’t stare stupidly, or daydream about wild sexual fantasies. Certainly they had sex, but it was a frenzied moment, usually designed to create complications rather than actually to bond. When he had sex with Jennifer, there was a bond. He didn’t feel comfortable defining this bond, but it existed, and he knew that she felt it, too.

Which didn’t explain why she never let him into her apartment. He held himself back from the entrance, where she hovered and guarded, and sometimes he worried that she was hiding some piece of her life from him. He frowned.

“What are you doing?” he asked, deliberately not peeping into her doorway like some voyeur. He crossed his arms across his chest to show her exactly how much he was not bothered.

“I’m giving you a hard time.”

“Will I ever live this down?” he asked, hoping he never would. He liked it when she teased him.

“This isn’t punishment. This is just my personality,” she explained, and he thought that was acceptable, too.

“Okay. I can live with that.” He waited for a beat longer before he knew she wasn’t going to invite him in. And he hadn’t come there for that. He had another purpose for tonight. “Come with me.”

“Where?” she asked, going inside, grabbing the monstrosity she called a purse, and then she locked the door carefully behind her.

“I’ll show you,” he said.

The ball field was in Queens, a small park underneath the expressway, bounded by a bank building and a large highway sign with a sexy woman proclaiming that beer was good. There were two teams on the field—the Crushers and the Stingrays.

Aaron wasn’t sure why organized sports couldn’t be more creative. It was as if the sports gods had reached down with their thunderbolts and scribed a list of appropriately masculine animals, destructive weather anomalies and melodramatic verbs that sports writers adored. Like Crushers, for example.

He pulled the cap low on his head—not that he thought Kevin would recognize him…or acknowledge him, but he wasn’t here to interact, only to observe. And to show Jennifer a small part of his life. Or actually, a small part that wasn’t his life. He seemed to have a talent for that—collecting small pieces that weren’t his.

“You like baseball?” she asked.

“He’s my son.”

“Which one?” She didn’t look surprised, and he assumed she’d researched the rumors, but she’d never asked him. For that he was glad.

He nodded toward the north dugout. “The one on the bench. With glasses.” Glasses were an unnecessary descriptor; Kevin was the only one on the bench.

“Are you going to speak to him?”

“No.”

“Why?”

Of course now there were questions. Every time he opened the door, questions trampled inside with their muddy feet. It was the primary reason that Aaron believed in very rarely opening the door. But sometimes when Jenn didn’t ask, and he wanted to tell her, the door was a little easier to open.

Kevin didn’t seem to mind being alone. His chin was up, and his gaze was glued to the sky, looking somewhere beyond the game. His shoulders were thin.

“We’re not at that stage of the relationship,” was the best explanation Aaron could think up.

“There are no stages in fatherhood. It starts when he pops out of the womb. It ends when someone dies. That’s it. You’re his father.”

“Not technically.”

“All right. Biologically.”

Aaron stared at the boy, who was so like him in so many ways. “Not technically,” he corrected.

“There is no gray in paternity,” she corrected, and he nearly smiled.

“I’m not his biological father. He thinks I am. I thought I was. But I’m not.”

“Oh.”

He waited for her questions, but she was waiting on him. Eventually the silence grew too loud to ignore.

“I paid Roxanne a lot of money because I didn’t want to be a father.” There were men in the world who should be fathers, and Aaron wasn’t one of them. Neither was his father.

She looked at him with her serious eyes, and finally the question came. The one he was expecting. “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. Secretly he had hoped that she would tell him what to do. Jennifer seemed to instinctively know these things. She seemed to know about people in ways that Aaron never could.

“What do you want to do?” she asked. Another question.

“I’d like to go away.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I don’t know. I feel rather useless.” And empty. He moved closer to her. He didn’t want to touch her because sometimes he was afraid that he couldn’t stop, but when he was closer to her, he didn’t feel quite so alone.

“Does he need a father?”

“Probably.”

“Does he think you’re an ass?”

“Definitely.”

She looked at the boy, and then at Aaron, and then she glanced back at the boy. “It’d be very easy to walk away,” she told him in a silky voice. It was what she called her conscience voice. She seemed to use it a lot. “The kid thinks you’re an ass. You don’t want a son. You paid for the very privilege of not being a father. It looks like he sucks at baseball anyway.”

Jenn never liked her conscience voice. She complained about it constantly. Aaron didn’t like it, either. But sometimes he needed to hear it.

But the boy drew his eyes like a magnet, sitting on the bench like an immovable rock.

“I always wanted to play baseball,” he told her, and he’d never told anyone that.

“I bet you suck at baseball, too.”

“I’ve never tried.”

“Then maybe you should,” she suggested.

“What if I suck at it?” he asked her, because Aaron considered himself something of a perfectionist, and he didn’t like sucking at things.

“You probably will until you get the hang of it,” she answered, which was absolutely no comfort. Eventually the team ran off the field, giving each other lots of high fives and hitting and wrestling, but Kevin sat there alone.

“My father sucked at fatherhood,” he said, very softly, hoping she wouldn’t hear.

“I know,” she told him.

“I’m not very good at this,” he said, not so quiet this time.

“I know that, too.”

She laid a hand over his and she had good hands. Soft and gentle when necessary. Like now.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he told her, and she looked up at him smiling, and he knew he’d done something good.

“See? What did I tell you? Already you’re getting the hang of it.”

“What if he hates me?” It was easier to talk about this now. Talk about the possibility of making a mistake. A large mistake. With a little person who didn’t need to have any more mistakes.

However, Jenn seemed to be more forgiving of mistakes then he was. “Parenting Rule Number One. Start with the bribes.”

Bribes? Good God. He was supposed to delve into a nine-year-old mind? “I don’t know what a kid would want.”

“I have the perfect suggestion. An iPhone. Educational. The Holy Grail of communication, and trust me, mister, you can use all the help you can get. And best of all, you can text.”

Her eyes were sneaky and sly, and he knew what this was about. She wanted him to get a phone, too. Being sucked into that whirling vortex where original thought and critical reasoning would cease to exist. “Oh, no. Do I look like a lemming? Give me some other ideas.”

She laughed, and it was as soft and gentle as her hands, and then she wrapped her fingers in his, and he thought he was getting the hang of it after all.

I
N A BOLD MOVE OF
social exploration, Aaron took her out to a party on the Upper West Side. Jenn wasn’t sure exactly why they were going, and she definitely wasn’t sure what to expect. A week earlier she had asked him once about his friends who lived in the city. Mainly she was curious about
the other side of the man. She knew the curmudgeonly hermit from Harmony Springs, but the author was still a virtual black hole.

It was two days after her question, when he announced they were going to a party. There was a certain rebellious quality to that pronouncement, as if he was proving to her that he had friends. Jenn tried to explain to him that she didn’t actually expect to
meet
his friends, it was more a conversational sort of inquiry about the existence of said friends, but he insisted, and determined to be optimistic, Jenn took this new
entre
into his life as manna from intimacy heaven.

To show her support, she even bought a new dress for the occasion. A figure-hugging silver sheath that showed off her curves and made her legs look longer than they actually were. When he picked her up, the look in his eyes said that he approved.

Aaron, on the other hand, was dressed in a somber black suit, dark tie and spotless black shoes. Funeral attire, she thought, steeling herself for whatever dirge lay ahead.

“Where are we going?” she asked after they climbed into a taxi and were careening through traffic at a death-defying pace.

“My editor’s apartment. He’s having a party.”

“Oh,” she said, a noncommittal expression of Swiss-like neutrality because she wasn’t sure if meeting his editor was a good thing or bad. There was a hard line to his jaw that didn’t encourage happy assumptions.

“We don’t have to do this.”

“He’s having the party for me,” he answered.

“I suppose it would be rude to skip your own party.”

“If you want to, we could,” he offered.

“Do you want to go?”

“No.”

“Then we should skip it,” she answered and hammered on the glass, prepared to get the cabbie to drop them off somewhere safer. Aaron’s hotel, for instance.

“I can do this,” he stated firmly.

“I know that, which is why we don’t have to do this,” she told him, trying to be perky and encouraging and supportive and probably failing.

“You don’t need to lie,” he said, his stance stubborn in his his funeral-black suit, determined not to go gently into the night. As a woman, Jenn knew that men were biologically driven to fight these winless battles, and she also knew that she couldn’t stop nature, so she leaned back and let the taxi drive them off into hell.

A few minutes later, they arrived at the apartment, which was decorated in that minimalistic style that belonged to that fashionable designer motif: “People Don’t Actually Live Here.” The main room was full of white unstained overstuffed couches, and a wall of smudge-free windows. Surprisingly there were no bookshelves—which didn’t speak favorably on Martin’s respect for the printed word.

Jenn kept her arm tucked in Aaron’s as he led her around the crowded room, introducing her to authors and editors and telling her names she was going to promptly forget. Fascinatingly enough, he was not surly in this small group. He was sophisticated, charming, urbane, and Jenn remained quiet, observing the happy smiles and tinkling laughs. The warmth in the room was as minimalistic as the design, and as the minutes droned on, she scarfed a lonely glass of wine because she was feeling more and more adrift.

At least Didi was there, glittering in a bloodred cocktail dress that suited her. Spotting Jennifer, she made her way over. “You cannot show fear here, darling. Smile.”

Jenn managed a toothpaste-selling smile, and Didi
laughed. “Yes, much better. Now you look as if you belong. I’m surprised he brought you.”