The Altruists Page 16

  Confirmation bias, he thought, against his will. Yes, Francine, I know.

  Friday. Sunset. Driving north through Overland on I-170, hurtling toward the airport like an extinction-hauling asteroid, Francine’s Toyota Spero was drenched with light. For years Arthur had driven an orange Honda with a cratered hood, but after Francine died he sold it for cash and commandeered her car. It was filling with the same light presently conquering downtown, a light of mystifying post-storm intensity that warped parabolic around the Arch before catching, chromed, in the windblown debris. This, he’d thought, this was what the weekend was about. The luminous and not the broken. The light and not the wreckage. The dappled gold that filled his car and not the plywood bolted over the airport’s row of blown-out windows.

  But as the Spero pulled up to the Arrivals curb, a great pallid cloud now hoarding the sun, all the old anxieties returned.

  Three days.

  So much could go wrong.

  There were temporary parking spaces at Arrivals. Arthur pulled into one, lowered his window, and idled. In his agitated mood he couldn’t help but notice the pitiable state of his surroundings. The lipedemic, mashed-potato legs of obese travelers. The insecure pageantry in pilots’ epauletted uniforms. He was flanked by two vehicles: a white van captained by a youth pastor and a blue pickup with truck nuts. Midwestern diptych.

  His nerves brought the broth of his thoughts to a boil. He tugged upward on his seat belt, felt the strap choke his chest, briefly losing himself in the asphyxia.

  On the radio, reports of a small bomb blast in Kashmir.

  It wasn’t all bad. The house was immaculate. He’d cleaned thoroughly. His hands still smelled of laboratory citrus. He was proud of the work he’d done, and was starting to like the idea of returning to Chouteau Place. Triumphant. He’d called Ulrike the previous day to reassure her of the efficacy of his plan, and the sincerity of his promise.

  “I need the weekend,” he’d said. “Friday through Monday. Then they’re gone, and we’ll be set. You and me.”

  “Are you certain about this?”

  “Sure I am, sure.”

  “Because I am late to tell the fellowship committee.”

  “Tell them—tell them no! Tell them you’re staying put, right here. You’re gonna be a star at Danforth, that’s obvious.”

  “I do not have one friend in this city.”

  “Friends? Who has friends?”

  “Arthur—”

  “It’s gonna be great.”

  “If I stay, you realize I will stay forever.”

  “Like I said. For the foreseeable future.”

  “For all of the future, Arthur. This is where my life will be.”

  “Of course! I mean, you can’t see what you can’t see—”

  “It is that kind of language which makes me pause!”

  “I’m saying, by definition, you can plan for the future as much as you want, but you can’t predict it.”

  “But you are planning on us.”

  “Yes.”

  “We will live together.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you are certain about this.”

  “Yes . . . inasmuch as I can be about something as unpredictable as the future.”

  “Arthur!”

  “Okay, okay. Look. What is it you want in life?”

  “To do my work. My research. I want to be a professor with tenure.”

  “And how does one accomplish that goal?”

  “I write a book.”

  “Exactly. And what do you need to write a book?”

  “Time. Space.”

  “Perfect. So. I’m happy to say you’ve been accepted.”

  “Accepted?”

  “To the Arthur Alter Scholarship Retreat for Limber Historians.”

  “Arthur . . .”

  “Room and board included. Sexual favors not required but highly recommended.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Okay. I will tell them no.”

  “Good.”

  “Arthur?”

  “Yes?”

  “I like you very much.”

  “You’re not terrible either. Okay, gotta go. Talk soon.”

  The future was bright and gilded and plush. He summoned the feeling of Ulrike’s thighs on his, her small, round ass a cushion in his lap.

  Arthur purpled. He scrambled with the seat-belt buckle and released the strap, gasping for air.

  Travelers were beginning to dribble out from the airport, grouping by family on the curb. What was the plural, he wondered, the noun of assembly? Herd? Swarm? Murder. That was it. Had to be. A murder of families on the curb. Huddled en masse, tottering five deep toward stationary cars.

  “This is the first major attack since the coalition government—”

  A jewel of salty sweat stung Arthur in the eye.

  “The militants opened indiscriminate fire—”

  “Leave me alone!” he shouted, striking the steering wheel with his palm. A honk farted through the lot.

  Among the murder of families, which was beginning to thin, Arthur identified a lone figure by the airport’s stuttering doors. He was pacing, alternately petting one arm of his cable-knit cardigan and fingering the zipper on his khaki weekend bag. Expensive gear, but Arthur recognized the body underneath. Its legs, and their overburdened walk, gave him away.

  Ethan.

  All that could be said about Ethan was that it might’ve been worse. Arthur had colleagues with shit kids, real upstart asshole sons who’d waited for the first signs of senescence—forgetfulness, new drug regimens, cryogenically frozen political affiliations—before returning home with a bouquet of brochures, armed with an accountant friend’s advice on what to do with the house. The house in which their fathers lived. Sure, these colleagues of Arthur’s were a little watery, their thoughts a little stale, but they didn’t deserve betrayal. Eviction. Not from their sons. Not like that.

  Ethan was different. Ethan would never forsake him. The kid was too compliant. Even now, Arthur thought of his son as he was at ten years old, a meek little ballplayer in Franklin Park, afraid to swing at Arthur’s underhanded lobs for fear that the vibrations in the bat would sting his hands. Arthur and Francine had called him the Potted Plant. He was that still, that unobtrusive. Still and unobtrusive was no father’s dream, but it was preferable to oedipal vengeance.

  Arthur might have turned into a shit son himself had his father’s heart not exploded on the eve of his forty-ninth birthday.

  Ben Alter didn’t drink himself to death, but the liquor surely helped. So did the failure. He had the gene for it. Homozygous FF. Doubled. There was no point in dressing it up: Ben Alter’s had been a cash-strapped life spent in other people’s mouths. Arthur couldn’t imagine it, those daily descents into the hot, gummy gapes of his patients, scraping rot, installing caps and crowns. Demeaning work. Demeaning but, in theory, lucrative. No one likes dentistry. They like money. But Benjamin Gurion Alter could not even make that work. Could not acquaint himself with profit. There were troubles in his house, money troubles, and Arthur was certain that this, too, rushed his father down the moving walkway in the airport of his life.

  For many years Arthur feared death in general and his father’s in particular. Was convinced he’d go the same way. One sharp pouncing pain. Sudden. Wham. Laid out by some inherited myopathy, an aneurysmal rupture, an atherosclerotic blast. He’d survived forty-six, and forty-seven, forty-eight . . . and as he awoke on the morning of his forty-ninth birthday from uneasy dreams and found himself unchanged, alive, he realized that he’d been given the gift of more life—and the curse of not knowing what to do with it. He’d never been afraid of the finitude, the end of consciousness, the interminable nothingness. No, what Arthur feared most was a messy death; a death that left things unresolved. H
is father’s death. Paperwork. Property. Unfinished business. A death that echoes one’s failures in life. With bureaucratic consequences, and disorder.

  A debtor’s death.

  The crowd on the curb dispersed and Arthur saw his daughter, brooding beside Ethan in a military field jacket, rusted-copper curls falling to her shoulders. She looked like her mother, but without the womanly heft. She looked carved out. Still, the mere fact of Maggie, his combative, sanctimonious daughter, here in St. Louis was promising. She would not be easy like her brother. But her presence meant that Arthur had a chance.

  “The government is closely monitoring the situation—”

  He offed the radio, honked his horn.

  Ethan waved. Arthur waved back in acknowledgment. As his children walked toward him, he opened the driver-side door, bent to shield himself behind it, and spat on the pavement. One last purging of the venom.

  “Kids,” he said, standing to greet them.

  Ethan bounded toward him, his arms outstretched. Arthur gave him a begrudging hug and took in a nose full of cologne. It was never comfortable, holding a grown man in your arms.

  “Good to see you, Dad.”

  “You too, kiddo.”

  His daughter tossed her oversize duffel into the trunk. If Ethan was a potted plant, Maggie was a dandelion, a cunning weed tearing through the garden. A pain, to be sure—but you had to admire her fervor.

  “Maggie,” he said.

  “Driving Mom’s car, I see.”

  “Welcome home.”

  She muttered something and slid into the back of the car.

  Okay, he thought. She’s still punishing me. Fair enough. Good to know. He stepped into the driver’s seat.

  “All right now,” he said, revving the engine of the Spero. “Who’s hungry?”

  * * *

  • • •

  Arthur’s devotion to Piggy’s Smokehouse, a barbecue dive in Midtown St. Louis, rivaled, in sheer religiosity, any time-honored culinary tradition he could think of. The Passover seder plate. Catholics and their wafers. Yes, when Arthur imagined roping his children back into his life, he pictured it beginning at Piggy’s, the three of them around a picnic table laughing hot, piquant laughs, their tongues alight with barbecue tang.

  Piggy’s did barbecue the right way, which is to say the Memphis way and not, crucially, the St. Louis way, which dispatched with the dry rub and slow smoking that made the whole endeavor worthwhile in the first place. The restaurant was a sanctuary for Arthur, a place of refuge and escape, an off-campus counterpart to the African Studies Library. (Francine, the only semi-observant Jew in the family, had in her Conservative upbringing missed the chance to develop a taste for pork. She loathed the smell, and never once stepped foot inside the place. Arthur felt differently. He was a Jew in temperament but not practice, who would’ve deemed himself agnostic were it not for the incontrovertible fact that he’d gestated in a Jewish womb.) Piggy’s opened in 1996, a few months ahead of the Alters’ move to St. Louis. But it had been hungrily accepted by the city, and so vintage was its charm that for years Arthur believed the place preceded him by decades. When eventually he realized that it didn’t, that its history in the city could be tracked alongside his, he came to think of Piggy’s and its development—the opening of second and third locations, the menu’s gradual inclusion of combination plates and Frito pies—as a mirror for his family’s trajectory. Moving to St. Louis, raising his children. Seeing them through college and into adulthood. In bringing Ethan and Maggie there now, he hoped they would remember the many afternoons spent under its wood beams; that the pork and the corn and the slaw in their waxed-paper-lined baskets would invoke the unbridled potential of grade school, familial warmth, the vulnerability of youth.

  But when they stepped into the unassuming restaurant, its walls adorned with logo merch, Arthur wasn’t met with the reaction that he’d hoped for. Maggie exhaled through her teeth, the hiss of pressurized air brakes popping open their valves.

  “Piggy’s?” she said. “Really?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Maggie’s eyebrows arched. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I have no idea what you mean,” he said. “Come on. Let’s grab a table.”

  His son sat beside him, his daughter across. Above the picnic-style table hung a hollow plastic piggy bank, spinning lazily, its tether winding and unwinding in the breeze of a ceiling fan.

  Ethan took it upon himself to hail a waiter. He craned his neck, one languid hand extended like Adam’s on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Arthur, momentarily distracted by the enervated, fey quality of the gesture, observed his son and freestyle theorized that his mannerisms must be biologically linked in some grand unified way with those of other homosexuals around the world.

  He set the theory aside. “How was the flight?”

  “Ethan upgraded to first class,” Maggie said, addressing the ceiling fan.

  “You didn’t sit together?”

  “It was a free upgrade.” Ethan blushed. “The airline offered. I had the miles from when I was—it’s a perk of traveling so much for work. I was entitled to an upgrade.”

  “‘Entitled’ is a good word,” Maggie said.

  “Hey,” said Arthur. “Be good.”

  Be good was one of his canonical imperatives. It meant a thousand things, calm down and sit still and shut up among them. What Moses accomplished with ten commandments, Arthur crushed with one. A solitary rule, all-encompassing and impenetrable. It didn’t merely implore you to be good. It forced you to wonder what “good” actually meant—and how you’d failed to be it.

  “Was there a storm or something?” Ethan asked, one hand still hanging in the air. “The airport was a mess.”

  “Big one.”

  “Mm.”

  “Tornado.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “. . . Yeah.”

  A waiter appeared and saved them. Arthur, relieved, ordered ribs with potato salad and green beans. Ethan nodded and said, “Same.” Maggie asked for water.

  “We’re putting in our food order too,” Arthur said.

  “I know.” She looked at the waiter. “I’ll stick with water.”

  “You’re not hungry?” Arthur asked. “You look like a stick.”

  “Dad . . . ,” Ethan said.

  Maggie’s cheeks flushed. “I’m a vegetarian.”

  The waiter excused himself.

  Arthur fought a scowl. “Since when?”

  “Since ninth grade.”

  Piggy’s had been instrumental in her decision to give up meat almost a decade earlier. As a girl, on mandatory outings there with Arthur, she’d listen as he griped about his marriage and attempted to betrayal-bond until the waiter came to take his ruined basket. After one particularly bitter trip, she’d returned from Piggy’s to find her mother with a bandage on her finger. “What’s that from?” Maggie asked. “Stupid me. I jammed it in a door,” Francine said. But Maggie believed, and in a way never ceased to believe, that Arthur’s comments at the smokehouse that day had somehow been the cause of her mother’s injury. That by some metaphysical force—Maggie was ten years old then, and the world was nothing to her if not a jumble of such forces; what made airplanes fly? Why did tennis balls eventually stop rolling?—her father’s words had actually damaged her mother’s body.

  She came to associate petty cruelty with the smell of burning meat. It made her physically ill. When she met her first vegetarian, the costume designer for her high school’s production of Rent, an abridged version from which all references to AIDS had been gracelessly removed, she realized there existed an ideological defense against the consumption of meat, and by extension father-daughter time. She’d found her excuse. Shortly thereafter she told him that she could no longer go to the smokehouse. That Arthur had forgotten this fact wa
s another instance of the way his actions rippled through her life while he floated up above it, unaware.

  “I guess I’m not surprised,” she said, “that you’d forget something like that. Which, clearly, you have.”

  “Forget what? That you were a vegetarian? I thought it was a teenage thing. I thought maybe you’d given that up.”

  “Given that up?”

  Immediately, Arthur knew he’d stepped into a minefield. She was slipping into her teenage self—rotten, bellicose, unsparing.

  “It was actually a pretty important decision for me. In terms of my identity. And personhood. But like I said, not surprised. You’re forgetful. Right? You forgot my birthday constantly. Like, whoops, Dad forgot, ha-ha, what a forgetful absentminded-professor type.”

  “I know your birthday.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Arthur deftly changed course. “But what we’re talking about here is something else. Don’t forget that I’ve known you longer than even you’ve known you. My humble apologies if I thought your abstinence from meat might be a passing thing. If I thought that teenagers go through phases. That you might have changed your diet.”

  “It was an important part of my identity!” she shouted. “Is important!”

  Ethan shielded his face from the verbal shrapnel. Civility: time of death, 7:43 p.m., CST.

  It bothered him that this was how things were: Maggie, who professed to hate Arthur and took every opportunity she could to provoke him, received, paradoxically, all of his attention. Whereas Ethan let his father have his way, never fought, never made a nuisance of himself—and Arthur rewarded this behavior by ignoring him.

  He watched his father and his sister trade insults, pushing their frustration back and forth across the table. He was disappointed in his father for missing the point, for harping on the vegetarian thing, the politics of identity. The fact was, Maggie didn’t look well. Hadn’t looked well since the funeral. It didn’t take a therapist to make the next few associative leaps. Ethan of all people knew the weird ways grief could rattle your life, the control it took away from you; and what better way to reclaim that control than by the strict regulation of one’s diet? But Maggie was prickly, and quick to lash out—traits she’d inherited from their father—and Arthur, in his aggressive pose, couldn’t see past her defenses.