“It’s not bad to be here,” I said. “I thought it might be.”
“I don’t come all that much. I guess I should.” My father took a long breath. “I really screwed this up. I know that.”
“It’s all right. It’s all over now.”
“I’m kind of falling apart. I have diabetes, my blood pressure’s through the roof. I’m forgetting things, too. Like yesterday, I had to sew a button on my shirt, and I couldn’t find the scissors.”
“So go to a doctor.”
“It seems like a lot of trouble.” He paused. “The girl you’re in love with. What’s she like?”
I thought for a moment. “Smart. Beautiful. Kind of sarcastic, but in a funny way. There wasn’t one thing that did it, though.”
“I think that’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s how it was with your mother.”
I looked up, into the spring day. Seven hundred miles away, in Cambridge, the graduation ceremony would be just getting rolling. I wondered what my friends were thinking about me.
“She loved you very much.”
“I loved her, too.” I looked at him and smiled. “It’s nice here,” I said. “Thanks for bringing me.”
We returned to the house.
“If you want I can make up your room,” my father said. “I left it just as it was. It’s probably not very clean, though.”
“Actually, I need to get going. I have a long drive.”
He seemed a little sad. “Well. All right then.” He walked me to my car. “Where are you off to?”
“Texas.”
“What’s there?”
“Texans, I guess.” I shrugged. “More school.”
“Do you need any money?”
“They’re giving me a stipend. I should be all right.”
“Well, let me know if you need more. You’re welcome to it.”
We shook hands and then, somewhat awkwardly, embraced. If I’d had to guess, I would have said my father wasn’t going to live much longer. This turned out to be true; we would see each other only four more times before the heart attack that killed him. He was alone in the house when it happened. Because it was a weekend, several days would pass before anybody noticed he was missing and thought to look.
I got into the car. My father was standing above me. He motioned with his hand for me to roll down the window. “Call me when you get there, okay?”
I told him I would, and I did.
—
In Houston, I rented the first apartment I looked at, a garage studio with a view of the back of a Mexican restaurant, and got a job shelving books at the Rice library to tide myself over for the summer. The city was strange-looking and hotter than the mouth of hell, but it suited me. We search for ourselves in our surroundings, and everything I saw was either brand-new or falling apart. Most of the city was quite ugly—a sea of low-rise retail, shabby apartment complexes, and enormous, overcrowded freeways piloted by maniacs—but the area around the university was rather posh, with large, well-kept houses and wide boulevards flanked by live oaks so perfectly manicured they looked less like trees than sculptures of trees. For six hundred dollars, I bought my first car, a snot-yellow 1983 Chevy Citation with bald tires, 230,000 miles on the odometer, and a sagging vinyl ceiling I used a staple gun to reattach. I’d heard nothing from Liz or Jonas, but of course they had no idea where I was. There was a time in America when it was still possible to disappear by going left when everybody expected you to go right. With a little digging, they probably could have found me—a few well-placed calls to a few department chairs—but this presupposed that they would want to. I had no idea what they would want. I didn’t think I ever had.
Classes began. About my studies, there is not much to say except that they occupied me utterly. I made friends with the department secretary, a black woman in her fifties who basically ran the place; she confided to me that nobody in the department had actually expected me to come. I was, in her words, “a prize thoroughbred they had bought for pennies on the dollar.” To describe my fellow graduate students as antisocial would be the understatement of the century; no lawn parties here. Their minds were utterly unfettered by thoughts of fun. They also despised me for the naked favoritism shown me by my professors. I kept my head down, my nose to the stone. I adopted the practice of taking long drives in the Texas countryside. It was windblown, flat, without meaningful demarcation, every square of dirt the same as every other. I liked to pull the car to the side of the road someplace completely arbitrary and just look at it.