JERRY

Jerry and Wynn had trouble parking the car for Robin’s “last, light” memorial service, but then they always did, coming to productions at Golden Oaks’ little theater. All the industries up and down this street had complained from the beginning of time about parents parking, students parking, faculty parking. Jerry remembered dropping his wife off more than once, saying, with false consideration, “You go on in. Save me a seat. No use you being late. . . .” Remembered it all so clearly, like a scene from his own childhood--the hard, tolerant look Wynn shot him as she got lightly out of the car without a protest. Yes, she’s my kid, not yours. But I’m the original Golden Oaks parent, even if Whitney had to be a scholarship child--and I bring that to Tina and Josh even if you pay their tuition now. Other wives piled out of other cars, with the same iron social will.

The memory happened in an instant. He thought he’d filed all that stuff in his mind under “U” for unimportant, “F” for forgettable. The look of the women as they stood on the sidewalk, tucking silk blouses into linen pants, appraising the crowd, making sure there were enough souls there, tallying the ratio of adults to kids, and were the kids the right ones? Remembering as well the covert glances of the husbands (never his friends, just guys whose first names he was conscientious enough to remember, clicking into what made them distinctive: Lee and his passion for billiards, Mike who liked the Dodgers, Bob who worked for CAA and loved his children with an embarrassing passion). These guys, out of a thousand things to do on a weekend night, would put a high school theater production far down in the one hundreds. But they were always there, gathering on the sidewalk, sentenced to an extra 40 minutes of socializing, while he, having managed to be 15 minutes late, got to escape, to park the car, far away.

Usually he missed the first act of whatever it was, standing outside the theater by sawhorses covered with boards and paper tablecloths and pots of marigolds and plates of cookies from Paris Pastries. He spent that time in the company of an anonymous wife who doled out glasses of white wine, whose name, thankfully, he didn’t have to remember. During intermission, he always struck the right note of interest and detached pride, talking about the play, even when he hadn’t seen it. Then he went inside with Wynn, into the auditorium painted arty black, and caught some shrill lines from Pinter, Brecht, sometimes Shakespeare. In 15 minutes, usually, he dozed off. But he woke easily and effortlessly, clapped heartily, enjoyed the fresh, young, flushed faces as the players stood on the sunken stage, bowing, bowing again, soaking up applause, affection, love. Enjoy it while you can, he might have thought sourly, figuring that most of the kids--for all their privilege--were headed for medium schools in the Ivy League, or middle-management positions in their fathers’ businesses. Some of them might end on dirty beaches, on second-rate islands, doing drugs, “finding” themselves, soaking up sun and family money. Privilege choked the kids today, he’d told Wynn when he thought about it; it spoiled them. But she’d rewarded him with her hard and tolerant glance: I wouldn’t happened to have cast my lot with a skinflint, would I?

If Jerry’d planned so hard to forget, how come he remembered? He and Wynn parked and walked together today, past the Mexican restaurants, the low office buildings, greeting other well-dressed couples, moving quietly toward the school. This Sunday afternoon, it seemed like they were going to church. This deliberately modest campus was dotted with sad monuments. A building named after a teacher dead from AIDS. A piece of outdoor art that he knew pertained to some friend of Whitney’s, a girl he didn’t remember, ruddy, athletic legs, long blond hair like Whitney’s, always dressed in sweat shirts, always carrying pompons. Always laughing. Hazel eyes with long lashes. Something had happened to her. You never knew about the particulars of anyone’s life.

His Japanese business partners were wise in that as in so much else. Never let anyone into your home! Never let them see your wife and kids. Take them to a geisha. Drink Scotch, tell jokes. Get drunk. Keep it clean and clear and joking and free. That was the way to build things. Because walking past a piece of alabaster with a dead girl’s name on it didn’t serve anyone.

He knew some parents by now, after seven years as Whitney’s stepfather. Their first names and their last, their kids. Some he knew from the elementary school where Josh was in kindergarten and Tina still hung out with the toddlers. T-ball and soccer. That was OK. Out in the air. Straight! It really did teach you what you had to know. Hit the ball. Laugh when you strike out. Hit it again.

So he knew these men he saw today, grave and sad, their pace measured and slow, their wives--in some cases their ex-wives--together for this sad occasion.

He and Wynn stopped for a glass of wine, and then another. The woman behind the table--that same woman from all the plays he’d seen at this good school--had been crying.

They sat where they almost always did--had--about 10 rows up in the theater bleachers. People they knew came up to say hello. During these past seven years, the parents had changed not at all. Was this Jerry’s wishful delusion, or the ministrations of the medical profession in this city, and good health and fitness? But there were other adults, single people, young couples, he had a hard time recognizing. They called him Mr. Bridges. Wynn knew them, reached out her hand to some of them. When a stocky young man whispered, “Hi, Mom,” to Wynn, it clicked in. They were Whitney’s schoolmates. High school seniors. Graduation in a month. On their way to college. They had been kids. Well. People grew.

The mourning family came in. He stifled a blast of resentment. How could this foolish memorial service, a full four months after the boy’s death, help anything, change anything at all? He felt Wynn take his arm as the lights went down. Just shut up , her strong body warned him. He felt the sorrow off her body, calm and stoic and controlled.

He didn’t remember the kid, that Robin, at all, thank God.

The lights went down and a videotape went on, grainy and small. One of the old plays--no, something around one of the old plays. Two boys, no more than 14, hurling themselves across the floor of this same theater, tumbling, turning cartwheels that broke in the middle. First one, then the other. Awkward, flinging their bodies like beanbags across blue-plastic mats.

Sobs began around him. Wynn kept steady and calm. A girl’s stern voice came from the video: “Come on, you guys! Come on, you guys! Will you cut that out? Can’t we get started? We’ve got to get started!” He recognized the voice from a dozen of their playlets, and, taken off-guard, laughed. Half the audience laughed. Then stopped. In attention balanced between grief and recognition, the audience watched the tape to the end, two gawky boys fooling around, not particularly joyful, not very profound. Engaged merely in irritating the female voice behind the camera, not knowing, not knowing what the future held.

The lights went up. There was the stage he’d seen/not seen so often, cluttered with this or that lovingly accomplished special effect. Bare, today, with only four risers. Maybe six, seven young men and women reclining, sitting, standing, motionless. Their faces were set in determined smiles. He didn’t recognize any of them. A young man, young man, called, conversationally, up to the booth where the camera, the sound, the technical effects came from. “I think we’d like to see that tape again. Roll it again, will you?”

This time, with the lights up, and with the smiling youths onstage turned from the audience to focus on the tape, it was OK to laugh. Even the family laughed. The young man waited for the waves of laughter to wash away. The lights went down again. The spotlight focused on his young face.

“That was Robin all right. What a brat he could be!”

Then Jerry remembered Robin. For a whole semester Robin had hung around the house, he and Whitney jabbering nonstop to each other without listening to each other. He remembered asking Wynn, “Doesn’t that kid have a house he can go to?” Remembered. Going into the den, shutting the door, turning out the light so that he could concentrate on business.

Another young man talked now, about going on some camping trip where Robin faked a sprained ankle so that he could spend the night in a Fresno hotel. But Jerry was remembering the kid rehearsing a scene with Whitney in that same den, with Whitney as a boy king from Shakespeare: “Will you put out mine eyes ?” Whitney asking over and over, “These eyes that never did nor never shall so much as frown on you?” And this same guy, his voice changing back then, his hand recklessly waving a poker he’d picked up from the den fireplace, repeating, “Indeed, I have sworn to, and I must.”

So he knew these kids. Remembered Whitney sneaking down their driveway with clusters of them, taking them upstairs over the garage to her room. Something in Jerry’s chest shifted.

“What happened to me and Robin,” a pretty blond said, “was that we ditched out on an afternoon rehearsal. It was right after school, broad daylight. We knew that once we left, we’d be late getting back. Robin and I would be late for rehearsal. But Robin was always late for rehearsal!” She waited, again, for familial laughter to subside--didn’t they all know it? Hadn’t they all waited for Robin, or covered for him, or gotten mad at him, or gone into the den and shut the door to get away from his presence and his pranks? Jerry remembered: “Doesn’t that kid have a house he can go to?” And Wynn torn up about it, and those kids going one more time, out of the main house, across the back lawn, up over the garage. That was better. That was the best thing for everybody.

“Robin had just got his driver’s license, and he had this bright-red Audi . . . “

The girl wore pale, often-washed loose jeans and a loose white silk blouse with a boy’s jacket slung over her shoulders. Her pale, thick blond hair washed over her eyes. You could see she resisted the urge to push it back.

“When he first got his driver’s license, he loved to make left turns in traffic. Some of us think that’s a male characteristic, like growing a beard.” She paused to let the laughter fade away. “All of you know what happened that day. The truck came out of nowhere.” She paused to take a deep, shaky breath. “I don’t think Robin would want us to think he left the planet making a careful right turn. I think I’m wrecking his reputation. I do know my mom would never let me drive anywhere with Kevin Seidenbaum because she saw him do a U-turn in front of our house once, but Kevin’s right here, across the stage.”

With severe formality five performers bowed to a kid who reclined on a riser. Kevin smiled an even smile.

“Kevin’s with us today. Robin is too, some way. I know it. When the truck came, Robin was in the middle of a joke. He was laughing. When he left the Earth, he was laughing.”

The spot moved from the girl. Jerry saw now, the girl was Whitney. The boy’s jacket covered the cast on her left arm. Kevin Seidenbaum began a story about Robin and baseball--how he always ended up playing shortstop and what that meant to him. But Jerry tried to see Whitney’s story from the top. Because he hadn’t heard it before. He’d been in Japan on business. Couldn’t the Audi have cut up onto the sidewalk? Or, maybe there were pedestrians. How about seat belts? That must have been the problem. How did Whitney live? And how could she, so young, have already seen a person die? Because Jerry had never seen a person die. Anything he could ever tell her or show her--that would be stupid now. And he had made her leave his house. Go live across the yard! But that was the best thing, wasn’t it?

A round of applause--the baseball story was over. Kevin had said something about Robin’s character, that it was generous and funny and good. But wait a minute! Wasn’t it irresponsible to let kids drive a car like that at all? Couldn’t the parents somehow be at fault? He remembered one in a dozen times during the past three school years when Whitney had been really late coming home. Wynn had paced and panted like a dog, had blasted Whitney, when she came in, with full force, her voice, her gestures, her body. Jerry remembered a couple of times when the cops had actually come to the door, Whitney one of a flock of kids messed up from a party. Wynn had lost it entirely with her then and actually hit her a couple of times--not on the face, but along her shoulders, across her collarbone. Whitney, half-laughing, half-crying, had let herself be pummeled and pushed across the hall and then the den, half-tripping on beige throw rugs. Then she went out across the yard to her own place. Jerry had tried to stay out of it. Wynn would never try that stuff with Tina or Josh. She’d better not even try.

In the dark--they’d turned down the lights and switched on the video again--the sound of young voices with the audio on too loud filled the place. A tape of one of those plays. Pinter or Brecht. But Wynn was next to him, and this whole damn thing would soon be over. His mind sneaked over to Japan, the development deal. New Guinea. Fierce natives with Day-Glo faces. Perfect beaches. But then he remembered once again the truck plowing into the Audi. The driver laughing. The passenger watching. Jerry thought how his first wife would have taken it--one high-pitched scream for hours. But Wynn! She’d be able to handle it.

He gave her arm a squeeze. She tensed her other fist around his own arm so hard he almost said something out loud. Christsake! Quit it! Looking over in the dark, he saw her face locked shut, tears streaming down it. She was straining to see, fighting those tears. He looked toward the stage again. The videotaped play had stopped. The lights came on, low. The kids weren’t looking at the video now, but out at the audience with iron smiles on their faces. See what we were then? they queried silently. How beautiful we were? You were in it with us, all the way.

He took the chance to look at Whitney: blond, frail, fine-boned, not glamorous, not cheap. Aristocratic. She’d looked at death. She set her teeth and smiled it down. He remembered other, furious nights, the way she was a few years ago, her blond hair shingled far up the back, red earrings, was that it? Sent whirling by her mother’s blow across the den like a spinning top. He’d dismissed the whole thing, forgotten it.

He was a one-woman man. The whole world knew that about him. And Wynn was his woman. And he might still--God help him--still be married to his first, shrill wife, if she hadn’t gone out on him, and set her hair in big curlers, and waked him up at night, and cried in the morning when he’d gone to work, and cried when they’d gone on camping trips, and told him she hated sex and God! All of it! She had left and he’d paid up and he was happy now, living with a woman who held him in regard and loved him, and he had his own children, Tina and Josh. “Write a poem, plant a tree, write a book!” That was what the proverb said. His poem, his tree, his book would be his children, and a better world.

But in the dark, and to himself, because he was an honest man and he prided himself on that, he acknowledged that if there were ever to be another woman in his life, it would be the young woman facing him directly in the half-dark. A woman stronger than her mother. Stronger than he was. Reckless and controlled. In a wave of grief he covered his eyes. That’s what his trips to Japan had been about, his tirades, the closed door to his den, Whitney’s banishment across the strip of back-yard grass. He could not allow himself to remember any of this, and when the lights went up, he had managed to forget.

He embraced, one by one, every member of the mourning family and the excellent cast of this affectionate memorial. When Whitney’s body came into his arms, he held her carefully, with the tenderness of a “real” father, with the chastity of an honest stranger.