There's Something I Want You to Do

She flipped on the light for the basement stairs and descended slowly, turning her feet at an angle so that she wouldn’t slip on the narrow steps. At the bottom she flicked on another light. He followed her, trying to see the stairs over the mound of his belly. Her canned preserves lined the shelves behind her, fresh this past summer from the cauldron of the pressure cooker, including the stewed tomatoes in mason jars that sometimes started to ferment and caused the jars to explode. He remembered reading the paper one evening and hearing a canned-tomato bomb go off underneath him. When he had gone downstairs to inspect the damage, shards of glass and stewed tomatoes were strewn all over the basement floor. It looked like a crime scene.

“How was your day?” she asked without interest. “Any hallucinations?”

“No. Just the usual can of worms.” He was puffing from the exertion. At last he shrugged. “No. A little better than the usual worms.”

“Remind me,” she said, “to have someone come down here and inspect this place for mold. I smell mold.”

“Okay.” He noticed that she faced slightly away from him, though her right hand played with the fingers of his left hand, an old habit. She toyed with his wedding ring. He often felt that she was inspecting him.

“What’s this about?” he asked, as the furnace rumbled to life. “How come we’re down here?”

“What’s what about?”

“Why we’re down here.”

“Oh. Down here?” She had grown terribly absentminded. Maybe it was the gin. “Oh, yes, of course.” She nodded, a bit too forcefully, though she was still facing away from him. “Okay, so brace yourself. It seems that we were grandparents for, I don’t know, about four weeks. Well, I mean, virtual grandparents, because, well, you get the picture.”

“I do? No, I think I don’t get the picture. What picture is this? Does this have to do with Jupie?”

“Bingo.” She nodded and then wiped her eyes on her bathrobe sleeve. Jupie was their son, Rafe’s girlfriend—though Jupie was Eli and Susan’s private name for this girlfriend whose actual name was Donna. A serious martial artist in tae kwon do, Rafe also considered himself a Marxist and had met this girl at a downtown political rally for voting rights or whatever. She was a freshman at Macalester, and although she was a year older than he was, her political activism matched his. They had hooked up soon after they met, and she had attended his matches and cheered him on. An attractive young woman with long brown hair, big brown eyeglasses to match, and a habit of chewing on her lip after she said anything, she nevertheless had an essential blurriness to her, which had provoked the doctor, after one of her visits to the house when she and their son had engaged him in conversation about gender identity, to call her Jupiter, not because she was godlike but because she resembled a gas planet. You’d go down through the layers of gas with her, and you never got to anything solid.

Her well-meaning earnestness had a certain charm. All it lacked was specific content.

By contrast, Rafe was all specific content. His body had a wiry density: when he moved, he seemed not to walk but to float, his movements all perfectly coordinated. When sparring, he showed absolutely no mercy, and his face showed an utter lack of expression. Watching him, his father felt pride and wonder. Well, he himself had been a fighter once.

Of course teens were hazy because life was still hazy to them, but this Donna, this Jupiter, was a mistress of the unspecific. Political platitudes and unsubstantiated generalizations just came leaking out of her. Besides, their son was still in high school, a senior. Big political rhetoric turned him on.

“Actually,” Susan said, “we’ve got to stop calling her that. Her name’s Donna. If Rafe ever catches us calling her Jupie again, he’ll pitch a fit.”

“So…”

“So I guess he forgot about condoms one time, or they got careless, but anyway he got her knocked up, unbeknownst to us, and also, equally unbeknownst to us, they went off to Planned Parenthood last week.” This sentence came out of Susan in pieces, severed into parts. Elijah took his wife into his arms and felt his old damaged heart breaking again, momentarily. “After all,” his wife said into his shirt, “she’s eighteen. Or nineteen. Old enough anyway to get an abortion.”

“When did he tell you?”

“This evening. And here’s the thing. He’s been crying all afternoon. The poor kid. His crying is contagious. And…I don’t know. You don’t expect a tough young man to be torn up about it. You don’t expect the fathers to cry.”

“You don’t?” He waited. “I do.”

She just looked at him, through the tears.

“But anyway Rafe’s not generic,” he said. “He’s not one of ‘the men.’ He’s not one of ‘the fathers.’ Rafe is himself. Of course he’d cry. Jesus, the poor kid.”

“I’d rather,” she said, stiffening, “I’d rather you didn’t lecture me about him. I believe that I know him as well as you do.” She paused for effect. “If not better.”