Page 86 of The Elements

This was the second time he had asked this, and I felt we’d already gone well past polite small talk but nodded cautiously.

“If you had to describe your late parents in a single word, what word would that be?”

I thought about this for a little before answering.

“Successful,” I said eventually.

“Now that’s a very strange reply,” he said. “Successful in what way? In their work?”

“In a sense. You said that the worst thing that can happen to any man or woman is to lose a child, and I don’t disagree with you on that.

But, by the same token, the best thing that any man or woman can do in life is to be a good parent.

To give their children a happy childhood.

And my parents did that. They were kind people.

They loved me, they took care of me. Always made me feel worthwhile.

” Perhaps the beer was getting to me because I added: “There was a time, in my teens, when I struggled with life. During those years, I wasn’t always as kind to them as I might have been.

But they never pushed me away. They were always in my corner, even when I gave them cause to run far from it.

So the reason I say ‘successful’ is because they took on the most important role in the world and did a great job at it. ”

He nodded his head. “Now that’s a lovely thing to say,” he told me.

“And if they’re listening from up there in heaven, then I imagine they’ll have a smile on their faces hearing such generous words.

I only hope my daughter, my surviving daughter that is, will be able to say the same thing about me someday.

And that, in time, when you’re a parent yourself, you’ll follow their example. ”

“I hope so,” I said. Since our night out with Vanessa and Ron around the time of our wedding, Rebecca and I had never discussed her comments regarding not wanting to bring a child into the world.

We should have, of course, but I hoped that it had simply been a throwaway remark, one designed to hurt her mother.

I still assumed that one day we would have kids of our own.

Although, of course, to have a child would require actually having sex.

“Still, at least you’re married,” continued Daniel, betraying a little more of his accent now. “Which is the right way to be. All these girls today having babies with no sign of a ring on their fingers. There’s a cheapness to them, don’t you think? A lack of self-respect.”

“I don’t think people care about those sorts of things anymore,” I said.

“That’s because the young behave like animals,” he replied, leaning forward, his face darkening. “And we allow it. God created marriage for a reason.”

“God didn’t create marriage,” I told him. “Man did.”

He waved this away dismissively.

“A child should have a father and a mother,” he insisted. “And that father and mother should be joined in the sacrament of marriage, a sacrament, I might add, that no court order can dissolve, even if the world thinks otherwise. Don’t you agree with me, Aaron?”

“No,” I said firmly. “If a child has two parents who love each other and remain together, then that’s obviously a good thing, but whether they’re married or not seems neither here nor there. And a parent can bring up a child alone and do a great job. Ultimately, it’s about love.”

“My wife and I waited,” he told me, tapping a finger against his nose, as if I was to keep this piece of intelligence to myself.

He poured himself another healthy shot of the whiskey and held it to the light, looking at it admiringly.

“Or rather, I waited. She had a history, I’m sorry to say.

One that I was willing to overlook, which is as much to my shame as it is to hers.

When I met her, she’d already been with other men.

Only a few, she told me, but who’s to say?

Women lie. You know that as well as I do.

It’s in their nature. They are inherently deceitful.

Especially when they’re trying to trap a man, and she trapped me well and good, so she did.

Oh, for a stupid woman, she was very clever when it came to snaring her catch.

It took a long time for us to conceive a child, and it wasn’t for want of trying, oh no.

Let me assure you, Aaron, that relations between us in those early years were as regular as they were convivial, but month after month we were left disappointed.

Let’s go to a doctor, she said, and I did as I was told because is there anything that a man wants more than a quiet life?

So we went to the doctor, a lady doctor, mind you, and didn’t she—the lady doctor, I mean, not my wife—didn’t she suggest that it might be my fault that we were having no success.

If I wasn’t a man who’d been brought up to respect the fairer sex, I’d have given her a good slap for her troubles and there wouldn’t have been a jury in the land that—”

He broke off for a moment when he said this and took a long breath, closing his eyes. I allowed the silence to linger, not wishing to say anything.

“Anyway, rest assured, I never laid a hand on her. And, as it turned out, it wasn’t my fault at all.

There was nothing wrong with me. Or her, in fact.

It was just God’s way of making us wait so that we would love our children even more when they finally arrived.

And He knows that we treated those girls like they were princesses of the royal blood.

There was never, let me tell you, two little girls who were loved more. ”

He took a longer swig from the whiskey now, and I could tell that he was growing drunk. Somewhere at the back of my mind, an idea started to suggest itself to me, but like a ship lost at sea on a dark night, it was still partly hidden by fog.

“When you do have children, Aaron,” he said, “may the good Lord see fit to bless you with sons. What is it that fella in The Godfather says, when he visits the Don at the wedding? The lad who ends up sleeping with the fishes. May your first child be a masculine child! Good strong boys who can look up to you and take after you. I loved my girls, I did, but a house full of women with their potions and their notions, their concoctions and their gossiping, and their bras and their panties hanging out on the washing line every afternoon, it can be too much for a man. A taunt. Something to get him all riled up. No, a man needs sons, that’s the truth of it.

And a man like me, in my position, with all I had to give, should have had sons.

Sons would have stood up for me in my hour of need and not abandoned me like the women in my life did.

That woman I called a wife and those girls I called daughters and who made up the most despicable lies about me.

Have you ever had someone make up a despicable lie about you, Aaron?

Have you ever had to endure a calumny that blackens your name and your reputation forever?

There is nothing worse, let me tell you.

When someone says that you’ve done a thing that you would never in a million years do, not unless you were invited to anyway, and the world hears about it and it turns on you and it says abominable things, well, it’s like no other form of torture.

You won’t have had that happen to you, of course not, you’re just a young man yet, but in time you might, so if you become a father, and I hope you do, then please God, may your first child be a—”

I sprang to my feet, upsetting the table, and he reared back, looking at me in surprise.

“Get out,” I said, a feeling of nausea overwhelming me as I finally realized who my visitor was, and that he had no more connection to Rebecca’s airline than I did. To my right, I heard the bathroom door open, then the bedroom door, and knew that Rebecca would be with us shortly.

“But why should I leave?” the man asked, holding his hands out to me like a supplicant. “A man has a right to see his daughter.”

“You lost all your rights after what you did.”

“Eleven years rotting away in Midlands prison with nothing to do but stare at the four walls all day and try to get from breakfast to dinner without having the head beaten off me by murderers and rapists and drug dealers because they needed someone to look down on, and who else, only Muggins here, Muggins, who was stitched up by his whore of a wife and his slut of a daughter, who he’d given everything to, who he’d worked every day of his life for, and who abandoned him when he needed them the most. Don’t you think after something like that happens that a man has a right to look that bitch in the eye and ask, why did you do that, darling girl, why did you do that to me?

Don’t you know that everything I ever did was for you and your sister, that I loved you both, that I would have laid down my life for—”

The door opened, and Rebecca stepped into the living room in oversized pajamas, running a towel through her wet hair.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I feel like some Thai food if you—”

She paused, obviously surprised to find someone else in the room with me, probably embarrassed that he would discover her in her nightwear, and I could tell that it took a few moments for her brain to catch up with her eyes and recognize who had invaded her place of safety under false pretenses.

Her scream was a sound that haunts me still.