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Date Posted: 16:40:25 06/04/10 Fri
Author: Nell
Author Host/IP: 201-211-228-130.genericrev.cantv.net / 201.211.228.130
Subject: Balance Requires Motion, Chapter 4
In reply to: Nell 's message, "Living the Normal Life, Part II - Balance Requires Motion" on 21:12:04 05/31/10 Mon

*****

Michael was really happy when he walked in on Nikita and Adam sharing what sounded like genuine laughter, even if they were laughing about him. The rest of that weekend was so good that he dared to hope that perhaps they had turned the corner and things would be easier and happier for everyone from then on out. Which, he supposed a week later, meant that he was destined to be disappointed, he just had not expected it so soon.

The following Tuesday he was telling Nikita that it was time to arrange to have their boat pulled out of the water for the season, when Adam asked if Elena had liked to sail. That stumped Michael briefly because he realized, to his embarrassment, he had no real idea if Elena had liked to sail or not. It had not been part of his cover profile or their life together, so it had never come up. He answered vaguely, but he saw the disappointment in Adam’s face. Instead of leaving it there, Adam had been sized by perversity and started asking if Elena had liked to ski, or hunt, or camp, or canoe, or fish, or hike, or play sports; and the truth was Elena had not really liked any of those things very much. At that point, Adam had jammed his hands on his hips and wanted to know what Elena had liked to do.

That Michael had answered too quickly. “She liked to shop.”

He realized immediately he had spoken too fast and too flippantly, and he tried to rescue the moment by adding, with perfect truth, that what he meant was she liked antique shops and junk stores and flea markets; she loved hunting for the unique and the rare and the beautiful, especially if it was hidden away and forgotten or overlooked. She loved to bring her finds home and clean them and repair them display them at their best for the world to see, or, at least, those she invited into her house.

Adam said, “So, basically, you two had nothing in common.”

Then he had walked out of the room and proceeded to spend the rest of the week wearing ear-phones at all times and grunting only when spoken too.

Michael had tried to make amends by telling Adam that Elena had loved classical music, and that she had enjoyed listening to Michael play the cello for her, and later for Adam. He reminded Adam that Elena had played the violin herself. He shared with Adam that he and Elena had played together some when they were first dating and early in their marriage, before Adam had been born. Because Adam had quit playing music the year before, when his violin teacher had retired, Michael suggested that they find a new teacher now and start playing together again. Adam had just shrugged and said he wasn’t really interested in classical music anymore, and besides it would probably just make Nicole’s headaches worse.

When Michael told Nikita about it later, she had chuckled wryly and told him not to tell Adam that Michael had also once upon a time played his cello for her, too, or that on the whole it was excellent foreplay.

They had laughed together then, but it was pretty hollow laughter.

The next weekend Michael invited Adam to take a short, overnight hunting trip, just the two of them, leaving right after the Saturday soccer games and returning on Sunday afternoon. Adam had responded with a distinctly unenthusiastic “yeah, sure. Whatever.”

During the drive out of the city, as they hiked through the woods looking for birds, and as they sat by their evening fire, Michael worked hard to draw Adam out, trying to recapture their long, easy conversations of the winter before. Adam was having none of it, so in a last desperate attempt to make some sort of contact with his son, Michael invited Adam to ask whatever questions he wanted about his mother and promising to answer as fully as he could. Adam had taken him up on the offer, grudgingly at first but then with more enthusiasm and interest as Michael dredged up every memory he could of his years with Elena.

One could only extol someone’s many wonderful qualities for so long, however, before the conversation got boring. Michael knew that out of guilt he had gilded most of his own memories of Elena, but he did not think he was exaggerating anything more than her son deserved. He was also uncomfortably aware that he was painting a picture of a woman no sane man would ever abandon, unwillingly or not, and Adam’s increasingly pointed questions made it clear he was hearing that too. But Michael could not find his way to elaborating on qualities about Elena that would make her more human, and that had really bothered him, and it was not her lack of interest in outdoor sports, without entering into very dangerous territory.

For Elena had, sometimes, left him nearly gaping with shock at her casual assumption that anyone who faced difficulty in life had somehow earned it through poor choices, and that if they had simply made better ones everyone could live the same life of ease and comfort that she did. She was genuinely kind to everyone, and perhaps unintentionally, she was also genuinely patronizing and condescending toward anyone less well off than she. Which was, of course, more or less, the overwhelming majority of people on the planet. He had found this attitude unfathomable and deeply offensive. But, he had never dared even open the subject with her. Elena had been utterly ignorant of Michael’s past with the violent student left, and, particularly as the politically conservative child of an Iranian exile, would have been horrified and angry if she had known about it. He had no way to talk about things he still believed about the world without fear of those old passions, locked away and encrusted with cynicism, perhaps, but otherwise undimmed with time, creeping into the conversation.

Nor was he ready bring his own past up with Adam, and in any case, it seemed excruciatingly unfair to Elena to call her out on that topic now, when there was no way she could speak on her own behalf. The best he could do was a gentle laugh as he said, “well, she could be a bit of a snob.”

So, instead he had talked about Elena’s mother, Adam’s grandmother, the importance of their Iranian heritage, and the central role the wealthy, Paris-based Iranian-exile community had played in their lives. Adam had seemed very interested in this history, as it was largely new to him, so Michael had wracked his brain and shared everything he could think of that demonstrated how important that part of Elena’s identity was to her, up to and including a long digression about Iranian politics in the 1970s and the collapse of the Pahlavi dynasty and the rise of the current regime. He had actually enjoyed how interested Adam had been in the convoluted history of twentieth-century Iranian politics, and in all the cultural signifiers important to the Iranian exile community – education, sophistication, travel, fashion, Iranian and Persian art, music and food traditions.

All in all, as they were headed back home, Michael was feeling relatively good about their conversations and the state of things between them.

Then, Adam asked, “Did you leave my mom because she wasn’t white?”

“What?” Michael wrenched around to stare at Adam and nearly drove off the road his shock was so great. “No!”

“Well – I mean, you left her for a six-foot tall blond with blue eyes and mile-long legs.”

All kinds of ridiculous thoughts ran through Michael’s head, staring with, ‘Nikita isn’t six feet tall.’ Recognizing those as paltry defenses against dealing with the substance of Adam’s accusation, he forced himself to respond calmly. “Are you asking me if I stayed away from your mom not to protect her, and you, but because I’m a bigot?”

“Well – are you?”

Michael was silent.

“Dad?”

Michael stared out at the highway in front of him and frantically tried to figure out how to handle this new line of attack, all the while cursing himself for not seeing the possibility of it.

It had just never crossed his mind that Adam would interpret all the information Michael had poured into him over the last twenty four hours as a sign that Michael had felt Elena, wealthy, privileged, sophisticated Elena, had not been white enough.

Of course, as Adam had presented this accusation in a classic “have you stopped beating your wife yet” challenge, Michael answered the only way he could. He refused to respond at all.

“Dad?”

Michael turned on the radio.

“Yeah.” Adam snorted in derision. “I figured that’s what you’d say.”

They drove the rest of the way home in angry silence, and Michael sighed in relief when they finally pulled in the drive. “Adam.”

“Yeah.”

“I loved your mother and I did not leave the two of you of my own free will. Either you believe me, or you don’t. There is nothing more I can say.”

Adam gave him a level stare, then wrenched open the car door. Before he slammed it shut he said, “okay.”

Michael let the dogs out of the back of the truck, then followed Adam in time to hear Nikita, in a very rallying tone, say, “come down to the basement and see all the work I got done while you were gone!” Catching sight of Michael, she called, “you too! Come see!”

The walls had been finished and primed and the carpet in the main room had been installed the week before, and the bathroom was also finished now. All that remained was to paint and furnish the main room. Michael trailed after them to discover that Nikita had painted the walls of the main open area a deep, warm red and she was holding up two large floor pillows, both upholstered in re-purposed Persian rugs. “What do you think?”

Adam crossed his arms and glared.

Nikita’s happy smile dimmed. “What? Adam? What’s wrong?”

Adam growled, “I can’t believe you would reduce my mother to a decorating theme.”

Michael felt cold foreboding sweep through his veins as Nikita shook her head in confusion and put the pillows back on the floor. She stood up and assumed the wide legged, fight or flight stance he recognized all to well from their days in the Section. “Excuse me?”

Adam kept his voice level, and very cold. “You think this will make it all okay? A little red paint and a few Persian pillows and Adam will forget we killed his mom?”

Nikita held up her hands, as if she were warding off Adam’s words, her own eyes starting to snap with defensive anger. “Whoa. Adam–“

Adam cut her off disdainfully, “yeah. You did. You thought I’d be so pathetically grateful to have you remember my mother, no matter how disrespectfully, that I wouldn’t care that you’re the fucking whore who moved into her house and stole her husband.”

Michael snapped, “Adam!”

His son turned on him, his face frozen and his eyes dark pits of repressed fury. “Oh yeah, right. I forgot. It was the vicious brown terrorists who forced you to leave your dusky Persian wife and run away with the blond Nordic sex-goddess.”

The buried rage from all those years ago exploded up out of his gut so fast Michael had backhanded his son across the face before he could think better of it.

Adam straightened slowly and raised his hand to his cheek. His glare was artic. “Yeah. Like that will show me how much you loved my mom.”

Michael held Adam’s stare until Adam broke and dropped his eyes, then Michael turned on his heel and left the house.

*******

Nikita sat in the dining room sipping hot water with lemon and wishing it were scotch. They should have seen it coming, she supposed. Adam had dropped plenty of hints that he was wound up tightly over what he saw as Michael’s betrayal of his mother, and, more crucially if much less self-consciously, that he feared that Michael would betray and abandon him as well. That Adam entirely misunderstood the nature, and the magnitude, of Michael’s betrayal of Elena was a bitter irony she told herself to savor as a reminder of all that she had hated. Life in the Section had been full of such ironies. The truth twisted just enough to be a lie, a lie leavened with enough truth to burn like acid; these were the Section’s stock and trade.

All she could do now was sit and wait. The lights in the dining room were off and she had a good view of the window well outside Adam’s bedroom, so she was sure that she would see him if he tried to run that way, and between the creaky stairs, the very noisy deadbolt, and the dogs moving around, she would hear him if he tried to slip out the kitchen door.

As it turned out, he didn’t do either. Instead he came slowly up the stairs and hovered silently in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room.

“Yes?” She asked.

“Where’s he gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh.” Adam was quiet for a moment before he said, “I thought, he would have called you by now.”

“No.”

“Oh.” Adam thrust his hands in his pockets. “I’ve never made him that angry before.”

Nikita dropped her gaze to her hands, wrapped around her now cool mug. “I have.” She shivered away a memory of blood under Michael’s eye, hoping the dark hid her expression. “He’ll get over it.” She looked back up at Adam. She had heard the faint notes of worry and fear in his voice, no matter that he had tried to disguise them with cool indifference. She said, “He’ll be back before morning.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Everyone he loves in the world is here.”

Adam shrugged. After another long period of silence, he said, “I wish you had never come.”

To Nikita he sounded slightly more wistful than resentful, though it was a close call, so she kept her own tone sympathetic. “I know.”

“I wish you would leave.”

“I know.”

“You won’t, though.”

“No. I won’t leave your dad, and your dad won’t leave you. So, you and I, we’re stuck with each other.”

“I guess so.” Adam stared at her in silence for a while longer, and then he slipped back into the kitchen and headed for his room.

*******

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