Page 144

He rose. He walked to the window and stood there with his hands behind him, looking out at the pale unwalked lawn, the bare trees, the low gray sky. His shoulders were rigid. I saw, in the reflection, the reflection of a face, and it was not the face of a banker.

“Since he was six,” said Richard Pendleton, “Alexander could not mingle with others.”

I was very still.

“He would look at other children, and he wanted to hold them. To grip. To press. To see what happened. Not out of malice.” His voice had gone quiet. “He simply could not stop. He bit a girl at a birthday party. He broke a boy’s tooth at kindergarten. Do you understand what it is to be a father, to look at your son at six years old, and see something moving under his skin, and not know what to call it?”

“I believe I do.”

“The doctors called it impulse regulation. They gave him pills. He hated the pills.” A dry, short breath. “So I stopped the pills. And I put him on the ice. A coach told me it might help. He was right. It was the first time in his life I saw him quiet.”

I heard him swallow.

“I did not go to his games,” he said. “I want you to know that. It was not indifference. I could not bear to watch. I sat in this room on those nights with the radio on, and every time it crackled I thought, this is the time. This is when he hurts someone. Or is hurt. “ His voice cracked, very slightly, and steadied. “I have been afraid for that boy for twenty years.”

“Sir—”

“Let me finish.”

He turned around. In his hand, drawn from an inside pocket, was a small black rectangle. He laid it on the desk between us with a click.

“Do you know what this is?”

“A credit card.”

“It is his. It is a card I gave him at eighteen, with no limit, that I have watched for eight years.” His mouth twisted. “Every few months, a sum leaves it. One hundred thousand dollars. Sometimes more. It goes to a place called the Pit, and I do not need to be told what it buys.”

The words were flat and precise.

“Alexander goes to places,” he said. “He pays people. To be beaten. I know. I have always known. I have had him followed. I have kept the receipts.” His hand flattened on the desk. “Lex has hyper-antisocial tendencies. It is a clinical term. It means that when he is hurt, he wants to hurt something back. He will grow, I think, out of the worst of it. He has already begun. But there will be nights, Mr. Volkov. There will be years of nights. Knowing that, do you think you can endure it? Do you think you can be with him?”

I looked at the card.

It was the thing my host had been building toward, the lever and the test. I saw it, and I saw beneath it the terror of a father who had sat in a dark study for two decades listening to a radio.

“May I tell you what I have seen?” I said.

“Please.”

“I have seen him stand in a room with a gun pointed at him, and step in front of the man he loved.” I heard my voice roughen. “I have seen him put his hand on the back of a stranger’s head and say I am sorry. I have seen him lie awake worrying about the sister he says he cannot stand. I have seen him eat a slice of pizza in a public dining hall and offer half to a man he had known for one day.”

The old man did not move.

“His personality,” I said, “is what I fell in love with. I do not love him in spite of the thing you fear. I love the man who fears it. Who fights it. Who has been fighting it since he was six years old, alone, with no one to tell him it was not shameful.” I met his eyes. “I do not want to cure him, sir. I want to stand next to him. When it rises, I want to be the one he turns to instead of a stranger in a ring.”

“That is a great deal to promise.”

“It is the only thing I have ever wanted.”

The clock ticked. Outside the window, a bird landed on a bare branch, considered the lawn, and thought better of it.

Richard Pendleton sat down.

He did it heavily, all at once, like a man setting down a load. He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and finger. When he looked up he seemed ten years older, and something in his face had come loose.

“You are as stubborn as he is,” he said.

“I have been told so.”