Part 7 (1/2)

”I knew her, although she wasn't in my case load. Isn't she a freshman now at Cornell?”

What was I trying to say? She's a terrific kid, an A student, she wants to save the planet. So don't be so d.a.m.ned hard on us ”Are you talking about hard drugs” Toba's voice was chilly ”or just marijuana?”

”Marijuana, Mrs. Jaffe, although I'll bet my paycheck these kids have dabbled in other stuff. LSD, mushrooms, has.h.i.+sh, cocaine, Ecstasy, crack, speed-everything's available.”

”Marijuana isn't going to kill them, is it?”

”In ma.s.sive amounts, Mrs. Jaffe, yes, it might. We're talking cigar- size joints. Your son's brains are being fried.”

The walls of Alan's room were covered with posters of rock stars, bodybuilders, Harley-Davidsons, and Bogart movies. Dumbbells and free weights were flung carelessly on the floor. Alan had inherited Toba's dark hair and my lean physique; he was determined to swell his biceps and pectorals to the size of a teenage Schwarzenegger's.

He cried when I talked to him that evening. He admitted that the boys smoked in the janitor's storeroom; they had stolen a key. He'd sold a few lids to friends.

”I didn't make any money on that. I was just doing these guys a favor.”

”What about crack?”

”No way. That's bad karma, Dad.”

”Cocaine?”

”Once or twice. Didn't do anything for me. And it costs a fortune.”

”Cigar-size joints is what Mr. Variano said. Is that true?”

Alan bit his lip, but he nodded.

”Do you want to quit?”

”Yes. I know it's ruining my life.”

I was pleased. These admissions had to be therapeutic.

”If you know that, Alan, and you want to quit, you can. And you will.”

Briefly I remembered what Toba had said to me years before about leaving black Jacksonville in the search for a ”decent, safe” school. I sighed.

In spring the school advised us that Alan would not be graduated with the rest of his cla.s.s. He had failed required courses in American history and science.

That was when we decided to move to Longboat Key. Take the kid away from his dope-smoking pals, get him in a new environment for the makeup semester.

”And I want to put him in a drug program,” I said. ”I've done some investigating. There's a good one downtown.”

Toba resisted my depiction of our son as an addict. ”Ted, back in the sixties, at college, gra.s.s was a way of life. Did it fry our brains? We still take a few hits now and then at a party-you do, anyway. Alan's just... well, I don't know what he is.”

”Then we'll find out,” I said.

After we moved to Longboat Key in August, Alan began a twice- a-week evening program. Parents were advised to come for separate guidance sessions those same evenings. Toba dropped out-”You never learn anything new,” she explained-but I drove there with Alan the evening after I met Jerry Lee Elroy at Sarasota County Jail.

Thirty adults gathered in an elementary school cla.s.sroom in Newtown, a black area north of the city center. The walls were papered with children's drawings, and we sat at small wooden children's desks scarred with initials. Most of the parents were black or Hispanic.

A bowl was pa.s.sed, and I slipped a check for fifty dollars under some crumpled tens and fives.

I made it. Why can't my son?

There was a fundamental parental dilemma. You loved your kid, so you got involved. A sailing trip down to the Keys, Beethoven or U2 together in the evening, a discussion of the book he was reading for his school a.s.signment. But after a while whatever advice you gave or whatever example you set, an unwritten law declared that the kid would do virtually the opposite. Or hate you at some level for meddling.

”Don't lecture him so much,” Toba told me. ”You have a tendency to pontificate.”

I hated that word, pontificate. Probably because it was accurate.

I tried to pay attention to what was going on in the hot schoolroom. A single mother was telling us about her twenty-year-old son who had come home, begging to be fed. ”But I knew he'd steal whatever money he could find, make me real crazy. I say, 'Go away until you clean!' Two days later they call me from the hospital. They say, 'Elston's here, he's undernourished, he's sick, he say his mama kick him out.' I say, 'When he quit killing hisself with that rock cocaine, I come see him.' ”

The group applauded her, while she wiped her eyes. But what would happen to Elston without his mother? Could I do what she did? Tough love, they called it. Coddle them, forgive them, and they a.s.sume the world will too.

That night, on the drive home to Longboat Key, I said to Alan, ”How are you doing, son?”

”Fine, Dad. We sit in a big group, and everyone gets up and raps about the s.h.i.+tty things they did when they were on dope, and how they've been clean for ten days, or thirty days, and we all applaud. Then we hold hands and say the serenity prayer.”

”Do you get up there and talk?”

”Not anymore. I'm clean.”

”Do you want to leave?”

”I know what a terrible thing drugs are now. I could use the time for studying. I'm having a real tough time with physics.”

We were home. Alan hit the b.u.t.ton that opened the electronic security gate, and it whirred open.

”Let me think about it,” I said. ”I'll talk to your mother.”

Stars glittered above Sarasota Bay. Standing in the driveway, I reached out to give Alan a hug, remembering that my own father had never done that to me. Leonard, who had died a few years earlier in St. Augustine from a heart attack, had been a handshaker, not a hugger or a kisser. Coming back from my licentious summer in Europe before law school, I'd greeted him with an embrace and a kiss on both cheeks. He had flushed, drawing back a bit to make sure our groins didn't touch.

Toba was upstairs, watching thirtysomething. With a snifter of Remy Martin for company, I went out on the boat deck. Under gathering clouds the Gulf was a silvery gray, and from the other side of Longboat Key the waves splashed and receded gently.

Years ago, I thought, life had been simpler. In Jacksonville I could grab a cold piece of chicken and a Mexican beer and feel happy. Now we searched for three-star restaurants, and I wouldn't consider a Chardonnay for under twenty dollars. I used to drive my old Honda, Toba a tanklike Volvo wagon. We currently owned four cars: my Porsche, Toba's Jaguar, Alan's hand-painted, gas-guzzling '82 Pontiac, Cathy's Toyota hatchback up in Ithaca. I was kicking in for four insurance premiums and supporting the economies of four nations.

The oiled black arc of a porpoise appeared out on the water. Cathy had brought back a b.u.mper sticker for me that said: MY DAUGHTER AND MY MONEY GO TO CORNELL, and I had laughed. But some days when I saw it on the rear of my car I felt more plundered than validated. She was already talking about graduate school. Not to become a lawyer, but to earn a degree that would allow her to get in line for a low-paying job in Was.h.i.+ngton where she would help give away part of my tax dollar to the poor in Ethiopia or Bangladesh. This f.u.c.king recession, I thought, came at the wrong time.

But when is there a right time?

I went back inside the house to the den, where I read for a while in a new le Carre novel. A clock was ticking softly in the kitchen. Gulls flew over the atrium, so close that I could hear the rus.h.i.+ng choral beat of their wings. The pool filter stopped. A rich and gracious silence filled the night.

There was a rhythm to any life, I thought, a routine that both sustained and deadened. Countless moments became strung together in the guise of a whole, punctuated with flashes of pleasure, ache, doubt, and desire. I want. I can't. I wish. Those were the themes. I was forty-eight years old. It would be over all too quickly, and if I had the courage at the end, I would ask myself: What was it all about? What did you do that really mattered?

And what would I answer?