Sunset Park

the word wonderfully well, he is a fine Willie, a good soul to work with, and how nicely he reads the paper early in the first act, Opening for smart youth , Wanted bright boy, she burst out laughing at the first read-through when he spoke those lines, Fred Derry, the same name as a character in that movie she watched with Simon the other night, the one he will be showing to his class today, The Best Years of Our Lives, an excellent old film, she choked up at the end and cried, and when she went to rehearsal the next day and asked Fred if his parents had named him after the character in that movie, her stage husband grinned at her and said, Alas, dear woman, no, I am an aged fart who crept into this world five years before that film was made.
    Alas, dear woman. She doubts she has ever been dear. Many other things on the long journey from the first day to this day, but not dear, no, never that. Intermittently kind, intermittently lovable, intermittently loving, intermittently unselfish, but not often enough to qualify as dear.
    She misses Simon, the place feels sickeningly empty without him, but perhaps it is just as well that he isn’t here tonight, this one night, a Tuesday night in early January, the sixth night of the year, because in one hour Miles willbe ringing the bell downstairs, in one hour he will be walking into this third-floor loft on Franklin Street, and after seven and a half years of no contact with her son ( seven and a half years ), it is probably best that she see him alone, talk to him alone. She has no idea what will happen, is entirely in the dark about what to expect from the evening, and because she is too afraid to dwell on these imponderables, she has concentrated her attention on the dinner, the meal itself, what to serve and what not to serve, and because rehearsal was going to run too late for her to cook the meal herself, she has called two different restaurants to deliver food to the loft at eight-thirty sharp, two restaurants because after ordering steak dinners from the first, thinking steak was a good bet, everyone likes steak, especially men with healthy appetites, she began to fret that she had made the wrong choice, that maybe her son has become a vegetarian or has an aversion to steak, and she didn’t want things to get off to an awkward start by putting Miles in a position that would force him to eat something he doesn’t like or, even worse, to serve him a meal that he couldn’t or wouldn’t eat, and therefore, just to play it safe, she called a second restaurant and ordered a second pair of dinners—meatless lasagna, salads, and grilled winter vegetables. As with food, so with drink. She remembers that he used to like scotch and red wine, but his preferences might have changed since the last time she saw him, and consequently she has bought one case each of red wine and white wine and filled the liquor cabinetwith an abundant range of possibilities: scotch, bourbon, vodka, gin, tequila, rye, and three different brands of cognac.
    She assumes that Miles has already seen his father, that he made the call to the office first thing yesterday morning as Bing Nathan said he would, and that the two of them had dinner together last night. She was expecting Morris to call her today and give a full account of what happened, but no word yet, no message on the machine or her cell phone, even though Miles must have told him he would be coming here tonight, since she and Miles spoke before dinner hour yesterday, in other words before Miles saw his father, and it is hard to imagine that the subject would not have come up somewhere in their conversation. Who knows why she hasn’t heard from Morris? It could be that things went badly last night and he is still too upset to talk about it. Or else he was simply too busy today, his second day back at work after the trip to England, and maybe he got caught up in problems at the office, the publishing house is going through hard times just now, and it’s even possible that he’s still at the office at seven o’clock, eating Chinese takeout for dinner and settling in for a long night of work. Then, too, it could be that Miles lost his nerve and didn’t make the call. Not likely, since he wasn’t too afraid to call her, and if this is the week for burying hatchets, his father is the logical place to begin, the one he would go to first, since Morris had a hell of a lot more to do with raising him than she did, but still, itcould be true,