The Whore's Child

means, though he’s learning. “Ever since last night I’ve been trying to figure out some way to punish myself. Now I can leave the whole thing in your capable hands. You’re about the most capable man I’ve ever known, Hank. I don’t mind saying it’s been a bitch competing with you.”
    I can’t think what to say to this, but I have to admit, now that I’ve heard him out, that it
is
funny. “I hope you won’t misconstrue my running you out of town as not liking you, Russell.”
    We both smile at that.
    â€œWere you and Faye ever unhappy?” he asks.
    â€œTogether or separately?”
    â€œTogether.”
    â€œSure.”
    He thinks about this for a minute. “I bet that’s not true,” he says. “I bet you’re just saying it for one of your famous philosophical reasons, like happiness just isn’t in the cards for human beings, the sort of thing guys like you say to college students in your late afternoon classes before you go home and spend a happy evening in front of the television.”
    There is a curious mixture of wisdom and naïveté in this observation, and it makes me even sadder to be putting Russell on a plane.
    â€œJulie always says that’s what she had in mind for us. To be as happy as you guys.”
    Once again I am aghast at how little my daughter knows me, at what a desert her imagination must be. What does she see when she looks at me? When I look at myself, the evidence is everywhere. I know now why she didn’t come to see me at the hospital. It was the nature of my operation. It wasn’t that she couldn’t imagine me with cancer. She couldn’t imagine me with a dick. That I am a man has somehow escaped her, which is why she doesn’t think twice about bending over in front of me in her peasant blouse. And maybe it’s even worse than that. If she has never thought of her father as a man, can she imagine herself as a woman?
    Russell’s car rides smoothly enough, but like most small Japanese models there is a low-level vibration that comes from being close to the earth and the buzzing engine. When the nausea I felt atop the lawn mower returns, I close my eyes and will it away, hoping that Russell will conclude I’ve fallen asleep.
    â€œThe good thing is I know now that I can’t make her happy. That’s what hitting her meant, I think. It was what I was thinking when I hit her. That I’d never make her happy. It pissed me off, because I always thought that was something I
could
do.”
    â€œYou’re very young, Russell,” I tell him.
    For some reason this observation also pisses him off and he looks over as if he’s thinking about hitting
me.
“You can be one cold son of a bitch, you know that, Hank? You’re just the kind of guy who’d kick a man out of his own house, take him to the airport in his own car, put him on a plane and figure he had a right to. The only reason I’m going along with this shit is because you look half dead. One little poke in the stones and I could leave you alongside the road for the undertaker.”
    â€œThere,” I say after a respectful moment of silence. “I guess you told me.”
    Bradley is crowded so we have to take the shuttle from a distant parking lot to the terminal. Then we walk a little and I begin to feel better again, waiting in line at the ticket counter, Russell behind me with his two suitcases.
    When it’s my turn, an earnest young woman wants to know how she may serve me. How do people keep such straight faces, I wonder. “Where can you go for two hundred dollars?” I ask her. “One way.”
    â€œSir?”
    I repeat my question.
    â€œLots of places. Boston. New York. Philadelphia . . .”
    â€œNothing west of the Mississippi?” Russell asks.
    She shakes her pretty head. The farther you go, the more expensive it gets. Such is life, she seems to imply.
    â€œTough luck, Hank,” Russell says.
    â€œHow about Pittsburgh?” I suggest, noticing that a flight’s leaving in half an hour. I think of a woman I know who lives there, or did once. We met at a convention a dozen or so years into my marriage. My one infidelity. She had recently been divorced, and we made love more or less constantly for three days. Then she returned to Pittsburgh as I did to Faye, and I’d never heard from her again. For several years I stopped going to