The Every Boy by Dana Adam Shapiro

Author:Dana Adam Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

I forgive you.

Technically, they were still married. They called the separation a “trial,” but that was five years ago. For the first time since the split he allowed himself to acknowledge her as his wife. He thought sweet thoughts, reread old love letters, built her in effigy from pillows, and squeezed her longingly—not murderously, as he had done in the past. He arranged the pillows under the covers so it looked like a sleeping body. He’d shut the lights, leave the bedroom, and come back later. He’d pretend to be quiet, tiptoeing so as not to wake her, then sliding under the covers, holding her into the night.

All the while, he kept reading the ledger, living vicariously through the dizzy saga of a boy who thought he’d found his girl. It was a strangely satisfying period. He spent quality time with his ink-and-paper son, and when his eyes went blurry, he crawled into bed with his foam-and-feather wife. He added verisimilitude by blowing up old pictures into freestanding, life-size companions placed strategically around the house: at the foot of his bed, by the stairs, in the kitchen. “Good morning,” he’d say to a pregnant Hannah, photographed in 1973 in front of the Doral Hotel in Miami Beach. “Nice lid, pal,” he’d say to Henry, photographed in 1977 beneath a giant sombrero on a family vacation to Mexico. “What happened to you?” he’d say to himself, photographed smiling, leaning out the window with a baseball bat, banging icicles off the gutter after the blizzard of ’78.

For dinner he cooked the meals he used to mock, her old favorites, mostly vegetarian. That she’d since turned into a meat-eater with a yen for beef Wellington was not important—this was a re-creation of the past, prewar, and he was going for period authenticity. He let his sideburns grow and sat around in clothes he’d worn in the early seventies. He sprayed her favorite old perfume, Estee Lauder’s Youth Dew, on her chair. He spoke out loud at the table about the allure of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the catchy-creepy treacle of the Carpenters, Evel Knievel’s crash at Snake River, and, of course, ants.

One night, after preparing her favorite dessert—chocolate fondue with shortbread—he decided to make a list of things he’d always felt he should have apologized for.

When I rolled my eyes and made you feel stupid for never having heard of Galahad, the flawless son of Lancelot and one of the three—with Percival and Bors—to achieve the Holy Grail. I read the Cliff’s Notes in college.

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