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Closure

In architecture, this term refers to the property of perception which causes the tendency for an open or incomplete figure to be seen as a closed or complete and stable form.

FRANCIS D . K . CHING, A Visual Dictionary of Architecture

WHAT THEN WAS Alec guilty of—that he was a less-thanperfect husband? That once, in the long distant long ago, he made his wife Gina suffer a specific cruelty for which she then very amply repaid him? That the last time he saw his father Alec had gone out of his way to fight with him?

Stuart Baxter, once a man of sophisticated political opinions, seemed in old age to become more and more simplistic. In the last few years of his life, Alec’s father began to rigidly divide the world into what was Good for the Jews and Bad for Them. Stuart began to loudly admire the Hasidim, to go on and on about their purity. The Hasids of Brooklyn were notoriously wealthy as diamond merchants, and were often robbed, yet they walked to shul on Shabbat without carrying money, not even a fake wallet to give up in case they were hit again.

“Which,” Alec mentioned to his father on his last trip to Queens, “might be viewed as being a simpleton.”

“Now Alec,” his mother said.

“It causes war, Pop,” he told his father. “Remember war?” he asked. “W-A-R? And that it’s usually the religious fundamentalist who’s happy to kick it off.” He felt like he was talking to a four-year-old.

When had his father become like this strict Jew off a TV sitcom? The house where Alec grew up on 219th had aluminum siding. Why? Because, as Stuart said, paint costs money! And their interior decoration ran severely now toward the Oi, Gottenyu!—with everything done along the lines of his parents’ cultural allegiances : brushstroke prints of kitschy Chagall-like brides flying upside down, or the made-by-kibbutzim crap his parents got in the airport shops in Tel Aviv. Oi, Jesus! the jumble of occasional tables for which there was no occasion. Hadn’t their parents once been more aesthetically interesting than this? he asked his sister Betsy. Now their reading was of the most pious kind. The silver-bound Israeli Hagaddah sat out conspicuously alongside their book club books, nearly every one of them written by a conspicuously Jewish author and very often on Jewish themes.

For the rest of that visit his father was polite if cool. First Alec insulted the Jews, then he criticized Stuart’s driving. It was Betsy who asked her brother to speak to their father—their father stopped listening to Betsy when he turned into what she called the Jewish Mr. Magoo. When he got lost or confused, Stuart now impulsively braked to a stop, never mind that he was on the turnpike. Their mother, who did not drive, encouraged and colluded. “You can go now, Stu,” Vivian chirped. “The coast is clear,” she said. Stuart yanked the wheel, making an abrupt left in front of three lanes of oncoming traffic.

“The coast is not clear!” Alec bellowed from the backseat. “Pop! What’s going on here? Are you trying to get us killed?”

“Will you look at that?” his mother asked as Stu pulled ahead and blandly kept turning. Brakes squealed, horns blasted, curses were hurled at him. “See?” she sniffed. “They won’t give an inch!”

Alec and his father quarreled in July; Stuart Baxter died of a heart attack on a Saturday morning in October, no angina, no prior history. Alec flew out on the next plane east feeling only mildly startled. Their father died while praying, Betsy said. Stuart was wearing his white and ivory prayer shawl, his wrist and hand were wrapped in phylacteries. Could this be literally true, Alec wondered, or was his father really somehow alive and still manipulating, going into disguise as a thoroughly pious man in order to become the stuff of family legend?

Alec got off the plane to discover that the sunlight and all colors had gone watery, that the whole of Long Island seemed bent and drenched and held underwater by the enormity of this news. His father had really died and so was really dead. Grief twisted him, might have broken him, had he had no give. The look of the world changed; objects seemed to float just as Alec too now did. He took a cab in, went right to the funeral home, bent to kiss his father’s face. Stuart lay in a plain pine box, his beautiful head wrapped in the same silk shawl he’d had since he was a bar mitzvah boy on Oak Street in New Haven. The skin was cold to the touch of Alec’s lips, his father’s features so pure and still.

“Oh, Pop,” he said. “How I loved you. I am so sorry I was rude to you.”

Alec flew home, staring out the window of the plane, went right back to work in order to forget himself, to forget the ways in which he didn’t live by the other nine of the Ten Commandments. Then just as everything began to settle back and coalesce into the ordinary, Alec’s whole bright world again began to shift and buckle, as if without the rules given by God to Moses, the earth would never again be stabilized. Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother, the strata thundered. This quake measured 7.1, lasted a full fifteen seconds.

Earthquake time is like all other kinds of time that lie within a frame of violence. A second goes on and on, trails away as far as one can see into the future. One reasons that the moment now must end but it doesn’t end and even when it then does end, the event is never really over with, as both history and the future are bent at that point, and all of time is therefore altered by what has just transpired. This is known in physics as the Frozen Accident.

It is chaos, Fran Bloom told him—if the quantum works for anything, it’s to prove there is no cause and effect, no way the world reflects the inner state except that we view it intrapsychically. The cause and effect of guilt was a human construct, a mathematical calculation, she reminded him. It happened in the one-andone-equals-two of the realm of the superego, which—in Alec’s case—was becoming strangely harsh and punishing. Fran Bloom was a psychoanalyst, one of the old-fashioned Freudian, lying-onthe-couch school. She did the talking cure, left off with the pharmaceuticals. Alec admired that, admired the fact that Fran Bloom still used both names to identify herself when she called the house though he’d known her for years. The name Fran Bloom, he thought, was as comforting as the lub-dub, lub-dub of heartbeat.

He sometimes wished he had married a woman who possessed such wisdom, such certainty. Alec had begun to go up the street in the evenings to visit with the Blooms because he needed now to actively obsess and they were older and would listen patiently. Alec had to go over and over the various events to find his place in them. He went back mentally, a bit forward, then back again, all the way back past Peter’s birth, back before Gina went to finish her schooling, back to the winter Cecily was conceived in his office at Cal. The redwoods were hung with glittering raindrops. Had there been some kind of entrapment for which each of them secretly blamed the other?

Alec seemed to be fingering a chain of evidence: here the fight he and his father had, here his father’s startled look that his son could so caustically talk back to him. Alec was simply hurt that his father turned away from him, that when Stuart rejected his earlier liberalism to return to the warm comfort of the fold, he left his son’s children outside in the chilly zero.

Buried in the past were all those hurtful things that Alec had almost entirely forgotten—such as that when Gina was finishing her schooling she’d once known someone named Timmy, known him much too well.

The quake struck like a hammer drop, centered near Santa Cruz, its shock waves radiating outward for hundreds of miles. The shifting occurred on the Loma Prieta Fault; this was part of the same splintering system that includes the San Andreas and the Hayward, the strike-slip fault that ran directly beneath the Baxters’ house.

That was October 17, 1989. The clockwork of events might have been constructed differently , might have sprung out and dinged and been plotted to produce a different result. Alec might have been at the ball game at Candlestick Park, might have taken his son Peter with him. He loved this boy so much it made Alec much too vulnerable to loss.

They might have gone with his partner, Carlo Empy, who had tickets, might be stuck there in the darkened stadium with fifty thousand others, phones and bridges down or clogged and no way to get word home to Gina and Cecily. They might have driven there and have parked and gone in and might have therefore lived, but it was also conceivable that they would be running late since they were with Carlo, who ran late. Carlo was half Italian. They might have been rushing to the game and so just hitting the upper deck of the Bay Bridge when the slab fell in. They might have hit the connector just there where it pancaked, at the I-880 interchange, killing forty-two people. The Cypress Structure stood only two or three minutes from Alec and Carlo’s Fourth Street offices. Before that day, no one knew such a thing as the “Cypress Structure” even existed.

This would have happened because Alec had Peter with him, Peter had psychic vulnerability, might be charged, even, in the particular way that draws lightning down. Alec was meant for nothing, he often thought, aside from keeping his children safe in this shifting world.

Alec would have taken his son to the Bay Bridge World Series game—he seemed to need to repeat this for weeks to anyone who would listen—except his father had just died and Alec was just back from his trip east, was home without eating or sleeping, was bordering on near exhaustion. “You don’t border on near exhaustion, Alec,” Gina mentioned in bed one night. “That’s like your saying dethawed when you mean defrosted.”

He made only the slightest little grunt.

“You might begin to feel a whole lot better,” Gina was going on to say, “if you went out and got a little strenuous exercise. You need to eat more greens, lose a few pounds. You need to drink more water and a lot less coffee.”

Alec was lying in bed with his hands behind his neck studying the shifting gray geometries of shadow and deeper shadow on the ceiling. These came from moonshine caught in the light well he placed at the center of the house. Light invaded each upstairs room at night by falling through the transoms in luminous Rothko-like floating rectilineals. He was guilt-wracked, vexed. Just when Alec relaxed, settled in to witness the many and very obvious pleasures of his life, a word or phrase (such as Timmy, the fucking boychik, such as Despite his better nature, my father had come at the end to perfectly despise the goyim) would bubble up to punish him.

“Know what Voltaire said when they told him he was killing himself with coffee?”

“What?” Gina asked. She was falling asleep.

“I was born killed.”

She made some small sleepy acknowledgment. “Know what U.S. Grant’s last words were?”¹ Alec asked. He was a specialist in this kind of knowledge for which he had yet to find any real application. Gina’s breaths slowed, evened out; she was lost to him. Who or what was it Gina dreamed of these days?

Never mind, he told himself, I’ll go find someone else to tell.