A FEW YEARS AGO, I went back to San Antonio for the last time. This was at the urging of my sister, Laney, who had called me up out of the blue to ask if I could do her a favor. She was out of the country at the time and was worried about my father, who lived just down the street from her in King William. They had both stayed in San Antonio over the years, my father because he had lived there all his life and Laney because she felt a certain obligation to take care of him ever since my mother had left him, filing for divorce and moving out to California.
Laney’s chief concern was my father’s health—he’d recently been diagnosed with late-onset Parkinson’s—and she feared that something might happen to him if no one was around to look after him. She said she knew things with my father and me had been strained in recent years, but that she’d consider it a personal favor if I made a short trip down from Portland to check in on him. Just for a few days, she said. Two or three max. She’d even pay for my airfare, she said, if I was willing. Cover any other unexpected expenses.
The last time I’d been in San Antonio I’d vowed never to go back, and Laney knew this. She’d been present to witness the two-hour fight between my father and me, a fight in which my father expressed his consternation that I had decided to stop working on a documentary film that had consumed much of my life for the past two years, a decision that had been both difficult and painful, but necessary for both financial and psychological reasons. I’d told him how I’d lost my partner of five years, Lauren, over this film, how I’d maxed out both my credit cards, how I’d be paying off the debt I’d amassed during the shooting of this film for the rest of my life; but all my father saw was his son selling out, giving up, and though he didn’t use those exact words, the subtext of his consternation was clear. I ended up leaving for the airport later that night, sending Laney a brief text saying I didn’t think I’d be coming back to San Antonio anytime soon, if ever.
That was over two years ago, though, and I knew a lot had happened in my father’s life since then. In addition to his Parkinson’s diagnosis, I’d learned from Laney that he’d recently been asked to step down from his position as a professor of painting and drawing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, a position he’d held since the mid-seventies that had supported not only his lifestyle over the years but also his own artistic career. The specifics around his dismissal were murky, but it was clear the humiliation of it had sent him into a deep depression, one he’d only recently emerged from, according to Laney. On top of all this, almost all my parents’ mutual friends had sided with my mother since the divorce, and most of his colleagues from UTSA had decided to distance themselves from him, which meant he basically just had Laney in his life, Laney and her husband, Bill, who were currently in Tuscany celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary.
“Do this for me and I’ll never ask another favor of you ever,” Laney had pleaded the night she called, and I could hear the desperation in her voice, my sister who I adored, who I could never deny anything.
“Two days,” I’d said finally. “Three is too many.”
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.” Then she added, “And just remember, he’ll be happy to see you. He misses you. And he feels terrible about the way the two of you left things the last time. All that stuff he said. He still talks about it all the time. How much he regrets it.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said.
“You don’t have to believe it,” she said, “but it’s true.” And then she said she’d be sending me a plane ticket via email in a few minutes and hung up.
I was thinking about this the evening I arrived at my father’s place a few days later, as my father and I sat in his dim-lit kitchen after dinner, sharing a bottle of wine. This was, of course, the same kitchen in which we’d had that fight two years earlier, though neither of us chose to mention this. In fact, we’d talked about very little of substance since I’d arrived, mostly just catching up on each other’s lives, superficial news about the family and people I’d known growing up in San Antonio. He looked much as he always had, or had for the past decade or so—his hair disheveled and graying, his face gaunt but still handsome, his frame similarly thin, but in a less healthy way now. Laney had told me to look out for certain things related to his recent diagnosis—a slight shuffle when he walked, an occasional tremor in his hands, some difficulty moving—but I hadn’t noticed any of these things really. He seemed older but no less agile or capable. And make sure he sits upright too, she’d added in a text earlier that day, when he’s eating. He’s been having trouble swallowing. But even this I hadn’t seen. We’d ordered tacos from a place around the corner, and he’d wolfed his down in seconds, wiping his chin with the sleeve of his paint-speckled T-shirt, then standing up to get some conchas from the cabinet above the fridge.
“You want something stronger than wine?” he’d said as he placed the conchas on a plate. Laney had warned me about letting him drink too much, but I knew it would be futile to try to stop him.
“Whatever you have,” I said.
“Tequila?”
“That’s fine. Is it good tequila?”
“It’s very good,” he said and smiled, and then he disappeared into the dark hallway of his small bungalow.
The last time I’d been to this house, my father had only recently moved in, having sold the old house, the house Laney and I grew up in, shortly after the divorce. Now, looking around my father’s kitchen, it seemed not much had changed in the past few years. Certain cardboard boxes still remained unpacked, piled on top of each other in the corner, and he’d done little to change the décor or atmosphere. Mostly his own paintings hung framed on the walls, older work that used to hang in the hallways of our old house, the one on South Presa; and most of the appliances, too, looked to be remnants of those childhood years, the out-of-date ones my mother clearly hadn’t wanted to take with her to California: the partially busted coffee maker that only worked on one setting, the avocado green GE toaster, the wood-grain crockpot. Through a window above the sink, you could see the leafy branches of his neighbors’ Mexican plum trees and the side of their yard filled with plumbago. In the far corner of the room was the one thing my father had insisted on keeping after the divorce: our light oak dining table, a table he’d built himself in the late seventies and that he and my mother had used to host countless dinner parties with their artist friends, that Laney and I had used to do our homework every night in high school, that we’d all used for festive family gatherings and holidays. It sat eight people comfortably and was a little oversized for my father’s modest new kitchen, but I could tell he’d kept it for sentimental reasons, that it meant more to him than he’d probably ever admit.
Now, though, it seemed sad that it sat unused in a corner, directly across from the much smaller table where he and I had eaten our dinner. It just sat there, piled high with books and unopened boxes, unused canvases and paint supplies, stray packages and mail. There was a fine layer of dust on everything in that part of the room and a mustiness that seemed to emanate from the table itself, a kind of stale odor mixed with the familiar scent of mineral spirits and turpentine and paint, smells that had filled every house my father had ever lived in.
“I’m going to need your help,” my father said when he eventually returned from the hallway with a bottle of tequila and two small whiskey tumblers. He put everything down on the table in front of me and rubbed his chin.
“Did Laney tell you?” he added.
“Tell me what, specifically?”
“About my show.”
“No,” I said. “What show?”
“Well, it’s not my show, I guess. It’s a group show, but I’m a part of it. I have two pretty large walls in it. Up to eight pieces, Maria said.”
Maria Estrada was an old friend of my parents, closer probably to my mother, but one of the few people in their old circle who hadn’t completely cut him off, at least according to Laney. She owned two galleries in Southtown and had been a champion of my father’s work, or at least a kind supporter of it, for many years. I was pretty sure that she was offering my father some wall space out of friendship or perhaps sympathy, but I could see it meant a lot to him. I don’t think he’d had any type of show—group or solo—in over a decade.
“Is this going to be new work?” I said, picking up the glass of tequila he’d poured for me.
“No, the new work’s not finished yet. This is old work, work I wasn’t ready to part with before.” He walked over to the sink and ran his hands under the faucet, then dried them on the towel hanging from the oven door.
“So how am I going to help?” I said.
He smiled, then took a big sip of tequila. “You’re going to help me choose it,” he said.
“Choose it?”
“Yes.”
“Tonight?”
“No, not tonight. Tomorrow. And then we’re going to call Maria’s son, and he’s going to help us transport it over to the gallery in his truck.”
“When’s the show?”
“Next week.”
I nodded. “Laney didn’t mention it,” I said.
“Well, she doesn’t always mention everything. She’s like your mother in that way.” He winked at me then in a conspiratorial way.
A moment later he came back to the table, poured himself another glass of tequila, and topped off mine. He’d been right about it being a good tequila. It was a Don Julio 1942, which I knew about but had never tasted before, a bottle he must have received as a gift, a bottle he’d never have bought for himself.
“It’s good, right?” he said, nodding at the bottle.
I told him it was, that it tasted more like a fine scotch than a tequila.
He nodded again.
Outside, the sky was darkening, and after a while my father turned on the college jazz station, which was playing a Bessie Smith retrospective. He stood by the radio a moment, nodding in approval, then made his way back to the table. He looked a little more tired now, or maybe just more relaxed. He leaned back in his chair and sighed.
“You know, your sister is planning to put me in assisted living. Did she mention that to you?”
I told him she hadn’t.
“Next year,” he said. “Or maybe the year following. But she thinks next year.”
“Can she do that,” I said, “without your permission?”
“No,” he said, “but she has my permission. I told her I was okay with it. What am I going to say to her anyway?” He shrugged. “I mean, I’m probably not going to be able to drive a year from now. Might not be walking that well either.” He shifted in his seat and looked at me evenly. “She told you about the Parkinson’s diagnosis, right?”
“She did.”
“I was kind of expecting you might call me.”
I looked down but said nothing.
“Anyway, no worries. I understand. I understand why you’re angry with me. I get it.”
I thought he might apologize then, show some sign of remorse for our last conversation, but he didn’t. He said nothing more about it, just sat there and sipped his drink, ran his hand along the side of his leg. Finally he looked up at me, and I could tell he wanted to say something more.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“Just tell me.”
He sighed. “I’ll just say one thing,” he said. “And I don’t want to get back into it again. I really don’t. But I’ll just say one thing. It was a beautiful film. What I saw of it, at least. And it’s just a shame that no one else will ever get to see it.”
I said nothing to this.
“That’s all I’m saying.”
“You know, all three of the producers pulled out,” I said. “I didn’t tell you that part, but they did. It wasn’t going to get any sort of promotional backing even if I did finish it,” I said. “And I was probably going to have to sink another twenty thousand into it, at least.”
“Still, you could have finished it,” he said, shrugging.
“For what? To be shown on YouTube?”
“No, just to finish it,” he said. “To finish it for the sake of finishing it.”
I said nothing, though I felt the old emotions returning.
“To say it’s done,” he continued without prompting. “To say I created this beautiful piece of art, and I wasn’t afraid. That’s why you do it. That’s why you finish it.”
“I was never afraid,” I said.
He shrugged.
“I wasn’t,” I said.
“Okay,” he said and held up his hands, as if to say whatever.
I felt suddenly unmoored and had to fight back the impulse to stand up and leave.
“Have another glass,” my father said, picking up the bottle. “Nobody’s driving tonight, right?”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Come on,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“Come on now,” he said again, pouring a generous amount into my tumbler.
“Drink up,” he said. “I won’t say another word about it, okay?”
In most of my memories of my father from childhood, he is moving. He was never a person who could sit still long, and even in his more sedentary moments he was always moving, shifting his hands, his arms, his shoulders. There was a restlessness about him in those early years, a sense that he couldn’t quite sit peacefully in his own skin. He always had to have something in the works—an art show he was planning, a dinner party, a mural or painting of his own. He was always leaving the house suddenly, speeding off in his car, returning with his arms filled with boxes, art supplies, cases of beer, walking around the kitchen with the telephone tucked under his chin, barking things at my mother, running up the stairs then back down again, heading into the garage in search of something. A chaos seemed to follow him everywhere, like he was a moving weather front.
Only when he left the house did our lives return to normal, resume their usual quietness and tranquility, my mother gliding through the rooms and hallways soundlessly, doing her own work behind closed doors in the studio she shared with my father behind the house. Never bringing her work inside, never bringing her own frustrations into our lives. Taciturn, elegant, beautifully restrained, my mother was as graceful and unassuming as my father was brutish.
And she had the ability to calm him down, which felt at that time like a blessing, the way she could talk him down from any cliff, mollify his anxieties, ease his temper. They’d disappear behind the door of their bedroom for long periods, and we’d hear my mother in there talking to him, listening to him, counseling him in her calm way, and then, later, they’d both emerge quietly, smiling, peaceful, my father walking down to the kitchen to start dinner, opening a bottle of wine, my mother coming over to join us on the couch in front of the TV, winking at us in her reassuring way, putting a hand on our shoulders, our arms.
It was a dance they’d danced for many years, for decades in fact, one they’d seemed destined to dance forever; at least, until my mother finally got tired of it and said no more.
Now, out in California, she’d managed to build a nice life for herself, a quiet life, and to begin a modest artistic career, something my father had never allowed her in Texas. Not that he ever openly discouraged her, just that his own career had always taken precedence. His art, not hers, had filled our house; his art, not hers, was talked about at the dinner table. He always said he loved that she made art too, that this was a special bond they shared, but I don’t think he’d ever given serious consideration to the art she made. Now, ironically, my mother’s quiet watercolors and drawings were selling at a consistent rate out in California, were being shown regularly in galleries and art shows, while my father probably hadn’t sold a single painting or sculpture in close to ten years.
Just last month, in fact, there had been a write-up of my mother’s work in a prominent online art magazine, one my father begrudgingly admitted he’d read when the topic of my mother came up later that night. We were sitting out on his back patio, overlooking his small xeriscaped garden and, beyond that, the tiny guest house that served as his studio. He’d brought out a six-pack of Pacifico and sliced up some limes with a paring knife, leaving the wedges in a porcelain bowl with a saltshaker beside it.
“I’m not going to talk about her,” I said after he’d mentioned the article and my mother’s work, clearly probing for information.
He sipped his beer impassively.
It was warmer out on the back patio but not hot yet. Still early spring in San Antonio. My father had the back garden lit with ambient light, and he’d planted agaves and aloes and other succulents along the retaining wall. Everything around us smelled fragrant, fresh. Whereas the inside of his house was a mess, the outside was remarkably clean.
“I’m just saying I’m proud of her,” he said after a moment, shrugging.
I looked at him suspiciously.
“I am,” he said. “And why don’t you want to talk about her anyway?”
“Because she doesn’t want us talking about her life out there,” I said. “Not to you, at least.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She just doesn’t.”
“Is she dating anyone?”
“I’m not answering that.”
“That means she is.”
In fact, my mother hadn’t dated anyone since she’d moved out to California, at least not that I knew about, but it gave me some pleasure to make him think she had. He looked down at his hands, momentarily crestfallen, and for the first time I noticed a slight tremor in his fingers and felt bad.
“She’s very happy out there,” I said after a while. “That’s all I’ll say.”
“That’s good,” he said and nodded. “I’m glad. And how often do you see her?”
“Pretty often.”
“More often than you come to see me, I suppose.”
I said nothing to this.
“It’s okay,” he said, as if to an imaginary apology. “I understand. I get it.”
He folded his hands on his lap and looked down.
“Did she ever say anything about the letters I sent?” he said after a moment.
“What letters?”
“Never mind.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I sent her some letters a while back,” he said, “that’s all. Some letters of reconciliation, you might say. Or contrition. But since she never responded, maybe they didn’t work.”
Out front on the street, I could hear the distant sound of mariachi music, people shouting. It was a First Friday in King William, meaning everyone was out and about, visiting the local galleries, roaming the streets of Southtown with bottles of beer and cups of wine, patronizing the various street vendors who came out to sell their wares. My father looked out at his garden pensively, perhaps still thinking of my mother. From the food trucks around the corner I could smell the sweet, doughy scent of funnel cakes cooking, the rich aroma of sizzling meats.
“You know, I’d never leave here,” he said after a short time, again as if in response to something I’d said. “Not like your mother did.”
“Leave here?”
“I’d never leave San Antonio.”
I nodded.
“I know your mother never felt that way, never understood that, but Laney does. And I know you never felt that way either. But the thing is, when you leave your home, wherever it might be, it’s like you become untethered from something. I see that happen with people all the time. And I feel like that’s happened with you.”
“Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just a feeling I have.”
“In what sense?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling, like I said. It’s not something I can really explain.” He shrugged and then leaned back slowly in his chair, thinking.
“I wasn’t happy here though.”
“That’s not true. You had a very happy childhood.”
I said nothing.
“What?” he said. “You had two parents. A stable home. Food on the table.”
“Stable?” I said.
“Well, we were never out on the street, were we?” He rolled his eyes.
“That’s not setting the bar particularly high,” I said.
My father reached for his beer. “You should have seen what it was like for me growing up with your grandfather. Talk about unstable.” He wiped his mouth with his hand. “But even so, I stayed, didn’t I? I never left my city. Or even this part of the city. Southtown, Lavaca. I never lived anywhere else. Nor had a desire to. What do you have up there in Portland that you don’t have here, now that you and Lauren are no longer together? I mean, why stay there?”
“I don’t know. I just like it, I guess. The weather. The people. The friends I have up there.”
“Yes. But here you have family. And forget about me. Your sister is here, who I know you love.” He looked at me evenly. “And soon you’re going to have a little nephew or niece. Did she tell you?”
“No,” I said, and then I sat there for a moment, stunned, and also hurt, hurt that she hadn’t mentioned this to me. “When? I mean—”
“I’m probably not supposed to tell you,” he said and looked down. “Anyway, next fall, I think. Sometime close to the holidays is what she told me.”
“That’s great. I mean, wow.”
“That’s why they’re over in Tuscany,” he said. “One more European vacation before they can’t take any more European vacations.” He laughed. “So, you have that. But you also have history here. People who’ve known you since you were a small child.”
“I’m not moving back here,” I said, picking up my beer.
“I know that,” he said.
“I’m not,” I said again, and then, to put an extra emphasis on it, and because I sensed he would persist, I stood up and went back into the house.
Later that night as I lay in bed, I would wonder why my father had even brought up the idea of me moving back home, what he’d been after, but at that moment, as I walked back toward the house, saying over my shoulder I’d be right back, I felt only a sudden and inexplicable need to be elsewhere.
Two days might have been too many, I texted Laney, once I’d used the bathroom and retrieved a glass of water. I was standing at the kitchen sink. He’s trying to get me to move back here. Also by the way congratulations.
I reread my text message twice then sent it off, forgetting for a moment that it was probably very early in the morning over there. Still, a short time later, to my surprise, Laney responded.
I’m so so sorry I didn’t tell you. Please don’t hate me. Will explain later OK? Then she added a trail of hearts and signed it Love Laney
I stared at the message for a moment, then out the window at the neighbors’ modest but beautiful house, the abundant plumbago that grew wildly along their fence, the hibiscus that lined the edges of their yard. The sound of drumbeats was coming from somewhere far off, down the street perhaps or along the river. I closed my eyes and tried to compose myself, to relax my breathing, to slow down my heart.
After a while, I looked back out the window and then down at my phone, considering how to reply to Laney. I felt hurt that she hadn’t told me about her pregnancy but didn’t want to stir things up with her right now, not when she was on vacation. Eventually I wrote, Don’t worry about it OK? I’m happy for you, Lane. We’ll talk later.
Then I pushed send, put my glass in my father’s dishwasher, and looked for the plate of conchas he’d left out earlier.
“I won’t say anything more about you moving back here,” my father said, when I came back out to the patio with the conchas. “I know you probably never would, but I hope you’ll just think about what I said, okay? I won’t say anything more about it, but just think about it.”
I sat back down on the wrought-iron chair. In the distance, I could still hear the crowds along South Alamo Street, the commotion from First Friday, and the muted sound of those far-off drums. For a moment I tried to imagine what my father had written to my mother in those letters, what his version of reconciliation might be, whether he’d tried to convince her to move back too.
“It’s just that when you get to be my age,” he continued, rubbing at his leg, “you just want your family around you. That’s all you really want. When I was your age, I wanted to conquer the art world, but now all I want is to have my family around. That’s it.”
I sipped my beer and looked over at his small studio. “Why did they ask you to step down from your position at UTSA?” I said after a moment.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” he said. “But it wasn’t anything prurient if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Just a lot of butting heads with the same people for a lot of years,” he said. “That’s what it came down to.”
I nodded but said nothing. I could tell it was still probably painful for him. In the past I might have persisted, but now I let it go.
“You know, Laney told me to look out for all of these symptoms you might have,” I said, “symptoms of Parkinson’s, but you seem pretty good to me. I mean, you’re moving around well, talking well.”
“Some days are better than others,” he said. “But yes, today has been a good day.” He took a bite of a concha. “Still, it’s going to get worse progressively, and there’s nothing I can really do about that.”
“But it might take a while, right?”
“Yes, it could be very slow moving. My doctor said a lot of people my age don’t even realize they have it.”
I nodded and, for the first time, told him how sorry I was to hear about his diagnosis, that I was sorry I hadn’t called him as soon as I’d found out.
He waved me away. “You were angry with me,” he said. “I understand. I went decades without talking to your grandfather. It’s just a thing that happens, you know? Fathers and sons. It’s just one of those things that’s kind of inevitable.”
I put down my beer and reached over and touched his shoulder gently, squeezed it.
The documentary film I made—or attempted to make—was about a group of independent musicians in Portland who had achieved moderate local fame but very little national recognition. It was a film about making music, even in the face of failure and economic strain. It was about being an artist, even when nobody seemed to notice what you were doing, or care. Months later, I’d realize I’d been making a film about my father, and my own childhood, trying to understand what might possess someone to keep making art even when nobody out there seemed to be waiting for it, which was often how I’d seen my father, especially as I got older. He’d achieved more recognition when I was younger, had even earned some major grants and fellowships, a few regional awards, but by the time I was in high school he mainly showed his stuff locally, if at all. He kept working away, but the paintings mostly found a home in the closet of his studio or on the walls of our own house. Others, he’d simply give away.
I mention this now only because my father’s personal investment in my film had always seemed strange to me. The fact that I hadn’t finished it really seemed to bother him, not just because I was giving up on it but because there was something in the story of these musicians that resonated with him. He must have sensed, as I would later, that the film was partially about him.
He didn’t bring the film up again that evening, though, not until we were getting close to calling it a night and the noise from First Friday was dissipating, the crowds going home. It got suddenly quiet, and that’s when he brought up the idea of funding the completion of the film himself.
“If I gave you the money to finish it,” he’d said, leaning forward in his chair and fiddling with the label on his bottle. “Would you do it? Would you finish it?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I funded the rest of it.”
“Is this a hypothetical?” I said.
“No. It’s not.”
“It would be a lot of money,” I said.
“I know, but I don’t have anything else to spend my money on now, and your sister has plenty of money. She and Bill don’t need it.”
“That would be very generous of you.”
“Well, think about it, okay?”
It was such an unexpected offer of generosity, and so out of character for him, that I didn’t know quite what to say. Part of me didn’t believe it. After all, we’d both had a lot to drink. Would he simply claim not to remember any of this in the morning? Would it all be lost and forgotten?
“I will,” I said after a moment, looking him directly in the eyes. “I’ll think about it. Thank you.”
I’d end up staying on another couple days, helping my father choose the seven paintings he’d display at the group show, two of which I knew were very important to him, abstract pieces he’d refused to sell in the past. Maria’s son came over to help us move them and, later, hang them in the gallery. Then we’d gone back home, and I’d ordered us some tamales from Rios Barbacoa on South Flores, and we’d spent the night going through old albums my father had kept, full of photos from my childhood, from the early years of his marriage to my mother, from his days in the army.
He never brought up the offer to finance the completion of my documentary again, and I didn’t mention it either, but this didn’t bother me as much as it might have in the past. I knew the next time I saw him, if I did see him again, he’d likely be much less physically able, and perhaps not as lucid either. Laney told me the thing she feared most were the delusions he’d eventually have as things got worse, delusions that the doctor said would be very painful to witness.
I tried not to think about any of that, though, not that day and not that evening. And it had been, in the end, a very nice day, helping my father set up his work for his show, just like I had back in high school, chowing on those tamales, splitting a six-pack of Tecate out on his back deck later that night. At one point I texted Laney to say that the visit had gone well, better than expected, and that my father had seemed in very good spirts, that he’d shown almost no signs of Parkinson’s at all. Maybe we should get a second opinion, I’d written. Maybe he’s been misdiagnosed. But Laney hadn’t responded, and later on that night I was woken from a bad dream by the sound of my father moving around the house restlessly, going back and forth from his bedroom to the kitchen, clearly unable to sleep, and I remembered Laney’s warning about how this was one of the issues he was currently dealing with—one of the symptoms of his condition—how he was often up the entire night, just walking around the house.
It’s really terrible, she’d said. It’s so sad.
And I remember thinking about this as I walked out of my room later that night and stood at the edge of the hallway, watching my father as he fiddled with the lock on the back door, then headed out into the night, moving slowly through the lit backyard toward his studio, this old man, this man who had hurt and humiliated me, put my mother through hell, traumatized all of us with his tantrums, his fury, this powerful, passionate man reduced to a feeble, limping figure, taking these short, uncertain steps across the back lot toward his studio, moving with an intensity, but in search of what? Some old work? Some paintings still in progress? A sudden inspiration? Still keeping one foot in that world perhaps, those dreams. This beautiful, slender man, who still looked beautiful now, silhouetted by the lights in the garden, a dark shape moving toward his studio door, aware perhaps of how little time he had left to do the work he wanted to do, to make the art he wanted to make, moving toward his studio door and then opening it slowly, carefully, switching on the lights, and then glancing back at the house once more, just briefly—as if he suddenly sensed my presence—meeting my eyes for just an instant, and then flashing a quick smile before turning around again, very slowly, and disappearing inside.
Andrew Porter is the author of four books, including the story collections The Disappeared (Knopf) and The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage) and the novels In Between Days (Knopf) and The Imagined Life (Knopf). He teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
Photo by Fabian Kühne on Unsplash
