Behind the Curtain
Greetings, fellow fiction-lovers!
Today, I’m very excited to bring you one of my favourite writers here on Substack —
. Kevin writes — a collection of essays and poems that circle literary Christianity. Such is Kevin’s knowledge of literature and his mastery of language, that I make sure to never miss an issue.Today, with his trademark depth, Kevin brings us a brilliant short story about the anxieties and absurdities of fatherhood. Enjoy!
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Alexander became instantly ready to raise three children, though he was only twenty-nine, when he felt an amorphous lump in his partner’s left breast. Vivian lay beneath him in the soft constraints of her cream-colored sheets, upon which Alexander often caved and deemed her his girlfriend, the loaded label they had long declined. Vivian his partner was the mother of three disparate children, a mother now trying to slide his hand down from her left breast, likely aiming it between her legs. But Alexander straightened, because the rod of responsibility had grown alert in his back. Benjamin, Jennifer, Sebastian. He would raise them, if this amorphous skin-within-skin forced his hand.
Vivian didn’t grasp the significance of the moment. “What’s wrong?” she asked, as one hand smoothed his spine.
“Did you know you have kind of a lump right here?” Alexander asked, patting Vivian’s left breast. “I just felt it, and, let me say, Vivian, I feel that—”
She had already sat up and replaced his hand with both of her own, and Alexander was shunted off her left breast. Her hands kneaded the flesh, rolling the taut brown nipple in the process. Alexander, lowered by her nipple turning left again and again, returned to his partner’s ample naked body. His mind felt a little formless, retracted, though his three-pronged resolve to become a father at his tender twenty-nine years had been like steel.
“Where did you feel it, exactly?” Vivian asked with her nipple—her mouth, which (as a human being) she used for speaking. Alexander had been watching her nipple continue rolling through counterclockwise arcs, as it grew soft without him. He slid his hand over her left breast again, at first cupping it from habit but then pressing its shape with each finger, one touch following another in simple four-four time. Pinky, and ring, and middle, and—there, a light lump under his pointer finger, soft like diced fruit hidden in yogurt. “Here,” he told Vivian, and he moved her own pointer finger over the lump.
Vivian again kneaded her left breast, now with her finger, shunting Alexander again despite his help. Her pointer finger was poking deep into the skin, as though she couldn’t feel the lump. Alexander, not watching her grow frustrated with confusion, was thinking instead of—Benjamin, Jennifer, Sebastian— waking early, preparing three school bags, cooking at least six eggs. He’d have to wake up no later than 5:45.
“Alex,” Vivian was saying, “shit,” and she was drawing her knees into herself, asking, “Where is it?” Her hand left her breast and caught Alexander’s wrist. “Alexander,” she said. “Show me again where it is.”
Alexander returned to her, because he didn’t recognize the cracked sound in her voice. Vivian was a thirty-eight-year-old personnel manager, she allowed no cracks in her voice. But the amorphous lump just atop her left breast had done it, Alexander thought, it had upset her. He returned her finger to where he’d found the lump, since his fingers remembered the way. Vivian released his wrist, but her finger continued to move, as though she couldn’t accept this threat concealed softly within her. They lay down beside one another and didn’t speak for nearly twenty minutes.
He could become a father with so little warning, Alexander thought. He kept thinking, for now was the time to step up to Vivian’s children in a way he hadn’t before. Picking them up from school, suffering through Jessica’s five sub-amateur music recitals, playing his bass for them while sitting against the front door (only Sebastian had drawn closer, outstretched fingers not quite wanting the strings)—the entire span of his previous attempts had been only a warm-up. Fatherhood, he said out loud, without meaning to.
Vivian snorted a mirthless laugh and rolled away onto her side. “You have perfect timing,” she said, “it’s almost like you’re a musician.”
“I could do it,” Alexander said, and he fit his chin onto her shoulder.
“There’s nothing there,” she said, “I don’t know what you felt.” Her voice had hardened once more, now that she thought the threat gone. But Alexander had felt the amorphous lump, he said, there in her left breast. “Can you get it looked at, please? Vivian.”
It’d become dark and drawn her in her bedroom, and Vivian shifted to cover her bare legs in the cream sheets. Alexander repeated himself once she lay herself down beside him, more insistently. Vivian agreed to making an appointment, at least to make sure that there wasn’t anything there. “We can’t take the chance, right?”
“They would be okay, I promise that they would.” Alexander’s hand draped over her arm, so that four fingers rested again on her left breast. Vivian didn’t brush him from her body completely, though she nudged her shoulder up under Alexander’s arm and three of his fingers were shunted away. She misunderstood his intent; Alexander couldn’t find her lump as her breast pooled sideways onto the sheet.
“Most tumors are benign,” Alexander murmured. One in eight women will get breast cancer, he thought also, an unspoken thought like the grimier side of the penny under a vending machine. That was, if the figure wasn’t two in eight women contracting breast cancer, two women simplified into one woman in every four.
That uncertainty of simplification spawned its own uncertainty, as Alexander lay still. Could he take all these things into account now? Yes, he could. Alexander could straighten that cord, thread in its jack, and become a triumphant, blasting ballad of a father. There was no uncertainty. He could raise Vivian’s three children if she was the one woman of eight whose tumor was malignant.
In the morning, Vivian scheduled and received a mammogram. Alexander heard the call, as she related it that night, as only tidy details measured out like pebbles down a sidewalk. He, who had vigorously led all three kids into their new school day that morning, didn’t mind that Vivian explained the coming results—due on a Tuesday, for some reason, in one week—without feeling. Her blanked words to him were probably the same words she spoke to any of her disgruntled tech employees, a tone Alexander had never heard in its native setting but spotted by its basic tonelessness. Thirty-eight-year-old, personnel-manager tonelessness like colorless gauze.
“Tuesday, next week,” she said. That was all. She could secure herself tightly with nearly a superhuman skill, now that she was clothed and not kneading her left breast in the dark. Her upcoming appointment wasn’t the verdict on a mortal fear, it was just a Tuesday. She said this very little to Alexander, and then she brushed her teeth in the master bathroom, likely in tidy concentric circles for no less than one and a half minutes. Alexander wanted to ask her from the bed what it was like to parent, to rear three half-formed humans who needed you as equally as they defied you. But he didn’t call to her from her bed, because her mouth was clogged with toothpaste.
Vivian returned to bed, reaching over Alexander to see if her reading glasses sat on his bedside table rather than hers (they did, as often happened). Her laden left breast pressed onto Alexander for a moment, and Benjamin-Jennifer-Sebastian occurred to him without warning. He could ask her about parenthood now, as she sat beside him and completed a personality quiz through her reading glasses.
“Mother Goose,” he said instead, and he preemptively stroked her bare thigh up to the underwear’s elastic, because the nickname always irked her. Vivian shot him a sideways glance over the titular reading glasses. She was no longer afraid. She was no longer naked with possible cancer blossoming inside herself. Alexander would ask someone else.
His most immediate circle, it turned out, parented only two French bulldogs, one miniature schnauzer, and one jack russell terrier between them. Alexander made sure to investigate quickly, texting each of the five friends he valued most throughout one day—a new query texted every ninety minutes. Everyone responded solemnly to the news of possible cancer, but they treated the question of children like a minor taboo. Their replies on the subject came out of courtesy, after at least twenty minutes. He didn’t dare press them.
You’re twenty-nine, man.
Why do you think you’re ready?
I can’t give you advice I’ll only help you fuck that up.
Only Sasha spoke positively of children for young people of their age. She would like to adopt internationally, to flaunt her interracial single-motherhood in the face of the “church ladies” who prowled the artisan coffee shops she frequented.
Alexander had wanted all day to ask Tuck, who was not a father or husband but did successfully wear a quiff pompadour greased with pomade. As the founder and front man of Alexander’s band, Tuck held a heightened sense of the world at thirty-three. He’d won two JUNO awards with his other band, after all, and to Alexander, the man swept rather than walked through rooms.
But Tuck was holed up in the cocoon of his song-writing. These retreats happened whenever their band (Stunted Schmoe, which enjoyed mid-level success in Canada, New York, and Vermont) had a few days between gigs. They entailed Tuck’s inaccessibility, as though he were a terrible deity sequestered behind a thick velvet curtain. At the start of one writing retreat (it would later become the album Hunger Like Breath, soon to be successful with critics and fellow musicians but mostly unnoticed on music streaming platforms), Alexander had offered to bring by tacos. Sunshine Hut or Fraca-Taca? he'd texted.
In return, Tuck sent a forty-second audio recording containing several five-note piano trills, four different melodies in all. Which makes you dance? asked his message.
Alexander had almost replied. But he had first imagined Tuck hearing the buzz of Alexander’s opinion while seated at his upright piano, the one on which he’d taught himself to play the instrument at age twenty-five. Tuck might read the message’s display on the screen without unlocking the phone. Alexander’s choice would mean little to Tuck’s work. No doubt he would return to crafting the five-note themes, after the one or two seconds of silence, and he would pick his favorite with supreme confidence.
How would you parent three kids, Tuck?
The question would be either a four- or six-note trill, and it wouldn’t fit with the award-winning new song already in Tuck’s head. Alexander wouldn’t bother Tuck with a text. He wouldn’t have peer help with this one, he’d have to play it solo. Improvise it, solo.
He maintained, then, the on-beat, background riffs of his life so the days before Vivian’s results would dissipate like vibrations through the air: he walked carefully through Vivian’s house where he was living with less unease each day; he taught bass lessons to the enthralled teenaged boys he’d once been; he drove past the rangy bars where Stunted Schmoe would again perform whenever Tuck reemerged; and he visited, and returned to, the organic sections of his preferred grocery store.
Vivian, who worked around the clock, assigned no preference to any one store, and so Alexander imposed his will upon the family’s food each week. Crisp vegetables well-lit in their glistening drizzle of moisture, raw meats thickly wrapped behind a bloodless butcher’scounter, and other shoppers who looked like they might recognize Tuck in the street—Alexander enjoyed each during his visits on Monday and Thursday afternoons. These trips, more than his other activities, resonated like little homecomings. Then he’d swing by Granger’s Elementary to bring Jennifer and Sebastian back with him to the house. His makeshift family on these days wavered evenly, like a vibraphone intro that simulated simple peace.
Ask Cliff about fatherhood, it occurred to Alexander in his grocery store, as he weighed Drano in one hand and Green Gobbler in the other. He shook each bottle to hear their chemicals slosh inside, like they might drown out the errant thought of Vivian’s shitbag-cheater-liar-asshole ex-husband. Cliff knows more than you, the thought continued, when the two products hadn’t unclogged it from Alexander’s mind.
Cliff, at any time and in any setting, left Alexander wary of sudden, harmless attack. When he set the Drano back onto its shelf, its thunk startled him. Just as the thump of his car door and the thump-thump of Jennifer and Sebastian’s doors would also make him flinch. Sebastian wouldn’t talk about his day, and Jennifer wouldn’t stop talking about hers. This ten-year-old’s miniaturized face bobbing there in his rearview, her thoughts streaming, gave Alexander the same uneasy feeling her father had. They shouldn’t have. Jennifer was a shining child full of near-adult observations, equally likely to tell you that you were the nicest short adult she knew and to say that she’d like her class to go to another climate rally because the adult chants had sounded like music. “Jen is already seventy-percent formed,” Vivian sometimes said. The description sometimes left Alexander mildly sick to his stomach.
Make dinner when you can, I’m coming in late, Vivian texted him sometime between climate rallies and the front door. Alexander agreed and swept the kitchen counters clear so he could begin. He would cook something exemplary, Benjamin would resist joining everyone, and precocious Jennifer would continue to motorboat so that none of the males had to speak. Alexander knew this expected vignette to its -tte, he truly did.
But Jennifer slowed her speech at once, to eat her reheated gorgonzola ravioli; of the four separate courses Alexander had reheated, hers was the most gourmet. Alexander, eyeing her for a moment, then tried to engage Benjamin, thirteen and surly as a poet, over his uneaten balsamic lamb lined by fingerlings. “Did you not want lamb?”
“I didn’t want to eat,” Benjamin said, and he lowered his face enough that his hair curtained down over his eyes. His father called him Ben, Alexander remembered, and, whenever Cliff spoke, Ben always looked up to him. There was an odd light falling down over Benjamin’s head through the window behind him, its diverging beams joined like fingers from an outstretched hand. Odd, because the light thrust itself inside from a sun that’d already set, onto Benjamin and also into Alexander’s eyes. Alexander decided the window was too enormous for the room. That explained the odd, intrusive glare. A few other erroneous features of the house also seemed ill-fitting. The stairs dominating the downstairs, the shower swelling in Vivian’s bathroom, the front oak door seen from the inside. All things Alexander disliked, though he suspected he might not fully grasp why.
He had the chance to put Sebastian down to bed that night. Sebastian, on his back, rolled from side to side, and Alexander, reading Tadpole is Lost!, watched him toss. Knees bent, white tummy poking out from his matching astronaut pajamas, eyes fixed always on the ceiling. “I don’t like to sleep, Mr. Alex,” he complained. His tightened eyes remained locked straight ahead. So Alexander left the room, turning out the light before Sebastian could curl into the sleep he needed but didn’t like. This, whatever this was (between the complaint, the exit, and the darkened room), was probably what fatherhood meant. If Alexander could attempt summary.
Seb, Jen, Ben. And Viv, too. Together, they still fit the house because they had always lived there, the four of them still the remaining crew of a space vessel lacking just one escape pod. When Alexander laid himself out across Vivian’s bed, left ankle tucked behind the right, knees bent, eyes open to the ceiling, he slept. He’d only meant to close his eyes, avoid the nondescript ceiling—a deliberate, blank palette lowering down onto him. Indescribable like colorless gauze.
Vivian returned, and though she woke Alexander as she came into her darkened bedroom, he didn’t react. She flicked on the closet light so her shadow could undress. Her dark hair still sat high in its perch, for a moment. Her hands rose to let it fall, and to smooth it down her neck. Alexander closed his eyes again, to smooth her shadowed colorlessness over his field of vision. It became the color of Vivian’s hair and hands, a looming, expressionist night whether he watched or not. Her weight settled next to him. For her, today was not next Tuesday. She slept and rose the next morning like it was one fluid motion. Alexander couldn’t.
On the fateful Tuesday, he waited for her phone call in the endless paths of his produce section. A few children trailed their mothers between vegetables, but today Alexander wasn’t smiling at any of them. If Vivian called to say that the tumor was malignant, Alexander would wait perhaps five or six seconds, before he replied. The silence over the phone would sturdy them both. Then Alexander would say, We’ll do this together, you’re a fighter. Our kids will be fine. The our could be too much, but Vivian might not catch it, given the moment. He had been rounding and rounding the bagged cherry tomatoes for over a minute, and he changed course, escaping his etched walkways into the larger store.
If Vivian called to say that the tumor was benign, Alexander would reply immediately, saying, Thank god, it was just a scare. He would offer a celebratory dinner somewhere, of course leaving the specific place up to the woman who had withstood the specter of breast cancer. Their children secured with someone trustworthy, Alexander and Vivian would go to her choice of restaurant and eat in vindication—
His shoe caught against an outstretched power cord. It had been uncoiled into the aisle like a toy snake. Alexander had found power tools at the foot of the infinite home improvement aisles, which he must’ve visited once before and likely forgotten.
This aisle of power tools was exactly where Cliff would loiter, which was exactly why Alexander had forgotten doing the same. Cliff, tall and all-American, and always wandering away from the tasks which Vivian needed to complete in stores like this. Vivian would tow him along to choose curtains or groceries for a house party of his work colleagues, but then find him weighing one ball-peen hammer in each hand, or pulling an extension cord taut. Willful rejections, Alexander nearly said once when his partner complained to him about her ex-husband. Cliff had always deployed calculated absenteeism. By now, he would also be addled by middle-aged absurdities, like the best wrench for tightening sinks, the perfect noise which a self-installed air conditioner should make. In Vivian’s words, Cliff now worked as much as he’d always wanted to work, at least seventy-five hours a week as a creative director somewhere commercially unartistic. Creative director, with a touch of residual pride in her voice. Alexander noticed it but never knew whether he had to forgive it or not. Cliff had long been a charmer, and somehow his potent charm had grown with age.
Those conversations, Cliff settling like specter over the house he had bought, left Alexander rolling away from Vivian in bed and unable to sleep. Cliff was the shitbag-cheater-liar-asshole, he had forfeited his place. Alexander had been standing in this aisle for some corrosive length of time, the power cord still overlaying his foot, and he needed to go home.
Home, as in his own home, where he cared for the other inhabitants. His family, now cornered by breast cancer, needed him more than ever before. Alexander would care for them, though there would be costs to him, to his life, to his music. Fatherhood exacted costs, did it not?
Soon, Vivian would call to confide in Alexander about her test results. She wouldn’t confide in Cliff, and he wouldn’t comfort her as she needed. He would never again have what Alexander had, and Alexander felt that fact like tingling shimmers of goosebumps. No, he was standing under a vent of chilled air, so that his triumph over a man like Cliff warmed him as he moved away from it. He cared, he was the better man.
His phone buzzed once. Only once, rather than the insistent buzzing of mounting urgency. A toneless text message from Vivian. They didn’t find anything. See you tonight. Alexander felt robbed somehow, though he couldn’t decide whether his vicarious relief, familial support, or celebratory dinner had been stolen from him. He didn’t bother calling Vivian to congratulate her with his rehearsed well-wishing. He texted her a bland congratulation, and he left the store without returning through the produce. No, Alexander told himself, he hadn’t been cheated.
Vivian did at least announce a celebratory dinner at Al’s, also through a text message without a question mark. She would leave work early and collect her children, so that Alexander could go early and save them a table. He did, and he waited among the incongruous white tablecloths and Americana food steaming past him towards the plates of others. He should have texted her another option, also without a question mark. Let me get the kids, you can order the appetizers you want.
Alexander watched another cheeseburger and its wedge-fries emerge from the kitchen. Vivian shouldn’t have chosen Al’s, given its toothless male name, its array of children’s cuisine, and its guarantee that Vivian and Alexander would pay at least eighteen dollars for every dish. Alexander reminded himself again he hadn’t been cheated. He still had time to celebrate his family when they arrived—they had all been vindicated today, they had all triumphed.
“Alex,” said Cliff, approaching Alexander’s reserved table in the straight line of a permanent marker. He walked like the tall man he was, and Alexander had to stand and not greet him. Cliff wore a tailored gray suit which oozed a certain sheen, one Alexander still couldn’t quite name. A gray suit, coated in unnamable sheen, under Cliff’s slicked black hair and fucking cleft chin. He sat down.
“Hey, Cliff,” Alexander said, after a delay, “we don’t have enough chairs, it’s the five of us.” To which Cliff, still seated, pulled another seat to himself from a nearby unoccupied table. He kept his arm along its back, as though Vivian would sit there when she arrived. Cliff watched Alexander sit back down, after another delay, and then he smiled without showing his teeth.
“I was relieved it was benign,” he said. “Viv had sounded worried on the phone, when she first found the bump.”
“She called me,” Alexander said, “immediately after she’d gotten the results. She was ecstatic.”
Cliff nodded, raising a finger to a passing waiter and ordering an old fashioned. “You’re right, her voice sounded younger when she told me.”
His family hadn’t arrived yet, and Alexander hoped now that they wouldn’t. He might not be able to look at Vivian. As Benjamin, Jennifer, and Sebastian ran to their surprise of a father and hugged him in his shark’s suit, Alexander would lower his eyes enough to curtain them with his hair. Even if they never arrived, he had still been cheated.
Not by Cliff, though. Creative director, with a touch of residual pride.
Alexander hadn’t blamed Vivian for speaking of her ex-husband, that was her prerogative, her right to fondly recall the man here and there. Their children, how they lit up when he swept through the front door. His steel-trap decisions, how it gave her his same confidence. Their sex, how effortless it had always been—Alexander had whispered that he wouldn’t mind, he wasn’t possessive, they could discuss it as partners. “It had been just like conversation,” Vivian had said. Alexander hadn’t slept the next three nights, though he didn’t feel possessive.
Between Vivian and Cliff there was still a sort of warmth, remaining like imprints of a night’s sleep on a bed in the afternoon. Four entwined legs, now just furrows. Vivian still lived in their house, didn’t she? Two heads, bowl-shaped divots facing one another. Vivian still called him in the throes of her cracked emotions, to confide in him.
Cliff’s drink arrived and he drank it, probably because Alexander had been staring down onto his splayed fingers and not speaking. Alexander could now name that sheen around Cliff, emanating like a haze. Inevitability. It shouldn’t have been visible but it was, a lamp-light look of permanence, of inescapability. It was enough to make Alexander vomit, which he did that in the restaurant’s toilet, only three minutes after Cliff greeted his family with manly laughter.
That night, he wanted to say something to Vivian as she brushed her teeth, but she was already humming around her toothbrush, because the dinner had been a crowning success for her family. Alexander waited until she came to bed, where she stretched languidly, leaning back on her arms so her body elongated. “I was scared,” she whispered. Alexander only heard her because, while he’d averted his eyes from her body and its phantom lump, he still felt her presence like his own heartbeat. “I should’ve told you that, I was terrified.”
He delayed his reply, and Vivian’s weight shifted on the comforter, a shift as tangible as a bass through the stage’s floorboards. She must have settled forward, now that Alexander hadn’t taken up her invitation.
Alexander wouldn’t look at her. “It’s alright.” You told Cliff, you must’ve been terrified. Vivian would—rightly, understandably—want to celebrate her good news with relieved sex, but Alexander wouldn’t do that either. Touching her would worsen his cheated feeling, by allowing a delusion into the hollowed space he felt in himself.
Tonight Cliff had commanded the kids across the table. No, Alexander revised the thought, he had colluded with the kids, Cliff was the conspiratorial mentor every child wanted—a periodic touch of eye contact, the encouragement of a half-smile like footlights coloring the walk home. Was that fatherhood?
Alexander settled down onto his pillow. He couldn’t touch her, but he could wait for her to also lay flat on her side. That way, imprinting themselves in a parallel track, they could finally be nose to nose, their eyelashes overlapping.
“Are you feeling alright?” Vivian, still sitting up, touched his forehead with frigid fingers.
“I don’t know,” Alexander admitted. He should shut up now, he had to close his mouth before anything else escaped and exposed him to his partner. He rolled over so as not to face her, his hips twisting first and his head settling wherever it would. Alexander was not a father. Vivian’s body settled in behind his, and her arms encircled his stomach.
Alexander was still not a father. What was it that disqualified him? His untried twenty-nine years, somehow lacking the essentials; his own father, no colluder in his time; his timid bass-playing behind Tuck, the second-fiddle version of a child’s dream; his acceptance of borrowed life in another man’s house, like he was an understudy sweating under the lights; his sketched understanding of Benjamin, Jennifer, and Sebastian, how he could forget their faces at will; his inability or unwillingness to display all of himself, the way he left fractions of himself behind the curtain. He could not be a father. His reasons were many, and he didn’t know why. The lingering uncertainty—he didn’t know why—seemed the most damning reason of all. Alexander couldn’t take stock of himself. The fear of not knowing chilled his stomach with wintry shock.
“What’s wrong, Alex?” Vivian whispered in his ear. Alexander hoped, in a blissfully unrelated thought, to see a snowfall, the most gentle smothering he could imagine. A silent white blanket over a troubled topography, whose blemished landscape, almost kindly, was consumed without a sound. His hand remained between his knees, it did not rise to fall over Vivian’s thigh for an encouraging touch.
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that's a very good story
Great story! I was almost late to work reading it