“It seems possible, anyway, and that’s good enough, I think. It’s good enough for me, at least. And if it’s good enough for me, then you shouldn’t—oh…we’re…hugging? Okay. That’s fine. Sure. We’re hugging. Alright. Make me flinch, and then hug me. I guess why not? Big hug, then. Okay, son. Good. Yeah. Okay then. Alright now. Alright.”
* * *
Nonviolent, nonsexual, male-on-male contact. Two undemonstrative American men squeezing one another’s torsos in America. A widowed father and his motherless son, hugging after twentysomething years of not hugging.
There we were in the morning-lit kitchen.
But it wasn’t what it looked like. It wasn’t transformative. If anything, our hug worked against transformation—discharging the sentiments that, had we held them fast instead of each other, might have caused transformation; maintaining our emotional distance in the long term via closing our physical distance in the short.
Or something like that.
In any case, I didn’t, in the wake of the hug, confess to having broken the frame in the basement, nor to having long misconstrued as admiration for the Pellmore-Jasons—sometimes even as affection for the Pellmore-Jasons—my father’s contempt for the Pellmore-Jasons. Perhaps I hugged him to avoid confessing. If so, however, then only at first. As the hug proceeded, I hugged for hugging’s sake and only for hugging’s sake. We both did, I believe. It was a singular hug, tender and intimate and wholly acknowledged, lasting the better part of a minute, and although I don’t remember the way we disengaged, I know we didn’t perform the kind of shoulder-punching, backslapping, Zuko/Kenickie embarrassment routine I would have expected.
Once the hug had ended, my father left the kitchen to launder the T-shirt. I fixed myself a cup of coffee with honey. The first sip was interesting, the second one strange, and the third was disgusting—fumy, almost dizzying. To the roof of my mouth clung a musty sweetness, like breath on a window—stale breath on a window—while the coffee’s native bitterness, divorced from this sweetness, dried out the back of my tongue and my gums. I dumped what remained in the mug in the sink.
When I turned back around to pour a fresh cup, my father, freshly clothed, dis-bandana’d and de-goggled, was standing on the threshold bar, squinting at me, then my cup, then the sink, and then back at me. “Something wrong with the coffee there, Billy?” he said.
“I honeyed it,” I said.
“Come again?” he said.
“I used honey to sweeten it.”
“We run out of sugar?”
“No,” I said. “I just thought I’d try honey. In case it was great.”
“Not bright,” he said.
“Why ‘not bright’? What do you know about it?”
“I know I never heard of it,” he said, approaching.
“Neither have I,” I said. “That’s why I tried it. It could have been great.”
“No, Bill,” he said. “No chance in hell it could have been great. It could have, at absolute best, been mediocre.”
“Safe to say now,” I said, “after I told you.”
“Safe to say in 1961,” he said.
I didn’t know what he meant. He poured himself a coffee and explained what he meant. He began by explaining that by claiming that it would have been safe to say in 1961 that there was no chance in hell that honeyed coffee was anything better than mediocre, he was actually speaking conservatively: he didn’t know what year it had become de rigueur for the American housewife to have a coffee machine on her kitchen counter and a container of honey in her kitchen cupboard, and while he would guess it was well before 1953, he was certain it wasn’t after 1959, the year he’d been five and six years old, the first year he’d gone to school, and thus the first year he could remember reliably. (Though he did say de rigueur, he also used synonyms for de rigueur, e.g. customary, fashionable, in vogue, conventional, compulsory, essential, even comme il faut; used these synonyms, it seemed, not because he doubted my grasp of de rigueur’s full spectrum of meaning, but because he doubted I believed in his.) So, my father continued to explain, given the number of ready opportunities—tens of millions per day in America alone—to put honey in coffee in both 1959 and 1960, it would be nothing short of insane to deny that thousands, if not tens or even hundreds of thousands, of cups of coffee must have been honeyed by 1961. Considering, furthermore, that 1961 was already over fifty years past, and that more people drank more coffee these days than ever, and that we lived in a relatively open society that not only encouraged the free exchange of ideas but for some reason particularly encouraged the free exchange of ideas about foods and beverages, the fact that neither my father nor I, prior to that morning, had ever even heard of anyone putting honey in their coffee had to mean that those who had tried it, i.e. all those hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of men and women of the last five decades who had ever put honey in their coffee (perhaps because they’d run out of sugar, perhaps because they were foolish, perhaps on a dare from a mischievous friend)—even if some, or even many of those hundreds of thousands, if not millions, had determined honeyed coffee was mediocre, rather than outright disgusting—they had, each and every last one, unanimously found honeyed coffee to be less than great. Were it otherwise, we’d not only have heard about honeying coffee, we would have long before this morning tried honeyed coffee. And that was why, my father explained, it was distinctly not bright of me to ever have thought that by honeying my coffee I might realize some heretofore undiscovered and desirable potential, let alone greatness. Which appraisal (i.e. not bright), was, he added, also conservative—conservative in the sense of understated, or restrained.
Once he’d finished speaking, we stood there a moment, at the kitchen counter, by the coffee machine, just sipping our coffees, looking at each other and nodding a little til I made a sudden movement with my shoulders, like to hit him.
Flinching, he spilled half his coffee on his jeans.
“Goddamn!” he said. “You’re really on today, son. Or maybe I’m off.”
“Maybe’s the sound second thoughts make,” I said.
“Amen to that. It’s a shrug and a dodge.”
“If we’re gonna make it to brunch on time, I should probably watch Triple-J’s video,” I said.
“What you mean we, whiteman?” he said.
“You’re not going?” I said.
“Since when do I brunch?”
“You accepted the invitation,” I said.
“I was being polite.”
“Since when are you polite?”