The Spot: Stories

Cavanaugh pondered all of the above — along with images from the drive that morning over the Tappan Zee Bridge and the beauty the river had held, stretching toward Tarrytown, rippled with tight wavelets, shimmering blue under a pristine sky — as he held his son, Gunner, in the sweat chamber, talked to him, got him settled, and gave him his toys, extracting them one at a time from an old green rucksack. These toys had been put aside for a few days so that they might accrue some elemental newness again and, in turn, give more in the way of pleasure. (“There are enough old toys to keep him busy,” Sharon had insisted. “I can’t charge another toy on the card, and I think we should build up his desire so that when Christmas comes there’s not another huge letdown like there was last year. Case in point: You bought him that Gobberblaster gun last summer, which was totally inappropriate for a kid his age and might’ve been a perfect gift for Christmas a couple of years from now, and he went out and shot it a few times, and now it’s in the back of the closet like all his other junked toys.”)

That fight about buying Gunner some new toys for the test, he thought, dabbing the sweat from his brow onto his cuff, had really been spurred on by the fact that Sharon was now back in practice, commuting into the city to scrounge clients and taking on a disproportionate number of pro bono cases, as if to keep the financial burden firmly on his side of the ledger, because she felt — and he knew this from their ten years together — that pressure was good for him artistically, and that he’d find the strength to break through to the big time only if he pushed against the weight of their monetary need. So he extracted one toy at a time and watched as Gunner went to the floor, tinkered and fussed and depleted each quickly, and in less than ten minutes had already gone through the Emergency Tow Truck and something called the Question Cube after two lame questions:

What river is in Egypt? the Nile? the Hudson? the Thames? or the Kalamazoo?

And then:

Who said: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? Groucho Marx? William Shakespeare? Sigmund Freud? or King Edward?

before the Question Cube gave a weak static snort and faded into silence, so that little Gunner, who was really too young to know the correct answers, but who liked the sound of the toy’s artificial voice — a basso profundo — and got a thrill out of guessing, stood up and, with a grunt, gave it a hard kick. Then he went on to quickly sap the Zinger, a gravity-defying top that was said to have the ability — in correct conditions — to spin eternally, and his old favorite, Mad Hamlet, a strangely compelling action figure that went into suicidal fits when you pushed a button hidden on its back. Only ten minutes in the sweat chamber had gone by, and all Cavanaugh could do was wait a few beats while Gunner looked up, bright with anticipation, and then cried, “I’m hot, I’m hot, I’m hot, hot, hot.”