Husband and Wife (23 page)

We wandered back to the living room. I said, “My mother was twenty-two when she had me.”

“My mother was twenty-five.”

“Can you imagine? That was when we were in grad school. Can you imagine having had kids at that age? I didn’t even know who I was.”

She settled back into the couch cushions. “Don’t you think knowing who you are makes it harder? I mean, you know who you are, and then it becomes really hard to be who you are.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Excellent point.” On her bookshelf she had the same set of Proust she’d given me. “Have you read these?”

“What?” She leaned forward to see those elegant, reproachful spines. “Oh, God, no.”

“Me, neither,” I said, and I sat down beside her, relieved.

“Someday,” she said. “Maybe.”

“Someday maybe,” I said. “Do you miss graduate school?”

“What do you think? Don’t you remember Janelle and her sisterhood circle?”

“I totally forgot about that! She really wanted you to be her sister.”

“Did she ever. Goddess this, goddess that. She used to come up behind me at parties and start braiding my hair.”

“Remember when Tony kept trying to romance you by suggesting you both sign up for karate?”

“What an idiot. Karate isn’t even Korean. He should at least have said tae kwon do.”

“If only you’d succumbed to his charms. You could be a black belt by now.”

“Remember when Brian implied he’d been a male prostitute?”

“Was he hitting on you, too?”

She shrugged. “Kind of a misguided approach, if he was.”

“Did we ever find out whether that was even true?”

“I don’t know. It made his poems seem cooler, which was what he was going for.”

“I remember all the gossip after his reading, everybody trying to parse what his poems meant. They were elliptical in the extreme, but we were all convinced we saw truth in them.” I sighed. “I think back then I had a tendency to confuse the art and the life.”

“A lot of people did.” She smiled. Then suddenly she intoned, “I rode a great sadness today.”

I stared at her. She looked back at me, solemnly. “Are you trying out a poem on me?” I asked.

“You’ve got to be kidding.” She leaned forward. “You don’t remember that? The party at Brian’s house, everyone sitting around stoned, and suddenly out of nowhere he pipes up and says—”

I finished the thought: “I rode a great sadness today.” The scene rushed back, the dimly lit apartment over a liquor store, the orange velour couch and extensive vinyl collection. Brian had once worked for a museum, and along the hall he had put up detergent and tinfoil and cookie boxes alongside typed descriptions of each object and its significance.
An ironic facsimile of a box of tinfoil
,
this box of tinfoil challenges us with the question
:
Did I or did I not once contain tinfoil? Hung nonchalantly on the wall
,
much like a box of tinfoil in someone’s home
,
this box of tinfoil is
,
remarkably
,
indistinguishable from an actual box of tinfoil. Asking where life ends and art begins
,
this box of tinfoil is a box of tinfoil.

“And you…” She grinned, and I grinned, and then she started to laugh, her laughter bumping her words along. “You said…”

I was laughing, too, the laughter catching me up. “‘What?’”

“And he said, and this time he seemed a little sheepish, ‘I rode a great sadness today.’ And again you said…”

I was laughing hard now. “I really didn’t hear him,” I managed to say.

“‘What?’ You made him say it a third time! Then, poor guy, he just rushed it out as fast as he could, ‘Irodeagreatsadnesstoday.’ And just dead silence.”

“Well, what are you supposed to say to that? I rode a unicorn?”

“Oh, that poor guy,” she said, laughing.

“I felt a great human emotion tonight,” I said.

“Oh, me, too,” she said. “Me, too.”

“I really didn’t hear him,” I said again, no longer laughing, suddenly visited by remorse. For the first time I felt sympathy for Brian, who wanted so badly to be a certain kind of person that he ended up an actor on his own carefully designed stage. It seemed to me now that there had been pathos even in the way he wore his hair, like Bob Dylan circa 1965. No doubt he had been depressed that day. I remembered him as a depressive guy. But how genuine was his emotion if he could transform it so readily into a line, display it like an accomplishment? How great could his sadness have been if he could say it aloud?

“Do you miss graduate school?” Helen asked.

“I don’t miss the place, or, really, most of the people, or, God knows, workshop. I miss, you know, conviction. My youthful conviction.”

“Which youthful conviction?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe all of them.”

That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay there for a while listening to my children breathe. Binx had a phlegmy rattle in his throat. In her sleep Mattie murmured something about doorways. I got up. In the living room I brought the set of Proust over to the couch, and for the next three hours I flipped through the volumes, reading a little bit here and there. Proust was an insomniac, a piece of information that startled and unnerved me. How eerie it felt, in the middle of the night, to have a hundred-year-old voice tell me exactly how it felt to be awake in the middle of the night. Proust couldn’t sleep. He retreated from the world to ruminate on the minutiae of its pains and pleasures, our experience of art, of nature, of other human beings. He elevated that minutiae, he made it the only thing. A phrase of music, played again, less transient than love. Who, after all, can hope to hold all of her life in her mind, with so much forgotten, so much given away? There is no
life
, in the way we often mean the word, as one person’s story, a coherent narrative. There’s this moment and before it another one and after it another one and layered behind it another one. Experience echoes and retreats, a Coke when I needed it ten years ago, and another now, offered because the original experience endowed it with meaning. But only when the Coke passes from Helen’s hand to mine does it have that meaning. Without Helen it’s just a drink, liquid bubbling in a glass, a sweet taste, then gone.

In the morning Helen found me on the couch with the first volume of Proust on my chest. “This is quite a sight,” she said, gesturing at the rest of the books, splayed around me. “You got drunk on Proust.”

“I don’t know if you can get drunk on Proust,” I said. “He’s too detail-oriented for that. You can get stoned on Proust.” When I sat up, my brain seemed to shift inside my head. “Did you know he was an insomniac?” I felt awful. The day loomed before me like an obstacle course. “Are my kids awake?”

Helen shook her head. “I haven’t heard them. Abby’s up.” She nodded toward the kitchen, and I peered around her to see Abby wandering by with a piece of toast in her hand. She had half of it stuffed in her mouth and she didn’t seem to be chewing it, just carrying it around like a dog with a bone. “Abby’s always up.”

“What time is it?”

“Just after six. I’m sorry I woke you. I wasn’t expecting to find you here.”

I shook my head to say, don’t worry about it, and she
asked if I wanted a latte, and I nodded to say, Yes, please God, I do. She started to walk toward the kitchen, but I stopped her with her name. She waited. “Let’s invite Rajiv to dinner,” I said. If I had been her, I would have teased me about my change of heart, about this being the first thought I had upon waking.

“OK,” she said.

“I love you, Helen,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if she heard me.

In the late morning we took the kids to IKEA and Helen bought things while I chased the children, for whom the place represented not a frenzy of consumerism, not a cavalcade of fabulous deals, but an endless playground of beds and chairs and tables, a dollhouse big as life. We ate meat-balls for lunch. We took the kids home and put the babies down for naps and read to Ian and Mattie and then turned the TV on for them and drank some more iced lattes. All day I thought about the end of the day, which would bring Rajiv. Helen had called him that morning, and he’d been delighted to come. “Did he really use the word
delighted
?” I had asked, more than once, and more than once Helen had confirmed he did. Delighted. A positive word, of course, but also a slightly silly one, with its overtones of foppish effusion. Or perhaps he’d said it ironically, in a faux-uppity way. Had he said it ironically?

“No,” Helen said.

“You’re getting sick of this already, aren’t you,” I said.

She shrugged. “I remember what it’s like.”

“I haven’t done this in a long time,” I said. “It feels really weird to be doing this.”

“There doesn’t have to be a
this
,” she said. “It can just be dinner, if that’s what you want.”

What I wanted was to click my heels three times and return to the maze where he’d kissed me, the one and only time he’d kissed me, the white lights twinkling above us, around us, behind. What I got was a seat on the floor among the strewn pieces of a puzzle, Binx with a puzzle piece dampening in his mouth and me gently trying to tug it out while I also reached for Mattie, who was picking up the other pieces and throwing them, screaming because Binx had come crashing through her puzzle like Babyzilla after she’d spent a painstaking half hour constructing it. I never failed to be surprised by how strong Binx was, his hand and the puzzle piece incredibly difficult to tug away from his mouth as he made the guttural sounds of an animal disturbed at the food dish. Ian was watching with interest, plinking at an electronic toy piano in a desultory way. “Mattie,” I was saying, “Mattie, stop that right now,” but she couldn’t hear me over her own frustration and despair, and I’d failed to hear the doorbell, or notice that Helen had gone to answer it, Abby at her heels, and so when I looked up to see Rajiv standing just inside the living room, it was as though he’d appeared out of thin air. I recognized the look on his face as the shell-shocked one I used to wear years ago when confronted with a chaos of children. There was no yes, yes!, no swept-away feeling. There was screaming, and a look of alarm, and me cross-legged on the floor with my stomach pooched out over my lap, looking far far fatter than I did standing up.

Mattie noticed Rajiv seconds after I did, and abruptly her screaming stopped, although for a moment the air still seemed to ring with it. I hauled Binx to me, wrested the puzzle piece from him, and handed him a toy phone at the same time. Then I stood, held Binx in front of my stomach, and said, “Hi.”

“So…,” Helen said, and then Daniel called from the
kitchen, “Helen, that pot is boiling!” and she broke off and exited at a jog. Abby toddled along behind her, arms held out, crying, “Mama, Mama, Mama.”

“Hi,” Rajiv said. “Long time no see.” His eyes were on mine, and then they flicked away, to Mattie. He wore a small, odd smile that might have been nervous, might have been secretive, might have been…oh, who knows. It didn’t seem good. He wore a white, short-sleeved button-down shirt, just see-through enough to show the ribbed undershirt clinging to his stomach, which looked, yes, as taut as ever, like you could press your palm there and feel the ripples of muscle underneath the warm, dark skin. I was wearing my favorite shirt, one that augmented my milk-amplified breasts while falling in loose generosity over my stomach, and I’d taken care with my hair and borrowed a pair of Helen’s earrings, and still I felt slatternly, slovenly, exposed. Carrying extra weight felt like wearing my weaknesses on the outside. You could tell by looking at me that I had succumbed to too many pints of ice cream. I had stopped going to the gym. I had failed to be, as a book I’d seen recently exhorted me, a “yummy mummy,” and, of course, there was the small matter of my straying husband. Maybe Rajiv thought, No wonder, when he looked at me. Maybe he thought, Good Lord, what was I thinking? Maybe he looked at me with pity, a copy of a copy of someone he once knew.

He crouched before Mattie. Her tear-streaked face had a post-tantrum placidity. She regarded him. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Rajiv.” He held out his hand for her to shake. She looked at it. “That’s your hand,” she said.

“Are you sure?” he asked. He turned his hand palm up and wiggled the fingers. “Are you sure it’s not an overturned beetle?”

She laughed. “No, it’s not a beetle! That’s your hand!”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, in that case can you give me five?” He held his hand out and waited.

She backed closer to me. “Mommy, what is five?” she asked.

“Five fingers,” I said.

“You can’t take my fingers,” she said to Rajiv in the crisp, adult voice she used when scolding.

“You’re right,” he said. “I have my own.” He straightened up and smiled at me again. This time the smile was better, brighter, a little bit conspiratorial. “And this is Binx,” he said. As he bent to smile at the baby, to play peekaboo, which made Binx laugh, I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. I should have gone to his house. I should have just shown up there with a bottle of wine, I should have taken his hand and led him without a word to the bedroom, making sure the lights were out. I should have pretended we were in a movie, or a fairy tale—love, or at least lust, with no preliminaries. Or maybe I should have left it all to my imagination, maybe I preferred it that way. Because now we had to get to the bedroom from a beginning of tantrums and puzzles and peekaboo, polite chitchat over dinner, a segue that one of us had to be brave enough to make, the question of willingness hanging over our heads, unspoken, as we pressed on through the ordinary. This was all backward, the cinematic embrace normally coming before the screaming children, as it had, of course, with Nathan. And I had no idea what to say. I’d been envisioning kisses, twinkling lights, a rush of emotion. Oz, I’d been envisioning Oz. I’d never considered that I might need to begin by asking him about his day. I didn’t even know if I cared about his day. A few e-mails, one brief
kiss—what did I really know about this guy? What good had I thought seeing him would do?

Binx squirmed to get down, so I bent and set him on the floor, kept my eyes fixed on him as he crawled toward a stuffed animal and flung himself upon it. “He’s fast,” Rajiv said.

“He’s like a little bug,” I said. “He scurries.” I risked a glance at Rajiv, found him looking at me.

“It’s good to see you,” he said. I wanted it to be good to see me, of course, so why did I feel disconcerted by the emphasis with which he said this, almost as disconcerted as I was thrilled?

“It’s good to see you, too,” I said. He was standing awfully close to me. I looked at his stomach, could practically feel the warmth of it beneath my palm. My gaze went back to his face. My God, I’d just given him a once-over, like a pervy old man on the subway, and he knew it, too, his eyebrows up, his mouth cocked on one side in a knowing way. I grinned at him, caught, surrendering. “Hi, beautiful,” I said.

He looked surprised. He looked delighted. Yes,
delighted
was the word. Had no one ever pointed out his beauty before? “Hi,” he said. He leaned in like this was our first greeting and kissed me on the cheek, and now I could feel what I’d been waiting to feel, that reckless thrumming beneath my skin, that silent, magnetized acknowledgment of mutual desire.

But Helen was calling from the kitchen, asking what we wanted to drink, and Mattie and Ian had started squabbling over the toy piano, and Binx decided to chime in, too, crawling toward me and crying in the way I recognized as a demand for milk. I’d spent nearly four years learning to
subvert my own needs to somebody else’s, but desire, new desire, competes mightily with a little girl who wants a turn with the toy piano, with a baby who wants his milk. So I tried to set it aside. I sent Rajiv to answer Helen, I moderated over the piano, giving the usual speech about taking turns, and then I sat down on the couch and attached Binx to my breast. I didn’t even think about this latter action until Rajiv returned with two glasses of red wine and his steps faltered at the sight of me in that most maternal of poses. He recovered, handed me my glass from a respectful distance, started a conversation about a novel he’d been reading with his gaze fixed resolutely on my face. I hoped I hadn’t flipped a switch in his brain, so that now he’d think “mother” when he looked at me. There are many uses to which you can put the body, I wanted to say to him. They don’t have to be exclusive, no matter how it sometimes feels.

At home, Nathan and I were as schedule-oriented as Supernanny could ever want. Bedtime was between seven and seven thirty, and every night we repeated the ritual of baths and songs and storybooks. Helen and Daniel were much more casual; their children often stayed up snuggled against them on the couch until they carried them, asleep or half asleep, up to their beds. I was experimenting, rolling with the punches, and so I let my kids stay up, too, Mattie and Ian watching TV while we ate, Binx passed around from lap to lap, putting his fingers in people’s mouths and laughing. Would Jack Kerouac have put his children to bed on time? A ridiculous question, which made me smile in a way that Rajiv noticed. “What?” he asked.

“I was just thinking how cute Binx is,” I said, because the truth would require too much explanation, and Rajiv might not grasp how funny it was anyway, the whole idea of
On the Road with Kids
. Before Nathan and I had children, we had the usual difficulty understanding why our friends who procreated became, to our minds, incredibly uptight. Why we had to eat dinner at five. Why we couldn’t flush the toilet after the kids went to bed. Nathan and I said to each other that when we were parents we wouldn’t be like this. Nor would we let our children monopolize a guest, insisting on constant horsie rides that said guest felt obligated to supply, all the while longing for a seat on the couch and a beer. Nor would we let our children talk back to us, or refuse to eat vegetables, or a whole host of other things that seemed, in retrospect, like the rose-colored hopes of crazed idealists. Once, we’d gone to the beach with kid-toting friends, and we were astonished when they got up to leave after only an hour, after all the effort it had taken to sunscreen the children and load up the gear. The children needed to nap, they said, and Nathan said, “Why can’t they just nap on the beach?” And our friends the parents gave him a weary smile, a smile I now recognize as saying, If you have children you’ll understand, and until then I’m too tired to explain it to you. Sunlight and sunburn and sand in the diaper. A baby who won’t stay where you put him, who flips right over and crawls away. A little girl who can’t sleep without her covers over her head, the stuffed octopus she’s named Bob.

Two hours past his bedtime Binx grew fussy, wanting to nurse constantly, finally falling asleep at my breast, milk running out of his slack mouth. I carried him into the room we all were sharing and put him gently in the Pack ’n Play, and then Helen came up the stairs carrying a sobbing Mat
tie, and it took me a long time and three books to console and calm her down enough that she could go into the room with the sleeping baby. “Nap on the beach,” I whispered in her ear, and she repeated the phrase and laughed.

When I came back down Helen and Daniel were doing the dishes, their children dozing against each other in front of the television, and Rajiv was standing by the back door staring out into the yard. He turned when he heard me. “I’m going outside for a smoke,” he said. He waited. My God, he was good at waiting.

“Can I come?” I said.

It was a starry, starry night. Without discussing it, we walked to the back of the yard, just outside the pool of light spilling from the windows, where no one glancing out from the house could see us. Of course I didn’t tell him I no longer smoked. He handed me a cigarette and I took it, and then when he held up his lighter I put the cigarette in my mouth, my hand trembling a little, and he leaned forward and lit it for me. Nathan had never been a smoker, but he wasn’t the only man I’d ever dated, and I’d known the pleasure of having a man light my cigarette, of feeling for a breath of time like Lauren Bacall in black and white, wielder of a sultry gaze. I’d forgotten that feeling, and I enjoyed its return. What a shame that the cigarette tasted terrible, that I inhaled too heartily and the smoke assaulted the back of my throat, making me sputter and cough like a teenager failing in an attempt to seem worldly wise.