My Education (17 page)

“How do I know? He's her baby. I guess she can take him somewhere.” After a beat she appended, as if to herself, but without at all changing her volume, “That the way she do it. Don't give nothing. Don't give nothing. Then give a little. Then leave. Now he'll be all week asking for her.” Her face enlivened with satisfied mischief as she completed this speech. It was bald sedition: if I didn't dispute her I implicitly agreed.

“You shouldn't talk that way about someone you work for,” I said prudishly. The insult to Martha outraged me, yet strong inhibition, the accurate sense I was out of my league, held me back.

“I don't work for her,” Lucia surprisingly dismissed me. “I work for him.”

“Professor Brodeur?”

“Joachim.” She compressed her lips smugly at me. She pronounced the baby's name the Spanish way, a tender
“wah-KEEM.”
By contrast Martha used the British style of willful mispronunciation—“JOE-a-keem”—a decision I acknowledged, if deep within, as pretentious and somehow remote. Even in this, Lucia staked her claim to the natural order of things.

“Of course you work for him, in a way, but you're not
employed
by him.”

“I work for him,” she persisted. “He's the boss. If you were smart, he'd be the boss of you too.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You'd leave her alone. You'd stop taking like stealing from him.”

“How on earth am I
stealing
from him?” I exclaimed. Then we both heard the car crunching into the drive, and a door thumping shut.

Lucia was on the far side of the big kitchen island from me, so she leaned over it, with deliberate theatricality, though in her squat stature she did not reach far. “You selfish like her,” she said, smiling to show she did not feel rushed. “So you make her be worse.” Again came the expression of satisfied mischief. She didn't fear I might tell; she was goading me to. She might be crestfallen if I did not.

A gay, perhaps overly gay, babble of singsong and nonsense now came up the walk, and grew louder passing through the solarium. Then Martha shouldered open the door, Joachim on her hip, and saw us. That she registered the unprecedented conjunction of Lucia and me, my red-faced combativeness, Lucia's malevolent gleam, was unmistakably betrayed by her behaving as if nothing was strange. “So we had a fabulous romp in the park,” Martha informed Lucia, as if I weren't there. Martha set Joachim in his high chair, with much mugging and tickling of him on his belly to which he responded with gales of laughter which redoubled in resonance and helplessness each time he managed to squawk new breath into his lungs. His fluff-crested, jug-handled head, very slightly wider than tall on his soft little neck, like a small pumpkin or a cartoon child drawn to endear, a Charlie Brown or a Dennis the Menace, kept rearing back so he could better square her in his sights, fill his gaze with more of her; and each time he did his laughter died back a bit and he gave out a noise of pure surfeit and adoration. “Heh,” he sighed at her. “Heh
 . . .
”
It struck me first as a disorientation for which I then had to locate the source that he looked very different from when I'd last seen him, some five weeks ago. No one feature had changed; the gestalt was transformed. He seemed far more
there
than he had in the past. At the same time his eerie watchfulness of me, which had formed such a large part of my first impression of him, had now vanished—but perhaps he was taking his cues from Martha, who could not seem to look at me. With great effort his eyes left her face for Lucia's, which had more and more intruded on his peripheral vision. “Chee!” he finally cried, with an imperious gesture, and Lucia fairly glowed with her summons.

“He needs new diaper,” she tutted at Martha, undoing the elaborate high chair safety harness Martha had only just finished engaging. “And wash hands before eat.”

“He needs those playground germs for his immune system,” Martha mock-argued.

“So he wants to be sitting in poop for nice skin,” Lucia countered, hefting Joachim into her arms while Martha kept up her clowning claim on him, goofing with her eyes and tongue until he'd chuckled and
heh'd
himself into a mild state of hiccups.

“It's not poopy—”

“Full enough.”

“You change his diaper twice as often as I do. Those go in landfills, Lucia. They're made to take a lot more and you waste them. It just makes more garbage to strangle the earth.” But this was still in the key of indulgent teasing, of a listing of foibles.

“Baby's butt more important than earth,” Lucia huffed as she bore Joachim from the kitchen—but she was teasing Martha too, in her way, and Martha laughed as she left.

Throughout this diaper badinage I had been standing there as mild and inconspicuous as Joan of Arc with the flaming sword raised in one hand, yet Martha, like deliberate Lucia, had all but ignored me—how triumphant were Lucia's footsteps up the stairs! How exultant her banter with the baby! Martha yanked open that mute witness, the refrigerator, and said in low tones, “Now you're shooting the breeze with my nanny?”

“I beg your pardon? I came downstairs and practically stepped on her. She
ambushed
me, then she
insulted
me—”

“What were you doing downstairs?”

“Martha, you were gone when I woke up! What was I supposed to do, shiver like a kitten in your room until you brought a bowl of milk—”

“You know the drill for sleeping over.”

“You were gone. You did not leave a note.”

“I can't fucking
leave a note
every fucking occasion! I'm leaving my house and my child for a
week
, I have, possibly, a couple of things on my mind, can't you use your common sense—”

“My common sense told me to make myself breakfast. It didn't tell me my lover had left me alone in her house with the person she least wants me ‘shooting the breeze' with, who happened to insult me, and
you
, not that you'd ever care!”

“All you needed to have done was stay upstairs—”

“Why? Why, exactly, do I need to hide upstairs like Anne Frank when you've asked your husband for a separation, and there's nobody here but your baby and nanny, who, by the way, has not an ounce of respect for you—
why
am I hiding from her? Why, Martha? Why won't you tell her who I actually am?”

All through our escalating argument, which we conducted in stage whispers, not for risk of being heard but because, perhaps, hissing is second only to shrieking for the gratification of heated emotions, Martha had been concocting herself a breakfast of yogurt and granola and dried “mirabelle” plums she and Nicholas had brought home, I for some reason knew, from their last trip to Paris a lifetime before, first hurling yogurt bowlward by the spoonful, then reducing the plums to a mince with impossibly rapid-fire blows of the huge butcher's knife, then beating in the granola until the result was appropriate for mortaring bricks. Preparation complete, she leaned on the kitchen island and ate standing up, at a steam shovel's rate, at the same time as launching and dodging our argument's barbs. But I, motionless and foodless, had the better of her. However thin she constitutionally was, however many debauched evenings she'd passed with me dining on nothing but Jim Beam and ice cubes and Marlboro Lights, Martha was particular about food. She hated eating food that wasn't worth it, and hated eating if she couldn't commune with her meal in peace. She wouldn't have stooped to granola and yogurt without the “mirabelle” plums. And she didn't bother with breakfast at all if it wasn't sun-drenched and serene, conducted, ideally, in the breakfast nook with her lover tucked close beside her and the
New York
Times
paving the table. For some moments she kept up the act, as if she liked eating glop standing up, but I won: I spoiled her meal past her tolerance point.

“Why won't I tell her?” she repeated, throwing her swiftly scraped bowl in the sink. “Are you truly naïve? You don't seem to notice that this is my life.”

“And it isn't mine?”

“No! That Nicholas should know all about it, that Lucia should know all about it—that's
my
life. I'm not asking you to tell
your
husband, tell
your
nanny, tell the father of
your
child—”

“I haven't got such people.”

“Exactly.”

“Does that make me less deserving?” I cried. “My existence is less complicated and so less important . . .” but I trailed off, having somehow proved the very point I had meant to rebut.

“I don't know what you mean by ‘deserving,' but no. It doesn't make you less anything.” And yet we both knew, standing there, that I was somehow less; I could have walked to the Greyhound bus station and boarded a bus anywhere and it wouldn't have touched any life but my own. To be less entangled felt shameful and trivializing. Oh, youth!—that hopeless condition that marked me as different from her.

“I don't want to hide upstairs!” I was saying, like a petulant child. “I don't want you to say I'm the ‘research assistant' . . .”

“I know, babe, I know. Give it time . . . can't you please give it time . . . I don't know what I'm doing. . . .”

Thankfully no transit of Lucia's and Joachim's through that house could have ever been stealthy. Now we heard them returning, her resolute stomp on the stairs, and his voluble babble, and her attentive, I had to admit admirable, responses, as if he were Horace relating the Odes. “No!” came her shock. “Oh?” she realized. “Oh
my
,” she marveled anew. As Joachim had, I drew back from Martha the better to see her, and my heart burst again.

“I love you,” I said ardently. She was right; it was always my trump card.
You don't know what you're doing?
I
do.

But—“I love you,” she echoed—at last! “Let's just get to New York, okay, babe? Bear with me . . .” And her overwhelmed eyes spilled their tears: joyful tears like my own, I was sure, though the tears of exhaustion, concession, and bafflement are reportedly equally salty and wet.

Still, my tears were joyful enough upon hearing her speak those three words. Exhilarated I shouldered past Lucia and the baby as they made their return to the kitchen, and upstairs, before zipping my suitcase, I flung myself back into bed, and scooped the damp, redolent bedclothes in a heap to my face, and inhaled them and kissed them and clutched them. Outside I waited for her in the Saab, enthroned on its palm of black leather, and no more than ten minutes later she'd heaved her bag into the trunk and climbed in beside me. “You never ate!” she fussed. “We'll pick up bagels. Nicholas said he would be here by one.”

We sprang into flight like the arrow released from the bow. Racing down the two-lane state road between humped Ice Age hills and the little red barns and the round silver silos, music fugging the rush of the car with a sideways vibrato—it was the summer of Beck's first, irresistible single, with its twanging bass line. My bagel vanished unheeded by me, was devoured for fuel, for I hadn't yet fully absorbed Martha's lessons of living, and then a ball of brown sack and wax paper distracted my hands. “Just chuck it in back,” Martha yelled, wanting both my hands free to clasp hers, and so I did chuck it, and it surely bounced off Joachim's Swedish-made child restraint, already obscured under coffee cups, sun hats, Martha's summer-weight silk cardigan . . . so that only a full hour later, at the junction with the interstate highway, did Martha realize it was there.

“Fuck!” she screamed, in a sudden access of such frustrated rage as I'd never yet witnessed. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

“It's okay,” I soothed. “We'll get there, we'll get there, we'll get there . . .”

Then the full hour back to the start, for if Nicholas wanted to drive Joachim in his car, there was no second seat. Almost all the way Martha screamed “Fuck!” and her tears of frustration recorded their paths down her face, but I kept up the mantra
We'll get there
and
Look! Our vacation's already begun
and I kissed her all over her face and her neck and her gear-shifting arm. We trailed a dust plume through her yard and she yanked out the car seat and hurled it in the solarium. Then we retraced the road a third time and at long last climbed onto the interstate highway with New York just another four hours down the road.

“What did you mean, that Lucia insulted you?” Martha realized, as the noise of our speed settled safely around us, like silence.

“It was nothing,” I said, kissing her. It had shrunk to a speck.

•   •   •

How had I lived with my perfidy up until now?

The question was put to me quietly. Not by the glittering reach of the Hudson alongside the car. Nor by the somber limestone edifice, facing a riverfront park, through whose shadowy door we came pulling our bags. Nor by the mute uniformed man with a Mayan's fierce warrior face and a robot's impervious arm, cranking the wheel of the Victorian oak elevator with the brocade-trimmed, velvet-topped bench. No, these dazzlements were too grand and too distant from me to slip the admonition, like a feather's quill end, in the coil of my ear. It was not until we were inside, and Martha rooting through the kitchen for something to drink, and myself helplessly in the bedroom with the idea of unpacking my bag, that I heard it. I had opened the obvious drawer, the top drawer of the room's only dresser, and found myself gazing into a masculine cache of compressed, crumpled things. Wash-worn Brooks Brothers white cotton shorts now a pale shade of gray. Snake-tangled, unpaired argyle socks, all in bright Easter colors like clover and mauve which still showed fairly crisp near the tops, but down toward the heels were marred by thread pills and snags, and at the toes by the outright abjection of holes. To see laid bare in their entirety those socks, of which I'd heretofore glimpsed only brief merry stripes, when a pant cuff rose up from the rim of a shoe, was like seeing the man himself fully exposed to me—naked. Of course I would know whose these were, even without the additional scatter of items strewn over the top or sifted down into the gaps: a geode, a whale tooth carved into some sort of large rodent or bear with long ears, a clothbound copy of
Areopagitica
,
a handful of spare change and tokens, and a photograph of Martha in a plain wooden frame. The photo showed so little of her face that only someone who well knew her body and carriage, the way she held herself standing or sitting, would have instantly recognized her as I did. She sat, facing mostly away from the camera, on a sort of steep hillside or bluff, dressed in a T-back jog tank top, loose pants, and heavy boots, with a windbreaker tied at her waist. A baseball cap covered her head, her long hair carelessly pulled through the vent. She had glanced slightly over her shoulder, as if just realizing there was someone behind her, so that some of the left side of her face could be seen, but her attention was still clearly cast forward, toward whatever the view.