My Education (22 page)

“It's Regina,” I said, trailing into the uncertain silence that followed. “Martha asked me to call you. Something came up and she can't come to lunch.”

“Regina!” poor Laurence managed. “My God, I'm sorry. You sounded just like—hello there, how are you?”

“I'm babysitting Joachim today, and I'd be happy to bring him to lunch. I heard Beb was excited to see him.”

“Well—wonderful! That's terrific! We'll be thrilled to see you.”

Martha was right—it was truly exhausting, adult artifice. Standing there beside the unmade, hard-used bed, Martha's phone in my hand, Martha's unlaundered panties and cut-offs and wife-beater T-shirts ankle-deep at my feet, and Laurence's voice in my ear, I was two places at once, or perhaps more exact, two times: before Martha, and after. Laurence didn't know who I'd become and was not sure he wanted to ask. “Come on, Laurence,” I said, my voice seeming to drop a full octave. “That's not necessary.”

“Certainly it is!” But as always, Laurence was betrayed by his honesty. “Sahba might be uncomfortable,” he admitted, “but she's not here. She's gone down to New York for a girls' weekend with an old school friend. That was why, when Nicholas fell ill, I thought I would ask Martha over. She and I could break the ice, and Bebi wouldn't have to be disappointed. He loves other children, and there are simply no children out here where we live.”

“Now you'll have to break the ice with me.”

“I hope there's no ice to be broken,” he gaily protested, but Laurence was Laurence. He'd known me too well to pretend he might not, at this point, know me less. Still he kept his tone light when he said, “We can just keep it simple: it's a play date, for your charge and mine.”

For me at least it was more, which I realized before we arrived. My nervousness at driving with the baby—somehow heightened instead of allayed by the Swedish restraint, with its Space Shuttle catastrophe straps, as if Joachim would be shot into orbit—at first made me drive very slowly. Then my growing eagerness to see Laurence again made me speed. I'd so badly missed Laurence. His friendship, it seemed to me now, had coincided with a sense of pure rightness, a time of being just who I was without needing to try. Herky-jerky, going too fast and then going too slow, Joachim and I struggled toward Laurence's house. Waking Joachim from his nap so that we could set out I had found myself declaiming, in an improvised mixture of self-consciousness and lack of inhibition, while he sat staring at me from the crib, “Mommy has gone to her office. To work on her book. So I, Regina, am going to stay with you. What do you think? Is that okay with you? Mommy asked me to stay. So I'm going to pick you up now. Then we'll have a new diaper. Then we'll get in the car. Then we'll drive to see Laurence and Beb. What do you think, Joachim? Does that all seem okay?” I tried not to bellow as if he were deaf, yet I couldn't stop recalling that parrotlike volubility he had shown with Lucia, those musical babbles and shattering squawks. Now he was silent. Was it the silence of protest? Not necessarily, I felt. It might be the silence of deliberation. All the way down the hill, and through town, and out the other side along the two-lane state highway through farmland to Laurence's house, when I was not accelerating or braking I was stealing quick glances at Joachim in the rearview. He would be gazing either into the deep distance or right into the mirror, at me. “Here's the new road where we turn! There's a barn falling down! There's a birdie up there on the wire!” I thundered inanely, imagining his silence alternately as assent, or disagreement. But when we turned into Laurence's driveway—“Here we are! Here is Laurence's house! Which is also Beb's house! Where they LIVE!”—all at once a fluty noise of acknowledgment rose from his throat, and he kicked up his feet. Laurence was already crossing the lawn with a long-legged, sooty-eyed boy in his arms—the baby Beb, metamorphosed. Perhaps to lessen my shock at the passage of time Laurence was dressed as always, which meant overdressed for the weather, in his uniform khakis and button-down shirt underneath a light blazer, and braided belt, and Top-Siders.

“He seems to recognize your house,” I said, sparing Laurence the question of whether to kiss me in greeting or not by submerging my entire upper half in the car, in order to free Joachim from his seat. But when I got out again, holding the baby, Laurence bestowed his chaste brotherly kiss.

“You're looking wonderful. Come on in. I've got lunch all laid out, baby things and some less mushy items for us.”

I'd never seen Laurence's house in its full summer glory. The back deck was ringed around with flowerboxes and urns of eggplant and peppers and staked cherry tomatoes. A picnic table with an umbrella in its center was set for four, with high chairs before two of the places, one that clamped to the edge of the table and one of the usual kind. “This is Beb's travel high chair,” Laurence said, taking Joachim from me, “and so also his guest chair when he entertains. Will you fit in it, darling?” he asked Joachim. “Yes, you'll fit very nicely. Let me get them installed and I'll get us some vinho verde. Just small glasses. I won't let you overindulge.” The table recapitulated the abundance and variety of the deck, spread as it was with little bowls of olives and cashews and exotic-looking crackers, as well as halved grapes and halved clementine sections and halved cherry tomatoes and pale pink rubber erasers which I belatedly realized were pieces of hot dog and which gave me the key to the feast, the items intended for babies, and intended for us, although all were presented with care. Even tantalizing were the colored purees, in pale green and pale gold and pure white and a deep indigo. “Not that we're barred from partaking of mushy,” Laurence assured me, returning and setting a wineglass in front of my place. “The mushy is all rather good. That's a fresh pea puree. That's fresh corn with a bit of yogurt, that's just yogurt, that's wild blueberries Beb and I picked today, again mixed with yogurt—”

“You
made
these?”

“I love the summer. And now that Beb's almost two we can try him on all sorts of things. Last night he had asparagus spears and wild mushrooms. I don't read anymore, I just play with the blender.”

Outside our oasis of shade, blinding platinum sunshine ignited the lake. All we heard was a motorboat dragging its zipper of froth. Laurence and I ate, fed, wiped, shifted items within or beyond the babies' reach depending on what could be gauged of their changing intentions. At one point Beb upset his squat plastic cup, and Laurence said, “Shall we clean it up, darling? You take one napkin and I'll take another,” and it seemed then, as it had seemed the whole meal, that there was nothing so special involved in the care of young children. In fact, it was the simplest thing in the world. It was as simple as cooking five kinds of puree, and cultivating produce and flowers, and keeping a home clean and ordered, and ironing button-up shirts. Moderation in drinking seemed equally simple, because Laurence accompanied me. We had both only sipped at our thimbles of vinho verde. Everything had slowed down. No one was crying and nothing was lost.

When they had eaten their fill Laurence spread a blanket in the sun and anchored its corners with baskets of toys, setting Joachim in the middle, while ambulatory Beb roved back and forth, presenting various of the toys to his guest and demonstrating their functions. They seemed not to need us, and it was now that Laurence finally broached a subject not having to do with the children, the weather, the garden, the food, or the lake. “Do you know what you're taking this term?”

“Only a leave of absence,” I said, “but I might not even make it a leave. I might just withdraw.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. Do you feel like telling me why?”

“Don't be sorry. I just don't want to do it anymore. Papers, and classes—I've been in school since I was four. I want to be in the world.” It sounded childish even as I said it.

“What would you do instead?”

“Maybe get a job. It's a novel idea, isn't it?”

“But this is training for a job. A very good job at which I think you would be brilliant.”

“
You
will be brilliant. Me? I just can't see it anymore. Two years of course work, then exams, then a dissertation, then the job market? I want to do something
now
.”

“Fair enough. But what?”

“That's what I don't know,” I admitted.

We directed our gaze at the children, though they still were contentedly playing and still didn't need us. In a sudden movement of resolve Laurence topped off our glasses. “I want to apologize to you for something. I told you on the phone that Sahba would have been uncomfortable to see you. I was an ass to say that. Sahba cares for you a great deal.”

“But she's never cared for Martha,” I said. “It seems more likely you were being honest the first time you spoke. It's all right, Laurence. I'm a big girl. I know you might not like me either.”

“I like you very much, and Sahba does also. Her liking you so much is what makes her uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because unwilling to speak her mind to you, unwilling to speak her mind to you because she doesn't want to hurt you. That pains her.”

“She can speak her mind to me. Why couldn't she?”

“Oh, no, Daddy,” Beb despaired, for Joachim had begun flinging toys, and one had gone over the edge of the deck.

“Look at that pitching arm. It's all right, darling. It's on the grass there. I'll go down in a moment and fetch it back up. Regina, I don't want you to feel patronized, and I'm afraid that you will, but there's no other clear way of saying it. Sahba and I both, and Nicholas—yes—we all feel concerned about Martha's relationship with you. That your expectations and hers may not match.”

“What expectations? Of a miserable faculty marriage and a big gloomy house? Those are the
last
things I want,” I exclaimed caustically, just as if I were fending off Martha. For Martha accused me of wanting from her what I couldn't define and she couldn't provide—an accusation that enraged me in proportion to how accurate it was.

Laurence said, “Please don't be angry. If you are you'll prove Sahba right and me wrong, which will cause no surprise. Sahba insisted we couldn't be so blunt with you. She was afraid we would injure your feelings, and make you turn a deaf ear to our worries.”

“I'm not a child, Laurence.”

“It's because you're not a child that I felt I could speak to you frankly. You're not a child, but your life situation is very much different from hers.”

“Because I haven't got a Ph.D., or a job, or a baby? Why do I feel as though I'm always being penalized for not having these things?”

“I'm talking about whether two people can honor each other the way that they should. It's not about matching possessions or matching credentials. I can't claim to have any idea what Martha requires in her life. I only know it will be complicated because we're all complicated. I am. You are. These little boys, even. Complex beyond imagining, the things that we need. And now she has
you
, Regina, and what do you have?”

“Everything,” I said with bravado. Whether or not it was true, I knew the declaration made me sound like a fool.

After a moment Laurence said, gently, “I'm the greatest fan of love there is.”

I smiled on the droplets of moisture still lining my glass, while adding a few of my own. Love's ecstasy felt like sorrow. “I'm glad you don't hate me,” I said.

“Don't be absurd.”

“I'm sure Nicholas hates me.”

“I'm even less qualified to speak for him than for Sahba, but still, I don't think so. I don't think he blames his suffering on you. I don't think he would try to relieve it in hatred of you.”

“But he's suffering,” I said, as if I hadn't seen this clearly myself. Like any craven guilty party, I longed for absolution. For the first and only time that afternoon I caught sight of the nonsaintly Laurence, who could judge when required, and scorn when deserved. Now he let slip his impatience with me.

“Of course he's suffering,” Laurence said curtly.

On the drive back, Joachim fell asleep. Little by little his face had grown jowly and skeptical, cheeks and lids drooping down while the translucent eyebrows struggled upward in failed counteraction. The thread snipped while my eyes were turned back to the road. The next time I looked the dark fringe of his lashes, like wee Spanish fans, had been spread. One cheek was flat on the edge of his Swedish restraint, squashing the small rosebud mouth slightly open, so that a thread of clear drool, like an icicle, hung from one corner. Asleep and inert, his face flickered with alien life, as if first Martha's ghost, then Nicholas's, chased each other across it. Hardly seeing where I went I passed by Hobo Deli and took the homeward turn onto my street, pulling into my driveway for the first time in weeks. I killed the Saab's engine and turned all the way around in the seat. Joachim stayed asleep. Once again, as that morning, I was surprised by his breath, how regular and audible it was, even immersed in the rattlesnake chorus of summer insects. After a moment a door slammed behind me. Turning back toward the windshield I saw Dutra come out on the porch. I got out of the car with a finger bisecting my lips.

“He's sleeping,” I said as Dutra bobbed and squinted, looking past me. When he finally saw Joachim he raised his own eyebrows slightly, that were so dark and emphatic, unlike the baby's faint ones, little brushstrokes with water that would vanish as soon as they dried. When did people grow eyebrows? Or maybe some, like Dutra, had them in the womb.

“Now you're the nanny?” he said.

“Just today.” His mockery annoyed me. “Put your head in the car and you'll hear that he's breathing.”

“Where's Hallett?” His adoption of this bunkhouse familiarity was also annoying.