My Education (34 page)

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After I'd published my book, a certain kind of person from my past—the girl I'd passed notes with in seventh grade typing, the other waiter from the “health food” café where I'd worked for a summer in college—would tend to reappear for a while in my life, establishing contact with a phone call or letter, maintaining it briefly, then fading away. It was this category to which Matthew assumed Dutra belonged. The basis for the misprision was twofold, in addition to the fact that I didn't correct it. First, Dutra's reappearance coincided with most of the others, although I never thought it was my book that prompted him to call, nor did he use it as a pretext. Perhaps he'd reasoned that my having acquired a public profile, however minor and silly it was, meant his chances with me were improved. I might grant him the same graciousness I would grant to a stranger. Second, from Matthew's perspective Dutra was just as miscellaneous as the others—he formed no part of the contemporary pattern. He was a random odd fragment. The arbitrary groupings of childhood and young adult life, when our social contacts aren't yet fully aligned with our preferences, would account for him best—maybe Dutra and I, long ago, shared a second-grade classroom, or scooped side by side in the same ice cream shop.

What Matthew couldn't understand was why Dutra stayed on, and what I couldn't understand was why I didn't just tell Matthew who Dutra was. I had my reasons, or perhaps my excuses. Matthew had never been one to pore over the past, to fetishize my baby pictures, to play the voyeur to my lurid depictions of previous carnal milestones. Love for him was not a ritual of disclosing, confessing, or unearthing, but a resolute march to the future, well planned and equipped and unhindered by doubt. Our first weeks of love, when we managed to get out of bed, we hadn't spent telling our stories, or showing our scrapbooks and photos, or playing our most favorite records, or reciting our most favorite poems. We had bought me a helmet and flashing reflector, so when I cycled with him he felt sure of my safety, and we'd marked up the real estate section in search of a place we could live in a good school zone, so that when we had children, whenever that was, we would not have to move. I had never had a lover so unafraid of a future with me—and not just unafraid, but determined on it. The past didn't matter to Matthew because in the past, we had not been together—and this was a belief, like some religious beliefs, I suspected might benefit me if I shared it. And so I pretended I did, and readmitted Dutra to my life as a random odd fragment. It was an attitude to which Dutra, by instinct, gave his unspoken cooperation. Dutra and I never spoke of our earlier chapter of friendship, and this felt not artificial but natural, as if there were no past to speak of at all.

On the day he ambushed me with news of his marriage I hadn't seen Dutra in more than three months, but three months for us was a short interval, and Dutra tended to stay just the same a lot more than he tended to change. He still lived in the same five-hundred-square-foot bachelor pad off the Bowery he'd found when he first had returned to New York, although now he could have afforded the same apartment at its current market price, which was saying a lot, plus a few more just like it, exactly how many I couldn't determine given the corresponding absence of clear income cues and the continuing presence of not just the little apartment, but the rest of the time-honored Dutra attire. Dutra still had his hair cut by the Astor Place barbers, still wore the same bomber jacket he'd bought with his savings on Eighth Street at the age of sixteen. He still wore Vasque hiking boots in the winter with wool socks from Campmor (very likely the very same socks!—for he frequently bragged that, like all of the personal items he chose with such care, they were unparalleled for their comfort, endurance, and cheapness) and that same pair of Vasque hiking boots in the summer, but with white cotton socks now from Sears. He still “dressed up” for a glamorous evening in khaki trousers topped off with a black roll-neck sweater—the roll-neck his allusion to style—though five years ago, squinting at him through the crepuscular light of his favorite downtown restaurant, I'd been shocked by my sudden suspicion the sweater was newly cashmere, as if, even as our bodies had been replacing themselves cell by new, yet age-appropriate, cell, the sweater, too, had by fibers unknit and reraveled itself. Perhaps as a final, secret act of vanity it had traded its tag from J.Crew to Armani, or now even had no tag at all. Going to the ladies' room I'd tried for a look down the back of his neck, but the roll had been doing its job, rising up to just touch with its lip the shorn hair at his nape.

That night, the single time Matthew and Dutra and I ever dined together, had been to mark the occasion of Matthew's and my engagement. Dutra, on hearing our news, had awkwardly and needlessly and, it must be said, persistently in the face of Matthew's steady noninterest, insisted on taking us out. “What about Casper?” Dutra asked when I returned to the table, toiling, because we were with Matthew, to bring us to shared conversational ground, despite the ground being almost too small for us all to stand on. Dutra had barely known Casper when we were in school, and now did not know him at all. But Matthew, at least, had met me at the same time as I had rediscovered Casper in New York, and the two of them were better friends now than were Casper and I.

“He's been writing for this magazine called
Ultra
,” said Matthew. “I think the third issue is just coming out. Apparently the business plan is, you can't buy it on the newsstand, and you can't subscribe to it, but if your net income is over six hundred thousand a year they send it to you for free without asking you whether you want it.” Matthew and I had been dining out on the premise of
Ultra
ever since Casper, perpetually overtalented and un- or underemployed, had through friends of ours been hired to do
Ultra
's art coverage, which took the form of a quick-shopping guide to works of art available for acquisition to millionaire collectors with unformed or catholic taste. Everyone with whom we talked about
Ultra
deplored it or laughed at it or distilled from it some sort of vile cultural essence, but so far no one had said, as Dutra did that night, dredging his mackerel sashimi through soy sauce:

“So
that's
what that is. I wish I'd known Casper was in it. I threw it away.”

“Seriously,” I said to Matthew later that evening, as we were riding back home in a cab, “how much do you think Dutra earns?”

“Now we know more than six hundred thousand.”

“I thought
Ultra
went to people who made more than five hundred thousand.”

“That's just half a mil. And, the less predictable number's a marketing trend.
Thirty-eight
ways to lose weight this winter. The season's
fifty-two
hottest looks.
Six hundred thousand
or more.”

“Six hundred's just a hundred more than five hundred,” I complained pointlessly.

“You've got to draw the line somewhere,” said Matthew.

The next time we'd seen Dutra had been at our wedding, where of course we'd hardly seen him at all. The next time after that had been four months or so after Lion was born, though Dutra had conceived of the visit, and very likely had experienced it, as a visit to a newborn—to that distressingly remote and enigmatic extraterrestrial that had long since passed out of existence, what to me felt like two or three epochs ago. Since then had been the miraculous Smiling and Seeing Us baby, the terrifying, suicidal-thoughts-provoking Not Sleeping for Thirty Hours baby, the baby whose head must be held in one's palm lest it fall off his neck—such a boggling contrast to the baby who, at four months, could be plopped in a front-facing backpack without injury, and who then would dangle and bounce, smiling and babbling at charmed passersby. This was a baby who was practically ready for college—such was the depth and breadth of my experience as a mother by the time Dutra came to see us that I accepted his haphazardly wrapped offerings with a sense of anachronism—Lion had grown far too old for this gifts-of-the-Magi routine. Dutra wouldn't have noticed. As with that dinner he'd bought me and Matthew when we were engaged, the presentation of gifts to a newborn was the sort of gesture Dutra executed with equal parts anxiety and impatience, to get it done with and show he knew how, though I increasingly suspected he didn't. With Lion stuffed in the Snugli front pack I'd met Dutra on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, where we'd sat on a bench while I opened his gifts—a piece of stiff, multicolor-striped cloth with a white paint stain marring one end, and three crude wooden puzzles, of an elephant, hippo, and giraffe, made up of slightly splinter-edged, slightly warped pieces that had to be forced for assembly and forced even harder to break them apart. Dutra had in his spare time been flying abroad to donate surgery in various unswept corners of the third world where his patients would likely have died without him, but the more I tried to elicit the details of his actual work, the less enlightening he was, though he could talk endlessly, with his old near-insufferable swagger, about unhinged, untrained alcoholic helicopter pilots in the bush with whom he flew and even sometimes crash-landed, or about the squalid little saloons serving home-distilled rotgut from jagged cups made from the bottoms of Poland Spring bottles, or about the astronomically stupid white people with whom he, Dutra, had to contend. He discoursed for some time on the gifts. The piece of cloth was the exact ritual piece of cloth that the tribe with whom he'd grown so familiar would have presented to its next newborn child if Dutra had not come to alter the piece of cloth's fate; the puzzles were by local artists working with tools they had also handcrafted; with his usual bombastic pedantry Dutra established the gifts' peerless uniqueness yet aptness, and with his usual careless impatience he then shoved them back in their bag, which he proceeded to carry, as I had a diaper bag and handbag already. I made a mental note to double-seal the cloth's unknown allergens and the puzzles' likely lead-based paint in Ziplocs and store them in the basement until Dutra's next visit. We walked, over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, something we'd last done September 12 of a few years before, when all of downtown had been coated in ash and Dutra, utterly expressionless, had with his right arm held high in the air snapped one photograph after another with a series of disposable cameras he had stuffed in his pockets,
snap snap
every couple of steps, never looking where the camera was pointed, and never looking through the little viewfinder, as if to do so would be to lower himself to the level of the thousands of people who were also there gawking like us, if through tears, and with far less restraint. We hadn't talked about it since and didn't talk about it now. We fell easily into tandem, his unhurried gait matching my fast one. I had always walked swiftly with him because his legs were so long, and because he would not tend to notice me falling behind. One stranger after another graced me with a smile, often a positively luminous
beam
; I'd grown so accustomed to this since acquiring a baby I would hardly have noticed had Dutra not said, as another wave of approbation broke on us, “People think it's my kid. They assume you and I are together.”

It was pointless to rebut this. He would have taken rebuttal as evidence of discomfort, which he as usual would have enjoyed. And besides, he was right. No one ever saw a man, woman, and child and thought,
Oh, he must be her exasperating friend, permanent as a sibling
. Instead I said, “Would you ever want children?”

I might have asked, “Is the sun in the sky?” Dutra pshawed noisily that I'd had any doubt.
Of course
he was going to have children. “Look at the things that I've done in my life,” he instructed. “Sex, I've done every kind of fucking I ever dreamed of and a lot that I never imagined. Drugs, I was a heroin addict. Money, I was poor. Now I make so much money I can't even keep track of it. I cut people and get paid to do it—I cut a fucking maharani last month. I've traveled everywhere I ever wanted to go and I never want to travel again. The whole world's exactly the same. That's my biggest disappointment in life, that the whole world's the same. I've got to have kids. If I didn't have kids I would fucking implode out of boredom. It's the only way left I can challenge myself.”

Flop-limbed in his harness, strapped snug to my chest, Lion absorbed this harangue in a state of entrancement, and when it concluded let out an empathic shriek, flinging all four limbs wide, as if Dutra's excess emphasis took the form of electrical charge. “That's not exactly what they're for,” I said. “They're not some toy for relieving your boredom. They're for themselves.”

“They're for the species, if you want to split hairs. Anyway, you can't tell me you have no selfish motives for having a kid.”

“Well, sure, I
wanted
a kid—”

“The way you want all the trophies in just the right order. Book, boyfriend, fame, apartment, husband, baby—”

“Jesus, Dutra, I'm hardly famous.”

“You're famous for what you do among the people who do it, the same as I am. You're the same as me in a lot of ways, Ginny, you just hate to admit it.”

“You've got the big bucks, and I've got the baby, but otherwise, game tied,” I humored him, weary of it.

Back then Dutra was still with Alicia, the girlfriend he'd been dating, and then living with, almost the whole time he'd been back in New York. Alicia was vastly younger than Dutra—when they'd first met, with Dutra already a resident and Alicia some kind of uncategorizable laboratory scullery maid, their age difference of roughly a decade had struck me as downright immoral. Through murky connections Alicia, who'd never finished high school, had been given a job maintaining experimental equipment—she literally washed tubes, and mopped floors—in one of the city's most prestigious medical research institutes. She had a security clearance, and was regarded by some of the bench scientists as a valued apprentice, despite the fact that she had never been to college and was by my guess about nineteen years old. Given that everything I knew about Alicia had been told me, with typically self-regarding bombast, by Dutra, every worst instinct of mine had been excited long before she and I met, but when we finally did, I'd been impressed. Striking, though hardly pretty. Her body that of a thin, bookish boy, her eyes those of a very old woman placed into the face of a very young girl. Unmarred flesh and a weather-worn soul; I couldn't decide if she was a frigid virgin or a retired child prostitute, and the information that she had lived for a time with her unmarried anthropologist mother on a seagoing yacht between the microscopic South Pacific islands did nothing to tend my conclusions one way or the other, although it helped explain the recognition I'd felt upon watching her sit next to Dutra at dinner. Through his noise and her silence, his tics and her stillness, I'd perceived their sameness: their unfitness for social relations, combined with their fierce competence. She was a hermit, and knew it; Dutra was also, but didn't. Henceforth I had blessed their alliance and been barely required to see her again.