My Education (35 page)

That day we walked to the midpoint of the bridge and stood awhile suspended between the two boroughs before walking back to the waterfront park on the Brooklyn side, where we lay on the grass with Lion stretched on his stomach between us. I noticed that, unlike other childless men I knew, Dutra felt no obligation to incessantly pull faces at or nonsensically speak to or otherwise signal his fearless enthusiasm for the baby. In fact he seemed more relaxed around Lion than he frequently did around other adults. Perhaps because he was a doctor, and Lion a nonspeaking, hale little body whose physical needs Dutra understood better than me. “Alicia wants to get married,” he said. Without forethought I expressed my delight, as if conventional sentiments, conventionally phrased, ever made it past Dutra.

“What makes you think it's so great?”

“Oh, God, Dutra, I'm just trying to congratulate you. I'm not looking for a long drawn-out dissection of the benefits of marriage.”

“Uh-oh! A little defensive.”

“A little not-stoned. Can you ever just converse like normal people? Marriage is great, Alicia is great, Alicia wants to get married, that's great.”

“That's not how I remember you talking before you were married. Remember? Before you and Matthew got married you were superambivalent. ‘I don't believe in marriage.' ‘It's the path of least resistance.' That time we went out in my 'hood, you told me you were
terrified
he was going to ask you to marry him, because you'd
have
to say ‘yes,' and then you'd
have
to get married, and then you'd
be
married, and you felt locked into it, like it wasn't your choice. Don't you remember? We were sitting at that crappy little place down on Orchard, with the fluorescent-lit bar—”

Of course I remembered. “Of course I remember,” I snapped. “I was drunk and freaked out. Change is scary. Don't read me the transcript.”

“Now you're married and marriage is great.”

“Because as it turns out, it
is
great.”

“Really? Are you sure it isn't because, once you're locked in, you have a greater vested interest in
thinking
it's great?”

It was just like Dutra to undermine all my hard-won maturity and wise acceptance of the inherent costs of marriage with a single remark. “Marriage as Stockholm syndrome?” I snapped irritably. “God, Dutra, you're right! Only you had the insight to realize!” But Dutra had already traded mockery for doe-eyed solicitude, as if at the flip of a switch.

“Aw, Ginny,” he said, “I'm just kidding. I know that you're happy.” My little malformed happiness, kindly noticed by him, might sprout leaves and grow tall after all.

It was Alicia's happiness he was worried about. Alicia was demanding they marry, but for all the wrong reasons. What Alicia really needed, what she desperately wanted, was a stay of execution for her mother. Her mother was dying, very rapidly and unpleasantly, of cancer, and Alicia could not come to terms. And so she berated Dutra or abandoned him, disappearing for days at a time to her mother's small farm in Bucks County. She always seemed to be slamming a taxicab's door in his face, her parting words choked and generic: “I'm sorry—” “I can't—.” Dutra refused to propose until Alicia acknowledged the root of their problems.

“Which is what, that she's upset that her mother is dying? Jesus, Dutra, do you even want to marry Alicia?”

“Of course I want to fucking marry her.”

“Then propose and don't be such a know-it-all. She's scared out of her mind, she wants love and security, she doesn't need you to act like her analyst. Are you being supportive?”

“Of course I'm supportive!”

“Not like a genius surgeon, like a boyfriend. Sometimes you need to can it with the relentless emotional honesty, Dutra. You should be hugging her and saying her mother won't die.”

“I should lie to her? No fucking way. Her mom's untreatable too-far-gone
dying
and in a couple of months she'll be dead.” He'd been right about this, as he had probably been right about the causes of Alicia's behavior—but not, if he'd meant to keep her, about how he should act. The next time I'd seen him, the following spring, Alicia's mother was dead and Alicia was married, to somebody else. Just after our day at the park, Dutra and Alicia had agreed to a separation Dutra somehow imagined would return Alicia to him as she'd been, as they'd been, at the start. Alicia began seeing someone with sufficient free time, unlike Dutra, to be willing to frequently visit her mother; arriving one midwinter late afternoon they'd found her mother propped up on her pillows in bed, a hole blown through the back of her skull by the handgun still hooked to her thumb. A funeral and a wedding had followed, in barely that order. “
That
person walked in that house with her that day—not me,” Dutra said, without rancor but with a terseness that forbade any further discussion. And so his girlfriend of close to a decade, the only girlfriend he'd had in the whole time I'd known him, was never mentioned between us again. Since then he'd been single, or so I assumed, though busily enthralled as I was by my life as a mother, I'd rarely seen him. Just an annual glimpse through the crush of our holiday party, at which he invariably made a few fans and a few enemies, and perhaps even flirted. But so far as I'd ever observed, at the ends of those evenings he went home alone.

•   •   •

In the course of married life, the perilous transition I most often endured was the preliminary moment of hosting a dinner. The blundering scrum at the door; the salutation of Matthew, immured and in fact downright stony amid pots and pans in the kitchen; the dispatching of jackets and bags; the exclaiming in grateful protest over stuffed toys for Lion and bottles of wine; and all the while the secret, panicky struggle to surmount the great hurdle and serve a first round. At that point, the page turned. Knowing this I kept my head down like a sheepdog until I'd propelled everyone to their places. Once Dutra and Nikki were on the living room sofa with sloshing wineglasses and Lion was tearing the wrap from his gifts, I could analyze her at my leisure. I'd thought I had no expectations, yet I found myself very surprised. Perhaps “Chevalier” had brought me in mind of “chignon” or some other species of smooth elegance. But, “Regina!” she had squealed at the door, in the voice of a helium addict or a cartoon chipmunk. Even Lion, with his lifetime of experience with my mother's ear-rupturing voice, was momentarily stunned. The impression of a living doll, or a humanized version of some beloved cartoon, was so strong that he quickly recovered himself, and with the unerring instincts of the toddler seized her firmly by the hand and made to lead her to his room for an introduction to the rest of his toys. Her nonchignoned hair was a mess, not in spite but because of the effort she'd made, the front locks pinned unevenly back from her face by a jeweled barrette that might have sooner been worn, and perhaps even made, by a grade-school child. Her eyes were large and startled, like a doe's, and made up to look even larger by thick fronds of mascara which either failed to conceal, or created, a downturned effect, so that her whole expression, even while she was smiling, was droopily wistful. Her frame was very small, and lost beneath a witchy ensemble of black lace and black silken tassels and a black crocheted shawl of connected rosettes. In short, she spoke like a child, and dressed like a granny. I would have given her, if pressed further, a family of cats with whom she shared a secret language; a canopy bed; and at least forty-five years of life. “She's thirty-nine years old,” I recalled Dutra stating, though he hadn't been asked, the sameness of their ages made even more doubtful by the fact that beside his new bride he looked many years younger than that.

“Does having a baby take up lots of room?” Nikki was asking me wonderingly, as Lion, having perfunctorily inspected the embarrassment of high-priced new toys he'd released from their wrappings, industriously distributed gift box cardboard and paper so that ankle-deep garbage now covered the floor. “Because Danny's place is so tiny, but every time we come back there from seeing apartments we just love it more. It's so him. It's where we've always known each other.”

“It's not babies that take up the space, it's their stuff,” I offered, as if not just the union of Dutra and Nikki, but their future offspring, were the oft-sounded themes of our long years of friendly discourse. “All they really need is someplace to sleep.”

“But you'd want
all those things,” Nikki said dreamily.

“Ginny hasn't even seen my apartment in, what, almost four years?”

“You haven't invited us.”

“Oh, bullshit. You know you're always welcome to drop by my place. Anyway, Ginny doesn't know all the stuff I've done there.”

“Danny has such gorgeous taste,” Nikki cried.

“Does he now?” I teased, but this went disregarded.

“She hasn't seen my place in ages,” he repeated, as if to explain my extreme ignorance. “I did it all down to the inch in Italian modern. Down to the
inch
. Where I couldn't find the perfect thing I got it custom. Down to the inch. That apartment's only five hundred square feet. When I finished it looked like a loft. Only thing was, I designed it for me.”

The surprise of hearing Dutra, for the first time, talk about spending his money was hardly noticeable amid all the other surprises. “We couldn't have a family there,” Nikki said with regret of the customized loftlike apartment.

“We couldn't even have a meal. No functional kitchen. When I did the pavlova I had to work on the floor.”

“When you did the what?” I said.

“Okay, this was insane.” Dutra was laughing. “I had to buy an electric mixer—”

“He hasn't told you about the pavlova?” Nikki's hands flew together at her breast. “It was the
most
romantic thing.”

“Nikki's favorite dessert is pavlova—”

“And my favorite ballerina is Pavlova!”

“You know pavlova's meringue with whipped cream. So I'd had our rings made, and I got the idea I'd conceal them inside a pavlova.”

How much better it was to stop pretending their story was something expected, and instead give full expression to my incredulity. By so doing I gratified Nikki, who discerned in me no skepticism, only apt astonishment at her good luck. Dutra had, in fact, had their rings made—before he'd even met her, or secured her consent to their marriage, let alone measured her finger. The rings—hewn with their interlocked initials, thick and heavy as signets—were undeniably unique and beautiful. They'd been the devils themselves to suspend in meringue, and Dutra had almost gone mad from the effort, presuming he'd started out sane. The morning that Nikki arrived, on the red-eye from San Diego, neither of them had slept in more than two days, from in his case pavlova and in both cases nerves. Dutra had driven her straight from the airport to Montauk, a takeout picnic brunch from Russ and Daughters, and the pavlova on the rental car's backseat. On the winter-lonely beach he'd watched his guest break meringue with the edge of her spoon until, unable to wait any longer, he'd smashed up the pavlova with his hands and found for her the gob of crusted egg whites, and gold.

Lion was an easy child to put to bed, yet once I'd had him say good night and excused us, and brushed his teeth and tucked him under his covers, I lingered on the floor beside his elf's bed, in the undersea glow of his LED nightlights. Having weathered the night's cooking crisis, I heard Matthew emerge from the kitchen. I could see without actually seeing the hospitable face he would now have put on. He would refill their glasses and gather to him all the loose conversational strands. The compact of marriage: an intricate code of reliance. One always on if the other is off. One up if the other is down. They would never know how little he'd wanted them here, nor how much I now wished they would leave. I heard their voices, burbling on without impediment, caught in the current of warm fellow-feeling and booze. It was possible I could stay in Lion's room for almost half an hour and not be suspected of anything strange. Only Matthew would wonder, and at the same time assume that a rare freak of Lion's had kept me. A twitch of the threadlike antennae. I was pregnant; a fact so recently established I refused to give it credence. “It's possible,” I had told Matthew a few days before, “that in about seven weeks, I'll be about twelve weeks' pregnant. But it's equally possible that I will not.” “Equally possible? Exactly the same odds apply?” “Also possible,” I'd amended. And that had been that; tell Matthew that a fact was not a fact until further established, and he no more brooded on it than on something he'd never been told.

But Lion; Lion scented a change. The night before, at bedtime, as I was rising from kissing his cheek, he'd seized my hand with such unprecedented strength I had gasped in surprise. “I want to keep you forever,” he'd whispered, still squeezing my hand like a vise, and my rush of adoration had been streaked with fear, as if he'd slammed a cage door in my face. “I'll always be your mommy,” I'd whispered, already trying to draw my hand free. “No!” he'd said, his other small hand shooting out from his covers to buttress the first. I'd been half an hour extracting myself, my gratification alternating with rising impatience. Since emerging from changeable infancy Lion had been notably self-contained, sitting alone and absorbed with a toy or a book, toddling far away at the playground without so much as a glance at me over his shoulder, and I'd sometimes wondered how much of my enthusiasm for parenthood rested on this foundation. Now, though, with Dutra and Nikki effusing at my dining table, I longed for him to cling and detain me. He settled himself on his pillow, his face turned to the ceiling, hooked one arm around his bear, and closed his eyes. Tonight it was I who kept hold of his hand, and it lay in mine limply relaxed, as soft and slight as the fallen magnolia petals that for the past week had littered the streets. From the living room the voices rose and fell. How long had I been hiding here—five minutes? As many as ten?