My Education (42 page)

“He blessed you,” I said after a moment.

“He did. I know that he meant it.”

“Are you saying he'd do it himself?”

“No. I'm only saying that he doesn't have the hang-ups, the judgmental feelings or fears, that might stop other people from doing it.”

“If he wanted to do it, he'd do it.”

“I think that's all I'm saying. But—promise me that you'll worry about him. I can't be the only one worried about him or he'll really be sunk.”

“I promise you,” I said. “I don't know how, but I won't let him sink.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I knew you'd get it.” Though Alicia sat with her back to the window she had sensed Nell's arrival. She turned to confirm, and turned back, and I knew that our meeting was nearing its end.

“Wait, Alicia,” I said. “When was the second time? The second time that he had crazy lightning-bolt love. The time you said that I knew all about.”

She looked at me oddly. “The time—how he met you. That whole thing when the two of you were both in love with the same person.”

“Martha.”

“That's right. That's her name.”

“He loved Martha,” I said, as if speaking a phrase in Sanskrit, the three words felt so strange in my mouth. “That's the torch that you hoped he'd put down.”

“He wouldn't talk much about her. But he told me enough. That she'd been your lover, and then he fell in love with her, too. And she used him, to break up with you. He would say that was why he was finished with love. Because it wasn't just him devastated, but you. He had this theory, that from then on he'd break it down into components—friendship, emotional intimacy, and then sex. All totally separate. He wouldn't ever do all three, maybe not even two, with one person again. So far as I know, he hasn't. With me, it was emotional intimacy. With you, friendship. I know it meant so much to him, when you let him back into your life. After that he said he'd never give a second's thought to her again. But, you know, carrying a torch is a form of thinking. He couldn't help it.” My face, like the tip of the iceberg, must have suggested to her, most inadequately, what I felt. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I don't mean to stir up bad memories for you.”

“Don't be silly,” I said rapidly. “All of that was a long time ago.”

“Not for him. People talk about time like erosion: ‘give it time, it'll turn into dust, it'll all go away.' For Dan time is more like that clear shiny stuff that you paint onto things, now I've spaced on the name.”

“Shellac. Lacquer.”

“Yes. That. Every year puts a new layer on and the past just gets harder and brighter and more permanent. Thanks for the words for that stuff, not remembering that would have driven me nuts. Dan always talked about how smart you were, that you knew everything.”

“I'm not so smart,” I said. “In fact, I'm an idiot.”

But not understanding my meaning she said, “It's okay. I used to resent how impressed he was with you but now I'm relieved that he has you. He needs to have someone he thinks of as smarter than him.”

•   •   •

May 10, 2007 PARADISE LOST . . . and the angel Michael came unto them and said,
“Guys, there was a brand-new Apple iBook laptop computer lying under that tree with a sticky note on it that said FOR THE USE OF THE DAMNED FALLEN ONLY and now it's like, GONE, and You-Know-Who says somebody called ‘nudiecuties' is posting a blog about, like, gardening, and what to name your animals, and how fun it is not to wear any clothes and SERIOUSLY? Did you think you could do this without getting noticed? Get out! Hand over that Apple computer and GET OUT of You-Know-Who's garden! Shoo! Scram! On the double!”
It's official! Yours Truly is officially suspended from the Mendocino County Waldorf School for violations of the Home Technology and Electronic Media Restrictions! All I can say, Public, is Thank You, clearly one of you ratted on me, and I am so honored you'd bother to do that. Stirring up my Public to the point where they'd want to Betray me is more than I ever hoped for when I started this blog. Just so you know because Tone can be weird on a blog I'm not being Sarcastic. I'm never sarcastic, sarcasm is one of my personal Things I Don't Do, as I often remind HRH who, we know, thinks that Sarcasm gives her more Power.

HRH [seeing not-so-clean kitchen]: Thanks for cleaning the kitchen after dirtying every last pan in the house. Wow, that's great.

Yours Truly: Are you really upset? Or just joking about it? It's so hard to tell when you're being Sarcastic.

HRH: I wasn't being sarcastic. Please don't lecture me on sarcasm.

YT: Not being Sarcastic is one of my Personal Goals.

HRH: How laudable of you.

YT: See? You just were Sarcastic again!

HRH: You don't know the difference between sarcasm and irony, Sweetie.

YT: Of course I don't! Because I go to Waldorf School!

But not anymore! Here's what happened. Earlier this year, when we received our Home Technology and Electronic Media Survey, we Fudged it because of some Lapses that all had occurred at the end of the summer, namely my Nikon Coolpix (it shoots video too!) and my brand-new iBook which knows how much I love it so doesn't require a shout out, and less sexy but very important our DSL line which I paid for myself out of savings and all of which brings me to you! Public! You remember (see Archives) that HRH felt some distress over this. We, HRH and I, share the unplugged all-wood-no-plastic Value System of the Mendocino County Waldorf School or we wouldn't be there. Right? Right? But didn't we also share the Value System that says Honesty is the Best Policy?

YT: Let's just put it all on there and see what they do.

HRH: Sh*t, what if they kick you out? Let's leave it off. It's not like they'll ever come up to our house.

Well, Public, you know the rest. Poor HRH is very Stressed, but at least there were only five weeks left of school and we have the whole summer to figure it out. Meanwhile you can enjoy the Improvements I've made in my new Leisure Time. Introducing the Hallett Farm . . .

LAMB CAM!

“Mommy, the song,” Lion said when the lacy-cuffed lambs wandered into the background and couldn't be seen anymore. “The song” was another recent feature of Joachim's blog, a three-minute piece of rudimentary computer animation that superimposed orange and red, crudely drawn falling leaves on a still photograph of a sheep standing, passive and doomed, in a chewed-over field. The sheep, one learned elsewhere on the blog, had been killed by coyotes. Perhaps it was only the additions of the leaves, and the soundtrack, a continuous loop of the nonvocal violin part from the Kansas song “Dust in the Wind,” that so imbued the image of the sheep with pathos, but regardless the sheep was intensely commanding. Lion stared at it, riveted, as the fake-looking leaves fell and fell, and the melodramatic refrain sawed its truncated plaint. After three minutes it didn't conclude, simply froze.

“Again,” Lion said.

“Kitten, it's time to brush teeth.”

“Again!” Lion cried in despair. “One more time, Mommy, please!”

It was a strange work of art; staring at it myself, hypnotized by its utter monotonousness, I was alternately blurting laughter and wiping the tears from my eyes. I knew that it wasn't Sarcastic and yet I suspected it purposely tempted the sarcasm of others, if only to shame it with unabashed sentimentality. It was very high/low, Martha might have said back in her Jacques Lacan/black leather days. But now she said, on the ladder of comments—finding her there made my heart lurch, as if I'd discovered her seated with me in the room—
Hi YT (my own JHB), thank you, sweetness. I'm so proud that you've taken your sadness, which I know is still so huge inside you, and turned it into something to share that will solace the sadness of others. You are my solace. No Sarcasm!—love, HRH (also known as your mother)

The members of the Public liked it too:

beautiful! mist in my eyes. RIP Helene
[this was the murdered ewe's name]
you will always live on in our hearts

so few people understand the pain of losing an animal thank you thank you thank you

dear YT you are a brave poetic generous kid

i know it is hard but try not to hate the coyotes. their just livin. doin what they haveta do

hi joachim its maya from school. your blog is awesome! i wanted to tell you! i'm not the person who ratted you obviously! hey rat: today i quit lurking to dare you to rat on me too!

Hi Maya, wow! Thanks for reading! And thank you for taking this risk, I'm so honored! E-mail or IM me and we can talk more!—YT (Joachim)

“Wow, look who's still not in bed,” Matthew said, coming home at eight-thirty to find Lion slumped glassy-eyed on my lap, in communion, or perhaps it was now catalepsy, with departed Helene. “Is there anything here I can make us for dinner?”

“Um, no,” I said, collapsing the browser window and hefting boneless Lion, too tired now to protest.

“Are we ordering in?”

“Um, sure,” I said, pushing past him. I understood, better than a somnambulist, that after two hours adrift in that blog, my pupils were just slightly smaller than dimes and my mind was a blast crater, stupidly gaping. But I was no better than the sleepwalker would be at waking myself. In Lion's room I knelt in the darkness beside his small bed with my cheek on his chest, feeling it rise and fall, waiting for him to breathe into me ordinary perceptions and thoughts.
I can see why you wanted to keep the screens out of the house
I would e-mail to Martha.
I've been mainlining your son's sheep-farm blog and it feels pretty strange.
Perhaps I had still not returned to the world. I heard the door open and close, Matthew's swift angry tread on the stairs. By the time he'd returned with a bag of Chinese and a six-pack of beer, I had managed to put plates on the table and Dutra's check prominently between them. Matthew regarded it while roughly shaking glop from the takeout containers, which came down on the plates with a series of loud smacking sounds. “Is this what's the matter with you?” he asked after a moment.

“What?” I said.

“Don't ‘
What?
' me. That's just what I'm talking about. Your obliviousness and your incredible self-absorption. Every waking moment I'm with you, you look straight through me like I'm not even there. Lion says something to you and you don't even hear him. You'll stand blocking the refrigerator door until I take you by the shoulders and
move
you and you don't even notice. Can you try to have some basic awareness? Of your child, for example, who was practically asleep on top of you when I walked in the door, a full hour past his bedtime? Or of your refrigerator, for example, which is empty except for a bunch of tiny Tupperware boxes of mold—”

“Oh, so I'm not keeping house well enough? I'm not sufficiently managing
every
aspect of Lion's upbringing, and doing
all
of the shopping—” But I could never get away with this line and I was almost relieved when he cut me off short.

“Don't try that. We have both always done a shitload. I, for example, work fifty hours a week, earn a regular income, get our family health benefits, manage all of our money, insure our house and our car, do our taxes, and replace the fucking fire-alarm batteries every six months.
You
, very brilliantly and indispensably and even, until now, with much humor and grace, manage our household, care for our child, maintain our social life down to purchasing our friends' wedding presents and sending them notes when they have us to dinner,
and
you sacrifice your writing time to wait for the dishwasher repairman or whatever the equivalent pain in the ass, at whatever time it should arise. Don't act like I'm one of those husbands who don't notice things. You know I do, and you know that I've noticed that lately you don't do a goddamn fucking thing but read a blog about sheep.” We stared each other down a long moment, too angry to laugh. We hadn't even touched the heaps of food, or uncapped the beer bottles. I heard the sound of our home telephone, though it was only in my mind, like the little red lighthouse in Lion's favorite book:
warn-ing! warn-ing! warn-ing!

There were so many arguments we could have had at that moment, such oldies and goodies we might as well have had a player piano that did them for us. But none was germane, they were all just time wasters, the smoke in the eyes and the mud in the water. “Matthew,” I said, “I don't want to go back to the life that I had before you.” Wasn't that always the unspoken threat? I saw his eyes, so rigid in their sockets, glaze over with tears. Matthew cried easily, at the movies, during TV commercials, when told any sad story about a small child. It was something I loved, but right now his own tears only made him more angry.

“Why are you telling me that?”

“To save time. To not fight, and make threats, and then have to recant them because they're not real.”

“Sometimes that kind of reassurance means the opposite thing. The very fact that someone feels the need to say it.”

I couldn't deny this. I could only believe what I'd said, and hope that I was right. “I want to go to California,” I told him, watching him watch me, from the back of the great distances that were somehow contained in his tired pale skin and his watery eyes. “For a long weekend. Three days at the most. I'll arrange babysitting. I'll arrange everything. You won't lose time at work—”

He made an impatient gesture: he didn't care about that. “To see Dutra?” he said.

I hesitated. “I'm hoping I'll see him.”

“Is that what this is?” He lifted the check briefly. “Traveling expenses?”