Night Soul and Other Stories (26 page)

I’m really pretty sick of Indians, my wife murmured, or did I just know this was what she felt?

And this Indian’s hands, enriched by centuries of sun and of knowing who he was, gripped the controls of the giant earth-mover, and he spoke to us of this and other machines as if the firm that created them employed him to run them. Or sold them to itself.

How did we get here? I think I said.

You were moving away from me, while I was talking to you, my wife said; why don’t you sit down to watch TV since you’re here, instead of standing and making everyone else nervous?

What? said Liz, our child, as if she had heard someone say something important to her, facing the screen’s distance so her voice seemed distant, if there at all.

I wasn’t moving away from you yourself; I was just moving.

Wrong, said my wife, you didn’t want to hear about the wife of that black philosopher Chuck.

What? said Liz faintly.

I heard what you had to say, I said; I remember the party at the health club, the forty-third floor sunset, the banana daiquiri that spilt itself into the pool or was it an old-fashioned sea-breeze with true grapefruit juice, or vodka on the rocks that turned into a chlorine dawn? And I remember her leaving her drink on the brink of the pool while she swam some laps and it was gone when she reached for it again and she called Chuck but he was staring into the sun above the New Jersey cliffs and I remember him saying that the sun was exactly at the level of the pool, forty-third floor, and, come to think of it, he said something reassuring.

Listen, said my wife, in my brain—

What? said Liz from afar—

I was saying when you walked away that Chuck’s wife—she’s a scientist—was telling me in the sauna before we ate—

Until, I said, that other woman in the sauna started spitting on the floor, and then you left.

You remember all the bad things.

Nothing bad about spitting in the sauna: the heat brings out all that mucus.

The point, my wife said, as the commercial gave way to the news and Liz turned the set off and remained sitting cross-legged, seeming to look at the screen in a way she has when she, I believe, is thinking what to do next—the point was, this woman—

—Charlotte, I said.

Right. Charlotte. She’s a very interesting woman, you know.

And not just her career, I said.

You’re right all over the place, my wife said—she has two, three kids, and she’s a biochemist in a laboratory and somebody in her lab won the Nobel Prize, and she has the most beautiful hair, it’s like Liz’s when it’s all dry and brushed, only lighter, and when you walked away I was saying—

I didn’t walk away, I said so softly I seemed to emphasize what my wife knew anyway.

—that her husband’s a stay-at-home, that’s what she said, and she finally gave up on him and didn’t mention it but started, you know, seeing people on her own, nothing much.

Friends, I said.

Why not, said my wife.

How did we reach this point of agreement? I think I said.

You wouldn’t sit down.

The TV’s off, I said.

A real scientist, this Charlotte, said my wife, no lab technician, no lab assistant.

No guinea pig, I said.

Daddy! said Liz, that’s gross.

I moved around her.

And when she came home—

You know that any job you want to get—

What?

You know I rather like having a working wife to show off although it’s so old hat I hardly want to speak of it, it’s not just the money.

I was saying, my wife said, that when she came home, Chuck would not say a word.

Yes, I said, I remember that particular sunset when she called to him from the water asking where her drink was and he didn’t hear her. But at least he was in his trunks and said something generally reassuring to me I think.

And she wanted to say to him when she got home, Don’t you want to know who I’ve been with, and Chuck would smile and say, quietly, Yes—as if a discovery had just come from her; and you know she wouldn’t tell him after all; then she told him a couple of dreams instead.

Were they clever? I said, and I added, Were they good?

Liz looked at the TV.

What reassuring thing did Chuck say? my wife asked. You said he said something reassuring.

I try to block it out, I said, but it was this: the options for the planet are narrowing down to almost nothing and we will set fire to ourselves before we know it; but meanwhile the options for personal relationships between women and men are multiplying. Sure, I retorted, but those relationships you’re talking about are getting more and more superficial. Ah, said Chuck, a nice superficial relationship—that’s what we’re all looking for. It’s so soothing, so friendly.

But despite these interesting words that I hadn’t realized I remembered, my wife and I were still repeating our circular routines. I didn’t, therefore, know if we would all move on. It was time for Liz to go to bed.

You’ve done that a lot, said my wife. Walked out of the room when I was talking.

If I’d only been conscious of it, I said, I could have thought about it. My wife knew when I was reaching for a joke; she did not know that I had attained a thought—that marriage is putting two people face-to-face slightly off.

A last drink of water, my wife said. That was one dream. In the dream she brought Chuck a last drink of water as if he was her husband. She was a long time reaching it to him. He kept looking at her while he reached for the glass, and he was still looking into her eyes when he had it in his hands, his last drink of water, and brought it to his mouth so slowly she wanted to yell at him. But then she saw the water was all cloudy and she knew she was afraid he would get up and take a walk because it was his last drink of water and she saw the cloud was her, it was her in the glass, her exactly. He was about to drink the water with her in it. He had his eyes on her, not on the glass which was at his lips. She called to him not to drink. He didn’t hear, of course. He was looking into her eyes. He didn’t hear. We were sitting in the sauna. That was one dream she told him. But—not to wake up exactly, which would be crass—she wasn’t dreaming; and the dream was what really happened.

She made it up, I said.

There’s a remote possibility, my wife said, that she made it up as what really happened, but you are crazy, my wife said, did you know that? The woman is a scientist, she’s made it, what do you mean she made it up, you’re crazy. I mean it.

Mommy…, said Liz, staring at the TV, something in voice.

Well, I, I said, am not a stay-at-home like the black philosopher Chuck.

You’re not all that bad at it, my wife said, but why did you say “black”?

Why do you want to know? I said.

Daddy…, said Liz.

My wife’s eyes gazed at me.

I said, Sorry, kid, I thought we were getting somewhere.

Do not call me kid, said my wife.

I was addressing my daughter, I said.

Do not call me kid, said Liz, looking at the TV.

In one turning pull, she switched it on, turning off the sound.

If he drank her, did she wake up inside him? I said. The devouring male, I said.

The other way round, said my wife.

What? said our sly zombie of a kid whom I sometimes wonder if I reach or am like anymore.

She woke up outside him? I said.

No, she woke up and he was inside her.

Mommy! said Liz.

I mean, said my wife, I mean it was another dream.

This one, I said, you’re going to make up.

You don’t understand that I’m telling you something, said my wife, and left the room.

Hey, wait a second, I called, you’re still in the sauna, so these are communicating dreams, that’s good, look let’s go over to the church, oh no it’s Tuesday night, Charlie practices Mondays, let’s finish our game from last week, oh the board got put away, let’s tune up both our derailleurs and the action on your brake you said was stiff, let’s prepare Liz’s room for painting, oh no we’re out of spackling, Atlas Hardware closed three hours ago, let’s the three of us go out for ice cream—or do you have homework?

My wife materialized at another door. Have you left anything out? she asked, amused at last.

I did my homework at school, said Liz, her long, glossy hair turning its layers over as she turned.

I couldn’t begin to capture it all, I answered my wife.

Daddy…, said Liz, staring at the silent screen where a woman was, I knew, reporting news but now came to the end and smiled and then I saw that Liz sitting there on the floor had flung her head back and was looking up at me upside down, a welcome angle.

She is not in the habit of asking for information. That is, beyond what is normally supplied. I am backward. So many friends divorced ahead of me, questions low-flying in my direction, like the evening in Norm’s living room hearing the cars ashore above us on the West Side Highway but not the faintest wash of river water, and Lucille, returning to the room’s bright black-and-yellow-painted beams, said to Liz and me, I believe, “Sometimes I think, Which one of you is the nice one?” and when Norm said, “Both of them,” Lucille said, “Of course, that’s what I meant.”

Once my wife and I went out on our bikes together, wrenches bagged, the folds of our spare tubes powdery-soft, a French pump in place along my frame—and came back separately. For it had not been a good afternoon in the beginning. At least I did not arrive home riding two bikes.

Liz and Val heard the front door hit my fender and when Liz came into the hall and the refrigerator shut with a sucking thud and she asked where was Mommy, I said that she would be along but I didn’t honestly know where she could be. Liz looked at me. I said, Whatever we do, you are you. Do you understand? Then I added, You are our daughter.

When is Mommy coming home? Liz answered. Is she having dinner out?

On her bike? I said.

Sure, said Liz.

I look up to her, everywhere I turn I guess I have seen her. A new breed of girl, her mother has persuaded me. Freed, I hear. Of old conditioning. So if chosen tomorrow for success, she would not be surprised.

I would hope—I would hope (as we preface things at a meeting in San Diego, Albuquerque, San Antonio, Columbus, Montpelier)—that down deep in her nervous system Liz believes she’s bereft of obligations except to herself—I’ve said it better than I know how. Thanks to her: who assumes much and nothing about her future, including that she is, or has been prepared to live it at an address entirely hers. Sees an adult in the evening who was wiped out first thing in the morning, and thinks, does Liz, not at all that she might have caused the depression (she knows well the word) that extends hollow and banal and lasting before that adult who shall be nameless and genuinely without regard to sex, while with calm before this spectacle she lets the adult get on with it. She does not cry except in anger, which gets exhaled and is gone. She falls into home-makerly locutions, such as asking if I will be in for dinner tonight as if she were planning the meal. Her future—what can I say? She has hidden powers. Gives good advice if approached in the right way, not as a simple adult but one to one.

I pass to and from one aerodrome or the other, promoting steel in major cities, my program mapped a month or two months in advance, yet nothing if not flexible. I wake up, having been awake deep-seated in the multiplied upholstery of a system that works, and correct my slouch, guarding my lower back as a thing, a being, a moral that could come true. I straighten up and then I squeeze back my shoulders and I arch my spine; time empties in front of me along its main, and its overhead and cupped sides pave my way beyond me with what you think’s an elusive new material, you see through it, so the main is known to be there and you to be in it but you don’t exactly see it, and that goes for the bends up ahead, the turns built into it tunneled into the mountainous field through which time never knows itself.

Or am I a new breed of man, hearing my lies yet clear that they are not—and believing them so very honest I then doubt.

Chuck the philosopher’s wife has her dream. She does well to share it. I have mine. Or, rather, Liz’s. Cupped in the middle of the night in my one unpillowed ear. Not like the answer I got at dinner when, just the two of us, I’d asked if she felt Val’s parents were different from her own, more strict, more together, that kind of thing; and she said, No, she didn’t think so, not much; and I said did they have fights? She guessed so, sometimes. And did Val, I asked boringly, mind her mother working? Sometimes, not really. And what was it like having two high-pitched parents?

You? she said. Which parents was I talking about? she asked, smiling with one side of her mouth—what’s for dessert?

Yogurt on a stick, I said—raspberry. The phone rang, Liz talked to Val. We had dessert, Liz and I. I asked her, What is this topology you study in math? I had become curious.

I was more than a father supporting a daughter’s research, taking an interest in her homework, suddenly last month’s, last week’s. She answered that it was a math where you didn’t really get right or wrong answers, she remembered that much. She goes to a private school. I sensed that she might have more to say later. She said that she had a stomachache and excused herself. She does well in math, and so when I ascertained that she had received A-minus in topology yet in all honesty (her own) could not say what topology was, I decided topology was something you practiced more than thought about. I checked the dictionary and had something to think about then. What holds constant through the April showers and cloudy nights, through changes, through turnings, twistings, and stretchings. Rubber-sheet geometry, her math book says.

I kissed Liz goodnight, waiting. I went to bed early, so I must have been tired.

Somewhere in my sleep a phone began and began and began to ring. I strove to answer it and woke up on my feet hearing, “Liz! Liz! Liz!” and knew the words meant How could you! and heard them outside me like a set of real objects self-possessed; then, with the next words, I knew the speaker deep in the dark apartment was my daughter now crying, “I didn’t! I didn’t! I didn’t!”