Picturing Will (26 page)

Not wanting to betray your impatience, you have nevertheless been trying to speed him along
.

Wanting to stand his ground, he has lagged behind
.

Trying to be kind, you have told him jokes simpler than those that amuse you
.

Understanding that compulsive talking is your nervous tic, he has patiently allowed you to rattle on
.

You have explained to him that some words that can be said in front of you cannot be said in front of his mother
.

He has understood that secrets bond men together
.

You have done everything possible to give him the impression that although men and women may be different, women are every bit as intelligent and capable as men
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He has told you he knows fifteen words for women’s breasts
.

You have told him, in terms he can understand, about sex
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Sex becomes a great mystery
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When questioned about fine points, you have not backed down
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He has spared you information about playing doctor with the boy next door
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You finally realize that the day has come when you can let go of his hand as you are crossing the street
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In his peripheral vision, he sees the red sports car he wants one day to own
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Being ever so subtle, you drop into conversation the name of your alma mater
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He tells you to stop pressuring him about where he will go to college
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One morning the child sees you smelling a rose and looks at you questioningly. You feel like a doddering old man, straightening up from smelling the flower
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He has more information about cars than you have
.

You read
Car and Driver
at the barbershop, instead of
Time.

He wears a larger size shoe than you
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You can’t believe it
.

He sings snatches of a song you’ve never heard before
.

You find yourself humming a song you used to sing when you rocked him to sleep, and you look at him nervously, thinking he may think you sentimental
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He tells you that you can relax: There is nothing he wants to know about sex that he doesn’t know
.

You tell the barber not to take so much off—that you are letting the sides grow
.

He gets a cough he cannot seem to shake, and you fear that it is pneumonia
.

Your wife tells you that it is an ordinary cough. You insist that he visit the doctor
.

He looks at you the same way he did the day he saw you smelling the rose. It is just a cough, he says. Nothing to worry about
.

You think, in the night, that you hear him coughing. You go down the corridor, to his bedroom, but all is silent. You must have been dreaming. Only when he is grown do you acknowledge your terror about ordinary childhood maladies: measles, mumps, sore throats, infected cuts, and bulging bruises. It would have been the greatest tragedy if anything terrible had happened just as he was starting to come home with jokes that made you laugh, the quite-inventive whispered profanities he’d learned from the older boys, if he disappeared so his eye would no longer suddenly meet yours when his mother got upset
.

Imagine this: You love someone whose birth had nothing to do with you, whose features are too striking to resemble your own (although something in your bearing may account for people’s observation that the child looks just like you), whose presence is potentially threatening
because of its power to leach away all of his mother’s emotional energy. You love someone whose mother has admitted, on occasion, to wishing him away so that the complexities of her life would become simple matters. She pursued fame, and left it to you to pursue baby-sitters. And the closer you and the child became, the more she withdrew, as if that was what she had wanted all along: a clear road, space, time, the people around her happily involved. You would expect a little jealousy. More guilt. But that isn’t the way it was
.

Your worst fear about the child is that he will never let you in
.

He sits on your shoulders and puts his hands on top of your head to steady himself when you start running. Feeling his cupped hands, you think to teach him the word “yarmulke
.”

You think that his mother will not marry you
.

You get married
.

You become melancholy, sure that you will die before the child is grown
.

You live
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You fear that the world will treat the child unfairly
.

The child, rarely intimidated, proceeds on his way quite well
.

Struck by lightning, then. Something cruel and sudden
.

Lightning does not strike
.

He wanted more G.I. Joes; you lobbied for another child. His chances of getting a toy were always higher than your chances of talking her into having another baby
.

He wanted to daydream; you thought about changing careers midstream. He daydreamed whenever he felt like it, but you stayed in the same profession after all
.

He trusted you; you worried that although he was right in his judgment of you, he was generally too accepting of people and things
.

He wanted a dog; you wanted a dog. She said she wanted to be free to travel, and that she did not want to feel guilty all the time she was gone about some sad-eyed dog hanging its tail between its legs in a kennel
.

He would make up stories about people at her openings; you would
repeat all but the most scandalous gossip to him. She looked across the room and smiled at the two of you, and you thought your heart would break
.

In short, you lived, with this child, the most ordinary life, suspecting in the back of your mind that virtue might be rewarded, giving thanks that you had found each other in this world, trying to avoid sentiment, dutifully planning for his future. And if, miraculously, he did not end up hating you, perhaps you could one day ask him what he thought about his life. Not fishing for compliments. Just finding out what were high points for him that might have gone unnoticed by you. Or things you were curious to know: How many times did you hear your mother and me making love? Did you envision it, when you heard the bedsprings creaking? Did you want us to get it over with faster? Did it make us seem more childish? Vulnerable? Remote? Might it as well have been a sneeze? Were there times when you coughed or got up and went to the bathroom on purpose to make us whisper and wait? Do you have any memory of when you were still quite small and came to listen at our door at night? You stepped out of your bedroom slippers, so in the morning we found them there, in front of our door, like shoes left in the corridor of an expensive hotel. Do you remember how you managed to find poison ivy in New York City? Do you think that Haveabud and your mother had a sexual relationship? Do you think I ever stepped out on her? Did you ever fear that we would divorce, like everybody else’s parents? Did you think that one or both of us might die? Who would you rather had died? Did you know that I defended your decision to say your prayers silently at night, and that I honestly didn’t think that you meant to stop saying them? How many arguments did your mother win, and how many did I win? Was my favorite color obvious, or did I tell you at one time what it was? How interesting that you learned all my sizes, as if memorizing necessary mathematical formulas, but you might not know my favorite color. In time, you certainly disliked Haveabud much more than I did. What about that scare when your mother went in for the biopsy? Did you think of her as disfigured? Did
you know the worst that could happen? Was it helpful or harmful to be told your I.Q.? Did you sense, in your mother, a bit of misogyny, and in me a bit of homophobia? Am I making up questions to provoke you? Did I do that raising you? Did I condescend? Did I convince you of things, even when you argued? How often does chance intervene, and how often is “chance” a term used loosely about an incident that is self-generated? Did you think that your mother had a rather bleak view of life, considering her photographs? Was it wrong of her to discuss her family in print? Did she tell the truth about us? Did she know the truth? Do we know the truth about each other today? Does it seem calculating, her getting a puppy at this point in time? I suspect she will spoil it when she’s around. That in getting it, she’s also thrown me a bone
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I came into your room one night and found that your mother, seated at the foot of the bed, was reading you Blake’s sunflower poem. A poem that I could only think would be obscure to a small child. Perhaps you liked the rhyme. Her presence. You seemed not to criticize what she read, but you complained if I varied my intonation from one night to the next
.

We would not have had Christmas trees, except at my insistence. She would have let you grow up without Christmas trees. She knew that was terrible, and always gave in. Hanging the decorations, she acted as if it were the most pleasant thing possible. Then, the next year, she would not want a tree
.

My guess about Haveabud is that he would do anything that was expected of him by an important person, but if that thing went unstated, he often overreacted
.

It was more difficult than I thought to live with an artist. Is that the primary reason why things have sometimes been difficult?

She loved my ears. She would bite the ear lobes lightly, and nuzzle the ear with her nose, as if she meant to enter my body there
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I hated buzzing insects. She hated anything that crawled
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Enough of the past tense
.

Today, the sun is shining with a brightness that would seem to
obliterate the words written here. I like overcast days, when you don’t have to squint. Days of pale clouds
.

There would not have been this house without your mother. Or any you, of course, without your mother. So that when she travels, it seems strange: Things seem to have been abandoned, to exist without context. I realize that when you agree to something, it becomes your world. I may be disingenuous in saying that she determined so much. What I am really saying is that she put a border around my life, as if we lived within a photograph
.

Think of the things she has photographed that I have never seen. Sequential shots, like the blinking of an eye. Think of how many times I have looked at her face as she blinks, and how many times those eyes have closed and opened to my presence in her world
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There were years in which I could have devoted myself to writing if I had wanted to. It is commonly known that everyone looks back and regrets not following through on more things that mattered to them
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What will you think of these ruminations, which started out with such surety about the wonders of childhood, filled with Ben Franklin-esque advice to the wary? I look back and see that what I recorded as sound advice was often only a prediction. Probably I had in mind passing on something eloquent, pretending to myself that it would be useful, but secretly hoping you would be surprised by my sensitivity. Maybe I have ruined my chances merely by writing that sentence. Maybe written words could never guide you and this information about childhood could not mean any more to you than your mother’s photograph—of which you are so fond—of your shoes kicked off in a field where champagne glasses sparkle like huge diamonds and the rain has misted the grass and deteriorated the paper napkins as fast as acid
.

Her feeling has been that people do things, then abandon the worlds they have created. She is interested in what remains, after the fact. No doubt she also feels abandoned. All artists are involved in personal quests, regardless of how well they seem to be investigating larger matters. Also—no different from cowboys or saints—-they will be drawn to what reinforces them. I have recently read, and smiled over,
this passage from Valéry: “It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary. This is how one recognizes that there
is
a soul at that moment, if at the same time one experiences the sensation that everything else—everything that would require a larger vocabulary—is mere possibility
.”

We all like simple rhymes, spontaneous smiles. We are all so much alike, which is rarely remarked upon by artists
.

I see now that what started as a private record took a trajectory of its own. I might have let it fly away, of course; or perhaps because it was dear to my heart I held it close. The trouble might simply have been that I was wary of creating something. A child—I would have created a child; the physical creation of something didn’t scare me—but words … perhaps I was reluctant to let language transport me
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It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. Should we simply record any thoughts we want, and judge them along the lines of Valéry?

Questions and question marks. This is being written at night, the light and the muttered expletives of the day having faded into darkness and silence. The dog curled nearby. Leaves brushing the window. An archetypal scene of the room in which the writer writes
.

As always, the writer is secretly waiting for something else. Tomorrow night, your car in the driveway. You will close the door and walk toward a house that was once called “the retreat,” when we still lived in the city, but that now, when we are older, is the only home we own
.