Picturing Will (7 page)

Jody had been moving fast. She had a roll of 1000 ASA in her camera and was in the process of taking photographs of Casper the Ghost as he crouched with Peter Pan by the car headlights. As she moved the camera and Mary Vickers’s startled look suddenly became the central image of the frame, she clicked quickly. Thank you, God, she was thinking, for the invention of the auto winder. The next shot she took was the photograph that would later be blown up and hung on the large wall to the right-hand side of Haveabud’s gallery in New York—the primary display wall, the place people always looked as they began to find their way into the depths of the gallery: Mary Vickers’s eyes, bright enough to bore a hole through the camera lens, full moon shining to one side, people clotted together on the road, and in the background the large form of a ghost, white body billowing in the wind, looking down at who knew what.

O
f course you do not want the child to be a ventriloquist’s dummy, but if there could be a bit more sitting on the knee, a little less of the back of the head and more of the profile as you spoke, that might be all the better. The child that reminds you of your own mortality needs so much tending to—so many wisps of hair brushed off the forehead, so many dollar bills handed out, so many anklet cuffs turned down, so much humming to accompany the soprano-sung solo—that it is almost impossible to decide whether to be as quick-talking as an escaped convict, or as patient as a penitent
.

It is understandable that parents play a little game of self-deception and think they know everything about their child—that with their peripheral vision and with their ear inched backward an extra bit to listen they need not turn to see the child’s predictable expression: the gleeful smile, the lowered eyes. In this way, they miss the unexpected. They make the mistake of thinking children are simpler than they, and
that therefore they have children figured out. (The children know better. They know that at least some of the time they can rush toward danger faster than their parents can stop them. That the parent who confiscates the water gun has failed to notice the slingshot in the back pocket. That tying shoelaces is a reassuring activity for parents. That off-key bedtime singing should be tolerated because it helps parents unwind.)

You have created the child, but you could not have anticipated the child’s power. Because the child’s presence and desires are so constant, it becomes the course of least possible pain to persuade yourself that being subsumed is synonymous with parenthood. You can only pray that by early evening the child’s eyelids will grow heavy with sleep. Then you hope that the sleeping child will not loom large in your own dreams, that once the night-light has been switched on, that beam of light alone may guide the child to dreamland
.

In the silence of the house, you can sort out the day’s failures and successes. You can admit that you have approached the child with a mixture of awe, regret, and envy. Wouldn’t it be nice to scream louder than the child? To plead for peace as diligently as the child pleads for adventure? Couldn’t the tables be turned, and couldn’t
you
be found hiding underneath?

Parents can endure only so many tears before they become impervious, can listen to only so much pleading before whatever is being requested—the smooth peanut butter, the puppy in the pound—begins, cosmically, not to matter. It is predictable that the child denied a mongrel will contort its face into a version of the thing it most desires
.

Fact: The child is your child whether or not the crib seems some days like a sinking ship. In order to proceed, focus your attention even though the haunting lullaby you sing distracts you. Grab on to the diaper as if you were clinging to the mast of a ship. Ignore the Sirens’ song tinkling on the child’s music box that would lure you into drowning in memories of your own childhood. Consult the experts and let them steer the way; call a sympathetic friend whose child is six months older
.

There are so many books published to advise you about the child’s upbringing, so many predictions about patterns you will notice and pleas to which you will be subjected. Psychologists will speak to you on early-morning television shows, mothers in the park will disagree, relatives will try to pull the rug out from under whatever you believe, the pediatrician’s calm may turn to poorly disguised mystification, and the comic on late-night TV will effectively satirize the creature whose existence you care so much about
.

The message is always to change doubt to certainty and proceed
.
Sit by the sandbox with newfound strength. Embrace the squirming child and urge him to behave differently. Insist on eye contact when you speak. Do not let others turn the child upside down. Check the baby-sitter’s references. Lock the cabinet that contains the cleaning products below the sink. Regular visits to the doctor. Two security blankets, so one can be washed. Check toe room in shoes regularly, by depressing the leather underneath your thumb. Comb tangled hair from the ends up. Speak out against environmental hazards. Look out for danger, but do not communicate your fear to the child. Buckle your seat belt. Cut down on consumption of red meat. Learn a jingle called “The Toothbrush Is Your Friend.” Advise him not to bother kitty when she’s eating. Try to make a game of gathering up toys with the child. Don’t overdramatize the scary parts of books. Do everything right, all the time, and the child will prosper. It’s as simple as that, except for fate, luck, heredity, chance, the astrological sign under which the child was born, his order of birth, his first encounter with evil, the girl who jilts him in spite of his excellent qualities, the war that is being fought when he is a young man, the drugs he may try once or too many times, the friends he makes, how he scores on tests, how well he endures kidding about his shortcomings, how ambitious he becomes, how far he falls behind, circumstantial evidence, ironic perspective, danger when it is least expected, difficulty in triumphing over circumstance, people with hidden agendas, and animals with rabies. With these things in mind, you will watch the child hopscotch from certainty to uncertainty, throwing the stone of trust before him
,
going all the way to the end by hopping one-footed, then turning and hopping back, full grown, much taller, with a puzzled expression that may not leave his face whether he is succeeding or failing
.

Does it seem impossible that the child will grow up? That the bashful smile will become a bold expression? The sparkling eyes in need of corrective lenses? That fevers will subside, that there will be no more bloody knees, that a briefcase will replace the blue security blanket? You must resist the tendency to think ahead; wishing for peace is not
the same as wanting things to change forever, and when all is said and done (a state only songwriters believe in), the child will never really be gone, even though he grows up. You will find that although the child may be remembered in association with one or two prized toys, more likely the child will be remembered alone, standing with his legs parted, his arms dangling at his sides, pants fallen down a bit so that only the toes of the sneakers are visible. He will be standing the way he stood in the snapshot, with an expanse of field—or maybe the beach—around him. A little thing, but you will remember that distinctly without having a photograph in front of you. That will be the way, in fact, the child will stay: a visual image—one that, even at the time, you squinted to look harder at, whether or not a camera was raised to your eye
.

When you are thirty, the child is two. At forty, you realize that the child in the house, the child you live with, is still, when you close your eyes, or the moment he has walked from the room, two years old. When you are sixty, and the child is gone, the child will also be two, but then you will be more certain. Seeing pictures of your child at different ages, you will not hesitate for a moment. You will point to the two-year-old, not the ten-year-old or the twenty-year-old. He will always be that high. With a nick above the eyebrow. Those eyes, at that point a bit too large for his face, so that, in remembering the eyes, you are sure that your child possessed startling intensity. He might be wearing some article of clothing purchased for a special occasion, but unless the picture of the shirt with the anchor and the sheepshank knot is right in front of you, you will not think much about that. He will
be in typical little-boy clothes, smiling or looking straight at the camera with a tolerant expression that may show a hint of fatigue: Another picture? Why do you want it? What can it mean to you? He will be there with you without special costumes or toys as the years go by: the child alone, more and more a fact. Your life before the child seems too long ago to think of. What happened with the child, something of a blur. There were late-night walks in the summer heat, weren’t there? Didn’t the child once assume that you could give him pointers about how to fly? Didn’t he think he was recreating the rumbling of Vesuvius with the plastic straw in the glass of chocolate milk? You go on—and the child goes on—but you change, as the child sees you. You do, but he does not. He stays the same, no matter how many marriages, mortgages, dogs, and children he may surround himself with—he does not change, so he is not vulnerable. It becomes difficult to remember that he ever was. That the dog snapped at him, and he was afraid. That the cut got infected. That night after night, the same blue-bodied demon flicked its tail in his dreams. Sticky fingers. Wet sheets. Wet kisses. A flood of tears. As you remember him, the child is always two
.

SIX

I
n New York, every crack in the sidewalk seemed to Mel to portend disaster. Wouldn’t panes of glass be blown out of skyscrapers? That had happened so often with the John Hancock building in Boston that for a long time people were not allowed to walk beneath it. The situation with the homeless was already so grim you didn’t want to have to think about buildings tipping over, construction accidents, small things gathering speed and force as they dropped to earth. If you thought of New York as precarious, it would do you in; the way to keep going was to take big strides even if you felt like shuffling, to come on stage like the MC even if you were only the warm-up act.

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back
, Mel kept thinking. His mother had been dead for years. Then maybe bad luck would befall his father? Nothing had befallen his father so far but a woman twenty years his junior, who lived with him in his Scottsdale, Arizona, condominium. His father had stopped smoking, joined a country club, and was taking flying lessons. Step on a crack or not, the world was an unpredictable place. He was back in the awful pattern of finding fear in a handful of dust, when he should have been savoring life in every egg of caviar he spooned onto his tongue.

Mel was on his way to the second meeting with D. B. Haverford, who had bought him lunch at Petrossian the week before. Haverford was moving his gallery uptown and wanted Mel to work for him. He must never know that childish rhymes went through Mel’s mind, that over the weekend, after a cold walk during which Mel had again not gotten up the courage to ask Jody to marry him, he had cried. That Mel had seriously been thinking about going to a psychic at the Ansonia Hotel. That because the woman Mel loved wouldn’t marry him, he was even thinking about leaving the city and going to her, to see if that would impress her. For D. B. Haverford, Mel had put on his Charivari suit, with a moss-green shirt and no tie. The more audacious he was in his dress, the more compliments he got. Being a graduate of Dartmouth was a great embarrassment to him, but he covered for it by being the first to bring it up, shaking his head and saying that he had turned down Yale (not the truth; he hadn’t even applied) because in his youth he had only wanted to ski. When Mel shrugged, he looked as helpless as someone forced to stand and recite something he hadn’t memorized. At Dartmouth he had been the lead in two plays and the applause had made him seriously consider becoming an actor, though he had eventually capitulated to his father’s demands that he go to business school at his alma mater, U. Va. His father had also been an excellent skier, and Mel had never learned how to outski him, though for years he had dreams in which he did, leaving his father behind, buried in avalanches. Years before, he had tried to write about the competitiveness that existed between them, but probably he had tried to write for the wrong reason: to exorcise demons instead of trying to court them and see if, in a fair fight, they won out or the writer did. The analyst he saw during those years pointed out to him that he was very goal-oriented. In the novel, the analyst became a humorous figure who listened to his patient’s stories about skiing and replied with anecdotes about tennis. As he was writing the book, and during the time he saw the doctor, he found the courage to quit school and to try to envision something to do with his life other than what his father would have liked. Mel’s grandfather left him a house in Williamstown and some money when he died. He sold the house the same spring he met Jody. She had just moved south and was figuring out how to make a living. Jody had seemed to him genuinely sad—so much so that he was surprised she didn’t turn out to be a transient, that she stayed in town, placed ads in the paper and started a business, functioned like a person who was not oppressed. All the particulars of her sadness intrigued him, so that he would have fantasies about Wayne and the bad way he had treated her, imagine her other suitors who fell short of the mark as keener competition than they were. He had thought she was younger than she was, so he had lied about his age by a couple of years—an entirely pointless thing to do, because women never minded that men were older. He had no reason to trust her, so he told her about the sale of the house but not about the money he had also been left after his grandfather’s death—also pointless, but he didn’t know then that she had very little interest in other people’s money. He pretended that his novel did not mean much to him, though she probably would not have asked to read it anyway, being hesitant to ask anything that might seem to be a favor. He never mentioned his analyst, but since Freud and Jung were among her books, it was doubtful that she would have thought less of him for seeing a psychiatrist. She had always turned out to be other than he expected.