The Ten-Year Nap (10 page)

“Yeah. You should be able to say to your new clothes,” said Amy, “‘One of you shall betray me.’” They had laughed and lain back together on the wide bed as though they were in college again. Amy had let her head drop down over the side, seeing the room upside-down, feeling a disorienting, teenaged blood rush.

But their time together seemed stolen, pitched against the grain of family life. Marriage and children sometimes divided friends; the one or two women Amy knew well who had remained single and childless seemed almost unaware of the astonishing differences between their life and hers. They would call her on a weeknight, when anyone with kids would be in the prime of high-homework and arguments and general noise and distraction and preparation for tomorrow.

“Hey there, Amy girl,” Lisa Silvestri would say on the telephone at eight o’clock on a Tuesday. “What’s going on? Is this a good time to talk?”

Amy had once crammed with Lisa Silvestri in law school, sitting together on the chunky, modular furniture of the library lounge, and then later on, by coincidence, they’d had offices down the hall from each other at Kenley Shuber, where Lisa still worked along with Leo; she had been made partner, while he was forever to be a salaried associate. But Lisa Silvestri seemed to have little awareness of the rhythms of family life that often carried you away from your friends.

Some mothers felt secretly
pious
about motherhood; they were sure their childless friends could never reach anything approximating the gorgeousness of family bedlam: the intensity of teaching a child to read, the drama contained in a tantrum, the on-call mother love that was more concentrated and ecstatic even than sexual love. Life with children was bigger than life without them, these mothers were convinced, and so the childless women could seem austere and prissy, though this could never, ever be said aloud, for it was judgmental and certainly unfair.

When Lisa Silvestri called in the middle of the chaos of an evening, Amy had to casually say, “Listen, Lisa, I’ve got to call you back, okay? It won’t be tonight, I’m afraid.” In the background of Amy’s apartment, there might be a crash and shouting and the roar of bathwater running unchecked from a tap. Over at Lisa’s loft, the sound of light jazz noodled along softly.

But even when you made time for your friends, Amy thought, and they made time for you, at intervals the center of your attention reflexively moved back to your family. You sat with the other women in the morning here at the Golden Horn, but you thought,
Pick up shin guards for Mason.
Or else, you even used your precious time with your friends to ask them, “Do you know where I could get shin guards?” One of the other women might name a new sporting-goods store called Outdoorland, and you would pull out your BlackBerry, which, unlike your husband’s—which was stocked with notes on depositions and meetings with clients—was stocked with names of shops and doctors and pediatric orthodontists and other mothers, and dates for meetings at the school about how to talk to your sons so they will listen. According to the school psychologist, Dr. Linda Kreps, mothers should never address their boys directly when they have something important to say to them. “Instead,” Amy seemed to remember that the psychologist had actually said, “you should go outdoors and engage with them in an activity in which you can’t stare into their eyes and intimidate them.” You should fish, she’d said, or drive, or walk along a city street or a country lane as you tell them that you and their father are breaking up, or that you are dying.

Now Amy listened as Penny Ramsey told her the story of how she had become Ian Janeway’s lover. Ian, Penny said, had come downtown to her museum six weeks earlier for a meeting with a curator and had sat in the anteroom outside the executive offices upstairs, waiting. Penny had been at her desk eating a quick lunch, “something sad, like beef cup-a-ramen,” she told Amy, and Ian had poked his head around the doorway and said, “That smells good.” By which he might have meant,
You smell good
.

Penny Ramsey, a harried woman in a good pale yellow suit with little flecks in the weave like vanilla beans, invited him into her office while he waited. He sat across the glass plane of her desk, inhaling her beefy, salty soup fumes and flirting so boldly that they both began to laugh.

“You want some of my ramen?” she finally asked. “Is that it?”

The sexual part started a week later, after he had called her on her cell phone half a dozen times. “Do you need a lunch date today?” he’d asked once. And, another time: “I call with urgent news from the world of framing.”

On the day they first slept together, Penny had been coming back from a lunch meeting with a donor and was walking along the edge of the park talking on the phone to her assistant, Mark, when Ian text-messaged her. “Come see me,” he wrote. “I’m home in bed.”

She called him right away. “Are you sick?” she asked.

“No,” he said slowly. Then, “I have to touch you.” He lowered the conversation to a teenaged level, making them both laugh in a dumb, drugged way. Penny hurried into the subway. There was still a little time before she had to return to the museum, so she headed uptown on the express train to meet Ian Janeway, a thirty-three-year-old British man who waited for her in his bed.

Penny walked up the stairs to his apartment, a narrow one-bedroom in a tenement building in the upper Nineties off Fifth Avenue. Amy imagined the small bedroom, the slew of unframed prints angled at the foot of the bed, and the framer himself with his tentative scrape of a voice and pale narrow body lying against the golden complement of Penny, whose pretty clothes draped the chair. Amy saw Ian lowering himself down onto her, talking and cajoling in his wonderful accent, his mouth on her little breast, his body establishing itself against her, a finger going against and inside her until she was helpless and babbling, and then everything moving more quickly. The images were exciting, not because either one of the people in them excited Amy sexually but because she felt privileged enough to get a glimpse of the scene, at least secondhand. Now, unhappily, Amy tried to picture herself and Leo in bed, but she could only see her husband toiling away above her with the same diligence with which he toiled at Kenley Shuber.

“Please say something,” Penny said to Amy. “I guess you disapprove.”

“I have no opinion. I’m not your mother.”

“My mother would die if she knew. She’s so impressed by Greg’s whole corporate thing. His money thing.” Penny paused. “I want you to know that I don’t go around talking about Ian. I have told no one else. You’re it.”

“I’m
it
? Can I ask why?”

“I don’t know. The mugging; I had to talk. I’m sorry to burden you.”

“It’s not a burden,” Amy said, although maybe, suddenly, it was.

“Well, thank you,” said Penny.

She told Amy more facts about Ian: how he had studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford and had hoped to be a painter, but had had a kind of minor nervous breakdown during his first term and was briefly hospitalized, then sent home. “The doctors decided he was just in over his head,” Penny said, “and that he needed more exercise and ‘fresh air’—they were always big on fresh air—and he basically agreed with them. He told me that he had far too many ideas for his artwork and that the visuals would keep him up all night. He was completely overstimulated, and he crashed. So he switched to art history, with an emphasis on Italian engraving, and finally he found his way into framing and then became a very good curator. But he’s still kind of emotional; it never went away. He’s also sort of boyish and romantic, which is part of what I like about him. He leaves me these long, nutty messages on my cell, these soliloquies. I guess I worry about him a little too; he’s so intense.”

Amy thought of the few men she had been involved with long ago, before Leo; their images were still individually preserved for her. She thought of those young men in their twenties whose arms were lined with light hair and whose stomachs hadn’t yet been tenderized by a continual influx of breakfast-meeting pastries and nighttime cookies, or by the long spiral freefall of middle-aged resignation. She remembered how, when you are so young, you rarely think about the direction or purpose of love. Instead, you just follow it wherever it goes. That was what she used to do all the time, and it was what Penny was now doing with Ian. Amy watched it all from a distance, like the crippled girl in a wheelchair in an old storybook, looking on as Heidi and Peter frolic and fuck on the side of a mountain.

“And listen, one thing. I really have to ask you not to tell anyone,” Penny said. “Not your husband, okay? And not any of those other mothers. Please promise. It’s important.”

“Duh,”
Amy said—a word Mason used—smiling and pleased.

T
HAT NIGHT,
when her son asked if one of his parents would read to him, Amy volunteered. She wanted the warmth of such an encounter, with Mason close beside her on his trundle bed, which was decorated with the remnants of old stickers glued and then half-peeled from the headboard. He was fast growing out of the desire to be read to, and soon the activity of reading aloud to him would stop forever.

“So which book tonight?” she asked, and to her mild disappointment he handed her
Blindman and the Moorchaser
by the Scottish writer Rachel Millar, which all the boys in his grade were reading this year. Blindman was the actual name of a character who had been born without eye sockets (was that even possible?) and who wandered a moor in a fully reconfigured and oddly futuristic nineteenth-century countryside, trying to avenge his brother Azajian’s death. The book was enormous, as all books were for children lately.

Amy was resistant to fantasy; whenever Mason asked her to read to him she said yes, but in recent years she had felt betrayed by the books. All those questing characters and that dire, apocalyptic imagery were exhausting and so depressing, not unlike watching the news out of the Middle East. Everything was bathed in waves of blood described by Rachel Millar as being “the exact colour of King Moloral the Second’s garnet ring.” When Mason was younger, she’d read
The Secret Garden
with him, because it was her favorite book when she was a girl, and she had wanted her child to love it too, regardless of his gender. He’d liked it enough to finish it—there was an outbreak of cholera in the plot, killing the protagonist Mary Lennox’s parents, and mysterious noise in the night—but Amy knew that Mason had never thought of it again and that it hadn’t held him the way these darker, bloodier, fantastical novels did.

“Okay,” Amy said, picking up his book now, “so where were we?” Her wrist ached slightly as she lifted it. The thick spine was crenellated and immodestly faux-filigreed.

“There’s a bookmark, Mom,” Mason said.

“Ah yes. Indeed there is a bookmark.” She read aloud: “‘Chapter the Eleventh: In Which the Moorchaser Learns an Invaluable Lesson.’”

“Why is it invaluable?” Mason asked. “Why don’t they just say ‘valuable’?”

“Please, just let me read,” she said, and she started the chapter:

 

At the exact moment that the old clock in the Stillson Abbey tower began to chime, the Moorchaser was far from the village of Haddensdown-on-Clef. He had managed to slip past one of the Defenders and enter the Zone of Sorrow, from which no man has ever returned. But the Moorchaser, of course, was not a man; he was a Frailkin, and none of this species had ever entered the Zone before. As soon as he walked through the greenish copper gates with their twisted, strangulant vines, he felt something stir inside him.
I am home
, thought the Moorchaser, though surely this was not his home, nor had it ever been, except in a dream.

 

Mason’s eyes were already half closed. He was tired, but if she were to ask whether he was bored by the book he would say no, no, it was thrilling. What the hell is a “Frailkin”? she wanted to ask him. How can you expect me to say that word aloud with a straight face? She wondered how he could find this book thrilling; something was inside his brain, as small as a legume, giving him a fascination with the promise of worlds that did not exist.

Maybe it was just that the actual world of adulthood, with its long meetings and requirements that you sit still, was too disappointing for most boys to face head-on. Or maybe it was that boys were in need of a belief that something more intoxicating than this world lay ahead, as though to buffer them against reality after they stopped believing in the existence of Santa Claus. You could lose Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy all at once in a terrible massacre with severed limbs and fur and blood and veined wings and fluffy material everywhere yet still hold on to Frodo and the rest of Middle-earth at least until high school. At which point, in order to weather the pain of losing that last fantasy foothold, you discovered the sexual wonders of girls, with their outsized breasts, nimble tongues, and the geometrical welcome of their open legs. You replaced one type of fantasy with another, and then you never, ever had to lose that one.

“The thing you have to understand about boys,” an older, more experienced mother in the park had advised Amy long ago, “is that sometimes they’re very simple. Sometimes all they need is to be run like dogs.”

This had offended Amy a little; she’d felt she ought to be offended on behalf of all boys, everywhere, who could not defend themselves. But of course there was some truth to that remark. Amy remembered how once, when Mason was two, she had taken him to a mother-child swimming class at the Y and how afterward in the locker room, when she had dressed him and still stood naked herself, about to change back into her street clothes, he had suddenly pushed open the heavy door that led to the lobby, where dozens of old men and women sat. Through the pneumatic exhalation of the slowly closing door, she saw Mason make a break for the outside world, and in that second she understood that he might easily slip away from her forever.