The Ten-Year Nap (4 page)

When Amy and Leo had first moved in, the playroom had been a big draw. Of course, back then Amy had imagined in some deluded way that Mason would use that playroom forever. She’d pictured him as an eternal toddler, someone she could sit near and keep an eye on and occasionally take to a museum in the rain to see the Magrittes. She had not really understood that he would get older and tramp off into the world, and that the playroom would eventually go unused by him, taken over instead by a new generation of babies, who waddled and crawled and licked and grabbed and sat stunned in that sunlit, shit-tinged aerie.

New York City was an island unreachable by most people in America, and somehow even the taint of horror and fear that had fallen over it in 2001 had given it a dented, temporary quality that made it seem even more valuable, in the way that fragility always increases the price of a thing of beauty. They had rented their apartment in its bulky, unbeautiful fortress at the height of Leo’s flushness as a lawyer. The Rivermere was for young families moving rapidly forward; no one was expected to stay in these overpriced rented apartments for years and years, and yet Amy and Leo weren’t able to buy an apartment elsewhere and leave.

There were always alternatives to this kind of draining urban life. If you were determined to stay in the area, you could move to one of the other boroughs, as all the practical or adventurous people did, and you could live there decently. Early on, Amy knew couples who had nosed deep into neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The middle class extended its reach, reconfigured its range of territories. Narrow art galleries and cybercafés grew on patches of street beside check-cashing stores and rundown walk-in dentistry centers. Strollers abounded on craggy sidewalks in the steep shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge. Those neighborhoods were overrun with families now, and if the new residents were incidentally knocking out the low-income dwellers, they couldn’t really think too much about it; they would surely become squeamish, and then the whole plan would fall apart. The less game couples Amy knew went to nearby suburbs or to quaint and faraway towns with a single, narrow main street and one not-great restaurant that closed at eight, forcing everyone into their homes for the night, as though desperadoes roamed freely and there were townwide curfews.

You had to love the companionship of your family unambivalently in order to live up there, Amy thought. You had to be willing to stay put in those dark-wood-trimmed old-house rooms as night fell. But Amy and Leo would neither go to Brooklyn nor buy a house in an outlying town. Though it wasn’t prudent for them to stay in their apartment, they stayed anyway.

“We’re like the Jews in Berlin before the war,” Leo had said, and Amy told him the analogy was obnoxious, and that his great-aunt Talia, who had been in Dachau, would have been offended if she’d heard him. “I only mean that we refuse to see what’s happening,” he added. “We are demented and irrational.” But still they did not leave.

Over the years the steep increases in rent at The Rivermere were frightening. You had to live for the moment, Amy Lamb understood, treating even real estate as if it had an existential dimension. The rent battered and shook them; it sucked the money away from them each month as if it were stored in the wind tunnel of the lobby. Mason’s school tuition drained them too, and Amy still thought uneasily that he should have gone to public school, like the rest of the country’s children did. They had tried to get him into a public gifted program. (“It’s like winning the lottery, and we won, we won!” the father of an accepted child had cried, actually jumping up and down as he spoke.) But Mason had only scored in the ninety-seventh percentile, not the ninety-eighth, and so he had been knocked out of the running.

When Amy and Leo went to look at the local public elementary school, they and a hundred other parents had stood in the low-ceilinged cafeteria/gymnasium with its exposed pipes and boilers and flickering lights. There was no money for the arts. Their son would not paint or throw pots on a wheel or play an instrument. He would be artless—literally and figuratively. There were no sports to speak of, either, and the student-teacher ratio was discouraging.

“So, do you think we can do the private-school thing?” she had hesitantly asked Leo as they walked outside after the tour.

“I don’t know.” He sounded pinched and sour.

She wished they had liked the school more; it was integrated and democratic. Over the doorways you could read the quaint words that a hundred years ago had been cut into stone: “Girls’ Entrance,” and “Boys’ Entrance,” though now girls and boys poured in through either door, watched over by a tough-looking female guard with a nightstick. In theory the school was an enclosed utopia. But this was New York City, where life was impossible and dear and the schools were a splintered mess, except for the ones where the parents banded together and served as substitute teachers and librarians and held one long, perpetual bake sale to rescue a school from a slide into indigence.

“Can we at least figure it out?” Amy asked Leo.

“Now? Right now?”

“No, I don’t mean now, obviously. What are you so angry with me about?”

But he ignored her question, and on the corner of First Avenue in a light rain, with his shoulders slumped against the onslaught of the future, Leo pressed the calculator function on his BlackBerry and ran some numbers, then sighed in a dramatic manner and said yes, yes, he thought they could actually do it, at least for a while. “It’ll probably be a big mistake,” he warned. “And we may have to pull him out later, when it will be much harder.”

Leo made a fine income by most American professional standards, and yet as a salaried associate at a small, second-rate firm—not a partner, not a rainmaker—his earnings placed them at the crux of the city’s striving and diminishing middle class. The school that Mason eventually attended seemed almost a direct rebuke to the unhappiness of the morning that they had spent in that dark cafeteria. It was beautiful, orderly, all-boy. Close attention was paid by thoughtful teachers. But Amy and Leo were shocked when it came time to pay Mason’s tuition twice a year, and when the American Express bill appeared in the mail as thick as a long, torrid novel, its many pages detailing the folly of the previous month. They spent too much at every turn, writing checks and charging meals and purchases, throwing bills and hailstorms of coins at cab drivers and handymen and the tolerant Hispanic waiters at the Golden Horn.
Here,
they seemed to cry,
take it all.
Money was forced away from them in the wind tunnel, but then the wind eventually shifted so it blew the other way, bringing more money with it.

In his own bedroom in the apartment now, Mason slept on obliviously. Over his head, warplanes hung on fishing wire, and on his shelves were stacks of board games that were barely used. By now almost all children had made the transition into games played upon screens, though their parents and grandparents still stubbornly kept buying them the latest editions of Battleship and Stratego, trying to seduce them back toward the last embers of the pre-microchip world.

“Mason, honey,” Amy said in the softest voice, as if in penance for all the shouting. “It’s time to get up.”

She looked into his wide, beautiful face, at the slender nose and deer-brown hair. His eyes batted open and he said, thickly, “Five minutes?”

“No, sweetness, sorry,” Amy said. “I already gave them to you.”

“Oh.” He blinked a few times, then said, “Can you name all the U.S. presidents who were left-handed?”

“What? No, I can’t.”

“Try.”

“I can’t try. It’s not something you try.”

“James Garfield Herbert Hoover Harry Truman Gerald Ford Ronald Reagan George Bush the first one and Bill Clinton,” he said in a big release.

“Well. Well. That’s very good,” she said, and truly she thought it was, though it left her with nothing much to say in response. He sometimes just came at her like this with
facts
; to her they seemed random, but to him they were part of a beautiful system in which an array of presidents sashayed back and forth across his consciousness, grasping pens or quills in their left hands.

He sighed now and lifted himself from the bakery warmth and human smell that churned below his covers. She wanted to pull him back onto the bed and heave him into her lap, though he was ten years old and his legs were long and gangly, and it would have been approaching incest at this point if she had done that. But she longed for him, as well as for the version of herself that had been his mother when he was small. Remember when we saw the Magritte painting of the man with the green apple? Amy wanted to say now, and perhaps he would remember, and inexplicably both of them would begin to cry.

But Mason was finally out of bed, standing and urinating in the tiny slice of a bathroom connected to his bedroom, making a sound as loud as glass being struck with a hammer. He was awake and in no need of cuddling from his mother, and was already thinking about what awaited him at school. Someday, Amy thought with an astonishingly sharp sadness, her little boy—who told her all about the left-handed presidents and about Achilles with his undipped heel, and who until very recently had held her hand while walking along the street, and with whom she experienced fits of closeness that made life seem not just
not pointless
but
pointed
—would likely be sitting in an office behind a sealed window, looking out upon a city or an industrial park. Amy briefly remembered her own view from the window of her office at Kenley Shuber and how sometimes, in the afternoon, she would take a break and stand for a minute with her forehead and the palms of her hands against the glass.

Life in that office, at first, had been crisp and collegial. There was always more work being set before her, and always she could manage it, but eventually a low-grade familiarity set in that Amy tried to ignore, because when you really thought about it, so many elements of life were similar. The tasks at the law firm became at times interchangeable, and even the clients over lunch began to seem as if they could be siblings. The lawyers wore similar gray suits and silky ice-blue ties, or cream-colored tailored blazers. Someone became the “funny” one in the office, and someone else became the “irritable” one, and the firm took on aspects of a small and self-contained village. Amy became one of several female “nice” ones. She didn’t mind this role; it meant that everyone came to the door of her office and leaned against the frame and said, “What’s up, Amy?” or “We’re all going to Umbrella Sushi tonight,” or sat on the edge of her desk, wanting to reap her niceness personally.

Soon, when she and Leo fell in love, the job took on a new quality. She had seen big Leo Buckner in the corridors and at meetings, though the domains of their work rarely overlapped. He’d been there a year longer than she had and was a popular young lawyer, broad-bodied, dark, with an easygoing, sighing quality that appealed to everyone. Women were always flirting with him, practically climbing on him as if he were a genial, napping uncle.

Once Amy and Leo became involved, the other women backed politely away, as if in a formal gavotte. With an office romance, work had a shimmering, exciting aspect, and most days were punctuated by moments when she would see her curly-headed beloved in the corridor, and they would each remember what had happened the night before.

Then, finally, they were married, and there was the pleasure of being newlyweds at the firm. The work itself remained tolerable, even sometimes highly enjoyable. At night, eating take-out food in bed or watching TV together on the spineless futon in their starter apartment, they advised each other on work matters and deconstructed the idiosyncrasies and intentions of their colleagues. When Amy became pregnant, they agreed that she would leave the firm for an allowed twelve weeks and then return. It was raining on the day of her going-away party, and the sky outside the conference room was dark. This room had also been the scene of other going-away parties; one by one over the years, young lawyers were picked off either through opportunity or failure or having been sucked through the widening portal of motherhood.

“I’ll definitely be back in twelve weeks,” Amy had said in her brief, embarrassed goodbye remarks. “So nobody take my coffee mug.”

But twelve weeks proved to be nothing, and when the time was up, it was as though an alarm had suddenly gone off, sending electronic doves cooing, chickens squawking, and horses galloping—the entire rotation of animals in a clamor as if there were a fire in a barn—and yet she could just not get up. She could not leave the apartment, that crazyland of strewn burp rags and unironed miniature outfits and gifts of rattles and soft pillow-books that still lay with the detritus of their wrapping paper all around them. The garbage overflowed, the baby confused day with night, and anyone in her right mind would have wanted to run from that place and return to the sharp corners and fragrant tang of the office climate, with its industrial carpet and stuttering fluorescent lights that forced you awake in the morning like a flask of ammonia passed under the nose.

But a new mother was not in her right mind. Something overcame her, and her entire purpose was to
save that baby
, as though she were a superhero flying with arms outstretched through the metropolitan sky. Even a quick trip to the Korean market for yogurt and juice was interminable, and Amy ran the three short blocks back to The Rivermere. She could not leave Mason yet; she loved him too much for that. But neither could she turn him over to some woman from Jamaica or Guyana or Mount Olympus. She could not turn him over to the kindest, softest woman in the world; even a gigantic, gelatinous, floating human breast would not be good enough. She was the only one who could rescue him; their marrow matched, and everyone else’s was imperfect. She was the sole donor, and he drank straight from her tap. The hush of the office and the seduction of all the briefs and the clients and the conferences were worth nothing to her now.