THE CITY’S pleasures were too complicated for raising a kid. They were too wound up with rot. I thought so, and Jonathan did, too. Clare was less sure—she worried that the baby might grow up with its imagination damaged by too much ease.
“What if it turns out to be some sort of Heidi?” she said. “I don’t want any child of mine growing up too good. I couldn’t stand it.”
I reminded her of what New York has ready for anyone too small or uninformed to do battle for a body-sized patch of air rights. I invented probability numbers about small-town schools and the effects of the color green on psychological development.
“And listen, growing up in the country doesn’t doom anybody to good behavior anymore,” Jonathan said. “Most of the really interesting murderers come from derelict farms and trailer parks.”
“Well, all right,” Clare finally said. “I guess everybody needs New York to escape to. If we raise the kid here, it’ll just move to the country when it grows up.”
And so we started making phone calls. We started driving upstate to look at property so strange or desolate we could afford it with Clare’s inheritance money. Shopping for cheap real estate, you get an insider’s look at daily human defeat. You smell the dank, vegetable smell of the outdoors working its way in through soggy wallboards, see ceilings and floors in a slow-motion state of ongoing collapse. You see how weather and decay win just by continuing, day after day, until the money runs out.
“We can’t stop too long to think,” Clare kept saying. “We have to keep looking. If we stop and think too long, I’m afraid I’ll come to my senses.”
After three weeks we found a two-story brown house five miles out of Woodstock, a place with a motherly, slightly insane dignity whose advantages mostly balanced its faults. Its walls stood on a solid foundation. The price was low—a desperation sale. Light from an alfalfa field floated through the rooms as if the passage of time was man’s silliest delusion. Well water clear and cold as virtue itself flowed from the taps.
On the debit side, the wiring had disintegrated and the pipes had gone lacy with rust. The old pine floors were alive with dry rot and carpenter ants.
“At least this one has a soul,” Jonathan said. “You know what I mean? I feel like it’s not too late. This one isn’t dead in the water yet.”
Clare nodded. She ran her thumb along a doorjamb, and looked with critical uncertainty at her thumb.
“It feels right,” I said. “Don’t you get a feeling from this place?”
“Mm-hm,” Clare said. “Nausea. Vertigo. Panic.” She kept looking at her thumb.
We argued for a week, and bought the house. We bought the well and the afternoon light. We bought fifteen oaks, eight pines, a blackberry thicket, and a pair of graves so old the markers had been worn smooth as chalk. As Clare sat pregnant on a green vinyl chair signing the papers she said, “So long, Paris and Istanbul.”
Jonathan added, “So long, Armani. So long, crocodile shoes.” The two of them shared a sour little laugh. And then the deal was made. Clare had bought us all a fresh start with her dead grandfather’s rhinestone fortune. By way of celebration, the real estate agent gave us complimentary white wine in white Styrofoam cups.
When we left our New York apartment we got rid of everything worn out or broken—nearly half our possessions. We put them out on the street as offerings for the people who were just arriving, full of hope, at the place we were about to leave. We watched from the window as passers-by carried things away. A woman took the lava lamp. Two skinheads and a fat tattooed girl took the swaybacked sofa covered in leopard-skin polyester.
“So long, treasures,” Clare said. Her breath made a spool-shaped flicker of steam on the glass.
“So long, old garbage from thrift-store bins,” Jonathan said. “Honey, there are times when nostalgia is simply not called for.”
“I dragged that sofa down here from Sixty-seventh Street,” she said. “Years ago, with Stephen Cooper and Little Bill. We’d carry the damn thing a few blocks, stop and sit on it, then walk another few blocks. It took us all night. Sometimes bag people would sit on it with us, and we’d all have a beer. We made a lot of friends that night.”
“And now you’re a homeowner and a mother-to-be,” Jonathan said. “Did you really expect to scavenge around the streets of New York for the rest of your life?”
“Little Bill died,” she said. “Did I tell you?”
“No.”
“Corinne told me. He died in South Carolina, oh, at least a year ago. We’d all lost track of him.”
“I’m sorry. Is Stephen all right?”
“Oh, Stephen’s fine. He really did open a jewelry store up on Cape Cod. I suppose he’s making a mint selling little gold whales and sea gulls to tourists.”
“Well,” Jonathan said. “That’s good. I mean, at least he’s alive.”
“Mm-hm.”
We watched the sofa travel down East Fourth Street. On the sidewalk below our window, a man and a woman in leather jackets whooped over Clare’s old kitchen clock—a yellow plastic boomerang shape covered with pink-and-red electrons.
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into throwing out the clock,” she said. “I’m going to go down there and tell those people it was a mistake.”
“Forget it,” Jonathan said. “They’d kill you.”
“Jonathan, that clock is a collector’s item. It’s worth money.”
“Sweetie, it doesn’t run,” he said. “It doesn’t tell time anymore. Let them have it.”
She nodded, and watched numbly as the couple jogged away toward First Avenue, passing the clock back and forth like a football. She stroked her pregnant belly. She breathed steam onto the glass.
That was over ten months ago. Now we live in a field facing the mountains. Spiky blue flowers climb through the slats of our fence. Bees drone in their ecstasy of daily work, and a milk-blue sky hangs raggedly behind the trees. These are old mountains. They’ve been worn down by wind and rain. They are not about anarchy or grandeur, like the more photogenic ranges. These mountains throw a smooth shadow—their crags don’t imply the gnash of continental plates. They are evenly bearded with pine trees. They cut modest half-moons out of the sky.
“I hate scenery,” Clare says. “It’s so obvious.” She is standing beside me in the unmowed grass. It’s the first April of the new decade and she’s a new Clare. She’s sharper now, with more true bite under her jokes. You’d expect motherhood to have had a softening effect.
“Aw, come on,” I tell her. “Get over it, huh?”
A pair of crows glide over the house. One lets out a raucous cry, like metal twisting on metal.
“Buzzards,” Clare says. “Carrion-eaters. Waiting for the first of us to die of boredom.”
I sing softly into her ear. I sing, “By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong, and everywhere there was song and celebration.”
“Stop that,” she says, batting the song away as if it was a taunting crow. Her silver bracelets click. “If there’s one thing I never expected to end up as,” she says, “it’s an old hippie.”
“There are, you know, worse things to end up as,” I say.
“It’s too late,” she says. “The butterflies are turning back into bombers. Haven’t you noticed? They’re going to build condos on that mountain, take my word for it.”
“I don’t think they will. I don’t think there’d be enough customers.”
She looks at the mountains as if the future was written there in small, bright letters. She squints. For a moment she could be a country woman, all sinew and suspicion, and never mind about her lipstick or her chartreuse shirt. She could be my mother’s mother, standing on the edge of her Wisconsin holdings and looking out disapprovingly at the vastness of what she doesn’t own.
“As long as there are enough customers for the Home Café. Christ, I still can’t believe we decided to call it that.”
“People’ll love it,” I say.
“Oh, this is all just so weird. It’s so outdated and—weird.”
“Well, it sort of is,” I say.
“No ‘sort of’ about it.”
She is so bitter and hard, so much like her revised self, that a rogue spasm of happiness rises up in me. She’s so real; so Clare. I do a quick, spastic dance. It has nothing to do with grace or the tight invisible laws of rhythm—I could be a small wooden man on a string. Clare rolls her eyes in a wifely way. There is room here for the daily peculiarities.
She says, “I’m glad one of us feels good about all this.”
“Aw, darling, what’s not to feel good about?” I say. “We’re some thing now, I mean we won’t just blow away if one of us takes a notion.”
“It would be nice if that were true,” she says.
“You know what I’d like to do someday? I’d like to fix up the shed as a separate little house, so Alice could move up here when she gets tired of the catering business.”
“Oh, sure. Let’s build a cottage for my old fourth-grade teacher, too.”
“Clare?” I say.
“Mm-hm?”
“You really are happy here, aren’t you? I mean, this is our life. Right?”
“Oh, sure it is. It’s our life. You know me, I think in terms of complaint. It’s how my mind works.”
“Right,” I say.
We stand watching the mountains, then turn to watch the house. This house is so old the spirits themselves have melted into the walls. It feels inhabited not by anyone’s private unhappiness but by the collected days of ten generations, their meals and fights, their births and last gasps. Now, right now, it’s a disreputable marriage of old and new disappointments. The floorboards are crumbling, and the remodeled kitchen seethes with orange linoleum and Spanish-style wood-like cabinets. We’re going to fix it up, slowly, with the money we make from our restaurant. We are forces of order, come from the city with talents and tools and our belief in a generous future. Jonathan and Clare look at the house and see what it can become. They talk antique fixtures, eight-over-eights, a limestone mantel rescued from a house in Hudson and trucked up here. Although I wouldn’t fight progress I like the house as it is, with bug-riddled floors and wood-grain chemical paneling that looks like sorrow and laziness made into a domestic fixture. Sitting on its four overgrown acres, the house answers the elderly mountains. It, too, is docile and worn smooth. It has been humbled by time.
“I’ve been thinking,” Clare says. “What if we painted the windowpanes blue? Like a cobalt blue, you know? Do you think that’d look too cutesy?”
“Ask Jonathan,” I answer. “He’s the one who knows about things like that.”
She nods. “Bobby?” she says.
“Uh-huh?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I walk around the place and I feel like I’m standing on an airplane wing. At thirty thousand feet. I guess I want you and Jonathan to think this is as strange as I do.”
From the house, the baby starts crying. “That’s what really does it,” Clare says. “I’ve always just made my own mistakes, I never had to worry about somebody else like this before.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Everything’s fine and perfect. Trust me. Okay?”
She nods uncertainly. She keeps losing the battle to decide instead of worry. Worry is part of what makes her short-tempered; she is trying to develop a personality to match her worst expectations.
“Let’s go see how Jonathan’s doing with her,” she says.
“Okay. Sure.”
We go into the house together. The door opens straight into the living room, a big shabby rectangle still papered in scowling red eagles and blue drums. At this time of day it’s filled with squares of light that slant in from three sides. Jonathan is walking a circle with Rebecca propped on his shoulder. She wails, a series of short piercing cries like mortified hiccups.
“Mystery tantrum,” he says. “Her diaper’s fine, and she just ate half an hour ago.”
“Let me try with her,” Clare says.
Jonathan fails to hide his reluctance. He dislikes giving the baby up, even to her own dreams. But when Clare holds out her arms he passes her over.
Clare folds her in, whispers to her. “Hey, sweetheart,” she says. “What’s the matter? Just a little fit of existential despair?”
Rebecca is a twenty-pound being with feathery hair and dark, furious eyes. Already, at eleven months, she has a nature. She is prone to contemplation. She resists both laughter and sorrow until they overwhelm her, and then she gives herself up completely.
Clare walks the living room with her, whispering. She speaks to the baby the same way she speaks to Jonathan or me, in full sentences, but she speaks to the baby without an undercurrent of rage.
“Now, Miss Rebecca,” she says, “you’re not being reasonable. But, hey, why should you be? Lord, if I ever start nagging you to be reasonable, will you shoot me, please?”
Jonathan watches in an ecstasy of edgy affection. Parenthood has brought several surprises—the biggest is his tortured devotion. Clare and I are calmer in the face of Rebecca’s fragility and her unending needs. Jonathan hasn’t rested since she entered the world. He is a living illustration of love’s power to unsettle our nerves.
Now he has something vital to lose. Now there is a small victim for every tragic story he can tell himself.
Rebecca won’t be quiet, and we take her outside. She is lost in crying the way a motorboat gets lost in sound and spray. We walk the property with her, and let her cries dissipate in the noon air. Jonathan picks a daisy. He twirls it in front of her pinched red face.
“Hey, kid,” he says. “Hey. Take a look at this amazing, unprecedented thing here.” Of all her qualities, Jonathan is most in love with her capacity for amazement. He almost weeps when she stares goggle-eyed at a yarn ball or a teaspoon cupping the sun. But she keeps crying, right into the daisy.
“Can’t be bought with flowers,” Clare says. There is true pride in her voice. If Jonathan loves her for being the world’s best audience, Clare loves her stubborn insistence on her own mysteries.
We walk into the stand of trees behind the house. Here, in the endless shade, there is no grass to speak of. There is only forest trash—pine cones and shed branches, the droppings of deer. We walk among the silent trees with Rebecca’s noise trailing behind us like a glittery scarf.
Clare asks, “Did you boys call the plumber today?”
“Yep,” Jonathan says. “He can’t fit us in until two weeks from Tuesday. Why don’t you let me try with her again?”
“Shit. This house isn’t going to be done until the next century. You know that, don’t you?”
“No big rush,” Jonathan says. “Come here, Rebecca.”
He reaches for her, but Clare maintains her hold. “No big rush,” she says. “So we’ll just keep heating water on the stove for the rest of our lives?”
“We’re pioneers,” Jonathan says. “Can’t expect all the suburban comforts right off the bat.”
“I think,” she says, “that both of you are some kind of retards. I honestly do.”
She holds the baby close and hurries ahead of us, deeper into the woods. Bars of light, fractured by pine boughs, hang stodgily. Jonathan takes off after her, as if he believes she might be planning to take Rebecca and raise her alone in the wild.
Our restaurant will open in less than a week. Jonathan and I work all day, finishing it up. It’s nothing grand, just a nine-table restaurant in a former saloon. We’ve reformed the saloon like a pair of mail-order brides newly arrived on the frontier. We’ve painted it white, and hung striped curtains. Jonathan has covered the walls with old photos: school pictures of kids in bow ties and pinafores, men and women in plaid Bermuda shorts posing sunburned beside a lake, somebody’s grandmother shoveling snow. He’s hung a record-breaking salmon caught in 1957 and a shelf full of trophies. On the trophies bright gold men and women, sexlessly naked as angels, act out human excellence in bowling, golf, badminton, and citizenship. This will be a simple place, just breakfast and lunch. We’ve bought unmatched tables and chairs from the same secondhand stores where we found the trophies and photographs and the lacquered salmon.
“Come on down, everybody,” Jonathan says. “The Homo Café is just about open for business.” He daubs white paint over a scar on the molding. He is wearing overalls, with his hair tied back in a ponytail.
I’m in the kitchen, loading five-pound jars of preserves and ketchup onto the shelves. “They didn’t send strawberry jam,” I say. “They sent, like, half boysenberry and half peach.”
“I’ll call up and yell at them. They probably think they can send us whatever they’re trying to get rid of, just because we don’t know what we’re doing.”
When the jars are all stacked on the shelves I stand at the counter, watching Jonathan paint. “Clare thinks we should think what we’re doing is strange,” I say.
“It is,” he says. “Who thinks it isn’t strange?”
“Well, I guess she thinks we should be more upset about it.”
“She’s just anxious because she’s paying the bills. She’s waited all her life to get this money, and now, wham, it’s being spent.”
“It’s being, you know, in vest ed,” I say.
“Right. She has been sort of a pain in the ass lately, hasn’t she?”
“Oh, I don’t know if I’d say that.”
“I’ll say it. Clare has been a bitch for a long time now. Really, since she got pregnant.”
“Well, you know,” I say. I punch a new cassette into the sound system. Jimi Hendrix sings “Are You Experienced?”
“I guess she’ll be okay,” Jonathan says. “Motherhood is hard on all of us. I know it’s hard on me.”
I get a paintbrush and help with the touch-ups. Jimi puts out his velvet growl, a living voice from the world of the dead, as Jonathan and I cover the last nicks. We sway to the music. There is some kind of small perfection in this, painting a wall together while Jimi sings. There is a knitting of times, the past tumbling into the future. It comes to me suddenly, in the form of a surprise: I’ve got what I wanted. A brother to work beside. A revised future shining like a light bulb over our heads.
Here is what’s unsayable about us: Jonathan and I are members of a team so old nobody else could join even if we wanted them to. We adore Clare but she’s not quite on the team. Not really. What binds us is stronger than sex. It is stronger than love. We’re related. Each of us is the other born into different flesh. We may love Clare but she is not us. Only we can be ourselves and one another at the same time. I daub paint over an old scar. The tinted faces of grade-school kids, all in their forties or fifties now, look out from the walls with toothy, clear-eyed optimism.
Later we lock up the restaurant and go to our car by way of the main street. I prefer walking through the middle of things—I’m the one who likes town. I’ve been on my way to Woodstock since I was nine and now, more than twenty years later, I’ve arrived. My brother was right—there are still people here. The concert, I’ve learned, happened sixty miles away, in a broad grassy field that is no more or less than that. An empty space ringed by green-black trees. Jonathan and I tried swimming in the chocolate-colored pond while Clare sat with Rebecca in the weeds, but mosquitoes drove us all back to our car. We ended up having lunch at what Clare believed was the same place she went with her husband-to-be when they fled the actual concert. She said the hamburgers would come with three pickles and a sealed ketchup envelope, and they did.
Woodstock is what towns were supposed to become before the old future got sidetracked and a new one took its place. Bearded romantics still strum guitars in the town square, still dreaming of themselves as forest creatures and apprentice magicians. Old ladies with their gray hair frizzy and loose nod in time on the benches. Clare calls it pathetic and Jonathan doesn’t pay close attention one way or the other, but I appreciate the kindness of its quiet streets and the people’s cheerful determination to live in ways that are mainly beside the point.
Jonathan and I drive home in our used Toyota, up and down the rises, with branch shadows flicking across the windshield. He sits low in the passenger seat, his sneakers propped on the dashboard. “I’ll tell you what’s really strange about all this,” he says. “What’s really, truly strange is the fact that we’re doing it at all. People say they’re going to move to the country and open a little café, but who actually does it?”
“We did,” I say. “We are.”
When we top the last hill, I hit the brakes. “What is it?” Jonathan asks.
“Nothing,” I tell him. “I just want to look for a second.”
From where I’ve stopped we can see our old brown house raising its chimney among a riot of junipers. Three dormered windows catch the light that will soon slip away behind the mountains, and the ivy that has grown unchecked for decades flutters, the leaves showing their silver undersides. The house has stood for more than a century without giving in to the landscape. No vines have snaked their way through the masonry, no underground lake has increased its boundaries by seeping into the foundation. Although I usually sing it to tease Clare, now I sing the Woodstock song to Jonathan, with a half-serious attitude that is all the pleasanter for being only half. “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” He listens to a few bars, and joins in.
At dinner, we talk about the restaurant and the baby. Lately our lives are devoted to the actual—we worry over Rebecca’s cough and the delivery of our used-but-refurbished walk-in refrigerator. I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.
“I don’t like Dr. Glass,” Clare says. She is sitting beside Rebecca’s high chair, spooning vanilla pudding into Rebecca’s mouth. Between each bite Rebecca looks suspiciously at the spoon, double-checking the contents. She has inherited my appetite but has also inherited Clare’s skepticism. She is both hungry and watchful.
“Why not?” I ask.
“Well, he’s a hippie. And he can’t be more than thirty-five. I’d just rather take Rebecca to an old fart. You know, somebody in sensible shoes who got your mother and all her sisters and brothers through things like smallpox and polio when they were kids. When Glass tells me not to worry about these coughing fits I keep thinking, ‘I’m being told this by a man in Birkenstocks.’”
“I agree,” Jonathan says. “Glass does Tai Chi. I’d rather find somebody who plays golf.”
“Glass seems okay to me,” I say. “I mean, I like him. You can talk to him.”
Jonathan says, “I suppose what it really gets down to is, you want your baby’s doctor to be some sort of fatherly type. You know? Someone who seems unaffected by trends.”
“Amen,” Clare says. “Tomorrow I’m going out looking for a new pediatrician.”
“I really think Glass is fine,” I say.
Clare holds a spoonful of pudding an inch from Rebecca’s open mouth. “I want to try someone else,” she says. “I’m nervous about Glass, I think he’s too easygoing. Okay?”
“Well. Okay,” I say.
“Okay.” She slips the spoon into Rebecca’s mouth with smooth, practiced accuracy. Clare is turning herself into the Mom character from our Henderson days. We don’t talk about the Hendersons anymore, maybe because the difference between our actual lives and their hypothetical ones has shrunk below the measuring point.
Later, after we’ve put Rebecca to bed, we watch television together. It’s what there is to do at night, with a baby, in the country. We lie on the queen-size bed, surrounded by corn chips and beer and Diet Coke. The upstairs bedrooms are snug and dark. Their ceilings follow the curve of the roof. The last owners—the ones who did the downstairs in eagle wallpaper and Spanish-style cabinetry—must have run out of money at the stairwell. Up here the shabbiness has more patina. The wallpaper in this room swarms with faded carnivorous-looking flowers, and the venetian blinds dangle from frayed cords the color of strong tea. Clare flips around the channels. We have cable here, a powerful magnet that sucks down each invisible impulse passing overhead. Along with the normal stations we get strip shows from New York, Mexican soap operas, Japanese women gleefully demonstrating inventions so complex that only other inventions can fully appreciate them. Occasionally we tune in a hesitant, snowy channel that is almost frightening—it looks like men and women walking, just walking, through an empty field. It could be a transmission we’ve picked up by mistake, something from a world we aren’t meant to see.
“A hundred and twenty stations and there’s still nothing to watch,” Clare says.
“Nothing on TV tonight, let’s fuck,” Jonathan says.
Clare looks at him with her brows arched and her eyes dark. “You two fuck,” she says.
Jonathan jumps on her and simulates frantic, rabbit-like copulation. “Oh baby oh baby oh baby,” he moans.
“Off,” she says. “Get off me. Really. Go jump on Bobby.”
“Ooh baby,” Jonathan says.
“Bobby, make him stop,” she says.
I shrug, powerless. “I’ll scream,” she says. “I’ll call the police.”
“And tell them what?” Jonathan asks.
“That I’m being held prisoner in this house by two men. That they lured me here for purposes of breeding, and force me to live in a perpetual 1969.”
“You’ve done the breeding,” Jonathan says. “If that were your only purpose here, we’d be through with you by now.”
“The baby still needs milk, doesn’t she?” Clare says. “And the house needs a momma. Doesn’t it?”
Jonathan pauses a moment, considering. “Naw,” he says. “You’re free to go.” He rolls off of her and picks up the remote-control box. “Let’s see if there’s anything good coming in from Jupiter tonight.”
“If I go,” Clare says, “I’m taking the kid.”
“Oh no you’re not,” he answers. Then he remembers to adjust his voice. “She’s everybody’s,” he says more gently.
Clare leans back, cocks her head in my direction. “Bobby?”
“Uh-huh?”
“I’d like to know the secret of your imperturbable calm. Here we are in the middle of a highly peculiar and unorthodox arrangement, in a house that could fall down around us at any moment, Jonathan and I are bickering over possession of my child—”
“ Our child,” Jonathan says. “Really, Clare, you’ve got to stop with this yours business.”
“Over possession of our baby,” she says, “and you just sit here like Dagwood Bumstead. Sometimes I think you’re what’s coming in from Jupiter.”
“I guess I am,” I say. “I mean, none of this seems all that strange to me.”
She looks up at the ceiling, her eyes dilated to black disks. “I should have known,” she says. “I should have figured it out the first moment I saw you, with blow-dried hair and Calvin Klein jeans. And then you could switch practically overnight to East Village hip. It’s so funny. It turns out Jonathan and I are the conservative ones. We’re the ones who need to look in the mirror and know what we’re going to see from day to day. You can just do anything, can’t you?”
“No,” I tell her. “I can’t just do anything.”
“Name me something. Name something you wouldn’t do.”
“Um, well, I wouldn’t be alone. I haven’t been, you know, by myself since I was a kid.”
“That’s it,” she says. “You’re a company man, aren’t you? You mirror everybody’s desires. Oh, why didn’t I think of this before? When you lived with Jonathan’s parents you were a nice Ohio boy, when you lived in the East Village you were cool, and now that we live in the country you’re this sweet sort of hippie-dad figure. You just give people whatever they want. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
There are things I can’t tell her, things I wouldn’t know how to say. I am part of the living and part of the dead. I am living for more people than just myself.
“Oh, Clare,” Jonathan says from the foot of the bed. “What are you all of a sudden, some sort of Nancy Drew of the psyche? Do you really think you can sum Bobby up in a sentence like that?”
“You go sentence by sentence in this life,” she says.
I reach over and stroke Clare’s hair. I try to kiss her troubled lips.
“Boys, boys,” she says, pulling away from my kiss. “What a perverse crew we are. What a deeply weird bunch.”
“We’re really, you know, not much weirder than any family,” I say. “At least we love each other. Didn’t you say that first?”
“Maybe I did. About a thousand years ago.”
I look into her scared, aging face. I think I know what frightens Clare—a certain ability to invent our own futures has been lost. Now we are following a plan that got made in a haphazard way along a highway in Pennsylvania. Now the good things are the predictable ones, and surprises mean bad news.
I put my lips on hers again. This time she returns the kiss. Jonathan continues flipping channels, lazily half-watching.
I NEVER expected this, a love so ravenous it’s barely personal. A love that displaces you, pushes you out of shape. I knew that if I was crossing the street with the baby and a car screamed around the corner, horn blaring, I’d shield her with my body. I’d do it automatically, the way you protect your head or heart by holding up your arms. You defend your vital parts with your tougher, more expendable ones. In that way, motherhood worked as promised. But I found that I loved her without a true sense of charity or goodwill. It was a howling, floodlit love; a frightening thing. I would shield her from a speeding car but I’d curse her as I did it, like a prisoner cursing the executioner.
Rebecca’s mouth worked to form the word “Momma.” She fretted whenever I left her. Someday she’d pay a fortune to therapists for their help in solving the mystery of my personality. There would be plenty of material—a mother living with two men, intricately in love with both of them. An undecided, disorganized woman who fell out of every conventional arrangement. Who dragged her own childhood along with her into her forties. I’d been just a private, slipshod person going about my business and now I was on my way to becoming the central riddle in another person’s life.
Being a mother was the weighted, unsettling thing. Being a lover—even an unorthodox lover—was tame and ordinary by comparison.
Maybe that was the secret my own mother discovered. She’d thought my wild, undisciplined father would prove to be her life’s adventure. And then she’d given birth.
We worked out a variation on the classic arrangement, we three. Bobby and Jonathan went to the café before sunrise every morning, I stayed home with Rebecca. I didn’t want a business. Eventually I’d start making jewelry again, or some other little thing. The restaurant was the boys’ project, a way for them to support themselves and begin paying me back. They were good, uncomplaining workers. Or, Bobby was a good, uncomplaining worker and Jonathan more or less followed his example. They left the house at five o’clock every morning, just as the darkness was beginning to turn, and didn’t come back until four or five in the afternoon, when the dark was already working its way back into the corners of the house. To be honest, I didn’t know too much about their work lives. Bobby cooked, Jonathan was the waiter, and a sweet dim-witted boy from town bussed tables and did the dishes. Although I listened to their stories—furious customers, kitchen fixtures that blew up or caught fire in the middle of the lunch rush, wildly improbable thefts (someone stole the stuffed salmon right off the wall, someone else took the seat off the toilet in the women’s room)—it all seemed to happen in a remote, slightly unliving realm of anecdote. I felt for the boys. But to me their single, salient characteristic was an eleven- or twelve-hour daily absence. Real life, the heart and heft of it, was what happened during the hours they were gone.
For years, for most of my recollected life, I’d walked carefully over a subterranean well of boredom and hopelessness that lay just beneath the thin outer layer of my imagination. If I’d stood still too long, if I’d given in to repose, I’d have fallen through. So I’d made things, gone to clubs and movies. I’d kept changing my hair.
Now, with Rebecca to care for, each moment had an electrified gravity that was not always pleasant but ran right down to the core. Sometimes I grew bored—babies aren’t always interesting—but always, in another minute or hour, she would need something only I could provide. It seemed that every day she developed a new gesture or response that carried her that much closer to her own eventual personality. From hour to hour, she kept turning more fully into somebody. The hours were stitched together, and nothing limp or hopeless ever threatened to unravel the day. I bathed Rebecca, fed her, mopped up her shit. I played with her. I showed her what I could of the world.
All right, I liked it best when the boys were gone. Once they came home, a sense of continuing emergency was lost. Weary as they were, they told me to relax while they attended to Rebecca. They were being good, responsible fathers. I knew I should feel appreciative. But I didn’t want to relax. I wanted to be stretched and beset. I wanted to be frantically busy with Rebecca every waking moment, and then fall into a sleep black and shapeless as the unlived future.
Bobby loved our daughter but was not tormented by her vulnerable, noisy existence. In a world with more room in it he might have been a settler, with visions of reinventing society on a patch of ground far from the site of the old mistakes. He had that religious quality. He was soft-hearted and intensely focused. He was not deeply interested in the flesh. Sometimes when he held Rebecca I knew how he saw her—as a citizen in his future world. He respected her for swelling the local population but did not agonize over particulars of her fate. In his eyes, she was part of a movement.
Bobby and I slept together in a new queen-size bed. Rebecca’s room was the next down the hall, followed by the bathroom and Jonathan’s room. Bobby’s days were unrelenting. He flipped eggs and baked pies, fought with suppliers. He came home to Rebecca’s cries and dirty diapers. At night he slept the sleep of the exhausted and depleted—a desperate unconsciousness. I was grateful for his waning interest in sex, not only because I was tired also but because my nipples had turned brown from Rebecca’s nursing. Three yellow stretch marks stitched their way from my bottom rib to my crotch. I was forty-one. I couldn’t feel pretty anymore. If Bobby had been more ardent or high-strung, if he’d shamefacedly confessed that I repelled him now, I’d have had something to work from. I might have started on a new kind of defiant pride. But he was himself, a charitable, hardworking man. We slept peacefully together.
Jonathan generated more static electricity as he ran through his days. If Bobby moved with the methodical, slightly bovine will of a vacuum cleaner, sucking up each errand and task, Jonathan clattered along like an eggbeater. He was manic and flushed, vague-eyed from lack of rest. He and Bobby both told me that, as a waiter, he offered charm in place of competence. Water glasses went unfilled. Eggs ordered scrambled arrived sunnyside up. He said there were moments during the breakfast rush when he actually seemed to fall asleep while moving. One moment he’d be filling a cream pitcher and the next he’d be standing beside a table, in the middle of taking an order, with no recollection of the intervening time. Soon he and Bobby would hire a waitress, and Jonathan would become the host and backup errand boy. “I’ll make sure everybody’s happy,” he said. “I’ll pour them more coffee and ask about their hometowns. We’ll hire a specialist to see that they actually get what they order.”
His true vocation was the baby. Every evening after work he brought her something: a plastic doll from the dime store, a rose from somebody’s garden, a pair of miniature white sunglasses. He took her for long walks before dinner and read to her after.
Around four in the morning he’d wake her, change her diaper, and bring her to Bobby’s and my bed. He was comically paternal in boxer shorts, carrying our sleepy child. “I know it borders on child abuse, getting her up like this,” he said. “But we need to see her before we go off to bake the bread.” He’d crawl into bed beside me, holding Rebecca on his lap. Some mornings she whined sleepily in the lamplight. Some mornings she chuckled and mouthed unintelligible words. “Miss Rebecca,” Jonathan would whisper. “Oh, you’re a fine thing, aren’t you? Mm-hm. Oh yes. Look at those hands. You’ll be a tennis player, huh? Or a violinist, or a human fly.” He kept up a stream of talk, an unwavering flow. Sometimes when she cried, only Jonathan could comfort her. She’d wail in my arms, and buck and shriek in Bobby’s. But when Jonathan took her she’d quiet down. She’d stare at him with eyes that were greedy and surprisingly hard. She clung to him because he was elusive and because, during his hours at home, he took the most elaborate, courtly care of her. Even that early, I believe she was falling in love.
Rebecca and I shared a more nervous kind of love. While the boys were away, she and I lived together in a state of constant need. She needed and, with growing vehemence, resented my protection. I only needed her safety but I needed it completely, all the time. I had to know she was all right, every minute. It took its toll on both of us. Sometimes when we were together, when I checked the temperature of her bathwater or snatched a pencil out of her mouth, I could almost feel the question crackling in the air around us— What if I fail to protect ? We could grow irritable together. I could be short-tempered with her, and bossy; I could deny her too much. She was addicted to my fears. She wept if I watched her too closely, and wept if she realized that for a moment I’d forgotten to watch her at all.
I was beginning to understand something about my mother. She’d made a choice after I was born. There wasn’t room in the house or in her parsimonious nature for two difficult children. She’d been forced to choose. Maybe that was how the battle started. My father had had to fight for a share. He’d used his best weapons, his sex and recklessness, but my mother had prevailed with her powers of organization and rectitude. I’d loved my father more. He’d called me Peg and Scarlett O’Hara, said it was all right to buy anything we wanted. But toward the end, when he fell cursing on the front lawn and drunkenly broke furniture, I’d turned away from him. Finally, a child will choose order over passion or charm.
As a grown woman I’d fallen in love with Jonathan’s intelligence and humor and, I suppose, with his harmlessness. He was neither frigid nor dangerous. Neither man nor woman. There was no threat of failure through sex. Now I saw how Rebecca, too, would one day fall in love with him. He had a father’s allure. He had a mother’s warmth without the implied threat—she would not die if Jonathan briefly lost track of her. He worked all day and then came home with a present in his hands, flushed with the sheer excitement of seeing her after so many hours’ separation. Bobby was sweetly remote and I was too constant. Jonathan exerted a steady charm made perfect by his daily absence. Rebecca would be his. She’d care for Bobby and me but she’d belong to Jonathan.
There were times—moments—when I believed I had in fact found my reward. I had love, and a place on earth. I was part of something sweetened and buffered. A family. It was what I’d thought I wanted. My own family had crackled with jealousy and rage. Not a single one of my parents’ wedding gifts survived. We’d devoured the past. Now nothing was left to inherit but the improvements my mother had made, the gilt fixtures and floral prints, after my father went off to quit drinking and find Christ and then start drinking again.
But at other times I missed the violent wrongheadedness of my own family. We’d been difficult people, known around the neighborhood: Poor Amelia Stuckart and That Man She Married. I’d grown famous in our suburb for being Their Poor Little Girl. I’d based my early self-inventions on the concepts of deprivation and pride. I’d worn the shortest skirts, teased my hair into a brittle storm. I’d fucked my first skinny bass player at fourteen, in the back of a van. The local forces of order made it easy for me by wearing lumpy bras and girlish hairdos, by slathering their jowls with Aqua Velva. They said, “Join us in our world,” and I found a drug dealer for a boyfriend. I watched myself shrink in the eyes of the counselors and the pastors— perhaps, in fact, Mrs. Rollins, this one is beyond our help. I went to school with a pint of tequila in my purse. I shot through the frozen Rhode Island nights sizzling on speed. I left a vapor trail behind. People who’ve been well cared for can’t imagine the freedom there is in being bad.
Now, late in life, I’d been rescued. The boys came straight home every night, took care of Rebecca, cooked our dinner. Their love wasn’t immaculate. They may have loved one another more than they loved me. They may have been using me without quite knowing it. I could live with that. I didn’t mind touching the rough bottom of people’s good intentions. What I had trouble with sometimes was the simple friendliness of it. We lived in a world of kindness and domestic order. I sometimes thought of myself as Snow White living among the dwarfs. The dwarfs took good care of her. But how long would she have lasted there without the hope of meeting someone life-sized? How long would she have swept and mended before she began to see her life as composed of safe haven and subtle but pervasive lacks?
WHEN I summoned Jonathan to Arizona, I didn’t mention the parcel I had for him. It wasn’t the sort of gift to talk about over the telephone. I simply exercised my motherly prerogative and demanded a visit. I wasn’t generally much trouble to him, and he had always suffered from an exaggerated sense of his own culpability. I suspect he wished I would burden him more. I think he’d have found some relief in a beleaguered, badgering mother. Given his nature, he had little choice but to obey when I called and said I wanted to see him. “The desert’s lovely this time of year,” I said. “Please come out for a few days.” And he did.
I met him at the Phoenix airport. Country life hadn’t changed him much. Since he’d left for college more than ten years earlier, and I’d grown accustomed to going months without seeing him, I had learned a new objectivity. As a little boy he’d seemed like an invention of mine, and I’d loved him with a stinging, tangled intensity that hurt me at times. It was as if the part of me I felt tenderest toward, the little wounded part that wanted only to cry and be held, had been cut out and now lived separately, beyond my powers of consolation. His existence compelled and distressed me so much that I scarcely knew what he looked like. Now I loved him less dreadfully, from a deeper reserve of calm, and I could see him better in his human particulars. Among the disembarking passengers at the airport he was pale and pretty but unfinished-looking; as he aged I began to see that he stood in danger of growing old without acquiring a visible aspect of repose. Unmarked and boyish, with a boy’s equine beauty, he was taking on the perennially fresh, untried quality that can lead an old man to look like a shocked, ancient child. I waved from among those waiting and he made his way toward me, chipper and a little haunted-looking, threading gingerly through the crowd as if he suspected it might be full of enemies in disguise.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hello, my dear.”
We embraced, inquired after one another’s health and happiness, and started for the car. On the way he asked me, “How’s business?”
“Booming,” I said. “I’m getting more calls than I can handle, but I hate to turn anybody away at this stage. I’ve been trying to hire another cook. But it’s hard to find anybody who’ll do things the way I like them done.”
“I’m proud of you,” he said. “Who ever expected you to turn into a catering mogul?”
“Watch yourself, now. Don’t get patronizing.”
“I’m not being patronizing. When did you get so thin-skinned?”
“Oh, don’t mind me,” I said. “Nerves, I guess. I’ve never had a business at all, much less a successful one. I keep thinking something will happen and it will all just come apart.”
“Don’t worry. Or is that being patronizing too? Do worry. Awful things happen to the nicest people.”
“True,” I said. “Entirely true. How’s your own business?”
“Insane. It seems like we’re always there, and everything is always right on the verge of total madness. But we’re breaking even. On our busiest days we even make a little money.”
“Good,” I said. “It’s a tough field. Breaking even your first year means you’re succeeding.”
“I guess. I keep waking up in the middle of the night, thinking, ‘I forgot to take table five their coffee.’”
“Welcome to the front lines,” I said.
When we reached the car, we had a small cordial tussle over who would drive. I preferred to, since I knew the way, but a grown son doesn’t care to be chauffeured by his mother even on her home ground. I tossed him the keys, for his comfort’s sake.
We drove along the flat bright highway, talking of ordinary things. The sun, which was not too merciless at that time of year, shone on the flowering yuccas and the exquisite charcoal-gray tangles of mesquite. I thought without envy of the drizzle and blear that prevailed just then in the East. The desert, I’d found, had a beauty too severe to sink immediately into your skin. Its nearest geographical relative was the glacier—like a glacier it could fool the uninitiated into mistaking its slow turning for stasis. We who lived there loved it for its simplicity and cleanliness, its daily suggestion of the everlasting. A forested landscape came to seem both crowded and ephemeral, sweet enough but far too young, and subject to unpredictable turns of fortune. It is no accident that the first civilizations arose in deserts. It is no accident that the elderly often return there.
“You look great,” Jonathan said as he drove. “I like what you did to your hair.”
“Well, I have to make an appearance now,” I said. “I can’t stumble around town like the wild woman of the mountains anymore. To tell you the truth, I’ve found a barber. A men’s barber. Most of the women’s salons out here still insist on giving you these poofy lacquered hairdos, and I’ve got no interest in that. I have it cut once every three or four weeks, and don’t think about it otherwise.”
“I love it,” he said. “My mother is a catering mogul with a crew cut. I’m not being patronizing. I’m being appreciative.”
He pulled in at the condominium, and carried his bag into the house. “Place hasn’t changed,” he said.
“It’s just lost a little more ground to the forces of entropy,” I said. “I meant to get it whipped into slightly better shape before you got here. But a good steady client of mine called with a last-minute dinner party, so I spent yesterday making shrimp with cilantro pesto instead of vacuuming and dusting.”
“It’s okay. Our house in Cleveland was always a little too orderly, to tell you the truth. I mean, I’m glad to know you’re not out here cleaning all the time.”
“That’s the least of your worries. Believe me.”
Because he’d be sleeping on the fold-out couch, there was no unpacking to do. He simply set his suitcase in a corner. As he did so, I was overtaken by nervousness—I’d brought him all the way to Arizona for such a strange purpose. Perhaps I’d pass it off as a simple visit after all. Feed him, buy him a few new articles of clothing over his protests, and send him home again.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“A little. I didn’t eat the lunch they served on the plane. At a certain point in my flying career I realized I could just refuse the tray when they brought it. I still feel reckless doing it, though. Like I’m throwing away money.”
“Why don’t we go out for a late lunch?” I said. “I’ve found a marvelous place about ten miles from here, where they make their tortillas from scratch. I’d love to hire their cook away from them, have somebody who really knows traditional Mexican cooking, but I don’t think I could pay her enough.”
“Sounds great,” he said. “Let’s go.”
For a moment he was so like his father that I stopped and stared at him, the blood ringing in my head. All mothers must experience such moments, when their grown children—who have seemed to depart irrevocably into their own personalities—suddenly reveal a strain of their father’s nature so pure and undiluted they might be the man himself, reborn, right down to the three-note cough that has punctuated the past forty-plus years. What I saw in Jonathan just then was Ned’s easy, boneless willingness; his urge to be pleasantly enthusiastic and to keep things rolling along. If I’d been a different sort of person, a braver sort, I’d have taken him by the shoulders and said, “Want whatever you want more fiercely. Be more difficult and demanding. Or you’ll never make a life that uses you.”
Instead, I took the car keys from him and said, “I’d better drive this time. Even I’m not sure exactly how to get to this place, and I’ve been a dozen times.”
We spent the next two days talking and eating and going to movies. I gave him the tour of my rented kitchen and makeshift office, introduced him to my staff of three. I inquired after his life as well, although I wasn’t always sure how to phrase my questions. “How’s the baby?” was the most obvious opening.
“She’s fine,” he said over a margarita. “She’s amazing. Sometimes it seems like she’s changing a little every day. I’m beginning to understand why people have a half dozen kids—it’s hard to realize that now she can crawl, and she’ll never be quite so helpless again. It’s a relief, too. But I can see how you’d want to have another one just for the sake of seeing somebody else through that incredibly helpless period again.”
“And you spend a good deal of time with her?” I asked.
“Of course. Of course I do. I’m her father. I’m one of her fathers.”
I shook my head. “Maybe I don’t quite get it,” I said.
“What’s to get? You’ve been there, you’ve seen us all together. We’re three people who have a baby. What’s the big deal?”
“No big deal,” I said. “I guess I’m just old-fashioned.”
“You’re not old-fashioned. Not with a haircut like that.”
“Well, all right. I worry that you’re being exploited in all this. Bobby and Clare have each other. What have you got?”
This was delicate ground. We’d never formally acknowledged his proclivities—other than Bobby, I’d never met a liaison of his. As far as I knew, he didn’t have them. And here’s the awful truth: I preferred it that way. If he’d insisted on it, I’d have tried to accommodate a mental image of my son engaged in sexual acts with other men. But he wasn’t prone to insistence. He paid his visits in the guise of a chaste bachelor, and his father and I had always been willing to receive him as such. If life was failing to mark him in some way, I suppose we must have played our part.
“We’ve all got each other,” he said. “Mom, you’re right. You’re not getting it. Maybe we should talk about something else.”
“If you like. Just tell me this. You’re happy doing what you’re doing?”
“Yes. I’m ecstatic. And I’m part of something. I’m part of a family and a business. We’re building a home together. You get too caught up in the fact that we don’t look exactly like an ordinary family.”
“All right. I’ll try not to get too caught up in that.”
And, after a moment, we moved on to other subjects. I could have responded to confessions of unorthodox love, if he’d chosen to make them. But I could not demand such candor. I simply couldn’t. It would be his move to make.
I didn’t get around to my own business until the night before his departure. We had eaten in—I’d made a simple avocado vinaigrette and done salmon steaks on the grill. After the plates were cleared away I started coffee and said, “Jonathan, dear, there’s a reason I asked you to come this time. There’s something I want to give you.”
His eyes quickened—he must have thought I had a family treasure put away for him. For a moment I could see him perfectly at the age of four, precociously well mannered but beside himself with greed in a toy store, where no acquisition was too lavish to lie beyond imagining.
“What is it?” he asked, his eagerness politely concealed.
I sighed. If I’d had a quilt or a gold watch I’d have given it to him instead, but neither Ned nor I had ever saved things like that. We both came from families more interested in the future than in the past. I went upstairs to the bedroom without speaking, got the box out of my dresser and brought it down.
He knew what it was. “Oh, Mom,” he said.
I set it gently on the table, a smooth wooden rectangle with a brass plaque that bore Ned’s full name and his dates. “It’s time for you to take charge of this,” I said. “That was your father’s one request. That you decide about disposal.”
He nodded. He looked at the box but did not touch it. “I know,” he said. “He told me.”
“Have you been thinking about it?” I asked.
“Sure. Sure I have. Mom, that’s part of why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m trying to make some kind of home.”
“I see.” I sat down beside him. We both watched the box as if we suspected it might move on its own.
“Have you looked inside?” he asked.
“Yes. At first I thought I couldn’t stand to. Then as time passed I realized I couldn’t stand not to.”
“And?”
“It’s sooty. Yellowish-gray. There’s more than you’d think. I’d imagined just a handful, something talcumy you could toss into the wind with one hand. But it’s not like that, there’s quite a lot. There are some little slivers of bone, dark, like old ivory. Honey, I can tell you this—it’s no more of your father than a pair of his old shoes would be. Do you want to look?”
“No. Not right now.”
“All right.”
“Why are you giving this to me now?” he asked. “I mean, well, exactly that. Why now?”
I hesitated. Here was the truth: I had started seeing someone. He was younger than I, his name was Paul Martinez, and he’d begun teaching me a range of pleasures I had hardly imagined while married to Ned.
It seemed I was living my life in reverse. With Ned I had had order and sanctuary, the serenity one hopes for in old age. Now, at the onset of my true old age, I seemed to be falling in love with an argumentative dark-skinned man who played the guitar and kissed me in spots Ned had hesitated even to call by their names. I felt wrong about having his ashes in the house now.
But all I said to Jonathan was “I’m afraid I’m turning into Morticia Addams, with my husband’s ashes on the mantelpiece. I shouldn’t have kept them this long.”
There would be time to tell about Paul, if the attraction caught and held. Although his attentions thrilled me, I didn’t trust them yet—there were so many reasons for a younger man to fleetingly believe he loved an older woman. Why upset Jonathan needlessly? I’d wait and see whether this affair was serious enough to merit upsetting him.
“I can understand that,” he said. “I can’t quite believe these are his real ashes here. It seems so…It doesn’t seem like something that would happen in the twentieth century. For a private citizen to just have his father’s ashes in a box.”
“Do you want to take them out to the desert together?” I said. “We could go right now.”
“Here? You mean take them out and scatter them behind the house?”
“Yes. Now listen. This isn’t the life your father and I dreamed about. It wasn’t our fantasies come true. Hardly. But it’s where we ended up, and we weren’t unhappy here. To tell you the truth, I’ve been very happy.”
“He told me not to bury him in the desert. He told me that explicitly. He wanted me to settle down, and bury him wherever I made a home.”
“Jonathan, honey. Don’t you think there’s something a little… kitschy about all this yearning for a home?”
He fluttered his eyes in mock astonishment. “Mother,” he said. “Are you telling me to get hip?”
“I’m telling you to stop worrying so much,” I said. “Your father’s dead. He was concerned about your rootlessness because he couldn’t imagine anyone being happy if he wasn’t tied down. That was his nature. But it would be a shame to let your father’s lack of imagination curb your own life. Especially from beyond the grave.”
He nodded. After a moment’s hesitation, he put out his hands and touched the box. He ran his fingertips lightly over the engraved letters on the plaque. Without looking up he said, “Mom, if anything happened to me—”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I said quickly.
“But if something did.”
I sucked in a breath, and looked at him. Here was the real reason I’d lived unquestioningly with my image of Jonathan’s simple bachelorhood, his sexual disenfranchisement. I knew I could get a call someday, from Bobby or Clare or from someone I’d never met, giving me the name of a hospital.
“All right,” I said. “If something did.”
“If something did, if you got stuck with both Dad and me, I don’t want you scattering our ashes in this desert. It gives me the creeps. Okay?”
I didn’t speak. I got up and poured coffee.
“Do you want to take them back and scatter them in Woodstock?” I asked as I set down the steaming mugs.
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“It’s up to you,” I said. “This is strictly your decision.”
“I know. I’ll find a place. Do you want to go to the movies?”
“How about a game of Scrabble instead?”
“Fine,” he said. “Great. You’re on.”
The following day we drove to the airport with Ned’s ashes tucked inside Jonathan’s black shoulder bag, swaddled among the socks and underwear. This time I’d claimed the driver’s position, and Jonathan didn’t protest. It was a rare overcast day, the sky filled with clouds that had bumped their way down from the Rockies, still heavy but depleted of their rain. The air was silvered, imbued with a steady, shadowless, and all but sourceless light that could as easily have emanated from the desert floor as from the atmosphere.
Jonathan was telling me of his growing interest in carpentry when I turned off the highway onto a side road I knew about.
“Hey,” he said. “Is this a shortcut?”
“No. It’s not.”
“Where are we going?”
“Just hang on.”
“I’ll miss my plane,” he said.
“No you won’t. If you do, you can get another one.”
The road, a thin ribbon of newly laid asphalt, led into the mountains where a scattering of wealthy men and women had built their homes. One of my customers lived out there, in a house so intricately married to the surrounding rocks it was barely distinguishable as a house at all. Before the road reached those elaborate dwellings, though, it dipped through a shallow ravine that held one of the desert’s small surprises: a surface manifestation of underground water, not so blatant as to form a pool but moist enough to grow lush grasses and a modest stand of aspen trees, the leaves of which shimmered as if in perpetual surprise.
I stopped the car in that ravine. It looked especially beautiful in the cloudy light. The white trunks and pale green leaves of the aspens were luminous, and a spoke of sunlight, breaking through, set fire to a single facet of the rough red mountainside beyond.
“Jonathan,” I said. “Let’s scatter the ashes here. Let’s be done with it.”
“Here?” he asked. “Why here?”
“Why not? It’s lovely, don’t you think?”
“Well, sure. But—”
He glanced at the back seat, in the direction of his bag.
“Get out the box,” I said. “Come on, now. Trust me.”
Slowly, with great deliberation, he reached into the back and unzipped his bag. He returned with the box cradled in both hands.
“Are you sure?” he said.
“I’m sure. Come along.”
We got out of the car, and walked several paces into the thick dry grass. Jonathan held the box. Flies buzzed lazily around us, and a dust-colored lizard froze atop a waist-high pink rock, staring at us with the whole of its darting, speeded-up life.
“This is pretty,” Jonathan said.
“I pass by sometimes,” I said. “I have customers out here. Whenever you come to visit from now on, we can come out here if you like.”
“Should I open the box?” he asked.
“Yes. It isn’t hard. Can you see how it works?”
“I think so.” He touched the catch. Then he took his hand away, without lifting the lid.
“No,” he said. “I can’t. It isn’t the right place.”
“Honey, they’re only ashes. Let’s scatter them and get on with our lives.”
“I promised. This isn’t the right place. It isn’t what he’d have wanted.”
“Forget about what he wanted,” I said.
“You could do that. I can’t.”
He held tightly to the box, his knuckles whitening as if he feared I’d take it away from him. I said, “That isn’t fair.”
“I don’t know if it’s fair. It’s true. Mom, why did you want to marry Dad?”
“I’ve told you that story.”
“You’ve told me about wearing white shoes after Labor Day and him having nice thick hair and how you couldn’t think of any reason not to, so you did,” he said. “But why did you marry him, why did you stay married to him, if you weren’t any more interested than that? Did our whole family start just because getting married and having a baby was what you thought you were supposed to do?”
“Now watch yourself, young man. I loved your father. You didn’t sit it out in that condominium for years. You didn’t wake up with him in the night when he couldn’t breathe and fell into a panic.”
“No. But did you love him? That’s all I really want to know. I know you sacrificed for him, and supported him, and all that. But were you in love with him?”
“What a question to ask your mother.”
He cradled the box in his arms. “I think maybe I was in love with him,” he said softly. “I adored him.”
“He was just an ordinary man.”
“I know. Don’t you think I know that?”
We stood for a while at the edge of the aspen grove. Nothing happened; nothing moved. Jonathan held the box, his face set stubbornly, his eyes squeezed shut. After several minutes I said, “Jonathan, find someone of your own to love.”
“I’ve got someone,” he said.
It gave me a kind of vertigo, to hear us both talk like this—a tingling, lightheaded sensation of great height and insufficient protection. We had always been so circumspect with one another. Now, rather late in the game, when I had things to discuss with him, we possessed no easy language.
“You know what I mean,” I said.
He looked petulantly away, as if something on the horizon and to my right had captured his attention. There, right there before me, angrily avoiding my eyes, was the four-year-old boy I’d known more intimately than I knew myself. Now he was back in the guise of a man aging in a British, professorial way; taking on a weedy, slightly ravaged, indoor quality.
“You don’t know anything about it,” he said at length. “Our lives are more different than you can imagine.”
“I know well enough about women,” I said. “And I can tell you this. That woman is not going to let you have equal rights to her baby.”
Now he could look at me. His eyes were hard and brilliant.
“Rebecca isn’t her baby. Rebecca is our baby,” he said.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“No. Literally. Bobby and Clare and I don’t know which of us is the father. That’s how we decided to do it.”
I didn’t believe him. I knew—somehow I knew—that he and that woman had not been lovers. He was telling me a story, as he’d liked to do as a child. Still, I went along with it.
“And that’s what Clare wanted, too?”
“Yes. It’s what she wanted.”
“It may be what she said she wanted,” I said. “It may be what she thought she wanted.”
“You don’t know Clare. You’re thinking of a different kind of person.”
“No, my darling. You are. I know what it is to believe the people you know are different, that your life is going to be different. And I’m standing here telling you there are universal laws. A woman won’t share her baby.”
“Mom,” he said in an elaborately calm voice. “Mom, you’re talking about yourself. It’s you who wouldn’t give your baby up.”
“Listen to me now. Go out and find yourself someone to love. Have a baby of your own, if that’s what you want.”
“I’ve already got one,” he said. “Rebecca is as much mine as she is anyone’s.”
“Three is an odd number. When there are three, one usually gets squeezed out.”
“Mom, you don’t know what you’re saying,” he said. “You don’t have any fucking idea.”
“Please don’t speak to me that way. I’m still your mother.”
“And please don’t pull rank on me. You’re the one who wants to talk.”
He had me there. I was the one who wanted to talk. I was the one who had disappeared into marriage, let myself be carried along by the simple, ceaseless comfort of domestic particulars. And now in a desert grove I wanted to talk.
“All I’m saying,” I said, “is that there seem to be certain limits. We have a hard enough time staying together as couples.”
“And I,” he said, “am seriously considering the possibility that those limits are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bobby, Clare, and I are happy together. We plan on staying together.”
“History teaches differently.”
“History changes. Mom, it isn’t the same world anymore. The world’s going to end any minute, why shouldn’t we try to have everything we can?”
“People have believed the world was ending since the day the world began, dear. It hasn’t, and it hasn’t changed much either.”
“How can you say that?” he said. “Look at yourself.”
I was aware of the ground under my feet, chalky and red-gray. I was aware of myself in jeans and a suede jacket, under the open sky.
I said, “Do you think that when it comes down to brass tacks, Bobby will chose you? That’s it, isn’t it? You think Clare will recede, and you and Bobby will raise that child together, with her in the background.”
He looked at me, and I saw him. I saw everything: his hunger for men, his guilt and disappointment, his rage. I saw that in ways his anger was a woman’s anger. He had a woman’s sense of betrayal. He believed he’d been pushed unfairly onto the margins, been loved by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. For a moment I felt afraid of him. I feared my own son, out in that wild place so far from other beings. We had protected ourselves with silence because our only other choice was to howl at one another, to scratch and bite and shriek. We were too ashamed, both of us, for ordinary anger.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said quietly, and I conceded that I probably didn’t. We had lost track of one another; we were strangers in some deep, impenetrable way that ran like a river under our devotion and our cordiality. Perhaps that had always been the case.
“We’d better go try and catch your flight,” I said.
“Yes. We’d better.”
“About the ashes. It’s your choice. Let me know what you decide, whenever you decide.”
He nodded. “Maybe I’ll give them to Rebecca someday,” he said. “Here, kid. Your family heritage.”
“She won’t know what to do with them either,” I said.
“If I have any say in things, she will. I want her to grow up with no question about where to put her grandfather’s ashes.”
“That would be nice. That would be nice for her.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Come on, then,” I said. “We can just barely make it if we hurry.”
We got back into the car, and drove the rest of the way in silence. Jonathan returned the ashes to his bag and closed the zipper. As I drove I tried to phrase some bit of parental advice, but I couldn’t think of how to get it said. I’d have liked to tell him something I’d taken almost sixty years to learn: that we owe the dead even less than we owe the living, that our only chance of happiness—a small enough chance—lay in welcoming change. But I couldn’t manage it.
Because we’d lost time, he had to jump out at the curb in front of the terminal. “Bye, Mom,” he said.
“Goodbye. Take care of yourself.”
“Yep. I always do.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Go, quick. You’ll miss your plane.”
He got out of the car and slung his bag over his shoulder. Before sprinting for his plane, he came around to the driver’s side. “So long,” he said.
Was he ill, or simply aging? Why did he look a little haggard, his eyes slightly too large in his skull?
“Jonathan? Call me when you get in, all right? Just so I know you made it in one piece.”
“Okay. Sure.”
He bent before the open window and I kissed him, lightly but square on the mouth. I kissed him goodbye. And then, without a wave or a backward glance, he was gone.
B OBBY and I arrived at the station a few minutes before Erich’s train was due. At a small-town station like that—which was only a maroon-brick building the size of a toolshed, fronting a concrete platform—you got a true sense of your own remoteness. Here, where the country and the city met, you understood that the important fact about an approaching train was its subsequent departure for other places. Even as we watched the silver line of the train snake around the last green hillside, I could imagine the gritty windstorm it would cause on its way out. Cinders and a stray paper cup would blow briefly around the platform and then settle again into the prevailing hush. A lopsided red vending machine that had once sold newspapers stood gaping among the cattails and nettle across the tracks.
I had called Erich because I was lonely. That’s not true: I should call my condition by its proper name. When we moved to Woodstock I’d thought there would be more unattached gay men around; I’d imagined meeting them in bars and yard sales. But, as it turned out, the gay men who lived there had all arrived in pairs. So, eventually, I’d called Dr. Feelgood and invited him up for a weekend.
I patted Bobby’s shoulder, because I was nervous. I hadn’t seen Erich in over a year. The only other person on the platform was an obese elderly woman searching with mounting irritation for something in a white straw bag. I kept my hand on Bobby’s shoulder as the train curved toward us. A figure from my old, more sensible life was about to visit me in my strange and bucolic new one.
The train rumbled in, its doors sighed open. A family disembarked, followed by a bald man in a brown suit, followed by the obese younger woman who was being met by the old woman with the white straw bag. For a moment, it seemed Erich was not on the train after all. And then he appeared, holding a blue canvas suitcase, at the top of the train’s three metal steps.
I knew the moment I saw him. On someone as wiry as Erich, the loss of even five pounds would have had a noticeable diminishing effect. He had lost at least ten. His skin was gray and dense-looking.
He smiled. He got down the stairs competently if slowly, moving as if he balanced an invisible jug atop his head. Bobby took his elbow when he stepped from the last tread to the concrete.
“Hi,” Erich said. “Here I am.”
“Here you are,” I said.
After a brief hesitation, we embraced. Through his clothes—black jeans and a blue denim shirt—I could feel the true thinness of him. It was like holding a bundle of sticks. In his embrace I felt a surge of panic. The blood rushed dizzyingly to my head. All I could think of was breaking away, running from the platform into the cattails. As Erich and I held one another the world broke down into bright swimming specks before my eyes, a garish moil of color, and I could for a moment have knocked him down, kicked him under the wheels of the train so he’d be ground to nothing. So he would no longer exist.
Instead, I took his bony shoulders in my hands and said, “It’s good to see you.” The train started up again, pulling away in a knee-high fury of sparkling dust.
“Thanks,” he said, nodding. “Thanks a lot. It’s good to be here. I haven’t been in the country in a long long time. Hello, Bobby.”
He and Bobby shook hands. I couldn’t tell from Bobby’s face how much he knew. He carried Erich’s suitcase to the car with the impassive certainty of an old family retainer. Erich could walk well enough, though there was palpable caution in his step, an elderly deliberateness, as if his bones were soft and brittle as wax.
“Did you have a good trip?” I asked.
“Fine. Oh, yes, fine. The train goes through some beautiful parts, it really is, well, just beautiful up here, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “If you like this sort of thing.”
He blinked uncertainly. Erich understood formal jokes, but lost track of small ironies.
“We like it here,” I said. “It’s every bit as restful, satisfying, and dull as you ever imagined the country would be.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, good. That’s good.”
We got into the car and started for home. Bobby drove, and Erich sat in the front seat. I sat in back, the child’s place. As we drove over the familiar road, I looked out at the fields of wild grass and could not stop thinking of hiding myself in it; of burrowing deep into a grassy field until I was completely hidden among the yellow-green blades, which were blanching with the coming season. Fourteen months ago, when Erich and I last made love, we’d been careful with one another. But less than a year before that, we had practiced no caution. I ran my fingertips lightly over my chest, and watched the leaves of grass sway under the sky.
Erich said, “Bobby, did you bring your record collection here with you?”
“Oh, sure,” Bobby said. “You know me. We got a turntable and everything.”
“I brought you some presents from the city,” Erich said. “There’s a great record store down in the financial district, if you can believe that.”
“Oh, I know that one,” Bobby said. “Yeah. I used to go there.”
We drove home, managing our conversation in spasms. I found, to my surprise, that I felt a distinctly social aversion to asking Erich about his health. It was not horror but embarrassment that prevented me from mentioning it; he might have come back from a war missing his arms or legs. From where I sat, I could see the patch of unprosperous skin that showed through his thin hair—both skin and hair had lost a luster that was perceptible only by its absence. Although Erich had never been robust, his hair now looked as if it would break off in your hands. The scalp underneath was hard and dry; juiceless. What I did, faced with his evident decline, was point out my favorite views, discuss the eccentricities of the local population, and tell of our recent visit to the county fair, where prize cucumbers and 4-H piglets had been proudly displayed. I could not stop stroking my chest. We crossed the Hudson. Beneath us, barges cut through the sparkling brown water. The trees on the far bank were going yellow and red from the first frosty nights. Among the trees, the crumbling mansions of dead millionaires looked blindly out at the cooling, ice-blue sky.
When we reached the gravel drive that led up to the house, Erich gasped and said, “Oh, this is wonderful. I can’t believe this is yours.”
I had never heard this note of excitement in his voice—this undertone of quivering wonder. I wasn’t sure if I believed it. It had a false, gushing quality. He might have been the wife of an ambitious man, taken to the boss’s country house.
“Wait till you see the inside,” I said. “It’s got a long way to go.”
“Oh, no, it’s perfect. It’s just perfect,” he said. “Whatever it looks like inside.”
“Just you wait,” I said.
Clare met us on the porch with the baby. Rebecca, recently bathed, looked at us with buggishly astonished eyes, as if she had never seen anything like us before—three men getting out of a car and mounting the porch stairs. Clare called, “Hello, boys.”
“Hello,” Erich said. “Oh, it’s, well, it’s very good to see you again. Oh, look at the baby.”
I could tell from Clare’s face that she suspected something. I could almost see the interior process she went through, struggling to match this Erich with the Erich she’d met years ago. Had he always been so ashen and thin? Had his skin been so opaque?
“This is her,” Clare said after a moment. “You’re catching her on a good day, she’s been angelic from the moment she opened her eyes this morning. Better admire her quick, because things could change at any moment.”
Erich, uncertain about small children, stood several feet away and said, “Hi, baby. Hello there.” Rebecca gawked at him or at the empty air in his vicinity, a string of saliva dangling voluptuously from her chin. She’d been talking for months by then. In private she could babble for hours, mixing actual words with her own private vocabulary, but when faced with strangers she retreated, staring with unabashed and slightly fearful fascination, committing herself to nothing, waiting to see what would happen next. When she was uncertain she still claimed the infant’s privilege, and in her boggled fixations there was a quality of self-abandonment that was almost sexual. I’d already learned one lesson about fatherhood—you love your child, in part, because you see her utterly naked. A baby has no subvert life, and by comparison everyone else you know seems cloaked, muffled, and full of sad little tricks. In a year and a half I’d learned that while I could imagine Rebecca growing up to make me angry, to hurt or disappoint me, I did not see how she could ever make herself strange. Not if she came to weigh three hundred pounds. Not if she preached the ascendancy of an insect god, or committed murder for personal gain. We were connected; we’d established an intimacy that couldn’t be undone while we both lived.
“How about giving me a squeeze?” I said. Clare reluctantly passed her over. As I took her in my arms she looked at me with unflinching amazement. I said, “Hey, Miss Rebecca,” and she laughed abruptly and ecstatically, as if I had just popped out of a box.
I held her close to my chest. I put my nose to her fat shoulder and inhaled.
Erich said, “This is really interesting. What you all are doing out here. I mean, it’s just very very interesting.”
“Putting it mildly,” Clare said. “Come on inside, I’ll show you to your room. Ooh, I’ve always wanted to say that to somebody.”
Clare led Erich into the house, and Bobby followed with the suitcase. I stayed outside with Rebecca for a moment. Afternoon light, which had taken on the golden weight of October, picked out each individual tree on the mountainside. A fat speckled spider sat motionless in the exact middle of a web that described a taut hexagon between two posts and the porch rail. As quickly as we swept the webs away with a broom, these country spiders—some gaily colored, some pale as dust—rebuilt them. Rebecca murmured. She started batting her hands in the frantic, exasperated way that preceded her sourceless fits of crying. I stroked her hair, waiting for the tears to start. I thought of walking away with her, just taking her into the mountains with me.
“There’s so much still to do,” I whispered. “The floors have still got dry rot. And we haven’t even started on the kitchen yet.”
We took Erich to see the restaurant, which was doing well enough by then for Bobby and me to have left it for a few hours in the charge of Marlys, our prep cook, and her lover Gert, the new waitress. When we started the restaurant we’d set out to simulate the kind of place we’d hoped to find on the drive back from Arizona—an eccentric little café that served honest food made by human hands. As it turned out, we weren’t alone in our desire for that simple, elusive café. Our place was always full, and on weekends the customers lined up halfway down the block. It was gratifying and slightly uncomfortable to see people so avid for such ordinary food: bread and hash browns made from scratch, soups and stews, two different pies every day. I sometimes felt we were deceiving them by pretending to be simple—we’d led convoluted, neurotic lives and now we were earning our living by arranging lattice crusts over apples from an orchard less than ten miles away and contracting with a local grandmother for homemade preserves. Still, half our customers wore country clothes they’d ordered from catalogues and rustic sweaters knitted in Hong Kong or Guatemala. I don’t suppose anyone was fooled.
“Oh, this is won derful,” Erich cried. The restaurant had closed for the day, although half the tables were still full of customers finishing up. Marlys and Gert greeted us with their particular mix of comradely good cheer and fleeting, untraceable hatred. I found that I was vaguely embarrassed by Erich’s pallor and thinness—it seemed I had brought some perversity of mine, some unpleasant secret, into the place where I had effectively simulated innocence.
Marlys took Bobby into the kitchen to show him what needed reordering, and to point out the leak she had managed, temporarily, to plug in the dishwasher. I’d learned that even a small, successful restaurant operated in a continual state of crisis. The machinery broke down, caught fire, failed when it was needed most. Produce arrived bruised or unripe, mealworms tunneled into the flour. The customers’ appetites followed distinct but unpredictable patterns, so that the ingredients we ran out of one week would spoil on our shelves the next. The profits, though steady, were small, and it seemed that literally every hour it was time to bake more pies, cut more potatoes, haggle with the vegetable man about a carton of wilted lettuce. Sometimes I’d walk into the dining room and see, with a certain astonishment, that people sat at every table eating without concern or particular attention, talking to one another about the facts of their lives. They believed this was a restaurant, they found it unextraordinary that we’d fought decay and parasites, the endless petty dishonesty of suppliers, to get this simple food onto these white ceramic plates. On the rare occasions when a customer complained that his eggs were overcooked or his bacon underdone, I had to force myself not to scream, “Don’t you realize how lucky you are that we do this at all? Don’t you get it? Where’s your gratitude, for God’s sake?” I’d begun to better understand the appeal of the flash-frozen, the freeze-dried or microwavable. This tastes almost as good, and it’s predictable. It’s already diced or kneaded, already rolled or chopped. It can’t rot. It will keep until the customers decide they want to order it again. Less than two years ago, the proprietors of all those brightly lit, desolate roadside cafés had seemed like our enemies, selling corrupted food out of greed and laziness. Now I saw them as victims of a more practical, seductive kind of defeat.
Gert asked Erich and me if we’d like anything. The coffee was still on, she said, and when last she checked there were still two pieces of blueberry pie. Did she know Erich was sick? Was that the true cause of her solicitude? I could tell Erich was charmed by Gert, for she was in fact charming, a strong-faced, ruddy woman with long gray hair who had left a good job in publishing to live up here with Marlys. She dressed like a farm wife, in print dresses and cardigan sweaters, but she spoke Russian and had edited the work of a great poet. After we’d said no thank you to coffee and pie and she’d returned to the customers, I had to work to keep from whispering, “We think she’s stealing from the register.”
Erich said in his new, overanimated voice, “This place looks so sweet.”
“Part of the package,” I said. “An integral aspect of our appeal to our target audience.”
“Who are all these children?” he asked, meaning the photographs on the walls.
“Strangers,” I said. “Five for a dollar at a junk store up the Hudson. Half of them are alcoholics or Jesus freaks or inmates at the state penitentiary by now. The other half live in trailer parks with their six kids.”
He nodded approvingly, as if those were good ends for grown children. Bobby came out of the kitchen followed by Marlys, a hefty, freckled woman with apricot hair. “I think the dishwasher may be shot,” he said. “It looks, you know, pretty bad.”
“Great,” I said. “It’ll take them weeks to get a new dishwasher up here. You know how they are.”
Marlys threw me a shadow punch. “Hey, butch,” she said.
I threw my hands up over my head. “Ooh, don’t hurt me,” I answered. This was the method Marlys and I worked out for threading our way through the maze of sexuality and power. She earned good money at our restaurant and was constantly pummeling us, pinching our cheeks too hard or slapping our asses. I was her boss, and I feigned a physical terror not wholly unrelated to my actual feelings. Marlys was broad and calm and competent in worldly matters. She had repaired the dishwasher in the midst of the morning rush. She was an expert sailor and skier, and she knew the names of trees.
“Well, we’ll have to manage with this one until it breaks down completely,” Bobby said. “You and I may have to be back there washing dishes by hand for a while. And hope the health inspector doesn’t stop by.”
“The glamorous life of a restaurant owner,” I said to Erich, who nodded agreeably.
We had dinner at home, and talked mainly about the baby. Clare and I used Erich as an audience for our own interest in the minutiae of child-rearing. As we passed around the corn and the hamburgers and the tomato salad we clamored over each other to tell the next story of Rebecca’s peculiarities, our own shock at the various moral and bodily issues of parenthood, and our assorted resolutions about how to usher her, relatively undamaged, into a life of love and wages. Erich, whose good manners might have been imprinted on his genes, feigned or actually felt ardent, blinking interest in our talk. There was no telling.
After dinner, we put Rebecca to bed and watched one of the movies Clare had rented. (“We are not,” she’d said, “relying on conversation alone this weekend. I’m laying in movies, games, whatever. I’d hire a dog act if I knew where to find one around here.”) After the movie, we stretched and yawned and talked of how weary we were—a partial truth. Yes, we agreed, it was just about time for bed. Erich sat folded into his chair, with his hands slipped between his knees as if the room was freezing. He was so small, and so determined to be a good, unobtrusive guest—one who agreed to everything, who insisted that his hosts’ desires exactly matched his own. Almost before I knew I’d do it, I said, “Erich, how long have you been like this?”
He looked at me with a mingled expression of surprise and disappointment, blinking rapidly. It occurred to me that he might consider me the source of his illness. As in fact I might have been.
“I wasn’t sure if it showed,” he said. He spoke so softly I could barely hear him. His voice was mild as a radiator’s hiss. But he blinked furiously, and pressed his thighs tighter around his hands. “I’ve been feeling better,” he said. “I mean, well, I thought I looked all right.”
“How long has it been?” Clare asked. Before I’d spoken she had stood, on the pretext of making herb tea, and she remained standing, fixed in place beside the sofa. Bobby, still seated, watched in silence.
Erich hesitated, as if struggling to remember. “Well, I’d been feeling sick for more than a year,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it, I mean it seemed so strange to have imagined these symptoms so clearly and then start having them. I thought for a while that maybe I was just being a hypochondriac. But then, well. I got the diagnosis about five months ago.”
“And you didn’t call me?” I said.
“What good would it have done?” he said. Now his voice cut through the air cleanly as a cable through fog. His voice had lost its polite, enthusiastic tone and taken on a bitterness I’d never heard from him. “It’s not like there’s a cure,” he said. “It’s not like you could do anything but worry about it.”
“I’ve seen you when you were sick,” I said. “You didn’t mention it.”
But at the same time I remembered: we have no relationship to speak of. Our exchange is based primarily on sex and shared loneliness.
He looked at me. His eyes were terrible. “To tell you the truth, I was embarrassed,” he said. “When I thought about something like this happening, when I thought and, you know, imagined it, I knew I’d be afraid and angry. And, well, guilty. None of those things surprises me very much. But I’m surprised to be feeling this embarrassed about it.”
“Sweetheart, it’s okay,” Clare said.
Erich nodded. “Of course it’s okay,” he said. “What else could it be but okay?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry.”
“I thought I was working my way toward something like this house,” he said. “You know, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I thought I’d make money somehow and end up somewhere like this.”
“The nights get long out here,” Clare said.
“It’s paradise,” he said. “Don’t try to kid me. It’s fucking paradise, and you know it is.”
We remained where we were, with the lights on and the clock ticking. All I could think of was Rebecca. Just as I had wanted, earlier, to disappear into the tall grass, now I wanted only to go to her room, wake her up, and comfort her. I thought of her perfect feet, and of the way she clutched at her hair with one hand as she sucked the thumb of the other. I wondered if, at twenty-five, some vestige of the habit would remain. Would she, as a young woman, tend to play with her hair when she grew anxious or tired? Would someone love that about her—the brown hair being twirled and untwirled and twirled again around an unconscious finger? Would someone be irritated by it? Would someone someday look at her in her exhaustion, her fingers working busily, and think, “I’ve had enough of this”?
I said, “I’m going up to check on the baby.”
“She’s fine,” Clare said. “She hasn’t made a sound.”
“Still, can’t hurt to check.”
“Jonathan, she’s fine,” Clare said. “Really. She is.”
Erich slept alone in my bed that night. Although I’d claimed I was going to sleep on the futon downstairs, I ended up with Bobby and Clare in their bed. I lay between them, with my arms folded over my chest.
“What I feel really shitty about,” I said, “is how worried I am for myself. Erich is sick, and I feel sorry for him, but in this sort of remote way. It’s like my self-concern is a Sousa march, and Erich’s actual illness is this piccolo playing in the background.”
“That’s natural enough,” she said. “But listen, you’re probably fine. You’ve been healthy for, what, over a year since the last time you and Erich…”
“It can incubate for at least five years,” I said. “Lately they’ve been thinking it could be as long as ten.”
She nodded. Something was wrong; she wasn’t responding the way I’d expected her to, with Clare-like grit and flippancy. She seemed to have fallen out of character.
Bobby lay in silence on my other side. He had barely spoken since dinner. “Bobby?” I said.
“Uh-huh?”
“What’s going on over there? You’re so damn quiet.”
“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m just thinking.”
Clare squeezed my elbow. I knew what she meant: leave him alone until he’s had time to settle into his own reaction. Bobby negotiated the world’s surprises with a deliberateness that was almost somnolent. Clare and I had decided privately that if the house caught fire, one of us would take responsibility for helping him decide which window to jump out of.
“I just feel so…strange,” I said. “How am I going to get through the days from now on without checking myself for symptoms every five minutes?”
“Honey, you’re probably fine,” Clare said, but her voice lacked conviction. By way of compensation, she patted my chest. Since the baby was born, Clare had become more prone to physical contact, though her caresses were still flighty and vague, as if she suspected the flesh of others might burn her hands.
“What do you think, Bobby?” I asked.
“I think you’re okay,” he answered.
“Well, that’s good. I’m glad you think so.”
Clare said, “I wonder how Erich is going to manage this. I have a feeling he hasn’t got a lot of friends.”
“He has friends,” I said. “What do you think, he lives in a vacuum? You think he’s just some sort of bit player with no life of his own?”
“How would I know?” Clare said.
I realized, from the sound of her voice, that she blamed me in some way for failing to love Erich. Since the baby was born she’d discarded a measure of her old cynicism, and held the world more accountable to standards of unfaltering affection.
“Please don’t get peevish with me,” I said. “Not now. You can get doubly peevish with me another time.”
“I’m not being peevish,” she said. It was a habit of hers to disavow her actions even as she performed them. I believed, at that moment, that by being herself she could do serious harm to the baby. How would it affect Rebecca to grow up with a mother who screamed, “I’m not screaming”?
“Right,” I said. “You’re not. You always know exactly what’s coming out of your own mouth, and whatever anybody else thinks he hears is an illusion.”
“We don’t need to have a fight right now,” she said. “Unless you really want to.”
“Maybe I do. You’re pissed off at me for not being in love with Erich, aren’t you?”
“Of course I’m not. How could I be mad about something like that? Either you’re in love with somebody or you’re not.”
“Oh, we three are more used to ambiguity than that,” I said. “Aren’t we? Tell me this. Do you think I’ve fucked up my life? Do you think there’s been something wrong about my being in love with you and Bobby and having a strictly sexual relationship with Erich?”
“You’re saying that,” she said.
“But I want to hear what you think. You think there’s something unfinished about me. Don’t you? You think Bobby and I are each half a man. That’s why you ended up with the two of us. Together we add up to one person in your eyes. Right?”
“Stop this. You’re just upset, this isn’t a good time to try and talk.”
“This isn’t what I asked for,” I said. “It’s just what happened. I don’t want you turning on me all of a sudden because of it. Clare, for God’s sake, I’m too scared.”
She started to say, “I’m not—” but caught herself. “Oh, maybe I am,” she said. “I’m scared, too.”
“I don’t have to love Erich just because he’s sick,” I said. “I don’t have to suddenly take responsibility for him.”
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t suppose you do.”
“Shit, why did I have to invite him?”
“Jonathan, honey,” she said. “Erich’s being here doesn’t make any difference. You sound as if you think he’s brought some sort of germ with him.”
“Hasn’t he? I could go a full day without thinking about it before. Now I’ve lost that.”
“You’re not making sense,” she said. “Well, you’re making crazy sense. I know what you’re saying. But don’t blame him. It isn’t his fault.”
“I know,” I said miserably. “I know that.”
My limitation was my own rationality. I was too balanced, too well behaved. Had I been a different sort of person I could have stormed through the house, shattering crockery and ripping pictures off the walls. It would not of course have solved anything, but there’d have been a voluptuous release in it—the only pleasure I could imagine just then. The idea of sex revolted me, as did the comfort of friends who knew their blood was sound. My one desire was to run screaming through the house, tearing down the curtains and splintering the furniture, smashing every pane of glass.
“Try to sleep,” Clare said. “There’s no point in staying up worrying about it.”
“I know. I’ll try.”
“Okay. Good night.”
“Good night.”
She slipped her arm over my belly, and pulled me closer into her own nimbus of warmth and perfume. Bobby breathed softly on my other side. I knew I should have felt comforted and I almost did, but the actual sensation of comfort trembled just beyond my reach. I was in a remote place with people whose lives would continue unchanged if I died. I lay between Clare and Bobby, listening for Rebecca. If she awoke and cried, I’d go to her room and console her. I’d heat a bottle and hold her while she drank it. I lay listening for the first whimper, but she slept on.
IT WAS after midnight. The clouds had rolled past on their long journey to the Atlantic from the heart of the continent. The full moon blared freely through our bedroom window. As I crossed the moon-whitened floorboards I paused to look at Jonathan and Clare, asleep in the shadow of the dormer. She released her low snores, blowing soft, breathy bubbles. He lay with his head canted away from her, as if he was dreaming pure noise and didn’t want to disturb her sleep.
I went down the hall and tapped on the door, but I didn’t wait for an answer. That room was on the moonless side of the house—it maintained a deeper darkness. I stood for a moment by the door, then whispered, “Erich?”
“Yes?”
“Are you sleeping?”
“No. Well, no. I wasn’t, really.”
“I just, you know. I wanted to make sure you were comfortable.”
“I am,” he said. “This is a good bed.”
His head was a spot of moving darkness at the edge of the bright quilt. I caught glints of him: his eyes, his domed forehead. The room didn’t smell of sickness.
“It was Clare’s old bed,” I said. “Well, Clare’s and mine, for a while. Now it’s Jonathan’s and we have, you know, this other one.”
“It’s a good bed. Not too soft. I always think they’re going to have soft beds in the country.”
“Sometimes a mouse gets in here,” I said. “We keep saying we should trap it, but we never do. I’m not sure if we’re really, you know, thorough enough to be country people.”
“The mice out here are probably cleaner,” he said. “They’re probably more like real animals.”
A silence passed. After a moment, we heard the mouse scrabbling inside the wall. We laughed.
“Do you have, like, people in New York to help take care of you?” I asked.
“Well, there are volunteers,” he said. “If I get really really sick I can call one of those agencies.”
“What about your family?”
“My family’s written me off.”
“They won’t help you?” I asked.
“They don’t speak to me. I’m gone. My sister calls, but she wouldn’t want to be in a room with me. She thinks her kids could catch it.”
“Do you still have your job?” I asked.
“No. No, they laid me off a few weeks ago, after I was in the hospital with pneumonia.”
“And your friends?”
“A few of them have died in the last year. They just went like that, three people in, like, six months. The guy I’ve always thought of as my best friend is sicker than I am, he’s in the hospital. He doesn’t recognize people unless he’s having a very very good day.”
“Are you scared?” I said.
“What do you think?”
“Yeah. Well, I would be, too.”
He sighed. “And then sometimes I’m not,” he said. “It sort of comes and goes. But every minute is different now. Even when I’m not afraid, things are different. I feel—oh, I can’t explain it. Just different. I used to lose track of myself, you know. Like I didn’t have a body, like I was just, I don’t know, like I was the street I was walking on. Now I never lose track of myself.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And, you know,” he said. “If I ever really thought about it, I pictured myself as being old and having no regrets. You know? I pictured something like a famous old man in bed with people around him, and him saying ‘I have no regrets.’ That’s really pretty silly, isn’t it? It’s really very silly.”
“What do you regret, exactly?” I asked.
“Oh, well. Nothing really, I guess. I mean, I did think I’d do more with my life than this. I just thought I had more time. And like I said, I thought I’d be famous and retire to a place like this.”
“Uh-huh. Well, this wouldn’t be for everybody,” I said. “There’s only one movie theater. And no place to hear good music.”
He laughed, a low sound with a rasp to it, like scraping a potato. You could hear his illness in his laugh. “I never really did those things in New York,” he said. “I just, well, I guess you’d have to say I’ve been gambling with my life. I guess you’d have to call it that. I was thinking things would somehow work out. I thought I just needed to work hard and have faith.”
I walked over to the bed. I stood beside him, as the mouse went about its scratching inside the wall. “Um, hey, how about if I get in bed with you for a while?” I said.
“What?”
“It doesn’t seem right for you to be alone here,” I said. “How about if I just got in under the covers with you for a little while?”
“I don’t have any clothes on,” he said.
“That’s okay.”
“What’s the matter with you?” he said. “You want to sleep with me because I’m sick?”
“No,” I said.
“Would you have wanted to if I wasn’t sick?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Will you get out of here, please? Will you just get out of here?”
“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, like, offend you.”
“I know you didn’t. But go. Please.”
“Well. Okay,” I said.
I left the room, and closed the door behind me. I felt a weight in my arms and legs, a stodgy sense of disappointment and nameless, floating embarrassment. I hadn’t wanted to intrude on his privacy. I’d only wanted to hold him for a while, to guide his head to my chest. I’d only wanted to hold on to him as his body went through the long work of giving itself up to the past.
ERICH came back the next weekend. I’m not sure why the invitation was issued or why it was accepted—none of us, Erich included, had seemed to have an especially good time. All day Sunday he’d been sulky and withdrawn. Still, when we took him to the train station Bobby asked, “Do you want to come back next weekend?” Erich hesitated, and then said all right. He said it in a flat, determined voice, as if laying claim to that which was rightfully his.
As Bobby and I were driving home I asked, “Do you really want to have Erich back again so soon?”
“Jon,” he said, “that guy needs some time in the country. Really, did you look at him?”
For a moment it seemed Bobby did not yet understand the nature of Erich’s illness; he seemed to believe Erich was only stressed and overtired, in need of a good long rest. “He needs more than that, Bobby,” I said.
“Well, a little time in the country is about all we can give him. He’s, like, a member of the family now. Whether we like it or not.”
“The family,” I said. “You know, you’re going to drive me crazy with this shit.”
He shrugged, and smiled ruefully, as if I was being petulant about a condition that clearly lay beyond anyone’s control. Erich was attached to us now, however tenuously, and in Bobby’s private economy we were obliged to offer everything we had.
Erich returned the following Friday on the five o’clock train. By then he’d regained his polite, slightly squeaky enthusiasm, though now it was more prone to lapses. Bobby took the main responsibility for seeing to Erich’s comfort, and by the end of the second visit the two of them had embarked on a kind of courtship. Bobby was doggedly affectionate, and Erich accepted his ministrations with a wan and slightly irritable greed, like an indignant ghost come back to exact reparations from the living.
Late Sunday afternoon I was in the kitchen with Clare and Rebecca. Clare sliced an avocado. Rebecca sat on the counter top, sorting through a set of plastic animal-shaped cookie cutters, and I stood alongside, to keep her from falling. Outside the window we could see Bobby and Erich sitting in the unruly grass, talking earnestly. Bobby made sweeping motions with his hands, indicating enormity, and Erich nodded without much conviction.
“So, Bobby has a new love,” I said.
“Don’t be nasty, dear,” Clare said. “It isn’t becoming in you.” She laid avocado slices on a plate, began peeling a Bermuda onion.
“I just don’t feel like Erich needs to suddenly become our favorite charity,” I said. “He’s practically a stranger.”
“We have room here for a stranger, don’t you think? It’s not like we lack for anything ourselves.”
“So now you’re Mother Teresa?” I said. “This seems a little sudden.”
She looked at me with an even-tempered calm that was more cogently accusing than any censure could have been. Something had happened to Clare. I couldn’t read her anymore—she’d given up her cynicism and taken on an opaque motherliness. We were still friends and domestic partners but we were no longer intimate.
“I know,” I said. “I’m just a rotten person.”
She patted my shoulder. “Please don’t pat me,” I said. “You never used to pat me like this.”
Rebecca, who had been droolingly contemplating a cookie cutter shaped like a moose, started to cry. Discord cut into her skin like a fine cord; she wept whenever anyone in her vicinity spoke in anger.
“Hey, kid,” I said. “It’s okay, never mind about us.”
I tried to take her in my arms but she didn’t want to be held by me. She insisted on being picked up by Clare, who walked with her into the living room while I finished slicing the onion.
Eventually, Erich took up residence. He had nowhere else to go except his sparse, comfortless apartment in the East Twenties. He’d have endured his illness in the company of volunteers until he moved to whatever hospital beds were available to the unprosperous and the uninsured. Bobby insisted that he visit us often, and when the trip got to be too much for him he moved in for good. I offered my bedroom, claiming I’d learned to prefer sleeping downstairs. Taking Erich in was not a simple process. I resented him for being sick and at the same time felt compelled to treat him in ways I hoped to be treated if I fell ill myself. I practiced the tenderness I hoped I might inspire in others if my vigor leaked away and my body started to change. Sometimes I caught up with the feeling and experienced it, a flush and flutter of true concern. Sometimes I only manifested it. After a period of resistance Erich agreed to take over my bed, and in doing so almost palpably relinquished a degree of participation in the ongoing, living world. This moment may come to us all, at some point in our eventual move from health into sickness. We abandon our old obligation to consider the needs of others, and give ourselves up to their care. There is a shift in status. We become citizens of a new realm, and although we retain the best and worst of our former selves we are no longer bodily in command of our fates. Erich needed my room for the complex business of his dying. He was a private person and would not suffer well in the midst of our domestic traffic. So with a courteous and slightly aggrieved smile he allowed me to put him into my bed. I turned thirty-two the day after he arrived for the final time.
We took him for walks in the woods, cooked meals that wouldn’t tax his system. He was an elderly spirit in the house, alternately courtly and short-tempered. Our grandfather might have come to live with us.
Winter passed, spring came. The restaurant prospered. Rebecca cut new teeth, and discovered the lush possibility of saying no to whatever was asked of her. Erich declined unpredictably. His energy dwindled and returned, sometimes from hour to hour. He had intestinal trouble, fevers, a cloudiness of vision. His mind drifted occasionally—he could grow vague and forgetful. He made weekly trips to the hospital in Albany. On his best days he could walk into the woods with a basket, hunting mushrooms. On his worst days he lay curled in bed, neither discernibly awake nor asleep.
I lived slightly apart, in the middle of everything. I would not have asked Erich to live with us but I couldn’t bring myself to actively wish him gone—I was too nervous about my own status as the house crank. I learned to find a chilly comfort in being good to Erich. It offered some obscure hope of appeasing the fates.
One evening when I came home from the restaurant I found him sitting on the porch, wrapped in a blanket. The sun had fallen behind the mountain. Violet shadows were gathering though the sky was still bright—we would always suffer early dusks in this house. Erich sat on the ancient wicker chair with an old blue blanket of mine pulled up to his neck, looking like a tubercular teenager. As his flesh grew gaunter, his appearance became more and more adolescent. His ribs stuck out, and his ears, hands, and feet came to seem too large for his body.
“Hi,” I said. “How are you?”
“Okay,” he answered. “Not too bad.”
A formality prevailed between us, just as it had when we were sleeping together. We were courteous and remote. We continued to act as if we had recently met.
“Bobby’s staying late at work,” I said. “Marlys had some kind of women’s thing to go to, so Bobby’s doing the pies for tomorrow. Are Clare and Rebecca around?”
“They’re in the house,” he said.
“I’m going to go get Rebecca. Maybe I’ll bring her out here for a while, okay?”
“Okay. Jonathan?”
“Mm-hm?”
“This is going to be, you know, hard for me to say. But I’ve been thinking. Do you ever, well, wonder about us? I mean, about you and me.”
“I think about us,” I said. “Sure I do.”
“I don’t mean just think. I don’t just mean that. I mean, well, do you ever wonder why we always held back? It seems like we could have done so much more to make each other happy.”
Even in an extreme condition, such direct talk was hard on him. His fingers kneaded the edge of the blanket, and his foot tapped dryly against the wicker chair leg.
“Well, we had a certain kind of relationship,” I said. “It was pretty much what we both wanted, wasn’t it?”
“I guess so. I guess it was. But lately I’ve been wondering, you know. I’ve been wondering, what were we waiting for?”
“I suppose we were waiting for our real lives to start. I think we probably made a mistake.”
He drew a ragged breath. At the exact center of the web that stretched between the newel posts, a pretty yellow spider hung motionless.
“We did make a mistake,” he said. “I mean, I think we probably did. I think I was in love with you, and I couldn’t admit it. I was, I don’t know. Too afraid to admit it. And now it just seems like such a waste.”
I stood on the weathered boards atop my own purple shadow. I looked at him. He had an ancient, utterly dignified quality at that moment, an aspect neither old nor young, neither male nor female. His body was invisible under the thick folds of the blanket, and his eyes were brilliant in his colorless face. He could have been a sphinx posing a riddle.
I believed I knew the answer. Erich and I were never in love; we weren’t meant to be lovers. We had missed no romantic opportunity. Instead we’d hidden out together, in our good sex and undemanding companionship. We’d kept one another afloat while we waited. We might have been servants, two chaste balding men who’d given up their lives to vague ideals of obedience and order.
But I said, “I think I was probably in love with you, too.”
I didn’t want him to die untouched. If he died in that condition I might have to, too.
“You’re lying,” he said.
“I’m not.”
I thought of my father in the desert, receiving nothing from me but empty reassurances. He had died on his way back from the mailbox, with a handful of catalogues and flyers. I’d had a letter for him, in my pocket.
“Yes, you are,” Erich said.
I hesitated. Then I told him, “No, really. I think I was probably in love with you.”
He nodded, in a cold fury. He was not comforted. An early moth, so white it was nearly translucent, more an agitation of air than a physical presence, whirred past.
“We could have done better than this, you and I,” he said. “What was the matter with us?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
We didn’t move or speak for at least a minute. We stared at each other in furious disbelief. “We’re cowards,” I said at last. “This wasn’t a dramatic mistake we made. It was just a stupid little one that got out of hand. What do they call them? Sins of omission.”
“I think maybe that’s what bothers me most.”
“Me, too,” I said. And then, because there was nothing more to say, I went into the house to find Rebecca.
ERICH brought something new into the house. Or maybe he conjured up something old. Something that had been there all along. He rattled down the halls, skimmed failing breath from the dusty air. The plain facts of illness and death can seem remote as long as you don’t smell the immaculate chalk of the medicines. As long as you don’t see skin turning the color of clay.
Being a mother made certain things impossible, things I could have done almost without thinking in my other life. I couldn’t deny Erich what he needed and at the same time I couldn’t embrace him. I found that more or less against my will I’d become capable only, singularly, of protection. I suppose it was sentimental, though I didn’t taste anything like sentiment in my mouth. I felt hard and clinical, glacial. For the first time I didn’t think about myself. A district in my brain, that which I’d thought of as me, seemed to have been sucked clean. In its place was this steady uninflected drive to do what was needed. I fed Erich while the boys were at work, saw that he took his medicine, helped him to the toilet on the days he needed help. I spoke kindly to him. Nothing could have stopped me from doing that. But I didn’t care about him. In a sense our relations were strictly business. I cared only, truly, for Rebecca, who was alive and growing. Erich had already passed partway out of the world. While his comfort and safety were vitally important to me his existence was not. Now I better understand why mothers appear so often in stories as saints or as monsters. We are not human in the ordinary sense, at least not when our children are very small. We become monsters of care, inexorable, and if we occasionally lose track of the finer, imperishable points of the soul while ministering to the fragile body, that can’t be helped.
I was alone most days with Rebecca and Erich. Now that the boys had Marlys and Gert they were able to get home more often. But, still, the bulk of my time was spent with a two-year-old and a dying man.
I rented movies and poured juice. I began toilet training Rebecca, and occasionally changed Erich’s soiled sheets. He had passable days and worse days. On the bad ones he could be cranky with me. He could suddenly say “I hate apple juice, I’m just so sick of it, don’t they have any other kind at the market?” He could complain about the movies I brought home. “Mrs. Miniver ? God, is this all they had left?”
But he never lost patience with Rebecca. Sometimes, on the days he stayed in bed, the two of them watched videos together. I brought home Dumbo, Snow White, and anything involving the Muppets. Erich liked those movies, too. He didn’t charm Rebecca as thoroughly as Jonathan did, but he held her interest. He had a singular ability to focus, and I suspect she felt secure with him. He could so perfectly imitate a man who was good with children. He let her boss him around. He performed, on demand, a particular spastic dance with a stuffed monkey she had mysteriously named Shippo while she turned a doll named Baby Lou upside-down and waggled its stiff plastic legs in the air. He agreed to all the games she invented, many of which involved passing a rubber dinosaur back and forth while reciting a long, ever-changing list of demands. He could do the voice of Kermit the Frog, which she seemed to find hilarious and slightly upsetting.
Sometimes when I brought them a snack I found them sitting together on Erich’s bed, watching television, with toys scattered everywhere. Sometimes I had to catch my breath at the sight of them like that, Rebecca chattering and walking one of her miniature farm animals over Erich’s skinny knee or Erich absent-mindedly stroking her hair as they both watched cartoons. No matter how he felt on a given day, he was always attentive to my daughter. His powers of concentration were formidable. He seemed to have taken on a project: never to show this little girl any unpleasant or mean-spirited behavior, never to be anything but pliant and companionable in her presence. He was different from Jonathan. He didn’t love her. He liked her well enough. Being good with her was one of the organizing principles around which he built his days. He made it his job.
At first I felt it as a vague unrest that fluttered around in my belly, halfway between nausea and pain. I believed at times that I was developing an ulcer, or worse, though the doctor told me it was just anxiety. Finally, after several months, I realized. I was coming to a decision. Or a decision was coming to me. It was growing inside me, almost against my conscious will.
It didn’t reach its finished state until an afternoon in May, as I was taking a nap with Rebecca. She’d grown balky about naps, and would lie down in the afternoons only if I took her into Bobby’s and my bed and read to her from one of her books. She was almost two and a half then. She’d developed obsessions with several books, including one about a rabbit saying good night to every article in his bedroom and another about a pig who finds a magic bone. We’d read both books twice, and drifted off to sleep together. I woke twenty minutes later to the sound of Rebecca’s voice. She lay beside me, telling herself a story. This, too, was a recent habit. She could talk to herself for hours. I lay quietly, listening.
“I go to the store,” she said. “I got a talking bone. The girl never saw it before. She picked up the bone and went to Bunny’s house. And Bunny was there, and Jonathan was there. And they said, ‘My, my, my, what a fine little kitty.’ And Jonathan took the bone. He said, ‘Now I’m going to make something good with this.’ And he made… porridge. It was very very good. And Bunny said, um, and then Mommy and Bobby and Erich said. And I gave Erich some salad, because he was sick. And Jonathan had some, too. And then it was night, and Bunny had to go to bed. And then it was the next day, and the kitty is going to town. ‘My my my,’ the kitty said. Just imagine his surprise.”
As I lay listening to her, my chest constricted in panic. I could feel the heat rising to my face. I couldn’t tell at first why I was unnerved by what I heard. It was only Rebecca’s usual stream of consciousness, the kind of babbling I’d been hearing from her for over a month. But slowly, while lying on the bed with her, I figured it out. She was coming into herself. She was emerging from her foggy self-involvement and beginning to comprehend the independent life of other people. Soon she’d leave her disembodied child-world. She’d remember things. She was a camera getting ready to shoot. Click a brown house with a blue door. Click her favorite toys. Click Jonathan coming to get her in the mornings. She’d carry those images around for the rest of her life.
What if she came into her full consciousness as Erich died and Jonathan started to get sick? What would it do to her if her earliest memories revolved around the decline and eventual disappearance of the people she most adored?
One morning a few weeks later I was in bed with Rebecca, Bobby, and Jonathan. It was an ordinary morning. Rebecca had woken up in a good humor, and was telling herself an elaborate story about Bunny and a flying elephant. In a moment Bobby would shuffle downstairs to start the coffee. Erich was still asleep down the hall and Jonathan sat beside me with the sheet pulled over his chest.
Bobby said, “After work I’ve got to replace some shingles. Did you see how many have blown off? That roof has about, like, had it.”
“We should just get a new one,” I said. “Let’s start calling roofers.”
“When the place is more or less in shape,” Jonathan said, “I want to have my mother out again. I figure she’d have an easier time believing in my life if she saw more of it.”
“Parents, parents,” I said. “You know, I’ve been thinking. I should really take Miss Rebecca to Washington for a few days, to see my mother.”
Bobby got up to make the coffee, a half second before I knew he was going to. “Why not, you know, invite her up here?” he said.
“Because she’s sixty-five and not the least bit liberal. Believe me, you don’t want Amelia up here, going on about our life-style. That’s what she thinks we have. Not a life. A life-style.”
“Don’t you think she’d better get used to it?” Jonathan said.
“Sweetheart, my mother hasn’t gotten used to my having breasts yet. The sight of me naked still makes her uneasy. Trust me. It’s better to take Rebecca down there for a few days.”
“Well, you know, if you need to,” Bobby said, and went off on his morning errand.
“Only a few days,” Jonathan said. “Right? Like two or three?”
I nodded, and stroked Rebecca’s hair. I wondered if she might feel the tension in my hand, and start crying. But she babbled on, undisturbed. Our inner deceits don’t create much residue in this world.
I only half knew what I was up to. It didn’t become a plan until I found myself doing it, and then it seemed I was following a procedure I’d known about for months or even years. I packed Rebecca’s things: her clothes and a few essential toys, her stroller and high chair. As Jonathan helped me load the car he said, “Honey, you’re only going for a few days. Not till the millennium.”
“I want to be prepared,” I said. “It’s important to avoid shopping with my mother at all costs. If I run out of diapers, she’ll take me to Saks.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad to me,” Jonathan said. He wore a denim jacket with Albert Einstein’s gentle white face pinned to the lapel. A swarm of reddish-black tulips had sprouted on the lawn. A crazy meadowlark whose nest was nearby raged at us from the lowest branches of the oak. I lifted the stroller into the trunk, and Jonathan arranged the diaper bag around it.
“Guilt,” I said. “Even my guilt over my mother’s money feels decadent sometimes. It’s better to just avoid it. Not get myself into a position where she can buy me a five-hundred-dollar dress that makes me look like an astronaut’s wife. It’s better to just lay in supplies and stay home with her.”
I wondered if I was explaining too much. I didn’t want to sound like a criminal whose alibi is suspiciously perfect, her movements too intricately accounted for.
“Whatever you say,” he answered. There was no mistrust in his voice.
He closed the lid of the trunk. “I’ll miss you,” he said.
In another moment, Bobby would come out of the house with Rebecca. I reached over and took hold of Jonathan’s sleeve.
“Listen,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“Oh, you know. I’m sorry I’m such a coward about my mother. Next time I’ll bring her up here. You’re right. She’s going to have to get used to it.”
“Well, parents are tough. Believe me, I know about that,” he said.
“I’m just really sorry,” I said. I could hear the possibility of tears in my own voice.
“Honey, what’s the matter?”
At that moment, I felt sure he knew. I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said.
He gave me a reassuring little squeeze. “Silly old Clare,” he said. “Good old crazy thing.” In fact, he didn’t know. He still hadn’t developed the habit of loss. He believed his life would get fatter and fatter. Maybe that was the fundamental flaw in his perception. Maybe that’s what prevented him from falling in love.
“Oh, quit with that ‘good old crazy thing’ shit, all right? I’m an adult. I’m not some playmate of yours.”
“Oops. Sorry.”
“Really, Jonathan, I just wish you’d—”
“What? You wish I’d what?”
“I don’t know. How long do you plan on being a boy? All your life?”
“As opposed to becoming a girl?” he said.
“As opposed to…oh, never mind. I’m being a bitch today. I could feel it the minute I woke up.”
“Listen, will you call me when you get there? So I know you’re okay?”
“Sure. Of course I will.”
We stood for a moment, looking around at the scenery as if we were new to it. As if we had just stepped out of our Winnebago to stretch our legs and marvel at this particular stretch of a national park.
“Aren’t things supposed to be simpler than this?” I asked.
“Bobby says it’s a new world. He says we can do anything we can imagine.”
“That’s because Bobby’s a deluded asshole. I mean that only in the most complimentary sense.”
I realized I was still holding on to the sleeve of Jonathan’s jacket. When I let go, the denim held the shape of my grip.
“I’m going to go see what’s keeping him,” I said. “If Rebecca and I don’t get moving soon, we’ll hit the New York traffic.”
“Okay.”
Jonathan waited by the car, hands deep in the pockets of his khakis, sun glinting on his pale hair. I turned to him when I reached the porch. He gave me an ironic, sisterly smile and I went into the house.
Bobby was coming down the stairs with Rebecca. “I just about gave up on you,” I said. “If we’re not past Manhattan by one o’clock—”
He put his fingers to his lips. “Erich’s sleeping,” he said. “He’s had a hard morning.”
I took Rebecca from him. She was having a bad morning, too. “I don’t want to,” she said.
“You got everything together?” Bobby whispered.
“Mm-hm. Car’s all packed. Say goodbye to Erich for me, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to,” Rebecca said.
Bobby stood on the bottom stair, his paunch slightly straining the fabric of his T-shirt. At that moment he looked so innocent and well-meaning. I could have slugged him for being such a sap; such a guileless optimistic character. I could see him old, shuffling along in bedroom slippers. Claiming that the convalescent home was really fine and perfect. They had chocolate pudding on Fridays, he’d say. The maid’s name is Harriet, she brings me pictures of her kids.
“Listen,” I said. “I’ve got a wild idea. Do you want to come with me?”
“Huh?”
“Right now. Just throw a few things in a bag and come along.”
“I thought, you know, your mother didn’t approve of me. Of us.”
“Fuck my mother. Do you want to come?”
“We’ve got to take care of Erich,” he said.
“Jonathan can take care of Erich. It’s time he started to take more responsibility, don’t you think? The two of them will manage all right together. They’ll be fine on their own.”
“Clare, what’s up? What’s got into you?”
I held the baby. I said, “Nothing. Never mind. I’m just a good old crazy thing.”
I carried Rebecca out the door, and Bobby followed me to the car. As I strapped Rebecca into her car seat she began fussing and whimpering. Eventually the motion of the car would lull her but for a while she’d be inconsolable. I braced myself for her wails.
“Bye, boys,” I said.
“No,” Rebecca said from her car seat. “No, no, no, no, no.”
They both kissed me, told me to drive carefully. They kissed Rebecca. Their attentions were all it took to push her over the edge. She opened her mouth, nearly gagging on a howl she’d been building up to since breakfast.
“Bye, Miss Rebecca,” Jonathan said through the window. “Oh, we love you even if you are sporadically monstrous. Have fun with your horrible grandmother.”
“Take care of yourselves,” I said. I backed the car out of the drive. I waved, and the boys waved back. They stood close together, in front of the dilapidated house. As I pulled away, Jonathan suddenly came running toward the car. I thought for a moment he had something to tell me, but then I realized he was only going to run alongside for a few yards, foolish and faithful as a dog. I drove on. He caught up and briefly kept pace, blowing kisses. I waved again, one last time. Before I reached the turn I looked in the rearview mirror and saw both of them. Jonathan and Bobby, standing in the middle of the road. They looked like a pair of beatniks, sloppily dressed in a remote, unimportant place. In their sunglasses and T-shirts and unruly hair they looked like they were standing at the brink of the old cycle: the 1960s about to explode around them, a long storm of love and rage and thwarted expectations. Bobby put his arm over Jonathan’s shoulder. They both waved.
The road was silver in the morning sun. It was a perfect day for traveling. Rebecca kept up her wails in the back seat. Miles ticked away under the wheels. I knew our lives wouldn’t be easy. I pictured us together in San Francisco or Seattle, moving into an apartment where strangers argued on the other side of the wall. I’d push her stroller down unfamiliar streets, looking for the grocery store. She wouldn’t think of our lives as odd—not until she got older, and began to realize that other girls lived differently. Then she’d start hating me for being alone, for being old and eccentric, for having failed to raise her with a back yard and a rec room and a father. For a moment, I thought of turning back. The impulse passed through me, and if I’d been able to make a U-turn I might have done it. But we were on a straight stretch of highway. I followed the double yellow line until the impulse was absorbed by gathering distance. I kept my hands on the wheel, and didn’t think of anything but the next mile and the next. I glanced back at Rebecca. She was finally calming with the motion of the car. Before she went under, she looked at me balefully, her nose running and her cotton hat askew, and said one word. She said, “Mommy.” She pronounced it with a distinct edge of despair.
“Someday you’ll thank me, sweetie,” I said. “Or maybe you won’t.”
Now I’m alone with this. This love. The love that cuts like an X-ray, that has no true element of kindness or mercy.
Forgive me, boys. I seem to have gotten what I wanted, after all. A baby of my own, a direction to drive in. The house and restaurant may not be much to offer in trade but that’s what I’ve got to give you.
I turned off the highway and headed west.
THE MOON is following us, a white crescent in a powdery blue sky. We are driving home from the grocery store: Erich, Jonathan, and me. Erich these days is a slippery presence. He comes and goes. If I wasn’t driving I might hold him to keep him from floating out of the car. Instead, I say to Jonathan, “How’s he doing back there?”
Jonathan looks into the back seat. “You okay, Erich?” he asks.
Erich doesn’t answer. He is suffering a fit of absence. Who knows what he hears? “I think he’s okay,” Jonathan tells me. I nod and drive on. Farms pass on either side of the road. Cows go about their ordinary business, steady as history itself.
At the house we help Erich out of the car, guide him up the porch stairs. He smiles with the confused beatitude of the ancient. He could be pleased that we’re home again. He could be remembering a toy given him when he was four. We put the groceries away in the kitchen.
“How about a bath?” I say.
“Do you think he needs one?” Jonathan asks.
“I think he’d like one,” I answer.
We guide him upstairs, start the bathwater. Steam puts a sparkle on the chipped white tile. While we wait for the tub to fill we help Erich off with his clothes. He neither resists nor participates. His face takes on its boggled look, something different from expressionless. When he loses track of himself he drifts into this look of mute incomprehension, as if he can’t quite believe the emptiness he sees. It is astonishment divorced from dread and wonder. It is nothing like a newborn’s face.
When he’s naked we sit him down on the toilet lid. The tub fills slowly. Erich sits with quiet obedience, hands hung limp between the stalks of his thighs. Jonathan reaches over and touches his hair.
“I’m going to put some music on,” I say.
“Okay.” Jonathan stays beside Erich, supporting his shoulder bones with one hand. With the other he keeps administering ginger, comforting little swipes at Erich’s hair.
I turn on the radio in the bedroom. It is tuned to an oldies station, the music of our childhood. Right now, Van Morrison sings “Madame George.” I turn the volume up so it will carry into the bathroom.
When I get back Jonathan says, “This is a great song. This has always been one of my favorites.”
“Care to dance?” I ask him.
He looks at me uncertainly, wondering if I’m making a joke.
“Come on,” I say, and I hold my arms out. “Erich won’t fall. Will you, Erich?”
Erich stares in the direction of his own bare feet. Cautiously, Jonathan pulls his hands away. Erich does not tip over. After a moment Jonathan walks into my arms and we do a waltz. Our shoes clop on the bare tiles. I can feel the agitation of Jonathan’s continuing life. It quivers along his skin like a network of plucked wires. I run my hand up and down the buttons of his spine. Van sings, “Say goodbye to Madame George. Dry your eyes for Madame George.”
“Bobby?” Jonathan says.
“Uh-huh?”
“Oh, never mind. I was going to say something stupid like ‘I’m scared,’ but of course I am. We all are.”
“Well, yes. I mean, I guess we are.”
We dance to the end of the song. I would like to say that Erich smiles, or nods his head in rhythm. It would be good to think he joins us in that small way. But he is lost in his own mystery, staring into a hole that keeps opening and opening. When we’re through dancing we help him up, and lower him into the bath. Together, we scrub his head and his skinny neck. We wash the hollow of his chest, and the deep sockets under his arms. Briefly, he smiles. At the sensation of bathing, or at something more private than that.
After his bath, we put him to bed. It’s late afternoon. Jonathan says, “I’ll buzz down to the restaurant and do the reordering, all right?” I tell him I’ll replace the missing shingles.
We go about our errands. It’s a normal afternoon, steaming along toward evening. Jonathan drives to town, I prop the ladder against the house and climb up with an armload of new cedar shingles. They will look raw and yellow against the old coffee-colored ones. The old shingles, strewn with pine needles, are crisp and splintery under my hands and feet.
From the roof I can see a distance. I can see our small holdings, and the fields and mountains beyond. I can see a red convertible gliding past. In the grass near the porch lies a toy of Rebecca’s, a doll named Baby Lou. It lies grinning with stony rapture at the sky. I can’t believe Clare forgot to pack it.
I pass through a moment of panic. I know Clare and Rebecca aren’t coming back. I’d have said something before they left but I couldn’t risk it—what if Jonathan had decided to go along? I can’t let the house break up. It’s taken too long to build. Jonathan and I belong here, together. Clare has taken Rebecca to the world of the living—its noise and surprises, its risk of disappointment. She’s probably right to have done that. It’s where Rebecca should be. We here are in the other world, a quieter place, more prone to forgiveness. I followed my brother into this world and I’ve never left it, not really.
I have work to do. I have a roof to fix.
The panic passes.
Rebecca will be back someday, and the house will be waiting for her. It’s hers. It isn’t much—a termite-gnawed frame building remade in small pieces, with the work of inexperienced hands. It isn’t much but it stands now and will still stand when she’s twenty. Now, right now, I can see her. It’s as clear as a window opened onto the future. What I see is a woman with light brown hair, no beauty by the world’s standards but the owner of a sly grace and a steadfast, unapologetic way of filling her skin. I can see her come to stand on the porch of a house she’s inherited. A house she never asked for, a house she can’t quite think what to do with. I can see her there, standing in a winter coat, breathing bright steam into the brilliant air. That’s all I see. It’s not a significant vision. But I see her with surprising clarity. I see her boots on the floorboards, and the winter crackle of her hair. I see the way her jaw cleaves the frigid light as she stands before this unwanted gift. I touch my own jaw. I kneel there, on the roof, feeling the plain creaturely jut of my lower skull. Time is passing, and I get to work. The hammer makes a metallic, steady kind of music that shivers up and down the framework of this house. I hammer one shingle into place. I hammer another.
Late that night, Jonathan wakes me by touching my hair. I open my eyes and see his face, bright in the bedroom darkness, so close his breathing tickles my cheek. He puts a finger to his lips, and beckons. I follow him out into the hall. The dots on his boxer shorts swim in the darkness. He is wearing only the shorts; I am in Jockeys and an undershirt. He beckons again and I follow him downstairs. Shadows cling to the complications of his back.
In the living room he says, “Sorry to wake you up like this. But there’s a job I need your help with.”
I ask what kind of job needs doing at midnight. By way of answering, he picks an object up off the table beside the sofa. I take a moment to focus—it’s the box with Ned’s ashes in it. Holding the box in both hands, he goes to the front door.
“Come on,” he says.
We walk out onto the porch and stop at the rail, looking into the deep black like two passengers on an ocean liner. On moonless nights this house could be afloat; it could be sailing through space. All that offers itself from the surrounding night is a starfield and the restlessness of trees.
Jonathan says, “I’ve changed my mind about waiting to scatter these. It’s suddenly occurred to me that this is as good a place as any.”
“You mean you want to drop Ned’s ashes now? Right here?”
“Mm-hm. I want us both to do it.”
“Um, don’t you think Alice would want to be here, too? I mean, shouldn’t we have some kind of ceremony?”
“Nope. Mom will be glad to hear I’ve taken care of it. She’s not much for ceremonies these days.”
“Well,” I say.
“Let’s go.” He steps down off the porch, and I go with him. Walking onto the grass is like stepping off into space proper. I move with a light-headed, space-walk feeling.
“Jon,” I say. “Jonny, maybe we should wait to do this. I mean, don’t you think you’ll be sorry you didn’t plan something?”
“If you don’t want to, I’ll do it myself,” he says. He walks several paces toward the road, which is a dull silver stain on the darkness. Tree frogs put out their clicks and groans. The Seven Sisters pulse overhead in a small clustered storm of stars. I follow him. As we cross the road I am reminded of myself in childhood, following my brother into the cemetery to celebrate our heroic future together. Jonathan moves with a determination that is both ritualistic and slightly crazed. He is wearing only those polka-dot boxers as galaxies explode overhead.
An empty alfalfa field stretches beyond the road. Alfalfa brushes and sighs against our bare legs. Although I know from daylight that this field ends in brush and an abandoned shed, all I can see at this moment is an ocean of alfalfa. As we walk Jonathan says, “I just realized how ludicrous it is to hold on to my father’s ashes until I find some sort of perfect home for them. I’ve decided this is a perfect place. This field right here. I don’t even know who owns it, do you?”
“No.”
“Oh, Bobby. I wanted to be part of something that wasn’t dying.”
“You are.”
“No I’m not. I thought I was, but really, I’m not.”
“Jon,” I say. “Jonny.”
He waits, but I can’t tell him. I can’t tell him what I know—we both have devotions outside the world of the living. It’s what separates us from Clare, and from other people. It’s what’s held us together as the ordinary run of circumstance has said we should grow up and part.
After a while he says, “So I think it’s time to get rid of these. Right now. Here. This seems like a good enough spot.”
We are so far into the field that the darkness has closed behind us, blotting out the road and house. All we can see is alfalfa. Crickets make their racket and mosquitoes swarm around our heads, unable to believe their luck. We stand there in a starry, buzzing darkness complete as the end of the world.
“The lid’s a little tricky,” he says. “Just a minute. There.”
He sets the box on the ground. “This is hard to believe,” he says. “My father used to carry me on his shoulders. He once tickled me until I peed in my pants. I still remember how bad he felt. And embarrassed. And a little indignant.”
“Do you want to, like, say a few words?” I ask.
“Oh, I guess I’ve already said them. Listen, will you reach in at the same time I do?”
“Okay. If you want me to.”
We both bend over. “I’m going to count to three,” he says. “One, two, three.”
We reach in. There’s a plastic bag inside the box, and we work our hands through the plastic. Ned’s ashes have a velvet, suety feel. They are studded with chips of bone. When we touch them, Jonathan draws in a breath.
“Oh,” he says. “Okay. I think that was the worst part. Have you got some?”
“Uh-huh.”
We stand with handfuls of ash and bone. “She was right,” he says. “It really isn’t much more of him than a pair of his old shoes. Okay. Here goes.”
In silence, we sift the ashes into the field. We walk small circles, distributing. It’s too dark to see them fall. They disappear from our hands. If they make any sound it’s drowned out by the insects and the rustle of alfalfa.
We go back to the box again and again. We don’t speak until the ashes are gone.
“All right,” Jonathan says. “Dad, I got this far. This was the best I could do.”
He picks up the box and we head into the area of darkness where we think the house must lie. We’ve lost our bearings scattering the ashes, and we miss the house by some distance. We must walk along the road for nearly a quarter mile. We give a passing Volvo something to wonder about—two men walking a country road in their underwear, holding an empty box.
“Bobby?” Jonathan says.
“Yeah?”
“You know why I decided to do this all of a sudden?”
“No.”
“After Clare and Rebecca left I started thinking about how I didn’t want them to come back to Erich doing so badly upstairs and my father’s ashes sitting on a shelf in the living room. It suddenly seemed like too much death in the house. That’s when I decided to put the ashes out to pasture. I mean, what was I saving them for?”
“Well, nothing, I guess.”
“I want to paint Rebecca’s room,” he says. “It’s too dingy in there. What if we picked up some paint tomorrow, after work? Something gaudy that she’ll be nuts about, like bright pink. Nobody told me a baby would have such bad taste.”
I can hear his breathing. What there is of starlight shines gray and faltering on his bare skin. We walk for several minutes in silence.
“Listen,” he says.
“Uh-huh.”
“If something happens to me, this will be an all right place to put my ashes, too. If and when the time comes, I want you to tell my mother that. Tell her I had a last request, and this was it. God, if my father and I both end up strewn around here, where will my mother go when she dies?”
“She could come here, too.”
“Well, she’s always getting dragged someplace she doesn’t want to go. Why should things be any different after she’s dead, right?”
“Right. I mean, I guess so. This is where we all belong now.”
“What if that were true?” he says. “Wouldn’t it be something?”
We don’t talk anymore. There is too much to say. We travel the last short distance, invisibly watched by night animals. It is like a dream, one of those childhood dreams of public embarrassment, to be walking on a public road in my frayed underwear. But, in this particular dream, I feel no embarrassment. I’m just here, undressed on a country road, with a dark wind blowing around me. Ned’s ashes are mingling with the ground in a miniature world of ants and armored, lumbering beetles. Erich sleeps his skimming sleep, intricately lit by dreams. There is a beauty in the world, though it’s harsher than we ever expect it to be. It’s as unlike the autumn farm on my family’s dining-room wall as a bone is unlike a man or a woman. Somewhere on this continent Clare and Rebecca are sleeping, in a motel or a friend’s living room. As the blue silhouette of the house appears ahead of us I remember that home is also a place to escape. This is ours; we have it to run from and we have it to return to.
It’s black enough right now to see the future—the cold mornings and the long nights, the daily music. Jonathan and I are here to maintain a present, so people can return to it when their futures thin out on them. We’ve been on our way here for a long time. We start up the drive and I see something riffle the curtain in the bedroom window. For a moment I think Clare has come back. I grab Jonathan’s shoulder.
“What?” he says. “What is it?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing. Never mind.”
Between the impulse and the touch, I’ve come to my senses. Clare isn’t back. What I saw was just the wind blowing. It was either the wind or the spirit of the house itself, briefly unsettled by our nocturnal absence but too old to be surprised by the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we in fact create.
ONE AFTERNOON in April, several months before Erich died, Bobby and I took him out to a pond we knew of, deep in the woods. We drove ten miles to reach it, a circle of shimmering blue-black water ringed by pines. That early in the year, we had it all to ourselves. “First swim of the season,” Bobby said as we got out of the car. “It’s a tradition with us.”
“Beautiful,” Erich said. He was frail by then. His legs hurt him, and he had trouble walking—the disease was racing through him more quickly than it moved in most people. His face had altered during the winter. His eyes seemed subtly enlarged, and his jaw was squarer. I suppose the shape of his skull had started to emerge.
“We haven’t been out since last summer,” I said. Bobby and I helped Erich negotiate the short path that led down a slope to the crescent of earth and pine needles that served as a beach. The lake was almost unnaturally still—it was too early for bees or dragon-flies or the reflections of leaves. Less than a month ago, scraps of snow had lingered brightly in the shadows. Now the tree trunks were wet and vivid as animals’ fur and the sun was warm but winter-white, still shy of the deeper colors it would take on by May. The pond reflected a single cigar-shaped cloud that stretched from bank to bank. We stood on the narrow beach, and Bobby skipped a stone along the water’s surface, which was smooth and placid as slate.
“You go swimming here in the summer?” Erich asked.
“Mm-hm,” I said. “It gets crowded then, it’s the local Coney Island. It’s a real sight. There are babies and dogs, and eighty-year-olds swimming naked.”
He nodded solemnly. I regretted having referred to a future season, one he might not see. I was still getting used to the particular system of courtesy that prevails among the sick. It was like playing host to an impoverished relation, when your own business is still paying off. Only through his unprosperous presence do you realize how much your own wealth has to do with almost everything you do and say.
“So, are we going to go in?” he asked.
“It’s freezing,” Bobby said.
“You said first swim of the season. You said it was a tradition.”
“Figure of speech,” I told him. “We’re just here to pay our respects. It needs at least another month to warm up.”
Although I’d assumed he was merely playing along, I could tell from his voice how much Erich in fact wanted to go for a swim. He couldn’t trust the seasons—by the time it was warmer, he might not be able to walk at all. And even if he could manage it, he was far too inhibited to show his compromised body to the crowds of strangers who’d begin gathering here once swimming weather had arrived.
“Do you really want to?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, in a tone of childish insistence.
“It’d be a good way to get pneumonia,” Bobby said.
“Let’s do it,” I said. “Come on, the water’s okay. There hasn’t been ice on it for at least three weeks.”
“You’re crazy,” Bobby said.
“That’s a fact. Come on, Erich. Let’s go.”
“You can’t,” Bobby said. “It’s too goddamn cold.”
I started taking off my clothes, and Erich joined in. We were not graceful or smooth in our undressing—there was no hint of sex in it. Or whatever there was of sex was as deeply buried as that which prevails among ballplayers before a game, a love of the physical self generous and unlimited enough to extend to other bodies as well, simply because they are present and more or less alike. As Bobby informed us of our folly we worked our way out of our jackets and boots, tossing them onto the ground. We stripped naked in the warm white light. Finally Bobby gave in and began undressing as well, because he refused to be excluded from a mistake he could not prevent.
While Bobby got his clothes off, Erich and I stood together, nude, facing the water. We were too shy to look directly at one another, though I saw enough of him from my sidelong position. His arms and legs were knobbed at the joints, peppered with small purple splotches. His chest and abdomen also bore the scattering of marks, like old tattoos that had blurred into the skin. I held myself through a wave of revulsion, not only because his body was so changed but because his entwinement with the disease was so apparent. In jeans and sweatshirts he looked sick but ordinary; naked he looked like sickness itself. He looked as if his humanity was being eaten away and replaced by something else.
I reached over and took his hand, to protect both of us. In doing so, I caught up with my own gesture. I felt for him, a frightened soul no better prepared to face his mortality than I would be if the disease started working on me now, this moment. My face burned.
“Ready?” I said.
“Ready.”
We stepped into the water together while Bobby was getting out of his jeans. The first impression was of warmth—an inch of temperate water floated on the surface. But when we penetrated that, the water beneath was numbingly cold.
“Oh,” Erich exclaimed as it lapped his ankles.
“Maybe this isn’t a very good idea after all,” I said. “I mean, it can’t be good for you.”
“No,” he said. “Let’s just go a little ways in. I want to—well, I just want to.
“All right,” I said. I was still holding his hand. For the first time I felt intimate with him, though we had known one another for years and had made love hundreds of times. We shuffled ahead, taking tiny steps on the sandy bottom. Each new quarter-inch of flesh exposed to water was agony. The sand itself felt like granular ice under our feet.
Bobby splashed out to us. “Crazy,” he said. “Goddamn crazy. Erich, you got two minutes in here, and then I’m taking you out.”
He meant it. He would lift Erich bodily and carry him to shore if necessary. Since he and I were boys together, he had made it his business to rescue fools from icy water.
Still, we had two minutes, and we advanced. The water was clear—nets of light fluttered across our bare feet, and minnows darted away from us, visible only by their shadows skimming along the bottom. I glanced at Bobby, who was grave and steady as a steamship. He was a reverse image of Erich; time had thickened him. His belly was broad and protuberant now, and his little copper-colored medallion of pectoral hair had darkened and spread, sending tendrils up onto his shoulders and down along his back. I myself was losing hair—my hairline was at least two inches higher than it had been ten years ago. I could feel with my fingertips a rough circle at the back of my head where the growth was thinner.
“This is good,” Erich said. “I mean, well, it feels very good.”
It didn’t feel good. It was torture. But I thought I understood—it was a strong sensation, one that came from the outer world rather than the inner. He was saying goodbye to a certain kind of pain.
“You’re shivering,” Bobby said.
“One more minute. Then we’ll go in.”
“Right. One more minute, exactly.”
We stood in the water together, watching the unbroken line of trees on the opposite bank. That was all that happened. Bobby and I took Erich for what would in fact turn out to be his last swim, and waded in only to our knees. But as I stood in the water, something happened to me. I don’t know if I can explain this. Something cracked. I had lived until then for the future, in a state of continuing expectation, and the process came suddenly to a stop while I stood nude with Bobby and Erich in a shallow platter of freezing water. My father was dead and I myself might very well be dying. My mother had a new haircut, a business and a young lover; a new life that suited her better than her old one had. I had not fathered a child but I loved one as if I was her father—I knew what that was like. I wouldn’t say I was happy. I was nothing so simple as happy. I was merely present, perhaps for the first time in my adult life. The moment was unextraordinary. But I had the moment, I had it completely. It inhabited me. I realized that if I died soon I would have known this, a connection with my life, its errors and cockeyed successes. The chance to be one of three naked men standing in a small body of clear water. I would not die unfulfilled because I’d been here, right here and nowhere else. I didn’t speak. Bobby announced that the minute was up, and we took Erich back to shore.