The First Bad Man

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Clee thought it would be less hassle if I became a legal guardian. “Because it might take me a while to get set up.”

“That makes sense,” I said, holding my breath. Now that it was decided, she made plans very quickly, with an unfamiliar momentum. I was informed of an appointment at the courthouse; she drove, chatting all the way. As it turns out, almost anyone can legally kidnap your child, just as long as you stand in front of the judge and tell her you’re “totally fine with it.” A social worker would check in on me four times in the next year and Clee would get her own place.

“We’re more than happy to help out with her rent,” Suzanne assured me. “Obviously we should have done this in the first place. All parents make mistakes. You’ll see. When are you coming back to work?” She thought she’d won — that we were competing for her daughter and she’d won in the end.

I told Clee she could stop pumping since we’d have to go to formula anyway, but she promised me a month’s supply of breast milk.

“And when I come visit on Fridays I can pump.”

“You’ll be dried up. It’s fine — he’s seven months old. You’re done.”

Tears seeped into her eyes. Tears of joy. I hadn’t realized she hated pumping so much.

WE DIDN’T SAY THE LAST night was the last night but the next day was the day she would move into her apartment in Studio City and it followed that she would sleep there that night and the night after and for years until she moved, probably into a bigger place, maybe with someone, someone she’d marry, maybe they’d have kids. Eventually she’d be my age and Jack would be in college and this time, this very brief time when we lived together, would just become a bit of family lore about an accident and a family friend and how it all worked out for everyone. The details would be washed away; for example, it would not be told as a great American love story for our time.

The next morning her garbage bags were lined up by the door. Any closer to the door and they’d march out by themselves. The famous Rachel came to help her move.

“I heard you’re starting a flavored popcorn company,” I said, burping Jack over my shoulder. She winced a little.

“I guess you could call it that. I mean, technically that’s what it is.”

Clee banged in the front door and grabbed two bags, eyeing our conversation. Rachel was very skinny and Jewish-looking. She wore a blouse with diagonal pastel stripes that looked like it was from the 1980s; it was a joke about how silly the time before she was born was.

“Did I get it wrong? Clee said there would be gum popcorn?”

“It’s really hard to explain, because I’m working on a lot of different levels?” She heaved the biggest bag over her shoulder. “I’m surprised she even told you about it.”

“Well, she just told me the gum popcorn level of it.”

She looked me all the way down and all the way back up, landing not on my eyes but on my neck.

Clee huffed inside, grabbing the last bag. “That’s everything!”

“Really?” I looked around. “The bathroom?”

“I checked that.”

“All right, then.”

She rubbed the top of Jack’s head. “Goodbye, Little Dude. Don’t forget about your Aunt Clee.” Aunt. When had she decided that? He grabbed her hair; she freed herself. Rachel took out her phone and turned away; this was the moment allotted for our goodbye. Clee was looking antsy. I doubted she would come every Friday at ten A.M. She held her arms open like a friendly bear. “Thanks for everything, Cheryl. I’ll call you guys tonight.”

“You don’t have to call.”

“I’ll call.”

We watched them get into her car and drive away and then we walked around the house. The rooms sounded different, higher ceilinged, empty.

It used to always be like this, I explained. This is the normal way the house usually is.

Did she not leave anything? he asked. Nothing?

We searched every room. She had been very thorough. The envelope between the books was gone; so was the soda can tab. We did finally find one thing she’d forgotten.

I carried the sundrop crystal from the bathroom and hung it in the kitchen above the sink. Jack watched it clatter against the glass a few times, then spin silently.

Rainbows. I pointed to a flock of them gliding across the wall. His little mouth hung open in transfixed awe.

This kind of thing is more along the lines of what I was expecting, he said. This will for sure be my top interest, my area of focus.

Rainbows?

And everything else like this.

There is nothing else like this. Rainbows are alone; they’re the only thing like that.

The crystal began to wind the other way, sending the bright fleet back across his body. I could tell he didn’t believe me; it did seem unlikely. I racked my brain for others of the species. Reflections, shadows, smoke — these things were morose and distant cousins at best. No, rainbows are in their own class of spectacularity, every single one of them impressive, never a bleak rainbow, never with just some of the colors. Always all the colors and always in the right order. She didn’t call.

EVERY DAY I MELTED A milk icicle and watched Jack drink what Clee had pumped exactly one month earlier, each bottle labeled with a date. First he drank the day we made love; he gulped it all down. He drank the day we showed him off at Ralphs. He drank the cotton-candy milk from the day at the pier. The last batch was from the morning she left and this milk was full of plans I didn’t know about. When he finished that bottle she was really gone, every last drop of her. But the habit of remembering what had happened a month ago was hard to let go of, so we continued. As he drank his first bottle of formula I remembered our first night alone, the house bitterly quiet until I turned on the TV. I remembered remembering making love and crying right onto Jack, right into his eyes. When she had been gone for a full two months I remembered melting the last of her milk and thinking she was really gone now, every last drop. I burped him and that was all — I didn’t start over again with triple remembering.

She missed the first two Fridays, and the one after that. I called several times to issue a gentle reminder, but her phone just rang and rang. I pictured it in a rainy gutter somewhere. She was exactly the kind of woman who ends up murdered.

“I don’t want to alarm you,” I said calmly. “But I thought you should know.”

“We just saw her yesterday,” Suzanne said.

“Oh. How is she?”

“She’s happy as a clam in her new place — you should see it, she and Rachel painted the walls all kinds of crazy colors. Did you meet Rachel?”

“Rachel lives there?”

“Oh yeah, they’re inseparable. And I have to say they’re real cute together — Clee is just gaga for that girl. Did you know Rachel went to Brown? Carl’s alma mater?”

“When you say ‘gaga,’ what do you mean?”

“They’re in love.”

I PUT AWAY ALL THE dishes except my own set and Jack’s tiny plastic spoon. I covered the TV with the Tibetan cloth. I took the cloth off and put the TV on the curb by the trash cans. As everything went back into its proper place, I explained my system to Jack, carpooling and so forth.

See, this way the house practically cleans itself.

He crumbled a rice cake into his lap.

So if you’re down in the dumps you don’t have to worry about things devolving into filth.

He dumped a box of plastic blocks on the rug.

My plan for toys was to not worry about keeping them in their place, since that would be a never-ending battle, but to approach them like the dishes: less. I threw all of them into a suitcase except a ball, a rattle, and a bear. These were allowed to be anywhere but ideally they wouldn’t clump together. Two of them could be in the same room but I liked for the third one to be somewhere else, otherwise it became too chaotic. She wanted a girlfriend. Someone to pal around with. Exploration of the body, womanhood and so forth. It was so ordinary. Jack wondered where all his toys went; he crawled all around the house looking for them. I rolled the suitcase back out and emptied it in the middle of the living room. Stacking cups and blocks, soft cars and stuffed animals, board books and interlocking squeaking rings with googly eyes and textured tails. My system wasn’t really applicable to babies. Babies ruined everything. Secret plan to get in bed and never move again? Ruined. Tendency to pee in jars when very sad? Ruined.

Each day I walked to the park with Jack in the stroller. We stopped and watched the men playing basketball, wondering if Clee had ever watched these men and if they had watched her. There was a muscular bald man whose place she could have gone back to. He showed no recognition, but why would he think the child of a woman he’d never met was his son?

Do you feel a kinship with any of these men?

Jack did not. He was getting bigger and on some days he looked much less like Clee and much more like someone else. His expression when troubled was not unusual — I’d seen people, men, with brows that furrowed like that. But I couldn’t put a face to the feeling; it was a dissolving thought, like a dream that hurries away when you approach it. We watched people jogging and older children playing on the slide and swings.

A couple stretched on the grass smiled at Jack.

Do they know us?

No. People just smile at you because you’re a baby.

Now they were waving. It was Rick and a woman. They walked over to us.

“I was just saying, ‘Is that her? No, yes, no.’ ”

“He was just saying that!” the woman agreed. “He really was. I’m Carol.” She stuck out her hand.

I glanced around the park. Did he live here? I didn’t see a hovel or sleeping bag nearby. Carol was clean and ordinary; she looked like a college professor.

“This is him?” he asked, eyes moist.

“Jack, yes.”

He delivered you.

You’re kidding.

“I’ll never forget that day. He was blue like a blueberry — didn’t I say that?”

The woman nodded heartily. “You came home, dropped your gardening tools, and said, ‘Honey, you’ll never guess what I just did.’ ” She swung her hands in the pockets of her skirt and smiled. “But it’s not the first time you’ve helped out in a pinch, hon.”

Rick was either the homeless man she lived with and called “hon,” or else he was her husband.

“I did a small amount of medic work in Vietnam,” Rick mumbled modestly. “He certainly looks healthy.”

“He’s fine now.”

“Really?” Rick’s eyes were pained and full. “And the mother?”

“She’s doing great.”

Carol patted his back. “He didn’t sleep well for weeks after the birth.”

“I should have called,” said Rick. “I was afraid of hearing bad news.”

Not gardening, he wasn’t even dirty. Why had I decided he was homeless? Because he always arrived on foot. No car. I looked at him sideways, wondering if he’d been aware of my mistake. But if you weren’t homeless you would never assume someone thought you were. I pointed toward my house and said it was almost time for Jack’s nap.

“We were just heading back too,” said Carol, pointing in the same direction. “We’re a few blocks over.”

A neighbor with a green thumb and no yard. That’s all. Would this be the first of many awakenings? Was I about to be buffeted with truth after truth? More likely it was just a singular instance.

An isolated case of mistaken identity, I explained.

An honest mistake, Jack agreed.

WE WALKED TOGETHER AND RICK insisted on checking the backyard.

“What a mess. I shouldn’t have let it go like this. How are the snails?”

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen one. The bucket was empty. It seemed they’d left with Clee.

Carol picked lemons off my tree and made lemonade in my kitchen.

“Never mind me, just go about your business.”

I walked Jack around the house, teaching him the names of things.

Couch.

Couch, he agreed.

Book.

Book.

Lemon.

Lemon.

“It’s so quiet here,” said Carol, wiping her hands on my dishcloth.

“I like to keep it calm for the baby.”

“Do you ever talk to him?”

“Of course I talk to him.”

“Good, babies need that.”

They left lemonade and promised to return next Thursday with a quiche. I locked the door. Do I talk to him? I did nothing but talk to him! I laid Jack on the changing table.

All day long! I’d been talking to him for decades.

There we go, that’s nice, isn’t it? It feels good to be all clean and dry.

Okay, sure, I didn’t holler at him like a train conductor. But my internal voice was much louder than most people’s. And incessant.

Now let’s snap your pants.

I suppose it was possible that to someone on the outside it might seem as if I were moving around in perfect silence.

Snap, snap, snap, there we go. All done.

I patted his tummy and watched his wide-open face. It was a crushing thought, little Jack innocently living in a mute world. And all those words, all the terms of endearment — had he heard none of them?

I cleared my throat. “I love you.”

His head shook with surprise. My voice was low and formal; I sounded like a wooden father from the 1800s. I continued. “You are a sweet potato.” This sounded literal, as if I was letting him know he was a root vegetable, a tuber. “You’re a baby,” I added, just in case there was any confusion on that last point. He craned his neck, trying to see who was here. Of course he had heard me talk, but always to another person or on the phone. I put him down on the bed and kissed his fat cheeks again and again. He shut his eyes, gracefully enduring.

“Don’t worry, there’s not just me. You have other people.”

Who? he said. No he didn’t. He just waited for whatever was going to happen next.

SUZANNE SALUTED AS SHE TOOK off her shoes, I guess meaning it was fascist of me to insist on this.

“Do you do other Japanese customs or just this one?” asked Carl.

“Just this one.”

“We looked high and low for a baby present and then at the last moment we discovered a really incredible hat store,” said Carl, ambling around the living room. “I mean these hats were like something from a museum — a jester museum. They could have easily charged hundreds of dollars but most of them were twenty dollars or under.”

“But they didn’t have them in sizes for babies,” Suzanne said.

“They were one size fits all. We thought maybe if he had a very large head… an adult-sized head…”

Jack smiled shyly as his grandparents looked at him for the first time, appraising his cranium.

“It’s too big,” Suzanne said, pulling a jingling jangling jester hat out of her purse. Jack lunged for it.

“Bells,” I enunciated. “Jingle bells. You’ve never seen bells, have you? He loves it, thank you.” Jack gave up on the bells and tried to put his whole hand in my mouth. He’d been doing this ever since I’d started talking out loud to him. He’d also been grabbing the pages of books, shaking anything that rattled, stacking cups, rolling across the floor, chewing the legs of a toy giraffe, and sweetly reaching for me with whimpering excitement every time we were parted for more than a few seconds. Or maybe none of these things were new. Maybe I was just noticing them more acutely since the veil of my internal dialogue had lifted. He seemed less and less like Kubelko Bondy and more like a baby named Jack.

Suzanne smiled, putting the jester hat on her own head. “Do you want to tell her, hon?”

“We’re adding twenty dollars to your next paycheck,” Carl announced. “We ask that you cash it and put in an envelope—”

“It’s a fund,” Suzanne interrupted, jingling. “So one day, when his head is big enough, this money will be waiting for him.”

“We thought it was more special this way,” Carl said. “Look at her — isn’t she like a beautiful little sprite?”

We all stared at Suzanne with the hat on. If anyone looked like a little sprite wouldn’t it be the baby among us? But she batted her eyelashes daffily and fluttered her veiny hands like wings.

I gave them a tour of the house. In the nursery Carl whispered something to Suzanne and Suzanne asked if this had been Clee’s room.

“This was my ironing room. Clee slept on the couch at first and later we shared my room.”

They looked at each other sideways. Carl coughed and picked up a stuffed lamb.

“Lamb,” I said to Jack. “Grandpa is holding your lamb.”

They both frowned uncomfortably. Suzanne gave Carl a little poke with her elbow.

“We’re glad you brought that up,” he said.

Suzanne nodded vigorously with her eyes shut; Carl cleared his throat.

“Jack seems like an interesting person and we hope we get the chance to know him. But we’d like that to be on his own terms.”

Suzanne jumped in. “Do we share common interests and values? Is he curious about us and the kinds of things we care about?”

“I think he might be,” I ventured. “When he’s a little older.”

“Exactly. Until then it’s a forced relationship.” Suzanne’s vehemence was ringing the bells on her hat. Jack shrieked; he thought this was the most fun thing that had ever happened. “We’re supposed to play the part of the ‘grandparents’ [jingle jingle] and he’s supposed to enact the ‘grandson’ [jingle jingle]. That just feels empty and arbitrary to us, like something Hallmark came up with.”

Carl chuckled at the Hallmark line and rubbed Suzanne’s neck as she continued.

“Interesting young people come into our lives every day and we adore them, they’re engaging, they ask questions. Maybe down the road Jack will be one of these kids.”

“We might not even know it’s him,” Carl murmured.

“We won’t know it’s him and he won’t know it’s us — we’ll just be people who genuinely like each other.”

Suzanne folded the jester hat [jingle jingle] and put it back in her purse. She seemed relieved to have the speech out of the way.

“Do you want to hold him?” I said.

Her hands fit around Jack very easily. He looked up at her, wondering if the bells were coming back.