The Return of Service

Crossed in Love by Her Eyes

“I think you ought to know I’m not going to marry you,” I hear the baby say through the closed door of my study. “Marie and I are going together.”

Who is Marie?

“So you and Marie are going together,” she says, a thin note of pain breaking through the coolness of her tone.

“One of these days we might get married,” he says.

A few minutes later the baby’s mother comes into my study and asks if she might interrupt my unproductive self-absorption for a few minutes.

“I feel rejected,” she says, laughing in a way that implies she thinks she ought to be amused but isn’t. “Our baby’s got another woman.”

“It’s my opinion it won’t last.”

“The worst of it is that the woman he’s infatuated with — Marie, you may remember her, that streaky stacked blond that sat for him a couple of times — won’t have anything to do with him. Yesterday, when I asked her if she could, baby-sit Friday night, the truth came out. She said she’s no longer interested in babies, that they have nothing to teach her.”

“Did you tell the baby what she said?”

“He’s been so miserable as it is, mooning around the house and sighing in his pathetic way, I couldn’t make it worse. Will you talk to him man to man?”

“I’m not very good at that.”

She blows me a kiss. “I was only kidding, you know, about the unproductive self-absorption. I think your self-absorption is as productive as anybody’s.”

Moments after the baby’s mother leaves, almost as if it’s been rehearsed, the baby takes her place in the room.

“When you’re married,” he asks after a point, “does that mean you have to sleep in the same bed as the other person?” He asks the question with both hands over his face, one eye peering through the slats of his fingers.

“Only if both people want to,” I say.

“Well, both people do want to,” he says, “and that’s final.”

He does a parody of his father storming furiously out of a room.

He returns. “What about love?” he asks.

“What about it?”

His thumb, as if it were just passing by, finds its way into the tunnel of his mouth. It is apparent after a while that neither of us, with all goodwill, can think of anything to say. The word love has come between us. We study the silence for clues. Before I can put my thoughts into a sentence, he is gone.

Later that day, I get a phone call from a young woman who calls herself Marie.

“Your little son has invited me to share his bed,” she says in a voice that strives for outrage.

“I’ve heard something about that,” I say.

“Have you? In the last house I worked, the father used to come into my bed at night, pretending to be the son. As you might imagine, such a deception couldn’t go on for long.”

I say something to the effect that I can’t imagine how such a deception could go on even once, though my remark, like the father she cites, seems to pass unnoticed.

“I’m prepared to give it a trial run, if you want me,” she says. “My boyfriend’s moved back in with his wife, and I’m at loose ends.”

“It’s the baby who wants you,” I say. I am about to say something about talking it over with my wife, when the woman on the phone overrides me again.

“I get that,” she says. “I only hope he’s not too demonstrative. I really love babies, I really do, if they don’t expect too much from you. I have a lot to give, you know, if not too much is asked.”

An appointment is made for an interview.

Two weeks have passed since Marie has become a part of our household. The baby, whom I’ve hardly seen since the girl has come to live with us, patters glumly into my study and sits down on the floor with his back to me.

“Is something the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter,”

“Are you sad because it’s Marie’s day off?”

He treats the question as if a reply were too self-evident to deserve notice.

“Do you know what?” he says. “Marie won’t sleep in my bed,”

“She won’t?” He has caught me, as he often does, in a moment of distraction.

“Maybe she will if I ask her. Will she? Tell her she has to, okay? Tell her if she doesn’t…if she doesn’t, she’ll have to sleep with the dog and we don’t even have a dog. Okay?”

I indicate, which is something we’ve been through before, that it’s not within my power to compel Marie to sleep in his bed.

He is unconvinced. “I am angry at you,” he says. “Also disappointed. And I’m not going to tell you the story I was going to tell you unless you say to Marie, ‘Marie, you have to sleep with the baby. That’s the rule.’’’

“I’ll tell her that you would like her to,” I say. “How’s that?” He shakes his head in an aggrieved manner. “If you wanted her to sleep in your bed, I would tell her that she had to.”

I lift him in the air and hug him, to which he offers an obligatory complaint. When I put him down, though he insists he is still angry with me and still doesn’t like me, he offers me the story of what may have been his last night’s dream. What follows is the baby’s account.

THE STORY OF MY DREAM

The baby is in the bathroom taking off his overalls when a woman he’s never seen before walks in, carrying a baby about his own size.

“Is it my brother?” the baby asks her.

She doesn’t say anything, a reproachful quality in her silence, and puts the baby, who may or may not be the baby’s brother, in the baby’s place on the toilet.

“Isn’t he a little prince!” the lady says.

The baby holds his nose politely, doing the best he can to ignore the foul air of the other.

A big dog comes into the bathroom, not the dog the baby doesn’t have, but another one, a large white pig-faced dog with flowerlike spots. The dog sniffs the room, then in one large bite eats the other baby, toilet seat and all.

The lady is very sad. The baby tells her not to cry, but she is too busy crying to listen.

“We were going to be married,” she says. “Why did that monstrous dog have to eat him?”

The baby sits on the toilet the way the other did, but fails to make the same kind of splash. Nothing he does seems to please the lady, who is moaning and blowing her nose.

In a voice that makes the windows rattle, the baby orders the dog to return the baby he swallowed. At that moment, a lion comes in and eats the dog.

“Take me away, sweetlove,” says the lady, “before something really bad happens. I like you better than that smelly baby.”

She says her name is Marie, though she is a different Marie.

The baby reaches into the lion’s mouth and pulls out the dog, then reaches into the dog’s mouth to pull out the other baby, who seems a little smaller for having been eaten.

The lady is so overjoyed she announces that both babies can sleep in the same bed with her if they promise not to kick or wet. When they all go into the lady’s room, they discover that someone has eaten her bed.

Marie requests a private interview. The request comes in the form of a note delivered to me by the baby.

I tell her as soon as we are alone that I don’t like her using the baby as a go-between.

“I make such a mess of things.” she says. “I’m terrible. I really am. I really am terrible.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Oh, yes. It was a terrible thing to do. I’m always doing terrible things.” She laughs with self-mockery, offering one or two jewel-like tears. “The baby, you know, your baby, like, doesn’t dig me anymore. I told him yesterday that in my opinion it would be to his benefit to have more peer-group experiences, and now he won’t talk to me and he won’t even look at me.”

“He doesn’t like to be pushed into anything. Which doesn’t excuse his being rude. If you like, I’ll talk to him about it.”

She throws back her head in a melodramatic pose. “You people make me so angry. No offense. But a baby needs some kind of structure from his adult models. You can’t just let him do whatever he wants to do…. Now I’ve said too much and you’re going to ask me to leave.” Her face turns a deep red.

I indicate that we’re receptive in this house to differences of opinion.

“He’s really a love,” she says. “He really is.” She gets down on her knees and pleads with me to change my approach.

Her zealousness is hard to resist. “Have you talked to my wife?” I ask.

“I’ve always had more success with men,” she says.

ANOTHER VERSION OF THE SAME STORY

The baby tiptoes into Marie’s room while she is sleeping, or, in any event, giving the impression of being asleep, and asks her if she’d like to hear the story of the Sleeping Beauty. She’s heard it too many times, she murmurs, for it still to be fresh and exciting for her. Besides, she’s still, ummm, asleep.

“This is a different Sleeping Beauty,” says the baby. “This Sleeping Beauty is awake.”

Awake? The idea seems to interest the baby-sitter for a moment or two before it slips away into the dead spaces of unrequited loss.

“She’s not really awake,” says the baby, improvising. “I just said that to make the story sound different. Well, I’ll tell it to you in a very low voice. Okay?”

The baby-sitter seems to agree to this compromise, though falls asleep in the middle of the story. When she wakes up — it is at the most surprising part of the story — she is in a bad mood and says that the baby has no business being in her bed. “Only people I ask to come into my bed are allowed to be there,” she says. “Now go away.”

The baby is tenacity itself, refuses dismissal, buries himself under the covers, attempts to charm.

Marie rolls him over the edge of the bed, like a sausage, tumbling him to the floor with a bang.

“I won’t tell you any more stories,” the baby says, refusing against disposition of habit to let her see the pain she has brought to his life.

When the baby takes himself away, Marie comes after him, saying she’s sorry, inviting him back. “I’m always like this in the morning, baby. When I’m fast asleep, I can’t bear to be touched. I’ll tell you a story if you come back.”

“Well, I’m not coming back,” says the baby.

All day he refuses to look at the baby-sitter and he refuses to talk to her.

The next morning the baby forgets that he is angry with his baby-sitter and he asks her if he can sleep in her bed.

“Why don’t you go out and play?” she says, turning her back on him.

The baby will not. The baby will not do anything she asks of him.

Contemplating the nature of things in the bathroom that adjoins my study, I overhear this exchange between the baby and Marie.

“Do you love me?”

“I love you.”

“Do you really love me?”

Kissing sounds, or what I imagine to be the sounds of kissing, follow. Moments after that, I hear the door to the baby’s room click shut.

Hours pass. Sibilant whispers snake through the house like a gas leak from some undeterminable quarter.

I am, for no reason I can explain to myself, disturbed by the behavior of the baby and the baby-sitter. It is just not polite, I tell myself, for the two of them to stay by themselves all day in a closed room. It is also, I should imagine, not particularly healthy to be locked in that way. After a point, as an act of responsibility, I knock gently on the baby’s door. “Is everything all right in there?”

I am answered by giggles, which I find not a little shocking under the circumstances.

I mumble something about it perhaps not being a good idea, not being exactly healthy, spending a lot of time in a closed room, do you think? More giggles. Some boos.

“It happens to be a beautiful day out,” I say, and when I get no further answer, go out for a walk to prove my point.

My wife returns from shopping late in the afternoon, laden with packages. She laments the difficulty of finding anything in the stores she really likes. Everything is not right, has been created with someone else in mind.

I make no mention of the baby and Marie.

After my wife shows me the things she’s bought, a pair of socks and a tie for me, she asks if anything interesting happened while she was gone.

“Nothing interesting,” I say.

She calls the baby, and gets no answer. “Did they go out?” she asks.

“They’re in his room.”

“Are they?”

She is about to raise an eyebrow when Marie and the baby glide into the dining room, holding hands, the baby’s face aglow. At the dinner table, they exchange secretive smiles, which do not, of course, escape notice. The baby sings to himself as he eats, his mother observing him with pained concentration.

After dinner, baby and baby-sitter mumble their excuses and disappear upstairs.

“They seem to be hitting it off,” I say to make conversation. “Do they?” my wife says. She presses her face into my shoulder and holds on.

The next day, when the baby comes into the study to borrow my typewriter, I ask him what he does in his room with Marie when they have the door closed.

He shrugs. “Things,” he says.

A certain awkwardness appears to have come between us. I inform him, looking out the window as I deliver my speech, that his mother and I would prefer him to keep the door slightly open when he is alone in the room with his sitter.

When he is gone, I regret having yielded to what seems to me unexamined impulse. I call him back. “Just because it disturbs us,” I say, “it doesn’t mean necessarily that it’s wrong.”

“If the door is open,” he says, “someone might come in and someone might go out. We do Batman, Batwoman, and Batbaby in the room, and if the door is open, the baby could run away.”

We punch each other gently and hug, having come to a better understanding of our respective situations.

“The Sleeping Beauty doesn’t marry the prince that kisses her awake,” says the baby. “She marries a different prince.”

The baby comes into my study — Marie away on an emergency day off, her father sick — to tell me a new story.

In this story, when the Sleeping Beauty is awakened by the prince she is angry at him. Why won’t you let me sleep? she says. If I wanted to be kissed, I would have told you I wanted to be kissed.

You looked so nice sleeping, I couldn’t help it, the prince says.

I hate you, she says. Ohhhhhh!

The prince, who knows how the story used to end, asks the Sleeping Beauty if she’d like to get married.

Are you kidding, prince? she says. I’m not going to marry someone who wakes me up when I’m trying to sleep.

The prince regrets having wasted a kiss in a lost cause. He asks the Sleeping Beauty to marry him one more time in case she didn’t mean her first refusal of him. The Sleeping Beauty says if there is one thing she can’t stand it is a man who doesn’t take her at her word, which is no.

The prince says that though there may be other Sleeping Beauties in his life, he’ll always love this one the best. Then he goes away. The Sleeping Beauty is sad when he is gone, but after a while she falls asleep and dreams of a prince who will never wake her up.

“He kisses too much,” Marie complains to me. “I don’t like so much kissing.”

“You don’t have to go into his room with him and close the door.”

A small glint of surprise animates her otherwise impassive face.

“If I had known that, I wouldn’t be in the present predicament.” She stands with her back to me. “I hope you won’t hate me when I tell you this. There’s another man in my life.”

“Another man?”

She nods, lets out an exhausted sigh. “My boyfriend is insanely jealous. About little things. I had to tell him what was going on, and now he wants me to give up the job. He even talks of punching the baby in the nose.”

“He sounds unbalanced to me,” I say.

“He’s a little unsure of himself,” she says. “Like, he’s had a difficult life. His real mother gave him up and he was brought up by foster parents, both of whom happened to be blind. It gave him a suspicious view of life. He wants to marry me.”

“Your boyfriend?”

“The baby. For my boyfriend’s sake, I think it would be best if I gave up the job.”

For the baby’s sake, I press her to reconsider her decision.

Couldn’t she stay until he got over his crush?

Again we misunderstand each other. She furrows her brow, a pucker of tension in her forehead. “My boyfriend?”

“The baby,”

“And what about me, what about my feelings? The baby will grow up, and find someone else. I’m twenty-two. In eight months, I’ll be twenty-three.” Tears fall. I put an arm on her shoulder.

There is a knock on the door. We freeze, unable to speak, watching the door slowly open.

“Oh, my God,” she whispers. “What should I do?” She panics and rushes to my closet, opening the door and flinging herself in.

“Where’s Marie?” the baby asks.

“She’s hiding,” I say. “See if you can find her.”

He punches me in the side, a gesture more of impatience than of anger, the intent symbolic rather than violent. “I don’t want to play that game.”

I nod my head in the direction of the closet, give Marie away in silence.

“If you see Marie,” the baby says in a loud voice, “tell her I’ll be in my room with Polly.”

The baby-sitter comes out of the closet. “So young and so unfaithful,” she says, hurrying out, turning to give me a sharp look as if I were implicated in some deception practiced against her.

Crashing noises assail my concentration. The baby, red-eyed, furious, returns, saying, “I’m going to tell. Marie is throwing things at me.”

“He started it,” she says, following him in. “He called me a name. You tell him to stop calling me names.”

“She tore up a picture I made of Polly and broke the arms off my Spider-Man model.”

Their grievances against each other extend and intensify, a competition of complaint painful to witness. I stand between them, a truce-team to defend against further outbreak of violence.

“You ought to punish him,” says Marie. “I think at the very least his television privileges ought to be taken away.”

“I think her television privileges ought to be taken away,” says the baby.

“I don’t watch television that much,” says Marie, looking at me as if I were the one who would deny her. “Still, I don’t need to be told things like that. That’s no way to treat someone who lives in your house. I’m not going to stay like that.”

The baby goes with Marie to her room to help her pack. Forty minutes later she emerges with a valise under each arm, the baby at her side carrying one of her plants.

“I don’t want her to go,” says the baby after they’ve kissed good-bye two or three times.

“I don’t want to leave my baby,” she says. Her momentum apparently a determining factor, she moves irresistibly to the front door. “I’ll come back and see you,” she says.

“Will you come tomorrow?” the baby asks.

“I’ll try,” she says in a voice that acknowledges the odds to be prohibitively against succeeding. “I’m going to miss him.”

“I don’t want her to go,” the baby says.

They say good-bye several more times, and when it seems that the procedure might go on indefinitely, Marie rushes out as if weeks late for an appointment she still hopes to keep. The baby waves and calls to her, banging on the window to catch her fleeting attention. We watch Marie walk away with her head bent forward as if she is bracing against a hurricane. In the distance, she seems almost as small as the baby himself.

“She was waving,” the baby says, “but I couldn’t see it because she was turned the other way.” His thumb eases into his mouth, a ship entering port.

A week without word of her has passed since Marie’s departure. The baby keeps an optimistic vigil on a footstool at the window. He pretends he is studying the weather for signs of change. Her name is not mentioned.

Occasionally, he sings the name to himself. Marie. Marie Marie…•Marie Marie Marie…Marie Marie Marie.

The day the baby stops watching for her at the window, Marie calls. Her voice is so low that I think at first she is calling from some great distance.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“Here,” she says.

“Are you in the country?”

“I’m just a few blocks away.” Her voice fading out: “Does he remember me?”

“Of course he remembers. Should I put him on?”

“I don’t know. My head’s so untogether. I’m such a mess. Maybe I’ll come over and see him.”

“Why don’t you come over tonight and have dinner with us. Look, he’d love to talk to you.”

“He would? If he does it quickly, maybe it’ll be all right. My boyfriend’s in the bathroom and he’ll be out, unless he gets into what he’s doing, in about five minutes.”

I call the baby to the phone. “Is it anyone I know?” he asks, wary about taking the receiver, a stranger to its pleasures.

I step outside to give him privacy, and light up a cigar I was saving for a special occasion. Five minutes later, the baby comes out of my study walking backward. “Why did you give me the phone?” he asks.

“Didn’t you speak to Marie?”

“I spoke to Marie,” he says, “but it was a different Marie, not the Marie that was my baby-sitter.”

“It’s the same Marie,” I say.

“It’s not,” the baby says.

One day the baby and his grandmother, walking in the park — this reported to me by the baby — see a young woman pushing a stroller who looks like Marie or who is Marie. The baby calls to her.

(What he is about to tell me is true, the baby says, though it may also be a dream.)

The presumed Marie turns her head in the direction of her name, appears to see nothing, or everything, and then goes on, somewhat more quickly than before.

The baby calls Marie’s name again and gets no reaction except that a dog, apparently named Marie or something like it, comes running toward him.

The misinformed dog knocks the baby over and licks his nose.

When the baby is restored to his feet, the other Marie is in the distance.

The baby continues his pursuit, stopping every once in a while to pick up his fallen grandma or to call out Marie’s name. Each time he calls her name, Marie seems to increase her pace as if — is it possible? — she is actually running away from him.

Does she think he is someone else? Who could he be if not himself?

It is only me he wants to say, but finds himself restrained by doubts.

His pursuit takes the baby through places he has never seen before outside of books and postcards.

After hours of relentless chase — the baby too tired even to call her name — he arrives at the stroller he saw Marie with, now deserted.

There is not another baby in the stroller (as he might have expected) but a large stuffed bear with a note pinned to its chest.

— To my darling darling Baby.

Love, Marie

P.S. As soon as I have the time,

I’ll come and visit you.

“That’s the end of the story,” the baby says. “Does she come and visit?” I ask.

“Does who come and visit?”

“Marie.”

“When I’m older,” the baby says.