Criminals (12 page)

da capo

B
efore the musicians walked on, we sat there with the sad but alert expression worn by concertgoers. All around us were the French braids, the waved white hair, the freckled scalps, the university beards. Our organs were crowded by all the food we had eaten, but we kept a disciplined stillness. Paul shifted his shoulder away from mine.

We had been fighting in the restaurant. We had to fight quietly because the place was small and the owner, who waited on the tables while her partner cooked, scented our fight and kept coming in close to offer us the special she had just written on the blackboard, the wine label to study, the food itself in several stages, the peppermill, and in a last sally the pastry tray. Eventually four other tables were occupied but it was us she favored. We had to keep pausing for her in the midst of our eating and our fight, which should have become funny but did not, partly because of the woman's small tense face set forward at the jaw. She breathed audibly. She had some instinct like the one that makes our dog roll on dead seagulls at the beach. She even made us talk to her and got out of us where we were going after dinner.

When she approached the last time with our change she said, “Chamber music on a summer night! Wish I had tickets myself.” She winked, as if chamber music were something between us that other people might object to. “You still have plenty of time to park,” she said, following us to the door. At first I thought she said part. But she was not the Sybil, and she should have known how to be chilly with people who fight at dinner. She should have a remote, worldly air.

On the way over Paul did not drive recklessly, as he sometimes does when we fight, but with a kind of hunched carefulness, a meagerness in his steering, as if motion would hurt him. His face no longer looked swollen with anger, but tired. Fights like this, that leave you tired, are the worst kind.

I went back, in my mind, to the moment when our voices changed and that feeling came over me, of my head filling like a cup, to the ears, to the forehead, with daring and invention, and then brimming over with words. In the past there was joy in our fights, our blood rose against each other as chosen enemies, a pleasure could find its way into the shudders of insult and retraction. I was not tired the way he was, I could have gone on fighting.

His tiredness had to do with Sophie. A year ago Sophie had been determined to have him. Her determination had flagged, according to him, but she still hovered at the edge of things, did not pick up her bruised family and move away, kept up with her busy practice as a counselor.

Although Sophie has nothing more than an MA in psychology, and a job as a private counselor, she was the one brought in to give Paul's office a seminar on avoiding hierarchy in the workplace. After her presentation several of them took her down to the cafeteria for lunch, and she began to cry, because her cat had been put to sleep at the vet's that morning and she had not been there to say good-bye. Her crying, I am told, went beyond what might reasonably be passed over. Paul was the one who walked her to her car and questioned whether she should drive.

Think of that. Paul doesn't like women's tears, because of the many years of trying to stanch his mother's. Think of Sophie, always
in tears, asking waiters for Kleenex, hunched over the ferry railing in the middle of the Sound, stumbling into elevators in her tear-fogged glasses, sobbing at the dentist's, lurching out of a movie in the middle.

Think of such a person trying to sort out the troubles someone is confiding to her.

I know about these things because Paul told me. He let them drop, so that I had to picture him at a movie in the afternoon. They did that. Both of them shirking jobs, watching for people they knew, wasting the only time they had. How could they do that? I was screaming at him. What movie did they see? Did they go to the grocery store? Did they put gas in the car? Did they pretend they were married?

Once I knew Sophie existed, he couldn't stop himself from speaking of her. He thought he was just letting out a few details to relieve the pressure. Crumbs I could follow to get him if he got too far. He came home once with a grubby shadow on his shirt where they had tried to rub off tears and mascara.

I know about this kind of abject love. About him, what he is like when you are going through it. He goes through it, too, he is not a bystander.

A lover of music, Sophie could be on her way to this concert. We were all here in this same hall once before. He and I had the children with us. Karen, the younger of our girls, said to me, “Why do you look like that?” They never knew that Sophie had us in her sights and was leading us, like a sniper. Of course they knew nothing of Sophie and her red hair and her terrible cramps and her MA, even when their father talked to them on the phone from the hotels where he was staying with her, because he had to make sure we could reach him in a family emergency.

And what would she think if she knew she was not even mentioned in the fight we were having only a year later, in the hurt we were taking and giving? One of my friends said, “Try not to fight with him, just for a while.” She saw the need for caution. But we would have had to change, and if that change could be made, why not the one he was contemplating?

The children had thrown a match to our quarrel while we were getting dressed. They came in from riding their bikes, sighing and scowling because I won't let them stay out on bikes at the end of the day, in rush hour.

In a study, out of some number of children—in the thousands, I think—asked at random times what they were thinking about, none mentioned an adult. Sometimes you think of things you have it in your power to do, that would force your children to think about you, the power you have to break into the room of childhood, which they think is locked against you. Anyway, they were certainly not thinking about us, about our plan to go out, to face each other alone across a table and then sit in a darkened hall listening to music, and to reach underneath these things to lift out the buried excitement, distantly related to that of playing outside at dusk when we were their age, and try to keep it alive for an evening.

All three of them were getting ready to play Clue. Robbie had used up his time on video games for the day, and, having renewed his haggling for more time, had angered Paul and lost his game privileges for the weekend. His face dark, he was lying on the floor in the girls' room, drumming his thumbs, while they spread out the Clue board with its obsolete miniature weapons and detective notepads.

Not far into the game they began to disagree. “Goddammit,” said Robbie, ten years old. I was standing in the doorway and Jenny and Karen looked up at me. Robbie bowed his head over the board.

I don't want to have brought forth a family in which a ten-year-old says goddammit, not as a challenge but with adult bitterness.

Robbie is not in adolescence, but he is drawing near; he has the size—big feet, big joints, and squaring jaw—and the melancholy that prefigure it. Because of his birthday he is with children a year younger than he is in school, and this summer he is perplexed at some of their interests. He tries to go back and retrieve his love for the action figures he put in a bag to give away. When you are that age, each year really is a closed system, a stage. Maybe throughout life each year is a stage that we are too distracted to recognize. “It's because she's forty-one.” “Ah, forty-one.” It might be that we would treat a year
more respectfully if it were granted its own characteristics, even a name. There are not so many that we couldn't do that, greet each year at the birthday as it descends, original as a snowflake, with all the coming situations of mind and body sealed in it.

The year the alewives washed up on the Chicago beaches.
Paul and I lived, new lovers, above a tavern in a neighborhood with shrines in the backyards, with the Virgin or St. Francis holding out their arms over little fountains. The people with yards and statues knew we were not married and, we felt, watched us. The smell of decomposing fish along the shore of Lake Michigan, the smell of the stockyards near our apartment—these not only did not repel us, though we indulged in rich complaint, they seemed to us to be the world in its real, as opposed to its fancied, glory. Our fights were the same thing, words dark, stinging and flavorful as the beer we drank.

What dispelled the glory of these fights, their predictable but mysterious descent, I do not know. By means of them, it was possible that year to descend into a dim red place of bodily pity and remorse, and desire to please, and pardon. A little room, a confessional.

The year I read half of
Anna Karenina on a plane, leaving the country for the first time, thinking about the dullness of Levin and Kitty as a couple. The question was why people married so relentlessly, when it was the nature of love to take place outside of marriage. Over the cramped hours in the air, the stodgy Karenin made his increasingly pathetic appearances. There was something I didn't know, even though it was there in the book for me to read and I read it and thought I knew it. The most important thing: the thing Anna lost, dwarfing lost virtue and pride and even the love of Vronsky. Her son—her beloved Seryozha!

I read it but didn't know.

The year of Mr. Mead
,
First Year Algebra
in his hand as we all took a deep breath every time he turned, with his shoulder blades back, his layered muscles showing in the Banlon shirts his wife bought him, and wrote on the board. A full year of being unable to drag my attention from the way his wide back funneled smoothly down into his narrow beltless pants. When he turned from the waist, it struck me
that his sides moved the way a slab of modeling clay does when you begin to twist it. I went over and over this similarity. I was hardly any distance from scissors and glue and clay. One minute in braids, stiff with pride, carrying up my clay man to put on the teacher's tray to be fired, the next tall, slumping, sore in the breasts, mysteriously weakened. Mr. Mead.

And that obsession was only a shadow of the first one. Lately I wonder if it all goes back to the way you begin, and after that you love in that way, or go sleepwalking after something that evokes the luxury, fatality, sorrow, whatever the strong taste was, of that first one.

The year of the bad boy.
The year I was eleven I liked the bad boy all year. Because of that boy I am helpless in the hands of my son, who sometimes looks out with the same yellow-eyed look of a playing dog that would like to bite you, and barely restrains itself. A boy's look when he is finished with childhood and doesn't know it. That boy. Boy. A silly, jocular word for the mean, thin, graceful thing, the ghost-like thing.

He always had dark circles under his eyes, from having no bedtime, the teacher said. I waited for his high infuriated laugh after he stood in the corner while we read aloud, the sass he would mutter if she turned her back, the finger he would flick on the way back to his desk. Class, it wasn't funny, she said when he was in the principal's office. He was a serious troublemaker. He did things we could not be told about.

He knew something about the way I felt. When he passed close by my desk so he could rattle his knuckles on it I could smell the briny iron smell of the monkey bars on him, mingled with playground dust and a smell that was himself. I saw the unraveled hem of his T-shirt sleeve where his thin, hard arm emerged. Bruises all over it, lakes of bruise, disappearing onto hidden skin. Vague rumors about his father's meanness. We didn't have the word “abuse.”

For a while I thought the others were pretending indifference to the dark eyebrows drawn together, the bitter, grinning look that so afflicted me. But I was the one pretending, turning my back at recess, making the face the girls made when a teacher dragged him off the
playground.
She likes him.
The girls knew. But I could not stand up for a passion. I denied him.

It was a passion, although we called it liking. All the girls did.
She likes him
. Nothing I have felt since then has ever put it in the shade.

The children go back and start over and begin an elaborate plan to deprive Karen, the middle one, of the advantage she showed the last time. She chews her sandy hair casually. She takes part in the plan to handicap her, knowing she will win anyway. It is all established in the year each one of them is undergoing. Robbie will fare badly, thus he says goddammit.

I don't think in this actuarial way about the family for long. Soon the children have to go back to the beginning and start again because Robbie has used up his guesses early and he is crying. All three of them are oddly tenacious about Clue, as if they must expose a real misdeed. To the exacting oldest one's chagrin, her sister has put random objects on the board, a paper clip and a bottle cap, to replace the lost tiny pistol, the noose.

Then minutes later it happens again. They will not give in to Robbie's tears; he has made his mistakes and must play on without a chance to win. He cries loudly in his new way, with groans, the last—though he does not know it—that he may ever cry until somebody wrenches tears out of him when he is our age. Karen, the winning one, says something I can't hear. Her way is not to fight but to make observations about weaknesses in the others, which they think are secret. Robbie hauls up on his elbow and hits her between the shoulders with his fist, hard. She knows I'm there in the doorway so she does nothing. Robbie scrambles up, scattering the pieces, and begins slapping her on the head with the Clue board. The dog gets stiffly to his feet, points his nose down and barks. The board tears down the middle.