My Education (16 page)

“Because you're at such pains to tell me that it's not because of me! ‘We're gonna have more time, babe, but it's not because I wanted time with
you
.'”

“I
did not fucking say that
, Regina. I said that I've asked Nicholas to give me some time, to sort out what the fuck's going on with our marriage, and that's about
us
, that's about myself and Nicholas, not you.”

“What the fuck is the difference?”

“I need time apart from my husband; I want time with you; but these two things aren't caused by each other. They're not connected!”

“How the fuck can they not be connected?” I screamed, shoving her breakfast-nook table behind me. For love had bestowed such a dangerous sense of entitlement I thought nothing of storming my way from the house into which I had tiptoed just hours before. Just hours before, when we'd whispered our blunt urgencies, and suffocated our climaxing shouts in her pillows. Now that we had privacy I was shrieking and throwing her kitchen door wide on its hinges. Down the length of her drive and the prosperous lane with its tasteful stone walls and its fake hitching posts I went wailing without inhibition, and when the Saab pulled up just beside me I was so overtaken with woe I did not even realize at first who it was.

“Get in the car,” she urged me. “You cannot put this show on in front of my neighbors!”

“Why should
I
care what your neighbors are thinking?” I snarled. But I got in the car, and for once she had no quick response, and we drove down the hill in silence.

We continued the silence a long time in front of my house, gazing out her windshield, again like uneasy travelers who are no longer sure what direction they're going. At last I said, “Did you tell him you're seeing me?” and with too little hesitation she said,

“No.”

“Because—the fact that you'd rather not see him has nothing to do with the fact that you'd rather see me.”

“Yes,” she said after a moment, remotely. “That's right.”

I turned my head slightly, allowing her into my sights. I was only trying not to shed more tears, but she seemed to feel my gaze as a further chastisement. “I don't think you can understand—” she began, in the worldly-wise, weary voice that I most would have liked to despise, if I could have despised any part of her.

“Please don't,” I said, getting out of the car, “add insult to the injury.”

“Nicely put.”

“I've always been bright for my age,” I said, slamming the Saab's door as hard as I could.

I sobbed myself to sleep at the height of the day and that evening awoke through a fug of trapped heat to an awareness of weight at the end of my bed. My lamp was off and my door almost closed, but a needle of light crossed the floor from the hall. The TV was nattering faintly downstairs. “You and Dutra really do live like pigs,” mused her voice in the darkness, and then she stretched out beside me and I gasped in the vise of her arms.

“That prick let you in,” I protested.

“He was happy to see me. He said, from one prick to another, that I'd better shape up or be sorry.”

“I love you,” I said, with my face hotly pressed to her neck.

“We need to get out of here,” she was deciding. “We're going away.”

•   •   •

Any amount of time later I'd far better understand what at that time I barely understood at all, though Martha might have approved of my incorrect, seafaring view of our progress: sometimes against the wind, sometimes with it, but always forward. She might have approved, in her maritime way, but she would have been equally wrong. We weren't zigzagging forward but wildly seesawing, the ups ever higher, the downs ever lower, our fulcrum nailed smartly in place. Martha's flights of hedonism—Martha's brooding resolutions and remorse. Martha's desire—Martha's duty. I'd like to say I defied gravity just as often as feeling its snare, but my efforts were more likely spent clinging on with white knuckles to not be dislodged. Still, that was my heroism—my tenacious fidelity to her, though it was based on a grave misperception. I thought desire
was
duty. No trial could not be endured nor impediment smashed in desire's holy service, or so I believed, with naïve righteousness. I didn't grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often do.

Since the start of their marital troubles, which at least I had rightly perceived had begun very far in advance of my entrance, Nicholas and Martha had been in the habit of borrowing homes—always on the pretext that they lived in the middle of nowhere. They knew many accomplished people, principally New Yorkers, who were always decamping for Paris or Oxford or Stuttgart or Rome for a month or semester or year, to accept invitations to research or teach or complete overdue manuscripts. Nicholas and Martha would ask for the keys, so they need not reserve a hotel when they came into town for their opera subscription—but there was no opera subscription, and their travels together had long ago ceased. Tacitly alternating, one would go for a weekend or week to New York, then the other, and though both liked New York very much they went less to be there than away from each other.

This routine, once the baby arrived, had become both more halting and more necessary. At Christmas, a Manhattan professor they knew relocated to Los Angeles for the semester, and Nicholas, in response to insistent suggestions from Martha, became able to spend frequent weekends away. In May, the professor decided to remain in L.A. until August. And so it was that when Martha asked Nicholas not to come home right away from his three-week canoe trip, she knew her request would be, if not easy, at least possible for him to grant, and that in fact the Manhattan apartment was already fairly well stocked with his clothes.

That was where he had been since he'd left the Ontario woods, with the exception of the day he had driven five hours to spend a wretched less-than-two with his eight-month-old child at a Holiday Inn. At the time I didn't ponder this insult to Nicholas's parenthood. Far less did I dream Martha might have, or that she'd set out to redress the imbalance, if only to safeguard her interests. When she explained to me that she and Nicholas were switching places for a week, I didn't number the innumerable grains of need, and counter need, of hurt and counter hurt, of expectation shortfall and unhappiness surfeit that might, all bagged up, have the heft of a faltering marriage. I didn't see the circumstance as having much to do with marriage at all. Some forgiveness is owed me: Martha meant my perspective to suffer strict limits. Perhaps she wanted to impose them on herself. Her husband would enjoy the freedom and mastery of his own home and the company of his own child for the first time in over a month; but what she said to me was,
We need to get out of here, baby. We're going to New York!
Could I have blamed her, had I realized how many enmeshed purposes she was serving by each of her actions? In fact I might have loved her more, for the exhausting intricacy of her achievement, but this was the last thing she wanted.

We were going to New York—that was all I need worry about, and in the days leading to our departure I indulged that concern every way that I could. I bought new clothes of the sort I naïvely imagined would make me appear a New Yorker. I had my hair cut and my toenails done. I fretted, in the campus bookstore, over which was exactly the right sort of casually intellectual, urbane novel to read in New York in whatever spare moments I had. André Gide? Djuna Barnes? The morning that we were to leave I awoke by myself in her bed, morning light streaming through the tall windows. This time she'd left no note for me
.
It was already nine-thirty, the house very quiet as it always was this time of day, for Joachim and Lucia would have departed by now on their unknown, by me un-thought-of, rounds. Martha must be downstairs waiting. My eager efficiency in the shower was blunted somewhat, as if encountering headwind, by the enveloping recollection of the shower we'd taken the previous night, when we'd come in by stealth at some hour past one in the morning. We liked to make love very clean and go to sleep very dirty, sweat-enmatted and pungently syrup-adhered. Now back in the shower my attempts to self-cleanse became counterproductive, as my hand dropped the soap while one cheek squashed against the cool tile, and I muffled a groan that emerged like a gurgle and, though standing, almost drowned myself. Even with all this digression it was just ten of ten when, in a brand-new short skirt and short-sleeved leotard and new wedge-heeled sandals, I hurried downstairs to make coffee for Martha and instead almost stepped on Lucia. She knelt before the open refrigerator, silently accusing its disordered contents with a dripping rag poised in one hand. A cloud of bleach fumes scorched my face, originating logically from a bucket that sat on the floor but more persuasively from her contemptuous, unsurprised gaze as she slowly revolved it from the open appliance to me.

“
Ree-search assistant,
” she satirically addressed me. “You don't have your own home?”

“I didn't realize you were here.” In my shock at encountering her, my words sounded brusque, even rude. I hadn't faced her since the first time I'd met her, though we'd logged scores of hours beneath the same roof. Now I wondered in a cascade of panic if she could have been conscious of me all that time.

“You don't realize much,” she agreed, returning eyes forward again. “You are young but you supposed to be smart. One of
his
favorite students.” In another speaker, or in another speech, the emphasis might have meant snideness toward Nicholas but here I understood it meant snideness toward me. I was all the more contemptible, for failing to live up to the esteem of such an admirable man.

“I'm not so young,” I snapped, for she couldn't have chosen a better way to rouse my indignation.

“Then you worse,” she said. “Better young and stupid than old enough you should know better.”

“Know better than what?” I demanded.

“You got kids?” she demanded in turn.

Lucia was, as I knew via Martha, a great-grandmother at the age of fifty-eight. Bullet-shaped, orange-skinned and -haired, partial to fuchsia and orange tones as well for her eye shadow, rouge, blouses, and elasticized slacks, Lucia was, I would recognize later, as thorough a manifestation of uncompromised will as I've ever encountered. Marooned in the northeasternmost corner of the opposite America from that which she preferred, she had responded to a seven-month snow season, a twelve degrees median wintertime temperature, an average of two hundred and eighty-nine overcast days every year, with a personal palette of tropical colors that would brook no dilution; and the unwavering glare that she cast with her wardrobe was well matched in strength by her judgments of people and things. Lucia subscribed to notions of honor and blood loyalty with which no amount of enlightened employer-employee behavior on the part of Martha could ever compete. Martha might pay Lucia a staggeringly generous wage; procure her health insurance and a retirement account; attempt chatty, confiding analysis with her of Joachim's abilities and temperament; and it would never offset Martha's fundamental crime: that she was not, by her nature, maternal. Martha left the lion's share of decisions regarding Joachim's diet, sleep schedule, quotidian amusements, and even, as he grew a bit bigger, his discipline to Lucia, under the hopeful assumption that such obvious respect for Lucia's judgment would inspire Lucia to have respect for Martha's judgment, in return. Of course the opposite happened. The less Martha bossed Lucia, the larger and louder grew Lucia's contempt. Lucia now resorted to almost flamboyant sedition, as if she hoped, perhaps with the last shred of respect she retained for Martha, to instigate from Martha the sort of brute retaliation that would restore Lucia's regard to the exact extent it put her in her place. Instead Martha continued to give Lucia yet more reasons to disrespect her, of which I was merely the latest.

But all this insight was yet to be mine—it lay years in the future—for it was contingent on the very condition she'd sarcastically asked me about. At that time she knew better than I did how far children were from me, not just chronologically but mentally.

“Of course not,” I shot back, as if she'd given offense.

“Why ‘of course'? Your age, I had two kids already. Now five. Fifteen grandbaby. Last year, first great-grandbaby.” She still squatted where she had been but she had turned her whole body toward me, hunkered on her haunches like a toad about to spring, both extremities of temperature skewering out from her eyes, the overtaxed refrigerator, its door propped wide by her muscular rump, raising the pitch of its whine as its compressor went into high gear. As if to show me that I would not, by my malignant presence, cause her to neglect that appliance no matter how I might try, she seized a tub of sour cream out of its depths, pitched this into the trash, and then with some obvious pain straightened up to her full height and smacked the door shut. “I give them everything,” she concluded, pushing her eyebrows at me as if to dare me to doubt it.

“I'm sure you're a wonderful mother,” I said unkindly.

“
Everything
. I have nothing. Still they have everything. For my girls always beautiful clothes. For my boys always bikes, they get soccer, they get good shoes no one wore them before. Then they get big, they go, I come here so I do for them better. All my grandbabies, my great-grandbaby, I want I am giving to them. Always giving! Not taking!”

“Why are you yelling at me?” I yelled at her. “Where's Martha?”

“With
him
,” she condescended to my utter stupidity, and then as I gaped in mute astonishment, realized she was still giving me too much credit. “The
baby
,” she clarified in exasperation.

Even had I guessed on my own I would still have felt somehow deceived. “The baby?
Where are they? Where did they go?”