My Education (23 page)

“Working on her book. It was Nicholas's day, but he's sick.”

“And she couldn't quit work for one day to take care of her kid?”

“Jesus, Dutra. I'm not dangerously incompetent.”

“No one said you were. I just think it's ballsy, using the girlfriend for free babysitting. Have a little pride, Ginny.”

“Fuck yourself, Dutra.”

“No other options. Are you coming in? It's been starting to feel like I'm living alone.”

We didn't go inside but sat out on the porch, where I could still see the baby, slumberous in his seat, through the Saab's open window. The reflections of overhead trees weirdly framed him, oak leaves pulsing and glittering out of the glossy black depths of the Saab as if off the face of an undisturbed pond. I realized it had been a whole year since I'd first seen this house, walking here from the bus stop with a scrap of paper in my hand and being greeted by avid Dutra, with his long Roman nose and his tireless, percolating attention. It could have happened a decade ago. This summer, my time in this house had been simplified to intervals of sleep and then simplified further, to the occasional retrieval of some item. I lived with Martha entirely now. I wore her clothes and ate her food and read her books and even brushed with her toothbrush and washed with her soap, I left my drained coffee cups in her car and my shed hairs and sweat in her sheets. If I already knew that this couldn't go on, I equally knew that I couldn't move back in with Dutra. The house behind me felt as separate from me as it had on the day I'd first mounted the steps. And Dutra felt separate too, in an opposite way. I felt a reaching toward him like an ache. What I'd missed most was precisely this mode, this purposeless sitting together with beers while his mind paced and rummaged and ceaselessly tossed scraps of putative knowledge at me. The human mammal, for example, was not meant to metabolize wheat, hence beer made us sleepy; and yet this was the nature of civilization, these determined pursuits of the unnatural. Beer had been discovered when the stored wheat got wet and fermented, but what made man start storing wheat? What had made him start farming, stop hunting, forget who he was—

“I've decided to rent my own place,” I cut in.

For a moment Dutra, halted midlecture, tipped his beer bottle and gazed down the street. “Have you found something?”

“Not yet.”

“I've got the
Journal
inside. Take a look at the ads and if there's anything good I can drive you to see it. The way to do it is line up a bunch and I can drive you to see all of them at one time. That's the biggest pain about apartment hunting, all the time you spend seeing them.” The more officiously he offered his help, the more I knew I'd hurt him. We were both staring forward but in my peripheral vision I could see his bottle being raised to his lips with a quicker tempo, as if he'd remembered he had to be somewhere and wanted to drain it.

“It's not anything personal, Dutra. I just want my own space.”

“Sure you do. We all do. If it wasn't for money I'd live here alone. But I've loved living here with you, Ginny. Even when you've been crazy.”

Perhaps only Dutra could use the word “love” as if setting out two separate, even opposite meanings, for the listener to choose from, at no risk to Dutra himself. I've “loved” living with you as a cheerleader loves, with indiscriminate, bouncy fatuity that in fact isn't love, because it privileges nothing, which means living with you has meant nothing to me. Or: I've loved living with you—words I've not said to anyone else. I knew the second meaning was his true one, from his calling me crazy.

“Wanting the shower curtain pulled shut isn't crazy, you asshole,” I said, looking at him so that he had to look back. “Otherwise it gets moldy.”

“Wanting the toothpaste tube cap on the toothpaste isn't crazy, either. Otherwise gobs of toothpaste get stuck on the sink.”

“Much worse than the toilet seat always left up.”

“
Much
worse.”

“I've loved living with you, too. I'll miss you.”

“It's been like you already left,” he said after a moment. “Sure you need your own place? You're pretty much living with her.”

“I want my own place. Besides, the au pair's moving in.”

“The oh what?”

“The au pair. A live-in babysitter. It's like an exchange student, except she takes care of your kid.”

“So she's going to be young?”

“About my age. A year out of college.”

Now he was feeling better. A wolf grin split his face. “Oh, baby,” he said. “
Now's
when you're going to move out? And let the au pair grab your spot in the bed?”

If I hadn't been feeling so tenderly toward him I might have broken my beer bottle over his head. “If all Martha wanted was a woman my age she wouldn't need an au pair. Women my age are pretty thick on the ground around here.”

“But this one will be living in her house. Taking care of her kid,” jerking his head toward Joachim, still oblivious in the backseat. “Might start to remind her of a very special person.”

“Fuck you, Dutra.” I shoved my chair back and stood up. “It's late. I should go.”

“Aw, c'mon. I'm just teasing.”

“I know you're teasing and I don't give a shit, but I do have to go.”

He followed me back to the Saab, and stood a moment peering in the backseat. Joachim had shifted his head, exposing one flushed, dented, drool-varnished cheek. I found a clean cloth in his diaper bag and dabbed the cheek dry before getting into the car. “You seem good at this,” Dutra said through the window.

“I used to babysit when I was thirteen. It's all come back to me.”

“I really was just teasing about the oh-whatsit chick, but—don't turn your back, Gin. If you know what I mean.”

“I don't. I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“I just mean, when your lover leaves someone, for you—or is cheating on someone, with you—those kinds of betrayals are maybe a habit. I'm just speaking on principles.”

“She didn't leave Nicholas for me. Their marriage was over a long time before it was over.”

“Still. Hallett seems like a leaver. Just take care, okay, Ginny?”

I started the engine, perhaps more emphatically than was required, and as an afterthought glanced into the backseat. Still asleep. Joachim's capacity to sleep, at age ten months, through every kind of disturbance, would lead me to believe, incorrectly, that imperviousness was a component of his personality, and not just a transient feature typical of this developmental stage. “I know you like to believe that I need your protection,” I told Dutra, “but I'm actually fine. Really. You can relax,” and within I shored up this proud self-diagnosis by smugly reflecting that here was a man who required a six-pack, a packed bong, and both the TV and stereo on before his mind calmed enough to allow him to study. At least until I'd turned the corner he lingered in the driveway watching after the car. I turned slightly too sharply, as if shaking him off.

•   •   •

It had taken them a long time to choose the au pair, weeks of manila file folders passing back and forth between their departmental mailboxes bearing densely written Post-its by which each, with scrupulous courtesy, expressed grave doubts about the first choice of the other. The autobiographical essays, CVs, testimonials, and head shots of contending au pairs papered Martha's table, crackled in her bedsheets, slid underfoot when one climbed into the car. Wherever I looked, female faces looked back. They had an unpleasant effect on me. I too now needed a job. I too seemed to possess as my principal qualifications only youth and a uselessly broad liberal-arts education. Unwillingness to work as an au pair might set me apart, but then again it might not. The au pair applicants seemed to fall into three major types: the cheerleader/camp-counselor type, the premature-matron type, and a last miscellaneous type whose only trait in common seemed to be an unstated, but to me perfectly palpable, unwillingness to work as an au pair. It was written all over their faces, and loudly crammed between the lines of their overlong, self-regarding essays on their interests and goals. Perhaps inevitably it was one of this third type that Nicholas and Martha finally chose. She was a German named Anya, and I hypothesized that her pompous essay about studying Goethe had let them feel they were not hiring a substitute parent, but accepting a protégée.

When I'd told Martha I'd decided to drop out of school, her reaction had been so enthusiastic I'd started to wonder, in my mounting annoyance, if I'd hoped she would talk me out of it. “Baby, I'm so proud of you!” she enthused, sitting up from the postcoital snarl of bedsheets within which for some reason I'd thought to attempt serious conversation. “Graduate study of literature is the catchall for smart, rudderless people who can't think what to do with themselves—that's how
I
ended up here. I wish I'd had your guts. Honestly, babe, you're so lucky to be at the front of your life and not stuck halfway into the mire. I always want to say it to my most brilliant students: Get out! Go do something real! But I'm their professor: ironically the most qualified to tell them to get out of this field, and the least able to do so. I'm supposed to make clones of myself—” On and on she went like this, extolling my boldness and vision, until I could no longer quash my suspicions.

“You're awfully relieved I dropped out. Were you afraid that I couldn't have hacked it?”

“Couldn't have taught the great works to a room of stoned children? Are you joking? I think you could have—I think you
can
—do almost anything else.”

This mollified me, for the moment. “The problem is, I can't figure out what the anything will be.”

“You don't have to. You're twenty-one! Do you know what I'd give to be that age again?”

“Do you know what I'd give if you'd stop saying that?”

“I know what you should do: travel. It's what I should have done.” With lusty vicariousness she began to plot out my itinerary. “London, Paris, and Rome,” she began, “just to get those three out of the way. Then you keep heading east. Istanbul—”

“Now you sound like my mother.
‘Europe's Crown Jewels
.
'
‘Gateway to the Ottoman Empire
.
'
I haven't got money to travel.”

“Money? You need a backpack and train pass. In fact, I think you've got to buy the train pass while you're still twenty-one. When's your birthday?”

“November twenty-eighth.”

“That gives you three months!”

“But you're teaching this term.”

I might have finally irked her as much as she had irked me. “Regina,” she warned. “Look around at my life here. I can't travel with you.”

“And I don't even want to! I'm not interested in travel, I'm interested in you. And you seem interested in waving me off from some dock.”

“I'm interested in what's best for you,” she shot back, swinging out of bed. “I thought you wanted to be free.”

“Not of you.”

“Why does everything turn melodramatic?” she cried. But she returned to the bed and threw her unshowered body on mine.

The au pair finally arrived the first day of fall term, on the regional flight from New York that was always an unannounced interval late. Nicholas was teaching all morning, and after waiting several hours Martha had to rush down to campus to teach her own class, leaving me for a last time in charge of the baby. Just a few minutes later a taxi pulled into the drive. The au pair, Anya, looked just as she had in her picture, but larger. I imagined her ancestress swinging a scythe with her hair in a kerchief. Anya, however, was generations separated from outdoor occupations. Although August was ending she was as pale as if she'd spent the whole summer inside. She wore a long black tube skirt and an oversize black cardigan with large buttons and librarians' pockets, which costume should have been modest but somehow was haughty, as if by it she meant to imply that anyone who dressed better than she must be trying too hard. The quantity of her things was surprising. She stood by in calm idleness as the driver, the sort of sunburned, grizzled, eye-creased, twitchily feral white man I always assumed, seeing his doppelgängers lining the bar at the Pink Elephant, must be a Vietnam vet, with begrudged effort emptied the trunk. Things piled up on the grass: two large, soft, fat suitcases, a shoulder bag, a tote bag, sundry plastic shopping bags, and four small boxes which might have been packed full of lead from the way the man staggered with effort. “Which door?” she asked me, meaning I ought to direct him.

“I'll help you carry your stuff. He's a cab driver.” She raised her eyebrows very slightly at this, then let her gaze fall on the baby, who'd been watching the process with interest.

“So you are Joachim,” she said matter-of-factly, as if checking him off a list. She didn't offer to take him, so that I had to struggle, hitching him up with one arm, to get Martha's envelope open and pay the cab driver. I overtipped him for her presumption that he was her servant, somewhat hoping that as a result he would servantlike carry her heaped things indoors out of gratitude to me. He got back in his cab and drove off.

“Let's go in,” I told her. “We can put Joachim in his playpen and then carry your things in together.” But she was already making her way to the house, taking off her cardigan as she went.

“This is a nice house,” she said over her shoulder. “Larger than it looked in the pictures.”

“You saw pictures?”

“Of course. Of the kitchen and yard and my room. I could not have chosen to come if I didn't know what I would find.”

“I thought it's more like they chose you.”

“We chose each other. Otherwise there can be bad surprises. Sometimes there are, anyway.” She'd led me through the solarium and now her gaze flicked appraisingly around the vast kitchen. “I would love to drink some coffee, if possible.”