My Education (33 page)

My fish were dead. They had been so tiny, their dead bodies scarcely made corpses. I had to search hard for them, my tear-gummed gaze clumsily probing that cube of cold light. The jasmine had died long ago. I had pitched its pot into the trash.

Nicholas and I didn't finish just then, but we did not in the same way continue. Our bed-sharing became almost chaste, though some nights when we drank we did stumble by chance on desire. Then we handled each other roughly, he twisting and biting my nipples, and bringing me as close as I ever would get, and my pinning him down and mechanically bringing him off while the heel of my hand mashed contemptuously on his face. But that sort of thing less and less often. We took care of my housekeeping—or house-losing—errands. I knew it was time to leave now, and not just his apartment, nor mine. He drove me, back and forth, back and forth, to the Salvation Army with loads of furniture and books and pots and pans until finally all was erased but the little I knew I should not do without. If he recognized the few things of beauty and worth, the lamp and rug and framed pictures, as Martha's cast-offs, exiled long ago from his marital basement or attic, he did not say so. I almost did not recognize them myself. That homely and mismatched apartment, the first place I had lived on my own, and for which I had harbored what now seemed such laughable hopes. Spring had come, and the redbud was blooming. The day I left town, I did not look twice at it. We packed my rented car together, a ten-minute job. I locked the doors and tossed the key through the mail slot for Tim and drove in Nicholas's wake back to his apartment, leaving only, I would much later realize, that little clothbound
Shakespeare's Sonnets
of his, that I'd hidden so well even I never saw it again.

An indoor setting seemed required for our formal goodbye, but once back through his door I didn't know where to stand, lurching from sofa to bathroom to kitchen until he pulled me with him onto the staircase, where we had never had reason to sit, but just then it seemed the right choice in its in-between-ness, a perch for neither staying nor going.

He passed his arms around my waist and held me tightly, either to retain me or to gird me to leave, I couldn't decide. I was starting to cry but I'd always cried freely with him; in whatever we'd shared it was one of my primary faces.

“What happened?” I said.

He somehow understood the question exactly. “I think we fell a little in love,” he said after a moment.

“Just a little?”

“And then we decided. That it was enough.”

I had wanted him to contradict this truth. Without some sort of lie I had nothing. “I don't want to go,” I sobbed.

“You're going to be wonderful,” he said into my hair. Then we both walked outside.

Often that first summer I would call him, and we always spoke in murmurs, for hours, like lovers, and very often I wept. But, though I longed for him to with such force that it must have translated to him through the phone, he never asked me to come back and visit. Once I even said, “I was thinking of taking the bus up this weekend,” and he said, after just a slight pause,

“I don't think this weekend,”

with a sort of hollowness at each end of the sentence I understood later was mine to fill in.

Sometimes he wrote me, single or twinned sentences on the backs of austere picture postcards, almost always of Inuit art from the collection of the University of British Columbia, where I assumed he had just seen his brother. These messages were so impersonal I can't even recall them, except for one, his delighted response to my first publication.

A firm push, on smooth waters. After I'd traveled the distance, I saw what he'd done.

“. . . and I figure you'll want to invite me to dinner now that I'm
married
and all,” he signed off in his needling way.

“I'm sorry, what did he say?” I asked Myrna, who was helping me unload the groceries. Of course she would have no idea who he was, and would even find having to speak of my incoming calls a distasteful infringement.

“Oh yes,” Myrna said with reluctance. “This caller. You'll have to back it up further. That's only the end of his most recent message. This caller first rang in the morning, while Lion was taking his ten o'clock nap. I had to lower the volume because I thought he'd wake Lion with speaking so loud.”

“First rang?”

“You'll see there's four messages new. I believe they're the same caller, four different times. I'm not certain. I kept the volume turned down.” Myrna often found evidence of my defects of character in locations quite separate from me, and her comments now regretted my vulgarity, in having such strange, loudmouthed callers as Dutra, and broadcasting the fact with an audible message machine. But she never was rude: saying she'd turned down the volume to help Lion sleep was a kindness of hers to my pride. Obviously I should have my machine's volume down all the time, but I just didn't know any better. For this failure, as for so many others, she supplied her own cure. One of Myrna's ironclad idiosyncrasies was that she wouldn't put Lion's soiled clothes in the hamper, because the hamper was kept in the master bedroom. When Myrna arrived in the morning, if the door to our bedroom was not already shut, she would shut it herself, pointedly. Then, as the hours elapsed, and little Onesies and elastic-waist short-shorts and overall sets grew besmirched in their varied quotidian ways, she would drape items over the bedroom doorknob, one on top of the other. I'd seen her get to the height of six items of clothing. The instant I came home they collapsed to the floor for nobody but me to pick up—but God save Myrna from crossing that threshold and putting the clothes in the hamper herself! It wasn't decent for her to set foot in our bedroom. She knew if we didn't.

“If this guy that called really is married, there must be alien abductors involved,” I said now, because it was one of my ironclad idiosyncrasies to be nervously provoked by Myrna toward just the sort of jokey oversharing for which she had the least use. Of course, Myrna did not take this bait. She only blinked, as if to say, Does this pertain to the physical, mental, or emotional health and well-being of the little boy sleeping now in the next room?

No. In that case, is this something I ought to discuss with my pastor?

No again. Satisfied by the results of her silent inquiry, Myrna pretended she hadn't heard me. “There's leftover pasta with carrots and peas in the icebox,” she said in conclusion. “He made one poop this morning. At the playground he played very nicely with Noah.” She shouldered her purse.

“Thank you, Myrna,” I said humbly. I never felt more like my own impostor than when speaking with her, but she was the best sitter, by many orders of magnitude, we had ever employed, and Matthew—who of course had less than nothing to do with our sitters, having laid eyes on each one of them no more than twice, first to hire, then, until Myrna, to fire—insisted on her. I'd indulged in my youthful experimentation, had my fun—the aspiring-jazz-singer sitter, for example, who diapered Lion backward, and was never less than forty minutes late—and now it was time for an “actual, competent sitter,” to quote Matthew's passionate speech. A sitter who knew what her job was and did it, in order—so I felt went the unspoken subtext—that I might recall what my job was, and do it as well.

I never looked in on Lion while Myrna was still in the house. For all my alleged lapses in guarding my own privacy, I couldn't bear her to realize how eager I was to see him. I would potter around in the kitchen. Unload bags. Coolly glance at my mail. Never once would I ask how he'd been, as if I hardly realized he was there. Then as soon as she left I'd go into his room and kneel next to his miniature bed, where he lay in the throes of his delicious, sweat-dampened, enviable postlunch nap. Today he lay on his side, his legs scissored apart as if he'd been trying to outrun his slumber. His plump cheek squashed against the pillow had pushed his lips apart, deepening the arrowed indentation of the upper. His loose curls lay in a spray around his head. Carefully, fearing I'd wake him, I lowered nose and mouth into the cleft where his neck met his jaw, into that hot crease of cleanly odorous flesh, and there, eyes closed, inhaled and inhaled with hunger—if I could devour it, I thought, and so keep it forever, that hot, honeyed, clean scent of unfallen flesh—

From downstairs, the base of the building, I heard the muffled boom of the massive Victorian oak double doors: Myrna hitting the street. She was off to her other job, a pair of children she picked up from school and stayed with until someone got home. Beyond that I knew nothing of them, due to Myrna's discretion, which didn't mean I did not sometimes find myself thinking
Poor children
, no more shocked than amused by my smugness, as if, like a vice, it gave equal parts pleasure and shame.
Poor children
, to not have their mommy with them in the late afternoon, the best part of the day, when the languorous city belonged to the carefree alone. No one striding tight-lipped to the subway. Outside it was finally spring. When Lion woke up, we would go to the park and count tulips.

That an undeserved fluke, a strange coincidence of passable effort with outsize enthusiasm, was the reason I no longer needed a job, didn't hamper my feeling of moral supremacy over mothers with actual jobs, that I could spend so much more time with my child than they could with theirs. Nor did the feeling of moral supremacy hamper my awareness of being a fake, a do-nothing, unfairly lounging in leisure unearned. The two feelings were two sides of one weave, though it's hard to say which was the “good” side and which the reverse. More than a decade before, after losing my first job in New York as the assistant of an agent of extremely lowbrow fiction who had fired me for being “an incorrigible snob,” I had written what I'd hoped was an extremely lowbrow book as a sort of revenge. “Call me a snob? I'll show you!” I had thought, though in truth I had not meant to show it to anyone. But my young-girl-in-the-city rehash, like a Frankenstein monster, had thrown off her bonds and gone lumbering into the world, and to this day had not ceased her surprisingly lucrative rampage. She'd got herself translated into sixteen foreign languages, and adapted for premium cable; she'd even gotten me, early on, to produce her a sequel. But that was all she would get, I had vowed. Since the second turn of the millennium, as I thought of it, in September of 2001, I had set her aside and expected that everyone else would as well, but strangely, they had not. In general, multiple overloud messages on my machine would have been from my agent, a crass, brassy, hyperactive, come-to-think-of-it-not-so-un-Dutra-like man-boy hustler, who possessed the additional interesting feature of being a colleague of Matthew's, though I'd met Matthew second, through him. My agent was the agency's cash cow; Matthew was their nonfiction cap-feather, their pride, all the more prized for his anomalousness, his wholly un-agent-like professorial solemnity, his Pulitzer Prize–winning projects about genocide and the coming oil crisis. It was a matter of enormous satisfaction to the agency's heads that Matthew seemed there by mistake, and that he'd married
me,
four years after we'd met at an agency party, was fondly considered by his colleagues the stuff of great screwball.

As quickly as I'd swooned into Lion's soft neck, I stood again and slipped out of his room. He had not even stirred.

Dutra had indeed involved himself with my machine. He really had called four separate times, and talked a total of almost twenty minutes, touching on the subject of his marriage exactly once,
gotcha!
-style, in the course of the sign-off I'd already heard. “I figure you'll want to invite me to dinner now that I'm
married
and all.”

“Prick,” I remarked without heat as I picked up the phone. It was a peculiarity of my relationship with Dutra that I neither possessed, nor even knew if existed, home phone or mobile phone numbers for him. For years he had virtually lived at the hospital, in and out of surgery, periodically placing calls to me, at random hours, from what I imagined to be an atmosphere of unremitting somber urgency affronted, if not outright maddened, by his breezy wisecracking. There he must sit, the bludgeon-heavy handset of a bright-red phone prominently labeled
FOR EMERGENCY ONLY
pinched between jaw and shoulder, his long legs propped up on some erstwhile sanitized surface, spinning a pen on one thumb and yakking to his tolerant friend about the fantastical idiocies of his most recent cabbie while scrubs-clad and blood-spattered nurses rushed past him with lifesaving tools in their hands. Or so I imagined the scene, which was why I never called him unless he called me. “Dr. Dutra, please—Regina Gottlieb returning his call,” I ventured to the woman who answered. “I'll put you through,” she murmured pliantly—it was a very famous and well-endowed hospital at which Dutra had landed, and always surprised me anew with its telephone manner of a fancy hotel.

“Hel-
lo
. Looks like I got your attention.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Such a fast callback. That must be a record.”

“I always call you back.”

“Eventually. Anyway, don't you think congratulations are in order? Aren't you so happy for me?”

“Are you seriously married?”

“I would never get unseriously married. Yes, I'm seriously married.”

“Wow! Okay. Congratulations. And who did you marry?”

“I married Nikki.” Here he paused, as if expecting recognition, but I knew he was smirking—I could practically feel his smirk through the phone.

“Have I ever met Nikki?”

“I don't know,
have
you? Her last name is Chevalier. Nicole Chevalier. She's thirty-nine years old,” he declared, as if this were a primary characteristic, although the fact that he was thirty-nine himself was a matter of total indifference to him. “Family's originally from Montreal. Very big-deal people. They own a couple hundred of the Thousand Islands.” Now I could feel he was grinning, his face-splitting, earlobe-to-earlobe, clown/wolf-with-the-upper-hand grin. “Don't you know her, Ginny? She knows you. She's a fan of your book.”

“Jesus, Dutra. You're calling me out of the blue with the news that you're married to some woman you've never introduced me to, and now you're faulting
me
I don't know her?”

Oh, the delight! Oh, the satisfaction! Dutra verily burbled with glee—who needs a bride when one has an old friend to make fun of? “Of course you've never met her!” he crowed. “I've only known her for thirty-five days!”

Nicole Chevalier's elderly father had been operated upon by Dutra, it went without saying brilliantly and successfully, some two and a half years before. After the father's recovery, she'd gone home to San Diego, and dropped cleanly from Dutra's awareness, but as it turned out, he had not dropped from hers. Some six months ago she had written to him and included a photo. They'd shifted to e-mail, and then to the phone. Another man might have suggested a weekend in Vegas or Cancún to test the waters—but Dutra didn't have the leisure of other men or the patience for half-measures. He introduced a bit of drag to the momentum, made her twist in the wind a few months, then invited her to spend his vacation with him in New York. The day she arrived, he proposed. The next day, he took her shopping for apartments. The next week they were at City Hall. The rest of the month they had spent honeymooning in Tunis.

By the end of the conversation he'd extracted what it seemed he wanted even more than my shock: a dinner invitation. “How about next Thursday?” I'd suggested, feigning eagerness proportionate to his.

“Thursday,” he repeated. “Gee. Are you sure? Don't you already have hot
Thursday
plans?”

“Thursday's the new Friday.”

“‘Hey, guess what? I got married!'” Dutra dialogically reminisced. “‘No shit? How fantastic! Let's have a big celebration—on
Thursday
.'”

“Dutra's coming to dinner this Saturday,” I told Matthew that night, by which I meant, in our marital shorthand, Start thinking about what you'll cook.

“Could you have told me sooner?”

“I just found out myself.”

“Involuntary hospitality?”

“Sort of. But, you'll like this: he's bringing his
wife
.”

“He married Alicia?”

“No no
no
. Come on, he and Alicia split two years ago. He's married a woman he barely knew—I'm sorry. I'm guilty again of a misleading adverb. ‘Barely' is not only needless but actually wrong. He's married a woman he
didn't
know—”

“Is this about to become a long story?” Matthew interrupted me, his pen poised in midair above the usual split ream of paper, the first draft of part twelve of
The Rising Fundamentalist Tide
or some such embryonic best-seller. “Because I need to finish reading this tonight.”

“Why don't you just let me know when it's the time for easygoing marital chit-chat? Maybe we can put a little light above your head that turns green for, like, five minutes right before you pass out.”

Matthew had already relowered his head to the page. “I'm sure it's an interesting story. I'll look forward to hearing it.” He had a great talent for squeezing his mind's telescope to the width of a straw. Was a time, I reflected, and not so long ago, when
I
was that split ream of manuscript pages, spread beneath that most smoldering beam of attention—but this complaint seemed both childish and vain, and I took perhaps vain pride in not making it.