My Education (43 page)

“No. That's—a plea. For attention, or love, or something. We're not going to cash it.”

“Of course we're not going to cash it,” he snapped, sounding just like himself for a moment. Receding again, he asked thinly, “Are you sleeping with him?”

Then I felt such compassion for Matthew, that I could have so quickly grown so strange to him, that such an idea now seemed plausible. I would never have thought he could think such a thing, but what else would he think? I didn't flail or gape with affront. I only said, with finality, “No. Our relationship's nothing like that. But—when I knew him before we both moved to New York, he was really important to me. He, and somebody else we both knew. And we all had a misunderstanding.”

“What kind of misunderstanding?” he demanded, aggressive again, lawyerly, for “misunderstanding,” as both of us knew, is a baggy and cowardly word. Yet my reticence dug in its heels.

“Dutra did something for me. Gave up something for me. Because he thought that he should. Because it seemed like the right thing to him.”

“Like this check.”

“In a way. But this other thing he gave up cost him more. And I never even knew that he'd given it up, or how much it had cost, until now.”

“I don't suppose you're going to be more specific.”

“No,” I said, as every kind of apology and appeal and self-justification and assurance to him clamored and canceled the others, until we'd been sitting in silence, absorbing my bald refusal, and it was too late to say anything else.

Matthew picked up the check and gazed at it; who knew what he saw. I knew he was trying to see me. Then he carefully quartered it, and put it in his shirt pocket. “Don't take it with you,” he said. “I'll file it. You wouldn't want him to think you'd come just to return it.”

Now I was in tears, though I'd never less wanted to cry. I didn't want to appeal to Matthew's pity, but to his reason and judgment and trust, and I grasped, all at once, that this was why I was married to him. We often sat together in a place of deliberation, where the temperature was cool and the atmosphere clear. In the past I'd thought it was a weakness, a failure of ardor, when it was the ark. It was where we'd survive, if we did. Perhaps there's no shame in my taking so long to realize it. I'd never had it with anyone else.

Through the blur of my undeserved tears I tried to climb in his arms, but very firmly, and equally gently, he pushed me away.

“When you come back,” he said.

•   •   •

The etiquette of contacting an ex-lover's child to ostensibly compliment him on his blog is not yet codified. I am sure it will be, but I ventured without any guidance. I tried to be brief.

Dear Joachim
, I wrote to his e-mail,
I've liked reading your blog. It was your Dad who first showed it to me. I'm an old friend of his and your mother's. Please say hello to her for me, and tell her, if she wants, she can write to me here or call me at the following number. Best wishes, Regina Gottlieb

And below this, repeatedly typed and deleted and retyped and redeleted and at last after more vacillation but no true resolution a final time retyped and sent, an illogical warning, a warding-off gesture as ornament to the come-hither:

p.s. my three year old son loves the “Dust in the Wind” video of Helene

After fourteen years I perhaps wanted fourteen more hours of wondering how much or whether she thought of me, fourteen more hours to envision the curl of her lip at the sight of my name, to presume she discerned like an X-ray the contortions concealed in my prim little note. Perhaps I thought, having entirely remade my life on the plan of her absence, I still needed a little more time for doorknobs and a last coat of paint. Perhaps it was remorse, or intimation, but when, just a few hours later that morning, my cell phone, set to vibrate, began buzzing and scooting itself with the force of its own agitation the length of my desk, I first thought
please it can't be not yet
even as I smacked down on its beetling locomotion with the palm of my hand. I thanked God that Myrna and Lion had left for the zoo. I reminded myself that my cell phone rang daily, sometimes every few minutes, and that never before had I uttered my greeting and then heard the sound of her voice.

“It is you,” she said. “Regina. My heart's in my throat. I don't know what to say.”

“It is me,” I echoed, having no better idea what to say than she did.

“You're in New York. You're in New York and you saw Nicholas and he showed you the blog.”

“I've been here for years.”

“I was there for a while.”

“He told me.”

“I want to see you,” she said, as if no time had passed, or as if time had rewound its coil and I was that young girl again, who had not known that such things could happen. “I want to see you. But you can't travel, can you. You have a little boy. Do you have a husband?”

“Yes.”

“A little boy and a husband,” she repeated, as if reminding herself what these were. “That must mean you can't travel.”

“I'm actually flying to Oakland next week.”

“I'm a three-hour drive north. Could you drop in on me? Can you drive? You didn't used to know how.”

“I always knew how. I just didn't have my own car.”

“I'm sorry. That's funny: I misremembered. But you won't have a car here.”

“I'll rent one.”

“Of course. Right. All grown up!” She let out a wild laugh, as if slightly afraid. “All grown up, and a mother. You'll come? You'll drop in?”

“I'll drop in,” I told her.

•   •   •

Flying west, I became middle-aged. All the cowardly, derisive ideas I had somehow absorbed in my youth of what middle age meant fell away, as can sometimes occur to clichés for mysterious reasons. That poor hunchbacked jargon stepped out of its clothes and stood uprightly naked and plain. It meant just what it said, nothing else. It wasn't a need for face cream or an interest in stocks or conservatism. It meant that one now touched both ends: that is what middle is. Middle age only meant that the least reconcilable times of one's life would in fact coexist until death. My youth—the demands of my young, able body, and my young understanding, whether able or not—was not going to shrink in perspective while allowing superior ripeness to gently replace it. My youth was the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself. In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being. It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year-olds on the street. It frankly examined their bodies. It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young. It meant I was divided, as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance. I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore. My body had not, in its flesh, fundamentally changed quite so much as it now could intuit the change that would only be dodged by an untimely death, and to know both those bodies at once, the youthful, and the old, was to me the quintessence of being middle-aged. Now I saw all my selves, even those that did not yet exist, and the task was remembering which I presented to others.

At the rental-car desk of the Oakland airport I allowed the young agent to sell me an upgrade: the miserliness of youth, the pride of young poverty, also die hard. One must give them a push. I asked for a sunroof, cup holders. Perhaps this was something like buckling my armor. I could have the Eddie Bauer edition for a mere extra twenty-five dollars a day, and I said I would take it. I could choose from their menu of types of insurance, and I chose the most pessimistic and costly.

That morning, when I'd woken up Lion to tell him goodbye, he had clung to me hard as he sometimes did now, and repeated his heart-piercing mantra:
I want to keep you forever. I want to keep you forever. I want to keep you forever.
I'd let him repeat it again and again as the cab honked outside. I'd felt he was casting a spell over me. Then I asked him for something to carry with me on my trip. He was at the age now where he constantly had some little treasure gripped tight in one palm, almost always some natural object, a pine cone or seed pod or stone. My request had electrified him, ceased his mantra, and caused him to lurch out of bed. “What should I give you?” he wondered, riffling through all the meaningful litter he kept on his dresser and in his toy chest. “Should I give you a chestnut? Should I give you this big dried-up leaf?” Wilted lavender pom-poms of clover, spiny balls from a sycamore tree; we had even considered some small, wilted carrots he'd swiped from the kitchen and hidden, perhaps weeks ago, it appeared from their softness. At last I'd accepted a feather, because I could keep it safe closed in a book. Now I had my knight's amulet, too.

Matthew had kissed me lightly, with dry lips. Neither punishment nor promise in them, as if to say
That's up to you
.

“I love you,” I'd said. “I'll see you next week.”

“I love you,” he'd only replied, only certain that that much was true.

I'd felt him watching from our windows as I got in the cab. I looked over my shoulder, and after a brief hesitation he raised up one hand.

That was my second knight's amulet: the sight of him, letting me go.

I denied myself romance and drove on 101, not the coastal highway, but it seemed not to make any difference, scenery or lack of it, or perhaps had I chosen the fog chloroforming the hills and enhancing the scent of the frayed eucalyptus I might have been less overtaken by Martha, as if this drive, in its dull ugliness, had surrendered up its motion to the past. I had loved to gaze uninterrupted at Martha as she drove, her complicated hands so separate from her gaze, which was cast far out, past the veil of the road, caught on—what? What interior vision had transfixed her then, as my vision of her transfixed me? One summer day we had driven along the lakeshore to a town that was only a few little houses beside a deep creek that went down to the lake over massive square blocks like a giant's staircase; there had once been a mill. Now there was only a wild, profuse flower garden spread across the whole front of a falling-down cottage; Martha had discovered it some years before and admired it, and drove out every summer to perform clandestine observations. This was what she wanted to achieve: a flower garden that seemed to exist outside all human efforts. That day, for the first time, a tiny bent woman, the gardener, ventured out of her house to receive compliments. I remembered now the thrill of spousal impersonation, standing tolerant if silent beside Martha as she avidly talked about flowers and weeds. And I remembered now, too, my inadvertent youthful condescension, when the woman had said, apologizing for some information she couldn't recall, “I still remember the coat I wore when I was five, but I have no idea what I ate for breakfast today.” I'd laughed and smiled in warm sympathy. How sweet, I had thought, she remembers her coat. She must have loved it not to have forgotten. But the coat wouldn't ask any effort of preservation. Feeling ninety, and no longer five, there would be the real effort. Telling that five-year-old girl, in her beautiful coat, You're all finished. Submerged. Obsolete.

We are ghosts of ourselves, and of others, and all of these ghosts appear perfectly real. Like the ghost coming down the dirt track from the house, as the ludicrous rental car bumps to a halt. I slid from the height of the driver's seat trembling, as sometimes now happened to me when I drove several hours at high speed. What had fourteen years taken away? Rancor. Some urgency, not all. The uniform gold of her hair, which was now a composite of silver and gold and exquisite, a far cry from my coarse, wiry gray that I slathered with hair dye, like tarring a roof. The years had taken something more from her skin, for she had that translucent pale skin that is easily weathered, but this imperfection had already been present when I'd known her before, and however much it had advanced, I couldn't measure—she so quickly approached me, effacing whoever she'd been. As if at a threshold, a scant inch of air left between us, she paused and we studied each other, she not without humor, that unruly right-hand corner of her mouth twitching upward, her gray eyes very active, like fast-moving clouds. They seemed to say, Do I dare? Isn't that why you're here? I felt her strong mouth again, wiping me clean, laying bare information; the shock of her body, to the eye barely changed but I now felt transformed, taut and hard with a life spent outdoors even down to the pads of her fingers. Then the inch of air sifted between us again, very different in quality.

“And pregnant too,” she observed. “That's good. A reminder to handle with care.”

Even notched tightly against her I couldn't believe she had known. “I'm not showing to anyone else.”

“Then no one else is looking very closely.”

“Aren't you the hippie earth mother, with all of your instincts.”

“I always was. I especially always had instincts,” she said, never ceasing to touch me, as we stood in the crook of the rental car's arm as if in the nest of her bed. But her “always,” acknowledging time, tinged the air. She drew back a bit more, widening her perspective, and widening mine. I allowed her to study my face, all my own signs of age, as I took in the scene of her life, the gray splintering fence posts, the gray splintering barn with its cavernous mouth through which roosters and hens with unusual plumage importantly, aimlessly marched; I'd read something about them: each one was a heritage breed. A great golden mound of manure with a pitchfork stuck in it, all sorts of other enigmatic structures or monuments, a garage with its doors standing open, a shed, a greenhouse, an outhouse, a rust-eaten swing set, an inexplicable folly with miniature onion-domes seeming to house just a ride-atop lawnmower, all indicating or somehow affirming allegiance to the house, despite their haphazard locations—it was an unsightly yet organic whole, as if it all grew from one source like a forest of fungus. The house itself was large and unromantic and variously clad, and bursting its seams with pragmatic objects, and looking at it I understood, as I had been hesitant to, reading Joachim's blog, that she knew well enough what she was doing. And all around her, so abundant she need not honor, cultivate, or even notice it, the outsize gorgeousness of the land, which she must have liked most for its imperviousness to whatever she did.