Peaceable Kingdom (7 page)

I no longer read at all. Without that awareness of what Lewis might choose, I’d lost my whole principle of selection. Out of habit, I browsed the shelves; nothing seemed any less boring than anything else. I gave up
Love Connection
, but often fell asleep watching TV, not for entertainment so much as for steadiness, comfort, and noise. For a while I forgot the doll, then considered throwing it out. I wound up tossing the counterpane over its head and leaving it in its chair; the doll showed no reaction. I remember waves of a tingly frostbite chill, a physical burning that sent me racing to the mirror. Naturally, nothing showed. It should not have been so painful, the whole thing had been so short-lived, not nearly so bad as, say, the breakup of a long marriage, losing someone you’ve shared years and children with. That pain is about everything: your life, your childhood, death, your past. Mine was purely about the future.

That winter the future took a very long time to come. I felt that time had become an abyss I would never get across. And then at last it was spring. The Carsons returned from Italy. Their eyes kept flickering past me till they’d reassured themselves that the house was in perfect shape. Then they thanked me for forwarding their mail, inquired after my winter, told me that Florence had been marvelous fun, and asked if I’d seen the ghost. No, I said. I hadn’t.

“No one has,” said Mrs. Carson. “But once you know about it…Now that you’re leaving, I can tell you. I’m always reluctant to lease this place to couples with small children because the ghost, oh, it’s horrible, the ghost is supposed to be that of a child.”

For just a moment I got the chills. I refused to let this sink in. I wondered if her reluctance really had to do with the supernatural or with damage control. I said, “Well, if that’s the case, I’m leaving the ghost a present.” I indicated the doll. They weren’t exactly thrilled. The doll, after all, was Victorian, hopelessly out-of-period. They seemed already tired of me and impatient for a reunion with their possessions.

Outside, packed, was the car I had just bought; even its monthly-payment book seemed a sign of faith in the future. I was moving to Boston to enroll in a library science program. I said goodbye to the Carsons and got in my car and drove off. On my way out of town, I drove past the golf course on which, from the corner of my eye, I spotted what looked like a sprinkling of brilliant orange poppies. It took me a while to realize that they were plastic tees.

Moments of recovery are often harder to pinpoint than moments of shock and loss, but I knew then at what precise instant I’d stopped grieving over Lewis. It had been late April, or early May, a few weeks before the Carsons came home. The tulips were in bloom. I’d been at work, shelving books, deep in the stacks. A volume on Coptic religious texts had fallen open to reveal a magazine hidden inside. It was a fetish magazine called
The Best of Rubber Life
. Inside were color photos of mostly plump, mostly female couples. Some of the women wore babydoll pajamas, others were in rubber suits or in the process of putting them on. Most were in quasi-sexual poses though no one seemed to be touching or making love. Everyone gazed at the camera, full frontal stares in some hard-to-read middle between totally blank and bold.

I wondered whose it was. I considered some (mostly elderly) men who seemed like possible candidates. I thought meanly: maybe it was Lewis’s. But I didn’t think so. Perhaps I should have been disgusted, it was really extremely sordid, or even frightened of being in the library with whoever had hid it there. In fact, I felt nothing like that, but rather a funny giddiness, an unaccountable lightness of heart. I felt remarkably cheered up. Standing there in the stacks, turning the pages, I realized, as never before, what an isolated moment each photograph represents, one flash of light, one frozen instant stolen from time, after which time resumes. It was what I’d thought when I’d first seen those Civil War pictures but had never known how to tell Lewis. Perhaps I’d been worried that if I told him, the camera would click and he’d move.

I looked at the women in the rubber magazine, and I began to laugh, because all I could think of was how soon the strobes would stop flashing, the cameras would click one last time, how that day’s session would end, and they would collect their checks and rise from their rubber sheets and fill the air with hilarious sounds as they stripped off their rubber suits. It was almost as if I could hear it, that joyous sigh and snap—the smacky kiss of flesh against flesh, of flesh, unbound, against air.

I
N THE UPSTAIRS BEDROOM,
three teenage girls lay on top of a pile of coats, watching Yasir Arafat with the sound turned off. “Neat headscarf,” said one. “Too bad he looks like Ringo Starr.”

How sweet it would have been to fall back on the bed and stare up at the high white ceiling and listen forever to the liquid murmuring voices of these girls! But Grady couldn’t do that, he was working, he was supposed to be giving a puppet show at the children’s party downstairs. Also he was anxious about Harry, his six-year-old son, who’d come to the party with him and been sent down to the basement where the other children were.

Three parties were going at once, one on top of the other. The TV teens were upstairs, the children on the bottom, and, sandwiched in the middle, adults. It had taken forever to find this place, out in the woods near Katonah. Grady kept missing the unmarked driveway, which, when he found it, went on so long he gave up in the middle and turned and drove back to the road. Harry had fallen silent. “We are not lost,” Grady told him. “We are absolutely not lost.” At last they reached a clearing and a perfect Victorian house so grand Grady felt he should be seeing it from above, in an aerial shot under the titles of some prime-time weekly soap opera.

On his way downstairs he drifted past other bedrooms; everywhere, platform beds and pedestal TVs seemed to levitate slightly off the dove-gray industrial carpeting. The hall was High Victorian, the bedrooms High Tech, so that crossing a doorsill often meant a hundred-year jump in time. Grady bypassed the grownup party and continued down to the basement—a huge room, dramatically lit through a band of high windows beneath the ceiling. The polished wood floor was covered with Turkish kilims on which a dozen children were greedily helping themselves to the pleasures of Space Age child heaven: video games, a robot, a wall-sized TV showing vintage Betty Boop. The noise was unspeakable—volleys of shooting rockets and maddening video tunes. Grady lingered long enough to see that Harry had found an inflated brontosaurus and was gently punching it back and forth with another little boy. Then he went upstairs.

The bar was set out on a carved oak hutch. Grady hovered nearby with a hopeful expression that eventually drew his hostess—a pretty, blond woman with sparkly girlish eyes that seemed startled to find themselves looking at you from so many spidery lines. A slight tic kept pulling one eye to the side, as if she wanted to wink at you but kept changing her mind.

“I’m Caroline,” she said. “Did I say that before? Can I fix you a drink? Would that be all right? What would Miss Manners say?” Grady knew what she meant. Even when they themselves were feverishly drinking away the longueurs of a children’s party, the parents who hired him almost never offered him drinks. It was as if he were one of the children, or had been hired to drive them somewhere instead of just entertain them.

Grady smiled. “Miss Manners would say bourbon, a little ice. Please. Thank you.” Caroline laughed and poured him a big glass of bourbon.

“You really shouldn’t,” she said. “Bourbon has the most toxins.” Even as it occurred to Grady that this was her way of flirting, some note in her voice made him realize which of the TV-watching girls was hers. He was thinking of how to say this when he looked past the hutch and saw a photo of Mr. Rogers grinning at him from the wall.

“Gee,” Grady said. “I’m finding it a little hard to drink this with Mr. Rogers watching.”

“Oh,” said Caroline. “I don’t think Fred would object.” She spoke warningly, as people do when you are about to slander someone and they signal you:
Careful. This is a friend.

“Do you mind if I ask,” Grady said, “why you have a framed photo of Mr. Rogers on your wall?”

“I don’t know if you know,” said Caroline, “but we have two sets of kids.” She gestured up at the ceiling and down at the floor. “The girls are from previous marriages, but Walt is our joint production. I used to watch Mr. Rogers with my first family, then I started watching him again with Walt. And there Fred Rogers was, still hanging in there. I wrote him a fan letter, and he sent me a very nice note.”

“That’s wonderful,” Grady mumbled. Barbara used to say that Mr. Rogers was the last guy in the world she would leave Harry alone in a room with. But he couldn’t tell Caroline that. It was a year since Barbara left—a year and two months, exactly. A year before that, a car had rear-ended her at a stop sign and left her in constant intractable pain from a headache nothing could touch. They’d seen a dozen doctors and at some point half the doctors asked:
What happened to the car?
It was embarrassing to have to say:
Only one taillight got smashed.

Last Christmas Eve, Barbara sent Grady and Harry out for whipping cream for the eggnog. She’d been so specific—they’d driven around for ages till they found the only cream in the county that wasn’t ultra-pasteurized—and by the time they got back she had packed and left. Christmas Eve: they would always know precisely how long she’d been gone. Now she called Harry weekly and sent postcards from Berkeley, where she was in herbal therapy with a homeopath from Bombay; her handwriting was unrecognizable, sloppy and round as a child’s. In nearly every card, she advised Grady to put sunscreen on Harry, as if she had forgotten they lived in a place with seasons. The longer Grady thought about this, the harder it became to let Caroline know that his silence was not a judgment on her warm feelings for Fred Rogers. Finally Caroline said, “Let’s go find my husband. Do you need any help setting up?”

Actually Grady didn’t; he’d designed the show that way. Still, he followed Caroline, who was, he sensed, bringing him not for help but to be checked out. She led him through a cathedral-like addition, its rough beams and glass walls suggesting an Alpine ski lodge with guests who had nothing to do but wait for the clouds to part for their personal glimpse of the Matterhorn. The afternoon light made everything look glittery and expensive—the snowy field outside, the tinsel, the candles floating in glass bowls, the gleaming metallic thread shot through the women’s sweaters.

The man whose forearm Caroline touched was talking to a pale girl with greased, lacquer-black short hair and wine-red raccoony eye shadow. She smiled once and vanished when Caroline said, “Eliot, this is Grady. Grady’s doing Walter’s puppets.” The man who shook Grady’s hand had the serious good looks of certain anchormen who Grady was always shocked to learn were around his own age.

“Eli,” he said, with an odd overemphasis that made it hard to tell if he was being friendly or just contradicting his wife. “Good to meet you. Can I get you another drink?” Eli’s eyes had a swimmy, unfocused gaze that couldn’t quite locate Grady’s.

“Puppets,” said Eli, refilling Grady’s bourbon. “That’s amazing.” Often guys like Eli said that what Grady did was amazing, mostly in the one-quarter admiring, three-quarters patronizing way people told Barbara:
It’s amazing women survive staying home with the kids.
How many of the doctors he’d gone to with Barbara had paused, pen poised above the prescription blank, to tell him how much they wished
they
had talent in the arts.

Grady said, “I’ve been doing it for five years.” He took a big gulp of bourbon. They were leaning against the hutch.

“I know what you mean,” Eli said. “Nothing stays amazing for very long. Then
other
things become amazing. You know what amazes me? I don’t know half of these people’s names.” They both stared into the room. Eli said, “This is embarrassing. Forget you heard this. I sound like the middle-aged yuppie Great Gatsby.” Suddenly it struck Grady that Eli was really stewed.

Grady put down his glass. He liked having his wits about him. Barbara’s leaving had left him feeling a need for extra vigilance about Harry. He kept telling himself that, despite everything, Harry would be all right; that morning Harry had woken him in great excitement to see on TV what looked like the Balinese equivalent of the Rose Bowl parade.

“I’ve got my puppet stuff in the hall,” Grady said. His stage was a rectangular frame, surrounded by curtains he hung at waist level from shoulder straps and put his hands up from underneath. His puppets fit in one large suitcase.

“Is that it?” said Eli. “Amazing.” As Grady followed Eli down the basement stairs, a stocky child flew into them with such force that Eli stumbled. “Walt, this is Grady,” Eli said. “Grady, my son, Walt. Grady’s the puppet man.”

The boy was dark-haired and glossily pretty, but with a peculiar, passive-aggressive slump you rarely saw in a child. “Are we having a piñata?” he said.

“No,” Grady said. “No piñatas.”

“Good,” said Eli, “I can’t stand piñatas. I’ve never seen it go down where some kid didn’t nearly get brained.”

“I want a piñata,” Walt said.

“Excuse me,” Eli said. “I need to check on something upstairs.” Stunned, Grady and the birthday boy watched him leave. The child recovered first, lost interest, and drifted off. Grady hoped Eli would come back. He could, if he had to, do his show marooned with kids on a desert island. But everything went a lot smoother with at least minimal grownup support.

An elderly woman in jeans walked briskly toward him. She had a quick, slightly batty smile and a furrowed, appealing face. “I’m Estelle,” she said. “Walt’s grandma.” Grady could have guessed. Estelle’s right eye had the same funny squint as her daughter’s.

Estelle said, “I’m Eliot’s mom.” It touched Grady to think of Eli holding out, through at least one previous marriage, for that tic he must have seen from his cradle and imprinted on like a duck. “You think these little monsters can sit still?” Estelle asked. “I guess you can try, but I doubt it. If it isn’t remote control or computer, forget it. If they can’t punch a button and tell it what to do, they’re not interested.”