Through the Children's Gate (23 page)

Virtue is not its own reward; virtue is its own punishment. You have to give back the trophy and get a smaller one. Doing the right thing has real costs, and you do it, essentially, not because of the way it feels inside at that moment—at that moment you want the trophy—but because of the way it will feel inside later, when your friends find out. That was what he had been considering as we walked those blocks. Conscience is not the still, small voice in the soul; it is the name we give to the anticipated opinion of our friends, and the pleasure of having the fruits of the unfair advantage isn't worth the shame of having an unfair advantage. Desire takes place in the trophy room; conscience happens on the street. I now know that it takes about ten minutes, and
three New York City blocks, to make itself felt in the mind of a bright, good-natured, competitive seven-year-old.

I recalled that poem by Philip Larkin, the one that begins “None of the books have time / To say how being selfless feels, / They make it sound a superior way / Of getting what you want” and then goes on to say that selflessness is really like wearing a badly fitted suit on a damp morning, or something equally British and uncomfortable. Luke has won a lot—the respect of the tournament masters, the friendship of a nice kid, and a computer chess game, for two weeks, anyway. He has also learned that moral decisions are a form of tactics: seeing four forced moves ahead in the game of life. But he lost the trophy, and he really wanted it. Now he will have to go out and get it honestly.

A
few days later, after we saw the Yankees wallop the Mariners in the fifth game, I had to explain to Luke, who was celebrating, that this was not the end—that though the Bronx Bombers (“Why are they called the Bronx
Bombers? ”
suddenly anxious. “It's good. Trust me,” I replied) had won the Championship Series, they would now have to move on to the
World
Series, the really big one.

He paused and took a deep, dramatic, heaving breath. “Tell me true things,” he said, which is what he says when he really wants the truth from his father—on oath, no teasing. “Tell me true things,” deep breath again, then, in a strangled voice, “Have the New York Yankees ever won the World Series?”

He was in real doubt, and I recognized in his voice exactly the same tone he uses to ask me if he can stay up until ten o'clock to watch
Dexter's Laboratory.
He knows he's asking too much of life but, oh well, what's life worth if you don't ask?

I paused. This seemed like as big a moment as we could ever have. I was in possession of crucial knowledge about a subject he had come to consider close to his heart, and I was almost afraid of giving it away too casually, without sufficient buildup or a sense of momentousness. It seemed like the sort of thing you at least sat down to say. (“You see, Luke, the team you've chosen to support—well, they're a very
special
team, in a way. Most teams, it's normal for them to lose. A lot. But
your team …”) Yet to tell him flatly that the Yankees always won was to make him an accessory to power, and what I found beautiful about his attachment was that it was rooted in a feeling of doubt, of powerlessness, of soulfulness. He had been a Yankees rooter for two weeks, five games, at the worst time in the city's history, and to reassure him that he had actually made a good bet on a big-market team would undermine the meaning of his allegiance. It seemed somehow that the better, emotionally apt, appropriate answer was “No, they never have. But you know—they just might this year.”

But that was a lie, easily discovered, so I said, “Ask the kids around school if the Yankees have ever won a World Series.” He did, and when he came home, he said cautiously, “Well, they say they won last year.” That seemed about as far back as the collective first-grade memory went. I was pleased. It was good news, but not too much good news—a way of attaching a young New Yorker to hope without going all the way back to omnipotence. Someday I will tell him about twenty-six, twenty-seven Series victories, but not just now. I want him to root for something that might not always work out. It seems healthier than rooting for a sure thing, just as giving back a trophy teaches more than keeping one.

At night, with the Series coming on, I can sometimes actually see the Statue of Bravery looming, slightly ridiculous but noble, on the Lower Manhattan skyline—leering hungrily at the big humorless French woman across the harbor, as the property tycoon would want him to, securing the future of the city by his iron lust.

T
hanks giving goes well: It is good to have the crowd around the table and the children, laughing. Decent heritage turkey, which I brined. The old group, for one more year … The Yankees lost at the very end, but Luke seem unperturbed by it. Hey, they did darn well. He still doesn't get it, thank God, is not yet really a querulous, demanding rooter, a true Yankees fan.

The next day we go with the Kogan family to Rockefeller Center and Bergdorf Goodman. There is a lonely Santa at Bergdorfs, a real
Bergdorf's Santa, elegantly dressed, with an little live dog at his feet, all alone. The children reluctantly volunteer to sit on his lap, Luke reluctantly because he is getting a bit old for it, and Olivia because she lives in fear of grown-ups in costumes. (We encountered the Easter Bunny in the park earlier this year, a guy in a bright pink suit handing out promotional candy, and Olivia's screams could be heard from one end of the Great Lawn to the other. She still talks about it, the way Odysseus must have talked about that encounter with the Cyclops.) But they sat and asked for stuff, and then we had a picture taken—the children on Santa's lap, smiling that cheesy, forced, alarmed public smile one sees on the faces of Chinese Communist officials at the Annual Party Congress.

Then we went skating at Rockefeller Center, thinking it would be nearly empty, which it wasn't, just the opposite, mobbed. We waited in line, put on our skates—proud Canadians, bringing our own—and then whizzed around, holding the children's hands, each of us grownups sneaking off for a quick one-time-only dash around the rink before rejoining our stately family chain.

After the skating was over, as the Zamboni came out, we saw a single couple left on the rink, a youngish man and younger woman. Suddenly, he fell to his right knee, and he handed her a little box, and we watched as her shoulders collapsed in tears. A single moment of caution—what the hell is
this?
—and then we all realized what had happened: He had proposed, and she had accepted. He hugged her and they skated off hand in hand, she still wiping tears away from her face, he looking embarrassed and empowered.

The applause, which began as a ripple and then spread into waves of thunder, was something larger than kind and something more than sentimental; it was a cheer for continuity, and for cheap gestures, and for life.

But, over hot chocolate in the café, as we analyzed the moment, Martha was indignant. “Of course!” she cried. “What was she supposed to do? What if she
didn 't want to marry him?
She was going to give him back the ring right in the middle of Rockefeller Center? It wasn't a romantic gesture. It was erotic coercion.” It was, I thought,
at least a good chess move, tactical and designed to throw your opponent—or, in this case, your conquest—so off balance that you get what you want.

Expensive public declarations of eternal loyalty are the best short-term erotic tactic, as generations of lovers have learned. What it leaves you with—a lifetime of debt and uncertain obligation—is worth the feeling of triumph and the promise of sex as you skate off the rink to music and applause. The wisdom of betrothal is like the wisdom of comedy, which is not very different from the wisdom of medicine or parenting: there is no true long run, no final result that will make sense of everything, only an endless sequence of short runs placed end to end. You have the pleasure of short-term satisfaction even if, in love, anyway, you almost always have to give back the trophy when the tournament is over. (You
always
have to give back the trophy in the true long term, the Keynes long term.)

I love you forever
really means
Just trust me for now,
which is all it ever means, and we just hope to keep renewing the “now,” year after year. I looked at the now-engaged faces, to see how old they were and if the city could trust them to remain here to have their children, as the property tycoon would want. But I couldn't tell.

The lover on skates, appealing to eternity, was actually two moves—one hidden ring, one romantic gesture—ahead of his beloved, which is as far ahead as you can reasonably hope to be these days. What we had applauded (en masse, in Rockefeller Center) was just one more short-term tactic disguised as a long-term plan, like all the other good New York moves in chess, sex, ethics, property development, and family trust.

M
y daughter, Olivia, who just turned three, has an imaginary friend whose name is Charlie Ravioli. Olivia is growing up in Manhattan, so Charlie Ravioli has a lot of local traits: He lives in an apartment “on Madison and Lexington,” he dines on grilled chicken, fruit, and water, and, having reached the age of seven and a half, he feels, or is thought, “old.” But the most peculiarly local thing about Olivia's imaginary playmate is this: He is always too busy to play with her. She holds her toy cell phone up to her ear, and we hear her talk into it: “Ravioli? It's Olivia … It's Olivia. Come and play? Okay. Call me. Bye.” Then she snaps it shut and shakes her head. “I always get his machine,” she says. Or she will say, “I spoke to Ravioli today.” “Did you have fun?” my wife and I ask. “No. He was busy working. On a television” (leaving it up in the air whether he repairs electronic devices or has his own talk show).

On a good day, she “bumps into” her invisible friend and they go to a coffee shop. “I bumped into Charlie Ravioli,” she announces at dinner (after a day when, of course, she stayed home, played, had a nap, had lunch, paid a visit to the Central Park Zoo, and then had another nap). “We had coffee, but then he had to run.” She sighs sometimes at her inability to make their schedules mesh, but she accepts it as inevitable, just the way life is. “I bumped into Charlie Ravioli today,” she says. “He was working.” Then she adds brightly, “But we hopped into a taxi.” What happened then? we ask. “We grabbed lunch,” she says.

It seemed obvious that Ravioli was a romantic figure of the big exotic life that went on outside her little limited life of parks and playgrounds—drawn, in particular, from a nearly perfect, mynahbird-like imitation of the words she hears her mother use when she talks about
her
day with
her
friends. (“How was your day?” Sighing: “Oh, you know. I tried to make a date with Meg, but I couldn't find her, so I left a message on her machine. Then I bumped into Emily after that meeting I had in Soho, and we had coffee and then she had to run, but by then Meg had reached me on my cell and we arranged …”) I was concerned, though, that Charlie Ravioli might also be the sign of some “trauma,” some loneliness in Olivia's life reflected in imaginary form. “It seems odd to have an imaginary playmate who's always too busy to play with you,” Martha, my wife, said to me. “Shouldn't your imaginary playmate be someone you tell secrets to and, I don't know, sing songs with? It shouldn't be someone who's always
hopping
into taxis.”

We thought at first that her older brother, Luke, might be the original of Charlie Ravioli. (For one thing, he is also seven and a half, though we were fairly sure that this age was merely Olivia's marker for As Old as Man Can Be.) He
is
too busy to play with her much anymore. He has become a true New York child, with the schedule of a Cabinet secretary: chess club on Monday, T-ball on Tuesday, tournament on Saturday, play dates and after-school conferences to fill in the gaps. Already, their conversation tracks their chromosomes.

“Luke, how was your day?” Olivia asks him at three-thirty after he has come from school, as they sit eating cookies and cocoa.

“Okay, I guess,” he says indifferently.

“What did you have for lunch?” she persists.

“Uh—I don't remember. A sandwich, I guess.”

“Luke, what did the teacher say about your birthday poem?”

“Nothing. It was okay, I guess.”

Longer pause. She waits patiently. Finally, pointedly: “Luke. How was
my
day?”

But Olivia, though she counts days, does not yet really
have
days. She has
a
day, and into this day she has introduced the figure of Charlie Ravioli—in order, it dawned on us, to insist that she does have
days, because she is too harried to share them, that she does have an independent social life, by virtue of being too busy to have one.

Y
et Charlie Ravioli was becoming so constant and oddly discouraging a companion—“He canceled lunch. Again,” Olivia would say—that we thought we ought to look into it. One of my sisters is a developmental psychologist who specializes in close scientific studies of what goes on inside the heads of one- and two- and three-year-olds. Though she grew up in the nervy East, she lives in California now, where she grows basil in her garden and jars her own organic marmalades. I e-mailed this sister for help with the Ravioli issue—how concerned should we be?—and she sent me back an e-mail, along with an attachment, and, after several failed cell-phone connections, we at last spoke on a landline.

It turned out that there is a recent book on this very subject by the psychologist Marjorie Taylor, called
Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them,
and my sister had just written a review of it. She insisted that Charlie Ravioli was nothing to be worried about. Olivia was right on target, in fact. Most under-sevens (63 percent, to be scientific) have an invisible friend, and children create their imaginary playmates not out of trauma but out of a serene sense of the possibilities of fiction—sometimes as figures of pure fantasy; sometimes, as Olivia had done, as observations of grown-up manners assembled in tranquillity and given a name. I learned about the invisible companions Taylor studied: Baintor, who is invisible because he lives in the light; Station Pheta, who hunts sea anemones on the beach. Charlie Ravioli seemed pavement-bound by comparison.