His mother opened her eyes. “I’ve never felt so much pain before in my life,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.” She closed her eyes again.
Daniel stroked the length of her arm with his hand. When he was little and he had a headache, his father would put his hands on either side of his head and say, “I’m drawing the pain out of your head and into my hands.” He would stand over Daniel with his hands firm on the boy’s skull, a terrible look of concentration on his face. Then he would step away and say, “Now your headache is gone.” Daniel would still have a headache, but it didn’t matter. He loved it when his father came to take the headache away.
He held his mother’s shoulders, watching her face for signs of relief. Her cheeks sagged, her eyes were peevishly closed. It struck him that this was only an extreme form of her habitual expression. She always seemed to be suffering in some remote, frozen way. He had been so used to it that he hadn’t recognized it as suffering. He didn’t think she did, either. It seemed to be her natural state. It seemed natural in part because of her courage, which was also habitual. He thought of her driving on the highway, dressed in her checked business suit, drumming her fingers on the wheel and moving her lips in silent conversation with herself.
The door opened. A dark-haired nurse with a still face came in, pushing a small metal machine. His mother poked one eye open and regarded the nurse like an animal from within a lair. The nurse told her she had to do a test, extract something. “It won’t be painful,” she said.
“Bullshit,” snapped his mother.
Awake at four in the morning, Daniel thought of calling Jacquie again. But he was still mad at her about the cat story and half afraid that if he called she’d say something else that would piss him off. He sat alone at the kitchen table, swatting his drum pad. He felt he was learning something important, something to do with families and with himself that he needed to sort out.
But Jacquie had a thing about families; in the abstract, the subject almost always made her scornful and antagonistic, especially toward parents. She was the kind of person who saw child abuse everywhere. When she went to visit a married friend, her friend’s daughter, who was three, brought home painted Easter eggs she’d done at day care. The kid had wanted to eat them, and her father had said no, because he didn’t think they were free-range chicken eggs. The child cried and threw an egg on the floor. Her father spanked her and made her clean it up. Daniel didn’t think that sounded so bad, but Jacquie was furious. She was even madder at their neighbors, who she said “mocked” their children.
“Ercie will run up to him to show him something she’s found, and he’ll say, in baby talk, ‘Oh, look what Ercie has.’ And then he’ll look over her head at me and sneer and say, ‘Really interesting, huh?’ And she looks crestfallen.”
“Maybe he’s embarrassed to be talking baby talk in front of you. Like you’ll think he’s uncool or something.”
“That’s no excuse. She’s going to grow up and have all kinds of problems with men, and nobody will understand why. Not even her.”
“I don’t know, Jacquie. It doesn’t sound that bad to me. Kids are okay as long as you love them, basically.”
“But what’s called love in most families is inadequate shit.”
“Loving doesn’t mean being perfect.”
“I’m not talking about perfect. I’m just talking about respect and kindness for your own kids.”
He didn’t understand her when she talked this way. Jacquie was a strong girl. She had square shoulders and a muscular butt. She took karate classes. Competence and spirit seemed built right into her. Most of the time he could see her spirit in the animal vibrance of her gold eyes. But sometimes her eyes would reflect a sense of stubborn injury that he could not quite locate. It was an expression that seemed to regard competence and spirit as contrivances that, while they kept her going, had nothing to do with who she really was.
He felt the look in a different way when they had sex. They would embrace, and he’d feel her engage him from the surface of her skin to the wet muscularity of her hidden organs. But there always came a moment when he stopped feeling her. She held him close, but she was somewhere else. He would look at her face and see it twisted away from him, her eyes closed as if she were looking at the inside of her own head in horror and fascination and need. There would be a moment of tension like a fishing line pulled taut, and then he would feel her slowly return. She would open her eyes and look at him and clasp his hand, her ardent palm open against his, her expression fierce and triumphant.
He decided to call her, even though it was two o’clock in San Francisco. There were four rings and a laborious click; his recorded voice asked him to leave a message. He hung up. He wondered where she was.
He sat back in his chair and remembered her naked, kneeling over the low coffee table with her thighs open wide. “If I fucked you in the ass I would own you,” he’d said.
She turned over quickly. “No, you wouldn’t. What a ridiculous thing to say.”
An hour later he called again, but she wasn’t home then, either.
The last time Daniel went to see his mother, he went with his father. In spite of what his father had said in the restaurant about how close he was with Daniel’s mother, there was a sense of overwhelming discomfort between them. It was clear that they were both sad, but they seemed to be sad in separate, restricted ways, as though they were hoarding it. His mother’s mouth was sarcastic, as if she found it ridiculous to be suffering before her ex-husband. His father was gentle, but the gentleness was excruciating. He didn’t say anything to her about his new business. They didn’t refer to the past or to her family. They talked about the accident, about Albert and Rose, and a little about the country club they had once belonged to. When Daniel talked, he felt that he was, in a more advanced and subtle form, serving the same function he had when they relayed messages through him.
They had been in the room for about half an hour when two interns came in. They said they needed to do a brief examination. One of them asked, “Are you Mr. Belmont?” Daniel’s father said yes. “And you’re the son. Then you can stay if you want. This will only take a few minutes.” Then, with gestures that would have seemed rapacious had they been less efficient, they stripped the sheet from Daniel’s mother, jerking up her gown to expose her lower body. Her pelvic bones stuck out. Her pubic hair was thin and snarled. Gross metal pins attached her at the joints. “Whoops, sorry,” said an intern. He pulled down her gown and absently patted her belly. “All in the family.”
Jesus Christ, thought Daniel.
His mother smiled like a bitter doll. “Oh, doctors, hello. You might be interested to know that Mr. Belmont and I have not been married for ten years.”
His father didn’t say anything.
The next day he flew back to San Francisco. Jacquie made him a special chicken dinner, and they ate it on the low coffee table. He told her about how difficult it had been to see his mother that first time and how he had almost fainted. He told her about his father and how he had routed the relatives in the hospital waiting room. He told her how his mother had said “bullshit” to the nurse. She listened attentively; he had the impression that she didn’t know what to say. She worked on her sweet potato with inordinate delicacy. Her gold eyes subtly glimmered. He wanted to tell her about the moment he’d had with his father in the car, but it was too far away from him now.