“What’s up now?” Andrew says, laying down the cheeseburger. He always eats them the same way, and it is a way I have never seen another child eat one: he bites around the outside, eating until only the circle at the center is left.
I look at my watch. The watch was a Christmas present from Arthur. It’s almost touching that he isn’t embarrassed to give me such impersonal presents as eggcups and digital watches. To see the time, you have to push in the tiny button on the side. As long as you hold it, the time stays lit, changes. Take away your hand and the watch turns clear red again.
“We’re going to Bonnie’s studio. She’s printed the pictures Ruth wanted. Those pictures she took the Fourth of July — we’re finally going to see them.”
I feel in my pocket for the check Ruth gave me to pay Bonnie.
“But where are we going?” he says.
“To Spring Street. You remember your mother’s friend with the long hair to her waist, don’t you? You know where Bonnie lives. You’ve been there before.”
We take the subway, and Andrew sits in the crowded car by squeezing himself onto the seat next to me and sitting on one hip, his left leg thrown over mine so that we must look like a ventriloquist and a dummy. The black woman sitting next to him shifts over a little. He stays squeezed against me.
“If Bonnie offers you lunch, I bet you take it,” I say, poking the side of his parka.
“I couldn’t eat any more.”
“You?” I say.
“String bean,” he says to me. He pats his puffy parka. Underneath it, you would be able to see his ribs through the T-shirt. He is lean and would be quite handsome except for the obvious defect of his mouth, which droops at one corner as if he’s sneering.
We are riding on the subway, and Ruth is back at the tiny converted carriage house she rents from a surgeon and his wife in Westport. Like everything else in the area, it is overpriced, and she can barely afford it — her little house with not enough light, with plastic taped over the aluminum screens and the screens left in the windows because there are no storm windows. Wood is burning in the stove, and herbs are clumped in a bag of gauze hung in the pot of chicken stock. She is underlining things in books, cutting coupons out of newspapers. On Wednesdays she does not have to go to work at the community college where she teaches. She is waiting for her lover, Brandon, to call or to come over: there’s warmth, soup, discoveries about literature, and, if he cares, privacy. I envy him an afternoon with Ruth, because she will cook for him and make him laugh and ask nothing from him. She earns hardly any money at the community college, but her half-gallons of wine taste better than the expensive bottles Arthur’s business friends uncork. She will reach out and touch you to let you know she is listening when you talk, instead of suggesting that you go out to see some movie for amusement.
Almost every time when I take Andrew home Brandon is there. It’s rare that he goes there any other day of the week. Sometimes he brings two steaks. On Valentine’s Day he brought her a plant that grows well in the dim light of the kitchen. It sits on the window sill behind the sink and is weaving upward, guided by tacks Ruth has pushed into the window frame. The leaves are thick and small, green and heart-shaped. If I were a poet, those green leaves would be envy, closing her in. Like many people, he does envy her. He would like to be her, but he does not want to take her on. Or Andrew.
The entryway to Bonnie’s loft is so narrow, painted bile-green, peeling and filthy, that I always nearly panic, thinking I’ll never get to the top. I expect roaches to lose their grip on the ceiling and fall on me; I expect a rat to dart out. I run, silently, ahead of Andrew.
Bonnie opens the door wearing a pair of paint-smeared jeans, one of Hal’s V-neck sweaters hanging low over her hips. Her loft is painted the pale yellow of the sun through fog. Her photographs are tacked to the walls, her paintings hung. She hugs both of us and wants us to stay. I take off my coat and unzip Andrew’s parka and lay it across his legs. The arms stick out from the sides, no hands coming through them. It could be worse; Andrew could have been born without hands or arms. “I’ll tell you what I’m sick of,” Ruth said to me not long after he was born, one of the few times she ever complained. “I’m sick of hearing how things might have been worse, when they might also have been better. I’m sick of lawyers saying to wait — not to settle until we’re sure how much damage has been done. They talk about damage with their vague regret, the way the weatherman talks about another three inches of snow. I’m sick of wind whistling through the house, when it could be warm and dry.” She is never sick of Brandon, and the two steaks he brings, although he couldn’t come to dinner the night of Andrew’s birthday, and she is not bitter that Andrew’s father has had no contact with her since before the birth. “Angry?” Ruth said to me once. “I’m angry at myself. I don’t often misjudge people that way.”
Bonnie fixes Andrew hot chocolate. My hands are about to shake, but I take another cup of coffee anyway, thinking that it might just be because the space heater radiates so little heat in the loft. Andrew and I sit close together, the white sofa spreading away on either side of us. Andrew looks at some of Ruth’s photographs, but his attention drifts away and he starts to hum. I fit them back in the Manila envelope, between the pieces of cardboard, and tie the envelope closed. He rests his head on my arm, so that it’s hard to wind the string to close the envelope. While his eyes are closed, Bonnie whispers to me: “I couldn’t. I couldn’t take money from her.”
She looks at me as if I’m crazy. Now it’s my problem: how am I going to give Ruth the check back without offending her? I fold the check and put it in my pocket.
“You’ll think of something,” Bonnie says softly.
She looks hopeful and sad. She is going to have a baby, too. She knows already that she is going to have a girl. She knows that she is going to name her Ora. What she doesn’t know is that Hal gambled and lost a lot of money and is worried about how they will afford a baby. Ruth knows that, because Hal called and confided in her. Is it modesty or self-preservation that makes Ruth pretend that she is not as important to people as she is? He calls, she told me, just because he is one of the few people she has ever known who really enjoy talking on the telephone.
We take the subway uptown, back to Grand Central Station. It is starting to fill up with commuters: men with light, expensive raincoats and heavy briefcases, women carrying shopping bags. In another couple of hours Arthur will be in the station on his way home. The Manila envelope is clamped under my arm. Everyone is carrying something. I have the impulse to fold Andrew to me and raise him in my arms. I could do that until he was five, and then I couldn’t do it any more. I settle for taking his hand, and we walk along swinging hands until I let go for a second to look at my watch. I look from my watch to the clock. They don’t agree, and of course the clock is right, the watch is not. We have missed the 3:05. In an hour there is another train, but on that train it’s going to be difficult to get a seat. Or, worse, someone is going to see that something beyond tiredness is wrong with Andrew, and we are going to be offered a seat, and he is going to know why. He suspects already, the way children of a certain age look a little guilty when Santa Claus is mentioned, but I hope I am not there when some person’s eye meets Andrew’s and instead of looking away he looks back, knowing.