I looked over at Karel. He didn’t seem to possess any Mandingo traits. He was just a little baby waving his arms around. When Monika collapsed with jet lag, I took him out to the sofa and let him play on my chest until he fell asleep. And then I fell asleep. The last thing I saw was a bird trying to get in the window. Monika’s luggage was still sitting in the living room, unopened.
Bob must have figured out that Karel did not have a skin condition because there was certainly a theme to the gifts he brought over. “He already had a baby shower in Belgrade,” Monika said, but that didn’t stop Bob. A children’s biography of Martin Luther King Jr., James Brown’s Greatest Hits, and a pretend leg of fried chicken made out of some rubberlike material. “He can actually teethe on it!” Bob said.
When he was gone, Monika said, “My dream was of a new life here, but this may be impossible.”
“I think Bob meant well,” I said.
“Ah, make no mistake: that was not Bob speaking and bringing his symbolic gifts. That was America speaking through Bob.”
Meanwhile, Karel teethed contentedly on his rubber drumstick, his little chin glistening as he hummed.
As part of Monika’s first assignment on her return to architecture school she began to design some alterations for our house, a wing here, a wing there: I was terrified that she would actually want me to have these things built.
“Why do we need a loggia?”
“Why do I even talk to you?”
Bob continued to visit some mornings for coffee. If he arrived before Monika left for school, she fled to her car. “Always in a hurry, that gal,” Bob said. “Someday she’ll be designing skyscrapers, and we’ll brag we knew her back when.” Whenever Bob drove Monika from the house, it fell to me to care for Karel until the babysitter arrived in her white tennis shoes and loose shorts that made the vanishing of her thighs into them a matter of urgent mystery. I loved to start the day by playing with Karel in bed. He’d sit on my stomach, and we’d play hand games that always ended with this merry little boy tipping over onto the pillows only to arise and crawl on top of me again to resume the battle with a shout. If Bob was still there, we did this on the living-room rug, scurrying around until I had rug burns on my knees. When Bob wasn’t launching into some complaint about his overindulgent mother, he was wonderful with Karel. I could leave the two of them together while I dressed for work, and whatever Bob did always had Karel squealing with delight. The arrival of the babysitter, nubile Lydia, would put an end to all this: I went to work; Bob went home.
I have lived in this town for a long time, but I was raised in Bakersfield, California, a town I was longing to flee by the age of ten. I coughed up out-of-state tuition, went to law school, then settled here, at first alone and then with Monika. I mention all this because my colleague, Jay Matthews, who has lived here all his life, told me that Bob’s mother could hardly be driving him crazy: she died when he was a boy. “Got to be fifty years ago.”
“I must have misheard him.”
“Yeah, Bob was an only child, and his mom was single. Ole Bob was a bubble and a half off plumb, even back then. That’s why he’s always fit right into this godforsaken town.”
Life went on. Karel’s father, Olatunde, called every week, sometimes talking to me and sometimes to Monika. His attempts to talk to Karel came to nothing, as Karel drooled and stared at the receiver. Olatunde spoke in measured tones in a deep voice, which, combined with his cultivated, slightly fusty British accent, seemed to come from a tomb. Nonetheless, his melancholy over the absence of his little boy could be discerned. He wished me luck with Monika and said that I was going to need it. His, he said, had run out.
Bob and Karel became so close — Karel singing in his presence and crying out in delight when he arrived — that Monika and I consulted about dispensing with the babysitter and using Bob instead. I wasn’t sure about this. The babysitter was getting ready to start college and needed the money, and, besides, I was sweet on her and thought she was starting to come around, recklessly bending over to pick up Karel’s toys in my presence. Monika noticed this once and started braying with sardonic and distinctly Slavic laughter. The time had come for me to take the bull by the horns. I followed Lydia to her car and told her that any fool could see how beautiful she was and I was no fool. She started but failed to reply. “You — you — you—” She got into her car and roared off. I thought it best to maintain a sphinxlike expression on my way back into the house. Monika smiled at me as I entered. “Turn you down?”
“Seems to be running okay. I can’t think why she thought the ignition was going out.”
Gales of laughter. “Oh, good one. Stick to your weapons.”
The moment blew over, with the usual residue, but in the end I was furious with Lydia for having wiggled around the house on the assumption that I wouldn’t notice. Entrapment, pure and simple. Another few steps down that trail, and Lydia could have owned my law firm. These youngsters look right through you, unless their gaze falls on something they might need. I should have held my wallet aloft with one hand while pointing at my crotch with the other, but I simply lacked the nerve. So (a) babysitter leaves, and (b) here comes Bob. The convenience and economy of this arrangement appealed even to Monika, who allowed that he was “not a bad chicken egg after all.”
Obviously, we made several forays into marriage counseling, during which we turned each of our counselors into helpless referees. I always felt that these sessions were nothing more than attempts by each side to win over the counselor, with charm, cajoling, whatever it took. In the end, Monika decided that everything that had led to the idea of counseling — Freud, Jung, Judeo-Christianity — was spiritually bankrupt. Therefore, she was going to look back thousands of years and seek the help of a shaman, now resident in Missoula. This shaman, she explained, had the benefit of ten thousand years of human spiritual experience, as opposed to the Johnny-come-latelies of psychoanalysis, and she intended to partake of that knowledge. I listened thoughtfully and replied that it sounded promising so long as she didn’t fuck the shaman.
Thus began our decidedly parallel lives: Monika and her shaman and her architecture, me and my law practice, Bob and Karel. Monika came home in the evening with long rolls of paper under her arm, and I with my briefcase, containing few briefs in these straitened times, to the happy home of Bob and Karel. When Bob left for the night, I held Karel’s rigid little body as he wailed and reached frantically in the direction of Bob’s departure. “Give him something to eat,” Monika remarked on her way into the bedroom.
One afternoon, Monika and I had a rather sharp exchange in the presence of Bob and Karel. I asked innocently if it was absolutely necessary for her to keep using her boarding pass as a bookmark.
Monika said, “None of your business.”
“I suppose it helps to remind you of that shithole where you grew up.”
“It reminds me that they still have airplanes that go back there.”
“Everyone wants to go to Yugoslavia,” I said, “where shooting your neighbor is the national sport.”
“Oh, you’re awful. You’re just so awful. My God, how truly awful you are.”
Karel started to cry, and Bob took him outside. Soon I could see the chains of the swing flashing back and forth and hear Karel’s delighted cries.
Monika had recently undergone an abrupt sartorial change from dark Euro-style clothing to Rocky Mountain chic: hiking boots, painter pants, bright yellow down jacket, and a wool cap with strings hanging down the sides. Now screwing a mountaineer, I thought ungenerously. Her exhaustion, I assumed, owed more to her shagging the mountain man than to anything she was doing in the world of architecture.