Even when miserable after Carl’s death she had endured no such haunting. When she thought of Carl she remembered with pleasure the soft brown hair of his thick eyebrows, and the reflective way he examined any broken-down appliance before deciding how to fix it, and Sunday football, and the disappointing fact of his sterility, though it had troubled him more than it did her: she played the hand she was dealt. And anyway, he wasn’t impotent. Oh, his feet. He liked her to wash his feet and clip his nails, and she liked to do it, and they always made love afterward, first lowering the shop’s blinds, then lying flat on the floor, sole to sole. Edging forward, he stroked her inner thighs with his heel and then he put his big toe in her keyhole and worried it for a while, and that was all she needed. After her ecstasy they progressed to conventional positions and a second pleasure.
She sat down in Bobby’s chair and kicked off her clogs. She picked up The Later Roman Empire—it was hiding under a towel. She let her bare feet slide into his tray of water, now cold. She felt the calm disinhibition that liquid provided. She thought: Bobby and his wife, former, had been selected to witness a disaster and had failed to act. Another thought, heavy and treaded like a tank, rolled up to her; Carl gazed out of it with disappointment. She too had failed to act. She had not refused to let Carl enlist. She might have stopped him. She could have held him home. “Who knew there wasn’t a child in that car?” Bobby had inquired half an hour ago, eyes closed, Ibid and Sic on her lap, not knowing or caring that he was thinking aloud, not knowing or caring that his unmoving feet had kicked a hole in her smooth innocence. “An infant, maybe.”
An infant, an ancient, a mature U.S. Marine…what matter who. Whoever they were they had been flipped into lifelessness and had abandoned the future. They had turned their dead backs on survivors now doomed to mourn until the end of their own days.
Dream Children
Willa found the first portrait on a July evening while she was straightening her room. She had invited the two older boys to play there before bedtime, and the floor was strewn with chessmen and Othello counters. She picked up these fragments and put them where they belonged: in the next-to-lowest drawer of a scarred, ivory-knobbed chest — an architect’s chest, the mother had told her — that stood under the window. Willa’s own blouses and underwear lay in the shallow upper drawers. The chest and a lamp and a bed — a bed not quite long enough; she often slept on the floor — were the only furnishings in this narrow room behind the kitchen. But the other rooms didn’t have much in them either. In her country there was a TV in every village bar, and in the island’s capital city even the poorest family owned a set. But in this New York apartment — none.
“We don’t like to watch, we don’t want the children to watch,” the mother said that first day, looking up anxiously at tall Willa. “But if you wish…”
“No, ma’am.”
“No ma’am, please,” the mother cried.
“No, ma’am, please,” Willa repeated.
“No, no, I mean, do call us by our first names: Sylvie—”
“Yes, ma’am,” Willa said.
“—and Jack.”
The bottom drawer in the architect’s chest was stuck. Every night she caressed the knobs as if to fool them, dark fingers soothing the ivory, and then gave a single sudden yank. Tonight the thing slid out at last. In the drawer were some large, deckled drawing papers, facedown. She picked up the top one and turned it over.
It was a pencil-and-watercolor portrait of a little boy. The left side of the child’s face bulged like a potato, a blue and purple potato. It wasn’t swollen because someone had smacked him, wasn’t bruised either, the worst smack couldn’t do that, he had been born that way. The eye above the bulging cheek seemed okay. The right side of the face was ordinary. The lower lip was a rubbery ledge, bigger on the left than the right. The upper lip almost met the lower lip on the big side of the face and didn’t meet it at all on the other side. Spittle, she could see it, a few curly lines.
Boy’s costume was like Pinocchio’s: shorts, a honey-colored vest, a shirt, kneesocks. The black hair was thick and neatly parted. Somebody was taking care of him. He carried a toy boat. There was a friendly dog at his feet, exactly the color of the vest.
The portrait was signed with a date — five years ago — and the initials J.L. The father’s imagining, then.
Willa put Boy back in the drawer. She went into the living room. They liked her to join them there, just as they liked her to eat with them. They worried about everything — traffic, poisons in food, mosquitoes, whether she was happy.
Dr. Gurevich from across the street was talking, her eyes huge in her square face. “I will bar the door,” she rasped. “I will lie down in front of the bulldozer.” She leaned forward. “I will drill their evil skulls.”
Then she leaned back, as if to get away from her own popping eyes. Maybe she had the goiter. She wore her gray hair in a bun.
The father said, “I heard of a group practice, three men on East Twelfth Street. They’re looking for a fourth, and they’d prefer a woman.”
“East Twelfth Street?” Dr. Gurevich sat up straight again. “I belong here, on West Eighty-Fourth Street. The city has given me no satisfaction,” she added.
“The firm who owns your building hasn’t broken any laws,” the father said. “I looked into it, remember?”
Dr. Gurevich was being evicted from her narrow building across the street. She was a dentist, and lived and worked in her second-floor apartment. Willa had been brought to see it one day in June by the ten-year-old, who planned to be a dentist himself. Patients sat on a chair in a bay window. “See, Willa, this would be a dining room for a regular person,” the boy had explained. He climbed into the chair. “Dr. Gurevich doesn’t require a dining room,” he said, opening his mouth and baring his teeth. Then he said, “Wider, please. She eats her soups wherever she likes — sometimes on the fire escape. Spit, please.”
A firm had bought Dr. Gurevich’s house and the one next door, and sent notices that condominiums were to be built. The current occupants must leave by July 1.
Willa had watched July 1 come. She’d watched it go. The other tenants left. The dentist remained, along with the janitor, who lived in the basement. There wasn’t much work for him in the building, so he planted vegetables and fruits in the deserted back garden. Raspberries were just emerging.
“You could plant squash,” Willa said.
“We won’t last until squash,” he told her.
But tonight, Dr. Gurevich, raging in their living room, looked as if she would last forever.
There was a cheep from the end of the hall. The cheep came again; then again; then a rapid twittering of sounds.
Willa got up and walked down the long hall and went into the darkened bedroom. The five-year-old slumbered spread-eagled on his parents’ bed. She rested her palm briefly on his back. His bony face lay in profile on the pillow. The three older boys resembled the mother — sharp features, long mouths, narrow intelligent eyes. The little fat fourth looked like the father. “Each one starts out looking like Jack,” the mother had mentioned; and the father laughed: “All babies look like me.”