With him, Mathieu was calmer. He had moved on from dinosaurs to particle physics, and to Mitch he seemed like a genius. He could explain the principles of nuclear fission for an hour, describing its various complexities, and it didn’t matter whether Mitch responded or not. If, however, he left the room, Mathieu would get upset, so he took to reading the newspaper in the boy’s room while these lectures were delivered.
This wasn’t a perfect life; he knew it wasn’t what Martine had once imagined; but it had its own warmth and pulse and pleasures.
Then, one Saturday, the three of them went to the Biodome, an indoor zoo that featured four different habitats, with corresponding flora and fauna, and visitors could walk from one to the next, trading tropical humidity for frigid Arctic air. As ever, Martine was hoping that this new experience might open Mathieu up, move him beyond physics. And at first, things went well. After the cold outside, the warm, wet air made them feel like they were on holiday. They walked through the rain forest, glimpsing birds high above in the trees and enormous capybaras in the streams below. Mathieu held Martine’s hand without complaint. Then he spotted something in the thick leaves overhead — a tamarin monkey, scampering, just barely visible, its golden-brown fur flashing against the trunk of a tree. Mathieu wanted to touch it, to play with it, for his mother to buy it for him and take it home with them. Martine patiently explained that the monkey wasn’t a pet or for sale, that it was happy in this rain forest but wouldn’t be in their apartment, which was too cold and didn’t have any trees.
None of these arguments made sense to him. “Singe! Singe!” he screamed, and Mitch wondered if Mathieu not only wanted the monkey but somehow identified with it, seeing himself up there, loose and wild and uncontained.
Around them families scurried away, eager to distance themselves from the howling boy, lest his behavior prove contagious. Mitch tried to distract him by talking about the snakes in the next room, but that didn’t work. Then he made the worst mistake of all, a gesture he replayed in his mind for weeks to come: he took hold of his shoulder, hoping to steer him toward a new attraction and change the scene. But Mathieu screamed even louder, wrenched himself free, and darted away. When Martine reached out to catch him, he pushed back — in a fit like this he was curiously strong — and knocked her right over the railing behind them, onto a steep, rocky slope. Unable to break her fall, she slipped and then rolled on her side, her hands grasping at air, down to the bottom. People were yelling and pointing, and Mitch instinctively grabbed Mathieu. When the boy tried to pull away, Mitch yanked his arm and heard — over the commotion of the crowd and the upset chattering of the monkeys — the soft pop of his shoulder dislocating.
Mathieu’s pretty face went white with shock and pain, and then he fainted.
Later, in the hospital, they popped Mathieu’s arm back into joint and bandaged Martine’s sprained ankle. Despite the relatively minor injuries, all of this took hours, and Martine refused to leave Mathieu alone with Mitch, who told her, over and over, “I’m so sorry, it was an accident.”
Each time she just shook her head, as if trying to clear her ears, without saying a word. She didn’t tell him to go, and by the end of the night he realized why. Because of her sprained right ankle, she needed him to drive them home. She was very practical, Martine. When they reached the apartment, she said, “I think we need to be alone tonight,” and he walked back to his place in what turned into an ice storm, the freezing rain pelting his coat.
Though he called Martine the next day to apologize yet again, and swore he wouldn’t let the incident dislodge him from their lives, things did change; cracks soon filtered across the surface of a situation that had been delicate to begin with. But they weren’t the cracks he’d anticipated.
The next weekend, he went over to cook them dinner. He hadn’t seen Martine, but they had spoken on the phone, their conversations scattered and filled with pauses that she blamed on the pain relievers she was taking for her ankle. When he showed up, it was Mathieu who came to the door. In Mitch’s thoughts the boy had loomed larger, stronger, and more demonic, and it was a shock to see how fragile he was, so clearly a child.
“Hey,” he said.
“Je peux faire un ruban de Möbius. Venez voir,” Mathieu said, turning around and walking back to his room as if nothing had ever happened. Mitch watched him twist the strip of paper for a while, the accompanying recitation high-pitched and breathless, and then said, “I’m going to say hi to your mother for a minute.” Mathieu didn’t respond, though he stopped talking, his small hands still turning the paper around.
In the kitchen Martine was drinking what looked to be, given her violet smile, a third or fourth glass of wine. She waved at him sloppily, hopping around to set the table. As he leaned over to kiss her cheek, she banged her hip against a chair and said, “Ow. Shit.”
That was their hello.
He told her to sit down while he made the pasta Bolognese, and she sat there chattering about their follow-up visits to the doctors and funny things Mathieu had said about her sprained ankle — a performance so untypical that it filled him with dread, and he sank into silence when she called Mathieu to the table. She kept it up all during dinner, joking with Mathieu and tousling his hair until he solemnly told her to stop. After five bites he asked to be excused, and she let him go. She didn’t eat much either.
Mitch washed the dishes and prepared to leave, the sorrow of endings pressing down on his heart. He felt sure he would never see any of it again: the tiny, cozy kitchen with its tomato-red walls, Martine’s handwriting on refrigerator-hung lists, Mathieu’s science books stacked on the counter.
Martine was in the bedroom, and when he went in to say good night she kissed him with her wine-dark mouth. He tasted the salt of tears. She dragged him to the bed and down on top of her, her hands under his sweater scratching his back, her good leg slipping over the back of his jeans. In all the time they’d spent together, she’d rarely initiated anything, and never had she shown such pulsing lust and desperation. She had his sweater and shirt off now and was trying to remove her own, but her elbow got snagged in the sleeve of her cardigan and caught him squarely in the face, knocking off his glasses.
“Fuck me,” she said. She was still crying.
“Martine, my love,” Mitch said, kissing her wet, crinkled cheek.
He was slipping in and out of her without rhythm or traction, trying and failing to match the jerking, spastic motion of her hips. She was crying harder now, practically choking, so Mitch slipped out and put his arms around her. He didn’t know what else to do. It was as if the Martine he knew was dissolving. She shifted until her back was to him, then curled into herself, her knees meeting her chin. He was shushing and comforting her, muttering gentle and meaningless sounds, when he heard a small noise behind him, lifted his head to look, and saw Mathieu silhouetted in the doorway.
The boy stared at him, his blue eyes open and frightened. Mitch watched anxiously, waiting for him to explode, but he just stood there, his gaze never once moving from Mitch’s face, even to examine his mother’s hidden, shuddering figure. Then he padded back down the hallway to his room.