“Hey,” I listened to her say on a tape, “what happened to the dinosaurs Daddy gave you? You had so many in that box.”
“I think they died,” he answered. Mitt must have been three.
“How?”
“I dunno,” he said. “See my Gobot, laser guns come out of his chest and shoot. See? Pht-pht. Pht-pht-pht.”
“Swell.”
“Too bad you don’t have guns there, too, then you could shoot dumb Alex.”
“I thought Alex was your friend.”
“Nope,” Mitt answered.
“Did something happen when he came to play? You were playing, weren’t you, with the dinosaurs?”
“Uh-huh. He wanted to see them. He said dinosaurs were dumb. He said they were no-brains.”
“Well, to be honest, they weren’t very bright.”
Mitt made the shooting sound again. “Alex said they were dumb. He said his Godzilla was smart and my T-rex was dumb and had no brains so he took my bat and smashed its head.”
“That wasn’t very considerate of him,” she said.
“He was right.”
“What do you mean?”
“No-brains. We smashed the other ones, too. All of them. They’re under my bed. Nothing in them. He was right.”
“They’re just plastic toys, sweetie. Real dinosaurs had brains, very small ones, but they did have them.” Pause. “I wish you hadn’t broken them like that.”
“Alex said that’s why they’re a-stink. Dumb-dumbs.”
“That’s not necessarily true. And the word is ex-tinct. When an animal completely dies off, every last one of its kind, then you say it’s extinct.”
“Will people get a-stink?”
“Extinct. We can, if we’re not careful.”
“Will you and Daddy?”
“That’s different, but no, sweetie, I hope not, not us. We’ll try our best.”
“Good,” Mitt said.
I went through and listened to the whole box of tapes. It was only the second time I was hearing them, and I noticed again how much care Lelia took while talking with him, not just with the words, but with her manner, so unstudied, calm. I thought how lucky he was to have had a woman like her directing his life. It struck me, too, how she spoke to him as though they had all the time in the world.
She did get angry with him on some of the later tapes, when he was older and his own quick temper (an inheritance from my father) overcame him. On one he called her a “jerkface,” and she must have hit him hard on the ass because there was a pause and he said it didn’t hurt but then he began to cry. Lelia cried a little with him. Sometimes they seemed to forget about the tape recorder, especially Lelia, who had a habit of talking to herself if she was short on cigarettes. One entire tape was Mitt saying every bad word he knew. I had to wonder about his expensive private-school yard. The worst bad word, he whispered, was “motherfucker.” Some tapes had them singing Christmas carols, singing Michael Jackson, singing the teapot song. The last one I listened to was an extended birthday card to me. Mitt said I love you four times. Lelia, three.
I compared these to some of the other moments that I remembered her saying it, the night we decided to live together, the morning after Mitt was born, the time drunk in a bar when she thought I had been sleeping with another woman.
I never felt comfortable with the phrase, had a deep trouble with it, all the ways it was said. You could say it in a celebratory sense. For corroboration. In gratitude. To get a point across, to instill guilt in your lover, to defend yourself. You said it after great deliberation, or when you felt reckless. You said it when you meant it and sometimes when you didn’t.
You somehow always said it when you had to.
I sorted the tapes and went out in the streets. It was late, warm for February, and I called Molly’s apartment from a pay phone but hung up before anyone could answer.
Molly was a filmmaker and a performance artist. She was smart, generous, her looks unquestionably homely, queer, egregiously frank, hip to the bones. Her swaddling clothes must have been black. Sometimes I thought she could have been a very beautiful Jimmy Durante. She was becoming mildly famous. She enjoyed a renown in Europe. I saw in a store once some German posters for retrospective festivals of her work. Years before we would go to some blacked-out converted garage or artists’ space to watch her latest show. Now she played places like the Ritz, and her short films were shown at the MOMA and Angelika.
Molly would sometimes call me from the pay phone outside in the street, to tell me what was going on with my wife. She thought I should know. We both acknowledged how painfully adolescent and insipid we were being with these third-party phone calls — we’d joke harshly about zits, menstruation, jerking off — but then over the line I could hear the street behind her, the din of a thousand hurried movements, my wife maybe becoming just one of them, hidden and indistinguishable.
I walked a few more blocks and then telephoned again. No one this time. I walked to Molly’s building anyway. She lived on the second floor. When I got there her windows were black. I wondered if they were asleep. I entertained an urge to find a pebble and throw it up against the panes but then there weren’t pebbles in the streets of New York, nothing small enough for anything cute, just hunks of broken brick, quart beer bottles. I would have to effect something in between. I flanked my hands to my mouth and said her name. I was whispering. I said it again, this time loud enough to feel it in my throat. I was ready to say it again, maybe yell it, but a light went on and the window opened and Lelia peered down at me. From her silhouette I could tell she had cut off all of her hair. The naked line of her head and neck reminded me of Mitt.
“Henry,” she said in a rough, sleepy voice, “is that you?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“God,” she said. “You better come up, then.”
In the doorway, she was wearing a white cotton nightgown that fell to her thigh. I could see the darkness of her nipples. She looked skinny to me, even gaunt, but I probably thought that because of her hair. Nothing left. The color seemed darker, what had been traces of a reddish hue were now gone, and only her roots were left, the fine nubs rich and brown. I beat down the idea that her cutting of it was a statement intended for me. Women, I know, sometimes have themselves shorn at those watershed moments of their lives, like discarding the memory of a man.
“I thought we had a plan,” Lelia said, rubbing her eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
“I know, I know.”
Lelia was sleeping in the sofa bed. On the lamp table were her reading glasses and a high pile of books. She slumped into one of Molly’s leather beanbags. I sat below her on the rug with my feet out. Her knees were bony, white. Now she stretched the nightgown over them.
“Your hair looks good short,” I said. “It hasn’t been that way since El Paso.”
“Oh, c’mon, it looks terrible. I cut it myself. Thus I discovered another talent I don’t have.”
“Why didn’t you let Molly cut it?” Molly always cut our hair.
“She wanted to. She was watching me and crying the whole time. I told her to go away. I didn’t mean to be cruel.”
“Is she here?”
“Nope. On a date. Looks like she won’t be back tonight.”
She looked for a cigarette, but didn’t find one. I thought for a moment that the tenor of her voice sounded like mine in those many months of our trouble, clipped, almost dead.
“I listened to the tapes tonight,” I said, trying not to sound sentimental. “I decided to wander over.”
“I bet,” she said, crossing her arms. “Though I doubt you’ve ever really wandered.”
“I wander a lot.”
“Oh, that’s good,” she replied. “But only in the place and time of your choosing. The word for that is invasion.”