Yes, I said, I remember that particular sunset when she called to him from the water asking where her drink was and he didn’t hear her. But at least he was in his trunks and said something generally reassuring to me I think.
And she wanted to say to him when she got home, Don’t you want to know who I’ve been with, and Chuck would smile and say, quietly, Yes — as if a discovery had just come from her; and you know she wouldn’t tell him after all; then she told him a couple of dreams instead.
Were they clever? I said, and I added, Were they good?
Liz looked at the TV.
What reassuring thing did Chuck say? my wife asked. You said he said something reassuring.
I try to block it out, I said, but it was this: the options for the planet are narrowing down to almost nothing and we will set fire to ourselves before we know it; but meanwhile the options for personal relationships between women and men are multiplying. Sure, I retorted, but those relationships you’re talking about are getting more and more superficial. Ah, said Chuck, a nice superficial relationship — that’s what we’re all looking for. It’s so soothing, so friendly.
But despite these interesting words that I hadn’t realized I remembered, my wife and I were still repeating our circular routines. I didn’t, therefore, know if we would all move on. It was time for Liz to go to bed.
You’ve done that a lot, said my wife. Walked out of the room when I was talking.
If I’d only been conscious of it, I said, I could have thought about it. My wife knew when I was reaching for a joke; she did not know that I had attained a thought — that marriage is putting two people face-to-face slightly off.
A last drink of water, my wife said. That was one dream. In the dream she brought Chuck a last drink of water as if he was her husband. She was a long time reaching it to him. He kept looking at her while he reached for the glass, and he was still looking into her eyes when he had it in his hands, his last drink of water, and brought it to his mouth so slowly she wanted to yell at him. But then she saw the water was all cloudy and she knew she was afraid he would get up and take a walk because it was his last drink of water and she saw the cloud was her, it was her in the glass, her exactly. He was about to drink the water with her in it. He had his eyes on her, not on the glass which was at his lips. She called to him not to drink. He didn’t hear, of course. He was looking into her eyes. He didn’t hear. We were sitting in the sauna. That was one dream she told him. But — not to wake up exactly, which would be crass — she wasn’t dreaming; and the dream was what really happened.
She made it up, I said.
There’s a remote possibility, my wife said, that she made it up as what really happened, but you are crazy, my wife said, did you know that? The woman is a scientist, she’s made it, what do you mean she made it up, you’re crazy. I mean it.
Mommy…, said Liz, staring at the TV, something in voice.
Well, I, I said, am not a stay-at-home like the black philosopher Chuck.
You’re not all that bad at it, my wife said, but why did you say “black”?
Why do you want to know? I said.
Daddy…, said Liz.
My wife’s eyes gazed at me.
I said, Sorry, kid, I thought we were getting somewhere.
Do not call me kid, said my wife.
I was addressing my daughter, I said.
Do not call me kid, said Liz, looking at the TV.
In one turning pull, she switched it on, turning off the sound.
If he drank her, did she wake up inside him? I said. The devouring male, I said.
The other way round, said my wife.
What? said our sly zombie of a kid whom I sometimes wonder if I reach or am like anymore.
She woke up outside him? I said.
No, she woke up and he was inside her.
Mommy! said Liz.
I mean, said my wife, I mean it was another dream.
This one, I said, you’re going to make up.
You don’t understand that I’m telling you something, said my wife, and left the room.
Hey, wait a second, I called, you’re still in the sauna, so these are communicating dreams, that’s good, look let’s go over to the church, oh no it’s Tuesday night, Charlie practices Mondays, let’s finish our game from last week, oh the board got put away, let’s tune up both our derailleurs and the action on your brake you said was stiff, let’s prepare Liz’s room for painting, oh no we’re out of spackling, Atlas Hardware closed three hours ago, let’s the three of us go out for ice cream — or do you have homework?
My wife materialized at another door. Have you left anything out? she asked, amused at last.
I did my homework at school, said Liz, her long, glossy hair turning its layers over as she turned.
I couldn’t begin to capture it all, I answered my wife.
Daddy…, said Liz, staring at the silent screen where a woman was, I knew, reporting news but now came to the end and smiled and then I saw that Liz sitting there on the floor had flung her head back and was looking up at me upside down, a welcome angle.
She is not in the habit of asking for information. That is, beyond what is normally supplied. I am backward. So many friends divorced ahead of me, questions low-flying in my direction, like the evening in Norm’s living room hearing the cars ashore above us on the West Side Highway but not the faintest wash of river water, and Lucille, returning to the room’s bright black-and-yellow-painted beams, said to Liz and me, I believe, “Sometimes I think, Which one of you is the nice one?” and when Norm said, “Both of them,” Lucille said, “Of course, that’s what I meant.”
Once my wife and I went out on our bikes together, wrenches bagged, the folds of our spare tubes powdery-soft, a French pump in place along my frame — and came back separately. For it had not been a good afternoon in the beginning. At least I did not arrive home riding two bikes.
Liz and Val heard the front door hit my fender and when Liz came into the hall and the refrigerator shut with a sucking thud and she asked where was Mommy, I said that she would be along but I didn’t honestly know where she could be. Liz looked at me. I said, Whatever we do, you are you. Do you understand? Then I added, You are our daughter.
When is Mommy coming home? Liz answered. Is she having dinner out?
On her bike? I said.
Sure, said Liz.
I look up to her, everywhere I turn I guess I have seen her. A new breed of girl, her mother has persuaded me. Freed, I hear. Of old conditioning. So if chosen tomorrow for success, she would not be surprised.
I would hope — I would hope (as we preface things at a meeting in San Diego, Albuquerque, San Antonio, Columbus, Montpelier) — that down deep in her nervous system Liz believes she’s bereft of obligations except to herself — I’ve said it better than I know how. Thanks to her: who assumes much and nothing about her future, including that she is, or has been prepared to live it at an address entirely hers. Sees an adult in the evening who was wiped out first thing in the morning, and thinks, does Liz, not at all that she might have caused the depression (she knows well the word) that extends hollow and banal and lasting before that adult who shall be nameless and genuinely without regard to sex, while with calm before this spectacle she lets the adult get on with it. She does not cry except in anger, which gets exhaled and is gone. She falls into home-makerly locutions, such as asking if I will be in for dinner tonight as if she were planning the meal. Her future — what can I say? She has hidden powers. Gives good advice if approached in the right way, not as a simple adult but one to one.
I pass to and from one aerodrome or the other, promoting steel in major cities, my program mapped a month or two months in advance, yet nothing if not flexible. I wake up, having been awake deep-seated in the multiplied upholstery of a system that works, and correct my slouch, guarding my lower back as a thing, a being, a moral that could come true. I straighten up and then I squeeze back my shoulders and I arch my spine; time empties in front of me along its main, and its overhead and cupped sides pave my way beyond me with what you think’s an elusive new material, you see through it, so the main is known to be there and you to be in it but you don’t exactly see it, and that goes for the bends up ahead, the turns built into it tunneled into the mountainous field through which time never knows itself.