“Oh,” Patsy said, “she’s already an individual. They’re individuals the minute they come out of the womb. Emmy’s very sensitive to sounds. She first turned her head in the crib when she heard the singing of a bird outside the window. She’s demanding, you know, like most kids — she likes to have the same things happen in the same way all the time — and she’s still learning that she can’t always get what she wants, but that’s a stage. That’s how infants turn into children. She’s going to have a good sense of humor as a little girl and as a woman, I can tell. She’s very curious about everything. Her first word was ‘Wzzat?’”
“I was wondering,” Howie said from his dark corner, “if you like her. I mean, I know you’re her mother, of course, so you love her, but I was wondering if you liked her, too.”
“What a question!” She waited, trying to unpack Howie’s subtext. Failing at it, she said, “Of course I like her. Mothers always like their children.”
“No,” Howie said. “I don’t think so. Nice to say so, but no. I don’t think my mother ever liked me very much. She protected me because I was sickly, but that’s different. Loved—sure, of course. But it’s a weird scene when your parents don’t like you, don’t feel that friendly affinity, and I don’t think my mother ever did. We were sort of peripheral to her concerns.”
“You know, she had an affair with her yard boy last summer.”
“Yes. She finally told me.” He sounded bored by the subject.
“What did you think of that?”
“I didn’t care for it,” Howie said. “I think she should act her age. She’s a predator.”
“Well, I kind of liked it, myself,” Patsy said, careful not to reveal that Howie’s mother had also told her that she had loved the kid, at least a little. “I give her credit. I take off my hat to her.”
“For what?” Howie asked.
“For guts. For nerve. For being an older woman who can still take steps.”
“Steps. Ha. She’s not your mother,” Howie observed. “When it’s your mother, it gets. . strange.”
“Howie,” Patsy said in the dark, using her flattest voice, “we can’t take your charity. We just can’t.”
“It’s not charity. It’s an investment in you two. Did you talk to Saul?”
“No,” Patsy said, “I didn’t. I just can’t stand the idea of being a millionaire. It would turn Saul and me into. . I don’t know—villains.”
“Then give it away to someone else,” Howie said with equanimity. “Give it to charity. Give it to your children.”
“It’ll turn them into villains.” She shifted in her chair. She had an odd, fugitive idea that Howie liked talking to women in total darkness, that it answered some early-childhood need of his.
At that moment another flying egg hit the outside of the kitchen window. Patsy glanced at it, decided to ignore it, and because she ignored it, so did Howie. What the hell. They were being egged. It wasn’t the end of the world. You could always clean it up.
“Give it to them,” Howie said.
“Who?”
“The Himmels. The golems. The kids who’re throwing those eggs at your house.”
“That’s impossible,” Patsy said.
“Why?”
They looked at each other in the dark, but Patsy couldn’t quite see him — his eyes, the entryway into his soul, were masked and invisible to her.
Another egg hit the house.
“Tell me more about Lis,” Patsy said. She needed to keep asking questions. If she didn’t, he might try to kiss her. She felt his anarchic erotic charges bombarding her. He seemed to be leaning forward in her direction.
“Who?”
“Lis — your fiancée. The girl in the picture.”
“Oh, Lis.” And for the next half-hour, until they both felt sleepy again and went upstairs, Howie told Patsy about the woman he loved: her hobbies (tennis and photography and cooking), her favorite reading (the encyclopedia, and British novels, mostly Murdoch and Winterson), and her work at eFlea, where her training as a lawyer had helped them establish the business and keep it running, free of litigation. Patsy leaned back in the dark and felt relaxed and happy over her brother-in-law’s happiness. His voice went on, rhapsodic, washing over her. She could not remember another time when a man had felt so trusting in her company that he could describe in full-throated detail a woman he loved, both the inner and outer qualities that had attracted him to her.
“May you live in joy forever,” Patsy said finally, and Howie thanked her for the blessing.
Eighteen
The next morning, after his brother and sister-in-law and niece had costumed themselves for the day, had had their meager cereal breakfasts and then were utterly gone, leaving him alone in the silent breathing despoiled storybook house, Howie found a bucket and a clean sponge in the basement under the laundry tubs. He located a spray bottle of glass cleaner and a roll of paper towels in the kitchen pantry, and after mixing soap and a household cleanser in warm water, he took a scrubbing brush and scoured off the disfigurements on the north side of the exterior wall facing the driveway. Vinyl siding! His brother lived in a house with white vinyl siding! Very poisonous, very up-to-date. Human beings would go far to disguise themselves so that they were invisible to other human beings. Using the glass cleaner and the paper towels, he wiped off the windows, making sure that the sticky raw eggs left no residual trace. By the time he was finished, the glass was perfect, immaculate, and he himself had worked up a small sweat. But no smell. His sweat had no smell and never had had one. His perspiration was as pure as distilled water. This feature he shared with the gods.
Having finished with the windows, he extended the ladder, climbed up to the roof line, and emptied the gutters of their leaves. October, days until Halloween, autumn days, the days of the harvest and of uncurable sadness. Before going up the ladder’s rungs, he’d been unable to find a pair of work gloves in the garage or the basement or the pantry. Perhaps no one here really worked. Therefore, he would have to do the job bare-handed. The leaves gave to the flesh of his hands a smell of vegetative mold — Madagascar. His hands smelled the way Madagascar would certainly smell when you arrived on the cruise ship into the harbor of Madagascar’s seaport. . Toamasina. He made fists of both hands and brought them to his nostrils and inhaled the smell of that harbor, of the men and women working there, beads of their sweat falling onto the docks of that island kingdom. He felt transported. He would stay in Toamasina as long as he wished.
At the bottom of the ladder were the used paper towels scattered here and there. He gathered them up one by one and went inside, wiping his shoes first, before he dropped the towels into the garbage bag in the kitchen, the little perfect garbage can in the little perfect kitchen.
He washed the dishes in the kitchen sink. The light seemed to be everywhere.
His brother and sister-in-law had no idea how the world worked. They had no idea what people could do to you. And did do to you. One small misstep, one stumble, and the jackals were upon you. Protected and insular in their storybook house, his brother and sister-in-law eased themselves from day to day with no glimmer at all of the steady-state diminishments of everyday life — until the jackals had picked the body down to the bone and you were no longer able to cry out.