"An artist," my mother said, blinking. "Oh, well ...if you want to look at it that way. I married him because he could play the violin and I was fed up with Vassar. At the time he was playing with Django Reinhardt ... I met him during Christmas vacation in Paris."
"I don't care to hear this story again," I said.
"I was supposed to be studying French. All the girls fell for him, though physically he wasn't a paragon of beauty, with his large nose and shock of dirty blond hair, a Northern Italian who smelled of garlic. Actually, you take after him."
"Mother, what are you talking about," I said. I was insulted.
"Lay off trying to tease me at this time. You know I don't have much of a sense of humor when it comes to myself. Ten years ago I could have been a male model. What a different life I would have been leading now. But you always encouraged me in my artistic ambition."
"I think I'm pregnant," my mother said, looking at the ceiling. "I don't know what to do. I've always had a healthy appetite, but this is different. ..."
"Once again you're changing the subject on me!" I said. "Well, Mother, I've told you for years to go on a diet."
"This is a different kind of fatness," my mother said. "This is the kind of weight gain due to something being alive inside my stomach."
"Did you see a doctor?"
"At my age I'm embarrassed to go to a doctor."
That's the kind of logic my mother always thought was acceptable. "Ma, what makes you think you're pregnant?" I said.
"A few months ago, visiting Andrea at her summer place in Maine, I had an affair with a young man. He was an instructor at Berkeley in the politics of television, and we had sexual intercourse twice, without using birth control. Neither time was very much fun."
"I thought, Ma, that you said you had been through the menopause."
"I never paid much attention to that sort of thing."
For a few minutes neither of us said anything, each occupied with our own thoughts. I supposed, if she went ahead and actually had this baby, that I would offer to take care of it and raise it as my own child. Would she have done the same for me? This was doubtful; besides, I would never let any child of mine fall into her hands. It wouldn't be so bad. My brother, my son. I would name the kid Achilles, it could talk to me while I painted.
And I might have opened my mouth to make my offer had not my mother opened her mouth to insult me once again.
"I can't go on worrying about you forever, Marley," she said.
"You're twenty-nine years old and haven't gotten any more mature since you were ten. I wonder if I should have given you more vitamins."
"Crazy old bat!" I said. "Old cow! Who asked you to worry about me? You're the one who screwed up your life and mine!"
My mother was like a little kid with a lot of toys, and I was just a toy she had forgotten about a long time ago. Once in a while she saw me up on the back of the shelf. When I was a kid, I waited for the times when she would dust me off. Then it was great, it made up for all the rest.
But I thought I had worked through all this. I hadn't meant to snarl at her; I really didn't want her bucks, nor did I need them. I didn't mind not eating, it was part of what I had chosen for myself. "Oh, that's not to say, Ma," I added guiltily, "that you didn't always make me feel capable of doing anything. I have to hand it to you for that. You had confidence in me— and look how I turned out, a genius of the first degree!"
This was a compliment of the highest order. But all my mother said, looking at the floor and not at my paintings, was, "You've always sounded so pompous to me, Marley. I wonder if other people feel the same way about you that I do? Or is it just because I'm your mother that you come across as pretentious..."
Let's face it, my mother was in outer space. She made me mad. There was no use in my trying to talk to her. I got up and walked out, leaving my mother alone in the loft.
Well, I really just went up the street to buy some beer. I only wanted to get away from her for a couple of minutes. But when I got back with the Rheingold, she was gone. This made me feel even worse. Because the neighborhood was not exactly safe, and it was already past dark. All the Cuban fritter joints had closed up for the evening and there was nobody out on the street but a bunch of men standing around drinking. Which was okay for me, because though I'm a skinny guy, I've always been tough. But for my mother, wandering around pregnant with my brother ...
I cracked open the quart of beer and there on the table my mother had scribbled a little note. It was lucky I found it, the table was so covered with old paint rags, napkins, telephone numbers, and unopened bills. The note was short: "As long as you have confidence in yourself, Marley, I suppose that's what's important. I'm leaving you five dollars, buy yourself something to eat."
My mother had never outgrown a certain girlish style of writing, at least in her personal correspondence. And yet her monthly pet column, appearing in various women's magazines, which she churned out with regularity, was highly professional, though the subject matter was generally quite deranged. Articles on homosexuality in the household pet; hookworm; rabies, and other lurid topics.
I was so mad at myself I went over to the sink and smashed the three plates I hadn't yet broken. I'm a very volatile type of guy. Why had I spoken to my mother that way, calling her an old bat? Maybe it was the cold, my apartment was without heat. I have never done well in the cold, nor in the heat either, for that matter. The cold hadn't seemed to affect the cockroaches, however, they were more active than ever. I figured the least I could do would be to poison the roaches, a task I thoroughly enjoyed. In this way I supposed I would be pleasing my mother. I would use the money she had left me to go buy roach poison and some ice cream. If my mother thought I was looking skinny, she who had never before paid the slightest attention to my appearance, then I really must be looking frail. So I threw my coat on and went back out.
On the street I realized I felt extremely giddy. Here I was, Marley Mantello, a genius of an artist, and shortly about to have a new brother. Already I thought of the kid more as my own son. The discussions we would be able to have! All that I knew about art would be his by osmosis. It was as if I was in a cyclotron, whirling about. I could feel the various amoebas and molecules inside me hopping like Mexican jumping beans. Oh, it was amazing how lucky I was, though it was no more than I deserved.
I couldn't control myself; once inside the grocery store I leapt up, accidentally knocking over a package of Japanese rice cookies. Oh, I was an elegant chap, and though my Italian almond-colored loafers were scuffed, what a team my son and I would make once he arrived! It would be him and me against the world.
Then I spotted an artist friend of mine, standing next to the piles of dried apricots and nutmeats. "Larry!" I said.
"Hello, Marley," he said, in the voice of a zombie. Humped over alongside the apricots that way, he gave me quite a jolt. It was screwy, the way he was standing, one shoulder lower than the other as if he had got the plague. Maybe he was trying to steal the fruit, though I could have told him that this wasn't the place to try. "How have you been, Marley?" he said.
The last time I saw Larry, he looked like a human being. Now he had slithered into some preliminary reptile. On his head were a few sprouts of hair with a lot of skull in between. Dull lizard eyes. He was dressed in some sort of shabby camouflage. A terrible odor, reminiscent of cauliflower and old cheese ...
"I'm great!" I said. "My work is going fantastically, I'm designing a giant altarpiece, ten by twenty feet long—see, I've applied to build a chapel in Rome, right near the Vatican. And I have a feeling I'm going to get the grant. But the real reason I'm excited is that I'm going to have a kid. Would you believe it? Me. Marley Mantello—" Meanwhile my voice trailed off. The guy obviously wasn't doing too well. I felt embarrassed to run into him like this, in my black Italian sweater with neon-blue stripes like an early Frank Stella, my elegant rumpled old jacket, my gold, angelic hair. There was a pause. I thought at least the guy would congratulate me.