"Shhh," said Maura. "Shut the fuck up."
We froze again, listened for moans, the beginnings of wails. It wasn't so onerous these days, but some moments still brought us back to Bernie's infant months, both of us on tiptoes, petrified we'd wake the baby, lose those seventeen minutes of email catch-up we believed our sacrifice had earned us. We were like the Frank family in their Dutch attic, but with email.
"Okay," said Maura, signaled the all clear. "So, what were we saying? Soap operas?"
"Yeah," I sulked. "Soap operas."
"Don't be such a queen," said Maura.
"Save that terminology for your gay lovers," I said.
"Excuse me?"
"I mean your lovers that are also gay."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"What's your problem?"
"I don't have a problem."
"Is there something you want to say to me?"
Why was I such a diseased fuck? It had to be society's fault. I loved people, all people, except for the ones with money and free time.
"No," I said.
"Are you sure?"
"I know you think I'm homophobic, but I'm not. You're the one who betrayed all your gay friends by having a baby."
"Most of my gay friends have babies now."
"You call them your gay friends. That's homophobic right there."
"You've really lost me," said Maura.
"I don't like animation. I like live action."
"Let me have a little time with that one."
"I don't care what people do behind closed doors, or open doors, or out in the street or in a coffee shop. I don't care what you do. Suck cock in Starbucks all day. Just don't be happy. And don't call me a depressive pansy behind my back."
Maura stared.
"I'm just kidding," I said.
Maura did not move.
"Really," I said. "Please, I don't know what I'm talking about."
"No, you don't," she said.
She looked beautiful there near the window in moonlight. I moved to her, tried to kiss her, let my hand fall to the strap of her dress, but she shoved me, gently, away.
"I'm sorry, Milo. I'm just… I'm just all touched out."
"Touched out?"
"I know you understand."
"Do I? Does Paul know that?"
"What?"
"You heard me."
"Don't be paranoid, Milo."
"Don't make me paranoid. Especially to avoid guilt."
"I don't know what you're talking about. Paul's really kind of an idiot actually."
"I'm an idiot, too!" I shouted. "Don't you fucking see it, Maura! I'm an idiot, too!"
Maura's eyes got beady. Bernie's wail, low at first, gathered up for the sonic cascade.
"Yes, Milo," whispered Maura. "I do see that now."
Bernie soon returned to sleep, but in that moment we probably both recalled the all-nighters of those first few years, Maura always the one to rise and slip into Bernie's room. Once in a while I'd pretend to be about to get up, even pull the sheets off my legs, but Maura would push me back down in disgust. She'd lost years of slumber. A point came where Bernie had suckled for too long to start a bottle, but I could have intervened, insisted I live my share of nightly hell. But I didn't. I liked the sleep. I still felt guilty about it, but I was not about to let the feeling devour me. I had learned long ago how to refine the raw guilt into a sweet, granulated resentment.
There was, for instance, the lullaby question. Maura sang the boy "Silent Night" almost every night. Operation Foreskin Rescue was one thing, but did she have to fill Bernie's brain with Christian death chants? Someday I thought I might go in there with an X-Acto blade, Jew-cut the little crumb right back into my tribe, my half-tribe.
T.C.B., Abraham-style.
Wonder if it's legal. Be good to do a little time.
It wasn't society's fault, really.
I dozed off worried I had truly unhooked myself from the apparatus of okay. Or maybe it was the Malbec.
I woke in silence. Light from the hallway fell on Maura and I watched her sleep, a lattice of saliva fluttering on her lips. I rose to fetch a glass of water, peeked into Bernie's room.
They were all lovely in sleep, but none so lovely as Bernie. Here in my humble outer-borough home a godlet took his rest, a miniature deity in need of protection until he was strong enough to fend for himself and, eventually, deliver humankind from fatal folly.
This not really working thing wasn't really working.
Ten
Purdy put off our meeting another few days. He'd flown out to Vail for an ideas festival, had gotten worked up over some of the ideas. He was holed up in a suite with a gorgeous renewable-energy guru. He would call when he got back, hoped I could forgive him.
"Of course," I said.
"You must have a lot going on back there anyway."
"Oh, yes, absolutely," I said.
"You should come out here, though. It's really something. I mean, these people, you read their books, their newsletters, see them on TV, but to hear them in person, chat with them. Very impressive. Do you realize that someday we will be heating our houses with trout?"
"Is that one of the ideas at the ideas festival?"
"It's just fantastic here."
I almost asked him why he didn't tell Melinda about it, including the part with the guru. Maybe it was blowback from the Jolly Roger days, but I'd always grown anxious when men confided their infidelity, surged with judgment, until my inner Nietzsche called me simp. Meanwhile, I was too scared to tell Purdy his delays had put the last of our savings in jeopardy. Never let them see you sweat, countless bastards tell us, just to see us sweat.
"I'm not really an ideas man, Purdy," I said. "I'm an action fella."
"Yeah, right," laughed Purdy. "Oh, I've got to go. The prime minister of Norway is throwing a pool party. We'll connect up next week."
"Sounds fine," I said. "I should be available."
I looked at my wrist as I said it, as though I kept a large calendar there.
I'd been back to Nearmont enough that I didn't have to plan for nostalgic reveries each time the bus passed my old high school (Go Vikings! Kill Catamounts!), or Nearmont Plaza, where once, behind Scissor Kicks, the local hair salon, I'd received the opening stages of a handjob from Sayuri Kuroki, before prowler lights stabbed us to the stucco.
Sayuri's family moved back to Japan soon after, but from then on, whenever I pictured my penis in her hard little hand, I always made sure to insert that gray pixelated dot over it, like they did in Japanese porn. Honor is important to every culture.
So shy and brilliant, my Sayuri, and nothing surpassed the way her black hair fell against the acid-washed jean jacket she'd adopted for life in New Jersey. While the bus pulled up to the plaza stop, I wondered where the years had led her. Maybe she was a successful businesswoman. Maybe she had a daughter who wrote cell phone novels. Maybe she was attending an ideas festival.
It was a short walk from the plaza to the house on Eisenhower, a yellow split-level with that forbidding bedroom turret my mother had built after my father died. I guess without the heroic measures there was money for turrets, for ramparts and moats, slits for boiling oil and archers from Milan, whatever a widow's castle required. The door was open and I stepped into the foyer, turned for a sinking step into the slightly sunken living room.
Claudia sat in her altitude tent, her body stringy and golden in her Mondrian print bikini. The tent took up a good deal of the room. Her girlfriend took up the rest. Francine was tiny but she spread herself out, her interests, her projects, calligraphy corner here, computer cranny there. Earlier, thwarted versions of this woman wove potholders. This epoch found her oscillating between soapstone carving and online pinochle while my mother toiled to meet her quota of surplus red blood cells. There was a seniors charity race a few days away, sexagenarian whippersnappers whose spirits deserved a good pulverizing.