“We were,” Tovah said.
“Well, then, fuck you, Big Bones. That’s your problem. And what are you doing that’s so great? Anybody can play with kids.”
“I’m also a poet.”
“And you have a blog, I’m guessing?”
“I’m sorry,” Tovah said. “You’re right. I’m being abrasive. I get scared of intimacy. I flail.”
“That’s so cool.”
“Let’s start again. No more scrapple.”
“I don’t think so,” Sean said. “Whatever the opposite of compatible is, that’s us.”
“Incompatible?” Tovah said.
“If you say so, wordsmith. Thing is, we both need the same crap. Somebody with money, and security, and also did I mention money? To shore up our egos. To nurture our unrealistic dreams.”
“Yes,” Tovah said. “That’s actually true. That’s an insight.”
“Thank you,” Sean said. “I used to be very promising.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Are you going to ask whether my hair turned white slowly or overnight?”
“Do you want me to?” Tovah said.
“Well, let me tell you a story. I was working on a guide boat out of the Solomon Islands.”
Sean spoke into the darkness for a while, telling a mesmerizing, no doubt spurious tale. Tovah realized that she didn’t care about him or his saga or the whiteness of his hair one whit. She could never mate with a man who called her Big Bones, even once, even in jest. She could never expose her eggs to such a jerk.
* * *
The climber room admitted six kids and one teacher at a time. The other children had to wait in the next room at their sand tables and clay stations. Tovah stood near the varnished wooden bars and watched Dezzy scale the ladder. This day had once been her day off.
Laura had called her soon after she’d talked to Mr. Gautier.
“Is this standard at Sweet Apple?” Tovah had asked. “Letting a parent dictate schedules?”
“He’s not dictating. He made a request.”
“What’s the diff?”
“Tovah, I understand how this might seem concerning to you. But you’re just here temporarily. Mr. Gautier has been part of the school family for many years. His yearly donation keeps us afloat. I don’t want to disappoint him. That would be concerning to me. I don’t want to say that if you don’t abide by his request, there’s a chance you might not be able to continue with us.”
“You don’t want to say what?”
“I believe you heard me.”
“What if I just quit?”
“God, can you afford that? Lucky you. Can I quit with you? Do you have us covered?”
“Okay, Laura. I understand. It’s okay.”
“You’re a real sweetheart,” Laura said.
“I’m a schmuck,” Tovah said.
“Always a fine line.”
Tovah winced admiringly.
Now Dezzy turned from the ladder and shoved herself at Tovah’s shoulder. Her frizzy hair scratched Tovah’s cheek. The girl’s breath carried sour fruit.
“I love you, Tovah!” Dezzy said, gurgled through surplus saliva. Desdemona wasn’t slow, just charmless, a sloppy need machine.
One of the other kids, a funny boy named Ewen, tugged on Tovah’s jeans.
“Tovah,” he said. “Can we read about the tigers again?”
Because Laura did in fact care about the boys and didn’t want them to notice her revulsion, they’d become Tovah’s responsibility.
“You can change them, the boys,” Laura had told her. “Erase the predator patterns in their brains. Make them docile and generous. I’d do it myself, but I get so nauseated.”
Tovah’s Dezzy duty was a drag. She wanted to read to Ewen, but if Dezzy didn’t want to join them, the morning would turn dire. Dezzy would collapse and wail. A real Trojan widow scene. It made Tovah wonder what went on at the House of Gautier. Randy Goat hadn’t been making drop-offs or pickups this week. A young Tibetan woman came instead. And what did Mrs. Gautier do with her time? Or was that blond woman at the home visit even Dezzy’s mother? Now Tovah found the narrative becoming dense. Dense wouldn’t do. She was ready to wrap this up, find another — what did they call it? — situation.
Dezzy licked and nibbled Tovah’s neck. Tovah hoisted the girl away from her.
“You don’t want to skin lip?” Dezzy said.
“What? What did you say?”
“Ouchie. Put me down.”
“Tigers, Tovah,” Ewen said, tugged.
* * *
Mr. Gautier offered too much money for the babysitting job. It was more like a call girl’s fee, even factoring in Dezzy’s unpleasantness, but this was no era to demur. Tovah took the gig. It would be a noon-to-midnight shift on Saturday. Mr. Gautier had meetings, a benefit dinner.
Tovah had never babysat, not even in high school, but at least she was starting at the top. This wasn’t a few hours at the neighbor’s house, with Tovah paid in cable TV and leftover casserole. This was big bucks to encamp in a palace on Central Park West and monitor a brat while Mr. and Mrs. Gautier lorded it over the city’s top-shelf kowtowers. Maybe they’d bring her white-frosted cake in swanned-up tinfoil. Everything seemed so pathetic and exciting.
She knew she should mention the offer to Laura, but she enjoyed the secret, side-business feel of it. There was something odd about Mr. Gautier, to be sure, but even if he returned home in his tux, tipsy from champagne, and his wife excused herself and retired to what she might refer to as her chambers, and when she was gone Mr. Gautier, while plucking sharp green bills from his silver clip, accidentally brushed his well-preserved knuckles against her breast or her bosom or her (perhaps let’s just say specifically) unusually responsive (based on informal polls of friends) nipple, and they locked eyes and giggled and then, for no reason at all, kissed, skin lipped, as some tiny persons would have it, until they heard a noise, a door off the den or a loose board in the refurbished hallway, maybe the wife returning to the kitchen for her bedtime book, one of those wretched memoirs with a blurred photo of a schoolgirl on the jacket, and upon hearing the noise, they, Randy and Tovah, froze and broke apart in thrilled fright — even if all of that happened, she wasn’t sure she would tell Laura. In fact, she knew she wouldn’t tell her, so why mention the babysitting job at all?
Besides, it would be awkward in a few years, when Tovah was — and let’s be totally random here — Randy’s new wife, the mother of his baby, and Tovah found herself, for example, president of the board of Sweet Apple, which had the power to hire and fire directors as she (or she and the board) saw fit. Of course, without question, Tovah would endorse a renewal of Laura’s contract. The woman needed a viable wardrobe, but she’d proved herself a more than capable employee. Besides, there would be so many other things to worry about, such as the transformation of Glyphonym from a ludicrous glossy bursting with trust fund doggerel to a rigorous journal where the best poets, regardless of tradition, would connect with one another and a larger audience. A few poems a year by Tovah would not be unseemly. Other editors did it.
Plenty more so-called luxury problems might rear their plush heads. You had to hire the right people, make certain that the nanny wasn’t teaching the baby Cantonese by mistake, or the cook wasn’t drizzling the wrong oils on Tovah’s salads, not to mention the guaranteed Stukka dives of bitchery from the ditched blond wife. Tovah didn’t know a thing about her, but the woman’s gold-digging implements had been edged enough to carve out some precious metal from the Randolph Gautier vein. Doubtless they could leave nasty divots in the flesh of her usurper. Still, the state of alert would be worth it because of the baby, the baby that would be hers and also nestled in cozy plenitude, the combination she never thought possible.