Clarissa’s sister, who evidently had flown in from somewhere to stand sentry over Teddy until the crisis passed, was the most upset at Mussolini and also was the most lucid, rattling off all his worst qualities to Clarissa and listing all the legal and practical ways to intimidate him. “Clarissa, I know you can’t hate him because he’s the father of your child, so I’ll hate him for you,” she said.
Clarissa quaked imperceptibly, and I watched her contain herself. She pulled herself inward, doing what she had to do as a mother: think how she could protect Teddy. She looked around the room as she thought, holding each position for an instant before shifting her head or body. As ideas occurred through her, she would respond to them physically. She shook her head; she would express dismay; her lips would tighten. Finally she whispered, “I can’t go home. Where can I go?”
Lorraine said, “You can stay with me.”
“No, no,” said Clarissa. “He knows where your hotel is.”
I said, “You could stay here for the night. All of you.” They all looked at one another and knew it was a good idea.
A few hours passed. Brian had secreted Clarissa’s car behind the building and parked it in Philipa’s space; if Mussolini drove by later and saw her car in the street he would bang down every door in the neighborhood trying to find her. Lorraine and Clarissa were going to sleep in my bed with Teddy between them. I would sleep on the sofa. Philipa brought in a sack of fried chicken, a donation. Tiger smelled it and gave me an imbecilic grin of anticipation. I offered him a leg and tried to switch it at the last second with a palmed dog biscuit, but he wasn’t fooled, even after I had smeared it with chicken grease. I made the sofa into a bed with a blanket I borrowed from Tiger, which was covered with a wide swath of dog hair.
As night began to fall I started to worry. When Clarissa went to sleep, she would naturally turn out the lights in my bedroom, which would prevent me from turning out the lights in the living room, which meant I would be sleeping under 1125 watts of power. Later in the evening, I noticed she had left a night-light on, which meant I could kick off the fifteen-watt range light. But that was it. I was attempting sleep in the land of the midnight sun. I turned facedown and buried my head in the cushions. After a restless twenty minutes of pretending, I heard a door creak and then footsteps headed my way. Clarissa’s hand touched my shoulder and I turned.
“I just wanted to say thank you.”
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Daniel, I was lying in bed thinking about all this and I realized I won’t be able to treat you anymore. It’s not proper for you to know all this about me. I’ll have to ask them to refer you to someone else.”
“Do the same rules apply even if you’re only an intern?” I asked hopefully.
“Even more so. I have to show respect for how things are done,” she said. “It would be serious for me not to report this.”
Clarissa was Mother Teresa to my leprosy. She leaned in toward me. I watched her lips part and close; I heard her breath between the words. In close, her voice changed. Lower, more resonant, like wind across a bottle top. In close, her beauty trebled. Her hair fell forward and scattered the hard light on her face into softer shadows. Her hand rested languidly on the sofa, palm up, almost like it wasn’t part of her, and the pale side of her wrist was lost and wan, longing for sun.
“Thank you for letting us stay here. We’ll look for somewhere else tomorrow.”
“You can stay here as long as you need to,” I said.
“We might need to stay here tomorrow. I called his sister. She told me he’s got to be back in Boston on Saturday. If he goes, we’ll be all right.”
Clarissa squeezed my elbow and then stood up. “Do you want me to turn out the lights?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “I want to read.” There wasn’t a book nearby and I had never told her of my wattage requirements, so she looked around, momentarily puzzled. But this was such a tiny bewilderment at the end of doomsday it hardly mattered. She retreated into the bedroom, leaving the door cracked open.
As midnight closed in on us, the extraneous sounds of televisions and cars, footsteps and distant voices unwove themselves from the night. I closed my eyes. The light no longer bothered me. I thought of the two women in my bed and the protective sandwich they made that held Teddy in place. My body curled and tightened as if being pulled by a drawstring. I gasped for breath. I pictured myself spread over Teddy like a blanket, but I was watching from above, just as Clarissa watched herself from heaven. The kicks intended for Teddy were taken and absorbed by my body. There was something about having intervened at the exact moment of heartbreak that evoked a deepening melancholy, and I hiccupped a few sobs. I then saw myself as the boy, hearing and sensing the blows from overhead, and why did I, rolled up on the sofa clutching a pillow, say out loud, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry”?
I heard a few small wahs during the night, a few footsteps pattering around, and I think we all had a fitful sleep. By 5 A.M., however, nothing stirred except my eyeballs, which delighted in having a fresh ceiling to dissect. Silence had finally struck Santa Monica, which put my mind in the opposite of a Zen state. Rather than my head being empty of thought, every crevice was bursting with facts, numbers, revelations, connections, and products. After I had deduced, or more properly, induced how Aquafresh striped toothpaste is coaxed into the tube back at the factory, I created a new magic square:
I was lost in the vision of the square, this graphic of my current life, when one of its components, Teddy, creaked open my bedroom door and crawled a few feet into the living room, pausing on all fours. The component looked over at me and grinned. He then made a surprising feint right but went left, then pulled himself up and leaned against the wall, moving his eyes off me only for necessary seconds. He turned and pressed his palms against the wall and then circumnavigated the room until he had gotten to the sofa where I was trying so hard to sleep. He plopped back on his rear end and extended his arms toward me, which I supposed to be some sort of cue for me to pick him up, and I did. I placed him on my chest, where he sat contentedly for about a minute, and I said something that had an intentional abundance of the letter b in it, as I thought the letter b might be amusing to a one-year-old. I started with actual words-baby, booby, bimbo-then degenerated into nonsense sounds: bobo, boobah, beebow. His expressions ranged from concentration, to displeasure, to happiness, to confusion, to distress, though as far as I could tell, there was absolutely nothing to feel displeasure, happiness, confusion, or distress about. Except for the letter b.
I put my hand on his stomach to tickle him and found that my palm extended over his entire rib cage. I picked him up and hoisted him above my head, balancing him in the air on my stiff right arm, which he seemed to relish. I twisted him from side to side and he spread his arms, and for a few moments he was like an airplane on a stick. This simulation of flight seemed to please him inordinately, and his mother, who must have sensed that her boy had gone missing, said from over my shoulder, “Are you flying, Teddy? Are you flying in the air?”
In the morning, they slipped away like a caravan leaving an oasis, and the return to quiet unnerved me.