It is disappointing when you discover that the person you love loves someone else. I made this discovery twice. The first was one evening when the three of us sat down to our usual meal. These dinners were the fantastic disorder at the end of my rigorously structured days spent with my nose in financial magazines and reports. I had grown to anticipate them and participate in them with a new-found looseness. Clarissa and I chipped in and had food delivered, and there was a lot of freewheeling talk accompanied by the opening of white paper bags containing napkins and picnic utensils and tuna sandwiches and mustard packets. This crinkling noise and snap of the plastic tops of containers of mayonnaise always sparked us into thrilling recaps of the day’s most mundane events, and months later I realized that these half hours were sacred.
After Clarissa had set Teddy in a high chair and thrown a few morsels of tuna in front of him, he fisted a glob of it and stuck it in his mouth, then turned to her and grinned. Clarissa’s face beamed and broadened, her focus was only on him; there was nothing else, no apartment, no jobs, no schoolwork, no life other than the joyful force that streamed between them. And there was no me. I sat and waited out the absorption, which flickered when Clarissa reached for more food and finally both alit back on earth.
Clarissa’s studies progressed and she engaged herself in them with fervor, and she grasped the language of psychology quickly. The vocabulary and concepts came easily to her and she hinted that she had an affection for the subject matter that the other students didn’t. At night she would catch me up on what she had learned during the day, give me shorthand analyses of syndromes and disorders, and then would go over comments she had made in class to get my opinion of them.
Clarissa was always thoughtful toward me and would express her gratitude for my assistance in her life, and I would thank her in return, which always left her puzzled. The impact she and Teddy had had on me was made clear one afternoon when a packet of mail arrived, forwarded from my old address. One of the envelopes was from Mensa. I opened it and read that it had been discovered that, as I had guessed, my scores had been compromised by human error, and would I like to take the test again? My first thought took the form of a shock: Human error at Mensa? What chance then did McDonald’s have, and the Rite Aid, and CompUSA? My second thought took the form of a semantic shudder at the phrase “human error”: Is there any other kind? My third thought was No, I didn’t want to take the test again, because here I was having a life, even though it was a pastiche of elements of the life of someone else.
One night I got a phone call from Clarissa asking if it was all right for her to be home later than usual. “Would you be okay? Were you going out?” she asked, “Can you watch Teddy; is Teddy okay?” Sure, I said.
Teddy and I had an evening of bliss. He was the model child and I was the model adoptive/uncle/friend. We cavorted on the bed, we played trash can basketball, we played “Where’s Teddy?” at professional levels. Finally a cloud came over him and he conked out on my bed and I slid him over and rested next to him. My lighting rules were still in effect and the soft thirty-watt lamp on my chest of drawers was balanced nicely by the solar glow in the living room. My door was ajar and I could see the front window and door as I lay in relative darkness. I used this solemn time for absolutely nothing, as I drained my mind of thought.
Tonto.
That’s who I felt like when I heard the footsteps coming along the second-floor walkway. I thought to myself, “There are two of them, Kemosabe, and they’re coming this way.” I heard Clarissa’s voice, then a man’s. They spoke slowly, each response to the other delivered in the same whispered tone. Her answers were shy; his questions were confident and cool. They passed the window and I saw him looking at her as she looked down, fumbling for her keys. The door opened and he stood outside while she moved in, putting her purse down and turning around to him. He spoke to her, and he stepped into the apartment. Her hand touched the light switch and the hard overheads went out, sending my body into rigor mortis. But I watched. They spoke again and he put his hand on her arm, pulling her toward him. She responded. He moved his hand, sliding it up under her hair. He drew her into him and rested his forehead on hers, and I watched him close his eyes and breathe deeply to absorb her. His lips brushed her cheek and I saw her surrender, her shoulders dropping, her arms hanging without resistance. His hand went to her back and urged her, pressing her against him. Her arm went up to his waist, then around his back, and he moved his lips around to hers and kissed her, her arm tightening, locking on his back, her other arm sliding up to his elbow. Her head fell back and he continued kissing her, standing over her, then he stepped back and looked into her eyes, saying nothing.
It is hard to find that the person you love loves someone else. I knew that my tenure with Clarissa and Teddy would have an end.
It was early June, and I had continued my pattern with Teddy, and had continued to incrementally withdraw my attachment to Clarissa. There were other nights, nights involving quiet door closings and early morning slip-outs. These sounds made my detachment easier, even though there was no official announcement of a pledge of love, even though, as far as I knew, there was no introduction of the new man to Teddy, which I felt was wise of Clarissa and protective toward her child.
On a particularly disastrous afternoon I was in charge of Teddy and he and I engaged in a battle of wits. My mind was coherent, rational, cogent. His was not. As compelling as my arguments were, his nonverbal mind resisted. We had no unifying language or belief. I wanted a counselor to mediate, who would come and interpret for us, find common ground, a tenet we could agree on, then lead us into mutually agreed-on behavior. All this angst was focused on a cloth ring that fit over a cloth pole. He screamed, he wanted it, he didn’t want it, he cursed-I’m sure it was cursing-and there was absolutely no avenue for calm. But there were moments of transition. The moments of his transition from finding one thing unpleasant to finding another unpleasant. And he would gaze into my eyes, as if to read what I wanted from him so he could do the opposite. But these transitions were also moments of stillness, and in stillness is when my mind churns the fastest. I looked into the wells of his irises, into the murky pools of the lenses that zeroed in and out.
I had spent time with him; I had been the face, on occasion, that he woke up to. I was fixed in him; my image was held in his consciousness, and I wondered if his recollection of me had slipped beneath the watermark of his awareness and entered into a dreamy primordial place. I wondered if he saw me as his father. If he did, everything made sense. I was the safe one, the one he could rage against. The one from whom he would learn the nature, the limitation, and the context of the cloth ring on the cloth pole.