THE CASTLE
SEIZE THE DAY
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
BLEAK HOUSE
THE SPOILS OF POYNTON
THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
VICTORY
PARADE’S END
THE SECRET AGENT
SECOND SKIN
We squat down on the floor, clearing a space, browsing among the fallen, looking for some words of counsel. A period of silence passes, each of us caught up in his own text, “Let’s not move,” I am prepared to say. Before I can find the words, before we can become aware of the ambiguities of my idle remark, she leans over and purrs an unintelligible secret in my ear.
I close my eyes, let exhaustion wash over me. This time, I think, I will not make the same mistakes, will not fall prey to indolence and cowardice again. I will be kind to my wife and child and kinder to myself. This is a new chance, I remember thinking, the same thought I had five years before when we moved into the other house and four years before that when we married, the same fresh moment gathered over and over in my life (and hers) going back as far as it goes.
The silence fails to contain our hopes, and we move, embrace, stand up, make idle chatter, and go on. In the abyss of a moment, all is forgotten.
Crossed in Love by Her Eyes
“I think you ought to know I’m not going to marry you,” I hear the baby say through the closed door of my study. “Marie and I are going together.”
Who is Marie?
“So you and Marie are going together,” she says, a thin note of pain breaking through the coolness of her tone.
“One of these days we might get married,” he says.
A few minutes later the baby’s mother comes into my study and asks if she might interrupt my unproductive self-absorption for a few minutes.
“I feel rejected,” she says, laughing in a way that implies she thinks she ought to be amused but isn’t. “Our baby’s got another woman.”
“It’s my opinion it won’t last.”
“The worst of it is that the woman he’s infatuated with — Marie, you may remember her, that streaky stacked blond that sat for him a couple of times — won’t have anything to do with him. Yesterday, when I asked her if she could, baby-sit Friday night, the truth came out. She said she’s no longer interested in babies, that they have nothing to teach her.”
“Did you tell the baby what she said?”
“He’s been so miserable as it is, mooning around the house and sighing in his pathetic way, I couldn’t make it worse. Will you talk to him man to man?”
“I’m not very good at that.”
She blows me a kiss. “I was only kidding, you know, about the unproductive self-absorption. I think your self-absorption is as productive as anybody’s.”
Moments after the baby’s mother leaves, almost as if it’s been rehearsed, the baby takes her place in the room.
“When you’re married,” he asks after a point, “does that mean you have to sleep in the same bed as the other person?” He asks the question with both hands over his face, one eye peering through the slats of his fingers.
“Only if both people want to,” I say.
“Well, both people do want to,” he says, “and that’s final.”
He does a parody of his father storming furiously out of a room.
He returns. “What about love?” he asks.
“What about it?”
His thumb, as if it were just passing by, finds its way into the tunnel of his mouth. It is apparent after a while that neither of us, with all goodwill, can think of anything to say. The word love has come between us. We study the silence for clues. Before I can put my thoughts into a sentence, he is gone.
Later that day, I get a phone call from a young woman who calls herself Marie.
“Your little son has invited me to share his bed,” she says in a voice that strives for outrage.
“I’ve heard something about that,” I say.
“Have you? In the last house I worked, the father used to come into my bed at night, pretending to be the son. As you might imagine, such a deception couldn’t go on for long.”
I say something to the effect that I can’t imagine how such a deception could go on even once, though my remark, like the father she cites, seems to pass unnoticed.
“I’m prepared to give it a trial run, if you want me,” she says. “My boyfriend’s moved back in with his wife, and I’m at loose ends.”
“It’s the baby who wants you,” I say. I am about to say something about talking it over with my wife, when the woman on the phone overrides me again.
“I get that,” she says. “I only hope he’s not too demonstrative. I really love babies, I really do, if they don’t expect too much from you. I have a lot to give, you know, if not too much is asked.”
An appointment is made for an interview.
Two weeks have passed since Marie has become a part of our household. The baby, whom I’ve hardly seen since the girl has come to live with us, patters glumly into my study and sits down on the floor with his back to me.
“Is something the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter,”
“Are you sad because it’s Marie’s day off?”
He treats the question as if a reply were too self-evident to deserve notice.
“Do you know what?” he says. “Marie won’t sleep in my bed,”
“She won’t?” He has caught me, as he often does, in a moment of distraction.
“Maybe she will if I ask her. Will she? Tell her she has to, okay? Tell her if she doesn’t…if she doesn’t, she’ll have to sleep with the dog and we don’t even have a dog. Okay?”
I indicate, which is something we’ve been through before, that it’s not within my power to compel Marie to sleep in his bed.
He is unconvinced. “I am angry at you,” he says. “Also disappointed. And I’m not going to tell you the story I was going to tell you unless you say to Marie, ‘Marie, you have to sleep with the baby. That’s the rule.’’’
“I’ll tell her that you would like her to,” I say. “How’s that?” He shakes his head in an aggrieved manner. “If you wanted her to sleep in your bed, I would tell her that she had to.”
I lift him in the air and hug him, to which he offers an obligatory complaint. When I put him down, though he insists he is still angry with me and still doesn’t like me, he offers me the story of what may have been his last night’s dream. What follows is the baby’s account.
THE STORY OF MY DREAM
The baby is in the bathroom taking off his overalls when a woman he’s never seen before walks in, carrying a baby about his own size.
“Is it my brother?” the baby asks her.
She doesn’t say anything, a reproachful quality in her silence, and puts the baby, who may or may not be the baby’s brother, in the baby’s place on the toilet.
“Isn’t he a little prince!” the lady says.
The baby holds his nose politely, doing the best he can to ignore the foul air of the other.
A big dog comes into the bathroom, not the dog the baby doesn’t have, but another one, a large white pig-faced dog with flowerlike spots. The dog sniffs the room, then in one large bite eats the other baby, toilet seat and all.
The lady is very sad. The baby tells her not to cry, but she is too busy crying to listen.
“We were going to be married,” she says. “Why did that monstrous dog have to eat him?”
The baby sits on the toilet the way the other did, but fails to make the same kind of splash. Nothing he does seems to please the lady, who is moaning and blowing her nose.