“Didn’t you speak to Marie?”
“I spoke to Marie,” he says, “but it was a different Marie, not the Marie that was my baby-sitter.”
“It’s the same Marie,” I say.
“It’s not,” the baby says.
One day the baby and his grandmother, walking in the park — this reported to me by the baby — see a young woman pushing a stroller who looks like Marie or who is Marie. The baby calls to her.
(What he is about to tell me is true, the baby says, though it may also be a dream.)
The presumed Marie turns her head in the direction of her name, appears to see nothing, or everything, and then goes on, somewhat more quickly than before.
The baby calls Marie’s name again and gets no reaction except that a dog, apparently named Marie or something like it, comes running toward him.
The misinformed dog knocks the baby over and licks his nose.
When the baby is restored to his feet, the other Marie is in the distance.
The baby continues his pursuit, stopping every once in a while to pick up his fallen grandma or to call out Marie’s name. Each time he calls her name, Marie seems to increase her pace as if — is it possible? — she is actually running away from him.
Does she think he is someone else? Who could he be if not himself?
It is only me he wants to say, but finds himself restrained by doubts.
His pursuit takes the baby through places he has never seen before outside of books and postcards.
After hours of relentless chase — the baby too tired even to call her name — he arrives at the stroller he saw Marie with, now deserted.
There is not another baby in the stroller (as he might have expected) but a large stuffed bear with a note pinned to its chest.
— To my darling darling Baby.
Love, Marie
P.S. As soon as I have the time,
I’ll come and visit you.
“That’s the end of the story,” the baby says. “Does she come and visit?” I ask.
“Does who come and visit?”
“Marie.”
“When I’m older,” the baby says.
Birthday Gifts
In this dream my father comes to visit with a box of birds as a birthday gift. I am between birthdays so I ask if it is for the one past or the one coming up. “It is for one long forgotten, your seventh or ninth, the year I was out of my mind.” I have no recollection of the circumstance he describes and accept the gift as a token of something else. There are some visitors with him, six or seven celebrated figures, including our major living poet.
What have they come here for? “I want them to commemorate you,” says my father. “I want them to see what you’ve become.” They space themselves out in a row of hard-back chairs like an audience. “We’ve just come from seeing the movie, Rules of the Game,” the famous poet says in his New England southern accent. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It fails to meet the test of time.”
“Do you mean the Renoir?” I ask.
“It fails the moment ambition takes over,” says another.
I defend the movie, modestly at first, not wanting to offend.
“You’re making a bad impression,” my father whispers. “You argue in too loud a voice and on top of that you have no clothes on.”
It is true. They had come in on me before I had time to dress.
I excuse myself from the company to put something on.
When I leave the room — I am hardly out the door — I can hear them talking about me. “Who is he?” a voice asks. “Is he a friend of someone’s?” “I don’t know,” says another voice which sounds like my father’s.
They had come to see me celebrate a former birthday uncommemorated in its time. How can they not know who I am? Perhaps it is a metaphor. Perhaps they are asking who I am in the metaphysical sense. “It is one of the great movies,” I shout at them through the door to my room.
My birthday birds have gotten loose in my room, flying in a hectic flutter in all directions, pecking and chirping. What kind of gift is a box of birds? I put on my new suit, a hand-tailored dustgray linen, to show these visitors that I have clothes as fine as the best of them.
My return is heralded by a small somewhat perfunctory applause.
I look over the row of dissatisfied faces before beginning. “If you’re so successful,” I want to say, “why is it you’ve gotten no pleasure from your lives?”.
My father comes up on the stage to introduce me. “I’d like you to give this failure the kind of attention you’d give to one of your own.”
“What does he have to say to us?” someone calls out.
“If he has nothing to say, may he have the grace to say it briefly,” says my defender.
Before I can say a word, thinking of blowing my nose, a bird flies out of my pocket. The crowd laughs. “He’s funny,” says the famous poet to my father, “but is he serious?”
I mean to be serious and say so when two more birds fly out from under my shirt. “Now that’s more like it,” says the dean of American letters, snorting his laugh. I hold up my hands to silence the applause, explain again that I am the victim of accident, my birthday birds having gotten out of their box. I tell them of my unrealized vision, the heartbreaking disparity between the glowing achievement I intended and the anonymity I have come to accept as my lot.
“Too much bathos,” says the poet.
A bird drops its soft pellets on the shoulder of my linen suit.
“Ah the birds have the last word,” someone says, the one woman in the group, a grandmotherly crone. The audience claps with appreciation.
“Now that’s what I call a critic,” says my father, pointing to the feathered bomber.
I can see now that there’s no point in going on with my presentation. The crowd takes me for a fool and I tend to become the way others see me. I rush the row of chairs in a fury and make clownish faces in the face at the end of each turkey neck in the audience. “Who are you?” I ask them. They fall over at the slightest question. These celebrities are cardboard mock-ups, figures in a shooting gallery. I drive them out the door, my father first and last.
It is not my birthday. I celebrate whatever day it is alone.
I am slowly reading a book about the passage of time. The pages, which are heavy, turn themselves when they are done. This young woman, my wife, comes into the room to ask why I don’t do something of large imaginative possibility with my life, which is not, she wants me to know, going to last till the end of time. “I happen to be reading a book. Isn’t that enough?” Your friend, K, she reminds me, who is two months younger, has already made a quarter of a million dollars on subsidiary rights alone and won two major literary awards.
“But is K happy?” I ask her. She says, but are you. We are talking about K, I remind her.
Does she think I don’t care about K’s unearned success? I have plans not to say another word to him unless he admits that success has nothing to do with the inner man.
My wife, no longer young, goes out of the room shaking her head. I call after her, “It’s no sin to be jealous of K.”
“I make no judgments,” she says.
In the book I am reading it says, underlined in red pencil, “The time of the man who waits will come.” It strikes me that the author is making oblique reference to my own life. When I show the text to the woman who shares my life she says that it is a different kind of waiting to which the book refers. She turns the page before the page is ready to turn.
The next page is blank. What does it mean? We put our arms around each other and weep. When K comes in to complain about the unfairness of his last set of reviews his hair is white.