COMPANY
My oldest friend and her husband had their first baby last year. I’ve never been that interested in babies, really. I perceive that they are very beautiful, so beautiful it’s sometimes hard to bear. But I don’t want one of my own and I’m not sure why other people do. They are adorable when they smile, but when they cry it feels like having your heart removed with a pair of knitting needles and no anesthetic: you’d do anything to make it stop. And then, as well, you can’t go out at night, you have no privacy, you have to be an example for someone all the time, etc.
This friend is someone I’ve known since we were teenagers. In high school, we were always together; we used to have private, extended jokes, some of them not very nice, about the kids at our high school who were more popular than us — which was almost everyone — and this helped us get through those difficult years and feel less miserable and insane. When we went to college, unlike many high school friends, we kept in touch and visited each other.
I’ve known her husband for many years as well. When we were in our twenties, there was a period where we all three shared an apartment together and we were like people who share an apartment on a television program, always talking and very involved in each other’s lives.
So when my friend flew up to visit her parents in Virginia recently, I decided to drive down from Pennsylvania, where I was teaching at the time, to see her and meet her baby.
I was looking forward to the visit, but not without some reservations. I’ve had other friends who’ve had young children, though never such old, close friends, and particularly when the kids are very young you can’t really sustain a conversation with the parents. There is always something that the baby needs: his diaper must be changed, or he must be fed, or he must go down for a nap, or he needs to be walked around to prevent him crying. I was thinking: okay, so we’ll have a few minutes to catch up between his crying fits; that will have to do.
Actually, if I’m honest, in the past few years I’d started to feel a distance grow between my friend and me. She now has a real, grown-up job in public administration, and she and her husband have bought a beautiful, old, wood-frame house in Atlanta where they live. I am still moving around every couple of years, bouncing from job to job, still working on my stupid novel. Sometimes I feel like she’s become one of those kids we used to be snarky about in high school. She’s managed to make the transition into being normal and I’m still out here looking in, but now there isn’t even anyone to keep me company.
Anyway, when I arrived at her parents’ house, where my friend was staying, I rang the doorbell and she answered it. On her hip was her baby: a little boy with a thick silky head of black hair like hers and her husband’s bright blue eyes. I looked at my friend and at her baby. There they were — my friend and her husband — mixed together into one person. Of course, in one sense, this was just what I’d been expecting; the genes of parents combine to make a child. But on another level it was a total surprise. How is that possible? It’s like magic, really. The baby is both of them and neither of them. When this little boy looks serious and thoughtful, there is my friend’s contemplativeness; and when he grins or laughs out loud, there is her husband’s good humor.
My friend leaned around her baby to hug me with one arm.
“Come in,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you.”
I stepped into the front hall, took off my coat and hung it up. My friend’s baby watched me do these very ordinary things as if they were the most fascinating spectacle he’d ever seen. He didn’t even seem to blink: just looked at me in absolute amazement. And without really meaning to I stared right back at him.
My friend said: “Would you like to hold him?”
“All right,” I said, uncertainly.
I stood in the hall and she passed me her baby. He was somehow heavier than I’d anticipated and he seemed to have one too many limbs so that whatever way I held him there was always an arm or leg either dangling out or squashed. After a few moments of awkward shifting around, trying to find a comfortable position for him, his face crinkled up and he started to cry.
“I don’t think he likes me,” I said, trying to give him back.
“Oh, no,” my friend said. “Don’t worry. Just try walking him around.”
I walked around the entire ground floor of the house bouncing him until eventually he stopped crying. Then I sat down on the living room sofa with him on my knee. He looked at me again with that same solemn expression on his face he’d had at first. He was watching me like he had all the time in the world to do it.
My friend came and sat down on the couch beside me. “Look who’s made a new friend,” she said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to her baby or to me or to both of us, but I didn’t answer. I just kept watching the baby, waiting to see what he’d do next.
Lucille’s House
Her mania for wallpaper reaches its apotheosis inside the walk-in closet off the bedroom. Silver, with giant white outlines of magnolia flowers sketched across it. Its surface reflects, so she can see her own movements, the warmth of her arms, as she reaches up to shuffle through the racks of dresses and shirts. But it’s not so smooth that the image is clear. Looking at it, she can see just enough of herself to be certain she is really there. And then for the interior of the bureau: a textured foil, also silver.
Charming, the designer says. Not many people make such bold choices, Mrs. Armstrong. But then not many people possess your impeccable, inimitable style. Lucille just looks blankly at the woman; she is pale, with a weak chin and thin blonde hair that falls lank around her face. This is not the first time the designer has embarrassed them both with her overly lavish compliments.
When the room is finished, the flowers on the interior doors don’t match up with the flowers on the rest of the wall. You’ll have to redo this, she tells the designer. I want the pattern to be continuous across all the surfaces.
She met Louis when she was dancing at the Cotton Club. “The Ebony Rose,” she was called, the only dancer on stage whose skin was so dark that she had to wear it all the time, couldn’t slip out of it to pass for Italian or Greek when that suited her better. He was there, fronting the Hot Seven with his photographer’s flash smile and that voice that seemed to come from the soles of his feet, from some other, richer world. She finished her last number and came off the stage, and he was there in the wing, grinning and looking at her like he could have eaten her up in one bite if he were inclined, but, as a gentleman, he’d refrain and instead consume her slowly, piece by marvelous piece.
“Glad to see they’re finally letting real women dance here,” he said.
“What do you know about women that you can tell the real ones from the rest?”
“A few things.” He hadn’t left off smiling. “I married three just to make sure.” And then he reached up and cupped her chin in his hand and ran his thumb along the arc of her cheekbone and down to her lips. She thought it was the gentlest touch she had ever felt. She shook her face free of his grasp.