“If you’re having trouble coping, we don’t lack for resources.” You towered over my couch with your son, like one of those mighty peasant icons of dedication to family and motherland in Soviet murals. “We could hire a girl.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” I mumbled. “I had a conference call with the office. We’re researching demand for an African edition. AFRIWAP. Thought it had a ring.”
“I did not mean,” you stooped, your voice deep and hot in my ear, “that someone else could raise our son while you go python-hunting in the Belgian Congo.”
“Zaire,” I said.
“We’re in this together, Eva.”
“Then why do you always take his side?”
“He’s only seven weeks old! He’s not big enough to have a side!”
I wrenched myself to a stand. You may have mistaken me for tearful, but my eyes were watering of their own accord. When I lumbered into the bathroom, it was less to get the thermometer than to underscore the fact that you had failed to fetch it for me. When I returned with the tube poking from my mouth, was I imagining it, or were your eyes once more rolling toward the ceiling?
I scrutinized the mercury under a lamp. “Here—you read it. Everything’s a bit blurry.”
Absently you held the tube to the light. “Eva, you screwed it up. You must have put it near the bulb or something.” You shook the mercury down, poked the end in my mouth, and left to change Kevin’s diaper.
I shuffled to the changing table and made my offering. You checked the reading and stabbed me with a black glance. “It’s not funny, Eva.”
“What are you talking about?” This time they were tears.
“Heating the thermometer. It’s a shitty joke.”
“I’m not heating the thermometer. I just put the bulb under my tongue—”
“Crap, Eva, it reads practically 104°.”
“Oh.”
You looked at me. You looked at Kevin, for once torn between loyalties. Hastily you scooped him from the table, then bedded him with such perfunctoriness that he forgot his strict theatrical schedule and cranked up his daytime I-hate-the-whole-world shriek. With that manliness I’d always adored, you ignored him.
“I’m so sorry!” In one swoop you lifted me off the floor and swept me back to the couch. “You’re really sick. We’ve got to call Rhinestein, get you to a hospital—”
I was sleepy, fading. But I do remember thinking that it had taken too much. Wondering if I would have a cool cloth on my forehead, ice water and three aspirin at my side, and Dr. Rhinestein on the telephone if the thermometer had read only 101°.
DECEMBER 21, 2000
Dear Franklin,
I’m a bit rattled, since the phone just rang and I have no idea how this Jack Marlin person got my unlisted number. He claimed to be a documentary maker from NBC. I suppose the droll working title of his project, “Extracurricular Activities,” sounds authentic enough, and at least he was quick to distance himself from “Anguish at Gladstone High,” that hasty Fox show that Giles informed me was mostly on-camera weeping and prayer services. Still I asked Marlin why he imagined that I would want to participate in one more sensationalist postmortem of the day my life as I understood it came to an end, and he said I might want to tell “my side of the story.”
“What side would that be?” I was on record as assuming the opposition when Kevin was seven weeks old.
“For example, wasn’t your son the victim of sexual abuse?” Marlin plied.
“A victim? Are we talking about the same boy?”
“What about this Prozac business?” The sympathetic purr could only have been put on. “That was his defense at the trial, and it was pretty well supported.”
“That was his lawyer’s idea,” I said faintly.
“Just generally—maybe you think Kevin was misunderstood?”
I’m sorry Franklin, I know I should have hung up, but I speak to so few people outside the office…. What did I say? Something like, “I’m afraid I understand my son all too well.” And I said, “For that matter, Kevin must be one of the best-understood young men in the country. Actions speak louder than words, don’t they? Seems to me he got across his personal worldview better than most. Seems to me that you should be interviewing children who are a great deal less accomplished at self-expression.”
“What do you think he was trying to say?” asked Marlin, excited at having snagged a real live specimen of what has become a remote parental elite, whose members are strangely uneager for their fifteen minutes on TV.
I’m sure the call was recorded, and I should have watched my tongue. Instead I blurted, “Whatever his message was, Mr. Marlin, it was clearly disagreeable. Why on earth would you like to provide him one more forum for propounding it?”
When my caller launched into some nonsense about insight into disturbed boys being vital so that next time “we can see it coming,” I cut him off.
“I saw it coming for nearly sixteen years, Mr. Marlin,” I snapped. “A fat lot of good that did.” And I hung up.
I know he was only doing his job, but I don’t like his job. I’m sick of newshounds snuffling at my door like dogs that smell meat. I am tired of being made a meal of.
I was gratified when Dr. Rhinestein, having lectured that it was practically unheard of, was forced to concede that I had indeed contracted mastitis in both breasts. Those five days in Beth Israel on an antibiotic drip were painful, but I was coming to treasure physical pain as a form of suffering I understood, in contrast to the baffling despair of new motherhood. The relief of simple quiet was immense.
Still in the grip of your breadwinning fever and perhaps—admit it—reluctant to put our son’s “good-natured” temperament to the test, you took this opportunity to hire a nanny. Or should I say two nannies, since by the time I came home the first one had quit.
Not that you were volunteering this information. In the pickup as you were driving me home you simply began nattering about the marvelous Siobhan, and I had to stop you. “I thought her name was Carlotta.”
“Oh, her. You know, a lot of these girls are immigrants who plan to go AWOL when their visa turns into a pumpkin. They don’t really care about kids.”
Whenever the pickup hit a bump, my breasts flamed. I wasn’t looking forward to the excruciating process of expressing milk on arrival, which I’d been dictated to do religiously every four hours for the sake of the mastitis, even if only to pour the milk down the drain. “I take it Carlotta didn’t work out.”
“I told her up front he was a baby. A pooping, farting, burping—”
“—Screaming—”
“—Baby. She seemed to have expected, like, a self-cleaning oven or something.”
“So you sacked her.”
“Not exactly. But Siobhan is a saint. From Northern Ireland, of all places. Maybe folks used to being bombed and shit can keep a little whimpering in perspective.”
“You mean Carlotta quit. After only a few days. Because Kevin was—what’s the term of art? Cranky.”
“After one day, if you can believe it. And when I call at lunchtime to make sure everything’s all right, she has the gall to insist I cut my workday short and relieve her of my son. I was tempted not to pay her a dime, but I didn’t want us blacklisted with her agency.” (Prophetic. We were blacklisted by her agency two years later.)