A Good and Happy Child (16 page)

She stood scowling by the door with the stroller. Sunglasses down.

“Are you coming?” she asked, without enthusiasm.

r r r

Outside was better. This was Fourteenth Street, loud, pushy, reassuring. Street vendors roasted nuts, sending up clouds of cloying charcoal smoke from their carts. Discount shops with names like U.S.A. IMPORTERS (with signage in red, white, and blue cursive) sold T-shirts, sunglasses, electronics, and toys by the heap, with, outside, ancient and eminently untrustworthy quarter-operated kids’ rides—a scarred horse, a dingy helicopter wearing a chipped grin. The sidewalks thronged with pale denizens in black overcoats; leggy ladies on cell phones; whole families spread out across the sidewalk, strolling, eyeballing the shops, the sons punching each other and laughing.

Maggie pushed the stroller. Out here, we could forget the couple we were at home. We could revert to who we had been, a married couple with rapport, who held hands, who gorged on eggy brunches, and who sneaked into dressing rooms at the Gap and kissed. Out here, Maggie could speak in her usual weekend-errands patter:
Oh, you know
what we need? X.
And X was always a surprise. Something I would a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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never have thought of.
Heirloom tomatoes. A living will. An O-ring for
the hose in the sink.
And I would respond mildly,
Sure, great idea, let’s do
it,
and we might acquire or accomplish whatever it was, but more likely, we’d stop for a pastry to indulge our mutual sweet tooths, drink a nerve-jangling gourmet coffee—while feeding the baby, nowadays—

and soak up the energy and chaos of the city we both loved. Making envious remarks about the apartment buildings we wanted to live in, the cars we wished we could afford. Or—we could run into friends.

“Hey!”

“Hey guys!”

Another thirtysomething couple with a baby approached us. We pushed the strollers together and stood grinning at each other, a big people-island in the street. Pedestrians circumvented us with a frown. The couple was Dominick—a software salesman with a shaved head and a cleft chin—and his wife, Tina, a wide-hipped woman with a flame-orange parka and big, soft, coffee-brown eyes, a stay-at-home mom. (
Dominick does well,
my wife had confided to me, significantly—

not-so-subtle code for:
Tina doesn’t have to work.
) We chatted about music classes, what we were doing with our Saturday. Maggie and Tina drew together and within seconds were laughing conspiratorially. Their daughter began to cry. Dominick dug out a pacifier quite calmly and plugged her mouth with it.

“George,” called Dominick, “what do you say we take the kids to the dog run in Washington Square? Give the moms a break?”

The women perked up.

“I won’t say no,” beamed Maggie.

“She loves it,” Dominick promised, nodding to his daughter. “Goes crazy when they chase the tennis balls. Don’t you?” he said, bending over her, talking baby talk.
“You like it when doggie chases the ball?”

Maggie put a hand on my arm. “You going to be okay?” she said quietly.

“Sure,” I said, licking my lips.

Maggie took her hands from the stroller. I was supposed to take over now. Suddenly, we heard screeching tires from the street, followed
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by honking, shouting. Maggie and Tina turned their heads, made concerned
ooh
faces—a taxi accident, narrowly averted. Maggie returned her attention to me. My face felt numb. My palms were sweating. A dream logic took over. I knew that if I put my hands on the stroller, something terrible would happen. Some connection would be made.
It would pass from me to the boy, like a fatal disease, a plague flea.
I could not let that happen. I should not hold the stroller. Maggie’s face was staring into mine. “George!” she shouted. From a distance, I watched Dominick’s jovial face, and Tina’s sympathetic eyes, turn hard, suspicious.

That’s okay. We can do it another time,
they were saying. What had I missed? Good-byes followed—markedly cooler than the greetings had been. A distant
See you, George
from Tina. A final, narrow glance from Dominick.

Maggie stood by the window of a Duane Reade. She held the stroller now. The sunglasses covered her eyes.

“What
is
it with you?” she said. Her voice broke. I realized she was crying. She wiped a tear from under her sunglasses. She stamped her foot in frustration, like a little girl. I always found it endearing when she stamped her foot, even though it meant I was in big trouble.

“What do you mean?” I said stupidly.

“Why did you
say
that?” she cried.

“Say what?”

“Dominick asks you to go to the park and you say,
The kids should
stay away from me.
Like you’re a zombie. It’s
creepy,
” she hissed. “They think you’re a child molester now.”

“I’m not a child molester.”

“Well, you’re freaking me out,” Maggie said, crying again. “Why are you doing this, George?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper.

The feeling returned to my face. I felt as though I were waking from a long nap. A tower of discounted moisturizer seemed ready to pitch over in the drugstore window.

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“You don’t even seem like you care about us! You just stand there!”

She was sobbing. A middle-aged woman with oversized glasses, walking a Chihuahua, slowed down to ogle us. Others—a couple in denim, an off-duty security guard—glanced over with nervous curiosity: open-air soap opera? Or opening act to a con game? You could never be sure in the city.

“I care about you,” I protested, numbly.

I felt like I needed to say something meaningful. Answer her question. Solve the problem.

“But maybe it’s better if you take care of the baby,” I said, “while I work some things out.”

A cataclysmic sob erupted from her.

“What?”
she cried. She actually seemed to sway. “If that’s the way you feel,” she gasped, “then just stay away.”

Maggie’s lip quivered, her breath came in gasps—real weeping, tears streaming—and then, to my surprise, she started running. She pushed the stroller ahead of her as if she were jogging.

“Maggie!”

I started to give chase. But the stares from other pedestrians turned from curious to hostile. I slowed down. I realized how this looked. A man chasing a crying woman with a baby stroller. It had all the appearance of a crime in progress. Judging from the angry glares I was receiving, it seemed highly probable that someone would intervene, or even call the police, if I pursued her. I slowed—eventually stopped. Maggie looked over her shoulder at me, still crying.
My wife is actually
running away from me,
I thought dully, as I watched her go. Oversized yellow signs, faded to near illegibility, gazed down upon me from the windows of a wine store, gaily and unseasonably announcing
Le Beaujolais Nouveau est Arrivé!
Mr. and Mrs. Denim and the Chihuahua Lady had moved along. Others took their places. The sun peeked from behind its thin winter cloud cover. Vestiges of Maggie, of our family, disappeared; were trod on; became archaeological traces before my eyes.

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I stood there, stunned. For some reason—maybe through a premonition that, after a struggle, my marriage had entered its last stages—I began to reminisce.

I remembered the moment when Maggie fell in love with me. I had been in love with her for months. It was a sunny, clear June day. We were lying on a hillside in Central Park kissing and talking about nothing. I reclined, gazing at the East Side apartments against a blue sky. She rested her head on my stomach, hair spilling in curls down into the bright green grass. I was teasing her—about what I don’t remember—

making her laugh, provoking her. Then, at one point, she sat up. She shot me a look. There was no revolution in her expression, no fireworks or melty-gooey sweetness. Just a very, very sharp stare. As if, when she had laid her head on my belly, some spark had jumped from me to her—my pilot light—and I witnessed it, beaming back at me, out of her eyes. We stayed on that hill until dusk. I took my time in asking her to marry me—waited until Christmas, in fact. I was in no hurry. I reckoned that, once kindled, that light could not go out.
That’s what all those
vows meant,
I thought;
the rings and the ceremony. It’s a binding contract.
A one-way journey.
But a laconic voice interrupted these sentiments.
Marriages break up every day, George,
it said.
Shit, you’re lucky you made it
this far.

I returned to the present. Fourteenth Street seemed suddenly to be a grubby place, a place for drifters. The door to the wine store opened, sounding a mechanical and irritating chime. A man with headphones and sunglasses—giving him a space-alien appearance—sipped coffee under the awning of a deli. Two men quarreled in Russian. I was alone. My family had fled from me.

Where would I go now?
I wondered.

n o t e b o o k 9

Time for a Meeting

Tom Harris remained in the hospital. If I had spent three days among the mentally sick, here were the physically sick, with their own kind of desperation: ghostly cancer patients; the bedridden and bored staring at televisions, immobile for who knows how many days; and drifting among them, the reek of illness, of urine and—to my imagination—leprous decay, emanating from the hospital’s many laundry hampers, bedpans, dirty pajamas, and brittle, starched sheets. A cheery nurse bustled us down a corridor, carrying a yellow plastic water pitcher that rattled with ice. “He had another surgery, yesterday morning, so he needs his rest,” she said, pronouncing it
ray-usst,
as she pushed open the door to Tom Harris’s room with her bottom. “Visitors, Mr. Harris!” she announced. Tom Harris lay propped in bed, face gray, pajamas blue. His legs stretched the length of the bedframe, and his horny feet poked out the bottom. An apparatus—an Erector set of bolts and wires—had been constructed alongside his left thigh. His jaunty energy was visible only in flickers, in his eyes.

My mother moved to his bedside, extended a hand gently to his arm. “Tom, how are you?” she murmured, face wrinkling in concern. I remained frozen by the door.

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“They rebroke my fibia in order to set it,” he grunted. “The plan, evidently, was: find the drunkest man in Stoneland County and ask him to do it with a mallet and a blunt wood chisel. At least that’s what it feels like,” he whispered, with a grimace meant to be a smile. “Not to complain.”

“I’m so sorry,” said my mother, gripping his arm.

“Not your fault,” he said gruffly. His voice sharpened: “But . . . I see you have George with you.”

My mother turned to me. “George wanted to see you.”

Tom Harris’s eyes went to mine. I felt ridiculous. What had I hoped to achieve by coming here?

“Is there something you want to say to Tom?” Mom prompted me. I kept staring.

“Maybe I should leave you two alone.”

The nurse finished examining Tom Harris’s chart. “I’ll be back later with your medication, Mr. Harris.” Mom followed her out. Tom Harris and I continued to stare at each other. Finally, he broke the silence, summoning his old strength of voice.

“Well? Aren’t you going to say ‘I’m sorry’?” he demanded. As usual, I could not tell whether he was teasing. “I am sorry,”

I said.

“And why are you sorry?” he intoned.

“Because you’re hurt.”

“But why are
you
sorry?”

I shuffled my feet.

“It’s not a trick question. Custom dictates that when someone apologizes, he has something to apologize for. Am I right?”

I nodded.

“So. Are you responsible for this?”

He flung out his hand over his leg. My eye followed the gesture. Tom Harris’s leg—bolted, bandaged, puffy flesh—seemed as tragic and shameful as a sacked city.

“I—I think so,” I stammered.

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“But you’re not sure.”

“It
is
my fault.”

“Do you remember doing it, George?”

“I think so.”

“What do you remember?”

“I remember being angry. I remember . . . coming into the party with grease on my hand.” I struggled. “I must have been under your car,” I concluded.

“When you came back into the party, you said something, didn’t you?” Tom Harris demanded. “Do you remember what you said?”

“No,” I lied.

“You said—according to Freddie—something about cutting the brake line of my car.” He fixed me with a stare. “George, have you ever in your life looked under a car?”

“I’ve looked.”

“But you don’t understand cars, is that correct?”

“I guess not.”

“Do you know where a brake line is?”

“By the tire?” I guessed.

“As I suspected, you wouldn’t know a brake line from a chorus line. And you do
not
know how to find, and
cut,
a brake line. I don’t suppose the psychiatrists in Charlottesville asked you that, did they?”

“No.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” he muttered. “Do you have any notion how you might have acquired that knowledge—however temporarily?”

I remained silent, stumped by the question.

“Has anyone been giving you information about cars?” he persisted, testily. “About brake lines? When and how to cut them?”

I examined the floor—scuffed tiles, with beige flecks. A minute ticked by on the wall clock.

“I think we both know what we’re talking about, don’t we, George.” I felt my face flush. “Look at me, son.”

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I did as I was told. His face had regained its full color, but its accustomed humor had been replaced by a fierce, interrogatory glare. Under that gaze I felt a sudden, intense pressure to reveal the truth.

“He took me to Daddy,” I blurted.