Elegy on Kinderklavier (28 page)

And on and on and on. I spoke very little during these conversations, eventually not even curious to see if, like a tunnel through the center of the earth, her endless in-turning, her frantic affected deprecation, her spiraling mental contortions might surface somehow back into the daylight of reason. There is nothing sadder than egotism in a partner you have given your life to, because it speaks mostly to the even greater egotism true of yourself in loving your partner in spite of it. Once the heart is colonized, you can't ever get it back, not even by killing it.

“I mean, you think I don't know what I've done to you?” she said, on another of these nights. “You think I can live with myself knowing what is probably the truth about all of this? You know what I thought right at the start while I was traveling? I thought, this is what I have to do because of the day after, you know, Haim's suffering is, you know, over, and the day after that and the day after that. I thought this is what I have to do to still be with
you
, this is what loving
you
really is, because I knew you couldn't be with me if something bad happened, if the final, you know, emergency happened and we were standing there in the PICU and you looked at me and saw that I couldn't handle
it, that I'd checked out, that I was not moved by any of it but horrified—filled with horror at the sight of our own son—I knew that you'd never be able to be with me after that, that even if you loved me you wouldn't be able to be with me after that. And I didn't want to start over. And I didn't want you to have to start over. And I thought that maybe, just maybe, this is what really loving you required: sacrificing myself, my character, taking myself out of it and letting everyone think I'm horrible—in fact,
being
horrible—so that you and I may live after Haim doesn't. And this is what I had to think about the whole time I was gone, this is the truth I had to face then and that I have to live with now—that it's possible—I can barely even say it—that I love my husband more than my son, if only because my son is barely getting to live. There, it's horrible, unbelievable, but I've said it, because it's more important than anything to be honest.”

That time I stood up and grabbed Charlie's face with one hand like you would a child who has something that should be spat out. I could feel her teeth through her cheeks.

“How about we try something new,” I said. “How about this: no pity. No pity, not for you, not for me, and not for Haim. No pity. And no forgiveness.”

That was all later, though. That is our recent history. That first night, when I heard her come in, as I listened to her undress in the dark of our room, I didn't say anything. She slipped into bed, and I could feel her heat—her body always so warm. And she settled in to the position in which she always slept and, as we'd done when we were younger, I felt her leg slide over, barely touching her skin against mine. I let her, felt the warmth enter my body, though later I would feel stupid about it. What can I say? There was only so much room on the mattress with which I could escape her, and I was already as far as I could go.

•

There was a time when we were not yet these people. This is how memory works, resisting your own meaningful organization. For instance, if you asked me to remember now a single day from the heady period when, simultaneously, Haim was a newborn and I was getting the bulk of the rejections for fellowships, teaching jobs, and my novel manuscript, I couldn't do it. But if you ask me about when Haim was a toddler, when we still lived in Iowa and I thought I might still be a writer, I am immediately back standing in the small canyon of buildings in downtown Iowa City on a brisk September late afternoon, watching the sun alight on Charlie's reddish-brown hair, which she'd dyed darker because it was cheaper to maintain, as we waited for the homecoming parade to start and Haim ran around, weaving between the families in lawn chairs in front of us and babbling loudly.

He'd just turned four years old, one of those birthdays where we along with him were suddenly older. Charlie had avoided gaining too much weight while she was pregnant (even though I told her that it didn't matter, that she should be eating double whatever she wanted because it was what Haim wanted too) but it'd been a long, difficult delivery, and she'd lost a lot of blood and was confined to bed for several weeks afterward and then extreme caution for months after that, during which time her curves became fuller, and small rises of fat began collecting at her lower abdomen, arms, and thighs. This had seemed a gentler body, one suited for the mothering of an infant. Now, though, in Haim's fourth year something had made her decide to regain, as much as she could, the body of her own youth. She found a gym that had a good daycare, and, at about this time, began talking to me about what we should do next, in terms of me teaching high school or doing any of the things I'd promised to try if writing didn't work out. By this, our fifth year in Iowa, I'd been
out of the masters program for as long as I'd ever been in it, and, in both Charlie's and my mind, the luminous encouragement and private assertions of confidence the faculty had once confided in me had faded, until it almost felt like I'd dreamt them. Charlie made a modest salary as an assistant in a law office, and I had a small stipend teaching Comp 101 at the university, but we were still depending on money from my mother, which shamed us both.

Charlie's body had, by the day of the parade, tightened and streamlined into an attractiveness that owed more to fitness than out-and-out sexuality. We were thirty years old, and I marveled at how her legs, bent in my periphery during sex, had completely changed, become slender, thin, graced with toned muscle instead of the full curves of her college years, as if this were an entirely different person than I'd first slept with. Her skin, which once seemed to lag behind her in the aging process, blushing smoothly with the cherubic health of a child, now seemed to have gotten ahead of her, and, standing there as the music of the marching bands approached, I could see again how in certain lights it seemed thin and almost grayish, the small fingers of red spreading over her cheeks sharp-edged with capillaries in the cool air.

As the floats and squads from the local baton-twirling studio passed along, I had been distracted by a small boy in front of us, sitting calmly on his father's shoulders, watching the parade with what seemed like an intelligent reticence. Every once in a while, he'd reach out and pat the top of his father's hair lightly, as if to say thank you. Haim was in and out of our sight, Charlie doing an awkward side-step thing along the back of the crowd to keep an eye on him as he moved. I could see some of the other parents eye the crowd in the direction he'd rocketed from, looking for someone to give the disapproving glance to, looking for me. Finally Haim came back to us and watched, leaning backward against Charlie's legs.

When the drunken middle-aged alumnus, leaning out from the top of a passing papier-mâché “hawk's nest” and wearing a black and gold jester's hat, threw the necklace of beads toward the crowd I saw it falling directly to me against the blank gray sky, and I reached up and caught it. The beads, I could see now, were actually tiny plastic black and gold football helmets. I can only guess that I must've forgotten that Haim was back with us, or maybe that I assumed that by then he'd run off again because, in a daze, I reached up to where the small boy perched, where he was turning to see who had caught the prize, and gave it to him.

I looked down at the sound of Haim's wail. For a moment he wasn't even crying yet, just looking up at me in shock and betrayal.

“For Christ's sake,” Charlie said, picking him up and looking at me. “Really? Really?”

Sometime around the middle of Haim's second year, something had changed. He would only let Charlie help him with his food, only let Charlie put him to bed at night. He began to follow her around the house, and screamed and screamed when she left for work. As she cooked dinner, he would stand, leaning against the side of her leg, turning the thick pages of one of the picture books silently, occasionally glancing up at her, as if to make sure she had not disappeared when he was not looking.

This was also around the time we began to understand his mind, what gifts he had inherited straight from Charlie. The only thing he would do with me (and then only if I faux-pleaded) was to let me watch him turn the pages of one of his books. Charlie and I had also begun noticing right about this time that Haim seemed to have, without any real help from us, intuited the alphabet, and was beginning to read. It was small words at first, but then when he added larger ones they were all the words that were supposed to be the hardest, the ones not spelled phonetically. He loved books, and would
carry stacks of them around to wherever he was playing in the house. Charlie had worked with number cards when she was little and so she decided to try this with him, and by the time we were planning his third birthday party he could do simple addition operations with single-digit numbers. Our daycare reported that Haim cried from the moment I dropped him off until the moment Charlie picked him up, with only a few breaks for sips of water in between. His face became red, dry, and chafed. Charlie decided to cut back on her hours at the law firm in order to stay home with him more. She couldn't stand the thought of him toddling around ready to learn with no one there willing to teach him.

On the night after his fourth birthday party Haim had woken up crying, and wouldn't stop until Charlie came in, even though I'd gotten up to see to him, and wouldn't calm down enough to tell her what happened until I left the room. I stood in the hallway while Charlie talked him down. He'd had a nightmare.

“Daddy's gonna, daddy's gonna leave me all alone,” he said, with barely enough breath. “He's gonna leave me and replace me with a different boy.”

“Why would you say that? Don't say that honey,” Charlie said, rubbing tiny circles on his back. “Daddy loves you very, very much. Daddy would never, ever leave you.”

“I dreamed it,” Haim insisted. “It's gonna be true.”

“Well, I've known Daddy a really, really long time, and he's never left anybody,” my wife said. “So I know he won't leave you. You're his favorite. What kind of boy could ever replace you?”

“It was, it was a robot boy,” Haim sniffled. “Except it—except you can't tell, because they look, they look like—they look the same.”

“No, baby,” Charlie said. “Robot boys aren't real, and Daddy wouldn't trade anything for you.”

Haim shook his head.

“You watch,” he said. “You watch.”

After that we'd made a deal with Haim, made a goal of one whole day with no crying. We would try to make sure we were doing things where he felt comfortable, things that didn't make him feel afraid or anxious, and he would try to be a little calmer. Charlie even took him to work one day at the office, and he wrote quietly on papers spread out on the floor behind her desk, filling page after page with the scrawled numbers he was just learning. The homecoming parade had been the closest we'd come to a cry-free day.

In the car on the way to the restaurant after the parade was over, I was thinking about the way the whole world seemed to be on the verge of great change—the fields into the winter anonymity of snow, Haim into a prodigy, premature school-goer with an acute self-awareness, a separate person from us, the qualities currently in concentrated miniature ready to swell, gain volume like one of his tiny plastic dinosaurs that, left for an hour in water, was suddenly too big for the bowl; its terrible, squishy body somehow all contained there in its condensed beginning. I was thinking about how strange it is that you can't really see even two or three years into the future. That you go through each of your days having no idea toward which sadness you are headed.

“Why should I have to guess at what you're upset about?” Charlie was saying in the passenger seat. We were continuing the argument that had begun in the parking garage after the parade, in which we'd cursed at each other in the few seconds when Haim was settled in his car seat in the back and we'd closed the doors before getting in the front. (“We should talk about this,” I said. “Why, so you can go on telling me why it's OK that you're such an asshole?” Charlie had hissed over the top of the car. “You can go fuck yourself,” I'd hissed back, and grabbed open the driver's side door.) Now she said, “Why can't you just tell me?”

“What I'm upset about,” I said, “is that you have to ask. That's the whole thing you're failing at; that's what empathy is. You're supposed to imagine yourself in my emotional position in a real enough way to not only know what it is I'm upset about, but to anticipate it. And I shouldn't be having to explain this to you.”

“Oh, is that what empathy is?” Charlie said, and sighed.

“Jeddey, jetty, jedi,” Haim said. He was just getting into the
Star Wars
movies, and liked to try to say the harder words over and over again to himself. Despite his intelligence, it seemed his speech development had been skipped over in the hurry, and he often had trouble.

We were quiet for a minute.

We slowed to a stop in a long line of traffic, and Charlie put her hand over mine on the knob of the gearshift. “I don't want to be angry,” she said.

And isn't this what we wanted? Hadn't this been the plan? We'd talked and talked about having a baby those first months in Iowa. It had seemed like a crazy idea at the time, but then at the end of one long argument about it, Charlie had sat down on the couch and cried, her shoulders heaving, trying to turn in on themselves. When she calmed down enough to speak she talked about her various failures: in being the concert pianist her early instructors had wanted her to be; in finding the mathematical proofs whose moving pieces she could no longer all hold in her head at the same time; in being a happy, well-adjusted wife. At the time, she'd just gotten the job at the law firm, which handled only family law, and spent most of her day filing, copying, and talking on the phone to confused, enraged women and men who had just been served divorce papers, or watched their children be taken from their own home.