Every Day (2 page)

Kirsten’s on her knees in front of the peonies, pruning.

“Can I dump them?” I call from the car.

She stands up, her gardening clothes wrinkly and smeared here and there with topsoil, her highlit hair falling out of its back clip. “Do they have suits?”

“Natch.” We smile at each other, squinting. Kirsten is the only friend I have to whom I can safely say “natch,” the only one who knows this is a leftover word and that I’m not from somewhere people would generally die to be from. I do have some names in my ancestry, but if there was ever any money it’s been spent.

Jane hands me her beach bag and streaks into the house to find Adrienne. I gather Daisy from her car seat, let her straddle my waist and take up fistfuls of my hair.

“Monkey!” Kirsten says to her, trying to ease the transition, failing, as Daisy starts to howl because she knows she’s about to be mommyless.

“She’ll eat everything you have,” I say. “You’re a better friend than I am.”

“I’ll get you back,” Kirsten counters. “Ted’s away all of next week. If you think I’m staying here alone, you’re wrong. There was another ‘blackout’ yesterday.”

She refers to a new gang agenda, about which we’ve been warned by the papers, talk radio, and local news stations. It involves too much horror to describe in rational terms, but it has the suburban folk as wide-eyed as the city folk.

“I’ll call you. I left Simon a note. I’m going into the city for lunch, and he’ll probably pick them up before I get home.”

I squeeze Daisy, try to urge the last sob out. “Love you, muffin,” I whisper. I give her to Kirsten, and then I turn, unable to watch her face registering the tragedy of my leaving. Not until I get on the parkway do I dare think of anything but her and how I should never let her out of my sight. Not until I’m safely through the toll do I let go enough to enjoy being sleek, or as sleek as I get under the circumstances, in my
fleur de lis
lingerie, in my worn jeans and platform sandals. I am thirty-one years old. At this moment I might look assured, I might look ridiculous, but I know one thing: this visit with Fowler is an act of will on my part. I’m driving south to where Fowler is. No music. No news. Just the brain thudding with heart’s messages, telling me to claim from him what he owes Isaac, what he owes me.

•   •   •

My friend Pam told someone about the pregnancy a few days before our unmodel behavior, mine and Fowler’s, was made public by Hastings Prep administrators. I remember a very early morning, how I sensed that other people knew, students, some teachers, even a woman on the kitchen staff who looked at my face probingly when she handed me my second plate of hash browns. Fowler and I had driven over the Massachusetts state line into New York where, he suggested, we could talk about the predicament more rationally, without distraction. He had tried to coerce me into an abortion. Sometimes I think on that effort as generous of him, and indicative of his knowing that he’d never follow through on fatherhood. At the time it struck me as outrageously selfish. I refused. I thought that a baby couldn’t be a happier idea, especially if it were Fowler’s. I remember shouting at him, invoking Thoreau, twisting his words to make him sound like a hypocrite. He did nothing. He hung on the steering wheel, silent.

When we got back to campus, it was dawn. A green smell emanated from the leaves where the water hung, restive and full, before the April wind pulled it to the ground. The combination of that fresh smell and the one of Fowler’s poncho, medicinal, having been packed away in a box with camphor balls for a season, is one I can still recall. I was enshrouded, hidden, under the poncho, and he guided me to the dorm. I imagined witnesses in the landscape, in windows, door frames, peering out from behind hedges. I knew Pam had told someone. My idyllic boarding school world, complete with secret older lover, had changed. It had become a place in which something I had thought could happen only to the lazy, husky-voiced girls I envied, girls like Pam, had happened to me.

“Like something out of a movie,” my mother said after she received the letter from the headmaster announcing the “unfortunate—for all concerned—circumstance.” Every family of every Hastings student, past and present, barring only the deceased graduates, received a copy of this letter detailing the reasons for Fowler’s being fired and my expulsion, “sadly, two months prior to graduation.” My mother thought the public announcement galling, and she only questioned me one time about why I’d chosen not to have an abortion. She was with me the day Isaac was born. She wept tears of joy on seeing him in my arms. After Fowler left and I went to live with her, she communicated her trouble with the situation only through an earlier bedtime, one she’s still observing. “He’s a divine boy,” she often says, shrugging, which I take to mean that she can’t imagine how he could have had such a father, and perhaps that she could have seen Fowler coming for a million miles, so why hadn’t I?

My father, circumspect to the last, said the school authorities wouldn’t have done anything like this unless they’d decided it was absolutely necessary. He was at a philosophers’ conference in Chicago when Isaac was born, but he too wept
when they met. Neither of my parents, despite their bohemianism, was able to understand how anyone could up and leave a child of his own in the manner that Fowler did.

After all this time he couldn’t have sounded more like himself: charged, definite. I can’t imagine what he knows of me now, other than my address and phone number. I don’t even know how he got those. We were never married, so when he left I had nothing on him, couldn’t sue for divorce or freeze his assets or take out judgments so someone could collar him in an airport. And I’m not sure I’d have done all that anyway. It would have made the fact of his leaving even uglier, more unspeakable. At the time I had Isaac, I was taken in a way I never anticipated, and it softened the blow. Now that I lead the kind of life Fowler and I agreed we’d never live because it would deaden the sensibilities we made such careers of having, I can say I don’t hate him. I could not pity him, but I don’t hate him. I didn’t want it, the misadventure, the friends in vogue, the
faux artistes
or the real ones, all in black leather, their hair spoiled with dye, sculpted, or simply shaved off.

“Fucking lost souls,” I say aloud, in the vernacular of that other time. I mean to include myself. It’s what we were. Lost and trying to capitalize on that fact. So sure of ourselves in a nihilistic way. So arrogant.

“What do you need
me
for?” I remember asking him shortly before Isaac was born. We’d established ourselves in a cavernous room above a Korean market in the East Village. “You’d have done this anyway. You’d be here anyway.”

“Oh, Leigh,” he said. “Let’s not do ‘need’ tonight. ‘Need’ is so schamltzy. Need’ll kill you. You don’t want to be
needed,
for God’s sake.”

Although stung, I understood what he meant. But I had no choice at that point, with a baby coming. I was going to be needed, whether I liked it or not.

But for a long time I did capitalize on the double vision.
On the one hand, I was needed (by Isaac), stable (in my goals, in staying in New York where my parents were). On the other, I was an unwed mother with atheistic, separated parents. I was bored unless something outrageous was going on. I liked it, when I met Simon’s father, that he’d spent nights in white-collar prison for extortion. I liked it that his various wives had undone themselves in one way or another (plastic surgery, dangerous dieting, excommunication from their children with previous husbands) in order to accommodate him, only to lose him. I just liked the possibility of him, the alternative he offered as a human being. The message that just beyond where we’re looking, something wild is preparing to enter and shake us up, make us account for what we’re doing, still moves me. I was, in many ways, reminded of Fowler when I met him, the first time, on Fire Island. He was coming off the tennis court, perspiring, bronzed beyond decency. “Tatskela!” he shouted when he saw me, and I felt instantly adored. For a second I could see why women dropped their lives for him.

He came to our wedding in a leather tux, his wife of the minute dressed as a cabaret performer.

“Could you
believe?”
Simon said, when we got to the hotel. “A gangster and his moll.”

I told him I sort of liked their effrontery, their proud transience. “What does it matter anyway?” I hooted. “That’s the way he is! He’ll always have one foot in the door, one out.”

Simon stood there, his arms long, helpless against me and his father.

“You two will get along very well, in that case. You both trade on that.”

He is a kind and careful man, and he doesn’t believe in being in two places at once. The fact that I do, that I can’t help this, is my biggest failing.

“I won’t be pigeonholed,” I added, with the seriousness he required at the time. “You are what you are.”

I cross to the East Side at 57th Street and take a chance on a parking garage off Fifth Avenue. Simon and I don’t go in for this kind of expedience when we come into Manhattan; we plan parking ahead of time. But a person on a mission such as mine shouldn’t get bogged down in too much banality.

The parking attendant sneers at our downscale wagon. He points out a dent and some scratches on the passenger side to make sure I am aware of their previous incurrence.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m not going to sue you.”

He smiles stingily. I have always wanted to say that to someone. Now I have.

I walk over to Fifth and toward the hotel. It is hard to imagine that there are others with similar stories going to meet prior loves to try to make sense of the damage, but there must be. You hear it all the time on the news, estranged fathers and children and the mothers of those children convening, come what will. Most of the stories I hear are gory, occurring in projects and outside city schools, places where gunfire is the rule rather than the exception.

I stop on 60th Street, sickened, as I’d always predicted I would be if the chance to see Fowler again, to present him with the fact of his son’s existence and mine, ever arose. I have neglected to mention shame. Shame, as I know it, is a chameleon. It appears in your children’s faces when what you have done mortifies them. It reaches you in snippets of others’ conversations, hospital staff, your parents’ friends, your new husband’s business associates. It is inescapable, and it doesn’t transmogrify or dissipate the way that anger and love do. I clutch my bag and step out into the street. I am ashamed, not for what I’m about to do, but for what I’ve done. My son’s fierce granite eyes bore into me from everywhere.

•   •   •

I was at Hastings a whole year before I even connected Fowler’s face with his name. Pam and I were dancing in our
room in ski boots. He came roaring in, bellowing about noise and unearned senses of entitlement. He’d been trying to hold an advisee meeting in the common room below ours, could we possibly save it for the slopes?

“I don’t ski,” I told him.

“That’s of no consequence,” he said.

Pam and I happened to be drunk, and Fowler’s rage thrilled and amused us. He was insufferably handsome, with finger-combed streaky blond hair and dark eyes, a combination that continues to be compelling for any girl who lays eyes on Isaac. I expected sarcasm and meanness from a guy like Fowler, but I was taken in by something else: a business, a rush to be done with this interview so he could get to the next thing, a total denial of weariness. An energy. He had energy, what were the senior boys saying that year,
out the wazoo.
You couldn’t keep up with him. Yes, he was handsome. Yes, purported to be brilliant. But he didn’t have time to devote to his appearance or his brilliance. He had things to do, people to advise, places to go. You could hop aboard, see if you could stomach the ride, or just sit back and watch his dust.

“I’ll see you two Monday morning at seven-thirty in the Hall of Languages. You can tell me and the acting disciplinary synod what you’ve been drinking that makes you think you can ski indoors.”

He picked up a glass that said New York Rangers. (Pam had a car; we were forever filling up the tank for our AWOL runs to the liquor store and being awarded free glasses featuring sports teams we had no interest in.) He sniffed. “Forget rum. It ruins the taste of the Coke.”

He was gone. Some people just leave. Fowler was able to vanish. Extreme, he was. A big deal. He made me tired, and he hadn’t been in our room but four minutes.

“What was that,” I said to Pam, who’d begun her unbuckling.

“Fuck him,” Pam said. “Man’s got the biggest chip on his shoulder since Richard the Third.”

I laughed and fell back on my messy bed. But I thought Pam was wrong. There was no chip. Fowler didn’t give a damn about who had money and ski boots. He just didn’t want them to get in his way, to waste his time with extravagant excuses. I closed my eyes. I thought about seeing him up close again, getting a chance to say something, stopping him dead in his blurry tracks.

•   •   •

For English my first year at Hastings I’d been the only girl in the class of Mr. Inslee Brinkman. “Some names you just don’t know what to do with,” my father had said when I told him. There were various unkind nicknames, ranging in their aptness. I went with “Pinky” or “Sprinkles,” which seemed the most fitting. Brinkman was a bachelor close to retirement who knew grammar as one does one’s own face. He could be seen of a Saturday afternoon in the fields beyond the athletic buildings, his back bent, in search of rare breeds of mushrooms. Everyone in his class learned the word “myxomycophetan.” I actually liked him in the end, and I even saw reason in his giving me a C.

My second year, the year of the ski boot incident, I had Chip Greenaway for English. He had a Dartmouth smile and a thick neck. He was also the varsity football coach. He spent more time stamping on the desktops than he did with his feet on the floor. He was emphatic, but no one seemed to know about what. I didn’t learn a thing from him except to shield my head whenever I perceived an overhead shadow. He did fall once, toppled by passion over some abstruse literary conceit. A lot of people got A’s in his class, evidence, we felt sure, that Greenaway was of a lower order.