My Education (36 page)

“Mommy?” Lion murmured, eyes still smoothly closed.

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Why you still here?”

“Just making sure you're okay.”

“I'm okay.”

“Okay, sweetness. Should I go?”

“Okay,” he exhaled, dropping off.

Now I was unambiguously truant. A perfect solitude enfolded me, defined by Lion's slow, even breaths.
Coup de foudre
. That was what it was called. Mad love like a bolt from the blue. As different from compatible, practical, let's-live-together-for-four-years-to-make-sure love as an abruptly erupting volcano from a sixty-watt lightbulb. I was jealous of them, I realized, as I was jealous, always, of odd pairs. The fat girl, her upper thighs squashing and squeaking together with each awkward step, and the slender boy tenderly holding her hand. Or the deformed boy, with a withered right arm, and the beautiful blonde twined around his good side. Something foreign to logic cleaved such pairs together: pure ardor. A sheer force of love. Matthew and I were a pair of quite similar envelopes. Close in age, close enough in background, genetically lucky with our looks and our minds. Inclined, for all our supposed hairsbreadth “differences,” toward all the same places, people, and things. One might wonder, if feeling unsteady, how deep a deficit of ardor such a list of matched traits could conceal.

It was a dangerous thought and it propelled me from Lion's bedside, back into the convivial glare.

Dutra and Nikki had followed Matthew to the kitchen, where, timers having gone off, the potential for crisis was resurrected. “Can you please set the table?” Matthew muttered at me through his teeth. So I had been gone slightly, or a great deal, too long.

“I had another nightmare getting Lion to bed,” I lied, as I sometimes found I could, when the only other witness, not yet having turned three, wasn't likely to give me away.

“Should I go in to him?”

“No, he's asleep finally.”

“You've almost missed the whole story of how I almost left Nikki a widow after two weeks of marriage.” Dutra barged between us, dumping wine in my glass. “So what happened was, we're in Sousse, on the coast, in this place that's supposed to be famous for seafood, and I order lobster, I fucking love lobster. But Nikki goes,
‘Ehhh,'
” Dutra made a moue, “‘I'm just not in the mood for seafood,' and she orders, like, pizza! I'm really pressuring her to get lobster. Come on, we should both have the lobster. No no, I'm just not in the mood. I'm frustrated, fuck it, I'll just get the lobster myself.”

“He always wants us to do things together,” Nikki glowingly clarified.

“So our food comes. Her pizza is—”

“So funny! Like a cake with tomato sauce on it—”

“It's disgusting, completely disgusting, and my lobster is gorgeous. It's this fucking magnificent lobster. And I'm so into it, I'm getting ready, I'm putting my bib on, I've laid out my tools, I get my claw meat out first—”

“Danny always saves the tail for last.”

“You know? The meat's less delicate and delicious than the stuff in the claws and the legs, but it's a
steak
. It's a fat, chewy, ocean-grub
steak
and I want to devour the whole thing at once and then relax and doze off like a pig, so I do the fine surgery first. Claws and legs.”

“Legs!” Matthew said, for now we were all taking chairs at the table, the roast laid before us, the trough left behind yet again as the four of us rose yet again on a wave. “I should have figured a surgeon could deal with the legs.”

“You don't eat the legs?”

“I can never get anything out of there.”

“Are you serious? Aren't you from Boston? Matthew, man, we have to go out for lobster some night. I'll school you. Let the girls go out for a girls' night and eat pasta or something, we'll go out for a man's night and eat us some lobster. You will never again leave a lobster a shred of its flesh.”

“Where's the part of this story where you almost die?” I cut in.

“It's right here! We've reached it! So I'm happily eating my lobster and,” Dutra threw himself out of his chair and collapsed on the floor.
Ech! ech! ech!
came the sounds of his flailing and gasping, obscured from my view by the table.

“It was
unbelievable
,” Nikki took up, her eyes huge. “I was next to him, trying to help him, and all the waiters were just walking by with their noses in the air, saying things like, ‘I guess someone's had too much sun!' Finally another tourist couple from France helped me carry him to our hotel. And he was all gray and convulsing and gasping and I couldn't get out of my mind what he'd said—”

“I forgot to tell what I had said,” Dutra said, climbing back in his chair. “I knew I was going down. A split second before I went down, I knew I was going. I felt it. Remember, I've been a heroin addict. I've OD'd. I knew my systems were all shutting down, bam-bam-bam. I wasn't sure if they'd ever come back up again. And right before I fell out of my chair, I looked at Nikki and said—”

“
‘I'm so sorry,'
” she wailed along with him. “
‘I'm so sorry I married you!'
”

Over the neglected roast we gaped at each other, astonished.

“He felt so bad that he'd made me his wife, for just seventeen days, and now he was going to die and abandon me,” Nikki explained. “But I wouldn't have been abandoned, because I would have died, too.”

After a dumbstruck moment I managed to say to Dutra, “Will you ever eat lobster again?”

“Fuck, are you kidding? I ate lobster the very next day.”

“He's
amazing
,” Nikki said, beaming.

“
She's
amazing,” Dutra corrected. “You know how we found out what happened? She had a BlackBerry with her, you know what that is? She starts going
tap tap
, the next thing you know she has it all figured out:
toxic lobster syndrome
. Certain lobsters, their flesh carries this toxin, you never know if you'll get one or not. People who've eaten it all of their lives, they get one of these, boom, they're dead.”

“So you'll still eat it?” I exclaimed in exasperation.

“Sure, won't you? It could happen to any of us.”

“If that's true, I don't think that I will!”

“That,” Dutra said, “is the difference between us, Virginia.”

A great deal, perhaps the whole final hour, of the dinner conversation was given over to plans that we four would embark on as soon as we could—trips to Vietnam and rented houses in Nice, at the very least brunch at their place on the first Sunday that Matthew and Lion and I were at leisure, all proposed by Dutra and Nikki with fervid insistence, as we sat over wrecked roast and glasses of bourbon. At last they were gone, and Matthew and I spent what seemed an eternity loading the dishwasher before I broke the silence. “Do you think she meant she would have killed herself?”

“What?” Matthew said with terse noncuriosity. “When?”

“When she said that if Dutra had died, then she would have died, too.”

“I took it more as a romantic sentiment than a suicide threat.”

“I didn't say
threat
. I'm just asking, do you think she meant she would have killed herself?”

“I think I just said no.”

Our silence reinstated itself, perhaps the silence of equal exhaustion, a form of union. Or perhaps it was the silence of inward-turned brooding, of taking our measure as a couple against that of our giddy and tireless guests, and finding it short. That task, however much shared, still must count as division. There was a danger in the room that I knew I would have to evade but I wasn't sure how.

“What did you think of her?” I asked at last, and I must have done the trick with my tone, because I felt Matthew actually pause and consider.

“I just don't know,” he said at last. “I couldn't get a read on her at all. The only thing I wound up feeling sure of was that she's had more than one thirty-ninth birthday.”

“Really?” I cried with delight.

“Oh, yeah. I might have said she's in her mid-forties, but something made me think she's even older than she looks. How girlishly she dresses. And acts.”

“So what is
up
with her? Is she after his money?”

“I have no idea. I more wonder what Dutra's after. How long did you say he'd known her? Forty days?”

“As of
today
he's known her forty days. And all forty are since he proposed! But maybe no one's ‘after' anything,” I allowed. “Maybe it's love.” It was easy to be generous now, Matthew's comment having made the possibility seem so remote. Yet in the following days my shame grew at how eager I'd been to discredit them. Who more than Dutra deserved adoration, after so much time spent on his own?
Coup de foudre
; perhaps it was real. One went from believing, when twenty, that it was the one kind of love that was real, to believing, once closer to forty, that it was not only fragile but false—the inferior, infantile, doomed love of twenty-year-olds. Somewhere between, the norms of one culture of love were discarded, and those of the other assumed. When did it happen, at midnight of one's thirty-first birthday? On the variable day that, while browsing a grocery-store aisle with a man, the repeating refrain of the rest of one's life for the first time resounds in one's ear?

Despite all the plans they'd proposed, all the nations they'd felt we should visit and all the brunches they'd promised to serve, in the days, then weeks, after the dinner we heard nothing from Dutra and Nikki, not even a phone call of thanks. It was all of a piece, I concluded, with their passion for each other, which swept up everything within reach, but temporarily and blindly; the accretions fell away again unmissed. After a while of musing and brooding, they fell away from me, too. I did continue to tell the tale of Dutra's toxic lobster syndrome, most often at the playground, to casual acquaintances, when the fitting occasion arose.

•   •   •

After Lion was born, I had gone temporarily crazy. The terror he'd unleashed in me—that he would cease to breathe and stiffen in the night and be blue and ice-cold in the morning; that cars would leap the curb and crush his tiny body as I passed with the stroller; that fever would incinerate him, or the volatile chemicals in the fresh coat of paint on his nursery walls give him brain damage, or that I myself would poison him through some bad thing I ate and passed into my milk—seemed inadequately accounted for by such a simpering phrase as “maternal instinct.” “Mother love.” “Mama bear, fiercely guarding her cubs.” The knowing condescension of my female friends, who had gone before me and now had ancient one- and two-year-olds, and even—this hardly counted anymore—children who went to grade school, left me disgusted and alienated. None of them remotely understood the threats ranged against Lion, or me. For the first time in my life I sincerely contemplated suicide. I wanted to know what foolproof method to use if I lost him. I was aware that losing children had once been routine, and that even now it still happened, and people went on. Such people to me were heroic, and very abstract. Their resilience would never be mine. It was outside my limits.

And yet, at the same time as being engulfed by this postpartum paranoia, I'd been crazily happy. Doom dogged my steps, death displayed all its faces—I had become a compendium of freak deaths, I could find the fatal instrument in the most padded playroom—and life, like the sun's blazing hair in a solar eclipse, only dazzled the more. Each extreme was the back of the other. They couldn't be pried apart, watered down. I'd wondered if anything ever had felt the same way, and of course thought of Martha. But the resemblance was superficial. It only arose from the phrases and words that so poorly described the emotions. The emotions themselves, from one case to the other, had nothing in common. Why then all these overlapped words?
Love. Adoration. Ardor
. All, previously used, now felt a bit grimy to me, not to mention deficient, in the way of
maternal instinct
. There was no language of love that pertained to my child. Perhaps this was why I couldn't bear to lose sight of him—because there weren't symbols to translate him to me, to capture his essence and keep it preserved.

“I'm not sure if I can stand to have another one,” I'd said to Matthew, “and I'm not sure if I can stand not to.” Matthew, in his infinite wisdom, had said, “Let's discuss it on Lion's second birthday, and until then not discuss it at all.” It was essentially what we had done. The very night of Lion's second-birthday party, the bright-colored paper plates heaped in the trash, I'd entered our bedroom with drama, while Matthew was reading, and lowered the lights.

“Is this the discussion?” he murmured, as I tugged off his boxers and, burrowing, even peeled off his socks. “I object . . .” Matthew's muffled voice said, “to this demeaning treatment . . .” But the rest of the subject was examined without use of words.

I'd always known Matthew wanted more children; it was me we had wondered about. Me and my stated historical lack of ambition to ever have children; my remote and beneficent attitude toward them; my nice-place-to-visit-but-don't-ever-need-to-live-there. Once Lion was born I could not fathom how such ideas had ever been mine. What had made me imagine that children were optional for me? Again I thought of Martha, and her very imperfect example of motherhood. And, though I might have expected to judge her more harshly, I found myself forgiving her instead, for those countless superiorities of hers, by which I'd felt crushed, which she turned out to have never possessed. She had not been infallible. The realization was melancholy instead of triumphant, and I remembered my confusion, a few years before, when I'd found myself having lunch in Manhattan at the same restaurant where amid untold glamour she'd treated me to my first oysters. The intervening decade alone could not have accounted for how small and out of style and even shabby it had somehow become.