The Child (20 page)

“As opposed to what?” Mary snapped.

“As opposed to saying ‘this is what I feel and why. What do you feel?’ You know, communicating. Facing the problem, whatever it is. Dealing with it. Trying, together, to resolve it. What is it?” Eva felt everything would be all right.

“You’re planning,” Mary said, like she was talking to the lamppost. “You have a plan that will help us get to a better place. No more plans. No more help. No more better.”

“Why not?”

“Because it makes me unhappy.”

“It does?” Eva said, relieved at having something to work with. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Now that you’re telling me, I can have more awareness.”

“I don’t want awareness. Awareness is a plan. I just want to
be
.”

“But, Mary, you’re not just
being
. You’re hurting me, and pretending that you don’t care. I don’t deserve that. It’s not neutral.”

“Go ahead, be better than me. That’s all you want.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Fuck off.”

Mary hung up.

Eva didn’t know what to say or do, what to feel or think. It was so unbelievable, it was like it had never happened. That couldn’t possibly have happened, could it?
Click?
She’d heard that little click. What was that? She pressed
Redial
. It rang and rang.

“Mary? Mary? Please pick up the phone … Mary?” The machine was out of time.

“Well,” Hockey said, “at least you don’t have cancer.”

“All eight thousand dollars of my insurance claims have been rejected,” Eva mentioned.

“You’re kidding.” He put Bach cello suites on the CD player. They always seemed to be so apropos. “How did that happen?”

“If only I had bought Oxford Plus instead of Oxford, I would have been partially reimbursed. Dr. Kumar is not in the Oxford Plan, she’s only in Oxford Plus.”

He broke his protein bar in two and gave her the smaller piece.

“When did you figure that out?”

“After seven hours on hold. I spent the night here, on hold on one line and calling Mary on the other. All eight thousand dollars are on my MasterCard with twenty-five percent interest.”

Hockey sat in his chair and looked at his clean, airy office. Bach in the air, his hair newly and perfectly cut.

“Eva?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Do you think I’m going to live?”

“Yes.” She got up and washed her face in the wall sink.

“That’s it then,” he said. “We’re stuck with our pointless loss. Mine was biological, and yours is on purpose.”

There was a knock at the door.

Eva looked at him. “Why can’t I see Mary’s pretty face?”

The person on the other side of the door started banging, desperately. Ringing the bell over and over.

“Hey, hey, open up.” It was Thor. Eva turned the lock.

“Oh my God,” he said, running in. “Turn on the TV.”

Thor, Hockey, and Eva stared at the TV like it was an oncoming train, or the path to the bottom of the well. They could not take in fully what fate and chance had done to their party of good intentions.

On the set, a live press conference was being broadcast from the front lawn of Van Buren High School. A blonde chick wearing a lot of foundation, a light purple ensemble, and white pumps cooed with authority into a sea of microphones. Her name was Bethany Bliss. She was a thirty-nine-year-old divorcée with two kids of her own and a private cocaine hobby. But Eva, Thor, and Hockey had not yet learned any of this. All they knew was that they were in serious trouble, because Eva and Hockey were responsible for someone else and they could barely take care of themselves. Now the person they were responsible for—David Ziemska, their client—was in hell.

“I, Bethany Bliss, am the attorney for the family of Victor Holder, the deceased seven-year-old who was brutally beaten by his uncle, Stewart Mulcahey. Under adult jurisdiction, the district attorney, Bernard South, has announced this morning that he will seek the death penalty in this case. We, the family, place the blame firmly on the shoulders of the police, courts, and social work agencies of Van Buren Township, who have committed severe malpractice and dereliction of duty in this tragic episode. We place the blame on the shoulders of Lieutenant Kevin Bart, who recruited Stewart into giving evidence under severe emotional duress, and Daniel Wisotscky,
CSW, for refusing the state intervention Stewart’s parents fervently and repeatedly requested.”

Thor sank back into his chair and Eva was stunned. She wanted to think about her own problems, but she felt too guilty. Her problems were nothing compared to Stew’s. So her mind was blank. Hockey, however, seemed energized by the absurd turn of events.

“God, Bethany is a genius,” he said, chomping on his kelp. “What great TV. Look at that backdrop. Small-town New Jersey red brick school, white steeple, pseudo-Protestant aesthetic for working-class Catholics.”

“What are you talking about?” Eva breathed. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Just look at that big hair on Bethany.” He pressed the
Mute
button.

“Hockey, Stew just murdered a little boy.”

“And David is going to pay for it.” Thor’s voice was apocalyptically matter-of-fact.

“It’s very smart.” Hockey was almost laughing. There was a strange glowing enthusiasm. “Big hair on TV conveys small-town parochialism. This helps the rest of the country’s sense of this as a monstrous crime. Homosexual crimes, when committed in sophisticated places, are entirely different than when imposed on a bunch of hicks. Hicks are victims of homosexuals, but they’re also aesthetically offensive to straight people in big cities. That’s why their teeth have to be Photoshopped.”

“Are you for real?”

“What’s the matter?”

“You sound like a brief.” Eva went over to the phone and pressed
Redial
. Then she left a message on the machine. “We’re talking
about real people here. It’s not a game.”

“No, it’s true.” Hockey was bouncing. “In
Newsweek
they ran a cover photo of some white-trash woman who had seven babies at once, and they Photoshopped her teeth so she would look middle-class.”

“She wasn’t white trash,” Eva said, remembering. “She was just white.”

“Poor David and Joe,” Thor said. “If only the cops had just left that kid alone.”

“Well, you’re right about one thing,” Hockey said expansively, like Sleeping Beauty waking up to a beautiful day. “We’re in deep doo-doo, but we can get out of it. Stew got screwed, that’s clear. But the state isn’t going to take the blame; our client is, unless we’re really strategic. All of those state officials they’re suing are going to put the blame right back on us.”

Thor rolled a cigarette, kept his voice flat. “He’s such a kid.”

“It’s about time you noticed.” Hockey laughed again.

“What was so funny?” Thor was talking very slowly.

Eva could see him thinking, trying to come up with a way to help Stew. She knew she should be doing the same, but she didn’t know how. They looked at each other. Hockey was oblivious, smiling. Watching the TV.

Eva turned her back on the tempting existence of the telephone and sat down at the computer. “How can we save him?”

“Who?” Hockey tore into his protein bar.

“Stew.”

“
Bubelah
,” Hockey said, so carefree he balled up the wrapper and shot it into the wastebasket. “Stew is not our client.”

“Okay,” Eva said, absolutely lost. “Okay.”

All is lost, because absence is found.

“So you grew up in this room, huh?”

“Yeah,” Mary growled, feeling sultry and sleek. “I used to bring girls home when I was in high school.”

“How did you seduce
them?
”

Wendy giggled. It was a fun fuck, and Mary could feel the girl’s excitement, like she was having one of those life-changing sex experiences. Maybe it was her first one-night stand. Maybe the first one that worked. Wendy was as seasoned a homosexual as a girl her age could be, but Mary was just so much older and so fucking hot. She knew how to show her a really good time.

“I would say ‘Take me to the movies and you pay. When we’re there, you can touch me any way you want to.’ I liked how it was in front of everybody. Those poor girls would sweat.”

It was three a.m. Her mother would never wake up. She was dead drunk.

“Wow.”

“Hey,” Mary said as she absentmindedly touched the girl’s nipples. She knew they were sore. “You know the fastest way to get a woman into bed, don’t you?”

“I think so. Tell her she’s intelligent?”

“Yeah.” Mary gave her the point. “And listen. Listening works, too.”

They were covered in sweat and cum, every orifice satiated.

“You know,” Wendy said shyly. “Some girls spend years trying to
find someone they can talk to. I’m not that way. I want to have sex. If it’s good, there’s always something to say. You’re sexy. It’s fun talking to you.” She looked around the bedroom. Now it was used for storage. “How do you like being home?”

“I like it,” Mary said, and knew immediately that it was true. “I’m never going back to New York.” She’d torn up her airplane ticket that morning. “I know I have to tell my ex-girlfriend, but I don’t want to.”

“That’s cold.”

“Whatever. I don’t want to help her…. What do you do?”

“I’m a cop.”

This little dyke?
“In Del Sol? There can’t be much business.”

“I’m from Freemont,” she said. “Three of us got sent here for a seminar.”

The garden chimes sang through the window in the night breeze.

“How do you like Southern California?”

“It’s so conservative.” Wendy shrugged. “Even the criminals are Republicans. You really need to deal with your girlfriend. Just try.”

Every afternoon, Mary sat in her grieving mother’s garden in Del Sol, California, watching her mother’s bitterness, her arthritic hands, old face, lifeless hair. Delilah’s will intact, but motivated only by resentment. There was nothing else, after all. Her daughter had not charmed her and her man was dead. All in Mary’s life was revealed to have been a false diversion from her mother’s disappointment. Mary’s girlfriend, her plays, her wish for professional mercy. None of this was real. Only disappointment was real.

There was no reason to ever go back to New York. As Mary had buried her mother’s lover, served the drinks, washed glasses, sat endlessly,
watched the TV, she had had so many revelations, none of which she wished to retain.

Eva’s pain. Her struggles, commitments, opinions, beauty, friends, and defeats meant nothing. All they ever did was make Mary feel inadequate, lost in her own failings. If Eva failed, Mary had to sympathize. She didn’t want to. There was nothing in it for her. There was no point, because it never stopped. Something new always went wrong, and neither Eva’s success nor Eva’s failure would erase Mary’s failure. So what good was it? It was a time waster. Mary had failed herself, and Eva hadn’t done anything to stop it. In fact, she had encouraged her to go down a dead-end street.

If Mary had had a stupendous success, one trumpeted in more than newspapers, it would have to be mentioned on television shows that her mother actually watched. Unavoidably in the right magazines at the dentist’s office. If Mary could have bought a huge place and a car with her success, then her open homosexuality would have paid off. But she had failed at that, so disappointment was the result. Her mother—widowed, no-hearted—looked at her like she was a broken blender or a stained shirt.

Eva had never really believed that Mary could be an overnight sensation, so Mary didn’t want her anymore. Now this cancer thing was coming up. Just like when the legal clinic was defunded. Just like the fucking baby shower. Just like Hockey having AIDS forever. It was always something. Eva would be upset and want help. Mary would have to worry about her and think about it night and day. Maybe even bedpans. Forget it. No way. There was only one bedpan she’d ever want to clean, and that was the one of her needy, vulnerable, futurely incontinent mother, so that her mother would finally know how important Mary truly was. That she was
the difference between shit and propriety.

“You need to try.”

“No.” Mary brought her face to the girl’s breast. Apple-blossom beauty. “Trying is humiliating. It points out that I have something to try. I’d rather just stay here. I mean, no one but Eva even cares. My mother is thrilled. She thinks I finally got away from that dyke.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty funny.”

A Mexican man came every other Saturday and earned five dollars an hour to take care of the block, but no one thought this was wrong. No one her mother came into contact with condemned this. It was natural. There was a freedom in that—just to be white, without other people’s histories.

That was the irony here. The women at the checkout counters looked just like Mary. They weren’t accented, fucked-over immigrants or candidates for workfare filled with resentment and secret languages, their own exotic makeup tips. If Mary had just stayed home where she belonged and gone to a job, she would have been recognized by everyone around her as worthy. As good enough. Her mother wasn’t asking for very much. But because Mary tried to be great and spent all those years with Eva, she didn’t have anything now. If Mary had stayed closeted, her silence would have protected her from this punishment, the pain of coming out. It wasn’t worth it.

Now she could wait for the lemons to ripen on the tree. She’d shop at the pastel mall, the only colors in this panoply being peach, sea foam green, egg yolk yellow, robin’s egg blue, and sand. Drive to the mall, drive to the gay bar. Get in the car and freak out. Out of the car is in public. Prepare each time for the human encounter and then return to the Mazda. In New York, once she left her apartment
it was all out in the open. People showed one another everything. Del Sol was more sedate, private and civilized.
Who wants to know? Get over it.