The Summer Without Men (17 page)

We did sleep there, all four or five of us, depending on how you counted. After giving Lola a couple of shots of whiskey from the Burdas’ stash of hard liquor, I rocked Simon to sleep and laid him on the bed, a fat ball of babyhood in blue pajamas with feet, who breathed loudly from his chest, tiny lips pursing and unpursing automatically. I dug out a small blanket I had hidden away and wrapped him up in it to protect him from the air-conditioning and then carried in the unconscious Flora, who snorted once when I pulled the blanket over her, but she quickly rolled over and settled into deep sleep. After I returned, Lola and I sat together for a while. She did not want to talk about Pete. I asked her about the row, but she said that their fights were stupid, that they were always about nothing, nothing that was important, that she was tired, tired of Pete, tired of herself, sometimes even tired of the children. I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, without a transition of any kind, she began to tell me that for three years after she had started school as a child, she had not uttered a word. “I talked at home, to my parents, to my brothers, but I never said anything in school, not to anybody. I don’t remember much about preschool, but I remember a little about kindergarten. I remember Mrs. Frodermeyer leaning over me. Her face was really big and close. And she asked me why I didn’t answer her. She said it wasn’t polite. I knew that. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t understand. I just couldn’t.” Lola looked at her hands. “My mom says that sometime in the first grade I started whispering in school. She was overjoyed. Her kid had whispered. And then, little by little, I guess I just got louder.”

After Lola was nestled beside her children on the bed, I sat down on the edge and stroked her head for about twenty minutes. She’s only two years older than Daisy, I said to myself. I thought of her, Lola, the silent little girl who couldn’t talk in school. The anxiety of speaking in a place that isn’t home, that’s outside, that’s strange. It had a name, as so many things do, selective mutism, not so uncommon in young children. I thought then of a young woman who had been a patient with me in the hospital, and I tried to remember her name, but I couldn’t. She hadn’t spoken either, not a word. Thin and white and blond, she had made me think of a tubercular revenant from the Romantic age. I saw her as she wandered stiffly up and down the hallway, hunched over, long pale hair drawn over her face like a veil, carrying a plastic pitcher she held very close to her mouth so she could spit into it, sometimes silently, sometimes noisily hawking up gobs of mucus from her lungs, which made the other patients snicker. Once, I had seen her dart behind a sofa in the common area, crouch down, disappear from sight, and then, after a moment, I heard the hoarse roar of her vomiting into the pitcher. Inside out. Keep the outside out. Seal me shut, tight as a drum. Close my eyes. Shut my mouth. Bar the doors. Pull down the shades. Leave me be in my wordless sanctum, my fortress of madness. Poor girl, where was she now?

I found a spot beside Flora and eventually fell asleep, despite the slumberland concert provided by my overnight guests: the whistling of congested little Simon, the masticatory noises of Flora as she sucked and chomped on her index finger, and the restless murmurs and single word emitted by Lola. Several times, in a small high voice, she said, “No.” Although I remained in bed with them, my mind roamed as was its wont onto thoughts of Boris and Sidney and the Pause and the sex diary in hiatus. I thought of writing about the innumerable dreams from which I had woken in full riotous orgasm or perhaps about F.G., whom I had called the Grazer because he was a nibbler and a chewer, who moved up and down my body as if it were a delectable green field. I then allowed myself several minutes of extreme irritation over the biogenetic fantasy that it was possible to calculate accurately the percentage of gene influence as opposed to environmental influence on human beings and began writing a scathing critique in my head, but the last thing I remember, which softened my mood considerably, was the RETURN TO TRAHERNE and his poem “Shadows in the Water,” which I had read several times to myself only hours earlier. It was prompted, I believe, by an idle musing about Moki and whether he lay invisible among us, the strong, wild little boy with long hair who flew only slowly, but needed comfort after the paternal eruption, needed pats and kisses from his very short, plump, newly wigless authoress.

O ye that stand upon the brink,

Whom I so near me through the chink

With wonder see: what faces there,

Whose feet, whose bodies do ye wear?

I my companions see

In you, another me.

They seemed others, but are we;

Our second selves these shadows be.

I woke to Pete, not in the flesh, but to his voice on the phone. It was not an angry voice but a composed one, polite but strained, asking for “my wife.” I couldn’t see the visitors—the bed was empty—but I heard them in the kitchen. Flora was singing nonsense; there was the clink of dishes and the dull bang of some object hitting another, which was then followed by the unmistakable smell of toast.

Lola took the call in the bedroom while I held Simon and supervised the second course of Flora’s breakfast, toast with jam, which she waved in the air between bites as she marched back and forth across the black and white tiles, still singing. The babe barfed milk all over my pajama top. The mild odor of the regurgitated milk, the stain that seeped through the cloth and wet my skin, the squirming, bucking body I held securely to my chest brought back the old days with my own Daisy girl, my fierce, agitated infant Daisy. I had walked the floors with her for hours in the first months of her life as I breathed soothing words into her tiny curl of an ear, repeating her musical name over and over until I felt her tense chest and limbs relax against me. I had had only one child, and it hadn’t been easy. And Lola had two. And Mama had had two. When Lola emerged from the bedroom, she paused in the door and smiled an enigmatic smile. I wondered whether Pete-of-the-Blasting-Expletives had begged forgiveness and caused that smile or whether I looked ridiculous holding the now howling Simon. Before she gathered her two charges, one in each arm, and trudged heavily across the lawn back to her sick, sorry, and sober husband, the laconic Lola said, “It never changes. It’s always the same. You’d think I’d wise up, wouldn’t you? It gave him a start, though, when I wasn’t home, scared him. Thanks, Mia.”

*   *   *

Good old Mama Mia, who lies alone in the great king bed with its wide-open spaces, a blank expanse of white sheets she fills up with inner speech and memory, a whirligig of words and thoughts and aches and pains. Mia, Mother of Daisy. Mia, Mother of Loss. Once, Wife of Boris.
But O the heavy change, now thou art gone
. O Milton on the brain. O Muse. O Mia, rhapsodic boob, blustering bimbo, pine no more! Roll up your troubles, wipe up your stains, kick off your shoes, and sing something silly for your own sake as you sail on kingless in that great groaning schooner of a bed, not a tawdry queen for you, Bard of the Laughing Countenance, but a king.

*   *   *

Thursday afternoon, Boris wrote the following.
Explication de texte
included:

Mia,

It has ended with [
proper name of French love object
]. I am staying in the Roosevelt. In the last two weeks I have thought more about my life than at any other time. It has been a black period for me. I even called Bob [
psychiatrist friend doing research at Rockefeller. The
even
here is an example of the radical understatement of which B.I. is capable. He has always stubbornly, vehemently resisted any oughl kinds of psychotherapeutic intervention
.
Calling Bob suggests desperation
.] It has become obvious to me that I have acted precipitously in order to escape parts of myself, parts of my past, and you have suffered because of this. [
Read: mother, father, Stefan, and remember, Boris is a scientist. His prose is going to thud forward. It seems to go with the job.
] When [
proper name of young Francophone bewitcher
] and I were together, I found myself talking to her a lot about you. This, as you probably can imagine, did not go over well. She was also annoyed by my domestic habits or lack of them. [Read:
cigar butts piling up in ashtrays, recently read papers from
Nature, Science
,
Brain, Genomics,
and
Genetics Weekly
stacked in piles on every surface of apartment, clothes thrown on floor. Also read: Despite three postdocs, claims he is unable to master the technology of dishwasher, clothes washer, or dryer
.] I came to see her as someone I had idealized from afar, and I suspect that she had done the same with me. [
The unreal no longer occludes the real
.] Working together and living together are different. [
You bet they are, Bub
.] I would like to see you, Mia, and talk to you. I have missed you. I am sharing a meal with Daisy tonight.

     Boris

I concluded that reality had to coincide with either A or B or D. Both C and X appeared to have been eliminated.

*   *   *

If this little epistle strikes you as inadequately emotional in light of what had happened, I cannot disagree, but then you haven’t lived with the man for thirty years. Boris is scrupulously honest. I knew every word he had written was both considered and truthful, but I also knew that the man was prone to a wooden demeanor. In some people, this indicates a genuine lack of feeling underneath, but this is not true of Boris. The entire letter turns on three sentences: “It has been a black period for me.” “I even called Bob,” and “I have missed you.”

*   *   *

Boris, I replied. I have missed you, too. Your letter is oblique, however, as to who left whom? You can understand that from my point of view, this matters. If the Pause threw you onto the street, and this act caused a reconsideration of our marriage, it is very different from an alternative, which is that you decided to leave her, after reconsidering your relationship with her because of your former relationship with me. Those two are also distinct from a mutual decision to part ways. Mia

(If he wasn’t going to write “Love,” I sure as hell wasn’t going to stoop to that devilishly tricky noun.)

*   *   *

Excitement usually comes at a clip. Agitation in one corner is often mirrored by a similar hubbub in another. There tleo rhyme or reason to this. Correlation is not cause. It is just “the music of chance,” as one prominent American novelist has phrased it. Long, lazy, uneventful periods are followed by sudden bursts of action, and so it was that the very morning after Pete’s screeching exit from his wife and children, another equally dramatic departure was taking place over at Rolling Meadows, which I discovered when I paid my daily visit to my mother. Regina had gone to the beauty parlor to have her long hair “professionally put up,” packed two suitcases, called the three Swans to announce that she couldn’t bear her incarceration in the Home any longer, and then, after slamming the door to her apartment, had made a speedy march down the hall (or as speedily as was possible for Regina with her delicate leg). My mother and Peg (Abigail was indisposed) had followed the fugitive to the front door, where they cross-examined her about what in heaven’s name she was up to. Her three daughters had counseled her to stay. She had ended it with Nigel, hadn’t she, after the story about the gold watch and the buxom barmaid? Within seconds, they concluded that Regina had no idea where she was going. Her flight was pure flight, that is to say, flight without a destination. Moreover, she had rambled on about Dr. Westerberg, whom she claimed had threatened her, and said that if she didn’t “get away” she was convinced he would “put her away.” After a quarter of an hour, my mother and Peg had cajoled Regina back to her apartment. A tearful scene had followed, but in the end, she had seemed resigned to her fate and had promised her friends to stay put.

Chapter 2: Only a couple of hours before I arrived, my mother had knocked on Regina’s door to check on her state of mind. Regina had refused to let her in. Not only that, she had claimed she had pushed the furniture up against the door as a barricade against enemies, especially Westerberg. When my mother reported this, she shook her head sadly. I could only sympathize. When paranoia arrives, it does little good to tell the paranoiac that the fear is unfounded. I understood. My brain had cracked, too. And so, after trying to reason with her unreasonable friend, my mother had gone to the nurse to report on the developments in No. 2706, and the medical staff had been summoned, including the diabolical Westerberg, and the door had been unlocked, and the furniture had been removed from the doorway, and after that Regina herself had been removed to a hospital in Minneapolis for “testing.”

When she finished this story, my mother appeared to gaze straight through me. She looked sad. Sadness was chasing us all, it seemed. I was sitting beside her and took her hand but said nothing.