Lit Riffs (20 page)

jennifer belle

T
he only reason I agreed to go was it said on the invitation that there was going to be a real kangaroo. I couldn’t believe that my friend Leslie’s child was going to be nine. It had been nine years since I had visited her in the hospital when he was born. I had watched them check out of the hospital, her then husband Paul nervously carrying the baby in the car seat and loading the family into the back of the car. We had all stood in the semicircle driveway at St. Luke’s. “This is my son,” Leslie had said, “this is my son.”

As indifferent as you may feel toward a friend (I hadn’t been invited to Paul and Leslie’s very large wedding for instance), there is nothing more exhilarating than holding a newborn in the hospital. And there is nothing more miserably boring than going to its birthday party one, two, three, nine years later. My appearances at these birthday parties were a heavy price to pay for those one or two moments of bliss in the hospital, when I was allowed to hold the baby after pushing my way through the large double doors, infringing on the family, and soaping my hands with disinfectant.

The invitation had a picture of a kangaroo jumping on a trampoline. For some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

I took the train to Croton-on-Hudson, eating a croissant in a waxy bag. The croissant was as stiff and starched as a collar. It was as far away from Paris as a croissant could get.

I looked out the small gray window as we slowed at the various desolate icy platforms. Croton, Croton, Croton, I’m going to Croton, I thought in my head over and over again involuntarily, like a Poe character. Every other seat on the train was empty. I noticed the neat rows of electrical sockets. I should have brought my computer. Actually I should have been home working.

At the stop called Tarrytown I thought I saw Blake running, trying to catch the train. But it was nobody. There was no one at all on the platform. I wondered if there was such a thing as the ghost of a relationship. Maybe the reason there were no other passengers was because every seat was taken by a ghost from my past. Those were my traveling companions: my ghosts, the velour seats (all facing in the opposite direction from where we were heading), empty electrical sockets, the strange out-of-season ad for an allergy medication called Claritin (a woman running in a field of flowers), the wrapped gift for the birthday boy, my own dim reflection in the window next to me, and of course the red emergency-brake pull handle, dangling from the ceiling like grapes in
Aesop’s Fables
or a tempting sausage. I pulled the handle in my mind, and in my mind it grew from my nose like the woman in the fairy tale who wasted the first of three wishes on a sausage.

All I asked from life was the potential for something good to happen. And I couldn’t help but feel guilty if I was the cause of the lack of potential. On an empty train, on my way to a child’s birthday party, what were my chances of finding love for instance? And whose fault was that? The day was cold, gray, and windy. The wind blew through me, it seemed, literally. Since he left, I had felt cold. I felt like I had a window fan lodged in my chest, like the kind we had used in the country house, congratulating ourselves every minute at how well they worked.

When I got off the train and started down the stairs, Paul, the father of the birthday boy, waved to me. He was standing near his car. I was surprised to see him. He and Leslie had been through a terrible divorce and custody battle, and Leslie despised his second wife, Karen. Despised. With the exception of myself, the father always suffers the most at a child’s birthday party. Hanging decorations, picking up the cake, picking up the guests at the train. Right before he waved, I had decided to turn around and go back home, but now it was too late. He had seen me. “How are you?” I asked him.

I said, “Blake and I are breaking up,” just as he said, “Karen and I are breaking up.” We both smiled. It was like that commercial on TV for cereal, where this fat guy is so proud and excited that he can’t help but tell everyone that he has just lowered his cholesterol, and then he turns to a woman in an elevator and is just about to blurt out to her that he has lowered his cholesterol, when she turns to him and says excitedly, “I lowered my cholesterol.”

I didn’t know what to say about his second marriage ending. “It’s nice of you to be at Harper’s birthday party.”

I wondered what it meant that he had come back to Leslie for the birthday party. I looked out the window. I had never seen as ugly a place as Croton. Paul had NPR playing. An author I had never heard of was being interviewed. Apparently a famous rock star had slightly based his song on a short story she had written and she was suing him. She was going on and on about what would happen, and how was she supposed to feel, if his song was, say,
optioned
to be made into a film? After all, she possessed the
rights
. “But it hasn’t been optioned to be made into a film, has it?” the interviewer asked, genuinely confused. “No, I’m speaking hypothetically. I mean, say they make a Broadway show out of it like Twyla Tharp did with Billy Joel.” “I’m not sure I follow,” the host said. “What I’m saying is people should not be allowed to feed off other people’s work. He should be obliged to explain why the ending of the song is exactly like the ending of my story,” the author said.

“Karen came home after spending three months at Yaddo and said she was leaving. She met a cinematographer,” Paul said.

“Cinematographer. That sounds like a fancy word for NYU film student.” I had actually met a cinematographer once, the cinematographer of the movie
Great Expectations
, but I didn’t think I should mention that now. “Cinematographer. That sounds like a fancy word for unemployed,” I said. If there was one thing in this world I hated, it was meeting an NYU film student and having to hear all about his “short.”

“She accused me of being afraid to leave the city,” he said.

“That sounds like a compliment,” I said.

He laughed. “After escaping from this place I swore I would never leave the city again. So what happened with you and Blake?”

The wind churned in my chest.

“Sorry, stupid question,” he said.

“No, it’s not,” I said. “Blake said I was a like a Pilgrim and he was like an Indian.”

“What does that mean?”

Again, I said, “At the time it sounded to me like a compliment.”

“But what about the
ending
of his song?” the author on the radio ranted.

“I don’t know why we feel obliged to defend ourselves,” Paul said.

We got out of the car before I could hear who the rock star was.

At the party I handed the kid his present, a small trampoline. I had lugged it on the train and Paul had slid it easily into the trunk and brought it into the house for me. I was proud of the gift. It was perfect. The invitation had a trampoline on it, and the trampoline perfectly symbolized my role in my relationship with Leslie, and with most people for that matter. I was proud of it, although my shrink said I was a slave to symbolism.

I had a friend who was a cartoonist and liked to draw caricatures of me. I could, I decided, ask him to do a caricature of me for the invitation to my fortieth birthday party—a cartoon of me lying down with an anthropomorphic trampoline jumping up and down on me.

We went downstairs to the carpeted rec room and sat on the floor in a circle. I sat Indian-style, not Pilgrim-style, I noticed. It was a moment before I realized that only the kids were sitting on the floor in a circle. The grown-ups were standing in the back. I was the only grown-up sitting.

Blake said that he couldn’t stand it when I acted like a child. I also know he was embarrassed when his sister-in-law said they were bringing her kids to an arboretum and I didn’t know what an arboretum was and she explained very condescendingly that it was some kind of a place with trees. “I grew up in New York,” I apologized. “Still,” she said. Fuck her.

A fat woman in a giant T-shirt with an owl on it took a porcupine out of a bag and held it in her cupped hands. Harper, the birthday boy, announced that it was a blowfish. Everyone touched it. A few other animals followed, a rabbit, an enormous snake, a turtle that was the same age as me, almost forty.

“Where’s the tiger?” the birthday boy demanded.

I thought back to my ninth birthday, on which I got my ears pierced, was given a gray wool coat, and went with my mother to visit the famous artist she was having an affair with in his art studio. I never had a party with a tiger.

“Here he is,” the animal handler announced, pulling a striped cat out of a crate. “This member of the cat family is a descendant of the Indian tiger.”

“That’s just a cat,” the birthday boy said.

“Rip-off, rip-off, rip-off,” one of the parents said in a harsh New York accent that suited the surroundings perfectly. The party wouldn’t have been complete without that voice.

“He’s one-eighth tiger,” the animal handler said.

Leslie looked annoyed. I couldn’t believe she lived in this terrible place, Croton, in this terrible house with framed family photos everywhere and gray carpeting and something she actually called a rec room. She said the word rec room completely naturally without even thinking about it. “Everyone, there’s still the kangaroo,” she announced desperately, like the woman in the fairy tale, clutching at the emergency brake, wasting yet another wish.

“Does anyone know what a baby kangaroo is called?” the animal woman said.

I leaned forward in anticipation. I didn’t know. No one knew.

“A joey,” the woman said. “And that’s why we named him Joey.”

The kangaroo hopped out of a large dog crate. He had coarse gray fur the exact color of the carpet and a stiff, starched tail that hit the floor like a ship’s anchor. He had big, expressive human eyes. He looked very angry.

Paul started taking pictures of each child alone with Joey.

“Make sure you get your picture taken,” Leslie said to me.

“Oh, no, that’s okay,” I said, even though I really wanted one. But I didn’t know why she would single me out for a photo. None of the other adults wanted one.

I posed next to Joey and touched his long, low tail. With the small, square window of the camera pointing at us, the orphan-thought that I would never have a child shot through me. I felt self-conscious and grabbed the hand of a little boy and pulled him next to me. Paul took the picture. I thought it would be exotic to have a picture of myself with a real kangaroo. I thought I would look like I was on safari. I thought I would look like I was a model in a magazine ad, wearing a tight dress and walking a tiger on a rhinestone leash down Fifth Avenue. I thought I’d look courageous, adventurous, athletic, and sexy. But it is just me holding the hand of a strange, ugly little boy and the tail of a miserable kangaroo on gray carpet in someone’s suburban rec room. It is a picture of one of the most pathetic moments of my life.

When I got my coat to leave, I caught a glimpse of Joey standing at the rec room window looking out on the gray suburban landscape. He looked straight out toward the horizon. Seeing it through his eyes, I considered for the first time that it might be beautiful. Beautiful, compared to in here, at least.

For the first time I understood longing. I stood next to him and we looked out the window together. It was all I could do not to burst into tears.

The children and their parents were upstairs eating pizza and cake. The animal handler was upstairs watching Leslie look frantically for her checkbook. Leslie was pretty much ignoring Paul, but Harper wouldn’t leave Paul’s side. He wasn’t playing with his friends or opening his presents, he just followed his dad around from room to room like I used to follow Blake around when I was trying to figure out where we were going to go for brunch or something. Now I just felt like standing with Joey. My eye went to the basement door. If I opened the door, he could hop down the gray, icy hill and keep going, following the Hudson.

I walked to the door and put my hand on the doorknob.

“What are you doing?” Paul asked, coming down the stairs, startling us.

“Oh, nothing,” I said, not taking my hand away, “just getting some air.”

“Harper liked the trampoline, that’s a pretty sexy gift,” he said.

I wondered what he meant by sexy.

“It reminded me of something you once said to me about yourself,” he said.

“And what was that?” I asked.

“You don’t remember?”

“No, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.” I honestly didn’t, and I was incredibly curious what it was he remembered me saying about myself, but I felt extremely uncomfortable all of a sudden, and I wanted to change the subject. “What did you get him?” I asked.

“I got him a guitar and I’m taking him to Graceland. You know, in Memphis. We’re driving, leaving in the morning.”

“Why Graceland?” I asked. It sounded awful. But a crazy thought occurred to me that he might ask me to go with them. I suddenly longed for an invitation.

“I don’t know. Harper’s a huge Elvis fan.” He laughed. “When I was nine, I liked explorers, Christopher Columbus, Sir Francis Drake, I liked the Civil War, I liked a red-haired girl in my class named Jessica Hershey, but what Harper likes is Elvis. And I have to admit, some part of me wants to see it. What about you? You could come with us. I could tell you what it was you said about yourself in the car.”