Living Room (32 page)

He looked at her as if over the top of glasses. “A premature one,” he laughed. “I guess you might call it a cynical history of the United States. It was supposed to be a kind of short course in what really happened
as
opposed to what they taught in school. Margaret thought it was senseless.”

“Was it?”

“Yes. I was too young, but I enjoyed it, it was like reliving school on my own, rethinking what I had been taught like an umpire calling the shots as I had begun to see them, maybe I was just teaching
myself but the form it came out in was chapters of a book
. Look, we get terribly disoriented in school, we spend all that time listening to teachers and reading books, and some of the teachers are so bad you get to rely more on the books. At least you can skim the bad ones and hook into the real ones. I wanted to say something, and the form that I thought people talked in was books.

“When Peabody got over his first reaction, he introduced me to a pal of his who was in textbook publishing. What the hell good was that? Nobody was going to buy a smart-ass textbook. The publisher-type was shocked. I was a kid, what, twenty-three? Maybe I ought to try magazine articles, or get an agent, or get a staff job writing. You know what technical writing is, manuals? Christ, I tried that for a week just to appease Margaret. The real problem was not that I was doing something that might or might not turn out to be a useless book. The problem was Margaret and me. We were a mistake. I didn’t realize that until she was four months pregnant. You ever find yourself in that kind of a box?”

“Al,” she said. “I had an affair that soured when I was two months gone. I had an abortion. We’ve all got skeletons.”

“I would have tried to talk Margaret into one, but it was too late. When her belly started to pop, really you could hardly notice it except for the stiffness, but she thought it was affecting me. The point was that I had turned off on the nothingness of our relationship. We fought, the usual. I saw a shrink, I tried to be constructive. I thought it would be better if she had other interests. I tried to get her out of the house, a gourmet cooking school, the League of Women Voters, anything. She thought I just wanted her out of the apartment so I could have peace and quiet to write my stupid book.

“She tried. She signed up for something at the Museum of Modern Art, quit after the third week. She started going on shopping sprees with daddy’s money, but even that got boring after a while. It was hopeless. The bigger she got the less she wanted to go out of the house. It wasn’t a difficult pregnancy, she just didn’t want to be seen that way, even by strangers. Her one
thing was the car. She was a terrible driver, you know, both hands on the wheel all the time, and too slow on the open road with everyone honking. But she had some kind of thing about driving herself to the hospital when the time came. I said it was ridiculous, especially since I was right there at home, if it happened in the middle of the night I’d be there, and I was there in the goddam daytime too, but she got hysterical about my being out when the time came. I think she was trying to say I was unreliable, at least that’s what the shrink thought. I said, for Christ’s sake, if I am out of the house, get a cab, and she’d say what if there were no cabs and the baby came real fast. Hell, it was only a ten-minute drive to Doctors Hospital, which is where her father wanted her to have the baby.

“I went with her a few times along about the eighth month and she said that wasn’t the point. If I was with her, I could drive her to the hospital, she had to practice doing it alone. Jack and Mary invited us to dinner.”

“They know all this?”

Al nodded.

Why didn’t Jack and Mary tell me? They must have thought it was Al’s business, they were protecting their friend. What about me, aren’t they friends of mine?
Then Shirley remembered. Mary had wanted to brief her and she had cut Mary off.
I’ll find out for myself.

Shirley looked at Al’s distraught face, a man trapped in a story he had to finish. Was he waiting for permission?

“Okay,” said Shirley. “Jack and Mary Wood were having you to dinner.”

“Margaret didn’t want to go. She was about two weeks from term. I told her you couldn’t stop living if you were having a baby. She said I was selfish going off. I pleaded with her to come with me, pulling her arm, and she stopped in her tracks and said, what’s happened to you, you don’t love me, and I couldn’t stop the words coming out, I said that’s right, and she said you never loved me, and I said that’s right. Why the hell did I have to say it?!

“Anyway, I took a cab to Jack and Mary’s. What Margaret did, the way we reconstructed it, she must have left the house within ten or fifteen minutes, took the car and went driving to the hospital. She wasn’t having contractions or anything. She just put her massive self behind the wheel and went driving. There’s a dead end on Fifty-second St. She should have been going straight up First Avenue, but she turned into Fifty-second and kept going right into the stone wall at the end of it. She must have intended to do it.”

Shirley tried to hold Al’s arm, but he shrugged loose. “She must not even have tried to control the car, because she wasn’t behind the wheel when she hit, she was in the middle of the front seat, maybe she was ducking, nobody knows for sure. She never got to Doctors. The ambulance took her to one of those city hospitals, Polyclinic, and when they delivered Julie by Caesarian it was from a dead mother.

“I didn’t find out about it for four hours, can you imagine? I had a great time at Jack and Mary’s, took a cab home, found the apartment empty, called Doctors, not there, called the police, they located her. I got to Polyclinic after midnight, Margaret had started to stiffen already, the baby looked all right, it was alive, but it had some kind of oxygen problem. For five or six months I didn’t accept the possibility that Julie’d be this way. I kept bringing in specialist after specialist, trying to get one who’d say the condition was temporary, that she’d grow out of it. If you’re desperate for hope the way I was, you’ll always find some doctor who’ll give you a lot of technical flap that sounds hopeful. The shrink made me come to terms with the permanence of it. And that I loved that hopeless baby more than I had loved her mother.”

“Was Peabody helpful?”

“He saw the doctors privately. He knew—and accepted from the start—that his only daughter was dead and her only child was some kind of near vegetable. He’s a rational man. He accepts the truth. I tried to get together with him and he avoided me. He left messages with his secretary. When they said I could take the baby
home, I had a phone call not from him but from
his lawyer. If I kept the child, if I didn’t get it into a decent home—wasn’t my home decent?—he’d find things to fight me over till I was consumed by legal bills, he’d get his friends at Internal Revenue to audit me to kingdom come, he—what’s the point? I got Juliet into a home—it’s a good place—I see her every few months when I’m up to it, and this last year they’ve let me take her away for a day or two at a time.”

Al blew his nose.

“Peabody’s last words to my face were, ‘Chunin, Margaret should never have married a Jew.’”

“It was his only daughter,” said Shirley. “He needed to blame it on something.”

The sound upstairs was Julie again. Al started to get up.

“I’ll go,” said Shirley.

“I’ve been talking too loud,” said Al.

“She may have had a dream.”

Upstairs, Shirley tiptoed in. The girl was asleep, breathing through her lips.

When Shirley came down, Al was looking out the window.

“I’ll scramble some eggs,” she said.

She put a little cheese into the eggs, and made some coffee.

As they sat at the kitchen table, Shirley asked, “What happened to the book?”

“It’s upstairs somewhere. Or down in the basement. Haven’t written a word since I went off to Jack and Mary’s that night.”

“What a waste,” Shirley said.

“Yes,” said Al. “All of it.”

*

Al had picked at his eggs, used his fork to toy with them till what was left on the plate was dry and cold. Shirley removed his plate and forked the remaining egg into the garbage pail.

Enough of the fire was still going for a few sticks of kindling to cause it to flare. Al put another log on, and the bark caught. Its crackling was comforting.

“No, no coffee,” he said when she asked. “The built-in insomnia is working fine this evening.”

He put the Purcell on the record player. “‘Come Ye Sons of Art.’ My universal antidote.”

Shirley tried to listen.

After a while, Al took her hand.

“Maybe it’s better to talk,” he said.

“Thinking is talking.”

“Think out loud.”

She was uncertain.

“Go ahead. Please.”

“If someone were rebounding from a woman like Margaret, I’d guess he’d wind up with someone like me.”

“That’s stupid,” Al protested. “It’s been nearly six years.”

“Some men,” said Shirley, “are slow.”

He did not turn the record over. The machine shut itself off.

“When does Julie go back?”

“In the morning.”

“Do her visits with you seem to matter to her?”

“I can’t tell.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“They don’t know.”

“What do you get out of these visits?”

“A lessening of guilt.”

“Is the pain worth it?”

“I don’t allow myself that question.”

“Would you rather she hadn’t been born?”

Al was on his feet, angry. “Would you rather have been born a man?”

He stalked out of the house without his coat.

Shirley was glad. She had wanted to provoke him.

*

A half-hour passed before he returned. Shirley, dozing on the couch in front of the fire, heard him come in. He was shivering.
But his face looked better.

“I’m coming down with a cold,” he said.

“You can’t get an instant cold like that. It’s probably psychosomatic.”

“Sure, sure.”

“When they came down into the desert, Eve caught the first cold.”

“If it was psychosomatic, how come Adam didn’t get one?”

“He was a man. Insensitive, you know.”

“Fuck you.”

“I wouldn’t try it. You’re a sitting duck for impotence right now.”

His eyebrows squirmed. When she saw his expression, she wished she hadn’t baited him.

“Give me your cold,” she said.

Al kissed her. His lips had no resilience. Not like flesh.

In bed they did not try to make love, he for fear of challenged failure, she for fear she had been right.

Al, pulled over to one side of the bed, wished he had taken sleeping pills. If he had, he might not hear Julie in the night if she needed help.

He opened his eyes to see Shirley in her nightgown standing beside him, holding the plastic bathroom glass and two pills in her other hand.

“I don’t want sleeping pills,” he said.

“Antihistamine,” she said. “For your cold.”

He swallowed the pills. She got into the opposite side of the bed. It seemed idiotic for them to be sleeping on opposite sides of the bed. She reached out and pulled him toward her. His body felt cold.

“Like a corpse,” he said.

“Shh. Sleep.”

They drifted off, enmeshed in each other’s limbs, two parts of one body, one cold, one warm, clinging together for life.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

THE CLOCK SAID MORNING. Shirley eased herself out of bed, took a tuck of the drape to peer outside.

Against the evergreens, the rain was sheeting down, puddling the driveway. The sky above the treeline was an absolute loss, a bumpy quilt of lowering clouds. Where did the birds shelter in a deluge?

Al’s sleep sounds were ominous: noisy inhale, death-rattle exhale. Her mother would have said,
Double pneumonia, or maybe just a bad cold.
She touched his hot face, careful not to wake him.
His cheeks, gray the night before, were pink underneath their stubble.

His blue bathrobe was thrown over a chair. Shirley pulled it around herself. Better go see Julie.

Gently she touched open the door of Julie’s bedroom, a wedge to see into. The girl was not in bed. Shirley felt a ping inside her, opened the door completely, and there was Julie curled in the armchair, her blanket a sanctuary tent. Shirley approached to pat Julie’s hair, but the girl pulled back inside her wrap, out of reach, her random eyes fright-filled.

Was her father’s new companion viewed as a threat? Could Julie
understand that much? Shirley, sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to figure out a way to start conversation, noticed the acid smell. The girl had peed in her bed.

Back to the bedroom, she found Al still asleep.
Thank God
Arthur had told her to take the day off. She snuck back into her side of the bed, closed her eyes, hoping for sleep.