Love in Infant Monkeys (11 page)

“I just gouged myself on a wire, Noam! Jesus! Teddy was up half the night crying and I'm exhausted! Jer's away in the city! Could I have one second of sympathy?”

“I get so tired of the constant state of emergency,” said Chomsky. “Everything is a personal
crisis
. A kid spitting up is a crisis. A baby chair that's missing is a major injustice. Frankly, it starts to feels like an exaggeration.”

“Oh. I see. So, things like this are never urgent to you?”

“Not really,” said Chomsky.

The harried mother, white-lipped, crossed her arms in front of the baby carrier and glared at him.

“For one thing, you're not the one with vomit soaking into your bra, your back aching from a nine-month-old that already weighs twenty pounds and a bloody hole in the side of your foot. So it's easy for you to be perfectly relaxed, isn't it?”

“Crisis is big,” said Chomsky. “Crisis is not this trivial, daily
texture
of living.”

“Sure. If you're a robot, that is,” said the harried mother.

K. had no excuse to be in the shed anymore but couldn't tear himself away. He picked up a china figurine
of a pig in a tutu and turned it upside down, pretending to scrutinize a maker's mark.

“What I'm suggesting is that emotion can be channeled in productive directions,” said Chomsky.

“That's not emotion you're talking about. That's just opinion.”

“Opinion—” started Chomsky, but she interrupted him.

“What you realize when you have a kid, if you're a woman, is we're animals and it's hard to be an animal. It's hard work. It's dirt and danger and bile.”

“That
particular
brand of gender essentialism—”

“But what you also realize as a mother is—and I don't think men really get this out of fatherhood, I think maybe they get it in other ways, like if they're having great illicit sex or beating the living shit out of someone—is that it's great to be an animal; it's what the core of life is, to be an animal. Not to be human. I don't mean to be human; I don't mean that at all, Noam. I mean to be a
mammal
.”

“Oh, please,” said Chomsky. His granddaughter set down the dartboard again, a little disappointed.

“Say what you like,” said the mother. A coolness came into her voice and it occurred to K. she had a certain steely quality. “Say what you like about anything
you want. I don't care. But consider the possibility that there's something here you can't know. Something here you will
never know
, Noam. Something you will
never know
that would change
everything
.”

She pushed the door open and slammed out, leaving the three of them alone in the shed. It was just K., Chomsky and the granddaughter. The old scavenger woman had slipped out unnoticed.

K., standing over a table, had the odd impression that the light filtering through the dirty gray windows had shifted or been subdued—as though an object of enormous weight and strange design had moved silently in front of the sun.

For a second, motionless, he remembered the Hindenburg. Great airships of the past.

Chomsky turned his attention to the gerbil condo.

“See? Right there,” he said quietly to the little girl.

“It's got this crack all the way across the bottom now, from that corner to this one.”

“But the gerbils wouldn't mind,” said the little girl.

“Would they?”

“They might not,” conceded Chomsky. “It would work just as well for them. But the problem is, the
people
would probably mind.”

“How come?”

“They won't pick it up,” said Chomsky. There was a heaviness to him now, and K. thought he looked older. “They won't even take it now, is the thing. They'll just think it's junk, with a crack across the base like that.”

“Oh,” said the little girl. She blinked, and again K. thought tears were coming. She shook her head but refused to cry.

“Come on,” said Chomsky gently, and shifted the gerbil condo to hold it propped against his side so he could take her hand. “Let's go.”

They walked out of the shed, their shoulders, to K., looking stooped. He watched out the window, still clutching the pig ballerina, as the two of them trudged toward the main garbage pit with their burden. When they reached the pit Chomsky stood at the railing for a long moment, holding the gerbil cage with his thin arms outstretched. Finally he let go.

HE CAME TO SEE me at my Atlanta office, after his move back to Plains. It was a slow afternoon and the day's sessions were already over when the Secret Servicemen stepped into my foyer. I wasn't expecting company; my first thought when I opened the door on them—with their clean-cut hair, dark suits and earpieces—was
hearing-impaired Witnesses
.

Then I caught sight of that broad, down-home grin.

Our families went to the same church when we were boys, and we had Bible Study together. He was an avid student, hand always shooting straight up with the answers, while I spent most of the class lobbing spit-balls at the back of a fat girl's head. Our interests were different: One of us was strong and popular, the other
was bookish, but it was a small town, and even though there were some differences between us we were thrown together often enough. We hung out, playing stickball in the meadow behind the general store, or ran a Cowboys 'n Injuns racket in a rotting tree house. Typically I was a cowboy and Carter was one of the braves. One time, if I remember right, he was a squaw.

Anyway, after some neighborhood unpleasantness my parents moved the family to North Carolina. That happened when I was twelve, and contact between Jimmy and me ended.

Come 1981 I hadn't seen the guy in nearly fifty years.

He wasn't seeking me out in a professional capacity, he told me up front. Of course, if he hadn't said that, the conversation would be privileged. No, he just wanted to get reacquainted. Was there someplace we could settle in for a chat?

We sat out on the roof of my building, which had a couple of chairs and a table. This was back before Carter became a hobbyist vintner, but he already liked his vino; I, too, was a bit of a connoisseur. My heart lifted when he handed me an Échézeaux, and I strode boldly through the glass sliders to my liquor cabinet for a corkscrew and goblets. As I turned from him, I
recall a kind of imprint on my visual cortex: a former free-world leader leaning back in a chair behind me, his legs loosely crossed.
President
, I thought.
President
and
waiting
. I'd stayed pretty calm till then, but some kind of delayed shock took me. I got butterfingered and dropped a glass.

Left it there. You don't squat and clean up shards in that situation.

Watching the glittery descent of airplanes in the sky, we cradled our drinks and kicked back. I let the burgundy soak my tongue as Ravi Shankar floated out through an open window; my office was, more's the pity, next to a yoga studio. This was before I moved to my more upscale current location. Meanwhile, in the shared lobby—as I would notice a couple of minutes later on my way to the bathroom—his Secret Service detail was scanning dog-eared copies of
New Age
and
Tantric Frontier
.

I needed a second to settle my nerves. I had known Carter before, certainly, but back then he was just a skinny kid with big teeth, your basic Young Baptist Next Door. Myself, I already had a deep voice. I got to second base with Patty Evans while he was still singing like Tweety Bird. But now he wore a mantle of sorts. I
had a good career myself, of course, but his credentials were hard to beat. When I looked at his face, media images clicked through my memory like cards in a shuffling machine. The guy had walked the corridors of power like Caesar or Napoléon, for Chrissake. So I have to admit my legs took on a liquid quality. A great vaulted hallway held them all, these massive, looming figures of men, and here was one of the monoliths in my office. Coming to me for help.

Because no one knocks on a psychologist's door to sell Girl Scout cookies. Carter wanted something.

There was denial there, of course. There always is.

Carter told me he considered talk therapy to be “for folks with real problems.” And he purported to be free of these. For Carter matters of the psyche were matters of the spirit, and matters of the spirit found their resolution in the teachings of Jesus. Even when we were boys, Jimmy took his churchgoing to heart. Back then, of course, Baptists were more easygoing and not overly interested in politics.

He eased into the confab with a casual narration of his life post-commander-in-chief. He'd published two memoirs and was looking forward to starting work on a novel. I waited patiently as he yapped about Rosalynn
and the kids; I was fairly sure he hadn't sat in the limousine for three hours to offer up the Carter family CV.

“Why I came to see you, Bobby,” he offered up when the small talk wound down, “was I'm trying to take a deep look at myself these days. Yesterday and tomorrow. I look back at my life so far and I try to make a moral reckoning. Where have I been, Bob? And where do I want to go?”

“Makes sense,” I said, encouraging.

I took the liberty of pouring myself another glass of the burgundy. It was an excellent Échézeaux—a '74, if I recall correctly, which carried a price tag in the triple digits.

“I'm not just looking at recent events, Bob. I'm looking into my character all the way back. And when I remember what we put you through, I feel badly. I truly do.”

It was then that my bladder put me on notice. In the cloying bathroom, thick with the sandalwood incense visited upon me by the yoga women, I popped a few codeine-laced Tylenol. My head was aching. Was it the spooks in the waiting room? Or was it Carter himself? I have an action practice: Clients know that with me the past is a springboard, not a quagmire. We don't dwell
on the mommies who didn't love us enough. My clients are strictly proactive. I don't often toot my own horn, but I've molded Fortune 500 executives out of acne-pocked office drones.

Important to steer the conversation in a positive direction. Carter wasn't a client, but the same tactics applied.

I left the bathroom with my temples throbbing and was quickly frisked by a Secret Service agent, apparently concerned I might have stowed a firearm in the toilet tank. Outside on the roof I sat down again and had barely picked up my glass when Carter leaned forward earnestly and clasped my arm.

“Keeping quiet and letting the blame fall on your head. Standing by while your family was hounded out of town and your daddy put you away in that place. It was wrong, Bobby. Sinful and wrong.”

“I go by Robert these days, Mr. President,” I said. I had no use for the rehashing of childhood squabbles; mine is a forward vector. Strength and velocity.

“Robert. Of course. Listen here, Robert. I want to apologize. I've always felt distressed by what happened. I can only imagine what you must feel.”

Then it came to me. The end stage of the Carter presidency had been a time of low points, like the hostage crisis
and Billygate. Those were the landmarks that showed up in the history books, but there were also the small, linchpin moments that turned the tide and got swept under the rug. I'm talking about what happened with the swamp rabbit. The newspapers called it a killer.

The killer rabbit plowed through the water toward Carter's boat in the spring of 1979. Carter was fishing alone on a pond at the time. Startled, he threatened the thing with his oar, splashing at the water to shoo it away. The vermin grudgingly changed its course. Not much of a story, but when it was leaked Carter was ridiculed for telling tall tales. People didn't believe rabbits could swim, for one thing. But soon a White House photographer showed up with pictures of the scene that backed Carter up, showing a large, light-brown hare, red-eyed and dog-paddling, and Carter splashing the water's surface a few feet from the animal in what looked like a feeble defensive posture.