My Education (21 page)

“You didn't tell me you'd asked Nicholas to move out,” I said, not for the first time.

“Can you please hand me those plates from our lunch?” she demanded. “Of course I told you he'd moved out.”

“You didn't tell me that you'd
asked
him to move out. Nor did you tell me he
had
.”

“Of course I did. You
know
, don't you?”

“I know it from
him
!”

“What difference does it make?”

“You didn't tell me: why? You didn't want me to know? You said he was going to come spend a week with the baby, not that you'd given him that week to move out.”

“And this is some crime against you? That having possibly a few fucking things on my mind, I failed to keep you apprised of my husband's movements?”

“That's not the point. The point is you came to a major decision about your marriage and you
didn't tell me
.”

“Because it's my marriage, not yours,” she said, slamming the dishwasher shut.

“So you admit it?”

“What am I, on trial?”

“You wouldn't be on trial if you weren't so evasive!”

“So
you
admit that you've put me on trial!” While we bickered Joachim, on the floor on his stomach with his head slightly raised, had been shoving the floor with the heels of his hands, so that, though he had his eyes fixed on a goal well ahead—Martha's feet—he never moved forward but backward, and now had wedged himself under the legs of a chair.

“You didn't tell me you were asking him to leave for the same reason you didn't tell him we're lovers,” I theorized furiously as Joachim unleashed a wail of frustration.

“I
did
tell you I was asking him to leave. Are you out of your mind?”

“You did not!”

“And there's a tradition, perhaps you don't know, of refraining from telling one's husband all about the adultery one is committing,” she said as, bisecting the room, she snatched the baby out by his tiny armpits, which rescue only further outraged him, so his wails became screams.

“So much better to let the news come from the nanny.”

“Why don't you call Nicholas and commiserate then. Poor wronged lover and husband!” But our screams were no match for the baby's, and that argument, like all arguments, as well as all peaceable conversations, and all meals, and all sex, was cut short.

To a depth no lecture of Lucia's could have ever achieved I'd begun to understand Joachim's disproportionate power. His very inability to walk, talk, obtain food, obtain toys, change his own elevation, control his own waste, added up to such efficient tyranny no five minutes elapsed that was not interrupted. No activity wasn't derailed. No coherence attempted to harden its edges that wasn't immediately smashed. And somehow, Martha's stubborn attempts to control her existence just deepened the chaos around us, so that I, who'd idolized her independence, and her unfettered intelligence, and her many achievements, now wished she'd concede her defeat and tie on a babushka and do some housecleaning. Martha was grimly determined to write her book, and the heaps of her research appeared everywhere, well-intentioned haystacks beside the high chair or in sight of the doorway bounce swing or wherever she thought she might steal a few moments for reading, so that in addition to misplacing Joachim's things, she was always misplacing the page where she'd had to leave off, and would ransack the house in a rage, grabbing up and discarding. Nights when Joachim was tranquil in his crib, and we might have made love, or at the very least slept, Martha's books would form jagged deposits all over the bed, and Martha herself would sit up with her face barricaded behind her bifocals, and the breast pocket of her old Oxford shirt bristling dangerously with black razor-tip pens. If I managed to doze underneath the hot glare of her lamp, I would often wake up with a sharp-cornered library binding impaling my gut. Yet I never went home, nor to some other room of her house where the light wasn't on. I would still rather lie with my cheek pressed against her bare thigh and the
Norton Anthology
splayed by my head. For some nights, when she finally clicked off her lamp to reveal the dawn starting to texture the room, as if freed by our shared tiredness, like composites of darkness our bodies would merge. Without words or struggle a fluid of pleasure would seal us in its cocoon, and final outcries would be quakes without sound, as if taking place on the floor of the ocean. For the night's short remainder, we slept blissfully, and whatever it was that we shared would seem inviolate.

If only she would tell me what it meant that Nicholas had moved out, that he knew we were lovers—if only she would tell me the one thing I wanted to know, which was what sort of future together we had. And yet the future arrived every day, until half of August was gone. Then questions of my own separate future, as a student and scholar, grew hard to ignore. Though I tried, for a while.

One morning when it was Nicholas's day to spend with Joachim he called to say he was sick. An au pair had been hired, but had not yet arrived. Nicholas had aches, a high fever, was sweating and chilled, and had vomited twice in the night. I heard Martha repeating his symptoms back to him as if she were expecting something more. Their conversation was brief, and when Martha set down the receiver she was pale with anger. “I suppose that you think he was faking,” I said, nastily.

“Go ahead and side with him again.”

“Side with him! Do you really believe he's not sick?”

“Of course he's sick. He could barely make sense. But I have just
ten days
until I'm back in the classroom. Ten days left to research and write, and now this day is shot.” For some time, scarcely seeming to see me, she continued to scold me, as if I'd suggested she give up her career. Just a half hour later the phone rang again, and answering Martha turned not pale but red with unease.

“Oh, Laurence! How nice . . .

“Yes, he's sick. Oh, he called you. Then why—

“Lunch?—No, I had no idea.

“A ‘
play date
'? Oh, I see.

“Can I phone you back later? Of course I'd love seeing you too . . .

“A ‘
play date
'!” Martha cried when she got off the phone. Today Laurence and Bebi, it turned out, had expected Nicholas and Joachim to come over for lunch and the activity Laurence called a “play date.” Having heard from Nicholas he was sick with the flu, Laurence had called Martha to urge her to accept the invitation in her estranged husband's stead. Joachim's absence, and hers, would be a great disappointment; Bebi had been awaiting his playmate's arrival for days.

I hadn't seen Laurence in months, since the night of the dinner, and Sahba and Beb in even longer than that. For a moment the dense interval, of my time with Martha, disappeared, and I was plunged into a prehistoric world, and felt I hardly knew who I was anymore. “Laurence loathes me,” Martha was saying. “This is some kind of divine punishment! Not only denied my workday, but now I have to have lunch with my ex-husband's friend who loathes me, so the babies can have a
play date
.”

“He doesn't loathe you,” I reproved her, although I was more lost in thought about whether or not Laurence might now loathe me, so that for a moment I didn't realize what she meant when she said, with a gasp of insight,

“You should go—you and Laurence are friends.”

“
I
go?”

“I'll leave you the car.”

“No!” I cried, understanding she meant it. “I haven't seen Laurence in ages—I don't think we're friends anymore. Just call him and say they should have their date some other time.” But I knew it was hardly the play date that Martha most wanted.

“Please, babe,” she said, sliding onto my lap. “I have so much to do and so few days to do it. I won't ever get these days back. I've never asked you for a favor,” and before I could halfway discern if this statement was true, she plunged her hot tongue in my mouth and I groaned when I'd meant to be silent, and slid my legs open and crushed her to me, and for the first time in weeks, in the daylight and conscious, we set ruthlessly after each other. But after some moments I pushed her away.

“You want me to take him to lunch and what else?”

Rosily disheveled, she leaned her head on one elbow and thought. “Could you look after him until six?”

It was eleven in the morning. “Martha,” I exclaimed. “That's seven hours.”

“Until five? No, how about this: you tell me how long.”

“You're asking me to babysit.”

“I trust you! You're far more trustworthy than me,” she attempted to joke. But this wasn't my objection, and she knew it. That she so frankly hoped to use me coursed through me like a charge, and I felt I understood, perhaps for the first time, the warlike accounting of love: the storing up of credits and debits like a forging of shackles.

I made her wait until she should have grown uncomfortable before I said, with some refrigeration in my voice, “I'll watch him because I love you, and I'm happy to help you. Not because I haven't got something better to do.” She'd gone too far, and yet, I was perversely glad she'd done so, which might mean I had gone too far, also.

“Of course. Thank you. I'm truly grateful, babe. I hope you realize how much.”

Our ardor of moments before had evaporated, and it only felt foolish to be lying, as we had somehow wound up, on her dining-room floor. We stood and Martha straightened her clothing and then, with tenderness but not heat, gathered me in her arms. “I know you've noticed,” she said in my ear, “that I'm a much more inventive lover when I've gotten work done.”

“Then by all means go do it. I'll expect to enjoy the rewards.”

“You will,” she said, kissing me deeply again, but briefly, as if she feared that the longer she lingered the greater the risk I'd renege. After much energetic ransacking of rooms she located her most needed papers, and with a shout of “love you!” tossed back over one shoulder, she rushed from the house.

All this time Joachim had been taking his late-morning nap. Had he been awake the discussion could never have happened, let alone the outcome. He was more skilled at retaining her presence than I. His absence had enabled her departure, and now, as he continued to heedlessly sleep, it forced me to reflect on my own situation despite how unpleasant would be the conclusions. I was alone in Martha's house and in charge of her child, yet I felt not like her trusted ally but a child myself. I would have liked to think it was because I hadn't babysat since the age of thirteen, but I knew this wasn't true, just as Martha's belief that I could have refused her was somehow untrue. She wouldn't think she'd overstepped. She had asked, I'd consented; then why did I feel like a child? Martha liked to pretend her adult obligations, her parenthood and her professorship and mortgage and the rest of the dread weighty things, added up to a prison forged only for her, but in fact it was armor. Thusly clad she could make every other claim yield, for what
did
I have better to do? Not a thing, as she knew even better than me. I had my summer reading list, off of which I had crossed not one title. I had my fall classes to choose: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Contestation? (M)Other Tongue(s)? How would I ever decide? And right then, though I loved studenthood, perhaps loved it too much, I was finished. I was finished with all forms of life that resembled a child's. At my age, twenty-one, my own mother had been already married and pregnant and entrapping new clients in my father's little office like the spider traps flies; twenty-one wasn't inherently inconsequential. And though I could have decided, in my angry resolve, to kidnap the baby and hold him for ransom, I meant to pursue consequence along dignified paths. No longer would I be the student, to Martha's professor. No longer denizen of a house full of empty beer bottles, to her mansion owner. And while she'd fled Laurence and in fact her own child, I would calmly attend to them both.

I went upstairs and crept down the hall to his nursery door. As usual it was ajar; after a moment's hesitation I inched it just open enough to squeeze through. My heart was beating so loudly I thought it might wake him—I really had no idea what I was doing. In all my career babysitting I'd never cared for a child so young. I saw only the crib, its monkey-patterned bumper sufficiently high that the baby, asleep, was obscured. I knew this and yet still grew convinced he'd somehow disappeared. I was alone; no one could judge me; I dropped to all fours, and with the caution of a predator—or prey?—noiselessly crawled toward the crib, the heels of my hands and my knees sinking into the carpet. I didn't have to get all the way there to come in range of the sound of his breathing. Once I heard it, so faint yet so steady, the quintessence of self-containment—here he'd been all this time—I was compelled to make sure it was him breathing there and not something else, like a raccoon. I raised my head just far enough to peer over the bumper. He'd bundled himself in a corner, limbs tucked under his body, face turned toward me. Because his eyes were closed I felt I had no idea what he looked like. I might never have seen him before. And then his breath snagged in his throat and he let out a strange, high-pitched whinny and shrugged himself more tightly into a ball and with wild haste, as if fleeing gunfire, hunched over I ran out the door, and closed it to a finger's width behind me, afraid of the noise of the latch.

The nearest phone was in the bedroom, where my clothes and Martha's seemed to have been raining down from great heights for a great length of time. With a pang I discovered I still knew Laurence's number by heart. And then hearing his chipper “Hello-oh?” I almost hung up but would not let myself.

“Hi, Laurence.”

“Martha!” with a great gust of mustered delight. “Are you able to come?”