Outtakes from a Marriage (9 page)

“Julia,” Nikki said, “finish up that drink. Mine’s completely gone and you’re making me feel like an alcoholic!”

I gulped the rest of my drink, and since Nikki was on a gossip jag, I asked, “What was that story I recently read about Susanna? I think it was on ‘Page Six.’…Something about her saving a choking man?”

Nikki hooted with laughter. “Oh, Julia, I have to tell Susanna you said that! Did you really read that? Was it ‘Page Six’? Susanna and I made it up for a laugh!”

“C’mon!” I said. “How?”

“Well, Susanna loves to Google herself, and sometimes we go on
Gawker.com
just to see what people have said about her.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, Gawker or Perez Hilton. Oh, you know, those sites where people post celebrity sightings in Manhattan, like, ‘I saw Kevin Bacon standing on the corner of Fifty-ninth and Fifth.’ Or ‘I saw Julianne Moore adjusting her knickers,’ that kind of thing. Anyway, Susanna and I remembered when
Mission: Impossible
was coming out, the press was full of stories about Tom Cruise saving people in real life. He rescued some drowning French people, he saved someone who was hit by a car…. There was something else, too. I forget. So we started wondering how his press agents or the Scientologists managed all that—Susanna was convinced the items were made up—so we decided to put up an entry about her saving a choking person on
Gawker.com
, just to see what would happen. And sure enough, it got posted and picked up by the tabloids. Her publicist’s phone was ringing off the hook the next day, and she told every reporter that Susanna denied helping any choking person, but lots of papers ran the story, anyway! Just goes to show you,” said Nikki. “Well, I’m ready for another drink. I think I’ll have a real one this time—the last one was mostly cranberry juice. Ready, Jules?”

“Sure,” I said, rising unsteadily. “I’ll get them!”

Just then Joe stepped up, balancing three pink drinks in his hands, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

“Here. I told the bartender to make up some more of whatever you girls are drinking, but this time I told him to use normal glasses.”

“Jesus Christ, Joe,” I said, laughing helplessly. He had Cosmo highballs in his hands.

“Have you got a fag, Joe?” Nikki asked.

“Nah, just the wife here,” Joe said, nodding at me, and then he laughed jovially at his own little joke. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and handed one to her.

“I’ll have one, too,” I said, and Joe held one out for me. I reached into his jacket pocket for his lighter.

“Do you smoke, Julia?” Nikki asked.

“No!” I replied, lighting up.

“Never?” asked Nikki as I lit hers.

“Really never.” I inhaled deeply. “Only, you know, occasionally when I drink.”

Joe was watching my every move. He loves it when I smoke. I looked at him and blew smoke out of the corner of my mouth. He gave me a slow, simmering smile, and I couldn’t help it, I had to smile back. I smiled and looked away.

“C’mere,” he said.

[
nine
]

M
ommy?”

My eyes slammed open. Sammy’s face was so close that our noses were almost touching.

“Hi, sweetness,” I whispered. Then I lowered my eyelids. Darkness.

“Mommy?”

“Mmm-hmm?”

“What smells?” he asked.

I opened my eyes again. Sammy had clamped his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Oh,” Sammy said. Then he said, “Maybe it’s you.”

I blinked at him.

I blinked and then I tried to sit up. Something in my frontal lobe—and I could somehow distinguish between my throbbing cerebral lobes—was killing me. My skull seemed to have shrunk overnight and the resulting pressure on my brain made me whimper.

“Can I have breakfast now?” asked Sammy. He rolled off the bed and trotted toward the bedroom door.

“Okay. Yeah. I’m coming,” I said, and the lungful of air accompanying those words settled around me like a noxious shroud. I had the breath of a two-day-old corpse. It actually hurt to inhale. I saw that I was naked and, glancing over at Joe, I saw that he was, too, and then it all came back to me.

Lighting cigarettes. Many, many cigarettes. Lighting cigarettes off cigarettes. Stopping off at the Dublin House for a drink with Nikki and a drunken young actor she had hit it off with at the party. Joe amiably signing autographs for a group of college kids. More smoking. Drinking beer. I remember we switched to beer so we wouldn’t get too drunk! Laughing at Nikki and her new friend making out at the bar.

Did I drag Nikki into the ladies’ room to try to talk some sense into her about hooking up with that guy? I did. I remembered now that Joe told me to. Nikki had slipped going into the bathroom and I had tried to force her to drink water and we had almost fallen over with laughter. Later, Joe and I, our arms around each other, walked the few blocks home, laughing and whistling and trying to remember the theme songs to old television shows. Somberly greeting the night doorman, and then, the minute the elevator doors closed behind us, the way I pushed Joe back against the wall and began kissing him on his lips, his throat, his chest, Joe pulling my lowering head close with one hand and attempting to cover the security camera above him with the other. The rest of it rushed back then, like smash cuts in a bad movie.

I stood.

I pulled on a robe, shuffled into the bathroom, and brushed the night’s accumulation of Cosmos and cigarettes off my teeth, all the while trying to find some way to blame Joe for what I considered to be an outright violation the night before. I had vowed to myself after the first overheard phone message from Miss Hornyasamother-fucker that any future sex with Joe was out of the question. Those days were over. The shop was closed. I had held out for two days (held out! as if anyone was asking) and then last night I had blown it. Literally. And no matter how I tried to turn it around in my mind now, I knew that I had been the culprit. The aggressor. Each drink had diluted my resolve. During dinner I glanced over, and when I caught Joe’s eye I thought,
When did his hair get so long? I love him with floppy hair.
Later, when I saw Susanna delicately pick up a piece of cake with her fingertips and then place it in Joe’s mouth, I thought,
Nah, she doesn’t have a Southern accent. And who could blame her for flirting? Look at him!

“Mommy!” Sammy called from the kitchen.

“Yeah, okay. Here I come.”

On the floor of the kitchen lay Joe’s coat, and a few feet away, completing this shameful tableau, my new Marc Jacobs jacket lay in a heap, all limp and used looking, the fur collar as lifeless and vulgar as roadkill. The kitchen table had been pushed away from its usual place against the wall. A bowl of fruit had been knocked onto the floor.

Had we…

Yes, I remembered. Indeed we had. We had said good night to Catalina, locked the door behind her, and…

“Can I have pancakes?” asked Sammy.

“Sure, honey,” I said, thinking,
Thank God Ruby slept at Emma’s last night.
“I’ll make you some pancakes and then let’s go out—to the park. Look how the sun is shining! And it’s Saturday!”

An hour later, somewhat fortified with coffee, pancakes, peanut butter, and Advil, I followed Sammy out of our building. We left the stale, heated lobby, stepped out onto West Eighty-fifth Street, and the late-morning air felt clement and pure and forgiving. It was early January, but the slicing wind that had whipped down the avenues on recent mornings had blown off the island of Manhattan and a mild breeze had taken its place. Sammy ran ahead to the Korean deli on the corner, where the owner’s wife was placing large buckets of flowers out on the sidewalk beneath a long, low pyramid of fruits and vegetables. I caught up with him, and as we waited for the light to change, we watched the woman, whose name we didn’t know but whose face we saw many times each day, carrying two buckets at a time from the inside of the store to the sidewalk. She seemed to just place the buckets haphazardly in a row, but there before us was a multitiered exhibition of color and texture and fragrance so vivid and promising against its dirty graffitied backdrop that most mornings even Sammy was compelled to stop for a moment to take it all in. It was like a seam had ripped in the corner of our building’s aged facade and this ripe, multicolored brilliance had burst out. There were tall buckets of irises with their impossibly blue spearheads pointing out in all directions, soft clouds of white hydrangea, interlocking tiered stems of fragrant blue-green eucalyptus, and scarlet-veined Easter lily buds, swollen and ready to bloom. We stood on the corner waiting for the light to change and we watched a frail, elderly couple filling a bag with apricots. The man’s hands shook and his body swayed slightly as he held the bag open for his wife.
Maybe Parkinson’s,
I thought, my hand touching Sammy’s shoulder. The old man seemed to be clutching the bag for all he was worth. He patiently held the open, shaking bag while the woman examined each apricot with bony fingers, rejecting three for every one she placed in the bag. The man just stood there with head bowed, clutching that bag as if his life depended on it, and his wife scrutinized the fruit as if they had all the time in the world.

“Walk!” said Sammy when the light changed, startling me a little. He reached up for my hand, which was the rule, and we started across Broadway.

“Hippo or dinosaur?” I asked Sammy.

“Hippo!” Sammy hollered. When we reached the far corner, Sammy dropped my hand and began his sprint up the block.

“Wait for me at the corner, Sammy! Don’t cross!”

“I know!” he called back.

“Wait!”

The Hippo Park is nestled beneath the shade of centuries-old trees at the foot of a steep hill in Riverside Park. Like the Dinosaur Park six blocks north, the Hippo Park’s proximity to the Hudson River always makes it feel about ten degrees cooler than everywhere else in the city, which is a good thing in the summer. In the winter it’s usually a windswept no-man’s-land. When we first moved to the neighborhood, during Ruby’s preschool days, the playground was being renovated. First the old-fashioned metal swings and rickety jungle gyms were removed and replaced by newer, safer models that were installed above rubber mats. And then came the hippos—hollow concrete sculptures that children scramble onto and jump off of, or straddle like a horse. In the summer, water squirts from the gaping hippo mouths and children dart in and out of the spray in sopping underwear or bathing suits. The hippos were meant to have children climb inside and stick their heads out through the massive benign jaws, and at first the kids loved to do just that until one morning when a little boy climbed in to discover that a presumably homeless person had decided the inside of the hippo was the perfect place to move his or her bowels. Not long after that, thanks to some frenzied calls from the more vocal members of the playground committee, the parks department filled the hippos with cement.

When Ruby was little, I was on the playground committee. We were playground regulars. Weather permitting, we could be found at the Hippo Park every day. Sometimes twice a day. I had friends I would meet up with in the park—other stay-at-home moms—and we would talk about the news, our husbands, and our kids, about sex and books and our favorite television shows and our annoying mothers and our reproductive cycles while our kids stomped around the fenced-in playground, imagining they were princesses and warriors and ninjas and fairies.

After Sammy was born, though, we could afford to have Catalina work for us full time, and she was usually the one who took Sammy to the park. The two of them developed their own network of friends, so now, on the rare occasions when I took Sammy to the playground, I felt like a bit of an outsider.

“¡Hola, Samicito!”
a woman called out as soon as we walked through the gates, and Sammy called back,
“¡Hola, Señora Berta!”
and ran into the woman’s arms for a hug.
“¿Dónde está Tía Catalina?”
the woman said, and to my astonishment, Sammy replied,
“En su casa. No trabaja hoy.”
This was a kid who had been recently labeled “possibly speech-delayed” by his preschool teacher, Lauren, during our parent/teacher conference in October.

“Really?” I had said. It was true that Sammy usually chose to speak in monosyllables, but I knew grown men—my brother, Neil, for example—who used words almost as sparingly. “Joe’s mother told me that Joe didn’t speak a word until he was two and a half,” I told Lauren. “Sammy’s sister and her friends do everything he wants, so all he has to do is grunt and point. I think he just hasn’t seen any reason to talk in complex sentences yet.”

But Lauren urged me to have him tested and the results shed a different light on Sammy than the soft, easy one through which we had always viewed him. Sammy had “issues,” according to his tester. He was “immature.” Informed of this diagnosis in a follow-up meeting, Joe had concurred. Sammy was indeed immature. He was four years old.

“We mean he’s immature compared to children his age,” said Lauren. She stared impassively at Joe, and I could see that she was determined to convey an “I’m unimpressed by celebrity and for that matter anyone with a penis” attitude. When asked for an example of his immature behavior, Lauren said, “He still thinks potty humor is funny.”

“That’s because potty humor
is
funny,” said Joe.

Lauren smiled tolerantly.

I said, “I think what Joe is trying to say is that we’ve probably encouraged him at home by laughing at silly potty jokes. He has an older sister—”

“No, what I’m saying is that potty humor is usually pretty funny.” I could see that Joe was clenching his jaw. Really a bad sign.

“And what’s this business here about sequencing problems—” I tried to continue, but was interrupted by Joe: “Seriously. I defy you to tell me something about…poop that won’t make me laugh.”

“Okay,” said Lauren, smiling condescendingly. “
Poop
is a natural function that helps our bodies eliminate waste.”

“HAHAHAHAHAHA,” Joe laughed maniacally. Lauren gazed at him with a look of controlled anger that I had seen her give Sammy when he got a little wound up. The tester, a meek girl named Paige, began explaining to me about “normal” sequencing and “delayed” sequencing, and it all got jumbled together in an incomprehensible, unsequenced mess in my mind, and all the while Joe shook his head and chuckled to himself. But despite Joe’s objections (he’s just a little kid), I had scheduled Sam for speech therapy and occupational therapy. Now I wondered if his speech therapist knew that he was bilingual.

“Hi,” I said to Berta as Sammy chased a little boy over to the climbing apparatus. “I’m Julia. I’m Sammy’s mom.”

“Hi. I know. I’m Berta, Catalina’s friend. I babysit with Alex.”

“Oh, of course…” I said, and then I tried to recall which little boy was Alex and I had no idea. I used to know all the kids in the playground. When Ruby was little.

The playground was rather busy on this bright morning, but as I gazed around I saw nobody I knew except Adam Heller, who was seated on one of the benches reading the
Times.
His daughter Katie was playing with another little girl on the climbing apparatus. The girls hung on to the lower bars and swung their feet back and forth, singing and laughing. Adam glanced up at them occasionally but seemed otherwise engrossed in his newspaper.

Adam Heller was a stay-at-home dad whose wife supported them with her income from a big law firm. He had been a source of fascination for me ever since his wife, Elizabeth, told me about how Katie had come to be potty-trained. We were in the park one Saturday, when Sammy and Katie were not even two, and while I was changing Sammy at one point, Elizabeth said, “Glad those days are over.”

“Really? You’re all finished with potty training?”

“Finished?” she said. “I never even started. I was on a business trip one weekend and when I returned, I noticed we were out of Pampers. I told Adam I was going to run out and get some and he said, ‘We don’t use those anymore.’ Honestly, the first thing that came to my mind was that Katie had had some kind of horrible accident or…operation while I was away. Then Adam told me that when he realized we were out of diapers, he figured she was probably old enough to start using the toilet, so he told her that from now on, she should just
go in the toilet.
He doesn’t read any books about raising children, so he just thought that’s all there was to it. And in Katie’s case that was all there was to it.”

I loved this story and recounted it to all my friends, who also got a kick out of it (eventually, the story became an urban legend—I once heard somebody at a cocktail party tell the story and they had never met Adam or Elizabeth). Adam Heller had disproved a silent understanding we mothers shared: that our children, left in the hands of their ill-equipped fathers for more than a few hours, would quickly regress to the point of becoming feral, unspeaking, self-wetting animals. The Adam Heller story forced us to consider the possibility that perhaps we mothers sometimes get in our own, and our children’s, way with all our fretting and researching and managing, and that maybe we should just trust our partner’s instincts a little more.