The Infinite Plan (23 page)

When Gregory met his sister at the airport, he was shocked to see how much weight she had gained. He could not hide his feelings, and she noticed immediately.

“Don't say anything. I know what you're thinking.”

“You need to go on a diet, Judy!”

“That's easy to say; and the proof of that is how often I've done it. I must have lost two thousand pounds in all.”

With difficulty she climbed into Gregory's bus, and they drove to the hospital to pick up Margaret. They were handed a small bundle wrapped in a shawl, so light they looked inside to be sure she was there. Among the folds of wool they found a tiny infant, calmly sleeping. Judy bent down to her niece and began to kiss and nuzzle her like a bitch with her whelp, transfigured by a tenderness Gregory had not seen in decades but had not forgotten. All the way home, she talked to Margaret and petted her, while Gregory observed from the corner of his eye, amazed at Judy's transfiguration: the unsightly layers of fat disappeared, revealing the radiant hidden beauty below. At home they found the cats sleeping in the cradle and Samantha in her room standing on her head, seeking relief from her emotional anxiety in a fakir's acrobatics. Gregory shook the cat hair from the baby's bedding while Judy, short-tempered from the trip and from hours on her feet, jolted her sister-in-law from nirvana with one shove, turning her right side up and returning her to the hard facts of reality.

“Come let me show you how to sterilize the bottles and change the baby's diapers,” she commanded.

“You'll have to explain it to Greg. I'm not any good at those things,” Samantha stammered, retreating.

“It's better if he doesn't spend too much time with the baby; you don't want the same shit from him I got from my father,” Judy grumbled testily.

“What are you talking about?” asked Gregory, who was holding the child.

“You know damn well what I'm talking about. I'm not a cretin; do you think I haven't noticed that you always have kids around?”

“Kids are my job!”

“Your job, sure. Of all possible jobs, you had to choose that one. I wonder why. I bet you look after little girls too, don't you? All men are perverts!”

Gregory deposited Margaret on the bed, took his sister roughly by one arm, and dragged her into the kitchen, closing the door behind them.

“Now you're going to explain what the fuck you mean!”

“You have an amazing ability to play dumb, Gregory. I can't believe you don't know. . . .”

“I
don't
know!”

And then the venom spilled from Judy, all that she had borne in silence from that night over twenty years before when she had not let Gregory crawl into her sleeping bag, the secret zealously guarded with the fear it was not a mystery and that everyone knew, the hidden theme of all her bad dreams and rancor, the unspeakable shame that she was exposing now only to protect her niece—an innocent baby, she said—to prevent the sin of incest from happening again in the family, because those things are in the blood, they're genetic curses, what a black day it was when that piece of garbage brought us into the world, he was a filthy, sinful lecher, and if you need more details I can give them to you, because I remember everything, it's burned into my memory, if you want me to I'll tell you how he got me into the shed with a hundred excuses and made me open his fly and he put it in my hands and told me it was my doll baby, my sugar candy, to do it like that, like that, more, until—”.

“That's enough!” screamed Gregory, clapping his hands over his ears.

• • •

Every Monday morning Gregory Reeves called Carmen Morales, something they do to this day. After the abortion that nearly cost her her life, Carmen had told her mother goodbye and disappeared without a trace. Her name was never spoken in the Morales house, but no one forgot her, least of all her father, who quietly dreamed about her but was too proud to admit he was dying of pain for his absent daughter. She did not communicate again with her family, but two months later Gregory received a postcard from Mexico with a telephone number and the drawing of a small flower, Carmen's unmistakable signature. He was the only one to have news of her during that period, and through him Inmaculada Morales learned what her daughter was doing. In their brief Monday conversations, the two friends kept up-to-date about their lives and plans. Their voices were distorted by static and by the strain of talking long-distance; it was difficult to communicate in interrupted sentences, and their memories of each other began to dim: they were as if blind, with their hands outstretched in the darkness. Carmen had rented a sordid room on the outskirts of Mexico City and was working in a silver workshop. She spent so many hours traveling by bus across that huge accursed city that she had no time for anything else. She had no friends or lovers. The disillusion she had experienced at the hands of Tom Clayton had destroyed her ingenuous tendency to fall in love at first sight, and besides, being where she was, it was nearly impossible to find someone who would understand and accept her natural independence. Her father's and her brothers' machismo was pale compared to what she was encountering, and, prudently, she settled for solitude as the lesser evil. Because of Olga's unfortunate procedure and the subsequent operation, she would never be able to have children; she was freer than before, but also sadder. She lived on the implicit boundary where the official city ended and the inadmissible world of the marginal began. The building she occupied consisted of a narrow passageway with a row of rooms on either side, a couple of water taps, a trough for laundry in the center, and communal bathrooms in the rear—always so filthy she tried to avoid using them. It was a more violent place than the ghetto where she had grown up: people had to fight for their minuscule space, and there were many quarrels and few hopes; she was in a nightmare world, unknown to tourists, a terrible labyrinth ringing the beautiful city founded by the Aztecs, an enormous conglomerate of wretched shacks and unpaved and unlighted streets suffocating in garbage that stretched toward an endless horizon. She walked among downtrodden Indians and indigent mestizos, naked children and starving dogs, women bowed by the weight of pregnancies and drudgery, idle men resigned to their fate but with a hand on the grip of a dagger, ready to defend their eternally threatened dignity and manhood. Now she could not count on the protection of her family and soon realized that as a young woman living alone she was a rabbit surrounded by a pack of hounds. She never went out at night; she slept with a bar across her door, another over the window, and a butcher knife beneath her pillow. When she went out to wash her clothes, the other women stared at her with distrust because she was different. They called her “gringa,” in spite of her having explained a thousand times that her family was from Zacatecas. Men she never spoke to at all. Sometimes she bought candy and sat in the alley, waiting for children to gather around her; those were her few happy moments. In the workshop she sat beside silent Indians with magic hands, who rarely spoke to her but taught her the secret of their art. The hours raced by unnoticed; she was absorbed in the laborious process of modeling the wax, pouring the metals, engraving, polishing, mounting the stones, and assembling each minute piece. At night she designed earrings, rings, and bracelets in her room; first she practiced with tin and pieces of glass; later, when she had saved a little money, she used silver and semiprecious stones. In her free hours she sold the pieces door-to-door, taking care that her employers never learned of their modest competition.

The birth of her daughter had launched Samantha Ernst into a quiet but fierce depression; there were no scandalous rages or dramatic changes in behavior, but she was not the same. She continued to get up at noon, watch television, and lie in the sun like a lizard, without resisting reality but also without participating in it. She ate very little, was always sleepy, and came to life only on the tennis court, while Margaret vegetated in a carriage in the shade, so forsaken that at eight months she still could not sit up and hardly ever smiled. The only time her mother touched her was to change her diapers and put the bottle in her mouth. At night Gregory bathed her and sometimes rocked her, trying always to do it in Samantha's presence. He loved the baby very much and when he held her in his arms felt a painful tenderness, an overpowering desire to protect her, but he did not feel free to cuddle her as he would have liked. His sister's confession had raised a Wall of China between his daughter and himself. He felt equally uncomfortable with the children in his charge and found that he was examining everything he did in the light of a possible licentiousness inherited from his father. When he compared Margaret to other babies her age, he saw she was slow in developing; something was obviously wrong, but he did not want to share his doubts with his wife for fear of frightening her and distancing her even more from her daughter. He performed little tests to see whether Margaret could hear; he thought she might be deaf, which would explain why she seemed so quiet, but when he clapped his hands near the cradle, she jumped. He thought Samantha had not noticed anything, but one day she asked him how you know when an infant is retarded; for the first time, he could speak of his fears. After a thorough examination, Margaret was diagnosed as being healthy but in definite need of stimulation; she was like an animal in a cage, suffering from sensory deprivation. The parents took a course in which they learned how to express affection toward their daughter, how to gurgle at her, how little by little to focus her attention on the world around her, and other elemental skills any orangutan is born knowing but they had to learn from an instruction manual. The results were evident within a few weeks, when the child began to crawl, and a year later she spoke her first two words—not “papa” and “mama” but “cat” and “tennis.”

Gregory was studying for final examinations, hours, days, months spent buried in his books and thanking his lucky stars for his good memory, the only thing left functioning while around him everything else seemed rapidly to be falling apart. Far from being over, as he had calculated it would be, the war in Vietnam was reaching the proportions of catastrophe. Along with relief at finally passing the bar came the inevitable nightmare of going overseas, for he could not continue to postpone his obligatory service with the army. His family was his principal worry; his relationship with Samantha was stumbling along, and a separation would undoubtedly mean the end to it; in addition, he was afraid to leave Margaret, who was developing into a very strange child. She was so quiet and secretive that sometimes Samantha forgot about her and when Gregory came home at night he found she had not eaten since breakfast. She did not play with other children but entertained herself for hours watching soap operas on television; she was never hungry, and she washed herself obsessively, pulling a footstool up to the basin to soap her hands over and over, saying, Dirty, dirty. She wet her bed and wept disconsolately when she waked to the clammy sheets. She was very pretty and would stay pretty even after the offenses she later committed against her body: she had the grace of her Virginia grandmother and the exotic Slavic face of Nora Reeves, as she looked in a photograph taken on the refugee ship that brought her from Odessa. While Margaret hovered in the shadow of the furniture and in dark corners, her parents, busy with their own affairs and deceived by the good-little-girl facade, failed to see the demons gestating in her soul.

It was a time of great changes and continuing surprises. The novelty of free love, for so many years kept under lock and key, spread rapidly, and what had begun as another hippie fantasy became the favorite parlor game of the bourgeoisie. Astonished, Gregory observed people who only shortly before had defended the most puritanical ideas now practicing libertinism in homey, private orgies. In his bachelor days, it had been almost impossible to find a girl who wanted to make love without a promise of marriage: pleasure without sin or fear was unthinkable before the pill. He seemed to remember devoting the first ten years of his youth to finding women; all his determination and inventiveness had gone into that exhausting chase—and often in vain. Suddenly things had turned around, and in a matter of a year or two chastity ceased to be a virtue and became a defect demanding treatment before the neighbors found out. It was such an abrupt reversal that Gregory, enveloped in his problems, did not have time to adapt and was not touched by the revolution until much later. Despite his failure with Samantha, it never occurred to him to capitalize on the hints boldly thrown his way by some of the girls he studied with and by mothers of his charges.

One Saturday in spring the Reeveses were invited to dinner at the home of some friends. Sit-down dinners were no longer in style; the meal was waiting in the kitchen, and the guests served themselves on paper plates and tried to find a place to sit while balancing a full glass, a dripping plate, bread, napkin, and sometimes a cigarette. Everyone was drinking too much, and some were smoking marijuana. Gregory had had a hard day; he was tired and wondered whether he would not have been better off at home than trying to cut a piece of chicken on his knees without throwing it all over himself. After dessert there was a general move to shed clothes and step into a large hot tub in the moonlit garden. The vogue for the Laboyer birth method had passed without much flurry, and many families had been left with an outsize tub as a remembrance. The Reeveses still had theirs in the living room and used it as a playpen for Margaret and as a place to throw the odds and ends that collected on the floor. More daring tub owners had converted these artifacts into a conversation piece inspired by communal baths in Japan, until an industry sprang up in manufacturing large tubs specifically for that purpose. Gregory was not tempted to go outside to freeze on the patio just after eating, but it seemed bad manners to remain dressed when everyone else was in the buff, and furthermore he did not want to give the impression he had something to be ashamed of. So he took off his clothes, all the while watching Samantha from the corner of his eye, amazed at his wife's naturalness in exposing herself. She was not a prudish woman, she was proud of her body and often went about naked at home, but this public exhibition made him a little nervous; on the other hand, everyone else seemed as comfortable as any aborigine from the Amazon basin. The women generally tried to stay submerged, but the men seized every opportunity to show off; the most arrogant offered the spectacle of their nakedness while they served drinks, lighted cigarettes, or changed records; some even knelt at tubside inches from the face of someone else's wife. Gregory realized this was not the first time his friends had practiced the sport, and he felt betrayed, as if everyone were sharing a secret he had purposely been excluded from. He also suspected that Samantha had attended such parties previously and not felt it necessary to tell him. He tried not to stare at the women, but his eyes kept drifting to the perfect breasts of the host's mother, a sixtyish matron he had not noticed before the watery revelation of attributes unexpected in a woman her age. In a restless lifetime, Reeves would travel the maps of so many female geographies that it would be impossible to remember them all, but he never forgot that grandmother's breasts. Meanwhile, Samantha, with her eyes closed and her head thrown back, more relaxed and content than her husband had ever seen her, was humming happily, a glass of white wine in one hand and the other beneath the water, suspiciously close to Timothy Duane's leg. On the way home, Gregory wanted to talk about the evening, but she fell asleep in the car. The next morning, as they sat before a cup of steaming coffee in the sunlit kitchen, the nudist party seemed like a distant dream, and neither of them mentioned it. After that night, Samantha took advantage of any opportunity to enjoy new group experiences; in contrast, in the privacy of the marriage bed she was as cold as ever. Why deprive ourselves? the evangelists of open marriage were preaching. We should add experiences to life, not subtract them; we emerge the richer from every encounter and therefore have more to offer to our spouse; love is big enough to go around; pleasure is a bottomless well from which we may drink our fill. Gregory suspected there was a flaw in this reasoning but did not dare to manifest his doubts for fear of sounding like a cave dweller. He felt as if he were in a foreign country; he was not convinced of the benefits of promiscuity, and as he watched his friends' enthusiastic acceptance he told himself that he was held back by his background in the barrio, and that was why he could not adapt. He did not like to admit how much it bothered him to see other men touching Samantha's body under a variety of excuses: detoxifying massages, activation of holistic points, and stimulation of spiritual growth through bodily communication. Samantha mystified him; she must be concealing certain aspects of her personality from him and living a secret life. She never showed him her true face but, rather, assumed a succession of masks. He thought it was perverse to fondle another woman in the presence of one's wife, but, again, he did not want to be left behind. Every week trendy sexologists discovered new erogenous zones, and apparently they must all be explored if one was not to be thought ignorant; manuals piled up on Gregory's night table, awaiting their turn to be studied. Once, he dared object to a method for exploring the Self and awakening Consciousness through collective masturbation, and Samantha accused him of being a barbarian, an unawakened and primitive soul.