The Stuff That Never Happened (14 page)

I heard Grant laughing into his pillow, next to my ear. “It’s wake-up time,” he whispered, and pulled me close. We kissed for a few minutes with pandemonium and discussions of poops raging two inches away from us on the other side of a flimsy piece of wallboard.

“So … what are you going to be doing today, do you think?” he whispered.

“Um … looking for an apartment?”

He laughed and swung his legs out of bed. “Excellent idea. I’ve got classes and meetings all day, but if you want, maybe we could meet for a late lunch on Broadway. I only have twenty minutes between my meeting with the dean this morning and my noon class, but we could grab a hot dog or something around 2:40. But then I really have to get back.”

“Okay, sure,” I said slowly. “How will I know how to get there?”

“Oh. Well …” He looked around uncertainly. “God, I don’t know how to explain it. You can walk it if you want, just head down to the end of the street, and then turn right and go two more blocks … Wait. Actually, you should ask somebody. Contrary to what you think, New Yorkers are very friendly.”

“Do you have classes every day?”

“Yeah. And I’m on a committee and I have students I’m advising. And then there are office hours …”

“I’m never going to see you, am I?”

He bit his lip and looked regretful. “Well, I come home at night. We’ll have joyful reunions all the time, just like last night.”

It was beginning to dawn on me what I had just done: flown across the country to be the houseguest of strangers. Grant was going to be gone all the time, and I couldn’t even afford to spend the day doing what I might do if it was our own place: recover from jet lag by soaking in the tub while I ate a pint of chocolate mint ice cream and talked to Magda on the phone. I was going to have to get up, get dressed, be a lively and easygoing houseguest, grateful and interested in all things. And Magda was long-distance. I wouldn’t be able to afford to call her.

“Listen, I gotta go get in the shower,” he said. “I’m already late.”

“Are you going to at least introduce me to … those maniacs out there?” I whispered.

He stopped and looked at me, dismayed. He was holding up his khaki pants and his blue button-down shirt, ready to bolt out of the room. “I … can’t. I don’t have time. And don’t call them maniacs, okay? They’re very nice. You’ll see. And they know you’re here. Just go out there and say hi. They know who you are. Tell them you want milk and not water on your granola. Trust me. It’ll be fine.”

“All right, all right. Go. Forget it.” I turned back over in bed, faced the wall.

“Come on, you’re not shy or anything,” he said. “Just go out there.”

Just then the door banged open, and the two-year-old hellions came dive-bombing onto the bed, kamikaze-style. I turned in time to catch a flash of two red-haired shrieking elves hurtling toward me, just as one landed right on my rib cage and nearly punctured a kidney with his elbow and the other started jumping up and down in the center of the bed, screeching, “Gwantie! I got a Band-Aid! Gwantie, wook at my Band-Aid! Gwantie,
wook!”
I tried to pull the comforter up over me while at the same time covering my head with my arms, hoping to save my eyeballs and some of my major organs from being punctured.

“Hey, hey,
hey
—wow, you do have a Band-Aid, Lindsay! Hey, Brice, be careful!” Grant was saying through the yelling and jumping, tugging on the comforter, but then there were footsteps and somebody else laughing. I peeked through my arms to see a man within inches of my head, a man with a shock of brown hair and blue eyes, bending, leaning across me, his arms outstretched, laughing as he managed to grab a flailing kid in each arm. It felt like nothing less than magic, as though he’d snatched spirits right out of the air. And then, very smoothly and competently, with both children twisting, screeching, and kicking in his arms, he backed his way out of the room. I was still struggling to hang on to the covers so that my naked body wasn’t completely exposed, and when I looked up, I caught him giving me a slow, conspiratorial wink—me, this stranger he had never seen before—looking at me as though he’d known me always. As he closed the door, he said, “Hey, we’ll just pretend this isn’t the way we met, okay?”

WE MET properly in the kitchen later that morning, after everyone else had finally left. By then I’d already explored the apartment, which I adored. Sure, it was small by California standards, but it had impossibly high, elegant ceilings and lots of rooms and hallways, fascinating little nooks everywhere. I loved how everything was both polished and disorganized, which seemed to me a lovely balance somehow, just the way a house should be. There were Oriental carpets and light oak furniture in the living room, a fireplace, and tables, and everywhere were heaps of books and papers and stuffed animals. On the carved wood coffee table, there was a Brio train and a headless baby doll, and, astonishingly, a crystal bowl with peonies—risky with the two-year-olds, I thought, but there it was. A stereo system. Big windows with shutters and flowered chintz curtains, bookshelves filled with double-decker rows of books. The dining room had a formal table with striped upholstered chairs, and there was also a desk overflowing with papers in the corner, and more bookshelves, and stacks of folders in a carton on the rug next to the desk. History stuff. No doubt this was the room where The Great Man worked. Down the hall toward the back of the apartment was the twins’ room, sunny, with two cribs, brightly colored plastic crates filled with toys, and a rag rug. I peeked into the room next to that—the master bedroom, small and cluttered with orchid-colored walls and an unmade king-size bed that took up nearly the whole space piled with flung-off clothes and quilts.

I wandered back into the kitchen to look for something to eat. It was sunny in here, too, with big windows overlooking a tiny lawn next to the fire escape. There were butcher block countertops and a round oak table, which, judging from the crumbs and bowls and spilled milk, seemed to be where people actually ate. I was rummaging through the cabinet looking for the granola when I heard something behind me and spun around.

“Hi,” he said. Then, seeing my face, he said, “Oh, sorry to startle you. Here I come barging in on you yet again, just when you thought you’d maybe have a moment’s peace.” He talked slowly and calmly, the way you’d talk to a wild animal, to soothe it. “Reduced schedule this year. I’m on sabbatical, actually—so I’m afraid I’m always popping in and out. Really quite annoying.” He’d been to drop the children off at their day care, he explained, a woman in the neighborhood who watched six or seven kids in her apartment. This situation wasn’t exactly ideal, he said, but what could you do with two-year-olds who weren’t potty-trained yet?

“The kids are adorable,” I said.

“Oh, adorable, sure,” he said. “But that’s just a safety net that nature provides so you won’t abandon them on the side of the road with the rubbish one morning. Because, make no mistake, they are
trouble.”
He looked at me and smiled, one of those knowing half smiles. “So did you find everything you were looking for?”

I blushed. “I was looking for granola,” I said. “I thought …”

“Oh, quite right.” He showed me the earthenware canister where it was kept, and then got out a bag of coffee from the refrigerator and some filters from a drawer, meanwhile talking in a matter-of-fact, self-deprecating way, until I could calm down. I hadn’t unpacked yet, so I was wearing one of Grant’s T-shirts, which said, “Historians do it longer,” and the miniskirt I’d worn on the plane, and my hair was messed up, so I kept trying not to look at him, on the superstitious theory that if I didn’t look directly at him, then he couldn’t see me either. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see that he was thin and taut with energy and wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with some kind of Chinese writing on the front, and he kept smiling at me and flipping his longish brown hair out of his very blue eyes.

He showed me where the bowls were kept, and then he got out cups and pointed to a banana in the fruit bowl, apologizing for the morning wake-up and the chaos, and then the generalized state of disarray of everything, motioning around the room in a gesture that took in the whole house and possibly all of New York. When the coffee was done, he poured us each a cup. There was only skim milk to put in the coffee, no cream. Carly didn’t allow cream in the house while she was trying to get herself back into shape, he said, laughing. “You’ll get used to us, I hope,” he said, and he sat down in the wooden chair across from me at the round oak table.

“So here’s the rundown that Grant was probably too polite to give you: the children are loud and crazy and we haven’t housebroken them or tamed them one bit,” he said. “And Carly is a dancer and the main organizer around here, except that she’s gone half the time these days trying to whip herself and some retired dancers back into shape so they can put on a show. Retired, in the dance world, means they’re all of thirty. It’s horrendous, really, what dancers have to go through, and I’m thought not to be truly supportive or sympathetic enough, though, in all fairness to myself, I do try. Still, I have crimes.”

I blinked. “What are they? Your crimes?”

He looked at me and laughed. “Really? You want to know? You like the gory details, huh? Okay. My crimes.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “One, I don’t find one-eighth inch of extra flesh to be a major, life-changing disturbance. Two, it’s been said that I’m not busy enough lately, due to my reduced schedule. And, let’s see, I’ve also been accused of not having enough bad stuff happening in my life, so that I lack depth and understanding, which is true, but what can you do about that? Go out and look for bad times?” He shrugged, and we both laughed. “
And
I don’t do the dinner dishes until the next morning. That may be my very worst crime.”

“Really!” I said.

“Dreadful, I know,” he said. “I’ve yet to meet a woman who can stand the sight of caked-on dinner dishes once fifteen minutes have passed after the meal.” He laughed. “Carly says she
cannot
relax knowing that food is hardening on the plates. Just can’t do it.”

“She can’t?” I said.

“Don’t even
try
to tell me you aren’t similarly afflicted.”

“I never thought about it, I guess,” I said. “I think if dishes eventually get done, then … well, who cares?”

“Exactly! Just my point. But I’ve discovered a peacemaking remedy for this problem, which—I don’t know—might actually be considered yet another one of my crimes.” He leaned forward and whispered, “Instead of doing the dishes after dinner, I just put them in the oven. Ingenious, right? Right?” He leaned back in his chair, grinning.

I laughed.

“You know,” he said, “or maybe you don’t know since you haven’t been married so long yet—but let me tell you: the one with the most free time loses in all marital discussions. It’s a given. So if you’re the less busy person, take my advice and fake extreme busyness. I wish somebody had told me that back when it would have helped.”

I laughed. “Well, that leaves me out, I’m afraid, because nobody on earth could be busier than Grant.”

“I suppose you have a point. Well, then you’ll have to go to Plan B, which is just to embrace the laziness and kick back and enjoy it. Luxuriate in it. Do your nails, brush your hair, yawn a lot. Take up lounging. It’s a path that also has its benefits. Work at lowering people’s expectations. That also can be quite effective.”

He got up and started washing dishes then—both the ones from dinner, which had to be taken from the oven, and the breakfast bowls—and I stood beside him and dried them, which he teased me about. “If you’re going to embrace laziness, this is not a good start,” he said. “You should be tossing your hair or something.” He let the stopper out of the sink, and the water bubbled out. “Oh, yeah, Grant said you’re an artist,” he said. “That may mean you can’t lounge as much as you need to.”

“Well, I don’t know about being an artist. I was studying art in college.”

“That sounds serious.”

“Well, I should be serious about it, I guess. I mean, I dropped out of school. But now it’s time to think of what I’m going to do, so I’ve got to go out and get some supplies, I guess, and decide what I’m going to try for.” My head was pounding from jet lag. “Do you have any aspirin or anything?”

“Aspirin?”

“I have a headache. A jet lag headache, I think.”

“If I may say so, I don’t think this is jet lag. At least getting a headache is what always happens to me when the talk turns to work and dishes, which we’ve been irresponsible enough to let happen. But I do have aspirin, if you want.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“They’re in the bathroom cabinet. Somewhere. Here, I’ll show you. You might as well get used to our system of disorganization right away.”

“We will get our own things,” I said, following him to the bathroom. “You’re so kind to let us live here, but you obviously don’t have to buy our aspirin!”

He laughed. “No, don’t worry. We’re grateful you’re here. You don’t know it yet, but you’re part of our plan to save our marriage. We should probably be paying you.” He was smiling, and I couldn’t imagine what he meant, so I just smiled back. We tramped into the bathroom together, which was all black and white tile and had a high window that looked out over a fire escape. He pulled towels and medications and heating pads and cosmetics out of the cabinet, until finally he triumphantly produced a bottle of aspirin and held it up like a trophy. Then he guessed correctly that I wouldn’t want to use the smudged bathroom glass, so we tramped back to the kitchen, where he filled a glass with water and handed it to me.

He had to leave soon after that; there was someone else he was advising besides Grant, who was doing splendidly, he assured me, just splendidly, a hell of a teacher. He stopped himself at the door, patting himself down and checking his briefcase to make sure he had keys and subway tokens, all the required documents. He didn’t; he sighed noisily and went back to his bedroom to get a file folder. I stood there in the entryway, admiring the artwork on the walls, the Indian prints and carvings.