The Wonders of the Invisible World (3 page)

“Well, hell,” he said, “just leave it out. You don’t want to go all the way back to Oneonta. How much do they call for?”

“Tablespoon,” I said. It was a teaspoon.

“Bag it,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”

“It really won’t,” I said. “It’s going to taste blah.”

He sighed. “Christ. Well, look. Why don’t you just fix something else? Roast the chicken like you would anyway, and we’ll eat the bread as
bread,
you know?”

“But you like the other so much,” I said, feeling vile.

“Paula,” he said. “It’s truly decadent to drive forty miles round trip for a tablespoon of mint, for Christ’s sake. You’re putting wear and tear on the car, you’re burning up fossil fuels …”

I tried to think: if my motives had been pure, would I be justified in thinking he was being a prick? And: would it seem more suspicious to fight him on this or to acquiesce? More suspicious to fight, I decided.

“I don’t know,” I said, “I guess you’re right. Look, what I’ll do is, I’ll run down to Webster’s and if they
don’t
have mint I’ll figure out something else for dinner, okay? You sure you won’t be disappointed?”

“
Au contraire.
I will admire your resourcefulness in the face of domestic crisis.” He reached around and patted my ass.

•   •   •

I threw my sketchbook in the backseat—that would be my alibi—and drove to Webster’s, where I bought a jar of dried mint and a pack of Care Free peppermint gum. I’d chewed all five sticks by the time I got to the liquor store in Oneonta. They didn’t have pints of Rémy, so I had to buy the next size up, which I really couldn’t afford. Then on the way back I remembered: fossil fuels. Steven wasn’t so anal that he’d know the odometer reading, but he might know how much gas there was. I calculated forty miles at, say, twenty-five miles per gallon. I stopped at Cumberland Farms and put in two dollars’ worth. Back at the house, just in case, I pushed the little button on the trip odometer to make all zeroes come up. Let him wonder.

I was smart to leave the bottle in the car: Steven stood there in the kitchen, the orange juice carton (no glass) in his hand. “Where the hell have you been?” he said, putting the carton back in the refrigerator. “Alice Porter called and I got stuck on the phone for an hour.” An hour meant five minutes.

“So you shouldn’t have picked it up,” I said. “Why the good Lord made answering machines.”

“I was expecting it to be Martin,” he said. “Our auteur has made still more changes in her text, and he had to be sure they didn’t affect the pictures. This woman thinks she’s Flaubert. I mean, this has been going on and on and on. I told Martin, this is the end of it.
Fini.
”

“Are they going to make you change anything?” I said.

“No, it’s just stuff like where she had the wolf with his tail ‘held high,’ it’s now ‘at a jaunty angle.’
Jaunty,
for Christ’s sake. I mean, this is what my life has come down to, ‘a jaunty angle.’ I told him, I said, ‘Look, the picture’s done, he’s got his tail in the fucking air, and if the goddamn angle isn’t
jaunty
enough, they can shove it.’ ”

“Good for you,” I said.

“So where’ve you been?” he said. “You didn’t go all the way back there, did you?”

“No, you were right, they had it at Webster’s. I went up to Randolph Pond and tried to do some sketching.” I held up my sketch pad as evidence.

“Good for
you,
” he said. “You haven’t sketched for a long time. Let’s see.”

I shook my head. “They suck,” I said. I got a book of matches out of the drawer. “I’m going to use the Steven Sturdivant method. Burn it before it gets out of hand.”

“You’re kidding, I hope. You know, you were absolutely on the money with what you said the other day. How does that thing go? ‘The man of genius makes no errors’?”

“I’m not a man,” I said, “and I’m not of genius. Be back in a second.”

“Come on, now,” he said, grabbing for the pad. “Let the old doctor have a gander.”

“No, Steven.” I twisted away. “I’m serious.” If he’d gotten the pad away from me, he would’ve seen that the last sketch in the book was of a little girl at Jones Beach, with pail and shovel. But the word
serious
seemed to back him off. I slammed the door behind me, to lend myself still more power.

Standing over the rusty oil drum, I ripped out two blank pages and set fire to them. Then I ripped out the little girl and burned her up, too. When I came back into the kitchen, I heard the toilet flush upstairs. I listened to Steven’s footsteps going back to his workroom, then went out and brought the new bottle in. I brought the level in the old bottle up to something like what I guessed it had been—apparently I’d hit it much harder last night than I remembered—took a slug of what was left for old times’ sake and poured the rest into the sink, running hot water to chase it down. I put the empty bottle back in the paper bag, stuffed it into a milk carton and tucked it away in the bottom
of the garbage. Okay: crisis averted. I lit the oven, unwrapped the chicken, sawed the top off the bread loaf with the good knife from Broadway Panhandler, and began clawing out the soft inside.

“I have a confession to make,” he said as I lit the candles. “I smoked most of a pack of cigarettes last night.”

“Steven,” I said. “You
didn’t.
”

“I decided I’m not going to do it anymore,” he said.

“How come you did it at all?”

“Well, we had that—and believe me, I’m not blaming you—but we had that unpleasantness yesterday that never really got resolved, and I felt like I was under the gun with those pictures, which it turns out I’m not, I mean I’m actually in very good shape with them. I think all it really was, I was just looking for an excuse to do it. So I did it.”

“I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry if I contributed.” I began cutting the stuffed bread loaf into inch-thick slices.

He shook his head. “Not your responsibility. It was my choice.”

“And you had them around,” I said.

“Yeah. I had them around.” He did his snorting laugh. “But I think this has taught me something. I mean, if
you
weren’t reason enough, there’s Trigger Junior to think of.” Trigger Junior was his provisional name for the baby.

“What about you?” I said. “Aren’t you reason enough?”

“Well, I never
have
been,” he said. “Maybe that’s changing. Did I tell you? I think these pills might be starting to do something. This morning I woke up and I felt just sort of—I don’t know. Not heavy of heart for a change. I can’t really describe it. But I definitely didn’t want a cigarette, despite putting all that nicotine into my system last night. Which I find almost scary.”

“But that’s wonderful,” I said. I laid a slice on his plate and a slice on mine.

“God, that looks splendid,” he said. “At any rate. Full disclosure.” He cut off a corner and speared it with his fork. “I’m assuming we still care about that.”

“I think we do.” What else was I to say?

“Good.” He put the corner in his mouth. “Mmm. Surpassed yourself.”

“I’m glad you like it,” I said, not meaning it to sound that dismal.

“In the interest of even fuller disclosure,” he said, “I must further confess to you that I nipped a bit at the cognac while you were out this afternoon. I don’t actually know why. Except that it was like, I really wasn’t craving a cigarette and
that
freaked me out. It was like nothing was wrong, you know? And that made me suspicious that something was
really
wrong that I didn’t even dare bring to consciousness, so I thought I’d better drink to sort of preempt it. Does that make any sense at all?”

“Absolutely,” I said. I wasn’t paying attention. How could he not have noticed that so much was gone out of that goddamn bottle? And now what? Try to keep him out of the kitchen and pour out some of what you just poured in?

We ate.

He took a second slice.

Half of a third.

Now he was talking about names for the baby. Lately he’d been liking Margaret. Did I know that was the same as Pearl?

“The same in what sense?” I said, getting up to clear the table.

“You know, etymologically,” he said. He stood up too, and reached for the platter with the remains of the stuffed bread loaf.

“Sit,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. I think you’ve had a hard day.”

“Only in my head.” He carried the platter and the salad bowl out to the kitchen; I set the plates and glasses on the counter next to the sink. “Tinfoil be the best thing?” he said, pulling open the drawer.

“Why don’t you just let me take
care
of it?” I said. I snatched the foil out of his hands. “Just go and sit and relax. Actually, you know what would be lovely? If you would put on some music, I’ll take care of this stuff and then bring our desserts out to the living room. How would that be?”

“Now you’re talkin’,” he said. He took down a brandy snifter.

“What are you doing?” I said. “I’ll get that for you. Go and sit
down.
”

“I can get it.” He opened the cupboard door, took out the bottle of Rémy, looked at it and said, “What the
hell
?”

He looked at me. Then I saw his eyes go down to my hands and get big. I looked down, too. I was sawing the saw thing on the aluminum-foil box across the thumbprint part of my thumb. There was blood on the front of me.

“You’ve been drinking,” he said.

“Obviously,” I said. I couldn’t feel the pain yet. I had a picture in my head of a bad person in shame.

“You’re pregnant and you’re drunk?” he said. “Don’t you know what that can do? Do you
care
? How could you
do
it? What the hell is going on in your mind?”

“I’m
not
drunk,” I said.

“You’re a whore,” he said. “Where did you go this afternoon?”

I wasn’t angry. Or frightened, really, even though I cringed to appease him. He would never be a hitter. That fist he was raising at me would wham into the cupboard door, hurting
only himself. I saw it all happening, then it really
did
happen. But I didn’t understand the whore thing. Why was he confusing the drinking with the other? Then I got it. Obvious. It was all mixed up for him, all the same thing: the drinking, the other, anything that could make a woman free.

W
hen Billy gets home, his nephew’s playing with that thing where marbles roll down slanting wooden rails and drop through holes onto the rail below. It takes a supposedly entertainingly long time for a marble to make it all the way down. This was Billy’s toy when he was a kid; Deke found it in a box in the basement.

“Hey, tiger. How was
your
day?” He sets the
Times
on the dusty Baldwin spinet and nods at Mrs. Bishop.

Deke says, “Watch this.” He lets a marble go.

Billy waits until it’s halfway down to say “Cool.”

“Yeah,” Deke says, “but
watch.
”

Billy watches the marble roll and drop, roll and drop, then turns to Mrs. Bishop. “How was it today?”

She looks over at Deke. “He’s a good boy.”

So nobody’s giving him a straight answer. But at any rate the TV’s not on. Unless she just now snapped it off, having heard his car. He could touch a wrist to it and check, but that would be a bit much. Cassie had let Deke have a TV in his room, which he’d watch for hours while she did what she did. Seven years old.

“I guess Uncle can take it from here,” Billy says. He opens the hall closet, hangs up his jacket and gets out Mrs. Bishop’s coat. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? But Mrs. Bishop used
to baby-sit Billy and Cassie when they were little—she seemed old then,
is
old now—and this arrangement would be even more bizarre if the boundaries got blurred. Mrs. Bishop’s all right, just boring and religious. As far as Billy can tell, she simply regards him as a “bachelor,” maybe not even “confirmed”: she’s been keeping him up to date on her semi-bohemian granddaughter, now divorced and living in Saratoga. “Thanks again,” he says, and holds up her coat as she backs into it. “Oh. By the way. Your honorarium.” He hands her an envelope with a hundred and fifty dollars in cash. “So we’ll see you Monday?”

“Lord willing,” she says. It sounds to Billy like some old ballad.
Lord Willing rode home on his snow-white steed/And spake to his servants three/O something something something something/And all for the love of thee.
Billy’s a tad overeducated for all this—and of course fatherhood had
not
been in the cards—but he’s doing it.

He listens for Mrs. Bishop’s car to start up, then says, “So it’s you and me, partner. Got a whole big weekend ahead of us. And tonight’s a bath night.” Billy’s funning: every night’s a bath night. Cassie had him using the shower—when she thought of it—but Billy’s theory is that a bath is not just relaxing but primal, a ritual no kid should be done out of. So it’s play a quick game of something, put together a dinner while Billy’s in the bath, then right into p.j.’s, eat dinner, brush teeth, read and safe in bed by eight o’clock.

Since Deke’s already into the marble game, that’ll be tonight’s amusement. Billy chooses a clear marble with red boomerang shapes inside—God, he remembers this very marble—and sets it at the topmost point, then lets it go.
Zoop plop, zoop plop, zoop plop.
“Kewel,” he says in his mindless-hippie voice.

“Kewel,” says Deke. He’s good at mindless hippie. “Can Caleb come over for a playdate?”

“This is somebody in your class?”

“Kind of. He’s in my reading group.”

“Does he
want
to come over?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh. So I guess step one is for you to ask him, and then I can call his parents. What’s his last name?”

“Jacobson.”

“Really. I wonder if—I think I might know his dad. So what do you want for dinner tonight? We’ve got pasta or spaghetti. Which would you rather?”

Deke gives Billy his faux-disgusted look.

“Okay, pasta it is. To tell you the truth, I hate spaghetti.”

“It’s the
same thing.
”

“Oh,” Billy says. “Well, in that case.” He goes into the kitchen and runs water into the big Revereware saucepan. They’ve had pasta the last three nights. Deke would eat it indefinitely, and Billy doesn’t care. If they want variety, they can always get a different Paul Newman sauce. Deke has come in to watch. “Today the marinara, tomorrow the world,” Billy tells him. Deke laughs; he seems to like stuff that’s over his head. If he’s going to be with Billy, he might just as well.