The Summer Without Men (9 page)

It was strange how quickly I had become accustomed to the woman’s jackknife posture and how little I thought about it as we talked. I noticed, however, that her hands were shaking more than when we were last together. She told me three times that no one had seen “the runner” but me, as if to be sure of my confidence. I said I would never speak of it without her permission. Abigail’s sharp eyes gave me the strong impression that choosing me as a repository for her artistic secrets was not caprice. She had a reason, and she knew it. Nevertheless, she explained little and conducted a roving, shapeless conversation with me that afternoon over lemon cookies and tea, moving from her visit to New York in 1938 and her love for the Frick Collection to the fact that she was six years old when women got the vote to the poor supplies that were offered to art teachers in her day and how she had had to buy her own or deprive her pupils. I listened patiently to her, aware that despite the insignificance of what she was telling me, an urgency in her tone held me in my seat. After an hour of this, I felt she was tiring and suggested we make another date.

When we parted, Abigail grasped both my hands in hers. The squeeze she gave them was weak and tremulous. Then, lifting my hands to her lips, she kissed them, turned her head to one side, and pressed her cheek hard against the skin of my knuckles. Outside her door, I leaned against the wall in the corridor and felt tears come into my eyes, but whether they were for Abigail or for me, I had no idea.

*   *   *

I knew Pete was back because I heard him. Now that I had befriended Lola, I felt worse about the noise. I was sitting in the backyard on my chair after a long talk with Daisy on the telephone, my up-and-coming comedienne with the kind but overly possessive boyfriend “who wants to be with me every minute when he’s not at work.” She had called because she
needed
to discuss diplomacy. Daisy wanted to find the perfect way to tell him, “I need my space.” When I suggested that the phrase she had just used seemed inoffensive, she moaned, “He’ll
hate
that.” Pete was hating something, too, but fortunately after only minutes his bellowing stopped, and the house next door went quiet. Perhaps the combatants had taken to the wordless thrusts and parries of copulation. My father had not been a yeller, Boris was not a yeller, but there can be power in silences, too, more power sometimes. The silence draws you into the mystery of the man. What goes on in there? Why don’t you tell me? Are you glad or sad or mad? We must be careful, very careful with you. Your moods are our weather and we want it always to be sunny. I want to please you, Dad, to do tricks and dance and tell stories and sing songs and make you laugh. I want you to
see
me, see Mia.
Esse est percipi
. I am. It was so easy with Mama, her hands holding my face, her eyes with mine. She could roar at me, too, at my mess and disorderly ways, my crying jags and my eruptions, and then I was so sorry, and it was easy to get her back. And with Bea, too, but you were too far, and I couldn’t find your eyes or, if I did find them, they turned inward and there was gloom in that mental sky. Harold Fredricksen, Attorney at Law. It was a great joke in the family that when I was four, I had recited the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name.” And Boris, yes, Boris, too, husband, father, father, husband. A repetition of the pull. What goes on in thre? Why don’t you tell me? Your silences pull me toward you but then there are clouds in your eyes. I want to ram the fortress of that gaze, blast beyond it to find you. I am the fighting Spirit of Communion. But you are afraid of being broken into, or maybe you are afraid of being eaten. The seductive Dora, glamour-puss mother weighted down by the myriad gestures and accoutrements of femininity, the sulks and coos and eyelash batting and shoulder rolling and hints and around-the-bend methods that will get her what she wants. I can hear her gold bracelets jingling. How she loved you, her bubeleh, her boychik, her darling, but there was something cloying in that love, something theatrical and selfish, and you knew it and, as soon as you were big enough, you kept her at a safe distance. Stefan knew, and he also knew that for her he came second in all things. Two boys with a father in heaven. And so it was, Boris, that we carried them, our parents, with us to each other. The Pause, too, must have them, father and mother, but I cannot think of her. I don’t want to think of her.

*   *   *

The presence behind the door came and went. It was there, and then it wasn’t there. I talked my way inside whenever I felt it, using my reason to trump the potent sensation. I continued to think of the presence as a speechless version of Mr. Nobody, a nut who sent regular messages but had shifted his tone from harassing mean guy to borderline philosopher, which again made me suspect Leonard. “Reality is immaterial, made from events, actions, potentialities. Regard these mysterious subjectivities that alter the mind-world, the Zeno effect! Relay this to Izcovich, your faithless spouse. Yours, Nobody.”

Annoyed and upset by the reference to Boris, I quickly typed a response and sent it, regretting it instantly: Who are you and what do you want from me?

*   *   *

“I knew he had a temper when I married him,” Lola said late in the afternoon while Simon dozed on her knees and Flora jumped in and out of a small turquoise blow-up pool. “But I didn’t have kids then. Flora gets so scared.” These three sentences seemed to float in the hot air between us, and I felt sad. I wanted to say,
But he doesn’t hit anyone, right? He’s not violent?
The questions that rose up sank back inside me, and I never pronounced the words. Lola was wearing a green bathing suit, sunglasses, and a baseball cap. Her body hadn’t entirely lost the swollen proportions of pregnancy, and her breasts were large with milk. She was a hefty girl, but looking at her I found her attractive. I guessed it was her youth—her smooth skin, her curves, her unlined face, with its gray eyes, slightly flat nose, and full lips—no part of her had succumbed to age, no brown spots or protruding veins or wrinkles or drooping skin.

“I wonder if she’ll ever take off that wig. Pete hates it. I keep telling him, who cares? She doesn’t wear it to church. I think he wanted a sweet little thing…” Lola didn’t finish. “He worries there’s something wrong with her, hyperactivity or something.”

Flora was engrossed in giving Giraffeyather violent bath. She was kneeling in the pool, bouncing him up and down as she sang, “Da, da, little Giraffey-boo. Bumba, bumba! Baby, you!” Giraffey was left floating, face down, and Flora began a new game—she lay back on her elbows and kicked vigorously enough to spray water onto my legs. “Watch, Mom! Look, Mom. Look, Mia!”

My feelings about Pete grew darker. What an idiot.

Pete’s son squirmed into wakefulness. He waved his small fists in front of his face, began stretching his knees and spine, and by the time I held him only minutes later he was fully conscious, his dark eyes like seeds locked into mine. I stroked the down on his head, examined his mouth pursing and grimacing. I spoke to him and he answered me with small sounds. After a time, he turned and began to root for food, and I felt the shadow of a familiar sensation in my breasts, a bodily memory. I handed him to Lola. Once her son was comfortably nursing, she looked over at me and said, “He didn’t want her at first. I got pregnant. We were already going to get married, it wasn’t that. It was too soon for him.” Lola leaned back in her chair. “Pete’s an anxious guy. I knew that, too. He had an older sister who was born with lots of things wrong with her and really retarded. They had to put her in a home. She never learned to walk or talk or anything. She died when she was seven. Pete doesn’t like to talk about it.” Lola examined her nail polish. “His dad never went to see her, not once. The whole thing was really awful for his mom. You can imagine.”

I could imagine. I looked up at the clouds, a dense cirrus configuration, and, as I watched a head dangling long streams of hair break away very slowly from a long attenuated neck, I realized that I had been more comfortable with the angry cipher Pete than with this new person, the young man with the dead sister.

It may have been the general emptiness of the view—corn and sky. It may have been the heat or my own quiet desperation or simply a need to fill the irremediably dull present with bluster and blabber, but when Lola asked me about life in New York, I regaled her with one story after another and listened to her laugh. I emphasized the crass, the prurient, and the outlandish. I turned the city into a nonstop carnival of poseurs, hucksters, and clowns whose pratfalls and escapades made for high entertainment. I told her about Charlie and Wayne, two poets who nearly came to blows over Ezra Pound one long-day’s-journey-into-a-drunken-night but ended up in a literal pissing contest on the roof of a building in SoHo. I told her about Miriam Hunt, the aging heiress with the big bucks, little boobs, surgical face, and Hermès bags, who true to her name stalked young male scientists eager for her money by sidling up to them and breathing sweet somethings into their ears: “How much did you say the research project you’re proposing would cost?” I told her about my friend Rupert, who, halfway through a sex-change operation, stopped, deciding that two-in-one was the way to go. I told her about the octogenarian billionaire I sat next to at a fund-raising dinner who farted and sighed, farted and sighed, farted some more and sighed some more throughout the entire meal, as if he were home alone on the toilet. I told her about my homeless pal, Frankie, whose children, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles died at a rate of about two a week after contracting colorful or rare diseases, including scurvy, leprosy, dengue fever, Klinefelter’s syndrome, tospirosis, fatal familial insomnia, and Chagas disease. Indeed, Frankie’s supply of relatives was so great, he forgot the names of the recent dead between our meetings on Seventh Avenue.

Lola’s eyes gleamed with pleasure and interest as she listened to my tales of the cosmopolitans, all of them true but all fictions nevertheless. Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad. It doesn’t matter whether you are stuck in the provincial backwater of Bonden or wandering down the Champs-Élysées. The merely sad business about me was that I wanted to be admired, wanted to see myself as a shining reflection in Lola’s eyes. I was no different from Flora. Watch me, Mommy! Look at me do a cartwheel, Dad! Watch Mia do verbal dances in Sheri and Allan Burda’s weedy backyard embellished with one swiftly sagging kiddy pool.

*   *   *

That night I received a message from Boris informing me that Roger Dapp was returning from London, which meant that he was losing his temporary digs and would be moving in with the Pause. For the time being, this was
“practical.”
He wanted me to know. It was only
“fair.”
I took it like a woman. I wept.

You may well wonder why I wanted Boris at all, a man who tells his still-wife that he’s shacking up with his new squeeze for “practical” reasons, as if this shocking new arrangement is simply a matter of New York real estate. I wondered why I wanted him myself. Had Boris left me after two years or even ten, the damage would have been considerably less. Thirty years is a long time, and a marriage acquires an ingrown, almost incestuous quality, with complex rhythms of feeling, dialogue, and associations. We had come to the point where listening to a story or anecdote at a dinner party would simultaneously prompt the same thought in our two heads, and it was simply a matter of which one of us would articulate it aloud. Our memories had also begun to mingle. Boris would swear up and down that he was the one who came upon the great blue heron standing on the doorstep of the house we rented in Maine, and I am just as certain that I saw the enormous bird alone and told him about it. There is no answer to the riddle, no documentation—just the flimsy, shifting tissue of remembering and imagining. One of us had listened to the other tell the story, had seen in his or her mind the encounter with the bird, and had created a memory from the mental images that accompanied the heard narrative. Inside and outside are easily confused. You and I. Boris and Mia. Mental overlap.

I didn’t tell my mother about the new status of the Pause. It would have made it real, more real than I was willing to accept at the moment. Too bad I’m real, Flora had said. She had wanted to climb into the little house and live with her toys. Too bad I’m not a character in a book or a play, not that things go so well for most of them, but then I could be written elsewhere. I will write myself elsewhere, I thought, reinvent the story in a new light: I am better off without him. Did he ever do a domestic chore in his life besides the dishes? Did he or did he not tune you out regularly as if you were a radio? Did he not interrupt you in mid-sentence countless times as if you were an airy nothing, a Ms. Nobody, a Missing Person at the table? Are you not “still beautiful” in the words of your mother? Are you not still capable of great things?

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Mia Fredricksen, who was Born in Bonden, and during a Life of Continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, Besides Her Childhood, Was Poetic Paramour and Mistress to Various and Sundry, Thirty Years a Wife (to Naturalist and Scoundrel), at Last Gained Riches and Renown from the Concerted Efforts of Her Pen, Liv’d Mostly Honest, and Died Impenitent
.

Or: “No one knew who Fredricksen was. She rode into the village of Bonden in the summer of 2009, a quiet stranger who kept her well-oiled Colt in her saddle roll, but could use it to deadly effect when the need arose.”