by Mona Simpson
“You are not so different,” I say. “They have a younger love.”
“A stronger love, maybe.”
“Younger loves are stronger. That is always the way.”
“I wish we were more in love.”
“For what?” I say. “You are fine.” I start the dishwasher.
“Paul deserves it.”
This I really do not know. “But he is not here. What good would it do?” His career really it should come to more, for all the time he works.
She holds a ripening tomato.
“Very few people get a big love. Maybe one in four hundred. Six hundred even. And even fewer than that like what they have to do every day.” I am giving her a gift she can recognize: what she already owns. I was lucky. Virgin when I married Bong Bong, maybe two in a thousand bodies fit. When they left the Garden of Eden, my grandmother said, God changed men and women, only a small bit. Because it is really that, a trickle of water making its way down dry soil, involuntary, a digging that is right. So many times I was in the kitchen, thinking, No I do not want tonight, I am so tired, and then when we are in our bed together a restlessness began. The sole of my foot moved on his leg.
Now when I think of my husband, I see him carrying boxes. So many times he has packed for our daughters, wrapping every treasure in newspaper, waiting in line to send. Unwinding what I ship from here. So much care for our cherishables. He understands the importance of the things you cannot take with you. What you keep—the smoke of love—that trades in mementos, the way value trades in coin.
I hear keys dropping. Paul. I put a dinner for him in the micro.
“So you will call the Hollywood agent?”
But my employers decided not to become rich. “You don’t drive freeways, Lole, it would take hours to get to Burbank on surface roads. I can’t drive him all over LA for auditions or shoots or whatever they do.”
“We have two careers,” Paul says.
That is true, but maybe the career of Williamo it would be higher.
I use the calculator to add up the money. If I stay until Williamo is eight, it will have cost more than seventy thousand. That is counting a five-dollar raise once a year.
So Lola is romantic after all. I am the one who gave up the big bucks for love. But not the American sex kind of love.
Claire
THESE ARE THE JOKES SO YOU BETTER START LAUGHING
I saw Paul one more weeknight that year.
A Thursday late in October he walked across our lawn while it was still light, Surprise! in his manner. I’d settled into my chair, reading, Gorecki’s sad chants on the boom box. Lola had taken Will and the house had finally fallen quiet. When the door slammed, my eyes raced through the paragraph before I tented the book down. Paul entered with an air of faint disappointment, looking around the room.
“Would you like a drink?” I asked. Since when had Paul become a guest?
“Maybe I’ll go pick him up,” he said, eyeing the door.
But this was Will’s first playdate with China Howard since he’d pushed her onto the gravel and she’d had to get three stitches. “They just went over at four-thirty. Lola planned this with China’s nanny; she seemed to think it was important.”
“Well, I think his father trumps China Howard.”
He wouldn’t have said that if Will had decked Bing Grant, I thought. But China Howard’s parents owned a sporting-goods chain in the Valley.
“You didn’t call me back.” I shrugged. “I could’ve told you.”
“Claire, I sit around a table in a room with eleven guys. What can I say? Their wives don’t call as much.” His hand was on the doorknob.
I turned back to my book.
“Well, I’m going to go get him.” The door slammed.
Paul would gladly take Will to McDonald’s. But I pushed myself up to get dinner. I’d had a good day. I’d written three measures and then I’d had a weird, opening moment with Lola. She’d been standing, putting Paul’s clean underwear and socks in their drawers, when I walked in. She gave me a plastic bag.
“Claire, it is half off at Sav-On! Vons, it is too expensive!”
I’d never said anything to her, but she’d bought me two packages of diapers.
“Thank you.” I crossed the room then, walking through a trapezoid of sun. It was an ordinary afternoon in the house, but warmer, my problems smoothed by a nurse’s hand of routine. I went back and wrote eighteen measures.
I stood picking the last of our tomatoes when Paul’s car yanked up the drive. “Not there,” he shouted. “They left already!” He looked at me as if I’d done a terrible job. Of what? Keeping his son available to surprise during this rare and dwindling hour?
“They’ll be back soon.” Standing in an aisle of tomatoes, I felt rich in perishables, and shy. Almost November, and late heirlooms hung on the vines, giving off the smell of abandoned lots I’d passed, walking to school with my instrument. Tomatoes grow anywhere, like sun, the outside face of God in the world, given free. I’d planted four varieties, and the vines had outgrown Will in a little more than a month. Why didn’t Paul come see? I picked off a yellow leaf, breaking the unmistakable scent into the air.
“I’m going to try and meet them. You don’t have to make dinner. We’ll go somewhere. Or get takeout. He’s not the prince of England here,” Paul said, climbing into the car. “And Yo-Yo Ma isn’t Martha Stewart.”
I did think dinner every night mattered. I doubted that Yo-Yo Ma subsisted on takeout. Paul worked twice as many hours as I did, yet I still believed I had a vein of talent. But wasn’t this important too? I didn’t know how to extricate care from time. Just then Lola came around the corner pushing the stroller.
Paul knelt down and opened his arms.
“Abba!” Came the scream, followed by pell-melling legs and a heavy leap.
Then they were up and twirling.
Will and I made quieter reunions. He sometimes sidled over and hung on to my leg. I went inside with fennel to chop for the salad. We’d been hungry sometimes when I was growing up. It happened when my mother bought a dress. She was in the first generation of divorcées forced to work; she hoped to reverse her fate and fall back into the census norm. Clothes struck her as a necessary expense. Looked at from the vantage of failure, they seem a flimsy vanity. But if her plan had worked, it might be remembered as a middle-aged woman’s pluck. “Clothes are an investment in yourself,” she’d said. Her friend Julie took the opposite view and put her teacher’s retirement money in Michigan lakefront property. I measured lemon juice and olive oil for dressing. I tried our soup; the squash had a deep aftertaste. I took pumpkin seeds from the oven to sprinkle on top, tossed the pasta with tomatoes, basil, and a little hidden mint. “Paul, Will, dinner!”
But they didn’t come. The barley bread I’d just pulled out of the oven wouldn’t be anything in ten minutes, but only Lola stood holding her plate. This was good food. I wanted them to eat. Paul would have been just as happy with a Happy Meal. Will would have been happier. You don’t have to make dinner. But if I didn’t, who would? And if nobody did, what kind of life would we have?
These were the riddles: if Paul was right, I was ridiculous.
Will skidded in; I spread the napkin on his lap and poured him a glass of milk. I asked as I asked every night, “Won’t you sit with us, Lole?”
“I will just eat in my place.”
Nights in the writers’ room, they ordered takeout from expensive restaurants; the network paid. Paul didn’t have to feel grateful for food. Maybe he’d never had to. But what was he doing as our good meal got cold? I found him on the living room floor. He appeared to be cleaning his briefcase. “We’re sitting down,” I said. “Come to dinner.”
He sighed. “I never have the time to do these things.” Then he followed, pulled out his chair, not a clue that I was displeased. Here he was, before dark, saying, “Great bread.” He looked up. “Oh. There’re two guys from the show I’d like to ask over to dinner with the
ir wives.”
I didn’t answer.
“Just one of your pastas, like tonight.”
Just. I wondered if any of my friends’ husbands thrilled them. I was pretty sure not. Except Jeff. I didn’t and did like thinking of him.
• • •
The sky grew dark blue with tiny stars. Paul kept William outside, playing tag. I read again, the chime of voices falling in through the open windows.
“Paul, remember, when he’s overtired he can’t sleep,” I called out, charmlessly.
But, as if in collusion, Will slept instantly when Paul put him down.
“I did that brilliantly, if I may say so.” Paul dropped keys on the dresser.
I had my book on the bed. Usually, I slept like a nun, my side so perfect in the morning that Lola didn’t touch it.
Paul took off his jeans and crossed the room in his boxers. He looked over his shoulder, in a straight line.
I felt hunted.
He raised his eyebrows.
I looked down. Please no, just not now, I thought. Anything else.
He laughed. “’S okay, you don’t have to.” He picked up a magazine, rolled it into a tube, and slapped his hand. He was attractive, a slim animal, with a jaunt to him. What was wrong with me?
I opened the casement window. Our rental house didn’t have screens. You could smell the mineral ground and hear a steady trilling from crickets. I’d once asked a teacher what they were and he’d had to explain, you couldn’t notate insect sounds or warbles.
“You’re the most perceptive person I’ve ever known,” Paul said, laughing that evening in October, flinging himself on our bed. “But we’ve had sex once in the last six weeks. It’s just not enough for me.”
“I know,” I said, pulling the cover to my chin. “I’ll do better. I’ll try.”
When had this dread started? I thought of them. Helen’s open-mouthed laugh. Diamonds resting on indentations. I bet she didn’t have dread. But I’d sleep with him, I thought, turning over and starting to cry. My lapses no longer surprised Paul.
“Oh, come on,” he said, flipping through Variety, Vanity Fair stashed underneath. One hand reached over to scratch my back.
When William’s scream surged at 1:45, Paul put a pillow over his head. My feet met the ground. I’d been constantly vigilant for more than two years. No wonder I didn’t have the languor for sex. The damp, pajamaed body on me, I remembered the way Jeff had stared that night at dinner: a direct gaze, full of meaning, but meaning what? Will fell asleep in my arms, his head heavy. I transferred him to his crib, skidded back to bed, and remembered: we were in the middle of life. The outcomes had already been decided. Jeff had picked Helen. And as my manager once said about country music: It’s the kind of thing you like if you like that kind of thing.
Paul had the covers pulled tightly around him. Tomorrow would be the same. The deprivations in the marriage seemed given, immutable as air. He proved able to live with my regular disappointment. I could, apparently, live with his working whenever the hell he wanted. Therein lay the security, too, the peace I felt in waking: small clanks as Paul fixed his tray of coffee, cereal, and the newspaper, with which he’d trudge to his den where at five he would call the 800 number and check the ratings of last night’s shows, making four columns for the lineups on the three networks and Fox. He didn’t have his own show yet. That was his hope and mine, too, for him.
When Lola arrived, she collected Paul’s clothes from where he’d dropped them and followed his trail of coffee cups. But she left the various envelopes with the lists of ratings. They must have seemed important.
“Just do it,” Lil said, long-distance. She made hanky-panky sound silly.
“Do I have to?”
“Yes.” She laughed.
“Whatever happened to the froth?”
“That doesn’t last anyway.”
“But life doesn’t last. That doesn’t make it skippable.” When I was thirteen, babysitting, I opened the mother’s closet and looked at her clothes. She was an ordinary woman with a kind face, the wife of a rabbi, but she had gold sandals, the gold worn off in the place of each of her toes, like the paw print of some animal. I knew it had to do with sex. Her husband’s body resembled a Bosc pear. Maybe it could last.
Lil had once built a box with sixty-two hooks that showed in a Fifty-seventh Street gallery. She hung keys, by their various chains, in the separate compartments. Behind a jailor’s ring was a small photograph. In another nook, a chewed bottle nipple and a phone number scrawled in red lipstick.
Letters to a Young Mother, the piece was called.
The words chimed, to me who never was one.
Now her third child had pooping problems. A ribbon of lightness ran through her, a capacity for renewable hope.
At noon, my doorbell rang. A young guy already balding held an electric oscillating fan and a box. “Delivery from Jeff Grant,” he said. “Do you want me to set it up?” It looked old-fashioned but it was brand-new.
The night Paul’s episode aired, I wanted to invite people over but we still didn’t have friends here. “Jeff and Helen?” I asked.
“I think he’d make me nervous.”
I prepared our favorite pasta, linguine with small greenish cockles and Sweet 100 tomatoes, and we ate on trays on the bed. At the last minute, we invited Lola in, and she watched, her plate on her lap, sitting on the corner chair.
By Paul Berend appeared at the end, in the Worklings typeface.
Lola stood. “Paul, congratulations,” she said, and left with her plate.
“I think it really did turn out well,” Paul said. “Oh, now I wish I’d invited them.”
“Call them,” I said. “We have champagne.” I’d made chocolate bread pudding. I slid in my socks to the kitchen to caramelize the top, but we never opened the champagne, because the phone kept ringing—Paul’s mother, his sister, an aunt, and two cousins whom we’d hadn’t heard from since the wedding. When Lola left for her walk, I gave her half the pudding to drop off at her other house.
The next day Jeff asked if Paul wanted to work with him. Paul’s contract was picked up for two years. Everyone but the showrunner and the guy they called Jack the Genius said something. He wished Jack had. Jack should have. It was so much better than the other ones I’d seen.
“I’m lonely here,” I said on the phone.
Paul sighed. “Can you call Lil?” This was how he got off now. We both took it for granted that he didn’t have time.
And I couldn’t find my way. I gave a cello talk to twenty-six children in the Brentwood living room of Paul’s mother’s college roommate. The kids sat cross-legged on the floor, eating catered lemon bars off china. A few of them wanted to hold the cello. A child on my lap, my hand over hers on the bow, I missed Will. Mommy, I love the smell of my feet, he’d whispered last night. I adjusted the girl’s wrist so the bow dragged over two strings.
“Can you play something happy?” I did a riff of Philip Glass, thinking, Cello is not built for happy.
“Something sad?” Villa-Lobos.
“Something happy and sad at the same time?” That was the maid’s kid. Beethoven.
Then I stood outside my front door, the arrival I’d craved for hours, but now that I was here, the rush drained. I put my ear to the wood and listened to the playclub, a reliable enchantment, one of the good beads on my daily chain.
“I did not dream of becoming a babysitter.”
“What did you want to be, Lola?”
“Oh, a princess. Then the queen. Like every girl.”
“I wanna be Batman!”
“No little girl dreams to be the helper. And a princess will need more helpers than the queen. The dresses, they have a longer tail.”
I wished my mother could stand outside my life and listen, but she’d wonder, Why aren’t you happy? I had what she’d always wanted. A home. A child.
A car lock oinked in the driveway: Helen, to pick up Bing. I rummaged for keys, caught on my
porch inside a dream. She wore shorts. The tendon joining her calf to her knee appeared simplified, winglike. My knee, by comparison, had bulges.
“After queen, what did you want to be?”
“Who, me? Oh, Lola was probably born to be a mother.”
I opened the door. And here they came! Boys stuck to our fronts, my chin on Will’s head, I turned to Helen. “Want a drink?”
I opened wine and we made offhand, vaguely complaining mother-talk. I asked about her poetry, but Bing had taken one of Willie’s trucks, my boy grabbed it back, and now Bing ran to his mother. A few other kids gathered around.
Crybaby, I thought. Where was Lola?
Helen knelt, on their level. “That’s not okay,” she said to Will, emphasizing the k.
I didn’t love that. Bing shouldn’t have taken the truck in the first place. But Helen looked taut and risen, scolding. She probably felt she earned authority by the hours spent talking to children, but I didn’t buy it—she also scheduled pedicures. She doesn’t like Will, I thought for the first time.
Once the boys settled down, she asked where we were applying for preschool.
“Nowhere yet,” I said. “Should we be?”
Her face tried to contain alarm. “Well, the deadlines are right after Christmas.”
I rushed to get paper. There was so much I didn’t know. She told me there was a class I needed to take. “Help,” I said.
Then the doorbell rang—another mother.
“I should go too,” Helen said. “The group is at my house tomorrow. Come.” As she collected Bing’s things, she mentioned that she and Jeff had been invited to the White House. “He shot a TV spot for the Democrats.” I found William by the door reciting his passage—Ay there’s the rub.
“That’s amazing,” the other mother said. “I have to get Brookie to memorize. I see Claire, she’s such a great mother, I get inspired.”
“Claire, really?” Helen said, in a barely managed tone.
• • •
So I went to the playgroup. We arrived a little after eleven, and Will ran into the yard, Lola following, hands in her pockets. The moms sat inside. Two French doors, without screens, opened out, stopped by lavender bushes. A morning of no music, and I wouldn’t even be with Will. Still, I felt a little relieved. I didn’t really know how to play.