by Mona Simpson
“Fine,” he said and hung up.
His sister in Boston—who had a law degree but now worked part-time—took home movies of her baby during her maternity leave, so her husband could watch them at midnight.
I did try to be a wife. How many dinner parties did I cook that summer for the guys Paul worked with and their wives? Jeff and Helen came too. Lola made a diary of our menus, and she took pictures of the food. Paul kept the conversations going. I didn’t understand the references, the names of actors. I got up and down, taking in plates.
Late, the nights of the parties, Lola and I cleaned the kitchen, talking about which recipes succeeded, picking at leftovers. Finally, that August, she started eating with us, except on the rare nights when Paul came home.
The evening with Buck Price and Sky, my dessert, a latticed rhubarb tart, turned out exceptionally well. Buck said, “We’ll have to have you guys over too.”
“Or go out,” said Sky, daughter of a ballerina, slipping her shoes off and taking one of her slim feet in her two hands. “I don’t cook.”
As if I’d been born with a measuring cup in my hand! As if I weren’t meant for more. I just looked at her, but Buck quickly mumbled, “We’ll take you guys out.”
“So we’ll go out,” Paul said later, as if we’d both been unruly children. We never did go out with them. That didn’t bother Paul. He didn’t need friendships to catch.
Once, I delivered a script to the showrunner’s house. His wife, a Chicana who’d grown up in Boyle Heights, gone to Harvard, and then dropped out, stood issuing instructions in fast Spanish to her maid, a small woman working furiously on hands and knees. Then she gave me a tour of their house, pointing out the new den where the enormous TV stood. “The decorator suggested an armoire, but I think we can’t hide it. That’s where it’s all coming from.” I felt her awareness that her husband was Paul’s boss. She asked me to wait while she paid her maid, who was just then leaving with her daughter.
“Maybe she’ll be like me,” said the showrunner’s wife, cupping the child’s head. I suppose she meant Harvard and marrying the showrunner.
Maybe she doesn’t want her daughter to be like you, I thought.
But of course she probably did.
I disobeyed the school director’s advice and flew to Lil’s fortieth. The school director was undegreed anyway. On the airplane, though, I missed Will’s weight on my lap. It was the first flight I’d taken alone since he was born. Go. We’ll be fine, Paul had promised. I expected Will to eat cereal for supper but it was only a weekend. I’d be back Sunday night. Wives in Santa Monica had fortieth birthday parties too. Helen was hosting one for Melissa, whose husband was putting together a slide show in the partners’ conference room. The husbands didn’t seem to have parties. They had work. Women, I guess, got lives instead.
Music was all or nothing. Art gave no B pluses, no credit for trying. If I couldn’t make that, I’d be better off tending my son or working in a hospital. I still didn’t know if I could make that. And I was almost forty.
I’d always wanted only this.
And now William too.
I had fragments of the first movement. I’d scored the main theme, giving it to the French horns. I gave an accompanying figure to the oboes, a melody of tender attentions I’d written the week Will was born. But I was stuck in the exposition. I couldn’t imagine the whole structure.
On the layover, in Chicago, I called Harv and played what I had, holding the small tape recorder up to the pay-phone mouthpiece.
“You and your C-sharp minor,” he said.
Cut the difficulty in four, Yo-Yo Ma’s father had told him. That’s what people do when they practice. Break it down into measures. I had a phrase in F-sharp major. One of the held notes was a G. The notes leading up to the arrival point implied other, short-lived harmonies. I pictured the symphony like a square cloth of fabric, moving, I could put my hands underneath. And it would stay together, woven. I sighed as the plane landed in Philadelphia. Composing was the most important thing, but it didn’t make me happy. Lil had found art everywhere. Then her kids came along and they were art too, for her. As much as I loved Will, I wanted to make something longer than life.
My existence had caused too much pain. Having a child wobbled and undid my mother, forced her through strenuous marathons, at the edge of her capacity. She made it to the finish: she kept me till I was seventeen, then sent me out mostly intact, with an instrument to hold. My mother had wanted to do something artistic—she’d spent our scarce money on my lessons—but because she had to, she’d made a living teaching people to talk again. I wanted to be somebody, to justify all that work.
In the rental car, alone, I chattered out tunes with my teeth. “Tiny Dancer.” “Billy Jean.”
Lil had once collected braids people had made out of their dead loved ones’ hair. I called her from the airport. “We’re making scrap screens today,” she said. “I’m gluing on wrens.” The party was to be tango dancing in their barn.
If I made any money from this symphony, I wanted to buy one of her old pieces.
This is important too, she’d told me once, of her life with children. Letter to a Young Mother #2.
Will ran down the long corridor, legs greedy for motion, all knees, then swoop! Into my arms. Paul materialized from behind a pillar, bent to kiss my cheek. He’d driven to the airport, with Willie clean in clean clothes. Going home, we talked softly between Will’s happy jabber, but when Paul pulled into our driveway, he lifted my suitcase to the porch and said, “I better get back.”
“But it’s Sunday. Almost seven.”
“They’re there breaking a story. I left a couple hours ago. I’ve got to get back.”
Was he lacking because he wouldn’t take off the extra hours, or was I for not appreciating what he did in fact give? The unanswerable riddle of our marriage. Still, the house felt like itself without him. Will tuckled with me in my bed until I lifted him, asleep, into his own. In the middle of that night, I rose to turn and found Paul sitting up. “Are you awake?” he asked.
I tried to be.
“I have to tell you something. He almost died, Claire.” He was heaving. “It was that goose.”
“What?” Will slept in the other room. I’d carried him—then slid him between clean cowboy sheets.
“Your mom and Tom took us to lunch.” Paul talked in gulps. “Twin Dragons. We walked in that park with the pond. They had that goose along, and I saw a huge piece of glass. Like a windshield. So I asked her to watch Will while I moved it. I even made a joke. Don’t just watch the goose. Keep an eye on your grandson too. I asked her because Tom was on the other side of the pond, picking up trash.
“And when I came back, I saw his jacket floating with the hood up. I literally thought, Claire, I thought, How could there be another jacket like his facedown in the pond, and then I began to look for Will and I didn’t see him and it took me I don’t know how long probably a minute to put together that I didn’t see him and that that was him in the pond. So I jumped in with all my clothes on, my boots are ruined, and he was gulping water. I was so scared, Claire. How would I tell you?”
I felt dropped two stories. I’d asked him not to leave Will with her. Hadn’t he heard that?
“I get it now,” he cried. “I really get it.”
So he’d heard. He just couldn’t fathom the fact of an adult who couldn’t be trusted: the central fact of my childhood.
We both stood over Will’s little bed, watching him breathe, safe among his animals. He slept on his back, an arm thrown over his head.
In the bathroom, I noticed his gas station attendant’s outfit, muddy, ruined, hanging over the lip of the tub.
“Can I ask you something, now that I’m back? I was thinking on the plane. I need some days, some days when you get home for dinner, when you kind of just take over. I’m not good at this alone.”
“Okay.”
“Any two days, whatever’s best for you. Maybe we could st
art this week.”
He shook his head. “I can’t even think about it until after the network pitch.”
“But I have work too. I need to finish this symphony.”
He sat down on the bed. “Claire, you’ll finish. This is a young man’s career I’m in.”
“And you’re a young man.”
“No I’m not. Not for here, I’m not.” What was he saying? His voice turned soft. “If I get a show and it goes, it could be enough money for us not to worry. Life is long.” He got up, walked to the bathroom, and turned the shower on. I heard him brushing his teeth.
You can have your turn, only later.
“What if I say no?” I said, in a normal voice.
He stepped out, still dry, a towel wrapped around his waist. “Claire. Just leave him with Lola.” His voice had completely changed. “You can compose from nine until five.”
All along, Paul had agreed that he wouldn’t keep working like this. He was agreeing still. The when just got pushed further ahead. I kept asking for and receiving my future promise, which I carried around in my pocket. Now I felt like a bill collector.
My symphony could never earn the money a TV show might, if it sold for syndication. I understood Paul’s logic, but that wasn’t the hierarchy I wanted to live by. I’d known at fifteen that classical music didn’t earn big money. I’d danced around the apartment kitchen in my socks when I’d opened my Guggenheim letter. We’d put that money in the bank and, eventually, used it to move here. I felt embarrassed now for how proud I’d been, for thirty-seven thousand dollars. Having a kid made the amount of money you needed grow a zero. I paid Lola every week; I understood how close her wages came to mine.
At one time, the question concerned who would make it. Now it seemed a matter of attrition. Musicians, excepting harpists, generally stayed. We packed the world full of piano teachers who’d once done something more than flashcards for children with half notes and quarter notes and pick-a-scale-out-of-a-hat parties.
I just wanted to be one of the ones who stayed.
The network had ordered two extra episodes this year that Paul would be paid for. The first thing he intended to do with that, he said, was replenish the thirty-seven thousand we’d taken out of savings to make the move. I suppose, then, my contribution would be settled. I was asking for something. He’d first politely said No, not now, and given me a wrapped box of earrings. Today, after I pushed it, he told me less politely. Not now. But now was when Will’s life was.
“More than half my practice is with women who would give their right arm for a man like Paul,” the couples’ counselor said. She rocked in her Eames chair as she talked, her bare and not particularly lovely leg swinging. A huge toe was the engine rocking it all. She looked like a younger, less-dressed form of Paul’s mother. She would have given her right arm to have a man like Paul. “Okay,” I said, standing, “we’re done.”
Paul chuckled, still sitting, looking at her from under his long lashes. You can’t really blame her. “This was your idea,” he said, throwing up his hands.
I tried to do it Paul’s way. I asked Lola to copy some program notes and fax in a contract from Kinko’s. Pushing Lola seemed more promising than pushing Paul.
Then, one day when I came home from Colburn and had to dress to go out with Paul’s mother, Lola gave notice. “Why, Lola?” I asked. “Are you unhappy?”
“I am working too hard. And Ruth, she is calling me, there are jobs for elderly they are paying a lot already.”
“What if we pay you more?”
“At night here, too, I am working. We are always cooking! You have too many parties.”
I paid her extra whenever we had a dinner. It wasn’t as if I got extra. “Fine. No more parties. Please consider staying, Lola, we need you. Will loves you. And I hate to do this, but I have to go now, I’m already late for Paul’s mother.”
She sat in the restaurant booth, with a glass of white wine.
“Sorry I’m late. We had a calamity at home.”
“Of course,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
Her tempo jarred me. No What calamity? And didn’t she mind sitting in a restaurant with only me after flying three thousand miles to see her son?
“How is your mother, Claire?”
“Well, she got a goose for Will, but we didn’t want it so she’s been raising it in her apartment. But now it’s big and needs more room. So she’s been going crazy trying to find it a home.” She had three adoption possibilities. A petting zoo off the Pacific Coast Highway, a farmer Tom knew in Oxnard, and a normal Topanga family.
“Oh, honestly,” Paul’s mother said.
“It’s taking a lot of her time.” I nodded. “I’m a little distracted tonight because Lola gave notice.”
“Claire, did you tell Paul?”
“Tried. Left a message.” I shrugged.
“I wonder if it would help if I gave her a little present and said, Just because we appreciate all you do for William.”
“That might be nice but I think we’ll have to pay her more.”
“You know, Claire, every summer Marjorie would go home to Mississippi, and I never knew whether or not she was coming back.”
“Really? Paul always told me Marjorie was so close to you.”
“She loved the children and that’s why I put up with it. But I never knew.” She sighed. “If Lola becomes unreasonable, do you have agencies you can call?”
I couldn’t even think about that. Whatever Lola wanted, I’d have to give her.
“But isn’t it exciting, Claire, that Paul’s pitch went so well?”
Paul had pitched his pilot to the head of comedy, who’d given him the go-ahead. He’d still have to be in the Room; he’d write the pilot weekends. We were supposed to be celebrating.
“Do you think two people who work like Paul should have kids? If both parents left at, say, eight-thirty, and that’s the last the kid sees of them until the next morning?” Paul’s mother hadn’t worked hours anything like Paul’s hours when she’d had children and neither did his lawyer sister in Boston now.
Just then, nine o’clock, Paul slid into the booth, hands up Pierrot style.
“Of course,” his mother said, shooing away explanation.
“We were talking about whether two of you should be allowed to have kids.” But would I have chosen to be Paul? I’d miss Will too much, the feel of his shins.
“I say yes,” his mother said, “if they spent weekends with the children. They’d have to take their holidays with the family and sacrifice romantic vacations.”
She and her romance! Go. Work. The boy will be fine, they both believed. As if all those women who stayed with children, for countless centuries, had been fool idiots.
“How’s your teaching?” she asked, obviously pleased with this new tack.
“Teaching is a job for money,” I said. “For not enough money. On my salary, it would be hard to afford a family vacation with clean bathrooms.”
Later, I told Paul about Lola’s threat.
“How much of a raise are you proposing? There’s got to be some point at which we say no.”
I balled a fist inside my pocket. “Easy for you to say.”
We bickered three days. Finally he said, “So why don’t we raise her twenty a week?”
I told Lola twenty-five. I’d make up the difference without him knowing.
“You ride limousine?” Lola asked four weeks later.
“No,” I said instantly, but Paul smiled.
“Well, it’s in Pasadena and who knows what parking’ll be like. The studio’d probably pay.” Even though Paul’s episode wasn’t nominated, we still had to go to the Emmys.
“Yes, Paul,” Lola said. “Claire, you ride in limousine.”
He sighed. “I’d be more excited if my show were nominated.”
“It should be,” I said, setting down Will’s pancakes—a recipe using only eggs, one spoonful of flour, and cottage cheese.
“My employ
er will attend the Emmy Awards,” I heard Lola say at the playclub. “They ride limousine.” The nannies aspired to Helen’s life, not mine. The servants’ dream was to have servants, not to free all the servants and make everyone do their own wash. That was Mao’s dream, but Mao had been born rich.
The words they used! The moms were right. Not only limousine but also rich and sexy. All the realms we didn’t want our children to know about.
One night in August, Helen walked over to show me the red-room class list. Helen had been in the director’s office in April and had to dig out our file from a mess. I was so grateful. She seemed invigorated by the beginning of school.
Will ran out of his room. I chased him back. “Popple in bed!” People told me Will had a big vocabulary but what they didn’t mention was how small mine had become. At the beginning, it’s only you talking. He and I turned in gray twilights, waking to too many dawns. Pulling Will’s sheet up, I told him he and Bing would be in the same class.
“Oh. Good.”
Play a William, Bing used to say. When had he stopped saying that?
“I brought popcorn.” Helen followed me to the black kitchen. We microwaved it, and then took the bowl and a shaker of salt outside to the front step. She showed me the choices of what you could volunteer for, when we heard the high fan of laughter. She leaned over the paper as if it were complex business.
“More piggy!” he shouted from the hall.
“Come on,” I said, putting him in bed again. “You really have to sleep now.”
“A hole is to dig,” I said, marching out. “A house is to live in, fathers are to, what?” Lola had taught Will to say working. So whenever she said, Where’s Daddy? even on the rare nights Paul came home, Will would say, Dada working.
“I’m going to be Class Mom,” Helen said, biting down her lip.
Then came the pell-mell of steps again, and he landed in my lap. I took my sweatshirt off and blanketed it around him.
“It’s a lot,” she said, “but Mary thinks I should do it.”
“Dada!” Will verged up, pointing. At three, he recognized BMWs.