In the Flesh

by Hilma Wolitzer

  My dear,

  Watch out for Paulette and Douglas of Art and Life.

  But the neighbors minded their own business for once. And the kids wouldn’t confuse the two men, wouldn’t call Howard accidentally by Douglas’s name, even in the wild excitement of play.

  Still, they could squeal on me, couldn’t they?—could tell about dear Doggie, our constant new companion. Howard might think I’d decided to overlook Jason’s allergies and brought home a pet.

  I began to speak more pointedly about Douglas to Jason, in that careful diction usually reserved for teaching birds to talk. I said that Douglas was Mommy’s friend. Let Jason try that on Howard. Mommy’s friend makes us grilled cheese. Mommy’s friend can draw all the cartoons on TV. Mommy’s friend is like Captain Marvel in bed.

  I waited for a sign, for some of that unfair, insufferable outrage I knew Howard was capable of. He had a lot of experts behind him and much of literature. Men did it, women only had fantasies about doing it. If women did do it though, they paid dearly in the final pages. People ostracized them, they poisoned themselves with torturously slow-working stuff, or they ended up under onrushing trains.

  But Howard remained obstinately silent.

  Douglas was the one who was jealous. He said it just about killed him to think I’d had a “sacred” relationship with someone else and that the boy and the girl were the products of that relationship. He imagined other men staring at me in luncheonettes, at bus stops. He couldn’t blame them, but still it bothered him. It bothered him too that I was posing in the nude, although he knew that there was nothing lascivious on my part. Some of the creeps in class might forget themselves though, might forget we were all there for art’s sake. His possessiveness annoyed and amused me at the same time. It was silly, but silliness seemed to be a suitable antidote to grief and rage. I needed breathless high-school romance, Archie struggling with Reggie over Veronica.

  Nathan had dropped out of class, and I felt relieved about that. His relentless yearning gaze had become as terrible to me as his drawings. Now I imagined him regretting his losses elsewhere, his sighs echoing in the dim, waxy corridors of other people’s ears.

  One afternoon, when the lesson ended, I felt chilled. It was a damp, miserable day and even when I was dressed, I still felt naked, cold and vulnerable. The studio began to look unfamiliar to me, even alien. What was I doing there, anyway?

  Douglas and I went to his apartment where he tried to warm me with his breath, with his own radiant heat. But the feeling persisted, expanded further into thought. What was I doing here, with this kid, letting him do these things to me?

  I kept shivering, my teeth rattling, hoping I was just coming down with something, while Douglas tried desperately to restore me. He tried in the same ways I used to restore Howard, to warm his spirit, to kindle love, and I was moved by his efforts. And I was grateful to be the beneficiary for a change, the one admired, nurtured, resuscitated.

  “Oh, Babe,” Douglas said, and even when I lay numbly under him, Sleeping Beauty kayoed by spells, no part of his body rejected me, not even for a moment. “It’s all right,” I said at last, kissed back to life. “It’s all right,” I kept saying, knowing that it wasn’t, but knowing too that there was no sin in taking what you really needed.

  38

  In this kitchen

  where supper steams,

  the broth and bones

  breathe heat.

  Now the late sun

  throws hoops of light

  across the tiles. And you,

  waiting for food,

  are food yourself.

  The bones of

  my desire.

  February 1, 1962

  THEN THE CHILDREN AND I really did become ill the way pining princesses do in fairy tales. But the sickness in our case was actually viral, not spiritual. We coughed and wheezed and ran escalating temperatures. I guessed this was the moment I had been waiting for; a chance to use the children. It didn’t seem terribly unfair or even crafty. Fate itself was on my side. The kids were really sick. Feverish and listless, they slept in the afternoon and woke with burning skin and hoarse weeping. They even called for Howard themselves—those croaking cries of “Daddy, Daddy,” that would have swayed the harshest judge, so I called him at the studio and pleaded their case. Of course he said he would come.

  I felt awful myself, but the illness seemed to stimulate the brain, even as it slowed down the body. I couldn’t stop thinking, going over past transgressions and triumphs, forcing life into a doubtful future. When I fell into restless dozes, my thoughts conveniently projected themselves into dreams, and twice I woke suddenly, certain that Howard had said my name and that I had answered him.

  But it was quiet in the apartment; only the raspy breath of the children and the complaining rattle of rising heat.

  Howard was coming and I had everything worked out in my fevered head. I would tell him that we were moving to New Mexico or Arizona. I had picked two places so distant in miles, so alien to our own geography, that he would be stunned. And the children were going with me, that was the main thing. If he didn’t like it, he could grieve. It was his turn. Despite that big display of sorrow and regret, he hadn’t done any real grieving. Or if he had, he still had Mrs. X for easy, instant comfort.

  Now his lamentations would have to come airmail or in long-distance phone calls, diffused and filtered by the remoteness of separation. About how he missed us, about how he couldn’t help himself, it was as if he had lost his senses, and how he didn’t want to do anything to hurt us.

  “Oh, bullshit,” I said aloud, and I looked at the clock. It was only three, but it was late winter, and there was already a gloomy foreshadowing of evening. Howard had said he’d get there as quickly as he could, that he would come straight from the studio as soon as he could get away. I was still so sleepy and my hands and feet were terribly cold. They were too far from the hot center of my being to get any natural warmth. I shivered and climbed into bed again, tucking my hands into my armpits, letting my feet search out shelter under the blankets. I squinted and looked at the clock again. Five more minutes, I told myself, and then I’ll get up and do something. Open some windows. The whole place stank of illness and confinement. I sniffed my hands undercover and they smelled of Vicks, but so did everything. A little refreshing catnap and then I’d get up and bathe. Feel cooler. Scented powder. And maybe he’d stay for supper. The children would beg him to, I could count on that. I’d make something good. Five minutes more.

  Then I was awake and I saw that the clock had moved forward when I wasn’t looking. The room was dark. Maybe Howard had been there and left! And where were the kids? “Jason? Annie?”

  Silence. And then I heard giggling from another room. At least they were safe for the moment, hadn’t gone into aspirin bottles or drunk Lysol the minute my back was turned. I wished they’d come and get into bed with me; a little warmth and I could tell them my plans.

  “Jason? Bring Mommy water.”

  “Please. Say please,” Jason reminded me, his face rising from the foot of the bed.

  “Oh yes, I forgot. Please. And where’s your sister?”

  But he was gone. Then his voice, shrill and wily, came from the bathroom. “I can’t reach.”

  “Use the stool, Jasie. Get a big glass and let the water run for a long time so it’s very cold.” What an effort! It was as if I had shouted across the Alps. I fell back and waited in the racket of my own breathing.

  The baby pulled at my feet and her hands were small fires.

  “Hi,” I said brightly. “Mommy is sick.”

  “Sick,” she echoed, turning my toe hard between her fingers.

  “Oh God, don’t do that, Annie. Just stay here and keep me company.”

  But she waddled away.

  Then Jason was next to me, so close that his eyes looking into mine blended into one huge relentless swimming eye. His hand shot up, holding a large brimming glass. Before I could protect myself, s
ome of the water spilled, rode down the neck of my nightgown in an agonizing icy stream. Jesus!

  I pulled myself up and took the glass from his trembling grasp into my own. It had been so cold on my neck and chest, but seemed lukewarm and medicinal when I drank it. I wondered if it came from the goldfish bowl and the idea made me laugh.

  “Say thank you,” Jason warned me, unamused, and he and the glass disappeared at once.

  It’s all that fucking television, I thought. We wouldn’t even have a set in Arizona or New Mexico. We’d live close to nature in some primitive but comfortable way. Howard would be sorry, that was the main thing.

  And I remembered again that he was coming. It was after five—he should have been there already. The children were murmuring together in the living room. Battery-operated toys buzzed across the floor. Well, if they were playing, they had to be feeling better. That was something. Though, guiltily, I had hoped they would at least appear sick enough to arouse their father’s concern. The way they had been only yesterday and during the night. But it was no use. Their voices rose now in high spirit, in that familiar convalescent frenzy. In another hour they’d be jumping on the beds, fighting with one another, full of the ebullience of survival.

  Get up, I told myself. I felt dizzy and had to hold on to the bedpost until the room settled. Then over to the mirror in two lumbering steps, and there I was. I looked crazy, that was my first impression. Like those deranged, rag-wrapped women who mutter to themselves in subway passages. Tangled hair, swollen features, and the wild gleam of fever could do that. And the nightgown I had been wearing had been chosen for comfort, not seduction; for its worn, pilled fabric, its billowing shapelessness that wouldn’t adhere to tender skin. A comb, I thought. Soap.

  But his key was in the door, just like old times. Why didn’t he ring, damn him? He didn’t live here anymore.

  I had no time at all. I was still struggling with the inverted sleeves of my bathrobe when he and the children came into the bedroom together. Howard was out of breath. “Traffic,” he said. “Stuck on the bridge. God, you look terrible.”

  “I’m better,” I said severely. It was one thing to play on his sympathy with sick children. It was another to use myself. “I fell asleep, that’s all.” I pulled a comb as far as it would go through my hair, and then they followed me into the kitchen. “I’ll make us some dinner,” I said, lurching toward the sink.

  “Don’t bother … I can’t stay …” Howard began, but I waved my hand and said, “We have to eat anyway, don’t we?”

  The children were going full-force by then, one attached to each of his hands, pulling him in different directions, overflowing with accumulated news, with deferred affection. They showed him everything: the kittens romping on their rumpled and stained pajamas, the junk food I’d been buying just to keep the peace, the coloring books we had defiled with red skies and orange clouds. It was “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” in what seemed like one continuous head-bursting shriek.

  I took out silverware and dishes, cans and boxes. I rummaged in the refrigerator and found four large apples I had meant to cut into a pie on one of those fleeting, martyred days. I searched in a drawer now for the corer. I would bake the apples for Howard. It was such an old favorite of his. They would come from the oven, warm and fragrant and rosy. In my fevered dream at the stove, I thought of them as flesh, those perfect apples, that still life with hope.

  Of course he protested. He couldn’t stay. He wasn’t that hungry. I didn’t look well. On and on. But I was so busy I only heard fragments of his alibis. I chopped and sliced and pared and mashed, and set things steaming and sizzling on the stove and in the oven. I put up the baked apples and a frozen slab of pork that would take hours and hours to cook. Potatoes. Soup. Thinking, Food is love, and resisting a sudden impulse to sing.

  In the other room, the children were still in command, and I could hear the reassuring sounds of old family games, of bear-wrestling and “Mountain,” where they climbed their father’s legs to reach the peak pleasure of his embrace. He was knocking them out. They wouldn’t stay awake long enough for anything. And when they fell asleep he would go.

  Howard came back into the kitchen with the children following right behind him. He leaned against the refrigerator and the smoke from his cigarette veiled his eyes. “Do you need anything?” he asked. “Any money?”

  “I’ve been working,” I said. “Part-time.”

  “You don’t have to do that. There’s enough.”

  “I want to do it. It’s a way to get out of here, to meet people.”

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  I found that I couldn’t meet his eyes. “Posing,” I said, turning my back as I spoke.

  “What? Posing? Do you mean modeling?”

  “Yes. For art students. At the Art Students’ League.”

  It took a moment for the idea to register. “Do you mean in the nude?”

  I turned to face him defiant. “Yes.” Did he want to make something out of it?

  He tried to put his face in order, to return my gaze directly, but he only succeeded in looking bewildered.

  “Are you so surprised?” I said.

  “In a way. You were always sort of … shy.”

  “Shy?” Now it was my turn to be surprised.

  He corrected himself quickly. “I don’t mean shy, exactly. Just private. You know.”

  I knew. He was talking about the exclusiveness I had always felt about our bodies, about his and mine. “I like it,” I said sullenly.

  “I didn’t mean anything. You have a right to do what you want.”

  “I know that. You don’t have to tell me.” And the subject fell between us, all things unfinished, unsaid.

  Howard filled two bowls with soup. He sat the children at the table and baby-fed them, first one and then the other, until the soup was gone. Then he took them into their room. I tiptoed after them and stood just outside the ring of lamplight in the doorway and watched while he changed their pajamas and tucked them in. He sat on a straightbacked chair between their beds, and he sang songs to them, one song apiece, so that nothing would be diluted by the act of sharing. While he sang, his fingers made little folded birds from sheets of kraft paper, and his feet tapped out soothing rhythms related to the current song.

  Oh, he’s a living wonder, I thought, a regular paternal one-man band. The children loved it, of course. Fair-weather friends. Never mind that he’d be gone the minute they dropped their guard and wandered into sleep. The second. It occurred to me that I should have encouraged them to sleep longer before he came. I could even have drugged them, some harmless, sleep-inducing stuff that would have left them maddeningly awake now. Howard wouldn’t be able to just walk out on them under those circumstances. He would be caught interminably in this career of magician-entertainer-father. Let him take out his whole bag of tricks. Let him juggle the three rotten lemons that were in the back of the refrigerator, compose birthday songs months in advance, rock their beds with a fierce concentration and all of his energy. “I’m not tired,” they would say. “Daddy, don’t go,” and his heart would be won, and he’d stay.

  But instead they slipped into sleep like deserters, and I went back to my post in the kitchen and looked into the oven at the sweating roast and the apples. My final ploy for extra time. At least Mrs. X wasn’t waiting downstairs in the lobby now, with her motor idling, the way she was on visiting Sundays.

  And I had the magic of this familiar domestic scene on my side. Those sleeping children, the food-steamed kitchen, the clock strategically set at the parents’ hour.

  He came inside then, embarrassed by his handsome good health, shy and uneasy in the sudden privacy between us. “I’m going now,” he said. “Is there anything you want me to do first?”

  Did he think I would ask him to catch up on household chores, to change light bulbs or fiddle with the toilet tank? “Stay for supper,” I said, and before he could object, “I have to talk to you. It’s important. There�
��s something I have to tell you.”

  “Tell me now, Paulie. But I really can’t stay.”

  I pretended I didn’t hear him, folded napkins, set out water tumblers. If only I hadn’t slept so late. If only I’d had a chance to change my clothes. Why did I ever think it was possible to win his attention with food? It was all wrong. My head ached. The clatter of dishes and pots jarred me. All wrong, all wrong. The way to a man’s heart is through his cock, not his stomach. But he wouldn’t come close to me, wouldn’t even stand still. He smoked a cigarette for camouflage and to give his hands innocent occupation. He looked restlessly at his watch.

  “The kids and I are moving to New Mexico,” I said. I hadn’t meant to say it so abruptly or in such a threatening voice. I had meant to come on easy like a salesman who knows that if his product can’t compete, he can always count on the winning quality of his pitch.

  “What?”

  “New Mexico. We need a change.”

  “Paulie, what are you talking about?”

  “A change of scenery. A good climate. Indians,” I added, irrelevantly. “And we’ll get fewer colds.”

  “Paulie, I think you’re really sick.” He reached out as if to feel my forehead and I jumped back, that motion setting off a resounding chain of aches in my bones.

  “Don’t touch me!” I screamed. Touch me. That’s what I meant to say, but I was irrevocably committed to the defense.

  “Hey,” Howard said. “Please don’t be like that.”

  “Like what? Like what?”

  “Ah, listen, Paulie. I know how you feel.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said. “How could you know how I feel?”

  “Because I know you. Because, well, you know—I love you.”

  “Love? Do you mean 1-o-v-e? Love?”

  “Shhh,” Howard said. “Hold it down. The children.”

  Ah yes, the children, those turncoats. I gripped the edge of the counter for balance. Raising my voice had made me dizzy again. “Well, I’m getting out of this joint,” I said. I looked around, as if for new ideas. Inside the oven the pork roast defrosted, sputtering fat. A fine mist drifted about us. “Look at this place,” I said. “Who can even breathe? We’re all being poisoned by escaping gas.”