Toby nods. “To go and live with Dr. and Mrs. Mackey and their new baby.”
Gina slams on the brakes when the traffic in front of them suddenly slows. She hasn’t been keeping her eye on the road. Toby’s backpack thumps to the floor in the back. Funny, she thinks, gripping the steering wheel, me, too. You think we should start a commune? I don’t even hate Ted’s wife. I want to, but when I met her she was funny and nice. The traffic speeds up. Gina keeps a safe distance from the Land Rover ahead of them.
“Toby, let me tell you something. For the rest of your life, you’re going to want things you can’t have. This will make you very unhappy. It may seem to you that the solution is to do everything you can to get those things. But the real solution is to figure out how to want the things you do have. I know that sounds corny. But you must do this. You don’t have to want or like all the things you have, but at least some of them. Do you know what I mean?”
Toby makes that disapproving clucking sound.
“Well, just think about that.”
Heavy sigh.
“Because you have some homework to do for me. I’m handing out an assignment.” Gina pokes herself in the chest so firmly it hurts a little.
“Oh, great.”
“That’s right. It’s going on your chore list along with taking out the trash and you’ll need to do it to get your allowance.” Earlier, Gina considered making Toby’s room part of the deal for him to get his allowance, but she worried he might not clean up the room or take out the garbage and he’d forfeit the allowance, which he didn’t seem to spend anyway. He had all the books and games he wanted for now, thanks to his father and Ted. Besides, he doesn’t really lust after material things. People are what he really wants. She and her son have that much in common.
“All you have to do is make a list of three things you want,” she continues. “One of the things can cost money. The other two can’t. After you make your list, we’re going to look at it together and we’re going to talk about whether those are things you can have or we can make happen for you. If they’re not, we’re going to think of the next best thing.”
There is a long silence. The woman who’s driving the Land Rover ahead of them looks in her rearview mirror and laughs, talking to a child in a car seat behind her.
“Like if you wanted french fries, but there weren’t any on the menu, so you’d have potato chips,” Toby finally says.
Gina’s relieved by this shift in his attitude. “Exactly. It might not seem easy . . . but after we do that—”
“Oh, brother.”
“Just listen for a minute. We are going to New York City to the Metropolitan Museum and you’re going to see the armor. Trust me: When you see it, you’re going to put it on the list of things you want. You’re going to wish you were a billionaire and you lived in a house with a suit of armor in the front hall, like Mick Jagger or somebody. The good news is that as long as you live, the exhibit will be there and you can always go and see it. So, in a way, it’s yours. It’s for everybody to enjoy.”
Toby’s posture straightens with enthusiasm. “Can I miss school to go to New York City?”
“Yes. Two days. I’ll get your homework from your teacher and you’ll miss two days of school and I’ll miss two days of work. We’ll take a four-day weekend. If you don’t have fun, you’ll get a full refund.”
Toby frowns out the car window.
“That was a joke,” Gina tells him.
“Yeah, it was so funny I forgot to laugh.”
“And—”
“Did you drink a lot of coffee today or something?”
“For your next essay for school you’re going to write about chivalry. I looked at your knight book while I was trying to clean up your room, and there’s a lot of stuff in there about chivalry. It’s not just about axes and swords, you know. Knights were fierce fighters, but they were also courteous and civil and they always practiced courtly manners toward women, particularly their mothers.”
“What’s courtly?”
Gina isn’t sure, exactly. “Ah,” she says. “That is for you to find out. You’re going to write a report on chivalry and try to be more chivalrous, like a true knight.”
Toby keeps his head turned away from her as he studies the passing scenery. The sun flickers through the sun roof, illuminating his matted curls. “I might be a knight for Halloween,” he says, more to himself than to Gina.
Gina’s counting out her client Suzanne’s lunges with the medicine ball when she gets another phone call at work. She hopes it isn’t the principal again.
“Ten more on each side,” she tells her client, stepping away to the back office.
“Is this Gina?” The caller sounds like Shane doing an impression of a sober, polite person.
“Shane?”
“No. My name is Roger. I’m calling in reference to your son needing a tutor?”
“Oh!” Gina fumbles and retrieves her purse from her cubby and finds her list of questions. Student? What year at the college? Math major? Hours available? Gina thinks, Child molester? Thief? She should have called the learning center she saw advertised on TV, with its special after-school facility. But Brenda at work said those places charge too much and Ted seemed to think a sign at the community college would be a good idea. But what does he know? He doesn’t have children!
Gina asks Roger her list of questions and as many others as she can think of. She learns that he’s not a student at all, but a graduate of an arts college with a degree in photography. He was a math minor.
“I took a lot of math classes because they’re easy for me, and they help with photography,” Roger explains. “But maybe you’d rather wait and get a real math major. That’s cool.” He sounds young, yet smart and friendly. Maybe someone Toby would look up to. A serious math student might not relate to Toby’s offbeat humor.
Roger agrees to meet Gina for an interview at the coffee cart outside the movie theater at the mall. Gina has already scoped out the area. It’s easy to find, and in a wide-open public area, yet it’s fairly quiet in the afternoons, after the lunch rush and before the movie rush.
“Great,” Gina says. “See you Thursday, then, at two.”
“I think I found a potential new math tutor for you,” Gina tells Toby that night over a supper of organic macaroni and cheese. “He sounds really nice.”
“I don’t want another tutor.”
“I know.”
“So I’m not going to meet him. Or her. Or whoever!”
“No, I am. His name is Roger. He’s a photographer.”
“Is he coming here?”
“No, I’m going to meet him on Thursday at two o’clock, while you’re at school. At the mall by the new theaters. He sounds like a really nice guy, Toby. A younger fellow. We’ll see. I need to talk to him first.”
“Right, like you’re going to ask him questions about math. You’re probably going to date him.”
Gina ignores Toby’s jab. “You’re going to ask him the math questions. I’m going to find out if he’s sure he wants to work with the world’s crankiest ten-year-old.”
As Gina approaches Toby’s room later that evening—tiptoeing by to see if he’s started his homework—she hears him talking to someone. She pauses in the hallway.
“You should beat it, jackass. My mom has a boyfriend. She has three boyfriends.”
Barefoot and light on her feet, Gina moves closer to the door.
“Yeah. Barry, Dr. Mackey, and this new guy, Roger.”
What on earth? Who is he talking to? She peeks into the room and sees that Toby is bent over his desk, conversing through his window to someone on the front porch. She ducks back and tiptoes to the front door to look through the peephole. Shane! He stands at the edge of the porch on crutches leaning over the jasmine toward Toby’s window. His right leg curls up behind him in a cast. When Gina called the hospital after Shane jumped off the roof, she wasn’t able to get any information. Patient privacy, the nurse said. They told Gin
a she should come down and see Shane to find out how he was doing. She certainly wasn’t going to do that. Two days later, she read the police report in the paper and learned that Shane was treated and eventually released. Altercation on Lone Pine Lane. It sounded to Gina like the name of a bad movie. No charges pressed. Thirty-five-year-old male. Satisfactory condition. She decided to go down to the police station and file that restraining order.
Now Gina grabs the phone from the kitchen and returns to Toby’s doorway.
“And she’s getting married,” Toby continues defiantly.
“Married?” Instead of anger, Gina hears disbelief in Shane’s voice. Sadness and remorse. Gina closes her eyes.
“Yeah, to Dr. Mackey.”
“Toby!” she hisses, trying to whisper. She doesn’t want Shane to know she’s home. Then she’ll have to call the cops and there will be another altercation. She doesn’t want her address to appear in the police beat in the newspaper more than once, thank you. With any luck, Toby’s heckling will drive Shane away.
“Who the hell is Dr. Mackey?” Shane’s voice gets louder. He’s been drinking.
Gina squeezes the telephone.
“He’s a doctor, that’s all,” Toby says.
“Cool.” Shane seems to be struggling to keep calm.
“Yeah, so she’s going to have to break it to these other guys that she’s marrying Dr. Mackey. But this Roger guy, he might give her a ring, too, and I don’t know what she’s gonna do then. He asked her out to the mall on Thursday and I’ll bet you anything he’s going to propose.”
“That’s cool. I’m cool with that. Which mall, bro?”
“Oakmont at two o’clock—”
Gina leaps into Toby’s room, stumbling when she steps on a pencil. She tackles Toby, grabbing him around his small waist and pulling him to the floor.
“I told you I don’t want another tutor,” he whispers into her face.
“Point taken,” Gina whispers back. “What is the matter with you?” The bottom of her foot burns from the pencil point. She checks to make sure the skin isn’t broken.
Toby rolls out of her grasp and lies on the floor on his back, his arms and legs outstretched. “What’s the matter with you?”
Gina waits for Shane to yell or pound on the door or God knows what. She’ll have to call the police. But then she hears Shane scrabble off the porch and the squish-slap of his crutches, then his sneaker hitting the walkway to the street. The sound fades and then a car door clicks shut and an engine turns over. Thank God: A cab or friend or someone is taking him away.
18
I’m really outside the Zone now, Ted thinks as he wolfs down biscuits with butter and honey at Kentucky Fried Chicken on his lunch hour. He’s come here two days in a row, skipping the chicken and coleslaw and just ordering biscuits—three of them and a carton of milk lined up on his little red plastic tray. Lately he craves carbohydrates: bagels and Frosted Flakes and Eskimo Pies. Certainly not flax. And not alcohol, thankfully. While he enjoys a nice Cabernet, he’s never been one to take comfort in booze. Instead he gets up in the middle of the night to eat cereal. He stands in the kitchen, which is dark except for the yellow glow of a night-light, and eats Cheerios with bananas and sugar. As he imagines folic acid and vitamin B12 seeping into his bloodstream, serotonin returning to his brain, he feels calm.
Now he splits and butters the second biscuit. It seems that he and Elinor are broken in a new way, with Elinor experiencing yet another variety of pain he can’t alleviate. Instead of collapsing on the floor at the OB’s office, he wishes he’d stood beside Elinor and held her hand. He’s a doctor, for chrissakes. He should be able to handle a poor prognosis. But there isn’t a whole lot of bad news in podiatry: ingrown toenails, a foot fungus, maybe a neuroma or hammertoes. The worst-case scenario is having to amputate a diabetic’s toe or toes. Nothing like the loss of a baby.
That’s why he chose podiatry. It seemed to have high odds for helping patients, with low odds for losing them. He didn’t know how oncologists did it, frankly. He’d freak if he lost a patient. Both Elinor and Gina tell him he’s sensitive. A nice way of saying wimp. If he were really sensitive, he never would have had an affair and hurt his wife.
Ted licks the insides of the last honey wrapper, not caring if anyone sees this slovenly act. He’s packing on the weight that Gina helped him lose. Eating to stave off the intense urge to crawl into her bed. This morning in line at the coffee shop, he found himself daydreaming about her. He recalled waking up in Gina’s room at five in the morning, the alarm on his cell phone chirping, her body curled in a fetal position, her butt pushed up and back against Ted’s waist, her long hair fanned across the pillow and sometimes in his face. He’d sit up and peek through the curtains by her bed at the predawn navy sky, still flecked with stars. Then he would lean over to watch Gina sleep. She always looked so peaceful; her brow never furrowed from troublesome dreams. He breathed in her China Rain perfume, remembering the day he learned the name of the stuff. He was in her bathroom after they’d had a glass of wine but before they’d made love and he was rifling through the little shelf hanging on the wall, looking for the bottle. He had to see and touch the container, to know what it was called. “What are you doing in there?” Gina had giggled outside the door. Ted let her in and confessed: He had to know about her perfume. She laughed and showed him the bottle, a little glass tube with a tiny roller ball, like deodorant, that she rubbed behind her ears and between her breasts and onto her wrists. In the mornings as he watched Gina sleep, he’d breathe in that sweet earthy smell. Finally, before getting up, he’d brush aside her hair and kiss her cheek and temple—two gentle kisses that felt like something he did for good luck, like throwing coins into a fountain.
At work, Ted starts making mistakes. Nothing major, but it isn’t like him. He forgets to phone in prescriptions, addresses an elderly gentleman as Mrs. Dawson. He shows up at the office one morning when he’s supposed to be at the hospital scrubbing up for surgery. As he’s whistling and shaking off his umbrella, the out-of-breath receptionist reports that his patient has been waiting in pre-op for forty-five minutes.
“Need some time off?” his partner Larry asks hopefully.
“Maybe,” Ted replies. “Think I should take Elinor somewhere nice?”
“Yeah. Go to Venice! It’s so romantic. You have to go before it sinks!” The urgency in Larry’s voice startles Ted, as though the water is rising right there in the office.
On his way home that night, Ted buys a travel book on Venice. He has it gift-wrapped, then picks up two steaks, potatoes, sugar snap peas, and bouquet of yellow roses. At home, he fixes Elinor dinner and puts the flowers and the book by her place setting.
Elinor unwraps the book, smoothing her hands over the cover, obviously trying to muster enthusiasm. “Oh, Venice, wow.”
“Let’s go,” Ted says. “That’s supposed to be the good part about not having kids. We get to travel.”
Elinor looks shyly at her plate. “Maybe we should save the money for a trip to a country where we can adopt a baby.”
“Oh. Okay.” Ted sets down his fork and knife. “Maybe.”
“You know,” she continues, “most complications are with domestic adoptions—when the birth mothers can legally change their minds. Maybe we just need to choose a foreign country.”
Most likely this would be a country with generations of people who have suffered from malnutrition and received poor medical care, Ted thinks. He doesn’t want to dampen Elinor’s spirits, but he’s not ready to transfer from the infertility treatment roller coaster to the international adoption roller coaster. He wants to stay on the ground for a while. But Elinor has already started clipping and collecting articles on adoption in a manila folder. Her manila folders make him nervous. They’re a sign that she wants to embark on something big.
“It won’t be a real vacation if we go to research adoption,” he argues. “It won’t be much of a break.”
Elinor cuts a
chunk of potato. “I don’t really want to take any more breaks,” she says softly. “I never feel like I’m getting anywhere when I’m taking a break.”
“Okay.” Ted tries to sound cheerful. “Let’s talk about it, okay?”
“Okay.” Elinor pats the book. “This is sweet. Thanks for the book.” She doesn’t seem to want to argue, either. In the past few days, they’ve gone out of their way to be kind to each other. Yet somehow they seem to be drifting apart, all the while maintaining a politeness you’d bestow on a co-worker or houseguest.
“You’re welcome,” Ted says. He has lost his appetite for the dinner.
G ELLISON, the caller ID says. Ted lurches across the desk in his study to grab the phone, afraid Elinor might pick it up.
“Um, hi,” Toby’s nasally voice croaks.
“Toby!” Ted feels a twinge of disappointment that it’s not Gina, followed by a rush of guilt. He grinds his knuckles into his desk, the pain clearing his head. “You can’t call—”
“My new tutor wondered if he could meet you and talk about my math.”
“You know I can’t do that. You can tell him what you’re working on.”
“See, I know, but he wants to talk to you. He said he can help me better if he talks to you.”
“Toby, I’m sorry, but Mrs. Mackey and I are going through a very difficult time right now and I can’t cause her any additional stress.”
“How does my math cause her stress?”
Ted hears the whine of the vacuum cleaner hitting the wood floors downstairs as Elinor moves through the house, cleaning. Carpet, then wood floor, then carpet again. Since she’s been feeling better, she’s been doing housework daily, even though they have that weird photographer kid coming in every other week to clean.
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