by Lorrie Moore
The Husband leans forward. “But don’t you think that now that we have the upper hand with this thing, we should keep going? Shouldn’t we stomp on it, beat it, smash it to death with the chemo?”
The Mother swats him angrily and hard. “Honey, you’re delirious!” She whispers, but it comes out as a hiss. “This is our lucky break!” Then she adds gently, “We don’t want the Baby to have chemo.”
The Husband turns back to the Oncologist. “What do you think?”
“It could be,” he says, shrugging. “It could be that this is your lucky break. But you won’t know for sure for five years.”
The Husband turns back to the Mother. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
The Baby grows happier and strong. He begins to move and sit and eat. Wednesday morning, they are allowed to leave, and leave without chemo. The Oncologist looks a little nervous. “Are you nervous about this?” asks the Mother.
“Of course I’m nervous.” But he shrugs and doesn’t look that nervous. “See you in six weeks for the ultrasound,” he says, waves and then leaves, looking at his big black shoes as he does.
The Baby smiles, even toddles around a little, the sun bursting through the clouds, an angel chorus crescendoing. Nurses arrive. The Hickman is taken out of the Baby’s neck and chest; antibiotic lotion is dispensed. The Mother packs up their bags. The Baby sucks on a bottle of juice and does not cry.
“No chemo?” says one of the nurses. “Not even a little chemo?”
“We’re doing watch and wait,” says the Mother.
The other parents look envious but concerned. They have never seen any child get out of there with his hair and white blood cells intact.
“Will you be okay?” asks Ned’s mother.
“The worry’s going to kill us,” says the Husband.
“But if all we have to do is worry,” chides the Mother, “every day for a hundred years, it’ll be easy. It’ll be nothing. I’ll take all the worry in the world, if it wards off the thing itself.”
“That’s right,” says Ned’s mother. “Compared to everything else, compared to all the actual events, the worry is nothing.”
The Husband shakes his head. “I’m such an amateur,” he moans.
“You’re both doing admirably,” says the other mother. “Your baby’s lucky, and I wish you all the best.”
The Husband shakes her hand warmly. “Thank you,” he says. “You’ve been wonderful.”
Another mother, the mother of Eric, comes up to them. “It’s all very hard,” she says, her head cocked to one side. “But there’s a lot of collateral beauty along the way.”
Collateral beauty? Who is entitled to such a thing? A child is ill. No one is entitled to any collateral beauty!
“Thank you,” says the Husband.
Joey’s father, Frank, comes up and embraces them both. “It’s a journey,” he says. He chucks the Baby on the chin. “Good luck, little man.”
“Yes, thank you so much,” says the Mother. “We hope things go well with Joey.” She knows that Joey had a hard, terrible night.
Frank shrugs and steps back. “Gotta go,” he says. “Good-bye!”
“Bye,” she says, and then he is gone. She bites the inside of her lip, a bit tearily, then bends down to pick up the diaper bag, which is now stuffed with little animals; helium balloons are tied to its zipper. Shouldering the thing, the Mother feels she has just won a prize. All the parents have now vanished down the hall in the opposite direction. The Husband moves close. With one arm, he takes the Baby from her; with the other, he rubs her back. He can see she is starting to get weepy.
“Aren’t these people nice? Don’t you feel better hearing about their lives?” he asks.
Why does he do this, form clubs all the time; why does even this society of suffering soothe him? When it comes to death and dying, perhaps someone in this family ought to be more of a snob.
“All these nice people with their brave stories,” he continues as they make their way toward the elevator bank, waving good-bye to the nursing staff as they go, even the Baby waving shyly. Bye-bye! Bye-bye! “Don’t you feel consoled, knowing we’re all in the same boat, that we’re all in this together?”
But who on earth would want to be in this boat? the Mother thinks. This boat is a nightmare boat. Look where it goes: to a silver-and-white room, where, just before your eyesight and hearing and your ability to touch or be touched disappear entirely, you must watch your child die.
Rope! Bring on the rope.
“Let’s make our own way,” says the Mother, “and not in this boat.”
Woman Overboard! She takes the Baby back from the Husband, cups the Baby’s cheek in her hand, kisses his brow and then, quickly, his flowery mouth. The Baby’s heart—she can hear it—drums with life. “For as long as I live,” says the Mother, pressing the elevator button—up or down, everyone in the end has to leave this way—“I never want to see any of these people again.”
There are the notes.
Now where is the money?
TERRIFIC MOTHER
Although she had been around them her whole life, it was when she reached thirty-five that holding babies seemed to make her nervous—just at the beginning, a twinge of stage fright swinging up from the gut. “Adrienne, would you like to hold the baby? Would you mind?” Always these words from a woman her age looking kind and beseeching—a former friend, she was losing her friends to babble and beseech—and Adrienne would force herself to breathe deep. Holding a baby was no longer natural—she was no longer natural—but a test of womanliness and earthly skills. She was being observed. People looked to see how she would do it. She had entered a puritanical decade, a demographic moment—whatever it was—when the best compliment you could get was, “You would make a terrific mother.” The wolf whistle of the nineties.
So when she was at the Spearsons’ Labor Day picnic, and when Sally Spearson handed her the baby, Adrienne had burbled at it as she would a pet, had jostled the child gently, made clicking noises with her tongue, affectionately cooing, “Hello, punkinhead, hello, my little punkinhead,” had reached to shoo a fly away and, amid the smells of old grass and the fatty crackle of the barbecue, lost her balance when the picnic bench, the dowels rotting in the joints, wobbled and began to topple her—the bench, the wobbly picnic bench, was toppling her! And when she fell backward, wrenching her spine—in the slowed quickness of this flipping world, she saw the clayey clouds, some frozen faces, one lone star like the nose of a jet—and when the baby’s head hit the stone retaining wall of the Spearsons’ newly terraced yard and bled fatally into the brain, Adrienne went home shortly thereafter, after the hospital and the police reports, and did not leave her attic apartment for seven months, and there were fears, deep fears for her, on the part of Martin Porter, the man she had been dating, and on the part of almost everyone, including Sally Spearson, who phoned tearfully to say that she forgave her, that Adrienne might never come out.
Martin Porter usually visited her bringing a pepper cheese or a Casbah couscous cup; he had become her only friend. He was divorced and worked as a research economist, though he looked more like a Scottish lumberjack—graying hair, red-flecked beard, a favorite flannel shirt in green and gold. He was getting ready to take a trip abroad. “We could get married,” he suggested. That way, he said, Adrienne could accompany him to northern Italy, to a villa in the Alps set up for scholars and academic conferences. She could be a spouse. They gave spouses studios to work in. Some studios had pianos. Some had desks or potter’s wheels. “You can do whatever you want.” He was finishing the second draft of a study of First World imperialism’s impact on Third World monetary systems. “You could paint. Or not. You could not paint.”
She looked at him closely, hungrily, then turned away. She still felt clumsy and big, a beefy killer in a cage, in need of the thinning prison food. “You love me, don’t you,” she said. She had spent the better part of seven months napping in a leotard, an electric fan blowing at her,
her left ear catching the wind, capturing it there in her head, like the sad sea in a shell. She felt clammy and doomed. “Or do you just feel sorry for me?” She swatted at a small swarm of gnats that had appeared suddenly out of an abandoned can of Coke.
“I don’t feel sorry for you.”
“You don’t?”
“I feel for you. I’ve grown to love you. We’re grown-ups here. One grows to do things.” He was a practical man. He often referred to the annual departmental cocktail party as “Standing Around Getting Paid.”
“I don’t think, Martin, that we can get married.”
“Of course we can get married.” He unbuttoned his cuffs as if to roll up his sleeves.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “Normal life is no longer possible for me. I’ve stepped off all the normal paths and am living in the bushes. I’m a bushwoman now. I don’t feel like I can have the normal things. Marriage is a normal thing. You need the normal courtship, the normal proposal.” She couldn’t think what else. Water burned her eyes. She waved a hand dismissively, and it passed through her field of vision like something murderous and huge.
“Normal courtship, normal proposal,” Martin said. He took off his shirt and pants and shoes. He lay on the bed in just his socks and underwear and pressed the length of his body against her. “I’m going to marry you, whether you like it or not.” He took her face into his hands and looked longingly at her mouth. “I’m going to marry you till you puke.”
They were met at Malpensa by a driver who spoke little English but who held up a sign that said VILLA HIRSCHBORN, and when Adrienne and Martin approached him, he nodded and said, “Hello, buongiorno. Signor Porter?” The drive to the villa took two hours, uphill and down, through the countryside and several small villages, but it wasn’t until the driver pulled up to the precipitous hill he called “La Madre Vertiginoso,” and the villa’s iron gates somehow opened automatically, then closed behind them, it wasn’t until then, winding up the drive past the spectacular gardens and the sunny vineyard and the terraces of the stucco outbuildings, that it occurred to Adrienne that Martin’s being invited here was a great honor. He had won this thing, and he got to live here for a month.
“Does this feel like a honeymoon?” she asked him.
“A what? Oh, a honeymoon. Yes.” He turned and patted her thigh indifferently.
He was jet-lagged. That was it. She smoothed her skirt, which was wrinkled and damp. “Yes, I can see us growing old together,” she said, squeezing his hand. “In the next few weeks, in fact.” If she ever got married again, she would do it right: the awkward ceremony, the embarrassing relatives, the cumbersome, ecologically unsound gifts. She and Martin had simply gone to city hall, and then asked their family and friends not to send presents but to donate money to Greenpeace. Now, however, as they slowed before the squashed-nosed stone lions at the entrance of the villa, its perfect border of forget-me-nots and yews, its sparkling glass door, Adrienne gasped. Whales, she thought quickly. Whales got my crystal.
The upstairs “Principessa” room, which they were ushered into by a graceful bilingual butler named Carlo, was elegant and huge—a piano, a large bed, dressers stenciled with festooning fruits. There was maid service twice a day, said Carlo. There were sugar wafers, towels, mineral water, and mints. There was dinner at eight, breakfast until nine. When Carlo bowed and departed, Martin kicked off his shoes and sank into the ancient tapestried chaise. “I’ve heard these ‘fake’ Quattrocento paintings on the wall are fake for tax purposes only,” he whispered. “If you know what I mean.”
“Really,” said Adrienne. She felt like one of the workers taking over the Winter Palace. Her own voice sounded booming. “You know, Mussolini was captured around here. Think about it.”
Martin looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“That he was around here. That they captured him. I don’t know. I was reading the little book on it. Leave me alone.” She flopped down on the bed. Martin was changing already. He’d been better when they were just dating, with the pepper cheese. She let her face fall deep into the pillow, her mouth hanging open like a dog’s, and then she slept until six, dreaming that a baby was in her arms but that it turned into a stack of plates, which she had to juggle, tossing them into the air.
A loud sound awoke her—a falling suitcase. Everyone had to dress for dinner, and Martin was yanking things out, groaning his way into a jacket and tie. Adrienne got up, bathed, and put on panty hose, which, because it had been months since she had done so, twisted around her leg like the stripe on a barber pole.
“You’re walking as if you’d torn a ligament,” said Martin, locking the door to their room as they were leaving.
Adrienne pulled at the knees of the hose but couldn’t make them work. “Tell me you like my skirt, Martin, or I’m going to have to go back in and never come out again.”
“I like your skirt. It’s great. You’re great. I’m great,” he said, like a conjugation. He took her arm and they limped their way down the curved staircase—Was it sweeping? Yes! It was sweeping!—to the dining room, where Carlo ushered them in to find their places at the table. The seating arrangement at the tables would change nightly, Carlo said in a clipped Italian accent, “to assist the cross-pollination of ideas.”
“Excuse me?” said Adrienne.
There were about thirty-five people, all of them middle-aged, with the academic’s strange mixed expression of merriment and weariness. “A cross between flirtation and a fender bender,” Martin had described it once. Adrienne’s place was at the opposite side of the room from him, between a historian writing a book on a monk named Jaocim de Flore and a musicologist who had devoted his life to a quest for “the earnest andante.” Everyone sat in elaborate wooden chairs, the backs of which were carved with gargoylish heads that poked up from behind either shoulder of the sitter, like a warning.
“De Flore,” said Adrienne, at a loss, turning from her carpaccio to the monk man. “Doesn’t that mean ‘of the flower’?” She had recently learned that disaster meant “bad star,” and she was looking for an opportunity to brandish and bronze this tidbit in conversation.
The monk man looked at her. “Are you one of the spouses?”
“Yes,” she said. She looked down, then back up. “But then, so is my husband.”
“You’re not a screenwriter, are you?”
“No,” she said. “I’m a painter. Actually, more of a print-maker. Actually, more of a—right now I’m in transition.”
He nodded and dug back into his food. “I’m always afraid they’re going to start letting screenwriters in here.”
There was an arugula salad, and osso buco for the main course. She turned now to the musicologist. “So you usually find them insincere? The andantes?” She looked quickly out over the other heads to give Martin a fake and girlish wave.
“It’s the use of the minor seventh,” muttered the musicologist. “So fraudulent and replete.”
“If the food wasn’t so good, I’d leave now,” she said to Martin. They were lying in bed, in their carpeted skating rink of a room. It could be weeks, she knew, before they’d have sex here. “ ‘So fraudulent and replete,’ ” she said in a high nasal voice, the likes of which Martin had heard only once before, in a departmental meeting chaired by an embittered interim chair who did imitations of colleagues not in the room. “Can you even use the word replete like that?”
“As soon as you get settled in your studio, you’ll feel better,” said Martin, beginning to fade. He groped under the covers to find her hand and clasp it.
“I want a divorce,” whispered Adrienne.
“I’m not giving you one,” he said, bringing her hand up to his chest and placing it there, like a medallion, like a necklace of sleep, and then he began softly to snore, the quietest of radiators.
They were given bagged lunches and told to work well. Martin’s studio was a modern glass cube in the middle of one of the gardens. Adrienne’s was a musty stone hut
twenty minutes farther up the hill and out onto the wooded headland, along a dirt path sunned on by small darting lizards. She unlocked the door with the key she had been given, went in, and immediately sat down and ate the entire bagged lunch—quickly, compulsively, though it was only 9:30 in the morning. Two apples, some cheese, and a jam sandwich. “A jelly bread,” she said aloud, holding up the sandwich, scrutinizing it under the light.
She set her sketch pad on the worktable and began a morning full of killing spiders and drawing their squashed and tragic bodies. The spiders were star-shaped, hairy, and scuttling like crabs. They were fallen stars. Bad stars. They were earth’s animal try at heaven. Often she had to step on them twice—they were large and ran fast. Stepping on them once usually just made them run faster.
It was the careless universe’s work she was performing, death itchy and about like a cop. Her personal fund of mercy for the living was going to get used up in dinner conversation at the villa. She had no compassion to spare, only a pencil and a shoe.
“Art trouvé?” said Martin, toweling himself dry from his shower as they dressed for the evening cocktail hour.
“Spider trouvé,” she said. “A delicate, aboriginal dish.” Martin let out a howling laugh that alarmed her. She looked at him, then looked down at her shoes. He needed her. Tomorrow, she would have to go down into town and find a pair of sexy Italian sandals that showed the cleavage of her toes. She would have to take him dancing. They would have to hold each other and lead each other back to love or they’d go nuts here. They’d grow mocking and arch and violent. One of them would stick a foot out, and the other would trip. That sort of thing.
At dinner, she sat next to a medievalist who had just finished his sixth book on the Canterbury Tales.
“Sixth,” repeated Adrienne.
“There’s a lot there,” he said defensively.
“I’m sure,” she said.