by Edan Lepucki
“Kit made thousands upon thousands of dollars off those photos, but every time she and I meet for lunch she insists on reviewing the bill, calculating exactly who owes what.”
“But the photo itself. What do you think?”
“Did you know she wouldn’t tell me when she was coming over to photograph me? She gave me a two-week window like some awful cable guy—she did that with all the women. She wanted us unprepared, and she wanted our apartments dirty. Next time you see her, ask her about YouTube videos. She loves when people do dance routines in front of dressers covered in junk. If there’s a kitchen counter in the background with a stick of deodorant on it, or, I don’t know, a car battery, she goes wild. I’m serious, clutter and grime turn her on.”
That was actually something Karl had said when he took me to coffee for the first time; his crudeness, I realized later, was an act, a way for him to show me he was on my side.
I had refused a dinner date with him. He was the artist’s brother, it was too weird. Besides, Kit had given him my personal information, which felt like a violation. In his email, Karl admitted the creep factor. He couldn’t help it, he said; he’d fallen for my image. “I purchased the photo before Kit’s show opened,” he wrote. “But that makes it worse, doesn’t it?” It did, and yet, I replied to his email, and four days and a string of correspondence later, I agreed to at least meet for coffee. I was conspiring to get the photo back; I hadn’t planned on falling for him.
“Lady?” S said.
“Sorry. Just thinking.” And then, because I saw that she was standing there, waiting as if for a compliment, I said, “I won’t show you the photo.”
Seth had been at school when Kit had taken it. And thank God, because it wasn’t until I started dressing for work that she even brought that big camera to her eye. She didn’t care about me watering my plants or how carefully I marinated the chicken for dinner. She wanted nudity and beauty rituals. She liked my pantyhose. “Those are great!” she cried when I pulled them from the dresser.
“It’s in Kit’s book,” S said.
“I realize that. I still won’t show it to you.”
“No, I mean…I own that book. I’ve already seen it.”
“You have?”
She nodded.
“And out of all those photos, you remember mine?”
“Not specifically,” she said quickly.
When Seth found out I’d given away his favorite Sea World towel set, he freaked out. I told him I had to get rid of the towels, that the towels had been cursed by that stupid photographer. But nothing I said helped; he was hurt, it was my fault.
“So, later on?” I asked S. “It’s your day off, so if you don’t want to spend time with me, you don’t have to.”
“You really meant it? You want to hang out later?”
“Unless you’re going back to your mom’s place. You should probably go see her.”
She shook her head. “She expects me to come, she’s hopeful.”
“But you aren’t going.”
“When I was a freshman at Cal, she badgered me for weeks to visit for spring break, and when I got here, she wasn’t there. She’d left with Frank—that’s her on-and-off-again boyfriend—for San Luis Obispo.”
“What’s in San Luis Obispo?”
“I don’t know, but I can tell you that I wasn’t.”
“When I was little, before my dad died, my mom would purposefully give him the wrong time to meet me, and when he didn’t show up I’d have to call her from a pay phone to pick me up.”
“She left you somewhere alone?”
I nodded. “At the Hamburger Hamlet—the one that used to be on Sunset?”
“Why didn’t he pick you up at your house?”
“My mother didn’t trust his driving.”
“Why not?”
“Because he used to sleep with other women in that car.” I let out a bark, which is the laugh of jaded women everywhere. “So anyway. Stay here this weekend. As revenge.”
She squinted. There was the promise of a wrinkle, its prequel, forming between her eyes, and I felt the urge to warn her. “Maybe,” she said.
15.
When I met Kit, Seth was fifteen and attending a private school called Greenhouse geared toward “alternative learners.” He was on scholarship. No one else was nonverbal, but there were a number of students who either couldn’t write (dysgraphia), or couldn’t stop writing (graphomania), and there was one girl who spoke in a squeaky Martian voice and was obsessed with ancient Egypt. She was otherwise normal; meaning, I suppose, that aside from the voice and the King Tut thing, she worried about her training bra and could write perfectly coherent essays about To Kill a Mockingbird. She and Seth hung out a lot, actually.
I’d spent the day before writing about Greenhouse; Anya had suggested I draft out of order and follow whatever inspired me. “We can organize it chronologically later,” she said. “Why not start with that amazing school of his?” So that’s what I did, and to my surprise it was easy to describe the principal’s office, with its beanbag chairs; a round table in lieu of a desk; and the young teachers from places like New Hampshire and Hawaii, who encouraged Seth to get into filmmaking and creative writing. They didn’t push math on him like so many experts of yore had. As if numbers were the consolation prize for those who couldn’t communicate. As if Seth couldn’t communicate.
And yet, even as I described all this and the pages piled up, I knew I was avoiding the more important stuff: the beginning, the painful parts. At the end of my first meeting with Joyce, she’d put her hands on my shoulders and said, “Don’t worry, Lady, you’re up for this. You’ll be able to capture the pain.” At that, I imagined a great big net, my pain caught inside of it like a shark, two hard cysts for eyes, and I nodded vigorously. But the truth was, I could write about Greenhouse until I died (graphomania indeed), and I wouldn’t even be touching that pain, let alone the net.
I needed to start from the beginning and write what my editor had asked for. That would get me closer to the pain, and I knew it. “Why is he silent?” Anya had asked. “When did you realize he wouldn’t speak?” I murmured like she’d posed something profound, when in fact those two questions were the most common. They were also unanswerable. How could I tell her that all I had were a few measly memories that I connected, however indirectly, however illogically, to my son’s silence? They were part of the gnarled web of his disability, but they didn’t untie it. If anything, they tangled it further. My pain was just that: pain. It wouldn’t explain or solve anything.
—
That first year. Seth ended it with just four teeth, two on top and two on the bottom, and for all of it, he didn’t sleep. Sometimes he lay awake in his crib, slapping the air at the mobile I had fashioned for him out of tinfoil, sea shells, and a wire hanger. Sometimes he sprawled on my stomach, sucking my knuckles, an empty bottle between his thighs. Devin cooed constantly his first year, but I don’t remember if Seth did; I wasn’t looking for a lack.
If I slept at all in those first twelve months it was wearily, my dreams flimsy and half-lucid, and almost always anxious: Seth falling into a campfire; Seth crawling into the road; Marco changing the locks and forgetting to tell us; Marco forgetting Seth’s name and mine. I often awoke abruptly on the couch next to Seth’s crib, my back compressed into a series of knots, Marco snoring from the bed across the room. Wherever Seth was, on me or in the crib, those big dark eyes of his were always open.
Seth was nine months old when Marco’s mother died. For the funeral I strapped the gingham carrier to my chest and bounced Seth up and down as they lowered his grandmother into the earth, my mouth on his head, hushing him quiet. A few of Marco’s mother’s friends made moony eyes at the two of us, but Marco didn’t bother to make introductions. He shuttled me and Seth into the car as soon as the service ended. I didn’t realize we weren’t driving to the reception until we were halfway home. “But Seth eats now,” I said, as if that had anything to do with
Marco’s decision.
At ten months, Seth was already ambling across the apartment like a drunk. Perhaps he walked early to make up for other, nonathletic, deficiencies. At the time, I thought he might be ahead of schedule on everything: he’d been born a week early; he was tall for his age; and now, look, he’d gone from tadpole to ape to human in no time. Talking, I presumed, was the next frontier, waiting to be conquered. It’s my presumptions that are most painful to recall.
Back then, Marco was still shutting himself into the bathroom to cry—or to vomit, that’s what it sounded like. Whenever Marco retched behind the closed door, Seth would cock his ear, listening. As I said, I was still expecting Seth to talk, and soon: if not in a few months, then within a year; soon he’d be speaking in complete sentences. If he could have spoken then, he might have said, Why Daddy still sad? I guess I was assuming his questions because I always said, “He just needs time, baby. More time.”
When Marco opened the bathroom door, his face waxen and ashy, Seth toddled toward him, arms up.
“Lady,” Marco would say, and I’d rush in to swoop Seth under my arm like a football.
Seth never cried over his dad’s subtle gesture of neglect, and neither did I. Marco was doing enough crying for everyone, and, anyway, grief was still a powerful excuse. Not just for his crying in the bathroom, or for his lack of interest in Seth, but also for his long trips to Vegas, not a single phone call, and for the time he told me my rust-colored blouse “looks like your period.” If I had laughed, he would have gotten angry, and so I smiled. Grief made him angry too.
Seth had been walking for just over a month when Marco quit working at the Bagel Broker. In the last year he’d increased his hours there, had even become a shift manager, but he said he just couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t stand smiling at the customers or picking cornmeal out of his fingernails every night, the funk of lox like a wicked cologne on his skin. That was all true, sure, but the real reason was that Marco expected to sell his mother’s house and live off the money.
I can imagine my own mother saying, “A smarter man would have investigated the state of her finances before depending on them,” and she would have been correct. Marco walked out in the middle of a shift, and the next day found out that his mother had been about to lose her Chatsworth shack to the bank when she died, her medical debt a mushroom cloud over the backyard’s straw-colored lawn and termite-infested garage. There’d be no money, only a house to clean out and papers to file. Upon learning the news, Marco punched a hole in the wall above our bed.
We needed money, and not only for rent. Now that Seth was walking, it was becoming difficult to bring him to the Actress’s house. She loved Seth, but she also loved her glass figurines.
The memory that’s stuck in my mind, and won’t let go, even seventeen years later, is from the day she and I catch Seth gnawing on her crystal candy bowl.
“Why don’t you look into getting a nanny?” she says, and I agree.
It’s been a long afternoon, filled with phone calls and door-answering, all the while shadowing Seth to make sure he doesn’t bother the Actress. Her colonoscopy is scheduled for the next morning, and her nerves are, as she says, “fringed like an Indian’s moccasins.” At five, I kiss the Actress on the cheek and hurry with Seth to the car, eager to be home, to be done with it all.
By the time I find a parking spot three blocks from our building, I’m so hungry my stomach is sucking itself like a straw. My eyes burn with lack of sleep. If I could eat a hoagie in bed, I would. But I can’t do that: Seth must be fed and bathed and rocked and hushed before I can even fantasize about a sandwich. And a fantasy it will remain because there’s never any bread in the house.
I am holding Seth on my hip because if I let him walk from the car to the apartment, he might decide suddenly to run in the opposite direction, and I don’t have the energy to chase him. On the walk into our building, I accidentally pinch him in my attempt to keep him from wriggling out of my arms, and he cries into my shoulder. “Baby, baby,” I say, over and over again as I let him into the building.
Now we’re in its long hallway, which always smells of hair spray and fried food. Someone is yelling in Armenian.
Even from here, I can hear the music playing from our apartment, loud and raucous; it’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” By the time we reach our door, I can make out Marco singing along; the sound of his voice, scratchy and vulnerable, makes me smile. I am still in love with Marco, despite his meanness and the way he fails to acknowledge Seth. I can’t help it. The night before, Marco pulled me from the couch and into our bed, and after going down on me until I whispered Good, good, good, he sighed his pussy-stink breath into my face and said “Good night” so sweetly my eyes got hot with tears. I love him. I consider tattooing I want to be your dog on my wrist.
“Do you hear Daddy?” I say to Seth, and he nods.
I unlock the door. The music is so loud it feels as if we’ve stepped inside a chainsaw. Seth’s squirming in my arms, his hands are on his ears now, and he’s wrinkling his face, in disgust or discomfort, I don’t know. But when Marco walks into the room from the kitchen, Seth drops his hands, straightens his posture. Is he trying to be brave for his father? Maybe just tolerant.
“Hey,” Marco yells.
I put Seth down and he runs into the bathroom.
Marco looks confused.
“The music,” I call out. I walk over to the record player and lift the needle. All at once the apartment drops into silence.
“Really?”
“Sorry,” I say.
Seth’s standing in the bathroom doorway with a cloud of toilet paper in his arms.
“Fuck!” Marco yells.
“Marco,” I whisper.
“That was our last roll. Fuck.”
I gently remove the toilet paper from Seth’s arms and begin to wind it around my palm. “We can still use it,” I say.
Marco lets out a big whoosh of air and runs a hand through his hair. “Okay, yeah. That’s true.” And then he winces. “Are your hands clean?”
Instead of replying, I carefully remove the toilet paper and step into the bathroom to set it down. “Come on, Seth,” I say, heading toward the kitchen, “let’s eat a sweet potato.” (I too will eat a sweet potato for dinner.)
“Lady,” Marco says, and grabs for my hand as I pass.
“If you require more pristine toilet paper,” I say, “you’ll have to go out and buy it. With whatever money is left in your bank account.”
“Wow, aren’t you being a bitch.” He releases my hand. I look at Seth to see if he’s listening. He is; his eyes are on his father.
“You’re going to have to stay with Seth tomorrow while I’m at work,” I say. “I can’t bring him with me anymore.”
“So that’s what’s got you in a pissy mood.”
“Can you do it?”
He pauses. “Sure. Yeah.”
And then he leans forward and puts a hand on Seth’s cheek. He hasn’t done that since the day Seth was born. “Right, Seth?” he says. “Us boys are gonna hang?”
It’s supposed to feel good, this moment when my lover claims my child as his. And it does, it does. I think: We are finally a family. I think: Grief hasn’t swallowed Marco. Or: Grief did swallow him, but he was spit back out again as a better man.
But then Seth points to the kitchen. And then he opens his mouth. And he speaks.
“There,” he says.
There, there, there, there. I say that word to myself sometimes.
I let out a shriek. “His first word! Yay, Seth! Yay!”
“Really?” Marco says. “He hasn’t done that before?”
I shake my head, and we both look at Seth, who has gone silent again. It’s like he lifted the record player needle inside of himself.
“There!” I say. “There is where dinner is! Right, Sethy, right!”
I whisk him into the kitchen. Already I am imagining what other words he might say, and even, how he might say
them the next day, when he’s with Marco. With his daddy. With his daddy’s hand resting on his cheek.
Before I fall asleep that night, I curl into Marco and whisper, “Everything’s going to be all right,” and Marco says, “Yep.” The headlights from a passing car slide across the ceiling and disappear.
This memory is mostly good. It ends happily, even if it showcases my presumptions about Seth, and emphasizes my naïveté, my willing suspension of disbelief, regarding Marco. I really thought Seth had started talking, and I really thought Marco had turned tender.
It hurts because nothing turned out the way I thought it would. You think you know how a story begins, or how it’s going to turn out, especially when it’s your own. You don’t.
There, there. So there.
16.
Seth texted to say he was going to Kit’s and wouldn’t be home until late. I didn’t reply for an hour, and when I did all I wrote was the letter K. I imagined them roasting marshmallows over Kit’s backyard fire pit, Devin bouncing on Karl’s lap and Seth leaning into the flames until Kit yelled at him to be careful. Devin would ask for one more marshmallow, and then another. Karl would give him five, maybe six, before restraining himself.
I was surprised by how much I missed Devin. I ached for him in the way I used to ache for Seth when he was a baby. I imagined Devin’s wispy blond hair and his chubby legs, the way the toilet imprinted arcs across his thighs after a good effort to poop on the potty like a big boy. The space between his chin and his neck smelled like the inside of a cereal box and I loved the way he kissed me: openmouthed, slobbery as a dog. His lips were the color of raspberries. I wanted him back.
Maybe this was why I’d let Karl take our kid for the weekend, so that I could remember what longing felt like.
When the sun began to descend, I heard the back door slide open and S calling my name.
“Be right down,” I yelled. I’d been going over my pages, as if rereading them would do any good. I’d also showered and put on the long white linen dress I’d worn on my honeymoon. It had been the three of us in Hawaii: Karl, Seth, and me—or four of us if you count Devin’s cells already multiplying inside of me. We’d spent our days on the beach, building elaborate sand castles and running in and out of the water. The dress still smelled like that trip, like ocean and sunscreen. I never washed it.