He’d just turned four years old, one of those birthdays where we along with him were suddenly older. Charlie had avoided gaining too much weight while she was pregnant (even though I told her that it didn’t matter, that she should be eating double whatever she wanted because it was what Haim wanted too) but it’d been a long, difficult delivery, and she’d lost a lot of blood and was confined to bed for several weeks afterward and then extreme caution for months after that, during which time her curves became fuller, and small rises of fat began collecting at her lower abdomen, arms, and thighs. This had seemed a gentler body, one suited for the mothering of an infant. Now, though, in Haim’s fourth year something had made her decide to regain, as much as she could, the body of her own youth. She found a gym that had a good daycare, and, at about this time, began talking to me about what we should do next, in terms of me teaching high school or doing any of the things I’d promised to try if writing didn’t work out. By this, our fifth year in Iowa, I’d been out of the masters program for as long as I’d ever been in it, and, in both Charlie’s and my mind, the luminous encouragement and private assertions of confidence the faculty had once confided in me had faded, until it almost felt like I’d dreamt them. Charlie made a modest salary as an assistant in a law office, and I had a small stipend teaching Comp 101 at the university, but we were still depending on money from my mother, which shamed us both.
Charlie’s body had, by the day of the parade, tightened and streamlined into an attractiveness that owed more to fitness than out-and-out sexuality. We were thirty years old, and I marveled at how her legs, bent in my periphery during sex, had completely changed, become slender, thin, graced with toned muscle instead of the full curves of her college years, as if this were an entirely different person than I’d first slept with. Her skin, which once seemed to lag behind her in the aging process, blushing smoothly with the cherubic health of a child, now seemed to have gotten ahead of her, and, standing there as the music of the marching bands approached, I could see again how in certain lights it seemed thin and almost grayish, the small fingers of red spreading over her cheeks sharp-edged with capillaries in the cool air.
As the floats and squads from the local baton-twirling studio passed along, I had been distracted by a small boy in front of us, sitting calmly on his father’s shoulders, watching the parade with what seemed like an intelligent reticence. Every once in a while, he’d reach out and pat the top of his father’s hair lightly, as if to say thank you. Haim was in and out of our sight, Charlie doing an awkward side-step thing along the back of the crowd to keep an eye on him as he moved. I could see some of the other parents eye the crowd in the direction he’d rocketed from, looking for someone to give the disapproving glance to, looking for me. Finally Haim came back to us and watched, leaning backward against Charlie’s legs.
When the drunken middle-aged alumnus, leaning out from the top of a passing papier-mâché “hawk’s nest” and wearing a black and gold jester’s hat, threw the necklace of beads toward the crowd I saw it falling directly to me against the blank gray sky, and I reached up and caught it. The beads, I could see now, were actually tiny plastic black and gold football helmets. I can only guess that I must’ve forgotten that Haim was back with us, or maybe that I assumed that by then he’d run off again because, in a daze, I reached up to where the small boy perched, where he was turning to see who had caught the prize, and gave it to him.
I looked down at the sound of Haim’s wail. For a moment he wasn’t even crying yet, just looking up at me in shock and betrayal.
“For Christ’s sake,” Charlie said, picking him up and looking at me. “Really? Really?”
Sometime around the middle of Haim’s second year, something had changed. He would only let Charlie help him with his food, only let Charlie put him to bed at night. He began to follow her around the house, and screamed and screamed when she left for work. As she cooked dinner, he would stand, leaning against the side of her leg, turning the thick pages of one of the picture books silently, occasionally glancing up at her, as if to make sure she had not disappeared when he was not looking.
This was also around the time we began to understand his mind, what gifts he had inherited straight from Charlie. The only thing he would do with me (and then only if I faux-pleaded) was to let me watch him turn the pages of one of his books. Charlie and I had also begun noticing right about this time that Haim seemed to have, without any real help from us, intuited the alphabet, and was beginning to read. It was small words at first, but then when he added larger ones they were all the words that were supposed to be the hardest, the ones not spelled phonetically. He loved books, and would carry stacks of them around to wherever he was playing in the house. Charlie had worked with number cards when she was little and so she decided to try this with him, and by the time we were planning his third birthday party he could do simple addition operations with single-digit numbers. Our daycare reported that Haim cried from the moment I dropped him off until the moment Charlie picked him up, with only a few breaks for sips of water in between. His face became red, dry, and chafed. Charlie decided to cut back on her hours at the law firm in order to stay home with him more. She couldn’t stand the thought of him toddling around ready to learn with no one there willing to teach him.
On the night after his fourth birthday party Haim had woken up crying, and wouldn’t stop until Charlie came in, even though I’d gotten up to see to him, and wouldn’t calm down enough to tell her what happened until I left the room. I stood in the hallway while Charlie talked him down. He’d had a nightmare.
“Daddy’s gonna, daddy’s gonna leave me all alone,” he said, with barely enough breath. “He’s gonna leave me and replace me with a different boy.”
“Why would you say that? Don’t say that honey,” Charlie said, rubbing tiny circles on his back. “Daddy loves you very, very much. Daddy would never, ever leave you.”
“I dreamed it,” Haim insisted. “It’s gonna be true.”
“Well, I’ve known Daddy a really, really long time, and he’s never left anybody,” my wife said. “So I know he won’t leave you. You’re his favorite. What kind of boy could ever replace you?”
“It was, it was a robot boy,” Haim sniffled. “Except it—except you can’t tell, because they look, they look like—they look the same.”
“No, baby,” Charlie said. “Robot boys aren’t real, and Daddy wouldn’t trade anything for you.”
Haim shook his head.
“You watch,” he said. “You watch.”
After that we’d made a deal with Haim, made a goal of one whole day with no crying. We would try to make sure we were doing things where he felt comfortable, things that didn’t make him feel afraid or anxious, and he would try to be a little calmer. Charlie even took him to work one day at the office, and he wrote quietly on papers spread out on the floor behind her desk, filling page after page with the scrawled numbers he was just learning. The homecoming parade had been the closest we’d come to a cry-free day.
In the car on the way to the restaurant after the parade was over, I was thinking about the way the whole world seemed to be on the verge of great change—the fields into the winter anonymity of snow, Haim into a prodigy, premature school-goer with an acute self-awareness, a separate person from us, the qualities currently in concentrated miniature ready to swell, gain volume like one of his tiny plastic dinosaurs that, left for an hour in water, was suddenly too big for the bowl; its terrible, squishy body somehow all contained there in its condensed beginning. I was thinking about how strange it is that you can’t really see even two or three years into the future. That you go through each of your days having no idea toward which sadness you are headed.
“Why should I have to guess at what you’re upset about?” Charlie was saying in the passenger seat. We were continuing the argument that had begun in the parking garage after the parade, in which we’d cursed at each other in the few seconds when Haim was settled in his car seat in the b
ack and we’d closed the doors before getting in the front. (“We should talk about this,” I said. “Why, so you can go on telling me why it’s OK that you’re such an asshole?” Charlie had hissed over the top of the car. “You can go fuck yourself,” I’d hissed back, and grabbed open the driver’s side door.) Now she said, “Why can’t you just tell me?”
“What I’m upset about,” I said, “is that you have to ask. That’s the whole thing you’re failing at; that’s what empathy is. You’re supposed to imagine yourself in my emotional position in a real enough way to not only know what it is I’m upset about, but to anticipate it. And I shouldn’t be having to explain this to you.”
“Oh, is that what empathy is?” Charlie said, and sighed.
“Jeddey, jetty, jedi,” Haim said. He was just getting into the Star Wars movies, and liked to try to say the harder words over and over again to himself. Despite his intelligence, it seemed his speech development had been skipped over in the hurry, and he often had trouble.
We were quiet for a minute.
We slowed to a stop in a long line of traffic, and Charlie put her hand over mine on the knob of the gearshift. “I don’t want to be angry,” she said.
And isn’t this what we wanted? Hadn’t this been the plan? We’d talked and talked about having a baby those first months in Iowa. It had seemed like a crazy idea at the time, but then at the end of one long argument about it, Charlie had sat down on the couch and cried, her shoulders heaving, trying to turn in on themselves. When she calmed down enough to speak she talked about her various failures: in being the concert pianist her early instructors had wanted her to be; in finding the mathematical proofs whose moving pieces she could no longer all hold in her head at the same time; in being a happy, well-adjusted wife. At the time, she’d just gotten the job at the law firm, which handled only family law, and spent most of her day filing, copying, and talking on the phone to confused, enraged women and men who had just been served divorce papers, or watched their children be taken from their own home.
“And maybe I’m just not one of those people who can find in a career the kind of meaning that can sustain a life,” she said that night of the decision, her face drawn from crying. “I just think, I just really think that maybe I’m supposed to find meaning in something else—that maybe what I’ll be really good at will be loving our little kid. I can feel that. I just know it’s true in my heart.”
For weeks I said I didn’t know; I talked about how we didn’t have any money, how if we had a kid now we’d have to take money from my mother for a long time. I talked about how much we fought, how we weren’t quite ready, and Charlie listened but then she said, “I think this is one of those things where you’re never quite ready. Where the only way you learn how to have a kid is by having one. You figure it out as you go, I think. For instance, I think we’d fight less if I was pregnant. I think we wouldn’t want to fight. I think we’d be better people because that is what our lives would require of us.”
And she wasn’t wrong, really. We had only the one bad fight while she was pregnant, and never argued at all while Haim was a baby. It was only in the middle of his second year, when he started to resemble a separate person, no longer our little ball of love and chubby rolls, that we began to fight again.
There was only one time that I doubted anything in those years. Charlie was five months pregnant, and going through a phase where she was so fatigued, she climbed into bed at about six p.m. and slept through the night. Usually, I lay with her for an hour or two because she said this was the only way she could fall asleep. It was a Saturday, though, and I had been invited to a party thrown by my fellow students in the masters program. It was at seven thirty, and after ten or so minutes of lying still with Charlie, I got up. I felt anxious. I wanted to take a shower and get ready.
“What are you doing?” she said, and I told her. She didn’t say anything after that.
The party was in an old, warm house. A cool drizzle had begun to fall in the twilight as I pulled in. Inside the front room a couple amps and an electric organ were set up and a few of my colleagues were playing together. In the kitchen a group of women were pouring bottles of alcohol into a pot on the stove, making something they called “blood.”
After about an hour I texted Charlie. I was thinking that I wished she was there with me. There was something refreshing about the way these new people looked at her, about knowing they were looking at her and not seeing Attica and all that had happened there.
What are you up to? I sent her, hoping she was still awake.
After a few minutes she texted back. I’ve packed, it said. By the time you get back, I’ll be gone.
I suppose I should have thought she was joking, should have paused at the unbelievable, melodramatic way she was doing this. But a few weeks earlier, Charlie had come home and not been able to recognize my face.
“It’s different somehow,” she’d said, looking at me almost with wonder. “It’s like, you don’t look like you. Or you do, but just not you you.”
“It’s like,” she said later, “imagine if you had an identical twin. You look like your own twin, if that makes any sense. I know it’s you, but for some reason it doesn’t feel like you. Like you’re an impostor of yourself.”
This kind of dissociation had happened once before, in Attica, right before everything fell apart. Back then I was obsessed with the medical implications, an official cause, maybe Capgras Syndrome. Then, when everything happened there, I spent days wondering if my wife was schizophrenic, if she had some kind of early-onset dementia, if maybe even she’d had some kind of traumatic brain injury years ago without knowing it. But by the time it happened again, by the time Charlie was saying this pregnant, I understood that she was not sick, that there was nothing actually wrong with her. This was not dissociation, I thought, standing in the bathroom door, watching her watch me. This is the imitation, subconscious or not, of dissociation, of delusion. Just as back then her wandering down the shoulder of the highway had been, this was Charlie getting scared, and attempting to leave me.
That was three weeks before the party. Then I got the text. I’ve packed, it said. By the time you get back, I’ll be gone. I wasn’t even surprised, just ill. I stepped outside of the crowded kitchen, into what was now a steady rain.
“Where are you?” I said into the phone. “Tell me where you are, and we’ll talk about this.”
“No more talking,” Charlie said. “I have nothing more to say.”
“Come on,” I said. “Just come back home, I’m going to my car now, I’ll come back and we’ll talk about it.”
“I don’t want you to try and bully me out of it,” Charlie said. “I’ve decided.”
The wife of the poet who was hosting the party stuck her head out of the back door.
“Come in, come in!” she called. “You’re getting all wet!”
I waved to her that I was OK.
“I won’t try to talk you out of anything,” I said. “I just want to see you.”
Charlie didn’t say anything. There was the sound of children laughing. Until that moment I’d thought she was bluffing, was sitting in our bedroom, the suitcase open dramatically beside her.
“Come on, Charlie,” I said. “If we sit down and see each other just for a few minutes before you go it’s one thing. If you leave like this, via, via text message and a phone call, it’s something else.”
Through a side window I could see one of my classmates playing guitar, his eyes closed, face gesturing with the emotion of the riff.
“I was very angry when you left,” Charlie said after a while. “When you get back home go inside and see if you still want to talk.”
Back at the house, her closet was emptied out, her suitcases and car gone. I thought she might’ve broken my laptop, but it was safe on my desk. In the living room, though, our TV stand and the shelf underneath it were bare; only a few jagged, smashed pieces of plastic were left in the places where our television and my ex
pensive game system usually were. The hammer was sitting in the middle of the coffee table. Everything was strangely orderly. This missing television and game system was what I’d been using to kill the long hours between when Charlie fell asleep and when I went to bed.
“I can sense you’re gone,” she often said. “Even in my sleep.”
I called Charlie again.
“I still want to talk,” I said.
“I’m on my way,” she said.
And it was in these few minutes before she got back to the house from wherever she was that I thought all the things I had not allowed myself to dwell on. I remembered her face in the queasy lights of the rest stop, the two policemen bracketing her. I thought of how desperate I’d felt when we’d moved here to Iowa, how much I thought that if something drastic didn’t change, I would lose her. I remembered thinking that a baby would be the thing, maybe the only gesture crazy or grand or selfless enough to jar us both out of our failing, competing ideas of ourselves and our marriage and make our life a life spent together, about something more than our problems. And it was only when I heard her car pull up, and tried to imagine how it would work for the rest of the pregnancy, if someone would have to call me to tell me my wife had gone into labor, if she would even still be my wife by then—it was only when the door opened, and I saw her empty, even face that I thought, just for a moment, to my great shame, that she was carrying my mistake.
Elegy on Kinderklavier Page 21