The Return of Service

by Baumbach, Jonathan;

  I have rehearsed in memory the significant events leading up to the present moment, changing them slightly to permit (for myself) the pleasure of new discovery. My wife, as I look about me, is sitting on a three-legged stool, staring at the walls, hoarding her silence. I put my arm on her shoulder. “It will be all right,” I whisper. There is no response, not even a slight turn of the head.

  I leave her reluctantly, go on through the remaining rooms, promising a full report when I return.

  There is nothing wrong with the second floor that a little paint and plaster couldn’t make right. I hang my coat over a small hole in the east wall of the master bedroom. Why advertise disrepair.

  The second-floor bathroom is being grouted, I discover, by a Sicilian with only two or three words of English at his command. “Who employed you?” I ask him.

  “Is a equal opportunity,” he answers. “Who a demployed you?” “I’m the owner,” I say, “or will be after the closing ceremony which is going on, unless I misrecollect, at this very moment.”

  “A Miss Recollect,” he says. “She a demploy.”

  We discuss the films of Lucino Visconti, none of which he has seen, and how much of the plumbing is brass and how much lead. “All is van…” he says, referring to the plywood cabinet under the sink.

  “We’ll tear it out,” I say.

  The third floor, mostly glass and steel, is the showcase of the house, an extensive renovation “combining,” says the brochure on the end table in the hall, “the glories of the past with the luxury and elegance of the future.” The extended back room, which has a glass wall overlooking an overgrown English garden, is a painter’s studio. There is something familiar about its very unfamiliarity. The sun filtering through the large stained-glass skylight creates liquescent patterns of color on the white marble floor. This extraordinary studio moves me to regret. If this room had been available to me years back, my life might have moved in a wholly different direction.

  I look out at the street from the third-floor terrace. The movers have just arrived, their truck double-parked in front of the house. My wife, or a woman who resembles her, is talking animatedly to a pencil-thin black man with a sofa strapped to his back. She is pointing toward the third floor. I try to get her attention, but she doesn’t notice my wave and the street noises drown me out. The mover nods and shakes his head, of two minds about whatever it is. My wife sits upright on the sofa, balancing herself against the angle of repose, and is carried inside on the mover’s back.

  The house fills ups. I go down the stairs, looking for my wife.

  The stereo in the first parlor is playing “When I’m 64.” The children, not all of them mine, are having a party in the kitchen.

  I ask who’s supervising them; no one seems to know. “This is a housewarming,” the smallest of them says. “It’s cold outside.”

  My wife is standing in the doorway, tears streaming down her face. The movers edge discreetly by, careful of her privacy.

  “Now that I have everything I want,” she says, “I don’t know what to do with myself.”

  This remark, coming from anyone else, would seem ironic.

  “Everything you want?” I ask,

  One of the movers, the thin black reed, invites her to run away with him to Harlem. (I plead with her to stick it out here.)

  She is moved by his unexpected offer, she tells the mover, though she doesn’t see how she can accept, her life circumscribed by intractable patterns.

  “You will not be asked again,” he says.

  Our marble table passes, a jagged crack unknown to its past at the center.

  We are talking about not moving again for five years, unless the unforeseen is manifest, when a crash interrupts and we turn as one to see a book box, the instant after it slides out from under the sash of the reedlike mover, bumping down the steps. My wife lets out a scream of alarm. Books fall in disorder at our feet.

  SPEAK MEMORY RETURN OF THE NATIVE

  THE CASTLE

  SEIZE THE DAY

  GREAT EXPECTATIONS

  BLEAK HOUSE

  THE SPOILS OF POYNTON

  THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE THE WINGS OF THE DOVE

  VICTORY

  PARADE’S END

  THE SECRET AGENT

  SECOND SKIN

  We squat down on the floor, clearing a space, browsing among the fallen, looking for some words of counsel. A period of silence passes, each of us caught up in his own text, “Let’s not move,” I am prepared to say. Before I can find the words, before we can become aware of the ambiguities of my idle remark, she leans over and purrs an unintelligible secret in my ear.

  I close my eyes, let exhaustion wash over me. This time, I think, I will not make the same mistakes, will not fall prey to indolence and cowardice again. I will be kind to my wife and child and kinder to myself. This is a new chance, I remember thinking, the same thought I had five years before when we moved into the other house and four years before that when we married, the same fresh moment gathered over and over in my life (and hers) going back as far as it goes.

  The silence fails to contain our hopes, and we move, embrace, stand up, make idle chatter, and go on. In the abyss of a moment, all is forgotten.

  Crossed in Love by Her Eyes

  “I think you ought to know I’m not going to marry you,” I hear the baby say through the closed door of my study. “Marie and I are going together.”

  Who is Marie?

  “So you and Marie are going together,” she says, a thin note of pain breaking through the coolness of her tone.

  “One of these days we might get married,” he says.

  A few minutes later the baby’s mother comes into my study and asks if she might interrupt my unproductive self-absorption for a few minutes.

  “I feel rejected,” she says, laughing in a way that implies she thinks she ought to be amused but isn’t. “Our baby’s got another woman.”

  “It’s my opinion it won’t last.”

  “The worst of it is that the woman he’s infatuated with—Marie, you may remember her, that streaky stacked blond that sat for him a couple of times—won’t have anything to do with him. Yesterday, when I asked her if she could, baby-sit Friday night, the truth came out. She said she’s no longer interested in babies, that they have nothing to teach her.”

  “Did you tell the baby what she said?”

  “He’s been so miserable as it is, mooning around the house and sighing in his pathetic way, I couldn’t make it worse. Will you talk to him man to man?”

  “I’m not very good at that.”

  She blows me a kiss. “I was only kidding, you know, about the unproductive self-absorption. I think your self-absorption is as productive as anybody’s.”

  Moments after the baby’s mother leaves, almost as if it’s been rehearsed, the baby takes her place in the room.

  “When you’re married,” he asks after a point, “does that mean you have to sleep in the same bed as the other person?” He asks the question with both hands over his face, one eye peering through the slats of his fingers.

  “Only if both people want to,” I say.

  “Well, both people do want to,” he says, “and that’s final.”

  He does a parody of his father storming furiously out of a room.

  He returns. “What about love?” he asks.

  “What about it?”

  His thumb, as if it were just passing by, finds its way into the tunnel of his mouth. It is apparent after a while that neither of us, with all goodwill, can think of anything to say. The word love has come between us. We study the silence for clues. Before I can put my thoughts into a sentence, he is gone.

  Later that day, I get a phone call from a young woman who calls herself Marie.

  “Your little son has invited me to share his bed,” she says in a voice that strives for outrage.

  “I’ve heard something about that,” I say.

  “Have you? In the last house I worked, the
father used to come into my bed at night, pretending to be the son. As you might imagine, such a deception couldn’t go on for long.”

  I say something to the effect that I can’t imagine how such a deception could go on even once, though my remark, like the father she cites, seems to pass unnoticed.

  “I’m prepared to give it a trial run, if you want me,” she says. “My boyfriend’s moved back in with his wife, and I’m at loose ends.”

  “It’s the baby who wants you,” I say. I am about to say something about talking it over with my wife, when the woman on the phone overrides me again.

  “I get that,” she says. “I only hope he’s not too demonstrative. I really love babies, I really do, if they don’t expect too much from you. I have a lot to give, you know, if not too much is asked.”

  An appointment is made for an interview.

  2

  Two weeks have passed since Marie has become a part of our household. The baby, whom I’ve hardly seen since the girl has come to live with us, patters glumly into my study and sits down on the floor with his back to me.

  “Is something the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,”

  “Are you sad because it’s Marie’s day off?”

  He treats the question as if a reply were too self-evident to deserve notice.

  “Do you know what?” he says. “Marie won’t sleep in my bed,”

  “She won’t?” He has caught me, as he often does, in a moment of distraction.

  “Maybe she will if I ask her. Will she? Tell her she has to, okay? Tell her if she doesn’t…if she doesn’t, she’ll have to sleep with the dog and we don’t even have a dog. Okay?”

  I indicate, which is something we’ve been through before, that it’s not within my power to compel Marie to sleep in his bed.

  He is unconvinced. “I am angry at you,” he says. “Also disappointed. And I’m not going to tell you the story I was going to tell you unless you say to Marie, ‘Marie, you have to sleep with the baby. That’s the rule.’’’

  “I’ll tell her that you would like her to,” I say. “How’s that?” He shakes his head in an aggrieved manner. “If you wanted her to sleep in your bed, I would tell her that she had to.”

  I lift him in the air and hug him, to which he offers an obligatory complaint. When I put him down, though he insists he is still angry with me and still doesn’t like me, he offers me the story of what may have been his last night’s dream. What follows is the baby’s account.

  THE STORY OF MY DREAM

  The baby is in the bathroom taking off his overalls when a woman he’s never seen before walks in, carrying a baby about his own size.

  “Is it my brother?” the baby asks her.

  She doesn’t say anything, a reproachful quality in her silence, and puts the baby, who may or may not be the baby’s brother, in the baby’s place on the toilet.

  “Isn’t he a little prince!” the lady says.

  The baby holds his nose politely, doing the best he can to ignore the foul air of the other.

  A big dog comes into the bathroom, not the dog the baby doesn’t have, but another one, a large white pig-faced dog with flowerlike spots. The dog sniffs the room, then in one large bite eats the other baby, toilet seat and all.

  The lady is very sad. The baby tells her not to cry, but she is too busy crying to listen.

  “We were going to be married,” she says. “Why did that monstrous dog have to eat him?”

  The baby sits on the toilet the way the other did, but fails to make the same kind of splash. Nothing he does seems to please the lady, who is moaning and blowing her nose.

  In a voice that makes the windows rattle, the baby orders the dog to return the baby he swallowed. At that moment, a lion comes in and eats the dog.

  “Take me away, sweetlove,” says the lady, “before something really bad happens. I like you better than that smelly baby.”

  She says her name is Marie, though she is a different Marie.

  The baby reaches into the lion’s mouth and pulls out the dog, then reaches into the dog’s mouth to pull out the other baby, who seems a little smaller for having been eaten.

  The lady is so overjoyed she announces that both babies can sleep in the same bed with her if they promise not to kick or wet. When they all go into the lady’s room, they discover that someone has eaten her bed.

  3

  Marie requests a private interview. The request comes in the form of a note delivered to me by the baby.

  I tell her as soon as we are alone that I don’t like her using the baby as a go-between.

  “I make such a mess of things.” she says. “I’m terrible. I really am. I really am terrible.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Oh, yes. It was a terrible thing to do. I’m always doing terrible things.” She laughs with self-mockery, offering one or two jewel-like tears. “The baby, you know, your baby, like, doesn’t dig me anymore. I told him yesterday that in my opinion it would be to his benefit to have more peer-group experiences, and now he won’t talk to me and he won’t even look at me.”

  “He doesn’t like to be pushed into anything. Which doesn’t excuse his being rude. If you like, I’ll talk to him about it.”

  She throws back her head in a melodramatic pose. “You people make me so angry. No offense. But a baby needs some kind of structure from his adult models. You can’t just let him do whatever he wants to do…. Now I’ve said too much and you’re going to ask me to leave.” Her face turns a deep red.

  I indicate that we’re receptive in this house to differences of opinion.

  “He’s really a love,” she says. “He really is.” She gets down on her knees and pleads with me to change my approach.

  Her zealousness is hard to resist. “Have you talked to my wife?” I ask.

  “I’ve always had more success with men,” she says.

  ANOTHER VERSION OF THE SAME STORY

  The baby tiptoes into Marie’s room while she is sleeping, or, in any event, giving the impression of being asleep, and asks her if she’d like to hear the story of the Sleeping Beauty. She’s heard it too many times, she murmurs, for it still to be fresh and exciting for her. Besides, she’s still, ummm, asleep.

  “This is a different Sleeping Beauty,” says the baby. “This Sleeping Beauty is awake.”

  Awake? The idea seems to interest the baby-sitter for a moment or two before it slips away into the dead spaces of unrequited loss.

  “She’s not really awake,” says the baby, improvising. “I just said that to make the story sound different. Well, I’ll tell it to you in a very low voice. Okay?”

  The baby-sitter seems to agree to this compromise, though falls asleep in the middle of the story. When she wakes up—it is at the most surprising part of the story—she is in a bad mood and says that the baby has no business being in her bed. “Only people I ask to come into my bed are allowed to be there,” she says. “Now go away.”

  The baby is tenacity itself, refuses dismissal, buries himself under the covers, attempts to charm.

  Marie rolls him over the edge of the bed, like a sausage, tumbling him to the floor with a bang.

  “I won’t tell you any more stories,” the baby says, refusing against disposition of habit to let her see the pain she has brought to his life.

  When the baby takes himself away, Marie comes after him, saying she’s sorry, inviting him back. “I’m always like this in the morning, baby. When I’m fast asleep, I can’t bear to be touched. I’ll tell you a story if you come back.”

  “Well, I’m not coming back,” says the baby.

  All day he refuses to look at the baby-sitter and he refuses to talk to her.

  The next morning the baby forgets that he is angry with his baby-sitter and he asks her if he can sleep in her bed.

  “Why don’t you go out and play?” she says, turning her back on him.

  The baby will not. The baby will not do anything she asks of him.
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br />   4

  Contemplating the nature of things in the bathroom that adjoins my study, I overhear this exchange between the baby and Marie.

  “Do you love me?”

  “I love you.”

  “Do you really love me?”

  Kissing sounds, or what I imagine to be the sounds of kissing, follow. Moments after that, I hear the door to the baby’s room click shut.

  Hours pass. Sibilant whispers snake through the house like a gas leak from some undeterminable quarter.

  I am, for no reason I can explain to myself, disturbed by the behavior of the baby and the baby-sitter. It is just not polite, I tell myself, for the two of them to stay by themselves all day in a closed room. It is also, I should imagine, not particularly healthy to be locked in that way. After a point, as an act of responsibility, I knock gently on the baby’s door. “Is everything all right in there?”

  I am answered by giggles, which I find not a little shocking under the circumstances.

  I mumble something about it perhaps not being a good idea, not being exactly healthy, spending a lot of time in a closed room, do you think? More giggles. Some boos.

  “It happens to be a beautiful day out,” I say, and when I get no further answer, go out for a walk to prove my point.

  My wife returns from shopping late in the afternoon, laden with packages. She laments the difficulty of finding anything in the stores she really likes. Everything is not right, has been created with someone else in mind.

  I make no mention of the baby and Marie.

  After my wife shows me the things she’s bought, a pair of socks and a tie for me, she asks if anything interesting happened while she was gone.

  “Nothing interesting,” I say.

  She calls the baby, and gets no answer. “Did they go out?” she asks.