“They’re in his room.”
“Are they?”
She is about to raise an eyebrow when Marie and the baby glide into the dining room, holding hands, the baby’s face aglow. At the dinner table, they exchange secretive smiles, which do not, of course, escape notice. The baby sings to himself as he eats, his mother observing him with pained concentration.
After dinner, baby and baby-sitter mumble their excuses and disappear upstairs.
“They seem to be hitting it off,” I say to make conversation. “Do they?” my wife says. She presses her face into my shoulder and holds on.
The next day, when the baby comes into the study to borrow my typewriter, I ask him what he does in his room with Marie when they have the door closed.
He shrugs. “Things,” he says.
A certain awkwardness appears to have come between us. I inform him, looking out the window as I deliver my speech, that his mother and I would prefer him to keep the door slightly open when he is alone in the room with his sitter.
When he is gone, I regret having yielded to what seems to me unexamined impulse. I call him back. “Just because it disturbs us,” I say, “it doesn’t mean necessarily that it’s wrong.”
“If the door is open,” he says, “someone might come in and someone might go out. We do Batman, Batwoman, and Batbaby in the room, and if the door is open, the baby could run away.”
We punch each other gently and hug, having come to a better understanding of our respective situations.
5
“The Sleeping Beauty doesn’t marry the prince that kisses her awake,” says the baby. “She marries a different prince.”
The baby comes into my study—Marie away on an emergency day off, her father sick—to tell me a new story.
In this story, when the Sleeping Beauty is awakened by the prince she is angry at him. Why won’t you let me sleep? she says. If I wanted to be kissed, I would have told you I wanted to be kissed.
You looked so nice sleeping, I couldn’t help it, the prince says.
I hate you, she says. Ohhhhhh!
The prince, who knows how the story used to end, asks the Sleeping Beauty if she’d like to get married.
Are you kidding, prince? she says. I’m not going to marry someone who wakes me up when I’m trying to sleep.
The prince regrets having wasted a kiss in a lost cause. He asks the Sleeping Beauty to marry him one more time in case she didn’t mean her first refusal of him. The Sleeping Beauty says if there is one thing she can’t stand it is a man who doesn’t take her at her word, which is no.
The prince says that though there may be other Sleeping Beauties in his life, he’ll always love this one the best. Then he goes away. The Sleeping Beauty is sad when he is gone, but after a while she falls asleep and dreams of a prince who will never wake her up.
6
“He kisses too much,” Marie complains to me. “I don’t like so much kissing.”
“You don’t have to go into his room with him and close the door.”
A small glint of surprise animates her otherwise impassive face.
“If I had known that, I wouldn’t be in the present predicament.” She stands with her back to me. “I hope you won’t hate me when I tell you this. There’s another man in my life.”
“Another man?”
She nods, lets out an exhausted sigh. “My boyfriend is insanely jealous. About little things. I had to tell him what was going on, and now he wants me to give up the job. He even talks of punching the baby in the nose.”
“He sounds unbalanced to me,” I say.
“He’s a little unsure of himself,” she says. “Like, he’s had a difficult life. His real mother gave him up and he was brought up by foster parents, both of whom happened to be blind. It gave him a suspicious view of life. He wants to marry me.”
“Your boyfriend?”
“The baby. For my boyfriend’s sake, I think it would be best if I gave up the job.”
For the baby’s sake, I press her to reconsider her decision.
Couldn’t she stay until he got over his crush?
Again we misunderstand each other. She furrows her brow, a pucker of tension in her forehead. “My boyfriend?”
“The baby,”
“And what about me, what about my feelings? The baby will grow up, and find someone else. I’m twenty-two. In eight months, I’ll be twenty-three.” Tears fall. I put an arm on her shoulder.
There is a knock on the door. We freeze, unable to speak, watching the door slowly open.
“Oh, my God,” she whispers. “What should I do?” She panics and rushes to my closet, opening the door and flinging herself in.
“Where’s Marie?” the baby asks.
“She’s hiding,” I say. “See if you can find her.”
He punches me in the side, a gesture more of impatience than of anger, the intent symbolic rather than violent. “I don’t want to play that game.”
I nod my head in the direction of the closet, give Marie away in silence.
“If you see Marie,” the baby says in a loud voice, “tell her I’ll be in my room with Polly.”
The baby-sitter comes out of the closet. “So young and so unfaithful,” she says, hurrying out, turning to give me a sharp look as if I were implicated in some deception practiced against her.
Crashing noises assail my concentration. The baby, red-eyed, furious, returns, saying, “I’m going to tell. Marie is throwing things at me.”
“He started it,” she says, following him in. “He called me a name. You tell him to stop calling me names.”
“She tore up a picture I made of Polly and broke the arms off my Spider-Man model.”
Their grievances against each other extend and intensify, a competition of complaint painful to witness. I stand between them, a truce-team to defend against further outbreak of violence.
“You ought to punish him,” says Marie. “I think at the very least his television privileges ought to be taken away.”
“I think her television privileges ought to be taken away,” says the baby.
“I don’t watch television that much,” says Marie, looking at me as if I were the one who would deny her. “Still, I don’t need to be told things like that. That’s no way to treat someone who lives in your house. I’m not going to stay like that.”
The baby goes with Marie to her room to help her pack. Forty minutes later she emerges with a valise under each arm, the baby at her side carrying one of her plants.
“I don’t want her to go,” says the baby after they’ve kissed good-bye two or three times.
“I don’t want to leave my baby,” she says. Her momentum apparently a determining factor, she moves irresistibly to the front door. “I’ll come back and see you,” she says.
“Will you come tomorrow?” the baby asks.
“I’ll try,” she says in a voice that acknowledges the odds to be prohibitively against succeeding. “I’m going to miss him.”
“I don’t want her to go,” the baby says.
They say good-bye several more times, and when it seems that the procedure might go on indefinitely, Marie rushes out as if weeks late for an appointment she still hopes to keep. The baby waves and calls to her, banging on the window to catch her fleeting attention. We watch Marie walk away with her head bent forward as if she is bracing against a hurricane. In the distance, she seems almost as small as the baby himself.
“She was waving,” the baby says, “but I couldn’t see it because she was turned the other way.” His thumb eases into his mouth, a ship entering port.
7
A week without word of her has passed since Marie’s departure. The baby keeps an optimistic vigil on a footstool at the window. He pretends he is studying the weather for signs of change. Her name is not mentioned.
Occasionally, he sings the name to himself. Marie. Marie Marie…••Marie Marie Marie…Marie Marie Marie.
The day the baby stops watching for her a
t the window, Marie calls. Her voice is so low that I think at first she is calling from some great distance.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“Here,” she says.
“Are you in the country?”
“I’m just a few blocks away.” Her voice fading out: “Does he remember me?”
“Of course he remembers. Should I put him on?”
“I don’t know. My head’s so untogether. I’m such a mess. Maybe I’ll come over and see him.”
“Why don’t you come over tonight and have dinner with us. Look, he’d love to talk to you.”
“He would? If he does it quickly, maybe it’ll be all right. My boyfriend’s in the bathroom and he’ll be out, unless he gets into what he’s doing, in about five minutes.”
I call the baby to the phone. “Is it anyone I know?” he asks, wary about taking the receiver, a stranger to its pleasures.
I step outside to give him privacy, and light up a cigar I was saving for a special occasion. Five minutes later, the baby comes out of my study walking backward. “Why did you give me the phone?” he asks.
“Didn’t you speak to Marie?”
“I spoke to Marie,” he says, “but it was a different Marie, not the Marie that was my baby-sitter.”
“It’s the same Marie,” I say.
“It’s not,” the baby says.
One day the baby and his grandmother, walking in the park—this reported to me by the baby—see a young woman pushing a stroller who looks like Marie or who is Marie. The baby calls to her.
(What he is about to tell me is true, the baby says, though it may also be a dream.)
The presumed Marie turns her head in the direction of her name, appears to see nothing, or everything, and then goes on, somewhat more quickly than before.
The baby calls Marie’s name again and gets no reaction except that a dog, apparently named Marie or something like it, comes running toward him.
The misinformed dog knocks the baby over and licks his nose.
When the baby is restored to his feet, the other Marie is in the distance.
The baby continues his pursuit, stopping every once in a while to pick up his fallen grandma or to call out Marie’s name. Each time he calls her name, Marie seems to increase her pace as if—is it possible?—she is actually running away from him.
Does she think he is someone else? Who could he be if not himself?
It is only me he wants to say, but finds himself restrained by doubts.
His pursuit takes the baby through places he has never seen before outside of books and postcards.
After hours of relentless chase—the baby too tired even to call her name—he arrives at the stroller he saw Marie with, now deserted.
There is not another baby in the stroller (as he might have expected) but a large stuffed bear with a note pinned to its chest.
—To my darling darling Baby.
Love, Marie
P.S. As soon as I have the time,
I’ll come and visit you.
“That’s the end of the story,” the baby says. “Does she come and visit?” I ask.
“Does who come and visit?”
“Marie.”
“When I’m older,” the baby says.
Birthday Gifts
1
In this dream my father comes to visit with a box of birds as a birthday gift. I am between birthdays so I ask if it is for the one past or the one coming up. “It is for one long forgotten, your seventh or ninth, the year I was out of my mind.” I have no recollection of the circumstance he describes and accept the gift as a token of something else. There are some visitors with him, six or seven celebrated figures, including our major living poet.
What have they come here for? “I want them to commemorate you,” says my father. “I want them to see what you’ve become.” They space themselves out in a row of hard-back chairs like an audience. “We’ve just come from seeing the movie, Rules of the Game,” the famous poet says in his New England southern accent. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It fails to meet the test of time.”
“Do you mean the Renoir?” I ask.
“It fails the moment ambition takes over,” says another.
I defend the movie, modestly at first, not wanting to offend.
“You’re making a bad impression,” my father whispers. “You argue in too loud a voice and on top of that you have no clothes on.”
It is true. They had come in on me before I had time to dress.
I excuse myself from the company to put something on.
When I leave the room—I am hardly out the door—I can hear them talking about me. “Who is he?” a voice asks. “Is he a friend of someone’s?” “I don’t know,” says another voice which sounds like my father’s.
They had come to see me celebrate a former birthday uncommemorated in its time. How can they not know who I am? Perhaps it is a metaphor. Perhaps they are asking who I am in the metaphysical sense. “It is one of the great movies,” I shout at them through the door to my room.
My birthday birds have gotten loose in my room, flying in a hectic flutter in all directions, pecking and chirping. What kind of gift is a box of birds? I put on my new suit, a hand-tailored dustgray linen, to show these visitors that I have clothes as fine as the best of them.
My return is heralded by a small somewhat perfunctory applause.
I look over the row of dissatisfied faces before beginning. “If you’re so successful,” I want to say, “why is it you’ve gotten no pleasure from your lives?” .
My father comes up on the stage to introduce me. “I’d like you to give this failure the kind of attention you’d give to one of your own.”
“What does he have to say to us?” someone calls out.
“If he has nothing to say, may he have the grace to say it briefly,” says my defender.
Before I can say a word, thinking of blowing my nose, a bird flies out of my pocket. The crowd laughs. “He’s funny,” says the famous poet to my father, “but is he serious?”
I mean to be serious and say so when two more birds fly out from under my shirt. “Now that’s more like it,” says the dean of American letters, snorting his laugh. I hold up my hands to silence the applause, explain again that I am the victim of accident, my birthday birds having gotten out of their box. I tell them of my unrealized vision, the heartbreaking disparity between the glowing achievement I intended and the anonymity I have come to accept as my lot.
“Too much bathos,” says the poet.
A bird drops its soft pellets on the shoulder of my linen suit.
“Ah the birds have the last word,” someone says, the one woman in the group, a grandmotherly crone. The audience claps with appreciation.
“Now that’s what I call a critic,” says my father, pointing to the feathered bomber.
I can see now that there’s no point in going on with my presentation. The crowd takes me for a fool and I tend to become the way others see me. I rush the row of chairs in a fury and make clownish faces in the face at the end of each turkey neck in the audience. “Who are you?” I ask them. They fall over at the slightest question. These celebrities are cardboard mock-ups, figures in a shooting gallery. I drive them out the door, my father first and last.
It is not my birthday. I celebrate whatever day it is alone.
2
I am slowly reading a book about the passage of time. The pages, which are heavy, turn themselves when they are done. This young woman, my wife, comes into the room to ask why I don’t do something of large imaginative possibility with my life, which is not, she wants me to know, going to last till the end of time. “I happen to be reading a book. Isn’t that enough?” Your friend, K, she reminds me, who is two months younger, has already made a quarter of a million dollars on subsidiary rights alone and won two major literary awards.
“But is K happy?” I ask her. She says, but are you. We are talking about K, I remind her.
Does she thin
k I don’t care about K’s unearned success? I have plans not to say another word to him unless he admits that success has nothing to do with the inner man.
My wife, no longer young, goes out of the room shaking her head. I call after her, “It’s no sin to be jealous of K.”
“I make no judgments,” she says.
In the book I am reading it says, underlined in red pencil, “The time of the man who waits will come.” It strikes me that the author is making oblique reference to my own life. When I show the text to the woman who shares my life she says that it is a different kind of waiting to which the book refers. She turns the page before the page is ready to turn.
The next page is blank. What does it mean? We put our arms around each other and weep. When K comes in to complain about the unfairness of his last set of reviews his hair is white.
We put a place mark in the book about time and the three of us go out for a walk. It is one of the most beautiful days ever made, the breeze like the rustle of satin in a room of silken women. K remarks on it. “If I could make a day like this,” he says, “I would give up everything else.”
For moments, I am desperately happy. “Why are you smiling?” my wife asks. “I have never seen you smile like that before.”
I am desperately happy. “Is it because you love us?” she asks. K says he is tired and sits down on the running board of an abandoned automobile. He waves us on as if he were tending a road in the process of repair. “Someday we’ll see each other in a different light.” he says.
In his absence, K dominates our concern. “One of us ought to stay with him while he rests.” says my wife. “Is he waiting?” I ask her. She pretends not to know what I mean.
“I don’t mind if you go back,” I say, hoping that she will choose not to return.
“I can’t bring myself to leave you,” she says.
I finish alone the walk the three of us started together, The path, though giving the appearance of being straight, gradually winds back on itself, When I return home the book I have been reading on time is gone, K has borrowed it, she says. His bowels are stuck without a diverting book to read, “Besides,” she says in a voice like an avalanche of feathers, “he is dying.” (Of what?) “His life is killing him. He is dying of loneliness and ennui. He is incapacitated by an inability to love.” She covers her face with her hands.
The Return of Service Page 9