From the start, Anne and Jasper’s apartment had found it hard to contain the child. It was like trying to keep a dolphin in a bathtub. That Anne’s study was transformed into a room whose unfolded sofa bed was littered with T-shirts and toys, shoes and underwear and odd snack bags of foreign foods already required an adjustment. But that the boy himself — large, energetic, loud, somewhat clumsy — moved at speed near the large plate-glass windows caused her hourly anxiety, and meant that Anne was hardly once, in the time they visited, truly relaxed. A slab of deathly cement awaited Mitchell when he might finally break through the postcard view and, lacking superpowers, plummet the twenty-seven floors down. Anne could not get that image out of her mind.
Her nephew was lovable, though, and Anne adored him. Kinship was not an issue. Plump and fond as a puppy, a natural flatterer (the habit apparently enhanced by his parents’ divorce, and his role as morale booster to both), Mitchell mopped up attention like an eager sponge. Of the two of them, Jasper might seem the more forbidding to a young person: restrained, ironic, speaking in a register children recognized as not quite straight. Jasper did not fawn or talk down, but if you met him where his humor was, you did well, and Mitchell swiftly figured that out. The boy was smart and amusing, and early on established a few running jokes with Jasper, the first of which had something to do with burned toast. This led to an impromptu lecture about M.F.K. Fisher, whom Jazz revered, and his plucking one of her books from their shelves.
He showed it wordlessly to sandy-haired Mitchell, who read the title, then looked quizzically at Jasper. He wasn’t alarmed, but he was curious.
‘And does it really tell you that? How to cook a wolf?’
‘I think it might. Shall we find out?’ Jazz asked, then sat with the boy on the couch and started reading. Jazz loved to read aloud and was good at it, with a resonant voice and an ability to captivate. Mitchell was entranced. When the phone rang for Jasper, Anne came over and took up the reins. She found a favorite cookbook as well, butter-smeared from frequent use, whose pen and ink drawings could serve as illustrations for Fisher’s culinary musings. There was an unparalleled pleasure in sitting beside her nephew and reading, then showing him the pictures, his head tilted comfortably against her shoulder. She loved him, simply. When Tricia said later she was amazed they had gotten Mitchell to enjoy a book, he never wanted to read with her — ‘What did you do? Hypnotize him?’ — Anne felt a thrill of auntly pride. The visit had, up to that point, gone so well.
But something happened on the last day of their trip to New York.
Jasper had gone off to teach, and Tricia was at a work meeting at MoMA. Anne planned to take Mitchell into Soho, where a filmmaker friend of hers lived in a marvelous, enchanted loft with a toy-like dachshund. Anne had little liking for dogs, large ones with intrusive noses and small ones with a tendency to yap, but she thought Mitchell and Minnie might move at the same speed, and appreciate each other’s noisy enthusiasms. It would be fun for the boy, she hoped.
There had already been a problem, so Anne’s nerves were frayed. While she was getting her bag Mitchell had left the apartment without telling her and gone down in the elevator alone. Anne spent several anxious minutes assuring herself that he was not hiding in the apartment before calling the lift, her heart pounding as she stood outside it, while she considered the possibility that he had left the building and ventured onto Bleecker Street by himself. When she got to the lobby, she found Mitchell chatting in a friendly way to the security man, Ronald, who gave Anne his customary smiled greeting and made good-natured jibes about Mitchell being a Detroit Tigers fan. Anne quelled her temper in front of Ronald, but in a low voice as they left the building she made it clear to Mitchell how displeased she was that he had gone out without letting her know. ‘That is not acceptable,’ she heard herself repeating in a tone of deep disapproval, as though the boy were a college student who had produced a shabby piece of plagiarism for his final paper. She shuddered with Irène recognition, which only rendered her tenser.
The incident followed just after. It took an instant, as attitude-altering events often do. The two were waiting at the edge of Houston Avenue, that vast four-lane car-river of a thoroughfare that marked the southern edge of Greenwich Village. Anne was trying to hold Mitchell’s hand but he squirmed away from her. Then he skipped for a mischievous second out into the road.
Killed.
He was going to be killed.
Her heart somersaulted up her throat and Anne grabbed the boy by the arm, shouted ‘Mitchell! ’ with guttural ferocity, and yanked him onto the sidewalk.
‘Don’t you ever do that again,’ she whisper-spat.
Then she slapped him.
Mitchell was too stunned to cry. They both stood for an instant in shock. It took Anne a beat to understand what she had done.
‘I’m sorry, Mitchell. I shouldn’t have . . .’ Her left hand wrapped her slapping right one, as if to conceal the evidence of what had happened. ‘I’m sorry. You frightened me.’ Her voice was shaking; hands, too. She tried to still them by touching his shoulder in reconciliation, but he pulled away. ‘I should not have . . . That was wrong. But’ — she was not talking just to the boy, but also to a galley of imagined jurors — ‘you just can’t jump out into the street like that. Do you understand? You could have been killed. People do get killed on city streets, every day. It isn’t funny.’
He wasn’t laughing. Nobody was.
Anne alternated between contrition and condemnation while the child remained silent, lapsing into a long-lasting, mute resentment. He told Jasper later (he wouldn’t speak to Anne again that evening, just squeezing out a ‘good-night’ on his mother’s insistence) that it was a joke, he was going to jump right back, there was a space in the traffic, he hadn’t been in any danger. The bus coming at them was, the boy was sure, ‘a mile’ away.
Anne tried to recover, and finally decided to take him to her friend’s place anyway, as she didn’t have a better plan. Mitchell was sulky, uninterested in Rachel or her loft or the dog, asking in a monotone if he could watch television, which Rachel, sensing the discomfort, let him do. While cartoons animated the boy back to ordinariness in the other room, the adults sat on stools in the minimalist kitchen murmuring over coffee, and Anne tried to calm herself, though she was still trembling, then and for a long while after.
26
For the rest of that day Anne had a sense memory of how sharp her grip had been on Mitchell’s young arm, and could feel in her palm how hard had been her slap. His cheek stayed pink for half an hour; his arm was not visibly bruised, but Anne knew she had left a mark, whether or not it showed. Of course she would have to tell her sister about it, humiliatingly. Jasper had proved adept at reestablishing normalcy with Mitchell, playing a game of chess and collaborating with him on their evening meal. ‘Shall we cook a wolf tonight?’ he asked him. ‘What do you think?’
‘You mustn’t make too much of this, love,’ he comforted Anne that night in bed. ‘He was naughty, you were provoked, these things happen. He’s OK.’
‘I suppose so.’ Her frown lines were deep. ‘Is he, though?’
‘He really is. You didn’t kneecap the boy.’
She agreed, to placate him. What Jasper did not realize was that Anne was horrified not only by how she could so easily and without thinking slap her nephew’s sweet round face, feeling her own mother’s harsh voice and violence surging through her; but by the moment just before, when she saw this beloved kid step out into the lethal road. Anne’s heart poured out of her mouth with the certainty of what was about to happen to him: the animal terror that she was going to watch Mitchell get fatally hurt.
‘I could never be a mother,’ she told Jasper in a ferocious, terrified whisper that night, tears pooling in her eyes.
Jasper had shushed and consoled her. But years later, when he prepared the case for his departure from their home and their lif
e together, he allowed himself to invoke this incident, to use it against Anne.
The once love-laden living room had become a site of more and more wrenching conversations, including the one in which Jasper finally made irrevocably clear to Anne that he was choosing a different life. With Sophie. That they wanted to have children together.
Anne had closed down, most of her internal mechanisms had gone cold and still. She was in a kind of hibernating, or power-saving, mode, where the only part of her alive were her fiery green eyes. And a boiled pain on her lips, that she was trying not to speak.
‘Of course, motherhood is not something you wanted, or ever felt able to do.’ To sell his decision to himself, Anne saw, Jasper had had to recast Anne, the woman he had so adored. ‘Which was clear from the beginning, of course — in fact, we agreed for a long time on that preference — but I didn’t realize till that day with Mitchell that it was really an impossibility for you. You remember that day.’ And now Jasper’s face was twisted, slightly, with the effort of distorting the truth. ‘You were clear — you said as much to me — that you could not care for a child.’
How Anne had loved that strong and intelligent face. She had counted on it for truth and for understanding. He had taught her to. Yet Jazz had allowed himself to take away the wrong conclusion from Anne’s arm-grab of Mitchell, the standing on the edge of the abyss, the slap that followed it. Or he pretended to have, which was just as bad. He had filed the episode in the place a person keeps in his mind, even if he is deeply in love, in case the couple one day breaks apart, and evidence is required for the one who leaves. Jasper was not, perhaps, in every fiber the romantic he had always promised himself, and her, that he was.
I could never be a mother, she had told him.
Anne had thought the second silent clause of her remark to Jazz that evening on Bleecker Street was clear. Only years later, as Jasper prepared his exit, did she realize that perhaps it hadn’t been.
Because I would care too much.
27
There was only so much art Anne could look at before starting to feel faint, and she needed some solid reality. Like a sandwich. Their last stop was the bright installation of Great Britain, called English Magic. One room had a painted kestrel flying with a diminutive Aston Mini in its talons; another was screening a video, which drew a younger crowd. Anne sat down on a broad bench next to an alert little boy. She could never tell children’s ages; perhaps he was eight or ten. Together they watched, mesmerized, as kids and adults bounced cheerfully up and down on what Anne saw was a rubbery joke — an inflated model Stonehenge. Tricia came in and found Anne, sat down on the other side of the boy. The piece was called Sacrilege.
‘We should take a break,’ Tricia said, and Anne agreed.
They found a cafeteria, then sat at a round aluminum table in a crowded yard, eating panini of tomato and mozzarella, the perfect food. They were surrounded by students and families and voracious pigeons.
A group of English women nearby erupted into laughter. The spirit of this exhibition seemed to lean that way — into hilarity, or at least good humor. Then a tidy, gray-haired man approached their table and asked politely, in what might have been a Dutch accent, if he could take their third chair. The sisters assented, then watched him carrying it back like a slain beast to the table around which sat a fair-haired younger woman and two toddlers, a plum-cheeked girl and a check-shirted boy. Anne knew that she and Tricia were making the same silent assessment: was the man the children’s grandfather? Or father? Parental ages were not what they had been. The man and woman interacted pleasantly, helping the children with their pizzas; then the children fought over something, a glass was knocked over, and the girl started wailing. The woman leaned in to scold the boy, help the girl, mend the problem; the gray-haired man sat back, as though the situation no longer interested him. He caught Anne’s gaze. She looked away.
‘He’s the father,’ Anne declared softly.
‘Who?’ Tricia feigned surprise. ‘Oh, that guy?’
‘Yes.’ Anne put her sunglasses back on, embarrassed to have been caught staring. ‘He acts grandfatherly, but is actually the children’s father.’
‘Could be.’
‘He did not quite know what he was getting into — fatherhood, at this stage. He hadn’t realized how much pizza would be involved.’
Tricia laughed. ‘Chicken tenders. Burgers and fries.’ She got into the spirit of it. ‘Anything at all, as long as it’s fried or you can put ketchup on it.’
‘He’s disappointed,’ continued Anne, with an edgy glint of humor, ‘that he hasn’t yet found the children receptive to his lamb tagine.’
Tricia snorted. ‘No. They wouldn’t be.’
‘To his dismay, he finds that there seem to be a lot of messes to clean up.’
‘Oh, sure,’ Tricia agreed. ‘Runny noses. Vomit. Trips to the bathroom.’
‘Though he lets his wife do most of the work.’ With her glasses on, Anne glanced back at the now calm table. ‘It’s part of the deal they made at the start.’
‘And are we still talking about that man over there?’ Tricia asked her. ‘Or are we talking about someone else?’
28
‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ Anne began, and even before saying more she felt relieved. At last she could tell this story. ‘Jasper became very fearful about death. He saw sixty coming, and it flicked some kind of alarm switch in him.’
She was hesitant, uncharacteristically. It would take only the slightest misstep — if Tricia smirked, or made a joke — to seal the story back up within Anne. But Tricia simply waited. Anne’s own trick: staying quiet.
‘Obsessive, almost.’ Anne had not spoken of this to anyone. ‘He could not sleep at night, which hadn’t happened before. Jazz was always a sound sleeper; I was the one who had insomnia for years. I could even put a light on, it didn’t bother him.’
Her sister listened.
‘Then . . . he started waking up too. He was restless, agitated. He spiraled down into very dark moods. Really, an existential despair. That’s the only way to describe it.’ Anne remembered the ashen quality of Jasper’s sleepless face. How hollow his eyes looked. This man she loved was, in those bottomless nights, terrified. ‘He once told me that all he could see was blackness, and . . . the end.’
Tricia took in this picture. ‘Was there anything you could do, or say? To help?’
‘Nothing.’
Anne had herself known depressions, she was the one of the pair who occasionally succumbed, and Jazz had been the rallier, the rock, the soother. She wanted to be able to do the same for him. It was his turn. ‘I couldn’t seem to help him at all.’ Anne’s voice was reedy and thin. She sounded like a child, admitting defeat. I didn’t finish the race. I got too nervous to play at the recital. In a tiny sigh, nearly a whisper: ‘I tried.’
Anne felt a hand on hers, which startled her. She almost pulled away, instinctively, but made herself leave it on the metal table, allowing Tricia’s to anchor hers there.
‘I suggested the obvious things. Anti-depressants. Sleeping pills. Jazz wouldn’t do any of that.’
‘Therapy?’ Tricia asked tentatively. Anne was glad of the question as it made her laugh, abruptly, a laugh with a sharp note of grief in it.
‘Can you imagine?’ she said to Tricia. ‘Jasper Elliott on the couch?’
Tricia laughed a little too. ‘I can’t,’ she admitted. ‘Honestly. No.’
‘Well.’ Anne pulled off her sunglasses, rubbed her salt-tinged eyes. Let them, unprotected, look at the crowd around them. This part of the narrative became easier, and Tricia knew pieces of it anyway. ‘It was in that state that I sent him off to visit his sister in LA. He had started talking about children. His niece and nephew. And also, the way children give you a link to the future. They made — he actually said this — the grave less dark. Or maybe it wa
s less stark. I was never sure which.’
Her sister raised her eyebrows in something fairly similar to an eye roll, but that was all right with Anne now.
‘Yeah, I know. Anyway. Whether his sister Harriet knew any of this is unclear to me, but certainly she was the one who introduced him to adorable Sophie.’ Anne’s voice was steady now. ‘Pretty, young French Sophie, recently divorced, and eager to start a family.’
Tricia didn’t speak, so Anne said her line for her. ‘The story of men chasing tail, as they have for millennia.’
‘And women wanting children,’ Tricia added, ‘as they always do.’
Anne removed her hand from the table but leaned in for a moment first.
‘Well, Trish.’ She smiled, though tautly. ‘Not always.’
29
‘Let’s stay in and have an orange evening, at the apartment,’ Anne suggested, after they had finished their art marathon. ‘I’ve had about as much omniscience as I can take, for one day. I’ll cook us something simple.’
‘Thanks. Nice idea. But nothing too carby. I don’t want to have put on five pounds by the time I see Paul again.’
So Anne found a few fillets of fresh fish and a couple of leeks, two small comical purplish artichokes, and, with a minimum of fuss, created an easy meal for them both to enjoy out on the mini balcony.
‘OK,’ she said, serving them. ‘You have a story too, I know. Tell me.’
It had been too soon, at the memorial, for Anne to have asked in detail about Chère Irène’s last weeks. But now, after a few months, Anne felt that the only way she could begin to balance the ledger — though the debt was fundamentally unpayable; nothing equals aiding one’s parent through her dying — was to give her sister a stage and a setting. How the story ended: as Anne knew from her work, everyone always wanted to know that.
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