“This already is a serious relationship.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do. I’m not talking about playing mother to him.”
He remembered thinking how calmly she said this, how her voice lacked even the slightest edge of desperation. How it made him think: The absence of anything, some element, creates the presence of something else. And how he chose not to hear the certainty of affection that was in her voice.
She said, “You know I’d never tell you how to bring him up.”
“I know.”
“And you know this isn’t about trying to replace his mother.”
“I know that, too.”
“So what is it?”
“I won’t set him up for more disappointment.”
“I’m not going to disappoint him. Or you.”
“It might not start out that way, but you never know what will happen over time.”
She shook her head. “Come on, Jack. That’s not what this is about.”
He leaned back and took a deep breath. “I’m not going to calibrate his life. I’m not going to rush him through his childhood. And I won’t do that to you, either.”
“Do what to me?”
“Make you wait until Danny’s an adult.”
“That’s something I can decide for myself, don’t you think? Besides, that’s not what I’m asking you to do.” She stood up and straightened the blinds, keeping her back to him. “You’re circling the wagons. There’s something you don’t want to tell me. Or is it that you don’t know quite how?”
“I’m doing what I think is right for Danny.”
“I never said you weren’t. But does that include depriving yourself of a relationship?”
“You’re exaggerating things.”
“I might be understating them.” She turned around. “I’m willing to bet this isn’t the first time you’ve had this conversation with a woman you were seeing.” When Jack said nothing, Maggie only smiled and nodded her head. “Don’t think I’m trying to make a case for myself. Trying to talk you into anything. You can walk away, I can walk away, and we’ll never see each other again. We’ll miss each other like crazy, but we’ll live.” The music stopped and at the same time Maggie stopped speaking, as though she wanted the silence to hang there; as though that was the sound of the emptiness Jack was proposing and she wanted him to get a good dose of it. He didn’t break the silence. He only waited for her to talk him out of it. That’s what he wanted. He didn’t want to leave her and he didn’t know how to stay. And what if he’d said that, if he’d said, “I’m the one who’s getting too attached”?
If he’d said, “You see, I’ve made this deal with myself. It’s about self-deprivation and protecting Danny and it’s the only way I know how to hold my life together and keep Danny safe, but there’s got to be a way to work with it.” It would have told her what she wanted to know. If he’d said, “Once I had a wife and a baby and we lived in a loft on Crosby Street and I lost that…” If he’d said, “You see, there’s Anne…” they might have come up with an answer. It was something Maggie would have understood. But if he could have said that, he wouldn’t have needed the deal.
Maggie let the silence hang there while she looked out the window. The sunlight lay frozen on the floor.
Jack stared at the back of her head, at the sleek cut of her hair, at the way her yellow sweater flared over her hips. He could smell her perfume.
Maggie walked back to him and sat down. She drew herself close to him and softly traced her finger along his cheek, the way she had when they danced at Ambrosini’s and when they sat in the corner booth listening to jazz.
When she broke the silence, she asked, “Have you ever tried? Since your divorce, I mean.”
“You know I’ve dated—”
“I’m talking about a relationship.”
He didn’t answer.
“You’re afraid of something. Isn’t that what this is really all about?”
He didn’t answer that, either. “I’ve told you what it’s about.”
“No. You’ve been saying what you don’t want and won’t allow, but what will you allow?”
“I’m going to stop seeing you.”
He expected her to pull away from him, but she didn’t. “That’s ridiculous,” and she leaned into his body.
“Maybe it is, but that’s the only way to resolve this.”
He considered what he was doing, what he was about to do, without any pretense of rightness. It was easy to ponder the future beyond his action, to know that only a few more minutes remained and he would never see Maggie again and he would always regret this day and his decision, to consider what he was doing in the name of self-deprivation. Or was it Danny who was being deprived, and of what, exactly? A mother? A second chance at childhood? Did he really believe that he was keeping Danny safe from more disappointment and sadness? He might have wondered what he was protecting and who.
He might have wondered if all he had to do was tell Maggie, “Okay, let’s give it a try.” Or, “Okay, let’s give it a little more time.” Or he could have said, “It isn’t that I don’t know what I’m doing, what I’m giving up, what I’m losing. But I don’t know what else to do.”
All he did was wait, choking on the things he did not permit himself to say.
Maggie said, “It’s not the only way,” flatly, her hand touching the back of his neck where it’s always soft and warm.
“And what if we keep seeing each other?” Jack answered. “We’ll only have this discussion again, a week from now, a month. It will always be there.”
“So? We’ll eventually come to terms with it, or work through it.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“So you’re going to walk out on it. That’s foolish.”
“I have no choice.”
“No choice? That’s not a reason.” She shifted a little and looked at him. He felt her breath on his face. “Tell me,” she said, softly. “Tell me what you’re afraid of.”
He paused before he answered, “Do the math.”
“But I’m not Anne.”
“Everyone is Anne,” he explained.
He thought: Everyone is Anne. And no one is Anne. He thought about Anne, who would curl up in the crook of his arm and breathe softly and pull his face to hers. How her skin smelled so terribly exciting. How she said, “Can we always be like this? Loving each other and living our lives together?”
He thought about how much he loved her when they were still undergraduates at Gilbert College and when he was the young professor at NYU and Anne was rushing headlong through Cultureburg.
He thought about how much he loved her when the three of them spent the summer in the country house in Loubressac. Anne was working against time, preparing to mount her second show. Jack was writing his next book. Danny was four months old and slept on the pallet Anne had made for him. She said, “He sleeps through the night and makes these little insect noises in his sleep, and when he wakes up and sees us, it’s like this ecstatic recognition: ‘It’s you. Yay, it’s you.’” She managed not to make this sound precious. She said, “He really is the best little baby,” and lay with her head on Jack’s chest breathing with his breathing, playing with Danny’s hands, which were unimaginably small and awesome for their fragility, while Danny, tucked between his mother and father and not making those little insect noises at the moment, issued a soft purring sound.
“He has the most lovely colored eyes,” Anne said. She placed her index finger on Danny’s face and drew a tiny circle along his cheek. “He’s quite lovely. Quite the little charm boy. Just like his father.” She turned her face to Jack. “We’re doing all right with him, especially now that he’s emerging from his larval stage?” And she said a second time, nodding her head firmly, “We’re doing all right, aren’t we, Jack?”
Jack didn’t hear the doubt, he didn’t hear the need for reassurance, although surely it was there, that summer
in Loubressac. He only answered, “We’re doing all right,” while Danny giggled, or made sounds that sounded like giggles.
“He does try to ingratiate himself,” Anne said, “doesn’t he?”
Later that month when they returned to New York, they walked through Central Park with Jack’s parents. His mother said Danny was “the best little baby. So much easier than you were.”
“And very cooperative,” Anne said.
“Cooperative?” Jack’s mother asked.
“He never makes a fuss when I’m working, or cries.”
“Cooperative,” Jack’s mother repeated.
“He’s also very alert.” Jack’s father lifted Danny out of the stroller. “Look at that face. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s talking before he’s a year.”
“His first word will probably be cinema,” Anne told them.
“Chiaroscuro,” Jack said.
“Duchamp,” his father said, and laughed. He lowered Danny into the stroller and pushed him along the path.
“So it’s working out?” Jack’s mother said in a way that made Jack tell her she sounded less than convinced.
They stopped to pose for pictures with Danny smiling atop Jack’s shoulders, Jack believing it would always be like this. It was there on his face, in the photographs, but there was something else in the photographs, in the expression on Anne’s face while she looked at Danny, if only for that moment, that could have been mistaken for confusion, as though something had thrown her off, and it wasn’t the first time Jack had witnessed it. He’d seen that same expression when Anne sat at her easel and Danny slept in the cradle next to her. And sometimes when Danny was playing on the floor, and Anne sat on the couch sketching him or simply watching him. And sometimes when Danny wasn’t even in the room.
Jack would ask, “What is it?”
Anne would shake her head and say, “It’s nothing. I’m just thinking.” But she didn’t say what it was that she was thinking. Only, “It’s not important,” the inflection in her voice suggesting that it was anything but unimportant, which Jack pointed out.
“It’s really nothing. Nothing at all.”
And he asked her again one night, after they’d dropped off Danny at Jack’s parents’ apartment. They were sitting in the back of a cab, on their way to a dinner party.
Anne told him, “I’m thinking of the new paintings.” And a few seconds later, “I’m thinking of naming the series ‘One Foot on the Platform, One Foot on the Train.’ That’s how I’ve been feeling lately.” She turned her head and looked out the window. The sparking of the street lamps, the red and green of the traffic lights, the quick flash of amber, burst against her reflection. “I don’t mean about us. You and me. But I don’t always know how to feel about Danny. About being a mother.” She looked over at him. “I don’t mean just in the moment when I’m with him. I’m talking about something more pervasive. I can’t really give it a name, except that I want to be Danny’s mother and at the same time I don’t want a child at all, and all the while I don’t ever doubt that I love him. It isn’t about that. And it isn’t about being nostalgic for when it was only the two of us.”
Jack said he had a pretty good idea of what she was talking about, and that he’d sometimes felt the same way.
Anne said, “All parents do, I suppose. Once in a while.” She said she really believed that, “even if half the time I don’t know what I feel, or how I feel, except confused and it frightens me.” She shook her head. “God, Jack. He’s the best little boy.”
There were mornings when the three of them would lie in bed, Danny nuzzling his cheek against Anne’s neck and kicking his small feet against Jack’s hips, and they would laugh and sing songs. Times when Danny would roll across Anne’s lap and burrow his head in the crook of her arm. Or she would sit on the floor with him and make toys out of cardboard, old socks and yarn. There didn’t seem to be any confusion then. Anne would look at Jack and smile, then look over at Danny and scoop him up and swing him around her hips and declare, “You are the best little boy.”
There were times when Anne told Jack that she wanted to protect Danny from any doubts she had. She said, “I know it’s only a phase I’m going through. I know it will pass.” Those were the times, she said, when she had no doubts at all.
But there were those other times when that look returned, and not just when Danny was running around the loft, making noise, talking to himself, while Jack worked on his book and Anne painted—there always seemed to be a work-in-progress back then, propped on Anne’s easel, stacked on Jack’s desk—but when they were doing nothing at all, and Anne told Jack that she wondered if Danny could sense how she was feeling and how worried she was. But that winter, Danny did not behave like a little boy with any worries, not when he rolled around in the snow, or chased the pigeons in Washington Square. Or when he spent the weekend with his grandparents so Jack and Anne could spend the weekend alone. Jack’s mother said Danny was the most contented little boy she’d ever seen, and then, with no small amount of displeasure, “I assume he’s still cooperating.”
Danny was still cooperating.
And he was still cooperating in late March, a few weeks before his second birthday. That’s when Anne said, “I think all that concern was over nothing. I couldn’t be happier.” Maybe it had something to do with her upcoming show. Maybe she really believed, “It must have been one of those phases mothers go through.” She told Jack, “I know we made the right decision.”
Later that month, the gallery mounted Anne’s “One Foot on the Platform…” show. The art critic from the Times said Anne’s palette had grown deep and expansive over the past two years. ARTnews crowned her “the Queen of Postmodernism.” Art in America praised her for the “ontological autonomy indicative of her entire body of work.” It was 1983. A lot of people were throwing money at art. Some of that money came to Anne. That summer they went back to France. To the country house in Loubressac.
Anne was going to work on paintings for two private collections. They were commissioned for September. Jack was under contract to write his third book. They hired a local woman, Isabelle Pujol, to be Danny’s au pair. It was very hot that June. There were no fans or air conditioners in the house, no screens on the windows, which were kept open day and night, the shutters pulled back; the shade, and whatever cooling it managed, came courtesy of the old trees in the yard. The kitchen hummed with flies. At least once a day a sparow came swooping into the big room and quickly flew out. It was never less than warm inside. The best time to work was late afternoon, break for supper with Danny, work until sunrise while Danny slept, and sleep during the hottest time of day, while Danny was off with Isabelle. Some nights their friends George and Catherine came by for drinks.
Anne worked downstairs in the big room off of Danny’s bedroom. Jack worked upstairs, shirtless in cutoffs, where the clacking of the typewriter would not keep Danny awake. In the morning, they both kept Danny company while he ate his cereal or the egg Anne scrambled for him. Danny was walking and talking now, in the clutches of the “terrible twos.” Fighting toilet training. Curious about everything, and defiant. His word of choice was “No.” Anne said maybe Danny was finally acting out feelings he hadn’t expressed back in New York. He needed help drinking his milk, but when Anne tried to show him how to hold his cup, he shouted “No” and splashed the milk in her face. He demanded their attention, but when they gave it to him he yelled, “Don’t look at me,” and threw the nearest object, a pencil, a plate, at them.
“Isabelle has a big day planned for you,” Anne would say, “so finish your breakfast.”
“No.”
“She’s taking you to her uncle’s farm,” Jack would tell him. “Isn’t that exciting?”
“No.”
“You’ll see lots of animals. Horses and—”
Danny would kick his feet against his chair, shriek, “Don’t want to go,” take a handful of scrambled egg and throw it on the floor.
“Do you
want to stay here with Mummy and Daddy?”
“No.”
“Don’t you want to go for a ride with Isabelle?”
“Hate Isabelle.” Danny would pound the table and scream.
“What do you want to do?”
Danny would reach for another handful of eggs, but if Anne beat him to it and took the eggs out of his hand, Danny would start to cry.
So it went: Danny kicking and screaming, throwing his food, behaving, well, like a two-year-old.
“But you said—”
“No.”
“But you asked—”
“No.”
“But you wanted—”
“No. No. No.”
Some mornings, Anne would scream back at him, and when Danny threw eggs at her she’d snatch the plate and shout, “Then, don’t eat your breakfast,” and scrape the food into the garbage. Or Jack would grab Danny’s bowl of cereal just before the small hands pushed it to the floor, and leave Danny sitting in his high chair kicking and screaming at the empty room.
By the time Isabelle arrived, Jack and Anne were dripping sweat, exhausted and in no mood to coddle or charm their little boy. They warned Isabelle about Danny’s present mood—they all spoke French so Danny wouldn’t understand. “L’enfant terrible,” Anne explained.
Isabelle smiled, lifted Danny to her ample bosom and a moment later he was sitting on her lap, eating what remained of his breakfast, drinking milk out of his cup and, after hugs and kisses to Mummy and Daddy, grinning happily and handsome from inside Isabelle’s pickup truck.
“Not exactly sleep-inducing,” Anne said, as they walked upstairs to their bedroom.
The evenings, after supper, were the most difficult. Danny, tired but too excited to go to bed, hurled himself through the house, distracted for a moment by a toy, then zipped through the big room, yelling, banging books together, throwing them in the air, jumping at whatever caught his attention, laughing, screaming, hopping along the furniture. Anne managed to keep her brushes on a shelf beyond his reach, or Danny surely would have scattered them on his way upstairs to Jack’s room, where he banged on the typewriter, doing little damage to the work-in-progress, until he mastered the technique of turning on the typewriter—the law of averages notwithstanding, Danny never managed an actual word, let alone a masterpiece.
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