Not my problem, Paul thought.
In his adult life, how many times had those words crossed his mind?
The child glanced at him again, peeking around the trunk of a London plane, and this time she pulled her fingers from her mouth and gave what looked like a smile, sly and secretive, though he was too far away to be sure. More certain was the gesture she made with her wet hand, a scooping motion, its meaning definite. Come with me.
There were times in Paul’s life when he felt as if he were being watched by the cold eye of an impatient audience, waiting for him to provide amusement. And as much as he resented it, he felt oddly obligated to do his best. When the child slipped behind the tree again, what he wanted to do was throw away his trash and head straight back to his office, taking the shortest route possible through the center of the park, stepping over the stripped bodies of students and backpackers, cutting between the carousel and ticket booth, leaving the place behind for good.
What he knew he should do was approach the mother, politely mention that her child was running away and likely to be snatched by a child pornographer who still haunted this section of Midtown, and prepare to get told off. But he didn’t like the look of her now that he could see her face: jowly and aggressive, facing her friend with a hard, skeptical squint, her wide-hipped stance making her belly—hugely pregnant, he realized—stick out as a challenge. And if he stopped to speak to her, he’d lose sight of the child, whose legs he now saw poking out from behind another tree, several yards down the row. How had she gotten so far? Then there was the flash of her white dress, red cherries streaking across the path and out of view. He left his trash where it was and hurried after her.
As soon as he stepped out of the shade, the sunlight struck him a blow. He had to stop in the middle of the path, blinking and cupping hands around his eyes. For a moment he saw nothing but squared patches of green and white—the central lawn stretching in front of him until it met the library’s marble steps. Then people came into focus, lying down, sitting, walking, obscuring his view like fog. Over the grass, white bowling pins turned end over end, spinning between a pair of bare-chested jugglers. The sound of an accordion drifted from somewhere out of sight, playing a tune that was almost but not quite familiar. A huge belch welled up in his chest, but he let it out quietly, in three or four installments. He’d regret the chili dog for the rest of the day and probably all night. Though the hum of traffic sounded distant, all he could smell was exhaust.
And the child? He couldn’t spot her anywhere. He should have been troubled by this, frantic maybe. He’d seen the look on the faces of parents who’d lost a kid in a crowd, a terror unlike any he could imagine, and then the shaken expression when they snatched the little hand again, the gradual onset of relief warring with imagined scenes of despair. But he felt the relief already and guessed relief was all he’d feel. He’d experience no guilt walking away. He wouldn’t tell anyone in his office about the child, nor mention her to Cynthia when he made it home in the evening. With luck, he’d forget her by the end of the week.
But then: a tug on his trouser leg, and there she was, standing at his feet, looking up at him not with a smile but the same open stare with which she’d watched the ping-pong match—maybe full of wonder, maybe of the empty thoughts of a dimwit. The hand fixed to his pants was wet, though it hadn’t been the one in her mouth. A convex film of yellow snot bubbled from each nostril. Up close her hair was wispier than it looked from a distance, and through it he could see patches of scaly scalp. “Where’s your mother?” he said, more sternly than he meant to, and to make up for it, asked what her name was. Of course if her parents had taught her anything, she wouldn’t tell him. He bent down and tried again. “Should we go find your mother?” Then, feeling unreasonably silly, added, “Your mommy?”
“Uh-oh,” the child said, as he attempted to pry tiny fingers from bunched cloth. But their grip was surprisingly strong, or else they were stickier than he’d realized. Her head was angled back as Takuro’s had been when looking up at the wiry guy, and this, Paul decided, was what made him so uncomfortable around children. Having imagined himself David all his life, he hated stepping into Goliath’s shoes, waiting for rocks to smack him between the eyes.
He pointed in the direction of the ping-pong tables. “I think your mother’s over there.”
“Uh-oh,” the child said again. “Wha’ happened?”
What else could he do but lift her up and carry her to the woman who, neglectful or not, was the mother she was stuck with? But when he reached for her, she let go of his pants and bolted away with a little squeal, a sound of delight, he guessed, though it could just as easily have been one of fear. He didn’t know which for sure until she stopped a few feet away and gave him a look over her shoulder. This time the smile was distinct. Yes, she was playing with him. Did he look like someone in the mood for games? At lunchtime, on a weekday? Did he seem like someone who had the temperament for them?
In half a dozen years, when Kyle was in Little League, Paul had played catch with him ten times at most, because Kyle always turned what Paul thought of as important practice into a series of ridiculous challenges: how high he could throw the ball, how hard he could make a grounder skip off the lumpy lawn, how far he could make Paul run for an errant toss. At ten or eleven, Joy would sometimes get him to wear bedsheets and act out a royal melodrama she improvised on the spot. But she usually ended up scolding him for giving in too easily to the princess’s demands, for not keeping up his English accent, and after a while she stopped asking him to participate, replacing him instead with a huge stuffed elephant her father had given her for Valentine’s Day, having missed Hanukkah by almost two months.
The child waited until he’d nearly reached her before sprinting ahead. If he’d really tried, he could have caught her, of course—his legs were twice as long as hers—but he couldn’t help imagining how foolish he’d look diving after a dirty, barefoot toddler, and even more, how people would stare at him if she screamed in earnest. So instead he followed her in this halting manner across the lawn, until they reached the fountain, where she clambered onto the cement lip and ran precariously around the edge of the pool. Above her a stone chalice squirted a stream of water ten feet into the air, and its spray drifted onto her shoulders. She was now on a level with his eyes, and straight on he could see how disproportionately big her head was compared to the rest of her, how unbalanced, and thought it was only a matter of moments before it tipped her into the water. Already he wondered if he’d have time to pull off shoes and socks before stepping in to fish her out. It depended, he supposed, on whether she landed face up or down.
But instead of falling, she raised up on her toes and stuck out her tongue, catching mist. Then she sat, splashing her feet through the water in an uneven rhythm, two kicks from the right foot followed by one from the left. If he could have trusted her to stay where she was he would have run for the mother then, but the odds were low that she’d be here when he returned. He would have called Cynthia to ask for advice if there were a payphone in sight. What he saw instead were the two ping-pong players, the wiry guy and Takuro, side by side, walking toward him like a pair of warriors striding away from battle. Both carried hot dogs in paper sleeves. Unlike Paul, they deserved all the chili and onions they wanted. They’d worked for it. But when they were close enough he could see the wiry guy’s dog was spread only with pickle relish, Takuro’s nothing but mustard. He wanted to ask for their help. Would they watch the kid while he looked for the mother? But when they came even with him, he only managed to call, “Nice game.”
Takuro gave him a glassy look and would have kept walking if the wiry guy didn’t stop and smile. His headband was gone, but a line of dried sweat marked its place across his forehead. He took a bite of hot dog and tipped one ear toward Takuro. “Never seen him lose,” he said while he chewed. “Two years running.”
“Does he play professionally?” Paul asked.
“Nah. Portfolio m
anager.”
“Makes sense. Nerves of steel.”
“Closest I ever came is eleven-eight. Saw another guy take him to game point.”
“Did he break a sweat then?”
“One slice, then two serves to his backhand. Done.”
Up close Takuro’s boyishness bordered on petulance, as he worked his jaws and scowled, staring off toward Sixth Avenue. His tie hung loosely around his neck, his suit jacket draped over a shoulder. A pinprick of mustard dotted his shirt. Paul was working himself up to mention the child. Weren’t they already a part of it, since he’d seen her while watching them play? Weren’t they as responsible for her as he was, or as any stranger in the park? But when he glanced behind, she was no longer kicking her feet in the pool. In fact, she was no longer sitting on the fountain at all, and he bent over the edge, expecting to find her floating, or submerged.
“That your kid?” The voice was deeper than the wiry guy’s, huskier, perfectly calm. Takuro’s. Only this wasn’t the voice of a Takuro. It had neither the accent Paul had been imagining, nor the whispery deference that made Paul’s Japanese business associate tolerable. More likely his name was Tommy, though Paul couldn’t quite adjust to the change.
“What the hell,” the wiry guy said. Paul followed the line of Takuro or Tommy’s jutting chin, and then he saw: in the right lane of Sixth Avenue, there was the child, tiny as a doll against the open stretch of pavement and the line-up of cars waiting for the light at 41st.
“She doesn’t look anything like me,” Paul said, weakly. What glitch of evolution made morons most likely to reproduce? He’d let his own genetic material go to waste, and now in another hundred years only brutes would inhabit the planet, articulate as apes and less well groomed.
The dress printed with cherries stirred in the breeze. One bare foot reached up to scratch the opposite calf. Beside him, neither the wiry guy nor Takuro or Tommy made a move. The light changed to green.
Afterward, he didn’t remember running to the child, nor making the decision to do so. Did he skirt the food kiosks and tables around the fountain or charge between them, upsetting people’s drinks? Did he take the stairs one at a time or stumble down all three in a stride? All he knew was that he’d scooped her up around the waist with his right arm—his weak one—while his left waved at cars barreling toward them, in big arcs, like a flagger’s at an airport. There may have been time to turn and run back to the curb, but his momentum had him moving in the opposite direction, and it took all his effort to keep from pitching into the next lane. Please see me, he thought, with a measure of self-pity, believing no one ever had.
At least some of the drivers must have seen him, because horns sounded as soon as he pulled upright. But the car in his lane didn’t slow at all. In fact, it accelerated, its grill pointed solidly at his waist. He was still waving, but if the driver noticed he or she gave no indication. In his mouth, the taste of chili powder mixed with acid. He managed to tuck the child around his side and stick his left hand straight in front of him, fingers spread, and for some reason he thought, sadly still, my ping-pong hand, though he’d never picked up a paddle.
Only at the last minute did the car swerve. It was an old Buick Regal or Chrysler LeBaron, a boxy thing from the mid-eighties, with a high dashboard the driver could hardly see over, and a square trunk that fishtailed as it heaved into the next lane, cutting off a cab. It missed Paul’s leg by inches. The wind blew him back on his heels, but he was able to keep his eyes fixed on the driver, hunched down so low he couldn’t tell if it was a young man in a hooded sweatshirt or an old woman with a handkerchief tied tightly as a helmet over her hair. And before the Regal or LeBaron was all the way past, the wind stirred something in him—not rage, exactly, or hatred, but flames of a different, wilder sort, and he ran after, at least a dozen steps, his left fist raised and shaking. “Go fuck yourself!” he shouted, as its engine coughed and then revved, blowing through a yellow light at 42nd and speeding uptown. “Go fuck yourself!”
These were words that had crossed his mind often enough in the forty-five years since he’d first heard them, shouted by the proprietor of a bakery on Utica Avenue, after a patron complained that his bread wasn’t fresh. But before now Paul had never spoken them aloud, at least not in public. They may have crossed his lips from time to time while he was safely enclosed in his car, with the windows rolled up and heat pouring out of the dash and the radio playing, after he’d jammed on the brakes to let a puttering station wagon merge in front of him on I-80. More often he heard the phrase in the silent voice that was deeper and louder and pushier than the one that left his throat, that talked a blue streak between his ears from the time he woke up until he was back in bed. Last week in the supermarket, for example, when the customer ahead of him blathered on to the cashier for a good five minutes about the difficulty of finding effective arthritis medication. Go fuck yourself! he thought when the cashier suggested four Excedrin with a shot of vodka, and again when the customer couldn’t find her checkbook and emptied her purse onto the conveyor belt. Go fuck yourself!
Or, earlier this month, when he called in a roofer to replace a few shingles that had blown off the back porch during an early spring storm, and the roofer told him the entire thing needed replacing—not just the shingles but the plywood underneath. He brought Paul out of the house to tell him this, pointing to a spot where the pitch of the roof sagged. “Like a ninety-year-old tit,” he said. It was drizzling, and Paul was in slippers and socks. He knew the roof needed replacing; the entire porch needed replacing, because to build it Cynthia had hired an unlicensed contractor who’d cut every corner he could. It was all she could afford at the time, a year before she and Paul met, and though they could have easily replaced it now, they hardly ever sat out there since the kids had moved away. They were debating whether to fix it or get rid of it altogether, to give Cynthia more room for garden beds. Of course it was sagging. Did the roofer think Paul was blind?
Paul cried silently, Go fuck yourself! Go fuck yourself! as the roofer drew up a bill for the missing shingles, along with a bid to replace the roof, a bid so outrageously high Paul knew he would shred it the moment he walked inside.
The phrase was so much more descriptive than “Fuck you,” a slur Kyle, while in high school, had liked to hurl around indiscriminately, saying it to his sister, to Cynthia, to the TV, with a smirk and a little shrug, as if his insincerity took all the force out of the words. Paul had no doubt the baker on Utica Avenue had been sincere, had even meant the phrase literally, as he grabbed a rye loaf and gave an underhanded jab at the customer who doubted his integrity. Yes, Paul wanted the roofer to go off somewhere and fuck himself, brutally, with an instrument that would cause him pain. When he did get around to tearing up the bid, after stripping off his wet socks, he thought, Go fuck yourself with a two-by-six!
And now, standing three feet into the right-hand lane of Sixth Avenue, with a grubby child in his arms, and traffic backed up behind him, he actually let the words out. They felt so good passing his teeth he shouted them a third time, with a flourish, after the Regal or LeBaron cleared the 42nd Street light. “Go fuck yourself with an exhaust pipe!” For the first time, he actually believed his father’s line about small men and big cities, which he’d secretly thought was nonsense. After nearly fifty-five years of living in it and working in it, only now did he feel fully a part of the city—not just an observer of its madness and energy but a participant, alive and writhing, fist raised over his head. He wished he’d been shouting all along.
It was wanting to hang onto the feeling for as long as possible that kept him from hurrying back to the sidewalk. But as soon as he began to enjoy it he knew it had begun to fade. What replaced it of course was a furious flood of hot embarrassment as cars started to ease around him, and he caught several gawking, horrified faces behind passenger windows. He knew what they were thinking: you could clean up Midtown all you wanted, get rid of the pimps and hookers and junkies, put cafés and ping-
pong tables in the park, but you’d still have the same unhinged place, teeming with lunatics.
With draining adrenaline came a rush of sound, horns honking for three solid blocks. “Get your fucking kid out of the street,” someone called, and only then did he feel the weight of the child in his arm, the fabric of her dusty dress, one bare foot against his back, the other pressing into his belly. Only then did he smell her bittersweet breath and oily hair and what was unmistakably a soiled diaper. Only then did he realize she had one of her filthy fingers in his ear and two others working at his mouth. “Uh-oh,” she said when he pulled her hand away. “Wha’ happened?”
Back on the sidewalk, he hesitated before putting her down. He had a flash of the car charging at him, and then a flash of what might have happened if it hadn’t swerved: his body flinging through the air, flopping on the pavement, the child squashed beneath him. Or, if he’d stayed on the sidewalk, and only the child’s body went flying. What would he have done then? Rushed into the street or scuttled away?
The sidewalk was bustling, people hurrying past in either direction. The ping-pong players had disappeared. No one else was coming up to congratulate him.
Hadn’t anyone seen what he’d done?
The child stuck her fingers in his mouth again, and again he tasted stomach acid. He set her on her feet, and once more she bolted away. He prepared to follow, but this time she ran straight to her mother, who stood beside the fountain now, her back to them, her enormous taut belly catching sunlight. The child raised her hand, and the mother took it without any sign of surprise, without any hint that she’d been looking for her or realized she’d been gone. She expected nothing else but the little fingers slipping into hers. Linked now as if they’d never been apart, the two walked downtown. Not once did the child glance back at Paul.
Between You and Me Page 15