by Steve Tesich
Our lawyer told me that he was calling me from the hospital room where the young girl was now recuperating. His voice was very low. He was whispering almost. No, no, he said, there was nothing wrong. No problems at all. Everything was fine. The girl had delivered not long ago. The baby was fine. It had been quickly removed so that the girl didn’t even have a chance to hold it or see it, which lessened the risk of her becoming attached to it. She didn’t even know if she had given birth to a boy or a girl.
“It’s a boy,” he whispered.
There was just one thing, he said, and I could refuse if it made me uncomfortable. The young girl had pleaded with him to be allowed to hear the voices of the couple who were adopting her baby. Just to hear them. To hear what they sounded like.
Had Dianah been there, I would have passed the phone to her and let her, as one mother to another, talk to the girl. But since she wasn’t, I agreed to do it myself.
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” our lawyer advised me.
“I know.”
“Remember,” he whispered, “no names.”
“Yes. I know.”
There was a long pause and then a very sleepy, very young voice came on to say, in a soft Southern drawl, “Hi.”
“Hello,” I replied.
Another long pause ensued and then, not knowing what else to say, I asked her how she was feeling.
“Tired,” she said. “I thought it would hurt more to have a baby. But it didn’t hurt. Not nearly like I thought it would. It just made me tired. I could sleep and sleep. It’s a real nice room they have me in.”
“My wife’s not at home,” I felt obliged to tell her, so she wouldn’t be wondering why she wasn’t talking to the future mother of her child. “She’s out buying baby things. She’s been shopping ever since we heard.”
“Tell me, mister, if it’s all right for me to know this, are you folks rich?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Real rich?”
“Real stinking rich,” I told her.
Maybe it was the way I said it. Laughter just bubbled out of her in response. There was this raucous catchin-the-throat quality to her laughter that not only seemed unusual for somebody her age and startling under the circumstances, but also caused her laughter to break up, seemingly to die, and then reerupt again an octave higher. It just trailed off at the end, becoming softer and softer, but raspy soft, like the sound of a soft-shoe dancer.
We talked some more. She kept calling me mister. I didn’t know what to call her. She asked me to promise that I would love her baby, that it would have everything. I promised. I thanked her for giving us her child.
“You are welcome, mister,” she told me.
And then, tired and sleepy, she said, “Bye.”
When Dianah returned, I told her all about the telephone call. I left out the description of the mother’s laughter.
4
I despise and have always despised the term “little masterpiece.” It’s a favorite category of film critics for certain foreign films. The term “little masterpiece” seems to suggest the existence of a whole spectrum of masterpieces ranging in sizes, like products on supermarket shelves, from small to medium to large, to jumbo-sized masterpieces. And yet, despite my aversion and detestation of that term, I could think of nothing more fitting to describe the Old Man’s film. It is humbling, if not humiliating, to realize that there are occasions when we’re all just as fatuous as any film critic.
The film was a masterpiece because it was perfect. It was “little” because its subject matter was love.
A man and a woman. They were both, in their own words, happily married. Then, by chance, they met each other. A vision of another kind of life and another kind of love was born between them. It was as if at some point in their lives their souls had been torn in half. Just when they had adapted and found a way to be happy living with half a soul, they met the very person who had the other half in his, in her possession. The serrated, torn edges, like the two halves of a treasure map, fit perfectly.
Once they had met, they could not unmeet. Once they had experienced the feeling of being whole, they could not pretend that it hadn’t happened.
So they went on meeting and the affair began.
The mere act of being together, in a car, in a coffee shop, in a motel room, increased the wattage in their lives, made both of them burn with a different kind of light. Her whole face changed, became more beautiful, when he was with her. Likewise, he changed when she was with him. A third entity came into existence when they were together. A ghost. The holy ghost of love itself.
But to keep this kind of love alive required an inordinate amount of energy, both spiritual and emotional, because it was an inordinate kind of love they felt for each other. Each time they got together was almost a mutual act of self-immolation. They were both ordinary people, an ordinary man and an ordinary woman, caught in an extraordinary love affair that required terrifying amounts of inner resources to feed the fire of the love they felt.
It was not the infidelity that troubled them, or what the people in the town were saying about the two of them. It was the sheer amount of energy they needed if they wanted to keep on loving each other.
They discovered, in the course of the film, that the demands of this kind of love were too much for them. They tried to make do on less. They tried to ration themselves. They could both tell that as a result of this rationing, something divine was dimming and dying between them. But they could not shake off the entropy. In the end, it was just the two of them, sitting in that same restaurant where we saw them early in the film. Just the two of them. The ghost, the holy ghost of love, was not there with them anymore.
Unable to comprehend what had happened, to accept responsibility for what they had allowed to happen, both of them used their marriages as an excuse for ending their love affair. They both said that the guilt they felt, she toward her husband, he toward his wife, was the cause of their separation. They said this to avoid confronting the much greater guilt and the much graver infidelity toward their own souls, torn in half again.
We see them a few years later, at a Fourth of July celebration in the park in the center of the town. Her husband is there. His wife is there. Their children are there. In a scene full of heartbreaking ordinariness, we watch the fireworks.
They have both returned to the fold of their families and former lives, but it is clear that they will be haunted forever by the vision of the love they have allowed to die. And because the memory of that vision, and the part they played in its demise, is still with them, they both seem, in that final scene in the park, despite the fireworks and the festivities and their friends and families around them, as alone as any inmate on death row.
The film was a love story, but it would be more fitting to think of it instead as a story about love, a story that explored the expiration of love in us all. The tragedy of the limited resources of man.
The waitress in the restaurant, that woman I knew to be Billy’s mother, appeared several more times in the film, but only as part of the background in a scene belonging to somebody else. She never had another line to say.
The movie ended the way it began. No end credits. No music. No THE END at the end. Nothing. It just ended.
5
Four days later. It’s a little after three A.M. I sit on the couch in the living room, smoking, with an ashtray on my lap. I have one of those remote-control gizmos in my hand. On top of the TV set, where I have placed it, sits a framed photograph of Billy. His high school graduation picture. On the screen I watch, yet again, the scene in the restaurant. The waitress appears. She goes to the booth. She says her lines. She laughs.
The laughter just bubbles out of her. The same raucous catchin-the-throat laughter of that fourteen-year-old girl on the telephone some twenty years ago.
And then I rewind and replay that same scene all over again.
&
nbsp; I have been doing this for hours.
I think my thoughts or they think themselves, it’s hard to tell the difference. I think the kind of thoughts that only God should think, but the remote-control gizmo in my hand makes me feel godlike.
The three of us, Billy, his mother below him on the monitor, and I sitting on the couch opposite them, the three of us are like three parallel rivers, three parallel lines, which in the old Euclidean geometry could never meet and intersect, but which in the modern time-bend and space-bend universe can. With a phone call or two (another remote-control gizmo) I can alter the landscape of all three of our lives. I can change the course of the rivers. I can cause a confluence to occur. I can, like God, bring mother and son together. There is something terrifying about doing this, meddling in their lives in this way, but I know that I can do it.
What would happen, I wonder, if I arranged to bring mother and son together without either of them knowing that they were mother and son?
Would something in them respond to each other?
Would they know in some way that they were flesh of the same flesh?
My thoughts move on as I replay the scene again on the TV screen.
Despite my many failures as a father, I now have (do I not?) something enormous and essential in my possession that I can give Billy and that will (will it not?) make up in one fell swoop for all the derelictions of my past. If I give him back his mother, that will (will it not?) more than make up for all the rest.
What greater gift could I give him?
And by doing so, would not a bond form between us, some new bond, loving in its own way? Would he not thereafter think of me as a true father, because who else but a true father gives back a mother to a child?
And she, would she not see in me a deliverer who gives her back something she foolishly gave away as a child?
It is possible (is it not?) that thereafter I will be an indispensable and cherished part of their lives. It is Saul, they will say (will they not?) who brought us together. We owe it all to him and we will always love him for it. And as a result I will (will I not?) finally have a home of my own in their hearts.
I think my thoughts, or they think me, it’s hard to tell which, and because I’m in a mood to do so, I warn myself against setting such thoughts in motion.
There is something terribly wrong, I tell myself, about my godlike contemplation of intervening in their lives.
A man like me, incapable of playing the role of a man properly, should not try playing God with the lives of others.
My mood is one of judicious restraint and concern for the welfare of Billy and his mother.
But I know myself. I know that my mind revolves. I know that my moods are like phases of the moon. I know everything except how to stop being the way I am.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1
HER FACE GREW on me. Either because I knew who she was or because there really were features in common, I came to see many similarities between the moving image of her face and the framed phgotograph of Billy on top of the TV set.
Billy was sixteen in the photograph.
When she was sixteen, Billy was two.
I didn’t know her name. I didn’t know where she lived. I didn’t know if she was now married or not, with or without children of her own. I didn’t even know if she was still alive. People die. And sometimes they die senseless, random deaths. The pages of the New York Times were full of stories of random bullets and random victims and there was no guarantee that this epidemic of randomness had not claimed her as well.
It was all I could do to keep myself from calling Cromwell’s Brad in LA and getting all the information I needed about her, or at least enough to allow me to find the rest for myself.
As the crisis of what I should do intensified, my response to it was to let my beard grow. If this was not exactly dealing with the crisis, the sight of my hairy face in the mirror every morning was a useful visual reminder, lest I forget, that I had a crisis on my hands.
When Dianah called me, my scraggly beard was approaching its first full week of existence.
She had just returned from her spa. It was wonderful. Truly wonderful. They had both had such a wonderful time, especially “poor Jessica” who seldom got a chance to go to places like this.
We decided to meet for dinner that Saturday. Although I did not feel like seeing her, it seemed like a good idea to discuss with her in person the details of my dilemma. The least I could do, before I did anything about Billy’s mother, was to inform Dianah about her existence. My personal feelings about Dianah aside, she had been a good mother to Billy and deserved to be consulted.
2
The French restaurant where Dianah and I go to discuss our divorce is located not far from my office, on Fifty-eighth Street.
The restaurant, when I get there, is packed. The din is pleasantly deafening. We agreed to meet there at eight, but I am early as usual. Dianah, I know, will be late, as always.
The maitre d’ is a man named Claude who greets me warmly since I am an old customer, then apologizes that my table is not ready yet. He inquires, as he always does, about Dianah, and I tell him, as I always do, that she is fine and will be along shortly. Claude is aware of my scraggly beard, but in the best maitre d’ fashion he manages to convey the impression, without saying a word, that a scraggly beard is just what I needed.
He leaves to greet other customers. I go to the bar and order a drink to pass the time while I wait for Dianah to show up. I have three bourbons in a row. I chug the first two. I sip the third. But the drinks have absolutely no effect on me. It’s like pouring lighter fluid on myself, only to discover as I strike one match after another that I’m completely fireproof.
3
Dianah finally arrives. She is wearing a striking blue dress dotted with lifelike images of little endangered elephants. Whether African or Asian I’m not qualified to say, but there are dozens of them, all over her blue dress, beautifully replicated, tusks and all.
Although we’ve spoken on the phone, we haven’t seen each other in person since the McNabs’ day-after-Christmas party at the Dakota. She looks at me, and then she looks at me again and bursts out laughing.
“A beard!” she cries out and claps her hands. “My poor darling,” she says, “it looks like a swarm of flies landed on your face.”
We kiss. She pulls back. She strikes a pose. She is convinced, as she has told me on the phone, that her stay in that spa has done her a world of good and that as a result she now looks entirely different, younger, more beautiful, radiant. She looks exactly the same to me, but the sheer horsepower of her conviction that she has been rejuvenated overwhelms my perceptions. Who am I to say she doesn’t look radiant?
“You look wonderful,” I tell her. “I’ve never seen you look so good.”
“I feel good,” she says.
Claude appears. He leads us to our table. Dianah follows him. I follow her. If there’s one thing at which she excels, it’s the way she walks through a crowded room. I genuinely admire the way she does it. A kind of runway walk.
On the back of her blue dress too there are little doomed pachyderms. Her gleaming platinum-blond hair shines above them like the merciless sun over the defoliated, drought-stricken plains of the Serengeti.
We sit down at our table and check out the people at the tables around us. They return our gaze. We order drinks. Dianah, confident of her radiance, radiates. I light a cigarette.
The drinks arrive. We toast each other. I chug mine and light another cigarette. She sips hers and tells me about the wildlife conference she attended at the spa.
The natural habitat of countless species, she tells me, is being systematically destroyed.
“At least there’s a system to it,” I tell her.
She frowns.
“This wildlife expert from Seattle pointed out to us that once the natural habitat of a given species is destroyed …”
I drink my drink and smoke my cigarette and wonde
r, as she goes on, if I myself have ever had such a thing, a natural habitat.
The Eskimos have the Arctic. The Pygmies have their jungle. The rain-forest Indians have or have had their rain forest.
My co-op on Riverside Drive is very nice, very spacious, the maintenance is reasonable and the view is quite pleasant, but no, I wouldn’t call it a home and I certainly wouldn’t call it my natural habitat.
Maybe white people no longer have natural habitats.
“There are over eight hundred and fifty endangered and threatened species,” Dianah tells me, “not including plants. If the list included plants, there would be over one thousand and seventy. In the past twenty years alone, over three hundred species were declared extinct while awaiting government approval to be on the endangered list. At this rate …”
Our waiter comes to take our order. Dianah falls silent and listens to the specials of the day. Some items on the menu are, it would seem, endangered as well. There is only one sea bass left. A couple of other selections are unfortunately extinct tonight. No more Dover sole. Ditto for brook trout.
We place our orders. It’s absolutely pointless for me to keep drinking, but I order another bourbon and a bottle of wine.
The waiter takes our menus and departs.
Dianah, deeply concerned, admonishes me for drinking too much. She reaches across the table and places her beringed hand on top of mine.
“You must take better care of yourself, darling. You really must.”
“Why’s that?”
“Oh, Saul,” she sighs.
My bourbon arrives.
I don’t need this drink. What I need is to get drunk, but since I can no longer get drunk, it would be very easy for me to give up drinking altogether. Although I no longer love Dianah, I haven’t got the heart to hurt her. And it would hurt her if I stopped drinking. She has invested so much time and energy popularizing the myth that it was my alcoholism that was responsible for our wrecked marriage, that to give up drinking now would almost seem vindictive. For me to show any personal improvement after our failed marriage would border on being spiteful. Although I am riddled with diseases and reprehensible traits, spite is not one of them. So I know that the best thing I can do for her is to uphold the myth that I am a hopeless drunk. I feel I owe her that much.