Parallel Play

by Thomas Rayfiel

  “OK.”

  He flicked the joint out the window.

  “That's not what I meant. You shouldn't be doing any of this, Mark. You should be moving on to something new.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don't know. That's for you to decide.”

  He gripped the wheel very carefully with both hands, concentrating on his driving.

  “So your life is dull and depressing?”

  “No.”

  “That's what you said.”

  “I did not! I said that's what you were making it out to be, with this little pity expedition.”

  “So you're happy.”

  “Of course I'm happy.”

  I held Ann close.

  You just had to reacquaint yourself with certain basic emotions. Redefine them. This might not look or feel or sound like happiness, I told myself, not to the uninitiated, but in fact— I stuck my chin out—this was happiness now, so much more complex and rich a sensation than happiness used to be. I couldn't even remember a single instance of being happy in my old life. Not really.

  “I'm glad,” he said.

  What are you doing? I suddenly asked myself. Why are you sliding back into all these shopworn fantasies about a guy there is absolutely zero chance of your ever sleeping with again?

  We pulled up in front of the apartment building. The anger I thought I was getting out of my system swirled around me, a backwash of guilt, as he helped us down, got the stroller out too, and the diaper bag.

  “That's all right,” I said, standing there, helpless. “You don't have to do that.”

  “Hey, we finally went to Coney Island.”

  “Yeah. It was great.”

  He smiled. We had relived our whole relationship, from getting together to being a couple to breaking up, all in the space of a few hours, just running our emotions over it, as if this was some kind of healing exercise. And now it was over. Really over.

  “So,” he said.

  “Well, thanks.” I hurried to gather all the equipment, to fill my hands even more, not knowing how we would say goodbye. “Thanks for everything.”

  “Want me to help you get upstairs?”

  “No! I mean, really, it's fine. You've done enough. I had a great time.”

  I didn't watch him go. I let Ann do that, holding her over my shoulder while I opened the door to the building so she could stare behind. But she was tired. It had been a long day. I could feel her body going limp. She didn't know who he was, anymore.

  • • •

  “It's the Rockaways.” Harvey was in the bathtub. I was in the living room. “Breezy Point, Belle Harbor, Far Rockaway The Atlantic Ocean's on the other side.”

  “You've been there?”

  “Sure.”

  Of course he's been there, I thought. He'd been everywhere, without having moved a muscle.

  “Who is this guy anyway?”

  “An old friend.”

  “And he just called, out of the blue?”

  “I think he wanted to see what it was like. Having children.”

  I said it as one of those automatic white lies and then wondered if that really was the reason Mark had come around. Maybe he thought he could practice on Ann, see what it felt like to be a dad, just as, before, maybe he had been practicing on me, seeing what it would be like to be a husband.

  “So what did you tell him?”

  “That it was great.”

  “Do you want to have them over for dinner some night?”

  “Who?”

  “That friend of yours and his wife.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “He's not really a friend.”

  A few minutes later he came into the room, naked. My eyes went to the parts of him I particularly liked, his hands, very big and caring, his shaggy eyebrows. He sat down next to me and I laid my head on his chest, a rough blanket, thick and warm, the kind you could wrap yourself up in and survive any winter night. I missed Harvey. Even with him right here, I missed him. If a totally different man had come out of the bathroom, I wondered, how long would it take me to notice? And when I did, would I act any differently?

  “So what are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I don't know.”

  Tomorrow was my big day. He had just found out he wasn't working, for once. He wanted me to go off by myself and let him take care of Ann. I said we should spend it together, a family day, but he had this picture of me wandering around, carefree, doing all the things I wasn't able to do normally.

  “Maybe get a haircut.”

  “That sounds good.”

  I tried to think of something else. I didn't want him to be angry that I couldn't come up with more solo activities.

  “What about you? What would you do, if you had a day to yourself?”

  He shook his head.

  “It's different for me. There hasn't been such a break.”

  “Why?”

  “It's not like I had alternate lives I could have led.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, when you were talking about that guy …”

  “Mark?”

  “It made me think you must have been wondering what it would be like if you ended up with him instead of me.”

  “That's so completely wrong. The man I'm with isn't the sole determining factor of what kind of life I'm going to live.”

  “I never said it was.”

  “You're just jealous.”

  “Of course.”

  His eyes got that faraway look. He could go away in the middle of a conversation, pull a vanishing act. You had to shake him, reconnect him to his surroundings.

  “I want to get a job,” I announced.

  His hand, which had fit itself over the top of my skull and was massaging behind my ears, stopped for a moment, then went on.

  “That's great.”

  “No, it's not.” I tried rolling over, away from him. Except he was everywhere. I was staring between his legs. “Because what it would cost to put her in day care is probably more than I could make while she was gone.”

  “You could always go back to what you did before.”

  “Make knockoffs? And take care of her at the same time?”

  The male body was still a mystery to me. You'd think by now that would be the last thing it contained, mystery, but I couldn't get used to how external it was. Up close, I watched him expand, the little accordion folds, wrinkles, but not the wrinkles of age. Pleats.

  “People say how much things have changed,” I said, “with the wife working and the husband helping, but I don't see it happening. If the wife works, she still ends up doing the parenting and the housework too. Either that or she gives up the kid completely, and then what was the point of having one in the first place?”

  It sounded like something from a magazine article, but I didn't care. I was dimly aware of what was really going on. I was using Mark, the idea of Mark, to reignite my feelings for Harvey. And maybe Harvey's feelings for me. It was wrong, but something about it being wrong made it very deeply right. For both of us. His hands had come alive.

  So this is marriage, I thought. When you actually know how things work. What did it say about me, that I was being so coldblooded? Well, somebody had to be. Romance was not just going to spring up around us like some perfumed flower. The simple truth was, I was tired of not-making-love. We'd been not-doing-it, actively not-having-sex, every night. It wasn't so much that I wanted to, anymore, as that I wanted to get it over with. The tension had worn me out, made me desperate and crazy and no longer myself.

  He was trying to get me to go back to the bedroom with him. There were no curtains in the living room. I wanted to stay, though. I liked the idea of people watching us, of their finding us interesting enough to want to watch. He began to lift me and I shook my head.

  “Come,” he said.

  He was hard now, and I was half undressed but for some reason still resisting.

  “So you
see it's really not so great if I want to get a job. There's no way I can go back. I'm stuck.”

  “Stuck,” he repeated, like that was a good thing. Something to be desired.

  He tried to carry me.

  I was mad at him. I'd been talking without really listening to what I said, just playing a part, and then, cumulatively, it all came to me: I was furious at his physical presence in my life, at what he'd gotten me into. I was furious specifically at his arm, scooping under my shoulders. I nestled my chin into that familiar husbandy smell and bit down once, hard.

  “Jesus!”

  He almost dropped me. His knee came up to prop my back. He twisted his shoulder to get a better look. I hadn't even broken the skin.

  “Bitch,” he added wonderingly

  “Prove it,” I said.

  His eyes returned to mine and finally we were on familiar ground. I don't know how we had gotten there, by some weird roundabout route, a hidden passageway full of rats and spiders, but we were both back to a place we remembered. A power flowed through our limbs. Our thoughts combined and thickened.

  Ann made a gurgling sound.

  “What was that?” he frowned.

  “Nothing. You're right. Let's go to the bedroom.”

  “Did she laugh?”

  Neither of us had remembered her. She was asleep in the swing, or had been. God knows how long she'd been up, taking in a scene that was probably right out of some textbook on What Causes Mental Disorders.

  “I think she laughed,” he said.

  “She did not laugh.”

  I could taste him. There was a neat crescent of toothmarks on his forearm. I was already, in my mind, deeply involved in what was to follow.

  “Did you laugh, sweetheart?”

  He dumped me on the futon, went away, and came back wearing pants.

  “Did Annabelle laugh?” he asked, her not me, carefully extracting her from the swing seat.

  “Well, even if she did,” I argued, trying to replay the sound in my head, “think about what she was seeing when she did it.”

  “Still, it's her first time.”

  “I think she was just choking on something.” I didn't feel a shred of maternal instinct. The opposite, whatever that would be. Normal, rational thinking? Rediscovering your intelligence? “Let's see if she'll go down. It's almost bedtime anyway. Maybe we can still—”

  “I'm going to call my mother. It's not too late.”

  “Your mother? Why?”

  “To tell her. It's a big deal, Eve. She laughed!” He looked at me. “Maybe you should get dressed.”

  My pants were down around my ankles. I left them that way, trudging past the still-steamy bathroom. It was funny. I tried imagining what she'd seen, peering through her small, clear eyes. I mean, there was something funny about what we'd been doing. You had to admit. Not the kind of funny that made you laugh, though.

  • • •

  But Marjorie did, when I told her. She laughed so hard she had to put down her cup and saucer so she wouldn't spill.

  “You're fine,” she finally said. “Look, all mothers go through this. You're supposed to be the Virgin Mary and you're not. Big deal.”

  “I thought having a child was supposed to reprioritize my life.”

  She started to laugh again, then saw I was serious.

  “The real question you should be asking yourself is: What am I doing here?”

  “I wanted to talk.”

  “Well, I'm flattered, but if I had a whole day off I'm not sure this is where I'd choose to spend it.”

  We were at her house. What had been her house. She and Sherman were having money troubles since the split and had decided to sell. Stuff was in boxes—or black plastic garbage bags, if it was meant to be thrown away. There were Post-its everywhere because she tried not to be around when he came. Some said, Yours. Others, with this accusation you could almost hear, just in the way she'd written the word twice, once on top of the other, said, Yours.

  “This is not going to happen to you, Eve.”

  She'd been watching me take it in. Ian and Alex were climbing over piles of crumpled-up newspaper, grabbing fistfuls of packing peanuts, survivor children after a war, playing in rubble.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, Harvey very clearly adores you.”

  She had out the fine china. White with gold rims. I was terrified of breaking something. Unasked questions loomed: Because Harvey adores me? So it's up to him if we stay together or not? I don't have any say in the matter? Didn't Sherman adore you, once upon a time? He must have. So what happened? Why couldn't the same thing happen to me too? I tried thinking of various ways to steer the conversation to some safe neutral topic.

  “Oh, before I forget.” She gave me the keys. “Every two or three days is fine. The watering can's on the counter. There's cat food in the closet. Don't bother to change the litter.”

  “You have a cat? I didn't know that.”

  “He's shy.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Under the bed. He never comes out for strangers.”

  “How come?”

  “He was traumatized as a kitten, they think. We got him from an animal rescue shelter.”

  “What's his name?”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “Fauntleroy He's pretty much the forgotten guy around here. Since the twins. You don't want these, do you? It's a setting for twelve.”

  “The dishes? Aren't you going to take them?”

  “I don't know if I should or not. His family paid for almost all of them. They made us register at Tiffany's. It seems wrong, somehow.”

  Marjorie's life was just as half packed as all the crap it had gathered. She wasn't even sure what she could take, what she was entitled to. None of the Post-its said Mine. It was so sad. I couldn't think of a thing to say.

  “Personally,” she went on, solving the problem of what to talk about, “I would sleep with any UPS man.”

  “Because of the uniform?”

  “That, and because they're both strong and intelligent-seeming. And they come bearing gifts. But I think the real reason is because I read somewhere that their vans have a skylight, a section of plastic in the roof. So we could do it in the truck, with all these boxes around us, on that metal with the special raised pattern. What's it called?”

  “Skid-resistant.”

  “Right. For some reason that appeals to me.”

  I held up my cup. The porcelain was so thin you could see through to the other side.

  “We almost never used them. Just once or twice, on special occasions. I guess this qualifies.”

  She was quiet for a minute.

  “Are you all right, Marjorie?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I don't know.”

  She seemed out of it, but in a pleasant way. Not as bitter as usual. I looked again at the boys. They were fine, not dirty or neglected. And the house, even in the act of dying, was cleaner than mine had ever been or ever would be. Still, there was an awkwardness I couldn't locate the source of. We weren't connecting.

  “Where is she, anyway?”

  “Who?”

  “Harvey's mother.”

  “At some assisted-living facility in Florida.”

  “You like her?”

  “She's all right.”

  “What about you? Why aren't you calling your mother when her granddaughter laughs for the first time?”

  “She doesn't have a phone.”

  “Really?”

  “No phones in the Bible.”

  “So write her a letter, instead of—”

  She started wrapping her cup in paper, even though she hadn't rinsed it out yet.

  “Instead of what?”

  “I'm going to get them some applesauce. Does Annie want any? Oh, that's right, she's with him. I forgot.”

  “Instead of coming around here?”

  She sat back down with a jar and fed the twins one spoonful at a time. They stayed o
n the floor with their mouths open, baby birds poking their beaks out of the nest. She took a bite herself. Then another.

  “You never talk about it,” she said.

  “The Colony? What's to talk about? It's where I grew up.”

  “It doesn't sound normal, from what little you do say.”

  “Whose home life was normal? Was yours?”

  “At least we had a telephone.”

  I sighed.

  “There's no point in writing my mother a letter. She wouldn't open it. I'm dead to her.”

  “Don't be ridiculous. How can you even talk that way?”

  “I'm dead to her spiritually.”

  “Does she know you're married?”

  “I'm not, in her eyes. My being married to someone like Harvey wouldn't interest her.”

  “What would?”

  “If I found God.” I thought about it for a minute. “Or someone like Him.”

  “Listen, you've got a day off, Eve. Make use of it. Do something. Go shopping, or go somewhere out-of-the-way and scream, or … go on a pilgrimage, if that's what you need to do.”

  “A pilgrimage? Where to?”

  “I don't know.” She looked around. “But don't waste your time sitting here with me. Besides, I have to pack.”

  • • •

  I went to Manhattan. It wasn't the same, though. It occurred to me that maybe the reason places didn't seem as loaded with meaning as they used to was because I walked over a landscape of time, instead. Mother, for example, had meant one thing all my life, and now it meant another, without replacing the first. I found myself ten years old in one thought and forty-five in the next. The only solid thing left, I discovered, was Ann. Without her, I was a prisoner released from leg irons, full of spastic energy that sent me staggering in circles, unsteady, without any sustained purpose, desperate to get locked up again.

  “I'm looking for some kind of Jewish gift.”

  The salesman didn't understand.

  “This is Brooks Brothers, ma'am.”

  Again with the ma'am, I thought. What did I have to do, wear a bikini?

  “It's for Hanukkah. I was thinking of a smoking jacket. Do you have those?”

  He hesitated, then finally motioned for me to follow.

  “This way.”

  My brilliant plan (it had just come to me, walking past the store) was to give Harvey a present. I would look at a few things, get some ideas, and then make him his own personal knockoff It would be a love offering, my first piece of work since having Ann. I'd really have to examine the item, though, especially since it was men's clothes, which I'd never tried copying before. But how hard could it be? The main quality of menswear was its incredible dullness. That's why I asked to see the smoking jackets, because they were the only fancy things guys wore that were even the slightest bit sensual.