“But I think now I have to go to sleep.”
I yawned, right in his face, a friendly stretching yawn, trying to say, This has all been a dream. We, you and me, us. It was nothing but a dream.
He reached out and lifted some of my hair. “What's this?”
“I know. I look like shit.”
“You don't look like shit. But your hair's too long.”
I wanted to take his hand away but that would be more intimate, somehow, than letting him explore just how ragged I'd allowed myself to get.
“Let me give you a cut.”
“No, Mark. I told you. I have to go to bed.”
“It's only nine-thirty”
“She'll be up again at five.”
He found a stool in the kitchen and carried it into the bathroom.
“Mark?”
“I'm going to shampoo your hair. Then I'm going to cut it. Just a trim. It'll take twenty minutes, tops.”
Maybe this is the way to sanity, I reasoned. Get your head looking organized externally, and then the brain, sensing the change, follows suit and trims its wild thoughts, gets rid of all those mental split ends that lead it down wrong paths, so you don't find yourself in two places at once anymore.
“Besides,” he said, sitting me down, “I want to talk. We never get to talk.”
Well, whose fault is that? I asked silently, letting his hands push me back until my neck hit the side of the sink. The sound of water started, close to my ears, and the feel of it, warm first, then steaming. He found shampoo, squirted it on, much too much, the way I remembered their doing it the one time I'd ever been to a semi-fancy salon. I had been scandalized by the waste, even though I was paying.
His fingers began working it in, not frantically scratching, the way I did in the shower, more of a kneading motion.
“Have you done this before?” My eyes were closed.
“Sure.”
“To Io?”
“No.”
“To who, then?”
“To myself.”
“Well, that's not the same, is it?”
“Sure it is.”
His thumbs reached my ears. They went right up to the base of each, making strong whorls, cleansing, loosening some invisible buildup. I felt my body sag. It was only the thick, insistent porcelain of the sink, bouncing against the back of my neck, that kept me from sliding to the floor.
“Does this hurt?”
“No. It's not like a shampoo, though. It's more of a massage.”
“I'm trying to get out the tension.”
“So what”—I felt my words slowing down—“do you want to talk about?”
“Nothing in particular. Lean back more.” He started to rinse. “You have conditioner?”
I risked opening my eyes. The ceiling had strange shadowy shapes to it. I was so horizontal it looked like another wall, a secret one, with no windows or door. A wall you never saw but was right there, all the time.
“Why did Io send you here tonight?”
“Because she thought you needed help. Because she's a decent person.” He said it like we weren't. “I told her about us.”
“Yes, I know. So she trusts you. That's nice.”
The conditioner slid in. I let his fingers go wherever they wanted, down farther, to the beginnings of my shoulders, to the back of my jaw. Or maybe I was making unconscious attempts to meet them. It was hard to tell. The boundaries between us blurred.
“You missed your calling,” I murmured.
“She can't have kids.”
“Io?”
“Her tubes are scarred. She had some sickness as a child.
They're not sure what. It screwed everything up inside. That's why she's so into physical fitness.”
“Are you sure? There's all kinds of techniques for getting pregnant now. Procedures that—”
“We might adopt. I don't know.”
He rinsed me again, then did that towel thing, squeezing out the water so my hair was perfectly damp, not dry or dripping. He sat me up and draped another towel around me like a cape.
“You're so good at this.”
“These are lousy scissors.”
He was combing carefully, a part right down the middle. I blinked once and caught him with an unusually serious expression.
“Eyes closed.”
I smiled into his body heat, his warmth.
“I'm glad we can be like this.”
“Be like what?”
“Talking. Not—”
“So is she mine or his?”
He raised one section of hair, the one he had touched to begin with, that had offended his sense of proportion, and snipped it off.
“What?”
“Ann.”
I could hear each strand being sliced, they were so close to my ear. They sounded like the cables of a bridge being cut, one at a time. Ping, ping, ping. The sounds translated into shivers.
“Is she mine? Or is she his?”
“She's mine,” I answered automatically. “What are you talking about?”
“You can't blame me for wondering.”
I opened my eyes but there was a distorted side of hand blotting everything out. He had a hunk of hair, half my head, he was tugging at with a comb, trimming off the edges. His smell, that familiar combination of beeswax, pot, and … just him, his musky take-a-bath-once-a-week self, was beginning to overpower the floral scent of the conditioner, which I now for some reason remembered was called Summer Evening. How ridiculous was that, naming a scent after a time of day?
“Well?” he asked.
“Are you serious?”
My mind was running along any possible random outskirt of thought to avoid dealing with this totally unacceptable turn the conversation had taken.
“Ever since we met that time in the park, I'd been hoping you'd tell me. I didn't want to—” He stopped. “I wanted to be cool about it. But I can't, anymore. I have to know.”
“Have to know what?”
“Is she my child?”
I was really afraid he was making me into a bald person. The scissors were clacking away. But there was nothing I could do. I was trapped by this maniac who towered over me, blocking the light.
“We broke up”—my palms clenched and unclenched— “about a year before I even met Harvey. You said you couldn't handle it. You said I was too intense, remember?”
He didn't have to remember. I remembered. I had bronzed the words. No, they were fragments of bullet, lodged in my heart. Whenever I moved a certain way they ached, so I learned to move in a totally different way, a new walk, except it wasn't really a walk, it was more a permanent limp.
“I'm talking about after,” he said.
“After was nothing. After was me calling and you hanging up.”
And after that was far worse; I allowed myself to truly remember. After was as degrading and humbling a time as I had ever spent in my life. Even when I stopped hounding and pestering him, I couldn't stop stroking objects he had given me, or freezing suddenly in the middle of the street at a sound or touch or feeling that was some leftover bit of love memory I hadn't dealt with, that I hadn't formally sobbed over those evenings, those long, hopelessly alone evenings. All that, I had managed to cover over with a thick growth of scar tissue, change into a nostalgic numbness, an emotional amnesia. And now he was threatening to bring it all back to life again with this—it struck me with the force of a revelation—crazy idea.
Wait a minute.
He was crazy, not me!
“Mark.” I almost laughed, able to breathe again. “Do you actually think—?”
“Hold still.” He was slicing right along my forehead. I could feel the cold metal against my skin. “It's not funny.”
“No, it isn't,” I gasped, trying to hold back this condescending joy I felt.
He really had me going there. It was such a relief to be smarter than him. It was the only card I held. But I forgot about it so often, willfully denied it, as if intelligence was
the opposite of sex. Why? Why set the two in opposition?
“We weren't seeing each other then, Mark,” I said gently. “Just because you're thinking about someone, just because you had this … intense relationship with them, doesn't mean that a year later you can possibly be involved in who their kid is. I mean, that's the one part of you that doesn't hang around inside me. In a way, it's very romantic, what you're asking, but—”
“There was that time you showed up at the loft.”
“When?” I asked, feeling just the most far-off obscure panic, like when the corner of a rug has been turned over.
“You remember. That night you came and stood under my window? Until I had to come down and get you?”
“Oh, that time.” I didn't actually remember, but I accepted what he said. It sounded right. It conformed to some sketchy outlines, colored in some black-and-white incidents I had floating around in my head that I never bothered to put in any coherent order. “But we didn't do anything.”
He gave a quiet laugh, a short forced-out breath, and then I remembered we had done something, but it was obviously a mistake. A relapse. We had proved to each other for the last time just how wrong this was, that's how I saw it. It didn't count.
“And that's what you're basing this whole fantasy on?”
“It's not a fantasy. It really happened.”
“It was one time.”
“One time is all it takes.”
“It was before I even met Harvey.”
“Was it?”
“Of course. You think I'd be standing under your window for hours like an idiot if I was already seeing someone else?”
“You're positive?”
“Mark, women keep track of these things.”
“Even you?”
“Believe me, if there was even the possibility of my being pregnant by you, that's all I would have been aware of until—”
“Until when?”
“Until I knew I wasn't.”
“And you weren't.”
“No.”
His comb did a long sweep. My hair felt detangled and clean. It tingled with an inner glow. He went on to the other side, digesting what I'd told him.
“I thought, because of her age … I don't know. It seemed right. The time line. Or close enough.”
“It's not horseshoes.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. But I'm touched, I really am. I would have loved to have had your child.”
“Well, that's a lie.”
“Yes.” I giggled.
He gripped my head in both hands, not a haircutting maneuver, pressing in. I opened my eyes. He had raised them so we were staring right into each other and, for the first time, I saw, in his, pain, the hurt of a person who'd had something taken away.
“You're sure, Eve?”
I nodded. Or tried to. The vise weakened. I felt the purpose go out of his fingers.
“I'm sorry,” I said.
“I can still love her, right?”
“Ann? If you want to.”
He stood back and looked at me, looked at my hair, the job he was doing, his handiwork, then came forward again, to finish.
“So,” I couldn't help but ask, “is that the only reason you've been coming around? Because you thought she might be yours?”
“Not the only reason.”
“But the main one.”
“I don't think that way.”
No, you just don't think, I wanted to say Period.
I tried keeping my eyes open, glaring, while he worked. But he looked so sad.
“Io thought it would be a good idea if I reconnected with you.”
“Really? Why?”
“I told you. She's a decent person. She thought it would help me work through some unfinished feelings.”
“Will you leave her?”
“There.” He tilted my head one last time. “Leave Io? Because she can't have kids? You must think I'm a real jerk.”
“No, I don't.”
For the first time ever, I had something he desired, something he couldn't have. It made me feel guilty.
“You must have thought about it, though.”
“All done. Turn around.”
He held on to me, which was a good thing, because in the crowded bathroom, with the stool taking up most of the floor, I almost fell. I leaned forward into the mirror to see past my face, around each side.
“Mark, it's fantastic.”
He picked up the stool.
“Really,” I called.
I looked sleek and flapperish. Like I didn't have a care in the world. He'd given me a little of his fairy dust, his youth, which was why he seemed older, I thought, back in the hallway. He came out of the kitchen and got ready to leave.
“Aren't you going to help me with the ice cream?”
“No. I should be going.”
“Poor Mark.”
I wanted to finger what I could see would one day be his graying sideburns. It was the trick—I'd never done it on him before—of seeing him middle-aged, because he'd finally met tragedy He wasn't an untouched boy anymore.
Instead, I opened the door for him. He stopped, halfway through.
“You hurt your foot.”
“When?”
“That last time. Well, right after. When you were hurrying out. Trying to get away.”
“Oh, right.”
“You wouldn't let me help you. You were in such a rush. You bashed your foot against the doorframe. Really hurt your toe. I wanted to take you to the hospital but you wouldn't let me. Don't you remember?”
“No.”
“That was the last picture I had of you, limping down the stairs. You could hardly walk. Holding on to the banister. Not letting me help. That's why it all felt so … incomplete. Until now.”
He hugged me, a brotherly hug, enveloped me, made me another thing he could keep close to his body, where he stored what he cared about.
“That's why I'm glad you let me help this time. Tonight.”
Then he took off, without turning back. Some keys he had hanging off a belt loop jingled.
I looked down and flexed my toes. I felt for old pain. For a familiar ache. My head, with its pound less of hair, was too light on my neck. It saw differently now, at new angles. I stood there, trying to piece things together. Yes. I had hit my foot on the doorway, going out. Of course. He was right. Wearing sandals.
What I remembered most were the sandals. I still had them. I had fractured my toe, it turned out later—only a few hours later, in fact, when I noticed the pain, accepted it, walking on the street, still in a daze—and from there I went to the free clinic, and that, of course, was where I met Harvey.
I had never connected the two. Never seen them as part of a story, a story bigger than each taken separately.
So the limp Mark left me with was real. Not that there was any chance of him being Ann's biological father. That was the kind of thing you didn't lose track of, even when you were as far out in space as I had been. Of course he didn't know that. He didn't really accept it, even now, after I'd told him. He was crazy about her.
I toyed with the idea of falling back in love with Mark. No, of escapinglove. Of returning, instead, to what I'd had before. Something less personal, something where we didn't always have the goods on each other. Marriage was so horribly intimate.
• • •
The next morning, she was all better. I gave her the antibiotic, bundled her into extra-warm clothes, and went for a walk. I wandered around the neighborhood, hugging her body to me through the Snugli. There was nothing I needed to do. I just wanted to stare into the sun, elevate my mood, burn back some of the insanity that was creeping in at the edges of my thought.
Mark, of course, wasn't the answer. Harvey had been there at her birth and every day since. That was far more important than flying her like an airplane or making her laugh by playing peek-a-boo. Right?
“You have got to develop better taste in men,” I scolded her.
<
br /> We walked past the playground. The benches had snow on them. You couldn't even push open the gate. I stood outside the fence, gazing at the equipment as if it were some Eden I'd been expelled from. Sun had cleared the middle of the slide. Slush was slumped at its bottom. The exposed metal shone. Water dripped from the seats of the swings.
We kept walking and left the park.
Back on Seventh Avenue, Alison was coming out of the hardware store. She had Dominic in a fancy jogging stroller, the kind that could roll right over most obstacles.
“This is really funny,” I called. “I just said I was with you when I wasn't.”
She looked at me with such an utter lack of recognition I thought for a moment I had made a mistake. She was wearing dark glasses.
“What are you buying that for?”
I pointed to the gardening claw she was holding, what you would use for raking through weedy soil or getting out crabgrass maybe, something very suburban and unlikely.
“It's for Dominic.”
“You let him play with that? Isn't it a little sharp?”
“Dominic my husband.”
The door to the hardware store opened again and she gave a quick look behind before starting to walk. I tried staying next to her even though it was hard, because the jogging stroller was extra-wide and there were piles of snow lining the street.
“Slow down, will you?”
“I don't like the salesmen at that place.”
“Why not?”
“They kept watching me.”
I noticed how she slipped the claw into her coat pocket and that it hadn't come in a bag or with a receipt.
“Did you take that, Alison?”
“Of course not.”
“Yes, you did. You shoplifted it. That is such an amazing coincidence, because I just took a piece of fabric from—”
“Oh, you're from Janice's play group, aren't you?”
I couldn't understand why she was acting like she didn't remember me, why she was being so stiff and formal. Had she forgotten? I involuntarily licked my lips, trying to retrieve some of the taste or sensation from the time—
“I haven't been back lately. We've been very busy. Dominic and I went to the museum yesterday, didn't we?”
“That must have been exciting.”
“Putting them in front of art stimulates their mental development.”
I looked down. It wasn't his mental development I would be worried about. He was one of those steroid babies, really plumped out, like a turkey. We came to an icy patch. She slipped. I reached out to grab her, but she held on to the stroller handle instead, using it as a walker to keep herself up. That's when I noticed she was wearing high heels. And stockings.
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