When Nadine had gone, I ordered a pizza and told Clea she could stay up late. Then I rigged an endless DVR loop of Dora the Explorer, hoping Dora’s unrelenting positivity and vigor would have some kind of reassuring effect.
I sat very close to Clea on the giant lumpen couch, so that she could snuggle if she felt like it. It seemed like snuggling ought to be something I should offer at a time like this. But I wouldn’t initiate. I found myself infected by an exaggerated respect for her boundaries. She was more private than most adults; she wouldn’t take well to the condescension of an unsolicited cuddle. So we sat there mutely watching the antics of Map and Backpack, until she suddenly stood up.
“I’m tired,” she announced.
“Do you want to go to bed?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Let’s get you into pajamas.”
She shook her head. “I want to sleep in the Dirty.”
I hesitated; was it my job to cajole her into something more appropriate? Or should I let her get comfort where she could? “Okay,” I relented. “But just for tonight.”
Clea brushed her teeth and used the bathroom. Then she got under the covers.
“You can leave now,” she said.
“You don’t want me to stay?”
She didn’t answer for such a long time that I thought she wasn’t going to. Then, in a small voice, she said: “Yes. Stay.”
“All right,” I said, relieved; I’d felt a terrible foreboding against leaving her alone. I sat in the chair next to her bed for a while, but it was impossible to tell when she’d really fallen asleep. Finally I stood up and tiptoed over to the bed. I observed her unmoving doll-like face, her shallow breathing. She had to be asleep, right? Yet there was something about her, a tension that her little body held even in repose, that made me doubt myself. It was possible that she was a superb faker; it was also possible that, even in sleep, she remained alert. “Good night, Clea,” I whispered. When she didn’t respond, I left the room.
Back in the kitchen, I opened the refrigerator to snoop. I hoped to come across some expensive tapenade or cheese, or at least some Häagen-Dazs. That was the best part of babysitting: you got to eat all their stuff when the kid fell asleep.
But Nadine and Walter’s refrigerator was like a vision of some terrible past or future. The top shelf was occupied by six Tupperwares, into which celery sticks were packed like cigarettes. You could tell from the sheer volume that not just one but all three members of this family regularly ate a Tupperware of celery for lunch. The only other items were a tub of plain yogurt, half a gallon of skim milk, and a jar of beet borscht. I felt suddenly crippled by sadness.
I took my phone out of my pocket and texted Zander: spending the night at nadine and walter’s. want to pay me a bad-girl visit on the upper west?
His response came immediately: be there by midnight.
While I waited for him, I watched a game show called Secret Secrets Are No Fun, an updated version of The Newlywed Game. The first question was “What’s the craziest place you’ve ever had sex?” Jake and Jessika, from Atlanta, both said “On an airplane” and passed Round 1. Harold and Arlene, retirees from Wisconsin, fared less well. Arlene said “My sister’s house” and Harold said “Standing up.” Just as the Deduction Buzzer rang, I heard a key turning in the lock.
I looked up, confused: it was too early for Zander. But, just as it occurred to me that he didn’t have a key anyway, I watched the door swing open to reveal David Wright. We regarded each other across the room with a pulse of disbelief.
I stood up. “Nadine’s mother is in the hospital,” I said. “She went to Connecticut. I’m staying over.”
He remained in the doorway, one hand on the knob. “Ah,” he said. “I see. So I guess she was distracted. I was supposed to—”
He stopped short of offering an explanation, because we each suddenly knew that the other knew why David was really there. A quick montage flashed through my mind: the small hatted girlfriend, the subterranean distrust between the two families. Of course: the tension was about more than a child’s utterance of a forbidden word.
But how deep did it go? Were David and Nadine conducting a juicy, old-fashioned affair, or was there some kind of complex sexual arrangement between the two families, one that required the maintenance of a delicate emotional balance, upset by the smallest transgression? Just because I’d rifled through their kitchens, played with their children, I imagined I’d known these people—but I could hardly surmise the precise contours, the byzantine rules, of their adult games. I was basically a child myself.
David and I stared at each other, saying nothing. Slowly that mocking smile crept into his face. He was coming to find the situation amusing.
He hung his jacket on a hook by the door, casually, as if he lived here (which maybe, it occurred to me, he kind of did); he advanced toward me across the kitchen, that smile growing deeper and more knowing as he drew closer; he paused and turned toward a cabinet, then extracted a bottle of red wine from the back.
Whatever he was going to do or not do, he was going to make me wait for it. He poured two glasses and handed me one, just as he had at his apartment that day. Our eyes met over the rims of our wide wineglasses, but still neither of us said anything. I could tell he was relishing the moment, its saturation with erotic cliché. I, on the other hand, was unable to feel any sort of irony. I was deeply, terrifyingly in my body; my heart pounded in fear, and I was soaking wet.
“My boyfriend is coming over,” I blurted. “In about an hour.”
“Ah,” said David. This seemed to amuse him even more deeply. “I see.”
“Well, he’s not really my boyfriend, exactly.”
“Hm. Interesting.” He took a sip of wine. “And this nonboyfriend is named?”
“Zander.”
“Zander. That sounds about right. Let me guess, he’s a deejay? Or maybe he plays the drums? The accordion?”
I blushed so hard I didn’t need to answer. David laughed.
That was when it became unbearable for me: not my desire but my nerves, my terror of this moment, my embarrassment at the obviousness of my discomfort. I reached out and seized the moment by its belt buckle. I planted a kiss on the moment’s rough, derisive mouth.
David made a noise that was simultaneously a laugh and a murmur of pleasure; then he reached down and lifted me up onto the kitchen island and deftly pinned both my wrists behind me with one arm. He slid his other hand up my skirt and whispered, “See how wet you are. I knew it. I knew you were a hungry little cunt.” Then he shoved two fingers inside me, hard, and I gasped with shock and pleasure.
He had succeeded: he had caught me off guard. For a few minutes he touched me in a way that was so rough and delicious that I didn’t care at all about the fact that I didn’t like or approve of him, didn’t care that Zander was coming, didn’t even care about the fact that there was a small child in the next room, that this encounter would surely cost me my job; I just wanted him inside of me. I wanted, for once, to be fucked correctly, in a way that acknowledged and made use of my darkness.
But David Wright did not fuck me. Just at the moment when he should have—just at the moment when it became imperative for him to fuck me—he withdrew his hand and slid it down into his own pants.
He worked with grim purpose, with total control. I was too stunned to say anything. Soon he let out a curt, strangled cry and came onto my skirt, in a dark splotch just above my right hip. Only then did his other hand let go of my wrists.
It was the most specific and expert way I’d ever been disrespected. As he zipped himself up, I opened my mouth, about to voice some kind of protest—but then he looked up with a grin, and I realized I had it all wrong.
He thought I’d liked it, what he’d just done. Was this what he did with Nadine, with his wife? Had other women pretended to enjoy watching him masturbate? He kept smiling at me as he buckled his belt, in a way that conveyed his sense that things had gone exactly as they should
have.
In theory, my feminist education had prepared me well for a moment such as this. Sitting around the seminar table, I could have come up with an articulate rebuttal to David Wright’s unspoken assumptions. But now there was the fact of him standing above me, wearing that grin; there was the fact of his splooge on my skirt, and of the cold granite of Nadine and Walter’s countertop beneath my ass, and I found I had no words.
He reached out and cupped my cheek in his hand. “You’re so young,” he said. He smiled with a serene self-satisfaction so radiant, it almost resembled tenderness. “So lovely and young.”
After David left, I took off my skirt in the bathroom and, hands shaking, tried to wash the stain out of it. Of course, I just succeeded in getting the entire skirt wet. So I hung it over the shower-curtain rod to dry. At least I was still wearing leggings beneath.
Then, with a rush of guilt, I remembered Clea.
I tiptoed over to her door and gently eased it open. She lay there on her back, in the same position I’d left her, but with her eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling.
She must have heard everything. What kinds of adult darkness had her little body registered, seismographically, while she lay there in that narrow bed? How many times had she overheard this “game”—David Wright messing with her mother, using the unspeakable word she’d learned to repeat? Did she now assume that being messed with by David Wright was a rite of passage for all adult women? If she had somehow been able to articulate this in the form of a question—if she’d been able to ask me which rites of passage were unavoidable, and which were disgusting and which desirable, and how to navigate them—what could I tell her? What did I even know?
“Clea,” I said.
She didn’t respond. The long limp sleeves of the Dirty lay on top of the covers, empty; for some reason, this image flooded me with despair.
“Clea,” I said.
“What?”
“Why are you awake?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you should put on some pajamas. What if you took off the Dirty and put on some pajamas?”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No.”
My phone beep-beeped in my pocket: probably Zander, texting to announce his presence in the lobby. I ignored it.
“Your phone,” said Clea. “It beeped.”
“I know,” I said. “I heard it.”
“When the phone rings,” said Clea, “you have to answer. Otherwise something bad happens.”
“Who told you that?”
“No one,” she said. “I just know things.”
I picked up the phone and looked at it. Here! it said. How do I get in?
I left Clea, closing the door behind me, and approached the complicated buzzer by the front door: a gray box with a speaker and three unmarked buttons. Which button did I press to allow him into the building? Was he supposed to press first, or did he have to wait on me? Why were there no instructions? I suddenly felt very tired, so tired I could cry.
I have to figure out how this stupid buzzer thing works, I texted.
I’m not going anywhere, he said.
I pressed all three buttons simultaneously—fuck it—then pressed them again, hoping at least one of them would do the trick: would send the correct message down into the building’s nervous system, move its muscles and bones, cause it to open itself up and allow this stranger inside.
A Room to Live In
Beauty is a matter of size and order, and therefore impossible either (1) in a very minute creature as it approaches instantaneity; or (2) in a creature of vast size—one, say, 1,000 miles long.
—Aristotle
I decided to give the boys little slingshots and toy trains. For the girl, I made a tiny doll; I had to use my most powerful magnifying glass to paint the freckles and eyelashes.
“Classic, well appointed,” Mrs. Perlman had told me over the phone. “Deep plush carpets, a piano, filigreed wallpaper in the master bedroom.” She hoped for me to re-create, in miniature, the apartment in Vienna where her mother had lived as a child, before the war sent the family into poverty and exile. There were two boys and one girl, though one of the boys—Otto—had died in transit.
I gave him the better slingshot.
Carl and I were washing the dishes that night, in our usual way (side by side, I in rubber gloves, he armed with a towel), when he abruptly cleared his throat. “I was thinking,” he said, carefully, “that we could do something.”
“You mean sex?”
“Well, actually, I was thinking in larger terms.”
“What terms?”
“Well, I was thinking we could have a child.”
“Tonight?”
“No, just sometime.”
“I don’t know. Where would it sleep?”
“Well, it could sleep in my room, and I could sleep in yours.”
“Where would I sleep?”
“In your room too.”
“With you?”
“Yes.”
We’d been over this before. Carl had suggested, many times, that as my husband he had the right to share my bed. But I always maintained that anything seen too close up grows fuzzy and indistinct. Carl’s head next to mine on the pillow displaced too much air, the wrong air. I could only see one of his features at a time: his nose, or his eyelashes, or his nipple. It gave me a sort of horizontal vertigo.
But sometimes, when I peered through his open doorway and saw him sitting on the floor cross-legged, plucking his banjo, I felt a desire of exactly the right size. Then, when the desire grew bigger, I asked my feet to take me into his room. They obliged. Then our bodies asked things of each other, and they obliged too.
“Carl,” I said. “You know how I feel about that.”
“Well, I know the words you’ve told me before,” he said.
“I’ll try to think of other ones.”
“This isn’t an issue of words, really, though. It’s more an issue of our bodies and where we put them.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”
Later, in my own room, I thought about it. I tried to think with my body and not just with words. I tried to trick my body into different positions, to put a new angle on things. I lay prone on my bed, then sat on the floor with legs splayed wide, then attempted a headstand against the wall and failed. My body made a loud noise when it crashed to the floor.
“You OK?” Carl called.
“Yes,” I called back. But I was curled in a fetal position, clutching my knees to my chest. This seemed to be the default position I ended up in when I thought about Changing Things. I did this only when Carl asked me to: infrequently in the first few months of our marriage, and then more and more often, and then pretty much weekly. Tonight marked an escalation in the seriousness of the request; Carl’s dissatisfaction with our system had grown more urgent. When I thought of his unhappiness growing sharper and sharper, like some pointed thing, I grew unhappy too.
But I still couldn’t imagine sharing my bed every night, let alone having a third person in the apartment, someone possibly very loud, who oozed bodily fluid and need. No, no, my position wouldn’t change.
I used my hands to pry my knees away from my body. I got up and did the only thing that reliably calmed me: I got to work.
I carved the two younger children from imported Tahitian balsa wood, with a blade designed to perform thoracic surgery on insects. I modeled them after a blurry black-and-white photograph Mrs. Perlman had provided. In the photo, the family stood squinting in the bright sun. The parents, in back, were the kind of couple who looked like siblings (parallel genetics? or a harsh molding by convergent life experience?)—both thin and pinched-looking, with the same severe shoulders and eyebrows.
The sun shone down on the children, twelve-year-old Franz and eight-year-old twins Otto and Gretel. Franz had curly hair and the open, handsome face of a future homecoming king. (He killed himself in 1972.) Gretel had
two braids wound tightly around her ears, like Princess Leia. She had fat cheeks and an impish smile, a girl who clearly expected to be fed and loved ceaselessly. (She grew up to be the mother of Mrs. Perlman and of two other children who both died in infancy. She lives in a nursing home in Bedford, New York.)
Otto, on the other hand, was thin and angular, like his parents, and from the piercing yet opaque expression of his eyes, I could tell he would have grown up to be a soldier or a scientist, a man of great privacy and precision, and that he would have loved one woman secretly for his entire life. But nevertheless he was a child, so I tried to give him the look of recklessness and delicacy common to all eight-year-old boys everywhere.
This proved difficult, even with such a small blade.
On my way to bed, I heard a soft, rustling noise coming from the dollhouse. I got up to investigate, fearing mice. We had a problem with them last winter; Carl caught them in a shoe box and released them in the park.
But it wasn’t mice. It was Otto and Gretel. They were rolling around on the floor of the master bedroom. They appeared to be wrestling.
“Give me the slingshot!” said Gretel.
“It’s mine!” said Otto. “Slingshots are for boys.”
“You two are being awfully loud,” I said.
They froze, pulled apart, looked up.
“Who are you?” asked Otto.
“I’m Irene. I made you.”
“Are you God?” asked Gretel.
“No,” I said. Then I considered this. “Well, not in an absolute sense. But in reference to you, yes, I suppose so.”
This had only happened once before, this coming-alive. Six months ago, I awoke to find that Drexel, modeled after the teenage son of my blue-blooded client, had stolen my charcoals, scrawled MY DAD IS A GIANT COCKSUCKER FAGET all over the walls of the dollhouse, and fled from my apartment—probably through the fire escape. I had to completely repaper the inside, of course, in addition to replacing Drexel; it cost me nearly a week of work.
The Wrong Heaven Page 9