"Just tell me this: what if we come home and he's dead?" Henry sat up very straight and spoke simply.
"That's not going to happen," I said. Martyr or not, I felt a great weight, like rocks in a laundry sack, shift and settle upon my shoulders. Henry was the serious and retentive one in our house. If you said something to Henry, you damn well better mean it; he would drive you crazy otherwise. He brooked no excuses, no equivocation. From his infancy he had had the most prodigious memory. So much so that for a while we'd feared that he would end up like Waldo's brother, Dick, the idiot savant. But Waldo insisted Henry was most like his late father, Waldo Fairweather III, mainstay of the classics department of Swan College. Three, as he'd been known since the moment of my Waldo's birth, could tell you every good joke in Herodotus, but his face went blank when confronted with a grandson's knock-knock joke. Henry was not turning out like either his uncle or his grandfather, fine specimens though they were. Henry remembered things beyond count, but he understood that the rest of us were not like him. Still, woe betide the lazy parent who promised what could not be delivered, who swore to tell him later or to explain when they got home but had no intention of doing so. Henry would catch that parent up every time and demand only and exactly what had been promised. At the age of three, Henry was insistent. By the time he was eight, he was remorseless.
In this matter of being a stickler, Henry was profoundly unlike his older brother, Ezra. So it had taken a couple of years for Waldo and me to understand what we had on our hands. We experienced a sharp learning curve with this second son, this voice crying out in the wilderness from our very own kitchen table.
Ezra had been such a compliant peach, a dreamy soul who each day forgot everything he'd been told and re-imagined his life and reinvented the wheel. In no way did our sons resemble the classic archetypes of first and second sons, although God knows we looked for the signs, looked for resolve and ambition and conventionality in Ezra, and saw it not; looked for waywardness and rebellion in Henry, in vain. But perhaps the fault was in our searching.
"Can you promise?" Henry said.
I said what I believed I could do, what I could not fail to do. "I promise I'll guard him with my life. And he can sleep with me."
"What if he doesn't want to?" Ezra asked.
"We'll cross that tunnel when we get to it," I said. "And I told you, I didn't really want to go caving in the first place," I said. "I wanted to go to the south of France."
"You always want to go to the south of France," Waldo said. "What does the south of France have that the Hudson Valley does not?"
"French food and French hats. And truffles."
"Big deal, Mom. We have morels and Grifola frondosa? Henry said. "As you guys never fail to tell us. Ad nauseam."
Waldo raised his eyebrows and said, "He is far too young to have a taste for fungi."
"You're telling me?"
"It would serve you right if we moved to France and you spent the rest of your life bicycling around with a baguette in your basket," Waldo said.
Ezra immediately grabbed a loose crayon and drew two large circles that became the wheels of a bicycle, and then drew a basket on the handlebars, and then a tall, skinny woman with a ponytail, and finally, with a flourish, he drew an exceptionally long loaf of French bread.
"Enough already," I said. "One day we'll actually go to France and you guys will eat your words. Also frogs' legs. Meanwhile, I'll stay with the dogs, and you go have fun in some dark, slimy, moldy, vermin-infested caverns. The more I think of it, the better it sounds, staying here."
"Are you sure?" Outside, there was old gritty snow on the frozen ground and three inches of ice on the Hudson, but Waldo was eating black olives as if his feet were bare and the sun were beating down on his battered straw hat.
For someone who resisted the lure of the Mediterranean, Waldo certainly ate lots of olives. And there was his interesting habit of keeping several pits at once in the hollow of his cheek and then spitting them out in rapid succession. His mother frequently bemoaned this practice and claimed that she'd tried in vain to break him of it in his youth. Waldo insisted this was impossible as he had never eaten an olive until he'd gone to Italy, when he was twenty. To which Posey always responded, "Olives, cherries, what difference does it make? Small fruit, hard pit."
"Of course it makes a difference, Mother. One is sweet, the other is salty. If you can't distinguish between those two flavors, then life is hardly worth living," Waldo always replied. Not that he'd ever caused his mother, Posey Fairweather, Scourge of the Back Nine, Maven of the Garden Club and Delphinium Society, and All-Maine Ping-Pong Champion, to doubt herself or her ability to make distinctions.
"Of course I'm sure," I told Waldo now. "And it just so happens that, being ignominiously unemployed, I am completely free to dog-sit, to cater to his every need."
"Try not to dwell on it, Al."
"I don't dwell on it. I dream about it. I dream of knives and serpents."
4
The Night Terrors
TWO DAYS BEFORE HE and the boys were to leave, Waldo called from work with a question. The telephone was anathema to him and he rarely called from his rabbit warren at DSG except to request some particular food for dinner. Waldo was subject to remarkable food cravings, and I always liked to indulge him. I was expecting to hear about seared tuna, or Fenway franks, or caesar salad. But I was wrong
"How do you feel about a houseguest?"
In order to answer the phone I'd peeled off one of the latex gloves I had to wear whenever I suctioned and measured Dandy's medication into a disposable syringe. It had to be exactly 1.1 cc's. Too little might not be enough to save him, and too much was a bad idea, given that this was the most expensive drug I had ever heard of, never mind given to a dog. Sometimes I told friends that it was very costly, but I always lied when they brazenly asked, "Exactly how costly?" Susie Crench next door, for instance, came right out and said I had my priorities all wrong and that I should let the poor dog die a natural death. Hadn't I signed a living will? she wanted to know. "Well, give poor Dandy the same respect, and save some money while you're at it." And she was my best friend, my soul mate, my partner in culinary adventures, and the recipient of my lamentations about dogs, boys, and joblessness.
I said to Waldo, "Is this a trick question?"
"Of course not. So?"
"To whom are we referring? I have no problem with houseguests who don't smoke in bed."
"Good, he never smoked anything."
"Who?"
"We called him Lalo. Remember him? Abelardo Llobet Carvajal."
"Should I remember him?"
"Of course you should," Waldo said. "I take that back. There's no reason you should, but it would be handy. He was in Quincy House with me. You met him once at the Harvard Club."
"Keep going," I said. Bells were not ringing. I peeled off the other glove.
"He's Nicaraguan, from an old family. He had several beautiful sisters. You wouldn't know them. But they were spectacular. One in particular." One of the hardest things about a phone conversation with Waldo was imagining what he was doing when he called from the office. Maybe sit-ups on the floor, or catapult practice—anything to distract himself from the fact that he was talking on a telephone.
"I get the picture," I said. "Babes."
"You liked him, though. He's smart. Or at least, he's a brilliant farmer."
"How do you know?" I said.
"Because I know you, Al. I have plumbed your depths and come up with this fact: you liked my old pal Abelardo. Or you will like my old pal Abelardo. Who, it just so happens, has called because he's in New York for a couple of days and wants to come visit. I said the boys and I would be away but that you would love to have him for a night. It seemed like the right thing to do."
"Did you ask me?"
"No. And I realize that that may have been an oversight. But it's too late. He accepted."
"With alacrity," I said.
"Huh?"
/> "Could you just tell me something so that I can picture this guy? Any distinguishing characteristics? And not his sisters."
"He does have rather big ears. They didn't register when we were in school because he wore his hair long. Oh, and he studied to be a priest. But gave it up."
"He didn't study to be a priest at Harvard, I take it?"
"Hell, no. That was before. He was in seminary in Nicaragua or maybe some other country down there. But there was some crisis in his family, or some crisis to do with coffee, and then Lalo lost the calling, so he came north and studied medieval history. Which doesn't have much to do with coffee farming, but what does?"
"I don't know. Just as long as someone keeps growing strong coffee, so I can stay awake."
"So you don't mind if he stays one night?"
"Didn't I tell you about my plans?"
"What kind of plans can you possibly have? No, hang on. That came out wrong."
"What about eating tinned oysters and saltines in bed? Did you tell him that was my plan for the week?"
"He's only staying for one night," Waldo said, conciliatory. Papers crinkled suggestively somewhere. "Al, he's really a sweet man. You'll enjoy it."
"It's fine. So long as he doesn't mind about the oysters," I said. "Will you be home soon?"
"I need to finish up a project here but it won't be too late."
"Henry just informed me that I'd better pack you guys extra-heavy fleece jackets because it will be very cold in the hypogeal domain. He said he looked forward to abseiling to an exsurgence and getting intimate with cavernicoles. I hope you are ready for this adventure."
"Tell him to make me a glossary. That should keep him quiet for about twenty minutes."
"He keeps asking Ez if he'd rather be a clint or a grike," I said. "I can't find either of them in the dictionary."
Then the night before they left, Ezra walked in his sleep, again.
Each time it was a little different, but also each time there was the same oh-damn-I'm-not-dreaming-I'm-awake-but-he's-not sick feeling. With that acuity of hearing that parents develop when their offspring are young, Waldo and I stirred almost at the same time, milliseconds after Ezra's door creaked open.
One of the things my mother told me before she died was never to wake a somnambulist. And she knew. Her baby sister, my Tía Sofia, once sleepwalked on their balcony in Barcelona, was startled awake by a stray dog's barking, and tumbled off. She barely survived the fall.
Waldo and I tiptoed across our chilly bedroom floor and into the hall where Ezra, exquisitely oblivious in his dinosaur pajamas, glided toward the stairs. Usually he went down to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and poured himself some milk, always into a coffee mug. It was something I had had to see repeatedly to believe. Sometimes he ate an Oreo, but not always. Each and every time I found it so hard not to reach for him, not to bundle him into my arms and put him back to bed.
Waldo whispered, "Where's he going this time?"
"How should I know?" I said. "Oh, damn, he's going to wake up the dogs."
Like water finding the lowest point, Waldo slipped past Ezra and down the stairs. I knew where he was going; he wanted to be below Ezra on the stairs in case he fell. And he wanted to get there before the dogs were on the move. Then it was too late. The dogs had heard him. Flirt was at the bottom of the stairs with her tail thrashing, while Dandy sauntered out Ezra's bedroom door. Both dogs barked if a mouse farted in the night, so it was uncanny how Dandy did not bark when Ezra sleepwalked. But Flirt was another matter. Ezra was midway down when he appeared to jolt awake. He turned to run back but only got up one step before he tripped over his feet and fell, smacking his head on the tread.
"Oh, Ez," I said, and lifted him up. "Don't wake him," Waldo whispered.
Was it possible he wasn't already awake? Waldo ignominiously dragged the barking Flirt into the kitchen. I led Ezra back to his room; his eyes were wide open and he was whimpering. But Waldo was right, he wasn't awake. Once he was under the covers, he turned his head back and forth. His whimpering continued at a lower decibel level. From the jumble that had all the pattern and rhythm of sentences but not the sounds or sense, I could very occasionally make out the words not now not now not now not now. Just those.
More than anyone I knew, Ezra lived fully in his sleep, in his dream-life, in his nighttime incarnation. When he was an infant, I'd nurse him, lay him in his crib, then stay and watch. And watch. There would be chores, telephone calls, and work beckoning just outside the door that couldn't even shut because it had been painted over so many times, but still I stayed. His room in our apartment was tiny, a former maid's room carved out of a larger former maid's room in one apartment of the three that had been carved from a larger prewar apartment. But there was room for his crib and a rocking chair I'd found on the sidewalk on Eighty-sixth and East End, and I was blissfully happy in that room. I loved to watch him sleep. His eyelids twitched, his fingers fluttered like an Indonesian dancer's, and his lips puckered, pursed, and then fell into a dreamy smile. Stories were unfolding, folding, and refolding, all inside that tiny head, or rather the not-so-tiny head attached to the tiny body with the tiniest fingers and toes. Could that be why I ended up hosting Dream Radio? Was it the memory of being warmly enclosed with napping Ezra in that tiny room that had spurred me to find employment in the early mornings listening to the dreams of those voices just emerging from the safety of sleep, just entering the clarity of day, and still between the two? Was it because I wanted to recapture that time of all-possibility, all-the-time?
As Ezra's body relaxed from the excitement of the sleepwalk, I lay beside him. I slept too.
Early in the still-dark morning I snuck back to our room, where Waldo in my absence had sprawled out and, like a Spanish conquistador, laid claim to the entire continent of our bed. I climbed in and rested my head in the crook of his arm, that warm, moist armpit place where he smelled most completely like himself. Whatever had gripped Ezra in the night, whatever it was he was now forgetting in the arms of Morpheus, still gripped me. Just on the very edge of the nighttime, in that thin line of light where morning was merely suggested in the east, there loomed an implacable void that I feared slipping into. In daylight I would be fine, but I knew only one way to keep away terror like this in the nighttime. Reaching down and taking hold of his warm penis, the muscle like no other, I held on tight and caressed the mushroom tip with my thumb. Waldo's penis was always ten degrees warmer than the rest of him, warmer by far than anything in the room or in the house. It seemed to exist in its private tropical climate, and always had. True to form, the magical hard-on came, and I climbed on top of Waldo and slid myself onto him. I knew he was awake by now and presumably pleased at where he found himself. But I could see he wasn't going to open his eyes yet, or let on he knew what was happening. He wanted this illusion that while he slept he was irresistible to the mysterious seductress and that even in his sleep he grew and thrust and gave pleasure in all the manly ways. Often that was fine. Wasn't that what marriage was all about? Being able to have sex in the middle of the night and not have to engage in conversation? Not entering the void? Or filling the void? Which was it?
Whatever it was, I'd clung just a little too desperately to it, ever since the week after Henry was born, when Waldo had told me that, to his great sorrow, he loved someone else. Edith Dilly, the daughter of his mother's golf partner. That was eight years ago, and now he said that he loved only me, and of course the boys. He said it repeatedly, and just as often I wanted to believe it. I had spent far too many hours of Henry's precious infancy obsessing about the wicked Edith Dilly and thinking of all the deserved and horrid things that could happen to her. It was so much easier, and safer, to hate her than to consider that Waldo had been willing to leave me and the boys and sail around the world, or at least up and down the eastern seaboard, with Edith Dilly. Everything was completely fine now. It was only in that chink between darkness and morning, between waking and sleep, that I caught glim
pses of the black hole and backed away with horror, lest it suck me in.
But this night it was not enough to screw wordlessly, sleepily. I needed more. I needed him to pound the void out of me and give the emptiness no purchase in my body.
"Fuck me hard, Waldo. Oh, please. Fuck away."
His eyes opened. "Al!"
"You were expecting?"
"Roll over," he said. And I did. The better not to look at those eyes of his that I craved, his midnight blue eyes that could suck in the sturdiest soul, and I was not that. Looking into his eyes, I needed to grip the furniture to make sure I didn't fall in.
When we were finished, Waldo kissed the top of my head and softly pulled out and rolled off, back to his side of the bed. We slept through the heady light show of dawn. Darkness averted.
Ezra wanted chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, and I made them too easily. That clued him in. He never seemed to recall anything of his sleepwalking, but I suspected that he knew something had happened because he often made extravagant demands at breakfast the next morning (ice cream on waffles, eggs and Oreo cookies) in the full expectation that I would comply. And I would.
Henry said, "Did Ezra somnambulate last night? Methinks I heard something."
"Are you sure we're related?" Ezra asked me. "Don't be silly," I said. "And Henry, you don't have to be such a busybody."
Absent a Miracle Page 3