They don't want to try it out on you until they've got it right."
I nursed a competing theory: that, having secredy been able to talk for years, he had enjoyed eavesdropping on the unwitting; that he was a spy. And I attended less to his grammar than to what he said. I k n o w this kind of assertion always gets up your nose, but I did sometimes consider that, between us, I was the more interested in Kevin. (In my mind's eye, I can see you going apoplectic.) I mean, interested in Kevin as Kevin really was, not Kevin as Your Son, w h o had continually to battle against the
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formidable fantasy paragon in your head, with w h o m he was in far more ferocious competition than he ever was with Celia. For example, that evening I remarked, "I've been waiting ages to find out what's going on behind those piercing little eyes."
You shrugged. "Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails."
See? Kevin was (and remains) a mystery to me. You had that insouciant boy-thing going and blithely assumed that you had been there yourself and there was nothing to find out. A n d you and I may have differed on so profound a level as the nature of h u m a n character. You regarded a child as a partial creature, a simpler f o r m of life, which evolved into the complexity of adulthood in open view. But from the instant he was laid on my breast I perceived Kevin Khatchadourian as pre-extant, with a vast, fluctuating interior life whose subdety and intensity would if anything diminish with age. Most of all, he seemed hidden from me, while your experience was one of sunny, leisurely access.
Anyway, for several weeks he would talk to me during the day, and w h e n you came h o m e he clammed up. At the clank of the elevator, he'd shoot me a complicitous glance: Let's put one over on Daddy. I may have found a guilty pleasure in the exclusivity of my son's discourse, thanks to which I was apprised that he did not like rice pudding with or without cinnamon and he did not like Dr. Seuss books and he did not like the nursery rhymes p u t to music that I checked out from the library. Kevin had a specialized vocabulary; he had genius for N-words.
T h e sole m e m o r y I retain of any proper childhood glee during this era was at his third birthday party, w h e n I was busy pouring cranberry juice in his sippy cup, and you were tying ribbons on packages that you would only have to untie for him minutes later.You had brought h o m e a three-tiered marble layer cake from Vinierro's on First Avenue that was decorated with a custom butter-cream baseball theme and had placed it proudly on the table in front of his booster chair. In the two minutes our backs were turned, Kevin displayed m u c h the same gift that he'd exhibited earlier that week by methodically pulling all the
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stuffing through a small hole in what we thought was his favorite rabbit. My attention was drawn by a dry chuckle that I could only characterize as a nascent snicker. Kevin's hands were those of a plasterer. And his expression was rapturous.
Such a young birthday boy, not yet fully comprehending the concept of birthdays, had no reason to grasp the concept of slices.
You laughed, and after you'd gone to so m u c h trouble I was glad you could take the mishap as comedy. But as I cleaned his hands with a damp cloth, my chortle was muted. Kevin's technique of plunging both hands mid-cake and spreading its whole body apart in a single surgical m o t i o n was uneasily reminiscent of those scenes in medical shows w h e n the patient is "coding" and some doctor yells,"Crack 'em!" Gorier programs toward the end of the millennium left little to the imagination: T h e ribcage is riven with an electric hacksaw, the ribs pulled back, and then our handsome ER doc plunges into a red sea. Kevin hadn't simply played with that cake. He had ripped its heart out.
In the end, of course, we finalized the inevitable swap: I would license you to find us a house across the Hudson; you would license me to take my reconnaissance trip to Africa. My deal was pretty raw, but then desperate people will often opt for short-term relief in exchange for long-term losses. So I sold my birthright for a bowl of soup.
I don't mean that I regret that African sojourn, though in terms of texture it was badly timed. M o t h e r h o o d had dragged me d o w n to what we generally think of as the lower matters: eating and shitting. And that's ultimately what Africa is about.
This may be ultimately what every country is about, but I have always appreciated efforts to disguise that fact, and I might have been better off traveling to more decorative nations, where the bathrooms have roseate soaps and the meals at least come with a garnish of radicchio. Brian had c o m m e n d e d children as a marvelous antidote for jadedness; he said that you get to re-appreciate the world through their awestruck eyes and everything
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that you were once tired of suddenly looks vibrant and new.
Well, the cure-all had sounded terrific, better than a facelift or a prescription for Valium. But I am disheartened to report that whenever I saw the world through Kevins eyes, it tended to appear unusually dreary. T h r o u g h Kevin's eyes the whole world looked like Africa, people milling and scrounging and squatting and lying d o w n to die.
Yet amid all that squalor I still couldn't locate a safari company that could properly be considered budget; most charged hundreds of dollars per day. Likewise, the lodging divided off in a way that eliminated my target market: It was either luxurious and pricey, or filthy and too cut-rate. A variety of Italian and Indian restaurants were a good value, but authentic African eateries served mostly unseasoned goat. Transport was appalling, the train lines prone to simply stop, the aircraft decrepit, the pilots fresh from Bananarama Flight School, the driving kamikaze, the buses bursting with cackling passengers three times over capacity and aflap with chickens.
I k n o w I sound finicky. I had been to the continent once in my twenties and had been entranced. Africa had seemed truly elsewhere. Yet in the interim, the wildlife population had plummeted, the h u m a n one burgeoned; the intervening rise in misery was exponential. This time appraising the territory with a professional eye, I discounted whole countries as out of the question. Uganda was still picking corpses from the mouths of crocodiles discarded by A m i n and Obote; Liberia was ruled by that murderous idiot, Samuel Doe; even in those days, Hutus and Tutsis were hacking each other to pieces in Burundi. Zaire was in the grip of M o b u t u Sese Seko, while Mengistu continued to ransack Ethiopia and R e n a m o ran amok in Mozambique. If I listed South Africa, I risked having the entire series boycotted in the States. As for the bits that were left, you may have accused me of being unnurturing, but I was reluctant to take responsibility for callow young Westerners trooping off to these perilous parts armed only with a distinctive sky-blue volume of A Wing and a
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Prayer. I was b o u n d to read about robberies inTsavo that left three dead in a ditch for 2,000 shillings, a camera, and a guidebook and feel certain it was all my fault. As Kevin would later illustrate, I attract liability, real or imagined.
So I began to conclude that the marketing people's heads were up their backsides. They had researched the demand, but not the supply. I did not have faith that even our intrepid army of college students and my thoroughgoing staff could put together a solitary volume that would protect its users from making the grossest of missteps for which they could pay so dearly that a continent full of bargains would still seem overpriced. For once I did feel motherly—toward customers like Siobhan, and the last place I'd want pastily complected, there's-good-in-all-of-us Siobhan to end up was in a scorching, pitiless Nairobi slum. A F R I W A P was a nonstarter.
B u t my greatest disappointment was in myself. While rehnquishing the idea of A F R I W A P might have freed me to gallivant about the continent without taking notes, I'd grown dependent on research for a sense of purpose on the road. Released from an itinerary dictated by conveniently tabbed chapters, I felt aimless. Africa is a lousy place to wonder incessantly what you are doing there, though there is something about its careless, fetid, desperate cities that presses the question.
I could not shut you and Kevin from
my mind. That I missed you fiercely served as an aching reminder that I had been missing you since Kevin was born. Away, I felt not emancipated but remiss, sheepish that unless you'd finally solved the nanny problem you'd have to cart him with you in the pickup to scout. Everywhere I went, I felt laden, as if slogging the potholed streets of Lagos with five-pound leg weights: I had started something back in N e w York, it was not finished by any means, I was shirking, and what's more, what I had started was going badly. That m u c h I faced; that m u c h my isolation was good for. After all, the one thing you cannot escape in Africa is children.
In the latter legs of the t h r e e - m o n t h trip, w h i c h you'll recall
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I cut short, I made resolutions. O n e too many sojourns—this one launched less in a spirit of exploration than simply to make a point, to prove that my hfe had not changed, that I was still young, still curious, still free—was only proving beyond doubt that my life had indeed changed, that at forty-one I was not remotely young, that I had truly sated a certain glib curiosity about other countries, and that there was a variety of liberty of which I could no longer avail myself without sinking the one tiny island of permanence, of durable meaning and lasting desire, that I had managed to annex in this vast, arbitrary sea of international indifference.
Camping in Harare's airport lounge on gritty linoleum because there were no seats and the plane was eight hours late, the whole 737 having been appropriated by some government minister's wife w h o wanted to go shopping in Paris, I seemed to have unaccountably lost my old serene certainty that inconvenience (if not outright disaster) was the springboard for nearly every proper adventure abroad. I was no longer persuaded by that old saw planted in every AWAP intro that the worst thing that can happen to any trip is for everything to go smoothly. Instead, like any standardWestern tourist, I was impatient for air-conditioning and disgruntled that the only available drinks were Fanta orange, which I did not like. With the concessions' refrigeration broken down, they were boiling.
That sweaty, protracted delay allowed me to contemplate that so far my commitment to motherhood had been toe-in-the-water. In a funny way, I resolved, I had to remake that arduous decision of 1982 and j u m p into parenthood with both feet. I had to get pregnant with Kevin all over again. Like his birth, raising our son could be a transporting experience, but only if I stopped fighting it. As I was at pains to teach Kevin for years thereafter (to little effect), rarely is the object of your attentions innately dull or compelling. Nothing is interesting if you are not interested. In vain, I had been waiting for Kevin to prove out, to demonstrate as I stood arms folded that he was worthy of my ardor. That was
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too much to demand of a little boy, w h o would only be as lovable to me as I allowed him to be. It was past time that I at least met Kevin halfway.
Flying into Kennedy, I was bursting with determination, optimism, and goodwill. But in retrospect, I do feel obliged to observe that I was at my most passionate about our son w h e n he was not there.
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D E C E M B E R 2 7 , 2 0 0 0
Dear Franklin,
Having asked gently beforehand if I was up to it, tonight my m o t h e r had a litde holiday hen party here, and I think she regretted her timing. As it happened, yesterday in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a very large, unhappy m a n — a software engineer named Michael M c D e r m o t t , w h o the w h o l e nation n o w knows is a science fiction fan, m u c h as most m e n off the street are familiar with our son's predilection for undersized clothing—walked into Edgewater Technology with a shotgun, an automatic, and a pistol and murdered seven of his coworkers. I gather Mr. M c D e r m o t t was upset— and here I am, conversant with details of his financial life, d o w n to the fact that his six-year-old car was on the verge of repossession—that his employers had garnished his wages for back taxes.
I couldn't help but think of your parents, since they don't live far from Wakefield. Your father was always concerned that his top-of-the-line appliances have a fine sense of proportion, a preoccupation that surely extends to behavioral ratios like grievance to redress. Your parents must imagine that the world of the physically preposterous, which doesn't respect materials, is closing in on them.
Having long since given up on the painful charade of inviting Sonya Khatchadourian for soirees in return and suffering the kind of fanciful excuses she always supplied me for w h y she could not attend opening night of my school play, these old birds had sampled my mother's lahmajoon and sesame-topped ziloogs many times before and were disinclined to dwell on the finger food.
Instead, with some diffidence, given the guest of honor, they were all dying to talk about Michael M c D e r m o t t . O n e dowager c o m m e n t e d sorrowfully that she could see h o w a young man might feel rejected with a nickname like "Mucko." My crusty Aunt Aleen muttered that her o w n ongoing fight w i t h the I R S — a $17 disputed underpayment in 1991 had over the years ballooned from interest and late fees to over $1,300—-might soon move her to firearms herself. But they all subdy deferred to me, the resident expert with insight into the twitchy mind.
I was finally forced to remind these w o m e n firmly that this friendless, overweight loner and I had never met. It seemed to register all at once that no one in this country specialized in plain old murder these days, any more than a lawyer would study plain old Law. There was Workplace Massacre, and there were School Shootings, quite another field of concentration altogether, and I sensed a collective embarrassment in the room, as if they'd all rung the Sales Department w h e n they should have asked for Customer Relations. Since it's still too dangerous to bring up "Florida" in company without being sure that everyone is on-side, someone prudently changed the subject back to the lahmajoon.
Anyway, w h o says crime doesn't pay? I doubt the I R S will ever see a dime of Mucko's money now, and the forty-two-year-old tax cheat is b o u n d to cost Uncle Sam a far prettier penny in prosecution costs than the I R S would ever have squeezed from his paycheck.
That's the way I think now, of course, since the price of justice is no longer an abstract matter in my o w n life but a hard-nosed tally of dollars and cents. And I do often have little flashbacks of that trial—the civil trial. T h e criminal one is almost a blank.
"Ms. Khatchadourian," I will hear Harvey begin stentoriously on his re-direct. " T h e prosecution has made m u c h of the fact that
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you ran a company in Manhattan while leaving your son to the care of strangers, and that w h e n he turned four you were away in Africa."
"At the time I was unaware that having a life was illegal."
"But after your return from this trip you hired someone else to oversee the day-to-day business of your firm, in order to be a better mother to your child?"
"That's right."
"Didn't you take over as his primary caregiver? In fact, aside from occasional baby-sitters, didn't you cease to bring in outside help altogether?"
"Frankly, we gave up on hiring a nanny because we couldn't find anyone to put up with Kevin for more than a few weeks."
Harvey looked sour. His client was self-destructive. I imagined that this quality made me special, but my lawyer's fatigued expression suggested that I was a set type.
"But you were concerned that he needed continuity, and that's w h y you terminated this revolving door of young girls.You no longer went into the office nine-to-five."
"Yes."
"Ms. Khatchadourian, you loved your work, correct? It gave you great personal satisfaction. So this decision was a considerable sacrifice, all for the sake of your child?"
" T h e sacrifice was enormous," I said. "It was also futile."
" N o further questions, your honor." We had rehearsed enormous, period; he shot me a glare.
Was I, back in 1987, already planning my defense? T h o u g h my open-ended leave from AWAP was on a grand, over-compensatory scale, it was cosmetic. I thought it looked goo
d. I'd never conceived of myself as someone w h o dwelled u p o n what other people thought, but hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Hence, w h e n you two m e t my plane at Kennedy I stooped to h u g Kevin first. He was still in that disconcerting rag-doll phase,
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"floppy"; he didn't h u g back. B u t the strength and duration of my o w n embrace paraded my born-again conversion in Harare.
"I've missed you so m u c h ! " I said."Mommy's got two surprises, sweetheart! I brought you a present. B u t I ' m also going to promise that M o m m y ' s never, ever going away for this long again!"
Kevin just got floppier. I stood up and arranged his willful shocks of hair, embarrassed. I was playing my part, but onlookers might have deduced from my child's unnatural lassitude that I kept h i m handcuffed to the water heater in the basement.
I kissed you. Although I'd thought children liked to see their parents be affectionate with one another, Kevin stamped impatiently and mooed, dragging at your hand. Maybe I was mistaken. I never saw my m o t h e r kiss my father. I wish I had.
You cut the kiss short and mumbled,"It may take a while, Eva.
For kids this age, three months is a lifetime. They get mad. T h e y think you're never coming back."
I was about to josh that Kevin seemed more p u t out that I had come back, but I caught myself; one of our first sacrifices to family life was lightness of heart. "What's this uherr, uherr! thing?"
I asked as Kevin continued to tug at you and moo.
"Cheese doodles," you said brighdy. " T h e latest must-have.
Okay, buster! Let's go find you a bag of glow-in-the-dark petrochemicals, kiddo!" And you tottered off d o w n the terminal in tow, leaving me to wheel my luggage.
In the pickup, I had to remove several viscous doodles from the passenger seat, in various stages of dissolve. Kevin's dietary enthusiasm did not extend to eating the snacks; he sucked them, leeching off their neon coating and imbuing them with enough saliva to melt.
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