Baby Love (23 page)

There’s nothing so bad about this. He would do the same for Jill if she’d let him. He is just comforting her is all.

No need to ask what’s the matter. He wraps his Ashford Bowling League jacket around her shoulders and walks out to the yard, where there are no bats, and a patch of trillium has just come into bloom underneath the lilacs, that he noticed on his way over this morning. He’s holding her hand.

He has seen someone cry this way only three times. Once was his mother, when he was seventeen and she came home from Rainbow Girls and he had to tell her “Dad died.” Once was Doris, sitting next to him in his old Ford truck the next year, when she said she hadn’t got the curse for three months now, did he know what that meant. Once was Jill, when he had to tell her she couldn’t keep her Christmas bike after all because they were laying men off on his construction crew. In the end she kept it and he sold his father’s rifle instead. He can never bear to see a person cry this way. Their whole body shaking, their face more like a monkey than a person. It always breaks his heart, and he would do anything to make it stop.

What he does this time is, he turns his hat around backward, sort of like Frankie Fontaine on the old Jackie Gleason show, and he begins to dance. He’s singing too—a song his father taught him, that he learned out in Oklahoma, back in the twenties. You have to sing it very fast or it won’t be funny. Timmy has never taken the time to learn it right.

“Oh, I got a gal I do, and her name is Slewfoot Sue, she’s the chief engineer at the old steam laundry down by the Riverside Zoo. Her form was all she had, she had a shape like a soft-shell crab. And every night she had a tussle with her patent leather bustle, and the boys thought she was really bad.”

Ann is laughing, the kind of laughing that’s part crying too.

Doris stands a few feet back, holding a plate of egg salad sandwiches.

The thing that has always been hardest for Carla about living with Greg is how little he says. For her the words just keep coming. She dreams in sentences, paragraphs, and when she wakes up, she wants to analyze the dreams. Over breakfast she likes to talk about what happened yesterday, and not simply what appeared to happen, but what was going on under the surface, and what will happen today. Even when she’s alone she’s saying things: First I will wash the dishes, then get dressed, then go to the cleaners. She makes many telephone calls, and they take much longer than they would have to if the only thing that mattered was getting business attended to. At dinner she likes to reenact some of these conversations for Greg, speculate about the personalities of the speakers, her relationships with them, their true feelings. Even in the darkness, making love, Carla likes to say things. “I’m longing for you. Come live inside me, never leave. I’m burning up.” It doesn’t stop.

But if she were to type up a transcript of everything Greg said on a particular day (as she has pointed out to him many times), it would probably be about one page, double spaced. He likes to eat his breakfast in silence, says he’s digesting. He sometimes sings while he paints, but only other people’s words. Put on your red dress, Mama, ’cause we’re going out tonight. If you knew, Peggy Sue. And sometimes just notes or syllables. At dinner he will say, “This is good,” or mention that the Knicks won. Sometimes Carla will ask him, “What are you thinking about?” Why she keeps doing this is a mystery, because his answer is always the same. Artworks.

Of course sometimes he says something more, and when he does it’s always interesting, and Carla will listen very carefully. But it’s not primarily his words that she loves him for. Carla can never get over it, that a person like her would end up in such a nonverbal relationship.

In other ways, though, he’s much easier to read, less complicated, than she is. His face and his body—maybe because there’s so little extra flesh on his bones—always give indication when he is anxious or angry. She almost feels sometimes that she can see his internal organs; it’s that clear. And when there is a high place over a swimming hole, he doesn’t have to stand there five minutes, deciding whether it’s safe to jump. He can roll into a headstand at any second. He’s always ready for sex, and it always feels good for him.

Carla will never understand why he wanted to be with her. She has told him a hundred times she’s not his type. “If they lined up a hundred women in a room and asked people to guess which one was your lover,” she has said, “nobody would guess it was me.” Although she makes somewhat better sense for him than she did seven years ago, when they met. She looks a little more, now, like the girls in the photographs she has seen, in the cigar boxes he keeps from his old days. There were many of them, mostly artists or dancers. None, certainly, who owned an expensive black suit and worked at a women’s magazine. These women did not read magazines or set their hair or spend fifty dollars getting it to look frizzy. They were also the kind that just jumped off rocks when they wanted to, and did cartwheels. At a concert, when it’s suggested that the crowd sing along (if they would go to that kind of concert), they do not look around to see whether anybody else is singing.

Carla has never stopped being proud that he would choose her. When they were first together she wanted everyone to see him, to see how beautiful he was, to see that she wasn’t with Michael, the medical student, who appeared to be much more the kind they would have expected for her. She’d lie there on the mattress in his loft, once she had given up her place on East Thirtieth Street, thinking: I live on Duane Street, over a feta cheese factory. I ride the kind of elevator that has ropes you have to pull to go upstairs. I jump out when we get to our floor. There’s a shower in the middle of the room. I am loved by a man who is not interested in my opinion of
Cries and Whispers.

“What was it about me that first night that made you say you loved me?” she asked him once.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “The usual.”

Greg is not much on words, but there was more to it than that. He thought she was brave and unfashionable. Still liking Joan Baez. Having those copies of
Family Circle
and the
National Enquirer
open on her kitchen table. Owning a sewing machine. Wearing a full slip. Calling her grandmother every Sunday.

He was touched that in spite of her parents in Ohio and the boyfriend at Johns Hopkins and the fact that she was scared of the subway, she would have done something like tap his shoulder in the museum. That seemed more original than the conceptual artist he knew who showed up at a party with a hole cut in the top of her dress and one breast sticking out, or his girlfriend at the time who had recently spent the night with a Puerto Rican taxi driver, and then told him about it. He was touched by how nervous Carla was that first night, and the way she went into the bathroom and closed the door to put her diaphragm in, even though they had just spent two hours rolling around the floor naked with all the lights on. He liked hearing her quote the opinions of her magazine’s pair of sex experts. He liked the way, the night she had brought home a story to edit, by a woman whose daughter had died of leukemia, she cried for an hour. He did not make fun of her the night she changed her clothes six times when he took her to meet his friends Bob and Tina, who belong to an experimental music group in the East Village. Carla did not pretend to understand his paintings. She said one of the bears reminded her of her brother. He didn’t want her to ever change.

Carla would never have thought of herself as the kind of person who would live with a man seven years and not get married, who’d reach the age of twenty-eight and still not have a baby. If she’d married Michael they would probably have a couple by now. Michael used to say it was a good idea for the wife to have her kids while the husband was doing his internship and residency, so she’d have something to occupy her, with him gone so much. And for a while she had really believed she would end up married to Michael.

The reason, she has thought until now, why she isn’t married to Greg instead, with one or two of Greg’s children sitting on her lap, is that she wanted to be Greg’s type and not Michael’s. She wanted to be like the girls in the cigar boxes. Not so concerned with getting tied down. Keeping things fluid instead. Ready to jump off a boulder at a moment’s notice.

Not that she ever has. She has always had to work very hard at being casual. She realizes now it was pointless to try. She is not the fluid type, and if she doesn’t sew curtains, first thing, when she moves into a place, she will spend the next twelve months, until they move again, feeling a vague discomfort every time she looks at a window. Carla realizes suddenly that she doesn’t care if she never takes another jazz dancing class. All she wants is to marry Greg and have the baby.

This is what Carla is thinking about as she opens the door and sees him just sitting there, listening to an Emmylou Harris record, holding the sketch pad with the picture of Tara and Sunshine on it.

What Greg is thinking, as he sees Carla walk through the door, is that it makes him terribly sad, and he wishes it were different, but he doesn’t love her anymore.

In the fifth-floor TV room, six men in bathrobes are watching TV. Facing the set anyway. You could not exactly say that Rodney Quaid is following the show. Rodney is convinced he has cancer, and whenever there are no orderlies around, like now, he picks at his skin so hard he’s covered with sores. At the moment he’s working on his left thigh. He says he has found another tumor.

The show is called
That’s Incredible.
Wayne has just watched a segment about a man who can dip his hand into molten iron without burning the flesh. The stupid part is, there’s no point. When one of the hosts (Fran Tarkenton, getting out of shape, Wayne can tell) asked the man why he does this, the guy said well, why not? Wayne could do something like that too if he wanted—it’s all a matter of mental concentration, he knows—but there would be a reason. Because my woman let me down. She knew she was supposed to stay on her mattress, and she went out. Because there is a girl alone in a house in Ashford, New Hampshire, who doesn’t understand yet that I’m the only man in the world for her. Something along those lines.

Now another one of the hosts—that singer, John Davidson—is telling about this female police detective who can reconstruct an entire crime on the basis of the blood spatters. The detective is telling about a man whose death was ruled a suicide and then six years later she went back and examined the bloodstains on the pillowcase and the drips on the floor. She figured out what the angle of the gun had to be, and that the man could never have held it that way himself. They nailed his girlfriend. “Jesus,” says Artie LeFleur, “that’s incredible.” He says this every time a commercial comes on.

“Yeah, Artie, we know,” says Wayne. “That’s the point of the show.”

John Davidson is talking about another police detective now. How they found these two dead bodies in Nebraska, so decomposed you couldn’t even tell if the bigger one was a man or a woman. The other one was a child, they knew that. So they did this skull reconstruction and a police artist made a sculpture, based on that, of what the older person’s face looked like, and they ran a picture of the sculpture in some newspapers and a man recognized it as his wife, who had been missing, with their kid, for almost a year. “That’s incredible,” says John Davidson, smiling. He is talking about this grisly murder, this decomposed child, and he’s got a grin on his face, clear back to his molars. What Dr. Poster would call an inappropriate response.

“If that was my wife that got murdered, I sure wouldn’t want them to show her face on TV like that,” says Artie LeFleur. “It’s nobody’s business.”

“Yeah,” says a new guy, who won’t tell the others his name. “But they might give him the sculpture for consolation. Like a keepsake.”

Wayne has had enough of this. He wanted to stick around for the Ann-Margret special, but he can’t take these crazies tonight. Rodney Quaid has begun to ooze blood. (“Aha,” says the police detective. “From the way the drips fell I can ascertain that they were caused by a paranoid psychotic suffering from the delusion that he had terminal lymph cancer, picking at his scabs.”) Wayne gets up and goes to his room. Forget about Ann-Margret.

He doesn’t really want to watch a sexy woman right now anyway. Normally that’s the whole point. He sits there for an hour, very still in his chair, soaking it all up, and then he goes back to his room and jerks off. Some of the others don’t even bother to wait, they do it right there in the TV room, with their hands underneath their blue hospital bathrobes. That’s not Wayne’s style. Sex is private.

But he isn’t going to jerk off tonight or tomorrow. Or ever, until he is out of this place, and then it will be the real thing. Now that he has a goal, he’s going to save it all up. Like Muhammad Ali in training camp. Celibate until the big moment, in the ring.

Doris and Reg have not spoken about this afternoon. In the truck on the way home (the girl offered her a cup of tea but Doris said no thank you), she said, “Darn, I forgot the sandwiches.”

Reg said, “Do you want me to go back for them?” Doris said, “Don’t bother. I just thought you might like a bite to eat. She could be a nice-looking girl if she’d take off a few pounds.”

“She was a little upset,” Reg said. “Bats.”

He spent the rest of the afternoon out back, splitting wood. Now he is having his Tuna Helper and potatoes in front of the tube. It’s a Red Sox night.

“How’s it going, Baldy?” says Jill. She’s wearing her pink uniform from Sal’s with the two top buttons undone, on her way to work. She sits herself down on the arm of Reg’s La-Z-Boy. The score is Boston 4, Detroit 2. Jill takes a sip of Reg’s beer, leans one arm on his shoulder. She used to call him Baldy when she was younger.

“Since when do you drink this junk?” he says.

“I’ve been corrupted.”

“Better not let your mother hear that kind of talk.”

Carlton Fisk is at bat. New Hampshire boy. Reg’s favorite of the Sox.

“I bet you could have been a baseball player,” says Jill. “You’ve got the build.”