It Will Come to Me (7 page)

“Ricia Spottiswoode,” said the Pe&W interviewer, “what has changed in your life since
I'm Nobody?
What has made the difference?”

“Well, I married Charles.”

“And that's made the difference?”

“Charles is my muse. Did you know that there's such a thing as a male muse? Charles's love for me is unconditional. He makes me feel safe, for the first time in my life. I feel taken care of. I feel treasured.”

I
am not being unfriendly,” said Ruth. They were lying on their sides in bed, Ben facing Ruth's back, Ruth facing the wall.

“It's Ricia Spottiswoode, right?”

A silence followed, and then a violent stirring of bedclothes and knees and elbows. Ruth was hauling herself up into a sitting position, jamming a pillow behind her back. “Yes it
is
Ricia Spottiswoode,” she said, “but not the way you think.”

“What way do I think?”

“You think it's conventional … sexual jealousy. It's not. Don't bother trying to tell me you're not attracted to her, by the way, because I know you are.”

“I am not attracted to her,” said Ben.

“Not even a little?”

“Not even a little.” Not quite true, but close enough. The attraction he felt for Ricia Spottiswoode was only the baseline erotic interest he took in any nubile female, augmented slightly by the titillation of her fame.

“That's not the problem anyway.”

“What is the problem?”

“Well,” said Ruth, sliding back into a prone position. Ben could feel her agitation diminishing. “Well, there
is
a little bit of sexual jealousy, but it's not really personal. I'm sorry.” She rested a hand on Ben's chest. He took it and squeezed it. “Sorry,” she said again.

She went on. “It's a whole swirl of things. It's more envy than jealousy. It's her youth and her fame and my age and my non-fame. But even that's not quite it. It's that thing of the world being divided …”

Ben knew this theory well. Ruth divided the world into those able to work their will on others and those on whom the will of others was worked. She placed herself in the second group and moved Ben from one to the other depending on her mood. He had repeatedly pointed out to her that these categories were both overly broad and needlessly restrictive, that this distinction lacked explanatory usefulness and served only to justify her fatalistic passivity. Tonight it seemed best to let it go.

“And I can't help resenting how far she's gotten on how little actual talent. If you saw her books you'd be amazed. They're artful, in their own way, but they're so arch and so manipulative—

“Have you read them? I haven't seen them around.”

“I've seen them. I've looked through them in bookstores.”

“You know what you need to do, Ruth.”

“I know. Get back to writing.” Her intonation was singsong. This was not the first time they'd had this conversation.

Ben drew a deep breath. He'd memorized this litany. “You're a writer, Ruth. Isaac's gone. You gave the faculty-wife busywork thing a try. You need to be writing. There's nothing stopping you. There's been nothing to stop you for years.”

His exhortation was having no effect, he could see, or rather it was having only a soothing effect. She had heard it so many times that now she found it reassuring; she engineered their conversations to solicit it. That was all to the good, he supposed. Twenty years ago, the arrival of Ricia Spottiswoode and Charles Johns
would have been the occasion of a giant fight, one of those ruinous all-nighters that woke Isaac and continued even when they heard him shrieking in his crib. As their marriage aged, the spiky line of argument running through it had become an undulating path of theme. They had simply moved beyond the possibility of resolution to find that their marriage had endured.

“Oh,” said Ruth, “I almost forgot. There was a message from Martinez on the machine.” Eusebio Martinez was Isaac's therapist.

Ben made an acknowledging noise. Ruth was lying on her back, one hand resting on his upturned wrist. Her breathing had grown regular and his own brain waves were beginning to relax into swells and troughs. In a moment they would simultaneously flip onto their sides, each to begin the solitary descent into sleep.

“Ben?”

“Yes?”

“You treasure me, right?”

“Yes,” said Ben. After a moment he added, “I do.”

A
t four forty-five on the morning of the day she was to host the welcome back potluck dinner, Ruth rolled out of the cocoon of sleep and fell awake. She eased slowly out of bed—Ben was jealous of his rest—and padded downstairs to the kitchen and started the coffee.

It was too early for her walk. Turning on a light seemed rash, so she sat at the kitchen table in the dark until the coffeemaker had ceased its gurgling. She felt around in the cabinet for the round-bottomed mug she liked to use—the shape mattered to her—and poured coffee and carried it out onto the renovated screened-in porch. Then she stretched out on the wicker chaise where she did most of her reading, turned on the TV, and groggily watched the weather report. A blender-blade symbol representing Tropical Storm Denise was whirring across a stretch of flat blue representing the Atlantic, followed at a distance by a smaller blender blade
named Gary. Too early, the local-color weatherman was saying, to know yet whether either of these would attain hurricane status and whether either might pose any threat to south Texas. “But look. Lookie here,” he went on, pointing to a whorled swelling off the coast of Africa. “That's Tropical Depression Three formin’ up there, gettin’ ready to get in line.”

As she drank her coffee she watched the dawn pick out the details of the backyard, the humanoid limbs of the crepe myrtles, the sagging garage they still meant to convert someday into a study for Ben, the sun-scorched patches on the lawn. The lights in the house across the way went on and she settled back in the chaise to watch the yuppie breakfast scene she'd been monitoring for the past ten years. The cast of characters consisted of two tall blond parents, three rangy blond children, and an ever changing nanny. She'd never met this family, never even seen them outside of this view, but she'd made as thorough a study of the children as was possible, considering that she couldn't quite make out their faces. She remembered two from the time they were toddlers and the youngest as an infant. The parents she knew only as slender bending figures in the periphery of the picture, the father in pale-green surgeon's scrubs and the mother in a narrow skirt and blazer, leaning down to distribute goodbye kisses. Many years back, when the children were small, she'd felt an automatic stab of disapproval at these daily leave-takings. In recent years she'd come to acknowledge that she was in no position to pronounce judgment.

The nanny attrition had sped up recently; two had come and gone in the last year. Ruth knew why. The eldest blond child was a preteen now, and his transformation from child to adolescent was well under way. She saw it in the abject hostility of his slump
and the way he turned his body away from his siblings. In her mind's eye she could picture the look on his face—that princely contempt disguising queasy panic, as though it had just occurred to him that perhaps it was he and not the world that was the source of some smell he couldn't get out of his nostrils. It was Isaac's expression, the one she first noticed when he was ten or eleven.

She kept a group of framed photographs on the table beside the chaise. Here he was a few minutes after delivery, a pugilistic-looking newborn with a squashed nose. His face was covered with livid purple and yellow blotches; he squinted hard under the delivery-room lights and hunched his shoulders like a miniature ogre. “It's Chuck Wepner,” was Ben's remark, addressed to a young intern, one of a group of five or six clustered around the delivery table as the dripping, wailing, mucus-smeared baby, umbilicus just severed, was laid on Ruth's chest.

“Who?”

“Chuck Wepner,” said Ben. “The Bayonne Bleeder. A heavyweight from the seventies.” Ben was wearing regulation scrubs and paper turban. He'd taken out his camera, but for the moment seemed disinclined to use it. This was the first Ruth had seen of him in a while; he'd been pushed far back in the crowd of onlookers during the delivery.

“He's Isaac,” Ruth announced. Nobody seemed to hear her. She propped herself on her elbows and took a look at the baby. On his slimy cheek, she noticed, was an adult-sized pimple with a hard white pustule at its center. “He already has a pimple?” she asked the nurse who was taking her blood pressure as another nurse lifted Isaac away to be washed and weighed. “Oh, that's
real
normal,” said the nurse in a soothing-nurse voice. “Maybe he's
precocious,” said Ruth, but this seemed to go past her. “What do you think of your son, Professor?” asked the other nurse. “Ten pounds, six ounces. Here, hold him.” Ben took the howling, tightly swaddled Isaac in two spread hands, as if receiving a football. “You don't need to be scared of him,” said the nurse.

The newborn Isaac was not pretty. Nor was he friendly. He went rigid with rage and shook his fists when he was hungry, and he was always hungry. But for the four days that he and Ruth were kept in the hospital because of Isaac's mild jaundice, Ruth had the distinction of being the mother of the biggest baby in the nursery. “What a big guy,” murmured one of the other mothers, sidling up to her as she stood over Isaac's bassinet. “How was the delivery?” “A little rough,” said Ruth, “but we got through it.” “Well, bless your heart,” said the woman. “Here's your big big boy,” cooed the nurse who carried him into her room to be fed. “Feel how solid he is!” The candy striper who distributed the daily menu form giggled at his noisy nursing, the grunts and growls and smacking noises he made at the breast. On her second day in the hospital a young black man came to Ruth's bedside to draw her blood. Isaac was deep into a feeding—once he'd attached himself to the nipple there was no tearing him away. “I'm a man,” crooned the technician, smiling down on Isaac as he wrapped a rubber strap around Ruth's upper arm. “I spell M-A-N.”

She'd had the room to herself for the first two days, but on the third she awoke to find that the curtain around the other bed had been pulled shut. She never spoke to her roommate, never even saw her except for a glance at her inadequately covered backside as she limped into their shared bathroom. She did get a look at the baby when the nurses brought it in and noted that it was a very small girl in a pink preemie cap. Apparently the mother's milk
hadn't come in fully—from behind the curtain Ruth could hear a steady low hum of concerned consultation and an occasional faint ululation from the baby.

After a lunchtime feeding, when Isaac was milk-drunk and ready to drape himself compliantly across her shoulder, Ruth heaved herself out of bed and hobbled down the corridor to take them both for a turn around the solarium. She needed to get out of the room to allow herself to enjoy the surge of triumpha-list joy that had been gathering in her. For his first two days of life she'd viewed Isaac as an evil Golem, intent on making her nipples bleed. She flinched when the nurse brought him to her; it wasn't easy to form an attachment to a hideous frog-legged thing that seemed to want to eat her. But on the third day her feelings changed. Suddenly she was proud of him, proud of his size and voraciousness and his very ugliness, which she now understood to be a source of a repellent protective power, like the grotesque masks and amulets prized by primitive peoples. It was a power in which she shared. She was the mother of a big, big boy, a battered, heroic survivor of the birth canal, and unlikely as it seemed, that made her the reigning queen of the
Totem and Taboo
land that the delivery floor had turned out to be. Maybe Freud was right, she thought. Maybe it was true that the only truly unambivalent human connection was the relationship between mother and son.

Here was Isaac at eleven months, in his high chair. He'd mastered the pinching motion necessary to pick up a Cheerio between thumb and forefinger and he was offering one to Ruth, who was leaning into the frame in profile, her face lit with an adoring smile. Was she even capable of that smile now? And here he was at three, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the children's room at the library with Ben, working on one of the advanced puzzles the
librarian kept aside for him. He was as pretty as a little boy as he'd been ugly as a baby, with curly dark hair and girlish eyelashes. By the time he was two he was no longer particularly large—only a little over the sixtieth percentile. People smiled down at him when Ben and Ruth took him on stroller outings. He was an altogether appealing and promising child, solemn, conscientious, confiding. He put away his toys methodically. He sang on key in a high sweet voice. He listened to stories with intense concentration and retained long passages in his memory. Was it possible he'd be an early reader? As it happened, no. He learned to read at six, but quickly. Soon he was ahead of all the others in his first-grade class.

If Ruth had a particularly clear and detailed recollection of Isaac's preschool history, it was because she'd been asked to recapitulate it so many times by doctors and therapists. Her memories rarely satisfied them; they pressed her to bring back anything unusual, anything she might have forgotten. But to all appearances he'd been an entirely normal infant and small child. He began to talk at thirteen months, to walk at fifteen—her pediatrician told her that big babies were often slightly delayed in their gross motor development. Apart from that he scored well above age level. Perhaps his many allergies or his refusal to eat anything except peanut butter sandwiches and carrot sticks had had some insidious cumulative effect on his development that she'd failed to anticipate or understand. Maybe the anxious intensity of his will to do things right presaged something—at the time it had simply reminded her of Ben. Illnesses? Nothing outside the usual, except for the case of periorbital cellulitis he developed when he was four. Here her interlocutors brought out their clipboards and pens. When she told them that the cellulitis had been brought
under control by antibiotics in a few days the pens were returned to breast pockets.