Life Before Man (36 page)

“I’m so glad,” his mother says, her china-blue eyes shining as if he’s just won something: not a lottery but a prize. “I always felt that was what you were really suited for. You must be happier now.”

Nate’s throat is gripped by fearful anger. Can’t she tell, couldn’t any idiot see that he’s compelled, forced, he has no choice? The weight of her ideal son presses on his chest, a plaster mannequin threatening to enter and choke him. Angel of the oppressed. She’ll absolve anyone of anything, any crime, any responsibility, except herself, except him.

“I’m not,” he says. “I am goddamned well not
suited
for it. I’m doing it because I need the money.”

Her smile does not fade. “But it’s the right thing,” she says brightly. “At least you’re doing something with your life.”

“I was doing something with my life before,” Nate says.

“There’s no need to raise your voice, dear,” his mother says with wounded complacency. He hates it, this tone, which is supposed to make him feel, does make him feel as if he’s jumping up and down like an ape, swinging a club and thumping his chest. Years of her moral smugness, burying him like snow, like layers of wool. Intolerable smugness of all of them, Elizabeth, his mother, even Lesje. She complains but her complaints are smug, hedged bets. He knows that silent equation, he’s been well schooled:
I suffer, therefore I am right
. But he suffers too, can’t they see that? What does he have to do, blow his head off before they’ll take him seriously? He thinks of Chris, lying shattered on the bier of his mattress, mourned by two policemen.
Serious
. Not that he would.

“If you want to know,” Nate says, nevertheless lowering his voice, “I hate every minute of it.” Wondering if he actually does, he’s good at it, as good as you can be at something like that.

“But you’re helping people,” his mother says, baffled, as if he’s failed to grasp an elementary geometrical axiom. “Isn’t it legal aid? Aren’t they poor?”

“Mother,” he says with renewed patience, “anyone who thinks they can really help people, especially doing what I’m doing, is a horse’s ass.”

His mother sighs. “You’ve always been so afraid of being a horse’s ass,” she says. “Even as a child.”

Nate is startled. Has he? He tries to remember manifestations of this.

“I suppose you think I’m a horse’s ass, too,” his mother says. Implacably she smiles on. “I guess I am one. But I guess I think everyone is.”

Nate is unprepared for this degree of cynicism, coming from his mother. She’s supposed to believe in the infinite perfectibility of man; isn’t she? “Then why do you do it all?” he says.

“All what, dear?” she asks, a little absentmindedly, as if she’s had this conversation with him several times before.

“The Korean poets, the crippled vets, all that.” He sweeps his arm, taking in her red-starred map, her mushroom cloud.

“Well,” she says, sipping her tea, “I had to do something to keep myself alive. During the war, you know. Right after you were born.”

What does she mean? Surely this is metaphorical, she’s only talking about housewifely boredom or something like that. But she leaves him no doubt. “I thought of several ways,” she continues, “but then I thought, what if it doesn’t work? I could have ended up, you know, damaged. And then you start thinking about whoever might find you. It was right after your father, right after I got the cable, but that wasn’t the only thing. I guess I simply didn’t want to live on this kind of an earth.”

Nate is horrified. He can’t, he cannot see his mother as a potential suicide. It’s incongruous. Not only that, she hasn’t once mentioned him. Could she have abandoned him so easily, just left him in a basket and stepped blithely off into the unknown? His father is unforgivable enough, but at least he died by accident. Irresponsible, a bad mother, she couldn’t. Potential orphan, he sways at the lip of the abyss which has suddenly gaped in front of him.

“At first I did knitting,” his mother says, with a small laugh. “I knitted socks. You know, for the war effort. But it didn’t keep me busy enough. Anyway I guess I felt I would rather do something more useful than just knitting. When you were old enough I started with the veterans, and one thing leads to another.”

Nate stares at his mother, who however looks just the same as she has always looked. It’s not only the revelation but the unexpected similarity to himself that appalls him. He has thought her incapable of such despair, and he now sees that he’s always depended on it, this incapability of hers. What now, what next?

But his children intervene, clumping up the cellar stairs in toeless high heels, wrapped in cut velvet and satin, their mouths reddened with some long-discarded lipstick of his mother’s, their eyebrows penciled black. He applauds boisterously, relieved by their presence, their uncomplicated delight.

Nevertheless he thinks:
Soon they will be women
, and that recognition runs through him like a needle. They will demand brassieres and then reject them, blaming both needs on him. They will criticize his clothes, his job, his turn of phrase. They’ll leave home to live with surly, scrofulous young men; or they’ll marry dentists and go in for white rugs and hanging sculptures made of wool. Either way they will judge him. Motherless, childless, he sits at the kitchen table, the solitary wanderer, under the cold red stars.

At the front door he kisses his mother as usual, the obligatory peck. She acts as if nothing has happened, as if they’ve been talking about something he’s known all along.

She starts to close the front door and suddenly he can’t handle it, this closing of the door. He vaults the low iron railing of the cement porch, hurdles the short hedge onto the neighbors’ lawn. He leapfrogs the black jockey and takes the next hedge and the next,
landing on grass yellow from winter, mushy with melted snow; his heels sink, mud splatters his legs. Behind him he hears the chorus, the army of tired female voices:
childish
. To hell with them. He soars, over dog dirt, into soggy beds of someone’s crocuses, up again. His children race along the sidewalk, laughing, calling:
“Daddy! Wait for me!”

He knows he will land soon; already his heart is pounding. But he aims again for it, that nonexistent spot where he longs to be. Mid-air.

L
esje is holding a piece of paper. She’s tried to read it four or five times, but she can’t seem to get it into focus. Which is stupid, since pieces of paper exactly like it arrive in her mail almost every day. It’s a letter, printed with a blue ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper, addressed to
Dinosaurs
, care of the Museum.

Everything about this letter is familiar to Lesje. She knows it’s been sent by a wily child, bent on shortcuts, who would rather copy out a ready-made answer than condense one from a book. She even recognizes the questions, which have been rephrased slightly, first by the teacher, then, more drastically, by the student, but which are still almost identical to some of those in the Museum pamphlet on dinosaurs which she herself helped to prepare and edit. The teacher takes shortcuts too.

Ordinarily she would simply clip several mimeographed sheets together and attach a form letter.
Thank you for your interest. We hope these fact sheets will help you to find the information you require
. Today though, looking at the round ingenuous printing, she realizes she’s angry. She resents the implications of the letter: that dinosaurs are too boring to be worth much time, that she herself exists to be exploited. She resents the absence of a stamp and a return envelope.
DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK
, she wants to scrawl, in red crayon across the neat blue printing. But she can’t do that. Answering these letters is part of her job.

She reads the letter again, and the words float. Why is it called the Mesozoic? The correct answer, the one the teacher wants, is on the fact sheet.
Meso
, middle,
zoos
, life. After the Paleozoic, before the Cenozoic. But does the Mesozoic exist? When it did it was called nothing. The dinosaurs didn’t know they were in the Mesozoic. They didn’t know they were only in the middle. They didn’t intend to become extinct; as far as they knew they would live forever. Perhaps she should write the truth:
The Mesozoic isn’t real. It’s only a word for a place you can’t go to any more because it
isn’t there. It’s called the Mesozoic because we call it that
. And risk an outraged letter from some beleaguered teacher: What sort of an answer is that?

Her hands are shaking, she needs a cigarette. She can’t deal with this letter at all, right now she’s devoid of answers, she knows nothing. She would like to crumple the letter and chuck it into the wastebasket, but instead she folds it neatly in two so she can’t see the printing and lays it beside her typewriter. She puts on her raincoat and carefully does up the buttons and the belt.

There’s some bread and cheese in her desk drawer which she intended to have for lunch but instead she’ll walk up to Murray’s. She’ll find a single table and watch the office workers bolt their food, and the breathless, soup-spotted waitresses. She needs to get out of the Museum, if only for an hour.

Last night she fought with Nate, all-out for the first time, after the children were asleep upstairs, or possibly not asleep. That was another thing: the children were there, and it was a weeknight. They’d agreed that the children wouldn’t come on weeknights, but Nate had a last-minute call from Elizabeth. Recently all her calls have been last-minute.

“Her aunt just died,” Nate told her when she came in the door and found the children eating macaroni and cheese and playing Scrabble at the kitchen table. “Elizabeth felt it would be better for the children to spend the night here. She doesn’t want them to be upset by her own reaction.”

The children did not appear unduly traumatized, and Lesje didn’t believe Elizabeth was either. This was just another flank attack. She said nothing until after the children had washed the dishes and Nate had read to them and tucked them in. They were old enough to read to themselves, but Nate said it was a tradition.

When he came downstairs, he announced that he felt he should go to the funeral.

“Why?” Lesje said. The aunt was Elizabeth’s, not Nate’s; the funeral was none of his business.

Nate said he felt he should give Elizabeth some support. She would be brought down by the funeral, he said.

“From everything you’ve told me,” Lesje said, “she hated that aunt.”

Nate said that although this was true, the aunt had been important in Elizabeth’s life. In his opinion the importance of something to someone had nothing to do with its positive qualities but only with its impact, its force, and the aunt had been a force.

“I’ve got news for you,” Lesje said. “Elizabeth doesn’t need any support. Elizabeth needs support like a nun needs tits. I’ve never seen anyone who needs less support than Elizabeth.”

Nate said appearances were deceptive and he felt that after twelve years of marriage to her he was perhaps in a better position than Lesje to judge how much support Elizabeth needed. Elizabeth, he said, had had an unhappy childhood.

“Who didn’t?” Lesje said. “Who didn’t have an unhappy childhood? What’s so special?” If he wanted unhappy childhoods, she’d tell him about hers. On second thought, she probably wouldn’t, since the unhappiness in it had been without event. She could not, she knew, match the almost flamboyant melodrama of Elizabeth’s, which Nate had conveyed to her fragment by fragment. In any competition for unhappy childhoods she would lose.

Nate said he thought they ought to keep their voices down, since they had to think of the children.

Lesje thought of the children and saw a blur. The fact was that though the children were in her house almost every weekend she could hardly tell one from the other, she so seldom looked directly at them. She did not dislike them; she was afraid of them. On their part, they had their own oblique methods. They borrowed her belts
and shirts without asking, which Nate said meant they had accepted her. They mixed themselves drinks of milk and chocolate powder and ice cream and left the unwashed glasses around the house, brown scum hardening in them, for Lesje to find on Mondays or Tuesdays after they had left. Nate said she should speak to them about anything they did which she objected to, but she wasn’t such a fool. If she ever really did that he would hate it. Though they were always scrupulously polite to her, as she knew they’d been told to be. By both parents no doubt. The children were not individuals, they were a collective, a word.
The children
. He thought all he had to do was say
the children
and she would shut up, like magic.

“To hell with the children,” she said recklessly.

“I know you feel that way,” Nate said, with patronizing resignation.

She ought to have backed down, explained that this wasn’t what she meant really. She’d done it often enough before. But this time she said nothing. She was too angry. If she tried to say anything at all, it would come out in the form of her grandmother’s curses:
Jesus asshole poop! I hope your bum falls off! I hope you die!

She ran up to the bathroom, her boots crashing on the uncarpeted stairs, not caring if the children heard, and locked herself in. On the spur of the moment she’d decided to kill herself. She was amazed by this decision; she’d never considered anything remotely like it before. People like Chris had merely puzzled her. But at last she could see why Chris did it: it was this anger and the other thing, much worse, the fear of being nothing. People like Elizabeth could do that to you, blot you out; people like Nate, merely by going about their own concerns. Other people’s habits could kill you. Chris hadn’t died for love. He’d wanted to be an event, and he’d been one.