Love in the Present Tense (15 page)

LEONARD,
age
7:
things to get used to

The day they took me away from Mitch I was seven. Nearly eight. And they didn't really take me away from him, so the joke was on them. I had to be big about it because Mitch was really upset.

“I wanted to keep you.” He said that about thirty times that day. I told him I knew that, but I didn't make a point of the fact that he was repeating himself, because I wanted him to. I wanted him to always say it again.

“It's going to be okay,” I kept saying. “We'll see each other a lot.” It really wasn't that okay. It sucked. But I wanted Mitch to feel better.

Just before I got in the backseat of Jake and Mona's car, I pulled Mitch aside by saying, “I have to tell you a secret.”

He took a few steps away from Jake and Mona with me. These total strangers that were suddenly supposed to be better because there were two of them, one male and one female. The way the world is supposed to work.

He leaned down so I could whisper in his ear.

“What's the secret?” I think he was about to cry.

“This is where forever love comes in really, really handy,” I said.

Jake and Mona showed me to my room, which was on the second floor. Showed me around. The closet, where I could hang up my things, the half bathroom that was all mine. For the time being anyway. I was one of only three kids at the time. There was a dresser with a big wood-frame mirror on top. There was a baseball bat in the corner. I didn't play baseball. I hated baseball. Mitch would have known that.

“We'll just leave you alone to unpack,” they said.

After they left I picked up the baseball bat and broke every pane of both windows. I broke the mirror over the sink in the bathroom. Then I picked up the big mirror off the dresser. It wasn't even bolted down. I threw it through one of the broken windows, splintering the wood frame. I heard it crash onto the driveway below.

I heard one of them running up the stairs.

I lay down on the bed and waited.

Mona came running in, and looked around, and then looked at me. She came and sat on the edge of the bed. Didn't try to touch me, which was good.

“You're angry,” she said. “About having to leave Mitch.” It wasn't even a question.

“Duh,” I said.

I had to go to a new school.

I was walking down the hall, minding my own business, when a foot came out from nowhere and tripped me. I went flying, and landed hard, and it knocked all the air out of me. My glasses went skittering off down the hall. The fourth pair of glasses Mitch had bought me. A present from him. Out of reach. I could hear them slide away. I couldn't see where they'd gone. Not without my glasses.

I heard a couple of kids laughing.

Then one of them sat on me. I literally couldn't breathe. I thought it was going to send me into an asthma attack, because a stressful thing like that sometimes will. I didn't know if my inhaler was still in my pocket, and I couldn't reach my pocket to see. I could still hear kids laughing.

I thought, where is a teacher when I need one? I wasn't fond of teachers as a rule, but I would have taken one right about then.

I thought, these people don't even know me. What could I possibly have done to bring this on? What can I possibly do to stop it?

I thought, is there
anybody
besides me whose mother welcomed them into the world with a face full of joyful love? I mean, one single person besides myself?

I was going to have to breathe soon.

I wondered what Pearl would want me to do. The minute I thought that, I stopped struggling, and I stopped trying to breathe. I held still, almost like I was dead, so my need for air would be a lot less. I guess this bored the big kid who was sitting on me, because he got up and moved away.

I just lay there catching up with my breathing. It didn't go into an asthma attack, but I think it might have if I hadn't remembered Pearl. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I heard a voice, a girl's voice.

“Here,” she said and handed me back my glasses.

I put them on and looked up at her. Just an ordinary-looking girl, but I knew she'd gotten more welcoming love than most. “Thank you,” I said.

I looked back over my shoulder, and there were four of them, and they were looking over their shoulders at me. And they were all bigger than me. I think that's when I first realized how small I really am. They were still snickering, and one of them gave me the finger. Then they turned the hall corner and disappeared.

I had never met them before, and already they wanted to hurt me.

I remembered Mitch's voice when we talked about being different races. I remember how he said, “Get used to it.” I wondered if that would be his advice to me now.

MITCH,
age
34:
we could just snuggle

On my fourth session with that therapist, she said this to me: “Whose problems are we here to work on? Leonard's or yours?”

It wasn't as sarcastic as I make it sound. It may have been a pointed question but I think she really was waiting for an answer.

“But that's just it,” I said. “Don't you see? I blame myself for Leonard's problems. That's my problem. That I blame myself for his.”

“You don't have one single one of your own?”

I think I just sat there with a stupid look on my face.

Her name was Isabel. She was about fifty. She wore her hair pulled back but not severely, and she wore skirt suits. I sat there watching her cross one knee over the other, listening to the way her nylons brushed together, and thought, did I actually not realize when I chose her how much she reminded me of Barb? And how could I be so unaware of it then and so aware of it now?

Life's great mysteries.

“Here's an exercise for you,” she said. “Here's something I think it might help us to do today. Think of something that's happened in the past year or so that really bothered you. That has nothing to do with Leonard.”

“Okay.”

We both waited for a moment.

“Oh,” I said. “Right now?”

“Good a time as any,” she said.

She never let me talk about what I wanted to talk about. That being the fact that I had failed that kid by never once initiating a dialogue about his missing mom. Well, that's not entirely accurate. She let me talk about it for three sessions. Then she felt it was time to move on to something else, but I didn't know what kind of something else she had in mind. I was still stuck on What was I thinking, not talking about Pearl with him, whether he seemed to want to or not? And anyway, that's about me. Isn't it?

I mean, this is not a healthy thing. Kid never once said, hey, Mitch, did you notice Pearl has been gone a few years now? What's up with that? And I never said a word intended to get him to open up about it.

I guess it takes guts to loose a spray of questions you know you can't answer.

Anyway, I wanted to tell Isabel how he's got this chip on his shoulder now with authority figures, and he's fighting at school and acting out all this rage at Jake and Mona, and it's all my fault.

But no. This woman with the legs won't let me talk about it, I was thinking. And it's the only reason I came. That and the obvious Barb comparison seem like reason enough to maybe ditch her and get somebody better. A guy would be nice. I could be headed for a heavy transference thing here. Like my life is not complicated enough. And it's not like we've been together forever or anything. It's only our fourth session. We haven't really bonded yet, I thought.

“I have something,” I said. I guess maybe I expected her to be proud of me. Anyway, here's what I had.

Sometime going into that second congressional campaign, the one that worked, and put enough money in my bank account to hire this expensive therapist, I'd said to Barb, “Promise me you won't do one of those commercials. You know the kind I mean. The loving wife looks adoringly at her candidate husband while he looks into the camera and tells the voters how he'll keep their homes safe and let them keep more of their tax dollars in their pockets, which is exactly the same impossible drivel all the other candidates are saying but there's the wife beaming at him like it's some brilliant shit. Promise me you won't do that,” I'd said.

“There you go again,” Barb had said.

“There I go again what?”

“You know I can't promise that.”

Somehow that wasn't what I had expected her to say. I thought I'd feel better after our little chat.

For a while we couldn't even talk about it without everything coming apart. Then we made a sort of truce in which I agreed that I would not watch the commercials. Which pretty much involved not watching television except late at night, which was the only time I really watched television anyway. When in doubt, look the other way. It's an acquired skill, but once you learn it, it's like riding a bicycle. It'll never really leave you.

But then one night, about a year previous to sitting in that dreadful session with the temporary Isabel, I was sitting home watching late-night television and they went into local ad time and there it was. Harold Stoller and his adoring wife for Congress. I wanted to turn it off, but it just froze me. It was too horrible to watch, but definitely too horrible not to watch. It had me.

For two days everybody I ran into said the same thing. “What's wrong with
you
?”

“Nothing,” I said. Not in such a way that they would believe me, but in that tone that encouraged no further questions.

But here's what was wrong with me: Not even so much that the marriage could actually be real, a thing that existed and meant something, because I still didn't buy that. I was simply twisted by the fact that thousands would see that commercial and they would buy it. They would think that was a real marriage, an actual thing that existed and meant something, and even if I could find all those thousands of people who needed correcting, I wasn't allowed to straighten out the obvious misunderstanding.

The tiniest bit of denial. Perhaps. But that's what I felt.

Then after two days of my saying, “Nothing,” she came to see me, and she let herself into the house and climbed into my bed at night, just like always.

And I found myself unable to perform. For what I think might have been the first time ever. We lay there side by side in the dark and I waited for what she would eventually say.

I believe the correct line is, “Don't worry, it happens to all guys sometimes.” And then I think my line is supposed to be, “Well, it never happened to me before.” But we never really scripted things out in quite the normal way.

A good two or three minutes must have gone by in silence. Then, finally, this was her big line: “You told me you weren't going to watch the damn commercials.”

I wouldn't make a thing like that up.

So, I'm thinking this is the kind of thing this therapist person wants.

“Okay,” I told Isabel again. “Okay. I've definitely got something.”

We waited in silence for quite a long time. Patterns, patterns.

“Yes?” she finally said.

That's when it struck me that she wanted me to say all this out loud. I couldn't do that. I didn't even know her. That stuff was top secret. I couldn't be telling it to just anybody.

“You said think of one. You didn't say I had to recount it out loud.”

“Maybe next week we should talk about trust issues,” she said.

But I figured by next week I could locate a therapist who would let me tell him that I blamed myself for Leonard's acting out. Whose money was it, anyway?

LEONARD,
age
14:
forever lenses

I really had only one important private conversation with Barb, but it was a good one. It took place after Harry won his election for United States Senate. He blew that first try for Congress, but he won the second time out, served three terms, then set his sights on the Senate and moved up big. This was part of what led me to my conversation with Barb. Following a win like that, I knew Mitch had money coming out of his ears.

I called her, and asked if we could meet. She didn't even ask me why. Just gave me the name of a restaurant. She handles life like a business. She trusted me to state my case when we arrived. I guess she could deal with her curiosity until then.

The restaurant was a little nicer than I thought it would be. Not really fancy, but nice enough that I felt under-dressed in my jeans and T-shirt.

She rushed in three minutes late, apologizing, and I apologized for not dressing up more.

“There's no dress code here,” she said. “You're fine. Forget it.”

She sat down across from me and really looked at me for the first time, and I waited for her to react to the state of my face. She just looked, nothing more.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “Can I buy you lunch?”

I hadn't meant to get a lunch out of her in the package and I felt a little guilty. I had to keep reminding myself that she could afford this stuff. Where I come from, lunch out is a big deal.

“Why don't you just go ahead and say it,” I said.

She looked up at my eye again, and her face got soft. She didn't say anything at first, just reached her fingers out so she almost touched it. Instead she touched a place on my cheek just below it. Right at the corner of my eyebrow there was an actual break in the skin, and a lot of swelling, and I'm sure it looked too sore to touch. And, as a matter of fact, it was.

“Mitchell told me you've been fighting at school.”

I laughed. I guess maybe it sounded a little bitter. “That's what I tell him, yes.”

“Whereas actually…”

“I'm getting the shit kicked out of me. Every day. Well, no. Not every day. But it seems like it. It seems like every time I turn around. Look at me, Barb. Who am I supposed to hold my own in a fight with? Do you have any idea what I weigh?” I didn't want to tell her, so I just kept going. “Let's just say I'm about two inches shorter and twenty pounds lighter than the next smallest guy in my class. Then I have these big, thick glasses, and I walk around with an asthma inhaler in my pocket. I might as well be wearing a sign that says, ‘Beat the crap out of me, I was born for it.'”

“Is this what you needed to talk to me about?”

“Yeah,” I said. “More or less.”

Then the waiter came and Barb said the veal piccata was really good here, and I reminded her that I was a vegetarian. She got a confused look on her face and said she hadn't known that, and then apologized. Like she damn well should have known it. The waiter said one of the specials that day was a vegetable lasagna with spinach and ricotta. I said that would be fine.

After he left I looked at Barbara like I'd never seen her before. I think I was appreciating her. “Thanks for buying me lunch,” I said. “It's really nice.” She just waved it off. “It seems amazing that you and Mitch have lasted all these years. Oh, shit. That was a really stupid thing to say, wasn't it? I'm sorry if that was a stupid thing to say. I should think before I talk.”

“Forget it,” she said. “It's okay. We're probably both a little surprised ourselves.”

“It's just that there's always so much stress.”

She sipped at her water. “Maybe it's the stress that holds it together,” she said.

“That is
so
confusing.” I held my head like it would come off otherwise. “That would totally give me a headache if I tried to think about it. So I won't.” Besides, I already had a headache from being slammed in the temple with a locker door.

“How can I help with your problem at school?”

“I was hoping Mitch would buy me contact lenses.”

“Of course he will. I know he will. All you have to do is ask him. You know that.”

“Just one thing, though. He can't know I'm getting beat up at school.”

“He's a big boy, Leonard.”

“He can't. He can't know that, Barb. You can't tell him. I mean it. He hurts for me, Barb. He hurts when I hurt. Telling him I'm getting beat up would be like beating him up. I couldn't do that to him. I thought maybe it could be your idea. You could say, ‘I bumped into Leonard today, and I was just thinking, wouldn't his social life be easier without the glasses?' And remind him it's not the kind of thing Jake and Mona's insurance would cover. But if you say anything at all, it has to be something that won't break his heart.” We just sat with that for a moment, and then I said, “I'm counting on you not to break his heart.”

I didn't literally add, “or you'll have to answer to me,” but it was more or less sitting there on the table, obvious to both of us.

There was a quiet moment, and we were looking right at each other's eyes. I think we both knew, consciously, that it was a many-layered comment I'd just made. Most grown-ups wouldn't have let me talk to them like that. There were a lot of good things about Barb.

Then she nodded a few times, and I knew she was with me. At least on the contact lenses, anyway. “I'll make you a promise. Either I'll get the contacts out of him without him knowing why, or I'll buy them for you myself.”

“Wow,” I said. “You would do that for me?” I was touched. Really.

“Of course I would.”

“Wow. That's really nice. You know, I used to wish…No, you know what? Never mind. I think I've said enough stupid things for one day.”

“Go ahead if you want,” she said.

“I used to wish that you and Mitch could get married, and then it would be a two-parent home, and I could stay there. I knew you couldn't. Even back then I sort of knew. It's just one of those things you wish, you know? One of those stupid things that, when you're just a kid, you don't know any better than to want.”

She smiled, but I knew I'd made her sad. But maybe it wasn't the worst kind of sad in the world. I don't know.

Later, just as we were walking out of the restaurant together, I told her I loved her.

She didn't look at me at first, then she did. I could tell she was trying to say something, and that she was really uncomfortable. And I don't think it's because she didn't love me back. I think she did. I think that was the discomfort. Right there.

“Thank you,” she said. “You're very sweet.” And she touched my face again and walked to her car.

I just stood there for a minute and wondered why that would be such a hard thing to say. What does it snag on, in some people, while it's trying to come out? What would it feel like to live inside that skin and not be able to let it flow in and out like that? I couldn't imagine.

I wondered if she had ever told Mitch she loved him. I knew damn well she did. In that strange, deficient way that seemed to be the only love she could manage, I knew damn well she did.

When I got home, there was a phone message on my bed. Mitch wanted me to call him. I called him at his office. He said he had a big bonus check, and he wanted to buy me a present. What did I want more than anything else in the world?

“Well,” I said. “I've really been wanting to switch over to contact lenses.”

“Done,” he said.

He picked me up in a brand-new midnight blue Mercedes convertible. He took me out and not only had me fitted for contacts but he opened an account in his name with this eye doctor so all I had to do was go back anytime, be refitted for a fresh prescription, and the bill would go to Mitch. Forever lenses.

“Otherwise it wouldn't be a big enough present,” he said.

That was an important feature, because I was still going to get beat up some, and I had no idea how long I could make a pair last.

I knew Harry had given him a bucket of money this time.

I called Barb and left a message on her voice mail. I said I wouldn't need her help after all, but I wasn't sorry we'd had the talk.