My Education (13 page)

It was hot and moist in the kitchen, and redolent with human smells, steam fogging the mullioned windows where it had risen from the great maw of the gleaming dishwasher, its unhinged jaws bristling with fresh-boiled stemware and forks, and from a large saucepan, agitating its lid on the stove. The loud agitation was irregularly doubled, perhaps deliberately, perhaps just by coincidence, by a spoon being banged on the edge of a hard plastic bowl; and a mingled smell of heated starch and salty milk filled the air which swept me back to the sweaty pungency of Martha's crotch and the marsh we had made of her bed—but of course this scent, though it might share a few of the same molecules, was not like that odor at all. It was salt without sweat, and every glandular species of stink to which sweat can refer. And it was milk without flesh, like the milk I once squeezed from a green clover stem sitting in my backyard as a very small child; because of course it was child smell, though very little of the mixture came from him, but from his bottle and bowl and his one-piece striped suit, like a prisoner's outfit, and perhaps something recently stuffed in the trash.

He was seated atop an elaborate high chair and observing me with silent thoroughness, his gaze having found me the instant I stepped in the doorway. I only understood now, but with the force of retrospective revelation, those sounds I'd been hearing ever since I'd awoken in Martha's hot arms and drenched bed. Martha stood with her back to me, half bent over, facing the baby across the wide kitchen island and plunging her arms to the elbow, with excessive and dangerous vigor, in the depths of the dishwasher's cauldron. Arm's length from the baby and the other arm's length from the stove stood an older woman I had never seen before, with a creased, alert, orange-tinged face and a puff of orange hair, in a turquoise sweat suit. Unlike the baby, she made clear she had seen me by continuing to stare, not at me but at the baby, reaching awkwardly back to the stove, as if her eyes lacked the freedom to roll in their sockets. It must have been the peculiar appearance of their stares crossed like swords, firmly pointed in different directions, that made Martha, when she'd straightened her back and seen them, then glance over her shoulder toward me. The baby's hand holding the spoon resumed banging it hard on the bowl, as if the hand were asserting itself as an agent distinct from the eyes. Martha flushed, or perhaps she had already turned very red from the dishwasher's steam, and whipping back toward the baby emitted a sharp warning sound lest the force of the spoon on the rim of the bowl flip its wet contents into the air—“No, no, hey!”—which even in its brevity was truncated by the instant response of the orange-tinted, turquoise-clad woman.

“It don't move,” the woman told Martha, still averting her gaze.

Her tone could not have been convicted of rudeness, but any conscious person would have tried to make the charge. The bowl on closer examination was a specialized one that adhered to the tray of the high chair by some sort of suction, but Martha's failure to remember this feature, or possibly her failure to have known it at all, seemed hardly an adequate motive for the woman's contempt. Nor could I believe, at least not yet, that her motive was me, however inexplicable and freshly showered my appearance. Rather the contempt seemed instinctive, as if it were the third thing, along with the saucepan and baby, that this woman consistently kept within reach.

“Either way he doesn't seem to be enjoying this much,” declared Martha, making for the baby's other side as if to intercept an enemy combatant and attempting to unstick the bowl from the tray. Though she was still crimson to the roots of her hair she added as if as an afterthought, “This is Regina. She's one of Nick's students. I forgot to tell you she's doing some work for us. Research assistance. Regina, this is Joachim's nanny, Lucia.”

“Hi,” I heard myself say, so stung by this alibi—by the seeming ease with which, despite her blush, Martha had made it—that now I blushed also, and barely raised a greeting hand, though I saw that I could have said nothing, or stuck out my tongue, Lucia had so resolutely ignored Martha's introduction.

“He is crazy for his cereal today,” Lucia contradicted. “This is third bowl I give him.”

“Well, he's obviously done.” Martha wouldn't return my gaze, hard as I sought hers, as if she'd joined Lucia's backward swordplay, in which the object was evading contact, and Lucia for her part did not dignify Martha's comment with an answer—unless the answer was the wrist-flick with which, pivoting, she abruptly extinguished the stove burner, seized the handle of the saucepan, and dumped the scalding contents, of short, pointy noodles, in a colander placed in the sink. She extracted a tub of black stuff from the fridge, scraped a blob of it into a bowl, then dumped the colander's noodles in the bowl as well, and went to work furiously with a spoon. Martha had set upon the baby as if he presented a door she could lock against me and Lucia. She looked at neither of us nor, in truth, at the baby, but was grimly uprooting him from the high chair and uprooting the spoon from his fist and then sitting down at the table with him and pulling up her tank top and pinning it with her chin, vainly seeking to screw his mouth onto her breast while he swiveled one way and the other, whatever he needed to do, to keep me within sight while he meanwhile hid Martha's bare breast. But I didn't begrudge him; if not for his loyal attention I might have thought I had ceased to exist.

“You bought pesto?” Martha said to Lucia. “Damn it, Joachim, settle down! What did you buy pesto for?”

“He is not hungry now,” said Lucia with meaning. “It got so late I gave him his dinner. Now it's time for his bath.”

“The garden's already got bushels of basil. I was going to make pesto fresh.”

“I'll leave it out or I'll put it away.”

“Leave it out. Regina and I will eat it. Are you hungry, Regina?”

So abruptly had I been reinstated that it took me a moment to speak. “I guess,” I said, launching my own freight of furious meaning, but as mode of conveyance I'd chosen my eyes, and Martha still wouldn't look at me.

“Time for his bath,” Lucia repeated. Never had I been so in favor of a baby's being bathed. I wondered if Martha would cling to her baby, gurgle at or fawn on him or worst of all hand him to me, but with hauteur she yanked her tank top back down and held him out to be taken. In transit his smooth round head turned back toward me on his neck's frail stem, so that I remained his sole object of study. He didn't attempt to regain Martha's arms. As Lucia bore him out of the kitchen the two of them made a Janus, Lucia's outraged gaze boring ahead, the baby's placid one emanating behind, until they'd finally rounded the doorframe and vanished from sight.

Alone at last we rushed at each other like dueling snakes. “What the fuck are you doing?” hissed Martha. “I said stay in my room!”

“For how long? I can't hide there all night.”

“All
night
. You hid there for two
minutes
.”

“I shouldn't have to be hiding at
all.
”

“Regina, Lucia works for me and Nicholas, for fuck's sake. She's our nanny!”

“And I'm your ‘research assistant,'” I said witheringly.

“You'd better hope she believed that,” she said sharply, wheeling away.

“Or what?”

“Or you won't see me this way again.” She'd commenced cutting the space of her kitchen to ribbons, returning again to the dishwasher to snatch bowls, forks, tumblers, a cheese grater, a corkscrew—“What the fuck is this doing in there?” she snapped at it—from its still-smoldering mouth. Objects accumulated on the wide slab of gleaming black stone that divided the room; a pale melon, unearthed from the densely packed chaos of her refrigerator, was trapped between the counter and her knife and butchered to perfectly uniform crescents; so vehement were her movements she'd not only deflected my touch but had beaten me back to the doorway again, until she abruptly commanded, “Come here,” and thrust a white envelope in my hands. “Prosciutto,” she said of the pink skin within. “Drape it over the melon. Or wrap it around. Or attach it with toothpicks.” But there were only so many serving options with which she could ward me off, and I caught her wrist in my free hand and her mouth met mine roughly and then broke away. But something was dispelled, or deferred. “Let's eat,” she murmured. “We're starving. We've lost our right minds.”

“Let's go out,” I begged. “I'd rather not see your nanny again.”

“I can't do that,” she said patiently. “I have a baby to say good night to. But if it isn't too cold we can eat in the pergola.” She might have equally said we could eat in the bathtub; I didn't know what a pergola was. I did know that the longer the nanny and baby stayed out of the room, the more Martha returned and was mine. Our vehicle now, that would keep her with me, was the meal. I opened the white envelope with a fraudulent show of experience and the precocious sense that the bathing of the baby upstairs, and the meal preparation downstairs, were in direct competition for Martha's attention, and I must throw my energies onto the side of the meal if I wanted to win. It helped my cause that the turbulence left by Lucia had finally stopped agitating the room; Lucia even grew sufficiently absent for Martha to joke about her. “It's classic Lucia to buy grocery-store pesto when my garden is already choking on basil. She learns ‘pesto' from me—she's Brazilian—and then to show off she buys it at Friel's in June, when it's half-price, because everyone makes their own pesto the whole summer long in this town. Look at this stuff. It's like kombu. That's Japanese seaweed. It's practically black.” But this harangue was pro forma; it told me Lucia was no longer a threat. Not only Martha's speech but her movements had changed. They had slowed, and admitted the pleasure of usual tasks, and I could hardly complete my own task for the pleasure of watching. She brought out a green bottle of wine, a rough chunk of some stone—this was cheese!—a narrow box stamped with gold as of pricey cosmetics that turned out to be cookies. Now I couldn't stop catching at her when she passed near enough, or raining kisses on her when she leaned her face briefly near mine, so that my incompetent bunching of pink flaps of meat on the slippery spears of green melon proceeded so slowly she took it from me and like the rest of the meal prepared it herself, and crowding everything onto a tray, led me through the solarium—even tossing a sly smile over one shoulder—into the violet twilight. Down stone steps and along a stone pathway we passed verdant swells of luxurious lawn, to a little wood structure tucked just where the lawn began losing itself to one more of those striking abysses that with their unwarned-of drops past abutments of shale into sooty hemlocks made a rare kind of property line.

“Pergola,” she confirmed, as she set the tray down on the built-in stone table in the tiny octagonal shelter. “Nicholas's folly. I think it's supposed to resurrect some cherished boyhood memory of hiking with his scout troop in the Alps.” The lawn rising behind us concealed the house from our view, but despite this, or perhaps because of it, the house now felt somehow more present, and returned to the form in which I had first known it: his house. Her mention of him seemed to tell me she felt this as well. It was unlike the mention she'd made of Lucia and pesto. It didn't confirm a safe distance from someone who anyway lacked consequence. Though the wine was, perhaps, the best-quality wine I had ever yet tasted, so that I didn't perceive it as “very good wine” but, as her body had been though with many times less potency, as some entirely new category of pleasure; and though the food, Friel's pesto and all, dazzled me with its goodness and elegance, for I had never seen cheese that resembled quartz stone, nor a cookie from France with a boy's figure so neatly stamped in the chocolate that each of his coat buttons showed, nor a silken pink meat that was not boiled ham from the deli; and though we ate mutely, like wolves, as the light died around us, restoking our bodies of all they had spent; in truth we were not really tasting the food or the wine, and our muteness was swollen with words. Mine were all different forms of the same hungry question. Hers were likely retractions, and warnings. When she finally spoke, what she said was, “After I've gone up and dealt with bedtime, I can drive you back home.” A warning, but veiled.

What I said was, “I don't want to go home.” Hungry question, thinly veiled if at all.

“Regina,” she said. After a moment she added, “You understand why I can't have Lucia getting curious about who you are.”

I thought to say, facetiously, “I'm the research assistant,” in the hopes she'd refute me. Then I longed to say, “Who am I—to you?” but was afraid she would laugh at the question. At last I steeled myself to demand, “What happens when
he
returns home?” but this I was afraid she would actually answer. After such long hesitation, my silence and hers became part of the dusk, in which I could no longer make out her face though she sat just beside me, and speaking, regardless of what the words were, seemed unnatural.

It had grown very cold. With the afterglow gone winter seemed to return despite the loud chirring of insects. I pressed her to me and felt her arms rough with gooseflesh and her thin tank top sodden in front. She winced at my touch. “Engorged,” she murmured. “Ugh, you're all wet. I'm sorry. Because the kid wouldn't eat.” Although her voice was calm she twitched away sharply when I peeled back the drenched cloth from her breast. “No,” she said, but I'd already felt the breast's hardness and heat, as if changed by infection.

“No!” she repeated, and now I felt what she must have, overpowering me at the start of our day, when she shuddered and capsized, emanating a guttural, helpless, admonishing moan as I sucked on the nipple until with a shocking mechanical suddenness, like a shower head being turned on, her hot milk filled my mouth. It queasily tasted of vegetation, and of her, but mostly and sickeningly of itself, but I was so hungry for the taste it obscured, of her flesh, that I gulped it down just to get past it, and past it, and past it, until her soft breast moved and squelched, deflated, underneath the harsh probes of my tongue, and she'd groaned in relief and then grabbed my head literally by the ears, and forced the other hard breast in my mouth.