Native Speaker (12 page)

We were discussing the question of another child. I knew Lelia herself wasn't fully sold on the idea, but she kept making the argument that for her it was getting to be now or never. I told her we could have one in a few years, that she'd only be thirty-three. She argued that things can happen after a certain age. Complications. We'll be careful, I said. And wiser, as well. Then why not wait until I'm forty, she said. We'll be absolutely brilliant when I'm forty-five. At sixty we'll be goddamn geniuses. I asked her not to make a scene of it, and I could see that she was about to shout out but then just as quickly she quelled herself—a trick perhaps that she had gleaned from me—and whispered sharply that if I wanted to wait I had better be willing to talk about adoption again.

Of course she knew my feelings. Adoption, I know, is a noble and mostly happy practice. No doubt an advancement for a culture. And yet for me, the prerogative is that you should still bestow your blood whenever able. You grow your own. For although your offerings of unconditional love and respect and devotion will make good of most any child, what you cannot give or else substitute is that tie unspoken and unseen, the belief in blood, that unbreakable connection telling your boy or girl that hers will never be a truly solitary life.

Mitt then shouted and ran to us, thrusting himself face first into Lelia's chest and arms. She opened her wool coat and wrapped him up. She kissed his head. His rosy face just now untucked itself, the whole moment marsupial, strangely wondrous that way, and I thought if I had tasted a family hunger all my life that this should be my daily bread. What else is there to behold? I watched her kiss him again. But I said coldly to her anyway, “You know there's really no chance for that.”

She didn't say or do anything that might disturb Mitt. She was always too protective that way. She wouldn't look at me. She just kept combing his hair with her fingers, kissing it in the spots where it was irritated with the psoriasis he often had. Sometimes he even got little patches of baldness on the back of his head, and she checked for them now, sifting through his dark brown strands with slow method. When she found one she made a tight face, touching the bare skin softly with her thumb.

“It's not possible,” I said again.

“We'll talk about this later,” she answered stiffly, still examining him.

“You wanted to talk before,” I pointed out to her.

“I changed my mind.”

“Well, too late.”

“
Henry
,” she said weakly. “Stop this now.”

Mitt had slipped back down into her coat, out of sight. There was some struggling inside. She unzipped her front and he bolted away immediately. He found his friends again near the concrete monkey barrels and started playing with them like he hadn't missed a beat. Normally this would have been when Lelia started something, shook up the embers, but sitting there on the end of the bench she looked all frozen and chipped. No chance of fire. Then I didn't know what I wanted. I got up to walk around the playground. I thought to look at all the children, the many colors of them, listen to the shouting music of their mixed-up voice, inflections of a hundred home languages. As I came back around I looked all over for Mitt. I didn't see him. Lelia was still sitting on the bench, and this panicked me, made me angry that she wasn't keeping a close eye on him. I felt angry with myself. Then I heard his voice among the others. I bent down to look in one of the concrete barrels on its side, and inside were Mitt and two other boys, the three of them crouched like commandos around the micro-recorder. I stepped back a little. They were too busy to notice me. He was showing them how it worked, that you turn it on and just talk, you press this button and wait and then listen. They tried this back and forth, taking turns saying things, making gun sounds, fart sounds, their yabba-dabbas, and when he rewound the tape and played it back our voices spoke instead from the hollow barrel, the tight grim interchange. Mitt said he didn't want to play and skipped out the other end. I watched as he picked up speed and ran toward his mother, who saw him and opened wide her arms.

Now that Lelia was back from the islands for a few weeks I called her at Molly's and I asked if I could have the tapes for a while. She took them whenever she settled somewhere semipermanently. I said I wanted to hear his voice. She was quiet and then told me she would leave them with the super downstairs. She said it was a long time since we had seen each other and that there was no sense in doing anything before the meeting we had already planned. I wondered if she realized that it was her voice, too, that I wished to hear. Her responses to our son, their laughter, the simple, ambient noise of that time. Back at the apartment I rigged the micro-recorder up to our stereo.

“Hey,” I listened to her say on a tape, “what happened to the dinosaurs Daddy gave you? You had so many in that box.”

“I think they died,” he answered. Mitt must have been three.

“How?”

“I dunno,” he said. “See my Gobot, laser guns come out of his chest and shoot. See? Pht-pht. Pht-pht-pht.”

“Swell.”

“Too bad you don't have guns there, too, then you could shoot dumb Alex.”

“I thought Alex was your friend.”

“Nope,” Mitt answered.

“Did something happen when he came to play? You were playing, weren't you, with the dinosaurs?”

“Uh-huh. He wanted to see them. He said dinosaurs were dumb. He said they were no-brains.”

“Well, to be honest, they weren't very bright.”

Mitt made the shooting sound again. “Alex said they were dumb. He said his Godzilla was smart and my T-rex was dumb and had no brains so he took my bat and smashed its head.”

“That wasn't very considerate of him,” she said.

“He was right.”

“What do you mean?”

“No-brains. We smashed the other ones, too. All of them. They're under my bed. Nothing in them. He was right.”

“They're just plastic toys, sweetie. Real dinosaurs had brains, very small ones, but they did have them.” Pause. “I wish you hadn't broken them like that.”

“Alex said that's why they're
a-stink
. Dumb-dumbs.”

“That's not necessarily true. And the word is
ex-tinct
. When an animal completely dies off, every last one of its kind, then you say it's extinct.”

“Will people get a-stink?”

“Extinct. We can, if we're not careful.”

“Will you and Daddy?”

“That's different, but no, sweetie, I hope not, not us. We'll try our best.”

“Good,” Mitt said.

I went through and listened to the whole box of tapes. It was only the second time I was hearing them, and I noticed again how much care Lelia took while talking with him, not just with the words, but with her manner, so unstudied, calm. I thought how lucky he was to have had a woman like her directing his life. It struck me, too, how she spoke to him as though they had all the time in the world.

She did get angry with him on some of the later tapes, when he was older and his own quick temper (an inheritance from my father) overcame him. On one he called her a “jerkface,” and she must have hit him hard on the ass because there was a pause and he said it didn't hurt but then he began to cry. Lelia cried a little with him. Sometimes they seemed to forget about the tape recorder, especially Lelia, who had a habit of talking to herself if she was short on cigarettes. One entire tape was Mitt saying every bad word he knew. I had to wonder about his expensive private-school yard. The worst bad word, he whispered, was “motherfucker.” Some tapes had them singing Christmas carols, singing Michael Jackson, singing the teapot song. The last one I listened to was an extended birthday card to me. Mitt said I love you four times. Lelia, three.

I compared these to some of the other moments that I remembered her saying it, the night we decided to live together, the morning after Mitt was born, the time drunk in a bar when she thought I had been sleeping with another woman.

I never felt comfortable with the phrase, had a deep trouble with it, all the ways it was said. You could say it in a celebratory sense. For corroboration. In gratitude. To get a point across, to instill guilt in your lover, to defend yourself. You said it after great deliberation, or when you felt reckless. You said it when you meant it and sometimes when you didn't.

You somehow always said it when you had to.

I sorted the tapes and went out in the streets. It was late, warm for February, and I called Molly's apartment from a pay phone but hung up before anyone could answer.

Molly was a filmmaker and a performance artist. She was smart, generous, her looks unquestionably homely, queer, egregiously frank, hip to the bones. Her swaddling clothes must have been black. Sometimes I thought she could have been a very beautiful Jimmy Durante. She was becoming mildly famous. She enjoyed a renown in Europe. I saw in a store once some German posters for retrospective festivals of her work. Years before we would go to some blacked-out converted garage or artists' space to watch her latest show. Now she played places like the Ritz, and her short films were shown at the MOMA and Angelika.

Molly would sometimes call me from the pay phone outside in the street, to tell me what was going on with my wife. She thought I should know. We both acknowledged how painfully adolescent and insipid we were being with these third-party phone calls—we'd joke harshly about zits, menstruation, jerking off—but then over the line I could hear the street behind her, the din of a thousand hurried movements, my wife maybe becoming just one of them, hidden and indistinguishable.

I walked a few more blocks and then telephoned again. No one this time. I walked to Molly's building anyway. She lived on the second floor. When I got there her windows were black. I wondered if they were asleep. I entertained an urge to find a pebble and throw it up against the panes but then there weren't pebbles in the streets of New York, nothing small enough for anything cute, just hunks of broken brick, quart beer bottles. I would have to effect something in between. I flanked my hands to my mouth and said her name. I was whispering. I said it again, this time loud enough to feel it in my throat. I was ready to say it again, maybe yell it, but a light went on and the window opened and Lelia peered down at me. From her silhouette I could tell she had cut off all of her hair. The naked line of her head and neck reminded me of Mitt.

“Henry,” she said in a rough, sleepy voice, “is that you?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“God,” she said. “You better come up, then.”

In the doorway, she was wearing a white cotton nightgown that fell to her thigh. I could see the darkness of her nipples. She looked skinny to me, even gaunt, but I probably thought that because of her hair. Nothing left. The color seemed darker, what had been traces of a reddish hue were now gone, and only her roots were left, the fine nubs rich and brown. I beat down the idea that her cutting of it was a statement intended for me. Women, I know, sometimes have themselves shorn at those watershed moments of their lives, like discarding the memory of a man.

“I thought we had a plan,” Lelia said, rubbing her eyes.

“I'm sorry.”

“I know, I know.”

Lelia was sleeping in the sofa bed. On the lamp table were her reading glasses and a high pile of books. She slumped into one of Molly's leather beanbags. I sat below her on the rug with my feet out. Her knees were bony, white. Now she stretched the nightgown over them.

“Your hair looks good short,” I said. “It hasn't been that way since El Paso.”

“Oh, c'mon, it looks terrible. I cut it myself. Thus I discovered another talent I don't have.”

“Why didn't you let Molly cut it?” Molly always cut our hair.

“She wanted to. She was watching me and crying the whole time. I told her to go away. I didn't mean to be cruel.”

“Is she here?”

“Nope. On a date. Looks like she won't be back tonight.”

She looked for a cigarette, but didn't find one. I thought for a moment that the tenor of her voice sounded like mine in those many months of our trouble, clipped, almost dead.

“I listened to the tapes tonight,” I said, trying not to sound sentimental. “I decided to wander over.”

“I bet,” she said, crossing her arms. “Though I doubt you've ever really wandered.”

“I wander a lot.”

“Oh, that's good,” she replied. “But only in the place and time of your choosing. The word for that is
invasion
.”

“So shoot me.”

She cocked her thumb and aimed right between my eyes.

“Pow.”

I could see she wasn't in a horrible mood.

She said, “Anyway, you're here. I guess I don't mind, Henry, but you're always doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“What?” she laughed. “You preempt! Our supposed meeting next week, for starters. We had it all planned out, remember? What we've been talking about for the last month. Take it slow, gradual. Just like you said we should. I was heeding you.”

“I know.”

“Since I've been back you're always calling just as I'm getting into bed, or stepping out of the shower, or just when I've locked the door behind me. I rush to the phone and then of course it's you. Now I wait five seconds before bolting the lock. It's crazy. You always want to talk when I can't.”

“I know.”

“Well, please please please cut it out.”

“I'll try.”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “How is Jack? I think I truly miss Jack.”

“He's fine. He misses you. He wants to hear about the islands. I want to hear about the islands.”

Her expression dimmed. I knew the time was wrong. The trip to the islands would be off limits. I was promising myself that I wouldn't make it painful, whatever she told me. Anything.