Peaceable Kingdom (16 page)

No one has spoken for thirty miles when Beth says, “Doug’s thinking of giving up his practice and going to graduate school in anthropology.”

I say, “He’ll quit when he can’t find a tribe to pay him a hundred an hour.”

Doug was a mistake. It wasn’t a time when any of us was thinking clearly. Beth knew something was wrong but not what, and I couldn’t tell her. I asked a malpractice lawyer I knew. I said: Someone professional, not a crackpot, someone who won’t convince her she’s hated me all along. By accident, my friend and one of Beth’s friends both gave us Doug’s name; we mistook coincidence for consensus. I expected an elderly Viennese, not some guy with stringy hair and a necklace made of teeth.

Beth used to be funnier, used to talk more. Her hands flew around when she spoke. Now I reach out to touch Beth’s hand, though that is no longer simple. When we met, I had an old Pontiac I drove with Beth practically in my lap. Now we have bucket seats. Couples who’d laugh at single beds have no problem with this. Beth doesn’t see me reach for her hand, which is tucked in a corner of the armrest, so my groping for it has all the grace of wrestling a jacket off while you’re driving.

We are sharp, realistic people. We have senses of humor, I think. Then how to explain why we’re here, believing or at least pretending that the pain of loss, of adultery and miscarriage, can be eased by mumbling some mumbo-jumbo and committing to earth a frozen rodent in an extra-large Ziploc bag?

One morning last summer, a guy in my office said, “Guess who’s coming to the Ninth Avenue site.”

“Madonna,” I said. I’d been corresponding with some people trying to pitch a rock video to Madonna—a video filmed at our site with lots of guys walking high steel.

“Better,” he said. “Cookie the Clown.”

“
The
Cookie?” I said.

My supervisor was embarrassed when he told me I had to be there. He said, “If, God forbid, Cookie gets flattened, I need someone around I can count on. Come on, Martin. You’ll be a hero to your kids.”

A hero to my kids: Holly knew very well who Cookie was but pretended not to. Buzzy had only recently switched from clowns to baseball cards, but he hit his forehead with his palm and took an elaborate pratfall and shouted up from the ground: “Cookie the Clown? That’s sick!”

This wasn’t so long after my stepmother’s death. I remember thinking that the steady drizzle falling on Cookie’s set was the same rain that fell on Jacksonville. That day I saw it as Cookie’s set, although it was our building.

The site was covered with puddles and mud. It wasn’t raining too hard for the video crew to shoot, just hard enough to drench them. Cookie put on a slicker and explained to the boys and girls that work goes on in all weather. I was riveted, not by my job or the sight of Cookie in a bulldozer, but because I was standing next to a woman I desperately wanted to talk to. Her name was Marian. She was some kind of troubleshooter from the show; she was the one who helped Cookie into his slicker. We’d said hello and discussed the rain, but I wanted to say something else. I kept looking up at the sky, rolling my eyes and shrugging.

I hung around till she’d packed everyone into the vans. By then we were totally soaked. We went to a hamburger joint. She asked about my job. I asked her what it was like working for Cookie the Clown. She said you had to be careful. It wouldn’t look good for Cookie to sue or be sued.

I said, “There was one year when Holly was small, I don’t think Buzzy was born yet; my wife used to say the two people she hated most in the world were Richard Nixon and Cookie the Clown.” Marian laughed, but I got flustered, quoting Beth, bringing in the kids. I felt I had ruined everything.

And that, more or less, was that. We said goodbye, we shook hands. But I couldn’t get her off my mind. I would walk down the street, staring at strangers’ faces, wondering how many perfectly normal people were right at that moment obsessed with someone they hardly knew and had chosen almost at random to fix on with what, for want of a better word, you might as well call love. I felt like John Hinckley. I thought: It would be easier to shoot the President than to call her. But finally I called. We met for lunch. She said that my calling had made her so happy she was sure she’d be run over by a car on the way to meet me.

I couldn’t tell Beth. Of course she knew something was wrong. I knew she was suffering, but couldn’t explain—that was the hardest part. I kept asking, Is it me? In fact, I had never been so present. I had time and patience for everything—unraveling the children’s shoelaces, settling their fights. I actually
talked
to the children, though I can’t now recall about what.

One day I persuaded Buzzy to watch Cookie the Clown with me. He had, as I said, outgrown it. But he was so surprised I asked, he agreed at once. Cookie was touring an underground mushroom mine. The millions of fat white mushrooms waiting to be picked were a lovely sight, though not, I imagine, to the women who worked there, day after day in the dark. One of the workers told Cookie that each mushroom was different, like snow-flakes. “Like people,” Cookie said, and she said, “Very much like people.” “Buzzy,” I said, “mushrooms are
nothing
like people.”

Beth said her problems had nothing to do with me. She felt that her sense of the world had gone sour—curdled, she said, like milk. She woke me in the middle of the night to talk—in a hot, dry, panicky voice. Some guy on the street had looked at her a second too long and she’d thought he was going to kill her. She began to hate going out. I said, Talk to someone. Someone who isn’t me.

I have to admit I was grateful at first, glad even for Doug’s dental jewelry and Guatemalan poncho. I thought: They’ll talk more about jaguar rites, less about me. Even when it struck me that my wife was telling him secrets she didn’t tell me, I thought: Well, I deserve it.

Maybe I will never know why Beth decided to get pregnant. At the time I didn’t ask; now I no longer can. I am sure it was a choice—we had been married fourteen years; both Holly and Buzzy were planned. For all I know, it was Doug’s idea. Maybe Beth thought it would fix things, restore what had gone bad, like those cookbook tricks for fixing the spoiled hollandaise, the overthickened gravy.

And it did, it worked. As soon as Beth told me—as soon as it really sank in—images began streaming through my mind, pictures from our lives. One image stayed with me: when Buzzy was tiny, someone gave us a beanbag chair. Beth used to scoop him out a little hollow in the chair, and the two of them would lie there watching MTV. She’d said the videos were the perfect length for her and Buzzy’s attention span. It’s always the most trivial things that call us back to ourselves—never what you might expect. When I thought of that—Beth and Buzzy watching MTV—everything that had happened since seemed to dissolve, and I understood that my life with Beth and the children was my real life, and everything else was a dream.

That same night, I told Beth about Marian. I promised it was over. I called Marian and met her for lunch and told her Beth was pregnant—that was the reason I gave. At first Marian couldn’t see what difference it made; I couldn’t really explain. Finally she smiled and said she’d learned her lesson from me. From now on, she was sticking to guys in clown noses and size-15 checkered shoes. That was my moment of sharpest regret; because, even then, we could still joke around. At home, nothing was funny.

That wasn’t completely true. For that short time Beth was pregnant, something lightened; we could laugh about getting it right this time, or getting a child with all Buzzy’s and Holly’s worst faults. Then came the miscarriage. After that, we sat in Doug’s office. I joked about Murph. I was the only one laughing.

When the traffic lets up, I say into my rearview mirror, “Nancy and Ronald Reagan go into a restaurant. Nancy says, ‘I’ll have the meat and potatoes.’ And for the vegetable?’ says the waiter. And Nancy says, ‘He’ll have the meat and potatoes, too.’”

Beth says, “Martin, that’s awful.” Buzzy bursts out laughing. Holly says, “Why are
you
laughing? I bet you don’t even get it.”

“Vegetable?” I say. “Ronald Reagan?”

“I get it,” says Holly. “I think it’s really mean.”

“Toward Reagan?” I say. “Or toward vegetables in general?”

“I don’t know,” Holly says. “Toward both.” Holly flips back and forth about us, always so as to find fault. Sometimes I’m too soft and sometimes I lack compassion. Sometimes we’re too rich and sometimes too poor. Once, in fifth grade, Holly had to bring into school an anecdote from her very early childhood. It was a terrible moment: I couldn’t remember one. Beth came up with something for her, but Holly stayed angry at me. I remember telling her that it wasn’t a question of love or attention, but strictly a memory problem.

Doug says the whole point of ritual is remembering. He says they fix things in time, in the mind; they work like primitive record-keeping, tying knots in string. He says, “Time is the string, rituals the knots.” That doesn’t sound right to me. Anything worth its own ritual, you would remember without one. You’d know why you buried that jaguar under the headman’s house.

Two exits from my sister’s, I ask Beth how we should work this. Get out of the car and start digging a hole? Or wait, let Murph defrost? Sneak off on the sly? Invite everyone? Beth looks at me and blinks. The morning sun is harsh. She says, “Let’s play it by ear.”

In the uproar of arrival, Murph is forgotten. Buzzy jumps out and races in circles around the car with his cousin Jed. Holly heads across the field to toss sticks for Peg’s dogs. My sister runs out and wraps her arms around me and squeezes. It’s been so long since anyone hugged me that way, I decide to tell Peg everything, to get her alone and confess.

Eugene, Peg’s husband, shakes my hand. His handshake matches the rest of him—bony and a bit stiff. Eugene is a semi-famous painter with a reputation built on perfect hard-edge stripes. At least he and Beth can talk about paint. Once during each visit Eugene says you couldn’t pay him to live in Manhattan now, he gets so sick of hearing everyone talk real estate. After that, it is impossible for me to mention my work.

When Eugene’s paintings are selling, he drinks Mexican beer. When they aren’t, it’s Genesee. Everyone knows this, and, insofar as you can kid Eugene, we kid him about it. Now Beth and I get our choice of Tecate or Sol. We drink a couple of beers, then Eugene asks Beth to come see his studio. Before I can steer the conversation toward what’s on my mind, Peg says, “I need to talk to you about Dad.” She’s seen him more recently than I, three weeks ago; on the phone, she’d said he was fine.

Now she says, “Not
exactly
fine. I guess he’s okay. But listen. I went into the bathroom, and when I closed the door this
thing
jumped at me from the back of the door, her dressing gown, silk, good lace, very Miss Havisham. It swung out from its hook, puffed a puff of lavender, then swung back.”

I wonder why she’s telling me this. “You think it was her ghost?”

“Ghost?” says Peg. “I think it was her dressing gown. It’s been a year since she died.”

“Maybe he’s wearing it,” I say, and we both start to laugh.

“That’s disgusting,” says Peg.

We fall silent, drinking our beer. Peg says, “You spend your life eating whole grains and nuts and you come back from a hike, take your first sip of Pepsi in thirty years, and bingo, good night, you’re dead.” There is an edge in her voice.

I say, “How are things going?” I hold up my Tecate can. “Looks like they’re going okay.”

“Terrible,” she says. “Eugene is seeing someone. The thing is, it happened before, with this same woman. Two years ago.”

“Really?” I’m horrified by how hopeful this makes me feel.

“Really,” she says, and I understand I can’t tell her. Eugene and I should be talking, Beth commiserating with Peg. Peg says, “How are things with you?”

“Fine,” I say, and Peg says, “Sure. Beth looks completely zombified.”

“Oh,” I say, “you noticed. Well, the miscarriage…”

Beth and Eugene walk in. After an uneasy silence, Beth says, “It’s wonderful. Eugene’s doing something totally new.” I think, That’s not what
I
hear. But Eugene isn’t thinking that. When you talk to Eugene about his work, there are no double entendres, no subtexts.

Beth catches my eye and says, “We should get some stuff out of the car.” I know she means Murph.

Beth turns to Peg and Eugene. “I hope this doesn’t sound crazy to you,” she says, “but Murph, Buzzy’s hamster, died, we needed somewhere to bury it, we brought it…”

Eugene looks pleased; the spectacle of city dwellers with nowhere to bury their dead confirms him. I search his face, but there is nothing for me there, no fellow-sinner recognition.

Peg says, “It’s not crazy at all. Just bury it deep. Remember, Martin, we had that turtle that died and we just covered it with dirt, and the cat dug it up in the middle of the night and smeared turtle guts all over Mom’s kitchen?”

“Where was I?” I ask.

Eugene says, “Let me get you a shovel.” Beth and I go to the car. The children are playing in the field. I open the trunk. Murph is in an opaque white plastic shopping bag; his Baggie is inside that.

Beth says, “Would you hold Murph a second?” She reaches into the trunk, gets another white plastic bag, and takes out a small container of strawberry yogurt.

“What’s that?” I say. “Food for the dead? An afterlife snack for Murph?”

“It’s the baby,” she says. “The fetus. I saved it. I thought I was being crazy, but I discussed it with Doug. And he said I was right. I think we should bury it. Near Murph.”

“You
were
being crazy,” I said. “You are. You’ve gone totally around the bend. You’ve got a fetus in there? Are you kidding? Remember fifteen years ago we used to laugh at people eating the placenta after hippie communal births? What’s gotten into you?”

Beth holds up the yogurt container. All I can think of is the Pepsi can that did my stepmother in. I imagine the interior of the yogurt carton, dim light straining in through the waxy white walls, streaks of tissue and blood. Then I picture the inside of the aluminum can: pitch black, metallic, buzzing.