Precious (6 page)

“All right, a free-write,” he says. “I want you to compose a poem, or offer some meditation on why John Donne is gay. Either is fine. You’ve got five minutes, so make the most of it.”

He sits at his desk and glances around to the stacks of books, the reports and take-home assignments. How did he get here, to this place of bland conformity? What happened to those cherished nights, to the always-new conversations, to the laughter hiding in everything?

At least the morning didn’t start this way. He woke from a dream in which he was soaring over a canyon, the sky a pale blue and violet, the burnt-orange crevice below streaked with white and gold. He felt such bliss that everything about the morning seemed pure and perfect. He thought to share the dream with Amy, who had always seemed to him, in their six years of marriage, to be fascinated by dreams and their hold over people. She had studied Jung in college, where they’d met, and she’d majored in psychology. There was a time when she wanted to be a therapist. This was before Peter was offered a job after graduation, teaching on the East Coast, and Amy, succumbing to new pressures of money and house expenses, decided against graduate school and got a job working at a clothing store instead. She was good with people. She told him she liked the work.

Still dressed in boxers, Peter walked into the kitchen. He wanted to ask Amy if she still remembered Jung’s theories, and if she still thought she might eventually go back to school and do those things she had often talked about. He held out his arms like a bird in flight. Amy
watched but said nothing. Peter took no offense to this; he figured she had probably been awake for hours. Sophie’s teeth were cutting through, and, before going to bed, Peter had suggested a little brandy rubbed over the tender flesh. Amy would hear none of it. “That’s not something you do to a kid,” she said, but it was clear she had debated for a moment. It seemed to Peter that she wore her motherly duties with too much uneasiness. He hated to think in that way, but she had become so different after Sophie’s birth. She’d suddenly embraced family values, reconverted to Catholicism, and gone off birth control. Whereas she had once loved the spontaneous and impractical and flawed joy of each day, she now seemed to regard with annoyance anything that might disrupt an orderly life. In Peter’s approximation, the only aspects of her former life she clung to were her abhorrence of beef products and an almost sacred veneration for brussels sprouts, which she still called, to Peter’s surprise and sadness, her
petits choux.

However wonderful his dream might have been, it was only ill-fated in daylight. “I had an amazing dream,” he said.

“Oh, really?” Amy picked up a spoon and returned to feeding Sophie.

“Good morning, Peanut,” he said, kissing Sophie’s head. She sat perched in her high chair, slapping her dimpled fists against the tray.

“What about the dream?” Amy asked casually, and by then it seemed to him she cared little to hear of it. He wondered if at night she fell into a nothingness—no images or color or motion.

“Nothing.” He sat down next to her. “It’s nothing at all.” He regarded her, thinking that at twenty-nine and even in a ruined nightshirt, she was still pretty. Her face held the memory of the girl he met in his senior year. In college she was an earthy sort, pleasantly wide around the hips. She was self-assured, aware, vivacious. In those days, she shared almost anything that was on her mind. He still loved her, but sometimes when she became sullen and impatient, he felt as though she’d become a stranger.

They sat in silence for the better part of breakfast. Peter drank his coffee and read the paper. Finally, Amy put down her cup of tea. She took a spoon and stirred it idly the metal hitting the ceramic cup. “I’d like to talk, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” he said, looking up, surprised by the vulnerability in her voice. “Talk. What is it? What do you want to talk about?”

“Lear,” she said.

Peter glanced down to where their cat sat under the high chair, licking his booted paw. A black tiger, Lear’s eyes were so large and golden that Peter often became transfixed by them, particularly on nights when he snuck a little weed. “Okay,” he said, smoothing the paper. “What about Lear?”

“I know he’s your cat. I know you’ve had him a long time.”

“We’ve
had him since college.” Peter remembered how Lear had sat on the dashboard of his van and slept most of the way as they’d driven, three days, across the country.

“I’m worried about Lear and Sophie.”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish,” she said. “I was reading this story in a tabloid, where a house cat sat on a kid as he slept. The kid turned blue.
Blue,
Peter.”

“If it worries you, then at night shut the door of Sophie’s nursery.”

“Then I can’t hear her,” Amy said. “I don’t even think Lear really likes Sophie; it’s like he feels replaced, like it’s a competition.”

“Lear is fine.” He leaned in for a moment, toward Amy, and was about to say something more—something to the effect that he believed she was being ridiculous—but he stopped himself. He wished he could wean her off this new-mother syndrome, the fretting about every little thing when in fact nothing bad had happened to Sophie at all. Finally he said plainly: “The odds of a cat suffocating a baby must be one in ten million.”

“Still,” she said, “that’s one possibility I don’t want. It’s not just that, either. It’s the work involved with cleaning up after the cat, the time I
don’t have and don’t want to take. You’re out teaching, and I’m left here, with everything else.”

“I’m out,” Peter corrected, “making extra money. I’d like to be home more. It’s not that I don’t want that.”

“Sophie tried to pet Lear yesterday, and he hissed at her.”

“What did she do to him?”

“What do you mean, what did the baby do? She didn’t do anything.”

“You’re overreacting.”

Her shoulders stiffened and she sat quietly for a few moments. She smoothed her hair out of long habit, even though now it was short and permed. “Please,” she said finally. “Don’t tell me I worry too much. Just don’t.”

Were it not for her tone, which, at that point, seemed genuinely hurt, Peter might have laughed at how overly sensitive Amy was to the issue; they might have shared an amused chuckle. But he realized there was nothing he could say to rid her of her fear and of her anger at him for not understanding. The concern was real enough, and that was all that mattered. He knew she felt the way he did—that unexpected rush of pure love, a desire to protect the child at all costs—but he didn’t see the practicality in being obsessively paranoid about Sophie’s well-being. Life was there, all around them, and whether either wanted it, eventually something would happen. Sophie might sprain a finger, break an arm, fall on the pavement, chip a tooth. It bothered him, yes, but he saw it as inevitable. Part of being human meant eventually getting hurt. “Of course you’re right,” Peter said, finally.

“You don’t mean that. You only ever mean that you’re right.”

Peter ignored this comment and read about Ted Bundy’s recent escape, his half dozen murders in the Rocky Mountain area, and his subsequent arraignment in Florida. “Did you know,” Peter said, trying to change the subject, “that Bundy campaigned for the Republican Party. He planned a career in politics—that figures, doesn’t it? A serial-killer Republican?
Did you know he volunteered on a suicide hotline and authored a book on rape prevention? How fucked-up and hypocritical is that?”

She picked up her cup of tea. “I thought you were trying not to curse anymore.”

“No,” Peter said, without looking up. “You were trying to get me to stop cursing, as I recall. The newspaper says that Bundy bit some poor girl’s ass. Why is
that
fashionable to report, the violence? Why the attention on Bundy, like he’s some superstar?”

“Another debate?”

“I’m trying to have a conversation. I thought you wanted to talk.”

“I get tired of these kinds of conversations.”

“You told me what bothers you; I’m telling you what bothers me.”

“Bundy is a sadist,” Amy said. “Why would I want to hear about
him
?”

“I’m just trying to talk.”

“You’re
reading to
me from the paper. That’s not talking. It’s not. And I hardly have the time to think about every single thing you
read.
Last week you went on about beavers, dams, and the health of forests. You don’t even understand what’s important.”

Her words hit him, and they seemed to finalize something. He was angry but he kept his voice perfectly level. “You can tell a lot about dams and about the health of a forest by studying beavers, and I happen to find that important.”

“Sometimes I don’t know what’s happened to you.” She got up and placed Sophie’s bowl in the sink.

“Me?”

“Us, then. Us,” she said without turning. “I don’t know what’s happened to us.”

And then later there was the shirt. When he complained, Amy stood in the bedroom doorway, and he thought he saw a flash of victory in her. He pulled off the shirt, intent on finding another.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “They’re all like that.”

“Who’s the sadist?”

“Apparently that would be the dry cleaner,” she told him. “Life gets you in more mundane ways than serial killers do.”

It was only a few weeks ago that he ran into Eva at the library when he was browsing through the aisles, looking for a copy of
On the Road.
He was killing time, really—there was a woman with wavy hair, a friendly conversationalist, who worked the stacks. He’d been secretly hoping to bump into her, having already decided that she was a good candidate for the affair he knew he needed to have. But that day she wasn’t working, and, while Peter stood there and contemplated what to do next, self-pity crept up on him. He was so engrossed in his thoughts that at first he didn’t realize Eva was standing at the end of the aisle, watching him.

“Mr. Fulton?” she said, peering down a bit, uncertain.

He looked up, momentarily surprised. She was a tall, lean girl with a mass of hair difficult to miss. He caught himself staring, and she shifted uncomfortably and smoothed her skirt. She almost always wore skirts that made her look attractive. He could admit that—that she was very attractive. Embarrassed, he joked with her as he might with any student he saw, musing over her confusion and curiosity, as if she couldn’t quite fathom that any of her teachers had a life outside the classroom, or interests other than Watson High. “I’m not Mr. Fulton,” he said, changing his voice. “It’s Alien Fulton to you.” He held out a stiff arm and made a motion, like a robot.

It was a lame joke, a foolish attempt at a conversation. He could admit that, too, but she indulged him anyway.

“You seem different,” she said, smiling. She looked around. “I mean, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that much to see you here, should it? It’s a library after all. Where else would teachers hang out?”

Peter laughed. “Of course here. You know after school all your teachers turn into vapor. They only rematerialize in time for homeroom the next morning.
We live and die for Watson High!
It’s a motto we keep
pinned up on a banner in our secretive teachers’ lounge.” He raised his eyebrows a little, watched as she took a book and opened it. “Reading?” he said. “For goodness’ sake, why do that?”

“It just so happens I
like
to read. Now, if you’re going to be mean about it …” Eva pushed her hair back so that he could see the sharp line of her jawbone and her star-shaped earrings. Then she looked over to him and bit her bottom lip.

This pleased him, her defiance, her bit of flirting. “I’m only mean when I’m at the library and talking to a pretty student,” he said. It slipped, and he regretted it, but she didn’t seem to mind. She edged forward and read aloud. Peter felt the weight of possibility bloom in him. It all had a slightly treacherous quality to it, a moment alone in a quiet aisle with a young girl, reading. After all the nights Amy pushed his hand from her thigh, after all the times she didn’t want to talk and squirreled herself away in Sophie’s room instead, rocking the baby back and forth, he found the thought of screwing in a library both titillating and frightening. It flashed before him: sex against books, the smell of dust all around. Afterward, a heartfelt discussion on the beat poets.

“My sister is downstairs,” she said, interrupting his thoughts. “It’s a madhouse down there, twenty kids at story hour.”

“Ah.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I was getting bored.”

“Don’t feel bad,” he told her, smiling. “I’m almost always bored.”

The next day, Peter found a handwritten poem, left on his desk. It was awkward free verse and contained two typos. During study hall, she came up to him. “I had to ask,” she said, her face expectant, her voice so intimate it sent him reeling. They already shared a secret then, didn’t they? Her poem, his confession that he believed she was attractive.

“Ask me what?” he whispered back. He leaned forward over his desk, pushing the papers forward as he did.

“Was it awful?”

“The poem? No, it was fine,” he said.

“I’m not very good,” she said, suddenly bashful. “I know that.”

“I write sometimes, too.”

“Poetry?” she asked. “Can I read them?”

“You don’t want to read my poems.”

“I do.”

The next day, when they met after class, he said that he’d forgotten his work. He felt boyish as he said it, realizing that he was frightened of what she might think, that she would see he wasn’t as good as she believed him to be, or that his poems were doomed to a drawer where they’d gather dust and where someday his daughter might stumble upon them and realize that her father once had aspirations beyond what she knew or believed.

He began to meet Eva that last week of school, and then beyond that. He told himself he had time, that he was helping to nurture a young student who seemed to need from him something he could offer—conversation, a bit of fun. It seemed to him they shared a common desire for life to be different, more than a day-in and day-out routine. They both wanted something magical, he told himself, even if that magic were fleeting. It might eventually come to an end, but he didn’t want it to. The feeling it fostered in him was too grand, too wondrous.