Saving St. Germ (26 page)

“Hi, L.R. It’s Esme.” I take a deep breath. “You know ... I think it works. There was an error in our ab initio calculations—but when that’s corrected, you get the ... It
happens
.”

There was her barklike laugh.

“You know what I did last night? I went over and over the calculations. What have you
got
?”

I opened my legal pad. We went to work. We stayed on the phone for nearly thirty minutes, both talking at once after a while, yelling, we were so excited. Then the doorbell rang.

Ollie glanced at the door. I smiled reassuringly over the receiver at her.

“L.R.? I gotta go. Someone’s at the door. I’ll call you back.”

I peeked out through the curtains and saw an irritated-looking woman in a very ugly, shiny, navy-blue suit, standing on one foot and then the other. She was about twenty-five but she looked old and used, bad skin, greasy hair. I thought she might be a graduate student, but I didn’t recognize her.

I opened the door and she leaped forward, as if she meant me harm; I recoiled instinctively. Her eyes narrowed with a sudden fierce pleasure. I noticed that she was wearing a Happy Face pin on her lapel.
HAVE A NICE DAY!

“Esme Tallich?”

“Yes?”

She dropped a manila envelope in my hands, grimaced passionately, like her terrible button face, then was gone.

I leaned against the doorjamb, watching her click-click on her heels around the shining puddles to her VW parked at the curb.

“Thanks a
lot
!” I called after her, but she didn’t turn around.

I tore open the envelope and the papers slid out into my hands. I stared at the top sheet. Jay was divorcing me, on grounds of incompatibility. I turned over a page. He was asking the court for full custody of his daughter, Olivia Tallich.

I sat down hard on the porch steps. I watched and heard the ugly young woman shift out of neutral into first and roar off in her VW. A number of other cars passed. Then I got up and went back inside. Ollie was drawing the string. She’d carefully separated all the symmetric shapes from the asymmetric; they were divided by a long half-erased wobbly line. Now she was making a drawing of the unraveled string. As she worked, she sucked on the orange half; it was attached like a suction cup to her mouth. Juice dribbled down her chin.

She looked up at me and laughed. The orange half dropped. I hugged her, smelling her sweet orange smell, and I lifted my finger, drew an imaginary line from the top of her head down the center of her body, bisecting her. Then she did the same to me. I wiggled my ears again, but she looked at me solemnly.

“Mom, I am seeing ears. They are jumping with line bees.”

The sun rose higher in the sky and we still sat there on the braided rug, out of time, talking about our shapes. Ollie and Esme, Esme and Ollie; for just this moment no one could touch us: safe on the other side of the mirror.

I
OPENED THE
front door on Mrs. Kraft (my talkative elderly neighbor and occasional baby-sitter). I held a finger to my lips. Ollie was taking a late-morning nap and she was a light sleeper.

“Why isn’t the little stinker in school?” Mrs. K. asked in a loud stage whisper, her little birdlike head bobbing on her neck, her bright inquisitive eyes taking in the room. She winked at me. I used to wink back at her every single time until I finally realized she had a facial tic.

“She’s been exhausted lately.” I smiled, and covered my lips with my finger again. “Let her sleep, OK? I’ll probably be home before she wakes up.”

After Mrs. K. had settled herself, winking, in front of her soap operas with a diet Pepsi, I went into my study, shut the door, and played back the accumulated voices of concern and judgment. The tape ran around its track, the Greek chorus intoned.

Students’ voices: superficially solicitous, then annoyed. “Professor, my grade.” “Professor, my paper.” Two colleagues from the biochemistry department, inquiring politely as to my whereabouts and presumably, my state of mind. Faber’s secretary (several times, her tone getting sharper and sharper); then Faber himself (“Since you are not returning my calls, I have no choice but to leave this message on your recording machine. I’ve been in consultation with the dean and it is my sad task to inform you that as of Wednesday your contract with this university is suspended until further notice. I regret very much having had to take this step,” blah, blah); Susan Dubs, a friend and fellow mother at Sixth Street School; Ollie’s kindergarten teacher, sounding confused—Was
Olive
well? she asked after a long hesitation;
beep,
Jay—who paused dramatically, then called out “Esme? Esme?” as if I was deliberately refusing to acknowledge him, then left a terse sentence about the divorce papers. Rocky next, leaving a cool memorandum: She’d clear her stuff out of the lab, she’d leave the key on the hook by the door, she’d see me around sometime. Three hangups; a message from Jay’s dentist: His teeth were due to be cleaned. Before the tape ran out, cutting off his message, I heard a smoky, weighted voice, East Coast accent.

“Esme. Jesse. I was just thinking—” followed by a series of loud beeps. The tape was full.

Well, I thought, not bad. In one elliptical turn I’d lost my job, my husband, and the best lab assistant I’d ever had,
and
had my steamy fantasy life offhandedly amputated.

I sat down at my messy desk and put my head in my hands. Then I jumped up, talking to myself, grabbed my bag, and hit the door.

I stood on the porch, staring blindly in front of me. Then: Take them all away, God, I prayed. Except her.

I turned into the Paramount lot and stopped at the guard booth, where, as I’d expected, Sherman was on duty. We stared each other down, combat veterans; then he rolled his eyes, and with a quick brutal gesture waved me through.

I parked and found my way to Jay’s building. A red bulb burned over the entrance to the soundstage, indicating that a taping was in progress. There was a director’s trailer next to the soundstage and I walked up the steps and opened the door.

No one looked up as I came in. The director, a nervous man in glasses and a plaid shirt, huddled with Jay and the A.D., while crew members milled around them.

I glanced at the wall of monitors. On the screens was a montage of shots, all focusing on a cluster of very small people—dwarfs or midgets. I stared at the nearest monitor. Several of the dwarfs looked up at the dangling boom as one of their group pointed at it. They were dressed in strange costumes, vaguely Elizabethan—doublets and jerkins and hose. The costumes exaggerated their physical oddness, which was a matter not just of diminutive size but of queer altered symmetry: great hands, barrel torsos, overdeveloped biceps and legs—as if they’d all tried to grow laterally. One of their number stood to the side; he had a long pale face and a high Mayan forehead. He looked tragic and refined, like one of Picasso’s
saltimbanques.
One held a bouquet of shaggy mums, another an enormous lollipop. There was a wave of laughter from the studio audience, then another, sounding unintentionally cruel.

I wondered what show they were taping and, as if she’d read my thoughts, one of the production assistants moved in front of the monitors, sipping coffee and murmuring, “I mean,
I
could never guess which one is directly descended from an original Munchkin, could you, Tina? Are they gonna stump those deadheads on the panel, or what?”

A crew member came up behind her and put his arms around her.

“Who’d you rather fuck? Me or a Munchkin?”

She pulled away, making a face.

“In case you haven’t heard, Kellogg,
size
has nothing to do with it.”

I walked up to Jay and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned slowly, still talking to the director, and then he froze.

“Hey, Jay. I got your papers. I’d like to talk to you.”

He shook his head. “Not
now,
Esme.”

“This will only take a minute.”

The director looked at me over his glasses, then turned to Jay.

“Jay, take a little break, it’s fine. We’re just going to go over that last shot—stay close where we can find you.”

He turned away and Jay glared at me. Without a word, he spun on his heel, stalked over to the trailer doorway. I followed.

We stood on the steps and faced each other. Then he looked away. The sound of studio laughter filled the room behind us.

“Yes?”

“I just wanted to ask you face to face: Why are you asking for full custody of Ollie?”

Audience laughter.

“I
told
you—I want to p-put her in a special school, I want her to have a ch-chance to be a normal child.”

“So you’re going to put her in an institution.”

Laughter.

“
Not
an institution, a
s-school,
can you grasp the difference? She’s not going to be put in a straitjacket, she’s going to be working with p-professionals who will help her. And I s-suggest, Esme”—he looked into my eyes for the first time since I’d arrived—“that you get some p-professional help too. I mean it.”

“Jay, I don’t want a penny of alimony, I’ll give you the house, Jay,
anything
—OK? Just stop trying to hurt me like this.”

He laughed. There was another swell of audience mirth, backing him up.

“Wake
up,
Esme! I c-called UGC to talk to you and I was told by the department secretary that you’ve been s-suspended from your job. Apparently you’ve been fucking up there too. How are
you
going to support Ollie? And k-keep the house? Have you thought about th-that?”

I tried to catch his eye.

“Jay. The TOE came together. As a model, it works. Lorraine Atwater and I—”

“God damn your T-TOE!” he yelled, and a production assistant coming up the steps glanced, shocked, at my sandals.

“Listen to me! If this thing is what we think, I’ll be able to teach anywhere I choose. Jay, it’s something I
had
to do. And Ollie ...” He was looking out at the lot and I moved around and down a step so that I was looking up into his face.

“Jay, Ollie is fine. She sees the world in a very sophisticated spatial fashion. I went over mirror-symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes with her and she picked them right out. Then she organized them all—”

“Jesus, Esme! When are you going to st-stop this shit! Trying to make your own kid your ... experiment. S-so what if she understands the theory of relativity? She can’t t-talk to her parents, she can’t t-talk to other kids. She’s in a world of her own, Esme.”

More laughter.

“She talks to me, Jay. All the time.”

The director’s assistant stood in the doorway.

“Jay. Time.”

He started to turn and I grabbed his arm.

“Jay. Don’t put her through this.”

“D-don’t contact me again. Except through the lawyer. His n-name’s on the papers.”

He pushed inside, into the swelling laughter, then turned around. We looked at each other for a long minute. Then he closed his eyes, very slowly opened them, whirled around and was gone.

I stepped down and walked toward the parking lot. I nearly ran head-on into Paloma, who was hurrying toward the trailer carrying a number of grease-spotted white bags filled with what smelled unmistakably like Chinese food.

We stared at each other. Then she started to move around me. I stopped her.

“How are you doin’, Paloma? What’s new?”

“Hello ... Esme.”

“Got some egg rolls there, Paloma? You bringing those to my husband?”

“If you’ll
excuse
me, Esme—”

“You wanna take my kid, right? Bring her up?
My
kid—who you think is cuckoo, right?”

“Esme, listen to me, OK? I can’t help it your daughter is not
normal.
The sooner she gets into a ... you know,
special environment,
the better. Then she might have a chance to be ... like other normal, you know,
happy
kids.”

“That’s
true.
Maybe she could grow up to be like
you,
Paloma! You’ve met Ollie—what?
Once?
Right?”

“Esme, I
don’t
want to talk to you. Let me—”

“You stay away from Ollie. Do you hear me? Don’t you
touch
Ollie, don’t you even
think
about her!”

Paloma backed away from me and stumbled, dropping one of the bags. White-lidded foil cartons spilled onto the grass. She opened her mouth wide.

“Jay!”

It was amazing. He was there in an instant. I don’t ever remember him moving that fast the whole time I’d known him. He must have been watching from the door.

“P-Paloma?”

She took his arm. She began to cry.

“J-Jesus fucking C-Christ, Esme!”

He couldn’t look at me.

“Well,” I said. “Here’s my best wishes to you both.”

A plastic bag of fortune cookies lay next to my foot. I stomped on it and ground it in with my heel.

I smiled at them.

“Now,” I said, “you’ve got what you deserve—
no
future! Or about the same future
you
have as a stand-up, Jay.”

I kicked one of the foil containers toward them as I turned to go. They jumped back, staring at it.

“Too bad, Jay,” I said. “A depressing aspect of all this is you used to at least
try
to be funny.”

I waved to Sherman from my car on my way out, and he froze a second, then actually smiled and waved back to me.

When I got home there was a message on my machine from Lorraine Revent Atwater. She’d decided to go away for a while, the message said. She needed some more time to “refine her thinking.” She left no forwarding number, but she said she’d call me soon from the East Coast.

I played her message back twice, listening closely for some hint of emotional content—was she upset, tired, pissed off with me (like everyone else), or just preoccupied? But her tone was steady and uncompromising in its banality: Hello, Esme. It’s been swell. Goodbye, Esme.

I waited till Ollie was tucked in that night and then paced the floor of my study. At one point I tried L.R.’s number at home, but her recorded response was equally opaque. She was out of town. She’d be returning soon. Please leave a message after the beep.