The Parallel Apartments (10 page)

The professor was now running toward Justine.

“Please, mercy, I had to give you back, now stop that pother!”

A security guard stuck his head into the lecture room.

“Vanish, Pinkerton!” shouted the professor. The security guard retracted his head.

Justine's wail dropped two octaves, causing objects in the lecture hall to vibrate. The professor reached her.

“Please,” he said dropping his satchel and collapsing into genuflection. “Gahhhd. I had no choiii-oi-oi-oi-oi-oiiice uhhuhhu huh hoo hoo, hoooooo…”

Justine paused in her crying, deferring to Professor Quentinforce Johnsonson's own powerful bawl.

“Quit that,” said Justine, wiping her face with the short sleeves of her T-shirt.

“Hoo. Hooo.”

“Look, I quit crying, now you quit.”

Professor Johnsonson quieted down. He walked on his knees over to a red-velvet-covered seat and wiped his face on it.

“Good,” said Justine, strengthening, recovering from her second substantive wailing jag in a week. “Now. Did you adopt me? From…?”

“Ooo. Yes. Livia. My Livia. Livia Durant.”

“Livia was my real mother?”

“Mhm.”

“Then you gave me back to her? After a year? Why?”

“My wife. Betsey. She was—is—was—insane.”

This was new; a man, on the floor, cried-out, spilling. Justine liked this. She put her hands on her hips.

“I know that.”

The professor took a breath and sat on the steps. He removed his glasses.

“Livia was my student once, back when I taught summer school. It was awful, teaching reflexively dim, ungraduable seniors, but Livia—she was Livia Durant then—I felt for her. She was special, an electric intelligence. I saw it at once.

“She passed my classes effortlessly, and Austin High School awarded her a diploma. This was 1969. I then urged her to continue her summer studies, assuring her that if she did I would save a place for her in one of my classes, which I as a rule opened only to juniors and seniors—I had never before known a qualified sophomore, let alone a freshman.

“I began to go to her house, where she lived with her rock-and-roll-singing boyfriend, a Belton or Burpon or some such bisyllabic vocable—your real father, I presume?—to advise her on the Quellenforschung of allusions to masturbation in
Ulysses.
Livia seemed terribly proud of her boyfriend. They were in puppy-lovey bliss.

“Our studies went well, but there was something more between us. We discussed philosophy, linguistics, logic; Suarez, Chomsky, Gödel. We discussed family, her fatherless upbringing, my insane, barren wife. Even though we never discussed it, I know she sensed it, too, the something-more. Then, in late summer, she married that crooning poetaster. A few days later, he died while in basic training to perform some patriotic function in one of our proud nation's many obscure Oriental to-dos. The deceased, however, had of course found a moment before his tour of duty to deploy within his new bride that portion of genetic material necessary for the manufacture of yourself. After the funeral, Livia, then surnamed Moppett and freshly primigravida, abandoned her little house on Threepenny Street, and returned to bondage under her mother. I did not see her, Livia, that is, until the following summer—a summer through which I persisted in the daydream that the death of her husband would cause her to run to me—when she appeared at our house with you, a month old, in her arms.

“Betsey, who was just beginning to slough reason but had not yet bid fare-thee-well to the daylights, answered the door. Livia, her mother, you. You were gaunt and jaundiced and might have been a mere corpse if not for the ineluctable anima in those absurd green eyes, which, I see, adulthood has not occulted. Livia's mother, er—”

“Charlotte.”

“—yes, Charlotte, who bore an almost sibling resemblance to her daughter, seemed ghostily absent, as though in shock from bastinado and no longer responsive. Livia was not crying—in fact was radiantly happy—but she appeared as though she had been crying for weeks; she was puffy and florid, with tiny flakes drying in the corners of her eyes. I wanted to cast Betsey aside, strike you from her arms, and take Livia away with me, to Turin or Singapore. But instead, Betsey invited everyone inside, arranged a theater in the round on the floor of the living room, placed you in the center, and said,
Livia, tell us about your baby.

“Livia said to Betsey: ‘I can't afford to keep her. She reminds me not of my husband, Burt, but of his death. And I can't afford a baby. Professor Johnsonson, when he was tutoring me in the
Baiae
, told me of your trouble getting pregnant and desire for a baby, so I thought you would like her. She's nice.'

“‘Then let it be done,' Betsey said.

“Livia, for one, left our house without a child, universally relieved. Charlotte, for two, seemed—and there is no better word or I would use it here for I so loathe the watery ubiquity of its only contender—brokenhearted. For three, I was happy to have at least some reminder of Livia, videlicet, you, since I could not have the woman herself. Betsey, for four, was soon the happiest I'd ever seen her, a happiness so psychologically plump there seemed no room for other dispositions, especially—as became clearer and clearer—sanity. She was devoted to you, dear—is it still Justine?”

“Yes.”

“Possessively devoted. And five: you were simply… present. There on the floor of the living room, wrapped in some form of absorbent textile. Inert you were, odorless, scarcely an interruption of space-time. Except those eyes.

“Our agreement—Livia's and mine—was one of extrajudicial secrecy: there would be no papers. Neither family would contact any member of the other. And you, when you grew cognizant, would not be notified of your change of status.

“At first I argued for a name change—‘Justine' I thought tired and was at any rate already signally monopolized by the shuffling secretariat. I championed ‘Porcia'—you had a little mark on your thigh. I wonder, do you still?”

Justine, already disturbed by the professor's remembering her as a baby, felt like she'd been mashed by a perv in a movie theater at his mentioning the little eye-shaped strawberry mark on her inner thigh, which at sixteen she had sliced transversely after watching a week's worth of Luis Buñuel films on a rented VCR.

“That's… gone,” she said.

“Oh. Well, ‘Justine' won out.”

“I know that.”

“Of course you do. So. At the time I was laboring over
The Circumcision of Leopold Bloom,
my second important work, in which I, er, dissect the state of the great man's, er, Irish heritage. It was the work most hated by my critics, and thus the one of which I'm most proud. This period was one that could stand no noisome intrusion. But you, as I said, were as quiet as a noble gas, but also kept Betsey busy. It was, in spite of the burden of the manuscript, and Betsey's eccentricities, a sweet, rewarding era.”

Now the professor turned around. He put his glasses back on.

“Then,” he said, looking at Justine as if he were trying to find something of Livia in her, “a few days later, somehow, your insubstantial corpus became the channel for what seemed the sum anguish of a gulag. Why, I wonder, did you begin to cry so… sensationally? Do you know, young lady?
Do you
?”

“No,” said Justine, a little frightened of the tiny fellow.

“Cotton earplugs first, then, when those failed, waxed cotton, then, like Goscinny and Uderzo's Romans, parsley sprigs, then small clots of dental wax, then dedicated cylinders of expanding memory foam, but no earthly matter that would fit in my ear would also damp the power of your blarting wail. I moved to a hotel until funds ran out, then to the couch of a tolerant friend, then, when the friend's tolerance evaporated, leaving a precipitate of black ire, to the backseat of the Dart, which I would drive two blocks to a parking lot on Neches where on dry, cool nights your noisy woe could still find me; then, defeated, back home to you and Betsey. In that short period, your crying had gained a bel, and was even more urgent. Why during this period Betsey was not at all perturbed by your moist theater, I have never understood. But she seemed to love you all the more.

“A student of a sympathetic colleague in the architecture department contrived a helmet of sorts, an inverted fishbowl with two holes in the top which, after goggling and snorkeling me, he placed over my head, sealed around my neck with a flexible oiled gasket, and then filled with water. It almost completely blocked out sound. It was uncomfortable at first, but once I'd gotten the goggles correctly aligned and had greased my exposed skin with petroleum jelly, I could wear it for hours upon hours, typing, reading, meditating in submarine tranquility. I was even able to enjoy you, dear, for a few moments at a time. Your tiny mouth stretched apart in almost mute appall, white seedling teeth, perceptibly larger every day, and your eyes, even through the sea tint of my glass—as I called my fishbowl—a mineral yet vital green growing more and more…
more
as the weeks passed.

“Soon I was able to wear my glass… er, 24-7, as they say, removing it only to shave and change the water, which over time would flocculate with atomized Vaseline and moorless gleet; or to replace my snorkel, through which I had taught myself to eat soups and cognate liquid sustenance, and in which a horrid plaque would accrete; or to scratch the occasional itch, a priority emergency that twice required me to break my glass with a chasing hammer. Apart from these pit stops, life resumed its normal, productive
hubbub. I was able to make short assays into the world, for newspapers and the like; I could dreamlessly sleep for half a day; I could play squash and euchre at the Burnet Club; I could teach by penning my lectures and delivering them through my oracle, Denise Rodrigg, a graduate student and violist with a tremendous speaking voice and a presence like a small, voluptuous sun. I could even make love to Betsey, loop-the-loop Betsey, with you in a tiny wicker bassinet in the corner of our bedroom, constantly awail with some private dread.”

Justine tried to imagine being Betsey, gazing at the professor and his wet pompadour waving like a sea-vent creature through three inches of water and glass, thrusting and gyrating, an epically colicky infant a yard or two away, screaming. Listening.

“But Betsey repelled most of my stabs at ardor. Her love—and there was much of it to be sure—she shared with, and spared for, you alone. You and she were
never
plural, never separated. You rode on her hip, suckled at her teat (which, miraculously, responded by producing milk), regurgitated on her shoulder, dozed in her lap, cruised at her knees, clutched at her hair and collarbone and spectacles, and, while arching and purpling across her naked knees you screamed at her face. She drank in your screams. She lived off of you.

“When autumn was nearly over, Betsey had taken to indoor nudism—both of you now in the altogether—carrying you around the house, never allowing you to yourself, embracing you against her breast as though catheterizing your screams directly into her heart. When she went out, which was seldom, she covered you both in a blanket with two holes cut in the center for your heads. Come winter, she stopped leaving the house altogether, and I was forced to do the shopping, collect medications, and walk to campus to accomplish those occasional tasks even the abundantly able Denise was not qualified to do. By issue of pure necessity I found myself less and less domiciled in my water-world, and thus more and more unshielded from the sounds of your obscure ague, and the ballooning scope of Betsey's insanity, her immaculate postpartum depression.

“By springtime 1971, Betsey had begun to mimic you; she would ‘sing' along, harmonizing in sevenths. The cantata was perverse, and, in a way, beautiful—the way that some beauty can craze or revolt or destroy. And it was powerful enough that my glass became vincible and porous.”

“Your fishbowl leaked?”

“No, it still functioned perfectly. It was I who compromised the arrangement. Your and Betsey's choral venom found the base of my spinal column like roaches find orts, traveled up it, circumvented my inner ear, and went straight to the pain centers of my brain. I was forced, again, to move out. I asked Denise if I could stay with her. She said yes, as she was in love with me. But that need not concern us here. To resume: I filed for divorce. I also filed—and this may surprise you—for custody. As intolerable as you were, you were a small being, helpless, insensible, and, as I was soon to learn, in danger. I did also impose on a colleague, a teacher of psychiatry who owed me a favor, to find a nurse with experience in lunacy who could take care of Betsey. And, hopefully, you.”

“You have a lot of colleagues.”

“Fools, clods, dilettantes, each; naked, delicate egos, all. At any rate, in the early summer, the solstice, as Denise was in the backyard of her little bungalow, raising a cone of power with two of her hairy-ankled lesbian crones and could tolerate not the taint of male animus in their magical space, I returned to my house to pour boiling vinegar down the fire-ant hills, as it was something Betsey could never do herself.

“When I arrived at the house there was absolute silence. Usually the two of you could be heard some distance away. Indeed, the neighbors on either side, and one across the street, had all placed their houses on the market. With no little apprehension, I opened the front door. The odor that emerged was faintly ptomaine, like tinned milk spilled and forgotten. Then your wail arose, coming from the back bedroom. I was never so glad to hear it.