She asks me how I’ve been. Job, adequate; brother, terrible; I feel closer to my mother lately, and that’s been nice, but the whole family is devastated about my brother’s sick baby. We talk about my love life. She always tries to figure out what I want from a man, from a relationship. She asks me point-blank: “What do you want? Until you know what you want you’re not going to find it.” She’s giving me tough love. I think: You don’t know anything about tough, lady. Then I tell myself: You don’t know anything about love.
I don’t answer her directly. Instead I go through all the men in my life for her. There is a man I knew years ago, an artist, struggling, whimsical, pleasant, broke. I do not take him seriously as a potential love interest, but sometimes we meet for drinks. There is a former neighbor I text with and sometimes he comes over and we drink wine on my roof. He won’t date me because I’m white and he’s black and he refuses to date white girls but I think maybe we’re dating anyway. There is a newly single man, a divorced dad ten blocks away. I met him at a barbecue and we’ve had sex a few times, and he pounds into me like he’s going for a gold medal in fucking. Whenever I leave him I am shaken, off-kilter, yet I always return when he calls.
“If you add them all up they equal a boyfriend,” I say. “No, they don’t,” she says. “Half a boyfriend, then,” I say. She says nothing. There is a notebook on her lap. She writes nothing in it. Finally I start to cry. “I don’t understand why you won’t just leave me alone,” I say. I wish I were on that couch, I think. That couch looks great.
The therapist asks me if I want to make another appointment with her and I tell her I’ll call her when I know my schedule better and I am lying to her and we both know it. Before I leave her office I go to the bathroom so that I can drop Visine in my eyes. I would die if Indigo knew I was sad when I went to visit the baby. We should all be happy about the baby when we see it. The baby is unspoiled and perfect and doesn’t need to know anything about a lack of direction in life or family crises or inappropriate sexual partner choices.
Indigo lives in Tribeca, in a loft on the top floor of a small, old, beautiful building, full of tiny, romantic architectural details and two enormous pillars in the living room. She is draped on her couch when I enter, swathed in white, flowing fabrics. It’s unclear if what she’s wearing is a dress or separate shirt and pants or what. Where does one garment end and the other begin? An old-fashioned metal fan, erect on a stand, blows nearby. The fabric surrounding her flutters in its breeze. Swaddled in the middle of this is a baby boy. He is not as dark-skinned as his mother, but still tan, and his hair is a striking platinum blond.
“Look at him, he’s perfect,” I say, and he is. “A little drop of heaven.”
Indigo gives a dazed smile. “Forgive me, I just finished my morning meditation,” she says. “Also my mother just went back to Trinidad and I’m trying to recall who I once was before she took over my apartment. She hates New York, really hates it, so she refuses to leave the house once she gets here. She just wants to be with the baby. I beg her to take a walk but she says, ‘Where would I go?’ I don’t know, Mom, what would you possibly want to see in New York City? In this whole wide beautiful world, what would you want to see?”
Oh, Indigo, I shall miss you, I think. When you crack, you crack beautifully.
And then she remembers something, remembers how she wants to be in the universe. Yogi Indigo. “I’m always happy for the help, of course. She gifts me with her time and I am grateful. I am . . .” She looks at her child, deeply, nearly lustily. Don’t say it, I think. “Blessed,” she sighs.
But, I think, I shall survive without you.
Her baby’s name is Efraim. “That’s an old man’s name,” I say. “Like a dead old man from the Bible.”
“We were going to call him Tyler but then we looked into his eyes when he was born and he seemed one thousand years old already and I said Efraim. The wisdom of all the ages in one head.”
“Do you like it?” I ask. “Having a baby, being a parent?”
“I feel like my whole universe has folded itself in and then out again, renewing my soul and my mind.”
I laugh at Indigo, and she blinks and smiles. She doesn’t think any of this is funny. She is on Planet Indigo, and I am merely making a visit there.
“What does Todd think?” I ask.
Todd is an investment banker. Todd’s all right. He’s fine. He’s originally from Seattle and he was nearly a doctor instead of a banker and he started a microfinancing business to help children in Tunisia, a country he visited as a volunteer in college, back when he was a Christian. When he stopped being a Christian he lit his soul on fire in Tribeca for a decade using his Wall Street money as the kindling. Then he met Indigo, and now they are doing this thing, with the loft, and the marriage, and the baby.
“Todd’s in love with our Efraim. In love. Really, you’ve never seen a man more smitten with his own child. Before work every morning he gets up and takes him for a walk around the neighborhood. He shows him off everywhere he goes. It’s darling.”
The baby cries. Indigo reaches into the many folds of her fabric and somehow quite easily pulls out an enormous breast, with a giant, erect nipple. Her garments waft around her. She attaches her child to her nipple.
“What about you?” she says. “What about your life? Tell me what the rest of the world is doing. I’m dying to know.”
“I just went to my therapist,” I say.
“I didn’t know you were back in therapy,” she says.
“I’m not,” I say. “Well, I’m dabbling. I don’t know. I guess what’s old is new.”
The baby smacks loudly at her tit.
“It’s just good to have someone to talk to sometimes.”
“You don’t need to sell me on therapy. Todd and I have been going since our six-month anniversary. That was his present to me. He got us an appointment with the best couples counselor in town.”
The baby sucks and sucks.
“We talk about my relationships mostly,” I say. “This woman and I.”
“That’s good,” she says.
“I don’t really have a relationship, though,” I say. “I have just bits and pieces of things.”
“That’s a start,” she says. She strokes the baby’s head.
“I think I’m just going to be alone forever,” I say. I am starting to get upset.
“It’s fine if you want to be alone,” she says.
“I don’t know if I want to be alone, I just think I’m going to be,” I say. Well, most of the time I do. It’s complicated. I don’t see myself as having anything conventional. But still I date. I fuck. I seek.
“You don’t have to be with anyone. It doesn’t define your worth,” she says, in her two-million-dollar loft that her husband bought.
“I know that,” I say.
People architect new lives all the time. I know this because I never see them again once they find these new lives. They have children or they move to new cities or even just to new neighborhoods or you hate their spouse or their spouse hates you or they start working the night shift or they start training for a marathon or they stop going to bars or they start going to therapy or they realize they don’t like you anymore or they die. It happens constantly. It’s just me. I haven’t built anything new. I’m the one getting left behind.