From his earliest days, Matthew awoke with the birds. Or the neighbors. Or the traffic. Or the whine of the elevator. Nothing, it seemed, could induce him to sleep beyond 5:00 a.m. Not blackout curtains, not a white-noise machine, not even the special sound-absorbing cork they used to line the walls of his nursery. The early rising lasted through infancy, through babyhood, through the toddler years. Graham would look at the clock every morning as soon as he heard Matthew’s cries and do a sort of internal calibration—4:45 or later meant a good day, a survivable one. By the time Matthew was three years old, Graham and Audra were so desperate for sleep that they would bring Matthew into their bed and try to snuggle him down between them, to lull him with their body heat and slow breathing. Occasionally this would work and Matthew would drift back to sleep and then inevitably assume the dreaded starfish position in the middle of the bed, a little hand flung into each of their faces, a little foot poking into each of their hips.
But more often Matthew was just awake for the day and would squirm and wiggle and toss around until Graham felt like he was trying to sleep next to a bag of something that clattered, like a bag of aluminum cans. On those days, Graham would force himself out of bed and entice Matthew to the kitchen for breakfast while he drank coffee with an extra shot of espresso in it. And then they would leave the apartment together in the early morning and Graham would push Matthew in the stroller to the playground on Ninety-sixth Street, usually stopping at Starbucks for another coffee. (The thought of Matthew’s babyhood made Graham’s mouth feel sour with the heavy saliva left over from so much coffee drinking, made his head feel light with remembered caffeine.) Sometimes they skipped the playground and pushed on to the pond by the boathouse, where they could rest and have animal crackers or Cheerios or vanilla wafers—that was another thing about Matthew’s early childhood: crumbs everywhere, always, as inescapable as sand in the desert—before Graham would begin the long walk home. They had the park to themselves at that time in the morning—almost too much to themselves; Graham worried about muggers sometimes—but one day as they sat by the pond, another father came along. He was older than Graham and his son was older, too, a boy in his mid-twenties with Down syndrome. They sat on a bench near Graham and Matthew, and Graham felt moved by a spirit of shared suffering to offer small talk.
“Nothing like an early morning, is there?” he said to the man.
The man grunted. “We’re here a lot,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Come on, Timmy.”
Graham was startled. It has been his experience that adults on outings with children liked conversation with other adults—loved it, craved it, would rustle up a conversation based on the most artificial and flimsy connection. Where’d you get that T-shirt? You don’t have a Band-Aid in your bag, do you? Do you have four quarters for a dollar?
The man and Timmy moved off, having stayed only a moment. Graham realized that Timmy was even older than he’d first assumed, maybe in his thirties. How many years, how many decades, had Timmy’s father been bringing him here, on made-up outings, in the early morning? No wonder he was cranky and antisocial. He must be exhausted. And for him, there was no end in sight. At least for Graham, the end was in sight. Matthew would mature, perhaps more slowly than other children, and certainly more slowly than he and Audra might desire, but he’d get there. He would not always awaken before first light, and even if he did, he would eventually be able to make his own breakfast and get dressed and entertain himself. In fact, at age eleven, Matthew could already do those things. (Pretty much. If he didn’t touch the stove.)
It would be unbelievably—cruelly—frustrating to start all over again. It would be like finding your own footprints while lost in the jungle and realizing you had been walking in circles.
—
Julio came over for dinner the next night, and while Graham was pouring him a beer, Audra came rustling out of the bedroom and said, “Julio! How are you? Did Graham tell you I might be pregnant?”
One of the very best things about Julio was that he was nearly impossible to embarrass. Graham supposed that came from being a doorman.
“Well, now, no, he didn’t,” Julio said, leaning forward to accept Audra’s hug. “Congratulations!”
“It’s not for certain,” Audra said. “Especially since I haven’t had my Anthony Hopkins dream, but—” She paused suddenly. “Where is Sarita? Why didn’t you bring her?”
Julio sighed. “We broke up.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Audra said, putting a hand on Julio’s arm. “Was it because she refused to go to your sister’s wedding?”
“What?” Julio looked very startled. “My sister’s wedding? No.”
“Then why did you break up?” Audra asked.
“She said we wanted different things and that she—” Julio stopped. “Can we just go back to what you said before? About my sister’s wedding? Because Sarita said she had conjunctivitis that weekend. She said her eyes were redder than stop signs! And now you’re saying she just plain didn’t want to go?”
“Well, she mentioned some detail about your mother not liking that Sarita took such long baths,” Audra said. “And Sarita said she didn’t like people standing outside the bathroom door and saying in loud voices, ‘I sure hope Julio makes a good salary to pay the hot water bill. Must be nice to lie in the tub while other folks set the table and chop the vegetables!’ Sarita said baths are her way of relaxing and she didn’t deserve to be criticized. Sarita said not every woman relaxes by drinking an entire pitcher of sangria at four o’clock in the afternoon the way your mother does.”
Julio was looking positively alarmed.
“But I could be wrong,” Audra added hastily. “Maybe I’m thinking of someone else.”
Hear those hoofbeats? Graham thought. Those are the horses running away after you forgot to lock the barn door.
Graham was making dinner: pork tenderloin with herbed wild rice. No need to cater to the crazy whims of picky eaters tonight. Julio was a pleasure to cook for. He not only ate whatever you put in front of him but said it was the most delicious meal he’d had in a long time. This might even be true, because the doormen in their building seemed to eat take-out Chinese food all the time. If he’d lived in pioneer times, Graham sometimes thought, Julio would be the bachelor homesteader who came over for dinner in exchange for helping with the spring lambs.
Since there were no lambs needing to be born, Julio repaid them with gossip about the people in the building. Mrs. Mullen in 10E had her brother-in-law visiting and she wanted Julio to find out how long the brother-in-law was staying. “She told me, ‘Just ask him all natural-like. You know, inquire as to how long we’ll have the pleasure of his company, and then tell me what he says.’?” Mr. Coltrane in 3D had sublet his apartment (something strictly prohibited by the building) and the subletter had left the windows open during a rainstorm and now there were mushrooms growing in the carpeting. Mrs. Begay in 9C had received a package labeled “Live Reptile.” Mrs. Salerno in 4A had gone on a monthlong bird-watching trip to the Pacific Northwest and her husband was having his girlfriend visit every night, telling the doormen it was his assistant bringing him important papers from the office.
“How do you know it’s even his girlfriend?” Audra asked. “Maybe it’s a hooker.”
“Oh, no—they’ve been going out for a while now,” Julio said. “Mr. Salerno also forgot a lot of important papers at work last fall while his wife was off looking at warblers in New Brunswick.”