“Did Molly tell you that, too?”
In the background I heard the mason jar of macaroni being opened, the lid rattling on the counter, the sound of pasta hitting the glass measuring cup, the whoosh as it spilled into the pot. I could feel in Robin’s silence her exhaustion, disorientation, and rage. I did my best to set Kaya straight on the occult. I could feel the kitchen’s silent appraisal of me, of my acts of liberation, my remorse and rationalization, and of my failed experiments with the plutocracy.
I could almost see the newspapers piled on a dining room chair, the cat lying on Robin’s dirty gym stuff, old mail on the kitchen table, barf rags, nursing bras, filthy socks, running sneakers, Tupperware from old lunches, swim goggles, shredded sweetener packets, tubes of sunblock. I could hear Beanie in the bouncer we clipped to the kitchen doorway, spronging up and down on a steel spring as he stared ahead like a little zombie as, somewhere in the distance, a recording sang to him from Winnie-the-Pooh.
I wondered about her meeting with Katavolos, who had followed her to the Nature Channel and now ran the network. She took the phone from Kaya. When she finally spoke, she sounded less broken than I’d feared, surely benefitting from my absence, the simplified power dynamic, the relief of assaults upon her soul from my critical glances. “Please tell your daughter not to go in Mommy’s bed tonight.”
I heard a small protest in the distance, “But my baby was crying,” though she meant Polly, her doll. Robin didn’t say anything. Kaya asked, “When will Polly grow up?”
“She won’t grow up. She’s made of plastic.”
“Well, she might be made of person or she might be made of plastic or she might be made of bones.”
“Well,” Robin said, “she’ll be fine either way.” Then she let out a sigh and I waited. If she’d gone on to say that the feds had been looking for me in connection with a class B felony for trafficking in stolen property, or for oral and sexual mishandling of a Mrs. A. D. Rapazzo of Crumberry, Connecticut, or that a gang of hired killers had slit the tires of her car, dismembered the cat, and burned down our porch, or that she’d somehow gotten wind of my shenanigans, delivered in an envelope by a private investigator, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I would’ve been ready. The events of these past days had stomped all the juices out of my adrenals, but I could still feel the terror, the consequences of my choices, the potential horror of real loss, the jewel of my life, lost.
Then she would explain the malfunctioning psyche of an emotional cripple like me, defended against vulnerability, predisposed to fantasy, pain avoidance, and cynicism. Forty years earlier, as I’d been lying there in my diaper, some bored lady had flirted with me, told me I was irresistible, and I had the valence for it, and believed I was a Casanova. The more recent bored housewife who’d picked me out of the crowd at art camp had merely prolonged the delusion, blocking genuine intimacy and the intolerable awareness of death. Then Robin would inform me that the locks had been changed, that her dad’s attorney had filed a restraining order and I’d never see my children again, that as individuals we were nothing but together we’d made these miraculous beings, that I’d be broke for the rest of my days supporting them, as they drifted farther away and those bonds dissolved and turned toxic and became the unworkable torment of my life.
“We need floss.”
“Okay.”
“And toilet paper.”
“Yokey-dokey.” I said I’d get some on the way home.
She carried the phone to the table and put it on speaker while they ate.
“The meeting went fine.”
Sounds of chewing. Beanie gabbled away in the language of his people.
“There’s no job, but they offered me an episode of a show on what used to be the Crime Channel, which is now called something else and is part of the War Channel, which is now called the American Century Channel. We do crime reenactments, things like historical reenactments of train robberies from the Wild West. Next week I have to fly out to New Mexico to blow up a train.”
“Who offered you an episode?”
“What?”
“Who did you meet with?”
She didn’t sound evasive or annoyed—just detached, free of obligation to me, to my structural assaults.
“Was there a couch in his office?” She didn’t answer. “Did you let him feel your boobs?” She laughed. “Did he put his hands in your pants?”
She laughed again and said she hadn’t been wearing pants. “But he wanted to know why I’d leave Connie’s production company for this. I think he thinks I’m following him around.” It was a big, throaty, confident laugh, a sound of relief that reminded me that for the last couple years I’d been living with a depressed person, that it had infected us both, that together we’d grown into people who, upon waking, did not look out the window to examine the day’s weather. Then she told me about some old men who ran the company, who she’d bumped into in the halls, who’d grabbed and hugged her and asked where she’d been all these years. The channel those guys started in the mid-eighties had been a place for beautiful nature documentaries, flora and fauna, with a stress on cinematography, shows about world history and anthropology. For years now, the channel had been in a race to the bottom.
Then she gloated about her lunch meeting with Karen Crickstein, and all the old friends she’d heard about, former staff EPs and VPs who’d screwed up, aged out, or got fired, or who’d put out their own shingle and were hanging on, hoping for the big comeback.
I listened to them eat. Everything would go back to the way it was, only worse, because I’d given up. No more tricks, no gimmicks, no narcotics or lubricants, no funky aftertaste. No fake hysteria or narcissism, no more armoring self-hatred. Just dinner, stories, singing, bedtime, followed by calling, begging, weeping, and throwing up, until at some point, it was quiet. Just a feely guy, full of zinger insights and stunning sensitivity, preparing with humility for true interpenetration by and with his life person. How do you do it? How do you span the nothingness? Through love, through music, through art, through the sharing of food, fucking, and experiences. Inside my chest I imagined a lump of unpolished quartz, pink and cold, with veins of lighter pink in a cloud of white. The cloud, the aftermath of an explosion, had fine debris floating inside it, still to the visible eye but with some radiant nuclear dust, moving out, exploding.
“Oh, by the way, the washing machine broke. Stuff’s all wet at the end.”
“You have to run the spin cycle a second time.”
“I did.”
“And did it work?”