The Stories Of Mary Gordon Part 26

I wasn't home when the call came saying that Billy had died. The woman left the message with my son. Extraordinary, really, to leave such a message with a boy, a ten-year-old. "Just tell your mother Bill McGovern died. I'm his landlady. We found her number in his room, it was the only one we found there. But there's nothing that she needs to do. We buried him already. Just to let her know." She said that Billy had become a hermit in his room. She told my son that they'd kept asking him to come downstairs, for holidays and things, but he'd always say no. "Just send me up a plate," he'd say.

My son reported all this flatly; he is the serious one of the three, the youngest; it was unfortunate the woman got him. He would worry. Worry that someone he never heard of died with his mother's phone number in his room. He is a modern child, the son of modern, divorced parents; he would imagine Billy was my lover. And so I wanted to tell him about Billy, to relieve him, for it would be awful for a boy like him to think of a dead person as his mother's lover. But I didn't know where to begin the story. Or how to tell it once I'd started. To make a story of a life, you had to shape it, and there was no shape to Billy's life, that was the problem. I thanked my son and sent him to his room to join his brothers.

I'd known Billy all my life. His mother was my mother's best friend. I loved Veronica McGovern. She brought into my childhood books, cla.s.sical records, prints of the old masters, and a hint that there was somewhere a world- which she had once inhabited and now only imagined- where people had intelligent conversations in low, untroubled voices, where no one ever worked too hard or got too tired. She flipped the switch of my imagination, lighting up those rooms that are a refuge from the anger and miscomprehension of the adult world. She saved me from the isolated fate of the bright, undervalued child. She spared me years of bitterness. But she ruined her son's life as certainly as if she'd starved him in infancy; he would probably have been much better off if she'd abandoned him at birth.

Veronica had always lied about her age; she was eleven years older than my mother, though we never knew it till her death. She'd married at eighteen and had Billy a year later; my mother had had me at thirty-one. So although Billy and I were technically in the same generation, he was twenty-two when I was born. I thought him handsome when I was growing up; some nights he didn't come home and Veronica wrung her hands and mentioned the name Roberta. It was such a serviceable name and yet the woman cast so lurid a glow. She lived in the Village; she was a dancer; when Billy was with her he didn't come home. I had no idea what Billy and Roberta did the nights that he was with her; I had no idea that it was what they did that caused Veronica's distress; I was young enough simply to see not sleeping in one's own bed as an emblem of danger.

Billy would come home after these nights at around lunchtime; my mother and I would be sitting at Veronica's kitchen table and at the sight of him we would fall silent. He s.h.i.+mmered with the glow of s.e.x, though at the time I wouldn't have known to call it that. There was always a beat of silence when we saw him in the doorway, like the silence between merry-go-round tunes. Then he would say, "h.e.l.lo, Mother." Veronica would light a Herbert Tareyton cigarette and tell him to bring a chair from his room. There were only three chairs in the kitchen, a setup left over from the days when Charlie McGovern, Veronica's husband, Billy's father, who died when I was nine, was still alive.

I'd grown up on tales of Charlie McGovern's binges and disappearances, and Billy had been pointed to as an example of what can happen when a single mother spoiled a child. My father disappeared when I was two; it was handy for my mother to have so ready an example. "Spoiled." It is a terrible word, suggesting meat gone iridescent, but in Billy's case, it has always seemed apt. My mother explained that Veronica had never said no to Billy. Life with Charlie devastated her and she wanted to keep Billy by her side. In return for his loyalty she indulged him and convinced him that the world was too gross to value him correctly; in time, he believed it an unfit place for him to walk in as a man.

I only knew Charlie McGovern as a drunk, but in the twenties he had been a millionaire. To a child in the early fifties, the twenties were like the fall of Rome, something much too distant to think of concretely or even to believe in. Had Veronica McGovern been a flapper? Impossible to connect that sweet, wounded, muted, and above all genteel creature with the Jazz Age, but when she spoke about the early days of her marriage, it was all bathtub gin and the Black Bottom and rides in rumble seats and staying up till dawn. She mentioned that Charlie always bought her perfumed cigarettes and stockings with her name embroidered just at the top. Hearing about those stockings caused a river of electric joy to run through every nerve in my six-, seven-, eight-year-old body; it was one of those pieces of information children instantly know to be crucial, some essential clue to the incomprehensible maze of adult life, although they cannot place quite the significance of the small jewel so casually presented. I decided that at least I knew that Veronica and Charlie had once been in love, the love, perhaps, of people in the movies. But what had come of it? No two people could less suggest what my idea was of the love between men and women: Charlie so clearly embodying ruin in his bathrobe with its sash of fraying rope, Veronica devoting her physical existence to concealing any hint of s.e.x.

She clearly thought about how she looked: her impression of well-bred decay could not have been achieved by accident. I remember my shock when I realized as a quite young child that Veronica wore no bra.s.siere. I fell asleep once in her lap and awoke with my arms around her torso. She must have sat perfectly still all the time I slept. Pretending to be still half asleep, I ran my fingers up and down her back as if it were a clavichord. I kept playing her back, not knowing what it was I missed. When I realized what it was it came to me to pity her, for it was pitiable that she had nothing to show for her womanhood, nothing like my mother's fine, high bolster of a bosom I had always been so happily able to trust. She wore 4711 Cologne- an androgynous scent in an age when the s.e.xes shared almost nothing. Her shoes were a generation out-of-date: round-toed and laced and made to match some prewar dream. She was personally fastidious, but when three of her bottom teeth fell out she couldn't bring herself to see a dentist, but filled in the gap with strips of wax.

And so, of course, it was shocking when Billy came home from a night with Roberta. I can see now that Veronica must have tried to incorporate her son's girlfriend into the fabric of her frail domestic life. She would ask about Roberta in a tentative, good-humored way, and Billy would reply in vague terms, but without bad spirits. I don't know if the women ever met, but Roberta must have tried in some ways to ingratiate herself, for I remember a birthday card she sent Veronica. On the front of the card, a smiling sausage said, "I wish you the happiest birthday ever." On the inside of the card, the same sausage, now fatter and smilier, said, "And that's no Baloney!"

It seemed to me then that the birthday card was a clue to what was between Billy and Roberta, for Billy was by profession a cartoonist. He drew bosomy showgirls in the laps of sailors, or forlorn s.e.x-starved schlemiels looking with longing at signs saying "Exotic Dancers." I don't know whether Billy made a living from cartooning before I was old enough to notice such things, but by the time I could understand, it was clear to me that he lived off his mother. She taught third grade in a public school in Harlem; she was a pa.s.sionate teacher and she loved her work. I realize now that she never talked about her students' being black; given her nature, it is possible she didn't notice. When she came home from school, Billy was often still in bed. This did distress her. When she mentioned the fact to my mother, it was the only time I ever heard anything in her voice to suggest that something in her life had gone awry.

By the time I was twelve, Roberta was off the scene for good and Billy had hit the skids in earnest. He'd lost his looks; the das.h.i.+ng, slightly wicked ladies' man had turned into a fat mick with two days' growth of beard most of the days he cared to come out of his room. I don't know how often he left his room when he and his mother were alone in the apartment, but when my mother and I arrived, he was never visible, nor could he be counted upon to appear. When he did join us, he was affable and sometimes witty, but his interest in us was limited, and he clearly longed to be back in his room.

The year I turned fifteen, I spent a week with Veronica and Billy while my mother was in the hospital for an appendectomy. I realized gradually that I'd become interesting to Billy; it was my first hint that I might in any way engage a grown-up male. And although I could see that Billy was no prize in the particularities of his condition, his members.h.i.+p in the estate of adult malehood had its potency. I flirted with him- it was dreadful of me, of course, but then who ever thought of teenage girls as anything but savage. He took me bowling and bought me a beer. I didn't like it after the first few daring sips and asked for a c.o.ke. He laughed and said I was a cheap date. I was alarmed and not a little bit insulted. I knew it was s.e.x I was playing with, and not in its nicest aspects. I didn't know that calling someone a "cheap date" was a joke or a compliment; I was mistaken in the meaning of the words, but the unease I felt was right.

Billy and I walked out of the bowling alley, feeling the smoky blue air we'd just left behind to be the norm. Even the tainted air of the Bronx seemed too pure for Billy and me; I felt that we were seething with corruption. As we walked down the street, we ran into some of Billy's friends. They were as corpulent as he, and as ill-shaven; only it seemed they had been born to the bodies they were now inhabiting; it was clear to me that Billy had stepped down into his.

"Hey, Len, I want you to meet my girlfriend," Billy said, putting his arm around my shoulder.

Some genius made me go along with Billy; I was outraged at his suggestion, but I wanted to protect him from his friends. Clearly, if there were sides, I belonged on Billy's.

His friend Len, who wore a short-sleeved checked s.h.i.+rt and had a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm, snorted, "Guess you're robbing the cradle, for a change."

"I'm only kidding, Len," he said. "This is my mother's best friend's kid. I used to change her diapers."

These words angered me as his suggestion of our coupling hadn't. Both were false, but one falsehood elevated me to an honorific, if shameful position; the other simply reduced me to a child. And since I was much closer to being a child than a s.e.xual adventuress, I resented Billy's revision. I wanted to tell them that it wasn't true that Billy'd changed my diapers, that he'd never done a helpful thing in his life. But Billy hadn't moved his hand off my shoulder, and I felt the urgency of his need for my loyalty thrum through his fingers. And so I looked sullen, but didn't move away.

"I bet you'd like to change her diapers now," Len snorted. His two friends snorted along with him, caricatures of simpleminded, fleshly hearted sidekicks.

"Knock it off, Len," Billy said, stepping between the men and me, suddenly my gallant protector.

"Okay, Billy," Len said. "I didn't mean nothing by it. Just run along home to your mommy and forget it."

Then they were gone, moving away from us in a collective s.h.i.+ft of bulk. For a moment, I was afraid Billy was going to cry.

"No one understands what it's like for me," he said, not looking at me. "Living with my mother. Living off her. I know I'm a mess but I can't help it. She made me a mess and the army finished the job. You know I'm on veteran's disability. You know that, don't you? I don't live off my mother. I pay my share of the rent. And don't you forget it," he said, shaking his finger at me.

"I won't," I said, in a frightened voice. I'd never lived with adult males; their rage was as foreign to me as s.p.a.ce talk, and as terrifying.

"Listen, I'm sorry. I'm not myself these days. You know what I used to be like. Do I seem myself to you?"

"No," I said. I had no idea what could possibly be the right answer to that question.

"Let's go get a soda," he said. "I think you understand me. And by the way, don't say anything to my mother about meeting up with Len. She doesn't understand that kind of thing. You know, she was never in the army," he said, as if he were clearing up a misapprehension.

We went into an ice-cream parlor and both ordered hot fudge sundaes. Billy told me about his disability; it was lupus; he'd contracted it in Biloxi; he'd never even been sent overseas because of it. It meant he could never go out in the sun, he said; too much sun could make him look like a monster in half an hour. He never quite explained what would happen and I hadn't the nerve to ask.

"I like talking to you," he said. "You know how to listen. Always remember this: there's nothing more attractive to a man than a woman who really knows how to listen to him."

This was precisely the sort of information I most wanted; it made me willing to listen to him, to hang on through the long, self-pitying narrations to the bright, occasional sentence that would let me into the secret world of men. After a week, my mother came home from the hospital. Veronica was so grateful to me for "getting Billy out of himself" that she bought me a volume of Christina Rossetti. I'd asked for E. E. c.u.mmings, but she said she'd wait till Christmas for that. Meanwhile, wouldn't I try Christina Rossetti, try to make a friend of her? I did as Veronica said, I read Christina Rossetti, but it was fifteen years before I could see her as anything but maudlin. Veronica kept her word, though, even after I told her I didn't like Christina Rossetti. She gave me c.u.mmings's collected poems as a Christmas gift. I explained to her that I liked c.u.mmings better because he wasn't a phony. I could have died when I saw the look on her face. Never had anybody looked so sad, so wounded, so unhopeful. And I had done it. I could never take it back. I had done what Billy must have done a thousand times, and it disturbed me to feel so much kins.h.i.+p with him.

Soon after my time at Billy and Veronica's, I got my first boyfriend. It wouldn't have occurred to me to be grateful to Billy; I couldn't have known that it was his attentions that had given me the confidence to present myself as a desirable female. And so with the perfect heartlessness of a young girl in love for the first time, I couldn't bring myself to speak to Billy. I wouldn't go with my mother to Veronica's house. If Billy phoned and asked for me, I commanded my mother to say I was in the shower, or sick or sleeping. "Tell him I'm with my boyfriend," I said meanly to my mother, wanting at once to punish Billy for his presumptions, and to flaunt my status before his damaged countenance. Teenagers are pack animals; instinctively they turn on the wounded member and fall upon him, then run off. Occasionally, I would answer the phone when Billy called and I'd be forced into a conversation. Realizing the perfunctoriness of my presence, Billy would try to get my attention by telling dirty jokes. How completely he misunderstood our fragile, temporary bond! It wasn't the brute facts of s.e.x I was interested in, had ever been interested in. What I'd valued in Billy's conversation was a clue to the rules of courts.h.i.+p. That courts.h.i.+p could potentially end in the kind of thing Billy told jokes about and could only outrage me. I was disgusted, and I lost what little faith I had in him as a source of information that could do me any good.

Veronica died when I was twenty; Billy, then, must have been forty-two years old. The cable between his house and ours was cruelly cut; he had no reason, really, to regularly get in touch with us. On holidays, his birthday, my mother made obligatory calls, but the news of his life was too dispiriting to encourage any but the smallest contact. For, as far as we could figure, he did nothing. He had no work, no friends. He said his mother had been right, his friends were no good. He said he felt better off just keeping to himself. We heard from neighbors of his that he'd grown obese, that he sometimes pa.s.sed out at the local bar and had to be carried home- no mean feat since he was reported to weigh two hundred seventy-five pounds. The neighbors said he'd been told he was diabetic, so he was eating and drinking himself to death.

The last time I spoke to him was the night before my wedding. He'd been invited, but he hadn't sent back the little card that said " will attend." We were sure that he wouldn't come; perhaps we wouldn't have invited him if we'd thought there was a chance of his coming. We only heard from him when he was drunk; he'd call and talk about his mother with a sentimental tenderness the sources of which had never been obvious while his mother had lived. His relations.h.i.+p to her had been marked by a grudging deference that could turn to rudeness like the crack of a whip. And she had curved herself into a shape that would obtrude into his life as little as possible until he needed her rea.s.surance that his failures were attributable not to his own deficiencies but to the sheer corruption of the brutish world.

Billy was the last person I wanted to speak to on the night before my wedding. I'd decided I hated my veil; I'd been hysterical for hours, and not in much mood to be polite. But I knew that this large and complicated wedding could only be paid for by my doing my bride's job of gracious-ness. Think of Veronica, my mother said, but what she meant was, think of all I've just done for you. And she had done everything, and done it well; it was surprising that she'd done it at all considering how much she disliked my fiance.

I could tell Billy was drunk the moment he started speaking.

"I'll bet you're a pretty little bride," he said.

"All brides are pretty, Billy," I said impatiently.

"And what's the lucky man like?"

"Handsome, smart, and madly in love with me."

"And what's he like in bed? Oh, I forgot, you're not supposed to know that. White for a virgin. White. But what color's the groom wearing?"

"Black, Billy. The men don't matter at a wedding."

"Just tell me one thing, honey. I just want you to tell me one thing. Did I ever have a chance?"

"A chance?"

"A chance with you. I mean, did you ever think about me?"

I felt filled up with disgust. To imagine that that gross, drunken creature thought of taking the place of my perfect, princely husband-to-be! I couldn't bear to talk to him another second.

"I've got to go, Billy. I've got a lot to do."

"Sure, honey. I'll call you up sometime."

"Sure, Billy, my mother has my new number."

But of course he never called, and I would never call him. He knew of my divorce; my mother made a round of what she felt were de rigueur informing calls; it took a year, but in the end she got through everyone in her address book.

I think of Billy now as I make dinner for the children. I think of him eating by himself on holidays, in furtiveness, in shame, off the landlady's plate. I wonder why he didn't kill himself straight out. What could life have been to him, what could his waking after noon each day have signaled but one more round of fresh defeats? I wonder, too, with the inevitable egotism of the living, if he thought of me after I was divorced, if he imagined a place for himself here, with my sons, in a house as fatherless as his had been. And I hate the thought of him thinking of me, of us, like that.

I would like to blame somebody. Billy or Veronica. Roberta or the landlady. I would like, even, to take the burden of his ruin on myself, to imagine that had I not stayed in their house when I was fifteen, his life might have been different. I would like to point to one specific moment, one incident embedded in his history and say: Here everything went wrong.

But I cannot find a moment solid, powerful enough to blame. It seems impossible that anything could have been other than it was. I call my sons for dinner. Irritable, I tell them they should make more friends. They are fourteen, twelve, and ten: they regard my suggestion with various tones of incomprehension. Too soon after supper, it seems to me, they disappear into their rooms.

I realize I must say something to them. I don't want to; anger takes me over: I blame their father for his absence. Were he here now I could say, "What should we do? What do I have to tell them?" There is no one to turn to. My mother is in her room now in the home run by the Visitation Sisters, in the plain, unyielding senile fog that has become her habitation, and will always be, until her death. There is no one but me to speak to the children. There is no one who knew Billy and knows them now but me.

The apartment seems too big although our problem in reality is that we are quite cramped. But the ceilings loom, the walls push out, refusing shelter, the no-wax linoleum glares up. I walk into their bedroom where they sit in the unreal half-light of TV, aquarium, beneath the ever-changing posters: now Police, Graig Nettles, Sting. I tell them I would like to talk to them, when they are ready. Astonis.h.i.+ngly, they turn off the TV. They have been waiting.

"I wanted to tell you about Billy," I tell them. And I do say something, tell the outlines of his life, abstract the epochs, as if I were giving a lecture on prehistory: the Pleistocene, the Paleolithic. I speak about the army days, and his cartooning, and the final, long demise.

"He sounds like a complete f.u.c.kup to me," says my oldest son. "A real loser."

"You're being a little hard," I say. "Things weren't easy for him." I neglect to fill in the details; it would not be tactful to speak to three fatherless boys about the devastations of a father's abandonment.

"So, things are hard for everyone. Big deal," my oldest son says. He is the unforgiving one. My strongest ally in refusing to forgive his father.

"Why do you think it happened to him?" asks my second son, the scientist.

"I don't know," I tell him. "That's what's hard to figure out."

But all this time I have known that the worried eyes of the youngest were fixed on us, needing rea.s.surance, frightened of the spectacle of Billy's life, seeing it, of the three of them, most vividly.

"It couldn't happen to people like us, though, could it?" he asks. He is speaking for the group.

They gather from the far corners of their diverse positions here, with me in the still center. Do they want to know the truth? Will the truth help them?

I am thinking of Veronica. I think that what she did was tell the truth to Billy, but too early, and too much. The world is cruel, she told him, it is frightening, and it will hurt you. She told him this with every caress, with every word of praise and spoon of medicine. And he believed her. Well, of course he would. She was telling the truth; she was his mother.

I will not tell these boys the truth. To protect them, I will dishonor Billy. I will make him out a monster and a sport. I will deny his commonality to the three who sit before me, waiting for an answer. Not the truth, but something that will let them live their lives.

"No," I tell them. "It doesn't happen to people like you. Billy wasn't like you. He was not like you at all."

Safe.

I.

The morning starts with a child's crying. By arrangement I ignore it, by arrangement, my husband, who does not see the morning as I do- the embezzler of all cherished wealth, thief of all most rare and precious- gets the child and brings her to me. Still asleep, I offer her my breast, and she, with that anchoritic obsession open only to saints and infants, eats, and does not think to be offended that her mother does not offer her the courtesy of even a perfunctory attention, but sleeps on. There is a photograph of the two of us in this position. My eyes are closed, the blankets are around my chin. My daughter, six months old, puts down the breast to laugh into the camera's eye. Already she knows it is a good joke: that she is vulnerable, utterly, and that the person who has pledged to keep her from all harm, can do, in fact, so little to protect her. Is a person, actually, who can swear that never in her life has she awakened of her own accord. Yet, miraculously, she feels safe with me, my daughter, and settles in between my breast and arm for morning kisses. This is the nicest way I know to wake up. I have never understood people who like to be awakened with s.e.x: what one wants, upon awakening, is something gradual, predictable, and s.e.x is just the opposite, with all its rushed surprises.

I carry my daughter into the bathroom. My husband, her father, stands at the mirror shaving, stripped to the waist. How beautiful he is. I place my cheek on his back and embrace him. The baby plays at our feet. In the mirror I can see my arms, my hands around his waist, but not my face. I like the anonymity. I take my nightgown off and go into the shower. Every time I take a shower now, I worry about the time when water will be rationed, when I will have to wash in a sink in cold water. My mother knew a nun who, after twenty-five years in the convent, was asked what gift she would like to celebrate her silver jubilee. She asked for a hot bath. What did that mean about the twenty-five years of her life before that? All her young womanhood gone by without hot baths. I would not have stuck it out.

I step out of the shower and begin to dry myself. I see the two of them looking at me: man and child, she in his arms. She stretches out her arms to me in that exaggerated pose of desperation that can make the most well-fed child suggest that she belongs on a poster, calculated to rend the heart, urging donations for the children of a war zone or a famine-stricken country. I take her in my arms. She nose-dives for my breast. My husband holds my face in both his hands. "Don't take your diaphragm out," he says. Just ten minutes ago, I fed my child; just last night I made love to my husband. Yet they want me again and again. My blood is warmed, then fired with well-being. Proudly, I run my hands over my own flesh, as if I had invented it.

II.

The baby is predictable now. We know that she will want a nap at nine fifteen, just after we have finished breakfast. I put her in her crib and wait until I hear her even breathing. Does she dream? What can she dream of, having lived so little? Does she dream of life inside my body? Or does she dream for the whole race?

My husband is in bed waiting for me. Deep calls to deep: it must have been s.e.x they were talking about. I want him as much as ever. Because of this, because of what I feel for him, what he feels for me, of what we do, can do, have done together in this bed, I left another husband. Broke all sorts of laws: the state's, the church's. Caused a good man pain. And yet it has turned out well. Everyone is happier than ever. I do not understand this. It makes a mockery of the moral life, which I am supposed to believe in.

All the words of love, of s.e.x and love, the simple words; have, take, come, now, words of one syllable. Behind my eyes I see green leaves, high, branching trees, then rocks that move apart and open. Exhausted, we hold each other, able to claim love. The worst thing about casual s.e.x is not being able to express love honestly afterward. One feels it, but knows it to be false. Not really love. Yet, is it not inevitable to love one who has proffered such a gift?

We drift into sleep, knowing the baby's nap will not last long. She cries; the day begins for real. I am taking her into the city to see an old lover.

III.

Of all the men I have been with, M found me consistently, astonis.h.i.+ngly, pleasing. We had five months together in a foreign city, London, where he was almost the only one I knew. I was married then, to my first husband, who did not praise, who thought of me as if I were colonial Africa: a vast, dark, natural resource, capable, possibly, of civilization. As it turns out, I did not want his civilization- a tendency colonialists have discovered to their sorrow.

M is, as they say, well-bred, but with him the phrase has real meaning. Only centuries of careful marriages could have produced, for example, his nose. There are no noses like it in America, which got only the riffraff for its settlers, or those who must fear beauty as a snare. His nose is thin and long, the nostrils beautifully cut, the tip pointed down slightly to the full, decisive lips. He is the blondest man I have ever been with- this, in combination with his elegant, well-cut clothes, made him a disappointment naked. Really fair men always look foolish without their clothes, as if they ought to know better.

M likes to pretend that I have been married so many times he can't keep track. In letters, he tells me he imagines me inviting the milkman, the postman, the butcher into bed to thank them for their services. I write that there are no milkmen in America, the postman is a woman, and I buy meat in the supermarket. Don't quibble, he replies, suggesting my gynecologist, my lawyer, the man who does my taxes.

It is all praise, it is all a reminder of my power, and I thrive on it, particularly as we spoke last time we saw each other openly about the pleasures of friends.h.i.+p without the intrusions of s.e.x. I was newly married then, and he took no small pride in the court adviser/Dutch uncle tone he spoke in when he warned me against the dangers of infidelity. I told him he needn't worry; I had learned my lesson; I wanted to have a child. And besides, my husband made me happier than I had ever been. So then you're safe, he said, as safe as houses. I didn't like the image: I knew the kind of houses that were meant: large and wide and comfortably furnished: it made me see myself as middle-aged, a German woman with thick legs and gray bobbed hair.

It is with a high heart that I ride down on the bus on a spring morning. The countryside is looking splendid: frail greens against a tentative blue sky, the turned earth brown and ready. M's nose is not his only benefice: his manners, too, are lovely. They are courtly, and I dream of my daughter meeting him at Claridge's one day for tea, when she is twelve, perhaps, and needing flattery. I look at her in my arms, proud of what I have come up with. This rosy flesh is mine, this perfect head, this soft, round mouth. And of course, I think we make a charming picture, rightly observed, and I count on M for the proper angle.

The city pavements sparkle and the sun beams off the building gla.s.s. We get a taxi in a second- I am covered over with beneficence, the flattering varnish of good luck. But my luck changes and we are stuck in traffic for forty-five minutes. M hates lateness- he thinks it is rudeness- and I know this will get the day off to a bad start.

He is waiting for me in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. He does not look pleased to see me, but it is not his way to look pleased. He says he hates his first sight of people he loves: they always expect too much from his face and it makes him feel a failure.

I apologize nervously, excessively, for being late. He steers us silently toward the cafeteria. I am wearing the baby in a front pack sling, when I take her out and give her to M to hold, she screams. He asks me what she likes to eat. "Me," I say, but he is not amused. "Get her some yogurt," I say, feeling foolish.

"And you?" he asks.

"Oh, anything," I say.

"You always say that," he says, frowning, "and you always have something specific in mind. You've lost an earring."

He looks at the baby. "Your mother is always losing earrings in the most extraordinary places, at the most extraordinary times." She looks him squarely in the eye and screams. He moves off with a shudder.

Finally, the yogurt pleases the baby, and her good temper is restored. I ask M about his visit, and he is noncommittal, uninformative. I begin to fear that he has crossed the ocean to see me. He wants to talk about the past, our past; he keeps bringing up details in a way that makes me know he thinks about me often. He keeps taking my hand, squeezing it in studied, meaningful patterns of pressure, but I keep having to pull my hand away to take things from the baby, or to hold her still. Besides, I don't want to hold his hand. Not in that way. I begin to feel unsettled, and start chattering, diverting much of my foolish talk to the baby, a habit in mothers I have always loathed.

"I've got us theater tickets for tonight," says M. "And you must tell me where you would most like to have dinner."

I look at him with alarm. "I can't possibly go to the theater with you. I have to get home with the baby. You should have said something."

"I thought you'd know that's what would happen. It's what we always did."

"I never had a baby before. Or a marriage, not a real one. Surely you must know we can't go on a date.'"

"Obviously I don't know anything about you anymore. Come on, let's look at the pictures."

I try to put my arms through the sling, but it is a complicated arrangement if one is trying to hold the baby at the same time, and I know she will not go with M. He stands behind me, helping me to put my arms through the straps. His hand brushes my breast, but instead of moving his hand away, he cups my breast with it.

I am covered over in panic. For the first time in my life, I am shocked by a man's touch. I understand for the first time the outraged virgin, for I am offended by the impropriety of such a gesture, indicating, as it does, a radical misunderstanding of my ident.i.ty. He cannot have free access to my body, not just because it is mine, but because it stands for something in the world, for some idea. My body has become symbolic. I laugh at the idea as soon as it occurs to me, and M looks hurt, but I continue to laugh at the notion of myself as icon. My actual virginity I gave up with impatience and dispatch; an enc.u.mbrance I was eager to be rid of. Now, fifteen years later, I stand blus.h.i.+ng.