Gould (9 page)

digressions
—and fake slips and asides—that you must have unusually clear arteries, which should be something to be thankful to find out about. And then—joke flat, for you're not smiling,” and he said “No no, it was all right, just maybe I couldn't find anything funny now    . but what else, the serious?” and she said “To write back; I don't see how you can avoid it. What to say to her, though, right now I don't know. That's for you, as to how you feel. But one question you should ask yourself is why you're so sure the boy's yours.” “I just know he is; the timing sixteen years ago; her pretenses during it—at the early stages, and now in this letter, meaning  .   .  meaning what? This has also confused me. That it just seems authentic, this letter. I mean, there does seem to be something askew with her in it, the way she puts things. Or maybe I'm wrong; it's just her way of putting things—she's nervous, self-conscious, was always turning away, not looking at me, bashful, if you can believe it; frightened, even, though she now says she can be aggressive—I'm sure that's what she meant—and fierce. Fooling herself there, I think. But, but, just by the way she says she kept it from me and is now revealing it. And because I doubt anyone could make up a letter like this, or if anyone could, she wasn't among them or was the very last to     all that, I'm saying, smacks the truth—
of
it. I'm repeating myself and also still not being clear,” and she said “No, I understand, and how could you not be? What I'm thinking now though is why you're so sure she's even had a second son. It's possible she has gone a little over the who-knows-what and it isn't simply nerves and self-consciousness, since we don't know what's happened to her, like drugs she's taken or illnesses she's gone through and relationships she's had, in sixteen years. Or tragedies even—the loss of her first and only son, though that's carrying it too far. But she might only be imagining it or, as she said about the boy to his alleged deceased nonbiological father, is trying to get back at you for some reason. Though why would she be, since from what you've told me and this letter says she was the one who cut you off. But I'd look into the letter more deeply, read it for keys. Maybe she's getting back at you with this possible birth lie for originally getting her in bed and impregnating her when she didn't want to, at least the pregnancy,” and he said “I don't know, but I have to admit she wasn't very keen on sleeping with me. More like, if I really had to or sort of insisted—her meekness again—she'd get on the bed, hike up her dress and spread her legs and I should just go ahead. But there's more validity in what you say about the pregnancy, since I did trick her. I should have pulled out of her as we'd agreed—I'm saying, the first time. The second and third, if there was a third, I assume she was protectively prepared, or else she didn't do anything because she already knew she was pregnant. But she wasn't a vindictive type or a conniver and nothing in the letter shows it. In fact, just the opposite comes out,” and she said “Why, where's it say that?” looking at the letter, and he said “I thought I heard it come through, but I won't press it; I'm not as good a reader as you. But what she says here I'm convinced is the truth, though if it really came down to it I'd want a blood test to prove it,” and she said “Do you know what they cost? There was something in the—no, a doctor acquaintance, Debby, and she was talking about it, or someone for some reason asked her, when I was with her, and the figures stuck. Maybe it was originally a newspaper article and this person wanted it explained or couldn't believe the costs. But Debby went into it: more than a thousand; that is, if you want ninety-nine-point-nine accuracy. It's a very complex foolproof process which no medical insurance covers, so you really have to want the tests. And you need their consent, mother and child's, and they have to take the tests the same day as you and their blood flown to the lab air-express if the lab's here, or yours to theirs same way, or maybe theirs is taken the day before yours so it can reach your lab the next day, but which has to be another hundred in costs: flying blood,” and he said “Then that's another matter, which we'll maybe come to someday, but I'm saying I believe what she says is so and that I have to deal with it. And if it isn't so—now I mean that if she does have another child but it isn't mine; or what she says is a bit exaggerated I don't know what I mean by that; I know it's something but I forget what—then I'll find out somehow in my letters to him. But I will write her back saying the kid should write and I might even put something in the letter for him,” and she said “For no furtive purposes, believe me, or that this is the wise wife telling the obtuse spouse what a mistake she thinks he might be making, but I'm still a bit suspicious. Out of the blue, sixteen years, this boy opens a book and his papa drops out?—excuse me, but it doesn't even seem a trace fishy to you? Maybe it's the truth—taller tales have been—but it could also be she wants you to start kicking in for him—private school, for instance, if he has a problem academically or his public school or school district does. College—he's getting to that age and may even be so precocious that this is his senior high school year and he's thinking of going to Stanford or Amherst or Yale. But big bucks and the living's high there. Or she comes upon one review, sees you're teaching in a good school, has read that some college profs make a hundred thousand or more and thinks you were sharp and smart so maybe you're among this elite and feels it'll be no hardship for you to help her with some serious bills because she's being evicted or had medical expenses she's up to her arrears in, and so on—the last wasn't bad, was it? and it wasn't anything I heard,” and he said “As I told you, she wasn't like that and nothing she wrote suggests she's changed. She hated people who squeezed money or promises out of you. Hated advertisers, salesmen, promoters, professional handshakers, anyone pushy and aggressive and self-interested and unctuous, if I recall, is the word she used, but who wanted something from you like that. In a way, me at the time—that's what she said about me: pushy, sexually needy, other things, and I was. Those days, nothing was going to stop me from trying to get the babe in bed and once in it or sitting on the edge of it with a piece of her clothing unbuttoned or off—even a shoe—from being even more forceful in frigging her. And once in her I sure as hell wasn't going to pull out—except maybe to quickly stick it back in some other way—and dimish my good time. Okay, that was me then, now I don't have to. I'm married, we can go for days without doing it if we want to, though we don't seem to—both of us; it's not just me. But sixteen years ago, or really since I was around eighteen, if she let me stick it in or didn't fight me off hard enough to stop me from getting in her, then screw it—apt phrase, right?—I left it to her to take care of the rest of it, meaning her own pleasure and the birth control and after-sex wipeaway, etcetera, though I might provide the handkerchief if my pants were near. My satisfaction, once it got under way, was paramount. You don't like what I just said, though I know I've said it before to you in various ways, but what can I say? Now I wouldn't act like that for sure if I were single, and I didn't, I think, when I first met you. I remember I'd decided to change my approach to fit my age and probably, without admitting it, my existent sex drive. But your face is saying something; what?” and she said “Nothing. You came on plenty strong with me then but it was all right. I knew what I was doing, which isn't a criticism of her. She was about ten years younger than I when you met her, you've said, though with a kid, and it was a different and I think much looser time then all around and maybe people, even intelligent ones, thought like that: ‘Because I want another baby or am going to have another one some day, what's the difference if it's with him or someone else or even with my husband again, so long as the man seems to have good genes? It still comes out of me.' But I still think if I had been her age and without protection our first night and certainly if I was still cohabitating with my husband I would have clawed you off or grabbed your balls and squeezed them till they crunched if you had somehow got your stiff in without my permission or with my permission but I suddenly had second explicitly articulated thoughts about it and you refused to withdraw.” “Anyway,” he said, “looking at it all—and I know I didn't answer half your questions—in the end what's the harm? She only wants me to have a minimal relationship with him now—by mail. Maybe sometime later a phone call or a meeting, something I'd only do—the meeting—if I felt sure he was mine, and unless I get us all to take those blood tests, which I'm not about to, I don't see how I could. I don't know what I'll write to her but it'll all come out when I write it and I promise I'll be careful with my words.” He started to write her that night, then thought he's only writing her to get through to the kid, so just write him, and started a new letter, saying who he is—“A friend of your mother's. We knew each other years ago, which she's of course told you, though I never met your father, who I understand passed away and which I was very sorry to hear”—what he does for a living, his family—“We've a daughter who's just started to walk and who seems quite bright, lots of clear words and a few communicated impressions: ‘Look, bird! See, squirrel!' I'm not kidding. Early on kids talk like that, just verbs and nouns and commands, and not ‘squirrel'; ‘dog' “—and that “I heard from your mother you'd like me to write. I'd be happy to get a letter back telling things about yourself: what you like to do, school, job if you have one—I started working two to three hours a day and all day Saturday when I was thirteen, not recommended if one wants to get good grades, which I always wanted but never got except in music and art and if spelling had been its own subject, then I also would've got it in that”—his interests, friends, any pets? what he likes to read—“I'm assuming you do, no problem if not”—and so on. “Please give your mother my deepest regards.” No reply from the boy. Month later he wrote the woman saying he wrote Timothy same day he got her letter and he hasn't received an answer. “In something like this the first thing I always say is I hope everything's all right (sometimes it can be illness and even worse, heaven forbid). That said and everyone's in good health and neither of you is going through comparable problems in other matters (fiscal, residential, social, etc.) then maybe he's even shyer than you thought, not that I'm saying you don't know your own son or that I have some special insight into his behavior because of this one action. (I'm afraid I'm being extraguarded here, not wanting to step in your terrain and feeling I've no right to draw conclusions about him, and I don't. I don't pretend to know him in any way other than from what you've said about him, but let's face it, as you like to say, or did a couple of times in your letter—and I didn't mean to make you self-conscious about that; it's really nothing. Damn, I forgot what I was going to say, so don't look for the closed parenthesis. But something about parents, because they're so close to their kids, often not being the best judges of them, which is an old notion but seems new to a new parent no matter how old he is and which I'm sure will be true of me too with my child (Fanny,
née
Francine, and it's been suggested, for obvious reasons except the big overlooked ones [force of habit and we like it] that we go back to the
née
one or call her, if we insist on an abbreviated or just less formal name and one we don't like, Franny). But have I gone too far in even saying what I just did about Timothy and you? Talk about self-consciousness (mine)! This whole thing, quite truthfully, has catapulted me into a tumultuous hazy maze (and also into blowhard overprosy writing just witnessed). So where was I? And I'm not saying you're one of the parents unable to judge her child sometimes because you two are so close (I don't even know how much you are but I get a feeling of it and fine, fine, why shouldn't you be?). But if Timothy's had a change of mind about contacting me or wanting to be contacted, that's okay, but please let me know. That's probably all I should have said. Most sincerely, and always my best to you and Tim.” He showed his wife what he wrote, said “You think I should've called him Timothy, or maybe just change the ‘Tim' to ‘him'; I can do that with a correction tab,” and she said “Why are you diving in headfirst like this?” and he said “What do you mean?” “Listen, the boy didn't answer you, so wait till he does,” and he said “But what do you mean about diving in headfirst?” and she said “You're not being deliberative, prudent, patient, even the least bit skeptical; you're being impetuous, precipitous, reckless, even foolhardy,” and he said “Adjectives, adjectives, all adjectives; fuck them and adverbs.” “Okay,” she said, “then this, since I can see what I said made you pissed: what's the big rush? All right, not ‘big,' but just ‘rush, rush.' If he doesn't answer in another month or two, he'll still only be fifteen or at the most on the cusp of sixteen, but still young, with plenty of years left to begin to get to know you, and in the interim you can decide the next thing to do regarding him, which might be to do nothing. But you're acting like     this waiting for his letter the last month. You've been all hyped up and anxious about it as if it's a
fait accompli
or something that he's your son. In other words, a given, indisputable, no q's asked, and you're dying to hear from him. Perhaps, as you once intimated, to find some signs in his letters that he is who she says he is. Maybe by the way he writes or what he says or even his handwriting and signature, if he isn't already on a WP, and then oh boy, wait till the photos of him come in: ‘Look, Sal, my chin, my nose, my lobes.' But that he's yours unequivocally. It's as if you're not already a father. And that you're forty-seven but unmarried, or married to a barren woman or you're the one at reproductive fault and you're desperate to go down in life as having fulfilled some universal or divine purpose and that's to leave a child behind with your seed in it, even if all this information about your fathership comes from someone you haven't seen in sixteen years, only was with two or three days—you two will never get that one straight—and has a history of being untrustworthy or considerably unreliable and for the most part simply not there. But there's Fanny and in a year or two we'll probably have another child or start to and if you want three I'll go for three. Rather, if we want a third we'll have it, and we've said we do, but we'll determine that for certain after we have two. But what can you do for this boy now that he's fifteen or for all we know soon to be or already sixteen?” and he said “No, it would be early summer when she and I met; that'd have him born in March or April, so he's only a few months into being fifteen.” “Money for tuition and things like sleepaway summer camp and braces we can't afford,” she said, “and I won't let you legally adopt him since that'll cut into what we want to give to the children we conceive. If you want to send him a few dollars—a few hundred—and it's from time to time, but money for his health or health insurance mostly, okay. I wouldn't even send this letter, though I won't do anything to stop you, and I certainly wouldn't write another one if you don't get one back from this one or the last. Take their not sending back as a sign, not that either of us believes in that,” and he said “Truth is, but I told you this before,” and she said “How would I know?” and he said “That I remember how much I wanted it to be true when she first said she was pregnant and then with that photo I told you she sent me and letters about her pregnancy, or maybe there was just one letter or two. And truth too is that I feel good now at the possibility of having a second kid in him. It won't stop me from wanting a second one with you and if we want, a third too, but that should do it. But if he's connected to me in the way she says then even at this late date in his life—fifteen's not late but you know what I mean—I have to take whatever responsibility's mine, all of which I'll find out what it is.” “You don't. She kept it from you. You're off the hook as she said, or whatever so-called so hard to come by colloquialism she used—‘out of the woods,' ‘in the clear,'” and he said “Blood. If the kid's blood, then that's all there is to it, whatever's happened and no matter how much time's elapsed, though call me a misled sentimental sap.” “You're full of shit,” and she left the room. “Sally?” but she didn't answer. He mailed the letter and came back and said “I mailed it,” and she said “So?” and wouldn't talk to him anymore that day or let him close to her that night. He woke up a few hours into sleep and wanted to put his arm around her and hold her breast and if he could hold both of them in one hand then both and fall back to sleep that way, which she knew was the easiest way he could get back to sleep, but she took his hand off and moved to her end of the bed. They didn't talk for two days. Sure: “Good-bye,” “So long,” “Excuse me,” “Go ahead,” but nothing much more than that. The woman didn't write back, the boy didn't, they never did. Two months later he called information in their city and was told the woman's phone number was unlisted. He wanted to ask her or the boy, whichever answered, and if a boy did he was prepared for that: “Hi, this Timothy? I'm Gould; I wrote you almost three months ago,” and if it was the older son he'd say “Let me speak to your mother”—but to either of the other two “What gives? You don't want to write, then as I said in my last letter to you” or “To your mother: that's fine, you had a change of mind” or “Your son changed his mind, but you should have done the right thing—either of you, or both, for he's old enough and you must have some control over what he does or doesn't do and could have squeezed a line or two out of him—and let me know where I stood. You bring me into it, you shift my life somewhat, you turn me around and around and upside down and send me into I don't know what consternations, in addition to what it does to my family or just my wife, then you shouldn't step away as if you never wrote” or “Your mother never contacted me to ask if I'd welcome a letter from you and you never asked her to, and which I said I would.” Two years later he was going to be in their city and wrote her, saying “This is like something from ten years ago or twelve or fourteen, I honestly forget, but closer to the latter, I believe, when I wrote saying I was going to be in Madison and would like to look you up. Well, things come back on us, don't they, and I don't mean anything sly or snide in that, and I will be in your city in a couple of weeks and hope to see you if you're there and, if possible, your youngest son. I hope everything's well with you all. It is with us, and we've recently had a second child: Josephine.” No reply from her. He called information there the next week, thinking maybe she's listed now, but there was no one with her or Timothy's names at that address or anywhere in the city. A week later, when he was there and after he'd done his business for the day, he went to their old address. He didn't expect them to be there, though they actually could be, something he just thought of, but didn't have a phone anymore—service could have been cut off because she hadn't paid the bill—but he also just wanted to see where they had lived. It was a large Victorian house turned into seven or eight apartments, the tenants' bells and mailboxes on the porch by the front door. Her name wasn't on any of them. Maybe she married again and took the last name of her new husband, but then she also would have had hers there, he'd think, and if she was remarried they probably would have moved out: the place seemed rundown. To find out about her he rang the first tenant's bell and when no one answered, the next bell and then the next and the man who came to the front door said the woman had moved out several months ago and he didn't know where. One day she was there with grocery bags in her arms and the next day she was loading a rented truck by herself with her furniture and stuff. “As for the boy, he was here a long time—she had two but the eldest has been away at college for a while and you almost never saw him, not even summers, and the youngest left home for Canada more than a half year ago I'd put it and seemed unsure about what for when I asked him. ‘Work,' he said, and I said ‘Work up there when they have a worse unemployment picture than we do down here?', ‘Or maybe school then,' he said, ‘or maybe nothing, just exploring, but not like up a mountain or in a hole,' is what he said. Young for going off on his own so far alone but he said he saved up for it the last year so it was okay. I never asked his mother what happened to him. Or if I did she never answered or else by accident I had my hearing aid in wrong or turned off. I suppose nothing bad did happen since she never showed any grief or anything and I used to see her almost every day—my window's right there and I was laid off and then retired so I had little to do but look out and snoop. But she had the same placid look, mood and voice for years. You couldn't get a laugh out of her, even when you said something really funny but unnaughty, not that she wasn't the nicest of ladies and also the most helpful in coming to people's aid here and troubles and things like that in the house.” “And the boy, was he a nice kid—the youngest?” and the man said “Oh yeah, very nice, Tim, a real fine young gentleman. Civil, respectful, kept his music low. And listen to this: not the harsh angry clamor: ‘Kill me this, beat me black and blue that, rape the world and its girls, drink and drug and party and buy my harsh angry music,' but good classical and jazz, to my ears. And no shouting matches with his mother, and when his brother was around, always a nice thing going between them. And things like after he rode his bike he parked it close to the building upright, saying good morning and hello, and helpful to the neighbors too with packages and opening doors, and errands when he was much younger, and you'd have to beg him to take a tip. That says a lot about her too, doesn't it? I wish my boys had had more of that in them. But I've told you so much and I don't even know why you want to know. They being investigated; the boy?” and he said “Far from it. I'm an old friend of the family's, Gould Bookbinder's my name,” and shook the man's hand. “In town for the day and lost touch with them, so I came to the last address of theirs I had, hoping against the odds, when I couldn't reach them by phone, to meet up with them here, and seems I didn't miss them by much. You think anyone else in the building knows where she moved or the boy?” and he said “Nobody. I've spoken about it with them, the steadies. It's become something of a mystery to us we like to wonder about, since they were here awhile, though it's not like it's never happened before. Tenants here are always moving in and out at the spur of the moment or their roommates or lodgers are, and after they're gone I've never seen another one again, except by accident someplace, but that only happened once and I forget where.” When he got home he found the letter he sent her two weeks ago returned by the post office: addressee left, no forwarding address. “So that's it, I guess,” he said to his wife, “and I bet the next time I hear from her, even if I've nothing to back this up except that one long lull before I heard from her again, will be in ten to fifteen years. Somehow she'll find me-—well,