The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (102 page)

And there were always children around for Oliver to play with, the children of other people who had come to help, the engineers and agronomists and contractors of various sorts and people who were conducting studies or surveys, and children of the government officials to whose parties we went and so on, who invariably spoke English. And sometimes there would be a maid on the premises, or a gardener, who had children. But when we would drive by local markets or compounds, or even fenced-off areas, Oliver would cry—he would
scream
—to play with the children he saw outside the car window.

John would explain, quietly and tirelessly, about languages, about customs, about illnesses. We brought Oliver up to share—naturally—but how does a child
share
with another child who has nothing at all? I always thought, and I still think, that John was absolutely right to be cautious, but the fact is, when Oliver was a bit older and John was away for some days, I would sometimes relent and let Oliver play with some of the children whom, for whatever reason, he found so alluring.

Oliver had spent so little time on the planet, so all those places we went were really his life—his entire life until we came back—and maybe I didn’t take adequate account of that. Sometimes now, when I hear one of those names—Nigeria, or Burma, or Ecuador—any of the names of places where we spent time—it is as lustrous to me as it was before I had ever traveled. But usually what those names bring to my mind now are only the houses where we stayed, all the houses, arranged for us by the various companies John was attached to, similarly well equipped and comfortable, where I spent so much time waiting for John and working out how to bring up a child in an unfamiliar place.

Oh, there were beautiful things, of course—many beautiful and exciting things. Startling landscapes, and the almost physical thrill of encountering unaccustomed languages and unaccustomed people, their music, their clothing, their faces, the food—the sharp, dizzying flash of possibilities revealed—trips into the hectic, noisy, astonishing towns and cities.

Sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, when he wasn’t traveling around, John liked to go to a fancy hotel if there was one in our area, and have a comically lavish lunch. Or, if we were someplace where the English had had a significant presence, a tea—which was Oliver’s favorite, because of the little cakes and all the different treats and the complicated silver services.

There was the most glamorous hotel, so serene, so grand. The waiters were handsome—truly glorious—all in white linen uniforms that made their skin look like satin, dark satin. And their smiles—well, those smiles made you feel that life was worth living! And of course they were charming to Oliver, they could not have been more charming.

And there were elegant, tall windows overlooking the street, with heavy, shining glass that was very effective against the heat and noise, with long, white drapes hanging at their sides. It was really bliss to stop at that hotel, such a feeling of well-being to sip your tea, watching the silent bustle of the street outside the window. And then one afternoon, beyond the heavy glass—I was just pouring John a second cup, which I remember because I upset it, saucer and all, and could never get the spot out of my lovely yellow dress—there was a sort of explosion, and there was that dull, vast, sound of particles, unified, rising like an ocean wave, and everyone on the street was running.

Well, we were all a bit paralyzed, apparently, transfixed in our velvety little chairs—but immediately there was a
whoosh
, and the faint high ringing of the drapery hardware as the waiters rushed to draw the long, white drapes closed.

Early on, John would sometimes describe to me his vision of the burgeoning world—lush mineral fields that lie beneath the surface of the earth and the plenitude they could generate, great arteries of oil that could be made to flow to every part of the planet, immense hydroelectric dams producing cascades of energy. A degree of upheaval was inevitable, he said, painful adjustments were inevitable, but one had to keep firmly in mind the long-term benefits—the inevitable increases in employment and industry, the desperately needed revenues.

Well, in practice things are never as clear, I suppose, as they are in the abstract; things that are accomplished have to
get
accomplished in one way or another. And in fairly fluid situations, certain sorts of people will always find opportunities. And that, of course, is bound to affect everyone involved, to however slight a degree.

In any case, eventually there was a certain atmosphere. And there were insinuations in the press and rumors about the company John was working with, and it just wasn’t fun for John anymore.

It was an uncomfortable, silent ride to the airport when we finally did come back for good. I remember Oliver staring out the window at the shanties and the scrub and the barbed wire as John drove. There was a low, black billowing in the sky to one side of us, fire in the distance, whether it was just brush or something more—crops or a village or an oil field, I really don’t know. And after we returned, there was a very bad patch for John, for all of us, though John certainly had done well enough financially. Many people had done very well.

“What is it, darling?” I ask Oliver. “Please tell me. Is one of your courses troubling you?”

He turns to gaze at me. “One of my courses?” His face is damp.

“You’re not eating at all. I’m so worried about you, sweetheart.”

“Ma, can’t you see me? I can see you. I can see everything, Ma. Sometimes I feel like I can see through skin, through bone, through the surface of the earth. I can see cells doing their work, Ma—I can see thoughts as they form. I can hear everything, everything that’s happening. Don’t you hear the giant footfalls, the marauder coming, cracking the earth, shaking the roots of the giant trees? What can we do, Ma? We can’t hide.”

“Darling, there’s nothing to be frightened of. We’re not in any danger.”

“His brain looks like a refinery at night, Ma. The little bolts of lightning combusting, shooting between the towers, all the lights blinking and moving…”

“Darling—” I smile, but my heart is pounding. “Your father loves you dearly.”

“Mother!” He sits bolt upright and grabs me by the shoulders. “Mother, I’ve got one more minute—can’t you see me, there, way off in the distance, coming apart, flailing up the hill, all the gears and levers breaking apart, falling off—flailing up the hill at the last moment, while the tight little ball of fire hisses and spits and falls toward the sea? He’ll close his fist, Ma, he’ll snuff it out. Are you protected by a magic cloak? The cloak of the prettiest girl at school?”

“Please, darling—” I try to disengage myself gently, and he flops back down. “Oh, God,” he says.

“What, darling? Tell me. Please try to tell me so that I can understand. So that I can understand what is happening. So I can try to help you.”

“It’s all breaking up, Ma. How long do I have? I’m jumping from floe to floe. Do I have a minute? Do I have another minute after that? Do I have another minute after that?”

I run my hands over his face, to clear the tears and sweat. “This is a feeling, darling,” I say. My heart is lodged high up near my throat, pounding, as if it’s trying to exit my body. “It’s just a feeling of pressure. We’ve all experienced something like it at one time or another. You have to remember that it’s not possible for you to fix every problem in the world. Frankly, darling, no one has appointed you king of the planet.” I force myself to smile.

“Every breath I take is a theft,” he says.

“Oliver!” I say. “Please! Oh, darling, listen. Do you want to stay home for a while? Do you want to drop one of your courses? Tell me how to help you, sweetheart, and I will.”

“It’s no use, Ma. There’s no way out. It was settled for me so long ago, and now here’s your poor boy, his head all in pieces, just howling at the moon.”

During that whole, long time, when we were away, I used to dream that I was coming home. Almost every night, for a long time, I dreamed that I was coming home. I still dream that I am coming home.

I stand, for a moment, outside the bedroom door.

“Well, there you are,” John says, when I bring myself to open it. “I was calling for you. Didn’t you hear me?”

“I was…Do we have any aspirin?”

“Come in,” he says. “Why don’t you come in?”

The blinds are drawn, the house is a thin shell. The acid moonlight pours down, scalding.

“Talking to your son?” he asks.

“John?” I say. “Do you remember if Oliver ever had a nurse—maybe in Africa—who told him stories?”

“A ‘nurse’?” John says. “Is he having some sort of nineteenth-century European colonial hallucination?”

I sit down at the dressing table. In the mirror, I watch John pacing slowly back and forth. “He needs reassurance from you, darling,” I say. “He needs your approval.”

“My approval? Actually, it seems that I need
his
approval. After all, I’m an arch criminal, he must have mentioned it—he’s not one to let the opportunity slip by. I’m responsible for every ill on the planet, didn’t he spell it out for you? Poverty? My fault. Injustice? My fault. War somewhere? Secret prisons? Torture? My fault. Falling rate of literacy? Rising rate of infant mortality? Catastrophic climate change? New lethal viruses? My fault, whatever is wrong, whatever might someday go wrong, whatever some nut thinks might someday go wrong, it’s all my fault, did he not happen to mention that? The whole world, the future, whose fault can any of it be? Must be dear old Dad’s.”

I rest my head in my hands and close my eyes. When I open them again, John is looking at me in the mirror.

After a moment, he shakes his head and looks away. “I noticed we’re running low on coffee,” he says.

I turn around, stricken, to face him. A neat, foil packet, weighing exactly a pound—such a simple thing to have failed at! “I meant to pick some up today—I completely forgot, I’m so sorry, darling. But there’s enough for you in the morning.”

He looks back at me, sadly, almost pityingly, as if he had just read a dossier describing all my shortcomings. “Enough for me?” he says. “But what about you? What will you do?”

“I don’t mind,” I say. “It doesn’t matter—it’s fine. I’ll get some later—I have to do a big shop tomorrow, anyhow.”

“No,” he says. “I’ll go out now. Someplace will still be open.”

John’s car pulls out. The sound shrinks into a tiny dot and I feel it vanish with a little, inaudible
pop
. I listen, but I can’t hear a thing from Oliver’s room—no music, or sounds of movement. I’ll check on him later, after John has gone to sleep. I begin to brush my hair. It’s surprisingly soothing—it always has been; it’s like an erasure.

It’s extreme to say, “I do my best.” That can never quite be true, and in my opinion it’s often just a pretext for self-pity, or self-congratulation—an excuse to give yourself leeway. Still, I do
try
. I try reasonably hard to be sincerely cheerful, and to do what I can. Of course I understand Oliver’s feeling—that he’s lashed to the controls of some machine that eats up whatever is in its path. But this is something he’ll grow out of. As John says, this is some sort of performance Oliver is putting on for himself, some melodrama. And ultimately, people learn to get on with things. At least in your personal life, your life among the people you know and live with, you try to live responsibly. And when you have occasion to observe the difficult lives that others have to bear, you try to feel gratitude for your own good fortune.

I did manage to throw out his card. I couldn’t help seeing the name; the address of his office twinkled by. But I made an effort to cleanse them from my mind right away, and I think I’d succeeded by the time the card landed in the trash basket.

There’s no chance that he would turn out to be the person who appeared to me this afternoon, really no chance at all. And I doubt I’m the person he was imagining, either—which for all I know, actually, was simply a demented slut. And the fact is, that while I might not be doing Oliver or John much good, I’m certainly in a position to do them both a great deal of harm.

I’d intended to stay in today, to run some errands, to get down to some paperwork myself. But there we are. The things that are hidden! I felt such a longing to go into town, to go to the museum. It’s not something I often do, but it’s been a difficult week, grueling, really, with Oliver here, ranging about as if he were in a cage, talking talking talking about those hearings and heaven only knows what—and I kept picturing the silent, white galleries.

Looking at a painting takes a certain composure, a certain resolve, but when you really do look at one it can be like a door swinging open, a sensation, however brief, of vaulting freedom. It’s as if, for a moment, you were a different person, with different eyes and different capacities and a different history—a sensation, really, that’s a lot like hope.

It was probably around eleven when I parked the car and went down into the metro. There was that awful, artificial light, like a disinfectant, and the people, silhouettes, standing and walking, the shapeless, senseless sounds. The trains pass through in gray streaks, and it’s as if you’ve always been there and you always will be. You can sense the cameras, now, too—that’s all new, I think, or relatively new—and you can even see some of them, big, empty eyes that miss nothing. You could be anywhere, anywhere at all; you could be an unknowing participant in a secret experiment. And with all those lives streaking toward you and streaking away, you feel so strongly, don’t you, the singularity and the accidentalness of your own life.