Tuesday Nights in 1980 (30 page)

“Does someone want to tell me what is going on?” Marge, to the rest of them. He was someone. He was the someone who should tell her what was going on. But he had become mute.

To his horror and surprise, Lucy chimed in.

“I'm Lucy,” she said, her hand extending like a turtle's head from her plaid coat, out toward Marge.

Stop speaking,
James wanted to hiss at her. But his voice was trapped behind the layers of sensations, which had coagulated into a glass wall around him.

To his horror and surprise, Marge chimed in.

“I'm Marge,” she said. “Nice to meet you. I'm guessing I don't need to tell you that you look familiar?” Marge nodded her head back toward the painting behind her. How had he forgotten this about his own wife, that her desire for pleasantness would trump any suspicion, erase any annoyance, curb any curiosity, and she would
be polite to the woman who, a week ago, he had fucked standing up, against Raul Engales's apartment wall?
Almost all of the panic he had seen in Lucy on the stoop had evaporated, now that she was talking with his pleasant, perfect wife, and Marge's face had been suddenly stripped of annoyance, and was now motherly and open.

Lucy smiled back.
Lucy smiled back!
What was going on here? What was this alternate universe? Was there some kind of code between women that he did not know about, where the default was being . . .
nice
? Why was this happening in his living room? Why was this happening in his life?

“And who is this?” Marge said, gesturing toward the boy.

“This is Julian. That's why I'm here. I just met him today. And I barely know your husband, I just met him at a gallery once, and he recognized me from the painting, so we chatted, and I didn't mean to come over here like this, I just didn't have anywhere to go . . . I'm brand-new in the city . . . I don't know how to take care of kids, and this lady, Sofie, left Julian with me, and so I came here, because, well . . .”

“So you're in a pickle?” Marge nodded in the way that a teacher nods to a student who hasn't passed a test: with pity and warning, but most deeply, a desire to help.

“Yes, I guess you could say that.”

James was still reeling, his back pressed against the back of the couch, his hands gripping the cushions near his thighs. Suddenly he heard himself speak.

“No, she isn't in a pickle,” he said rigidly. “She's ready to leave now, is what she is.”

Marge looked at James, her eyes narrowing. He knew this look. It was the look she gave when he said something off base at a party, when he was accidentally rude to a dinner guest, when he failed, as he had so many times in their years together, to be a normal and upstanding man. He decided he should not speak anymore unless absolutely necessary.
Shut the fuck up, James.

“Let's start from the beginning, though,” Marge was saying to Lucy, having seemingly forgotten about James altogether now. “You were saying a woman left this boy with you.”

“Yes. She was tall and blond and spoke Spanish and said she was friends with Raul's sister, but she didn't seem like she was from Argentina.”

“And did she tell you where she was staying?”

“She only said ‘middle of town,' so she probably meant Midtown, but then she left right after that—all of a sudden. She got into a cab and left me standing in the street with this boy, and I have no idea how to find her again.”

“And was she a relative of the boy's?”

“A neighbor, was what she said.”

Marge became thoughtful. James could not bear to watch her, trying calmly to solve Lucy's problem. But this was why Marge was so wonderful. This was why he loved her! She was so
in the real world
that she could look at real problems and dissect and solve them. She could be kind and gracious while she was doing it. She could be patient and forgiving.

But could she forgive this? If she knew what this
this
actually was?

“What we'll do,” Marge concluded, “is go to Child Services. I'll look it up, and I'll go with you, and we can start there.”

James felt the orange in the room press down on his eyes. It was as strong as a stoplight. He knew what he needed to do. He closed his eyes against the light. Squinted hard.

“No,” he said with a painful wince, shaking his head. “You can't go to Child Services. Nobody is going to Child Services.”

“And why is that?” Marge said, calm still, but obviously frustrated.

“Because I know who's responsible for this boy, and if he goes to Child Services he might never get out. So no. We can't really take him to Child Services. Nope.”

“What?” Marge said. “What are you talking about? What do you mean you know who's responsible for him?”

James's eyes were still shut; he could not bring himself to open them to reveal what was in front of him. Marge, Lucy, the boy, the painting.

“Raul Engales is responsible for him. I have been visiting Raul Engales at a rehabilitation hospital, where he's been since his accident. He told me about his sister today. Just today, he was worried about her.”

The room was quiet for a second. When James opened his eyes, he saw Marge and Lucy glaring at him: Marge's gray eyes, Lucy's blue eyes, both sets fixated on his face. Both of their pretty mouths agape. Both of their tongues.

“You know where he is?” Lucy suddenly gasped. “And you didn't tell me?”

“Since when are you visiting someone in a rehab clinic?” Marge questioned loudly.

Lucy and Marge said these things at the exact same time, and their voices, on top of each other, combined to make a double helix of roaring sound in James's ears, not unlike a siren.
Fuck.

“Wait,” Marge said, looking at James, who would not return her gaze. “James, why would you have told her?” She looked at Lucy. “Why would he have told you anything?”

Lucy looked up, her eyes as frozen as arctic lakes. James could see regret in them, but it didn't matter. He knew what he had to do now. He closed his eyes again, swam slowly into the sound.

“I could have told her when I saw her last,” he said. “Which was last Tuesday, October seventh. I saw her for fifteen days in a row, and we had sex twenty-two times. I had an affair, Marge. It's over now; it's done, but it doesn't excuse it. I'm a terrible man. And I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry.”

The screaming in his brain stopped. There was only the static hum of the orange of the two women he loved, sitting in the same room. There was only Marge's voice, tight as a balloon, saying: “So this is François Bellamy. You lying sack of shit.”

James had mostly
expected Marge to leave right then, to get up and march out the door and head straight to her mother's, or her friend Delilah's, or anywhere where he wasn't. But he should have known she wouldn't; she wouldn't leave for all the same reasons that she would want to, because James was a fuckup of the first degree who she could now officially refuse to trust, and without her, everything would fall apart.

Marge's least favorite thing was when things fell apart: piecrusts, finished jigsaw puzzles, lives. Where there was chaos, even of a moderate degree, she took action. She did the thing you were supposed to do, and would not abandon it simply because she felt angry, or because it was hard, or because it was messy. She was a cleaner-upper of messes, a fixer of things. She could not and would not leave James here alone with a child, because James would not know what to do. So she would stay. She would be the glue.

But not before she told Lucy to leave, with a quick and tearful lecture about what having dignity meant, especially as a beautiful woman.
It isn't enough to be beautiful,
James thought he heard her say, though with the ringing in his ears he couldn't know for sure.
Beautiful is for other people. You have to be something for
you.

But when Lucy cried then, in his living room, in front of his wife, James began to see that Marge was not actually mad at Lucy, and that Lucy was not mad at Marge. Even though they were completely different women, even though their only commonality was that they had slept with James, which should make them jealous, or suspicious, or angry with each other, they were on the same team. They were women who had been wronged, and he was the man who had wronged them. When Marge told Lucy that she needed to leave, and that she should leave Julian here with them, at least for the night, the seriousness in her voice was also gentle, as if she had been Lucy once.

When had Marge been Lucy? James could hardly imagine it now: Marge as a very young woman, new to life's rough parts, bumbling through them with her marijuana and her line drawings. He missed her. He missed every version of her, though technically all the versions were still inside of her somewhere, and she was right here in the house with him, just within his reach.

And yet she was so far. Lucy was gone now and Marge was so far.

And then Marge
was moving. Because if she were still, even for one second, the falling apart would start. She was boiling a pot of water and cooking a box of pasta. She was carrying the boy to the table, sitting him atop a large couch pillow, forking small bits of food for him. She was making up a bed on the couch—right next to James, and yet so far away from James!—with the softest blankets she could find, ones that her mother had brought from Connecticut that they had never used, James favoring the ratty, heavy quilts over the plush, frivolously fleecy blankets—tucking their edges lovingly into the cracks. Did the boy need anything? Did he want to watch the television? He could watch only one show, if so. The boy didn't answer, possibly not understanding her or possibly too terrified to talk, but she went on asking him questions, setting him up. How could she be doing all this now? James himself was paralyzed, his hands glued to his sides. But then again here was the difference between him and Marge: Marge was the glue and his hands were glued to his sides. Marge did things. He sat in one place, merely thinking them.

Before she went upstairs to bed, Marge said to James with her eyes:
You're staying down here.
And:
I'm staying for the boy.

In the middle
of the night, Julian peed. James felt the hot liquid move under his leg. He jolted, bringing his fists to his eyes with nocturnal instinct. He flicked on the light to see the wet blanket, Julian's wet eyes. “Ohhhh no. Julian? What happened, kiddo? Did we have an accident?” This was what adults said to kids, right? They said “we”? And they said “accident”?

James had a sudden and distinct memory of being four or five years old himself, being so scared to ask his father to take him to the bathroom during church that he had wet himself. The fear of his father was greater than the fear of warm liquid on his leg. He had had the feeling that he was stuck in a body that wasn't his, needing things he didn't want it to need, and that he was all alone in the world.

Was this how Julian felt now, looking up at him with his big, guilty, fearful eyes? Had he simply been too frightened to wake James up to ask him to use the bathroom? Or was this just something little kids did, something normal? Either way, James desperately wanted him to feel okay. But how did one make a child feel okay? Especially if the child could not understand him?

“Don't worry, kiddo,” he said. He pulled Julian up by the armpits. He walked him to the bathroom, flicked on the light with his elbow, set him down on the tile, and inched off his little pants. “One leg out,” he said, trying to say something that sounded like something Marge would say. “Okay, two legs out.” The pants were miniature little chinos, khaki in color and now half dark with pee. James put them in a pile in the corner, along with Julian's underwear, which had green frogs on them. “Okay, arms up,” James said. Julian's arms went up. He pulled off his little striped shirt. His little arms were cold and thin, and James didn't know exactly how to handle him.

Should he go get Marge? No way. This wasn't a hard thing. And he couldn't ask her for anything, not now.

“We'd better get this water running,” he said, as if narrating his every move would somehow make the boy more open to it. “We'll make it the perfect temperature. Not too hot, okay? Here, Julian, you stay right here for just one more second, I'll get the water going, and we'll have a nice hot bath, okay?”

Julian's face looked as if it might crack into tears at any moment, but he held his lips tight and his face tight and he nodded. He was shivering, and James realized simultaneously how tiny and vulnerable he was and how much he looked like Raul.

When the water got warm enough James plugged the drain and lifted Julian into the bath. He felt nervous and awkward, like someone on the first day of a job. Trying to go through motions he had never gone through before with some sort of gracefulness or knowledge that he did not have. He imagined Marge watching him, like a boss, assessing his every move.

“Here we go,” he said. He scrubbed Julian's body. He told him to close his eyes when he did the shampoo. He remembered how much it stung to get soap in your eyes. He remembered being at a friend's house when he was small and taking a bath and having the friend's mother tell him to close his eyes. He had never been told by anyone to close his eyes before. His mother had never told him to close his eyes. He had simply let his eyes sting, then rubbed them with his fists. He gently washed Julian's soft flop of dark hair with Marge's lavender shampoo.

James had always wondered, especially when Marge was pregnant, if he would be able to comfort a child in the way he had always wanted to be comforted. He wondered about his ability for selflessness, and he wondered about the feeling of his own touch. Would he be able to touch someone small with care and lightness? Would he be able to kiss a child's head? Would he be able to conjure these actions out of nowhere, having never received them from his own parents? Would he be able to develop the language of loving a child? Was it something you could learn?