“Seriously. Maybe before Cal was born. But now. I got no tits, he sucked them all dry. Some days I don’t even wear a bra.”
Jean, smiling, said, “I’m sure the guys hate that.”
“It’s not like I’m worried about it or anything. I’m fine. It’s just …”
She shook her head, and thought, why are you talking like this, it’s just a habit, but she wanted to communicate something, about her situation, she had a desire to explain herself to Jean but wasn’t quite sure yet what it was she was supposed to explain. Some kind of sadness about Paul, but maybe that was just a means to an end.
“Come on,” Jean said again, getting slightly annoyed. “Who are you kidding. You’re obviously, in terms of female attractiveness, in the top two percent. For what it’s worth, I put myself somewhere in the top forty. In our age category.”
“Now you’re being ridiculous,” Dana said, more confident now of the tone you’re supposed to take in this kind of conversation.
“I don’t want to … it’s not like I’m trying to ask for … I mean, it’s done the job. If this … thing with Henrik works out, it’s done the job.” After a minute, when Dana didn’t say anything, Jean added, “That’s all you can ask of it.”
“Of what?”
And Jean looked at her suddenly very sweetly, changing mode. “I don’t know. Ignore me. I’m talking … crap.”
The first song had ended, and the front woman ducked down for a minute to make an adjustment to the amp, then stepped up again and said, “In case you don’t know, that song was by the Mountain Goats. Which you should know,” and Dana said to Jean, “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but I’m seeing somebody.” Then the woman said, “All right, folks. See if you recognize this,” and began singing, “Couple in the next room, bound to win a prize …”
For a minute, Jean and Dana listened to the music, with the firelight in their faces, not speaking, on a soft winter night in Austin, with Christmas lights glowing multicolored in their eyes, though Jean also felt the wind knocked out of her, surprisingly upset, and like she had to speak carefully and measure her words.
“I’m glad you told me,” Jean said.
“Well, it’s … early days. I don’t know what it is.”
“Does Paul know?”
“I don’t … we don’t really communicate about … anything you would expect us to be communicating about. He’s … I mean, he made his intentions pretty clear, and acted on them, and seems to expect me to do the same.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
“If you mean … I don’t have the feeling that I’m doing what I want, no. But I can’t wait around for that forever.”
“Who is this guy?”
“He’s a guy. He’s a nice guy. He’s older. He’s very … we’re both weirdly nervous about everything whenever we meet up.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
“You mean, with you guys? Yes, I told him. He thinks it’s weird.”
“I think it’s a little bit weird. In a good … I mean, I’m glad you are.” And Jean looked at Dana again, with her wide eyes. One of the things she knew how to do was make the younger sister appeal, where you show that you know that there’s stuff going on that’s above your head, but you prefer the action on your level, and want to make them feel that, too. “I’m just sad about …”
“Me, too. But I don’t want it to mean anything. I mean, it’s just Paul, right? It’s not you or Liesel, I haven’t really changed … I still love him, but he’s … We’re just going through a period of our … parenting life … where what we have to do is make an effort to be nice to each other, and that’s fine, that’s the best we can expect.”
“Is it such an effort?”
“It’s kind of an effort,” Dana said.
When the song ended, the guy in the dirty black jeans, who had been listening, too, turned back in a friendly way toward the two women and said, “I’ve been thinking about … I’ve been trying to work out how you guys know each other.”
“Hey, just fuck off,” Jean said suddenly.
“I’m just trying …”
“Nobody wants to talk to you. You’re drunk, you stink.”
“Hey, hey,” he said, in a let’s-all-keep-it-down kind of way. “If I … have, I mean, I’m not trying to … I’m just trying to have a good time here.”
“Well, you tried. I’m sorry, I’m not in the mood to pretend to be nice to asshole guys.”
He leaned toward Dana and said, confidentially, “I’m sorry if I’ve offended your friend over here, who seems like she’s … having …”
“Hey, waiter,” Jean said, because she had seen the woman in the velvet dress bringing out a pitcher of sangria to another table. So the woman in her running shoes quietly came over—she had a way of walking like she’d been choreographed to do it, and stood at attention afterward with her feet together.
“What can I do for you?” she said.
“Can you get this guy to back off?”
“It’s okay,” Dana said to Jean. “Let’s just go.”
“I’m just trying to … spread a little Christmas spirit …” the guy said.
“Come on, Kevin,” the woman said to him. “Are you getting into trouble?”
“I told her she looked like a movie star,” he said. “I’m a big jerk.”
“I’m sure she’s heard it before.” And then, making a face for Dana and Jean: “He’s all right, I’ll kick him into line.” And she pretended to kick him, to show they were all friends, but also a little like he was a dog, and he pretended to react, like a dog might, whimpering, but he didn’t make a sound.
“If we could just have the check,” Dana said, feeling a little stuck-up.
“I’m sorry,” Jean told the waitress, “that’s not good enough. It’s not like he’s everybody’s fun drunk, he needs to learn to react to what he’s being told. We came here to have a private conversation, we made that clear to him.”
“This is a bar,” the woman said. “People want to—I mean, they want to interact.”
“All right, whatever. Just get me the check. Please.”
They had a minute of just sitting there while Kevin made a big deal out of looking the other way, and then, from time to time, glancing around and turning back, like he’d touched something hot. At least the band was playing—the music spread a layer of sound over everything, you could hide in it. Jean checked her phone again. When the bill came Dana put ten dollars on the table, and Jean added whatever else she could find, a couple of singles, a few quarters. Nathan’s flight had finally taken off, it was a three-hour drive to DFW and she wanted to be there when they came out of the gate. They had to walk past Kevin on their way out, but by that point whatever tide of feeling Jean had been riding had started to recede.
* * *
Cal didn’t eat much at dinner, and after Dana left, Paul tried to get him to eat a little more. He sat down next to him at the table and offered to do what he had complained about Dana’s doing earlier: to spoon-feed him. When that didn’t work, he gave him a bowl of dry Cheerios, and for a few minutes Cal sat in his chair and played around with his food, sometimes putting a handful into his mouth—gummy little Os stuck to the skin of his mouth-wet hands. “It’s like he’s regressing,” Paul said to Susie, who made her whatever face.
“When they’re ill,” she said, “it’s not worth fighting about this kind of thing.”
Paul knew he had opened himself up to motherly advice, felt his stubbornness rising and then let it go again, an almost physical sensation, like letting something slip through your fingers; he didn’t want to pick anymore fights. And the truth is, Cal’s nose was streaming, his eyes looked cruddy, and he seemed to be receiving information through a kind of scum or film: there was a slight delay in all of his responses. But he also didn’t want to be left out. When Ben and Willy—the “boys”—got to watch a little TV after dinner, he insisted on joining them and sitting next to Ben on the
sofa. Insisting meant bursting into tears until Paul gave in.
“Where’s Liesel?” Susie said. “Has anyone seen her?”
They sat in a couple of rocking chairs in the playroom, staring at the screen. May sat on Susie’s lap, watching, too, while her mother rocked gently and played with her baby’s fingers, rubbing them a little, each separately, as if she were cleaning them and counting them. The Brady Bunch was on.
“I can’t believe they still show this,” Paul said. “I can’t believe we used to watch it.”
“It’s fine.”
He turned around to look at the kids. Cal, glazed over, sat with his legs stuck out and his shoes on. Shoes on the sofa is the kind of thing that annoyed Bill. Paul almost said something but didn’t. From time to time Cal rubbed the back of his hand against his nose, and then against his shirt. Willy had a tennis ball on his lap and was letting it run down between his thighs and then catching it at the knees. Ben occasionally said “Stop it,” and then Willy would stop for a bit and then forget and let it roll. Ben didn’t care that much, but he still said Stop it. Cal seemed very small next to his cousins, and Paul somehow felt his exclusion, even from this pointless exercise in mutual irritation. It’s the stuff his childhood was made of, which Cal would probably never experience. Above the boys’ heads the four painted figures of the Essinger kids looked on.
Liesel walked in and Susie said, “Where have you been?”
“I wanted a walk so I walked to Breeds.” Breeds was the hardware and general store on the corner of 29th and West, opposite the bakery. “We needed light bulbs and I wanted to see if there were any little presents for the kids.”
“Power drills. Chainsaws. That kind of thing,” Paul said.
“Just little things.” Liesel looked flushed with the exercise, happy but tired. “Where’s Jean? I wanted her advice.”
When Paul didn’t answer, Susie said, “At the Spider House. With Dana.”
“That’s nice.” But for some reason Liesel’s heart sank. “Okay. I’m going to sit down for a moment and then make supper. We’ve got some tuna steak and I thought I might make a salade niçoise.”
Susie turned around in her chair—her mother was standing behind her, staring at the TV. “That sounds great. The kids have already eaten, right?”
“What is this show?” Liesel asked, almost angrily. “They look like plastic people. Why is everybody always smiling?”
“Because they’re Americans,” Paul told her, playing up to her, faintly mocking.
When the show finished, he had a hard time getting Cal off the couch. Ben wanted to watch something else, something he wanted to watch, which wasn’t just for kiddies, but Susie had to turn the TV off to let Paul persuade his son to go to bed. In the end, Cal said, “Carry,” so Paul carried him. The boy felt hot, he was sweating, you could feel the fever in him like a kind of intensity, of sensation or feeling, which communicated itself to you through the dampness of his T-shirt and the heat of his hands around your neck. Paul felt tender and loving and said (his mouth was next to Cal’s ear), “You’re my good boy, you’re my tough kid.” He could also hear, behind him, Susie telling her sons, “All right, before we do anything else, let’s all wash our hands.”
Cal was half-asleep by the time they got upstairs; his eyes had closed, he was breathing regularly but with a little hitch in his intake, like a bump in the road. Paul laid him on Dana’s bed and undressed him there, taking his shoes off, pulling his pants down. “All right, Buddy, all right, all right,” he kept saying. But he was also conscious of a slight intrusion—this was Dana’s room now, not his, and he could see her clothes, including her underwear and bras, carefully folded in the open suitcase. There weren’t any drawers to put them in. “Time to pee,” he said.
“I don’t need a pee.” He was talking but his eyes were still shut.
“Well, you’re going to. You gotta brush your teeth anyway.”
Cal, still dopey, eventually managed to walk to the bathroom by himself. He stood naked at the low toilet, holding his penis in his right hand, patiently, and after a moment the urine streamed out, and he shifted its arc a little and waited for it to stop.
“I thought you didn’t need to go,” Paul said, amused or touched to see the familiar male ritual reproduced in miniature. Afterward he wet a cloth and washed the kid’s face, pulling a little at the crust of snot around his nose and mouth. Cal winced but didn’t much complain. Paul brushed his teeth. And this time, holding hands, they walked back to the bedroom.
But the real fight started when he tried to put him in the crib. “You said I could have a bed,” Cal told him, suddenly alert.
“Let’s do it tomorrow. It’s late. You’re not feeling great.”
“But you said.”
“I promise you, tomorrow.”
“But you said.”
Each time louder, each time more desperate—it was like a knot of irrationality you couldn’t iron out, the kind of knot that as an adult you feel in your shoulder or neck, but which in children expresses itself in these moments of insistence. You said you said you said. It always amazed Paul, their instant access to deep unhappiness. They just have to throw out a line and that fish bites. But there were also in this case contributing circumstances. Cal’s fever didn’t help, the fact that it wasn’t his house, that Paul was Paul and not Dana didn’t help. The only thing that would help is getting him some sleep.
“Yeah, well. I say a lot of things.”
Paul tried to lift him up and lay him down, but the kid was too strong and the truth was, the crib really was too small. For a moment he felt the sudden surge of his own anger, I can make you do this, like the flare of a match, but it died away again, leaving a kind of residual sadness behind. “All right,” he said at last. “You win.”
The problem was he couldn’t dismantle the crib and there wasn’t enough space to put a mattress on the floor unless he took it out. For a few minutes, he tried to carry the crib out of the room, but the doorway was too narrow and he ended up dragging it along and scraping the floorboards. Imagining in the back of his mind what Bill would say when he saw the scratches in the varnish, but also somehow at the same time imagining that Bill was standing there, offering advice, or maybe he was Bill, and saying what Bill would have said, God damn it, God damn it—his disproportionate despair at minor household disasters. Dana’s bed was a trundle bed, which you could pull out to make a double. This is what they slept on when they started going out, when Paul took her to meet his parents. In theory Paul could lay the second mattress on the floor for Cal … but only if the fucking crib was out of the way. He jammed his finger trying to lift up one of the sides (there seemed to be a lever you had to push) and sat on the bed afterward, sucking at his hand. And feeling surprisingly miserable. Cal by this point appeared to be perfectly awake, hot and sick, but awake, and stared at his father with wide bright eyes. Most of what grown-ups tell you is packaged for consumption, but somehow the sense of adult raw material had gotten through to him. He was old enough to know you shouldn’t swear and said, “Mommy says don’t swear.”
“Well, Mommy can …” But Paul let it go. “What am I going to do with you?” he said, looking at his son and tapping more or less deliberately into his reserves of ironic detachment. Then: “What are you going to do with me?”
“Nothing,” Cal said.
“You need to go to sleep.”
In the end, he put Cal down in Dana’s bed and lay with him a while, on top of the sheets. With his shoes still on, he rested them against a bedpost; and then, when that got tiring, tried to kick them off, using the toe of one against the heel of the other—without shifting his body, because Cal was in his arms and beginning to close his eyes. Of course, when the shoe came off, it fell bang against the wooden floor, but Cal only gave the startle reflex and settled back and Paul knew he was asleep.
For a while as he lay there staring at the overhead fan, he worried he might fall asleep, too, and then in a kind of borde
r state followed through some kind of fantasy logic, where Dana came in to check on Cal and saw him sleeping there with Cal in his arms. One of the things that worried him is that she couldn’t get in the door, the crib still blocked the way, and he knew he had to do something about it but wanted her to see them like that, for some reason, father and son, in her bed, though what kind of point he was trying to prove, he didn’t know. Before kicking off his other shoe he slowly released Cal from his side, letting his head fall lightly back against the sheet. Then, using his arm as a prop and trying not to shift the mattress too much by the shift in his weight, he rolled across his son, for a moment staring down at him, almost lying on top of him, but suspended by the elbows, before crawling like a crab over his body and out of bed.
With Cal asleep, in the quiet and the calm, it took him ten minutes to dismantle the crib. He leaned the various parts against the bookcase in the hallway and pulled out the mattress from the trundle bed and laid it on the floor. Then he got sheets and pillows from the bathroom closet and made the bed. The last thing he did was transfer Cal from one bed to another, carrying him across like a forklift and lowering him again, while resting his knees on the carpet and trying not to throw out his back. Afterward, he picked up his shoes and stood in the doorway for a moment, more or less self-consciously, marking the occasion, a job done, before closing the door.
*
Liesel was peeling potatoes at the sink when Dana and Jean came back. She wore her red apron. She held the potatoes under a running faucet then cut them in two on a wooden board and dropped the halves, clean as eggs, into a pot full of water. She looked happy.
“Supper will be in about an hour,” she said.
Dana asked her, “Is there anything I can do?”
“You can pour yourself a glass of wine. You can open a bottle.”
“I’ve got to go,” Jean told her. “I’ve got to pick up Nathan.”
“Which bottle?”
“Whatever you want. There may be some white wine in the fridge, otherwise look in the laundry room.”
Christmas in Austin Page 14
