Mercifully, there was the sound of water running in the upstairs bathroom. From outside there was the sound of a blue jay squawking.
“It’s over,” Laura said brusquely, rising with her minced herbs. “Whatever it was. I can’t even reach him.”
“Neil Banks.” Elise shook her head. “Who would have thunk it?”
“Don’t. Please don’t…” Laura switched the burner on under a frying pan and it ticked angrily before bursting into flame.
“Does Mac…? Of course not,” Elise answered herself.
Laura stared into the frying pan before her, and then turned suddenly to face Elise. “You can’t say anything to anyone—not even Jenny. Especially not Jenny. It doesn’t matter—it really—I don’t even know why—”
They both froze at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Apparently the running water had not been a shower after all. “Not even Chrissy,” Laura hissed.
The swinging door from the dining room opened and Chrissy emerged looking sleepy, the crease of her pillow still pink on her cheek. “I thought I smelled bacon,” she said, reminding Elise of the crackling pan beside her. “What a gorgeous day—Ula must be pretty pleased with her new digs.”
“That’s right, the lucky bugger,” Laura said, switching into a cheerful, normal voice with ease. She’d had practice by this time, after all. The meanness of her own thought startled Elise. She wasn’t married to Mac, or even particularly friendly with him—who was she to judge? But Laura’s revelation shocked her. And in some sour way she felt betrayed. Once upon a time they had all four just been friends. What impact Neil’s return had had on her—her work, her home—seemed suddenly inconsequential, dwarfed completely by this. But why did this matter? It wasn’t a contest: whose life Neil could most fuck up, who had the most connection to him, as if he were some celebrity, or youth itself.
“How was it?” Chrissy asked, resting a hand on the back of Elise’s neck for a moment. “Was she totally freaked out when she came to?”
“Ula?” Elise said blankly, and then, under Chrissy’s scrutinizing gaze, collected herself. “Oh, no—she was fine. I had to help her get up, but then…she was totally okay.”
“Hnh,” Chrissy said, narrowing her eyes for an instant and then walking over to the French doors.
Of course, Elise would tell Chrissy of Laura’s confession. This was one of the many differences between being married to a Chrissy or a Mac: Laura did not understand that for Elise to keep something, even of much lesser significance, from her partner would be impossible. Laura had, after all, never shared that kind of closeness with Mac. It gave Elise a pang of sympathy—and forgiveness—for her friend. For her to have turned to Neil for closeness or connection or whatever it was! There was nothing, honestly nothing, he was in a good position to supply.
“Eat outside?” Laura said, scraping the eggs onto a plate.
“Perfect!” Chrissy affirmed, pulling silverware out of the drawer. “And we’ll save some for Ula.”
Feeling still slightly dazed from Laura’s revelation and suddenly exhausted from the past few nights of no sleep, Elise grabbed the greasy plate of bacon and followed them outside.
6
THE BALL OF ANGER in Neil’s chest was growing like a gradually inflating balloon. It gave him heartburn and took away his appetite. At night, it blocked his sleep for hours on end. And when finally he did doze off it gave him fitful, hyper-realistic dreams. He had been drawn into the all-American world of products and lowest common denominators that he had for so long despised, and then, on the ugly, corrupt terms of this greed-driven environment, he had been fucked. Not only by a vindictive and crazy woman he had been sleeping with, but also by…how was he supposed to even think of Jenny—an old friend? An ex-girlfriend? The mother of his baby?
It was impossible that Galena’s actions were unknown to Jenny. She was Galena’s boss, after all, and a control freak of the first order. She was also Jenny. The ludicrousness and injustice of her involvement in this debacle was appalling. Objectively. It had cost him not only his job but his dignity, and the one worthwhile creative idea he had had in the last ten years. The Sphinx became more and more beautiful, more and more brilliant and appealing as it receded from his grasp. To have squandered it in a stupid computer game! To have had to relinquish control of it—its milky threads of DNA, its careful symbolic heritage, its secrets. It should have been—what? A book? An artwork? The subject of some thought-provoking article? Something more meaningful and more his.
At two a.m. Neil was wide awake and sweating in the tangle of sheets he had scavenged out of Johnson’s rudimentary linen closet. The moon was bright and full and shone through the tiny cracks of the venetian blinds with a splintery boldness. He had been up since five a.m. He had walked all the way to Roslindale in his brooding deliberations this afternoon. Didn’t he deserve to sleep? The echo of the language that had so galled him on the Setlan commercial registered ironically. He was no better than your average American asshole, thinking about what he “deserved.”
He kicked off the covers and sat bolt upright. Even Albert Sorenson Jones had never had trouble sleeping. And Jones was a twisted individual.
Neil stepped into his jeans, pulled on a T-shirt, and went out.
He did not know where he was going at first. Just out onto the street, which was as empty and, this being Boston, as shut down as a party bus on New Year’s Day. So when he found himself in his car and driving west, he could still think, on one level, that he had no plan—just escape. Escape, escape, and escape. This was a ruse he kept up all the way to Wellesley, listening to an old Nick Cave CD he found on the floor of his car. It was warmer than he had realized and he kept the windows open and let the air howl through the car. When he turned onto Belleview Road he turned the music off. The gig was up. He was not just driving. He had driven here.
He pulled the car over to the side of the road, exactly where he had left it on his last little trespassing walkabout, and started up the drive on foot. The vision taking shape in his head was an act of vandalism: he would slit the tires of Jenny’s car or scratch something hateful on that pretentiously grand McMansion door. But then, emerging into the open expanse of damp, impossibly even lawn, he saw it: an open window at the far corner of the house.
And it beckoned to him, presenting the deeper blackness within alluringly, a secret to be plumbed. He had never broken into anything before, but it seemed astonishingly simple. Why hadn’t he? Neil crossed the lawn to the window, which opened over an empty flower bed, the earth freshly turned and mulched and redolent of sticky, fermenting pine chips. There was a screen, of course, but, breathing rapidly, blood pounding in his face and adrenaline coursing through his veins, Neil took the penknife from his key chain and sliced into this fiercely. It was harder than it looked, cutting a screen. He sawed away as if his life depended on it, expecting, at any moment, an alarm to go off. But there was nothing except the tinny squeak and scrape of his knife. Finally he managed to cut and tear enough of the screen away that he could reach in and slide the window all the way open. In a burst of unfamiliar strength he ripped the remainder of the screen away and hoisted himself up onto the sill, stuck his upper body inside, and pulled himself through.
He had entered the dining room. A formal table stretched out long and shiny in the moonlight. At the far end of the room there was a hideous framed modern painting—something full of sterile, geometric blocks.
There was a part of Neil that expected, at any moment, to see Jenny—that hoped, almost, to see her. He was so charged on anger and adrenaline he felt himself to be in a position of righteousness, even here, having broken into the sanctified and private terrain of her house. But she did not appear. He stood for a few long moments in that dining room listening and waiting, but there was nothing, just the oppressive buzz of closely attended silence.
He made his way through this and across a large, empty living room into the front hall, with its arched stairway and second-floor balustrade.
A giant chandelier glittered faintly in reflected moonlight and Neil could see the dark shape of himself in a mirror on the opposite wall. He averted his eyes.
There was no squeak or groan of the stairs—the carpeting was thick and the boards beneath it new and probably treated with some rubbery and invincible synthetic that made them give under his weight. At the top of the stairs he stopped again, trying to listen. And there was a great relief that came with the ascent of the animal in him—a muting of all the garbage that usually filled his mind. Just basic instincts, purity of purpose.
And what was his purpose? He did not ask himself this. He did not tell himself this. But somewhere, in his journey through the house, it had taken shape in his mind. Unnameable and profound. He was here to reclaim what was his.
Stepping lightly on the sides of his feet, muscles taut, heart still pounding, Neil started down the hall. The door at the end of this was partway open and he knew instinctively what this was: the master bedroom. This was not where his business lay. It was the door to the left of this and closer to the stairs that he was looking for. There was, it turned out, an obvious marker on it: a pillow embroidered with the words “Baby Sleeping,” hanging from the knob. He paused for a moment, listening to some sort of soothing electronic rush coming from within.
And then he opened the door—twisted the shiny brass knob and stepped in.
Immediately there was the palpable energy of another human being—a charge of breath and sentience in the air. In the darkness, the obscure shapes of stuffed animals, a beanbag chair, a rocker, took on a shadowy dignity.
There was a movement in the crib—a rustle of fabric and slight crackle of mattress. It sent a jolt of excitement and panic through Neil. What if the baby began crying? For some reason he had not considered this.
But the baby didn’t. Slowly, carefully, Neil approached the crib, which was in the darkest corner of the room. At first he could not even make out which end of the little bundle was the baby’s head, but as his eyes adjusted he could see the round, bald slope of it, the little hands clasped as if in prayer before his face.
And looking down at him, he was filled with a kind of wonderment. Out of some small sampling of his genetic material had come this fully formed little being, who would someday grow up just like everyone else and become a man. As he stared at the little legs encased in the soft cotton of the baby’s sleeper suit, at the little dignified, peaceful face, he felt the pull of some strong attachment. He wanted to know what this little body felt like: he wanted to hold him like a father holds his son.
Gingerly, he reached his hands into the crib, slid them around the baby’s back. It did not matter, he realized, if the baby cried. He had to hold him. It was the only thing that mattered right now. He had to know what holding his baby felt like.
And somehow, miraculously, the baby did not wake. He grunted and frowned in Neil’s awkward clutch, and stretched one little arm up over his head, but he did not cry. It felt, at first, terrifying: the lightness of his body, the fragility of the little limbs. But gradually, as Neil held him, he became more accustomed to this. Began, even, to feel there was a contagious buoyancy to the baby, as if his lightness gave them both an ability to rise. With growing confidence, Neil edged toward the rocking chair.
Once he was seated, he could really look at the baby. It was evident, right away, how much the boy looked like Jenny. The tilt of his little nose, the wide-set eyes, even the dark hair, which already gave a hint of being curly. But there was, Neil thought, a grain of himself in the straight little mouth and the chin. He hoped, it struck him suddenly, he had not given him much more. The boy would be much better served by inheriting Jenny’s uncynical view of the world and unquestioning taste for success. In fact, he would be better served also by her hearty disposition, athletic ability, and social skills. Jenny’s way of life was not one that Neil admired. It was not a way of life he had faith in. But it was a lucky one to be born into.
And with this, the question of what the hell he was doing here, in the baby’s room, reappeared in his head. He had arrived compelled by the impulse to get back at Jenny. To punish her for everything she had done and everything she was. For all she stood for and all she had taken from him. But did he…? Had he come in to…?
He had not considered the flesh-and-blood fact of this baby, now sleeping so sweetly in his arms: that he could cry, that he would need to eat—what did he even eat anyway? breast milk? bottled milk? oatmeal and bananas?—that he would need his mother. Above all. Below him the baby’s little fist clenched and unclenched in his sleep. He was a baby, not a Sphinx, not some transparent catalog of DNA. Not a belonging. And meanwhile, he, Neil Banks, despiser of all things material, of the American obsession with property, of the bare-bones mine-and-yours attitude capitalism spawned, had come here to steal his child. The realization of his hypocrisy was like a physical blow. He had come with the vague urge to protect the child—from what? The answer presented itself clearly at once: he needed to protect his baby from himself.
It was in the middle of this horrifying recognition that the baby began to cry. The first bleat from his mouth sent a bolt of adrenaline through Neil. After this first noise the baby stopped short and stared up at him, his dark eyes—huge now that they were open—seeming to be taking in the very essence of Neil. Neil tried, shakily, to smile. But to his dismay this made the baby cry in earnest, a real bloodcurdling howl that squinched his face up into an angry ball. And with this, Neil’s calm, come-what-may attitude left him. He had to ditch this angry, howling little being and get the hell out. But how? The baby writhed and arched his back and Neil practically had to wrestle him into submission as he scrambled up out of the chair in a blind effort to put him back into the crib.
In his moment of hesitation (was it inhumane to put down a screaming baby? had he somehow injured him? or was his shaky smile simply an intrinsically terrifying thing?) Jenny appeared.
She screamed when she saw him—a guttural, instinctive cry every bit as horrible as the baby’s wails.
“It’s me—Jenny, it’s Neil. It’s okay—it’s okay,” he began babbling, holding out the baby, whose howls literally felt as though they might kill him. “Take him, take him—I just—I didn’t do anything, he just started—”
Jenny grabbed the boy, wild-eyed, and pressed him against her shoulder and began murmuring soothingly into his ear and bobbing up and down, walking toward the door. Neil stood frozen beside the crib, listening to the faint murmur of her voice. What the fuck was he doing? Should he just leave? Clear the hell out and run for cover? But this would put his actions in not only a bizarre, but a malevolent light. And he had never wanted to harm the baby. He needed to explain this.
Jenny’s footsteps approached again from the far end of the hall, and wherever she had gone, whatever she had done, had calmed the baby down. He was still on her shoulder, wide-eyed, looking around incredulously.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Jenny hissed.
“I’m sorry.” Neil shifted his weight. “I’m wrong. I’m totally in the wrong.”
Jenny gave him a wincing, incredulous look at the understatement. In her fuzzy terry-cloth robe, with her wildly curly hair down, she looked young, like a teenager, or even a little girl. It was unnerving. In his mind she had become a giant—hard and impervious, perpetually in makeup and a business suit.
“But what are you doing?” she said.
“I just wanted to—” Neil became suddenly extremely, dangerously tired. Where to begin his explanation? “I wanted to see the baby,” he said finally.
“To see him?” Jenny repeated. She hugged the baby’s head to her. “Why didn’t you just call? Or email?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to hear from me.” It came out sounding peevish, pathetic even.
“I’d rather hear from you than find you standing in my son’s bedroom in the middle of the night,” she hissed.
There was nothing to say to this.
“I call
ed the police,” Jenny said.
It was logical, of course, but the knowledge settled over Neil with a crushing heaviness. He crouched down and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes.
“Are you okay?” Jenny asked. There was an edge of panic in her voice.
Neil nodded. It was silent for a moment—the thick rush of electronic white noise filling the air around them like some heavier medium than oxygen. For a moment he and Jenny regarded each other through the darkness like strangers. But beneath this he could feel the deep-down movement of the past—faint slides of their former selves playing against the rock wall that had risen between them. They had known each other in a more innocent time—had glimpsed and consorted with each other’s more hopeful and promising selves.
“You know I lost my job,” he said impulsively.
“You…?” Jenny blanched visibly. “On account of that email?”
Neil nodded.
Jenny had been leaning against the doorframe, and at this she slid down until she was sitting on the floor, back propped against the wall, baby now sleeping in her arms.
And to Neil’s great surprise, she started to cry. Her shoulders shook and a kind of gentle hum escaped from her mouth, but as far as he could see she was tearless. There was a kind of violence to her crying that made sense. Somehow, the baby remained asleep.
“Shit,” he said, squatting down and resting his own forehead, for a moment, on his palms. He could hear Jenny’s shoulders shaking against the wall.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her face bowed, buried against the soft bulk of the baby on her shoulder. “I was going to say something tomorrow—I should have done it earlier.”
Her voice sounded muffled, small, un-Jenny-like. It was almost eerie. And deeply unnerving.
“Where’s Jeremy?” Neil asked. “Are you alone here?”
“Jeremy?” Jenny asked, raising her face. “He’s doped up. You could set the smoke alarm off and he wouldn’t hear.”
Perfect Life Page 26
