In the Flesh

by Hilma Wolitzer

But Howard wasn’t thinking bad thoughts. He wasn’t eying those carefree young men at the Speedy Checkout, who were buying porterhouse steaks and a bottle of grenadine. In my purse was the shopping list, the items I had forgotten written in at the bottom in his own touchingly broad and childish hand. Light bulbs, Drano, soap. And then, Do you know I love you? I would tear that part off later and preserve it between the pages of a book.

  He hummed and whistled to the awful piped-in music as if it didn’t assault his professional ear. We worked like a relay team, passing the items from the cart to the rolling counter, carrying the bags and the baby to the car, where Howard took my hand on an impulse of love and pressed it against his face.’

  And yet there can never be enough proof, enough assurance. “Do you love me?” I found myself asking Howard on Monday morning. I felt a little guilty even as I said it. It wasn’t original or witty, two of the things I had promised myself I’d be. But Howard didn’t mind. He rolled against me in bed, and I arranged myself to his contours—a perfect fit! Anyway, it was impossible to be more creative so early in the day, and not to speak in the smug, familiar rhetoric of lovers. “Do you love me? When did you first know? Am I really beautiful?”

  In a few minutes he would have to get up and go to work. But in the meantime it was enough to just lie there, delivered from sleep, and repeat our ritual of homage. It worked both ways, that was the wonderful thing. I was the best and Howard was the best. We outdid one another in the generosity of our praise. Who could have invented better lovers, a sweeter cock, a more warming fire? Ah, love, its saintly tolerance for imperfection!

  Our baby (who was sleeping later than usual this morning) wasn’t so perfect either. In the first spring of his life, he had developed a crusty eczema in his hairline. Nothing in itself, we were told, but sometimes the precursor of other things: severe allergies, even asthma. After breast-feeding, we experimented with goat’s milk and exotic mixtures of soybeans and green bananas, until things began to look better.

  But that was only the beginning. A few months later we noticed that Jason’s feet turned out, like Chaplin’s. An orthopedic device called a Brownie Bar was prescribed for night use. It was a straight metal strip welded to a pair of open-toed baby shoes, and it was guaranteed to train Jason’s feet in the right path.

  What next? we wondered, and we didn’t have to wait long to find out. One navy-blue eye began to slide furtively out of focus, moving restlessly toward his nose and back again. Howard was very upset, even after the doctor promised that it would correct itself eventually, that there were exercises to speed up correction, that it was only a weak muscle. The idea of an additional weakness in someone already so vulnerable was staggering. Who had passed on this weakness anyway? For which of his own sins was Howard being so deviously repaid? For car-fucking? For pubescent lust for his own sister? For eating bad hot dogs at ballgames? For not remembering dead grandparents who had predicted on deathbeds that they would not be remembered? Suddenly there was only human responsibility for everything that happens.

  “We never had those things in our family,” my mother said.

  “Listen, it’s nothing to worry about,” I told Howard, about Jason’s latest flaw, but I wasn’t so crazy about it myself, and preferred to admire him asleep or turned to favor his better profile.

  And now he was asleep in the next room, which had easily been converted from a junior dinette to a cozy nursery. Howard made the first tentative signs of leaving the bed.

  “Don’t go,” I said, holding on with a stranglehold, pinning him down with my weight.

  “I have to,” he murmured, but he didn’t move any farther.

  My hand explored under the covers and found him. “Ah, Dr. Livingstone!” I said. “I would know you anywhere.”

  “Don’t start that now,” Howard said without conviction. “You know I have to go to work.”

  “Think of this as your work,” I said.

  “It’s getting late,” he warned, but his body betrayed him and his voice was heavy with desire.

  We moved in concert to the center of the bed, locked together like Peabody dancers. Oh, my mother was all wrong; the first flush of passion doesn’t die like a vampire in a blaze of sunlight. This bed was an even more magical vehicle than a car. And the magic of anatomy—that rosy rising, tongues seeking refuge, all the oiled and meshing gears of pleasure.

  Afterward, we lay like the dazed victims of a train wreck until Howard stirred.

  “Don’t move. Stay here for just a minute.”

  “Sweet love, I have to.”

  “Half a minute, then.”

  “My beautiful white valley,” Howard murmured, his voice coming muffled.

  “My little stand-up comic,” I said to the creature retreating now into its dark nest of hair.

  After a while, Howard lifted my arms gently to release himself, softening the shock of separation with a series of light kisses. “I’ll check the baby,” he said, and I smiled, poised on the edge of sleep as he left the bed. Oh, that goodness of his, that dogged loyalty. I dozed.

  But what if all his relationships earned that kind of devotion? I thought of Renee, Howard’s first wife, and my eyes opened. She was certainly still in our lives, calling up to ask advice or just to say hello. How could he ever have become attracted to her in the first place? It could only have been her pathos, I decided, because Renee isn’t Howard’s type at all. She’s little, her flesh is stringy and pale. She has large, light freckles everywhere, as if she can’t decide to be one color or another. But he had married her anyway, hadn’t he?

  And his mother still lived on the unguarded border of our neighborhood. She loved him with an unnatural love. Those were her very words. On another occasion she said that he was her whole life. What was I supposed to say to that? She was his mother, after all, and this was Queens, N.Y., in broad modern daylight, not the portentous gloom of Greek tragedy. His mother was little too. Howard could lift her with one hand, something she demanded he do from time to time to demonstrate that phenomenon of the child outgrowing the parent. Howard was clearly embarrassed, but his mother insisted. Alley-oop! And she was in midair, smiling professionally and with her arms outstretched like Sonja Henie’s. Defying gravity and all the laws of decency.

  God, there were so many threats. And far outside our own harmony, there was discord and violence. Every morning we read the newspaper and discovered terrible brutal acts had been committed while we slept, during our very dreams. Even in our building, people wrote obscene threats on the elevator walls. Women quarreled about whose turn it was in the bakery, and children tried to bury one another in the sandbox.

  The couple next door were always fighting. The walls were so porous that their battles sifted into our living room. The paintings trembled and shifted, lampshades danced, and glassware chimed in the cupboards. It was like listening to the radio when we were children, to the Lux Radio Theater of the Air, when the visual part was always left to the imagination.

  Howard and I were so glad to be alone together in the evening after the baby was asleep, but our neighbors’ voices insisted on our attention, demanded we be the audience to their drama. “You bastard, you’re ruining my life!” the woman next door shouted.

  Howard would go to the adjoining wall and bang a warning with his fist. “There’s a baby asleep in here!” he’d say, and there would be a small silent pause before they would begin again.

  I couldn’t understand it. Why did they stay together? They didn’t even have children to bind them. And they were older than we were: was this a little preview of what was to come? I wondered if they had ever been like Howard and me. How close was passion to violence anyway? If I heard that couple cry out in climax, would I be able to tell the difference? “I’m scared,” I told Howard, feeling like a small, unarmed country.

  Howard turned up the volume of the stereo, canceling out our neighbors’ war cries with love songs. “Don’t listen,” he said, and we danced in a close reassuring embrace,
thinking, it’s all right, it can’t happen here.

  Now I could hear Howard moving and singing in the nursery. I padded inside. The baby was on his dressing table and he crowed with happiness at the sight of our faces bobbing and looming into his tenuous field of vision. Mommy and Daddy, those two good giants.

  The small room stank of urine and spit-up milk. Howard was unpinning a soaked diaper, while Jason kicked his locked feet high, the Brownie Bar catching fire from an arrow of sunlight.

  “See, he’s happy,” I said. “Stop looking at him as if he’s the man in the iron mask.”

  “Hey there,” Howard said, wiggling Gulliver’s finger until it was taken in the astonishing grasp of that tiny fist, and held.

  I touched each of them with one of my own hands, so that we formed a small, imperishable circle.

  5

  SHERRY CAME TO VISIT in the afternoon. She brought a toy for the baby that had been made by an artist friend of hers in the Village. It had sharp edges and the paint looked like the kind that would flake right off. I made some insincere remarks and then I put it on a high shelf in Jason’s room.

  “God, I love it in here,” she said, taking in the Boy-Blue night-light, the Disney decals, and a newly folded stack of tiny garments.

  Did she mean it? Sherry had always insisted that the only worthwhile aspects of human existence were adventure and mystery. “We know how it all ends,” she said. “So we need the uncertainty of day-to-day experience to distract us.” That philosophy certainly precluded marriage with its built-in predictability. She was going to try everything else once, and hardly anything twice, if she could help it. Right before Jason was born, Sherry had a life-threatening abortion in Havana. Now she had obtained a couple of guaranteed local contacts, one in New York and the other in New Hope, Pennsylvania. It was hard for me to imagine her decorating a nursery corner in her apartment with its floor pillows and beaded curtains and death-wish colors. It was even harder for me to imagine maternal longings in that narrow, armored breast. Everything about her spoke against it: the long, protective fingernails, for instance, all that heavy, aggressive-looking jewelry she wore, and her bang-shadowed eyes that always seemed troubled with ingrown thoughts. A child of hers might have to settle for Purina Cat Chow instead of Gerber’s lamb and macaroni dinner. When the kid passed away from malnutrition or began to grow fur and whiskers, Sherry would be dragged off to jail, with her mother in the background wailing, “I don’t know how this happened. I raised her to be a good mother.”

  But Sherry didn’t even really like children. Right now she wasn’t looking at the sleeping Jason himself, only at the things in his environment. I chose to believe her anyway and to encourage her admiration and envy of us. After all, wasn’t this far better than her life in that tiny, dark studio room shared from time to time with a restive lover?

  Sherry always hinted at bizarre goings-on out there, of new dimensions of pleasure forbidden to ordinary housewives, of brand-new sexual acts, involving rubber bands or ice cubes, that were being invented on the hour. Didn’t I want to know? But I felt too complacent about my own capacity for invention, about Howard’s, to pay much attention. And besides, Sherry tended to exaggerate. The “terrific apartments” she always found for herself or for friends were usually dismal, roach-infested firetraps. And the men she bragged about sounded much better than they turned out to be: dark-eyed poets who read with the resonance of Dylan Thomas but who couldn’t publish, distinguished-looking married executives who wanted to have it both ways, and unemployed actors, for whom she washed underwear and socks. Her mother was desperate for Sherry to settle down and in her anxiety even used me as a dubious example of good behavior. She would have preferred marriage and then pregnancy, in that orthodox order, but at least I was more normal than her own crazy daughter. Strange men answered Sherry’s telephone during the day when her mother called; men with names as blunt and short as their capacity for allegiance: Max, Jake, Al. Her mother always hung up, stunned and disheartened. But what could she expect from a girl who believed in the influence of the stars more than in the conventions of society—who chose men because they were Taurus with Scorpio rising, rather than because they were eligible and gainfully employed?

  Sherry had offered to do my horoscope. Given the time and place of my birth, she would be able to tell me what was in store for me, how things were being predetermined in the dark reaches of the universe while I was innocently sleeping or eating or making love. But I didn’t believe in astrology, or phrenology, or Tarot cards; only in my own ability to control my own destiny.

  Poor Sherry. Once I might have envied her, the way one envies George Sand or Isadora Duncan or other doomed but independent women.

  Now I was delirious with domesticity. I was like Sherry’s mother, my soul sparkling with silver polish, my pride stiffened with laundry starch. Everything here spoke of stability and trust. Everything in Sherry’s life was shifting, transient. She didn’t even have a permanent job for fear of losing some of her precious freedom. She could have worked, as a schoolteacher, she was licensed, but instead she went out on calls from an employment agency that specialized in temporary office work, and she did horoscope readings on the side.

  I made a tunafish salad for lunch, and I decorated it with radish roses and carrot curls from instructions in the August issue of Family Circle. I threw a batch of homemade cookies into the oven too, but Sherry, used to the poison of pickup meals and cafeteria browsing, hardly noticed. She was one of those people who only played with food. Now she made fork ridges in the tuna and tidy anthills of crumbs with her roll.

  But I ate everything on my plate, starting with polite nibbles, then plunging in because it was delicious and because eating was so pleasurable.

  Some days I woke with an absolute determination to diet, with a head full of cottage cheese and calorie counts. I’d weigh myself ten times in the morning, shifting from one foot to another to give myself the benefit of the doubt. And then, halfway through the day, I’d go under, gobbling up the little pieces of finger food that Jason moved around on his high chair tray like chess pieces. Waste not, want not. On to the refrigerator, where temptation waited with frosty patience, EAT ME, the food said, and I did, growing bigger, just like Alice. Which only proved that eating had almost nothing to do with frustration or unhappiness: I would never have defiant little hips like Sherry’s anyway, even if I starved to death, and, God knows, I needed my strength. Look what I had accomplished already that day and it wasn’t even two o’clock.

  Sherry grew dreamy over coffee. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you have the right idea, after all. Maybe everything else is only marking time. One love. Financial security. A beautiful child. That’s reality.”

  “It’s nice,” I said modestly. “But it doesn’t have the suspense of your life.” I felt I could afford to be generous.

  “That’s true,” Sherry admitted. Only last week a painter had moved in with her, just until he could find a decent studio at a reasonable rent. He was beautiful, she said, a della Robbia cherub, fully grown. He smelled deliciously of turpentine and linseed oil, and his brow was folded with the importance of abstract thought.

  I was taken in by the romantic sound of it. And it wasn’t simply promiscuity if there was only one man at a time, and if it felt like love while it lasted.

  Sherry told me that she posed for her artist sometimes, as an added service. “But you know how that usually ends up,” she said. “Hey, Paulie, that’s something you could do, if you ever want to earn some extra money. At the Brooklyn Museum or the Art Students’ League. They’d love those Mother Earth curves of yours.”

  “Oh, I’d never!” I said, and I felt myself blush.

  Sherry laughed. “Wow, Paulie, you really are into it, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I’m into it,” I said. “What do you mean? Do you think you can have this kind of relationship without absolute commitment?” Did she think I was only playing house?

  �
�And does Howard feel the same way?” she wanted to know. What kind of question was that? If it had come from anyone else, I would have thought it born of malicious envy. But Sherry wasn’t like that. If she was outspoken sometimes, it was because she believed it was in the service of Truth.

  Of course Howard felt the same way. She should have been there that morning, or any morning so far in our marriage. She should have been there at night, when I hung out the window, precariously balanced, waiting for Howard to come home. She should see him running, not walking, across the traffic on 108th Street, just to get back to Jason and me as fast as he could.

  “I only mean it’s difficult for men, I think. They tend to be you know … more … restless.”

  “You can’t generalize like that!” I said. “You’re only speaking from your own experience, with the kind of men you know.”

  “Some of them are married,” she said.

  How had the conversation turned this way, with me defending the life-style she had seemed to covet only a few minutes before? What did she know about marriage anyway, someone whose heart was probably as empty as her refrigerator, someone who could bring a potentially deadly weapon as a gift for a helpless little baby?

  “Especially musicians,” Sherry was saying.

  “What?”

  “Musicians have a special kind of sensuality. For heaven’s sake, Paulie. You know what I mean. It’s one of the first things you said you liked about Howard yourself. And women have been attracted to musicians since the time of King David.”

  “So what?”

  “So, nothing. What’s happening here, anyway? I’m not saying anything about Howard. But have you ever gone with him on one of his club dates, or to those weddings and bar mitzvahs he plays?”

  They called themselves the Fantasy Five. There were more conventional groups around, the ones who blasted the unfortunate wedding guests seated at tables close to the bandstand with old favorites, updated by a Latin beat; the ones who provided shipboard games at bar mitzvahs, where all the guests got to move around the dance floor in an attached line or to pass a balloon among themselves without using hands. The old people still moved to their own drummers in Harvest Moon Ball routines and diagramed two-steps, no matter what the beat, no matter what the message. But more and more young couples liked the sounds of Howard’s combo, those jazzed-up arrangements that cut the sentimentality of old love songs, like “Deep Purple” or “Stardust,” and left in the seduction. It was the music I loved best because it was Howard’s and because it was loaded with the ache of wanting.