Well, it was too late to take back now. Spilt milk.
She opened the door in front of her and came into the workshop where instruments were made, a large, airy room with the peppery scent of sawdust. There were lathes and benches, chisels scattered on rough shelves. Two pallet beds, laid for the guests, looked oafish beside a row of delicate violin tops and shawms. In one corner, an apprentice boy perched on a sawhorse; Emilia’s maid Mary and the baby’s nurse stood beside a bassinet, which the nurse was rocking gently with one foot. The bassinet’s sides were shallow, and Emilia could see the baby’s pink face, his fishy mouth that gaped asymmetrically in sleep.
Mary and the nurse made hasty, fumbled curtseys. The apprentice hopped off the sawhorse. The thump woke the infant and he peeped and struggled in his swaddling, jerking like a jumping bean. He still had the wizened appearance of newborns and shockingly clear black eyes. Emilia was terrified by his fragility. Her baby: a thing that couldn’t be undone.
Then he squalled, and Emilia’s milk let down: a peculiar wash of helplessness, her body obeying a command not hers. There was the soaking of her chest, the warm wet shame of it. She was wearing an old, loose gown that already smelled faintly of mildew. Now of milk. She glanced down before she could stop herself, and the women’s faces changed.
Then a clatter outside and the actor, Sad Will, appeared behind her in the doorway.
Their eyes met again. Then the change went through her like a shiver. She knew him. She felt it like setting her bare foot into ice water. He was real. All around him was a dream, but he was real.
Then her heart changed three times. First for him, who alone here was real and must suffer somehow from loneliness. Second for the baby, who was only a figment, who was made by the man’s reality into nothing but a baby in a dream. Third for this world that was passing. That was gone. It went black in her eyes, and she felt it in the skin of her palms, an electric jolt as Emilia gasped and was Kate who grasped at air.
She woke next to Ben, in the half-light of dawn, in their bedroom—which was subtly changed. A pair of blue men’s sneakers she’d never seen before were toppled on the floor by the bed. There was a prescription vial on the nightstand for a medication whose name she didn’t recognize, although the label said it was hers. Her drawings on the walls that had previously been of bears were now of neat brown horses. Where the curtains had been, there were Venetian blinds; this impressed her the most because the blinds were ugly and plastic. They were something Kate wouldn’t have had.
But most things were the same. Her arms looked the same. It was the same room and Ben was the same.
She almost woke Ben to show him the changes. But of course they wouldn’t be changes to him. He was a Ben who’d had a different past, a past where Kate had drawn horses not bears, where she would have cheap plastic blinds. Ben would never understand. He would never believe. Only Kate was from Kate’s past.
Then she lay for a long time trying to understand. She remembered the feeling of blackness, the static, her voice that felt like power. She had felt the change. It had the brightness of a paper cut. It didn’t feel as if it could have been wrong. But she was obviously changing history. That was what it was. And, looked at objectively, Will had guilt-tripped Emilia into doing him a favor and what that made was a New York where Kate had ugly blinds and took some medication, a small degeneration in the world.
Ben woke an hour later and found Kate staring, sitting up in bed. When he asked her if anything was wrong, she said, “What if you had a chance to save the world?”
He said sleepily, “I guess you should do it.”
“But what if, in order to save it, you had to run the risk of making it worse?”
“That would be bad. That would be a tough position. So I guess it’s just as well you can’t save the world.”
She laughed but looked a little misunderstood. “I guess.”
“What’s this about? Did you have a bad dream?”
“I wouldn’t say it was bad. I had a dream.”
Then he asked her to tell him about the dream, but she only grimaced and shook her head. So he told her the dream he’d had, instead, about a Chinese kingdom where the children were slaves, and he and Kate were children. In the dream, the children had one task. They were painting the white sky blue. It was a blue that had never existed before, a shade of blue so pure it made the children blind, and the blue was heaven.
11
For Ben, the strange phenomena began the day they went to Martin’s house in Brooklyn and were quietly amazed by the size of the place, which was Victorian and big enough to be a haunted house; it had a backyard with trees and overgrown grass and a homemade swing; it was a house in which to raise ten children. The interior had already been made pristine by a high-end contractor. Fresh painted, it smelled white. In some places, the paint smell was oddly cavernous; it made the lack of furniture spooky. Then Martin, when he stood close enough, had the stuffy, intimate smell of wine.
Martin talked and talked while he showed them the house; inconsequential chatter, though his voice sometimes had an odd honking tone, the sound of a strained depressiveness. He never mentioned the baby (as Ben kept noticing); instead he talked about his new gardening client, who’d insisted on buying a jacaranda for a climate that would kill it stone dead, and had purchased five ornamental boulders without consulting Martin and today just emailed Martin a photo of a Japanese sand garden with the comment: Instead of lawn? “He’ll end up living in a gravel pit with a single dead tree in the middle. Fine, if he wants to live in a post-apocalyptic sandbox, more power to him. Except that it’ll have my name on it. So I have to fight him tooth and nail, he has to acquiesce to a beautiful garden … And this is the kitchen, though I don’t know when I’m going to cook. I might lie naked on the tiles. Come, feel.” (Martin crouched down to stroke the tiles, and Ben and Kate crouched down obediently and copied him. The tiles did have a satisfying stony chill.) “I’ve never had sex on tile,” said Martin. “Have you ever had sex on tile?” Then Martin’s cell phone rang, and he stood up and transformed into an adult. His posture changed and the expression on his face. He was authoritative and sensible. He was discussing quotes for bamboo. Then he hung up the phone and sighed. “Work is driving me mad. I’d like to just become a Canada goose and fly north. Shall we go see the upstairs?”
For Ben, this all had a sinister feeling, the feeling of a darker time about to begin. He kept thinking he shouldn’t have pushed Kate to get a job. How could he protect her here? He tried to catch Kate’s eye, but she was cheerful and oblivious, enjoying the house and liking everything Martin said.
This continued through the upstairs rooms, at which Martin gestured carelessly, saying, “Bedroom. Other bedroom. Clearly that’s a bathroom.” But then he paused outside a door and said, “Now, you have to be nice about this. I wasn’t sure I was even going to show you this,” and he opened the door to the nursery.
It was the only furnished room, though the furniture had all been gathered in the center of the room to leave space to paint the wall. There was a crib and a double bed (made) and a dresser and two standing lamps that Martin immediately went to switch on, although it was a bright afternoon and he hadn’t turned on any lights before. He nodded at the bed. “I’m sleeping there. I started sleeping there last night.”
Kate said, “There’s really no need to furnish the rest of the house.”
“Exactly.” Martin smiled, comforted. “I just don’t know that I will.”
“It needs stuffed animals,” Ben said, trying to enter into the spirit of things.
“Yes,” said Martin. “I’ve asked everyone to buy him-her a stuffed animal. So each stuffed animal is someone’s good wish? And the room will be full of all these animal blessings.”
Kate laughed out of pleasure, a very Katish thing to do, and Martin grinned, though his body was still tense.
“What stuffed animal should we get?” said Ben.
“A seal?” Martin said. “I
like seals. Little babies are a little like seals.”
Kate said, “It’ll be amazing to have a real baby. A real live person.”
“Shit,” said Martin. “I’m terrified. But what if you could make one person happy? That’s what I keep thinking. I’d do that, and that would be enough somehow.”
“What if?” said Ben, and it came out sour.
Martin and Kate looked at him: Martin with a frightened expression, Kate scowling. Ben said, “Just speaking as a person with terrible parents.”
Martin nodded nervously and looked away. “I know. It’s fucking impossible. Even if I were perfect—and I’m well aware I’m not—there’s the world. There are so many things in this world that can make a little person unhappy. Not to mention killing him.”
“I feel as if the world’s getting worse,” Kate said. “Is it me, or has the world gotten worse?”
“It’s worse,” said Ben.
There was a minute of silence, then Martin said, “Jackie’s making a mobile. But I don’t know, I find mobiles creepy? I suppose because they remind me of childhood. I had a terrible childhood too.” He looked at Ben. “Do you find them creepy?”
“A little,” said Ben, in a deliberately friendly tone. “But I think what’s creepy is imagining the mobile alone in the room, still moving. Like it’s thinking.”
“Like a baby,” Kate suggested. “When you think of a baby alone in a room.”
“Well, that’s okay,” said Martin. “Because my baby isn’t ever going to be alone.”
Then he switched off the lamps and took them downstairs to open another bottle of wine.
That whole visit was scary (to Ben, not Kate, who said Martin would be a great father, and when Ben cited Sabine saying Martin was an alcoholic, Kate said, “Sabine never said that, I don’t believe it,” and they almost got into a fight on the train) but that wasn’t the strange thing. That came later that night.
They’d gone to see the movie Il Padrone, which hadn’t aged well, or so Ben thought as he torpidly watched, although the scenes of Rome were beautiful and it was somehow comforting to look at so many Italians. So Ben thought, nodding off in his seat: he would like to live in Italy and look at Italians.
Then, as they left the cinema, Kate said, “Is there any way a person could spontaneously learn Italian?”
“I know,” Ben said. “I want to learn Italian too. That movie made me want to move to Italy.”
“But there isn’t any way, is there? Just to learn it spontaneously? Without studying?”
“We could study. Though I think this urge will pass.”
“But if you hadn’t studied,” said Kate impatiently—uncharacteristically impatiently. “What would that mean, if you suddenly knew Italian?”
They were on the street by then, and a truck was passing with an overwhelming roar that made Ben feel unsure and windblown. He stopped walking, and Kate turned back to him, her face upset. When the truck had passed, he said, “Hold on, you think you suddenly know Italian?”
“I understood most of the movie. I mean, I wasn’t reading the subtitles after a while.”
“Well, I guess Italian’s similar to French.”
“But you know French. And you didn’t understand the movie.”
“Well, I guess I’m not as smart as you. What do you want me to say?”
“I thought it might be a thing that happens to people. I thought you might have heard of it.”
“Only as a symptom of schizophrenia.” When Kate flinched, Ben added hastily, “I know you don’t have schizophrenia. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t think it was schizophrenia. I thought it was just knowing Italian.” Kate shrugged and turned away, and in a car’s passing headlights he saw her profile, strained and unhappy. He followed, although he didn’t want to follow. The thing was, he didn’t believe her. It must be an affectation, at least in part; you couldn’t spontaneously learn Italian. At the same time, he was envious because he didn’t spontaneously know Italian. You could count on Kate to be more magical than you, to have to be more magical. Everything about it got on his nerves.
Now she said, in an odd, strained voice, “I was thinking of getting a flute, but now I’m afraid I’ll be able to play it.”
“A flute?”
“It’s from … It was something I dreamed. I thought I might be learning things in my sleep.”
“What? You think you learned Italian in your sleep? ’Cause I feel pretty confident that didn’t happen.”
Abruptly, she put both hands to her face. She was crying. It happened too fast; he couldn’t stop being angry. He wanted to comfort her, but violently. He wanted to comfort her by saying, Would you stop this shit?
She said, and her voice was frightened, “Maybe you should break up with me.”
“Don’t break up with me,” he said hoarsely. “How did we get to breaking up? Don’t say that.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“So don’t hurt me. What is this about?”
Then she reached to him, and he took her in his arms. He held her hard; it was a kind of collapse. Her face wet on his neck. He’d shut his eyes, and the adrenaline felt like sex, like he’d never felt love like this. It was awful. It was the relationship he didn’t want to have.
She said in his ear, “It’ll be all right. Forget I ever said anything. It’s all right.”
The next weird thing was about José Morales, the golden boy of their political crowd. José was an ex–Navy SEAL, now getting a PhD in public policy at Columbia, two features that were enough, in combination with his affable, regular-guy demeanor, to make him a rising star of the left. In particular, the SEAL thing made him holy; everybody treated him with a certain deference, even though the Guatemalan intervention in which he’d fought had been loudly opposed by those same people and quietly condemned by José himself. Still, he was a Real Man. He’d hazarded his small life. He was bison shaped; his nose had been broken at some point; he had calluses on his knuckles from boxing—but he was just plain nice. Remained polite in the face of anything, of Sabine’s worst. He didn’t have to prove anything—that was the subtext—but this implied (Ben thought) that the thing you had to prove was a capacity for violence. You got a pass for being a decent human being if you had enough blood on your hands.
Ben had had an embarrassing first meeting with José at a benefit dinner where they were seated together. José had assumed Ben was Latino, as Latino people often did, and was liberally peppering his conversation with Spanish. This annoyed Ben more than it should have, and he said suddenly, rudely, “I don’t speak Spanish,” which wasn’t even true.
José said sympathetically, “Your parents didn’t speak Spanish at home?”
“No,” Ben answered truthfully.
“Mine didn’t either. I picked a little up from mis abuelos, but I had to learn the rest on my own as an adult. My parents were that generation: assimilate, assimilate, assimilate. I guess, yours too?”
“My dad isn’t Latino,” Ben said truthfully. “So …”
“It’s not that hard to learn.”
Then José launched into the story of how he’d learned Spanish, which involved night classes in which he’d struggled, then a breakthrough during a trip to Mexico to visit extended family where José got blackout drunk and delivered a diatribe in Spanish against the US military to a group of relatives who’d finally dissolved in helpless giggles, both because of his terrible Spanish and because they’d wasted so much breath telling José not to join the military, and he’d ignored them so long he’d ended up as a freaking Navy SEAL. “I was like a perfect storm of hypocrisy. But I speak Spanish now,” José said, which should have been likable.
But the story’s sheer length meant it was now too late for Ben to come clean about not being Latino. This had the result that Ben’s ethnicity became a ticking time bomb whenever José was in the room. Ben blamed José for this, because what fucking idiot assumes your ethnicity? How did Ben become the bad guy here?
After that, José seemed to be everywhere; Ben even once looked out his window at work and spotted José below with a group of Hispanic women, all talking and laughing, with picket signs parked across their shoulders that were clearly in Spanish although they weren’t legible from this height, and Ben felt an irrational twinge for turning his back on his (nonexistent) Hispanic heritage. It was like something from a meaningless dream. Another sighting that struck Ben with the force of a dream or a premonition was at an inauguration party—not at Sabine’s place, but in an uptown club, with deafening music and strangers, so there shouldn’t have been any risk of José. In fact, who Ben saw first was Oksana, in her underwear, stridently pregnant, her white-blond hair standing up like a flame. She was talking passionately to a good-looking man who turned out to be José. She was gripping his shirt front with one hand, and her white belly glowed like a light bulb, was weirdly smooth like an ostrich egg. An ostrich light bulb. And they fit together and seemed to mean something, as if they were conspirators meeting in the cover of the crowd. A meaningless dream; a bad, bad dream: so Ben felt, and left the party early.
One night in bed, Ben confided these feelings to Kate—with some trepidation, aware of his own small-mindedness and envy, and conscious of the risk she had a crush on José, as most straight women and gay men did. He was prepared for a kick in the teeth.
He wasn’t prepared when Kate said, “José? I don’t think I know a José.”
It couldn’t be true. José was always at Sabine’s. Ben and Kate had eaten breakfast with José at least once, which Kate now said she didn’t remember, which couldn’t be true. You didn’t forget José; it wasn’t in the range of human responses to forget José.
Ben let that pass, though, and launched into his grievances, assuming Kate would presently remember, or admit she remembered, who José was. However, Kate only looked increasingly puzzled. At last she said, “But why would anyone admire him for being in the army? That can’t be a thing.”
The Heavens Page 7
