Don't Worry About the Kids

by Jay Neugeboren

  The next afternoon Mark cut his office hours short and surprised Janet by coming home at two o’clock. He took the papers he had prepared out of his briefcase, showed them to her, and told her that he had figured out the logistical details. All things were possible, he said. They would each choose one friend with whom, during the twelve months, they would be constantly in touch. Each friend would have the name of the other in a sealed envelope. If any emergency should arise, one friend would open the sealed envelope, notify the other friend, and that friend would notify one of them. He took out their bankbooks and checkbooks and explained to her how they would arrange their finances. They would each use a different travel agent. They would agree, from this point on, not to open or to read each other’s mail, or to look upon each other’s desks. In late May, when classes were out, he would go to New Haven for two weeks, to work at the Beinecke Library, and she could use that time to do whatever could not be done with him present. She would leave the house sometime before his return. He would then come home and would leave one week later. He would notify Amherst College about their plans to be abroad for his sabbatical; they lived in a college-owned house, and the college would take care of it in their absence. He spoke for more than an hour, working from notes, and when he was done speaking she burst into applause and declared him a genius, that rare man who could wed deep feeling and wild invention with practical realities.

  Then, abruptly, she stopped smiling. “But Mark,” she said, her brow furrowed. “There’s something else. I’ve been thinking—are you sure you’re up to this? Are you sure you don’t just want to forget the whole thing?” She looked down. “I wouldn’t mind. Really. I’ve been thinking too, and I can see now that it might be hard on you afterward in a way it might not be on me. I wouldn’t mind. It’s been wonderful to play with the idea, but—”

  He took her in his arms and told her that he would be doing it as much for himself as for her. Hadn’t the idea been his? Hadn’t he worked out all the details? If he did not now put his character to the test he had imagined for it, he would live out the rest of his life, he knew, with the feeling of failure, with the knowledge that he had proven himself inadequate to the demands of his real self, his true dreams. He spoke to her with great intensity and while he spoke she sat across from him on their bed, cross-legged, listening; and when he was done speaking she was kind to him in ways that gave him the courage she kept assuring him he had.

  2

  Now THE YEAR WAS over, and they were across the room from each other, at the first faculty party of the new academic year. While he talked with his colleagues and their wives, and parried their questions with noncommittal answers, he could not keep from grinning, he could not keep from searching out Janet’s sparkling eyes, from thinking of their reunion the night before. She had seemed even younger to him than she had in the weeks preceding their separation. Her body was leaner, her skin smoother, and her hair—her lovely flaxen hair, which she had always worn just past her shoulders—now hung down almost to her waist. That had been her gift to him.

  They had, during their last days together the year before, agreed that although they could not bring home souvenirs or purchases that might in any way reveal a place or an event, they would allow themselves to bring each other a gift, so long as the gift—a test of their ingenuity—was not in any way a clue. His gift to her was the story itself—“The Year Between,” by Mark Goldman—and when she opened the manilla envelope and saw the title page, she had embraced him happily. Then she set the story on her night table and told him to close his eyes while she readied her gift for him. She undressed and removed the lavender scarf from her head; when he opened his eyes and saw her golden hair lying across her bare shoulders, he had gasped.

  Their night together had been wonderful—not so much the sheer physical pleasures, he realized, but the obvious happiness they each felt simply in being with each other again, in touching each other, gently and tentatively, and in smiling at each other without the need for words; and all the while they were apart during the day—she on errands, he at the college—and now again, when they were surrounded by others who knew of their year apart, he was aware of the pleasure he took from the new way people looked at him. They were, he realized, in awe of him, almost as if he were a movie star or a well-known novelist. And he saw that the less he said, the more they felt this way.

  “You look older somehow, Mark. More mature,” the wife of one of his colleagues said to him. She reached out and touched his hair. “There’s more gray in your hair, isn’t there?” She smiled, her head tilted to one side, and then, speaking softly, she began to ask the inevitable—had they really gone and done it, and now that it seemed that they had, what was it like to return to ordinary life, to the humdrum reality of Amherst?

  “Is this reality?” he replied, gesturing with his glass to the roomful of people. She touched his arm and told him how wonderful Janet looked. “Maybe—” he said, “—maybe this is all an illusion and the only real thing is—is—”

  “—the year we’ll never tell about?” Janet asked. She was at his side. She leaned against him, her fingers on his wrist. “Kiss and tell?” she asked. She kissed him on the cheek.

  He shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m sworn to secrecy.”

  There were others around them now, watching and smiling. “Kiss and tell,” Janet whispered again, and he noticed that as she pressed her chest against his, she raised one leg from the carpet, her shoe half-off, as if, he thought, she were a schoolgirl on prom night.

  He put his arm around her and drew her close. He looked at the others. Their eyes pleaded with him to tell them something—anything. “Never,” he said. He heard laughter. “Never.”

  Janet closed her eyes and he sensed that she was happy in a way she had never been before.

  A week later they gave a party in their own house and, near the end of the evening, when he was walking a couple to the door, he caught a glimpse of Janet in the kitchen. She was leaning forward, and then, as he was about to turn away, he saw her leg go up from the floor, her ankle arch, her toe point. When he passed the kitchen again, a minute later, Janet was walking toward him, her arm in the arm of one of Mark’s colleagues, a young poet the department had recently hired. She told Mark that the poet had just offered to write a sonnet sequence about their year—if only she would reveal a few of its details to him. Mark smiled. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I’m holding out for an epic.”

  “Janet tells me that you’ve already written a short story about the year,” the poet said.

  “There’s nothing about the year in the story,” Mark stated. “It’s the one thing that’s left out. That’s the point, of course, or else—”

  “Of course,” the poet said. “Or else Janet would have—”

  “Precisely,” Janet said, and she giggled. She walked the two men into the living room, leaning now against one and now against the other.

  When the guests were gone, Mark asked her what she and the poet had been doing in the kitchen. In his mind’s eye he saw again the slender curve of her calf, the delicacy of her ankle. “Kiss and tell?” she asked.

  “Tell me what you were doing,” he repeated. “I’m serious.”

  She breathed in deeply, as if to sober herself. “You’re jealous,” she exclaimed. “You’re actually jealous—”

  “I suppose so,” he said. “Still, I want to know what—”

  “Oh Mark,” she said. “My sweet Mark!” She came to him and took him by the hand, drawing him back with her to the living room. “He is an attractive man and we were having fun with each other—at least I was having fun teasing him while he tried to find out what we’d really done and if we’ve kept to our vows—but that was all.” She tugged on his fingers so that he sat beside her on the couch. “Do you realize that you haven’t asked me even once about all those days and months I was on my own, and yet you see me for a brief moment in the kitchen with—”

&
nbsp; “It is crazy,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Please promise me that? It would ruin everything if I thought you were being hurt in some way. I’m all right, and I wouldn’t trade you for any man in the world, don’t you know that? I chose you, Mark. I chose you, and I chose to stay with you.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Before—there were times before, I’ll admit, when I often had an active fantasy life, but that’s all behind us, don’t you see? What we have now is so real, Mark. It’s something nobody else has and I wouldn’t give it up for anything.”

  “But I see the way other men have been staring at you ever since our return,” he said, “and it—”

  “And I’ve seen the way women look at you now,” she said. “You are a very attractive man. You know that, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “That was always my ambition.”

  “Your ambition?”

  “To grow up to be a very attractive man.”

  “I love you,” she said, hugging him. “And I’ll always be true to you and you won’t ever have to worry again.” She pulled away and looked at him. “You trusted me fully, and I don’t ever need to test that trust again—for you or for me. Even in my imagination I’ll be true to you now.” She took his face between her hands. “I have what I want, Mark. Can you understand that? Everything is different for me now and that’s the great thing.”

  3

  TIME PASSED, and Mark realized that the closer they drew to each other—now playfully, now passionately—and the more they talked and shared, without ever mentioning the year itself, the more tangibly it seemed to be there; so that he found himself beginning to wonder which was more real, the life they led now, or the year they would never talk about. He knew that she was right—that the year had changed them, and that the changes themselves were profound and good. She seemed to grow younger, and at the same time, more serious. She took up sculpture—an old passion—with great energy and intensity. When he arrived home from the college, and found her in the basement working in one of his old shirts, he was happy. He would bring a book and a drink, and sit and watch. For his birthday, she surprised him by presenting him with a sculpture of his head, in clay. The likeness was excellent, and though he thought it made him look more handsome and substantial than he actually was, nobody suggested that her love for him had made her blind to some weakness in himself that he feared she could not see. She had never had more energy, she had never been happier, and yet, most remarkable of all, when he was at home, she seemed, still, to have endless time to be with him—to cook for him, to sit and read with him, to talk with him about his work.

  He wanted to take the story he had given to Janet, and to expand it into a novella, a novel. He wanted to write story after story—to give his imagination free rein—but he found that his teaching and committee duties required too much of his time. He was giving a new course, a senior seminar in the American novel that he had designed before his sabbatical, and it came as a surprise to him one day when one of his students pointed out that virtually all the books he had chosen, by his favorite authors—Melville, Hawthorne, James, Cather, Bellow—were set elsewhere than in America: Benito Cereno, The Marble Faun, Wings of the Dove, Shadows on the Rock, Henderson the Rain King. And even when the works themselves were far from great—Twain’s Joan of Arc, Faulkner’s A Fable, Malamud’s The Fixer—it seemed significant that they were, usually, the favorite books of their authors.

  If so many American writers had, for their major statements, to seek out some past from which they themselves, and their countrymen, had been cut off, where in his own life, he wondered, might there be an equivalent past from which he had been severed? Where, in his own past, did the origin of his idea lie? When and where had it been born?

  In his memory he found that he returned frequently to a year during which he had lived, not with his parents, but with an aunt and uncle. Was this the missing year? His father had been overseas, in the Army. His mother, a fragile and hysterical woman, had been away in a sanitarium, suffering from one of her periodic breakdowns. He had been a year and a half old when his aunt and uncle had taken him in, and no matter how hard he tried he could recall nothing about the year, and—his parents and his aunt and uncle now gone—there was no way, he knew, that he would ever find out about it.

  He returned also, in his memory, to the many times he would, as a child, accompany his mother for walks along Flatbush Avenue, in Brooklyn. She would push his baby carriage, and in the carriage there were treasures from home—scarves, silverware, pots, dishes, hats, toys—all of which she would try to sell to people along the street. Sometimes, he knew, his father followed, a block or so behind. His mother, he realized, had been truly happy during these walks, and he recalled, for the first time in many years, that he had, when he was in the third grade, written stories that he gave to his mother to put into the carriage and sell for him. He remembered how wonderful her smile had been, each time he brought her a new one. He remembered a neighbor who had bought one of his stories for three cents. Was the lost Henry James story somehow connected with these lost stories of his childhood? Had he sensed, as a child, from the reactions of others, just how strange his mother was? Or—Janet found this idea most probable—had he feared that, the possessions filling the space in the carriage where he had previously sat, that his mother had somehow wanted to sell him?

  As Janet talked with him about his ideas and memories, she also urged him to work less hard. She noticed more gray hairs, new lines around his eyes, and when Mark looked in the mirror one morning, in the seventh month after their return, he realized, with some alarm, that he was beginning to look like his father. He stared at his image for a long time. His father had been a failure, in business and in life, and his mother, whether sane or insane, had mocked the man mercilessly. He asked Janet one night if she thought that all his efforts—his marriage, his New England home, his career—were, like the new life he had conjured up from some hidden recess of his imagination, nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to avoid being the failure his father had been.

  “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  “Then why—?”

  “Because when you’re tired, as you’ve been lately, from overwork, you do fear that you are somehow like your father.” She touched his cheek. “But that’s natural, Mark. You’ll see—as soon as you get some rest, you won’t feel this way.”

  “But there’s something else,” he said. He spoke rapidly. “Another idea I’ve been toying with. Tell me what you think, all right? I’ve begun to conceive of a book, half-fiction and half-memoir, part memory and part fantasy, in which I’d write about a man who’d imagined and done what I’ve imagined and done, and then had gone on to try, by looking backwards into his own life, as if through a series of glazes in a Renaissance portrait, to try to account for the origins of it all.” He breathed out. “What do you think?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure I quite understand what you mean by half-fiction and half-memoir,” she said. “If it’s really going to be about what you’ve imagined and done, then in what way will it be half-fiction?”

  He felt weak suddenly. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I haven’t worked it all out yet—I haven’t even begun the real writing—but it just came to me that way, as some new kind of prose form, as if, say, Twain had combined Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi in one book, or as if Bellow would rewrite Henderson the Rain King and mingle it with an account of his own psychoanalysis.” He blinked. “That’s all I meant.”

  She kissed him once on each eyelid. “I think you should go ahead and try it. I don’t have to understand everything you do, after all.” She laughed. “That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it, Mark?—that we’re so close that we know each other so well, and yet what binds us together—our secret—runs so deep that we can never speak of it, that we ourselves hardly know what it is.”

  “I suppose,” he said, and as h
e looked into her face, he felt a terrible weariness settle into his bones. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I need to rest more. All the reading I’ve had to do for this new course, and my freshman world literature survey—which I haven’t taught for a half dozen years—and then being adviser to some senior honors students, sitting on the Dean’s curriculum review committee—it’s been getting to me. I’ve felt tired all day, in fact, much more so than usual. Walking home through the snow this afternoon my legs felt especially heavy. I didn’t want to worry you, and then—”

  She felt his forehead with her lips. “But you have a fever!” she exclaimed. She darted from the couch, to the bathroom, and returned with a thermometer. “You’re burning up.”

  He lay in bed for four days. She fed him, washed him, shaved him, and read to him, and she urged him not to be a critic of the writings of others, but to consider, when he was well, doing more writing of his own. She hoped, when his time was less pressured, that he would give himself the chance, yet again, to let his imagination take wing. But if he did or if he didn’t, she would still love him, she would still be happy.

  His eyes ached, his muscles were sore, his throat and chest were thick with phlegm. He thought of Milly Theale, in Wings of the Dove, dying in the room that overlooked the Grand Canal. He realized that he did believe that Janet was, truly, as happy as she claimed to be. Still, he sensed that it was his idea, and not himself, that had brought such happiness to her, and the difference disturbed him.

  “Maybe—” he said, while she sat at his side, holding the glass from which he sipped his tea and honey, “—maybe I need a prolonged rest. I feel so damned exhausted sometimes, Janet. As if—”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s just the flu. It’s been hitting everybody. You’ll get over it in another day or two.”