Don't Worry About the Kids

by Jay Neugeboren

  The process of decay allows the proton to transform itself into two elements—a pi meson and an anti-electron—that race away from each other, and decay into light itself. It is the remarkable prediction of grand unification theory, then, that since all things are made of protons, and all things decay, then all things glisten.

  When Lynne woke I spoke the words that had come to me, words that named both what I felt and what I thought: We are composed, I said, of incipient radiance.

  You’re a wonderful man, she said.

  We met at the library for eleven consecutive weeks. We did not see each other at any other time. We did not go out for dinner or to the movies together, or to the park or to museums with our children. We did not call each other, at home or at work. I did not send her flowers or playful notes, and she did not send me frivolous gifts and clever cards. Did we miss each other, during the six days we were apart? I couldn’t tell. Neither of us ever addressed the subject.

  When we talked, we talked about our work and about our children. We shared the problems of single parenting—the frustrations and joys, the emotional burdens and logistical complexities of doing it all ourselves: chauffeuring, car pools, music lessons, athletic teams, medical and dental appointments, emotional burnout, housekeeping chores—and we shared, too, a firm belief that, to our surprise—since we had previously been so invested in family life—we thought it better for children to be brought up by a single parent than by a couple. Because our children were aware that while they were left in the library we were elsewhere, and because they asked about the future—would they become brother and sister?—Lynne bought us T-shirts to wear in our apartments that she’d had imprinted with two words: Separate Households.

  Three Saturdays ago, when we returned to the library shortly before noon, our children were gone. Notes were tacked to the corkboard next to the checkout desk in the children’s room, each with our name on it, along with the simple declarative sentence: Your child has been towed.

  We laughed. We asked the librarian if she had seen our children. She had—during morning story hour—but not since then. We looked around. We walked through the library and searched all rooms, stacks, bathrooms, closets. We went outside and walked, in opposite directions, around the block, returning to the library entrance. We went back inside and searched again. We spoke to the head librarian. She telephoned the police station and told us that the officer on duty advised us to come down.

  We hurried. The officer at the desk, a handsome young man named Galen Kelly, took the information from us and asked if we could supply him with photos. Lynne took a photo from her purse and I took one from my wallet: head and shoulder shots against blue pastel backgrounds, taken by school photographers. Officer Kelly advised us to check our apartments, to notify friends, relatives, and neighbors, to inform the schools. He made several phone calls, but came up with no information about children resembling Timothy or Carolyn. He suggested we go to our homes and check there, and then check the library again. He asked if he could keep the notes and run them through the police laboratory.

  Although he would, of course, send all data about our children to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, he added that, in his experience, the Missing Children problem was overblown by the media. Most missing children were not missing at all: they merely crossed state or city lines, after separations and divorces, to return to one or another parent. The greater problem, about which nobody was talking, he said, was missing parents.

  We thanked him and left. I went to my apartment but Carolyn was not there. I checked in her closet, under her bed, on the fire escape. I checked the refrigerator, the freezer, the hallway incinerator, our storage area in the building’s cellar. I telephoned the library. I telephoned Lynne.

  Maybe we’re being punished, she said.

  Oh Lynne, I said. Come on. What did we do except to have a good time—?

  You don’t understand anything, do you? she said. I’m not talking about right and wrong. What scares me is precisely that this seems to have happened so arbitrarily—without any discernible reference to who we are or what we’ve been doing. I just don’t get it, Jason. That’s all I mean.

  I thought of Schrodinger’s Cat. I said so to Lynne—that perhaps our children were actually in their rooms while we were talking on the phone, but that each time we looked in their rooms, they disappeared.

  She found no humor in my remark. I had thought Lynne a woman who knew what she wanted from life and went after it, who was not subject to panic when she didn’t immediately get what she was after. When she spoke now, however, her voice reeked of desperation. What if they never return? she said. I’ve already fantasized the abuse Timothy might suffer, the feelings I’ll have when I see his picture on milk cartons, cereal boxes, movie screens. I’ve imagined his death and mutilation nine ways till Sunday. I can deal with facts, Jason. But what if we simply never know what happens? What if this waiting for the news never ends?

  I recalled a joke my father loved to tell, about the Jew who sits at the train station, tearing his hair and wailing. What’s the matter, his friend asks. I missed my train, the Jew replies, and recommences his wailing. When did it leave? Three minutes ago, the Jew says. Ach, his friend replies, waving away the Jew’s suffering. From the way you were carrying on I thought you’d missed it by an hour!

  Given Lynne’s mood, I kept the joke to myself, and asked instead if she wanted me to come to her apartment. I left a message on my door for Carolyn, spoke to the doorman, to neighbors, and to the parents of some of Carolyn’s friends. I informed them of what had happened. Everybody looked at me with a terrible mixture of sympathy and admiration—I was, after all, an anomaly: a single hard-working man who was parenting a single child full-time—and assured me that Carolyn was a good and sensible girl, that she had probably wandered off for a while along Flatbush Avenue, or to Prospect Park, or to a friend’s house, and that she would soon come home.

  Carolyn did not return that day, or the next. Lynne and I took turns staying in each other’s apartments. We drank heavily, watched movies on our VCRs, and slept. We neither talked nor touched.

  On Monday we returned to our jobs. On Monday evening Officer Kelly visited me at home. He took fingerprints, hair samples, the pajamas from under Carolyn’s pillow. He sat with me in the kitchen and wrote down a family history. I told him about Carolyn’s birth, about Carolyn’s mother, about Carolyn’s early years, about my first divorce, and about my divorce from Carolyn’s mother. I gave him the names, addresses, and phone numbers of my two ex-wives. I spoke of Carolyn’s schooling, her habits, her hobbies, her idiosyncracies, her favorite books and television shows. I talked about how wonderful it felt, in the simplest way, when, in traffic or in a crowded store, she took my hand, or when she looked up at me in an elevator, say, and asked me a question to which I knew the answer. I told Officer Kelly about how hurt I’d been when Carolyn’s mother left us, about my drinking problem, about the arrangement Lynne and I had been developing. I left nothing out, yet I sensed that he found my account cold, that he did not believe I truly loved my daughter.

  When he left, to visit Lynne and secure data from her, I telephoned and told her he was on his way. She asked if I would stay with her after he left. I arrived at her apartment near midnight. She took some tranquilizers and a glass of bourbon. We sat in her living room and had nothing to say to each other. I felt depleted. I didn’t ask her about her day at work and she didn’t ask me about mine. I didn’t ask her about her interview with Officer Kelly and she didn’t ask me about mine. I had no desire to touch her and I wondered about all those hours when, for eleven mornings, I’d been transported physically into a rapture beyond any I’d previously known. Where was it now? Where were the feelings that had, for a time, seemed to comprise the universe?

  It was as if my memory were detached from my body, or, more exactly, as if, like a patient operated on for removal of the hippocampus, I was now destined to live forever in the present
: to have permanently lost the ability to learn new things or to remember my own experiences. Like the patient who, distracted, has no memory of the person he has been talking to a moment before, I looked at Lynne now and wondered who she was. And if I had known her, what exactly was it I had known if I could conjure up no true memory of what it was I had felt when we’d been together?

  On Saturday morning we went to the library. Carolyn and Timothy were not there. The librarian asked me about my father, whom she remembered from the years when I was a young boy. He died four years ago, I said. Had I heard that Mrs. Kachulis had passed away only two months before? Cancer of the spine. She was sixty-eight years old. What of her daughter Demeter, I asked. The librarian said that the less I knew of Demeter the better. Demeter had not turned out well. The last anyone had heard, Demeter was wandering in the West somewhere. Demeter had not come to the funeral.

  Lynne sat at one of the low tables on the far side of the room, her hands clasped in front of her. Was she afraid she would forget Timothy—all they had done together, all he was? Old memories, I wanted to explain to her, are rarely lost, are impervious to anything short of brain damage. New memories, in comparison, are fragile, though about memory itself, its structure and architecture, we still knew virtually nothing. Why is it that almost all children have virtually perfect photographic memories, yet lose these at about the time they learn to read and write? Persisting photographic memory—iconic memory—is much more common in adults of preliterate cultures. Was learning to read and write, then, even as it worked to help us retain what was most beautiful, good, and true about our lives, joined in an eternal bond with the very loss of memory and feelings about those things we wished, by the act of reading and writing, to hold to?

  Officer Kelly visited me each night that week. He was the only person who seemed concerned. Friends, neighbors, relatives, and school officials stopped inquiring. Officer Kelly sat in my kitchen and asked me about my day at work, about Carolyn, about my relationship with Lynne. I spoke to him of what I was working on at the office, of theories and mysteries concerning memory, evolutionary change, the origin of time, the riddle of space, the psychoneurological basis of feeling.

  We watched ballgames and movies together. He talked to me of his life as a policeman, its banality and violence. I continued to tell him everything I remembered about Carolyn and our life together, but the more I told, the less I felt I knew. It was as if by remembering and naming what had been, I was losing the very things I was hoping to find. On Friday night of the second week after Carolyn’s disappearance, Officer Kelly said that it would make no difference to him—to his regard for me—if I never spoke about Carolyn again. He would not think my love for her, or my feeling of loss, any less authentic.

  The following morning, when Lynne and I were sitting in the children’s room at the library, a young man dressed in jeans and a red and blue checkered sport shirt, came up to us and asked if our children had returned yet. How did you know—? I asked, and then realized that the young man was Officer Kelly, dressed in civilian clothes. He told us that he had resigned from his job as a policeman. He assured us that our cases would be followed up on a regular basis, through regular channels. He sat at our table and began to talk about himself. He had no parents, no brothers and sisters, no wife or ex-wives, no children. Until the age of twenty-one, he said, he’d had only one desire: to be a policeman. He’d fulfilled that desire, and didn’t see why, at the age of twenty-five, he should still be bound by a dream he’d had when he was five, or ten, or twenty. He needed some time to reconsider his life. I asked him if he wanted to stay with me. He thanked me and offered, in exchange, to take care of the apartment while I was at work—to do the shopping, the housekeeping, the preparation of meals. When Carolyn returned, he would, of course, leave.

  Lynne had supper with us that night. We ate by candlelight and I repeated a saying of my father’s, that when you lost the most precious jewel, you searched for it with a candle that cost but a penny. Neither Lynne nor Galen reacted. Our children might be lost, I added, but our childhoods were not. We could talk to one another of all we remembered and when we were done remembering, I said, we could make up stories and give them to one another. Again, neither Lynne nor Galen showed any reaction. They ate in silence, and while they did, I tried to imagine what they were thinking or imagining or feeling. I could not. So I suggested that Lynne consider moving in with us. She could sleep in Carolyn’s room and Galen could sleep in the living room. There was no reason, until we knew what would happen next, for any of us to be alone.

  What Is the Good Life?

  SO, I ASKED. Are we in love then?

  Probably, she said.

  Probably?

  She laughed. The surface of the Mediterranean was smooth, and I imagined peeling off a thin layer of it, offering it to Aldy—I imagined her furling it around her neck, smiling lovingly at me. I imagined that I could, by such an act, please her in a way no one else had ever pleased her.

  She took my hand. But here, she said. Here, Carl. Come. This is the place I wanted to show you—where the car plunged through. It landed down there.

  She pointed to a spot about forty feet below, told me that Doctor Duplay, head of neurosurgery at Nice Hospital, was convinced Stephanie had tried to pull up the hand brake. There were other stories—that Stephanie, and not her mother, had been the one driving; that Prince Rainier covered this up since Stephanie was under age; that the Prince’s marriage, twenty years before, had been part of a deal whereby the United States—with the French about to withdraw militarily from NATO—would secure a strategic base in this part of the world; and that the death itself was not accidental—that it was, instead, merely the last bit of a long and lousy piece of foreign intrigue. Aldy believed none of these stories—she believed that Stephanie had, in fact, tried to pull up the brake and save her mother’s life.

  Will you say so?

  Yes. God, but the press went after her—not because she survived and her mother died, but more, I think, because she didn’t attend the funeral.

  I kissed the back of Aldy’s neck, watched the frail gold hairs there uncurl. I thought of how peaceful I’d felt the night before, driving home from Nice airport, along the coast—of how happy I’d been, knowing Aldy would be waiting for me.

  I’ve never felt this way before, I said. I never imagined I could love anybody the way I love you. I’m still surprised.

  That you love me?

  That someone like you finds me interesting. Sometimes I just want to tell you everything—all I feel, all I’ve done.

  The height must be getting to you, she said. It’s eight hundred feet above sea level here.

  Don’t, I said. Please. Don’t make light of what I say. Tell me instead. Tell me what you feel.

  You’re the dearest man I’ve ever known. She kissed me gently, on the mouth. I’m surprised, Carl. Astonished really, by what you make me feel.

  She turned away from me again, so that she too was looking down at the sea. We stood close to the wall of the Moyenne Corniche, and she leaned back into me, then reached behind, slipping her hand under my shirt, letting it rest against my stomach.

  This is the way it was, she said. The gear shift was in drive. The parking brake was up three notches. Grace lay unconscious in the back seat. They pulled her through the rear window of the car. Stephanie suffered a hairline fracture of one of the vertebrae on her neck, but that wasn’t what kept her from the funeral.

  Shock?

  Yes. She’d taken it in the neck before—no pun intended—for absenting herself from obligation: she stayed away from the grand ball the night before her sister Caroline’s wedding. Why? Because her mother had denied her request to wear slacks.

  So then, I asked, are the rich different from you and me?

  I wouldn’t know, she said. I’m very rich.

  And very beautiful. Sometimes, even when we’re together, I don’t believe it—that a woman as beautiful as you cares for me the way y
ou do.

  Stop. She pulled away. I’ve told you not to tell me that anymore. Why should I value what I didn’t cause and can’t help?

  I didn’t apologize for what I’d said. I lifted her chin, kissed her. Aldy spoke: Here’s what Stephanie said—“I don’t understand why people are interested in me. I want to be an ordinary girl. I can’t stand for my friends to call me princess.”

  But you’re not her friend. You’re a writer—a reporter.

  I have an appointment with her tomorrow. And I’ll interview Caroline next week, while you’re away. Which reminds me—my father wants to meet you. He’ll be here this weekend.

  Then he approves?

  Princeton uber alles, Carl. She moved her hand down, below my belt buckle. I grew hard at once. You like it when I do this—here—don’t you?

  Yes.

  I’m doing this at the very spot where Grace Kelly’s favorite car, her brown Rover 3500, an eight-cylinder automatic, plunged through the crash barrier. Are you thinking of Grace Kelly?

  No.

  Do you still love me?

  Is this a trick question?

  In third grade, at the International School in Geneva, I was madly in love with a Danish boy named Peter. I sat behind him and slipped notes to him, under my desk and through the opening to his seat. “Do you love me? Please answer yes or no.” When he wrote “yes” and passed the note back I’d write a new note: “Do you still love me?”

  Her white blouse shone in the sun as if, I thought, it were made of fiberglass. I moved a hand to her breast, but she pushed it away.

  I asked you a question and I expect an answer: Do you still love me?

  Yes.

  I touched her, at the hip, leaned on her there, for when she began to make love to me like this, I became dizzy. She lifted my hand. Don’t move, she said. Don’t touch me. I used to dream of doing you this way. Even at Princeton. Her mouth was at my ear. Some dreams do come true, you see.