by Unknown
“As was his wont . . .”
That night, Mister Wicked, poring through the small ads in the Post-Intelligencer, bought a wholesale consignment of white mice, an African parrot that could say bad words in five languages, and the world’s biggest, loudest, most embarrassing whoopee cushion.
When Finn was asleep, Tom came down to the kitchen to find Beth tipping the last of the bottle of Syrah that they’d shared over supper into their two glasses—more into his than hers—and sliding it across the butcher-block table.
“You may need this,” she said.
“Oh?”
“I’m buying a condo. In Belltown.”
“What for?”
“Tom—don’t make things harder than they have to be. What do you think?”
“Not as an investment, then.”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“And, no, before you ask, it’s not ‘another man.’ ”
“A woman?”
“Hardly.”
“What about Finn?”
“Well, obviously we’ll have to draw up a parenting agreement.”
“But we’re Finn’s family. You can’t just—”
“It’ll be better for Finn. Better for all of—”
“—unilaterally . . .”
“Half his friends at Treetops already live in two houses.”
“That’s not true.”
“Scott? Amelia? Taylor?”
“Christ.”
“He’s still at that adaptive age. It would be tougher on him next year, or the year after. That’s one of the reasons—”
“I had no idea.”
“That’s what’s so wrong with us.”
“What is?”
“Your having no idea.”
“But—”
“You’ll see it’s for the best when you get used to it.”
“I thought . . . it seems bloody ridiculous to say it now, but I thought, I actually thought, we were happy.”
“I’m sorry, Tom. I’m sorry.”
Crouched on his haunches at the top of the stairs, Finn listened to his dad making these funny gasping noises, like he was crying, and his mom saying “Tom” over and over. He knew what they were doing.
He and Spencer had talked about it loads of times. Spencer knew all about it because Spencer’s mom was going to have a baby sister for him. When people made babies, the dad grunted a lot and then the mom yelled. It was bad to interrupt people when they were making babies: Spencer did it once, and there hadn’t been a baby.
So Finn just listened.
Spencer was wrong about one thing. He said the mom and the dad always did it in their bedroom. He’d tell Spencer tomorrow: his mom and dad did it in the kitchen.
“. . . because of something I said on the bloody radio?”
“Please don’t shout, you’ll wake Finn. No, of course I’m not. I was just using that as an example.”
“I didn’t show it to you because you’ve been so busy lately that talking to you about anything at all has seemed like an intrusion.”
“Okay, forget the radio thing. It was trivial anyway.”
“It didn’t seem trivial three minutes ago.”
“Well, it is now.”
Tom was fossicking in the cupboard where the liquor was stored, but there wasn’t much: a boxed bottle of champagne with a pink ribbon tied round it that Miriam Glazebrook had sent him last Christmas; two more bottles of Syrah, and one of Chardonnay; a tablespoonful, perhaps, of The Famous Grouse; and the bottle of Dutch gin, still unbroached, that he’d bought at Schiphol Airport last year after a conference at the University of Utrecht.
He slopped geneva into his empty wineglass. “Gin?”
“No, thank you. I’ll stick with water.”
The only thing to be said for geneva was its alcohol content. He swallowed the oily, herbal stuff like medicine, thinking, I shall always remember this as the taste of devastation.
“Tom—we’ve been going in different directions for years.”
“For one year. Maybe.”
“I’ve been growing up.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“Don’t be cheap. Look, I know you want someone around, someone to come home to, someone to read your pieces to. But that’s not love, it’s babysitting.”
“That’s so unjust.”
“Is it?”
“It’s not ‘someone’ I want. It’s you.”
“But you don’t know who I am.”
“Eight years!”
“Hey, I played along. I tried. I did the wife thing. ‘My wife, Beth.’ I learned all my fucking lines.”
“But—Finn!”
“I won’t let you use him like a weapon.”
“I’m not trying—”
“This is about me. And it’s about you.”
“It certainly seems to be about you, but I don’t see how I come into it at all.”
“You live in a world of your own construction, Tom. Half the time, you don’t even live in America, much less with us. Finn and me, we’re like characters to you, like in a book you never quite get around to writing. You make us up—‘my son,’ ‘my wife.’ Well, I’ve had it up to here with being a figment of your fucking imagination.”
“Beth!”
“Well, I have, I’m sorry.”
They wrangled until after midnight. Tom cried twice. Then Beth cried. Then, in the temporary lull at the center of the hurricane, they discussed custody. It was agreed—though agreement was hardly the word for it—that once Beth’s purchase of the condo was finalized (requiring his signature on several documents), Finn would spend Monday and Thursday nights in the house on Queen Anne and weekends would alternate; Tom would pick him up from Treetops on Tuesday and Wednesdays and have an hour or two of playtime before Beth whisked him off to Belltown for the night. This arrangement was, she claimed, “non-prejudicial.”
Tom stared at her, slack-jawed. “You’ve been talking to a lawyer.”
“Yes,” Beth said.
Once he had the birth certificate, the rest was easy.
He paid Lázaro $100—$20 for each of the Mexicans—to use their address in Greenwood. They were careless, and never stayed long in one place, anyway, so this was no real inconvenience. A hundred dollars was a lot of money, but it would have been dangerous to use the address of the yard. He was having enough problems as it was with Mr. Don, who’d found a buyer for his asbestos ship.
“You got seven days to get your shit out of there, pardner. Come Tuesday, say around dark o’clock, I want you gone, okay?”
“Where I sleep then?” Chick asked.
Mr. Don looked up from his papers. “You seen my sign outside there?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it say?”
“It say ‘Dahlberg Marine Inc.’ ”
“See, I’m in the marine business, not the hotel business or the homeless-shelter business. If I ever try that out, I’ll be in touch—but right now I’m selling ships, not renting rooms. Got it?”
“Yes, Mr. Don.”
Some days Mr. Don seemed like his friend; other days, he bullied him. First smiley-smiley, then loud shout. That was the trick of his power—you could never be sure where you stood with him—and Chick was fascinated by the way he could suddenly veer from gentle to fierce. When Mr. Don turned rude, he watched his face to see how it was done. Then he practiced on the Mexicans.
They were stripping paint off a tugboat. Chick was in charge. “Lázaro,” he said. “In Mexico—you got kid?”
Lázaro reached into the back pocket of his jeans and from his billfold took out a buckled snapshot of his little girl, Ria.
“Nice,” Chick said. “Now move your ass.”
There was much to learn from studying Mr. Don, but Chick was looking ahead to the time when he could have a business of his own. After his Social Security card came, he’d go for a driver’s license, and then he’d be legal, almost, as Charles Lee. Free of Mr. Don, he could st
art making real money.
He had saved $2,312. Compared to the Mexicans, he was already rich.
Finn had to be told.
It was an ice-cream night, so they waited until he’d finished his bowl and “The Crocodile Hunter” was over. He was sitting at his own table in front of the TV in his little red chair.
“Pumpkin, we’ve got something to tell you,” Beth said, squatting beside him with an arm around his shoulder.
“Yes?” he said expectantly.
“Your daddy and I have been talking, and we’ve decided—”
“I’m going to have a baby brother—”
“No, Finbow—”
“A baby sister?”
“No, honey.”
His face began to crumple. He’d already told Spencer that he was going to have a baby brother.
“But we’re going to get another apartment. So we’ll have two houses!”
“We already have a house,” he said angrily. “I don’t want another house.”
“Pumpkin, the new apartment’s near the Aquarium—and the Science Center.”
“I don’t care.”
“You’ll have your very own room—”
“I want to watch ‘Amazing Animal Videos.’ ”
“You see—”
“I heard you making a baby.” Finn’s lower lip stuck out, and he blinked back tears. “I thought you were making a baby.”
As Beth said later, it hadn’t gone well, but at least they’d sown the ground, and Finn would soon get around to asking about the condo in his own good time.
“It’s nowhere near the Science Center,” Tom said.
Sleepless and jumpy, he was trying to teach his weekly morning class. The Cyrillic writing on the chalkboard had been replaced with Italian, the beams of weak sunlight had disappeared, but otherwise all was the same, though everything was different. He was talking, as kindly as he could, about Alan Wurtz’s story.
“. . . I did find myself pausing, rather, over that long stretch of dialogue on pages 4 to 6. It’s all weighted one way. I felt throughout, really, that Lance was being starved of the kind of authorial attention he deserved, and I was reminded of something I once heard said by V. S. Pritchett, the English short-story writer. If you don’t know his stories, you really ought to. He was a sort of Russian realist with a powerful libertarian streak and a magnificently impish sense of humor. Very observant, very funny, very humane. Try reading ‘The Saint,’ or ‘The Wheelbarrow,’ or ‘The Camberwell Beauty’—wonderful pieces of writing, rather neglected now, but they’ll come back.
“What Pritchett said . . .”
It must have been—what, 1983? He’d gone to the party with Sue, in a dark, packed, and smoky flat in Paddington. Sir Victor was in his chipper eighties, wineglass in hand, pipe clamped between that mouthful of incongruous teeth. Scott-Rice was somewhere in the picture, too. But Pritchett, older by a quarter century than anyone in the room, seemed younger, merrier, than the thirtyish crowd around him.
His pipe puffing like a traction engine, he’d said: “I’m not really much of a one for ‘tips,’ but there’s a tip I sometimes give myself, and find quite useful. Whenever I think up a good line—a ‘clever’ sort of line, you know?—I always try and give it to my least-favorite character.”
Tom quoted this to the class. Hildy Blom scribbled on her pad, but the rest looked back at him with faint, indulgent smiles, as if such advice was a bit on the elementary side.
“You’d never catch V. S. Pritchett using a term like ‘characterological,’ I’m afraid,” Tom said. “But it’s a luminous remark, and if you think about it in relation to Alan’s story . . .”
He taught on autopilot, his mind elsewhere. Talking of Pritchett made him think of Waugh, who wrote, when his first wife left him, “I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live.” Misery was not what Tom felt. Rather, he was wonderstruck. Beth, with her reliable talent for surprise, had pulled the floor out from under his feet, but the force of gravity hadn’t yet kicked in, and he was left standing on empty air, like one of Tiepolo’s massively fleshed, absurdly buoyant rococo angels. Tom supposed it would not be very long before the laws of physics were restored and he’d come hurtling down to earth. For now, though, he was in a giddy, weightless state akin, strangely enough, to happiness. It was like that first fortnight with Beth in Seattle, when he’d flown over for his interview at the U. Same lack of sleep. Same jittery high. Same sense of looking at the world through intensifying hangover spectacles.
He heard himself saying, “Alan, if you were able to grant Lance sufficient wit to speak that early line spoken now by your narrator—you know, the one about their father flying low over their lives like a cropduster spraying herbicide on fields of young wheat? See how that would open up the dialogue?”
It wouldn’t really, of course. Alan’s story was unrescuable, but the principle of the thing was worth exploring.
“We always want to claim the best lines for ourselves, or for our stand-ins. That’s only human. What I love about Pritchett’s remark is that it argues for generosity on the part of the writer. In American terms, I suppose you’d have to call V. S. Pritchett a ‘socialist,’ although I doubt if he ever defined himself quite like that. But he did believe in a general redistribution of verbal wealth, in taking good lines from the haves, and giving them to the have-nots—an impulse at the heart of his kind of liberal realism . . .”
When class was over, walking in the rain back to his office, Tom was deep in the past. The party had been in Westbourne Terrace—it must’ve been at Greg Harbison’s flat, when he was still with Tessa. He and Sue had gone in Sue’s old Mini—and Sir Victor was there because Scott-Rice had brought him. They’d come in a taxi together from Shepherd’s Bush, where David had been interviewing him for “The Book Biz.” Tom remembered seeing that interview, though Pritchett had said nothing as memorable as his “tip” on dialogue. It would be something to remind David of when he came to Seattle.
On Sunday morning, the three of them drove to Belltown to see the condo. They took the Audi.
Finn was given a quarter and two dimes to throw into the lobby fountain, and allowed to press the button for the eleventh floor in the elevator. It was hard to know how much—if anything—he understood about what was going on. Mostly had been the key word, so these new arrangements might sound comfortingly slippery and provisional. Mommy was going to live mostly in the condo, to be nearer to her office; Daddy was going to live mostly in the house on Queen Anne, because he needed the space and it was closer to the university. And Finn was going to get two of everything, where before there had been only one. Beth and Tom alike made it sound as if Finn had won the lottery and was on the brink of a sudden, spectacular enlargement of life that would make him the envy of everyone at Treetops.
Beth was encouraged to see that he certainly liked the fountain.
In the elevator, she said, “Won’t it be cool, riding to our house in an elevator?”
The condo was a maze of interconnecting white compartments. The developer, Tom thought, must have wanted to economize on doors, and there was an insistent generic resemblance between these rooms and the cubicles in the Klondike building. On the woodblock floor of the main living space were piled half a dozen huge, unopened cardboard boxes from Ikea.
“Ah, the furniture’s come,” Beth said.
Someone would be spending many hours with incomprehensible assembly diagrams, L-shaped keys, and a Phillips screwdriver. Tom feared it would be him.
“Look, pumpkin—our breakfast bar.”
Beyond the Ikea boxes, a sliding glass door in an aluminum frame opened onto a small concrete balcony with a view of more condo blocks and a compact rectangular slice of Elliott Bay. Tom craned to see if the house was visible from here, but it was just hidden by the curtained picture-windows of somebody else’s corner apartment.
He heard Beth saying, from one of the bedrooms, “Well, it’s not really big enough for Daddy to live here, t
oo. He needs his upstairs office at the house.”
He stepped back inside. Even on a day of pearly overcast, the condo was bright. In sunshine, it would be blinding—like living, he thought, in a hospital operating theatre, or on the set of a shadowless TV sitcom. He walked through the tiled kitchen area and joined Beth and Finn in the smaller of the two bedrooms, which smelled pungently of its snow-white fitted carpet.
