by Steve Almond
His son was obviously, stupidly smitten. He couldn’t keep his hands off the baby. “Lambchop,” he called her. “Love of my life.” He carried her around in a ridiculous contraption, a sling that held the baby’s back to his stomach, so that she hung there in front of him, her head bobbing absurdly. Rodgers could hear his son quack playfully as he changed her diaper in the next room.
His daughters, of course, had plopped the baby into his arms the moment they arrived and motioned with their hands, as if they were tossing salad. This meant he was to interact with her. There was about the act a kind of covert aggression; Rodgers felt as if he were being tested. See here, his daughters were saying. Life goes on.
But the infant felt inert in his arms, like a stony loaf of bread. He muttered one or two awkward words. As if sensing his discomfort, the baby squirmed with an alarming vitality. Rodgers feared he would drop her, briefly imagined the chaos that would ensue. The baby began to sputter, then to cry, its gums gleaming like tiny pink rinds. His daughter-in-law appeared immediately and swept the child away. “She’s just hungry,” his oldest daughter said, and they all agreed. Nonetheless, Rodgers felt humiliated by the entire episode. He wasn’t Connie.
Ken said, “Cops never change.”
Rodgers nodded. “Yeah. They just kept on like that. I was relieved, actually. I settled back and kept my mouth shut. The president was staring out the window, at the rain. He was a dapper fellow, but up close you could tell he’d had some acne as a kid. He had those scars. His hands were folded in his lap and his shoulders were tense. I guess he was scared, too.”
“That must have sobered you up.”
“Not really,” Rodgers said. “My thoughts were coming too fast. What I was most worried about was that at some point I might start talking, you know? Really let loose and start blabbing. And then I might not be able to stop. You know how that can happen?”
“Sure,” Ken said.
“I was already paranoid. I was sure the troopers, for instance, knew what I’d been up to. But we were trapped in this strange situation. What could they say? I started thinking about what was going to happen next, picturing things, planning it out, really. We were going to pull up to the funeral parlor—”
“Wasn’t it a morgue?”
“Yes, that’s right. It was. But somehow in imagining it, that’s not what I saw.” Rodgers smiled and the ball at the end of his nose flushed. “What I saw was this small-town funeral parlor, lit from within, sort of like one of those Hopper paintings. We’d walk in and there’d be this warm foyer with flowers and wreaths and things. Then we’d pass into another room, a kind of chapel, with pews for people to sit and a raised area for people to speak. And we might wait there for a few minutes. And they might bring us coffee. Then we’d move along into this back room and that’s where they’d have the coffins. The bodies would all be neatly dressed and they would wheel Mary Martin over and I would look down at her, lying in this pink-padded coffin, and nod, and that would be it. I kept running this scenario through my head. The foyer, the chapel, the coffee.”
“What’s that theory of Malraux’s? The assimilation of death?”
“Yes, the assimilation of death. The adjustments one makes, tries to make. That’s what I must have been up to,” Rodgers said. For a moment he saw Connie, saw her as she had appeared when he entered her study, lying under a blanket, her face set in the wax of motionless blood.
“How well did you know the student?” Ken said.
Rodgers shook his head and steadied his hands on the edge of the table. He wanted more wine but worried that he would spill. “Mary Martin? Oh, I barely knew her at all. She was a quiet girl. Quiet. She looked a bit like that actress, the one in Love Story. Pretty. Dark hair. But quiet.”
The conversation in the other room hit a lull. There was just the occasional snap of the fire that his son had built earlier. Rodgers had forgotten how to open the flue, and suffered some gentle teasing over this. He listened, now, to the fire, and sat back and stared at the orange shadows cast along the doorway between the two rooms.
Mary Martin had spoken just once in his class. But he was alarmed to find the memory of this incident still very much alive. Rodgers had been lecturing on the Ik, an African tribe celebrated among cultural anthropologists for their meager standards of community. Mary Martin was in the back row, where she customarily sat. Gradually, as if with great effort, her pale face took on a disturbed animation.
“You mean they just leave one another to die?” she demanded.
“Oftentimes, yes.”
“Even a relative, or a friend?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Mary Martin shook her head and glared at him, as if he were somehow responsible for the Ik’s behavior.
Rodgers tried to soften his approach: “It is true that the Ik represent an extreme, an affront to our conception of compassion. But every culture operates according to what Mead referred to as a concentricity of love. We all make decisions about whom we can afford to care for. In essence, we choose who to love. We do this every day, without even thinking about it. We might feel bad for a person, but that doesn’t mean we choose to take care of him, to love him. We might pass by him every day without a thought. If any of you have been to Mexico, for instance, or India, you know it is impossible to move about without beggars asking for help, people who are in real need.”
“But that’s different,” a second student said. “This tribe you’re talking about—”
“The Ik.”
“Yeah, the Ik. They leave their own relatives to die. Parents leave their kids.”
“In some cases, yes. I know it’s disturbing. But this is how they must lead their lives. They live in an extremely harsh environment and must make harsh decisions as to whom they can afford to love. Sometimes a father or mother decides there is only enough food for the two of them, and not for the children. Or they decide that a child is too sick to care for and, yes, they are left behind. But this is not cruelty. Weakness, perhaps. But not cruelty.”
“You’re saying it’s not cruel to leave a kid like that?”
“No. What I’m saying is that the Ik, all of us, really, we possess only a finite amount of love, a finite amount of the internal resources by which we can enact demonstrations of our love. And in some cases, some people choose … they choose to love themselves, or to love each other, rather than their children.”
Mary Martin sat at the back of the classroom, her jaw clamped. Rodgers fumbled on, but the rest of the lecture was a loss. He felt overruled, condemned by the dull contempt of her gaze.
Ken cleared his throat. He was staring steadily at Rodgers. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. Certainly.”
“Did you want to finish your story?”
“My story?”
“Yeah. Did you ever ID the body?”
“Oh yes. Yes. Where was I? In the car? Okay. In the car with the president and the troopers, right?” Rodgers motioned toward the wine and tapped his brow. “We drove for a while, I know that. Then the car pulled up behind this building. It was low brick, with a concrete ramp and a doorway. I thought for a minute it must be some kind of errand one of the troopers had to run, because it was clearly the back entrance. The lot was unpaved. The president said, ‘Let’s get this over with,’ and got out. The cops got out, too. I looked through the window and saw these bright circles of light pouring through the doorway, and at the center of these circles at the top of the ramp was a gurney and on top of that was the body, this white body lying there looking very small. The president crouched down and stuck his big face in the window and said, ‘Are you ready, son?’ and I got out. The troopers fell in around me, as if I were a suspect, or some personage worthy of protection, and they marched me up the ramp and to the doorway and I looked down.”
“Jesus,” Ken said.
“Jesus is right.” It was infuriating, what he’d been asked to do. He could see that now. What right had anyone, even puffy old President Van B
uskirk, to drag him into this? He was a young adjunct, with a pretty fiancée, not so many years older than his students. It was Saturday night, late. He had been sitting at home, innocently, waiting for her to call, to hear her voice. He had nothing to do with any of this. He remembered, particularly, how bright it all was, how he had been forced up the ramp, like a suspect.
“I looked down. She was in awful shape. A real mess job, as the trooper put it. They had her naked there and you could see one of her ribs, the end of it, poking through. Her eyes were closed and I remember that one of the orderlies reached down and opened them and in the same motion he pulled her jaw up. Because, you see, her jaw was broken, hanging loose there; he did this so I’d be able to recognize her. The other orderly said: ‘Is this the woman you know to be Mary Martin?’ I couldn’t speak. I nodded and turned away. But then this same orderly said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, we need you to be quite certain. Could you please look again?’ I started to feel sick. It wasn’t the blood. They’d cleaned the blood off. But there were these places where you could see the fat, these yellowish gashes, and her face … I mean, it had to be held together. They hadn’t given me any chance to adjust, was the thing. It was just: out of the car and up the ramp and yes or no.”
“Jesus,” Ken said again.
“I kept looking at her, this young girl, and thinking: That’s her. She’s dead. She isn’t coming back. But I couldn’t really believe it, not emotionally. It didn’t register.”
“You must have been protecting yourself.”
“Right. Sure.” Rodgers nodded. He was trying to remember why he had started this story. Perhaps he had meant to convey a mood of boyish exhilaration, that sense of possibility that belongs to the young. But this was not how he felt. Rather the opposite. He ran a finger under the collar of his new turtleneck, a gift from the girls. A drop of sweat traced his ribs. How had his home become so ungodly hot?
Ken said something more about the police and their ill habits. Rodgers listened to his children in front of the fire. They were worrying over the baby. His daughters were noting, for perhaps the hundredth time, how much she resembled Connie.
Just before dinner, in fact, they had converged outside his study and yammered on about the likeness. The same button chin and generous forehead. Wasn’t it uncanny? Rodgers had stooped over his desk and felt a pulse of rage bang bloodily behind his eyes. He imagined storming into the hallway and telling them what he really thought: that the child, with its drooping cheeks and fat lips, looked like a little Jewish gangster. That he half expected a cigar to be poking from the corner of its mouth.
In moments such as these, he wanted nothing more than the peace of an empty house, an end to the polite dismay his children forced onto him.
It was expected he would join them soon, and find his place at the edge of them, his two daughters and his son with the new baby. But he knew, without a strong sense of wanting to know, that he would not be terribly missed if he stayed put.
It was not that he didn’t love his children. He did. There were photos all around, photos with the right sorts of smiles, or nearly so. But he had always felt overmatched by the demands of their love, the red wailing and grubby hands and later the expectant gazes and sullen protests. It was Connie to whom he ceded a true concern. And she who had run interference between him and the world of his deficiencies.
He could hear her, the soft lilt of her voice, as she stood at the stove and hummed a Beatles song, that one about a silver hammer. If Connie had been there, with him in Newton, she would have known how to handle the situation with Mary Martin, how to undo his panic. He wouldn’t have been stoned in the first place, if she had been there. Or he might never have answered the phone. And if she were here, tonight, he would be in the other room with her, with their children, together. She was the one who made that possible, coaxed from him feelings that brought him closer to the center of things.
Ken shook his head. “That’s a crazy story,” he said. “Crazy.”
Rodgers said nothing. He had thought to answer, but found he could not. The feeling was not one of drowning, more that the breath had been sucked out of him. He was seized by the urge to tear his new turtleneck off, felt this might ease his breathing, cool his skin, though he merely looked to the table in hope of finding water there.
“We should probably join the others, huh?” Ken said.
“Yes, of course.”
The young man got up and offered an awkward wave and left.
Rodgers listened absently to the discussion in the other room. “Where’ve you been?” his son asked Ken, and Ken murmured something and the group laughed. “Maybe we should make him drink wine more often,” his son said. Then the group discussed plans for the next day. A late brunch, a trip to the nautical museum. The baby began to cry and was given over to her mother to be fed. There was a momentary humming. Rodgers knew that his absence was being charted.
Those last months had been so quiet. The children were gone, sunk into hectic lives and cowed, truthfully, by their mother’s illness, or perhaps afraid to interfere with his grief. They had proved adept, this last year, at matching him silence for silence. Their conversations remained stiff, and a little hollow. They made him wonder: Is this all there is to fatherhood, or have I missed something?
Connie had been dreadfully quiet. She spent mornings by the sun window, perched in her favorite rocking chair, and afternoons sleeping in the den. She moved with the deliberation of one who hopes to obscure suffering. Rodgers watched her grow gaunt. He felt, in her presence, small and boneless.
In moments of duress, such as after treatments, he adjusted pillows and said the right words, but these somehow had the effect of underscoring the unnaturalness of his attempts. Knowing her affinity for sun, he cursed the gray days of autumn until he felt his throat rip.
And then the study; that afternoon in the study. She had done well the previous day, eaten all her potatoes and even a bite or two of chicken. In the morning he had seen a trace of color in her face. To find her like that, still and unbreathing, her hand clenched against her white cheek—he simply shut down. It was only the phone calls and later a visit from his neighbor that allowed things to move forward.
One by one his children came into the kitchen until he was surrounded. They were here now, his sweet son and daughters, asking what was wrong and their voices, all going at once, composed a child’s chant. “Are-you-okay-are-you-okay-Dad-what-is-it-Dad-what-is-it?” He tried to tell them, “Don’t be scared,” but could not. He understood that it was his role, as father, to provide some reassurance, to subdue the tide of sorrow that now threatened them all. It was only this business of breath that held him back, the loss of breath.
To calm himself, Rodgers closed his eyes. The baby was whimpering and Ken was apologizing and someone was stroking his poor old bald head and the youngest, Amy, she was even weeping. He felt hands being laid upon him, one pair then another, the hot cling of his children’s fingers. They were good children, more than he deserved, because within them lived some link to her; it was this link to which he attached his hopes.
There was quite a lot of commotion, you would have to say that, a lot of crying, a lot of noise, and he could feel his children crowding in on him and he heard the baby nearby, crying now, and he must have reached out for her or made some indication of his need, because someone placed her in his lap. Rodgers opened his eyes. She stared up at him with sleepy eyes, a tiny fist worked loose from her swaddling and pressed against her cheek. Rodgers examined the intricacy of her face and hands and straightened up a bit and then quietly said, “Why do these crazy people cry so much? Can you tell me that? Why is everybody crying so much, baby girl?”
Geek Player, Love Slayer
Computer Boy swaggers over to my cube to help me open this one knucklehead email Phoenix sent me and within about, oh, two seconds, I’m ready to whip off his khakis and blow him right there. He’s leaning over my keyboard, tappy-tap-tap, with his lousy beautiful sideburns an
d his Right Guard wafting all over the place, and underneath that this kind of wounded musk that tends to make my nipples go boing, and his teeth which I could fucking eat they look so healthy. I have, mind you, already offered him my seat. But he can’t allow that. No-no-no. Don’t you move your pretty little self, he tells me, which is when neighbor Brisby starts snarking away and I’m like, Oh for Chrissakes, why does this obnoxious creature, this dopey slab of masculine grace, whose name is (try not to laugh) Lance, and whom I have taken to calling Lancelot, Sir Lance-me-a-lot, why does this totally throat-lickable hottie have to be such a shitbrain?
So I just sit there smelling him and watching his unreasonably defined triceps pulse and unpulse and noticing the blond hairs on his earlobe, like tiny spears of wheat, and the way his firm little rump tenses up when he gets a systems error. And the worst part of it is that he keeps running these lines about how I must be doing something to my machine, my keystrokes must be pretty vigorous—key strokes, get it?—and even though I’m actually kind of impressed by his use of the word vigorous, there’s no way I can flirt back without losing total office cred with Brisby, who’s outright laughing at this point. It’s not like I have time for this crap anyway; I’m on deadline. Though actually, the worst part is my leched-out imagination, wherein Lancelot is bending me like a band saw and this can’t be happening, this cannot be happening. I cannot be lusting after the Computer Boy on deadline, that is too lame for even me.
Only now Brisby’s on the phone with his fiancée, for the twelfth fucking time this hour, and Lancey tells me he’s going to have to reboot and suddenly down he goes, under my desk, and I forget to skootch my chair back because I’m too busy staring at his back and counting up the individual muscle groups, sort of flowcharting them, and then something rubs against my knee, his wrist I guess, but of course I’ve got these jeans on, because it’s forty fucking degrees in the office; the hotter it gets outside, the colder they keep the office. Then, just to balance himself I suppose, Lancey sets his hand on the bridge of my foot and starts in with these little appraising squeezes, like he’s fitting me for a pair of pumps, and I want to tell him, Hey, bright boy: there’s a whole calf and thigh where that came from! But before I can say anything, he turns and informs me I’ve got real soul and I want to barf and run my tongue along the pink canals behind his ears all at once and I can hear Brisby mumbling his I-love-yous and hanging up and my screen goes blank. Lancey rolls back on his haunches just enough to send a ripple under his shirt and I imagine looping my arms around him, taking the meat of his shoulders in my palms, and his front teeth, his, let me emphasize, goddamn perfect front teeth, biting my clavicle, and I know Brisby’s going to slag me for the rest of eternity, until death do us part, but it’s too late, I’m halfway off my chair in a canine posture and my knees are trembling.
