Parallel Play

by Thomas Rayfiel

  It wasn't until Ann was born that I did the math and figured out I'd had her at the exact same age my mother had me. That was depressing. It made me feel I was on a sled, going downhill. Sure, I could lean a little from side to side and maybe influence where I went, to the right a few feet or to the left, give it my own personal style, but basically my future was already decided. I was doomed to whiz by and disappear, just like the person before me. Which made me wonder if there was really any “me” at all, or if we were just caught in some loop, repeating mistakes we called accidents but were really our defining characteristics, who we were.

  I reread the recipe. Cooking was hard. I interpreted too much, started imagining instructions that weren't there. “Boil until liquid is thick enough to coat a spoon.” What did that really mean? It seemed so open-ended. But this time everything went right. I was on my way, rolling along, until I noticed the telephone message light flashing. It was Harvey, calling while I was in the shower, saying he'd be late, not home before eleven. The meat was already on. I had been about to “tent it loosely with foil,” so we could sit down, have a drink, talk …

  Did I mention we hadn't made love in eight months?

  It was my fault, of course. When I was in labor, she wouldn't come out right away so they decided to use forceps. I caught a glimpse, even though I wasn't supposed to (“Don't look!” they kept saying), but it was so distorted in my memory I refused to believe what I saw: curved steel grippers, a giant gleaming scoop. I didn't feel anything at the time, but after, when the pills wore off, I was so swollen I could barely move. There was an invisible bolster between my legs. That had gone away a long time ago, but by then other things started happening, like our both passing out at night from exhaustion, never being alone, fighting, and just being repulsed, I think, by anything having to do with the body. We were dealing with all this aftermath, the wreckage of our former happiness, which the world kept stubbornly insisting was really a beginning, a new life.

  I listened to the message again. The hospital paging system blared in the background. He didn't sound mad at me. Ann was up by now, so I put her in the swing. I only allowed myself two windups most nights because she looked a little sick when she was doing it. Her head flopped, always a second behind her body, causing cases of mini-whiplash. But she liked it. It sent her into a trance. I poured myself a glass of wine and ate some meat without the sauce or the asparagus or even the plate, just stood over the pan with a forkful of semi-raw cow. A medallion. It tasted good. I surveyed my situation. Another cozy evening at home. How could I club these next few hours to death?

  Mark wasn't in the phone book. Of course not. He said he had only moved a month ago. Then I remembered how his old number was a big secret. He wouldn't write it down. You weren't supposed to either. You had to memorize it. He was paranoid about the police, except in his case, considering how he really made his money (not by “contracting,” like he had told Marjorie), it wasn't paranoia. I would probably never see him again, which was fine with me. I wasn't really going to call. I was just curious. Curious to see what his new number looked like. The shape of it. Ann slowed down and stared. She knew what I'd been up to.

  “Daddy's going to be a little late,” I said.

  My voice sounded deeper than usual, and thick. Thick enough to coat a spoon.

  “Talk to her more,” everyone urged. “That's how she learns, by listening to you. Talk to her all the time.”

  But I couldn't. In the park, on the street, in coffee shops, all I heard was mothers keeping up this running commentary. “Mommy's going to pick you up now. Here we go. Up in the air! You're getting so big. How did you get so big? Isn't today a beautiful day? Look how blue the sky is.” Maybe it was because I never played with dolls, but I found it awkward and unnatural.

  “I talk to her when I have something to say,” I answered.

  They looked startled, like I was some kind of monster.

  Instead, I wanted someone to talk to me. Was that too much to ask for? I was tired of initiating conversations with, if you could take away the insulting sound of it, a complete moron. I was drinking a second glass of wine now, and I'd finished half the meat. I put everything away, quickly, without looking, as if it was about to attack me. Mugged by a filet mignon.

  You're doing fine, I told myself. The place is clean, dinner's waiting (he usually got something at the hospital, but just in case), the kid's alive. What more could anyone ask?

  I don't know how we got through the rest of the evening. The same way we'd gotten through a hundred others. I read a book to her that she didn't understand, bathed her while she screamed so loud the sound split my eardrums, did another windup, fell asleep, and woke just a minute later totally disoriented, not knowing where I was, with the suspicion she'd been watching me, that a tiny part of her life had gone on without my knowledge. Finally I got her to bed, lowering her into the crib with my arms stretching and my back aching. Then I sang, the one part of the job I didn't mind, not lullabies or psalms but “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  “Oh, say can you see—”

  It was the only song I remembered the words to.

  “—by the dawn's early light …”

  Chapter Two

  We met at a free clinic. He was the doctor, I was the patient.

  “I don't see a last name here,” he frowned, going over the card I'd filled out.

  “No last names in the Bible.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I don't believe in last names, that's all.”

  He knelt down to look at my foot. His scalp was just beginning to show.

  By then, I had developed this defense mechanism and saw, in any man who caused even the slightest spark, the paunchy middle-aged troll he would soon become. It was a way of neutralizing my desires, protecting myself against hurt. I was very proud of this discovery.

  “Just because you don't believe in a thing doesn't stop it from existing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone has a last name. Whether they believe in last names or not.”

  Now I wouldn't be blinded by looks or attitude or any other superficial trait. Instead—I followed the argument to its logical conclusion—I'd end up with a man I wasn't attracted to at all. Which wasn't my aim, of course. It was just a way I'd found to take a temporary break.

  “Women don't, actually.”

  “Don't what?”

  “Have last names. Take me, for instance. I'm just Eve.”

  He was only half listening, making mindless conversation, working on his bedside manner.

  “Well, just Eve, I'm Dr. Gabriel. Does this hurt?” He flexed my ankle, very gently.

  I shook my head. I was in agony and for some reason didn't want him to know.

  “What about this?”

  “Excuse me, but are you a real doctor?”

  He looked up.

  “I mean, you seem a little young. Not young exactly, but …”

  “What would you call a real doctor?”

  “Someone who knows what he's doing?”

  He nodded, like that was one possible answer.

  “In that sense, yes. I know what I'm doing. Don't you?”

  “Well, not consciously.”

  He stopped for a minute, then went back to examining my foot.

  “I'm sorry.” I tried again. “It's just that you seem closer to my age, and I'm used to doctors who are old. Not old, but older. I guess it's me, really, not being young anymore. I mean it's not like I'm forty-five or anything, but—”

  “Actually, you're right.”

  “I am? About what?”

  “I got my medical license three weeks ago. I do know what I'm doing, but I'm not sure that makes me a real doctor yet.”

  “Oh.”

  “This is my first rotation, working here at the clinic.”

  “I thought so.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “I don't know. You seem …” My voice trailed off.

  T
he problem was, once I started looking at men that way, it became almost impossible to stop. I saw the bald spot in every full head of hair, mentally inflated the thirty-pound inner tube belted around each man's waist. But Harvey was already so grown up, so serious and intense, handling my foot like it was some kind of complex puzzle, turning it in all different directions. With him, the process was reversed. Even though he was solid, with a broad, handsome adult face, I saw back into his youth, to the lonely child.

  He was touching my toes now, wiggling them one by one. This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy had roast beef. This little piggy had none. A bolt of pain shot through me.

  And this little piggy, this little piggy—

  “You're not telling,” he complained.

  “Telling what?”

  “When it hurts.”

  I wasn't interested in him. How could I be? He was a doctor. Even if he was only a few years older, he was already prepared to enter a different stage of life. That was obvious. Although what that stage was, I didn't know. I couldn't imagine. The mysterious next.

  “Just Eve?” he repeated, finally hearing what I'd said ten minutes ago.

  “Never mind.”

  “No, I'm curious. What did you mean?”

  “I was raised in a place where we didn't have last names.”

  “What kind of place was that?”

  “A religious colony in the middle of Iowa. We lived our lives based on Scripture.” I was pronouncing each word with a weird intensity but felt I had to go on talking, to conceal the fact that I was about to pass out. My foot was on fire. “I'm a Tertiary Baptist, or was, so a lot of stuff here is still new to me. Like last names. There are no last names in the Bible.”

  “But—”

  “I mean, women change their names all the time, when they get married.”

  Great, I thought. Why don't you just propose to the guy?

  His hand traced an invisible line up my ankle.

  “But even with men”—I swallowed, trying to obliterate that last remark—“it's just the name of your father's father's father. Back forever.”

  “In my case, it isn't even that. Gabriel is a middle name. My great-grandfather, when he came over, at Ellis Island, only got as far as ‘Chaim Gavriel—’ before they cut him off and yelled, ‘Next!’ He never got to say what his real last name was. At least that's the family legend.”

  “So who was he, really?”

  “Nobody knows. He wouldn't tell. He took it as an omen. A new start.”

  “Ow!”

  He stood up and started writing on a prescription pad.

  I stared at him. “So you don't have one either.”

  “Your toe is fractured.”

  “A last name,” I persisted. “Same as me.”

  “I guess you're right, I'm just Harvey.” He tore off the sheet. “Unfortunately, there's not much you can do. These are pills, for the pain. You're going to have to stay off it for a few days.”

  “I can't. I'm working.”

  He shook his head.

  “No work. Bed rest, with the foot elevated. Did someone come with you? You should take a taxi home.”

  “A taxi? You think if I could pay for a taxi I'd come here in the first place?”

  “Good point. You'd go to a real doctor.”

  I slid off the examining table and almost fell. It throbbed a lot worse now that I knew something was wrong. Before, I had taken comfort in thinking the pain was all in my head. He was taller. Being high up had given me the wrong idea of our relative sizes. He caught me with one hand.

  “How did you hurt yourself?”

  “I didn't,” I complained. “I was just walking along and then—” “That's how it happens, sometimes.” Oh, and how would you know? I wanted to ask. Just because you're a doctor doesn't make you wise.

  Clearly nothing bad had ever happened to him. I leaned hard against his side, trying to tip him over.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked.

  “I just want to go home.”

  He stopped holding me up. I couldn't blame him. I was acting obnoxious. I was so angry. I couldn't believe I had hurt myself, that it was my fault, that there was no one to blame. It seemed a sign, somehow, of how my life was going, one huge accident. I made my way out, holding on to chair backs and the wall. I could feel him behind me, that annoying magnetic presence doctors have, even three-week-old doctors like this one.

  “Who's next?” he asked.

  “Quack,” I muttered, dragging myself through the door, out onto the street.

  The next day he showed up with food.

  “You can't tell anyone about this,” he warned. “I could get in real trouble.”

  I was still so slow on the uptake I thought it was some kind of follow-up visit. A house call.

  “Trouble for what? It's so nice of you.”

  “Copying your address, for starters. Let me see. Why isn't the leg elevated?”

  Why didn't you take a bath? I was silently screaming to myself. Or at least clean the apartment?

  “So this is what you do?”

  I had never realized how sensitive my foot was. Not because of nerve endings. The opposite. Because it was tough and ignored, because nobody ever bothered to touch it, and now he was back to fingering it so intelligently, focusing all this expertise, reminding me it had parts: the heel, the sole, the arch.

  “I do fashion knockoffs.”

  My voice sounded ridiculously breathy.

  He nodded, indicating he'd seen the sewing machine and the tailor's dummy, all the material.

  “Is that like copies?”

  “Mostly high-end stuff. People see something they like, ask me to go look at it, and then … Am I going to be OK?”

  It occurred to me he had come because I was going to lose my toe. It had turned orange-black overnight and was the size and shape of a cocktail frank. I knew it. He was a messenger of doom—

  “Knockoffs. Can you make a living at that?”

  —here to announce my horrible fate. But at the same time, I was still excited that he was this very professional new-style doctor, only a year or two older, who carried around with him, instead of a black bag, Chinese food.

  “Barely. That's why I can't afford to stop working. I've got to make my rent. I'm worried about the nail. Is it going to fall off?” I felt myself collapsing. No one had been nice to me in so long. I didn't know how to handle it. “Please be honest. Is there anything you can do, or is the situation just completely hopeless?”

  He smiled. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I don't know. You're the doctor.”

  “So now I'm a doctor?”

  I wasn't crying. There was just a general mistiness invading my nose and eyes.

  “If there's no cure, maybe you can at least give me something to make it feel better?”

  He thought for a minute, staring at the toe, then bent lower and kissed it.

  “Oh.”

  He opened a carton. The smell of Spicy Szechuan Chicken with Cashews flooded the room.

  In a way it was good, because we had gotten so much of the awkward stuff, talking, touching, out of the way early, before we even began. And in a way it wasn't, because that's where so much romance takes place, in all the early doubt. With Harvey, I somehow knew what it would be like, right from the start. There were no fantasies to be imagined, but also none to be betrayed. He was this fact, this meteorite that had landed in the middle of everything.

  “Know what I like about you?” he said.

  “What?”

  I had a dread of being praised. As soon as you heard what someone liked about you, you had to keep it up, and it was usually a quality you didn't even think you had in the first place. It was usually a request to act differently, a criticism disguised as a compliment. What's he going to like about me that I'm going to be constantly trying to live up to? I wondered.

  “I like how your name is the same backwards as fo
rwards: Eve.”

  All right, I thought. I can live with this. It didn't seem to require too radical an adjustment.

  I loved him, by an act of will. I decided to love him, and it was the best decision I ever made. But that's not to say it wasn't hard, and lately it had gotten so much harder.

  Ann, on the other hand, was not a decision I made. But I still blamed myself for her. I felt, like with everything else, it was my fault, because I knew what we could and couldn't do, how far we could go, in a way he didn't. That was my one freakish and most of the time useless talent. I could make him lose control. It was just bad luck, I told myself, but how accidental could it really be if almost the first time we did it resulted in an event the rest of my body had been so busy preparing for?

  He took it the same way he took everything else, very calmly and logically.

  “There's a saying surgeons have when the unexpected occurs: Repair the damage and move on.”

  “That's easy for you to say”

  “It is not easy for me to—” He stopped. “I'm giving you an out.”

  “I know you are,” I said miserably.

  “But if you're asking if we should do this, I vote yes.”

  Why did I have her? Maybe because he once told me—this was the most important thing he ever said, although he never knew it—that sex for him was the physical enactment of our relationship. I'd never thought of it that way, that it was symbolic, that we were participating in a ritual, and if we did it right, if it was good, then the rest of what we had was good too, and we could even change things, improve them, by our actions. I'm not sure I believed it, but at least it gave me a way to see, a context, because before sex had always seemed pretty senseless. Things led up to it—speed, exhilaration, fear—and things led away from it—relief, confusion, more fear—but sex itself stayed unknowable. He made it sound like a religious practice, and I understood about those. It also moved me that he was so optimistic, that he thought we, as a couple, had meaning.

  • • •

  He got home around one. I woke to the sound of his key. Footsteps creaked over the floor. I closed my eyes again. The footsteps went away, checking on Ann, then came down the hall. The door was only half closed, but when he came in it was like a seal had been broken. I could feel the cold air he brought with him from across the room.