Fiction from The Literary Review
The Inventor of Love
GABRIEL BROWNSTEIN
This is the saddest story, one my wife told in pieces. Two men, a boy, a park in another city, the men in close communion, the three of them not quite a family.
My wife and I lie awake in bed after we've put away the magazines, turned off the lights. The warmth of her body, the safety of the dark, I say anything to hear Julie talk. 'Most embarrassing blemish you've ignored on a friend?' Or, 'Rodomontade. English word? Really?'
'To brag, I think. Also a parking manuever. Something you do with fish.'
And then this story. The men are dressed fussily, the boy a ragamuffin. He leaps in mud puddles. He screeches and hoots. And I've gotten a little flat, a little desperate in conversation. 'What do you figure are the major issues facing us today?' And Julie won't say a thing.
This sad story, it's punched a hole in our bedtime conversation. We stare at the ceiling. Fat furry failure squats on our chests. My wife heard the story and told it to me in pieces. She'd come to bed after phone calls to New York, then let me have it chapter by chapter, a sick real-life serial told long-distance by her friend Klara.
'What do you think, Jules,' I'll keep at her. 'The major issues facing us today?'
'Oh, Charlie. Not tonight.'
I get up. I wander the house. The story concerns her friend Klara, Klara's partner Claire, a crazy child called Napoleon, and a couple I don't know, Michael and Brad. All in Brooklyn, a couple hundred miles away.
I like Klara. She's my wife's oldest friend. Scandinavian washerwoman build, big arms and big shoulders, rough and ready, a mothering-type with the face of a baby or a nun. Klara's features are tiny in her pan-flat face, a bump of a nose, squinty eyes, nearly lipless mouth, but the mouth is liable to gape and beam. If my wife the skirt-wearing financial analyst seems to have nothing in common with Klara the lesbian social-worker, well they've known each other since they were kids. Daughters of prep school teachers in Long Island, they grew up in faculty housing and watched their fathers swap wives. On field trips Klara and Julie packed tuna sandwiches; the other girls carried credit cards and twenties. They lost their virginities almost simultaneously, Memorial Day weekend, eleventh grade, and confessed to each other while drinking beers by the Montauk light house. Klara leaned down and kissed my wife's mouth. Think of her as my almost sister-in-law and also as the world's most idealistic practical woman: big legs rooting her to the earth, but sometimes she gets a faraway look like some Valkyrie explorer staring out at the horizon for new found land.
Claire is Robin to Klara's Batman. Tiny girl and her blonde hair is a mess of curls the color of masking tape. The two of them together suggest a comedy team-Klara the giant, slow-moving straight man and Claire always getting them into some kind of fix. The stories they tell in car-rides: The time they went into a K-Mart photo booth in Ames, Iowa, spent time smooching in front of the automatic camera, and Claire stripped and did some nude shots. Neither of them realized that the shots were being broadcast to the whole store via a monitor beside the make-up counter. The guard rushed over, ready to have Claire arrested. Klara talked him down. She explained that the shots were for Claire's boyfriend, overseas in Kuwait. They'd never do it again and never, ever would return to the Ames, Iowa, K-mart.
Claire weighs about 98 pounds wet, but at the dinner table I can't keep pace with her drinking. Wine and liquor, when she gets rocked she turns raconteur: The time Prince's '1999' came on the jukebox and she couldn't help herself, started dancing on the table of a biker bar. Or when she wanted to take Klara out for dinner, ordered all the most expensive things on the menu, then realized she had forgotten her wallet. These are like butch episodes of I Love Lucy, Klara in the Desi Arnez role. Claire tells stories of her childhood, too, sniffing shoe polish, sniffing glue, the kid she knew in her teenage years who used to shoot-up deodorant. Punks in Lincoln, Nebraska, they drove all night to see X play Des Moines.
The women keep a menagerie of strays in their one-and-a-half bedroom Brooklyn apartment, three dogs, two cats, no room. Klara's favorite is Quasimodo, the ugliest and most useless pooch you can imagine. Half corgi, half sheep dog, stomach hair that's always filthy on account of its being longer than the legs. Klara works in a children's shelter in Brooklyn. In late night phone conversation for years, she calls us in Philadelphia and fills my wife's head with the worst stuff imaginable: an infant girl who had been severely scalded-she'd either fallen or been pushed into a pot of boiling water. The macaroni-cooking mother claimed it was some kind of cockamamie accident. Cops came and so did medical examiners, put the lie to her story. Burns had traveled so high up the three-month-old's asshole that it was obvious: the baby had been forced into bubbling steam.
My wife burrows her head into her pillow as she tells these tales. She gets off the phone with Klara, she climbs into bed, she puts her hands over her ears-like she's expelling the bad news and wants to block the routes back in. Once she gets the story out, she can sleep. Then it's up to me to play insomniac. Klara tells one story that pops right out of nightmare: A little girl was explaining to a doctor that her mommy pressed a searing hot iron against her palm when a nurse contradicted the stuttering kid: 'That's not what you told me.' I don't want to pretend all these stories have led my wife and me into some permanent depression. We talk. We giggle. I'll get her imagining our roles in a family future.
'You'll be superdad.' She laughs. 'Waking up the kids early, clapping, hearty breakfasts.' Or, 'Rules,' she'll say. 'Because kids like that. To understand there's rationality to a house.' Or, 'In good-cop, bad cop, don't make me play the bad-cop ever. Okay?'
* * *
'Alfred.'
'Kakushka.'
My wife and I list names.
'Oswaldo.'
'Cherise.'
We've said Alice or Elaine if it's a girl and Jacob if it's a boy, after my brother.
Klara wants a baby, too. When she and my wife are on the phone and they're not talking about the suffering of Klara's charges or the wacky antics of Claire, they bond over this shared longing. Klara doesn't talk about names so much as methods: sperm banks, possible donors, adoption. You can imagine how Klara is around all those kids at the shelter. She must day-dream about adopting all the time. The pudgy child of a deported Ecuadorian drug-smuggler frolicking in the park with Quasimodo. Claire and some crack-addicted seven-year-old building castles on a Maine beach. Klara has worked in the same place for six years, but she never actually spoke of taking in any child before Napoleon showed up.
'There was something,' my wife tried to explain, 'I don't know, about this one. Ratio of cuteness to suffering. Or a multiple, take the cuteness to the suffering's power. This Napoleon.'
He was five years old, of mixed racial parentage, and desperately affectionate. I never met the kid, but imagine him with gold-toffee skin and a loose Afro. His eyes are wide. His hands are cool. He runs around the room like a banshee, can't for a minute be one of a group. Put him in naptime with the rest of the kids and he will shout, hoot, whip his blue mat in the air, knock blocks together-a crack that registers deep in your skull. You single him out from the group, punish him or dote on him and Napoleon will charm you, love you with all his love from the moment he first gets you to smile.
But facts: He spent the first two years of his life locked in a windowless room, astew in his own shit and juices. His mother is dead. His aunt is a crack addict, his uncle in and out of jail. A miracle beyond miracles Napoleon survived. Most of the time when I heard about the kid, it came after my wife's phone calls with Klara. After they hung up my wife gave me the news in bed, hands over her ears so she could sleep. But once when Claire and Klara were visiting us in Philadelphia and we were all sitting in the garden behind our little house, Klara produced her theory of the kid's survival. This was two months after she met him. Late summer, brown leaves.
'He survived because of who he is,' Klara said. With her infant face and massive body, she looks like some Norse goddess of decent charity. 'Call me crazy but I'll tell you this child has a self-saving power. He learned-and you've got to believe it was his own invention because no one around him could have shown him much of it at all-he learned how to love people. There he is, tiny, neglected, malnourished Napoleon, in a room in some hovel in Brownsville. Brownsville 1992, which for God's sake to this day refers to Mike Tyson as its pride. Undeclared war zone and if you're a low-level, unaddicted drug dealer, you're doing well. And useless, fractured people stumble into this cave with a crying babe. They stumble in, they stumble out. And the child somehow gets fed, gets people to teach him language. How?'
Cats crawled fence tops. Squirrels leapt between the branches of trees. We all stared at Klara- my wife, who's a financial analyst, and me, I work at a bank, and Claire, who thinks she's an actress, but as far as I know only takes movement classes and has never in her life been in a play. We stared at Klara-it was dusk, our nice, tidy garden, mesclun growing in pots next to rows of snap dragons, basil, and tomato plants-and Klara had that faraway, ocean explorer's look. She'd seen something on the horizon that none of us could name.
'I'll tell you how. He learns to love people. Invents it on his own. The bumbling addict in this nowhere room comes in and stumbles upon a child, and the child stares up at the useless, broken man, and loves him. I'm not talking about passion but some miraculous, Darwinian, self-preservation response. Affection like magic spills out from the infant arms and eyes. The addict knows he is loved and in response musters some return affection, manages some cousin of sobriety and calls out to the baby's keeper, "Damn, Marian, you best get this kid here some food." That's the way the baby survives. Love.'
I don't know if Klara was talking with her own love-blindness then, but she's no sentimentalist. You can't be with a job like hers. We sat in the half-light. Klara doesn't make speeches. I stared at my wife. She had on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt with the name of her alma mater. I pictured her with a bulge in her taut belly, tried to guess what she'd look like pregnant.
Claire said, 'My God. Wow.' Then she broke out some marijuana, for which we were all grateful. I thought then what a good couple Claire and Klara were.
* * *
So in bed, I'll ask it again, prod my wife unimaginatively. 'What-' I don't even know what I'm saying here- 'are the major problems in our nation today?'
'Oh, Charlie. Oh.' She grumbles. 'Problems? One: Are we going to get enough sleep tonight? Two, I guess: Why can't people just be a bit more decent with one another?'
My wife's got things pretty well planned. She looks at our world like it's a runaway train and she's been deputized to guide the thing to its station. She says she wants to make Assistant Director, the next rung up, before she takes time off for a kid, wants our money-market account at a certain value, a certain distribution of stocks, bonds, property, and guaranteed trusts. 'I don't want to be thirty-two, have a gaping hole on my resume, Charlie, a kid in pre-school and me trying to find a job.' This all sounds rational but papers over fears. Any child will just bring chaos.
She thinks of herself as the practical one. Before I worked in the bank, I had a band, Happy Hippy Hugo. My wife found this at first attractive, but in the long term a drag. When she was a college girl, she thought of me as earthy and dangerous, which is funny now that I'm a chunky bank manager with a bald spot. I split up the band and took the job at the bank mostly because of an accident that happened last year. Contraception failure and my wife got pregnant, and this thing led to the other and she decided that we had to end it. Two weeks there sent my head swimming. My wife, Julie, knew from the start that she couldn't have it, couldn't carry it to term, and there was nothing I could do but plead. I had this vision, this zygote tadpole in her gut.
Julie said, 'Look. You're thirty-three and basically unemployed and living like some teenager's dream of rock and roll. I don't think, right now, you're ready. And God knows I'm not ready either, to be a mother, not now.' She was sorry of course. She didn't mean to snap. 'I'm under a lot of pressure on this one, Charlie,' she said. 'Don't pressure me more. Stick by my side.' My wife knew what she wanted, we took care of it.
She doesn't have parents to talk to. Her mother is dead. Her father's a jerk. She is all the family I have. I don't talk to my parents, either. They are Christian Scientists, very devout, in a town a hundred miles west of Philly. My little brother was born with a heart condition, a cluster of defects, the cardiac muscles and valves. A heart full of holes and it worked like a sieve. He was born in the early seventies, a blue baby, and there were ways of curing Jacob, surgery not exactly routine but certainly not experimental. We didn't see doctors. Jacob was never officially diagnosed, not until it was too late. What I remember most was the praying, the sense of the unity of illness and sin. Jacob changed over eight years from a joyful, playful child to a doughy, blue-cheeked, bloated body. His feet, little kid's feet, got to be fat like a drunk old woman's. Towards the end his legs leaked water from their pores. He was eight then, I was sixteen, and a couple of years later, I left my parents' house for good. They're lawyers, had the money to save him. It's a thing that can't be forgiven on the grounds of faith or ignorance or stupid, crazy bliss.
I remember them mostly as they were after Jacob's death. My mom, tensed as her frizzled hair. My dad, the soldier, plodding heavy-legged around the house. The morning they put Jacob in a coffin, Dad kept running his hands over his bald scalp, reminding himself how little was left up there.
* * *
'Jedidiah.'
'Portia.'
'Constantine.'
Of course Napoleon fell in love with Klara and Klara fell in love right back. He had never witnessed something that large and tender. And Klara had never felt so tugged at by the strings of love. She fed him cookies and apple juice while he drew crayon pictures of bats with purple fangs, or of daddies murdering rabbits. He played with toy airplanes and trucks and always made them crash.
This is how I imagine it: Klara comes home in a blue dress, but with her round face grim as an admiral bracing for war. At their kitchen table, she makes the case for adoption. Picture Claire in their crazy apartment, Quasimodo easily mistaken for an unwashed rug or a mophead that's sprouted legs, the two other dogs, Hero, an aging, gimpy toy poodle, and Muttley, a lame Doberman that drools. The cats are hiding under the sofa, claws bared. The place is a haze of unvacuumed fur mixed with steam from Claire's cooking. She's making something healthy and indigestible. The things those people eat, not just soy hot dogs, but soy corned beef, soy orange cheese. The main dish is always stir-fry.
So this is what I imagine Claire cooking, sloppy chopped carrots, her hair in a rubberband, and the tiny kitchen filled with the smell of nutritional yeast. October, Klara's dress emphasizes her shoulders, her big legs. And while they eat, Klara lays down her plan. Claire is at first dumbfounded, then excited. But she's no fool. She stops and thinks and finally says, 'I'm not ready.'
'But you do want to have a kid with me-you do want-I mean, we're together-'
'Yes-of course-honey. Yes.' Claire tells Klara she loves her. Then she bites her little thumb-I've noticed this about Claire, her thumb is as thin as the other digits on her hand and she's got a mouth with big healthy teeth and when she bites her thumb, which she does nervously, there's a strange effect-you could see how someone in love with her would be dizzied. She's heard all about Napoleon and while she is proud and awed that Klara works with such children, she knows that she doesn't have the patience, the ability. 'I couldn't keep up.' Claire, after all, has plans. She's been taking classes in speech and movement, walking and talking classes she calls them, and she figures the next step is to find an acting coach, one really good coach, and then maybe to start going for auditions. She's also been working on the Alexander Technique. She wants to become an Alexander Technique instructor. It will be a way for her to make money while she acts. She has all these plans and doesn't see how she could manage a child at the moment, especially not a troubled one. And she thinks about it-Claire quite sober and not so wacky, and lays her decision down.
'I don't think I could do it,' she tells Klara, and she holds her lover's big hand. 'I do want us to have a child. And I think it's wonderful that you are ready to give so much. Maybe I'm being totally selfish here. I'm sure he's great. And I'm sure if I went in and met him I'd fall in love-and I don't want to fall in love with a wounded, crazy boy. I'd love to think I could shelter someone who had suffered so much, but, I mean, he's got to be haunted, right? Full of visions of all the people who abused him. And it'd be like bringing all those people into our house. I couldn't do it, Klara. No.'
I know they had that kind of conversation, because later that night, Klara called my wife. She told Julie the whole thing, and then in bed, Julie told the story to me.
'It's that kid, that kid she talked about, that inventor of love. They're not going to take him in. Thank God, Claire reminded her that they can't. You don't know people like Klara, people who give it all to the suffering of others. There's something wrong with them-if they took the kid in, I mean, it would be crazy, crazy. Right? And I know Klara, she's going on the warpath. The great defender. The great avenger. The savior of suffering children everywhere.'
I picture Klara girding for battle: Her Norse social worker's armor, in her right hand a two-headed battle axe, in her left a sack of Huggies. My wife lay on her back and squeezed her eyes shut as tightly as she could. The skin on her nose curled and wrinkled. She fell asleep. I went downstairs and fixed a whiskey and sat on a couch in my bathrobe and stared at the blank TV.
We have a nice little two-story place. A woman comes and cleans once a week. The furniture is new and the carpets come from my wife's family, inherited from a grandmother. It's an old Federalist house-not too hard to come by in Philadelphia-two stone steps leading right out to the sidewalk and a narrow garden in the back. After I learned that Klara would not adopt Napoleon, I headed out there into the cold and did what people do when they can't sleep. I was wearing furry bear-claw slippers that my wife had bought me as a joke. I drew my bathrobe around me, but it did no good. There was a freak meteorological incident that night, I swear, though no one else seems to have recorded it-a sudden October flurry. Snowflakes dusted my head and robe.
I've had trouble sleeping ever since I was a kid. When I was younger, I'd worry about God or death. I'd lurk around my parents' house tip-toeing. I'd hide in closets so no one could shoo me back to bed. As I've grown older what worries me is not the end of my life or the infinite horizons of the universe but things like money and the future, having children, growing old. My job is a job for an idiot. I lied on my resume, was encouraged to do so. I'm a glorified teller, a big white guy in a tie who's memorized the rules. When people give trouble to the tellers-black women, Hispanic women, all of them-they feel good giving their gripes to me. I nod solemnly, restate policy and tell them who to write if they want to complain. A moron's job, ground-level enforcement that allows the money to flow smoothly to the glass buildings downtown. Julie talks about it in terms of its stability, its practicality.
'You're lucky to have it,' she says.
'I'm lucky to have you.'
I've thought about going back to school, but I figure it would only give her an opening. Four more years till we have a kid. I used to work as a bartender, but then I'd work nights and she'd work days and I'd never see my wife. I think about what Klara does and it just about breaks my heart, but to take care of frightened children and get paid, you need a master's degree or a doctorate.
I can't remember when the guys entered the story, when my wife began to talk about them at night. They were dog-walking friends, Michael and Brad. They had a pure-bred pooch, a Jack Russell terrier, and perversely it liked Quasimodo best of all dogs in Prospect Park. That's how Claire and Klara knew them: the dogs ran circles, sniffed each other's butts, slobbered over tennis balls while their masters talked.
Somehow, Claire and Klara knew Michael and Brad were thinking about having a child. I don't think Klara would have even approached those guys with the possibility of adopting such a desperate kid, but Claire is impulsive. She takes things as they come. When you talk to her, it's like that. You mention yogurt for breakfast. She says her mother ate a tub of cottage cheese each morning and then puked before sending the kids to school. And so one chilly day in the park, after Michael said something about health insurance, Claire brought up Napoleon.
I never met the guys but I can imagine. In the winter time, Brad goes running in the park. With his thick muscles, pink cheeks, and auburn hair, you could mistake him for a stocky dancer or cute fratboy. Seventh grade, he was the fat kid in Columbus, Indiana; during one third period he burned his own hand against a steam pipe so he wouldn't have to take his shirt off in gym. These days, he's got a lightning smile, gracious, easily fashionable, you have to look close to see the underbite. Michael is taller and thin-faced and anxious, the child of divorced art dealers in Manhattan. It's Brad who's the catch, Michael who's the catcher-a miracle that sensitive Michael has managed to keep Brad down home. And yet Brad has come to love the life. He argues over decorating, washes Michael's socks. He'll talk about it like he's the victim of a prank.
'I am so the wife,' he'll say.
Michael is a lawyer who works for Lincoln Center. He calls his mom on weekends, has occasional lunches with his dad. Afterwards, bitches with Brad. 'No, I don't mind the German wifette.' Their apartment is a chilly place, a view down across Brooklyn to Wall Street's towers. They're serious about having a kid as Julie and I are-which is to say parenthood is an enormous lake around which they wander daily,
ing maybe soon it'll be warm enough for a dip.
With Claire in the park that December day, conversation slides around a New York Times article about gay marriage in Hawaii. Dogs yap. Brad chucks sticks and then hops on one foot to avoid puddles and half-frozen mud. Claire is beaming up at skinny Michael, who nods and keeps his arms crossed. Talk moves on to the difficulties of their lives. From a distance it looks like Claire is flirting, but they're just discussing insurance and domestic partnership laws. Brad is covered by Michael's job, Claire by Klara's. She runs her hand over her messy hair and then asks, point blank, if they've gotten any closer to having a kid.
Michael laughs. He can't believe the question or what's more, that he's going to answer it.
'Yeah,' he muses. 'Oh yeah. We're getting close to ready.' Then he chuckles, embarrassed.
'Adoption, right?'
'What else is there? Inseminate Brad?'
Claire's open face is impossible to mistrust.
She dodges bounding Muttley and gives Michael the news: 'I know a sweet kid in and out of foster care, but really sweet and he needs a home.' Talking about the kid like he's an apartment for rent.
And then, with a strange hesitation-or maybe I'm not imagining this right, maybe I'm making it go too fast, but soon enough careful Michael says it. 'I think,' he says, 'I think-well, we've talked about this. Brad and I. A kid. A kid in need, yeah. We. Yeah.' Reality drops like a wedding cake smack into the middle of their conversation. 'We're-I think-interested in, maybe, talking or meeting-uh, Brad?'
Who flips. 'Oh my God!' Brad's hopping around, and all the dogs start barking. 'Oh my fucking God!'
'Oh my God,' Michael agrees.
Claire claps and hops and hugs Brad and Michael, who seem dazed. The dogs leap up, muddy feet against clean clothes.
It was impulsive. They must have seemed decent-they are decent guys, no doubt. They didn't do anything bad. They acted with the best intentions and from their friends I bet they get sympathy all the way. It helps, for me, to think of my parents. These guys were just following the rules they knew best.
My brother Jacob lay bed-ridden for months before his death. He'd flicker in and out of consciousness twenty-four seven. Sometimes if I got up at four in the morning, I'd find him rolling and wheezing. I'd help him to the bathroom. I'd get him a drink. Towards the end he was incapable of much of anything, even talking, but he liked it, I think, if I'd creep in there and for lullabies play Bruce Springsteen tunes. 'Say goodbye, it's Independence Day.' My father would peer in, catch us. He knew he was losing both sons.
* * *
'Athol,' I say to my wife. 'You know-O'Henry's daughter or the South African playwright. It can be a name for a boy or a girl.'
'How do you know things like that, O'Henry's daughter?'
'I just can't believe anybody's named Athol, that's all.'
'No child of mine.'
In January Klara goes to have coffee with Michael and Brad. She heads over to a shop with rotating fans on the ceiling and pretty young help behind the counter, coffee served in thirty European styles. Brad and Michael are nervous before they go. They bicker over what to wear. Brad's T-shirt, 'I Can't Even Think Straight,' is too much says Michael. This pisses Brad off. 'We're meeting a dyke for God's sake.' But Brad relents, takes off his leather jacket, pulls a sweater over the shirt. They don't talk as they head over to the café but things go well: on the way back Brad drapes an arm around stiff Michael and sings. 'A baby, a baby, we're gonna have a baby!'
That's how I imagine it, but there are some specific things I know. Michael was the one who first visited Napoleon; he met the kid at Klara's place of work. He didn't want Brad to go. I picture it like this: Michael telling Brad that he's just certain Brad will fall in love too easily, that he, Michael, will be able to make a clear judgement. But Brad has suspicions-Brad reads Michael's mind: Nobody wants to give a kid to a flighty little fag. And when Michael shows up at the shelter, a Friday when he could have dressed casual, he's wearing an overcoat, a suit and tie, a show of his own substantiality. He crouches down on the floor. He leans his briefcase against the cinder block walls. Napoleon hides behind Klara.
'He's beautiful,' Michael says.
Klara laughs, embarrassed. For an instant she wants to say it's not Napoleon's beauty that has drawn her to him. She wants Michael to see the miracle that is this child. And Napoleon buries his face in Klara's breast.
'He's shy today,' Klara says; she's nervous. 'I've never seen him so shy.'
She tries to pull little Napoleon over towards his new potential daddy-lifts him up in the air, swings him about, sets him sitting on her cross-legged lap, but when Michael gets too close Napoleon squirts over Klara's shoulder, plunges headfirst to the floor, and gathers himself behind her. It's real terror. Napoleon cowers from strange men. He's been raped before, Klara explains.
But even from over her shoulder-even with this chilling piece of news-Napoleon charms Michael. It's the kid's magic power-the one Klara told us about, the kid's power to make people love him. He squints and smiles and shows off, charming Michael. And it all works. Michael is imagining Brad playing with this kid-at some seaside, some park.
* * *
When I was sixteen I was crushed, sullen, and angry. I lurked. Women loved me for it. It didn't matter where I was. Flat on my back in the town square on a sunny day in June, I was subterranean and furious. I got to Philadelphia at eighteen and people who were alienated or angry or otherwise split from the world liked to have me around. Massively depressed, but everyone took it for a James-Dean cowboy cool. These days I'm worried and anxious and fatherly. I pace my comfortable house. I sit in the garden. Out of the shower, I shave. I comb what's left of my thinning hair. I put on a white shirt, a blue suit, a purple tie. My cheeks hang fat towards the collar. Heels clatter across the wooden floor downstairs. Julie calls, 'Goodbye.' I call, 'I love you.' I check beneath my chin for spots I didn't shave.
The adoption went through and soon began showing signs of strain.
'They don't know how to take care of a kid,' said my wife in bed, her body tense and nervous. 'They take long, quiet walks in the Prospect Park. He throws rocks at ducks and squirrels.'
It didn't take long before Michael wanted to give back the child.
'They can't handle the kid,' Julie said. 'It's too much for them. They lie in bed with the kid, putting him to bed, and just before he falls asleep he starts screaming. Stick in me. Stick it! Fuck me up the ass!'
'Jesus, can they do that?' I asked. 'Give him back?'
'I don't know,' said Julie, and she rushed her hands across her face. 'I guess so. And I just can't imagine . . .' Me, I can't help myself. I see them giving the kid away.
Michael tells Brad that he has tried his best, that the adoption was something he needed to do, but that this boy is not for him, it's not possible. The kid makes the most fundamental parts of his life unlivable-he no longer sleeps, he no longer writes letters, they no longer make love; there is nothing in his life except Napoleon and work, and both of those are strained. Michael pushes his words forward hesitantly but forcefully. He says he's got to take care of himself. He doesn't always have to be his own first priority, but he has got to have a life in which he can function. There have got to be children, somewhere, who will let him relax in his couch as he listens to a three-minute song. There have got to be people, somewhere, who will devote themselves to this child as this child requires, that is to say patiently, twenty-four seven, for the rest of their lives.
I swear I could drive to Brooklyn and bounce Michael off walls. I could keep on bouncing him, work his head like it's a basketball. The head snaps back. Blood stains the plaster-but this is not the story in which I do that. This is not the story in which I do anything. This is my life. My wife told me the ending. She took her hands off her ears. They were giving up the kid. It was over.
Julie dropped off to sleep. I headed down to the kitchen. I fixed myself a whiskey. I tried to think how Klara would handle this. Klara's tougher than I am. She's faced worse beasts than Michael-who is after all a kind and well-meaning soul. She doesn't have my tendency to hide or mope or run away or dream of violence. She would find him and talk.
So Klara invites him out to coffee again. It's late March and she has to trudge through a snowstorm-crazy New York weather, winter comes in bursts. She pulls off her scarf and her face is the color of a cooked beet. They smile and laugh about the snow. Michael gets coffee. Klara gets cocoa. She asks how Napoleon is doing. 'Terrific,' Michael says, and Klara turns stern. 'This has got to be hard for him,' she says. 'Oh, for all of us,' Michael tells her. 'It's terrible.'
Carefully, Klara tries to invoke his obligations. She appeals to Michael on grounds of conscience. Michael, the lawyer, says his conscience is clear-depleted, he laughs, but clear. What about responsibilities? 'I know,' says Michael. 'I know.' Klara lets a word slip: selfish.
Michael has been waiting for this. He knows it's not true. He sees his adversary's weakness and presses his advantage. This is in that same non-smoking coffee shop they met in before. It's crowded with people in sweaters, mothers with strollers, young women with novels, middle-aged men with laptops. Everyone looks like they attended the same private college. Ella Fitzgerald sings over the stereo. Michael takes a small sip of coffee, bends forward, and gives vent. He says: 'I am being nothing more than honest in saying this adoption has failed.'
Klara drops her hands to her sides. She's lost.
He says: 'It's been only two months and I know I cannot do this. I am admitting my own failure-this isn't easy. Remember, you chose not to adopt Napoleon. You weren't willing to try. I was. I failed. I am not happy, I'm not proud, but I know that giving up now is far preferable to pressing ahead. I am incapable of being his father.' He pauses. 'Do you know what that means? That means I know I will grow to resent, to fear, maybe even to hate him.' Michael bites his own lip. 'This is a beautiful, wounded child, and I had wished and dreamed that I could tend to him. But I can't. I don't know how to do it. Understand? At night, he doesn't sleep, he doesn't let me sleep. At meals, if I eat, if I stop tending to him for a second, he panics. If I read, he begins shrieking. He needs a different person than me. Another parent. Someone else. I don't think I am capable of making his life better-and I know he is capable of making my life worse. I am selfish here, yes, but selfishness here is based on a reasonable estimation of my own abilities. I will fail as his father. I have failed. I continue to fail. And it is not generous to offer someone a failed father. It's hubris. It's idiocy. It's crap.'
That dreamy look is in Klara's eyes again, as if they're scanning the horizon looking for land. She says, 'I know you can do this.'
'It's two months now,' he says, 'and in a year, if we keep him, it will only be worse to give him up. His attachments will be greater and so will ours and the whole thing will be so much more heart-rending. To keep him on beyond, for the rest of my life-what would that accomplish? I know I can't do this. I've failed.'
'But you said'-Klara's reduced to mourning-'you said you'd take care of him.'
'And I was wrong, and I admit it. I can't.' He cleans up some crumbs with a napkin.
At the day-care center which he still attends, Napoleon invents a game. He makes Klara pretend to be a train. He tells her to pull out of the station. As she begins chugging elbows, he starts to cry, 'Don't leave me! Don't leave me!' They repeat this dozens of times a day.
Brad picks Napoleon up on April Fool's Day. He's wearing a spring-time leather jacket and a pink T-shirt. The guy is an angel with clipped wings, looks like at any moment he's going to sob. He loves Napoleon. The kid's magic has totally worked on him. But Michael has given his ultimatum. And Brad can't imagine life alone.
'I am so,' he says, 'so the wife.'
I'm furious, but that means nothing. Julie and I both know that we could take in Napoleon. She makes enough money. I could quit my job and stay with the kid. Nobody in the world would be better at it than I would. But like I said, my wife and I have plans. Two more months at the bank, and then we'll throw away the condoms. This time around, I feel cursed.
I see an article about people with gross facial deformities. I think, that will be my son. He will have extra holes in his nose. His face will be shaped like a radar dish. When I see an ugly or crippled toddler in Rittenhouse Square, a grade school kid in a wheelchair with an electronic breathing apparatus hitched up to the back-I think that will be my Jacob. Limbless, brainless, spineless, grotesque.
But Klara and Claire are tougher than I am. They're not easily shaken. Recently, Michael and Brad have approached them with a proposition: They want to co-adopt a child, the four of them together. They see each other walking in the park and they're friendly; they're on the same team.
I think of Napoleon, that poor tortured kid who on his own invented love, and all I can think is: he'll be lucky to live past fourteen. He'll be some miraculous, charming con-man. He'll be a beggar or a jailhouse slut. I think of my father, peering into a room, seeing his dying child and his sullen teen. He knows that both of his sons have lost him.