Tar Baby

table but no one was there. Jadine and Son foraged in the refrigerator—accomplices. Margaret appeared for breakfast coffee only. Sydney took trays of halfheartedly prepared sandwiches to Valerian’s room and brought them back untouched.

Margaret told her husband in pieces. Little by little, she spooned it out to him a sip here a drop there. A fleeting sentence in midair as they passed on the stairs: “It was not as often as you think and there were long, long periods of happiness between us in between.” But he had stepped inside his bedroom door. Another time she said, “Don’t try to persuade yourself that I didn’t love him. He was more important to me than my life. Than my life.” She had to repeat the phrase for his back was receding fast. He never directed those gloaming eyes her way. She told him in bite-sized pieces, small enough for him to swallow quickly because she did not have the vocabulary to describe what she had come to know, remember. So there was no way or reason to describe those long quiet days when the sun was drained and nobody ever on the street. There were magazines, of course, to look forward to, but neither Life nor Time could fill a morning. It started on a day like that. Just once she did it, a slip, and then once more, and it became the thing to look forward to, to resist, to succumb to, to plan, to be horrified by, to forget, because out of the doing of it came the reason. And she was outraged by that infant needfulness. There were times when she absolutely had to limit its being there; stop its implicit and explicit demand for her best and constant self. She could not describe her loathing of its prodigious appetite for security—the criminal arrogance of an infant’s conviction that while he slept, someone is there; that when he wakes, someone is there; that when he is hungry, food will somehow magically be provided. So she told him that part that was palatable: that she could not control herself—which was true, for when she felt hostage to that massive insolence, that stupid trust, she could not help piercing it.

Finally, Margaret entered his room one night and locked the door behind her.

“I’ve just spoken to Michael,” she said.

Valerian could not believe it. She could call him? Speak to him? Say his name? Did she think it was business as usual?

“He said he sent two cables telling us he couldn’t make it. Two. Neither one was telephoned to us. I asked him to call B. J. Bridges. Obviously we don’t need any guests at New Year’s.”

Valerian was speechless. She was going to go on about it, chatting about things just as if nothing had happened. The blood had not dropped out of his eyes yet, so this still was not life. He could get through it because it was some other thing he was living.

“How dare you call him?” he asked hoarsely. “How do you dare?”

“He isn’t damaged, Valerian. He isn’t.”

Valerian said nothing; he only stared at her. She was even lovelier now that her hair had no spray in it, that it was not tortured into Art Deco, now that it hung according to its own will and the shape of her head. And she wore no make-up. Little charming eyebrows instead of styled ones, and the thin top lip was much nicer than the full one she ritually painted.

“How can you know that? How can you know what is damage and what is not? If you don’t know the difference between between between between.” He stopped, he could not say it. “How do you know the difference between what is damaged and what is healed?”

“I know; I see him; I visit him. Believe me, he’s fine. Finer than most.”

They were both silent for a few moments and then Margaret said, “You want to ask me why. Don’t. I can’t answer that. I can tell you that I was more successful in keeping myself from doing it than not. When it did happen, it was out of my control. I thought at first it was because he was crying or wouldn’t sleep. But then sometimes it was in order to make him cry, or to wake him from sleep.”

“I can’t hear this, Margaret.”

“You can. I have done it, lived with it. You can hear it.”

She seemed strong to him. He was wasting away, filed to nothing by grief, and she was strong, stronger. Talking about it as though it were a case history, an operation, some surgery that had been performed on her that she had survived and she was describing it to him.

“You are disgusting. You are are are are monstrous. You did it because you are monstrous.”

“I did it because I could, Valerian, and I stopped doing it or wanting to do it when I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t?”

“Yes, couldn’t. When he was too big, when he could do it back, when he could…tell.”

“Leave me.”

“He’s fine, I’m telling you. He’s all right.”

“Please leave me.”

She understood, understood completely, and without another word she unlocked the door and left.

Another time she waited for him at the breakfast table and said, “You are angry because he didn’t tell you.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?” Valerian had not thought of that yet; he had been living with just the picture of the boy under the sink and had only been hearing the la la la, la la la, but now he realized that was part of his anger. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

“He was probably too ashamed.”

“Oh, God.”

“I think he is still ashamed.”

Valerian’s hands were shuddering again. “Why does he love you?” he asked her over his shuddering fingers. “Why does he love you?”

“Because I love him.”

Valerian shook his head and asked her a third time, “Why does he love you?”