downstairs in eagle wallpaper and Spanish-style cabinetry—must have run out of money at the stairwell. Up here the shabbiness has more patina. The wallpaper in this room swarms with faded carnivorous-looking flowers, and the venetian blinds dangle from frayed cords the color of strong tea. Clare flips around the channels. We have cable here, a powerful magnet that sucks down each invisible impulse passing overhead. Along with the normal stations we get strip shows from New York, Mexican soap operas, Japanese women gleefully demonstrating inventions so complex that only other inventions can fully appreciate them. Occasionally we tune in a hesitant, snowy channel that is almost frightening—it looks like men and women walking, just walking, through an empty field. It could be a transmission we’ve picked up by mistake, something from a world we aren’t meant to see.
“A hundred and twenty stations and there’s still nothing to watch,” Clare says.
“Nothing on TV tonight, let’s fuck,” Jonathan says.
Clare looks at him with her brows arched and her eyes dark. “You two fuck,” she says.
Jonathan jumps on her and simulates frantic, rabbit-like copulation. “Oh baby oh baby oh baby,” he moans.
“Off,” she says. “Get off me. Really. Go jump on Bobby.”
“Ooh baby,” Jonathan says.
“Bobby, make him stop,” she says.
I shrug, powerless. “I’ll scream,” she says. “I’ll call the police.”
“And tell them what?” Jonathan asks.
“That I’m being held prisoner in this house by two men. That they lured me here for purposes of breeding, and force me to live in a perpetual 1969.”
“You’ve done the breeding,” Jonathan says. “If that were your only purpose here, we’d be through with you by now.”
“The baby still needs milk, doesn’t she?” Clare says. “And the house needs a momma. Doesn’t it?”
Jonathan pauses a moment, considering. “Naw,” he says. “You’re free to go.” He rolls off of her and picks up the remote-control box. “Let’s see if there’s anything good coming in from Jupiter tonight.”
“If I go,” Clare says, “I’m taking the kid.”
“Oh no you’re not,” he answers. Then he remembers to adjust his voice. “She’s everybody’s,” he says more gently.
Clare leans back, cocks her head in my direction. “Bobby?”
“Uh-huh?”
“I’d like to know the secret of your imperturbable calm. Here we are in the middle of a highly peculiar and unorthodox arrangement, in a house that could fall down around us at any moment, Jonathan and I are bickering over possession of my child—”
“
“Over possession of our baby,” she says, “and you just sit here like Dagwood Bumstead. Sometimes I think
“I guess I am,” I say. “I mean, none of this seems all that strange to me.”
She looks up at the ceiling, her eyes dilated to black disks. “I should have known,” she says. “I should have figured it out the first moment I saw you, with blow-dried hair and Calvin Klein jeans. And then you could switch practically overnight to East Village hip. It’s so funny. It turns out Jonathan and I are the conservative ones. We’re the ones who need to look in the mirror and know what we’re going to see from day to day. You can just do anything, can’t you?”
“No,” I tell her. “I can’t just do anything.”
“Name me something. Name something you wouldn’t do.”
“Um, well, I wouldn’t be alone. I haven’t been, you know, by myself since I was a kid.”
“That’s it,” she says. “You’re a company man, aren’t you? You mirror everybody’s desires. Oh, why didn’t I think of this before? When you lived with Jonathan’s parents you were a nice Ohio boy, when you lived in the East Village you were cool, and now that we live in the country you’re this sweet sort of hippie-dad figure. You just give people whatever they want. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
There are things I can’t tell her, things I wouldn’t know how to say. I am part of the living and part of the dead. I am living for more people than just myself.
“Oh, Clare,” Jonathan says from the foot of the bed. “What are you all of a sudden, some sort of Nancy Drew of the psyche? Do you really think you can sum Bobby up in a sentence like that?”
“You go sentence by sentence in this life,” she says.
I reach over and stroke Clare’s hair. I try to kiss her troubled lips.
“Boys, boys,” she says, pulling away from my kiss. “What a perverse crew we are. What a deeply weird bunch.”
“We’re really, you know, not much weirder than any family,” I say. “At least we love each other. Didn’t you say that first?”
“Maybe I did. About a thousand years ago.”
I look into her scared, aging face. I think I know what frightens Clare—a certain ability to invent our own futures has been lost. Now we are following a plan that got made in a haphazard way along a highway in Pennsylvania. Now the good things are the predictable ones, and surprises mean bad news.
I put my lips on hers again. This time she returns the kiss. Jonathan continues flipping channels, lazily half- watching.
CLARE
I NEVER expected this, a love so ravenous it’s barely personal. A love that displaces you, pushes you out of shape. I knew that if I was crossing the street with the baby and a car screamed around the corner, horn blaring, I’d shield her with my body. I’d do it automatically, the way you protect your head or heart by holding up your arms. You defend your vital parts with your tougher, more expendable ones. In that way, motherhood worked as promised. But I found that I loved her without a true sense of charity or goodwill. It was a howling, floodlit love; a frightening thing. I would shield her from a speeding car but I’d curse her as I did it, like a prisoner cursing the executioner.
Rebecca’s mouth worked to form the word “Momma.” She fretted whenever I left her. Someday she’d pay a fortune to therapists for their help in solving the mystery of my personality. There would be plenty of material—a mother living with two men, intricately in love with both of them. An undecided, disorganized woman who fell out of every conventional arrangement. Who dragged her own childhood along with her into her forties. I’d been just a private, slipshod person going about my business and now I was on my way to becoming the central riddle in another person’s life.
Being a mother was the weighted, unsettling thing. Being a lover—even an unorthodox lover—was tame and ordinary by comparison.
Maybe that was the secret my own mother discovered. She’d thought my wild, undisciplined father would prove to be her life’s adventure. And then she’d given birth.
We worked out a variation on the classic arrangement, we three. Bobby and Jonathan went to the cafe before sunrise every morning, I stayed home with Rebecca. I didn’t want a business. Eventually I’d start making jewelry again, or some other little thing. The restaurant was the boys’ project, a way for them to support themselves and begin paying me back. They were good, uncomplaining workers. Or, Bobby was a good, uncomplaining worker and Jonathan more or less followed his example. They left the house at five o’clock every morning, just as the darkness was beginning to turn, and didn’t come back until four or five in the afternoon, when the dark was already working its way back into the corners of the house. To be honest, I didn’t know too much about their work lives. Bobby cooked, Jonathan was the waiter, and a sweet dim-witted boy from town bussed tables and did the dishes. Although I listened to their stories—furious customers, kitchen fixtures that blew up or caught fire in the middle of the lunch rush, wildly improbable thefts (someone stole the stuffed salmon right off the
