—Of course; how do you think you were born?
—How disgusting. I’ll never do it. (Wrapped in a towel, a desert saint at nine.) Do you still do that with men?
—Of course.
—How often? he asks.
—That’s none of your business.
—There is something else. The boys said there is something even worse than fucking. But I can’t tell you. Do you know what?
—No. Worse than fucking?...then whisper it...
—It’s when boys do it to each other. Is that true?...I think it’s disgusting. I won’t get married when I grow up. I’ll be a priest...
• •
—But Mummy, you’re not leaving us all alone!
—I told you I was going out for dinner with a friend.
—Why can’t we go too?
—Why can’t you tell us who? What’s the big secret?
—She has a date and it’s none of your business, Joshua tells them. My advocate. —You’re going like that? he asks. How come you’re not dressed up?
—Really! You behave like the worst parents...Tell them I’m just meeting an old friend at a deli...Now they’re really indignant.
—That’s all! Leaving us alone just to...Big schmear!...next time I’ll put on my mother’s fur coat and tell them...
—Just go, Mom, and leave everything to me, Joshua with an evil gleam in his eyes.
—Mummy, you can’t! He’ll torment us! Toby cries, but she is already screaming with delight as she leaps aside, casting hopeful looks at her tormentor.
—Well, why don’t you go! Giggling, they push me out the door.
•
Variety at least, one would think—or the married woman would suppose, like the settled person supposes the traveler has variety at least—but it’s the sense of repetition that saddens, even when it’s very pleasant she has the old feeling, here I go again; it seemed all right for many years, it seemed the very essence of herself to feel here I go again getting laid, the limbs twining, the fingers running up and down tracing ear, shoulder, haunch, the womb beginning to rise; pulled along with it, the spirit remains an observer on a dizzying ride. To feel here I go again being laid like every woman since Eve and enjoying it was how it should feel in marriage, all right if it’s not going anywhere, it’s a reaffirmation, a repeat, the old lay. And now it’s again like this; except it’s not carried into sleep and through the next day, giving the daily chores and cares, all the varied offices of this strange coexistence of two, its impertinent validity. The ease with which she leaves the scene because she isn’t chained to this room by marriage or love feels so odd. Riding up Broadway in a taxi, a free woman, if this moment she is less lonely than she had been with Ezra, does she miss the heavy old misery? Even when it has a kind of perfection like with X—it was in his country, she made the voyage, successfully transplanted and transformed into a creature of his planet, the phantom image of her alienated self persisting through the act and for days after...And that won’t do either.
• •
—Why aren’t you in bed, Joshua? It’s three in the morning.
—Mom, I’m so sad. Stay with me a little. Do you think life has any meaning?
—You behave like a clown all day and at three a.m. you ask me if life has any meaning.
—What do you expect? Fourteen, he says. C’est l’âge bête. I know I’m horrible and give you a hard time but I can’t help it.
—You’re not even trying.
—I know. Don’t you think I know. I don’t even try to improve myself. Oh I feel sick. I keep thinking that I’m going to die. One day I simply won’t exist. Nobody will remember me. So why bother?
—We all have to die, I say, savagely cheerful. Disgusting how he wallows like his father.
—God! you’re a real comfort.
—If you thought about death seriously for one minute...
—Why don’t you believe I’m serious? You think I’m shallow, don’t you? Maybe you don’t care. But I hate to have to die. If we have to die—life is stupid.
—And so?
—What do you mean, “and so?”
A closed figure, hands clasping knees, his mother, I sit on the floor the incarnation of life’s stupidity. The silence growing vertiginous, my body’s surface like a black cloth absorbs his angry baffled look. I am the abyss. Can’t tell him I mean Yes, life is stupid, fifteen years ago in a furnished room in London pleading with Ezra I wanted to run out of this world and he said, Yes, I’m going to give you a child this time to root you in life; I didn’t believe it was possible; life couldn’t begin in such darkness and he said, Yes, in just such darkness. And in uttermost exhaustion of all hope and love and understanding, his father explained with dialectical theology. And now here you are, my boy.
—Don’t you really care? he asks, dismayed.
—Don’t you know that I do and that I love you and that I know that you’re a good boy; even when I seem annoyed and don’t come up with answers, you must always know that.
—I know, Mom. I just like to talk.
—Joshua, lovey, it’s very late.
—I’m sorry, Mom.
—Let’s have some hot chocolate and go to sleep.
—I’ll make it, he says. Mom, aren’t you really afraid of death?
—Of dying, yes, when I cross the street. But the thought that I’m going to be dead one day, that doesn’t bother me at all, I feel it’s right and just as it should be. Sometimes I think women find death less of a problem than men. The real problem is not death—
—Well naturally, he cuts in. Because a woman has less to gain from life than a man.
—You don’t say...
—A woman’s life, after all...The fact is it’s a man’s world. Solemn, wide-eyed, telling his mother the obvious painful fact. When you think what a man can achieve, I mean...
—But Joshua, can you imagine living forever? Can you really?...That’s wonderful.
• •
—Kids stop that racket I’m on the phone. It’s
