'Now I do.'
'Are you always able to do all of your homework without me?'
'Not always.'
'What do you do?'
'It's all right if it's wrong.'
'Wouldn't it be better, though, if it were always correct?'
'The teachers don't care. Can I go now?'
'Where?'
He smiles apologetically, anticipating the humor of his reply. 'To my room.'
'Sure,' I consent genially, with a heartiness that is false. 'I just wanted to make sure you weren't angry with me.'
'You stay in your room a lot,' he pauses near the staircase to argue over his shoulder defensively. 'Mommy stays in her room. You don't think there's something wrong with me, do you?'
'But I always let you come into mine.'
Oh, God — here he is, a sensitive, candid, alert little boy, no larger now, it seems, than he was as a toddler; and I am quarreling with him, near tears (and with a lump in my throat), as though I were a rejected suitor, fencing with him selfishly as I would with my wife or my daughter.
How shall I die? Let me count the ways. (No, I won't.) I've been through that juvenile exercise before and won't waste time. None is good. I'm unable to eradicate from my mind the image of that vigorous, prosperous, large, handsome man who fell dead in the lobby of my office building a few weeks ago as we were nearly abreast of each other. I saw him clearly as he fell forward. Even as he was doubling over and crumpling he looked the epitome of radiant and robust indestructibility until his face hit the floor with a soggy whack and blood from the impact shot out of his mouth. I continued walking past him without a hitch in my stride. I made believe I didn't see. When I got back from lunch, he wasn't there. He had been taken away. I was disappointed. Someone had distorted reality for the sake of neatness. (I have things organized very neatly now upstairs.) I still catch myself looking for him in the spot where he fell. I still remember him falling. This morning on my way to work I saw an unconscious derelict lying on the steps of Saint Patrick's Cathedral, staining the stone platforms with a fluid that could have been urine or whiskey. Policemen were there and had the situation in hand. They didn't need my help.
It's a good thing they didn't.
Woe, woe, alas, and alack. My wife is unhappy too again. We have arrived at a reasonable understanding: it isn't all my fault and there's not much I can do to improve things (even though I still won't tell her I love her and she refuses pointedly to ask). She makes no difference to anyone.
'I wish I had a career at something exciting.'
'It isn't too late.'
She lifts her eyes to study me in steadfast gaze. 'It is too late.'
'Of course it is.'
She accepts the fact that Kagle was fated to go no matter what I did, and that if I had not gone in to replace him, I would never have been allowed to go anywhere else.
'You'd get a housekeeper, wouldn't you?' she says dreamily. 'And put Derek in a home. Or you'd send the children away to boarding school and move into the city.'
'If what?'
'If I committed suicide or died of cancer or just moved away alone or with some other man.'
'Are you thinking of any of those?' I ask with healing indulgence.
'And I wouldn't blame you. I just don't make a difference to anyone.'
'Neither do I,' I have to confess intimately. 'Except to you and the children. Not even Derek.'
'I'd be satisfied with that. No, don't lie to me about it,' she adds with dignity and a very small, regretful smile. 'I wouldn't believe you.'
My wife feels she makes no difference to anyone anymore and she is probably right.
There is so much torment around, even for her. I have to make a speech. My boy will probably perish without me (or I without him. I think I may always have felt that way about him). Oh, my God — we go into torment long before we even know what suffering is. We are saddled with it before we can even see. There is so much inner fright. I was born, I was told, with a mashed face and red and blue forcep bruises on my shoulders and arms but felt not one message of pain because I had no nervous system yet that could register any. But I knew what loneliness was. I was already afraid of the dark. Or the light. If I knew what cold and sleet were I would have been afraid of those too. (Are we afraid of what we can't see or of what we will see when we do?) I was afraid I would open my eyes and it would still be dark. (It was that way in that hospital the night they took my tonsils out.) I am afraid of that happening now. And no one would come. Fear. Loss of love, loss of the loved one, loss of love of the loved one. Separation. We don't want to go, we don't want them to go, we can't wait for them to leave, we wish they'd return. There seem to be conflicts. I was in need of whatever nipple succored me and whatever arms lifted me. I didn't know names. I loved the food that fed me — that's all I knew — and the arms that held and hugged and turned me and gave me to understand, at least for those periods, that I was not alone and someone else knew I was there. Without them, I would have been alone. I am afraid of the dark now. I have nightmares in strange beds, and in my own. I have apparitions underneath my bed waiting to stream out. I have spirits in my bedroom closets. I am anxious as a four-year-old child. I am afraid of the light. I am afraid I will open my eyes someday and it will still be dark. And no one will come. (I woke up without tonsils and adenoids in the hospital one thousand times that night and it was always dark, and I thought there would never be light again. And no one came.) What will I have to look forward to if morning comes one day and there is no light? What will I be like when I am senile? Will I molest children, break wind, defecate on living room floors, say nigger, bait Jews? I say nigger now occasionally; it slips out. I could bait Green. I think I know expressly how to cope with Green.
'Jack,' I could begin, with an air of disarming joviality, 'I think I'd like to hire a Jew. Do you know of any? I'd want a smart one.'
'I'm afraid that would be impossible,' he might reply, with the same pretense of amiability.
'Aren't there any smart ones left?' I could follow up, tauntingly.
'Oh, yes,' he would answer. 'But a smart one wouldn't work for you. And if you're going to hire the other kind, you'd might as well stick with a Protestant. They'd make a better appearance, for you.'
And I'd discover once more that I'd still not been able to cope with him at all. I'll bet I'm probably one of the very few people in the entire world who know (not
'Why are you staring at me?' he asks uncomfortably.
'I'm not staring.'
'You were.'
'I'm sorry. I was thinking.' He intends to remain silent. 'And if you asked me what I was thinking about, do you know what I'd say?'
'What?' he asks, to oblige me.
'I was thinking about when you were going to ask me why I was staring at you.'
He grins with a small noise of appreciation as a token of acknowledgment, and goes into his room, closing the door.
I don't want him to go. My memory's failing, my bladder is weak, my arches are falling, my tonsils and adenoids are gone, and my jawbone is rotting, and now my little boy wants to cast me away and leave me behind for reasons he won't give me. What else will I have? My job? When I am fifty-five, I will have nothing more to look forward to than Arthur Baron's job and reaching sixty-five. When I am sixty-five, I will have nothing more to look forward to than reaching seventy-five, or dying before then. And when I am seventy-five, I will have nothing more to look forward to than dying before eighty-five, or geriatric care in a nursing home. I will have to take enemas. (Will I have to be dressed in double-layer, waterproof undershorts designed especially for incontinent gentlemen?) I will be incontinent. I don't want to live longer than eighty-five, and I don't want to die sooner than a hundred and
