Ideas of Heaven Page 10

  Eli did not talk much that first day. Rita and I were hearty and brisk around him—“Here we are!” “You ate your whole lunch!” “You have a yard now!”—and he watched us. When Rita left in the evening, she said, “Be good, pumpkin.”

  He said, “I’m not a vegetable,” with a little smirk. He didn’t seem upset at her going, but she wasn’t someone he knew very well.

  “You know what I like to do?” he said to me while we were standing outside in the twilight. “Guess.”

  “Wrestle alligators?”

  “Nope.”

  “Jump tall buildings at a single bound?”

  “No.”

  “End world hunger?”

  “I like to listen to the radio before I go to bed.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  “That’s what you think,” he said.

  What he liked, I discovered when he fooled with the tuning dial, was hip-hop music played very loud. He did actually fall asleep with it blaring, with the rhyming engine of the lines going on and on. I was so happy that he was sleeping soundly in my house that I left the radio on for an hour, although it drove me nuts and made me feel old.

  Noise was his element, it turned out. On good days, he was excited and shrieking. On bad days, he was sullen and explosive. I had once heard a comedian say that living with kids is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain, and I quoted that line to anyone who asked. Eli needed (as Peggy advised me from London) a lot of stimulation. He was at his worst—lonely for his mother, angry over the move, hostile to me—when there was nothing buzzing or banging or bleating in front of him. Well. If that was what it took. He was a great boy, under all that crashing noise, funny and full of ideas and very smart. I had to think of places to take him—parks and roller rinks and swimming pools. I had to keep him moving; I had to be on the case every second, in the early days. Once he got used to me, he was a snuggler too, but that didn’t happen for a while.

  AT FIRST, Peggy phoned us often—at seven in the morning, U.S. time. For a while there was talk of her coming back to take Eli to London, and then that idea petered out, before I even argued with her. I got his musical taste expanded to samba, John Philip Sousa, and the Sex Pistols, which may not have been an improvement. He played around in the backyard with another boy from school—they threw rocks into the compost heap, they pretended to be space aliens, I don’t know what they did. He liked the yard.

  But sometime during that year, Eli began to know that Peggy wasn’t coming back for him anytime soon, and California suddenly soured for him. He hated the way everything looked, he thought all the people were stupid. He called everyone in his class a shithead, he threw a toy truck at a girl’s chest. His school complained. When I spoke to him, he turned his back. He had come through the first months so well, and now I was afraid he was going to turn into a kid I couldn’t handle. This was a very bad time.

  A WOMAN CAME into the store one day to buy a dresser and she flirted with me. I was astonished. She was distinctly pretty, leaning toward me in a skimpy T-shirt, a small blond person who asked a lot of questions and then asked me how I knew all that. I couldn’t get over it. I was like an innocent yokel with his mouth wide open, although I hadn’t been altogether celibate during these years. But she arrived just when I was thinking that nothing, nothing, was ever easy in my life—why wasn’t it? why not?—and here she was, so mild and good-looking and interested.

  She asked me if some long wooden hairpins with carved tops were Chinese, which they were.

  “We had one like that on the knickknack shelf in our house,” she said. “My great-great-grandmother sent it back. She was a missionary in China. Well, a missionary’s wife.”

  “The missionaries were very tough,” I said. “Very sturdy types.” I made that up, what did I know about it? I was just talking. I invited her back to the house for dinner the same day.

  Eli said, “Who’s this dweeb?” when she walked in, but I had more or less warned her and she laughed him off. Her name was Mattina, and Eli kept singing over and over the refrain from “Frère Jacques,” “Sonny lemon tina! Sonny lemon tina! Ding dang dong! Ding dang dong!” She was a good sport about everything. We had to talk loudly over his video cartoons, as if we were in some comedy about the dating dad. Actually, this chore of voicing breathy sentences into each other’s ear began to feel quite sexy. She was so round and smooth and calm about herself, just waiting for me to figure out how to get us into bed, with Eli right there in the next room. She was younger than I was, somewhere in her mid-twenties, and I could see that for her nothing was very difficult yet.

  I shamelessly let Eli watch a cop show on TV that I usually banned, and while he was hynotized by the tube, I snuck her off into the yard for some heavy petting. She was a graceful kisser, unflustered by any awkwardness, sleepy-eyed and friendly. She laughed softly when I took off her bra.

  ELI WAS NOT crazy about her. At the time they met, he didn’t care for anyone—man, woman, dog, cat—but even later he didn’t seem to get past a certain point with Mattina, though they got along all right. But I saw my chance and I took it. I saw that I could have a less starved and cramped and insane existence. Mattina was a day at the beach, a walk in the park, a piece of cake. And not stupid. She worked in a lab at Berkeley, helping some big-deal botanist with his hybrids. She was probably smarter than I was.

  And what did she want with me, a gloomy guy with a screeching imp of a son? I don’t think she knew any better—she might have fallen into any attraction that offered, and I was older and seemed glamorous to her. I needed her very badly. We had a good time together, quite often. I wasn’t in love with her exactly, not in the way I had been when I was younger, but she was such a pleasant, fair-minded person—it awed me sometimes. I was moved to appreciation. It is hard to explain how moving that can be.

  Once Eli knew Mattina was coming to live with us, he said, “Are we getting a swimming pool too?” When he was that little, I couldn’t always tell if he was making a joke, but I knew he was linking Mattina to something like bourgeois comfort, a less slip-shod lifestyle. No more Fritos for breakfast, no more going to school in his pajama top. There would be trips to the mall, rides to baseball games.

  All Mattina asked was that I not condescend to her for being young (as I sometimes did) and that I make room for her in the household as my cherished consort. She complained when I could never remember what days she worked at the lab, but she was ridiculously touched when I brought home a quart of the ice cream she liked. It made no sense that this terrific-looking young woman had to fight for my attention, but that was the premise we lived under. She cajoled and bribed and gently bullied me. Gary said I was a lucky jerk.

  And so I was thrown back once again into the mundane world of human relations. There was my wild-guy-Eli making his many decibels of noise that had to be dealt with, and there was Mattina with her sweetness and caresses and her friends who liked to visit. My days did not have a second of solitude in them. I was in the thick of some kind of talk-talk-talk in every waking hour. Gone was my long spell of silent study and inner ripening. Vanished without a trace.

  Rilke—I knew from my reading—never saw his daughter Ruth very much after her first year. She was left as an infant with his wife Clara’s parents in the country, and Rilke lived intermittently with his wife, a sculptor, for just a little while longer, and then he slipped away from the confinement of those bonds. He was always shaking off women. One after another. I didn’t want to be like Rilke. I was ashamed for both of us. I just wanted Eli to be all right, I wanted to build a nest that could safely hold him.

  Eli had been sleeping on a daybed in the study, and Mattina made me set up a real room for him. She took him to the mall to get Batman sheets and a red plaid quilt and a lot of other crap. He was cosseted with toys and given books he couldn’t read yet and fitted with overpriced running shoes. This distracted him from being impossible. He didn’t mean to improve but he did, in fits and starts.

&n
bsp; From England, Peggy made a few snotty remarks about how much money I seemed to have now—where had it been before?—but she wasn’t as annoying as she might have been. This decision of hers to be relatively agreeable meant, I thought, that she was expecting Eli to stay with me longer. “His feet will grow out of those fancy sneakers overnight,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  Right away I had the idea (we all did, from our own angles) that if I married Mattina, I had a stronger case for keeping Eli with me. It wasn’t a legal question—Peggy and I never went to law, and who knows what rights I would have had—but I thought the gesture would make a lasting impression on Peggy. This was probably right.

  Mattina and I had a wedding in our yard, with amazing flowers provided by her cronies from work and many bottles of champagne drunk by cute young women and perfectly nice young men I didn’t especially want to talk to. I was a tense, somewhat embarrassed groom, and nobody thought this was odd. Mattina looked excited and pretty, in a little short white sheath. My family liked her. Gary and his boyfriend paid to have someone play the flute for us in our driveway. From across the ocean, Peggy made fun of our not having a honeymoon, but she sent a silk bowtie for Eli to wear.

  Later Peggy and I had disputes about his upbringing, and when Eli was older he went to spend summers with her in England, but my marriage did help bind him to me. In our wedding pictures Eli looks toothy and pleased. And it would have been much, much harder to raise him without Mattina. I can’t even think how it would have been.

  PEOPLE KNOW WHEN you’re not in love with them. It can be kept a secret for only so long. For the first five years Mattina chose to assume that I was just older, more tempered and moderate than other men she’d known. Or that I wasn’t open about my emotions, as many American men weren’t. I did try to be kind to her. The kindness and the tender adventures of lust kept us going for a long time.

  At one point Mattina started to think that I had a lover, when I was out at night too much. I was really with Gary’s Vipassana meditation group, which I had decided to try again. I didn’t know how to make Mattina believe that was really where I was, and the quarrel we had about it, in which she cited all the ways I didn’t notice her, broke open more pockets of sadness from her than I’d known about. “I notice you all the time,” I said, and then I argued that couples never stayed in their first full delirious flush forever anyway, how could they? “You were never in any flush,” she said.

  I did get her to believe that I was where I said I was on those Thursday evenings, just sitting still and trying to focus on my breath. “Why your breath?” she said. “It’s handy,” I said. “It’s something I can observe without fear or clinging.” After that she accused me of going out every week to learn not to feel, a thing I was already good at. But she did believe me.

  At this point in my life, I took to it pretty readily—the meditation, the discussions afterward, the whole package. I was often sleepy and distracted and completely unable to concentrate, but I was in thrall to the notion of going beyond my own particulars.

  Eli, who was almost eleven when I started this, kind of liked my having this new hobby, which he connected with his favorite kung-fu movies, despite my disclaimers. “Sorry to tell you it doesn’t involve kicking people,” I said. And even Mattina got used to it, when she saw that I wasn’t going to leave her, that I was going to do everything else the way I’d always done it. She did want me to be happy, after all.

  IT WASN’T UNTIL Eli was in his early teenagehood and he flew across the ocean by himself to spend a month with his mother in England, that I decided what I needed was to go off alone for a week to Yosemite. Not to meditate—I had already hit my limits with that—but just to hang out by myself, in a landscape of noble heights and thrilling chasms, with no one talking to me all the time, no one. Mattina was disappointed that this was my idea of a blissful vacation. But it wasn’t an eccentric thing to do in California, and she didn’t try to block me.

  So I took off in the car with my backpack and a new tent, and I picked the trails I thought were the least popular, although of course there were other humans often within sight. I got sprayed on by spectacular waterfalls, and I saw a Sequoia that was thirty feet thick, and I passed through meadows ringed by granite peaks. One afternoon I sat for an hour looking at the rock walls of Half Dome, and I remembered myself in a place like Prague, gazing at the tower of St. Vitus Cathedral. But when I was young I took things in differently. I thought I was giving them their meaning by dowering them with my attention. What did I know then of what else would be asked of me? I didn’t know how life would shout at me and tug my arm and bellow commands. I’d had another idea completely.

  The whole week I got rained on only once, a pelting thunderstorm that was over fast. And when I came back from Yosemite, after not speaking to another person for a week, tired and unbathed and rank-smelling, I was more changed than I’d expected. It was not that I was calmer (everyone’s idea of why I’d gone), but that the world seemed newly proportioned, as if I had judged the relative size of its parts wrong before now.

  When I hugged Mattina to me, I couldn’t get over the delicate sturdiness of her. How delicious the pressure of her hug was. I was spacey when I first got back, but not hard to get along with. “Just don’t feed me any freeze-dried chili,” I said. “I missed your beautiful food, girl.” I wanted to be nicer to her.

  My visual sense was especially sharp—the roses Mattina had planted in the yard were a startling creamy-peach color, vibrant and lush. Not talking for so long had a good aftereffect. In the shop, objects displayed their details to me in a single glimpse. Under this spell of acuteness, I found a hairline crack in a creamware plate that Gary was going to buy, so we paid a lower price for it, although it seemed laughable to me that people cared about cracks, as if the world weren’t naturally cracking and dissolving every second anyway.

  ELI CAME BACK from England that summer with a duffel bag full of unbelievably raucous CDs. Thick, anarchic blasts of roiling rock ’n’ roll. Peggy had let him go off on his own quite a lot, and he was proud of this, ready to continue being more independent of pesky adults. He liked to call Mattina “Fat-Tina”—in fact, she was still slender and sexy—but otherwise he wasn’t a hostile, horrible teenager, comparatively speaking. But after this summer he was away from the house all the time—on his own, with his friends, in his own places. See you later, oldsters.

  I checked on him as much as I could. He was in a rock band, and they were rehearsing in some other kid’s parents’ garage, lucky for us. Gary said this was our reward for merit in a past life. They played a loopy form of neo-punk cacophony, with Eli’s Brit CDs as hip models to copy, and Eli was the manic, poker-faced drummer. He went and got a blue Celtic chain tattooed around his arm, but he promised to stop there. I told him piercing and hair dyeing were okay, but not tattoos. I threatened to wear a nose ring if he got another one, just to embarrass him. He did think that was funny. He could be so charming on his good days.

  The Yosemite hike had been arduous in spots—I wasn’t in quite as good shape as I’d thought—but it left me with a craving for more. After the first trip, I took off by myself on these long hikes whenever I could—back to Yosemite and to Lassen and to Marble Mountains—but not when Eli was home, only when he was away, in England with his mother or once with a friend’s family on vacation in Oregon. I never felt right about leaving Mattina to deal with Eli by herself. She wasn’t ever completely his parent, and I didn’t want Eli pushing the envelope on this while I was gone.

  The hikes always had miserable patches—I got lost more than once and wandered around scared and my leg muscles couldn’t believe the steep terrain that presented itself—but I was usually happy when I sat down to my lunch on some boulder with a nice view. How strangely slanted those days were, the chilly mornings with their hazy light, the speechless days, the long nights in the tent with its smell of dirt and damp canvas.

  I began to want to go on longer hikes alone. Three we
eks, a month. Gary filled in for me at work without too much griping.

  “Why live with other people at all,” Mattina said, “if withdrawing is such heaven?”

  “I come back,” I said. “I don’t want to retreat all the time. Believe me.”

  “Which is more real to you?” she said. “Not us, I bet.”

  “Mattina,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m here.”

  “Say something nicer,” she said. “I feel like a needy nag, for Christ’s sake.”

  Not for the first time, I thought it had been selfish of me to marry her. “You look gorgeous,” I said. “Every time I come back. You do.” She did.

  When Eli arrived home from England at the end of the next summer, he was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. “Only Americans are these lame health freaks, “he said. Mattina gave him a hideously graphic description of what happens to cancerous lungs, and we tried to ban him from smoking in the house. “In the U.K. people smoke anyplace they want,” he said.

  “Next you’ll say you were crazy for Bovril and baked beans on toast,” I said. But Eli’s attachment to British habits meant the summer with Peggy had gone well. She was living with a journalist who wrote for some scandal sheet, a much better guy than the last lager lout she’d been with, and they’d taken Eli to the cold English seashore, which he had actually liked. “You just take walks, you don’t have to lie on the beach all the time,” he said. He could never resist brightening under whatever light Peggy shone on him.

  Peggy looked older, in the snapshots Eli brought back from those windswept walks on a craggy coast. We were all getting older, there was no news in this, but Peggy’s face had grown leathery and coarse and disturbingly gaunt. The change in her felt like an outrageous loss to me, although I never saw her anymore. She was always planning to come back to the States for a visit, but she was always short on money or full of complicated neurotic reasons—she had to have her teeth checked, she had to be in London for the solstice, she wasn’t going to fly with a lot of college kids when it was spring break.