Ideas of Heaven Page 9

  Peggy saw his spirit, I have to give her that. In those early days, when he was just a dainty blob of protoplasm to me, I would hear her talk to the baby. “You hear me, sweetie,” she would say to him. “Little sharp-ears. You know what’s what.”

  I could list the times when I felt closest to Peggy: the first weeks together in the hotel bed in London; certain moments when we were traveling; and the early days when Eli was a new baby. This last phase, with its broken nights and hazy mornings, was unmixed with sex. I was swept up in another amazement, but it confused me to be with Peggy with no desire acted out between us. I waited for her through those months—I wasn’t an oaf or a boor or a brute—but my existence, even with the baby in it, seemed less real to me.

  I hadn’t really been without contact with a female body since I was a teenager, not for more than a few weeks at a time. My whole life had been bound up with women. I fell in love with them and lived with them. I didn’t see how people led any other sort of life.

  I wasn’t used to being at work without Peggy around, and I hated being away all day. I’d call and wake her from her naps. But Eli was thriving. “Little fat boy,” Peggy said. “You take nourishment from the air, you feed on everyone’s vibrations.” The doctor said he was gaining at a very good rate. When I carried him in his pouch across my chest, I could feel his weight pulling sweetly at my shoulders. I was proud of us.

  I had never expected Peggy to be such a confident mother. “Worry less, please,” she told me. I was the one who thought the baby shouldn’t go outside without a cap and shouldn’t play on the dirty wooden floors of our apartment. Peggy would dangle him upside down by his feet (he laughed), she would hold him in the crook of her arm while she carried a pot of hot soup in her other hand. “Relax,” she would say to me.

  And Peggy, who had always been bony and slim, now had lush breasts, a slacker figure. At the end of six months, when she came to me again as a lover, I felt newly held and enveloped, settled in the bosom of my family, where I was a contented man. I had been so idle and young before this, and now the world had come to claim me.

  We had a few different babysitters—a fuchsia-haired girl from the neighborhood, a nursing student, a gay guy in his thirties. They all seemed fine to us. But I shouldn’t have left Peggy alone so much. I should have just quit my stupid job, people think jobs are everything. The antiques place I worked in was written up in the Home section of the Times, and all of a sudden we were swamped with calls from decorators. I was on the phone for hours, answering questions from the most meticulous people in the world, and I had to stay late night after night. I missed Eli. When a woman with a client from Southampton canceled a lunch we were supposed to have, I ran home to steal a break with my son.

  I heard him crying from the hallway. He could set up a good yowl when he wanted to. “Hey, guy, I know how you feel,” I said, as I came through the door. “It’s me, Peg. I’ll walk him around.”

  Peggy didn’t answer. The baby was standing up in his crib, holding on to the railing and belting out his complaints. “Eli the man,” I said. “I’m here.” I lifted him up and patted his back while he wailed. I thought Peggy must be in the bathroom or on the phone. She wasn’t. She wasn’t anywhere. The baby’s diaper needed replacement, and I changed it, which I thought was a nice thing for me to do before she got back from wherever she was. He didn’t like being changed, in his current mood, and he did a lot of kicking. I walked him through every corner of our small apartment, expecting Peggy to emerge from some hidden nook. Or one of the sitters, although it wasn’t their time. Eli was still crying, but more softly, when I sat down on the sofa with him and waited. I waited and waited, getting angrier every second. I fed him a bottle. I put him in his crib. I waited for two hours, and then I heard a key in the lock, and Peggy came through the door and gave a small shriek when she saw me.

  The baby was sleeping, so I didn’t want to shout. “You left him?” I said. “You left Eli this long?”

  “He was fine,” Peggy said. “People think babies can’t be alone but they can be.”

  “What?” I said. “What did you say?”

  “Eli never does anything stupid. He knows I’m coming home.”

  “Never?” I said. My head was cracking from inside.

  “Just tell me,” I said. “You can tell me. You leave him like this all the time?”

  “He’s fine,” Peggy said. “He’s always been fine.”

  Her eyes were tight and ashamed, but her mouth was petulant. “I didn’t bother to tell you,” she said, “because I knew how you would be about it. And look.”

  “Where did you go?” I said.

  “Nowhere,” she said. “Just around.”

  I did shout then, and I woke my son. I kept asking Peggy, what was the matter with her, what did she think she was doing? I followed her around, bellowing, fighting for an answer, which I did believe was my right. Peggy took the baby from his crib and soothed him and looked at me irately.

  I shouted at her for days. There was a piece of her missing, I thought. I made her cry, with my bullying, but she was only crying in pity for herself at having a mate like me. Nothing had happened to Eli, why should she feel remorse?

  What about when Eli got big enough to climb out of his crib? “He won’t do that,” Peggy said. “He’s very sensible.” She’s at her wit’s end, I thought, and she doesn’t know it. I was afraid to leave her alone for too long with Eli, despite her promises, those vows made only to humor me. I borrowed money and had Manny, our favorite sitter, come in more often. I sent friends over to be with her. I left work early as often as I could, oftener.

  Who was this woman? She looked like the ruin of someone I loved. Ropy and tired and tight around the mouth. The beautiful ruin. I loved her. When I came home, I would hold her to my chest and kiss the top of her head, the way I kissed the baby’s head. It made her smile. There was still a taste of floating lust between us, but whatever happened in bed did not do us much good. Who was she?

  I CAME HOME one night with cartons of Chinese food for supper, and there was no one in the house. It was a cool fall day, and if Peg and Eli were lingering in the park, I hoped she had put enough clothes on him. Or she might have gone to visit one of her friends. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that she had a lover.

  After I got sick of waiting, I heated up some of the food for myself, and when I sat down at the table, I saw her note for me on the pad where we kept shopping lists.

  We’re gone—I’ll call. Eli is fine.

  What did it mean? I knew what it meant. Peggy had left me and taken Eli. She had gone to someone—she would never do anything like this alone—and I had no idea who the man was, which seemed particularly bitter to me. I had nothing to do with any of this. Nothing was mine.

  I stood up, since it was clear I had to do something. When I tore the note off the pad, my hands were shaking with anger. In a movie, an actor playing me might have thrown pieces of furniture around the room. The chairs, the table, the high chair. I had the feeling that there was such a movie playing somewhere, while I stood perfectly still, and fury went through me like a jolt of current. I knew that if I went into the bedroom, I would see the empty spaces in the blue-painted cubby where Eli’s things were kept, and I didn’t want to go in there. I sat down again at the kitchen table and waited for Peggy to telephone me.

  IF SHE HADN’T sounded so pleased with herself, maybe we could have worked it out right then. “Peggy,” I said. “You can’t do it this way. You just can’t.”

  “This is my way. This is the way I do it.”

  She was sorry, she said, but her leaving was for the best. “For the best”—she’d never used a prissy phrase like that in her life. Whose language was this?

  “This was a very hard thing to do,” she said.

  Did she want compliments on her bravery? From me?

  “Can you listen for a minute?” she said. “Is that too much to ask? We couldn’t go on the way we were.”


  “Why not?” I said. “Why not?”

  “There was nothing there,” she said.

  And then I did shout every single thing I could at her, every mistake of hers I could jeer at, every intimate secret I could point to in wild disgust. And who was this Richard? Oh, not anyone I knew. He was a lawyer. A what? Well, not exactly a lawyer. He had left law school and he had his own business. What business? A laundromat. A laundromat! Mr. Clean Machine. Mr. Suds, Esquire. I couldn’t stop when I heard that.

  THROUGHOUT THE first year there were times when we might have gotten back together. We would snarl and rage, and then a spark of our old affection would make us sentimental again. Every week she brought Eli to see me, and sometimes she simply dropped him off and fled, and sometimes we both played with him, dancing him around or doing funny voices for his toys. I tickled Eli and then I tickled Peggy too, Eli cackled and crowed, the three of us snuggled together in the bed. Then Eli would get wild and speedy, and Peggy would announce that I was bad for him. “Maybe we shouldn’t come anymore,” she’d say. Eli would cry. Peggy would say, “He’s better with Richard.” “You’re not much of a mother,” I’d say. In short, we made a mess of things. We made everything worse.

  I kept away from Richard, who seemed slick and crazy to me. Why had Peggy picked him? Every week, after Peggy took Eli back, I’d feel like shooting myself or shooting her. After we had gone on like this for almost a year, I did something I should never have done. I left New York. I moved to California, where my family was. I kept calling Eli on the phone every few days but he wasn’t even two years old yet, he had no real idea where I was.

  I stayed in Mill Valley, at my cousin’s, in a room over his garage. I woke up each day desperate with loneliness. I walked around like a zombie of grief. I was looking for work, but in the first weeks I had nothing to distract me from the mortal agony of missing what I’d once had. Every night I had supper with my cousin Aaron and his wife and two kids—they were very nice to me—and then I’d lie in bed in my room over the garage, with its dusty shag carpeting and its smell of mice, and I would think, how did it get this way? I couldn’t bear not seeing Eli, and I was homesick for what Peggy had been to me. That I had taken myself to the other side of the continent did not keep me from the torment of waiting for her in vain, like any abandoned lover.

  But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back

  into herself, as if there were not enough strength

  to create them a second time. Have you imagined

  Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any young girl

  deserted by her beloved might be inspired

  by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love

  and might say to herself, “Perhaps I can be like her”?

  Shouldn’t this most ancient of our sufferings finally grow

  more fruitful for us?

  I had to buy a new Rilke because I had lost the other copy at the airport in Singapore. I still thought that Peggy would come back to me. Maybe she thought so too. Before I left, I had been giving her money from time to time, and I sent her some from California, after I got work refinishing oak chests and tables for a vintage furniture dealer nearby. Not a lot of money, but some for the baby. I called her to make sure she got it, just to hear her thank me.

  Sometimes when I called New York to check on Eli, I’d start fighting with Peggy again, fighting and then pleading. The old accusations, the old imploring. “It’s not too late. Why do you think it’s too late?” I said. “Are you listening?” The phone was in my cousin’s kitchen and the family heard me from the living room, embarrassed for me and puzzled. I knew better than to hope for anything from Peggy. This did not keep me from wanting her.

  I HAD TO remember how many other people had been morons the way that I was being one now. There wasn’t much other consolation available. Lying in bed back in my cruddy room over the garage, I imagined Gaspara Stampa, as Rilke suggested. A note in another book told me that she was a poet (1523–1554) of unhappy love sonnets (two hundred forty-five on that one unending subject). She was still read quite widely in Italy. Even before Rilke wrote the Elegies, he had made the narrator of Malte Laurids Brigge say, “Women like Stampa hurl themselves after the man they have lost, but with the first steps they overtake him, and in front of them is only God.”

  I didn’t feel that God was in front of me, but I began to want something like Him to be. The ideas I’d lived on weren’t strong enough for this next stretch, I could see that. Nothing I knew was much help to me now. As a young man, all my longings had been around sex—when did I have occasion to think of anything else? Now I lived in that occasion. In Rome I had seen a mosaic in the Basilica di San Clemente of a deer dipping its nose in a blue stream, symbol of the soul’s thirst for God.

  My cousins talked me into going with them to Friday night services at their very liberal synagogue, but the prayers (even the familiar ones) didn’t stir me and certainly didn’t comfort me. The liturgy filled my mind with objections to it. I only went that once.

  I was friends with Gary, the antiques dealer I worked for, and he took me a few times to his Buddhist meditation group—I had the idea that I knew something about this, since I’d been to Thailand, but I didn’t, not at all. I didn’t much like it either. Sitting there only made me think of Peggy. It was especially bad for me toward the end of the forty-five-minute sit, when my mind could not keep from picking over its wounds. I was thrilled when someone rang the little gong that meant the sitting part was over. I’d go home and think, nothing’s going to fucking help.

  I worked hard at the job for Gary—that was how I kept from going under altogether. I learned from him whatever he knew about the pieces we were handling, the armoires and vases and Hoosier cabinets and once a potbellied stove from 1875, the year (I remembered) of Rilke’s birth. We had everything from formica to Mission Oak to ivory. “Between junk and glory” was our slogan. “Think of us as plucking lotuses out of the muck,” Gary said.

  I enjoyed looking at objects closely. It reminded me of traveling, of the days spent gazing and walking around to get a better view. I was only fair as a furniture refinisher, but my opinions about what pieces to buy were good and got better. Sellers and buyers trusted me because I was low-key, and I didn’t cheat them, but I was wily in my way. It was a small business, and I rose from handyman to partner in about a minute. I had time to read in the field, books and trade publications and magazines, and I had a sense of what people were going to want next. Shutting up is a good research tool.

  For a while I lived in the back of Gary’s house, and I liked to go out to the shed to look over the stored objects, to poke and examine and ponder. Gary used to say I was like a farmer checking on his sheep. I came to know certain pieces very well—a painted bench from Mexico that was much too big for its purpose, a bamboo dressing table from the thirties, a stenciled stoneware crock from Illinois that pickles had been stored in. I liked identifying the marks of human use, the scuffs and hollows, the smoke stains and ink smudges.

  Often when Gary and I were selling a piece, we would tell people something like, “What parties this punch bowl has seen!” I was aware always of the irony there—I who was so taken with the amount of feeling left in these objects hardly lived in the outside world at all. No quaffing any punch to the last drop for me.

  But I’d done my quaffing, hadn’t I? Mostly I seemed to be finished and spent. I found myself on the other side of things, which turned out to be a realm with its own scenery. Sometimes what I had was quite beautifully sufficient.

  And the external

  shrinks into less and less. Where once an enduring house was,

  now a cerebral structure crosses our path…

  I leaned on Rilke quite a lot at this time.

  I MIGHT HAVE gone on like this, flourishing ever more fully in the space of my own head. I was making my way to something, slowly. But when Eli was five, Peggy decided that he should come to live with me.

  �
��It’s time,” she said, in a solemn voice that bugged me. I think Peggy was not in good shape—she and Richard the Suds had split up, and she had been living at a bunch of different phone numbers, crashing with friends or staying with various guys. She wanted to go back to London—she said she needed a change—but she wouldn’t say how long she had in mind. “Eli will be fine with this,” she said.

  I had not seen Eli since he was a baby. I was always planning to go back East to see him, but I didn’t. In our phone talks, I would get him to narrate what he’d been doing, and I had my goofy questions I’d been teasing him with for years, but you couldn’t say we had a smooth back-and-forth. A delight with a huge amount of panic in it rose in me at this news.

  I knew what he looked like in his pictures—a stringy little boy with dark hair and pale skin. But I didn’t really know a thing. In the weeks before he arrived, I stayed by myself as much as I possibly could. I was renting a bungalow at the end of a gravel road, and I sat outside under the eucalyptus trees in the yard, inhaling their medicinal scent and looking at the blue western sky. I was trying to savor my last days of inwardness. There was an iridescent glass vase from the twenties that I was deciding about (unsigned but maybe a Loetz), and I held it in the sunlight to study its shimmering tints and to check for nicks. I wasn’t going to be keeping anything fragile in the house anymore, was I?

  IT WAS NOT Peggy who brought Eli to me but her mother, who traveled from Chicago to New York to fetch him and then all the way to me in California. Rita was a nervous and silly woman, but she’d always liked me and she waved madly when they walked through the gate at the airport. “Look at this boy!” she said, holding Eli’s hand. Eli seemed dazed, as well he might, but he looked so actual to me I could hardly stand it—his skin too fresh and delicate, his mouth too mobile, his eyes too glinting. I was beside myself. “Hi, boy,” I said.