The First Bad Man

  “Do you think it’s rigged?”

  “Probably,” I said shakily.

  “I’m gonna try anyway. Can you hold this?”

  Another month went by and I realized she might not know. I might be waiting for years. She might grow old in this house, with her son and the employee of her parents, never knowing she was supposed to abandon me. Her impatience would ebb away, her blond hair would turn white-gray and she’d become portly. When she was sixty-five I’d be eightysomething—just two old women with an old son. It wasn’t the ideal match for either of us, but maybe it was good enough. This revelation was a great comfort and I thought it might sustain me indefinitely, a hidden loaf. Then one afternoon Jack and I were returning from the park when we saw something in the distance.

  What’s that on the curb? he said.

  It’s a person, I said.

  A hunched-over gray person. Clee. Her hair wasn’t gray, but her skin was. And her face. Weathered and broken down by a burden so heavy that anyone could see it: here was a woman who hated her life. And this was how she planned to get through it, by sitting on the curb, smoking. How long had she been depressed? Months, that was obvious now. She’d been smoking out here since we brought Jack home. It must happen all the time, a fleeting passion overwhelms someone’s true course and there’s nothing to be done about it. I looked at Jack; his brow was furrowed with concern.

  She can be very energetic, I assured him. And fun.

  He didn’t believe me.

  She lifted her head and watched us make our way toward her. No wave, just a tired flick of her cigarette into the gutter.

  ONE OF MY FAVORITE TV shows was about a man’s survival in the wilderness. In a recent episode part of the man’s foot was trapped under a boulder and he had no choice but to cut it off with a tiny hacksaw. He sawed and sawed and then threw the piece of his foot into the bushes. It was black and blue. In our case the foot would have to cut itself off, to free the man. To free Clee. I would do it tenderly, ceremonially, but with the same unflinching determination. I shuddered; a panicky whine escaped me. This wouldn’t be like the first time Kubelko’s mother had taken him away, I wasn’t nine. I would never recover. But I couldn’t keep him by keeping her, it wasn’t motherly, or wifely, or likely to end well. Pick up the hacksaw. Saw and saw and saw and saw.

  Real candles are a fire hazard so I bought electric votives that turned on when you shook them. There were thirty of them; it was a lot of shaking. The Gregorian chant CD was not “our song” but it was very similar to the one we’d heard on the radio that first morning. I turned it on, quietly, and turned off the lights. Jack and I stared at the plastic flames floating in the dark; among them was one real candle, the pomegranate currant column I’d given her almost two years ago. The room flickered and glowed. I tried to cry silently, so the baby wouldn’t notice. Mouth contorted and hanging open, tears streaming into it. It was the thought of being one again, after having been three—of silence and perfect order after all the noise.

  There were forty minutes to get him to sleep before Clee came home from work. I bathed him as if for the last time. His night-night song came out like a dirge, so I opened Little Fur Family but the tale was too devastatingly cozy, given the circumstances. Jack began to squirm and fuss.

  Why so little faith? he asked.

  I said faith had nothing to do with it, you couldn’t always get everything you wanted. But he was right. A real mother throws her heart over the fence and then climbs after it.

  I closed Little Fur Family, turned out the lights, and held him in my arms.

  I’ve gotten myself all worked up, haven’t I? What a silly Milly. We’ll say goodbye a million times and hello a million times over the course of your long, long life.

  Jack looked up at me; he was wondering what had happened to the bedtime story.

  Okay. One day, I began, when you’re all grown up, I’ll be waiting for an airplane and you’ll be on it. You’ll be coming from China or Taiwan and I’ll rise to my feet when your flight is announced. Clee will stand too, she’ll be there. We’ll wait with all the other moms and dads and husbands and wives, down at the end of the long arrivals hall. Passengers will begin to trickle down the corridor. I’ll be searching, searching, my heart will be pounding, where, where, where—and then I’ll see you. Jack, my baby. There you are, tall and handsome with your new girlfriend or boyfriend. I’ll wave wildly. You won’t see me, and then you will. You’ll wave. And I won’t be able to stop myself, I’ll start running down the hallway. It’s too much but once I’ve started I can’t stop. And guess what you’ll do? You’ll run too. You’ll run toward me and I’ll run toward you and as we get closer we’ll both start to laugh. We’ll be laughing and laughing and running and running and running and music will play, brass instruments, a soaring anthem, not a dry eye in the house, the credits will roll. Applause like rain. The end.

  He was asleep.

  THE GREGORIAN CHANT WAS STILL playing when she came home from work. I was waiting in the candlelit bedroom. She poked her head in, bewildered. I poured tequila into the tumbler I only had one of; it had been holding dusty barrettes for the last sixteen years.

  “Weird lights,” she said, sipping and looking around. The CD was on a different track now, a silencing hymn. Mute, we climbed into bed.

  I lay with her and she curled around me in the old way, Ss.

  The whole chant played through and then a new one began, one lone voice in an infinite cathedral, climbing and echoing and praising. The singer was lifted up and illuminated with gratitude, not for any one thing, but for the whole of this life, even for the agony. Even in Latin you could tell he was thanking God for the agony in particular, for the way it allowed him to cleave so tightly to the world. I squeezed her arms and she tightened them around me.

  “You have to move out.”

  She froze. I pictured the man cutting off his toe. I shut my eyes and sawed and sawed.

  “You need to live in your first apartment, learn to take care of yourself, be free. Fall in love.”

  “I am in love.”

  “That’s nice. That you would say that.”

  She didn’t repeat it.

  Because she was behind me I didn’t know what was happening for a long time. Then she breathed in sharply, sucking her tearful snot back into her throat.

  “I don’t know how I’ll”—she sniffled into my neck—“take care of him.”

  I counted to nine.

  “I could—if you wanted—keep him here. I mean just until you got settled.”

  She cried now in a way I could feel, her whole body shaking.

  “I guess I’m pretty much the worst mom ever,” she coughed.

  “No, no, no. Not at all.”

  The CD played on and on. Maybe it started over again from the beginning, it was hard to tell. We slept. I got up and gave Jack a bottle. I came back, slipped into her arms, slept and slept. Morning had gotten lost on the way home. We would lie this way forever, always saying goodbye, never parting.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Clee thought it would be less hassle if I became a legal guardian. “Because it might take me a while to get set up.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, holding my breath. Now that it was decided, she made plans very quickly, with an unfamiliar momentum. I was informed of an appointment at the courthouse; she drove, chatting all the way. As it turns out, almost anyone can legally kidnap your child, just as long as you stand in front of the judge and tell her you’re “totally fine with it.” A social worker would check in on me four times in the next year and Clee would get her own place.

  “We’re more than happy to help out with her rent,” Suzanne assured me. “Obviously we should have done this in the first place. All parents make mistakes. You’ll see. When are you coming back to work?” She thought she’d won—that we were competing for her daughte
r and she’d won in the end.

  I told Clee she could stop pumping since we’d have to go to formula anyway, but she promised me a month’s supply of breast milk.

  “And when I come visit on Fridays I can pump.”

  “You’ll be dried up. It’s fine—he’s seven months old. You’re done.”

  Tears seeped into her eyes. Tears of joy. I hadn’t realized she hated pumping so much.

  WE DIDN’T SAY THE LAST night was the last night but the next day was the day she would move into her apartment in Studio City and it followed that she would sleep there that night and the night after and for years until she moved, probably into a bigger place, maybe with someone, someone she’d marry, maybe they’d have kids. Eventually she’d be my age and Jack would be in college and this time, this very brief time when we lived together, would just become a bit of family lore about an accident and a family friend and how it all worked out for everyone. The details would be washed away; for example, it would not be told as a great American love story for our time.

  The next morning her garbage bags were lined up by the door. Any closer to the door and they’d march out by themselves. The famous Rachel came to help her move.

  “I heard you’re starting a flavored popcorn company,” I said, burping Jack over my shoulder. She winced a little.

  “I guess you could call it that. I mean, technically that’s what it is.”

  Clee banged in the front door and grabbed two bags, eyeing our conversation. Rachel was very skinny and Jewish-looking. She wore a blouse with diagonal pastel stripes that looked like it was from the 1980s; it was a joke about how silly the time before she was born was.

  “Did I get it wrong? Clee said there would be gum popcorn?”

  “It’s really hard to explain, because I’m working on a lot of different levels?” She heaved the biggest bag over her shoulder. “I’m surprised she even told you about it.”

  “Well, she just told me the gum popcorn level of it.”

  She looked me all the way down and all the way back up, landing not on my eyes but on my neck.

  Clee huffed inside, grabbing the last bag. “That’s everything!”

  “Really?” I looked around. “The bathroom?”

  “I checked that.”

  “All right, then.”

  She rubbed the top of Jack’s head. “Goodbye, Little Dude. Don’t forget about your Aunt Clee.” Aunt. When had she decided that? He grabbed her hair; she freed herself. Rachel took out her phone and turned away; this was the moment allotted for our goodbye. Clee was looking antsy. I doubted she would come every Friday at ten A.M. She held her arms open like a friendly bear. “Thanks for everything, Cheryl. I’ll call you guys tonight.”

  “You don’t have to call.”

  “I’ll call.”

  We watched them get into her car and drive away and then we walked around the house. The rooms sounded different, higher ceilinged, empty.

  It used to always be like this, I explained. This is the normal way the house usually is.

  Did she not leave anything? he asked. Nothing?

  We searched every room. She had been very thorough. The envelope between the books was gone; so was the soda can tab. We did finally find one thing she’d forgotten.

  I carried the sundrop crystal from the bathroom and hung it in the kitchen above the sink. Jack watched it clatter against the glass a few times, then spin silently.

  Rainbows. I pointed to a flock of them gliding across the wall. His little mouth hung open in transfixed awe.

  This kind of thing is more along the lines of what I was expecting, he said. This will for sure be my top interest, my area of focus.

  Rainbows?

  And everything else like this.

  There is nothing else like this. Rainbows are alone; they’re the only thing like that.

  The crystal began to wind the other way, sending the bright fleet back across his body. I could tell he didn’t believe me; it did seem unlikely. I racked my brain for others of the species. Reflections, shadows, smoke—these things were morose and distant cousins at best. No, rainbows are in their own class of spectacularity, every single one of them impressive, never a bleak rainbow, never with just some of the colors. Always all the colors and always in the right order. She didn’t call.

  EVERY DAY I MELTED A milk icicle and watched Jack drink what Clee had pumped exactly one month earlier, each bottle labeled with a date. First he drank the day we made love; he gulped it all down. He drank the day we showed him off at Ralphs. He drank the cotton-candy milk from the day at the pier. The last batch was from the morning she left and this milk was full of plans I didn’t know about. When he finished that bottle she was really gone, every last drop of her. But the habit of remembering what had happened a month ago was hard to let go of, so we continued. As he drank his first bottle of formula I remembered our first night alone, the house bitterly quiet until I turned on the TV. I remembered remembering making love and crying right onto Jack, right into his eyes. When she had been gone for a full two months I remembered melting the last of her milk and thinking she was really gone now, every last drop. I burped him and that was all—I didn’t start over again with triple remembering.

  She missed the first two Fridays, and the one after that. I called several times to issue a gentle reminder, but her phone just rang and rang. I pictured it in a rainy gutter somewhere. She was exactly the kind of woman who ends up murdered.

  “I don’t want to alarm you,” I said calmly. “But I thought you should know.”

  “We just saw her yesterday,” Suzanne said.

  “Oh. How is she?”

  “She’s happy as a clam in her new place—you should see it, she and Rachel painted the walls all kinds of crazy colors. Did you meet Rachel?”

  “Rachel lives there?”

  “Oh yeah, they’re inseparable. And I have to say they’re real cute together—Clee is just gaga for that girl. Did you know Rachel went to Brown? Carl’s alma mater?”

  “When you say ‘gaga,’ what do you mean?”

  “They’re in love.”

  I PUT AWAY ALL THE dishes except my own set and Jack’s tiny plastic spoon. I covered the TV with the Tibetan cloth. I took the cloth off and put the TV on the curb by the trash cans. As everything went back into its proper place, I explained my system to Jack, carpooling and so forth.

  See, this way the house practically cleans itself.

  He crumbled a rice cake into his lap.

  So if you’re down in the dumps you don’t have to worry about things devolving into filth.

  He dumped a box of plastic blocks on the rug.

  My plan for toys was to not worry about keeping them in their place, since that would be a never-ending battle, but to approach them like the dishes: less. I threw all of them into a suitcase except a ball, a rattle, and a bear. These were allowed to be anywhere but ideally they wouldn’t clump together. Two of them could be in the same room but I liked for the third one to be somewhere else, otherwise it became too chaotic. She wanted a girlfriend. Someone to pal around with. Exploration of the body, womanhood and so forth. It was so ordinary. Jack wondered where all his toys went; he crawled all around the house looking for them. I rolled the suitcase back out and emptied it in the middle of the living room. Stacking cups and blocks, soft cars and stuffed animals, board books and interlocking squeaking rings with googly eyes and textured tails. My system wasn’t really applicable to babies. Babies ruined everything. Secret plan to get in bed and never move again? Ruined. Tendency to pee in jars when very sad? Ruined.

  Each day I walked to the park with Jack in the stroller. We stopped and watched the men playing basketball, wondering if Clee had ever watched these men and if they had watched her. There was a muscular bald man whose place she could have gone back to. He showed no recognition, but why would he think the
child of a woman he’d never met was his son?

  Do you feel a kinship with any of these men?

  Jack did not. He was getting bigger and on some days he looked much less like Clee and much more like someone else. His expression when troubled was not unusual—I’d seen people, men, with brows that furrowed like that. But I couldn’t put a face to the feeling; it was a dissolving thought, like a dream that hurries away when you approach it. We watched people jogging and older children playing on the slide and swings.

  A couple stretched on the grass smiled at Jack.

  Do they know us?

  No. People just smile at you because you’re a baby.

  Now they were waving. It was Rick and a woman. They walked over to us.

  “I was just saying, ‘Is that her? No, yes, no.’ ”

  “He was just saying that!” the woman agreed. “He really was. I’m Carol.” She stuck out her hand.

  I glanced around the park. Did he live here? I didn’t see a hovel or sleeping bag nearby. Carol was clean and ordinary; she looked like a college professor.

  “This is him?” he asked, eyes moist.

  “Jack, yes.”

  He delivered you.

  You’re kidding.

  “I’ll never forget that day. He was blue like a blueberry—didn’t I say that?”

  The woman nodded heartily. “You came home, dropped your gardening tools, and said, ‘Honey, you’ll never guess what I just did.’ ” She swung her hands in the pockets of her skirt and smiled. “But it’s not the first time you’ve helped out in a pinch, hon.”

  Rick was either the homeless man she lived with and called “hon,” or else he was her husband.