The Infinite Plan

  The birth of her daughter had launched Samantha Ernst into a quiet but fierce depression; there were no scandalous rages or dramatic changes in behavior, but she was not the same. She continued to get up at noon, watch television, and lie in the sun like a lizard, without resisting reality but also without participating in it. She ate very little, was always sleepy, and came to life only on the tennis court, while Margaret vegetated in a carriage in the shade, so forsaken that at eight months she still could not sit up and hardly ever smiled. The only time her mother touched her was to change her diapers and put the bottle in her mouth. At night Gregory bathed her and sometimes rocked her, trying always to do it in Samantha’s presence. He loved the baby very much and when he held her in his arms felt a painful tenderness, an overpowering desire to protect her, but he did not feel free to cuddle her as he would have liked. His sister’s confession had raised a Wall of China between his daughter and himself. He felt equally uncomfortable with the children in his charge and found that he was examining everything he did in the light of a possible licentiousness inherited from his father. When he compared Margaret to other babies her age, he saw she was slow in developing; something was obviously wrong, but he did not want to share his doubts with his wife for fear of frightening her and distancing her even more from her daughter. He performed little tests to see whether Margaret could hear; he thought she might be deaf, which would explain why she seemed so quiet, but when he clapped his hands near the cradle, she jumped. He thought Samantha had not noticed anything, but one day she asked him how you know when an infant is retarded; for the first time, he could speak of his fears. After a thorough examination, Margaret was diagnosed as being healthy but in definite need of stimulation; she was like an animal in a cage, suffering from sensory deprivation. The parents took a course in which they learned how to express affection toward their daughter, how to gurgle at her, how little by little to focus her attention on the world around her, and other elemental skills any orangutan is born knowing but they had to learn from an instruction manual. The results were evident within a few weeks, when the child began to crawl, and a year later she spoke her first two words—not “papa” and “mama” but “cat” and “tennis.”

  Gregory was studying for final examinations, hours, days, months spent buried in his books and thanking his lucky stars for his good memory, the only thing left functioning while around him everything else seemed rapidly to be falling apart. Far from being over, as he had calculated it would be, the war in Vietnam was reaching the proportions of catastrophe. Along with relief at finally passing the bar came the inevitable nightmare of going overseas, for he could not continue to postpone his obligatory service with the army. His family was his principal worry; his relationship with Samantha was stumbling along, and a separation would undoubtedly mean the end to it; in addition, he was afraid to leave Margaret, who was developing into a very strange child. She was so quiet and secretive that sometimes Samantha forgot about her and when Gregory came home at night he found she had not eaten since breakfast. She did not play with other children but entertained herself for hours watching soap operas on television; she was never hungry, and she washed herself obsessively, pulling a footstool up to the basin to soap her hands over and over, saying, Dirty, dirty. She wet her bed and wept disconsolately when she waked to the clammy sheets. She was very pretty and would stay pretty even after the offenses she later committed against her body: she had the grace of her Virginia grandmother and the exotic Slavic face of Nora Reeves, as she looked in a photograph taken on the refugee ship that brought her from Odessa. While Margaret hovered in the shadow of the furniture and in dark corners, her parents, busy with their own affairs and deceived by the good-little-girl facade, failed to see the demons gestating in her soul.

  It was a time of great changes and continuing surprises. The novelty of free love, for so many years kept under lock and key, spread rapidly, and what had begun as another hippie fantasy became the favorite parlor game of the bourgeoisie. Astonished, Gregory observed people who only shortly before had defended the most puritanical ideas now practicing libertinism in homey, private orgies. In his bachelor days, it had been almost impossible to find a girl who wanted to make love without a promise of marriage: pleasure without sin or fear was unthinkable before the pill. He seemed to remember devoting the first ten years of his youth to finding women; all his determination and inventiveness had gone into that exhausting chase—and often in vain. Suddenly things had turned around, and in a matter of a year or two chastity ceased to be a virtue and became a defect demanding treatment before the neighbors found out. It was such an abrupt reversal that Gregory, enveloped in his problems, did not have time to adapt and was not touched by the revolution until much later. Despite his failure with Samantha, it never occurred to him to capitalize on the hints boldly thrown his way by some of the girls he studied with and by mothers of his charges.

  One Saturday in spring the Reeveses were invited to dinner at the home of some friends. Sit-down dinners were no longer in style; the meal was waiting in the kitchen, and the guests served themselves on paper plates and tried to find a place to sit while balancing a full glass, a dripping plate, bread, napkin, and sometimes a cigarette. Everyone was drinking too much, and some were smoking marijuana. Gregory had had a hard day; he was tired and wondered whether he would not have been better off at home than trying to cut a piece of chicken on his knees without throwing it all over himself. After dessert there was a general move to shed clothes and step into a large hot tub in the moonlit garden. The vogue for the Laboyer birth method had passed without much flurry, and many families had been left with an outsize tub as a remembrance. The Reeveses still had theirs in the living room and used it as a playpen for Margaret and as a place to throw the odds and ends that collected on the floor. More daring tub owners had converted these artifacts into a conversation piece inspired by communal baths in Japan, until an industry sprang up in manufacturing large tubs specifically for that purpose. Gregory was not tempted to go outside to freeze on the patio just after eating, but it seemed bad manners to remain dressed when everyone else was in the buff, and furthermore he did not want to give the impression he had something to be ashamed of. So he took off his clothes, all the while watching Samantha from the corner of his eye, amazed at his wife’s naturalness in exposing herself. She was not a prudish woman, she was proud of her body and often went about naked at home, but this public exhibition made him a little nervous; on the other hand, everyone else seemed as comfortable as any aborigine from the Amazon basin. The women generally tried to stay submerged, but the men seized every opportunity to show off; the most arrogant offered the spectacle of their nakedness while they served drinks, lighted cigarettes, or changed records; some even knelt at tubside inches from the face of someone else’s wife. Gregory realized this was not the first time his friends had practiced the sport, and he felt betrayed, as if everyone were sharing a secret he had purposely been excluded from. He also suspected that Samantha had attended such parties previously and not felt it necessary to tell him. He tried not to stare at the women, but his eyes kept drifting to the perfect breasts of the host’s mother, a sixtyish matron he had not noticed before the watery revelation of attributes unexpected in a woman her age. In a restless lifetime, Reeves would travel the maps of so many female geographies that it would be impossible to remember them all, but he never forgot that grandmother’s breasts. Meanwhile, Samantha, with her eyes closed and her head thrown back, more relaxed and content than her husband had ever seen her, was humming happily, a glass of white wine in one hand and the other beneath the water, suspiciously close to Timothy Duane’s leg. On the way home, Gregory wanted to talk about the evening, but she fell asleep in the car. The next morning, as they sat before a cup of steaming coffee in the sunlit kitchen, the nudist party seemed like a distant dream, and neither of them mentioned it. After that night, Samantha took advantage of any opportunity to enjoy new group experiences; in contrast, in the p
rivacy of the marriage bed she was as cold as ever. Why deprive ourselves? the evangelists of open marriage were preaching. We should add experiences to life, not subtract them; we emerge the richer from every encounter and therefore have more to offer to our spouse; love is big enough to go around; pleasure is a bottomless well from which we may drink our fill. Gregory suspected there was a flaw in this reasoning but did not dare to manifest his doubts for fear of sounding like a cave dweller. He felt as if he were in a foreign country; he was not convinced of the benefits of promiscuity, and as he watched his friends’ enthusiastic acceptance he told himself that he was held back by his background in the barrio, and that was why he could not adapt. He did not like to admit how much it bothered him to see other men touching Samantha’s body under a variety of excuses: detoxifying massages, activation of holistic points, and stimulation of spiritual growth through bodily communication. Samantha mystified him; she must be concealing certain aspects of her personality from him and living a secret life. She never showed him her true face but, rather, assumed a succession of masks. He thought it was perverse to fondle another woman in the presence of one’s wife, but, again, he did not want to be left behind. Every week trendy sexologists discovered new erogenous zones, and apparently they must all be explored if one was not to be thought ignorant; manuals piled up on Gregory’s night table, awaiting their turn to be studied. Once, he dared object to a method for exploring the Self and awakening Consciousness through collective masturbation, and Samantha accused him of being a barbarian, an unawakened and primitive soul.

  “I don’t know what the quality of my soul has to do with the perfectly natural fact that I don’t like to see other men’s hands between your legs!”

  “A typical remark of an underdeveloped foreign culture,” Samantha retorted, impassively sipping her celery juice.

  “How is that?” he asked, nonplussed.

  “You’re like those Latinos you grew up with. You should have stayed in the barrio.”

  Gregory thought of Pedro and Inmaculada Morales and tried to imagine them naked in a hot tub with their neighbors, mutually groping for Self and Consciousness. The mere idea vented his rage, and he burst out laughing. The next Monday he told Carmen, and across two thousand miles heard his friend’s uncontrollable laughter; no, no such modern innovations had reached the ghetto in Los Angeles, much less Mexico, where she was living.

  “Crazy, they’re all crazy,” was Carmen’s assessment. “There’s no way you would catch me parading naked in front of someone else’s husband. I wouldn’t know where to look, Greg. Besides, if men try things when I have my clothes on, imagine what would happen without them!”

  “Don’t be too optimistic, Carmen. No one would give you a second glance.”

  “Then why do they do it?”

  I did not feel at home anywhere; the barrio where I had grown up belonged to the past, and I had never put down roots anywhere else. There was very little left of my family; my wife and daughter were as cool to me as my mother and sister had been. And I missed my friends. Carmen was on another planet; I couldn’t really count on Timothy, because Samantha bored him, and I think he tried to avoid us; even Balcescu—always so close to being a caricature that he was nearly impervious to change—had done a turnabout and evolved into a kind of holy man. He lived in the midst of acolytes who worshiped the air he breathed, and from seeing himself reflected in the mirror of those adoring eyes, my bizarre Romanian had come to take himself seriously. Along with his sense of humor, he seemed to have lost interest in inventing exotic dishes and cultivating roses; we had very little in common anymore. Joan and Susan were as delightful as ever, with the delicious scent of herbs and spices still clinging to their skin, but all their time was devoted to their causes: the feminist struggle and the culinary chemistry of their vegetarian recipes—they were expert in disguising tofu so that it tasted like kidney pie. I hadn’t made any friends in law school. We were fiercely competitive, all of us absorbed in our own plans and ambitions, our eyes glued to our books. I had lost my taste for meetings and had even shoved my political and intellectual interests into the background. It would have been difficult to explain to Cyrus that where I was, the only problem that confronted the left was that no one wanted to occupy the right. When I went home at night I was bone tired; on the way I would toy with the possibility of taking a detour and wandering off toward the horizon, like my father when we were traveling the country without a fixed itinerary or destination. The chaos of the house got on my nerves—and I’m not a fanatic for order, to say the least. I suppose I was drained by studying and work; I have little doubt I was not acting like a good husband and that was why Samantha put forth so little effort. At times we seemed more like adversaries than allies. In such circumstances you become blind, you don’t see any way to get out of the dead-end street you’re on, you think you’re stuck forever in the same meat grinder and that there’s no escape. When you get your degree, it’ll be different, Carmen would console me long-distance, but I knew the degree alone would not cure my problems. I faithfully watched a television serial about a clever lawyer who regularly gambled his reputation, and sometimes his life, to save an innocent man from jail or to punish a guilty one. I never missed a program, hoping that the protagonist would restore my enthusiasm for the law and rescue me from the terrible boredom it inspired. I had not begun to practice, and I was already disillusioned. The future looked very different from the adventure I had imagined in my youth; the last push to finish the race was so tedious that I began to talk about giving up law school and devoting myself to something different. Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion. According to him, I was angry with the world and with myself, and not without reason: my life had not been a bed of roses. He advised me to get rid of complications—beginning with my marriage to Samantha, which he considered an obvious mistake. I refused to admit it, but nonetheless a moment came when at least in that regard I had to admit he was right. It was at a party like so many we went to during those days, in a house like any other house—broken-down furniture, Indian rugs covering the stains on the sofa, posters of Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara alongside embroidered mandalas from India, the same couples, the men not wearing socks and the women not wearing bras, cold food and pieces of cheese growing more rancid as the hours went by, too much to drink, cigarettes and such poor-grade marijuana that the smoke drove away mosquitoes. The same interminable conversations as well: the latest seminars on the primal scream, in which people yelled to rid themselves of aggression; or the return to the womb, in which the naked participants assumed the fetal position and sucked their thumb. I never understood those therapies and never tried them; I was sick of the subject, sick of hearing about the multiple transcendental changes in the life of everyone I knew. I walked out to the terrace to drink alone. I admit I was drinking more every day. I had given up liquor because it triggered my allergies and, between swollen mucous membranes and a terrible tightness in my chest, I could scarcely breathe. I soon discovered that wine produced the same symptoms but that I could consume more of it before I felt really sick. Some hours before, I had had a shouting match with Samantha, and I was beginning to admit to myself that our marriage was rolling toward the edge of a precipice. I had been driving into the garage when I saw a neighbor walking toward me, leading Margaret by the hand—my daughter was barely two. I think this is your child, he said, not bothering to veil his censure or his contempt. I found her wandering a couple of miles from here; to have got that far she must have been walking since morning. I picked her up in my arms, trembling. My temples were throbbing and I could scarcely speak when I confronted my wife to ask her where she had been when Margaret got out of the house and why she hadn’t realized the child had been gone so long. She planted herself with her hands on her hips, as furious as I, alleging that the neighbor was a bastard who hated her because her cats had eaten his canary, that she didn’t owe me any explanations, that after all she didn’t ask me
where I had been all day, that Margaret was very independent for her age and that she didn’t choose to watch her like a jailer or tie her up with a rope the way I did with the children I looked after, and she kept yelling until I couldn’t stand any more and left the room, slamming the door. I took a long cold shower to try to stop imagining the many accidents that could have befallen Margaret in those terrible two miles, but it hadn’t done the trick, because at the party I was still extremely angry with Samantha. I carried my wine out on the terrace and fell into a chair, in a foul humor, a little drunk, and sick of the deadly dull music from Katmandu I could still hear from the living room. I was thinking how much time I was wasting at that boring party; my bar exams were coming up in a week, and every minute was precious. About then Timothy Duane came outside and when he saw me pulled up a chair beside me. We didn’t have many opportunities to be alone. I noticed he had lost weight in recent years and his features had become deeply chiseled; he had lost that air of innocence that despite his posturing had been a large part of his charm when we first met. He took a glass vial from his pocket, sprinkled cocaine on the back of his hand, and noisily inhaled. He offered me some, but I can’t use it: it kills me; the only time I tried it, I felt as if an icy dagger were buried between my eyes—the headache lasted three days, and the promised paradise was nowhere in my memory. Tim told me we’d better go inside because they were organizing a game; I told him I wasn’t interested in seeing everyone bareassed again.