Life Before Man

  "Janie Burroughs' nephew Philip works at the Museum," Auntie Muriel says. "Janie is an old friend of mine. We went to school together. I have my grandchildren to consider; I want them to have a decent home."

  Philip's relationship to Janie Burroughs was something Elizabeth had forgotten during her witty, lighthearted resume of her domestic situation at the lunch table last week. An incestuous city.

  "Nate sees them on weekends," she says weakly, and knows at once that she's made a serious tactical blunder: she's admitted there is something, if not wrong, at least deficient, about fathers not living at home. "They do have a decent home," she says quickly.

  "I doubt that," says Auntie Muriel. "I doubt that very much."

  Elizabeth feels the ground sliding from beneath her feet. If she were only dressed, with no man in the bedroom, she'd be in a much better strategic position. She hopes William has the sense to stay put, but considering his general gormlessness she has no right to expect it. She thinks she can hear him splashing in the bathroom.

  "I really feel," says Elizabeth with dignity, "that Nate's and my decisions are our own concern."

  Auntie Muriel ignores this. "I never approved of him," she says. "You know that. But any father at all is better than none. You should understand that better than anyone."

  "Nate isn't dead, you know," Elizabeth says. A fist of heat rises, hovers in her chest. "He's still very much alive and he adores the girls. But he happens to be living with another woman."

  "People of your generation do not understand the meaning of sacrifice," Auntie Muriel says, but without vigor, as if the repetition of the thought has finally tired her. "I sacrificed myself for years." She doesn't say what for. It's obvious she hasn't heard a word Elizabeth has just said.

  Elizabeth puts her hand against the pine sideboard to steady herself. She closes her eyes briefly; behind them is a network of elastic bands. With everyone else she can depend on some difference between surface and interior. Most people do imitations; she herself has been doing imitations for years. If there is some reason for it she can imitate a wife, a mother, an employee, a dutiful relative. The secret is to discover what the others are trying to imitate and then support them in their belief that they've done it well. Or the opposite: I can see through you. But Auntie Muriel doesn't do imitations; either that or she is so completely an imitation that she has become genuine. She is her surface. Elizabeth can't see through her because there is nothing and nowhere to see. She is opaque as a rock.

  "I shall go to see Nathanael," Auntie Muriel says. She and Nate's mother are the only people who ever call him Nathanael.

  Suddenly Elizabeth knows what Auntie Muriel has in mind. She's going to go to Nate and offer to pay him. She's willing to pay for an appearance of standard family life, even if it means misery. Which to her is standard family life; she's never pretended to be happy. She's going to pay him to come back, and Nate will think that Elizabeth has sent her.

  Auntie Muriel, wearing a grey wool dress, is standing in the parlor beside the baby grand piano. Elizabeth, who is twelve, has just finished her piano lesson. The piano teacher, hopeless, pigeon chested Miss MacTavish, is in the front hall struggling into her navy blue trenchcoat, as she's done every Tuesday for four years. Miss MacTavish is one of the advantages Auntie Muriel is always telling Elizabeth she's being given. Auntie Muriel listens for the front door to close, smiling at Elizabeth, a disquieting smile.

  "Uncle Teddy and I," she says, "think that under the circumstances you and Caroline should call us something other than Auntie Muriel and Uncle Teddy." She leans over, fingering Elizabeth's sheet music. Pictures at an Exhibition.

  Elizabeth is still sitting on the piano bench. She's supposed to practice for half an hour after each lesson. She folds her hands in her lap and stares up at Auntie Muriel, keeping her face expressionless. She doesn't know what's coming, but she's already learned that the best defense against Auntie Muriel is silence. She wears silence around her neck like garlic against vampires. Sullen, Auntie Muriel calls her.

  "We have legally adopted you," Auntie Muriel goes on, "and we feel you should call us Mother and Father."

  Elizabeth has no objection to calling Uncle Teddy Father. She can hardly remember her own father, and doesn't much like what she can remember. He sometimes told jokes, she can remember that. Caroline hoards his sporadic Christmas cards; Elizabeth throws hers out, no longer even bothering to check the postmarks to see where he's drifted to now. But Auntie Muriel? Mother? Her flesh recoils.

  "I already have a mother," Elizabeth says politely.

  "She signed the adoption papers," Auntie Muriel says, with unconcealed triumph. "She seemed glad of the chance to get rid of the responsibility. Of course we paid her something."

  Elizabeth can't remember how she responded to the news that her real mother had sold her to Auntie Muriel. She thinks she tried to shut the piano on Auntie Muriel's hand; she's forgotten whether or not she succeeded. It was the last time she ever let herself be goaded that far.

  "Get out of my house," Elizabeth finds herself saying, screaming. "Don't come back, don't come back!" With the release of her voice, blood surges through her head. "You moldy old bitch!" She longs to say cunt, she's thought it often enough, but superstition holds her back. If she pronounces that ultimate magic word, surely Auntie Muriel will change into something else; will swell, blacken, bubble like burnt sugar, giving off deadly fumes.

  Auntie Muriel, face set, heaves herself erect, and Elizabeth picks up the object nearest to her and throws it at the repulsive white hat. She misses, and one of her beautiful porcelain bowls shatters against the wall. But at last, at last, she has frightened Auntie Muriel, who is scuttling down the hall. The door opens, closes: a bang, satisfying, final as gunshot.

  Elizabeth stamps her bare feet, exultant. Revolution! Auntie Muriel is as good as dead; she will never have to see her again. She does a small victorious dance around her pressback pine chair, hugging herself. She feels savage, she could eat a heart.

  But when William comes downstairs, fully dressed and with his hair brushed, he finds her curled unmoving on the sofa.

  "Who was that?" he says. "I figured I'd better stay upstairs."

  "Nobody really," Elizabeth says. "My aunt."

  Nate would have comforted her, even now. William laughs, as if aunts are intrinsically funny. "It sounded like a bit of a fight," he says.

  "I threw a bowl at her," Elizabeth says. "It was a good bowl."

  "You could try Crazy Glue," William says practically. Elizabeth doesn't consider this worth answering. Kayo's bowl, which can never be duplicated. A bowlful of nothing.

  Friday, April 29, 1977

  LESJE

  Lesje, in a grubbier than usual lab coat, sits in the downstairs lab beside the corridor of wooden storage racks. She's drinking a mug of instant coffee, which is all she intends to have for lunch. Ostensibly she's sorting and labeling a tray of teeth, small pro-tomammal teeth from the Upper Cretaceous. She's using a magnifying glass and a chart, though she knows these particular teeth backwards and forwards: the Museum has published a monograph on them which she helped to edit. But she's having trouble concentrating. She's sitting here instead of in her office because she wants someone to talk to her.

  There are two technicians in the room. Theo is over by the sandblasting machine, digging away with a dental pick at a semi-embedded jawbone. In Mammalogy, where the bones are real, they don't use dental picks. They have a freezer full of dead carcasses, camels, moose, bats, and when they're ready to assemble the skeleton they strip most of the meat off and put the bones into the Bug Room, where carnivorous insects eat the shreds of flesh remaining. The Bug Room smells of rotting meat. Outside the door, several pictures of naked women are Scotch-taped to filing cabinets. The technicians in that department work to rock and country music from the radio. Lesje wonders if solitary Theo would rather be there.

  Gregor, the department's artist, is applying daubs of clay to a bone, some sort
of ornithopod femur, it looks like. Though Gregor probably doesn't care that much what it is. His job is to make a mold of it, then take a plaster cast from the mold. Thus slowly and part by part, whole skeletons reproduce themselves. In the nineteenth century, Lesje knows, Andrew Carnegie cast and recast his own personal dinosaur, Diplodocus carnegiei, and presented the replicas to the crowned heads of Europe. No one can afford to do that any more; even if there were any crowned heads left.

  Lesje tries to think of something to say to the technicians, not about Diplodocus carnegiei, that wouldn't do it; some way of opening a conversation. But she doesn't know what might interest them. They do their jobs and leave at five every night for their other lives, lives which she finds unfathomable. She knows though that the Museum is not essential to them the way it is to her. Gregor could just as easily be working in an art store, Theo could be cleaning cement from bricks or paint from old brass drawer handles. Perhaps they want to Scotch-tape pictures of naked women up in here, too.

  Nevertheless, she very much wants one of them, either of them, to say, "Come out for a beer." She would watch baseball games on television with them, eating potato chips and drinking from the bottle. She would hold their hands, roll on the carpet with them, make love as an afterthought, attaching no more meaning to that than to any other healthy exercise, a swim, a jog around the block. It would all be friendly and without any future. She wants actions, activities, with no significance and no hidden penalties.

  She thinks with nostalgia of her life with William, which she sees now as having been simple-minded and joyously adolescent. The beauty of William was that she hadn't seriously cared what he thought about her. Once she wanted something less two-dimensional. Now she has it. It's true that she didn't love William, though she had no way of knowing this at the time. She loves Nate. She's no longer sure she's cut out for love.

  Perhaps it wasn't even Nate himself that attracted her at first, but Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Chris. She'd looked at Elizabeth and seen an adult world where choices had consequences, significant, irreversible.

  William never represented such a choice, William was open-ended. She must have thought she could live with William for a million years and nothing in her would really be changed. Obviously William hadn't felt like this. William, like a miser with a sock, had invested things when she wasn't looking, so that his outburst of violence had taken her by surprise. But she's beyond William now, even his rage. William was only momentarily painful.

  Nate, on the other hand, is painful almost all the time. Holding her two hands he says, "You know how important you are to me." When she wants him to say he would kill for her, die for her. If he would only say that, she would do anything for him. But how important invites measurement, the question: How important? For her Nate is absolute, but for him she exists on a scale of relatively important things. She can't tell exactly where on the scale she is; it fluctuates.

  In the evenings she sits at their newly acquired table, beside the stove and the wheezy fridge she paid far too much for at the Goodwill store, and broods. When she lived with William he did most of the brooding.

  "What is it, love?" Nate says. She does not know how to answer.

  She prolongs her cup of coffee for as long as possible, but the technicians say nothing. Gregor whistles under his breath, Theo merely picks. Defeated, she carries her tray of teeth upstairs to the office. She has a school tour at four, once more into the dusky push-button Cretaceous, round and round the cycad trees with a thousand children, her voice unreeling. Then she will go back to the house.

  She has to be there early, since this is the first weekend Nate's children are going to spend with them. She's been dreading it all week.

  "But there's nowhere for them to sleep," she said.

  "They can borrow sleeping bags from their friends," Nate said.

  Lesje said they didn't have enough plates. Nate said the children would hardly expect a formal dinner. He would do all the cooking, he said, and the children would wash the dishes. She wouldn't have to do anything extra at all. Lesje then felt she was being excluded, but did not say so. Instead she counted the silverware and agonized over the baked-in grime on the floors. When she lived with William she would have hooted with scorn over such scruples. The truth was that she didn't want the children to go home and report to Elizabeth that she had no silverware and the floors were dirty. She hadn't cared what William thought of her, but she cares desperately how she will appear to two young children she doesn't even know and has no special reason to like. They have no special reason to like her, either. They probably think she's stolen Nate. They probably hate her. She feels condemned in advance, not for anything she's actually done, but for her ambiguous position in the universe.

  On Thursday she went to Ziggy's and bought a bagful of delicacies: English shortbread in a tin, two kinds of cheese, chopped liver, fruit buns, chocolates. She almost never eats fruit buns or chocolates, but she'd snatched them off the shelves in desperation: surely this was what children liked. She realized she didn't have any idea of what children liked. Most of them liked dinosaurs, which was all she knew.

  "That's not necessary, love," Nate said when she was disgorging the contents of her Ziggy's bag onto the kitchen table. "They'll be just as happy with peanut butter sandwiches."

  Lesje ran upstairs, threw herself onto their mattress and cried silently, breathing in the smell of old cloth, old stuffing, mice. That was another thing: the children would see this mattress.

  After a while Nate came in. He sat down and rubbed her back. "You know how important it is to me that you should all get along," he said. "If you had kids, you'd understand."

  Lesje's belly clenched: she could feel it, a wall of muscle around a central hollow. He'd placed himself and the children, and Elizabeth too, in a tight verdant little oasis where such things as understanding were possible. In the desert without, isolated, single, childless and culpably young, she was made to stand in penance, watching a pantomime she could not decipher.

  Nate had no idea he was being cruel. He thought he was being helpful. He stroked her back; she could imagine him looking at his watch to see if he'd done it for the required length of time.

  Multituberculata, Lesje murmurs to herself. A soothing word. She wants to be soothed; she is not soothed. She dreads this evening. She dreads the thought of sitting at her own rickety table, with its inadequate silverware and cheap plates, feeling her jaws move, making awkward conversation or staring at her hands while two pairs of eyes watch her in judgment. Three pairs.

  Saturday, May 14, 1977

  ELIZABETH

  Elizabeth sits in the underground gloom of the Pilot Tavern, breathing in the smell of slightly stale French fries, watching the shadows. She spent several evenings with Chris here, once upon a time. It was a good place for them to go because they were unlikely to see anyone Elizabeth knew. She's chosen it now for the same reason.

  The waiter has come for her order, but she said she was waiting for someone. Which is true. She has kissed her children good night, left out doughnuts and Coke for the baby-sitter, called a taxi and climbed into it, all so she can sit here in the Pilot Tavern and wait. Already she's regretting it. But she'd kept the card, that business card, tucked into the compartment of her purse where she stores her change and the folder for her identity cards. She knows she doesn't keep things like this unless she intends, sometime, to use them. An available body, stuck in the back of her mind.

  She can still leave, but what then? She'd have to go back, pay off the baby-sitter, and lie down alone in the house that is empty but not empty, listening to the barely audible breathing of her children. When they're awake she can stand it. Though they're hardly great company. Nancy lies inert on her bed, listening to records or reading the same books over and over again: The Hobbit, Prince Caspian. Janet hangs around Elizabeth with offers of help: she will peel the carrots, she'll clear the table. She complains of stomach aches and isn't satisfied unless Elizabeth gives her som
e Gelusil or Phillips' Milk of Magnesia, from Nate's abandoned bottles. Nancy, on the other hand, slips from Elizabeth's arms, avoiding hugs and good-night kisses. Sometimes Elizabeth thinks the children are acting guilty rather than sad.

  What's she supposed to say? Daddy hasn't exactly left, he's just left. Mummy and Daddy both love you. Nothing is your fault. You know he phones you every night, when he remembers. And you've seen him on weekends, several times. But she and Nate have agreed she won't discuss the separation with the children until he himself has a chance to have a talk with them, a talk he's so far postponed. Which hardly matters. The children aren't fools, they know what's going on. They know it so well they aren't even asking questions.

  The man in the brown suit is hanging over the table; he's bigger than she remembers, and he's no longer wearing a brown suit. His suit is light grey and he has on a tie with large white lozenges on it that seem to glow in the dark. He's become more prosperous.

  "See you got here," he says. He lowers himself into the chair opposite her, sighs, turns his head for the waiter.

  When she called, he hadn't remembered who she was. She had to remind him about their meeting in the subway station, their conversation about real estate. Then he'd been too effusive: "Of course! Of course!" She found this lapse of his humiliating. And then his laugh, thick as gravy, as if he knew what she wanted.

  He cannot really know. All she wants is oblivion. Temporary but complete: a night with no stars, a road running straight to a cliff edge. A termination. Terminal. Before calling him, she was sure he could offer this. Perhaps he can. His hands are on the table, blunt, dark-haired, practical.

  "I've been on the trail," he says. "Just got back the day before yesterday." The waiter comes and he orders himself a rum and Coke, then asks Elizabeth what she'll have. "A Scotch and soda for the lady." He explains how exhausted he is. The only thing that breaks the monotony of the long drives he has to make is his CB radio. You can get quite a few good conversations going on that. Playfully, he asks Elizabeth to guess what his handle is. Elizabeth demurs. "The Hulk," he says, smiling a little shyly.