“No. Just the cleaning woman.”
“You know, my parents live nearby, on Swarthmore,” David said. “Maybe my mother knows someone who could come in once in a while. I bet she does.”
Claudia observed the way he spoke to Mr. Stanton and was struck by, almost confused by, the helpfulness, the strength. In contrast it made her feel like Mr. Stanton’s second grade Claudia, who had sat and cried at the prospect of losing her beloved teacher. She had lost him; each year, a new teacher was found and then lost, but in the bracket of time from September to June, the current teacher swooped down and rescued any child who was in need of it. Inevitably, year after year, Claudia was one of those children. She had gotten used to the role, hadn’t even thought to give it up because it fit her well, and she suspected that it always would.
Bombay Café, when they arrived, was crowded but subdued, with waiters moving swiftly among the tables. David’s father Mr. Gupta circulated the room discreetly, making sure the patrons had what they needed. Claudia recognized no one from the old days in Wontauket. Most of the families from back then had folded up their tents, and these new ones, these hopeful, chattering people spooning lamb korma and raita onto their plates on a Friday night after work, had replaced them.
“Do you need to help your father with anything?” she’d asked David at the start of the meal, seeing Mr. Gupta’s anxious expression, but David assured her that no, his father was on top of the situation and needed no help.
“He wants me to relax and enjoy myself tonight,” David said. “He’s always worried that I work too hard and that I’ll have a crack-up or something.”
“Why would he think that?”
David played with the silverware in front of him. “I got very stressed out last year when I was working around the clock on a brief, and I had an anxiety attack that felt exactly like a heart attack. I was positive I was about to die. A friend of mine took me to the emergency room in Philly, but they did an EKG and told me my heart was fine, I was just under too much stress.” He shrugged. “Which of course was true. It’s gotten better now, but I still tend to work too much, and to not sleep very much at night. It’s as if I don’t really know how to shut off. There’s no one around to tell me to, and so basically I forget.”
“I always know how to shut off,” Claudia said, imagining herself in front of a movie screen, the shadows darting around with the sole purpose of distracting her.
Over their many-course vegetarian thali dinner, David and Claudia swapped details from their lives and small things that they’d noticed over the course of the afternoon with Mr. Stanton. They discussed the rapid passage of time and what it did to people you hadn’t seen, and how the unfairness of life was on display almost everywhere, shifting shape freely to fit the form of, say, a former teacher who needed to grip a Koosh Ball in his hand to strengthen it and who fell when he went into the bathroom to stuff a plug into a socket.
“I wanted to do this film because elementary school was a time when I was happy,” Claudia said. “I didn’t mean for it to have all this pathos. But here it is.”
“Where’s the pathos? In the teachers? Why is that, exactly?”
“Because they’re still here and we’ve all moved on.”
David shook his head. “They’re not ‘all still here’ in the way you mean it. School isn’t everything to them the way I think it was to you. Their lives are bigger than that, I hope. They have their secrets. Their affairs. Their travels, their families. I don’t mean to insult you, Claudia, and I’m sure your film will be very good, but what makes you think that your life is so much more expansive than theirs? I don’t even really know what ‘moving on’ means. Who ‘moves on,’ really? I’d have to say that the pathos is a little more generalized than you think. We’ve all got it in our lives.”
He was right, of course, and she looked away, ashamed. “I know. I was being really reductive,” she said to him. “And I apologize. But when Mr. Stanton started talking about the last day he ever taught a class,” said Claudia, “and how he didn’t know it would be his last day because he didn’t yet know he was going to have a stroke on the way to his house—I started to feel that I should never have come here and filmed him, or any of these people.”
“What did you think they were going to tell you?”
“I don’t know. Funny stories about the 1970s. People really like hearing about that time. It seems so long ago already. Those smiley-face buttons. ‘Have a nice day.’ The clothes that everyone wore. The way our parents looked. Well, at least the way mine did,” she added.
“What’s that mean?”
He had no idea who her parents were, perhaps had never even heard of them. “They wrote a book,” she began, and after she mentioned the name, he lit up with recognition almost immediately.
“Yes, yes, I remember that book,” he said, and he popped the remnant of a vegetable samosa into his mouth and chewed excitedly. “Oh, that’s amazing, your parents, huh? That must have been quite an experience.”
“Oh, I guess so,” she said. But then something made her keep talking. “In the beginning, I was too young to understand what it was,” she told him, “but my brothers and sister were freaked out by it. Later on, when I got a little older, I realized what was happening. That that book I’d looked at, other people could see too. I realized that this wasn’t the only copy in the world; that there were others, in all kinds of languages. And that millions of people around the world were seeing pictures of my parents screwing each other. And, basically, that there was really no good that could come out of that.”
“Maybe not for you. But other people got a lot from that book,” said David. “I was always hearing how it changed a lot of people’s sex lives. It basically woke them up.”
“Oh, that’s what they say,” said Claudia. “But I’ve never seen sex change anyone’s life. At least not personally.”
“But they invented that position, right?”
Everything had turned, suddenly, and Claudia had gone from the surprisingly easy back-and-forth with this new person to a stilted conversation about the last thing in the world she wanted to talk about. She became aware of a nasal Indian female wailing from the speakers in the restaurant, and the rapid clicking of finger cymbals.
“Right,” she said. “It apparently came out of that mishmash of research they’d done. They borrowed ideas from The Kama Sutra—I mean, they basically stole them—and also from Chinese erotica. It was supposed to represent a feeling of excitement and, well, letting go of anger or something. I remember once, on TV, I think it was on Ken London’s Night Owl, they said it was a good position to use after times of great emotional upheaval. Well, it didn’t work out for them. Obviously.”
“Why obviously?”
“My mother left my father,” Claudia said. “Two years after the book came out.”
“Oh. That must have been a shock.”
“To me, yes. To my father too. She fell in love with someone else, but I only realized that later on. I mean, nobody told me then. Anyway, it’s a whole long story.”
“I’d like to hear it,” said David.
“My father went crazy,” Claudia said. “He was so deeply in love with my mother; she was his ideal. She was this, she was that, and he couldn’t believe that she would leave him. He took us off in the car the night that she told him, and he drove us around and around the town. We kept going past the stretch of stores right here, where your restaurant is. We went around and around, and when I looked out the window it was like the backdrop on some low-rent TV show where people are driving in a car and they keep passing the same tree, the same cow. The whole ride was very, very strange.”
“I guess you must have been scared,” said David.
“Yeah, I was. I sat way in the back of the station wagon. We had this family song we always sang, and for some reason my father started singing it. I guess it was meant to be ironic, because obviously we weren’t going to be a family anymore. And he was crying so hard I
remember thinking that they should have windshield wipers for people who cry when they’re driving. Little wipers for my dad’s aviator glasses. Nothing bad happened that night, though. We all just ended up getting Carvel, even my father, and then going home. A week or so later he moved out. My mother stayed in the house because all of us kids were still at home. So we saw my father every weekend, but he was different. Angry and depressed, I guess. One by one, my siblings left home, and finally, when I went away to college, my mother sold the house. She got everything she wanted, but he didn’t. He’s never gotten over the fact that she left him.” Claudia paused. “Why am I telling you this?” she asked. “Usually people confess things to me. I have no idea why I said all of this to you. My apologies.”
He was looking at her with interest, and she thought that he was being hoodwinked by her face, the features that were pleasing to the eye, the hair that she was able to bring to a high shine with ease. But if they were to stand together he would be reminded of her squat dumpiness, and he wouldn’t want to touch her. She imagined touching him, though, putting her hand on the soft, pale material of his shirt, peeling it back to reveal the complementary dark surface of his chest. Men’s bare chests seemed brave to her, reminded her of young warriors.
David broke a wedge of nan into a few smaller pieces. “I don’t mind at all,” he said. “It’s really interesting. Look, this may be too personal, but I wonder if you’ve ever tried it.”
“Tried what?”
“The position.”
She stared at him. He obviously didn’t know her at all. What did he imagine, that she’d had dozens of lovers with whom she had celebrated the freedom of sexuality, of being female, human, alive? “Of course not,” she said. “Why would I?”
“I don’t know,” said David, and then he shrugged and tried to smile. “Just to see?”
Later, with the rental car in the school parking lot, they sat on the merry-go-round at Bolander Elementary, letting the frozen metal disk slowly spin, so close to the ground. Once it had been thrilling when this thing was set in motion; now, though, the combined weight of the two adults made the process seem like the failed liftoff of a spaceship. But they needed motion between them, some sort of movement to help continue the conversation even after all the Indian food had been eaten. First they had walked around town, but it had appeared as deserted as a place with a curfew; there was no nightlife in Wontauket and never had been. Almost anything that happened after dark happened in the home.
“Are you freezing?” David asked her as they slowly spun.
“I’m okay,” she said. “It’s not too bad.”
“The town where I grew up,” said David, “was always cold. We were just north of Buffalo, and we wore these big ugly gray-and-orange parkas all fall and winter and even into the spring. But there was some sense of pride in the cold because we’d always heard how hot it was in Pakistan, where the cousins lived. Whenever we were freezing and would complain about the weather, my father would say, ‘Your cousin Partha is probably sweating buckets right now. You should think of yourself as fortunate.’ I heard about my cousin Partha my entire life. He was born one month before me, and he did everything perfectly. He was brilliant at mathematics—almost solved Fermat’s Last Theorem at sixteen. Of course, nothing comes out the way it’s supposed to, does it, because today Partha is a carpenter living on the Pakistan border and involved with corrupt political activities.”
“As opposed to you?”
“Yeah, I’m way not-corrupt. I’m the least corrupt intellectual property lawyer in the world.”
As the metal disk spun he told her about his job. His law firm, he said, was currently involved in a case that concerned the author of a little-known book about birth order and its psychological implications, which had been published in the 1950s. The author was suing another author, who had recently published a similar book that was currently on the best-seller list.
“Our client is the original author, Hubbard Elwell,” David said. “He’s eighty-five years old and indignant that his ideas have been stolen. But ideas are difficult because they’re not concrete. They’re not things. You can’t hold them up as ‘Exhibit A.’ Writing is concrete, though. And this motivational speaker, this slick guy named ‘Dr.’ Don Ardsley—and believe me, he’s got a doctorate in something fake like ‘life coaching’—who’s written the new book and is making a lot of money off it, he hasn’t stolen our client’s writing, exactly. The words are different. But all the concepts behind them are similar to Elwell’s. I think we have a fairly strong case, but a judge will have to decide.”
“So do you believe in the whole birth order thing?” she asked.
“Actually, I do,” David said. “I mean, it’s a little bit like astrology, I guess, but it seems to hold up in a lot of cases. My own family, for instance, my sisters and I, we’re classic. I’m the youngest.”
“Me too,” said Claudia.
“Hey, what do you know. How many are you?”
“Four.”
“So tell me about the others in order,” David said. “And I’ll make some conjectures. Who comes right before you?”
“That’s Dashiell,” she said simply, and as she did, she remembered her brother’s latest news. She thought of him in isolation in the hospital, and something must have crossed her own face because David tilted his head slightly.
“What is it?” he asked.
“My brother’s really sick,” she said quickly. She hadn’t wanted to talk about it, particularly about the information she’d learned only yesterday, but here it was, and she couldn’t go back. “He has Hodgkin’s disease,” Claudia said, “and it was supposed to be okay, but now he has to have a stem cell transplant.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I really love him,” said Claudia, and she felt herself start to fray. “We’re only two years apart. You should see him, he’s really good-looking, totally handsome and buff. He’s small, but he’s got this amazing physique, lean and graceful. You’d never think we were related.”
David stared at her. “Why do you say something like that?” he asked. “You’re so pretty.”
“Ah, you mean my face,” she said bitterly. “My good old face.”
“What do you mean? As opposed to your body?”
“Yes,” she said, looking away slightly.
“I don’t know that I was just thinking of your face. I was thinking of you. You aren’t . . . unscrewable. You can’t just screw off the head. It isn’t in pieces. I’m sure you’re very . . .” He suddenly laughed and looked away.
“What? What were you going to say?” she asked. “Tell me.”
“It was accidentally kind of crude,” David said. “I was going to say I’m sure you’re very . . . screwable. Oh God, let me shoot myself now.”
So the moment was interrupted with a little laughing, and the thoughts of poor Dashiell began to recede. She was silently apologetic as she pictured a hospital bed drifting away from her, moving quickly out of reach. Claudia had often felt that her three older siblings thought of their younger sister as an eternal baby, and she was perceptive enough to understand that this was a valuable asset in life. It kept you ageless, perhaps immortal. As you got older and older, there would always be someone older than you, always someone more decrepit, closer to death.
Now she thought about Dashiell dying before she did, and she just couldn’t stand it. The bed came rushing back toward her, and he was still on it, but this time he was clay-colored, impassive. She’d never really thought of any of them dying, actually, because their parents were so powerful and they, the children, were always the children, so much so that they carried a banner of childhood with them their entire lives. Their fully sexual parents kept them from growing up completely. No, it was more than that. Her parents would have been upset to know this, but they’d kept her from having sex. Sex was their territory. The children would have to try something else. Maybe model airplanes? Tournament bridge? T’ai-chi, maybe? Yes, t’ai-c
hi—they could choose the loose-flowing, turtle-slow movements of limbs in space instead of the frenetic rubbing and pushing toward ecstasy that had once been her parents’ stock-in-trade.
“If you still want to hear about it,” David Gupta said, “being the youngest can be particularly hard. Because the formerly youngest one—that would be your brother who’s sick? When you came along he might have gotten very threatened. He’d always been the baby. But he also would have realized that there was someone new to be the scapegoat. So he would’ve made you feel that you were too young to be a companion to the others. That you weren’t good enough. So you probably went off into your own little world. And now I should just shut up here,” David said. “You have more important things on your mind, and this probably doesn’t describe you at all. Pay no attention to me.”
But Claudia was already picturing herself in the role of fourth-born, youngest, watching movies in the den after school, ignored by the others, never taken fully seriously. Her troll dolls had been her mainstay, and she had sat in the middle of them, arranging them as she saw fit. They were naked, those dolls, and once in a while she would put one on top of another just to see how it felt to watch them. But it had felt like nothing, like a marriage of tan plastic, and so she would pull them apart and return them to their circle, their endless ring in which no one was the youngest, the oldest, the most knowledgeable, the least beautiful, the favorite, the disappointment.
On the way back to the car, walking across the spongy black rubber panels that had been laid over the school playground, David Gupta linked his arm through Claudia Mellow’s, causing her to turn to him in surprise, only slightly inflected by disingenuousness, for this, everyone knew, was the prelude to whatever was to come. Even if it hadn’t happened to you this way before, you’d been around long enough to know that this was how it was sometimes done. One person stepped forward bravely from his or her square of shyness and interlocked an arm through the other person’s arm, or perhaps lifted a hand to graze a cheek.