“When’s Mommy coming?” Lenny had asked, without taking his eyes from the television.
Up to this moment in her life, Audrey had never evinced the slightest sentimentality about children. Insofar as she had recognized them as an independent category of personhood, she had tended to think of them as trainee humans. Inadequate adults. She loved her own daughters well enough—wanted them to be happy and so forth—but they had failed to inspire in her that mad, lioness passion to which other mothers so preeningly testified. She was still in some shock regarding the servility of motherhood—the sheer, thankless drudgery of it. All the cleaning up of messes she had not made and preparing meals she did not want to eat. She fed her girls regularly and diligently brushed their teeth twice a day and made sure they were more or less appropriately dressed for the weather, but beyond a dull sense of satisfaction at having fulfilled her maternal duties, she received no pleasure from performing these tasks. Try as she might, she could not feel her daughters’ happinesses and sorrows as her own. The miniature dramas of their daily lives bored her, to tell the truth. When Karla and Rosa woke in the night, complaining of bad dreams, she irritably instructed them to think of pleasant things and sent them briskly back to bed. When they came home complaining of school friends who were being unkind, she shrugged and told them to buck up. “What do you care what those ninnies think of you, anyway?” she would demand, exhaling dragon-clouds of cigarette smoke as she rustled through her newspaper.
She had never felt guilty about her lack of maternal zeal. Hers was the sane response to motherhood, she thought. The shiny-eyed parenting maniacs she encountered when she dropped her daughters off at school—the grinning supermoms and -dads who hung around after the bell rang, hankering for “more access” to their children’s classrooms and fretting over the PTA’s efforts to fund a language lab for the kinder-gartners—they were the crazy ones. There was something infantile, it seemed to her, about their passionate identification with their children. Clearly, they were compensating for a terrible lack or inadequacy elsewhere in their lives.
But something had changed on the night that she found Lenny in the Harlem apartment. Gazing down at his owl-eyed face—noticing the chalky mustache of Yoo-hoo on his upper lip, the glistening scribble of dog drool on his pants—she felt a tiny aperture clicking open, a pilot light being lit somewhere deep within. Her temples throbbed. She had a panicked sense of onrush, of internal torrent. She wanted to pick the boy up and—she didn’t know what—squeeze him, kiss him, swallow him whole.
The next morning, she tried to describe this bizarre physiological drama to Joel. “It was like I was having an anxiety attack, or something,” she told him.
“Yeah, well, it’s a big thing, taking on another person’s kid,” Joel had muttered. He was pulling on his pants at the time, hurrying to get to the police station to see Susan. He glanced at Lenny, who was lying next to Audrey in their bed, still asleep. “Don’t worry. It’ll only be for a couple of days.”
But he had misunderstood. It was not the burden of her responsibility for Lenny that had threatened to overwhelm her; it was the long-awaited appearance of maternal instinct.
In the years since then, Audrey’s attachment to Lenny had been a frequent source of tension in their marriage. Joel, for all his talk of communal childrearing and tribes, deeply resented the idea that Lenny should have succeeded in evoking Audrey’s passion where her “real” children had failed. “Karla and Rosa are your flesh and blood,” he would chide her. But these appeals to sanguine loyalty missed the point, she felt. If anything, the fact that Lenny was not hers made it easier to love him. As the coauthor of Karla and Rosa, she could not help but look upon them with the dissatisfied eye of an artist assessing her own flawed handiwork. Lenny, on the other hand, was an unsolicited donation: she was free to enjoy the gift of him without any burden of genetic responsibility for his imperfections. She had chosen to love him. The disparity in her feelings toward her daughters and her son was regrettable, but it was not something that was in her gift to correct.
The gates were still closed when Audrey and Lenny arrived at the correctional facility. After Lenny had stuffed the contents of his pockets into the car door, they joined the visitors who were milling around outside the bunkerlike building. At the bottom of the driveway, a bus drew up, and a group of passengers, mostly women and children, got off. A little boy had just thrown up and his grandmother—a weary-looking woman in hot-pink stretch pants—was wiping his face roughly with a paper towel. “Be still!” she shouted at him as he squirmed. “You want to smell bad when you see your mommy?”
Audrey glanced at Lenny. As a boy, he had always been carsick on the journey to Bedford. At least once and often twice on every trip, she would have to pull into a rest stop, swab him down, and change him into a new set of clothes. He had never been sick on other car journeys; it was the stress of visiting his mother that had made him puke. Later on, in the visiting room, he would crouch in his chair, smelling of bile, asking Susan to explain, one more time, how she had got caught, what crucial planning error had led to her capture. When the bell sounded at the end of the hour, he would cling to her, sobbing for her to come home with him. “Why don’t you escape?” he had asked once. “You could climb out a window. If you ran fast enough, they wouldn’t be able to catch you.”
Audrey had found these visits almost unbearably wounding. It had enraged her that Susan should enjoy the privilege of Lenny’s devotion when it was she, Audrey, who was down in the maternal salt mines, reading him stories and singing him lullabies and cleaning up his vomit. What had Susan ever done for the boy, except abandon him to inadequate childcare while she buggered off to play urban guerrillas?
The gates were open now, and the line had begun to shuffle into the visitors’ processing area. There was a window with a counter where you could drop off food and clothes for the prisoners. A handwritten sign stuck on the glass instructed, NO THONG, FISHNET, G-STRING, OR BIKINI PANTIES. NO LACE OR SHEER BRAS. Audrey and Lenny passed through the metal detectors and walked down a corridor into a large cafeteria-like room with vending machines along one wall. Susan was sitting at one of the tables. Her face broke into a wide smile when she saw them enter. “Hey,” she said softly, elongating the syllable. She stood up and wrapped Lenny in a tight embrace, rocking him back and forth for several long seconds. Lenny, Audrey was pleased to note, looked highly mortified.
They sat down now, with Susan on one side of the table and Lenny and Audrey on the other. “It’s good to see you, man,” Susan said, taking Lenny’s hand and gazing solemnly into his eyes. During her days in the Underground, Susan had been a notoriously intimidating figure. She had worn men’s overalls and styled her hair in a fearsome Plantagenet bob. She had carried a knife “for killing pigs” in the sole of her shoe. Shortly after the arrest of Charles Manson and his followers, she had composed an infamous Cong communiqué, praising Manson as “a brother in the struggle against bourgeois America.” But incarceration, or age—or both—had had an emollient effect on her. Her hair was long and white now, and she wore it loose about her shoulders in the prophetess style favored by veteran women folksingers. The pig-killing rhetoric of yore had long since subsided into a dreamy singsong of healing and conciliation. Over the years at Bedford, she had founded several educational programs for her fellow inmates, including one on AIDS awareness and another—much to Audrey’s secret derision—on “parenting skills.” Her literacy program, in which inmates were encouraged to write and perform plays about their lives, was so well regarded that pilot programs based on her blueprint had now been set up in several prisons around the country.
“So, what’s up, man?” she asked. “What’s going on with your band, Lenny? You been playing recently?”
Lenny shook his head. “Not much.”
“Hey, Lenny, man, don’t neglect your music.”
Audrey turned away to hide her smile. Lenny’s band wasn’t really a band: it was a couple of stoner guys with
guitars who got together once a month or so to ad-lib tuneless, ironic songs on miniature domestic themes. Their signature number—their anthem, more or less—was a mock-heroic tribute to the drummer’s cat:
You eat tuna and Cap’n Crunch.
You got a face like Alice in the Brady Bunch.
Susan was always trying, in her earnest way, to lend Lenny’s halfhearted pursuits a serious, progressive inflection. If Lenny got a job in a restaurant, he was “getting into food”—which was great, because it was such a special thing to nourish people. If Lenny took a free trip to Morocco with one of his rich, druggy friends, he was “exploring Arab culture”—which was fantastic, because it was so important for young people to fight American parochialism and bigotry. Audrey treasured these misreadings as proof of Susan’s inanity.
“So what else you been up to?” Susan asked now. “What’s going on in the world?”
“Well, a bunch of things have happened with Joel,” Lenny said. “But Audrey should really tell you about all that.” (Out of respect for Susan’s feelings, he did not refer to Joel and Audrey as Mom and Dad in her presence.)
Susan turned to Audrey. “Audrey, how’s it going?”
Audrey looked at her sourly. She never felt quite respected by Susan. There was a labored politeness in the way that Susan spoke to her—an awkward condescension—that seemed to imply some difficulty in relating to a woman of Audrey’s thoroughgoing conventionality. You are a very straight housewife, her tone said, and I am a fearless renegade, but I am doing my best to find a connection here. It drove Audrey nuts. “The cheek of that woman!” she had often complained to Joel. “She fucked up a bank robbery, she made a couple of dud bombs, and she didn’t use deodorant for ten years. For this she thinks she can lord it over me like she’s fucking Aleksandra Kollontay?”
“Joel’s not doing badly,” she said now. “He’s had a couple of infections, but he’s come through them very well—”
“Yeah, Joel’s a tough old fucker,” Susan remarked.
Audrey flared her nostrils, like a rocking horse. Speaking irreverently of Joel was a right she reserved for herself and very few others—certainly not for Susan. Besides which, she had not yet finished her account of Joel’s medical status.
“And how about you, Audrey?” Susan asked. “You keeping strong?”
“Yup.” Audrey thrust her hands in her pockets as a preventive measure against Susan trying to hold one of them. “We’re all doing fine, aren’t we, Len?”
Susan smiled at Lenny. “Is that right? You doing okay?”
Lenny nodded.
There was a brief pause. Susan looked around the canteen. “I got a letter from Cheryl this week,” she said. Cheryl was a young Puerto Rican inmate with whom Susan had become romantically involved some years earlier. She had been released now and was back living with her boyfriend, but she and Susan continued to correspond. Susan wrote her a lot of love poems, some of which she had been known to read aloud to Lenny.
“She’s training to be an AIDS counselor,” Susan went on. “I’m so proud of her.”
Audrey shut her eyes. The woman was shameless, she thought. Having dealt with Joel in three sentences, she was now going to revert to discussing herself and her sordid lesbian romance. Joel used to say it was unfair to criticize long-term inmates for being self-absorbed. It was inevitable, he claimed, that the outside world should become abstract and somewhat unreal to them. But Audrey disagreed: Susan had always been a narcissist in altruist’s clothing.
Toward the end of the visit, Susan asked Lenny to get a soda for her from one of the machines. Once he had left the table, she turned to Audrey.
“Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” Audrey said.
“He’s not doing drugs again, right?”
Audrey bristled. “No. Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know. He’s kind of vague today. He doesn’t look good…”
“He didn’t shave, that’s all. He’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
Audrey folded her arms and smiled tightly. “I think I would know, Susan.”
Lenny was morose on the drive home. Audrey tried to cheer him up, but her chatter seemed only to agitate him. After a while, she accepted defeat and drove in silence. Halfway back to the city, Lenny said he needed to pee, so they pulled over at a rest stop. It was a place they had often visited on their trips back and forth to Bedford: a tatty strip mall with a newspaper shop, a McDonald’s, and a cinnamon roll franchise called Snack Attack. While Lenny was in the bathroom, Audrey stood in the parking lot and smoked a cigarette. The day had grown warm, and the air smelled of burger and car exhaust. She watched as a group of obese senior citizens in “One Nation Under God” T-shirts descended from a bus and came barreling across the macadam toward her. Joel had always hated places like this: malls, big-box stores, leisure parks—anywhere he was forced to confront his suburban countrymen en masse—but Audrey rather relished her encounters with lumpen America. Even after all these years in her adoptive country, she was still enough of a foreigner to be gratified by real-life sightings of underdressed Americans grazing on trans fats while they shopped.
She finished her cigarette and went into the mall to buy some coffee. When Lenny finally reappeared, they sat and drank their lattes outside on a bench overlooking the McDonald’s mini-playground.
“Look at him,” Lenny said, pointing at a boy who was sitting at the top of the slide. “He just bit the girl in front of him, little bastard!” He laughed with admiring incredulity.
“You’ve brightened up a bit,” Audrey remarked. She glanced covetously at the cinnamon roll that she had bought for him. It lay, coiled and gleaming, in its little styrofoam case, like the spiral flourish at the bottom of the Perry Street stair banister. “You not eating that?” she asked.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Go on, eat it.”
“You eat it. I don’t want it.”
“Go on, Len. You’ve had nothing since that hot dog.”
“Jesus, Mom—”
“All right, all right.” Audrey picked up the roll and put it in the trash.
She gazed at him. “Len…”
“Yeah?”
“You’d tell me if you were using again, wouldn’t you?”
Lenny sat back on the bench and raised his eyes skyward. “Come on.”
“Don’t be like that,” Audrey protested. “I’m just asking. You would tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes. But I’m not.”
“Honestly?”
“For real. A bit of spliff now and then, and that’s it, I swear.”
Audrey smiled. “That’s what I thought. It was Susan who wanted to know. She said you were behaving funny. I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”
He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Well,” he said with a sigh, “I’m glad you trust me, anyway.”
Audrey dropped Lenny off at Tanya’s apartment in the East Village before going back to Perry Street. The traffic was terrible getting over to the West Side, and she arrived home to find Daniel waiting for her on the front stoop. He was wearing skinny green pants the same lurid shade as Babar’s suit, and he had some sort of gel in his hair that made it stand up in stiff little peaks like a frozen sea.
“Do they make you dress like that at your new firm?” Audrey asked, as she opened the front door. “Or is this a look you came up with by yourself?”
Daniel smiled tolerantly. “I was about to leave. I thought you weren’t coming.”
“I’m ten minutes late, Daniel. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” She led the way into the kitchen.
“Now look,” Daniel said, as they sat down. “I’m not going to beat around the bush. I know that Berenice Mason came to see you a few weeks ago—”
“Oh, her.” Audrey gave a little hoot of laughter. “She’s started stalking you now, has she? Has she told you all about her romance of the century with Joel?”
Daniel was silent.
/>
“Oh, Daniel. What is it? You think Joel fucked her, do you?”
He lowered his eyes. “More than that, I’m afraid. She and Joel have a child together.”
Audrey lit a cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke in the direction of the ceiling. “Yeah, she gave me that one too. The woman is barking.”
“Audrey, this isn’t a joke. I’ve spoken with Joel’s assistant. She’s known about this woman for some time, apparently.”
Something swayed and lurched in Audrey’s gut. “Kate?” she said. “She’s just a little girl. She’d believe anything.”
“The woman has evidence, Audrey.”
“Like what?”
“She has an Acknowledgment of Paternity form with Joel’s signature on it.”
“Well, anyone can fake one of those—”
“It’s not fake. I’ve seen it. And there’s other stuff too—”
“Oh, please,” Audrey said. But even as she spoke, she could feel her disbelief lifting like a mist. She turned and looked out of the kitchen window. In a bathroom on the third floor of the house opposite, a naked man was stepping carefully out of the shower. “How old?” she asked.
“Sorry?”
“How old is this child supposed to be?”
“Oh, four, I think. Yes, four.”
“And what’s the other stuff?”
“What?”
“You said there was other stuff. Other proof.”
“She has records of monthly payments that Joel made into her account—”
“Payments?”