Blythe, to frame an inquiry about the jack-o’-lantern in the womb, had lifted her hands to form a sphere around her own head, wincing inside that pumpkin.
“No,” he said, “did you ever see a sonogram?” He set out to describe this funny impression he’d never explored much until now: the jack-o’-lantern wasn’t the fetus’s face; the actual face, naturally, appeared as the typical mask all fetuses display in a sonogram’s black blizzard, the cute little pointy-nosed salamander, surfacing. They’d seen the same salamander sixteen years earlier in Lotta’s sonograms.
The jack-o’-lantern image, rather, was formed by a slice through the top of the fetal skull, the cross-section oval of the cranium, showing where the boy’s identifiable syndrome was visible. The pumpkin’s “grin,” then, was made by a black crescent at the lower rim. It indicated an empty area. It wasn’t supposed to be there. And the jack-o’lantern “nose” was a perfectly triangular absence at the brain’s center, as a pumpkin might be incised with a kitchen knife. A fluid was collecting there, indicating a hydrocephalic condition. The corpus callosum was developing wrongly. If he’d had to pick out the “eyes,” they would have been a pair of blurred watermelon-seed dots, small, close together, high in the oval, making this jack-o’-lantern a cretinous-looking one, but a jolly one.
That was the only way they ever said hello to the accumulating boy with the temporary name: by peering through the sonogram’s apronshaped window of night in a black snow of static, the Halloween grin in the white ring of bone when the fetus bowed his skull forward, the twiggy forearms and shins all folded together inside his big yolk, and on the ends of his wrists the bones of human fingers fine as bristles. The boy’s actual little humanoid face, with its eyelids closed in patience, whenever it surfaced, was mysterious, tolerant, in its nirvana not the least bit judgmental, even slightly amused looking, so that you could almost see an incipient sense of humor. Such character traits—irony, mellowness—are indeed built into the bodily constitution, right into the bones and hormones and neurochemical paths. And traits like irony and a little tolerance would have served the boy well if he’d been born, born normal—and received a genuine name and grown up and (this was how Mark pictured the unlived life) had had a quiet existence in a white farmhouse somewhere. That was what he pictured. A little farmhouse, the kind of place where not much ever happens. There, a creature with all its faculties and the usual mellow equanimity could have kept its nirvana and never quite wakened. Like anybody. Like him, too. Like everybody, wading numb through the blaze.
But one thing Mark wanted to emphasize for Blythe. Lotta had been included in all the discussions. They’d agreed she was old enough and it would have been wrong to exclude her. And at the time she had no objections. She was decidedly in favor of the abortion of her little sibling, and in fact Lotta’s ethical equipment was somewhat simplistic: all she could see was that (a) a woman has a right to choose, and (b) the child would have had a short, unhappy life. Those rubrics were enough for her. They were enough for Mark, too. And for Audrey. Maybe they were simplistic, but they were the truth. The particular syndrome (identified medically by a pair of hyphen-joined surnames, perhaps the names of the doctors who’d first identified the syndrome, a hyphenated formula too electrifying ever to speak aloud, the hocuspocus that was the curse) was described in medical literature in bleak detail. A child with this affliction never lives past the age of ten. And during that decade he would have been motionless in paralysis, and in an unlifting mental fog, all his life. The issues were clear; nobody had any moral confusion over the thing. Least of all Lotta.
But then within a month, she started changing her story. She began claiming she’d said many times she would have been willing to quit school, in order to stay home and devote herself to caring for “Noddy,” setting loose again the accidental name that had been sealed away permanently in its columbarium niche. It was pointed out to her that, if she ever really had said such a thing, she would have been talking about a ten-year commitment, ten years of standing by, to change his IV drip and mop his drool from his neck (if indeed he was lucky enough to retain the salivation capacity), ten years of diaper changing, ten years of reading nursery rhymes aloud to a little icon in a crib, in the pretense that it might do something helpful for him. Who would have been blind from the start. Who would have never seen the mobile suspended over him. Who was destined to die of pneumonia, or kidney failure, or heart malfunction, or something awful like bedsore septicemia, any number of things. Lotta, to all this, replied it would have been a decade well spent.
Throughout the story of Noddy, Blythe left her wine untouched but listened with her chin on her hand, her eyes unwavering. Then at last—after Mark fell silent and shrugged—she said, “I Googled you,” and lifted her glass.
Mark took a sip of his own wine, which tasted all right to him. He’d lived in California almost twenty years but would never understand the wine thing. Whereas Blythe was sophisticated about it. It mattered to her, what she was drinking. After a certain hour of every day this long weekend, an uncorked bottle was always a lamp at her elbow, or somewhere nearby working its magic. He sighed, changing gears, moving away from the great Nod singularity, happy to do so—but not happy to move on to a discussion of his little one-time fame as a physicist. It would be hard to explain his ambivalence now about the period of his life when he had a popular book out. He’d never exactly lived that down among his colleagues. And in recent years, since he’d started having undisguisable “lymebrain” mental lapses publicly, it seemed all the more absurd: how arbitrary were the choices of the vulture of good fortune, who had come down and closed its talons on him at age twenty-two and then quickly dropped him.
She was swirling her wineglass, its hoop below her face. “And I YouTubed you. Old Nova episodes are on. The great Mark Perdue explaining physics. Looking young!” Yes, he remembered perfectly and with remorse. The Nova producers had thought they were being witty when they stood him up on-camera in front of a lightning bolt made from a zigzag of cardboard covered in aluminum foil. And they’d dressed him up in a wizard’s gown printed with stars and moons, holding a wand tipped with an aluminum-foil star. All because his dissertation seemed to imply that science had gone metaphysical.
He glanced around the restaurant, rescued by the future here. He always said he disliked Los Angeles, but really he’d only disliked the idea of Los Angeles that exists in one’s mind. In fact, this was nice. Every place is nice if you get to know it. If you discover its tendernesses. If you just simply get off the freeway.
“Your wife is surely not over it? I mean Audrey? Over the loss of Nod?”
So the subject would revert. Blythe was so extremely considerate she was able to seem as if she were cheerfully insensitive but meanwhile maneuver among his many sore spots—the drama of his daughter, the Berkeley job, the inconsolable wife, his run-in with Lyme disease and evidence of decaying mental powers. Everything with Blythe was in some sense her responsibility, her care, her purview, and she kept her stitches invisible, on the fabric’s “wrong” side, as seamstresses say.
“Audrey, yes. Audrey is devoting herself to charitable activities. You know, she used to be so ‘important.’ She, like, used to get her hair done on a twice-a-week basis and charge it to the office.”
“Mm,” said Blythe. “Lawyer.”
“As I told you, she’s doing the Women Build thing this weekend. You know they say—psychologists say—the principle symptom if you’re close to somebody who dies, right off the bat, is guilt, for survivors. ‘Inappropriate guilt,’ they say survivors get. I told you about the period she was going out along the highways with trash bags picking up beer bottles, like sleepwalking.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, she sounds like a solid person,” she said. She was seeing how truly lucky Mark indeed was. So there again was the agreement: no romance. Blythe refilled her own glass to near the brim. In ordering they’d asked for the complete megillah—a pasta course, a fish course, on and on, different wines—not because they were big