“Actually,” I corrected in a small voice, “television has been around for quite a while, so probably a lot of people could say that. I guess.”
He laughed as though I were an incredibly witty person, as opposed to the overprecise geek that I was.
And so we passed our first Saturday together, with him carrying on the conversation for both of us in that same innocuous vein. Just before four o’clock, with Alissa and the kids due back any minute, he picked up the tray, excused himself and said he sincerely hoped he’d made me feel just a bit better.
“You did,” I said.
When the next Saturday afternoon rolled around, and I was well enough to go out again, I had my hand on the door before I heard his voice call out to me.
“Charlotte, I guess you must be feeling well enough to do whatever it is you usually do?”
“I guess,” I said.
“But it sure would be nice if you changed your mind and decided to stay here,” he said with his sheep-wolf smile, “with me. I feel as though we barely got a chance to talk last week.”
“I could always cancel my plans,” I said, “I guess.”
“And I guess that would be finer than fine….” He sheep-wolf smiled again.
And so I canceled my plans with Grace and Helen, canceled my friendships with everyone in the world, never looking back, at least not for a long time.
Over the course of the next several Saturdays, we got to know each other better, always in the yellow bedroom. Even though we had the whole deserted penthouse to range over, we stayed where we had begun. What it lacked in comfort, it made up for in feeling talismanic to what we both felt growing.
At first, we talked about safe subjects. He liked to tell me about his career, seemed to respect that I was intelligent enough to understand whatever he might choose to share. And he was most interested in hearing about my desire to be a writer. Despite my relative lack of experience with men, I’d come to realize that there is a certain kind of man for whom the writing female is an endless source of fascination. Perhaps it’s as simple as this: they are curious as to what we write because they imagine we share our characters’ bravery and desire. Certainly, if there’s any sex involved in the writing, people would assume that you’ve either done or desperately want to do all the acts depicted; although God knows what they think about people who write serial-killer books with sex scenes involving gerbils. Or perhaps the fascination that writers hold for some people is more complex, like recognizing that the mind that is capable of sustaining a fantasy over a hundred thousand readable words must somehow be qualitatively different than the mind that cannot. They see the creativity as something other, foreign, exotic, those three adjectives having discretely different meanings.
“That’s the thing,” said Buster at last, one Saturday, “my wife could never be a writer.”
There it was: the first time he had brought up her name between us, even though he hadn’t named her by name at all, but had merely spoken of her in her assigned role.
That was all it took, though, the watershed after which he felt it safe to discuss his wife’s shortcomings at length. It would be easy to characterize him merely as a selfish and philandering husband—indeed, he was those things—but it would be a mistake not to allow the core truth in the things he said.
He said his wife didn’t understand him; and she didn’t.
He said there was no warmth between them; and there wasn’t.
He said she was the coldest of cold fish; and she was.
It was all true. Every accusation he leveled at her carefully coiffed head was true; I’d seen it all with my own eyes.
“I’m feeling overwhelmed by work lately,” I’d overheard him say to her one time.
“You just need to be more focused,” she replied, not even deigning to look up from her own work.
“Hey, how about a hug for an overtired ambassador?” I’d heard him suggest to her not long after I moved in.
“Not now,” Alissa replied. “I just did my hair. Are you really going to wear that to dinner with the Carlsons tonight?”
Then there was the time I tried to explain to her that some of the other kids at the playground were bullying Kim over his name, singsonging the cheer “Kim, Kim, he’s no Tim! If she can’t do it, let’s get a boy and win!” True, it was a lousy rhyming scheme, but it still hurt Kim. I told Alissa that it might be a good idea to come up with a nickname for him, preferably an “I eat nails for breakfast” kind of name, so he could avoid the taunts until he was old enough to defend himself from such abuse, at least mentally.
“What about Killer?” I suggested.
“What about Kim?” she countered. “Look, Charlotte, I really do appreciate your concern, but you are, after all, just the nanny. Kim needs to get tough. It’s a cruel world out there. He might as well learn it at an early age. He’ll be all the stronger for it later. One day, he’ll thank me for this.”
Somehow, I doubted that. What I really thought was that, one day, the overpriced therapist he’d undoubtedly need would thank her for it.
Sure, it was a cruel world out there. Nobody needed to tell me that. But I also knew that there was no need to make it any harder on a kid than it needed to be, just for the sake of toughening a kid up. What, did all of life have to be boot camp? And I also knew Kim’s pain, because I was the one who was there for him when the other kids bullied him, I was the one who held him when he cried about it at night.
“Why couldn’t they just name me Dirk?” he sobbed.
I had no answer but to hold him tighter.
Alissa and Buster were the kind of couple, not necessarily hating each other but with so little kinship or kindship between them, that when you looked at them and their children, you could only conclude: Well, at least on two separate occasions, everyone closed their eyes, gritted their teeth and thought of England.
And, of course, I understood Buster where she didn’t; he thought so and so did I. I was never cold. If not completely as warm as I could be yet, I was growing warmer all the time.
It was a few months before he traced the back of my hand with his strong finger; he was that patient.
It was another two weeks after that before we had our first kiss and then it was me initiating it. At this point, I had dreamed about doing so for so long, I could no longer wait for him to decide the matter for me. What if he never did? What if he remained content to have a woman who would listen to him? What if he remained content to have a woman to whom he enjoyed listening?
I’d tell him stories, shyly at first, about growing up in Aunt Bea’s house.
“I was eight when Joe was born,” I said. “I was so excited about having a new baby in the house. I thought, ‘Great! I’ve finally got a brother!’ But Aunt Bea pointed out that he wasn’t my brother. Well, of course, he wasn’t, not really. But then she said, ‘And don’t go getting any ideas that you’re equal. This is Joe’s house, not yours.’”
“Ouch!” Buster said. “What a bitch!”
Somehow, it was the perfect thing to say.
And when I told him about wanting to write, he made me feel understood.
At least that’s the part I let myself remember.
And I’d tell him what the kids had been doing during the week.
“Stevie and Kim helped me bake cookies. They said they’d never baked anything before. They were supposed to be chocolate chip, but they ended