At the Bottom of Everything(10)

Instead (and this was, I think, when I first noticed his inclination toward emotional seppuku) he looked up, as if he’d heard a whistle in the distance. In his clearest, most measured voice, he said, “Michelle, I’ve made you uncomfortable, and I apologize. I shouldn’t have come back here. I should have accepted what was obvious a long time ago. You won’t need to worry about avoiding me anymore. I’ll never bother you again.”





On a Saturday a week or so after the tea with Anna, I took Nicholas and Teddy ice-skating in the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery. This was a dripping, dishrag-gray day, and I was feeling mildly poisoned not only because of the weather but because I thought I’d seen Claire in the crowd that afternoon at Metro Center. The changing room smelled like wet socks and dirty rubber. As I kneeled in front of a bench, tying Nicholas’s skates, he said, “You’re kind of like our dad now, huh?”

For some reason this added to my gloom, and without looking up I said, “No, your dad’s your dad. I’m just your friend. Now give me your other foot.”

Teddy, standing balanced with one hand on my head, asked if he could go get a soft pretzel (he was always in a panic about when he was going to eat next), and I knocked his arm away, stood up, told them to quit being so slow or else I was going to take them home. I spent the hour on the ice dropping their hands, telling them they needed to learn to stay up on their own, doing everything I could not to look like their father. Beatles songs played on a loop out of faraway-sounding speakers and backward-skating show-offs zoomed around and between us.

“Can we stop for bagels on the way home?” Teddy asked, while we were hobbling back into the locker room.

“No.”

“Are you mad at us?”

“No. Not if you take your skates off and go get your shoes.”

I must have already known that I was going to start sleeping with their mother. When I try now to pinpoint the first moment when I realized this might actually happen, it keeps getting pushed earlier. Yes, the night of the tea, the dream, but hadn’t there been weird looks, little pauses, before then? Joel used to call her my middle-aged mistress, when I’d stand talking to her on the phone at night—he’d once dated an older woman, and he talked about it like an exotic dish he’d once eaten on vacation, something everyone should try before they die.

Anyway, a few days after the skating Anna left me a message (she always left me a couple of messages a week, asking if I could babysit an extra night or stay after to tutor Teddy), saying that she wondered if we could grab coffee sometime to talk about Nicholas. He’d gotten in a fight at school, apparently, and this wasn’t new, but this latest one was especially bad. There were a couple of kids in his class who called him “the Dick,” poured Pixy Stix in his hair, and he was incapable of backing down or shutting up—he was the kind of kid who’d keep shouting even as the teacher dragged him away with a bloody nose (he was also the kind of kid whose nose bled if you tapped it). She worried, she said, that with everything going on with his dad he’d keep acting out more and more and she was just about out of ideas. She wasn’t working Wednesday afternoon, if there was any way she could steal me for an hour.

We met at a coffee shop on Wisconsin just after four, when it was already almost dark. It had been raining so long that the sun seemed possibly to have gone out altogether. I’d spent the day researching law schools, which had meant mostly writing emails and watching old episodes of Family Ties on YouTube. There were only a few other people with us in the café, which had kids’ crayon drawings all over the walls and butcher-paper tablecloths. A classical radio station that sounded like falling asleep was playing, and in the corner a woman was breast-feeding with a kind of amazing lack of self-consciousness. The one waiter drifted around grumpily, forgetting to bring sugar, checking his phone. We didn’t talk about Nicholas at first—instead we talked about a friend of hers at work who’d started beekeeping, a new Spanish restaurant in Friendship Heights. We both had big ceramic mugs of weak coffee and we made a show, to the waiter’s indifference, of deciding whether we wanted something sweet. Finally we settled on sharing a slice of German chocolate cake, which I ended up eating most of and she ended up pretending to have eaten most of.

“It’s so nice talking to someone who actually knows the boys. I get almost greedy about it. Would you tell me if I was too much?”

“You’re not too much.”

“Well, you’re sweet. How have you been?”

Something about Anna made me able to talk about Claire without sounding, I think, like someone who lies in bed at night with his heart pounding, wondering what went wrong—instead I could say things like, “Well, I think I’m about done licking my wounds,” as if I were describing the aftermath of a tough game of cricket.