Windbreak of dark hair on the ear-tops of my baby. Faint spade
of dark down, shining
between shoulder blades. Little second grin of scarce
mustache: a boy disguised
as his future. And hard to believe from my fair and ham-cheeked line.
I used to tutor a girl
who looked like my son does now: teem of charcoal curls
and one terrific brow
kissing itself above the nose. Third grade, skinny, comfortable,
wearing her casual body
like a dish towel flung over a drying line. One week at her father’s,
the next her mother’s—
the two apartments facing each other across the East River’s
thinnest vein.
The father kept a spare, expensive space, black marble and
glass, floor-model
world without end or dust. His twin obsessions: to bring luxury toilets
to middle-class homes
and prepare our thoughts to be grooved into servers and never die.
The raw and the cooked:
the sewage and the microchips baking copied souls. What to waste,
how to refuse release.
At bedtime the mother flashed her light on Roosevelt Island so they could see,
from his window, hers—
love, its rhythm. Her place, tangle of bright throws, floor cobbled in toys.
I don’t know how
they found each other. Or later found enough joint language to split.
The girl liked math, didn’t
need me. She was the pretext so I could watch her brother without seeming
to single him out.
Sweet boy, father’s knifish nose on a butter-dish face, sister’s hair
but straight as a drape
over his eyes. Few want to be visible and twelve. I could show him
through his sister
a way of taking problems—small structures riddled with apertures.
Doghouses of the mind.
Silly, really, and subject to collapse. And who was I? Someone
who had mastered small
solutions in the daily set and couldn’t picture past the walk uptown
or the next day’s
classes and gigs. I was there at the bar mitzvah—heaps of mezze,
belly dancers,
the combined muscle of lamb outweighing the dizzy boy. I slid one
of his father’s crisp bills
into an envelope to wend its way back. So much was hoped:
action, duty, growth.
I heard the father at night sometimes as I taught, talking to the mother.
Honey in the phone.
Baby. Love. Appeal. The numbers and equations did nothing to dissolve it.
A few times I had
no choice but to sit on the future’s toilet seat installed beside
the children’s room.
The one we’d all own when the excess moving out of us would be
perfectly served.
Water, soap, fanned air of ideal temperature, babied. Our preferences
remembered.
Fromm says Adam and Eve’s shame was not the bare skin
but seeing
they were separate and did not yet know how to love each other.
Dark hair riming
the edge of a body, right where we are said to stop and the negative
encases us. Dark heart
drumming its shadow, how do you make a code from two notes.
Who learns it.
What’s compatible. What can be opened and saved. From user to user.
What will we say
when the body’s gone: what’s left to tap the chime. A decade later, by then
a doctor, I saw
the father breach the family waiting room inside my hospital. Far off,
hallway endless,
still possibly the tallest man on the Upper East Side. Me, I looked
like anyone. White coat,
blue square tied over my mouth. I could have been unreal, or no one,
and stuck with that.
Cruel to disturb the naked thought, to walk in on someone’s
unwashed privacy.
Cruel to be seen seeing the provisional face and not the one prepared.
I went on
to the next room to think I could offer explanation or test.
I am exactly
enough a stranger to heal strangers. Sometimes just saying
“We’ll get to the bottom
of this” drills a well through the invisible and we are all ladling
cold, ecstatic water
over our hot limbs, and I believe it, too, so I do. Is it my mask makes it work
or theirs—
my knowing too little to pity or disdain, nothing to furnish my thought
but facts of the case.
He must have seen I preferred his ex’s apartment, the lax clutter and sufficiency,
my voice, my shoulders
whenever the schedule shifted, though I’d follow the children
like a good sport.
Whenever I quit, he gave me a raise. I came back. Parents will drag
anything to their young—
see the panther towing some dripping parenchyma to the den—though I
wasn’t prey, wasn’t dead,
and have clawed more in my time. I don’t judge any of us, or I judge
all of us, keeping to
that stiff arrangement, the algebraic life, commutable and reckoned.
In which I heard and saw
and taught just what I was told. No more. It was, like many jobs, a place for selling
a cut and congealed
portion resembling love, a carefully measured helping. I think I had
the knack, even then,
sometimes to make it look unmeasured. That final sighting, in my newly
invented life, I barely
considered those children, though they would have been plenty old for
the adult ward by then—
maybe I imagined it was their mother, sick in one of the parts
of the body middle-aged
women tend to need cut out of them, and their father finally seeing
how distinct the flesh
is from its pattern and record, no harbor for reason without
these bloody pieces.
In truth I have no idea. As I said, I have a baby, and I’m told I’d kill
for him. I’ve no particular
reason to disbelieve it. It is because we are separate, that this unspeakable
relish could live
in me, to shield his bones, ensure his share, to do something like love
though that’s not quite it,
not on its own, not if I can’t see him, and I’m not sure as yet I can.
Like, who is this
limb-sprouted calculus? Who is this furled function and this dusky
confidence interval?
The insoluble, not to refuse it, and not to be too prepared. I should have
greeted my ex-pupils’ father
though something would have failed at least one of us who’ve known
the beholden state.
I’m letting time tack about here, but for every age and role, please,
let me have wished
us the bodies and presence we wanted. Let us have seen the edge of the portion,
and let us have helped ourselves.
And let that be done to us.