OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN by Victoria Lancelotta
Paul does not love me. When he touches me I can feel all the lies he can’t be bothered to tell. He is fifteen years older than I am and wealthy, for now. He lives alone in this town I’ve never left, where he moved his family when his family was whole. It is not, anymore. His son is in a locked hospital and his wife is in Boulder with a river guide and six basenjis. The guide is not much older than the son; he is strong, broad-shouldered and smiling. He ties bandannas over his tangled hair and shepherds breast cancer survivors and middle managers down rivers not nearly as dangerous as they would like to believe, as they will tell their friends. Paul knows this because his wife sends letters, sends photos.
The son, Alex, is a junkie. Before this he was a college student and a classical pianist; he made dean’s list and volunteered at an after-school program for at-risk children, guiding them through “Chopsticks,” through “Heart and Soul.” At night he sold his perfect body for plastic bags of poison bliss. He is a dark-eyed beauty, blade-thin with broken hands, sedated in a locked, white room.
He owed money he did not have. He was thrown down in the alley behind his favorite vegetarian restaurant, his smooth cheek crushed in oily gravel, his arms yanked up and out and his hands bound at the wrists. If he had seen the faces of the men who did all this he would have recognized them. No matter: one sat on his back and the other slid behind the wheel of a metallic blue Nissan. This one steered, rolled forward and back, careful and slow, and the son’s fingers were not so much broken as crushed, pulverized, skin split and bones powdered, and in the restaurant behind them pretty servers carried mache salad and parsnip-potato soup to undergraduates.
When Paul called his wife to tell her, she was serene. She would channel healing energy to his chakras, she said; she would meditate under the new moon. She had faith that he would emerge transformed from this obstacle in his karmic journey.
She writes Paul letters on handmade paper, pale green, fibrous and thick. The envelopes smell vegetal.
I know this because Paul tells me, late evenings like this one in my too-warm house, drinking bourbon from the good bottle he keeps here. His white shirt is damp at the collar, the monogrammed cuffs.
He’ll need to be on a strict macrobiotic diet, his wife said from Boulder, and I think he’ll need chelating – but this is a blessing for him. You can’t see it now but you will, she said. Her voice was sweet as bells and certain, buoyant with confidence. It was the voice of someone Paul had never met, would never want to know.
He pours another drink. “They didn’t even know he plays piano,” he says, his mouth wet and weak. We are in the peaceful clutter of my living room, surrounded by tilting stacks of magazines and DVDs, scraps of paper with phone numbers and recipes written in smeared ink. The kitchen is dark for the night and clean, the calendar and order sheet cross-referenced and balanced, towels folded and apron hung. “Of anything they could’ve done to him,” Paul says, shaking his head in bewildered fury, “why that?” He is waiting for me to acknowledge an injustice I cannot bring myself to grant. If they had known, those men with their benign and ruthless smiles, their insulted dignity, would it have stopped them? Would they have, for instance, wrapped his hands in batting and moleskin before cracking his ribs or puncturing a lung? Broken his knees or ankles, knocked out his teeth instead?
Would you rather that? I think, but instead I say, “What’s important now is that he’s safe. He’s safe and getting better – the doctors said so. You told me. Focus on that.”
Paul looks at me with loathing. “You have no idea what this means,” he says, and stands, begins rifling through the books and cups on the end table for his keys, “what’s been lost.”
“You’re right,” I say. It’s true. I have no children, have never felt that panic, the gnaw and chew of it, and there is only so much comfort I can give to him, in his vain and helpless love.
His wife told him that this was his chance for transcendence: Give yourself over to the pain, she says, and it will fill you with the purest light.
He loves a woman who could say such a thing.
* * *
By six a.m. I’m pulling four dozen cupcakes from the top oven and sliding a sheet cake into the bottom one. The stand mixer is ready for the next order, loaded with a pale soft mound of butter and drifts of sugar, eggs cracked and waiting in a bowl on the prep table. My laptop is safe and clean on the far counter but the open pages of my organizer are coffee-ringed and sticky.
I have appointments with potential clients at nine and ten-thirty, then a wide open stretch until three. Some are easy – the administrative assistants tasked with organizing the post-merger meeting, with reserving the conference room and stocking the bottles of water, ordering the laminated name tags and tri-fold packets. I’m the quickest call they’ll make: two pans of lemon bars and two of peanut-butter squares, childhood on plastic plates. As though this will make the rest of it any less bitter.
There are the easy ones, and then there are the rest, the frantic brides and their anxious mothers, the panicked husbands staring down their calendars, the birthday or anniversary looming, inevitable. When I give my quote the mothers will haggle, will argue and fuss, but the men will pay anything. They pick up the orders themselves, and when they do they throw their credit card down and sign the receipt without even looking, hold the white box away from them on the way out, stiff-armed and irritable. They are afraid of ruining their only chance. They cannot get away fast enough.
The women are another story, from the first phone call on, the engaged girls breathless and scattered, relaying questions from their mothers to me and back again until the mothers finally snatch the phone, exasperated and efficient – this is what they’ve been waiting for, after all, from first communions or bat mitzvahs or sweet sixteens through homecomings and graduations and every other occasion rendered with disproportionate enthusiasm in the window displays at the mall. This is the curtain all the dress rehearsals have been building to. They sail into my kitchen with their daughters behind them, shellacked and taut and ready to make one right decision after another. The girls themselves are interchangeable, beautiful in a way I can recognize without understanding, with their French-tipped nails and glassy sheets of ironed hair, waxed brows and lined lips and clouds of designer perfume. They are perfect American daughters, energetic, acquiescent; easy to admire and easy to forget. They hug me when they leave.
The drama doesn’t start until after they’ve gone, with rambling voicemails and updated head counts, with second thoughts and third and fourth: maybe not the carrot-coriander maybe that’s too much please call as soon as you get this message and I do, I call, and when I do I hardly have to speak: they will talk themselves back around to where they began, eventually, if I let them; to the almond-apricot or the key lime chiffon; the bride or her mother in a circling tumble of indecision and uncertainty.
They talk themselves out, exhausted, teary, skittish as horses. The girls are terrified and they are right to be. Like horses they can smell the threat they cannot articulate: that one wrong decision will lead to another and that to a worse one, will set off a landslide of mistakes, unstoppable and crushing.
The timer buzzes and I ease the oven door open. I touch the heel of my hand to the top of the cake, slide it onto the cooling rack and collect a bowl and whisk the glaze. I brush the first layer on while the cake’s still warm, a thin sheen of caramel, sugar coaxed to the bare edge of burnt, and then another layer every fifteen minutes, and a crackling frost deepens, becomes pearl-smooth and perfect.
The mothers don’t quite trust me, with my ringless finger and unstretched belly. They look at me too long, too close; they can see the years behind me. If I am not quite old enough to have a grown daughter I am too old to have none at all.
They stiffen when their girls hug me, they haul them out of my kitchen, fingers hooked and suspicious in cashmere sleeves. The doors click locked when they put the car in gear and twist to back it down my drive – they cannot get their daughters away from me fast enough. When they look at me they see what the girls here used to be, all of us rough and imperfect, our cheeks slick and shiny in the heat, our hair tangled and damp. We lived here before they came, before they parked their Range Rovers in front of the Tyvek-wrapped houses that overlook the highway I have only been so far on. We smelled of sweat and chlorine and bruised strawberries. We were nothing like their daughters, these girls with ironed hair and diamond studs who teeter on stilettos in my kitchen, unlikely as unicorns.
We stretched ourselves across hot grass on melting afternoons, waiting for the spill of dark, for the pool on St. John’s Lane to close so we could climb the chain-link fence and drop soft on the sloping grass above the deep end, the lounge chairs and furled umbrellas. We passed flasks of root beer schnapps and smoked Benson and Hedges Ultra Lights and waited for the boys to come and slip their hands between our bare hot knees, for the sudden punch of joy that was almost too sweet to bear.
They were seal-smooth, those boys, at seventeen all sharp teeth and ragged nails and hurry. They whispered exactly what we didn’t know we wanted to hear and no more, words slipping from their smoky mouths, slithering along back decks and bleachers, over rec room sofas and cracked front seats, floating through sticky midnights, tree frogs and crickets, cicadas, before they came to rest, untrue and irresistible, on us.
On our sunburned arms, our pastel halters and peeling shoulders. Our feathery hair, our coconut lips, pink and shimmering. Our concave stomachs and denim skirts, our flowered cotton underwear with its frayed elastic and the glass beads of our bracelets. Our pink-painted nails.
They breathed the words into our mouths, they fed us and we swallowed, gulped. What was true didn’t matter; we were too hungry for it to matter.
* * *
Paul tells me that during morning visits the common area is bright with sun and loud. Donated televisions are balanced on pocked tables in distant corners of the room, chairs filled with other people’s children circled around them, around the basketball scores and talk shows, the newscasts and cartoons. Paul surrenders his coffee at the reception desk before he is granted entry – he never remembers to leave it in the car – and pours himself a Styrofoam cup of hot water from the station in the corner, floats a dusty teabag on the top. He stands by the long bulletin board, by the frayed and faded posters of sand dunes and sunrises, of mountain ranges at dawn; by the laminated schedules and their color-coded blocks of time – orange for group, gray for meditation, a long rectangle of dark blue from ten p.m. to morning. Every hour of the day is saturated.
While I froth eggs and sugar, Paul waits for his son in his coat and his smile, in his desperate good cheer, his obduracy. I calibrate the ovens and Alex emerges from the stairwell, rested, damp and eager. From this distance he is so close to the boy Paul remembers. When they hug, he rests his cheek against his son’s clean hair, eyes closed. He can feel on his back the pressure of the boy’s brick hands, dull and blunt and heavy.
My own hands are hatched and laddered with scars. They were pretty once, new and useless.
Paul draws back to admire his son. Alex’s smile is wide, snow-globe vacant. His breath is sweet and hot, turned fruit; his hands float safe in their hives. The days drift past and he is monitored and counseled, fed and washed and supervised; the hours enfold him, soft as cotton.
My kitchen smells of almonds, white. When my phone rings I let it go to voicemail, pour coffee, and work my thumb under the thick peel of a grapefruit.
“I want you to come next time,” Paul says on the message he leaves. I can hear traffic in the background; he must be on his way to work. “I think it would do him good and I want him to meet you anyway. I got another letter from his goddamned mother – ”
I flip the phone closed and slide it back into my pocket without listening to the rest of the message. He won’t expect me to call back – the words themselves, flat and hanging, are enough: I want. He is comfortable with wanting and accustomed to getting. When he is away from me he does not cajole or coax and when he is with me he does not profess or promise.
My heart has never known such awful, gaping ease.
I put my sunglasses on and wrap myself in a heavy scarf, collect deposit slips and the metal cashbox, a paper-clipped stack of the checks the women scrawl and tear off and slap down on my sugar-gritted counter before rushing their daughters out to their appointments with the florist or the photographer.
When Paul came to pick up the cake he’d ordered for his wife’s birthday she was already gone, already waking in the pined dry air of Boulder, in the bed of someone else’s healthy son. He stood in my kitchen in his cashmere scarf and polished shoes, his bewilderment and fury, and decided I would do.
* * *
Paul’s house is on the way to the bank. When it was the Jensens’ house my mother drove past to have her hair cut; when it was the Humphreys’ I drove past to pick up bushels of corn for my father’s Labor Day parties.
The Jensens put up the basketball hoop and the Humphreys planted the forsythia, and in between a couple whose name I don’t remember hung wind chimes from the eaves and spent the summer on the front porch sprawled across brown wicker chairs, bottles of beer and a portable radio on a table between them where they rested their tanned bare feet. In September they painted the front door indigo, and in October they let the fallen leaves spin and flip from their drive to the street, and in December they packed a van with sagging cardboard boxes and folded quilts, crude wooden end tables and fringed wall hangings; they backed down the driveway in the first spitting snow and in the dark of the van the tips of their cigarettes flared and dimmed like beating hearts.
What Paul doesn’t know could stretch for miles.
He has never brought me to that house, has never held the front door open and waited for me to slip into those winter rooms, cold and waiting. He has never done this and those rooms are still more mine than his.
He does not know, for instance, that the neighborhood boys played basketball in the driveway even though the Jensens’ son Stuart could not; that Mrs. Jensen served those boys cherry Kool-Aid and oatmeal cookies while Stuart sat strapped in his metal chair, eyes crossed and drifting, hooting with excitement, with delight. His arms slapped the plastic tray like hooked and thrashing fish. He howled with joy and his mother looked straight through him to the boy she had never stopped imagining in his place, who was sloppy and surly and vertical, who tied his own shoelaces and drank milk from the carton and sneaked breathless giggling girls to the finished basement no one used.
He does not know that Kathy Humphreys and I crouched beneath the forsythia while her parents slept, waiting for those boys to coast down the street in cars borrowed from their parents or bought used and rattling, to slow enough for us to run light across the grass and launch ourselves up and through an open door. Inside the car they smelled of Flex shampoo and Zest soap, the least-used letters of the alphabet made common on drugstore shelves. We emptied our pockets of everything we’d brought for them – cinnamon jawbreakers and crooked cigarettes and perfect, aching secrets. Closer in they smelled of impatience, of promises. We climbed on their laps and dipped our heads so our hair fell tangled and warm against their stubbled cheeks. That close, they smelled of escape.
He does not know and does not care about the people who moved through that house before him, who slept wrapped warm in secrets and woke terrified or careless, who lied because they could or because they had to, who were strange and beautiful beyond imagining. Who were breakable.
He thinks there is no room for any grief in that house but his own.
Kramer: that was their name, the couple with the wicker and the indigo. Their wind chimes were strung with shells and driftwood and velvet curtains blew through their open windows. Stuart Jensen lived longer than any doctor expected he would, longer than his mother thought she could bear, and the only thing worse than his death was the wave of relief that came after, tidal and brute. Kathy Humphreys’ parents took her baby away before she was even stitched up and when she came home the priest was waiting for her with his keys in one hand and a vial of holy water in the other, a towel for her to sit on spread across the back seat of his car. Mrs. Jensen burned Stuart’s clothes before her husband could stop her and Kathy Humphreys bled across three states before sneaking through the back door of a roadside convenience store, and I stretched myself wide under the soaking sun; I slept under the only moon I knew.
* * *
In the evening it’s another story. In the evening the air is roiled, sour; the girls stalk through the common room in dirty slippers, trailing ashes and laughter, a mean ripping sound. The boys keep their distance, keep their dead eyes down; they flatten themselves over cards spread on tables meant to hurry the night along. I wait with Paul for his son in the watery green light of the hallway. Paul paces, in his coat and his dread and his sad, small hope, but the night does not hurry, nothing here does.
A metal door clangs open and his son comes shambling, cheeks slack and eyes hooded, smiling around the bent white stick of a lollipop. His hair is overgrown and curling; his bandaged hands hang gray as wasps’ nests. Next to me Paul stiffens, a marionette jerked taut. His fingers on my arm squeeze and lift and the heels of my shoes come up off the floor.
“Jeannie,” he says, “this is my son. This is Alex.”
Alex shakes a twist of greasy hair out of his eyes and works the lollipop to a corner of his mouth. “I knew a girl named Joanie once,” he says to me, “and that did not end well. One of many things that didn’t.” He is wracked and haggard and thrumming with a feral heat: it comes off him in sugary waves.
“How are you?” Paul says. “I talked to Dr. Patel and he said we’ll be able to get you out of here and back home soon. And I thought I could call Lerner and talk to him about next semester.” The words fly, the fingers on my arm press and dig, and around us the boys slide down the hallway, hands dragging along the walls that the girls press themselves flat against, their smeary eyes hot on Alex, on us.
“Jerome Lerner,” Alex says to me. “That would be my advisor, whose advice was sorely lacking. Meanwhile – ” he says, and lifts his chin and tongues the stick so I can see the lollipop between his teeth, “– help a guy out?” He waggles the stick and grins and Paul reaches up, snatches the candy from his mouth and tosses it at the metal trashcan against the hallway wall where it clangs in the ashtray on top.
“They sugar us up in here,” Alex says to me, and I understand that he has no intention of speaking to his father, he has angled himself away enough that Paul is leaning, straining to stay in his son’s field of vision. Alex’s eyes are red-rimmed, too shiny; his voice goes lilting and musical. “Sugar and caffeine and nicotine, yes. Haydn and crystal and pussy, no.”
“I’ll have the piano tuned,” Paul says, and his fingers knead my arm through the heavy fabric of my coat hard enough to hurt. He has not looked at me since we’ve been in here. “I can arrange for the sheet music – ”
“None of the good stuff,” Alex says to me, and his eyes dart to a knot of girls down the hall in pajama bottoms and stretched-out shirts and too much eyeliner, cheap rings on every finger and cigarettes burning low at scabbing knuckles. They huddle and preen like wet birds, all knotted hair and spotty skin and buzzing nerve. They are nothing like the girls I see and nothing like the ones he fucks but we both know them, Paul’s ruined son and I. When we look at them we can see everything they are afraid of never having and everything they wish they were.
“I can get the syllabi from Lerner,” Paul says, and the words tumble light and useless, so easy for Alex to bat aside, “I could have him come to the house after you – ”
“I’m sorry, but I have to ask,” Alex says, leaning in to me, “I apologize but my God I have to know – you’re not actually letting him fuck you, are you? You’re not letting him anywhere near that gorgeous –” and quicker than I have ever seen him move Paul is between us, his thick heavy hands on me for what will be the last time, shoving me back and away from his son, who is looking at me like a starving dog. My back hits the wall and the girls down the hall shriek and explode in a burst of feathers I can almost see and a giant of a man in bright white scrubs shifts his weight from one massive leg to the other before settling back into his spot by the water cooler: we are no worry to him. He pulls a chocolate bar from his breast pocket and begins to unwrap it, his face serene and shining.
Alex is grinning, almost panting; his skin is glazed and his sweat smells electric, marine. There is no breath or echo of Paul in his face and I wonder what it must be like, to look at your child one day and see in his place a stranger, perfect and whole and unfathomable. “I could make you forget all about him,” Alex says, with the limitless confidence of a boy who is still young and foolish enough to think this would be difficult for anyone but him.
* * *
A partial list of what Paul’s wife did not want:
Block parties. Weekend swim meets at the club and potlucks after, citronella torches and burnt hot dogs and foil trays of potato salad. Wednesday bridge, Sunday brunch, Christmas open houses. The fireworks at the park on New Year’s Eve and Labor Day.
The wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room; the finished basement and jukebox there; the freezer chest in the garage filled with boxes of stuffed mushrooms and mini-quiches, family-size lasagna and chicken pot pie. The parties at which these items were served. The basketball hoop, the forsythia. The brush of high grass and hazy press of sky in summer, the trees that closed around us.
Car pool on alternate weeks, revolving lunchroom duty, attendance at the holiday assembly. Fur-lined driving gloves and eighteen inches of Tahitian pearls. Her son’s bright and fevered eye and the weight of her husband’s heedless sleep.
The house whose door is no longer indigo whose eaves are free of wind chimes whose rooms are empty of broken children. The line of trees behind it, the shadows we slipped under and into before we had daughters or didn’t, before our sons disappeared or didn’t, before we understood how much hurt there was in the world that was pressing in around us, humming and insistent.
She exhausted herself, not wanting these things we hardly knew to dream of.
The river guide does not own a piano and the dogs do not bark and the sky in Boulder is a high, blue dome and beneath it she has pared herself of years, flayed seasons from her skin. She has let her hair go gray and long. Her son is just now broken but he will fit himself together. She is his mother: she does not doubt what his father despairs of.
* * *
The weather warms and my appointment book fills with orders for engagement parties and weddings, for bridal showers and bachelorette brunches, inevitable as the thaw and bloom. It is like this every spring, as though the ballast of ceremony is all that keeps the stretching days from floating up and dissolving in the pale, new sky.
Papaya and mimosa and violet, candied ginger and orange blossom and lavender honey, all familiar as vanilla to these girls, as unremarkable on their tongues. They are serene in first-class lounges and three-star restaurants, conversant in macroeconomics and Aristotelian tautology but in my kitchen they are fretful as horses, as easily spooked; in my kitchen they can think of nothing but the minefield of time to be got through before they see their grooms in their morning jackets or black tie or wrinkled linen and stubble, with their waft of cologne and whiskey, waiting for them at the foot of altars or the banks of streams, under chuppahs or the beaming sun.
I serve crumbly samples on rose-faded china, two forks on a plate: they chew and smile but taste nothing. The girls are terrified and their mothers are vigilant: everywhere they look is the threat of the imperfect, ticking and ready to detonate: a too-warm banquet hall, a wrinkled dress, wilting flowers, rain. They lay the forks down – It’s wonderful, the girls say, and their mothers nod, It’s fine – and they swallow what I’ve made them and it tastes of dust, of dread.
At night the kitchen cools and I lock the doors, climb the stairs and throw my bedroom window wide. In my bed Alex has kicked the sheets into a wrinkled twist; his breath is quick and shallow. He wakes when he hears me. His hair is damp and overgrown and his fingers are crooked on my skin, stiff and bent; they creak and pop when he tries to spread them, to grip. They announce their intentions, they fall on every right place.
He is empty of secrets and unable to lie, this beautiful boy with his tracked arms and perfect manners, his candy lips and ketamine eyes. He has climbed Machu Picchu and swum in the Bosphorus, he has trekked the glacier at Denali. He has decided he loves me and though I know better I say nothing. I know how fast a summer burns.
He will realize soon enough how much he misses what he had, the summers in Europe and Thanksgivings skiing, the girlfriend with the hybrid car and tiny diamond in her nose, the Negronis and Haydn and hand-blown Turkish pipe. He will realize all this when he’s well, but right now he opens his eyes and pulls me on top of him and he is nothing like those boys I knew, with their stolen cigarettes and borrowed cars, their need. He opens my lips and he tastes of the widest world.
His mother is so pleased he has landed in safe arms, so happy he has found a place to cleanse himself of those hospital days, those dragging rainbowed hours. She thinks of this time as an incubation of sorts, a needed respite, and from it he will emerge resilient, transformed.
I know this because she told me. Her handwriting is looped and swooping, the letters of my name pressed into the soft envelope in feathery ink, thick and sticky as pine resin. Her letters are a commotion of exuberant serenity, a spill of confounding joy: It is so peaceful here, she says, on the other side of expectation.
Tell him that, she says. Make him understand how little he needs, she says, and how can I hate a woman who believes such a thing?
The brick-walked campus and polished practice rooms, the girls wrapped in suede with their bindles and vials; Vivaldi and clean needles like water drops, like bells. When Alex realizes that none of this has disappeared he will slip back into it, full of stealthy grace, and his mother and I will wish for just enough mercy to keep him safe.
The boys I knew were nothing like him: they were shy and rough and kind, they mowed lawns and pumped gas and bagged groceries for the money they spent on record albums and baseball games, for movie tickets and milkshakes. They were quick to provoke and easy to soothe and their dreams were too small to be dangerous.
Alex gathers me to him, a sleepy thief: his ruined hands are slow and sure but they know nothing about me. There is so little to know, here in this small place he moves through, blessed and careless. He will blink this town away, once he is back out in the reach and heave of his bright world.
This town, its quicksand kiss, its boys. They dreamed of girls like me, and if there were anything else to want they could not have begun to imagine it.
Victoria Lancelotta is the author of the novel Far and the short story collection Here in the World, both from Counterpoint. Her stories have appeared in Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, and The Best American Short Stories.