Mail Read online

  “Oh, yeah …” I say.

  “I’ve heard splendid news about you. From our mutual friend.”

  This stumps me on two counts. What news? Who is our mutual friend?

  “Louie Cappetti,” Seamus goes on, “the mailman we share.”

  I am disturbed by this image, implying, as it does, a kind of joint custody.

  “So?”

  “A fine chap. A diamond in the rough.”

  There’s nothing rough about Louie, I think, picturing the smooth angle of his cheek, the sleek glide of his hair. He’s a diamond, a crystal, some higher form from another life. “Get to the point, Seamus.”

  “I’m quite taken with him. We have these little chats …”

  I keep my mouth shut.

  “He’s rather literate. Unschooled of course but intelligent.”

  These words give me more pleasure than I like to admit. My freshman year when Seamus had addressed them to me in his Sermon on the Mount voice, I was thrilled. Now hearing them applied to Louie, I’m still thrilled. Even though Seamus O’Toole is no longer quite the God of Intellect I once worshipped, his pronouncement is a corroboration. I am starting to feel almost tender toward him.

  “At any rate,” Seamus says now, “Louie told me you sold a story to Playgirl for big bucks. My heartiest congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How much?”

  “A lot.”

  “I’m not surprised. Remember that article I wrote on Molly Bloom for Playboy. Ten years ago and still an incredible sum.”

  It’s the usual one-upsmanship that Seamus with all his tenure, talent, women, prizes, accumulated years has not outgrown. Some things never change. My heart hardens. “Well, thanks for calling,” I say.

  “Of course, Georgette says only gay men and teenyboppers read the magazine.”

  I refrain from asking into what category Georgette fits. Or how she knows. “A story is a story, Seamus,” I say with a finely tuned world-weariness.

  “You’re telling me? I’m on your side, Katinka. Georgette has the impossibly idealistic standards of the very young.”

  Implying I have the sellout mentality of the very old. I say nothing.

  Seamus laughs. “Remember you owe it all to me.”

  I rise to the bait. “What do you mean?”

  “I taught you how to write.”

  “You taught me Joyce, Seamus.”

  “Much the same thing.” He chuckles. “I’m running a fiction workshop this semester. Maybe you’ll enroll.”

  “Not on your life.”

  “Ah, now that you’ve moved from the high two figures, you don’t need me anymore.”

  “I never did.”

  “Bull-twoddy,” he says. Then he wishes me a happy New Year. I wish him one. He asks what I’m doing. I tell him I have a date. Wow, he exclaims, a date and a story. I tell him to stuff it. He laughs. He and Georgette are spending a quiet evening at home because he’s hurt his back. How? I ask. The usual way, he replies. I tell him I’ll pray for his back to get better. Like hell, he says, he’s sure I am hoping it will get worse.

  I hang up hoping Seamus’ back will get worse. Maybe it will get so bad he won’t be able to get up to have one of his patronizing chats with Louie. I look at my watch. It’s after eleven. While I’ve been on the phone with Seamus, Louie must have made his last delivery of the year. That’s okay. I hadn’t planned to see him anyway before our rendezvous tonight. I’m like a bride hiding from her groom until the actual event. I’m not quite sure what the actual event with Louie will be. But I’ve got my hopes. All’s left is to get through the dinner party. The trial before the verdict. The dark before the light.

  I climb the three flights to Arthur Haven’s apartment carrying a bottle of California champagne and a box of chocolate truffles which Barney Souza assures me Harvard professors are mad about and which the Prescott Pharmacy can hardly keep in stock. I am sweaty and out of breath when I arrive at the door, which is opened by my mother as if it has been her life’s work. “Darling,” she exclaims. She is not wearing her glasses. From the way that she squints at me, however enchantingly, I wonder if I am recognized. No doubt she deduces who I am by the process of elimination because she adds, “Everybody else is here.”

  As we walk to the living room I notice that Arthur Haven’s apartment has the same layout as mine. But while mine is furnished in graduate student transience—bricks and boards, bamboo shades, posters, Conran’s sofabed—Arthur’s exudes English gentleman’s permanence—leather, mahogany, oriental rugs, portraits of ancestors framed in gold leaf, Blake etchings, old books.

  “Katinka,” Arthur comes toward me and pecks my cheek. He is wearing a red velvet smoking jacket. He has a certain glow. Or is he just flushed from the fire blazing in the fireplace? My fireplace downstairs doesn’t work. I use it to store my running shoes.

  Two people pop up as I am guided over the living room threshold by my mother and Arthur as if I am a bride they are about to give away. “Hello, I’m Zenobia Haven,” says the woman who takes my hand. Her hand is cool and firm. She herself looks cool and firm, stately. She’s tall, handsome, in a charcoal wool dress fastened at the neck by a cameo. She has straight eyebrows and small flat ears. Although I know she’s my age, she seems older somehow. Older than my mother even. Perhaps it’s because she exudes such competence. A quality for which my mother and I possess the defective gene. I find her intimidating.

  Her husband, Harriman Slade, isn’t quite so intimidating in spite of the fact that he nearly wrenches my hand off in its firmer-than-firm clasp and fixes me in the eye with such a masterful gaze I feel nearly mesmerized. Is it because he’s a man and thus a different species? Certainly he’s fine-looking. About Zenobia’s height with a sculpted face and light brown hair combed back. He is wearing an impeccable dinner jacket, a pleated white shirt, and plaid bow tie matched to its cummerbund. If Zenobia’s quality is competence, then her husband’s is cleanliness. His skin gleams, his eyebrows seem combed, his fingernails and teeth are whiter than white. He’s scrubbed, soaped, sandblasted with not, I’m sure, one excess body hair. I picture Harriman Slade in seersucker and wingtips, the centerfold in a Brooks Brothers catalogue.

  “And that’s Max,” Harriman Slade says, pointing to the bay window. “Max, come meet Grandpa’s guest.”

  On the other side of the room, a child of about eight is sitting in a rocker cradling what looks like a sack. His hair stands up in cowlicks and his ears stick out. Still, I see the line of his mother’s nose, the shape of his father’s mouth. But his eyes are crossed; freckles spatter his cheeks.

  Max climbs out of the rocking chair and places his bundle carefully on the seat. He takes a step toward me, then turns back. He removes the package and puts it on the rug. He grabs some pillows from the sofa and rings his package with these. He pats and adjusts. Then he moves toward me once more. He’s pigeon-toed. His shoelaces are untied. “Hello,” he says. He holds out his hand. His voice is gravelly. His hand is sticky. His mouth is filled with Chicklet teeth. I fall in love.

  This is the first time, I think, that I have fallen in love with a child. Aside from having been one, I haven’t much experience with them. I have no brothers or sisters, my mother having had three miscarriages before she’d managed to produce me. On both sides our families are small. There was only a second cousin who lived a five hours’ drive away in Aroostook County and who had been “somewhat of a problem” from the age of two. As a teen, I baby-sat—an activity that had consisted mostly of putting my charges to bed or in front of the television while I spent hours gabbing on assorted Princess phones and eating my way through the contents of unfamiliar refrigerators. I was happy to leave that career for a job taking inventory for a manufacturer of auto parts. I preferred spark plugs and cables to diapers and strained apricots.

  Still, I always thought I’d have a kid someday. The trouble was Seamus didn’t want one. He’d cite how badly Joyce’s children turned out, the one in
sane, the other floundering. And though I’d say you’re not Joyce (which, though it was meant as solace, seemed to bother him), I couldn’t quite see Seamus as a father. In fact, as I was all too soon realizing, he wasn’t much of a father figure either. When I pictured Seamus’ child, I imagined a kid with a big brain and a gray beard. A kid who cried a lot. I concluded I was lacking in maternal instinct. After all, the baby in our building—the one with the diaper service twice a week—is right out of central casting. Golden curls, button blue eyes, dimpled and pink. The yuppies drop their briefcases and cootchy coo. They play googly eyes. Not me. Not till now.

  But perhaps I am suffering from a perverted form of sibling rivalry. I want Arthur’s apartment. I want Zenobia’s child. I want the neighborhood’s mailman for my own. Still, I wouldn’t mind playing googly eyes with Max. He’s probably too old for such a game. But anyway he’s back in the rocking chair caressing his bundle, his eyes on his lap. Maybe I prefer older kids, and funny-looking ones. Is there something kinky about me? A person who is turned off by someone’s cleanliness, who is unmoved by dimpled baby flesh? Is there something kinky about Max? Even though I don’t know much about children, I can’t help but notice a certain peculiarity about Max’s bundle. Is it an imaginary friend? A security blanket? Should I comment on it. Ignore it. Pretend it’s normal. Is it normal? I am stumped. I move closer to Max and see that he is holding a ten-pound bag of flour. Native Brand is lettered across its side. He hums to it in a croaky voice. Our eyes meet. He holds a stubby finger to his lips. “Daniella is sleeping,” whispers Max.

  My mother pulls me back into the circle of grown-ups. She bustles in and out of the kitchen waving away all offers of help. Arthur makes me a drink. He passes a bowl of salted almonds. Zenobia talks about women in the arts. Harriman talks about reverse triangular mergers. It has something to do with taxes, I gather. He’s a lawyer in a Boston firm. He has a harbor view. I admire anyone, I tell him, who can read a tax return. I realize I have made a faux pas when he tells me, I don’t do tax returns, I structure deals. I plead ignorance and ask him leading questions whose answers I don’t listen to. He mellows somewhat and gives me a sanitary smile. My mother bustles around refilling glasses, spreading cheese. Zenobia discusses male domination in the art department. I long for male domination in the postal department. My mother pats Arthur’s shoulder. He puts an arm around her waist. Harriman touches Zenobia’s elbow. She brushes a nonexistent crumb from his lapel. I wish I had something to touch other than the stem of a glass and a cracker daubed with Brie. Just wait, I console myself. I look toward Max.

  Max gets up from the rocking chair. He places his sack of flour back inside its buttress of pillows. He walks down the hall toward the bathroom. This I know because our bathrooms are in the same place. When we hear the bathroom door shut, his parents give a collective sigh. “I loathe Daniella,” Harriman says with a startling ferocity.

  Zenobia turns to him. “Your own grandchild,” she teases.

  Harriman is not amused. “This has gone on long enough.”

  “Darling, just one more night.”

  “I’d like to pour Daniella’s insides out. Toss her in the garbage. Bake her into bread …”

  “Now darling, Max has learned a lot.”

  Arthur and my mother nod as if they both know what Zenobia and Harriman are talking about. Though Harriman’s vehemence is making me uncomfortable, they don’t look the slightest bit alarmed.

  Zenobia bends toward me and lowers her voice to a little-pitchers-have-big-ears level. “It’s Max’s school,” she explains, “they’re so concerned about teenage pregnancy.”

  That Max is not a teenager and thus incapable of pregnancy seems a moot point. I nod.

  She goes on. “They’ve assigned each child, boy and girl, a baby. A ten-pound sack of flour. For two weeks the designated parent has to take it everywhere. To class, gym, meals, home. If not, he has to find a baby-sitter. It’s quite marvelous. After all there are so many children out there having children for all the wrong reasons.”

  “Especially in Max’s upper-middle-class country day school,” Harriman snorts.

  Zenobia ignores him. “Children bearing children to seem grownup, to have someone to love them. Now Max is learning what responsibility for a child is like.”

  “I think it’s a lovely idea,” my mother says. “And terribly important.”

  “You’d be surprised the number of schools that remain unenlightened even in these times,” Zenobia confides. “Harriman and I visited dozens.”

  “All so I’d be asked to give up a tennis date to baby-sit a sack of flour.” Harriman shakes his head, incredulous.

  “Max has had a valuable learning experience,” Zenobia says. She takes a sip of her drink. “His school refuses to do anything by halves. For instance, there was originally a photograph of Daniella stapled to his bag. It caught in the zipper of his jacket and ripped. Poor Max was investigated for child abuse. It was touch-and-go whether Daniella would be taken away from him.”

  “If only,” Harriman sighs.

  Max comes back. With one hand he picks up Daniella. With the other he tucks in his shirt. Then with both arms he cradles his illegitimate sack of flour, nestling it lovingly against his single parent’s child-sized breast.

  We go into dinner. Damask swathes the table. A yard of silverware surrounds each plate. The china is rimmed with gold. The glasses are fluted, their stems as thin as my mother’s wedding ring. Candlesticks of Ionic columns colonnade the centerpiece of holly crowning a lusterware bowl. “How lovely,” I exclaim.

  “My mother’s things,” Zenobia says.

  I can’t read her face. Do I detect a hint of possessiveness across her calm and competent exterior? Does she see my mother, who seats herself across from Arthur, as a usurper? Does she begrudge her mother’s napkin on my mother’s lap? I look at Arthur beaming at the head of the table. I like him. I’m glad for my mother. I wish only that he didn’t live so close. Given that my subconscious may be churning blackly, my feelings for Arthur don’t seem complicated. Zenobia, however, is a person whose feelings are harder to know.

  Max, on the other hand, has feelings that are as plentiful and apparent as the silverware. Paternal protection and concern knit his brows. Affection shapes his mouth. He sits next to me. On his other side a place has been set for Daniella, though abbreviated, fitting her lowly flour status. Daniella gets no salad fork, no wineglass, no equal opportunity to make a social gaffe, to use the cream soup spoon for the consommé. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to worry about etiquette.

  For a while in Old Town, teas were held for us ladies-in-waiting. We wore white gloves and ruffled ankle socks. The local newspaper would report who poured, who passed the plates of crustless sandwiches. Years later, those teas came back to haunt me when Seamus and I would be seated apart at banquet-sized Brattle Street dining rooms dispensing chatter from side to side like the queen parceling out waves to her colonials. These days it’s Lean Cuisine from its own carton or a chicken leg gnawed àla Henry the Eighth while talking on the telephone. I suppose it’s what you’d expect from a writer for Playgirl. You’d need chafing dishes to have a Vanity Fair life.

  Max is now settling Daniella in her chair, which is not that easy given how the bag flops and slides. Daniella is one child you wouldn’t dare to admonish to sit up straight. He manages finally to prop her just so, even to tuck a napkin onto her bottom half. He sighs with relief, then climbs into his own chair. He flattens his cowlick, which pops right back up. He spreads his own napkin across his corduroyed knees. He turns to me. “Where do French fries come from?” he asks.

  This is a test. I ponder my answer. Do I say France? Do I say potatoes? Sometimes at night I wake up in a sweat with the classic student’s panic about a test for which I haven’t studied. Or the test is algebra and it turns out I’ve been memorizing Latin verbs. Now some of this same anxiety assails me. If I pick A, then Max won’t admire me. If I pick D, then Louie won�
�t kiss me. If I pick X, then Playgirl will take its acceptance back. “Where do French fries come from?” I scratch my scalp. I shake my head. “I give up.”

  Max giggles. He covers his mouth. “Greece,” he announces from behind his fanned-out fingers.

  “Aha!”

  “Get it?”

  “I think so.”

  He’s not taking any chances. “It’s really grease,” he explains, “because French fries are so greasy.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I know,” he says.

  Our dinner is not from Greece, or grease. There are no French fries. There’s a roasted leg of lamb with white beans, and artichoke hearts. Consommé in translucent bowls to start. I check what spoon Max picks and follow his lead.

  He sips the soup silently, tipping his spoon toward the outside rim of the bowl. His school’s curriculum must range from the lower depths to the upper echelon. Or else he’s learning Emily Post at home. He looks up at me. A drop of consommé glistens on his upper lip. “Do you know any jokes?” he asks.

  I rack my brain. I know the standard priest, minister, and rabbi variety. Probably not appropriate, and besides I always mangle the punch line. There are Seamus’ Irish stories that go on and on and rarely have a point. The political ones that are already passé. A Girl Scout cookie joke that is really gross. I have a sudden inspiration. “Why did the moron throw his watch off the Empire State Building?” I ask.

  Max wriggles with glee. “To see time fly.”

  “Why did the moron tiptoe past the medicine cabinet?”

  “Not to wake the sleeping pills!”

  We are off and running. We trade moron jokes. Elephant jokes. Knock-knocks. We poke each other’s ribs. We whoop. We groan. Max is neglecting Daniella. I am neglecting my hosts. Our etiquette is lousy but what can you expect from a single parent and a divorced writer of near pornography.

  Arthur taps the side of his glass with his spoon. Max and I fold our hands in our laps. Lower our eyes. I am afraid I’m being admonished. I’m afraid I’ve let my mother down. But both she and Arthur are smiling benevolently. Arthur wants to make a toast.