Thomas Disch - 334

The one thing he had not been expecting, the wonderful thing, was how busy he had to be. Till now his concern had always been to find ways to fill the vacant daylight hours, but in the first ecstasies of his new selflessness there wasn’t time for half of all that needed doing. It was more than a matter of meeting Peanut’s needs, though these were prodigious from the beginning and grew to heroic proportions. But with his daughter’s birth he had been converted to an eclectic, new-fangled form of conservatism. He started doing real cooking again and this time without the grocery bills rocketing. he studied Yoga with a handsome young yogi on Channel 3. (There was no time, of course, under the new regime for the four o’clock art movies.) He cut back his Koffee intake to a single cup with Milly at breakfast.

What’s more, he kept his zeal alive week after week after month after month. In a modest, modified form he never entirely abandoned the vision, if not always the reality, of a better richer fuller and more responsible life-pattern.

Peanut, meanwhile, grew. In two months she doubled her weight from six pounds two ounces to twelve pounds four ounces. She smiled at faces, and developed a repertoire of interesting sounds. She ate—first only a teaspoon or so—Banana-food and Pear-food and cereals. Before long she had dabbled in every flavor of vegetable Boz could find for her. It was only the beginning of what would be a long and varied career as a consumer.

One day early in May, after a chill, rainy spring, the temperature bounced up suddenly to 70°. A sea wind had rinsed the sky from its conventional dull gray to baby blue.

Boz decided that the time had come for Peanut’s first voyage into the unknown. He unsealed the door to the balcony and wheeled the little crib outside.

Peanut woke. Her eyes were hazel with tiny flecks of gold. Her skin was as pink as a shrimp bisque. She rocked her crib into a good temper. Boz watched the little fingers playing scales on the city’s springtime airs, and catching her gay spirits, he sang to her, a strange silly song he remembered her sister Lottie singing to Amparo, a song that Lottie had heard her mother sing to Boz:

A breeze ruffled Peanut’s dark silky hair, touched Boz’s heavier auburn curls. The sunlight and air were like the movies of a century ago, so impossibly clean. He just closed his eyes and practiced his breathing.

At two o’clock, punctual as the news, Peanut started crying. Boz lifted her from the crib and gave her his breast. Except when he left the apartment nowadays, Boz didn’t bother with clothing. The little mouth closed round his nipple and the little hands gripped the soft flesh back from the tit. Boz felt a customary tingle of pleasure but this time it didn’t fade away when Peanut settled into a steady rhythm of sucking and swallowing, sucking and swallowing. Instead it spread across the surface and down into the depths of his breast; it blossomed inward to his chest’s core. Without stiffening, his cock was visited by tremors of delicate pleasure, and this pleasure traveled, in waves, into his loins and down through the muscles of his legs. For a while he thought he would have to stop the feeding, the sensation became so intense, so exquisite, so much.

He tried that night to explain it to Milly, but she displayed no more than a polite interest. She’d been elected, a week before, to an important post in her union and her head was still filled with the grim, gray pleasure of ambition satisfied, of having squeezed a toe onto the very first rung of the ladder. He decided it would not be nice to carry on at greater length, so he saved it up for the next time Shrimp came by. Shrimp had had three children over the years (her Regents scores were so good that her pregnancies were subsidized by the National Genetics Council), but a sense of emotional self-defense had always kept Shrimp from relating too emphatically to the babies during her year-long stints of motherhood (after which they were sent to the Council’s schools in Wyoming and Utah). She assured Boz that what he’d felt that afternoon on the balcony had been nothing extraordinary, it happened to her all the time, but Boz knew that it had been the very essence of unusualness. It was, in Lord Krishna’s words, a peak experience, a glimpse behind the veil.

Finally, he realized, it was his own moment and could not be shared any more than it could be, in just the same way, repeated.

It never was repeated, that moment, even approximately. Eventually he was able to forget what it had been like and only remembered the remembering of it.

Some years later Boz and Milly were sitting out on their balcony at sunset. Neither had changed radically since Peanut’s birth. Boz was perhaps a bit heavier than Milly but it would have been hard to say whether this was from his having gained or Milly having lost. Milly was a supervisor now, and had a seat, besides, on three different committees.

Boz said, “Do you remember our special building?”

“What building is that?”

“The one over there. With the three windows.” Boz pointed to the right where gigantic twin apartments framed a vista westward of rooftops, cornices, and watertanks. Some of the buildings probably dated back to the New York of Boss Tweed; none were new.

Milly shook her head. “There are lots of buildings.”

“The one just in back of the right-hand corner of that big yellow-brick thing with the funny temple hiding its watertank. See it?”

“Mm. There?”

“Yes. You don’t remember it?”

“Vaguely. No.”

“We’d just moved in here and we couldn’t really afford the place, so for the first year it was practically bare. I kept after you about our buying a houseplant, and you said we’d have to wait. Does it start to come back?”

“Mistily.”

“Well, the two of us would come out here regularly and look out at the different buildings and try and figure out exactly which street each of them would be on and whether we knew any of them from sidewalk level.”

“I remember now! That’s the one that the windows were always closed. But that’s all I remember about it.”

“Well, we made up a story about it. We said that after maybe five years one of the windows would be opened just enough so we’d be able to see it from here, an inch or two. Then the next day it would be closed again.”

“And then?” She was by now genuinely and pleasantly puzzled.

“And then, according to our story, we’d watch it very carefully every day to see if that window was ever opened again. That’s how it became our houseplant. It was something we looked after the same way.”

“Did you keep watching it, in fact?”

“Sort of. Not every day. Every now and then.”

“Was that the whole story?”

“No. The end of the story was that one day, maybe another five years later, we’d be walking along an unfamiliar street and we’d recognize the building and go up and ring the bell and the super would answer it and we’d ask him why, five years before, that window had been open.”

“And what would he say?” From her smile it was clear that she remembered, but she asked out of respect for the wholeness of the tale.

“That he hadn’t thought anyone had ever noticed. And break into tears. of gratitude.”

“It’s a pretty story. I should feel guilty for having forgotten it. Whatever made you think of it today?”

“That’s the real end of the story. The window was open. The middle window.”

“Really? It’s closed now.”

“But it was open this morning. Ask Peanut. I pointed it out to her so I’d have a witness.”