T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

We would drink a bottle of wine, eat a lazy dinner — tofu salad or veggie delight from Sarah’s place or three-pound garbage burritos from the Mexican restaurant two doors down — go back to bed, smoke, drink, talk. We talked about our respective childhoods, childhood in general, about the relative virtues of growing up in Chicago and New York, about sculpture, movies, books, the tide of illiteracy rising steadily to undermine the country’s intellectual foundations. We talked politics, art, religion, talked blues and plainsong, considered the variety of life on the planet and the argument from design, wondered about life after death and dismissed reincarnation. I confessed that like most children of the Wonder-bread era I hadn’t believed in God past the age of awareness, but that lately I’d begun to feel the tug of the irrational. She told me she’d wanted to be an artist since her discovery of fingerpaints in kindergarten; I told her I’d always been fascinated with dirigibles. Lighter than air, I said, as if the phrase were magical.

“Felix, listen,” she said. Her hand was on my arm. She gave me a look, lips drawn tight, eyes extruded, that reminded me of Michelangelo’s PietéaG. “When he left me like that — my husband, I mean — it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I felt like I had a disease or something — I felt like I was a disease.”

“You know, I quit on my wife,” I said.

She just looked at me.

“It was a career thing. Or no, it was me, I was immature, hung up on role playing, you know?” I told her about Ronnie, how when we met she’d seemed so helpless, so utterly adrift — unable to eat in a restaurant by herself, incapable of locking a car door or paying the phone bill before they disconnected her — and how good it had made me feel to think that she needed me, that I was her champion, her foundation and support. I told her how all that had changed, how she’d grown up and abandoned the little-girl-in-search-of-a-daddy role like a dress that no longer fit her, how she’d suddenly taken an interest in local politics, Afghan hounds and assertiveness training, how she’d asked me for a quid pro quo — to support her through her M.B. A. program as she’d supported me through my abortive Ph.D. — and how I’d quit on her. When I finished, I glanced at Petra like a guilty child, like a thug, a criminal, a male supremacist and backward boor, and flashed her a tentative smile. She was holding an empty teacup. “You know something?” she said. I shrugged. “The way you smile — with your whole face, with your eyes — it’s like a certificate of trust.”

One night, I don’t remember how — who but an insomniac can retrace the web of association of even his own thoughts, let alone recall the progress of a free-ranging dialogue — we got on the subject of babies. It was not a subject to which I readily warmed. Raised as an only child in a neighborhood where it was thought impolite to have more than two children, I’d never had to deal with either sibling rivalry or sibling bonding, had never been supplanted at my mother’s breast by a little gene-shuffler, had never cooed into half-formed faces or wiped up infantile secretions. I knew more of dogs, cats or even goldfish than I knew of children, and my experience of the last-mentioned had been exclusively negative. Children — babies — were loathsome to me, all open orifices and dribbling body fluids, they were the noose around the throat, an end to youth, an eternal responsibility, anathema. But on this night, this otherwise triumphant, golden, redolent night, babies was the subject.

“I’m twenty-nine now,” Petra said, running a reflective finger around the edge of her wineglass.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ll be thirty in two months.”

I nodded, wondering what this had to do with anything. I felt a twinge of panic. Was she making an oblique comment on our relationship? Was she too old for me? Was I too young for her? Had she been doomed by some genetic infirmity to collapse on the brink of her fourth decade?

“You know,” she said after a moment, “I could never be serious about anybody — a man, I mean — who didn’t want children.” We were in bed. Her legs were wrapped around me. At the mention of this highly charged term with its suggestion of sex, love, tenderness, and affliction, of generations gone down and generations to come, with its messy implications and terrible responsibilities, my poor organ rose briefly with the inflammatory thought of the act involved, and then immediately collapsed under the weight of the rest.

“The child is father of the man,” I said, apropos of nothing. “Speaking of Wordsworth, do you know what Whitman had to say about childhood?”

She was resolute, unswervable. “I’m no religious nut,” she said. “Or one of these virginal types out of a Victorian novel who can’t relate to good clean healthy athletic sex — it’s nothing like that.” She sat up, arranged herself against the headboard in the lotus position and then reached out to the night table to refill our wineglasses. I watched her breasts move.

“It’s just that when you look at it, no matter how much our generation has tried to postpone the issue of adulthood and all the responsibilities that go with it, you’ve got to grow up sometime and realize that having a family is just a part of life, maybe the biggest part.” She shoved her hair back, took a sip of wine and went on to talk about the life force, mayflies, the great chain of being and the nesting habits of birds. She was philosophical, and she was nude. Somehow, everything she said made perfect sense. “It’s nature,” she said. “I mean, all these nerve endings, the physical thing, you know …” She dropped her eyes. I took her breast in my hand like a sacred object. I knew. “It’s all there to ensure the survival of the species.”

I was sitting up now, too, sitting close, my hands on her. “You sound like Charles Darwin.”

“No, I mean you go through life in stages and at each stage everything changes. You’re a kid with a doll or bicycle and every day lasts six years, then you’re a teenager counting pubic hairs and waiting for the phone to ring.”

“You too, huh?”

She smiled, nodded, took a quick sip of Bardolino. I hunkered closer.

“Then you’re twenty, twenty-five, and you want to have a good time — why get tied down? Hedonism, right? The Me Generation?”

My hands were on her, and now hers were on me. There was something moving in me, and it wasn’t philosophy.

“I’m all for it,” she said. “But I want something else, too. I want to feel complete — you know what I mean?”

At this point I could only murmur. I was rising up on my haunches like a satyr, falling into her as into a warm bath.

And then all of a sudden she was gone. Pushing herself up from the bed, swinging her legs out, padding across the floor to the gnome that sat on her dresser. “I loved being a kid,” she said, running a thoughtful finger across the gnome’s fallen forehead. “Loved it. My mother was a big woman and she would take me shopping or walking along the lakeshore and I would feel like I was in the grip of some god and that nothing could go wrong, that everything would last forever, like in a painting — like in Seurat’s La Grande Jatte … you know it?”

I shook my head.

Then she was crossing the room to the bookcase, everything in motion, and bending like one of Degas’s nudes to pluck up a book of reproductions of the French Impressionists. She handed me the book, open to Seurat’s idyll. I saw a day of milky sunshine, kids, dogs, sunbonnets, a warmth and radiance that never ends, no quitting allowed. Or even contemplated. Petra was watching me. “Come here,” I said, setting the book aside. She came, and then we sank back into the bed and I gave myself over to impulse and the tug of the life force.