J. Lennon - See You in Paradise

The teenager is getting on the bus now, the one Edward had been talking to. Alison says, “You could have been more helpful. Why were you talking to that young man?”

Edward’s gaze follows the teen until he disappears. “Nate. I don’t know. Nobody else was going to talk to him.”

Though she knows it annoys him, she can’t help sighing. Edward roots for the underdog. He buys cheap shirts from sale racks and votes for local crackpots every November. It’s one of the things that, when she loves him, she really loves, and when she is angry at him, she finds intolerable. He is intolerable now, but already her intolerance is on the wane. She can’t seem to get worked up about anything these days. It’s a feature of their marriage: as sexual passion has faded, so has pride, so has resentment. Sometimes she feels she may vanish completely into an undifferentiated fog of vague love.

She isn’t a crier — she prides herself on this — but she begins to cry. Edward pats her leg. The air is cooling down. In fact, it is suddenly ice cold. A chill runs through her. The tears shut off. Edward shuts off the AC.

“I’m thinking of a word,” he says.

“Oh, God, not right now.”

“No, let’s do it. You know you wanna.”

“I don’t!” But she can’t resist the game. They’ve played it on every road trip they’ve ever taken. They’ve played it naked. They’ve played it in elevators and on the Great Wall of China. She wipes her face, hangs her head, whispers, “Fallopian.”

“After.”

“Infertility.”

He snorts. “Before!”

“Uh, gum?”

“Close, in a way. After.”

“Itchy,” she says, scratching her legs.

“Itchy comes after infertility.”

“Edward, I just don’t feel like doing this right now.”

“It’s between infertility and gum,” he says quietly. “Something delicious.”

“Hot dogs. Hominy?”

“Perfect for a day like this. A sweet, refreshing treat.”

She turns to him. He is holding an invisible ice-cream cone and licking it lasciviously, his eyebrows rising and falling, his eyes rolling back in his head with simulated pleasure. He has not yet noticed the approach of Harlan Breece, who is walking bent over with his hands on his khakied knees, squinting in Edward’s window.

Edward sees the shadow of the massive hat falling across the dash before he hears the tap on the window, not a tap actually but a small thud, as Breece is using his fingertip, not his fingernail. In fact, Edward notes as he rolls the window down, Breece has barely got any fingernails at all. They are as irregular and receding as his hairline. He counts this as a victory and is able to meet the Texan with a broad and truly genuine smile. A ten-gallon smile, he thinks, that’s how we do it in Upstate New York! He realizes he is still holding the invisible ice-cream cone and releases it. Invisible ice cream splatters his thighs.

“Harlan, hello!”

“Hi there, Alison dear,” Breece drawls, glancing past Edward, “and I’m ashamed to admit I’ve forgotten your name.” Breece grimaces calmly at him.

“Edward. ‘Big Ed,’ if you like.”

“You’ll accept my apologies then, Ed, and hear me out. I’m pleased to tell you that Linda finds you both mighty charming, and she’s asked me to extend an invitation to dinner up at our little lakeside cottage. We still got a little water left in the lake, in spite of this heat of yours.”

We got a little water! Heat of yours ? Edward loves it, an honest-to-God member of the privileged class, whose wife finds him and his wife mighty charming. Without turning to Alison, Edward says, “Well, we’re real sorry about our heat, but we’d love to come take a gander at your water.”

“Splendid,” says Harlan Breece, and angles his brush-covered panhandle of an arm in through the window. Edward shakes the hand at the end of it. “When’s good for you?”

“Just about anytime,” Edward says as the first bad vibes reach him from Alison’s side of the car. “It isn’t like we need to get a sitter.”

“Tomorrow? Eight?”

“Of course, sure.”

The panhandle withdraws and returns, this time bearing a white slip of paper with a map printed on it. It dawns on Edward that Breece just happened to have this map on him, and probably has several more. You never know when you’re going to need to invite somebody up to the shack for some pig’s feet and moonshine. Edward accepts the map and gives it a game squint, then nods at Harlan as he rolls the window back up, his own pumping arm looking very working class, vulgarly utilitarian, like an oil derrick.

When the window is shut tight, he turns to Alison. “That oughta be fun.”

“You will be alone,” she says.

But he isn’t alone when, the following night, they get into the car and point themselves north along the scenic Lake Ridge Highway. She meant it when she said it, but really, she would never abandon him. Of course the Breeces didn’t find them charming, no doubt they found them odious. But tonight, none of it bothers her, because she knows that they, she and Edward, are going to win. Alison phoned up the agency first thing this morning from her desk at Spitznagel & Pinch Real Estate and told the girl that they wanted to “meet with the little boy Raymond.” Take a meeting, she restrained herself from saying. And the girl said, “Oh, he is a cutie, isn’t he, it’s amazing nobody’s whisked him home yet.”

Nobody’s whisked him home. Hanging up the phone, she pictured herself doing the whisking, ushering little Raymond into their car, into their house. The Breeces hadn’t got him yet. During her lunch hour, she stopped at the library and learned that childless couples in their thirties are more likely to adopt successfully than those in their fifties, and she felt a cautious optimism. Thirties: that’s us!

Or so thinks Alison. Edward, however, at thirty-seven, doesn’t see himself as being in his “thirties.” If pressed he would probably say he’s “around twenty-five.” That was his age when he met Alison, the age when he hung up his bong and shaved his beard. He regards marriage as a kind of deep freeze that perfectly preserves the version of Ed — Version 3.0, following Innocence (1.0), The End of Innocence (1.1), and College (2.0) — that got married. Sure, he’s noticed a few little changes, the usual ones: the hair loss, the out-of-breath, the getting-fat. But these are minor setbacks, if they’re setbacks at all. When he was a kid he’d get these hard fleshy growths on his fingertips, tiny numb extinct volcanoes, which lasted a good six months and went away on their own. That’s how it is with these things.

But this morning, when he was sitting in the breakfast nook, looking out at the suburban street and the elementary school and the cafeteria workers ineptly parallel parking at the curb, he suddenly found it difficult to see. He didn’t know what it was at first, a darkening, a fluttering, and for a moment he thought he was having a heart attack. Just for a moment! And thinking he was having a heart attack made his heart stand briefly, horrifyingly still, so that he seemed to be having another one. Then his focus shifted, and he saw that the bird feeder hanging from the eaves, suspended in the center of the window, was bristling with nuthatches. There had to have been twenty, flapping madly about the six seed-choked holes, and Edward laughed and instantly relaxed. Not a heart attack! Nuthatches!

They’ve got the dome light on and Alison is trying to read the map. “There’s supposed to be a secondhand clothing place … and then a bridge … wait, two bridges, take the first left after the second bridge, not the left after the first … and then go 2.3 miles …” The map is absurdly, counterproductively detailed, so that if they miss a single landmark they’ll be eating roasted possum off the end of a stick in the woods tonight. Still, somehow, they manage to find the place. The Breeces’ driveway is a couple of ruts that snake through a half-reclaimed farm field and plunge into an untrimmed copse of box elders. And beyond the treeline: Taliesin. Or something like that. Massive, slabbed, lit like a pumpkin; you can see everything inside — the furniture and art and a gigantic fireplace — and right through the back windows onto the lake and the blazing sunset reflected there. Alison suppresses a wave of hatred for the rival real-estate agency that sold it: she could have bought a baby on the black market with that commission.