Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“Whoever that is, they keep driving past: this is the fourth time this week and the second time today. That’s not your friend, is it?”

“No,” I said. “My friend is Brazilian.” As if this explained everything, the innocent photography, the innocence generally. A maiden knows her love like the sky the distant grass. That is, knows her love sort of, and from aloft sees not a blade. My head was full of middling poetry, only some of it my own.

“There it is again!” she exclaimed, and then she turned quickly to get to the front window to see, I assume, if she could actually make out the driver, the car, the spinning rims, the license plate.

She turned back toward me. “Have you noticed this car going by anytime before?”

“I don’t know what car it is.”

“Well, any car going by with a thundering bass and slowing down on this block?”

Actually, I had noticed it. The rap music and the car. You could hear its approach, the car turning the corner, the music booming like a furnace firing in a basement below you. I was attuned to the bass notes. But what I had noticed more, and what concerned me more, was the phone ringing and then when I answered it, as Sarah had instructed me to do, “Thornwood-Brink residence,” there was a long silence, then a hang-up. My thoughts had wandered to Bonnie, that she was home alone, not getting her life together at all, not nearly as she had hoped, not even close, and was instead lying fetally on a sofa in a position of seller’s remorse, tears of devastation streaming down her cheeks. How not.

But I could see now that Sarah’s concerns were not with Bonnie but with the mysterious, gone-missing birth father. I could see she imagined that it might be he who was driving past, having somehow found out Mary-Emma’s new address. He had not officially signed off on any papers. And though the agency had done all the things it was supposed to do, advertise in the local papers and seek him out in the halfhearted legalistic manner that fulfilled their obligation, it was easy to imagine a young guy in a bar or at work or walking with a cousin on a nice day back from church or home from school and suddenly hearing he had a child given up for adoption, and somehow wanting the child back. Had she not imagined the birth father as one of the Green Bay Packers, as I had? A minor celebrity, handsome, carefree, with no time for a relationship, let alone a child? At the very least she should have imagined him as perhaps the wayward son of one of the aging running backs.

“I’m not sure that I’ve paid that much attention,” I said.

“OK!” Her face reddened. “Have you paid attention to this ?” She pointed wrathfully at the photo. “The photographer? Have you paid attention to him? Who is this person taking pictures of Emmie?”

I did not say anything, because I could no longer speak.

The car with the booming rap song trawled by once more. “There it is again!” Sarah cried, and raced to the window. I could see her lips moving silently, memorizing, and then she went quickly into the kitchen and wrote down the license plate number on a Post-it.

“I’ve put the license plate number by the phone. If you see that particular car again, let me know.”

“OK.”

“It’s just …” And here she moved both hands through her hair in anguish, her words a kind of muttering to herself. “My whole life feels like a horror show of slowly moving cars …” I didn’t know what she meant by that — a funeral? “Look, I’m sorry. I’ve upset you,” she said. She touched my shoulder in what might have been tenderness, but I was too frozen to discern exactly. “Thank you for the picture. I understand. It’s a lovely picture. She looks darling. But no more. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said automatically.

“It’s not that I don’t trust your friend. It’s just, I might not trust his Rolodex.”

“I don’t think he has a Rolodex,” I said daftly.

Sarah’s eyes bore down on mine. “Now I’m going to tell you something I didn’t tell you before. I never phoned the references you listed on your résumé. I hired you because you seemed angelic to me. You gave off an aura. I didn’t phone one person on your list. Or, well, I phoned one person, but they weren’t home. I didn’t care what any of them said. I was a snob about you. I trusted my own instincts completely.”

I didn’t know what to tell her. Like everyone, I felt I was a good person. How could I tell her she should have phoned the references? How could I tell her, Why would you place your child in the hands of someone whose references you never checked out?

“I can see that you love Emmie, and I know she loves you. She says your name when she wakes up from naps. You are, sometimes, the first person she asks for. I don’t mean to sound suspicious of your friend, but I don’t want him taking pictures of Emmie. When you go for walks with her, go someplace else, not to his place, not with him.” She put her hand on my shoulder and smiled. “Love is a fever,” she said. “And when you come out of it you’ll discover whether you’ve been lucky or — not.”

I was silent and so was she.

“I am concerned for you just as I would be for anyone,” she added strangely.

I went into what my mother called okey-dokey mode. I grabbed for the midwestern girl’s shielding send-off. “Sounds good,” I said.

I began to find back routes to Reynaldo’s. One did not have to go down the most obvious streets. If I took the alleys, past the flowering bushes and the refuse and recycling bins, I could travel unseen, with Mary-Emma and her kick-ass American stroller bumping along the pebbles and potholes all the way to Reynaldo’s. There we would nuzzle and chat and he would make pepper water or early-morning curry, which I then believed to be Brazilian cuisine, and we would eat. Mary-Emma would play, and the pictures Reynaldo took — for his photography class — he no longer gave me, just showed me, and they were mostly taken from behind her as she studied something in her hands, an ashtray or a clock. She could have been anyone’s child in the world. He would play soccer with her and teach her phrases and songs. He always said “ Ciao ” when we left, and Mary-Emma had begun to repeat it, and wave. “ Ciao , Airnaldo!”

When I brought her back home she was often dozing from the stroller ride and I would take her directly upstairs to the attic nursery, where she promptly woke up. I could hear Sarah on the phone: “… roasted figs, braised wild boar with dried Death’s Door cherries, uh-huh, veal sweetbreads with chestnuts — this is very Sheriff of Nottingham! I mean, it’s springtime. Where is the spring? Where are the new potatoes, asparagus, ramps and fiddleheads, vinaigrettes and roux? How about that lemon sorbet with the chopped basil on top?”

Dementedly, and because Mary-Emma would not take a nap now, I made a clapping song out of “ramps and fiddleheads / vinaigrettes and roux,” and after Sarah got off the phone Mary-Emma and I went downstairs and performed it for her, risking that Sarah might feel mocked, but she didn’t — I hoped.

“Like our song, Mama?” asked Mary-Emma. Sarah seemed both amused and embarrassed, and her laughter contained the slightly hysterical, undulating edge of each.

“Oh, thank you for this, I guess,” she said, and Mary-Emma ran to her and threw her arms around one of her legs, pressed her cheek against her thigh. Sarah petted her head. “I feel like this restaurant is driving me mad!” she said absently. “Someone just accused me of raping the forest floor. Because of the fiddlehead ferns. And because of the veal, one of the waiters is going around the kitchen bleating ‘Mommy, Mommy!’ ”