Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘Marx was poor,’ Chuck used to say, when we paced the woods in our old coats. ‘No food, no money, never a decent place to live.’

‘Lenin was poor,’ Mark said. ‘Dostoevsky. Van Gogh. We’re supposed to be poor. Everyone interesting was poor when they were young. I think it’s a rule.’

‘Some rule,’ I said. Oh, we were pathetic, always sitting together in class, ignoring the teachers, ignoring the other students while we buried ourselves in books we hardly understood, books we carried around so that people could marvel at their strangeness. We read dark things, foreign things, things beloved of troubled teenagers. Kafka, Baudelaire, Henry Miller. Dostoevsky (never Tolstoy), Celine, Camus, Marx. Nietzsche. Schopenhauer. Always in cheap paperbacks that we bought secondhand, the thin, tightly printed pages heavily marked by strangers’ notes. We read to escape, to make sense of a world in which we had no place. We read because we were so impossible socially that we could do nothing else. We read to kill time, to obliterate the awful years until we could emerge as adults.

Chuck and Mark played chess and wrote. I drew and played the guitar. We agreed that our families were unbearable, pawns of a capitalist system, and we knew that we’d be different when we grew up. Mark was going to be a writer, Chuck a socialist. I was going to be some sort of artist. We worked after school at the Star Market, Chuck and Mark stocking shelves while I fried doughnuts in the bakery, and while our plans were vague they always included a moment when we emerged full-grown from our disfiguring skins and startled everyone: larvae into luna moths.

Chuck and Mark had vanished from my life when Mumu died and I dove into my motorcycle stage, but I thought my time with them had set me up for life with Randy. I told myself that the kind of poor we were living wasn’t the poor of my childhood but the right poor, the interesting poor, the kind of poor Chuck and Mark and I had dreamed about. Virtue. Solidarity. We were having an adventure. We set aside one of our three rooms for Randy’s studio, so he could paint the pictures that would make him famous and change our lives, but he couldn’t work.

‘Too ugly,’ he said disdainfully. ‘Look at those people. Look at those streets .’

Our neighborhood wasn’t so bad — it looked like Westfield, where I’d grown up, or like Holyoke, where Randy had. Maybe a little worse. ‘The light’s bad,’ Randy complained. ‘There’s no one to talk to. No stimulation. The streets look like shit. What do you want me to do?’

Get a job , was what I was thinking by the time we were six months into our marriage. I wasn’t finding our poverty so interesting after all. Teach , I thought. Do something. But he wouldn’t consider working, not even part-time; he said work interfered with the flow of his energy, and that I’d have to support us for a while.

I got a job out of self-defense, typing income-tax forms for three Swedenborgian accountants. Randy resented this wildly, especially during the late-spring crunch. ‘How can you work for these people?’ he said, although he was glad enough to have money for beer and paint and pot. ‘They wear suits. They drive station wagons. They think they have a pipeline to God.’

‘You have a better idea?’ I asked. I would have taken that pipeline myself if I could have found it; it was months since I’d touched a pencil or a pen, months since I’d done anything.

‘You have to have faith,’ Randy said. ‘In me. If you had more faith in me, I’d be doing fine. It’s because you took this stupid job that I can’t get a break. You jinxed me.’ He rambled on and on, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. As spring passed into summer and fall, winter again, spring again, he developed a new theory — that if we let ourselves go completely, gave ourselves over to the flow of luck and life, we’d be rescued by good spirits before we hit rock bottom.

Some theory. He stopped making love to me except on weekends, when my skin no longer carried the film he said fell over me at work. I started eating doughnuts, cannolis, cream puffs, cookies from the Italian bakeries nearby; I gained twenty pounds, thinking that was why, and Randy stopped sleeping, stopped eating, stopped going outside except to buy beer or score some pot. He decided he could live on air and sunshine, like a plant. He lay on the balcony all day, convinced he was photosynthesizing, and at night he paced and painted and drank beer. ‘For the minerals,’ he said. ‘Like fertilizer for a plant.’ I wasn’t scared of him — I didn’t think he’d hurt me — but I was scared for him, scared for us. And by then that ‘us’ included more than just him and me.

Just after our second anniversary, I learned that I was pregnant. For a few days I held the secret to myself — the pregnancy was an accident, the timing was all wrong, and I was terrified at first. But then, to my own surprise, I found myself wildly happy, and it was in that mood that I told Randy the news.

We were eating dinner when I told him, or rather I was eating and Randy was pushing his noodles around on his plate and carving holes in the table with the bread knife. He looked at me as if I’d grown a second nose before his eyes. ‘We can’t afford it,’ he said. ‘We can’t have a baby now .’

‘You could get a job,’ I said — something I hadn’t mentioned in a long time. ‘Even part-time. Or you could stay home with the baby, and I’ll keep working afterwards.’

He pricked his knife into the table again and chipped out another hole to add to the halo around his placemat. ‘ I am at a turning point in my career,’ he said. By then he’d lost as much weight as I’d gained, and his paintings, when he painted at all, swirled out of control. ‘I can feel it,’ he said. ‘Everything’s changing for me. You understand?’

‘But we’re having a baby. ’

‘ You’re having a baby. You want a baby, you’re on your own.’

We argued and argued about it, all the rest of that week, but in the end he won and I went to a clinic where they vacuumed me out. I got an infection that kept me in bed for six weeks and distracted me from the real pain of what I’d done, and afterward I felt as though all the nerve and courage had been sucked out of me, along with the soft bits of tissue and blood.

Things turned bitter for us after that. One night, the following spring, I came home from the accountants’ office and found that Randy had set up his easel in the living room. He’d spread newspapers around and laid out tins of paint in shades of blue and green. A platoon of brushes marched across the floor, and a Joan Jett album was blasting from the stereo. Randy was prancing around in time to it, as naked as a stone.

‘Painting time!’ he called when I came in the door. ‘Time for Grace to paint.’

He had a glitter to his eyes that made me nervous. ‘Randy,’ I said quietly, ‘I don’t like to paint. And I don’t have time to draw these days. As soon as things straighten out for us I’ll go back to school. I promise.’

‘Who needs school?’ he said. ‘Grace has Randy. Grace has me.’

He started undressing me and I was happy for a minute; I thought he wanted to make love or even, possibly, start another baby. But when he’d stripped off all my clothes he put a long-handled brush in my hand and then, with a pencil, drew a faint line diagonally across the huge canvas he’d stretched.

‘Paint,’ he ordered. ‘You take the top half. I’ll do the bottom.’

‘I don’t know how,’ I said.

‘Come on, Grace. You used to be creative. Remember? Back when you believed in me and I believed in you …’