Part 28 (1/2)

He cradled the box in his arms. ”I think maybe I was in love with him,” he said softly. ”I adored him.”

”He was just an ordinary man.”

”I know. Don't you think I know that?”

We stood for a while at the edge of the aspen grove. Nothing happened; nothing moved. Jonathan held the box, his face set stubbornly, his eyes squeezed shut. After several minutes I said, ”Jonathan, find someone of your own to love.”

”I've got someone,” he said.

It gave me a kind of vertigo, to hear us both talk like this-a tingling, lightheaded sensation of great height and insufficient protection. We had always been so circ.u.mspect with one another. Now, rather late in the game, when I had things to discuss with him, we possessed no easy language.

”You know what I mean,” I said.

He looked petulantly away, as if something on the horizon and to my right had captured his attention. There, right there before me, angrily avoiding my eyes, was the four-year-old boy I'd known more intimately than I knew myself. Now he was back in the guise of a man aging in a British, professorial way; taking on a weedy, slightly ravaged, indoor quality.

”You don't know anything about it,” he said at length. ”Our lives are more different than you can imagine.”

”I know well enough about women,” I said. ”And I can tell you this. That woman is not going to let you have equal rights to her baby.”

Now he could look at me. His eyes were hard and brilliant.

”Rebecca isn't her her baby. Rebecca is baby. Rebecca is our our baby,” he said. baby,” he said.

”In a manner of speaking.”

”No. Literally. Bobby and Clare and I don't know which of us is the father. That's how we decided to do it.”

I didn't believe him. I knew-somehow I knew-that he and that woman had not been lovers. He was telling me a story, as he'd liked to do as a child. Still, I went along with it.

”And that's what Clare wanted, too?”

”Yes. It's what she wanted.”

”It may be what she said she wanted,” I said. ”It may be what she thought she wanted.”

”You don't know Clare. You're thinking of a different kind of person.”

”No, my darling. You are. I know what it is to believe the people you know are different, that your life is going to be different. And I'm standing here telling you there are universal laws. A woman won't share her baby.”

”Mom,” he said in an elaborately calm voice. ”Mom, you're talking about yourself. It's you who wouldn't give your baby up.”

”Listen to me now. Go out and find yourself someone to love. Have a baby of your own, if that's what you want.”

”I've already got one,” he said. ”Rebecca is as much mine as she is anyone's.”

”Three is an odd number. When there are three, one usually gets squeezed out.”

”Mom, you don't know what you're saying,” he said. ”You don't have any f.u.c.king idea.”

”Please don't speak to me that way. I'm still your mother.”

”And please don't pull rank on me. You're the one who wants to talk.”

He had me there. I was the one who wanted to talk. I was the one who had disappeared into marriage, let myself be carried along by the simple, ceaseless comfort of domestic particulars. And now in a desert grove I wanted to talk.

”All I'm saying,” I said, ”is that there seem to be certain limits. We have a hard enough time staying together as couples.”

”And I,” he said, ”am seriously considering the possibility that those limits are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bobby, Clare, and I are happy together. We plan on staying together.”

”History teaches differently.”

”History changes. Mom, it isn't the same world anymore. The world's going to end any minute, why shouldn't we try to have everything we can?”

”People have believed the world was ending since the day the world began, dear. It hasn't, and it hasn't changed much either.”

”How can you say that?” he said. ”Look at yourself.”

I was aware of the ground under my feet, chalky and red-gray. I was aware of myself in jeans and a suede jacket, under the open sky.

I said, ”Do you think that when it comes down to bra.s.s tacks, Bobby will chose you? That's it, isn't it? You think Clare will recede, and you and Bobby will raise that child together, with her in the background.”

He looked at me, and I saw him. I saw everything: his hunger for men, his guilt and disappointment, his rage. I saw that in ways his anger was a woman's anger. He had a woman's sense of betrayal. He believed he'd been pushed unfairly onto the margins, been loved by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. For a moment I felt afraid of him. I feared my own son, out in that wild place so far from other beings. We had protected ourselves with silence because our only other choice was to howl at one another, to scratch and bite and shriek. We were too ashamed, both of us, for ordinary anger.

”You don't know what you're talking about,” he said quietly, and I conceded that I probably didn't. We had lost track of one another; we were strangers in some deep, impenetrable way that ran like a river under our devotion and our cordiality. Perhaps that had always been the case.

”We'd better go try and catch your flight,” I said.

”Yes. We'd better.”

”About the ashes. It's your choice. Let me know what you decide, whenever you decide.”

He nodded. ”Maybe I'll give them to Rebecca someday,” he said. ”Here, kid. Your family heritage.”

”She won't know what to do with them either,” I said.

”If I have any say in things, she will. I want her to grow up with no question about where to put her grandfather's ashes.”

”That would be nice. That would be nice for her.”

”Mm-hm.”

”Come on, then,” I said. ”We can just barely make it if we hurry.”

We got back into the car, and drove the rest of the way in silence. Jonathan returned the ashes to his bag and closed the zipper. As I drove I tried to phrase some bit of parental advice, but I couldn't think of how to get it said. I'd have liked to tell him something I'd taken almost sixty years to learn: that we owe the dead even less than we owe the living, that our only chance of happiness-a small enough chance-lay in welcoming change. But I couldn't manage it.

Because we'd lost time, he had to jump out at the curb in front of the terminal. ”Bye, Mom,” he said.

”Goodbye. Take care of yourself.”