The Folded World Page 12

  Alice opened the apartment door. The bare light bulb on the second floor landing flickered. Looking down into the stairwell, she realized that it was impossible to prove that throughout time, a little rain had, in fact, never hurt anyone. It was quite possible that someone had been hurt a great deal by a little rain. A man on fire, for example. She was carrying the stroller down the second set of stairs. Quivering from the effort, she pushed back against the front door, holding it open with one foot while struggling to open the stroller. The stroller, she decided, was her mortal foe. It mocked her with its dead weight. She knew that when she came back downstairs bearing both babies at once, the stroller would have malevolently scooted itself some distance away, like a cur to sniff trash. It was bad enough to carry the girls down the stairs at once without having to be worried about the stroller, which tempted her to descend faster, for what if someone found it alongside the trashcans and thought it discarded? Each time she set the girls down synchronously in the stroller, she wanted to pump her fist. The girls themselves were completely unresponsive to narrative sweep. They had no favorite or least favorite moment. They were calm during even the worst parts, the worst part of all being, for Alice, the precipitous descent down the dark and narrow staircase carrying both of them. It would have been easier if they were afraid. Then at least they would cling to her.

  “There.” She stood back, looking down at them. The plastic rain shield on the stroller billowed with air. She straightened Frances’s hat. “Let’s have an adventure.”

  She looked at the sky, which was decidedly less gray than it had appeared from inside. It really sounded so familiar, about the rain not hurting anyone. She remembered, through the myopia of her childhood, rain on the window, how it mangled the view of trees and sky. When she turned back to the stroller, Evelyn was bent in half, reaching down.

  “That’s a chicken bone, sweetheart,” said Alice, grabbing her hand.

  The infant looked up at her, as if to say, Chicken what?

  “A chicken bone. Because that’s the sort of street Mommy and Daddy live on, one with crap all over it on trash day.”

  Alice grabbed the handlebar and began to walk. The sidewalks were herniated with roots, and the poorly tended tenements, which had been built for huge Portuguese laborer families but were now filled with students and working people like herself and Charlie, lined either side.

  “We’re going to the bookstore,” she whispered. “Mommy is going to read a book.”

  In the distance, a rumble of thunder. Alice paused. In the middle of the street, a gyre of brittle leaves spun. No, she thought, she would not let a little rain stop them. She had come this far. She had come entirely down the stairs. As she marched past the shuttered houses, she saw all at once, that very morning in fact, how she had given up being wonderful, being immaculate, being the Gulf Wind, and all of a sudden was doing exactly the sort of thing her own mother would have done, marching her onward through the freezing rain for her own deep undeclared reasons and calling it an adventure. She could even remember now, her own yellow slicker, her little nor’easter, and her mother saying lightly Well Alice darling a little rain never hurt anyone. Even now, as Alice remembered and understood all this, and she might have been moved or astonished by life and its refrains, all she really wanted to do was get to the goddamned bookstore before it rained. The stroller took a hit from a root. The twins were quiet and absorbed by their mother’s behavior. Already she absorbed them completely—her power, her moods, her kaleidoscopic face. But even that revelation, that the twins could already feel her feelings, was somehow too arcane for this moment made of weather, traffic, and mud.

  For they were almost there. Along the lane of shops—a record store, a cheese shop, an ombudsman’s reelection campaign center—people ran from awning to awning, looking at the sky. Alice was steering the stroller across a wide intersection when the sky opened up. Rain crashed onto the hoods of cars, pelted the top of the stroller. Alice shrieked and began to run. Her hair beat against the back of her slicker. She could hardly hear for the rain. A girl in an apron came out of a bakery shop sucking frosting off her finger. The girl could not understand what it meant to jog sloppily down the street in the rain with a stroller laughing tragicomically, because you could not understand such things as a young girl with frosting on her finger. Drawing a lock of hair out of her eyes, Alice looked up and saw the sign swinging in the wind.

  “We’re here,” she said. “We made it!”

  She opened the door, backed into it with her rear, and tried pulling the stroller through face-forward. The twins were silent and clammy and shocked-looking under their plastic shield.

  The stroller would not fit.

  Alice tried to jam it through again, the twins swaying. Finally, both babies began to cry.

  “No, no,” pled Alice through the plastic. “No please don’t cry. We’re here. We’ve made it. Don’t cry now.”

  She stood, the rain pouring under her collar, her hair entirely wet, her blouse entirely wet under her slicker, and gazed down at the stroller jammed half inside the doorway. It was impossible to move in either direction. Her children were crying. They looked like two little children in a public service announcement about child abuse. Alice covered her face with her hands.

  Rain could hurt you, of course it could. She must tell her mother. She would go home and call her mother right away. And then she would add, in a hush, But please, Mother, help me. Come and take over. Do it however you like. Just save me. Help me. Mother me.

  Somebody was brushing past her now, reaching out into the rain with bare, brown hands for the crying infants. Alice blinked back the dizziness and the rain, watching as the baby Evelyn was lifted out of her seat and into the air. Only once the child was placed over the stranger’s shoulder did he turn around. It was a young man with very black eyes. Alice felt slapped by his face. The stroller rolled backward, coming unstuck.

  “Leave it there,” shouted the young man over the rain. “Come in.”

  He stepped further into the bookstore. He wore a thin white T-shirt and canvas painter’s pants. She could see his spine, and the face of her baby looking back at her. Alice quickly fetched Frances and stepped inside. The door closed behind her and the rain was silenced.

  The young man turned, balancing the baby with one square brown hand against his shoulder. He seemed very comfortable holding the baby. Alice stared. When she lifted her arm, a stream of water poured out of the cuff and onto the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Oh God.” She flapped her pruned, windbitten hands, tears pricking her eyes.

  The young man gestured with his chin outside.

  “It’s rolling away.”

  Alice whirled around, dumping more rainwater onto the floor. The stroller was rolling backward into the street, the plastic sheath acting as a sail.

  “Oh my God.” Alice thrust Frances at the young man. She could feel her face redden. She had needed rescue from a doorway, and now the stroller (expensive, ridiculously expensive!) was sailing out into the street.

  She marched back out into the rain, into the street, and grabbed the stroller. Through the sheets of rain she could see headlights coming toward her. She stood there in the street, staring at the headlights for just a moment.

  The young man watched her the whole time, holding the babies. His black hair was closely cropped against his head, giving him the look of a monk or a soldier. His expression was level and strangely impassive as he rocked the babies, without taking his eyes away. After a moment, she stepped back into the store.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got them. Take off your coat.”

  Alice swallowed. “I’m sorry.” She stepped forward and lowered her eyes, taking Frances from the young man, her knuckles brushing his body. “It’s just—It’s hard with two.”

  The young man smiled very slightly, revealing salt white teeth. He took Evelyn off his shoulder and held her aloft. Alice could see his navel under his T-shirt,
small and tense. He made a noise like an airplane. Evelyn, usually serious and wary of being dandled, gurgled in the air.

  “I don’t mind,” he said finally. “My cousin has four.”

  “Oh good,” said Alice, shrugging, laying Frances down on the bookstore’s old velvet sofa. “Hold her, then, why don’t you? God. We’re drenched.” She looked at the stroller. “Everything’s drenched. That fucking stroller. Excuse me.”

  “It’s all right,” said the young man.

  Over her shoulder, Alice was aware the boy’s swayed back reflected in the window.

  “What are you looking for?” he said to her reflection.

  “Oh. Well I’d like a really really long, fat book. I want the fattest book you have. I haven’t been to a bookstore in months. I haven’t even read a book. I can’t stand it anymore!” She laughed aloud—a silly, honking laugh—but she didn’t care. At last, here they were, rows and rows of books. She took one off the shelf, opened it, and stuck her nose inside. She hefted it in her hands. “I used to read, night and day. Everything. When I was little, I used to keep a book open in my lap during dinner. I couldn’t stop. Once, my mother grabbed my book and—” Alice opened her hand, remembering, “tossed it out the kitchen window. Look. She’s fallen asleep on you. The baby.”

  “Will you look at that,” the young man said. He seemed genuinely impressed, even though his expression was unchanged. He turned around, shelving a book with one hand. Alice looked at his head. It was the most finely shaped head she had ever seen.

  It was difficult not to look at him. There was something very crafted about the way he looked. He looked very created and offered. His head was so exposed, with the cropped hair and the knobs where the cranium ended at the base of the neck, and the dark brow bone sparkling with rain. One scar, like the streak of a cat’s eye, ran back from his temple. He could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, with the pliant back of an athlete. She blinked drowsily.

  He disappeared into a small storeroom and came out with towels and a blanket. He spread them on the threadbare sofa. Safe in a velvety crevasse, both infants were arranged and dozing.

  “Have you read Remembrance of Things Past? That’s a fat book.” He turned and began to walk toward the back of the store. “A man remembers—everything. Everything that passed.”

  Alice pursued. “His life story?”

  “No. More than that. Everything.”

  He climbed a footstool. Standing there, at the top of the footstool, he opened a book from the shelf and began to read in a slow, unmodulated voice. “ ‘For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book;—’ ”

  “Yes!” said Alice. “That happens to me too!”

  He looked down at her and nodded, as he continued in his slow, rather labored way, “ ‘This impression would persist for some moments after I awoke; it did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning.’ ”

  Alice laughed, leaning backward. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s what it’s like. To get lost in a book.”

  He came down from the footstool and held out the book. She took it.

  “Wow,” she said, making an exaggerated face. “Heavy.”

  The cowbell tied to the front door clanged, and a woman walked in with a large striped umbrella. The woman collapsed the umbrella, shook it off noisily onto the floor, and then clasped her hand to her heart.

  “Oh,” the woman shrieked, crashing over to the sofa. “How darling! How precious! Look at these beautiful babies. Are they twins?”

  “Yes,” said Alice, coming over to the woman. “Please. We’re taking a little nap.”

  The woman bent down and tweaked an exposed foot. “To die for. Ah! This one’s opened her eyes! Hello, darling. Hello, you little sugar dumpling. Don’t you have the bluest eyes?”

  Evelyn scowled up at the lady and began to cry.

  Alice, wet and pruned and exasperated, looked up. The boy was looking back at her in the window’s reflection. Grinning, he shook his head. She smiled back at him and the world that glowed through him. Sometimes maybe all it took was someone to say Isn’t life awful sometimes? Because life wasn’t awful. Life was on the whole gorgeous. It was awful sometimes. But if you spent too much time alone, you got confused. You thought maybe it was awful all the time.

  The schoolteacher backed away from the door. If he looked through the peephole too often, might he permanently start seeing people as convex, with big, distorted heads? He shuddered. He should be writing poetry. He should be wearing a timepiece. He should stop eating so much Turkish Delight. He pressed his nose once again to the door. It drew him to it, the hole. Through it his womanish curiosity was channeled. But why call it that? he thought—why not call it a Byronesque thirst for love and consummate understanding? He watched her shining hair fall in a curtain over her shoulder. Everybody felt Byronesque when looking through a peephole—that was the point of a peephole: you appreciated them but they didn’t appreciate you. They only stood there (the UPS man, the local Ombudsman on campaign) turning their huge ears slightly toward the door.

  Byron had died at 34. Sometimes the schoolteacher wished he had died at 34, too. Then he probably wouldn’t be ABD and driving a used Taurus. It wasn’t healthy for a man to drive a Taurus. And the Turkish Delight, well, that was a hard-to-shake fetish that he had acquired while in love, as a boy, with his piano teacher’s mother. Again he drank with his eye at the hole. She had the front door open now and was struggling to open the enormous contraption with which she pushed around her children. But how did she manage to look so lovely (he wanted to know) even through the unkind lens, her barrettes slipping down her black hair? The daylight snapped shut behind her and she disappeared back up the dark stairwell.

  He sat down in a chair. He put his finger to his cheek. He put his finger to his lip. He spread a book on his knee. He let his slipper dangle from one toe. Sometimes he could not get comfortable. It didn’t have to do with any one thing. He couldn’t get comfortable on earth. When he heard her footsteps coming back down, he became irrationally excited. It wasn’t just about watching, it was about not having to think (for one moment) about his essential physical uselessness. O to be a clarinet. To have one’s body covered with keypads. To produce sound when touched.

  She had her babies with her now. She was coming down the staircase like Diana of the Harvest, her small feet sensing each stair. Standing before the outer door, the white light met her face and she sighed. The babies swayed in her arms. What (he held his breath) did she need, in her soul? He craned to hear her soul. She put her shoulder to the door and shoved, meeting his gaze without knowing it. He backed away from the peephole instantly. The draft sucked itself under his door.

  By the time he looked back—thirstily, with regret—she was gone. Bubblegum wrappers settled on the dirty floor. A little help, he scolded himself, that was what she needed. Something as simple as a little help with the door. So why was his hand still clutching the doorknob, when she was gone? Why, he thought, gritting his teeth, why lie to yourself? You are completely alone. There is no one here to listen to your fucking intentions.

  He startled at the sound of the telephone. Still asleep, he pressed it to his ear.

  “Charlie?”

  “Christ,” he laughed. “Alice.”

  He looked outside. The view was pitch black.

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s seven-thirty, Charlie. I was worried.”

&nbs
p; He laughed again—his most natural defense. “Shit. I fell asleep on my work.” He looked around at his desk, the palette of folders, the voluminous papers stacked beneath the desk lamp. He smeared clean his mouth, patting the desk. “It’s just—last night—I hardly slept. Did you sleep? When do you sleep? Standing up, like a horse? I’m—I’m an idiot.”

  “Oh, Charlie.” He heard her voice melt around his name. “Come home. The twins are asleep now finally. Be with me. I’ll make you some dinner?”

  “How do you do it? How do you manage?”

  “Well, we actually had a wonderful day,” said Alice. “We went to a bookstore!”

  “You did?”

  “I bought a fabulously fat book and I’m looking at it right now, in the kitchen. It was so wonderful, to go out. Thanks. For encouraging me. Although we got absolutely drenched in the rain—”

  And then, gradually, although he was helpless to stop it, her voice became somewhat like background noise to other thoughts he was having. What GAF should he give the new guy? How the hell was he supposed to fit everything wrong onto Axis IV? He was hopelessly behind on his progress notes. The meetings with Dr. Hsu about Therese, was that yesterday or today? Did it matter? He saw a shadow in the hall. It was Bruce Zabilski, putting on his coat, walking toward him. Charlie waved. Bruce stopped, zipped his coat, and paused at the door.

  Charlie covered the receiver. “Do you need to talk to me?”

  “Take your time.”

  “—sailing out into the street, with a mind of its own—”

  “Honey, listen,” Charlie said. “I’ve got to talk to Bruce for a minute. Can I call you back?”