THE UNKNOWN KID

“Then why did you bother to have me?” my daughter asks, and I think of funny answers, which she deserves. Her question isn’t a question. Her words aren’t to be taken seriously. But they stick, they linger and malinger, in the dreamwork that gets us from this day to the next.

She came rushing through the house, her friend Val close behind. What a rush, fast forward, pursuit of friendship.

So was that an emergency dance that just went by? An advance guard of a tribe to whom I am unknown? What a racket of final things between them: forget it, friendship’s off, finished! don’t you ever call me up again—rage rushing, falling headlong.

But into what? Discomfitingly into that gap which is an absence of anything remotely like not caring. I might say it better. I am back from three business trips in a row—tired, lagging, coming down. I mean, their fight will break up in an enchanted awkwardness. This I predict, having witnessed it and witnessed other absences between them. Half of July and all of August they didn’t see each other, and when they met in September they stood in front of each other, facing head on with a great deal to choose from, hands for the moment not busy doing things like the hands of inexperienced actors, but at rest at their sides: till they laughed and laughed again, like idiots.

But today at the age of eleven, rushing through the house—the apartment—they are on the move and if I try to keep up, there’s hardly time to tell about what’s happening.

“Liz!” her friend Val remonstrates—screams, they’d say nowadays—“Liz, I didn’t do anything!” Val is older by a few months, yet younger.

They trade skirts, mingle laundry, think like old lovers alike. A. A. Milne’s been on the shelf for years. They sit drawing for an hour—turn the box on, turn it off—then at one selfsame instant they get the idea to dress up out of a closet, dress up, dress up.

Used to be me who put the record on, not now. But who did? Because here they come high-kneeing past like the hoofers they are and the orchestra’s conducted not by quick fingers on a tone arm but by the real world which they take for granted will accompany them.

High-knee it, Folies Bergère, no less; and the music that no casual intruder at this moment could hear unless the girls pant it out half under their breath—for I’m wrong, the record’s not on, not really—is Offenbach’s stately hysteria and it’s in their mind because I have sometimes put it on for them, a record scratched and replaceable. They slide to my right, out of sight arm-in-arm, and I stare straight ahead at all this (which isn’t so interesting to an outsider as to me, home from a business trip, three business trips), and yet divorced as I am from everything but this moment, interesting’s not altogether what it is to me. (Is that so? Well, if you’re not interested, “then why did you bother to have me?”) They’re sliding back into my seat; they’ve used the entire room, the walls, the ceiling—so why don’t I, too?

Their grins giggle. But their silences—don’t their unspeaking tracks run on like mine? Like me?—for all that I know one day to overtake by surprise my own voice amid those inside conversations mouthless and runaway.

Tracked in circles like those of a marriage. And all at once we hear them talking above the undoubted uproar inside us, drawing together, threateningly selfsame, adults, children.

Hey great! (There’s a lot of greatness in the air these days.) Great idea! Let’s do it. Let’s.

(Yet who was this speaking? Do people speak like this? Surely, Liz’s mother and I do. Nine of an evening, say.)

Let’s have a drink around the corner; let’s do some backgammon, where’s the board? Call the Martins; what time is it out there? What day is it? The week, where has it gone? The court’s reserved anyway, and if the Darbins can’t make it, we’ll play singles.

Let’s bike up to the boat basin, it’s not so far, we’ll hear the subway underneath us. Norm rents his two-and-a-half-room houseboat from a traveling paper products salesman; Norm, our somewhat junior friend, loves the older lady Lucille (older by a little less than a decade—which has been inflated into fashion like racially-mixed love); and she loves him too much not to move onto his houseboat, while Norm for his part loves her too much to ask her to put up with the wear and tear of him and the houseboat he comes with, and so Norm may have to cast off and drift, if he can, downriver.

But with her, he sometimes means.

Why not decide?

Because he doesn’t have to.

New Jersey to starboard, historic cliffs and cooperatives. Those great New York towers to port: riding into that unknown harbor that laps the canyons of Manhattan’s gross memory—but is the river capable anymore of moving itself?

The question’s academic when Lucille’s on all fours. If leaks and plaster dropping constitute weather-as-usual for your apartment, consider a leak in a houseboat. Lucille would go down on her hands and knees to find that leak. Lucille we are probably going to hear more about here and in the next life, which is close and no longer beyond the grave unless we had incorrect information and, in fact, the grave never did stand between us and the next life. So Lucille, a bright singer with a heart-shaped face, sings on the boat-basin dock at twilight, waiting below the West Side Highway drones of fossil-fuel accelerators for Norm to make his weekday way uptown on the underground.

What do you know about women? a voice was heard in the gap of last month’s next thing—last decade’s (for by now, women and men, we’ve heard here if not out on our business junkets in the hinter-lands, are beyond all that unconscious exploitation and find themselves at the barricades together before the future that is no longer to come). Still, what do you know about women? a voice is heard. By which is meant, to know is to please.

Or let’s drop over to Tanto Bene, have a cappuccino; the froth will have to suffice—resist the crumbly Napoleons, you who can—imagine we’re already there; and a foursome waits smoking at the glass-cased banks of free-floating forms with names packed with stiff, sweetest cream, specks of citron jewelling the glue of our floured sugar.

But if we didn’t go, we did something else simultaneously. Meanwhile, the fact that I didn’t dance at the party in the mammoth loft last night hints to my wife that when tonight I say let’s bike over to the Unitarian church to catch Charles for a drink at the end of his organ practice (powerfully muscled, thick-necked, uproarious also-tenor Charles), I’m making up for last night standing around in the light of a furnace and not dancing.

The Unitarians believe in more than they need to or used to; they are said to practice Plains Indian dances. They see gods everywhere—on the hoof, in the weather, along the equal arms of the famous Cross or in the hot, rich subterranean rocks that make it shake with drama—plus, equidistant from that old sin thought to be primal and surrounded by global wisdom, a peace that passeth understanding so fast one’s not sure if it’s eastward or westward, though Charles in his music holds to the known March of Christianity.

Industrial screening in last night’s loft showered us with rivulets of darkness, and I did not know why (speaking for both of us) we were here. World falling away on all sides constant, if that’s the way you like it. Sieved through sheets of dry light—Welcomes Anonymous a high, no less—but young for me in my present form. I like to know someone at a party.

And thinking that by proposing this little jaunt the night after my danceless marathon to surprise Charles whom she loves, I might be taking up the slack of not having offered my body to society at last night’s dance, I discover her saying most quietly, No…she will listen to TV and sew patches on the knees of Liz’s jeans. They’re luminous, funny patches, and “we” are no longer four or five going off to work in the morning in overalls.

Last night’s industrial screening shredded a tape of noise—ignition, concussion, coalition. Rained fish and insect stuff out of the thundering shifts so that the long, long ceiling of the mammoth loft furnished by the unknown lessee of that blast area got sifted; rained bombs, fir, rotation, geometry, dreams, and (if you looked at how the moving, for-a-moment-apparently-counter-clockwise-spinning fold swung around) rained ants.

Moved, though, not with that aim and life when Liz and Val blow by and leave behind them a wake—only to pause stock-still, together thinking of what?—stranded navy looking for its whale-boats. Val older physically a little than Liz, but younger in the mettle of maturity’s magic. Could I say it better?

Maturity beyond question. I’ll always give her that. A rhetorical answer if there’s such a thing, coming home off a business trip. But no answer to the dreamwork’s rhetorical question, “Then why did you bother to have me?”

What she has had to put up with I’ve had bad dreams about. Daydreams that are the despairing, would-be insanity of my class. And when it builds and hurries between her mother and me, Liz stays the same. That’s strength.

So strong I might forget she’s eleven. So strong I can’t ever get over it, or won’t for years.

Glad and able to be left alone (in this city) should we go out. And able to see more than she needs or wants. A story of real life, a dose of her parents sometimes not seeing straight to launch salvos at each other’s doubled blurs, you might think it the middle of the night, and just as well, no one gets hurt if a few healthy salvos heard round the apartment aren’t just on target.

I’ve found too many words, I’ve found too few. For this kid has had an unknown (not hard to guess, these days) amount of wake to vector through. But is it love, then, that lets her see her parents as they are, or strange maturity? So let the light shine in, shine upon her mother’s short, dark curls. The light comes in one end of a bedroom, passes through to be augmented by diagonally opposing mirrors that at first divide the morning influx of sun which then pours itself together again when it fills the bathroom threshold and reaches these two largely naked people approaching each other in height, if not always in looks, having an impromptu hip-to-hip analysis in the bathroom mirror, me fixed some paces behind them across the threshold over their shoulders.

They’re talking hair, the long and the short. I’ve heard the subject in a song sung at twilight at the boat basin on the West River, yet here it’s braids and parts, oily and dry, washed (the one) and to-be-washed (the other). And one’s belongings, the care of. And skin. But then, beyond skin and teeth—homework. What do you expect if you never do any? (That’s a lie, a complete lie.)

But homework, as if I never existed to discuss it myself with my daughter twelve short hours ago. In front of another sink, a steel kitchen sink where I divided our shares (among dinner plates slipperily layered in the detergent dark, and three smaller cake plates that could have served for salad dressed and undressed, if we in our household when at home together served salad separately, now tonight whisked before washing, having been pressured by the frictional, sugar-spun essence of pound cake and quick-crumbed at supper’s end, plates so little smudged they could have been dry-wiped instead of wiped-dry)—so now I have divided and turned our attention between my soap-sponging and hot-rinsing, and urging (her) my glowing-haired (as advertised) daughter not to dry anything but the glasses while I question her on her current math—topology, topology. Only then twelve hours later to hear her mother’s homework question at another sink, while ten feet behind I look her mom in the eye in the mirror as Liz also looks her doubting mom in the eye in the bathroom mirror in order to shout (not unhappily), “Then why did you bother to have me!”

“We didn’t,” observes my wife, examining her face in the mirror with a glance my way. I am a madman with a pair of shapes at bay, snug contours of female approaching each other so I can’t see my ancient relations straight—the waists, the shoulders, the spines I’ve touched. And so I stop feeling her my wife over my reflected shoulder who’s in front of the mirror and me; and if my somewhat retired brain had hands or sharpened elbows, I’d type onto a keyboard a right-brain projection of a shot of this bedroom sunbeam in whose flow I approach with my eyes the mirror that is not denied me above the sacred basin that is—and above which echoes Mom’s dry “We didn’t bother.”

“Well here I am,” Liz says, as her mother starts to say, “I mean we didn’t go to any—” and shakes her head and falls apart out of the mirror, hugs Liz, who shouts, “I asked you a question,” and giggles, being virtually tickled. The collective style is Family Throwaway.

Well, one spring night when I heard, against a far verse of Stephen Foster sung three miles away by Lucille dockside, the language of the low-splaying copters reach toward the receptors on our high-rising apartment house and the language of all the dogs in the street below hounding some being in their midst, and I could hear the silence of a known displaced owl-hawk walking our terrace walls and parapets eyeing the city and eyeing the tiles for long-ago-eaten pet rodents while hardly twitching in response to the crying, through the horizon of the twilight time and through glass and brick, of a large-ish jungle cat belonging to our neighbor who is a one-handed actor who’s been enjoying a long run at the other edge of the continent (and has farmed out his flat rent-free in the meantime to an electronically oriented shadow of a college girl who’s seldom in), I found the opportunity upon me going by instinct from strength to strength to capitalize on a blinding point of energy that came between my wife and me as we, from above, watched our daughter on the carpet watch television and were substantially ignored by her.

Wasn’t there a strength in her, separating her from me?

Lengths of light brown hair grew to cascades in the light from the screen. America comes into your living room, your TV room, what have you.

You have Indians. I remember Indians. Real ones, because on the screen it wasn’t a western but a commercial. A serious, corporate progress-report commercial for a firm that makes digging machines. The biggest in the world and in the history of the world. Monumental earth-moving engines bright-painted and fine, that dig, lift, let go, tilt, turn, all in one curving act, and are, I was set up to think at a glance, run by Indians. Indians represented by the unknown personable one in a red shirt with sun-ray design like false eyelashes on the upper part of the sleeve, and the unknown personable one was right here concentrated in the screen with a grin of white teeth and strong wrinkles carved by heritage and fed by all the plump bloods of youth—a heritage of lines.

I’m really pretty sick of Indians, my wife murmured, or did I just know this was what she felt?

And this Indian’s hands, enriched by centuries of sun and of knowing who he was, gripped the controls of the giant earth-mover, and he spoke to us of this and other machines as if the firm that created them employed him to run them. Or sold them to itself.

How did we get here? I think I said.

You were moving away from me, while I was talking to you, my wife said; why don’t you sit down to watch TV since you’re here, instead of standing and making everyone else nervous?

What? said Liz, our child, as if she had heard someone say something important to her, facing the screen’s distance so her voice seemed distant, if there at all.

I wasn’t moving away from you yourself; I was just moving.

Wrong, said my wife, you didn’t want to hear about the wife of that black philosopher Chuck.

What? said Liz faintly.

I heard what you had to say, I said; I remember the party at the health club, the forty-third floor sunset, the banana daiquiri that spilt itself into the pool or was it an old-fashioned sea-breeze with true grapefruit juice, or vodka on the rocks that turned into a chlorine dawn? And I remember her leaving her drink on the brink of the pool while she swam some laps and it was gone when she reached for it again and she called Chuck but he was staring into the sun above the New Jersey cliffs and I remember him saying that the sun was exactly at the level of the pool, forty-third floor, and, come to think of it, he said something reassuring.

Listen, said my wife, in my brain—

What? said Liz from afar—

I was saying when you walked away that Chuck’s wife—she’s a scientist—was telling me in the sauna before we ate—

Until, I said, that other woman in the sauna started spitting on the floor, and then you left.

You remember all the bad things.

Nothing bad about spitting in the sauna: the heat brings out all that mucus.

The point, my wife said, as the commercial gave way to the news and Liz turned the set off and remained sitting cross-legged, seeming to look at the screen in a way she has when she, I believe, is thinking what to do next—the point was, this woman—

—Charlotte, I said.

Right. Charlotte. She’s a very interesting woman, you know.

And not just her career, I said.

You’re right all over the place, my wife said—she has two, three kids, and she’s a biochemist in a laboratory and somebody in her lab won the Nobel Prize, and she has the most beautiful hair, it’s like Liz’s when it’s all dry and brushed, only lighter, and when you walked away I was saying—

I didn’t walk away, I said so softly I seemed to emphasize what my wife knew anyway.

—that her husband’s a stay-at-home, that’s what she said, and she finally gave up on him and didn’t mention it but started, you know, seeing people on her own, nothing much.

Friends, I said.

Why not, said my wife.

How did we reach this point of agreement? I think I said.

You wouldn’t sit down.

The TV’s off, I said.

A real scientist, this Charlotte, said my wife, no lab technician, no lab assistant.

No guinea pig, I said.

Daddy! said Liz, that’s gross.

I moved around her.

And when she came home—

You know that any job you want to get—

What?

You know I rather like having a working wife to show off although it’s so old hat I hardly want to speak of it, it’s not just the money.

I was saying, my wife said, that when she came home, Chuck would not say a word.

Yes, I said, I remember that particular sunset when she called to him from the water asking where her drink was and he didn’t hear her. But at least he was in his trunks and said something generally reassuring to me I think.

And she wanted to say to him when she got home, Don’t you want to know who I’ve been with, and Chuck would smile and say, quietly, Yes—as if a discovery had just come from her; and you know she wouldn’t tell him after all; then she told him a couple of dreams instead.

Were they clever? I said, and I added, Were they good?

Liz looked at the TV.

What reassuring thing did Chuck say? my wife asked. You said he said something reassuring.

I try to block it out, I said, but it was this: the options for the planet are narrowing down to almost nothing and we will set fire to ourselves before we know it; but meanwhile the options for personal relationships between women and men are multiplying. Sure, I retorted, but those relationships you’re talking about are getting more and more superficial. Ah, said Chuck, a nice superficial relationship—that’s what we’re all looking for. It’s so soothing, so friendly.

But despite these interesting words that I hadn’t realized I remembered, my wife and I were still repeating our circular routines. I didn’t, therefore, know if we would all move on. It was time for Liz to go to bed.

You’ve done that a lot, said my wife. Walked out of the room when I was talking.

If I’d only been conscious of it, I said, I could have thought about it. My wife knew when I was reaching for a joke; she did not know that I had attained a thought—that marriage is putting two people face-to-face slightly off.

A last drink of water, my wife said. That was one dream. In the dream she brought Chuck a last drink of water as if he was her husband. She was a long time reaching it to him. He kept looking at her while he reached for the glass, and he was still looking into her eyes when he had it in his hands, his last drink of water, and brought it to his mouth so slowly she wanted to yell at him. But then she saw the water was all cloudy and she knew she was afraid he would get up and take a walk because it was his last drink of water and she saw the cloud was her, it was her in the glass, her exactly. He was about to drink the water with her in it. He had his eyes on her, not on the glass which was at his lips. She called to him not to drink. He didn’t hear, of course. He was looking into her eyes. He didn’t hear. We were sitting in the sauna. That was one dream she told him. But—not to wake up exactly, which would be crass—she wasn’t dreaming; and the dream was what really happened.

She made it up, I said.

There’s a remote possibility, my wife said, that she made it up as what really happened, but you are crazy, my wife said, did you know that? The woman is a scientist, she’s made it, what do you mean she made it up, you’re crazy. I mean it.

Mommy…, said Liz, staring at the TV, something in voice.

Well, I, I said, am not a stay-at-home like the black philosopher Chuck.

You’re not all that bad at it, my wife said, but why did you say “black”?

Why do you want to know? I said.

Daddy…, said Liz.

My wife’s eyes gazed at me.

I said, Sorry, kid, I thought we were getting somewhere.

Do not call me kid, said my wife.

I was addressing my daughter, I said.

Do not call me kid, said Liz, looking at the TV.

In one turning pull, she switched it on, turning off the sound.

If he drank her, did she wake up inside him? I said. The devouring male, I said.

The other way round, said my wife.

What? said our sly zombie of a kid whom I sometimes wonder if I reach or am like anymore.

She woke up outside him? I said.

No, she woke up and he was inside her.

Mommy! said Liz.

I mean, said my wife, I mean it was another dream.

This one, I said, you’re going to make up.

You don’t understand that I’m telling you something, said my wife, and left the room.

Hey, wait a second, I called, you’re still in the sauna, so these are communicating dreams, that’s good, look let’s go over to the church, oh no it’s Tuesday night, Charlie practices Mondays, let’s finish our game from last week, oh the board got put away, let’s tune up both our derailleurs and the action on your brake you said was stiff, let’s prepare Liz’s room for painting, oh no we’re out of spackling, Atlas Hardware closed three hours ago, let’s the three of us go out for ice cream—or do you have homework?

My wife materialized at another door. Have you left anything out? she asked, amused at last.

I did my homework at school, said Liz, her long, glossy hair turning its layers over as she turned.

I couldn’t begin to capture it all, I answered my wife.

Daddy…, said Liz, staring at the silent screen where a woman was, I knew, reporting news but now came to the end and smiled and then I saw that Liz sitting there on the floor had flung her head back and was looking up at me upside down, a welcome angle.

She is not in the habit of asking for information. That is, beyond what is normally supplied. I am backward. So many friends divorced ahead of me, questions low-flying in my direction, like the evening in Norm’s living room hearing the cars ashore above us on the West Side Highway but not the faintest wash of river water, and Lucille, returning to the room’s bright black-and-yellow-painted beams, said to Liz and me, I believe, “Sometimes I think, Which one of you is the nice one?” and when Norm said, “Both of them,” Lucille said, “Of course, that’s what I meant.”

Once my wife and I went out on our bikes together, wrenches bagged, the folds of our spare tubes powdery-soft, a French pump in place along my frame—and came back separately. For it had not been a good afternoon in the beginning. At least I did not arrive home riding two bikes.

Liz and Val heard the front door hit my fender and when Liz came into the hall and the refrigerator shut with a sucking thud and she asked where was Mommy, I said that she would be along but I didn’t honestly know where she could be. Liz looked at me. I said, Whatever we do, you are you. Do you understand? Then I added, You are our daughter.

When is Mommy coming home? Liz answered. Is she having dinner out?

On her bike? I said.

Sure, said Liz.

I look up to her, everywhere I turn I guess I have seen her. A new breed of girl, her mother has persuaded me. Freed, I hear. Of old conditioning. So if chosen tomorrow for success, she would not be surprised.

I would hope—I would hope (as we preface things at a meeting in San Diego, Albuquerque, San Antonio, Columbus, Montpelier)—that down deep in her nervous system Liz believes she’s bereft of obligations except to herself—I’ve said it better than I know how. Thanks to her: who assumes much and nothing about her future, including that she is, or has been prepared to live it at an address entirely hers. Sees an adult in the evening who was wiped out first thing in the morning, and thinks, does Liz, not at all that she might have caused the depression (she knows well the word) that extends hollow and banal and lasting before that adult who shall be nameless and genuinely without regard to sex, while with calm before this spectacle she lets the adult get on with it. She does not cry except in anger, which gets exhaled and is gone. She falls into home-makerly locutions, such as asking if I will be in for dinner tonight as if she were planning the meal. Her future—what can I say? She has hidden powers. Gives good advice if approached in the right way, not as a simple adult but one to one.

I pass to and from one aerodrome or the other, promoting steel in major cities, my program mapped a month or two months in advance, yet nothing if not flexible. I wake up, having been awake deep-seated in the multiplied upholstery of a system that works, and correct my slouch, guarding my lower back as a thing, a being, a moral that could come true. I straighten up and then I squeeze back my shoulders and I arch my spine; time empties in front of me along its main, and its overhead and cupped sides pave my way beyond me with what you think’s an elusive new material, you see through it, so the main is known to be there and you to be in it but you don’t exactly see it, and that goes for the bends up ahead, the turns built into it tunneled into the mountainous field through which time never knows itself.

Or am I a new breed of man, hearing my lies yet clear that they are not—and believing them so very honest I then doubt.

Chuck the philosopher’s wife has her dream. She does well to share it. I have mine. Or, rather, Liz’s. Cupped in the middle of the night in my one unpillowed ear. Not like the answer I got at dinner when, just the two of us, I’d asked if she felt Val’s parents were different from her own, more strict, more together, that kind of thing; and she said, No, she didn’t think so, not much; and I said did they have fights? She guessed so, sometimes. And did Val, I asked boringly, mind her mother working? Sometimes, not really. And what was it like having two high-pitched parents?

You? she said. Which parents was I talking about? she asked, smiling with one side of her mouth—what’s for dessert?

Yogurt on a stick, I said—raspberry. The phone rang, Liz talked to Val. We had dessert, Liz and I. I asked her, What is this topology you study in math? I had become curious.

I was more than a father supporting a daughter’s research, taking an interest in her homework, suddenly last month’s, last week’s. She answered that it was a math where you didn’t really get right or wrong answers, she remembered that much. She goes to a private school. I sensed that she might have more to say later. She said that she had a stomachache and excused herself. She does well in math, and so when I ascertained that she had received A-minus in topology yet in all honesty (her own) could not say what topology was, I decided topology was something you practiced more than thought about. I checked the dictionary and had something to think about then. What holds constant through the April showers and cloudy nights, through changes, through turnings, twistings, and stretchings. Rubber-sheet geometry, her math book says.

I kissed Liz goodnight, waiting. I went to bed early, so I must have been tired.

Somewhere in my sleep a phone began and began and began to ring. I strove to answer it and woke up on my feet hearing, “Liz! Liz! Liz!” and knew the words meant How could you! and heard them outside me like a set of real objects self-possessed; then, with the next words, I knew the speaker deep in the dark apartment was my daughter now crying, “I didn’t! I didn’t! I didn’t!”

The phone was still ringing in my head. My back was cold.

“It’s OK, Liz,” I said firmly and half asleep. “It’s OK. I’m here.” This, I was glad to feel, was true.

But then, as if I had been running around doing things in the apartment, I knew what I’d stepped on back in the bedroom; for I heard another voice back there behind me say, “What?” and I turned around hearing again but quieter and muddled and now behind me the prior voice of Liz: “I didn’t.”

I went back to bed, remembering a warm place near my wife’s hip. I left her shoe where she had left it when she had come home. She was asleep, whatever she said.

Morality is a composed state of mind, said Chuck, the black philosopher, which seemed reassuring that health-club party-day of the forty-third-floor sunset. But now it seemed wrong, its wrongness reassuring.

Our organist friend put us on the Unitarian Universalist mailing list and the church’s weekly newsletter came and I found in it under the headline “Ultimate Questions,” this supposedly West African saying:

But rather than quote the rest, I’ll paraphrase it according to my own eclectic faith: “Complete it yourself.”