See You in Paradise Page 3

  “I don’t want parents,” Nate tells Edward. “I’m fine without them. Pretty soon I’ll get out of high school and I’ll take the money they give me at the home and buy a bus ticket.”

  The speech sounds rehearsed. “Where to?” Edward says.

  “Vegas.”

  “What’s there?”

  “Everything, man. Girls. Money. I want to deal poker. You ever seen those guys? They’re smooth.”

  “I agree.”

  Nate looks off across the park, squinting at the bright hills and water. It would be a piece of cake to live with this kid, Edward thinks. He’d be like a roommate. Because Edward doesn’t want a baby anymore, really, the same way he doesn’t want a sport-utility vehicle or a handheld computer. All the years of fertility brochures and pregnancy books, all the babies who pitch for mutual funds and radial tires and insurance policies and of course diapers and powders and creams: all of it has driven Edward to conclude that babies are a brand name, they are a product. They are conventional. They are what other people want you to have. To hell with them, with their big round heads and skinny asses and button noses. He’ll take this: this guy.

  All he has to do is find Al and introduce her to the kid. He scans the crowd. There she is, standing in the sunlight with a skinny sort of ersatz Texan and his wife. He stands up and brushes his butt off.

  “Sit tight, Nate,” he says.

  “Whatever.”

  But as he draws closer to Alison and the Texans, he realizes it isn’t going to work this way. In fact, it isn’t going to work at all. That’s because a child is there, among the three of them, a child of about five with the long, asking-for-it face of a chronic sinus sufferer. The child is holding a busted wiffle ball bat, whitened and creased in the middle, where it’s been pounded against a tree. When Alison turns, her eyes are chaotically glittering, as if full of broken glass. She’s in love.

  Dammit, things ought to be simple. Nate fades away behind him like a Coke can tossed out a car window.

  “Hi!” he says to the four of them and presses his palm against Alison’s humid back. Nobody says anything except the doomed child.

  “Hello.”

  Edward thinks he should probably introduce himself to the adults, but he has a feeling he’s not going to like them. He bends over and says, “Who’s in charge here? You, sir?”

  The child says, “No, Mrs. Scott is,” and points across the park to the tall woman, the one who looked like she might fall over. Great. Great Scott! Perfect! The boy is cowering, so Edward stifles his laugh. Raymond is his name. It’s markered on his name tag in that new kind of printing they teach now, with little curlicues after all the letters, so that the children will find it easier to connect them someday, when cursive is taught.

  Edward feels a willful hand on his shoulder. He allows it to pull him up into a standing position.

  “Harlan Breece,” says the Texan, “Linda Breece.” Edward shakes the man’s hand and gives Linda a little bow. Then Harlan Breece shakes Alison’s hand, too. Edward tries goofily to shake Alison’s hand, but she rejects him with a nervous smile. Everyone, actually, is smiling. Meanwhile Harlan is sizing them up, and after a moment he turns back to the boy, his face confident and calm. Edward sees that Harlan has deemed them not worth worrying about. His wife, seeing this too, relaxes, and a blush blooms briefly. Edward understands that a competition has begun. He turns to Alison.

  “You ought to get into the shade,” he says, for she is deep red and illuminated by sweat.

  “I’m fine,” she tells him brightly. “Raymond likes baseball. His favorite player is … who is it?”

  “Sammy Sosa,” says Raymond.

  “Son,” says Harlan Breece, “you ever been to a real baseball game?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, somebody ought to do something about that.”

  “I want him,” Alison says. They are in the car with the windows shut tight, the AC pumping hot air into their faces. The children are climbing into a bus while someone with a clipboard checks off their names. The event is over. The two couples talked to the boy Raymond for a good twenty minutes, not moving an inch, despite the blazing sun: a contest for which the heat-toving Breeces (genuine Texans, as it happens) were genetically predisposed. The Breeces revealed that they lived on the lake, that Harlan was a judge. They’d acquired a child once before, a foster child, as Linda had suffered a “female problem” that left her unable to conceive. The boy had gone back home after a year. The implication was that the separation had crushed poor Linda, and indeed, Linda looked the part, with her moist eyes and weak chin, and the heavy upper arms Alison tends to associate with deep sadness. The Breeces had sold their ranch to a developer and moved here, of all places, to the Finger Lakes.

  All of this was spoken in code, of course, with occasional frank asides to Edward and Alison, whenever a nugget of information seemed like it might break their spirit. Judge. Money. Experience with foster children.

  The teenager is getting on the bus now, the one Edward had been talking to. Alison says, “You could have been more helpful. Why were you talking to that young man?”

  Edward’s gaze follows the teen until he disappears. “Nate. I don’t know. Nobody else was going to talk to him.”

  Though she knows it annoys him, she can’t help sighing. Edward roots for the underdog. He buys cheap shirts from sale racks and votes for local crackpots every November. It’s one of the things that, when she loves him, she really loves, and when she is angry at him, she finds intolerable. He is intolerable now, but already her intolerance is on the wane. She can’t seem to get worked up about anything these days. It’s a feature of their marriage: as sexual passion has faded, so has pride, so has resentment. Sometimes she feels she may vanish completely into an undifferentiated fog of vague love.

  She isn’t a crier—she prides herself on this—but she begins to cry. Edward pats her leg. The air is cooling down. In fact, it is suddenly ice cold. A chill runs through her. The tears shut off. Edward shuts off the AC.

  “I’m thinking of a word,” he says.

  “Oh, God, not right now.”

  “No, let’s do it. You know you wanna.”

  “I don’t!” But she can’t resist the game. They’ve played it on every road trip they’ve ever taken. They’ve played it naked. They’ve played it in elevators and on the Great Wall of China. She wipes her face, hangs her head, whispers, “Fallopian.”

  “After.”

  “Infertility.”

  He snorts. “Before!”

  “Uh, gum?”

  “Close, in a way. After.”

  “Itchy,” she says, scratching her legs.

  “Itchy comes after infertility.”

  “Edward, I just don’t feel like doing this right now.”

  “It’s between infertility and gum,” he says quietly. “Something delicious.”

  “Hot dogs. Hominy?”

  “Perfect for a day like this. A sweet, refreshing treat.”

  She turns to him. He is holding an invisible ice-cream cone and licking it lasciviously, his eyebrows rising and falling, his eyes rolling back in his head with simulated pleasure. He has not yet noticed the approach of Harlan Breece, who is walking bent over with his hands on his khakied knees, squinting in Edward’s window.

  Edward sees the shadow of the massive hat falling across the dash before he hears the tap on the window, not a tap actually but a small thud, as Breece is using his fingertip, not his fingernail. In fact, Edward notes as he rolls the window down, Breece has barely got any fingernails at all. They are as irregular and receding as his hairline. He counts this as a victory and is able to meet the Texan with a broad and truly genuine smile. A ten-gallon smile, he thinks, that’s how we do it in Upstate New York! He realizes he is still holding the invisible ice-cream cone and releases it. Invisible ice cream splatters his thighs.

  “Harlan, hello!”

  “Hi there, Alison dear,” Breece drawls, glancing past Edward
, “and I’m ashamed to admit I’ve forgotten your name.” Breece grimaces calmly at him.

  “Edward. ‘Big Ed,’ if you like.”

  “You’ll accept my apologies then, Ed, and hear me out. I’m pleased to tell you that Linda finds you both mighty charming, and she’s asked me to extend an invitation to dinner up at our little lakeside cottage. We still got a little water left in the lake, in spite of this heat of yours.”

  We got a little water! Heat of yours? Edward loves it, an honest-to-God member of the privileged class, whose wife finds him and his wife mighty charming. Without turning to Alison, Edward says, “Well, we’re real sorry about our heat, but we’d love to come take a gander at your water.”

  “Splendid,” says Harlan Breece, and angles his brush-covered panhandle of an arm in through the window. Edward shakes the hand at the end of it. “When’s good for you?”

  “Just about anytime,” Edward says as the first bad vibes reach him from Alison’s side of the car. “It isn’t like we need to get a sitter.”

  “Tomorrow? Eight?”

  “Of course, sure.”

  The panhandle withdraws and returns, this time bearing a white slip of paper with a map printed on it. It dawns on Edward that Breece just happened to have this map on him, and probably has several more. You never know when you’re going to need to invite somebody up to the shack for some pig’s feet and moonshine. Edward accepts the map and gives it a game squint, then nods at Harlan as he rolls the window back up, his own pumping arm looking very working class, vulgarly utilitarian, like an oil derrick.

  When the window is shut tight, he turns to Alison. “That oughta be fun.”

  “You will be alone,” she says.

  But he isn’t alone when, the following night, they get into the car and point themselves north along the scenic Lake Ridge Highway. She meant it when she said it, but really, she would never abandon him. Of course the Breeces didn’t find them charming, no doubt they found them odious. But tonight, none of it bothers her, because she knows that they, she and Edward, are going to win. Alison phoned up the agency first thing this morning from her desk at Spitznagel & Pinch Real Estate and told the girl that they wanted to “meet with the little boy Raymond.” Take a meeting, she restrained herself from saying. And the girl said, “Oh, he is a cutie, isn’t he, it’s amazing nobody’s whisked him home yet.”

  Nobody’s whisked him home. Hanging up the phone, she pictured herself doing the whisking, ushering little Raymond into their car, into their house. The Breeces hadn’t got him yet. During her lunch hour, she stopped at the library and learned that childless couples in their thirties are more likely to adopt successfully than those in their fifties, and she felt a cautious optimism. Thirties: that’s us!

  Or so thinks Alison. Edward, however, at thirty-seven, doesn’t see himself as being in his “thirties.” If pressed he would probably say he’s “around twenty-five.” That was his age when he met Alison, the age when he hung up his bong and shaved his beard. He regards marriage as a kind of deep freeze that perfectly preserves the version of Ed—Version 3.0, following Innocence (1.0), The End of Innocence (1.1), and College (2.0)—that got married. Sure, he’s noticed a few little changes, the usual ones: the hair loss, the out-of-breath, the getting-fat. But these are minor setbacks, if they’re setbacks at all. When he was a kid he’d get these hard fleshy growths on his fingertips, tiny numb extinct volcanoes, which lasted a good six months and went away on their own. That’s how it is with these things.

  But this morning, when he was sitting in the breakfast nook, looking out at the suburban street and the elementary school and the cafeteria workers ineptly parallel parking at the curb, he suddenly found it difficult to see. He didn’t know what it was at first, a darkening, a fluttering, and for a moment he thought he was having a heart attack. Just for a moment! And thinking he was having a heart attack made his heart stand briefly, horrifyingly still, so that he seemed to be having another one. Then his focus shifted, and he saw that the bird feeder hanging from the eaves, suspended in the center of the window, was bristling with nuthatches. There had to have been twenty, flapping madly about the six seed-choked holes, and Edward laughed and instantly relaxed. Not a heart attack! Nuthatches!

  They’ve got the dome light on and Alison is trying to read the map. “There’s supposed to be a secondhand clothing place … and then a bridge … wait, two bridges, take the first left after the second bridge, not the left after the first … and then go 2.3 miles …” The map is absurdly, counterproductively detailed, so that if they miss a single landmark they’ll be eating roasted possum off the end of a stick in the woods tonight. Still, somehow, they manage to find the place. The Breeces’ driveway is a couple of ruts that snake through a half-reclaimed farm field and plunge into an untrimmed copse of box elders. And beyond the treeline: Taliesin. Or something like that. Massive, slabbed, lit like a pumpkin; you can see everything inside—the furniture and art and a gigantic fireplace—and right through the back windows onto the lake and the blazing sunset reflected there. Alison suppresses a wave of hatred for the rival real-estate agency that sold it: she could have bought a baby on the black market with that commission.

  They park in a gravel lot the size of a tennis court. Theirs is the only car. It is Linda who comes to the door, looking awfully tall without Harlan. She leads them inside.

  Harlan’s in front of the fire (as they’ve got the AC pumping pretty hard in here) with a drink in his hand. A mesquite smell fills the room. “Harlan, dear,” his wife calls out, and he theatrically snaps to attention and a grin spreads across his face, a wide face for such a thin guy. Edward notes a bear rug. Wow!

  “Welcome, welcome!” says Harlan. He sets down the drink on a coffee table made of petrified wood and throws his arms wide.

  “Howdy, pardner,” Edward says, and imagines he sees a flicker of irritation on the judge’s face. They shake hands. This time Harlan uses his free hand to seize Edward’s forearm, so Edward does the same. For a moment the two men are locked in a Boy Scout Death Grip. It is Harlan who lets go. Edward notices Linda and Alison attempting to greet one another. Al is a handshaker, and he just bets Linda is a kisser. The two stare nodding at one another from a distance of several feet.

  “What’s your poison, Ed?”

  “Does hizzoner drink tequila?” Edward says impulsively.

  “Hell yes.”

  Linda is talking about their failed foster-child experiment. Alison listens with alarm. It is a sermon, really, a testimonial, delivered with the strained alacrity of an introductory economics lecture. There is no room for question or comment.

  “He was the sweetest little boy, a little black boy,” she says. “His momma was hooked on the drugs, and he never had no daddy to speak of. His daddy wasn’t ever around—well, I suppose it could have been anyone. His momma went to prison because of picking up drugs at somebody’s house with the little boy in the back seat. And well, Harlan and I saw him and we thought, He’s the one. He had the sweetest kinky hair and his skin was so smooth and dark. Well.

  “We brought him back to the ranch and gave him all the advantages, don’t you know. He had a nanny of his own kind who was just as sweet as a biscuit, and we gave him riding lessons and Harlan took him out on the little golf course we used to have, just four holes. This was in the days before black boys played golf. And he went to a wonderful little school we found for him outside of Dallas, with children from all different races, they had the Mexicans and the Chinese and the Indians and all that. Well, we thought it would be just perfect. Except he had some trouble with reading, and they found out there was something wrong with his eyes, and also his ears, which explained why he didn’t seem to be listening to what we were saying to him sometimes. If you ask me, it was the drugs, the drugs his momma took when he was in her belly. And then poor Angeline, that’s the colored girl who was his nanny, she had to go back to Trinidad to take care of her momma, and the next one we got was a Mexican, name of Armada
—”

  “Amara,” Harlan says, staring hard into his tequila. Alison can’t help but notice that Edward’s glass is empty and that his eyes are casting about for the bottle. There it is, right in front of Harlan. She watches as Edward leans right past him and grabs it around the neck.

  “Of course,” Linda goes on. It occurs to Alison that the Breeces cannot possibly have any friends here. She wonders why they left Texas at all, how Harlan managed to get appointed a judge in Lake County. Edward keeps drinking. She nudges him to let him know that she considers this unwise, and Harlan, raising his eyebrows in a flirtatious manner, seems to notice.

  When the story peters out, they eat. It is DIY, black-bean-and-chicken fajitas. The salsa is out of a jar, a local store brand. The tortillas are cold and clammy and the chicken has had every last drop of moisture cooked out of it. It is a cursory dinner, clearly not the intended focus of the evening. Alison begins to wonder, with some concern, what the real focus is.

  After dinner they drink some more, then Harlan gets up to take the plates to the kitchen. “A little thing I like to do for Linda,” he explains. “Be a man, Ed, give me a hand here.”

  The two leave the room, balancing the plates in their arms. Edward is weaving dangerously. His shoulder bumps the kitchen doorway and Alison winces. She remembers the booze-soaked dinner parties they used to have, the giant vats of food, the shouted conversations during which not enough could ever seem to be said. And later, when the guests had gone, love. Their grad-student pals, with their retro eyeglasses and liter bottles of red wine, where are they now? Los Angeles, Costa Rica, Alaska. She and Edward were so smug about staying: real people stay put, they told themselves. And here they are, right where they wanted to be.

  She turns back to Linda and has to stifle a gasp. The older woman has come to life: hands on her knees, she leans forward as if to impart a powerful secret. Her eyes glow orange in the firelight, her skin is flushed—and how did her neck get to be so long and muscled? She looks like … a cheetah.