Authors: Sarah Bilston
I could hear the disapproval flowing down the line as soon as I answered the phone; I knew the speech that was forming in her mind as I sketched our days in Connecticut. “My husband never had to change a single diaper,” Lucille would say, if she could. “
I
took care of the family so
he
could take care of his career. And what has he got now? A world-class reputation. What have I got? More Tif
fany jewelry than my bony neck can possibly support, and the self-satisfaction of a woman who knows she’s done everything that could possibly be expected of her.”
She restrained herself, however, and got straight to the point: “I have good news.” (I’d managed quite successfully in the past to hint that access to her grandson depended on a good relationship between the two of us. And a good relationship depended on her keeping her views about my domestic arrangements to herself.) “
Very
good news. Tom will be delighted. A friend of his father’s has a wonderful job opportunity, very solid income, excellent prospects. For when he leaves Crimpson, I mean. It would mean moving to DC, but…”
“Thanks, Lucille,” I cut in brightly, “thanks a lot, but I don’t think Tom will be interested. He doesn’t like Washington at all.”
Lucille tsk’d. “I know you think you know everything about Tom, Q,” she returned icily, “but I should perhaps mention that I’ve known him longer than you. And if I know anything about my son, it’s that he needs
professional challenges.
This job of Peter’s will get him in the eye of people in the administration. It could open up real
political opportunities!
Maybe a future on Capitol Hill! I think you should support and encourage him, Quinn dear. I think—”
“Lucille, Tom doesn’t have the remotest interest in a political career, as you well know, and frankly
I
think,” I began, but at that moment Tom himself appeared in the doorway. He looked over at me quizzically, then—when I mouthed “your mom” unwillingly at him—reached out and almost snatched the phone from my hand. “Oh, hi, it’s you,” he said, glaring; I flushed. He turned his back as he sat down and, as I let myself out of the room, I could hear him embarking on conciliatory efforts. “No, that’s not what Q
meant
,” he assured her. “What she meant to say, I’m sure, is…”
I sat and stewed downstairs, snuggling Samuel while mov
ing plates pointlessly around the kitchen, until Tom reappeared. “Q, Mom was just trying to help,” he began irritably. “She’s obviously concerned about me, which is reasonable under the circumstances.”
“Tom, she’s not just worried, she’s got fantasies of having a senator son, and she wants me to be a quiet lady in pearls who stares adoringly up at you while you kiss babies,” I returned sourly. My exhausted brain seemed to be trying to sneak out my ears. “She thinks I emasculate you.”
“She’s just from a different generation. She was a good mom and she’s a good wife. I can’t understand you sometimes,” he went on boldly, back stiff and poker-straight. “Let’s face it, she’s quite right that I need a—well, some kind of a career plan.”
“You should have heard her on the phone just now, Tom! I knew what she was thinking to herself, what she says to all her posh lady friends…”
Tom was looking at me with an unreadable expression on his face. “Q, she told me what you talked about, and she’s right. I need a new challenge. And I don’t like changing diapers,” he added abruptly, flopping down on a chair. “I’m bored. I don’t like sitting around here all day. Samuel doesn’t
do
anything yet, except cry and need changing. Whenever I bathe him I half-drown him, and whenever I dress him I snap his fingers backward or get the poor kid’s skin stuck in those clippie things. It’s a nightmare. I’d rather be at work, frankly.”
I gazed. “Do you think
I’m
enjoying this? Do you think I’m having fun?”
“I don’t know what you’re feeling, to be honest,” he snapped. “You’re a mystery. You don’t seem particularly happy when you’re with Samuel, no. But every time I suggest going out, or leaving him with Jeanie, you act like I’ve hit you. ‘I can’t leave my son,’ you say, and ‘He’ll cry without me.’ And sometimes: ‘He’ll think we’ve aban
doned him.’ Honestly, Q, if I hadn’t seen the surgeon cut the umbilical cord, I’d think you two were still attached.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I scoffed, but there was enough truth in it that I agreed, eventually, to go out with Tom for dinner the next evening, before Paul arrived. Jeanie could babysit. It would be good for us, I knew; we’d hardly had a moment to ourselves since Samuel was born—so silly, when we had Jeanie to help look after him. But some deep, instinctual part of me worried that Jeanie might snap, that only a mother could withstand the terrible tearing, tortured sound of his screams. “That’s ridiculous,” my sister asserted, her long, honest, pretty face genuinely horrified when at last I managed to feel out this thought. “I won’t say it’ll be easy, being alone with Samuel if he gets into one of his—y’know, fits, but if things get too awful I’ll put him in his bed, take a deep breath, and phone you. All right?”
And that, it seemed, was the best we could do. “Besides, Q, you’re going to have to get used to it—leaving him, I mean,” Tom pointed out, catching my hands. “After all, in just three weeks’ time, you’ll be leaving him with somebody else
all day.
”
I smiled brightly, nodded, and pushed his words into a corner in the back of a box in the very farthest recesses of my mind.
Jeanie
A
t long last they went (“Are you sure—do you think you can—what about if we—”).
Paul Dupont was due to arrive approximately five hours later, between midnight and two a.m. Since there were only two rooms upstairs, I’d had to move my belongings out of the enormous double bedroom I’d been sleeping in so far into a wardrobe off the living room stuffed with a jumble of graying mops, rags, and a Hoover. I remade the bed for him (with matching sheets) then folded out the green sofa and made it up for me, working very hard not to mind the loss of my lovely room. Then I put Samuel on the floor beside me in his bassinet; he was blessedly asleep.
It was quiet as a church in the house; a striking relief from the madness of the day. Q was winding everybody up and radiating stress; it was crackling like electricity in the air. Thank goodness she’s gone out, I thought to myself, pouring out a very large glass of wine. Then I pattered upstairs to the bathroom with it and filled up the tub to the brim, relaxing with a sigh into the water. I left the baby monitor out in the hallway. It was
so
lovely to be alone for a change!
N
ow frankly, I blame the glass of wine. Or, no, maybe it was the order of things; I should have had the bath first and
then
the wine. As it was, with a heavy dose of Chardonnay thickening my brain, it seemed a perfectly good idea to leave my clothes off after the bath and stretch languorously along the sofa, hair loose, with magazines and a simple but rather fabulous meal of fresh fish, olives, bread, and cheese. Samuel was still sleeping.
I looked up at half past eight, conscious of a sudden change in the air temperature, to find the front door open and a tall man in a suit staring wide-eyed at my utterly, entirely, inarguably naked bottom. I did what I suspect any woman would do, yelped and started violently, at which point I unfortunately knocked my plate off the sofa-bed and on top of Samuel’s bassinet. Waking with a start, he began to scream as if his head had been bashed in, and I was in the unfortunate position of deciding whether to rush off the bed and pick him up, thereby giving the strange man an even better look at my naked body, or to cover myself with a sheet, which would have the unfortunate appearance of heartlessness and which might leave Samuel in a state of injury for longer than strictly necessary. My better self came to the surface and I hurled myself off the green sofa-bed, shouting “look away, you git!” before scooping Samuel up; he—thank God—was entirely unmarked. However, he continued to scream with such passion and intensity that, in something of a panic, I frantically pulled his eyelids apart with my thumb and forefinger, trying to remember if his pupils should be
large or small
after a blow to the head. At which point the very superior man staring, with fascinated brown eyes, at my bosom looked up and said, for Christ’s sake, naked lady, why are you torturing that poor child? Summoning up a haughtiness I didn’t know I possessed, I drew myself up as tall as I could and (struggling to cover myself with my right hand while clasping Samuel against my breast with my left) asked him who
he
was and what he was doing in
our
house?
The supercilious man casually dropped a black duffel on the floor, pulled his flamboyant red-and-gold tie loose, then said that since it was his house he supposed he could come into it whenever he liked.
Fair point, I suppose. It suddenly struck me that my fig leaf (so to speak) was rooting around at my breasts, trying to suck milk out of my nipples. The lack of milk in the expected place was clearly beginning to bother Samuel, and his cries redoubled in intensity; I held him away from my body, from my resolutely unmaternal breasts, and he began to cry even harder. As embarrassing moments go, this was probably the most memorable one of my life. There was that time with my ex Theo when the next-door neighbor called the police because he heard—no, no, this one takes the biscuit.
After a few mortifying seconds, the horrible man with cheekbones (Paul, I suppose I should call him) remarked calmly, over the din of Samuel’s screams, that he didn’t know Tom was hosting a colony of naturists, but that I should feel completely free to pursue my interests in his house in future.
I threw him a withering gaze (although there wasn’t any marked withering on his part, I have to say. If anything, I’d say his lips twitched). “Please turn your back,” I told him coldly. “I’ll put on some clothes and then I can deal with this poor child.”
“Well, all right then,” he returned with equal coolness. “I will, but frankly I think I’ve seen what there is to see.”
It was starting to feel like something out of a bad farce—or, worse, a porn movie, according to whose script I should suddenly appear, for no clear reason, to be overwhelmed by the need to drop to my knees and—well, you get the point. Obviously I wasn’t anything of the sort, although there was a look in his eye that suggested he might be familiar with the script, and ever so slightly wondering if the fantasy of a dark moment was about to be realized. Pah. I waved Samuel in front of his face to remind him of the baby’s presence, since I have long observed that infants are a reliable passion-
killer. It might have been the waving, or it might have been Samuel’s hysterical efforts on my behalf, but either way Paul silently handed me my pajamas, which were mixed up with a damp towel on an armchair, then turned his dark head and presented his back. I put the hysterical Samuel down in his bassinet for two seconds, hastily pulled on the pajamas, then began the long, long business of calming him down.
When, eventually, he had hiccoughed and burped himself into a state of relative calm, I looked up to find that Tom’s ghastly friend had vanished. Thank God, I thought to myself, relieved; with any luck he’s gone to bed. Or, even better, gone out. To kiss his boat good-night, or whatever it is rich people like him do. I was trying cautiously to loop my hair out of my eyes without waking Samuel when I heard the sound of voices in the kitchen: Q and Tom were back.
Q rushed into the sitting room in a vast, clucky panic. “Samuel—is he okay? Jeanie? How did you get on?” she asked hurriedly, peering down at the moist bundle in my arms.
I conjured up my most confident smile. “He was—um, ah—fine,” I told her, passing the baby off as gently as possible. “He slept a bit, cried a bit, you know, the usual stuff, nothing to worry about.”
“Really?” she asked, relief lightening her eyes as she looked down at the baby, “he was okay?”
“Of course—” I began, but then I stopped because the horrible man suddenly appeared in the hallway, bowing his head slightly to fit through the door. Q and Tom turned in surprise at the sound of his footfall.
“Paul!”
cried Tom. “We didn’t expect you for hours!”
Paul, who had now changed out of his work clothes and into a pair of black jogging pants and a black T-shirt, strode forward and shook hands with Tom and Q. “I met my deadline early, so I got a head start on the Friday-night traffic leaving Manhattan,” he explained sweetly, scratching at his emerging stubble. “I arrived to find your friend—oh, sister-in-law, I see—tending a peacefully sleeping kid,” he went on calmly. “Quiet as a mouse.”
Q beamed at me, Tom threw me a look of purest gratitude. Behind their backs, Paul looked over at me, brown eyes alight with amusement, and grinned a slow, fiendish grin.
No embarrassment at his earlier behavior, my God! He should clearly have backed out of the room as soon as he saw me in my buck nakedness, then kicked over a few buckets before clunking up the front steps, swearing loudly. He should have sworn blind, if asked, that he didn’t see a
thing.
Abject dishonesty was the only honorable course available to him. What an awful man! Of course it made me miss Dave even
more.
Q
T
om and I were on our very best behavior the night of our first post-Samuel date. We avoided the topic of parents entirely, concentrating on less contentious subjects: holidays of the past, for instance, and Samuel’s undoubted superiority to all other children. We licked butter from oysters and gorged ourselves on hot, plump fries while gazing across the expanse of the Sound, which glittered like a pale opal in the fuchsia lights of the setting sun. We drank cold white Chilean wine, purchased from Sam’s Package Store, in plastic water cups until the sea seemed somehow to become
a part of my head. We swayed home, warm and together, Tom and Q, a couple again.