LYLE WAS SITTING IN an Adirondack chair in the shade. Robert was lying on the grass near him, in the sun, reading—or leafing through—a magazine. John was in the garden.
The back door opened and Marian appeared on the steps. She had gone inside to put Roland down for his nap. She walked across the lawn toward her guests, clutching some things in her hands.
“Come sit with us,” said Lyle.
“No,” she said, displaying what she held: the paint set Lyle had brought for Roland, and a pad, and a tumbler full of water. “I’m going to paint a while. I want to try to do a sketch of the house from down near the river.”
“Do you want us to move?” asked Lyle.
“Of course not,” said Marian. “I’ll paint you in.”
“Those aren’t very good paints,” said Lyle.
“Then they’ll suit me,” said Marian. “Are you enjoying the sun, Robert?”
“Yes,” said Robert. “It’s great.”
“Good,” she said. She dragged another chair down the lawn a ways and positioned it facing toward the house. Her distance from Lyle and Robert suggested, rather than guaranteed, their privacy.
She began painting, and listened to them talk, although she could not make out what they were saying. But after a while they began to speak more loudly. “Take you, for instance,” she heard Robert say to Lyle. “You look better now than you did at thirty.”
“Am better-looking,” corrected Lyle. “But how do you know? You didn’t know me when I was thirty.”
“Marian showed me a picture,” said Robert. “Of you and Tony in Egypt.”
“Oh,” said Lyle, “did she?”
Marian glanced up and found that Lyle was looking over at her. He made a face. “How’s the painting?” he called. Robert turned his head.
Marian looked at her painting. It was not a success: the colors in the tiny compact were all wrong. They were intense and synthetic, and her attempts to mix them on the wet paper to suggest the sun-stunned colors around her had only muddied them. “It’s a mess,” she said. And then, as if such a judgment precluded continuation, she ripped the thick damp page from the pad and crumpled it up. She tossed it onto the lawn between them, where it unfurled itself slightly.
“I wanted to see it,” said Lyle.
“I’ll do another,” Marian said. “I’ll do one of you two.” She turned her chair and in doing so upset the water goblet. “That was careless,” she said.
“I’ll fill it up,” said Robert. He stood and crossed the lawn.
She handed him the glass. “Thank you,” she said. She expected him to walk up to the spigot beside the back stoop, but instead he walked toward the river. Of course, she thought, Robert’s a stranger here: he doesn’t know where the spigot is. She knew this did not make him inferior in any way but she had a strange urge to think so. Stop it, she told herself. She watched him squat on a rock at the river’s edge, dip the glass, and return. The river water was much clearer than she had imagined it would be. It was clear a glass at a time; only all together, flowing, was it opaque.
“Now go lie down,” she said, “and pretend I’m not here.”
Robert resumed his position, but Lyle had stood up.
“Sit down,” said Marian. “I want to paint you.”
Lyle frowned at her, and shook his head, and she understood that he did not wish to be painted. Was he angry with her for showing Robert the photograph? If he was, it was silly. She had merely pointed out something on the wall of her house.
“I feel in desperate need of a nap,” Lyle said, and began walking quickly up the lawn, as if his need were indeed desperate, and he might collapse before he reached his bed. Marian and Robert watched him enter the house.
“I don’t know how he can be tired,” said Robert. “We’ve just lay about all afternoon.”
Lain
about, Marian wanted to say, but instead she said, “Sometimes indolence can be exhausting.” She got up and sat down in Lyle’s vacant chair. She felt she should offer to paint Robert, but she didn’t really want to. His back, which had appeared smooth
and brown from a distance, was actually, she now realized, pitted with acne scars.
“I thought Lyle brought those for Roland,” Robert said, nodding at the paints.
“Oh, he did,” said Marian, “but Roland is a baby. Lyle is a loving, but impractical, godfather.”
“Lyle said he wanted Roland to be an artist. That’s why he bought the paints.”
“If only it were that easy,” said Marian. “Or rather, thank God it’s not.”
“What do you want him to be?”
Marian wanted Roland to be alive the next morning. She avoided the question by asking, “Do you like children?”
Robert flipped a few pages of the magazine. “Yes,” he said. “I like their hands. And feet.”
Marian found this answer unnerving. It was as if she had asked him what part of the chicken he preferred. She looked away for a moment, trying to think of an appropriate response. None came to mind. “How old are you?” she asked.
“Twenty-four,” said Robert. He looked at her. “I was twenty-four in June. How old are you?”
“I’m forty,” said Marian. She looked at her hands for a moment, as if they might belie her. Then she patted her palms against the broad arms of her chair. “Well,” she said, “I better check on Roland.”
“Of course,” said Robert, but in a way that let Marian know he knew she wanted to be away from him.
I did just put Roland down, Marian thought: I can’t leave now. “We’re so happy you’re here,” she said. She folded her hands in her lap.
“So am I,” said Robert.
“And we’re happy to see you with Lyle,” said Marian. Robert did not respond.
“What are you doing this summer?” Marian tried. “Besides painting, I mean.”
“I have a job. As a waiter, in an Indian restaurant.”
“Oh,” said Marian. “Are you Indian?”
“My father is Indian. He lives in Delhi.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a counterfeiter,” said Robert.
“Oh,” said Marian. “What does he counterfeit?”
“Different things that will make a lot of money. Mostly jeans, and sneakers.”
“And your mother?” asked Marian.
“She’s dead,” said Robert. “She died when I was young.”
“That’s very sad,” said Marian. “I’m so sorry. Was she American?”
“Yes,” said Robert. “She was.”
“How long have you been living over here?”
“About ten years,” said Robert.
“Do you go back? Do you see your father often?”
Robert thought for a moment, as if this question required contemplation. “No,” he said. “I haven’t seen him in a while. I don’t think he likes how I’ve turned out.”
“Oh,” said Marian, “you mean that you’re an artist?”
“No,” said Robert. “I meant he doesn’t like that I’m gay.”
“What a shame,” said Marian.
“Would you be happy if Roland was gay?”
“Happy? Well, yes, I suppose. If he was happy.”
“But you wouldn’t be happy first? You’d wait for him to be happy, and then be happy?”
“Actually, to tell you the truth,” said Marian, “this isn’t
something I’ve given any thought to. Roland is barely a year old. It seems a bit premature.”
“Of course,” said Robert. And then, after a moment, he added, “I’m sorry.”
“There’s no need to apologize,” said Marian. She thought: He’s not a bad person. I just don’t like him. A bee alit on the lip of her glass of river water, and they both observed it. She waved it away. “I better go check on him,” she said. She stood up. She felt defeated. “We won’t be eating until about eight, so if you get hungry before then please help yourself to anything you can find. There’s loads of fruit in the kitchen.”
“Thank you,” said Robert.
Marian paused for a moment, as if there were something else to be said, and then walked up toward the house. As she entered the kitchen, she heard the piano. She walked into the library and stood at the door.
Lyle was slowly and quietly picking his way through some Bach, peering closely at the music. He stopped and said, “I’m terribly out of practice.”
“It sounded good to me,” said Marian.
“I’m sorry about rushing in here like that,” said Lyle. “I just—” He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He played a few more notes, and then looked up. “Where’s Robert?”
“He’s still outside,” said Marian.
“Alone?” asked Lyle.
“Yes,” said Marian. “I came in to check on Roland.”
“I haven’t heard him,” said Lyle. “I’ve been playing very quietly.”
“Oh, don’t worry about waking him. He’s a good sleeper.”
“Can we play something together, then?”
Marian smiled. “O.K.,” she said. “Get up, and let’s see what we have. I think it’s all still in here.”
Lyle stood up and she opened the bench and looked through the music. “What about the Hungarian Dances?” she asked.
“I’ll murder it,” said Lyle, “but let’s give it a try.”
They sat together on the bench, and Marian put the music on the stand. “We actually had this mastered,” she said. “Remember?”
“Yes, but that was years ago.”
“Only two,” she said. “Let’s see how much we’ve forgotten.”
“Let me just look at it for a second,” said Lyle. “I don’t have my glasses, remember. That will be my excuse.”
“Ready?” asked Marian, after a moment.
“Yes,” said Lyle, “I suppose. Let’s take it slowly.”
Marian placed her hands on the keys beside Lyle’s. She nodded her head, and they began to play. They did not do badly, and got quite far before Marian suddenly stopped. “Wait a second,” she said. She listened. “I think that’s Roland. Do you hear him?”
Lyle listened. “No,” he said.
Marian stood up. “I’d better check. Come up with me.”
He followed her upstairs and down the hall. Roland stood in his crib, but he wasn’t crying. He was staring straight ahead of him, with a quizzical expression on his face.
“There you are,” said Marian. “Look who’s come to see you. Uncle Lyle.” She picked him up.
“It looks like he could climb right out of there,” said Lyle.
“He hasn’t tried it yet,” said Marian. “But I don’t think it will be long. Are you stinky, darling? Yes, I think you are. Does Uncle Lyle want to change your diaper? Or should Mommy?”
“There are limits to Uncle Lyle’s devotion,” said Lyle.
Marian laughed, and kissed Roland’s damp temple. “He’s a bit
warm,” she said to Lyle. “Would you take that facecloth and run it under some cool water? I’ll change him.”
“Yes,” said Lyle. He took the facecloth across the hall into the bathroom. It was a baby-sized facecloth, with yellow ducks, no bigger than his hand. He ran it under the tap and wrung it out, then moistened it again. Tony had worn diapers, his last days, in this house. Lyle had thought that changing Tony’s diapers would be like changing a baby’s diapers, but it had not been. It had been like changing a grown man’s diapers. It might have been better if Tony’s illness had made him a baby but it had not. He had never stopped being himself. Lyle realized he was pressing the damp cloth to his own face. He rinsed it out again and crossed the hall. Marian was sitting in the rocking chair nursing Roland. “Here,” he said, handing her the cloth.
“Thanks,” she said. She took the cloth and held it. “Sit down,” she said, nodding at an easy chair covered with neat piles of laundry. “You can put that stuff on the dresser.”
Lyle moved the folded clothes and sat in the chair. They were silent a moment, listening to the clutch and unclutch of Roland’s mouth, and then Marian said, “So. What’s going on?”
“What do you mean?” asked Lyle.
“The other day, on the phone, you said you had lots to tell me. I suppose now you were referring to Robert.” She smoothed Roland’s fine hair against his scalp with the cloth.
“Yes,” said Lyle. “I suppose I was.”
“So tell me about it. You met him at Skowhegan?”
“Yes,” said Lyle. “But only briefly. Then he drove me down to the airport, and we got a chance to talk.”
“And?”
“I found him interesting, and sweet. Most of the kids there were awful, so ambitious and confident and stupid and so totally
unwilling to listen to anything. But Robert’s different. He called me when he got back to New York, and I decided to offer him the use of Tony’s study as a studio.”
“Is he good?” asked Marian.
“I don’t know,” said Lyle. “It was more the idea of it, originally, that appealed to me: having somebody young and creative use the space. Don’t you think Tony would have liked that?”
Marian shrugged. Tony had never seemed particularly interested in encouraging young artists. “Yes, I suppose,” she said.