Boy, Snow, Bird(18)

All it would take was a single comparison to Julia Whitman and I’d be right back to square one. I didn’t add up to much when placed beside old J. W. I couldn’t think of many members of the non-movie-star population who did. I looked at photos of Julia, and listened to her voice on the vinyl recordings she’d made for her daughter. In a way they were practice for her. She was an opera singer; great onstage, but she’d signed a contract and was due to start work on her classical record once she’d recovered from having Snow. But in these recordings she didn’t sound operatic—she was a mother singing her daughter lullabies; her appeal was for love, not for admiration.

She’d left notebooks filled with handwritten recipes for the wartime cook: four different kinds of butterless-eggless-milkless cake, tens of tips for stretching meat and sugar rations as far as they would go. She’d also left a list of all the names she’d considered giving to Snow. There were hundreds of them. She had wanted her daughter very much; anyone could see that. The multitude of names didn’t seem like indecision—Julia Whitman was trying to summon up a troop of fairy godmothers. Somewhere in among the names of all those mermaids, warriors, saints, goddesses, queens, scientists, and poets I could see a woman trying to cover all the bases, searching for things her daughter would need in order to make friends with life. Conscience, resolve, loyalty, the kind of far sight that Mia wanted, the fearlessness to cross strange borders, whatever it was that gave Alice the guts to stick up for herself when Tweedledum and Tweedledee informed her she wasn’t real. I sat with those names for hours while vaguely worrisome sheets of smoke poured out from under the door of Arturo’s workroom. I’ve always wanted to know whether Boy is the name my mother wanted for me, and if so, what kind of person the name was supposed to help me grow up into.

Julia and I wouldn’t have been friends. She looked like a bashful Rapunzel, dark hair pinned up high, doe eyes always downturned or gazing off to the side in every single photograph. I don’t trust anyone who poses like that any farther than I can throw them. I think I know the drill: Mrs. Whitman only let down her hair when Mr. Whitman had been a good boy. He probably even thought their getting married was all his idea. These were things I couldn’t really say to anyone. I’d have been able to say them only from a disinterested position. But I was grateful too, grateful to Julia in yet another way I couldn’t tell anyone about. She’d left me her husband, who didn’t expect much from me. He’d had his great love. And now he was willing, determined even, to be amused, to belly laugh at the slightest provocation, to appreciate heart-shaped pieces of toast as tokens of my affection. On our first night together I kept thinking, Do I, do I, do I, do I . . . then Do I what? Something to do with wanting, or daring. We sat facing each other, cross-legged on his bed, and the lamp light laid a strip of gold along his bare shoulders. I leaned forward so that there were mere inches between our faces and he could smell me. I smelt of soap and musk. I’d made sure of that. Not too animal, not too pure. The idea was that his reaction would show me what to do next.

He didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. We were both naked, and his arm was spread loosely across the bedspread; I’d moved so that his right hand was just behind me, less than an inch away. And he was aroused, he was visibly aroused. All he had to do to bring our bodies together was raise his hand to the small of my back. Instead of doing that he gave me this reserved but friendly smile. A smile from an official portrait—a politician’s. Vote for me.

It felt like time to put my clothes on again, then add an extra layer of clothes on top of those clothes, for additional modesty. I used to make fun of women who ask men the question “What are you thinking?” but that night I got dangerously close to becoming one of them.

I asked: “Should I . . . leave?”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No,” I said. “But . . .”

“Stay,” he said, in a comfortable tone of voice, as if this was just the kind of conversation he preferred. (Later I asked him about this and he said: “I had a feeling it was your first time and I was trying not to rush you. I thought I was doing so well.”)

I switched off the lamp and returned to the bed to find him stretched out on his back, breathing easily. I curled up beside him, found his ear, and whispered: “Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Boy . . .” He stroked my cheek with the back of his hand.

I described the options to him one by one. I devised a minimum of twenty, each new configuration of body parts arriving in my mind with some kind of diabolical inspiration before I’d even fully dealt with the previous image. I used language that would have made Webster fall down in a faint. I promised him that he could have me in any way that he wanted, then I went on before he could choose. He nuzzled my collarbone a couple of times, and laughed at some of my more outlandish descriptions; because we were so close together and couldn’t see each other clearly, it began to feel as if we were school friends plotting some ridiculous prank. He was a good listener. But I can’t remember now exactly when he stopped listening and I stopped talking, at what point our breathing changed, fingernails dug into skin, and he covered my mouth with his so that I cried out into him. The whole thing kind of astounded me. I’d expected to have to explain to him about my being Winter in Siberia, but in the end I got to keep that to myself.

So there was the man (I began to think of him as mine when I told him about the rat catcher and he half seriously offered to drive down to New York, kneecap him, and bring me back a slice of pie from my favorite diner). And there was the home, with its long, low-ceilinged rooms. The floorboards were so snugly fitted that walking across them was like gliding across a bank of honey. There were no clocks, no real sense of time passing. It was the kind of house you went to in order to get well. Some nights I’d walk back to the boarding house from Arturo’s house and see the stars through the tree branches, nestled in between the leaves as if they’d grown there. It wasn’t just the man and the house, there was more. “I don’t mean much to you, do I?” Arturo teased. “I’m just . . . you know, Snow’s dad.”