Lost and Wanted(7)

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I don’t know whether this is something other parents feel—it’s not something you would bring up on the pavement outside the elementary school, where the conversation turns more naturally to the ways our seven-year-olds are unmanageable. I can participate in those conversations, complain about Jack’s baroque rituals at bedtime, or tell a story about the time he wandered off as a toddler and relieved himself on a stranger’s front porch, but all the time I’m doing it, Jack’s physical presence inside the building is exerting a kind of force on me, impossible to ignore.

    It isn’t so much that I’m excited to see him at the end of his day as that my body longs to be with his. The need to pick him up and caress him seems to be increasing just as it gets more difficult to do so. Sometimes, especially right after he wakes up in the morning, or when we’re reading together in his room at night, he’ll still sit on my lap, lean back against my chest, and allow me to put my face in his hair. In those moments there is a surge of contentment so intense that I can hardly see the page in front of me.

I did worry about sex before I had him, whether I would ever have it again. The surprise was that for the seven years since his birth, this alternative physical intimacy has taken the place of the other kind. I’m still introduced to men, and twice this has led to brief, sexual relationships. (My sister refers to these people, who haven’t risen to the level of boyfriends, as persons-of-interest, or POI.) But I’ve never gotten to the point that I wanted to introduce any of these persons to Jack.

The Germans have a child now. When I run into them in the hall, the father likes to tell stories about things the little girl has learned to do—climb the stairs, for example, or sing a German song about the moon—while his wife gently teases him for his pride. They tell me as a fellow parent, as if there’s no difference between us, but it’s now that I’ve begun to envy them. Some nights I see them sitting on my porch, drinking wine with the window open to the living room, keeping their voices low while she sleeps. I imagine they’re talking about her, their plans for her. I would like to talk with someone about Jack that way.





5.


I was surprised when Adelaide Boyce called me. I had considered sending Charlie’s parents a note when it happened, and even went into a fancy paper store—a place I thought Addie might herself patronize—to buy a card. But the very elegant and contemporary cards at that shop seemed ridiculous to me, and I couldn’t do it. What would I write? Something about condolences? About them being in my thoughts? It was true that they were in my thoughts, but in a haphazard way that had more to do with my own guilt than with Charlie. I daydreamed about accidents that might befall me, about Jack finding me dead.

Addie apologized for calling me at work, said she didn’t have another number. She would be happy to call back if now wasn’t a good time.

“Of course, now is fine,” I said, glancing at the clock. I was supposed to meet a graduate student in twenty minutes. “I’m so sorry—”

“Yes,” Addie said crisply. “Thank you. We’re all trying to focus on Simona now—without her, I’m not sure what we’d do.”

“Is Simmi…here in Boston?”

“She and her father are staying with us while they wait for the house in L.A. to sell. Perhaps longer.”

“It’s good that Terrence can take the time.”

“He works for his brother’s business now,” Addie said. “Apparently they’re just getting off the ground on the East Coast, and his brother thinks he could be useful here. The Brookline schools are wonderful, and Simona could be registered from our address, even if Terrence decides to rent a separate apartment for the two them.”

“That makes sense,” I said, although I thought that Charlie’s mother could have told me that Terrence and Simmi were going to live on the International Space Station and I would have accepted it just as readily. It had to do with the way she said things.

I first heard about the Boyces in bits and pieces, the way we all exchanged information about our families in college. I knew Charlie’s mother had grown up in a socially prominent Philadelphia family, had been a model in Paris in the early sixties, and then an art student in New York, where she’d met Carl—a wounded Navy corpsman on his way home from Vietnam—at a concert in Washington Square Park. They married in Philadelphia, and moved to Boston so that he could go to medical school at Tufts. Addie got her PhD in art history while the children were small, eventually opening a successful gallery in the South End, specializing in contemporary African painters. She had run the gallery until Charlie’s older brother, William, a chess prodigy, began having discipline problems in school—at which point she sold it to stay home with the children. By the time William and Charlie were in college, she served as an advisor to the boards of two different museums, and ran an after-school art program for children in Roxbury.

    Carl was from much humbler circumstances in Baltimore—his father was an orderly in a municipal hospital; his mother cleaned houses and took care of other people’s children. He had enlisted right out of high school and chosen hospital corpsman training; he shipped out after twenty weeks to South Vietnam, where he was assigned to a battalion of marines as a combat medic. He often said he was lucky to have been hit by shrapnel after eleven months, sent home to recover at the VA hospital at Wilmington, where he first became interested in psychiatry. He was in medical school in ’71, when Charlie was born, and eventually rose to become chairman of psychiatry at Tufts. In the eighties, he occasionally appeared as a “relationship expert” on television, once even on Oprah’s show.