They’d brought us ice cream and candles. There was a competitive energy between Robin and him, and all these shared experiences. I sat across from Elaine, shoveling food into my face, feeling pitiful. Danny sat across from Robin, staring at her as they talked about wherever they were heading next, or Alejandro the Chilean fixer, or the night they spent on the side of the road in the Darién Gap, one of the times he’d acted like Johnny War Zone and almost got them killed. She looked like Audrey Hepburn in the candlelight. Then they started speaking in Spanish, and I hated to interrupt them to ask for the grated cheese.
She looked at him, with her hollow cheeks and smooth, olive skin and hazel eyes. It all sat at the end of her nose. I must’ve felt proud watching Danny court my wife. It must’ve felt good all her life to get that kind of braying attention from guys.
But instead of answering me about her flight to Albuquerque, she got nervous and started babbling: “The average amount of television the typical viewer watches of crime-reenactment shows is a hundred and twenty minutes a sitting, four times a week, eight hours of this one stupid show. The average amount of television a person watches who watches that much crime reenactment is four to six hours a day. That’s six to midnight, with no break for dinner. Can you believe it? It’s disgusting.”
Maybe they never touched each other. Maybe she liked being flirted with or just needed to go back to work. She used to complain that he spoke Spanish like an old lady, and after two days on the road he smelled like a moldy sneaker, and almost got them macheted to death in a market in Port-au-Prince, wandering around like an idiot.
Or maybe she’d loved him for ten years. Maybe they cooked up reasons to go to places so they could live their other life. Maybe she was frustrated from having been denied his bodily pleasures and took it out on me, or him, or herself. Maybe it wasn’t just survivor guilt that had pushed her into war zones all over Latin America. Maybe it was because of guilt from two-timing me that she needed drugs to sleep. Maybe the years without him had made her heartsick. Maybe we were both better off when she was more in love. This was probably all in my head.
Robin ran through some of the pitches they’d come up with for her crime-reenactment show. The episodes were all the same: someone is in danger and doesn’t know it, and someone evil is coming to destroy them. “Artistically speaking, my attitude is ‘Here you go, dumb pigs, eat some slop.’?” She laughed.
Were we safe? Was someone coming to destroy us? She had loads of work to do. The sooner I got home, the better. “Anyway, I’ll do the best I can, and embrace the fact that it’s about ratings, and hope that people will want to watch. And that’s a good feeling.”
“Sure.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Yes. It’s good enough.”
The rain had stopped. As I crossed the quad, I tried to imagine them at that moment. After dinner, Beanie liked to sit on the rug in the living room with a piece of cheese in each hand, making coyote sounds. Kaya liked to scatter dollhouse furniture across the rug, little grandfather clocks, tiny cakes and clothing, and naked Barbies in a pile. She liked to place the Barbie with a flower sticker on her face beside the Ken doll, on a too-small canopy bed with their feet hanging off the end. At their feet she’d arrange some dollhouse people, a mismatched girl and boy, into a family of four, pretending to sleep. She liked to stage these family scenes, and didn’t want to take them apart at the end of the night.
She’d leave these things around the house: a stuffed Dalmatian wearing one of Beanie’s swim diapers, resting on the couch; a brown-skinned plastic baby, in sunglasses, flat on a kitchen chair on a dish towel, stripped to its panties. A feeling streamed toward me from a monkey in a tutu, with a teacup and saucer, cowering under Robin’s desk or crammed into a toy high chair beside a green knitted frog in dolls’ pajamas, propped against the bookcase like Tiny Tim. I thought she staged these props for a reason, to remind us of what we were really here for: to protect smaller, helpless bug-eyed creatures.
While she played, one of us cleared the table and the other gave Beanie a bath. Then came pajamas and a reading from Curious George. The tinted darkness, cream-colored walls of our bedroom, humidifier’s huff, noise-canceling machine’s whoosh, Thomas the Tank Engine’s face smiling sweetly from the night-light. I’d take in Beanie’s smell of crackers and fruit, the lingering fragrance of his bath, place him in the crib and lean my head against the rails, singing softly. With terrific strength he’d stand and grab my shirt and cling. I’d lay him back down and cover him with his gacky as he closed his eyes. I’d lie on the floor for a brief eternity, out of his line of sight, serenading from the rug beside the crib with “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” then crawl on my hands and knees, turning the knob like a safecracker, tiptoeing into the hall.
Some nights it was like splitting an atom. Panicking, bargaining, surrender, or the telltale burping that signaled vomiting at will. Other nights loneliness overtook me and I hauled him into bed. Some nights it went okay.
Burt stood in front of me in the supper line, twisting his beard, reading the chalkboard. Fresh seasonal fruit cocktail, Jell-O for dessert, and chicken fran?aise, with the “fran?aise” crossed out. A light yellow stain oozed through the bandage on his head. There were announcements too: Lions Club bingo, poetry reading at seven, “Bump and Grind” beach party on the cove at nine, and a drum circle at midnight, clothing optional.
I looked around but didn’t see anyone I knew, so I sat with Linda, who wore a visor from a casino in Atlantic City, and Shari, who was bipolar and on lithium and unable to utter a sentence without diagramming her mother’s destructive narcissism, and Ginny, a nature poet from the Pacific Northwest. The conversation turned to Solito. Because I’d introduced him the night before, they gave me the chance to weigh in. When I didn’t, they took turns. A great artist gave everyone in his proximity a sense of what’s possible, he lit the path, gave you hope, and so on.