The Return of Service by Baumbach Jonathan;

Author:Baumbach, Jonathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Return of Service
ISBN: 1801626
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2011-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

Crossed in Love by Her Eyes

“I think you ought to know I’m not going to marry you,” I hear the baby say through the closed door of my study. “Marie and I are going together.”

Who is Marie?

“So you and Marie are going together,” she says, a thin note of pain breaking through the coolness of her tone.

“One of these days we might get married,” he says.

A few minutes later the baby’s mother comes into my study and asks if she might interrupt my unproductive self-absorption for a few minutes.

“I feel rejected,” she says, laughing in a way that implies she thinks she ought to be amused but isn’t. “Our baby’s got another woman.”

“It’s my opinion it won’t last.”

“The worst of it is that the woman he’s infatuated with—Marie, you may remember her, that streaky stacked blond that sat for him a couple of times—won’t have anything to do with him. Yesterday, when I asked her if she could, baby-sit Friday night, the truth came out. She said she’s no longer interested in babies, that they have nothing to teach her.”

“Did you tell the baby what she said?”

“He’s been so miserable as it is, mooning around the house and sighing in his pathetic way, I couldn’t make it worse. Will you talk to him man to man?”

“I’m not very good at that.”

She blows me a kiss. “I was only kidding, you know, about the unproductive self-absorption. I think your self-absorption is as productive as anybody’s.”

Moments after the baby’s mother leaves, almost as if it’s been rehearsed, the baby takes her place in the room.

“When you’re married,” he asks after a point, “does that mean you have to sleep in the same bed as the other person?” He asks the question with both hands over his face, one eye peering through the slats of his fingers.

“Only if both people want to,” I say.

“Well, both people do want to,” he says, “and that’s final.”

He does a parody of his father storming furiously out of a room.

He returns. “What about love?” he asks.

“What about it?”

His thumb, as if it were just passing by, finds its way into the tunnel of his mouth. It is apparent after a while that neither of us, with all goodwill, can think of anything to say. The word love has come between us. We study the silence for clues. Before I can put my thoughts into a sentence, he is gone.

Later that day, I get a phone call from a young woman who calls herself Marie.

“Your little son has invited me to share his bed,” she says in a voice that strives for outrage.

“I’ve heard something about that,” I say.

“Have you? In the last house I worked, the father used to come into my bed at night, pretending to be the son. As you might imagine, such a deception couldn’t go on for long.”

I say something to the effect that I can’t imagine how such a deception could go on even once, though my remark, like the father she cites, seems to pass unnoticed.

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