The Friends of Freeland by Brad Leithauser

Author:Brad Leithauser [Leithauser, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76078-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

29

Jason, Mason

I had pledged myself to an altered existence, that of the paterfamilias, and there were moments when I would have sworn a metamorphosis was possible for me. Though she tipped the scale at only eight pounds—and, holding her in your arms, you might have supposed she weighed half that—our sweet-tempered new charge emanated subtle powers of enchantment. Under her influence, what previously had been one of the world’s oddest and most incongruous couples was transformed into a mystical triangular union called a family. Potentially, there was something beautifully elemental about it all. Our little quirks and queernesses would be smoothed away as we undertook, each of us, our ambitious new roles: we would become the father, the mother, the baby. Only, something in my life—in the patterns of our combined life—obstinately arranged it so that between me and Kornelia nothing could ever change substantially. I continued to sleep on the floor, because the extent to which Kornelia was smaller than at the full noon of her pregnancy was precisely compensated for by the baby. Moving into the newly vacated niche, Lilja slept beside Kornelia. I protested endlessly but in vain over this—fretting that Kornelia, always a loglike sleeper, might roll over upon the baby, who would be suffocated by one of the breasts intended to sustain her—but Kornelia brushed all my fears aside. Her friends continued to visit in dizzying, kaleidoscopically shifting profusion, and it seemed I had no meaningful role among them. We lacked a common language. I was, after all, the man who had “grown up with the Eskimos,” and conversationally I had no place among either the vivid blacks and whites of their fervent political debates or the pretty pastels of their mellower drug-musings: everything in the apartment smelled of pot. No, my colors, my personal spectrum, have always reflected the igneous grays and mossy green-browns of my native land. Warren continued to mumble and grumble in the mornings and to volunteer fussily finicky enunciations in the evenings. He continued to peddle pot and to remind everyone that he was the first student from his high school to attend Harvard.

I was prepared to amend my life, but could anyone tell me precisely what my new role consisted of? Even had I been willing, Kornelia made it clear she didn’t want me attending political rallies or joining the little circle gathered around the home-fire of the water pipe. Likewise, she made it clear that my paternal attentions were superfluous. She’d acquired a blue denim contraption of snaps and buckles which allowed her to carry the child—I’m tempted to say, to wear it—on her hip, and any attempt to remove the baby seemed tantamount to picking her pocket. Before too long I fell, willy-nilly, into my old routine, spending most of every day at the library. After all, I was doing what the Lord meant me to do: I was piling up pages.

From the first, Lilja was an, amazingly sweet and placid creature. Almost too much so: as if contentedly drugged.

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