THE CHILD, Part Two

The young woman made a cell phone call while still at the deli, and Michael, knowing she was calling Evan, or his machine, cleared off to the parking lot to wait for her. He watched her through the large plate glass window, as he was always watching her through glass. Her spirits seemed to rally as she spoke, as if to hide with her face what deceit she conveyed with her words. Perhaps it was a pantomime intended strictly for the painter's consumption; yet he could not say whether such a performance would be to encourage or dissuade his hope. The glass, in many ways, was all that was left to separate them—would always be the slimmest of things to separate them.

Emma came back to the car wearing a haggard smile, and he knew (if he knew nothing else) she would not be leaving town anytime soon.

Given the continuing Homecoming victory, getting back to the house was easier said than done. The driver took the long way round to avoid the clogged bypass, yet found driving past the fraternity and sorority houses no less daunting a task. Countless trees were strewn with rolls of toilet paper, and ruckus partiers, having abandoned all propriety, were overturning parked cars to goad campus police. The air was charged with something, and every intersection along the way felt like a fateful crossroads.

Michael looked stonily out the windshield, striking a pose for what he wanted to say. “Emma,” he began confidently, “I want to take financial responsibility for you. For your education. For your child.”

She turned her eyes from the to-doings out the passenger window. “What?”

“You can go to another school, and I will pay your way.”

The young woman could not help but laugh a little. “But you can barely take care of yourself.”

Her comment succeeded in deflating him.

She reached over to stroke his hand on the steering wheel. “I don’t want you acting out of pity, or duty, or anything like that.”

“I wouldn’t put it in those terms.”

“Then what terms would you use?”

He would not say.

Instead of going straight back to his house, Michael swung by Emma’s apartment to fetch a clean dress. Staying behind in the car, she entrusted him to go inside and choose one for her. He paused in the doorway to belatedly detect a change in the empty packing boxes: one now contained the dollhouse, and two others were filled with stuffed animals from the bedroom. Across from them, the snapshot of Seth was removed from the bulletin board; one of the pictures taken of him at the golf course was hanging in its stead. It then occurred to him, with more belated recognition, there was no other image of an older man: no one who could be reasonably presumed to be a most beloved father. As in so many things in the human sphere, it was a crucial detail he had failed to notice. He stepped closer to examine the remaining pictures of friends, and pondered, with his late thinking, which of them was Evan.

Michael continued on into the bedroom, where he spied the hand of the mannequin sticking out from under the bed. He got down on his knees to eye it in the dark recess. Silken cobwebs so perfectly hugged the figure’s contours they must have been spun in place over a long time. He let his fingers light reflexively on his Galatea’s clavicle, and with little effort tore open her gauzy gown down to the pubic bone. The sticky tatters were pushed off over a breast and hip, and with complete indifference to any spiders that might be lurking in them.

The man could not explain his paradoxical feelings: how the quality of impersonality made the plaster woman both sexual and untouchable at the same time. Somehow, he reasoned, it was when things got personal that these two irreconcilable poles (object and ideal) found a happy if imperfect medium. And maybe this was his great failing: He had not kept faith with love long enough for it to produce a workable solution to his conundrum. As an incurable romantic, he was in love with love, yet had no faith in the concept as a practical matter. Impersonality may have been cold and austere, but it was never cruel. But to be in love, body and soul, was to invite cruelty. Perhaps in hindsight the intended recipients of his affection had appreciated this impersonality so telling in him. And whether they had perceived his interest as being wholly sexual or blindly romantic in nature, no woman in his crosshairs had wanted to be a means to an end. Yet the only things transparently clear about Michael were the frankness and naiveté of his heart—not his motives; and this, in an impartial view, rendered his means and ends virtually indistinguishable.

Returning to his feet, he looked over the sea of dresses still in the floor, finally seeing them for what they really were: one half snare and one half means to a girl playing dress-up. In truth Emma was the young woman he had never understood as a young man, but this acknowledgement came only with the irony of years; and only with the understanding there was a misunderstanding. The wedding dress rose above the others in a dim, ankle-high cloud. Michael picked it up as he had picked up the stargazer lily two days before.

Omar once wrote to him symbols stood halfway between this world and the next. For the uncommunicative man, however, it was only vagueness he aspired to as a next move. Historically this indeterminism meant his actions in emerging romantic situations were chronically too much of something: too abrupt, too early, too overpowering, too indecisive, too finagled, too late… All these miscalculations stemmed from the woman being too female for his logic to get around.