Matthew who has insisted on staying up for Conradâs visit and is by that time nearly hysterical with exhaustion and will not go to sleep even after Conrad has wrestled him a few times and carried him slung over his shoulders to his bed. But she likes the way that he is with the boy. Itâs one of the things she likes best about him nowâand he knows it, grinning at her over Matthewâs head when he catches her noticing the way they are together. Matthew always asks her whether Conrad is coming over. âWell, why isnât he here yet? âheasks indignantly.
Sometimes by the time Conrad comes, sheâs very angry. Although sheâs spent three days waiting for him, the extra hour or so added on by his lateness is almost unendurable. Sometimes she nearly hates him and contemplates not answering the doorbell, letting him ring and ring. If it wasnât for Matthew, sheâd certainly go out. Yes, sheâd go out and walk, visit a friend, have a drink somewhere, leave a terse and pointed note:
Too bad youâre too late this time.
M.
Fuck him anyway. Sheâd walk off into the night and take a taxi to another part of town.
But when he is actually there in all his smiling bigness, she is just mostly very glad to see him. That is the paradox. And she ends up feeling so sorry for him too on certain nights when he arrives on her doorstep exhausted and pale, breathing hardâwith tales of a meeting that went on for six hours, or a flat tire on the Jersey Turnpike, and it turns out the poor man has not even had dinner. She rushes to the kitchen eager to nourish him. âJust something light,â he sighs, sinking down onto one of her rickety kitchen chairs, and ends up eating all her leftoversâhalf a chicken, an entire bowl of potato salad, the remains of a brie.
Sometimes, singing union songs, he takes a shower in her bathroom and washes his hair with her shampoo, Dr. Brunnerâs Peppermint Soapâthe label of which shows a fiercely bearded man and says you can use Dr. Brunnerâs for cleaning your teeth or washing your dog and any other known hygienic purpose.
It is a few weeks before she dares to buy him a toothbrush. It is a red one that she selects for him, and she presents it to him rather shyly: âHereâs something I think you need.â âOh thanks,â he says matter-of-factly, without much interest. It is clear that this is just a toothbrush to him rather than a significant toothbrush. She puts it in the holder with her yellow one and Matthewâs green one and looks on it with pleasure on the mornings when he has stayed over and with bitter regret when it is unused.
Sometimes I asked myself what I wantedâwhich I knew wasnât the same as what I was supposed to want. I was supposed to want freedom. The runaway wife was the new cultural phenomenon, celebrated in everything from poems whose lines mixed kitchen imagery with menstrual blood to how-to articles in the womenâs magazines. Now I was freeâfree to have as many lovers as I wanted of whichever sex or to live with a vibrator in celibacy, free to go to rap sessions any night of the week if I could afford a baby-sitter, or to develop my mind in night classes at the New School for Social Research and my dormant strength in Robertaâs exercise classes, free to start an exciting careerâbut I had already been working all of my adult life.
What I did was eat out a lotâsampling the various restaurants up and down Broadway with my son. For a while almost every evening that I wasnât expecting Conrad we were out à deux, my patient child with his shopping bag of comics and small plastic monsters with which he would relieve the boredoom of a televisionless dinner and I with whatever manuscript I happened to be reading. We would look around us and invariably see a number of similar couples at other tables even on weekdays. I taught Matthew to eat with chopsticks and