News from the World by Paula Fox Read Free Book Online Page A

voice, its range and muscularity, the ravishing music of her song, that I didn’t move for several minutes, listening. The song ended. I entered the living room to find Jack sitting in front of his record player, watching the record still spinning. He glanced over at me, whispered, “Maria Callas singing ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca .”
    In the hour that followed, Jack spoke about the operas he loved, and the singers, especially Maria Callas. I had studied the classical piano repertoire for a while at Juilliard but was largely ignorant of other music—except jazz. Years earlier I had overheard my mother speak scornfully about opera to one of my uncles— “ all those fat people standing around bellowing at each other,” she had said, and although I never consciously paid any attention to my mother’s aesthetic opinions—they couldn’t penetrate the obscuring darkness between us—somehow her words had been able to leave a stain for me on operatic music.

    I taught in a private school that my children attended on scholarship. On two afternoons and evenings every week, I took classes at Columbia University. When I was out, I hired a sitter, usually a young Swiss woman from a nearby hostel where Swiss people stayed when they came to this country to go to school.
    On a day when I reached home an hour or so before my children were due, I phoned Jack. “Should I come down or will you come up?” I asked. “Come down,” he replied. “There’s someone here I’d like you to meet.”
    Our apartments were identical: living room, dinette, narrow kitchen, two small bedrooms, a bathroom at the end of a short hallway. But the decor was dramatically different. Except the boys’ bedroom, full of books and games, their discarded clothes all over the floor, the rest of my rooms looked bare, even meager. But Jack and Dwayne lived in a miniature splendor—silk drapes, elaborate candelabra on small, elegant tables, tassels on the corners of brocade pillows arranged carefully across the seat of an opulent sofa in their living room, and in one of the bedrooms, a four-poster bed with transparent white side curtains.
    When Jack opened the door, four straight pins sticking out from between his lips, he led me to the spare bedroom. I saw a large woman standing there on a footstool. She was nearly covered with beige tissue paper, like a living gift being wrapped. Jack removed the pins from his mouth, explained that he was fitting her for a dress, then introduced us: “My mother, June—she’s visiting the city for a few days”; me he called “a lady friend from upstairs.”
    She peered at me over a piece of the tissue paper that clung to one cheek and smiled as he tried to locate her waist with a tape measure. She began to talk to me at once, as though we were friends in a conversation that had been interrupted. Bits of the beige paper were caught between her lips and she spat them out moistly.
    She looked like a middle-aged woman from a small Iowa town, and she was. But I had a sense of a discordance between her presentation of herself—stern, plain, straightforward, guileless—and her true nature. I noted a trace of irreverence in her comments on life—about which she said in one of her rare asides, “Well, we must put up with it . . .” I surmised she meant life in general as well as Jack’s preference for men.
    I tried to hold up my end of the conversation while Jack silently pinned and measured. I spoke of the pleasures of the park on the other side of the broad avenue, asked her pointless questions about the town she came from, and mentioned neighborhood crime, attributing it to poverty and hopelessness. But then she took me by surprise. “Human beings,” she said, “have an inborn capacity for wickedness.”
    Impulsively, I told her about overhearing two Hispanic men as they walked past me on the