Nice Big American Baby

I thought he’d be more willing to talk about it alone, without the others. I left work in the afternoon and went to his high school. I found him grading papers with a student sitting on his desk. She was sucking on a lollipop, swinging her legs, looked like a twenty-five-year-old pretending to be fifteen, her tiny rear just inches from Joel’s pen (purple; he said red was too harsh). She knocked her heels against the desk and he looked up.

“To what do I owe this?” he said. He took off his glasses and pinched the inside corners of his eyes. Heavy indentations marked the sides of his nose. His fingers left purply smudges. Ink and exhaustion had bruised his face like a boxer’s. The classroom had the sweaty gym-socks-and-hormones smell of all high schools. On top of that there was an aggressively floral smell that was coming off the girl and a stale, musty, old-man sort of smell that, I realized, was coming from Joel.

“Sondra,” he said, “go wait for your bus outside.”

“Okay, Mr. J,” she said, and slowly got up and fixed her skirt and sauntered out. Her bare thighs left two misty marks on the desk.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” I said, tracing them with my finger.

“You have to know how to handle these kids,” he said. “Sometimes they’re just trying to get your goat, and the best thing to do is ignore them.” He wrote an X on a student’s paper, then scribbled over the X, then circled it, then wrote sorry in the margin.

“I still think—”

“They get bored in five minutes and do something else. Half these kids have ADD. They have the attention span of a fly.”

“I wanted to talk to you about—”

“What? What was that?” He’d gone back to his grading.

If you looked at those few square inches of skin on the nape of his neck, the backs of his ears, you could almost imagine little-boy Joel. A vulnerable angle, looking down at his hunched shoulders and thinning hair. On the desk in front of him, next to a jar full of pens and highlighters, was a tiny snapshot of Nadia set in an oval ceramic frame. The picture was too small and blurry to make out her face. A gesture, that’s all it was, having that photo there, nothing more. Joel’s hands stopped moving. A flush moved along his scalp. He waited.

It’s not a good time, I said, or thought, and left.

Clearly, he was upset. I was worried. We were all worried about Joel. His clothes were limp. He drooped. He yawned constantly. “Is it Nadia?” we said. At first he ignored us. We kept asking. Finally he nodded.

Just as we thought. She was abusing him, demanding things, running him ragged. We knew she had it in her. It’s the quiet shy ones who are the hardest inside. And Joel was too kind; of course he would give in to her. All she had to do was find his sensitive spots and pinch him there. We knew where they were. She could probably find them. They were not hard to find.

But no, he said. He said it wasn’t like that at all. “She’s sad,” he said, “about something. She won’t tell me. It’s killing me to see her so miserable.”

We worried. Why shouldn’t we? He was our friend. We’d known him for a long time, long enough to see changes in him, long enough to still see the face of younger-Joel embedded in the flesh of older-Joel. We had known him when his pores were small, his hair thick, and his body an inverted triangle rather than a pear. Of course we worried. We had a right to.

Joel was lucky to have us. Men need female friends; they need our clear-sightedness, our intuition. And certainly women need male friends as well. The ideal male friend is one you’ve slept with at some point in the past—that way there’s no curiosity, no wondering to taint the friendship.

Joel would not do it, he was too kind to deal with her. We took it upon ourselves. On a day when we knew he was coaching “his kids” at a soccer match, we went to the house. Nadia let us in, offered to make tea. She seemed no more dejected than usual. She was wearing enormous furry slippers shaped like bunnies, her narrow ankles plunged deep in their bellies. Perhaps she was accustomed to wearing dead animals on her feet. She shuffled across the floor, raising a foot to show us. “Funny, no?” she said.

Funny. No.

We sat her down and gave her a talking-to. She kicked off the slippers and sat cross-legged on the sofa, and we gathered around her, holding her hands, knees, shoulders, and got right to it.

“Why are you making Joel unhappy?” we asked her.

“I don’t,” she said. “I make him tea, I make him dinner, I make his bed. I don’t make him unhappy.”

“What’s the trouble,” we asked her. “Are you homesick?”

The end of her nose was turning pink. It was easier than we’d expected.

“You can tell us,” we said. “Tell us anything. Need a shoulder to cry on? A hand to hold? Let it out. Have a good cry.” She kept her head still but her eyes darted back and forth.

“What about children?” we asked. “Don’t you want children?”

“We want children.”

“Joel wants children.”

“Joel wants children.”

“But you don’t.”

“No.…”

“You can’t?”

“No!”

“Are you trying?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t want to have a child?”

“I have child!” she said. She twisted away from us and went to take the teakettle off the stove. We wanted to press further, but we thought she’d said enough. By the time she returned with cups and spoons and the teapot on a tray, we were gathered at the door ready to leave. She carried the tray so easily, she must have had some waitressing experience in her past, we agreed, as we headed up the street. We must have imagined the shatter and skid of china somewhere in the dark house behind us.

Of course we told Joel, and he got it all out of her in his gentle, imploring way. Nadia had a twelve-year-old daughter back in … wherever it was. (I looked it up—one of those places with the devious names that sound nothing like they’re spelled.) Joel told her over and over, he told us over and over, that she shouldn’t have kept it from him, that of course he would welcome her daughter as his own.

Outside of Nadia’s hearing, he hissed that he was furious with us, with what he termed our interfering. Interfering! We’d done it for his own good. For the good of both of them. Frankness, we reminded him, was the basis of any good relationship.

We thought he would want to know what kind of woman his wife really was. How could she do such a thing? Leave her own daughter behind?

Joel didn’t mention—though we suspected he brooded over—the fact that a daughter meant there was a father. Dead? An ex-husband? A current husband? A boyfriend past or present? All men are jealous, even men like Joel. They don’t get jealous the same way women do, but they get jealous all the same.

“We’re going to bring her over,” he told us.

“Who, you?”

“Nadia can’t go; she won’t be able to get out again. I’m going.”

“By yourself?”

“Malcolm can help, maybe,” he said.

“What are you going to do, just go over there and snatch the kid?”

“There must be a legal way to do it,” he said. “And if not.…”

Joel had never been the type to make threats; we were almost inclined to laugh. But now look at him, pounding his fist into his hand, throwing back his shoulders, glaring as if looking for a fight. She had changed him, she had been riding him after all, but in a more insidious way than we’d suspected. She must have sulked and whined and prodded and provoked him into charging back to her backwoods hometown to rescue her brat. Her daughter, whom we imagined as a miniature, even more doll-like version of Nadia.

We still didn’t believe it. Out of those girls’-size-twelve hips? Such a tight squeeze. We pictured a blue and dented baby among gray hospital linen.