The Summer Without Men

about the poets who wrote for the few remaining middlebrow folk in the United States who bothered to glance at a feeble line or two in their copy of the New Yorker and satisfy themselves that they had just nibbled on a morsel of “sophisticated” poetic sentiment or wit about lawns or old watches or wine because, after all, it was in the magazine. Rejection accumulates; lodges itself like black bile in the belly, which, when spewed outecomes a screed, the vain rantings of one redheaded lady poet against the ignoramuses and insiders and culture makers who have failed to recognize her, and poor Boris had lived with her/my bawling ululations, Boris, a man for whom all conflict was anathema, a man for whom the raised voice, the passionate exclamation scraped like sandpaper on his soul. Paranoia chases rejection. During the days of my complete clinical derangement, hadn’t I been paranoid? They plotted against me. Now the words on the screen, the words of Nobody, had taken the place of the accusing voices in my head. Everyone hates you. You’re nothing. No wonder he left you. It was as if Mr. Nobody knew, as if he understood where to strike. I thought of George lying dead on the bathroom floor that same morning, and the future turned suddenly both vast and barren, and doubt, the deforming constant doubts that my poems were shit, a waste, that I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion, that I, not Boris, was to blame for the Pause, that my truly great work, Daisy, was behind me seemed all to be true. Now, menopausal, abandoned, bereft, and forgotten, I had nothing left. I put my head on the desk, thinking bitterly that it wasn’t even my own, and wept.
    After a couple of minutes of full-throated sobbing, I felt someone’s warm breath on my arm and flinched. Flora and Giraffey were standing very close to me. The child’s eyes were round with attention. A piece of her own light brown hair stuck out from under the wig and the skin all around her mouth had been stained pink from some unknown substance. We looked at each other. Neither of us said anything, but I felt she was observing me with the cool eyes of a scientist, a zoologist perhaps. Her sober gaze was digesting the whole animal, pondering its behavior, and then, without a word, she acted. She lifted up Giraffey and held him out toward me. It wasn’t at all obvious what she intended by the gesture so, rather than take him, I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and patted the filthy creature on the head.
    An instant later I heard Lola call her daughter loudly and urgently and, taking Flora’s hand, which she accepted easily, naturally, I walked with her into the other room to greet Lola and Simon (in Snugli) outside the open screen door. I saw Lola register my face; what it looked like I have no idea—a red-gray mash of tears and mascara, probably—but her brow furrowed for a fraction of a second in sympathy. The young mother looked bedraggled at that moment, almost slovenly, in her cut-off jeans, a pink halter top, and earrings of her own making, two golden birdcages that hung from her earlobes. She had pulled her bleached hair back, and I noticed that she was a little sunburned across her nose. I remember these details because all at once I understood how glad I was to see her, and the emotion I felt has fixed the particulars of the encounter. By then it was around seven-thirty in the evening. Pete was off again and she was going to try to get the children to bed, and then, she said, with an open smile, she had a plan to break out a bottle of wine and eat the quiche she had made that day, and she would love me to join her, and I accepted with an enthusiasm that would have embarrassed me in almost any other circumstance, but which in this instance seemed entirely “normal.” My mother was at her book club discussing Austen’s Emma over a variety of cheeses, and I had no obligations of any kind.
    And so that was the night we tackled the double bedtime together. On my side, this involved a complex strategy of rocking, bouncing, and occasionally shaking the just-nrsed Simon, who seemed to have developed paroxysms in the gut vicinity. The little red man squirmed with discomfort, spat milk on my shoulder, and then, after straining mightily, let out in one heavenly, propulsive motion a gob of creamy yellow shit into his diaper, which I happily cleaned while examining his tiny, adorable penis and surprisingly consequential testicles