The Summer Without Men

possible to calculate accurately the percentage of gene influence as opposed to environmental influence on human beings and began writing a scathing critique in my head, but the last thing I remember, which softened my mood considerably, was the RETURN TO TRAHERNE and his poem “Shadows in the Water,” which I had read several times to myself only hours earlier. It was prompted, I believe, by an idle musing about Moki and whether he lay invisible among us, the strong, wild little boy with long hair who flew only slowly, but needed comfort after the paternal eruption, needed pats and kisses from his very short, plump, newly wigless authoress.
     
O ye that stand upon the brink,
Whom I so near me through the chink
With wonder see: what faces there,
Whose feet, whose bodies do ye wear?
I my companions see
In you, another me.
They seemed others, but are we;
Our second selves these shadows be.
    I woke to Pete, not in the flesh, but to his voice on the phone. It was not an angry voice but a composed one, polite but strained, asking for “my wife.” I couldn’t see the visitors—the bed was empty—but I heard them in the kitchen. Flora was singing nonsense; there was the clink of dishes and the dull bang of some object hitting another, which was then followed by the unmistakable smell of toast.
    Lola took the call in the bedroom while I held Simon and supervised the second course of Flora’s breakfast, toast with jam, which she waved in the air between bites as she marched back and forth across the black and white tiles, still singing. The babe barfed milk all over my pajama top. The mild odor of the regurgitated milk, the stain that seeped through the cloth and wet my skin, the squirming, bucking body I held securely to my chest brought back the old days with my own Daisy girl, my fierce, agitated infant Daisy. I had walked the floors with her for hours in the first months of her life as I breathed soothing words into her tiny curl of an ear, repeating her musical name over and over until I felt her tense chest and limbs relax against me. I had had only one child, and it hadn’t been easy. And Lola had two. And Mama had had two. When Lola emerged from the bedroom, she paused in the door and smiled an enigmatic smile. I wondered whether Pete-of-the-Blasting-Expletives had begged forgiveness and caused that smile or whether I looked ridiculous holding the now howling Simon. Before she gathered her two charges, one in each arm, and trudged heavily across the lawn back to her sick, sorry, and sober husband, the laconic Lola said, “It never changes. It’s always the same. You’d think I’d wise up, wouldn’t you? It gave him a start, though, when I wasn’t home, scared him. Thanks, Mia.”
    *   *   *
     
    Good old Mama Mia, who lies alone in the great king bed with its wide-open spaces, a blank expanse of white sheets she fills up with inner speech and memory, a whirligig of words and thoughts and aches and pains. Mia, Mother of Daisy. Mia, Mother of Loss. Once, Wife of Boris. But O the heavy change, now thou art gone . O Milton on the brain. O Muse. O Mia, rhapsodic boob, blustering bimbo, pine no more! Roll up your troubles, wipe up your stains, kick off your shoes, and sing something silly for your own sake as you sail on kingless in that great groaning schooner of a bed, not a tawdry queen for you, Bard of the Laughing Countenance, but a king.
    *   *   *
     
    Thursday afternoon, Boris wrote the following. Explication de texte included:
     
Mia,
     
It has ended with [ proper name of French love object ]. I am staying in the Roosevelt. In the last two weeks I have thought more about my life than at any other time. It has been a black period for me. I even called Bob [ psychiatrist friend doing research at Rockefeller. The even here is an example of the radical understatement of which B.I. is capable. He has always stubbornly, vehemently resisted any oughl kinds of psychotherapeutic intervention . Calling Bob suggests desperation .] It has become obvious to me that I have acted precipitously in order to escape parts of myself, parts of my past, and you have suffered because of this. [ Read: mother, father, Stefan, and remember, Boris is a scientist. His prose is going to thud forward. It seems to go with the job. ] When [ proper name of young Francophone bewitcher ] and I were together, I found myself talking to her a lot about you. This, as you probably can imagine, did not go over well. She was