“We were listening to you,” Joyce said a trifle ungraciously.
Annie bustled in through the door, bowl in hand, looking domestic. “As the mother of two,” she said to Miles with a disarming smile, “I'd like to hear the rest even if it is a bunch of shit.”
“You were more respectful in college,” Miles said.
“I hadn't had kids then,” Annie said. “I thought the world was something real, and that people could explain it to you. I didn't know that it was something you invented as you went along.”
“Anyway,” Joyce said, “what about mother love? You can't tell me that mothers haven't always loved their children. It's the central fact of the female principle.” Bernie put his hand possessively and approximately on her stomach, and she gave his wrist a pat. He lifted his glass to his mouth with his other hand. “I'm driving,” she said.
“Of course they loved them,” Miles said soothingly. “They just couldn't get too attached to them. They were too likely to die.”
“Mine,” Wyatt said, pulling the cork from a bottle of cognac, “are going to live forever. Sometimes I think Jessica already has.” Jessica, his daughter, was thirteen years old and too pretty for her own good. Her little brother, Luke, was nine.
“Child mortality was fifty, sixty percent up through the seventeenth century,” Miles said. “Visit any old European graveyard and look at all the little stones.”
“No, thanks,” Annie said.
“It wasn't just child mortality,” Bernie said, surfacing from what had begun to look like a comfortable snooze. “Children were sacrificed, too. The archaeologists poking through the ruins of Carthage found the remains of more than twenty thousand children sacrificed to Baal and Tanit to avert bad fortune. In mitigation,” he added as Joyce gave him the kind of stare that Benedict Arnold must have seen a lot of, “they sacrificed sheep instead when things weren't so rough-say, to ward off a bad weather forecast.” Joyce got up, and Bernie, who had been leaning on her, toppled to the floor on his side. “Then there were the Polynesians,” he continued from his new position, ”ritually exposing kids on mountaintops or dropping them off cliffs every time the population reached overload, sort of Malthus as an active verb. Greek plays are full of children exposed on mountain-tops. Oedipus, right?”
Joyce went into the bathroom and pulled the door closed sharply behind her.
“I'd sell my girl right now,” Wyatt said, setting down a glass that had been full of cognac only moments earlier. “Anyone want to make an offer?”
“The point, if there is a point,” Miles said, “is that the disintegration of the family that people make such a fuss about these days is highly misleading. It wasn't until the seventeenth century that the family as we know it took shape. That was the first time that children were treated as children, that they wore different kinds of clothing, that they began to be sentimentalized. The trend reached its zenith in Victorian England about the time of the invention of the Christmas card, when children were transformed into symbols of innocence and it became the responsibility of adults to protect them from the evils of the world. Of course, we're talking about upper-class children here. The children of the lower classes were on their own. Or at the mercy of their parents, which was sometimes worse. Not much sentimentalizing over the little angels among the gin-drinkers. Child prostitution was a boom industry in Victorian England, and no one wanted to know about it.”
“They still don't,” I said. “Go down to Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood any night, and they're out on the sidewalk. Boys, girls, and kids who haven't figured out what they are.”
“Something tells me you're working again,” Wyatt said.
“I wish I weren't,” I said, meaning it.
“I still think it's a bunch of junk,” said Joyce, coming back in from the bathroom. “What about all those fairy tales?”
“Exactly,” Miles said with the air of someone who'd been waiting patiently for someone else to fall into a trap. “The most damning evidence of all. Find me a happy family in the fairy tales. They're about wicked stepmothers and children abandoned in the forest, boys and girls cooked for dinner, sisters separated from their brothers. Good Lord, they're a catalog of child abuse. No writers in history were ever more aptly named than the brothers Grimm.”
“The family is the basic unit of society,” Joyce said defiantly.
“It is these days,” Miles said. “Back then, it was the village. What are you working on, Simeon?”
It was just one more thing I didn't want to think about. “A little girl,” I said, wishing I were at home with all the doors locked, a safe distance from my friends. “She ran away.”
“From what?” That was Joyce.
“How the hell do I know? Her father has a face that looks like he shaves by slamming himself with a two-by-four to drive the whiskers in so he can bite them off inside. Maybe she wanted to go somewhere where people had smooth faces.”
“Well, Lordamighty, excuse me,” Joyce said, lifting her eyebrows all the way into the southern reaches of her hairline.
“I'm apologizing a lot lately,” I said. “I'm sorry. She found her way here from Kansas City. She seems to have settled in with a bunch of kids who think so little of themselves that they seek their common level at the point where the scum surfaces on the pool. They're killing themselves, right out there in front of everybody. What else can I say? What I want right now is a house in the woods, about three hundred miles from the nearest neon light. I'd also like a nice, stupid dog. A spayed dog.”
“So excuse me,” Joyce said, meaning it this time.
“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe I should just go home and chew on the furniture.”
Annie came into the room. I hadn't even seen her leave. “Dinner,” she announced.
People made unsteady attempts to stand up. “Don't go home, Simeon,” Wyatt said. “Otherwise, we'll just worry about you. This party is already weird enough without that.”
“You're the birthday boy,” I said. “I'll even cheer up, if that's what you want.”
“Don't go overboard,” Wyatt said, clutching his cognac bottle to his chest.
“Would you like to call your children?” Annie asked him.
“They're my children, if you noticed,” Wyatt said. “That's a sure sign of how things are around here. If they get straight A's and they haven't killed anything lately, they're Annie's. If their mug shots are pinned to the telephone poles in the canyon, they're mine.” He went to the foot of the stairs and bellowed, “Luke. Jessica. Dinner, believe it or not.”
He turned away from the stairs and threw an arm around my shoulder. “Come on, Simeon. If you get to the table without saying anything else that's depressing, I'll share my cognac with you.”
The table, which Annie waxed obsessively as an outlet for nervous energy, of which she had an abundance, glowed supernaturally. The fireplace crackled. “It's so nice to eat someplace where people don't say grace first,” Miles was saying, ladling onto Joyce's plate something that looked disconcertingly like beef stew. “I never know what to do with my hands, not to mention my soul. And look, the salad has real lettuce in it, not arugula or radicchio or rocket, whatever that is. What in the world is rocket?” he said, looking up as we came in.
“The only lettuce that's not supposed to extinguish sexual desire,” I said. “In the Middle Ages, lettuce was prescribed for nymphomaniacs. Sort of the edible equivalent of a flannel nightgown.”
“I've known people who could eat their way through a flannel nightgown,” Joyce said. “Of course, they're all in jail now.”
“The Doctrine of Signatures,” Miles said, slopping food onto Bernie's plate. “Lettuce is limp, you see. According to the Doctrine of Signatures, which was a very hot theory in the fourteenth century, the way food looked was supposed to be a key to what it was good for. Walnuts looked like little brains, so they were good for brain fever, whatever that actually was. Oysters, because you had to pry them open, were supposed to help women conceive. Asparagus was erect, so it was-”