“If and when I fall in love, I will make a decision based on that particular relationship and that particular individual. I’m in no rush.”
“Well, I think that’s fascinating,” she said doubtfully.
“But truthfully, I imagine I will remain alone. That suits me. I enjoy having the possibility of defining who I am without labels or promises to anyone else. I have worked very hard to free myself from entanglements and obligations. It would have to be someone very unusual to make me want to give that up.”
“Someone like Oscar,” said Abigail before she could stop herself. She changed the subject. “Do you earn a living from your writing?”
“No,” he said. “I work at the moment as an office temp. A temporary secretary. I have a long-term position at Citibank. I have a decent salary and good hours, and I can take days off when I need them. It’s not ideal, but it’s good for now. When I go back to school, I hope to have a teaching fellowship. If this book is at all successful, it should make it much easier for me to get into a superior program like Columbia’s.”
“Your future is all laid out for you,” she said admiringly. “How old are you? You look about twenty-three.”
“I’m thirty,” he said.
Abigail couldn’t tell whether he was miffed or flattered, but she suspected that although a straight man his age would be slightly insulted, Ralph, being a homosexual, would be glad to look younger. One had to appeal to women, the other to men. “When Ethan was a little boy,” she said, “before he was diagnosed, when I thought he was normal, I used to think about his future. It was the best part of having a very small child. Because a small child is all potential. Nothing much else to rejoice about when they’re two and three. It’s a lot of mess and work and panic. But the reward is thinking about later, when all that work pays off.”
“But it didn’t pay off,” Ralph said, perturbed.
“No, it didn’t,” she replied.
They ate in silence for a moment.
“No, it continued,” she said.
Ralph looked up from his soup bowl.
“I work as hard for Ethan now as I did when he was a small boy,” she went on. “When I die, I don’t know what will happen to him; I’ve provided for his care at a small private place upstate. But will he like it there? Will he be all right?”
“Will he even know?” Ralph asked. He scraped his bowl, ate the final bite of soup. “Not to be unfeeling, but how aware is he of his surroundings? He is unusually deeply autistic, am I correct?”
“Oh! He’s keenly aware, almost painfully so at times. I try to keep things regular, simple, calm, and quiet for him because he gets so overwhelmed by change, or noise, or upheavals. My death and his move will be a shock to him. I hope he can survive it.”
“How do you know he knows if he can’t tell you?”
“Because other autistics who aren’t as locked in have explained what it’s like, and they’ve described a whole world of sensation different from our own, but related. It’s not verbal. It’s not interpersonal. But it’s no less real for that.”
Ralph drank some wine, thinking about this.
“And,” Abigail continued, “I think it’s even more intense because there’s no shield of words in your head, no comfort of knowing everyone else feels what you feel. Language and society keep a lot at bay for us. Talking to ourselves and to one another. Autistic people have no such armor.”
The waiter returned, took away their empty first-course dishes, poured more wine into both their glasses, and then was gone.
“Why didn’t you have more children?” Ralph asked Abigail.
“Neither Oscar nor I wanted more children,” she said. “That is the short answer. I couldn’t take care of anyone else but Oscar and Ethan. They both needed me so completely and in such different ways, there was never any room for anyone else. And Oscar…well, he had more children, just not with me.”
“Right,” said Ralph, as if he weren’t sure how much he was supposed to ask or know about Oscar’s relationship with Teddy where Abigail was concerned. “And the long answer?”
“The long answer is a little more complicated,” she said. “No more children came along, although every now and then we would open ourselves to the possibility. With ambivalence on both sides, I have to add. So I think we were both relieved when it didn’t happen. Our parents thought we should try for more, though, so we did. Ethan wasn’t enough for them. They wanted a ‘normal’ grandchild. Especially Oscar’s parents, since Ethan was all they got. I have two sisters, and they had three children each, so my parents had plenty of normal grandchildren to look for the afikomen at the family seders.”
Ralph caught the eye of the waiter as he glided forth from the kitchen laden with plates. Abigail had a sudden image of Ralph and this beautiful young man entangling their limbs, white and black, in some imaginary realm of classical marble statues on a dappled Impressionist riverbank with the Italian Renaissance artists’ idea of Jerusalem in the background, those sheer, high, topographically unlikely mountains with their dizzying gorges and plunging waterfalls, strange black carrion birds wheeling high overhead.
“Everything all right?” asked the waiter.
“I haven’t had trout meunière in so long,” said Abigail. “This is terrific!”
The waiter fluttered doelike lashes and was gone.
“Oh!” Abigail exclaimed in a burst of wine-warmed chumminess. “Do you know what Teddy’s friend Lila said to me yesterday?”
“No,” said Ralph.
“She’s in love, but she can’t bring herself to tell Teddy — you know, Claire. Amazing that she told me, when she had only just met me. But I suppose that was safer. She said she’s afraid Teddy will resent her happiness or feel left out. And she’s seventy-four….”
“That’s something,” said Ralph with blank wonderment.
Abigail could tell that he couldn’t imagine being that old and feeling much of anything at all. Back when she was his age, old age had seemed as distant as a faraway time zone or planet. She had imagined the state of agedness as being like a Rembrandt self-portrait: the subject lit from within by a golden, ancient light, inscrutably wrinkled, at one with his achievements and beliefs, about to slide through the terrible black tunnel between this world and the next. The very idea of two people falling in sexual love at that fragile, faraway stage of life used to make her mind quail and shut down. The thought of old bodies conjoined, old faces mashed together, quavery voices making guttural sounds had seemed so undignified to her, it was obscene.
“This is a terrible time to be young,” she burst out.
“What do you mean?” Ralph asked.
“I love the computer; I spend as much time using it as anyone else. Maybe that’s why I’m saying this. I can see how much my life has changed. The feeling I get about what’s going on, which, I admit, is only from what I read, is that the young are highly sophisticated now, bright and educated and articulate, but no one is questioning the way things are in a massive, organized way. Kids’ lives are abstract, cerebral. There’s no cultural or political revolution, no upswell of anger. But there’s never been more to protest! Gosh, do I sound like an old crackpot.” She quoted in a high, self-righteous bleat, “‘When I was your age, I walked ten miles to school barefoot through the snow.’”
Ralph laughed. He held his wineglass up and looked off into the distance behind her left shoulder. “Things feel pretty hopeful to me,” he said. “Don’t worry about us.”
“I do worry about you,” she said, “and all of us.”