Arthur saw this was so, even as he was asking the question, even before, as he was dialing the number, clutching the receiver to his ear, breakfast curdling in his stomach. What he was really feeling was regret, and this was just a bout of wishful thinking. There was no buying back what he’d done. Though he could feel regret for it, he could not undo it. He had caused an explosion. Penelope was right. He was a terrorist. He had detonated something by publishing The Morels. Each copy out there a hot piece of shrapnel. And like it or not, there was no way to make a thing unexplode. The damage had been done. The only thing he could do now was make it up to her — to Will. “American style, as you so aptly put it.”
Arthur directed us with our market’s armload through the small triangle of park, into the chain toy store across the street. We traveled the slow escalators with the rest of the shoppers, stopping on each floor to audition games for Will. How lost Arthur seemed under the harsh fluorescents, gripping our shopping cart for dear life. He was truly a man from a different age. There had been a spate of movies around this time with a similar premise — one involving a man from Victorian England transported to contemporary Manhattan, another about a Neanderthal teenager thawed and released into the wilds of modern Los Angeles — and watching Arthur aisle after aisle puzzle through the bewildering maze of blinking beeping gadgets, I thought he seemed just as out of place. Although this has got to be something of an exaggeration, doesn’t it? He was, after all, the father of an eleven-year-old. This certainly wasn’t Arthur’s first time in a toy store. And yet, how was it possible for him to seem so unskilled still, after eleven years of practice?
The stuffed bags Arthur emerged with barely fit through the exit. We hailed a taxi and headed back to the apartment. For the first few stoplights on our way uptown, it hadn’t occurred to me that I lived elsewhere — and Arthur seemed too preoccupied to notice. When we came through the front door, Penelope was at the answering machine, playing a message that bore a distinctive grandmotherly voice I’d become well acquainted with two evenings before. This “grandmother” wanted to speak to the famous Mr. Morel — she had a bone to pick with him. Was he responsible for this smut she’d been hearing so much about? Well, it just made her want to reach into her purse and play with her vibrating penile toy!
“Three messages like this since you left,” she said to Arthur, who was stuffing the gifts up on a high shelf in the hall closet. “The third message is just screaming. It’s frightening. Who the hell is it?”
I asked where Will was.
“Spending the day with a friend,” she said.
I had gotten my mother a jade pendant necklace from the crafts market while shopping with Arthur, but when I got home and turned the thing over in my hands, it seemed all wrong — too intimate, the kind of jewelry one got for a lover, not a mother — so I put the necklace back in its box and wrapped it up, presenting it to whom it was really intended the next time I saw her, bench-side.
Penelope looked down at the little box I had just put in her hands and said, “Uh-oh. What’s this?”
“Just open it.”
She tore the ribbon off and lifted the lid to reveal the pendant sitting on a tuft of cotton. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “And who am I supposed to say gave this to me, when Art asks?”
“You can say I gave it to you.”
Penelope chuckled. “Okay, good idea.” She closed the box and handed it back to me. “Look, I’m flattered. Seriously, you have no idea. But I can’t.”
“It’s just a necklace,” I said. I put it back in my pocket.
She looked at me for a while, letting her gaze travel my face, and then took a deep drag of her cigarette and shook her head. “You’re sweet. But my life is very complicated.”
We sat for the rest of the time in silence, almost touching And when I got up to leave, she surprised me — herself as well, perhaps — by giving me a peck on the lips. “Now get out of here,” she said grinning, and slapped me on the butt.
I visited her every day for the next five days. We spoke less and less. I sat there and she sat beside me, both of us smoking, both of us seeming to feel through whatever this was between us. We sat with our elbows touching, our knees touching, our shoes touching. On the fifth day, Penelope gave me a tour of the bakery, which shared its kitchen with its parent restaurant next door — a war zone of shouts and clangs, the flare-ups of small grease fires lighting the corners of my vision. Everybody knew her, but as she talked into my ear about the role each of these people played in the greater chain of command, she did not introduce me. I thought I might have detected a knowing glance pass between herself and a few of these people. About what? I wondered. About me? The thought set my body into a faint tremor that lasted the duration of the tour. It ended out the back door, in an alley by several enormous metal dumpsters. She had a seat on a milk crate and lit a cigarette. She stared at me frankly without talking for some time. I went for my pack, to give my nervous hands something to do, but my pockets came up empty.
Keeping her eyes on me, she took the cigarette out of her mouth and held it out. I put it to my lips, my every fiber aware of the dampness around the filter’s tip. She said that she wished she could stay out here all day but had to get back to work — afterward, I realized it was meant to be a joke, taken in the context of the trash bins and the gaseous stink around us, but at the time I said quite earnestly that I wished the same. She walked me down the narrow alley and gave me a hug. She pressed her ear against my chest, and I let my lips rest on the top of her head, breathing in the intimate smell of her hair. When I spoke, my whispered words tripped over hers, so that together we sounded something like I wish we can’t I know me too.
(Writing this now, years later, I think about Penelope — how young she was, in her late twenties, with an eleven-year-old and married to a man like Arthur, how she must have felt, hearing day after day her coworkers’ after-work exploits, their carefree couplings and uncouplings, the total ease with which they were able to live. How she must have longed to be as free — to call in sick because she felt like catching a movie or to punch out at the end of a shift and walk off into the night with everybody else to a karaoke bar, to an all-night noodlery for yakisoba at three in the morning. Not to worry whether Art forgot to feed himself or let Will go through a box of Frosted Flakes for dinner. Not to worry what these two boys weren’t telling her, what she was so in the dark about.)
I stood out in the bright sun blinking into the mouth of the alley from which I’d emerged, disoriented. Where was I? It took a turn around the block to reconnect with the bakery’s main entrance. I walked on, past it, back to work.