Sebastian
Couldn’t find it, sorry
When he gets back to Sadie’s, he lights a joint and spreads the photos of the two of them and his mother’s nudes and Lola’s license out across the floor. Then, the scissors seem to be cutting on their own. On black cardboard, he pastes what is left.This is what it feels like to be the one who stays, he thinks. From the floor, his mother squints up at him, freed at last from her paper prison. She opens her mouth wide and laughs, unbearably loud, unbearably gone.
1991
“You told him what?”
Susan’s husband looks perplexed. Since his promotion to Associate Professor, he’s been roped into more department meetings, fewer late-night feeds. And now he is sitting on the edge of the bathtub, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up over his elbows, absently cruising a small plastic motorboat around Sebastian.
“I told Mark I want to go back to the show.”
Orson was true to his word. The call had come, begrudgingly, from Flowers, saying he was open to discussing it. He was a practical man, and the ratings had dipped since Susie’s hiatus. She knew, the moment he rang, she wanted it.
“But… You seem so happy—”
“I am happy,” she says. Her hands are massaging suds into Viola’s head, molding the nap of her hair into a mohawk. How can she explain? Happiness has washed diffusely over these last nine months. But now it is concentrating into intent. “It’s just, I’m ready to get back to my life, you know? And this is the chance.”
She lifts Viola up and swaddles her into a towel and rubs her tummy and pats between her legs and under her armpits. She presses her cheek into her daughter’s cheek. Al is allowing Sebastian to claw at his finger, to hit the water with the flat of his palm so that it flies up onto his shirt.
“Well, how would that work?”
“I could bring them with me.”
“And what about me?”
He sounds stung, like she’s reduced him to an afterthought. Which might have been true when her heart jumped into her throat at thesound of Mark Flowers’s voice. But all afternoon, she has been thinking of little more than how to present this to him. How to make it a shared adventure, an opportunity to unify their world.
“Well. I was hoping… You could come too.”
The last time they discussed this, it seemed impossible. Academia appeared to her an endless succession of hurdles. But now she can see that it need not be so.It is only his fear of the unknown that is stopping him, she tells herself, resolving to be gentle and positive.
“You’re suggesting I quit?”
“You could get a transfer.”
“You think it’s that simple?”
“I never thought it would be simple, I only thought…”
As Al lifts Sebastian out of the tub, their son starts to wail and piss into the water. Not all men are good with babies, but Al never complains. He changes their diapers and wipes their noses and spends Sunday afternoons putting together car seats. And now he is swaddling and applying baby powder and clapping his son onto his shoulder. They carry the children into the bedroom with its soft orange lamp, diaper them, place them together in the crib. She reads them a story about some meddlesome kittens and Al leans against the wall listening.This is the best part of my day, he told her recently, and she feels almost apologetic that she has taken something from him in this moment, a sense of total peace.
Gradually, the twins settle and curl toward each other, and he follows her quietly into the hall.
“In this plan of yours,” he says, “who would take care of them all day?”
“We could bring a nanny. Sadie will do it.”
“With all due respect, I wouldn’t trust your sister with a pet rock.”
Heat rises to her face. She follows him step-by-step down the stairs and does not say that Sadie has been beyond helpful recently. Susan has always loved this man for his simple offerings, for things he gave freely because they were easy to give. But now that she needs somethingdifficult, he has hardened himself. Perhaps she has dashed some hope she didn’t realize he was holding: that she had reached a point of completion. That she would never want for anything else.
They move to the kitchen, where he makes a cup of tea. In the bright light, his profile is smooth, plump with the hours of sleep, all the nourishment his mind is getting from his young, brilliant students, who are also sleeping for eight to ten hours, who are capable of adult conversation. With sudden fervor, she resents him. When did her desires, which have always felt so simple—to work! to live!—become selfish?
“Okay then,” she says. “Why don’t we just leave them with you? You can breastfeed them, right?”
“Susie.”
