Love and Other Impossible Pursuits Read Free

his age, is William. He has inherited his mother's agile and delicate fingers. He draws mostly seascapes: fish and octopi, multi-fanged sharks and moray eels. His latest is displayed outside his classroom. William, it turns out, is the only child who has failed to honor the birthday of the trees. At first I think his picture is nothing more than a huge scribble of red crayon, but when I lean in to take a closer look I see that on the bottom of the page William has drawn a rainbow-colored parrot fish. The parrot fish is lying on its side because a swordfish has torn a hole in its belly. The red overlying the scene is blood spurting from the fish's wounds. Perhaps the picture is meant to be an allegory, and the parrot fish to symbolize the Jewish people should they fail to recognize their connection to the land. But I doubt it.
    I gather William's coat and hat from his hook and wait for the door to the Red Room to open. William is Red this year. Last year he was Blue, and Orange the year before. Orange was his favorite, as he never tires of telling us. It is, apparently, a more interesting color. Many of William's favorite things are orange. Not oranges. Nothing that prosaic. It's not that William is opposed to fruit. He likes a nice kumquat, especially in preserves. But the things he enjoys that are orange include paella spiced with saffron, Monarch butterflies, the Orangemen of Northern Ireland and of Syracuse University, and especially traffic cones. William likes to talk about this kind of thing. He also likes to discuss the similarities and differences between the various dromaeosaurids, especially
Dromaeosaurus
and
Velociraptor
, what his daemon would be (a cat like Will Parry's, of course), and whether or not Pluto should really have been reclassified as part of the Kuiper belt of objects. (Williams thinks not. William thinks Pluto was robbed. William thinks having been a planet since its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh on February 18, 1930, Pluto deserves to stay a planet.) William is five years old, and sometimes sounds like a very small sixty-two-year-old man. Everyone finds these utterances of his very charming. His precocity is, by all accounts, enchanting.
    Everyone but me. I find William insufferable.
    What kind of a person feels this way about an innocent child, even a child who corrects your pronunciation of the word “travois,” one who accurately estimates your body mass index while you are halfway through a piece of chocolate cheesecake, one who rebuffs your attempts to please him with a knowing and dismissive smirk more suited to an acne-faced adolescent than a plump-cheeked preschooler? I am the adult and so I should be able to love this child despite his peculiarities, and despite my own guilt for having wrecked his home.
    I unzip William's insulated lunch box and dump the half-eaten contents into the trash can, holding my breath against the lunch-box smell—part sour milk, part plastic. I realize, a moment too late, that the mothers are watching me. One of them is bound to report back to Carolyn that I have thrown away the remains of lunch without taking careful note of what William has left uneaten. Another demerit. More evidence of my untrustworthiness. Without meaning to, I catch the eye of the mother with the baby carrier. I blush, but she does not. She turns away and lays her cheek against the top of her baby's head. I can feel the baby's soft skin under my own cheek, the wisp of hair against my lips, the feathery pulse beneath the thin bones of her skull. I blink and turn to make a thorough study of William's bloody drawing.
    By now the hall is crowded with nannies and mothers. The doors to the classrooms open and a teacher peeks her head out. “Is Nora's nanny here?” She sends a fat redheaded girl out into the hall. Down the corridors outside the Blue, Green, Yellow, Purple, Orange, Red rooms a kind of choreography of welcome is taking place. One by one the children tumble out,