Ordinary Love and Good Will Read Free Page A

sensuous nor as effective as before. His doctors didn’t see how he was even going to practice medicine again, much less do research, but they underestimated his will, as I had once but wouldn’t have again. The accident was a boon to me, though, because he relaxedcompletely about the custody arrangements. In fact, the first time in six years that Joe and Michael spent more than a few weeks together was when Michael lived with me while Pat was in physical therapy.
    When I tell Joe about the old days, I emphasize what he wants to hear about, their pleasures, hoping he will ask the natural question, why did I leave? But the dazzling family photo invites contemplation and repels inquiry. When the children were younger, not having to explain was a relief, but now it annoys me that they don’t ask, that they are interested only in what they can remember, as if it hadn’t ever occurred to them that their father and I had inner lives.
    When Pat and I first met, in college, we often studied together. I would be sitting across from him in the library, and I would look up from my book and say, “Here’s something.”
    “What?” he would say, practically snapping to attention. What I had thought to be of passing interest would now take on profound fascination as I read it aloud, and Pat would inhale it. A few hours or a few days later, he would give it back, in talk or as gifts—books, records, tickets to a performance.
    I would like to tell Joe what a peculiar and suffocating feeling it got to be, to be attended to so closely, to have every idle remark sucked up and transformed into a theory, to be made relentlessly significant, oneself and an enlarged model of oneself, the Visible Woman, always being told what she was like and what it meant.
    When I get home, Joe is sitting at the kitchen table, reading the autobiography of Bertrand Russell. His field is the history of science. He is specializing in medieval technological innovations, but his private obsession is stupidity—lots of the greatest mathematicians and physicists have been slowspeaking,slow-thinking. “People,” Joe says, “who come to a boulder in the road and stop and scratch their heads and finally sit down next to the boulder and contemplate it for a long time. No one who is really stupid would ever consider just walking around it and continuing down the road.” A sign of genius, Joe thinks. He has a challenging, rather crude way of phrasing these ideas, as if they have met opposition, even if I don’t disagree. I set the bags on the counter, and he says, “Taking a nap.”
    “Well, I’m sure he needs one.”
    He closes the book. “I’m not getting through this very fast. I was intending to have it read by this morning.”
    “Maybe we should send him back to India. I found the abundance at the grocery store awfully embarrassing.” We look at each other and smile. Joe has a pleasant face. Most mothers of identical twins assert that they have never mistaken one for the other. I assert it, too. But, inevitably, one twin is the theme and one is the variation. Michael was “aggressive,” “cheery,” “sturdy,” “harum-scarum.” Michael was himself. Joe, second-born, was nearly a pound lighter than Michael at birth, and Joe was somehow always more or less—even when Michael wasn’t around, Joe was “more frustrated,” “quieter,” “thinner,” “more studious,” “better organized.” The comparative belonged to Joe even if the terms weren’t at all the same. Then, when Joe was living with me and Michael with Pat, it was Joe who talked of himself this way, as if continual comparison and contrast would call up Michael’s ghostly presence. After this summer, though, I am so used to Joe and we have talked about so many things that I’ve forgotten, every so often, about Michael. I am sure this is a good sign, a sign that maybe Joe, too, has let him go a time or two. Now I say, and even as I say it I recognize and enjoy the intimacy of