Small Change Read Free Page A

show you that I don’t care either: the only reason I’m here is so that my son can play with your daughter.
    We walked along the river near her country place. William was on the good tricycle, my daughter on the one that didn’t work. Maureen said, “I don’t think children should be forced to share. Do you? I think kids should share when they want to share.”
    Her son would not give my daughter a turn the whole long two-hour walk beside the river – with me pointing out what? Honeysuckle. Yes, honeysuckle. Swathes of it among the rocks. And fishermen with strings of perch. I stared out over the river, unable to look at Maureen and not arguing; I couldn’t find the words.
    With each visit there was the memory of an earlier intimacy, and no interest in resurrecting it. Better than nothing. Better than too much. And so it continued, until it spun lower.
    We were sitting on the mattress on the floor of Danny’s studio in front of a wall-sized mirror. Around us were his small successful paintings and his huge failures. He insisted on painting big, she said, because he was so small. “I really think so. It’s just machismo.”
    How clear-eyed she was.
    I rested my back against the mirror, Maureen faced it. She glanced at me, then the mirror, and each time she looked in the mirror she smiled slightly. Her son was there. He wandered off and then it became clear that she was watching herself.
    She told me she was pregnant again. It took two years to persuade Danny, “and now he’s even more eager than I am,” smiling at herself in the mirror.
    Danny got sick. I suppose he had been sick for months, but I heard about it in the spring. Maureen called in tears. “The shoe has dropped,” she said.
    He was so sick that he had confessed to the doctors that he and Henry – old dissipated Henry whose cock had slipped into who knows what – had been screwing for the last five years. Maureen talked and wept for thirty minutes before I realized that she had no intention of leaving him, or he of leaving her. They would go on. The only change, and this wasn’t certain, was that they wouldn’t sleep together. They would go to their country place in June and stay all summer.
    I felt cheated, set up, used. “Look, you should
do
something,” I said. “Make some change.”
    She said, “I know. But I don’t want to precipitate anything. Now isn’t the time.”
    She said it wasn’t AIDS .
    Her lips dried out like tangerine sections separated in the morning and left out all day. She nursed her children so long that her breasts turned into small apricots, and now I cannot hold an apricot in my hand and feel its soft loose skin, its soft non-weight, without thinking of small spent breasts – little dugs.
    She caught hold of me, a silk scarf against an uneven wall, and clung.
    Two years later I snuck away. In the weeks leading up to the move, I thought I might write to her afterwards, but in the days immediately before, I knew I would not. One night in late August when the weather was cool and the evenings still long, we finished packing at nine and pulled away in the dark.
    We turned right on Broadway and rode the traffic in dark slow motion out of the city, north along the Hudson, and home.
    In Canada I thought about old friends who were new friends because I hadn’t seen them for such a long time. And newer friends who were old friends because I’d left them behind in the other place. And what I noticed was that I had no landscape in which to set them. They were portraits in my mind (not satisfying portraits either, because I couldn’tremember parts of their bodies; their hands, for instance, wouldn’t come to mind). They were emotion and episode divorced from time and place. Yet there was a time – the recent past, and a place – a big city across the border.
    And here was I, where I had wanted to be for as long as I had been away from it – home – and it didn’t register either. In other words, I discovered that I