American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [55]
In the kitchen the baby sat in her high chair eating pureed vegetables and wearing a bib. Iris talked to her while she prepared dinner from a book called Never in the Kitchen When Company Arrives. They were not having a dinner party tonight but they had many and she had become dependent on this book. They had dinner parties to help restore Alex’s reputation. He had had trouble since the trial. He was only now beginning to get referrals. Mostly he took whatever surgeries came his way at the hospital, but he was not in high repute. He had to defer to younger doctors, doctors who were less well educated, doctors he didn’t like. He came home withdrawn. He read the paper.
Iris looked out the little window in the kitchen. They lived on the twentieth floor of a postwar building on Second Avenue. It was one of the tallest buildings around and from it she could see the East River and the Empire State Building. It was a fancy apartment for them and too expensive, certainly her mother thought so, but they had taken it anyway right after the trial ended and he had found work and they had had the baby. They needed something to lift their spirits. Of course, having a child lifted their spirits, but it was also difficult and exhausting and it strained their already weakening bond. They didn’t laugh as much together, although one night only a couple of weeks after becoming parents they had decided to go bowling only to realize that they could not bring the baby and had not even thought about getting a babysitter. This made them both laugh. Being parents did not come naturally to them and it was a time in which they could not bring a baby out easily and so they found themselves home much of the time and Iris was grateful for the view.
Still, as the months went on the apartment seemed boxy and low-ceilinged and she regretted having bought a white couch and a white marble table. They were the height of fashion but she craved color. One day she decided to paint one wall in the hallway a dark red. When Alex came home she was smiling and there was Beethoven playing on the record player and the baby was cooing with her feet shooting up in the air like fat flowers and Alex said you cannot do something like that without asking me and how much do you think all this paint costs and do you ever think about anyone besides yourself? She stood up and the red paint dripped onto the parquet floor. That’s when she saw a look on his face that she had never seen before and it was livid and his eyes were widened in astonishment and rage. Years later she recognized that he had not been looking at her but at something deep inside his own brain, yet at the time he was appalled by her and she did not know how it had happened and it was growing bigger and coming closer like a storm.
This was the time when she thought about her life and she decided that she knew what had been the problem. She found the famous photographer’s address in the phone book. She wrapped the wedding picture in newspaper and mailed it to the building in Greenwich Village. She waited for a response that never came. She sat at the typewriter and tried to compose a more thoughtful letter than the hostile note that she had sent with the photograph, but the words would not come. She sat there and hours passed in a flicker. Her whole past scrolled through her mind and she thought about why she had written that fateful letter to the newspaper, how she had become someone so headstrong and impulsive, what would have happened if she had been raised differently, how her marriage would have worked out if she had only been understood so long ago. The baby cried. She went to get her.
Then one day she spent too much money and he was angrier than she had ever seen him. She had been walking home along