Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [54]
I waited to see if Saul would argue, but he didn’t. He went on flattening my hands. He kept his head bowed. Already I was sorry I had said it all, but that’s the way my life was: I was eternally wishing to take everything back and start over. It was hopeless. I went on.
“Well,” I said, “I’m worried that my body thought, ‘Now, we don’t want to drag this thing out. We surely don’t want a baby; a baby would stop her from leaving for another whole seven years. So what we should do is just—’ ”
“Charlotte, you would never leave me,” Saul said.
“Listen a minute. I have this check, these shoes, I—”
“But you love me,” Saul said. “I know you do.”
I looked over at him, his long, steady eyes and set mouth. Why did he always put it that way? That time at the Blue Moon Motel, too. Shouldn’t he be telling me how he loved me?
But what he said was, “I am certain that you care for me, Charlotte.”
And another thing: how come it always worked?
———
I’d been back on my feet six weeks or so when Saul walked into the kitchen one noontime carrying a baby and a blue vinyl diaper bag. Just that suddenly. This was a large baby, several months old. A pie-faced, stocky boy baby, looking very stern. “Here,” Saul said, and held him out.
“What’s that?” I asked, not taking him.
“A baby, of course.”
“I’m not supposed to carry heavy things,” I said, but I didn’t move away. Saul shifted the baby a little higher on his shoulder. He loved children but had never got the knack of holding them right; the baby’s nightgown was rucked up to his armpits and he tilted awkwardly, frowning beneath his spikes of hair like a fat blond Napoleon. “Can’t you take him? He’s not that heavy,” Saul said.
“But I … my hands are cold.”
“Guess what, Charlotte? We’re going to keep him a while.”
“Ah, Saul,” I said. You think I wasn’t expecting that? Nothing could surprise me any more. In this impermanent state of mine, events drifted in like passing seaweed and brushed my cheek and drifted out again. I saw them clearly from a great distance, both coming and going. “Thank you for the thought,” I said, “but it wouldn’t be possible,” and I moved on around the table, serenely setting out soupbowls.
“Charlotte, he hasn’t got a father, his mother ran off and left him with his grandmother, and this morning we found the grandmother dead. I assumed you’d want him.”
“But then his mother will come back,” I said. “We could lose him at any moment.” I started folding napkins.
“We could lose anybody at any moment. We could lose Selinda.”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “He isn’t ours.”
“Nobody’s ours,” said Saul.
So I finished folding the last of the napkins, and warmed my hands in my apron a minute, and came back to where Saul was standing. There was some comfort in knowing I had no choice. Everything had been settled for me. Even the baby seemed to see that, and leaned forward as if he’d expected me all along and dropped like a stone into my waiting arms.
We called him Jiggs. His real name was something poor-white that I tried not ever to think about, and Jiggs seemed better suited anyway to his stubby shape and the thick, clear-rimmed spectacles that he very soon had to start wearing. Also, Jiggs was such an offhand name. I might as easily have called him Butch, or Buster or Punkin or Pee Wee. Anything that showed how lightly I would give him back when his mother came to claim him.
We sat him in a pile of blocks in my studio whenever I was working. Linus built him teetering cities, Selinda drew crayon horses for him to ponder. I would talk to him continuously as I moved the lamps around. “Is he yours?” a customer might ask, and I would say, “Oh no, that’s Jiggs.”
“Ah.”
And I would photograph their polite, baffled faces.
For I was still taking pictures, but just because people happened to stop by. And only on a day-to-day basis. And I had lost, somewhere along the line, my father’s formal