We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [9]
I understood. These talks of ours had a gameliness, and your opening play was noncommittal. One of us always got lodged into the role of parental party pooper, and I had rained on the progeny parade in our previous session: A child was loud, messy, constraining, and ungrateful. This time I bid for the more daring role: “At least if I got pregnant, something would happen.”
“Obviously,” you said dryly. “You’d have a baby.”
I dragged you down the walkway to the riverfront. “I like the idea of turning the page is all.”
“That was inscrutable.”
“I mean, we’re happy? Wouldn’t you say?”
“Sure,” you concurred cautiously. “I guess so.” For you, our contentment didn’t bear scrutiny—as if it were a skittish bird, easily startled, and the moment one of us cried out Look at that beautiful swan! it would fly away.
“Well, maybe we’re too happy.”
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I wish you could make me a little more miserable.”
“Stop it. I’m talking about story. In fairy tales, ‘And they lived happily ever after’ is the last line.”
“Do me a favor: Talk down to me.”
Oh, you knew exactly what I meant. Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn’t tell well. And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story. I should know; I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray. Accordingly, the one respect in which I depart from my younger self is that I now regard those people who have little or no story to tell themselves as terribly fortunate.
We slowed by the tennis courts in the blaze of April sunlight, pausing to admire a powerful slice backhand through a gap in the green mesh windbreaks. “Everything seems so sorted out,” I lamented. “Wing and a Prayer has taken off so that the only thing that could really happen to me professionally is for the company to go belly-up. I could always make more money—but I’m a thrift-shop junkie, Franklin, and I don’t know what to do with it. Money bores me, and it’s starting to change the way we live in a way I’m not totally comfortable with. Plenty of people don’t have a kid because they can’t afford one. For me it would a relief to find something of consequence to spend it on.”
“I’m not of consequence?”
“You don’t want enough.”
“New jump rope?”
“Ten bucks.”
“Well,” you conceded, “at least a kid would answer the Big Question.”
I could be perverse, too. “What big question?”
“You know,” you said lightly, and drew out with an emcee drawl, “the old e-e-existential dilemma.”
I did not put my finger on why, but your Big Question left me unmoved. I far preferred my turn of the page. “I could always traipse off to a new country—”
“Any left? You go through countries the way most folks go through socks.”
“Russia,” I noted. “But I’m not, for once, threatening to ransom my life to Aeroflot. Because lately ... everywhere seems kind of the same. Countries all have different food, but they all have food, know what I mean?”
“What do you call that? Right! Codswallop.”
See, you’d a habit back then of pretending to have no idea what I was talking about if what I was getting at was at all complicated or subtle. Later this playing-dumb strategy, which began as gentle teasing, warped into a darker incapacity to grasp what I was getting at not because it was abstruse but because it was all too clear and you didn’t want it to be so.
Allow me, then, to elucidate: Countries all have different weather, but they all have weather of some sort, architecture of some sort, a disposition toward burping at the dinner table that regards it as flattering or rude. Hence, I had begun to attend less to whether one was expected to leave one’s sandals at the door in Morocco than to the constant that, wherever I was, its culture would have a custom about shoes. It seemed a great deal of trouble to go to—checking baggage, adapting to new time zones—only to remain stuck on the old weather-shoes continuum; the continuum itself had come to feel like