Barbara brought her baby to the gallery again today. It seems that either I have to pay her more, so that she can afford child care, or she will have to bring Holly with her to work every day, or else I will have to fire her so she can claim unemployment benefits. If she leaves of her own volition she will be defined as willfully unemployed and will not be able to claim anything. Since her husband is earning just over the minimum (£162.25 after taxes), the little family cannot expect family credit. She can’t deprive the child of its father; besides, she loves him. They have had very little sleep since the baby was born, which is why, she hopes, Ben is behaving this way. Since he believes it costs only twenty pounds a week to feed a family, a sum his mother once mentioned, this is the amount he has been giving Barbara from his wages, and which she has been supplementing with the money she earns from me. It seems her husband has now torn up the chore-share contract they drew up and pinned to the kitchen wall when they married. He says it is an insult to his manhood, which she has insulted enough.
“All this,” I say, “from having sex with Leslie Beck. Was it worth it?”
“I did not have sex with Leslie Beck,” she says, “though not from lack of trying. I was sorry for Leslie. He just made me feel so sorry for him. He took me up into Anita Beck’s studio. It’s the length of the house turned into one room. It is so beautiful and peculiar up there, you have no idea, and he cried because Anita was dead, and I cried, too, and I just somehow wanted to keep the world going.”
“And he couldn’t get it up,” says Aphra. She had her knuckle in the baby’s mouth again. “You ought to give this baby a pacifier.”
“Ben and I don’t believe in pacifiers,” says Barbara. She stares at me with desperate, furious eyes. She is quite changed from her usual gentle self. “What am I going to do? I had no idea life was like this. I had no idea it was so unfair.”
I don’t know what to say.
“When you look back upon these years,” is all I can think of, “they will seem the best time of your life.” I say it. “That’s what people tell me,” I add, “young marrieds with baby. The happiest of all.” But my voice falters.
Some idiot comes into the gallery. I have to go, though normally it is Barbara’s job to face the inquiring passerby, whose only apparent purpose in entering the gallery in the first place is to be able to say, when you give them a price or two, “What? That much? For such garbage?” and walk out laughing. This happens now. For the first time that I can remember, I wish I didn’t have to run a gallery. I wish I could just shut the door and go home. Who are the Tate, the Metropolitan, anyway? These idols of mine, the ones whose attention flatters me? For every hundred paintings on any of their walls, only some three percent are done by women. What does that make them? What is it all about? What does the putting of colors on little squares of canvas in certain shapes add up to? It’s all some nonsense of my own, some mad way of getting back at Ida and Eric. The worship of mud pies. “Look, look! See what I’ve done. Aren’t I clever!”
The baby wails. Aphra has handed him back to Barbara. It occurs to me that she is a very inexpert mother. I have a glimmering of sympathy for Ben.
“You think you’re so one-up on everything, Aphra,” Barbara is saying, “but if your boyfriend buys Leslie Beck’s basement flat, and you move in without getting married, you’re crazy. He’ll pay the mortgage and buy the car and the CD player, and you’ll do the groceries and the vacations and day-to-day expenses, because that seems fair, and when he throws you out after ten years he’ll own everything, and you’ll be thirty-three and have only the clothes on your back.”
“He loves me,” says Aphra feebly. I think for a moment she means Leslie Beck, but of course she means her boyfriend. “If anyone is forced out, it will be him.”
“It’s happening to all my friends,” says Barbara. “They either have babies and problems, or no babies and nothing.”
“Then your friends are stupid,” says Aphra. But she’s beginning to look troubled.
“It’s very damp and dark down there,” I say. “He never really got rid of the dry rot.”
And I refuse to say anything more. This is my staff; I am the boss; we are not a gaggle of agitated girls. They are betraying me, hurting me, but don’t know it. The baby is put in the office between cushions on a chair. I send Barbara out to buy some kind of nest for him—whatever they use, these days. The money comes from petty cash. It will be cheaper in the end for me to increase her salary, though she gives me to understand that child-care wages are higher than her own. She thinks this is monstrous; Aphra says it’s only reasonable, since working in a gallery is much more interesting than looking after a baby. Barbara leaves, weeping, to shop.
The baby stares at me. I suppose him to be about four months old. When he is not crying he has an unblinking stare. It is hard to believe he is the source of so much trouble. I wonder about my own child. I never gave him a name. I suppose he is all right and has not fallen victim to statistics, the sudden leap in the death rate that stands for male teenagers. I wonder what his political attitudes are? I almost never think about him. I suffered no aftershock when he went off with Brenda Streiser, who clearly, from her marveling gaze, had amply bonded with him. Research on identical twins shows that unless children are subjected to excessive trauma, they grow up to be what they will be, regardless of who rears them. Nature flings the genes together, in its endless experiment, this mother with that father, this father with that mother. The Leslie Beck–Marion Loos experiment is achieved, then carries on into other generations in search, presumably, of perfection. That’s all it is: we’re just bit-part players in the Life Force drama.
The baby cries. “Run round to the corner shop and get a pacifier,” I say to Aphra. “Don’t let’s traumatize the child.” Rosalie’s little children, I remember, all had pacifiers. So did Nora’s. Vinnie wouldn’t have them in the house. Aphra goes.
“Barbara won’t like it,” she says. I shrug. Aphra pauses at the door.
“I do think you’re wonderful, Marion,” she says, by the by. “I really do.”
I wished Monet and Manet hadn’t woken with sticky eyes this morning. I wished my apartment hadn’t seemed so dusty and forlorn. I wished the paintings on the wall hadn’t seemed like squares of canvas with peculiar colors on them. I wished the weekend hadn’t seemed so lonely and myself so friendless. I wished it were not my forty-fifth birthday, or that I had told someone. Who was there to care? I wished that the future were not bound to consist of less, not more—life shrinking to confine itself into old age, a hopeless struggle against loneliness and infirmity, with only a bank balance to keep me warm and a nature too proud and prickly to let me take to drink and be open to the warm and sloppy pleasures of pub and club society, where women like myself, only easier and warmer, abound.
I wished Leslie Beck had never come through my door with Anita’s painting stretching his arms, the basketball player who inclines over the heads of his fellow players and just drops the ball in the hoop. Though they say there is more to it than that; there is skill and scheming, too.
I called Rosalie for a chat. Tuesday mornings are almost always quiet. Many people nowadays stretch the weekend through to Tuesday afternoon.
I told her I was feeling low. She told me so was she, but she didn’t want to go into it. She told me Ed had left Nora. I said I didn’t believe it. And then I had to go, because in the gallery door stood Leslie Beck, smiling at me. I supposed I had become accustomed to his age, for he no longer registered as old. I felt a kind of hurt relief, as if I had been weeping for years and at last, exhausted and purified, I had stopped. I was grateful to see him.
“No Barbara, no Aphra?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said. “I only flirt with them to tease you.”
It occurred to me that he meant it.
“I think we ought to get married,” said Leslie Beck. “The old Life Force demands it. Our chance, yours and mine, to kick back at fate.”
“You mean,” I said, “with my money and my gallery you could get a new start in life, now the bottom’s dropped out of the development business.”
“I’m lucky to have a home to live in,” he said. “Don’t joke. I’m not.”
“Neither am I.”
“You’re lonely, I’m broke. The only thing is, cats give me asthma. Since Anita’s cat ran off, I’ve been feeling better. Don’t I look better?”
“Yes.”
“Leslie Beck the magnificent, still?”
“Yes.”
He was close to me. His hands were old but elegant. He was touching my sleeve, the way he used to, promising, offering, any number of delightful things.
“Your ambition, after all,” he said. “Not to be the servant anymore; to be the mistress.”
Aphra and Barbara came back at the same time and broke the spell.
“Take a few days to think about it,” he said. “But don’t leave it for too long. I’ll be snapped up. Widower with large house, central heating; but it’s you I want. Always have.”
“Creep!” said Barbara and Aphra, united in dismissing him once his hand upon my arm had been seen. Barbara didn’t protest when Aphra stuck the pacifier in the baby’s mouth.
“You be careful, Marion,” said Aphra. “It’s a setup. He’s after your money. He’s asking my boyfriend twice what he should for that flat. It’s not even got proper central heating.”
“Central heating?” said Barbara. “Aren’t you fussy all of a sudden. In your squat there’s no heating at all.”
“We can burn furniture and beams in an open grate,” said Aphra.
“There’s no open fireplace in Leslie Beck’s apartment,” said Barbara, smugly. How did she know?
I left them to it. I called Rosalie again.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “It’s difficult on your own. And you can end up in trouble, such trouble! But Leslie Beck? Of all people?”
Leslie Beck, of all people.