By Walker Rutter-Bowman
My wife has become a more suspicious person. I tell her we can trust the babysitter. Her references check out, she’s first-aid certified. She’s a nice young woman, but my wife thinks she’s in it for the wrong reasons. It’s all right to have an agenda, which is hard for my wife to accept. My wife’s success as a painter didn’t come from plotting and scheming, only because she’s not good at those things. The thing she’s good at is painting. The thing she leans on is her talent. I point out that she admires some artists of known agendas. When my wife and I wed under the dying elm next to the reservoir, her brother said we had to reason with each other, and we agreed. But she won’t let me be the devil’s advocate, let alone the babysitter’s. The babysitter’s not in it for the baby, though she likes the baby well enough. She’s in it for the money, because that’s our transactional society, simple economics. She stands at the door, slipping her feet into her shoes, arms into coat, and we hand her cash. Cash, the king. The baby sleeps. My wife says the babysitter is an art student looking for a recommendation, which is true. My wife hasn’t uncovered some great secret. My wife found her in one of the studio classes she teaches. The babysitter’s been honest with us since the beginning. She represents the frankness of a generation. My wife is eating dozens of daily grams of protein but her blood sugar seems low, her energy has cratered, she looks in the freezer for frozen meatballs and reasons to distrust her fellow woman and man. I make sure to be present when she interacts with the babysitter. My wife says I always take the side of the less fortunate. “The babysitter comes from wealth,” I say. “Where?” she asks. Wealth, I say, like it’s a place I know.
My wife wants an old woman to babysit. She thinks the lack of old women in our lives is a failure of character. And the old women we do have in our lives are not the right kind of old women. They say the wrong things. They make me carry their carts. When the baby was just born, they said it looked unwell. The baby’s eyes were different sizes, and she hadn’t grown into her skin. When I hurt my knee, one of the old women said, I guess your running days are over. We don’t believe in hitting old women, though sometimes a neighbor shakes our faith. When my wife married me under the dying elm by the reservoir, my brother said I would take care of her when she was old because I loved my elders. Maybe I did, once, but it’s hard to remember. When I help the old women in our building, a mutual feeling of animus lingers. Our eyes lock and narrow. When we wed under the dying elm on the shore of the recreational reservoir, we agreed to celebrate one another’s known associations, but perhaps we didn’t use those exact terms. My wife doesn’t approve of several old men in my life. She says I want to be like them, the old and lonely men, a sour smell clinging to my clothes and neck. She says they are the kind of old men who don’t listen to women, as if there are many kinds. But I keep my neck clean. When I hold the baby, she puts her face right into my neck, and she enjoys it. She loves my neck. She puts her mouth on it. I don’t want to be lonely, but there’s nothing wrong with a little time alone. No one wants an old man to babysit. Only an old woman. I’m not sure why, but this is how it’s done. We won’t be making any changes. Everyone’s a pioneer before the baby comes along, then they remember that convention has its merits.
The day before the opening the babysitter calls to cancel. She ate a bad salad. No one is thoroughly washing their vegetables and greens. My wife, for instance. It could have been you, I do not say. You could have killed the babysitter by accidentally feeding her the feces of livestock. Wash your stuff, I do not say. Restraint in such situations is even more valuable and punishing. I hold myself back with an outmoded form of tolerance. This infuriates my wife, who has read much about the lives of saints but has the wrong temperament to follow in their footsteps. She knew what the silence said. It drives her to wash a carrot with such uncommon vigor that it slips from her grasp and shoots out of her hands and into her eye, the orange point striking the white ball. “Are you happy now?” she screams. When we wed under the dying elm on the shore of the polluted reservoir, her aunt had told us to laugh at one another, and we agreed, so I am laughing. But of course I’m not happy, not even glad.
We get her squared away with a nice eyepatch. She lets me put it on for her, kiss her hair. It looks good on her because that’s the kind of person she is. Turning her head slightly to let me know she is being regal in her pain and humility, and that the kissing, if it continues, will not be on the lips. She is still trying to be a saint. I kiss her hair again. She doesn’t need an apology, just my sadness. Like a sexy saint she walks through the house, floating, touching things gently, with only her fingertips. She’s at her best in the aftermath of conflict. I knew my wife would secretly enjoy wearing the eyepatch. We decide to bring the baby to the opening. It’ll be easy. She is a good baby and well liked. She has never attended an opening, and maybe it’s about time we bring her along as a part of the family. My wife believes in one integrated life, not an artistic practice siloed from the rest of it, and I agree, I guess. The baby is a part of our lives.
When my wife was awarded a prestigious and lucrative prize that made us temporarily rich, we lost our minds a little. We got into wine. We did some research and bought a wine fridge. Anyone can win a prize just as anyone can have a baby. It was a lot of remunerative validation, but not enough. It went away quickly, and as it did, she asked herself, Why me?, which seemed like a natural question after the windfall of validation. Why me and not the others? But she asked it with such regularity, such force, that it began to drive me insane. Why me, why me, why me? I started hearing it in the squeal of breaks, the tinkle of a windchime, the creak of a rusted gate. Why me? Why me? When we wed under the dying orange elm we agreed to be as one, the reservoir was crowded with birds and the civic dreams of park architects and the promises we made to one another. My father told us to be grateful, and we tried. When we wed by a dead tree, we did so to condone one another’s worth through words of repetition, though perhaps not in those exact terms, and I’d like the option to veto a few repeated phrases. Why me, why me, why me? When we wed a tree was falling and a manmade lake was rotting and her mother told me she had never really considered her daughter the artistic type. When we wed, the wind ruffled the water on the reservoir, blowing the stagnant both toward and away, representing the chafing of nature against man, or vice versa. The wind is bad, the wind is good. At no point did the wind sound like Why me, why me, why me? There are questions I don’t ask myself, and in this way I hope to be a model for those I have agreed to share a life with.
I believe in my wife’s paintings. I believe in the baby. And yet, one of my goals in fatherhood has been to avoid comparing our daughter to my wife’s paintings. I have failed at many things but at this I have mainly succeeded.
There is wine at the opening, the paintings hang on the walls. The wine comes out of glass bottles and goes into plastic cups, it comes out of the cups and goes into mouths, onto tongues and lips, onto shirts and the concrete floor, onto pants and shoes. The beautiful people are wearing beautiful clothes, except for those who are trying something else. The people move in a circle around the room and then clump in the middle, their hands touch and then peel apart. I can tell my wife is disappointed, doing her fake smile. She pulls back her upper lip to show her pink gums. She is doing everything right, and she will have to keep doing it. We have not been temporarily rich for a long time. She wants to scream but the longer you go without screaming, the harder it becomes. Our friends have a wine fridge I find very sleek and unassuming. I am trying to drink less, sleep better, dream more. I can tell from her one eye that she’s tired. She’s not used to the eyepatch, and she keeps peeling it up and wedging her fingers under it to rub her socket with a back-and-forth squeak like a cloth or squeegee on a pane. Her paintings are excellent, and it’s unclear if they mean anything to anyone. It’s likely her eye is infected or getting there. The baby is being shy with her head on my shoulder, and then the baby stops being shy and wants to walk. The baby starts to cry, and my wife comes over to comfort her. The baby is not really a baby. Please understand that when I say baby I mean philosophically. She knows the difference between her mother coming over to comfort her and her mother coming over to shut her up. She can say a few words like hop and bob and money. I go outside to get some air. A fire truck crawls down the next street over and sirens drown out the sound of the baby screaming at the paintings. Someone is burning tonight. I hate to think of babies stuck in buildings, but I love the thought of firefighters carrying babies in their arms. They deserve a lot of credit for being so gentle in their huge fireproof suits, and I think the babies like to look into those firm faces under black and yellow helmets. From where I’m standing, I can see the baby facing the canvases and opening her mouth as wide as she can, as if to devour each work of art. I had the same instinct when I saw my wife’s paintings for the first time—the urge to engulf them, wrap them up, take them inside myself. Something about them makes you want to open yourself up, which not a single critic has noted. The baby is screaming, and people are looking at her with sympathy, but also moving away from her, putting some distance between them. From a young man I acquire a cigarette, which I begin to smoke. The baby screams with all her might and I use my whole chest to tug in every bit of smoke from this cigarette, a scream in reverse, as if I can flip it inside out with the force of my inhalations.
“What do you think?” says the man who gave me the cigarette. “She’s too young for an opening,” I say. “I mean the paintings,” he says. I mention that not a single critic has noted the thing about opening yourself up to a work of art. He writes it down on a little notepad.
The sirens keep pealing. The lights from the fire truck dance across the buildings, smudge across the windows. A few improbable stars poke out, and a plane rises or falls across the purple-black sky. The sky is like a reservoir. I am like a dying elm. My wife picks up the baby, and the baby kicks her as hard as she can in the stomach. But then she decides the violence must end. She gets snuggly. She securely clutches a clump of my wife’s hair, which means peace. My wife sees me and waves and tells the baby to look outside, pointing, and the baby doesn’t see me, but she waves all the same. She will be lucky if she grows up to have hair as beautiful and strong as her mother’s, able to withstand all this tugging. The baby is muscular, in her way. She wears tunics. She lifts objects above her head like boulders and then releases them. The paintings are mostly of trees that look terrified to be so well-lit and stuck, as the artist has stuck them, in the middle of grim fields. My wife likes the work of a group of French artists who called themselves prophets. They painted bright but soft interiors and trees that look terrified. One of them died in a river, one of them died of disease, and one of them—I don’t know, I don’t know. They were artists of a known agenda, and they said so. Usually in my wife’s paintings there are two trees but sometimes there are three. The trees don’t look like people, despite what some critics have said. Some critics have said that the trees are people, or the absence of people, the hatred of people. They have not said that the trees are trees, or the absence of trees, the hatred of trees. My wife believes her critics are trying to work their way into her. They bite her, they chew a hole, they burrow in, and from that vantage hope to see and say something of worth. The baby did the opposite: she was too close to the paintings. She had no perspective. She had to get out of there, look around, get her footing. She is my wife’s greatest critic because she gave up the privilege of proximity. She exited the body of the artist and, with a few exceptions, never looked back. My wife is like anyone else, hating people, loving trees, and vice versa. When we wed under the approximation of wood and by the facsimile of water we held hands and said we would share it all, but it turns out we could have been more specific.
The baby runs at the paintings and, whereas I would’ve stopped the baby before she reached them, something holds my wife back. The baby reaches the paintings and clutches at them with her small, strong hands. In some spots she pulls off the paint. If she puts it in her mouth there might be an issue. My wife holds her by the wrist to prevent it. The baby trembles with effort, and so does my wife. I think of a movie where a man tries to stab another man with a knife. One lies on top of the other, they tremble with effort, and the knife descends. The knife goes into one man’s heart, but the paint doesn’t go into the baby’s mouth. A clump falls to the floor, smacking softly. The good thing about paintings as creations is that they never destroy each other. They can glare at each other from across a room for years without ever rising to violence. Of course, the baby’s actions ultimately unlocked a new phase of my wife’s artistic career. She would never display paintings so wet and fresh again. In this way one creation can improve another. But I decided I couldn’t watch the epiphany happen. Or wonder how my wife would balance the discovery of a new direction with the need to discipline the baby. We don’t touch paintings. We don’t hurt art. So I walked around the block because, as a father, there’s nothing like it for the mind and spirit.
Before we ever had a child, we wondered what we would do when it misbehaved. Our first thought was to improve upon the past. We believed we’d turned out well, but was it because or in spite of the methods of our mothers and fathers? For a number of reasons, we didn’t want to strike the child. For one, we could still recall feeling so small and helpless before the power of our parents, who struggled in their positions of authority. My wife’s father was an alcoholic whose work significantly contributed to the microchip industry. He spanked her only once, under orders from her mother, and when his daughter started crying, so did he, and she was so shocked to see him crying she stopped, wiped her eyes. But he went on sobbing because self-pity was how he expressed himself. It came over him like a storm. They could speak to each other if they were watching a game. Televised grass made them feel calm. When I misbehaved, my mother, a classicist who won some acclaim from her book on plumbing in the ancient world, shook me by the shoulders and said, Why, why? and my father walked out to the backyard to check on his birdfeeders. He won very little acclaim for checking on his birdfeeders, despite his great passion and skill for it. Our goal was to be better, more logical. We wanted consequence for all parties involved, especially the child. It should make sense. Now we had to wonder what to do when a child unlocks a new phase of an artistic career by breaking the rules. And good art is all about breaking rules. It’s tricky. I buy and eat a hot dog. With caution the vendor watches me eat it as if expecting some complaint. No complaints. It’s a delicious hot dog.
Back at the gallery the lights are stronger and more colorful. The blues and reds and their whirling strobe belong to a firetruck. The sidewalk is full of the people who were once inside and are now confused. They had not planned to be huddled together on a sidewalk. They had not dressed for this. They are impressed by the truck but don’t want to show it. Now I hear the gallery alarm, a bell hitting itself like a penitent. I search the crowd outside for my wife and the baby until two figures catch my eye: my wife and the baby, alone in the gallery. Not alone for long, though, as the firemen march in. My wife speaks with one of them, and I can read confusion in her gestures as she struggles to process what the baby has unlocked in her artistic practice. We know there is no real danger of fire. I think we’re all feeling sheepish about our involvement in the art world when there are firemen about—even though firemen can be artists, and artists firemen. It’s easiest to be neither, and I recommend it. Some people are looking at me, wondering if I’ll run in, wondering if I’ll just stand there. I just stand there, and that earns some approval. It allows them to judge me, and once that is complete—it only takes a moment—to extend their tendrils of sympathy. I can tell the fireman is being kind to my wife. I can tell my wife is thinking about him in an intimate sense. I can tell my wife would like to take one painting off the wall and bring it outside with her. She hands the baby to the fireman. The fireman has never been in this situation. We see him through the windows of the gallery. The baby nestles into his arms. She is too old to be held like that, but the fireman is so big. He could hold anyone like that. He looks down at her. She will never remember this, the lights splashing across the buildings and streets and faces, her mother carefully unhanging from the huge wall a painting with a fresh divot. We will hold the memory for her, forever. The fireman cradling her with a gentleness he won not by training or study. He is special. The baby reaches up and touches his helmet. Her hand unlocked a new phase of a major painter’s career, and who knows what it could do for him. Her hand tells him, You’re doing good work, you bring something natural to all of this. The fireman touches her cheek with his large and gloved hand. That hand saves lives. It’s a moment I’ll never forget. She won’t remember it, but we’ll remind her for the rest of her life, the rest of our lives. Was I in danger? she’ll ask, trying to understand, and we’ll have to answer, No, not really. It wasn’t about that. It will be tricky for the fireman too. So you saved the baby, his family says, from fire, from death? No, he says, not exactly. It wasn’t about that. But for a moment, we were two people who understood one another. She unlocked a new phase of my firefighting career. But everyone has left the room. They miss his stories of melting metal, of noise and smoke. They don’t care what he found in the face of a child. So the fireman sits alone with his thoughts.
Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.