The Crying Man

For four days I’d been sitting at a conference table with engineers from the different outfits that had been pulled together for this project, and across the table was a guy who I’d bonded with after I saved his hide on some controls issues and he saved mine on some line specs. Since then, we had traded a few breezy jokes, but I didn’t actually know him very well, and now—our last morning meeting, everyone flying out in the afternoon—I noticed he was staring at me. So I nodded at him. And he nodded back and turned away. But a minute later he was glancing over again. So I mouthed, What?

He moved his gaze to the front of the room.

I decided to ignore him. We were reviewing piping and instrumentation drawings, which glowed on a screen in tangled lines of different colors marked with numbers and obscure symbols—if you didn’t know what it was, you might have supposed it was insanity. My daughter, Georgia, would have sat here for only a couple of minutes before she ran out screaming. A wise, bright little girl. What was she doing now? Daycare. Or gliding around in the jogging stroller. Lana had mentioned that she needed to do a fifteen-mile training run today, and I couldn’t think how she would fit such a thing into the day, but she would.

Then I heard the chair on the other side of the table creak as the guy turned again, and I decided to stare him down.

He surprised me. He caught my gaze and held it, and when there was a lull—someone was writing on the white board—he said, “You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Reason I ask is you don’t look great.”

“I feel good.”

Of course, everyone was staring now. Someone said, “You’re a bit whitish.”

“Maybe I need some coffee.”

“You look,” my friend across the table said, “kind of like, haggard.”

“Without enough coffee, I’m like a frog in the desert,” I said.

No one smiled. My boss, Bruce, said, “It’s been a long week.”

“I better go get coffee,” I said.

Georgia—she’s a three-year-old—already owned an impressive collection of animal books, plastic farm creatures, and stuffed bears, dogs, dolphins, and other mammals, but in recent months her interest had narrowed to amphibians and reptiles. Lizards and salamanders. Pig-nosed turtles and fire belly newts. Caecilians and ghost frogs. Why the furless and cold-blooded? I was struck once when she said, with relish, “Snapping turtles are mean,” and I thought maybe these animals offered a vehicle for whatever in her wanted to be mean and a little inhuman. Except that she didn’t particularly favor the big, mean ones. Her favorites were little lizards and newts, camouflaged and rarely seen. At any rate, not only could she distinguish crocodiles from alligators and terrapins from tortoises, but she knew that a horned toad is not a toad but a lizard, that the sandfish skink can swim through sand, that although no snakes have eyelids, certain snakes can indeed fly. “Actually,” she would say, “they parachute.” She and I examined field guides with photos of hundreds of species, absorbing the colors and shapes and names: Relictual Slender Salamander, Bleached Earless Lizard, Organ Pipe Shovel-nosed Snake, Blue-tailed Mole Skink, False Map Turtle, Ruin Lizard.

The corners of my eyes and mouth drooped in the bathroom mirror. I propped them up with my fingers, and when I let go, they fell.

I supposed I knew the cause of this, though I didn’t feel it. A couple of weeks earlier, I spent seventy-two sleepless hours feeling horrible and physically ill, but by now I was done. So, yes, Lana was having sex with some skinny guy with weird short arms from her marathon training group, and, yes, it was bad. But I had worried it and agonized over it and chafed myself past feeling it. Right now I didn’t have any particular awareness of presenting any particular face to the world, and the face before me in the mirror seemed a curiosity. I figured it would pass.

I waited in the car for the meeting to end. When Bruce came out, I said, “I’m sorry, man. That was embarrassing. But I’m feeling good now.”

He looked at me and said, “You’re crying.” I said no. With the slow articulation of trying for greater precision, he said, “Your face is wet.”

I touched my face. My finger shone wet. “I’m just so happy we’re done,” I said.

At the airport, we found the plane standing at the gate. We rammed ourselves three miles into the air, and then the guy in the window seat asked if I was going to be OK. “I’m fine,” I said. But he clearly disbelieved me. “My snake died,” I added. “Boa constrictor.” The man smiled, looked away, and wiggled. I could see he thought I might be joking, but he wasn’t sure. “We knew each other perfectly,” I said. “She slept in bed with me. She curled around me for warmth, and she didn’t constrict. In the morning, I just slipped out. She loved me, I think. She woke me with tongue kisses.” I wiped my eyes. The crying made little susurrant noises. Window man stared hard out his window. I focused on my breathing. I thought of Georgia sitting with me, the warm ball of her head on my chest, moving slightly with my inhale and exhale, and the crying subsided, except for a faint uncomfortable pulsation in my throat.

But as soon as the plane landed in Denver, my eyes welled again. In the terminal I stumbled, and Bruce caught my elbow. “It’s just,” I said, “I find myself thinking about all the puppies that are suffering right now.” Bruce—who had been divorced for ten years, who could yap all through lunch about his hunting buddies, but who rarely summoned a word about his two teenaged kids—stood dumb. I wondered if this was because he knew the problem to the precision of a decimal point. He had already lived through the effective ending of his own conventional family unit, and maybe, having been through that, he knew there wasn’t anything to be said about it.

I wiped my face and worked at smiling. Bruce asked finally, “Have you tried taking Allegra?”

I headed for my car. As I passed the baggage carousels, a little boy in smudged glasses stared. I waved at him cheerily, clownlike.

On an average day, Lana woke at 4:30 and left for work. I rose later and conveyed Georgia to daycare. Around 4:00 in the afternoon Lana left her office and picked up Georgia. When I got home, Lana changed and went out to run; if she had a marathon coming up, she might be gone for hours. I labored to coax Georgia to sleep and usually succeeded only moments before Lana returned, showered, and went to bed. I knew she and I should have made more time for each other, but make time out of what? Construction paper and glitter? That’s how it had felt, though it did seem that if Lana could squeeze in an affair, then there must have been more time around than I had realized.

I sat in the car in front of the house. I didn’t want to see Lana like this. She would want to know the cause. She might guess. I looked at myself in the mirror and strained to get control of the crying. If Lana didn’t want me to know about her affair, that was great: as long as she didn’t want me to know, our lives could go on. If she told me about a relationship with another man, or even if she only knew I knew, then she would feel committed. That was how she locked into things. I didn’t blame her; I was used to it; she couldn’t help herself. If she knew I knew, then she’d be committed, and we’d have to be divorced. It sounded stupid, but there it was. Cataclysm.

I tried to think of options, but the hardest fact was that I wanted to see my daughter. The crying was pulling my lips back tight on my teeth and dilating my nostrils, but I wiped my face dry and took deep breaths, and finally I felt my face relax.

As I walked across the lawn, however, it came back. Georgia had crying fits like this sometimes—you could see she wanted to stop but couldn’t, the emotion overtaking rational processes. So this was like that; I was like a three-year-old. Except that when it happened to Georgia, it lasted only a few minutes. So maybe I was more like an infant.

I could see Lana in the window. She had started running after Georgia was born, to get weight off, but for her it didn’t mean jogging a few blocks a couple times a week like a normal person. She had to run marathons. She had to become weathered, lean: her calf in my hand felt like a rock in a bag. It seemed strange to me. She had been a bit plump when we married, and I myself carried a dozen pounds of on-body provisions against the event of apocalypse and famine.

In our courtship, I could always get her to laugh, but that had faded. It grew worse after Georgia was born; we spent a full year in a sleepless deranged state that fatally poisoned humor. Now Georgia was older and slept better, but the humor stayed dead. Still, was our relationship so terrible? Until I saw the man in her car, I hadn’t thought so. Things were OK. Things were maybe even getting a little better. Yes? No. Perhaps it had only seemed that way because this other thing was going on, which had caused Lana to shift her attitude toward me. But I didn’t want to know. My only hope was to be as if I knew nothing.

I dropped my keys on the porch, and I was trying ineffectually to retrieve them with the toe of my shoe when Lana opened the door. “Hi,” I said. The crying bulged the lids of my eyes and hurt in my ears and seethed under my skin, but I squelched it quiet.

She torqued her head to a tilt. “What’s wrong? Did you lose your job?”

“I’m totally fine. Everyone is fine. A guy cut me off on the highway, a real asshole move, and, somehow, I felt bad for his mother. But I’m OK.”

“You aren’t fine.” She stared. “You’re crying.”

“On a scale of one to ten I’d say I feel like in the sixes or sevens. I don’t know what this is. Allegra will fix it, I bet.”

Georgia squat-jumped into the room behind Lana. “Rana catesbeiana, Daddy!” She tongued the air.

I looked at Lana. Lana smiled. “Latin,” she said.

Georgia had apparently picked out her own clothes, favoring poisonous-critter warning colors—fluorescent pink shorts, a green long-sleeved shirt printed with small red apples, and a mustard yellow vest. Also, she seemed to have grown three inches in the four days I was gone. “What!” I cried. “How can you have gotten bigger?” She grinned, but then she looked closer, and in a flicker her expression went flat. “Rana what? Is that a Latin name?” I asked. “Are you learning the beasties’ Latin names? That’s fantastic.” I rubbed the wet from my eyes and stepped toward her, but a gasp started low in the ribs, and I had to stop to concentrate on putting it down.

“You’re upsetting her,” Lana said.

I moved forward, but Georgia turned and began to cry, hands clutching. “Is she OK?” I asked.

“You’re freaking her out, for god’s sake,” Lana said. “Why are you wheezing like that?” Then a series of wracking sobs took my breath, the room revolved stutteringly, and I had to sit on the floor. Georgia shrieked. “Go outside,” Lana said to me. “Go wait outside. What’s wrong with you? She needs to calm down. You need to go.”

I sat on the porch, and while Lana was distracted, I bawled, made rough noises, gasped and heaved. It felt good. Maybe it only needed to exhaust itself. If only I didn’t know what I knew. It wasn’t my fault I knew what I knew; I hadn’t wanted to know; I hadn’t sought it. Sometimes when things were going badly with Georgia at bedtime, I put her in her car seat and drove—the motion and noise lulled her—and one day while driving, I saw Lana’s car, and Lana driving it, and a man in the passenger seat. So I followed them, to a motel, old and unrenovated, with a sign that still advertised Color TV. I parked in front of a bar across the street and watched the two of them hop out, both in little runner’s shorts, the man wearing a baseball cap, his shorts showing naked fatless legs, his weird little arms swinging with delighted machismo. They went into a room.

Georgia woke up a moment later. But she was so small in her car seat that she could hardly see out the window, and it wasn’t likely she’d spot her mother. I thought we might as well sit for a while. I wanted a reason to believe I had a mistaken impression of the situation. Maybe they were doing yoga. But Georgia started whining. To try to calm her, I started telling a story. I often told her stories at night to help her settle down. Typically, any sort of nonsense would work—recap an episode of Seinfeld with the characters turned into iguanas, for example. Sometimes I could even get her worked up into long fits of laughter. I loved doing that. When she was upset, however, a story had to be pretty good to claim her attention. I thought of some basil plants we were growing from seed on the kitchen windowsill, which she liked to check every day. So I began a story about two baby basil plants, growing toward the sun, tickled by worms, showering in the rain. I had her for a moment, but I couldn’t think what to do with basil plants, except that people might eat them, and I made the mistake of saying something about that. Georgia wailed. I reversed and talked happy basil, uneaten basil, spaceship basil, princess basil, but I’d lost her, she wouldn’t pay attention, she probably couldn’t even hear me anymore, the story was a failure. I watched the motel while my child in the backseat screamed for ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty. Finally, I had to drive away and tend to her before she could somehow die of screaming.

An hour later Lana arrived home, showered, and went to bed.

Tears blackly pocked the porch concrete. Neighbors passed in the twilight with strollers and dogs, and I responded to their greetings with lusty waving motions. I’d been sitting there for perhaps half an hour when Lana came out again. Her hands landed on my shoulders, and her fingers clutched in a suggestion of sympathy. I emitted a few whimpers; she’d surprised me, and now I couldn’t quite push it down. She sat beside me and hugged her rawboned arms around her chest. “Maybe you should go to a doctor. I’ve never seen you like this.”

“I feel OK.” Historically, sometimes, if I made her laugh, then she made me laugh. I said, “A doctor’s bill would really make me cry.” She didn’t laugh. I looked at her feet, encased in weird, alien-looking, propulsive socks and shoes. “I remember when I was in tennis camp in junior high,” I said. “A coach asked me why I was always pissed at him. I had no idea what he was talking about. But my doubles partner said, ‘He just looks like that.’”

“You don’t look pissed.”

“I had a girlfriend sophomore year of college who told me I always looked like I was thinking really hard. She kept asking me what I was thinking. ‘About you,’ I told her. ‘Penny for your thoughts?’ she’d say. ‘You,’ I’d say. I think it creeped her out. She had an angle to her eyebrows, like she was expecting bad news, although she was actually very cheerful. And my first boss was this calm, quiet guy,” I said, between occasional hiccups, “whose eyelids rested open really wide, showing white all around the irises, so that he always looked like he’d just seen a leprechaun but didn’t dare say anything.”

Lana adjusted one of her socks.

I told her about a study I had once read of, where people were made to smile, and scientists found that these smiling people were happier than they would have been if they hadn’t been made to smile. Maybe I just needed to smile more, I said. But I couldn’t seem to remember—I told Lana—how they had been made to smile, if they had just been told to do it themselves, or maybe there had been some kind of mechanical smiling device that shaped the lips…

“We ran this afternoon,” Lana said, interrupting. She had grown irritated, which hadn’t been my intent—irritation might accelerate us toward terrible things. “Georgia fell asleep in the stroller, so she will probably be up late tonight.” She remarked that it was difficult now for her to run when I was gone, because Georgia would no longer sit still in the jogging stroller or, if she did, she would fall asleep and then be up for hours during the night. I said that seemed pretty understandable; I’d be bored, too, in a jogging stroller. But Lana had settled into a mode of complaint. “It’s the only thing, to run, all I ask,” she said, “and even that gets pushed aside.”

I was puzzled about how much of her running time she actually spent running. Her muscles hadn’t come from nothing. Either they shared a real commitment to running, or they had bizarrely athletic sex. I said, “I bet if you smiled when you said that, you’d feel better.” Then a sob caught me off guard and wormed out.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“This meeting felt a lot like beating my own head against a wall for four days straight.”

“If you won’t tell me, then this is just annoying. I’d rather sympathize.”

“That’s fair,” I said. “It’s annoying to me too.”

“Annoying and kind of pathetic.”

“How can you say that to a man who’s crying?” This was a joke, but she looked stricken, which worried me. Desperate to reset, I said, “Gosh, it’s a warm evening!”

She tugged at the hems of her shorts and pressed her thighs together. “Georgia wants to be a veterinarian,” she said. “We went to this cute little class at the zoo yesterday. She made a stethoscope from a paper plate and construction paper, and they gave her a toy crocodile. Georgia told everyone that crocodiles eat rocks, and I could see that the woman running the class thought she was making it up.”

“But it’s true.”

“She listened to the crocodile’s heart, looked into its ears, and put a Band-Aid on its eye. She was excited to tell you about it. She said, ‘I’ll tell Dad that I helped a crocodile, and he’ll say, “What! You helped a crocodile?” And I’ll say, “Yes, I helped a crocodile with an ouchie on his eye, and I want to be a veterinarian when I’m older.”’”

Oh, that made me happy. I said, “I’m so predictable.”

Lana shrugged. “We all are.” Which made me laugh, but the laugh was a bubble upward in a downward gasping, and caused coughing. Lana patted me on the back, then suddenly stopped and pinched at the meat of her calf and raised a red mark.

“I need to talk about some things,” she said.

I shuddered. I gestured at the wet on my face. “Do you think this might be caused somehow by sunspots?”

“Probably should have said something sooner,” she said. This was very bad; it made me wheeze. “But,” she said, “right before your trip didn’t seem like good timing. I promised myself we would talk when you got back.” This was terrible. Awful. One of the things I had once liked about her sense of commitment was that it seemed I had, at last, an absolute in my life. All else might alter and drift, but I would have her commitment to me, a thing of magical durability.

“Do you,” she said, with the marching onward tones of a dirge, “feel all right about how things are?” She looked as pleading, solemn, and earnest as I had seen in a long while.

I said, “Do you remember whether newts have gills?”

Her expression turned bitter and cold. Away in the house Georgia began crying out. Maybe just talking to herself, loudly. “Is she in her room?” I asked. She sounded as if she had come downstairs.

“Life has these surprising things in it—” Lana said.

I let a sob press the air from me.

She looked at me, then started again, “I have to tell you—” she said.

I ejected a bleat. The crying felt like a head inside my head.

“Does something hurt?” Lana asked. I couldn’t reply. I waved a hand. Maybe I could remarry. My father had remarried when I was in high school. His second wife was a heavy woman, fifteen years younger than him, a cheerful woman, laughing too much and always in the same way, like a doll with a pull string.

Then Georgia pushed the door open and scuttled out in her pajamas, a sparkling star on her chest. “You said you would try to sleep,” Lana said.

“You did try,” I said to Georgia. “Didn’t you?”

She nodded.

“You’re supposed to be in bed,” Lana said, but she let Georgia sit in her lap. I wiped my eyes. Georgia glanced at me and appeared sullen. Looking at her knees she asked, “Are you sick?”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I feel great.”

Lana said, “Tell your dad what you had for dinner.”

“The eyes of blue-eyed newts.”

“What?”

“Blueberries,” Lana said. “That’s all she would eat for dinner.”

“Are eyeballs meat?” Georgia asked.

“They’re meatberries,” I said.

“You’re teasing me,” Georgia declared, pleased.

Lana, watching the dark, looked—for a slashing moment—not discontent.

I said, “Do you know why the sky is blue?”

“Why?”

“It would only eat blueberries,” I said.

“Blue-eyed newt eyes,” Georgia corrected me.

“Yes.” See how quickly it all changed when she was here! We could sit and do this and be this way for the rest of our lives. Why not? Were we faking it? Were we playing a great joke on one another? No, no! This was us being us, right now, us.

But I had to hurry to preserve myself. I told Lana that I would put Georgia in bed. Georgia sometimes threw a fit at being separated from her mother, so I was gratified when Georgia allowed me to lead her inside. In the hall she swung her arms and, god knows why, sang, “Material Girl.” I moaned a little. In her room, I clicked on the nightlight and the humidifier, left the overhead light off, stepped on a giant plush turtle and nearly twisted an ankle.

I sat in the rocking chair beside the bed and patted my lap. Georgia had stopped in the middle of her bedroom and wouldn’t come. “Story time,” I said. I could see her hunching. “What’s wrong, turnip?” The room was dark and I could hardly see her. I went to her, and when I picked her up and sat her on my lap, she was shuddering. “Everything’s all right,” I said. “I’m home. Everyone’s home. Don’t cry. What’s wrong?”

“You’re sad.”

“No way. Is that all it is? I’m OK. I’m happy,” I said, cinders in my eyes. “This is only something like a cold. You know how your nose runs, and you can’t stop sneezing and coughing? It’s like that, but in my eyes.”

She twisted to look at me in the shadows. I winked at her. “Daddy,” she said, “did you know that the tuatara lizard has three eyes?”

Could that possibly be right? But probably it was. Just then it struck me how this obsessiveness was like her mother’s. I asked, “Really?”

“Sure. Do you think when they cry, two eyes cry? Or three?”

“I bet they cry with their knees,” I said. She giggled. “Do you want a story?”

She said softly, “Yes.”

“About what?”

She performed twitches of protest at this question. “Tell the story.”

“Once upon a time, there was a frog. And there was a snake,” I said. Then I spent a moment trying to get a lid over the sobs again while trying to think what I could do with a frog and a snake. “OK?” I said at last.

“OK.”

I told her that the frog was friends with the snake. I spent some time listing things the two of them did together: hopping-slash-slithering through swamps, sharing crickets for dinner, sleeping all wrapped together in a ball. “They were a cute little pair,” I said. Georgia loved the word cute. “OK?” I said.

Georgia said nothing. She sat very still.

Then I had to think of something for them to do.

“A rock,” I said. We both sat wondering what might be done with a rock. “This rock,” I said, “looked like a snake. The real snake found it and really really liked it. She decided it was her new best friend. She brought it pieces of cricket to eat and wrapped around it to sleep.”

“A rock?” Georgia asked.

“The frog couldn’t believe it either,” I said. “He asked the snake, ‘What’s so great about a rock?’ ‘Well,’ the snake said, ‘it’s more my shape. And it doesn’t need to keep wet all the time.’”

We sat thinking on that for a moment.

“So,” I said, “the frog was sad. But, in time, he went off to make friends with a stick.”

“No!” Georgia cried out.

“What?” I said, startled.

“Tell a good story. The frog and the snake were friends.”

I said, “Well, the frog did go back to the snake and said,‘Hey, let’s get together, let’s go slither and eat crickets together, like we used to do.’”

I choked and hacked, coughed and cleared it.

“But the snake said no,” I said. “The snake liked the rock and felt that the rock was pretty much in all ways superior to the slimy, cold little frog.”

“Oh,” Georgia said, “no.”

I sniffled. “There was nothing to be done. The snake was writing Snake hearts Rock all over her spiral bound notebooks.”

“No.” Georgia bared her teeth. “Make it more fun.”

“I’m sorry—”

She screamed.

“Please, love,” I said. I tried to shush her, hugged her and rocked her, but she only stiffened and twisted and shrieked. I knew it shouldn’t be too difficult to turn the story around, but I couldn’t get my mind to bend that way. I didn’t know what to say. It crossed my mind that she didn’t know the word betrayal. She felt it, but she didn’t know that it had a word.

So she kept shrieking and I kept sitting there stupidly, thinking how, usually, with this commotion, Lana would have come in by now, and I didn’t want Lana to come. Then a new thought landed—and like a thing dropped onto my head from out of a tree, I wanted to fling it away—that I might be punishing Georgia for being like her mother. “Hey, it’s all right,” I said. “Everything will be all right.” I turned her to look at me. “Everyone will be happy.”

She had an astonishing ability to recompose herself in the passing of a moment. “Yes,” she said.

“The snake,” I said, “saw how sad the frog was. She changed her mind.”

“Yes,” Georgia said.

“The snake wondered what had come over her,” I said. “You can’t be best friends with a rock, she realized. What a good lesson that was for the snake. And then the frog and the snake busted up the rock with a hammer and buried the pieces in a hole in the ground. And they lived happily together forever.” The crying had turned giggly, little bundles of balloons popping from my throat.

Georgia nodded. We sat saying nothing. Would Lana come? But minutes passed, and she did not.

“And then,” I said, “it was time for Georgia to get into bed.” I rubbed my eyes out. “But I’ll sit with you for a while.”

I put her in bed and sat back in the chair. I would sit here until I slept, sit here until morning. I would keep Georgia between myself and Lana, like a shield.

The humidifier made its low, endless sound. My crying, too, moved in a smooth, gentle flow, the low mutter of a car exhaust or a crazy person, with a feeling like little quick wet creatures moving below my thoughts on cold feet, darting between dark, damp places.

In her bed Georgia shifted and turned. She began to cry again. Apparently in her sleep. I shaped her blanket over her and tried to quiet her, but soon the sound of her weeping was too awful. I felt I might be infecting her, and she needed to sleep. I had to leave.

I found Lana in the hallway. The dim light made elaborate shadows in the hollowed features of her face. We stood listening. After only half a minute Georgia had quieted herself. Silence engulfed us. I was thinking that all this was my fault in ways that would be clear to me later. It seemed that I never could see myself in full except as that jerk in my past.

Lana whispered, “Snake?”

“No.” I looked at Georgia’s door. “That shouldn’t have been a snake. It has the wrong connotations. I should have made it something more attractive, of noble bearing,” I said. “Like a turtle. Or an iguana. Pretty much the whole story should have been different.”

Lana stepped back against the wall. “I’ll sleep on the couch.” She looked at the ceiling. “I wish you would stop that.”

“I’m only crying to spite you,” I said. Then added, “That’s a joke.”

Georgia made a sudden strange noise then, high and choking, a cough, maybe, or a laugh or a moan.

We did not move or speak. When Georgia cried out in the night, what you did was you waited to see if she needed assistance or if she could settle herself, and meanwhile, you did not do anything that might disturb her. We were experts in the strategy of this particular moment. We had years of practice. We knew what to do. Occasional tears came down, loose pebbles on a treacherous slope, but I made no noise. The hallway was a vault of silent space. Lana looked at me. We knew what to do. We could not speak, and we could not leave.

I closed my eyes.

I wondered if Georgia had only been trying to make a frog call.

I imagined her a hairsbreadth away, on my skin the radiance of her childish heat.