From “Structural Failure”
It is getting very cold. I spend every day in the South End with Peter, surveying apartments. Peter and I have become like an old married couple, communicating in gestures, finishing each other’s sentences.
We go into the top-floor apartment of a brownstone that is settling, jagged cracks in the foundation, the stairs leaning drunkenly. This whole area of the South End is landfill, the houses built on centuries of garbage.
“This baby’s funky,” Peter says, “It’s a six, for sure.”
“Yup,” I say, knowing he means a total gut: new ceilings, new floors, new sheetrock on the walls. But from the slant of the floors, I’m also thinking: structural failure. I stand in the darkened apartment, trying to imagine how we’re going to fix this leaning, exhausted building. It takes me a few minutes to realize that Peter is standing stock still in the middle of the room. His nose is quivering like a hunting dog’s.
“Something’s wrong,” Peter says, gesturing to the kitchen stove. All the knobs are missing.
“What? We’re going to need a new stove?”
“Shhh. Listen.”
In the growing silence there is only the gurgle of heating pipes, the scratch-scratch of pigeons on the window sill. Then I hear it- a faint, high-pitched keening sound.
Peter flings open the door of the living room closet. Inside, cowering in a dark corner are two little boys. The older one – he’s maybe five– is clamping his hand over the crying three year-olds’ mouth. They are both filthy, with snotty, crusted noses.
Peter kneels down in front of them.
“It’s okay, it’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you. Where’s you’re mommy? At work?”
The older boy glares up, but the baby– he’s just a baby, the same age as my son—nods his head, still crying. Peter slowly takes the little boy into his arms, fishes out a handkerchief, and wipes the boy’s face.
“Call social services,” Peter says. He reels off a number and I dial it on my cell phone. A woman at the other end says someone will be there in half an hour.
We sit down on a battered couch in the living room with the kids, the baby in my lap, the five year old in Peter’s. Both the children fall asleep, exhausted from crying. It feels so familiar to have a warm child in my arms, sleeping peacefully.
I remember the first morning in the hospital after my son was born. Holding him in my arms, I’d looked out at the city, and whispered to him, “Baby, I’m your father, and I will always take care of you.”
And I have. I pick him up from daycare every day, take him home and bathe him, dance with him in my arms until he falls asleep. When my wife returns from work she scoops him up in her arms and croons, “Oh, my baby, my poor baby, never mind, your mother is home.” Then she takes the baby into the other room.
Later at night my wife and I argue: about my low paying job, about the money we do not have to buy a house. Ignoring our finances, my wife plans a trip to India. She wants to get off the plane like a movie star, with suitcases full of presents for her relatives. She retreats into her three-hour long Hindi movies and when I touch her, she snarls at me. I have become the symbol of her unhappiness.
I sit on the battered couch, the little boy asleep in my arms. His face is pushed into my chest, soaking it with drool. When the social services woman arrives, the boy wakes with a start and looks up at me with big, frightened eyes. I feel as though I’m handing over my own son.
The woman departs, the children crying all the way down the stairs. Peter’s face is ashen.
“I knew it, from the stove,” he says softly. “When they leave the kids alone they take the knobs off.”
Where the little boy slept in my arms, there is only air.
“What is happening to this world?” Peter continues. “These little babies left alone. And you can’t blame the woman. Her husband’s gone, left her alone. She’s got to get a job, feed those hungry mouths.
I am still sitting on the couch. My eyes are closed tight, my breath coming in ragged gasps.
“Hey, you okay, man?” Peter walks over, touches my shoulder. “These things happen. You gotta let it go.”
When I open my eyes, they are filled with tears.
“Let’s go get us some hot coffee,” Peter says. “That’s what we need.”
We take our usual seats by the plate glass window of the coffee shop. My hands are shaking so badly that I scald myself.
“What’s going on, man?” Peter looks at me over the rim of his coffee cup.
“Peter, it’s bad. We’re fighting all the time. She says she’ll kill herself.”
“Your wife? She serious?”
“I don’t know. It’s killing me.”
“You talk to her? You try- whatchamacallit- counseling?”
I nod dumbly. We’ve tried an Indian woman therapist who told us smugly that Indians don’t get divorced, that we’ll just have to learn to live with each other.
“My wife’s like a kid. I can’t trust her alone with my son.”
“Slow down, man. Drink your coffee. Breathe.”
The coffee is burnt and hot. I feel its sourness coiling in my stomach.
“I want to leave my marriage. I can’t handle it any more.”
I’ve never said these words to anyone before. I would never dare say this to my family, or to my Indian friends. Nobody in our family has ever been divorced. Indians don’t get divorced. Divorce is failure. Divorce is the destruction of the home. Divorce is to become like the Americans, who are barbarians and abandon their families.
Peter’s eyes widen.
“You sure you want to leave your wife?”
“I know it’s completely wrong. I know it’s a horrible thing to do and….”
“Listen to me.”
I look up at Peter, at his calm eyes. He speaks slowly, choosing his words.
“Listen. You a good man. I know that. You love your son. But. You got to look after yourself first. Understand? If you’re no good, there’s nothing you can do for him. You hear me?”
I nod again. I have heard him, the first words that I’ve heard in a long time.
“I’ll finish the other two apartments. You finish your coffee. Then take a walk, clear your head, man. No arguments.”
I watch Peter leave, a small man in his olive-drab janitor’s uniform, hunched against the cold. He looks tiny and alien on that cold Boston street.
