A GOOD AND HAPPY CHILD Justin Evans, once a film scout for Paramount Pictures and in business development at the New York Times, is now a strategy executive at a social media technology company. He lives in New York City with his wife and their young son. This is his first novel. JUSTIN EVANS A Good and Happy Child This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly. Adobe ISBN: 9781407014456 Version 1.0 www.randomhouse.co.uk Published by Vintage 2008 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Copyright © Justin Evans 2007 Justin Evans has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser First published by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc., New York Vintage Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA www.vintage-books.co.uk Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9780099520313 The Random House Group Limited makes every effort to ensure that the papers used in its books are made from trees that have been legally sourced from well-managed and credibly certified forests. Our paper procurement policy can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/paper.htm Printed and bound in Germany by GGP Media GmbH, Possneck www.vintage-books.co.uk Evan_9780307351227_3p_all_r5.qxp 1/24/07 3:27 PM Page v 2 3 4 5 6 for Maria and Nicholas 7 9 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 S R Evan_9780307351227_3p_all_r5.qxp 1/24/07 3:27 PM Page vii 2 3 4 5 6 All the conventions conspire 7 To make this fort assume The furniture of home; 9 Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good —W. H. Auden 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 S R December, Last Year t was a tidy brownstone on Ninth Street near my home, one that I I had passed many times without noticing. Stone stairs and a com- fortable warm light inside. On the sidewalk, a lady walked her dog, a bug-eyed Boston terrier, black. She smiled at me. I wondered if she knew somehow that I was a soul in need. My recent problem made me think of an instructor I had in college, an Israeli, who was always laughing at American naïveté, who was fond of saying, “With Freud, we are all poets in our dreams.” To him, analy- sis and dream interpretation were ways of converting our little personal miseries into big, robust myths. I had no intention of doing this when I arrived at your office. My problem, while maybe uncommon, seemed more like a hang-up than a crisis; I had no wish to dramatize myself, become the hero who asks the right questions, solves the riddles, and slays the dragon in an epic sung on the streets of Manhattan. In fact, I can honestly say I had no memory of the events I describe in these pages—meaning no conscious memory, no current memory. They are things I experienced in childhood, then tucked away in a file along with the soccer games, the Christmas presents, and the illicit midnight Nut- ter Butters. With both my parents now dead, and no siblings—and with many old ties severed—the only way to my past led through my own 1 2 Justin Evans mind. Strange, then, and a tribute to you, that you exposed this the very first day you met me. The foyer smelled of damp carpet, and the lightbulb was burned out. An inauspicious start, I thought. The brownstone was obviously a pri- vate residence. There were mailboxes in the hall and a mountain bike tucked under the stairwell. I reached the apartment with the tag “DR. H. SURMAN.” I knocked, and you appeared, shaking my hand, smiling, leading me inside to your office, to a wicker chair in a pleasant room with plenty of daylight (but discreet shutters on the lower halves of the windows), hanging plants, throw pillows, and a cinnamon smell that might be some kind of aromatherapy (why not? I thought, get my money’s worth). You folded your hands and your greet smile changed to a nice-business smile. I ran my hands over the chair’s arms and noticed dents in the wicker. “I wonder how many people have picked at that in fits of mental anguish,” I said, forcing a laugh. You smiled like a sphinx. Now we were genuinely in shrink terri- tory: I had made a revealing comment, you had dodged a bullet by refusing to disclose information about your other patients or to join me in mocking their suffering. Good for you. “So,” you said, “what brings you here?” Funny, how trite we patients must be to you. Like hundreds before me, I walked in convinced that a handful of irritations and sadnesses were “my problems.” And then, like hundreds of others, I was to see how the facts, laid out, began showing patterns. I sensed an underlying logic to my distress even in that first hour, but only dimly. It was just a quaver, which would later broaden and deepen and, at times, threaten to engulf me. But I was a greenhorn that first day; a city kid preparing to canoe the Amazon, smelling the damp air and feeling the first bumps of the Jeep ride and thinking, “Oh, this isn’t so bad,” when we hadn’t even taken the boats off the roof of the car. I told you about my son. “I can’t hold him,” I said. a good and happy child 3 I told you how in the early days it had seemed like normal anxiety: near-crazed from sleeplessness, jumping up at 3:00 A.M. to check the baby’s breathing, anxiety that I might somehow break him. But, I con- fessed to you, days passed, and then weeks, and I could still not stand to hold him—hardly to touch him. When, for brief moments, I was alone with him, I would leave him in his crib and sit nearby, smelling his deli- cious baby smell and feeling terrified, as if I might fall off the earth, unstuck from gravity, and go hurtling into space. “That sounds a little extreme,” you acknowledged. At the end of the first month, I hoped my negligence might be chalked up to paternal jitters. Would anyone notice if I worked longer hours than usual; left the room when my wife carried him into it; avoided my wife when she breast-fed; would not change him, bathe him, touch him? I passed off my behavior as old-fashioned: I was a man’s man. But I changed in other ways. I became edgy, sour, suddenly suspicious of my wife. After two months playing the surrogate dad, my mother-in-law began to make remarks. Behind my back at first, but ultimately to my face. My wife defended me for a time. But the extra work exhausted her—and my seeming indolence wore her down. Cut- ting remarks and criticisms escalated into arguments, arguments into warfare. Finally, with tears streaming down her face, she admitted she could no longer give me the benefit of the doubt based on four years of mar- riage and nine months of tenderness during her pregnancy. Seeing my coldness now made her think she had never known me; she was disillu- sioned; she fretted about our son’s future, and her own. My behavior was inexplicable, unforgivable. How could she stay married to a man who couldn’t care for his own child? She wanted me to offer an explanation, or seek help. Either way, my choice was to change or leave. And Jesus, think about our son, she had said, so pitifully that I confessed to her that in the presence of the baby, I was paralyzed. Sometimes I would just tremble; other times I would disappear into a trance for a half hour, an hour. Not from the usual parental anxiety; from a profound feeling of nullity, shock, disorientation. It was terrible for me, too. I promised her 4 Justin Evans I loved her and our son more than anything.