Anyhow, I said, Audrey cuts the baby’s pizza into tiny pieces and delivers the news to her husband, who’s back in bed. Fortunately, she’s already arranged for her mom to take the boys for the weekend, which will make it easier to clean the house top-to-bottom with lead-safe practices, the problem being this conference tomorrow, a sort of all-day workshop for the students with a bunch of prominent screenwriters. Audrey thinks she’ll have time to bring the baby to the doctor on the way to her mom’s house, but if her husband can’t clean…
Don’t worry, her husband tells her. He can clean.
“Does ‘her husband’ have a name?” the wife asked.
“Right,” I said. Audrey’s husband and I share a first name, and using it would have been complicated. “Paul.”
“You sound unsure,” my wife said.
I shrugged.
I keep talking, I said, about lead-safe practices. What it amounts to, when you’re washing floors, is you have to keep your bucket of water uncontaminated. Audrey and Paul are using paper towels, which means they have to tear off a sheet, fold it, dip it in the bucket, wipe a single square foot, and throw the sheet away. And the carpeting in their basement and attic will have to be vacuumed the same insanely deliberate way, using a kind of vacuum they of course don’t have.
While Audrey gets the boys ready for bed, Paul waits in front of the toilet, throws up, and gets to work. I don’t know how to describe this, I told our guests, because I can’t picture it myself, but they apparently had dozens of foam tiles on the living room floor—
“Numbers and letters, I bet,” the wife interrupted. “You lock them together to make a big padded mat.”
“But the numbers and letters pop out?”
“Along with all these other pieces, like the triangle in the ‘A.’”
“And those damn borders,” the husband said.
Well, Audrey’s last glimpse of Paul before heading to Home Depot is him on his knees disassembling these tiles and loading them into a laundry basket. It’s not that she doesn’t empathize, she’d love to tell him to just go back to bed, but there’s a hopeless amount to do and the boys can’t stay with her mom past Monday morning. In the car, her mind goes straight to the guy she’s been seeing. She should call him, they’re supposed to celebrate tomorrow by getting a hotel room after the conference, but she doesn’t want to talk about the lead and doesn’t know what else to say, definitely doesn’t know what to text.
That leads to the question of how long she’ll have to postpone telling Paul, which invites an imaginary third party to ask whether it’s not a little grotesque to poison your baby and make him a child of divorce. Fuck that though, she tells herself, this isn’t some off-the-cuff decision, she’s been weighing it for years, and this guy isn’t some relationship she drifted into because she’s dissatisfied with her marriage. She’s known him a long time and she’s in love with him. And what’s wrong with her anyhow, thinking about this instead of the problem at hand? So she tries focusing on the practical—what needs to be cleaned, in what order—but keeps getting hung up on the toys, because (a) the house is knee-deep in toys donated by friends who put them in storage and did not eventually have late-in-life mistake babies, and (b) what the hell do you do with the stuffed animals?
At Home Depot she’s walking past the paint, her cart’s full of paper towels and she’s looking for the vacuums, when it occurs to her that before 1978 lead paint was everywhere and it’s not like there was some sort of lead-poisoning epidemic; but then it further occurs to her that most kids weren’t licking lead off of shoes, and maybe cemeteries and prisons are populated by the ones who did.
That’s one thing, I told my guests, that really struck me: how torturous it would be, coming to terms with the uncertainty. Audrey and Paul would never know whether or to what degree the lead has affected this kid. If he turns out to be a bully or a terrible student or five feet tall they’ll blame themselves entirely. But what if he doesn’t read as quickly as his brother did? Or he’s just a mediocre athlete? Or he argues with them constantly? Maybe he lost an inch, some coordination, a handful of IQ points, a tiny bundle of cells in the frontal cortex. Because of them.
Our guests nodded.