by Glen Duncan
Money wasn’t, immediately, a problem. Selina’s father had cut off her allowance when it became obvious the relationship with Augustus was more than just the latest stick to beat him with. This ought to have been devastating, but in fact Selina had for two years been diverting her father’s stipend into antiwar organizations, literacy programs, Amnesty International and the Red Cross. Don’t give me any credit, she said. I’m only doing it because there’s other money. If I was busting my ass waiting tables these do-gooders wouldn’t see a dime. The other money was a legacy from her grandmother she’d come into on turning eighteen. It wouldn’t last forever but it would get them into an apartment and might tide them over until Augustus got a job. (He’d thought, vaguely, of becoming a journalist, but hadn’t done much about it.) Cardillo and Juliet both spoke privately to Augustus, made it known they’d make sure all was well. I know your little witch thinks I’m a grifting old whore, Juliet said. But talk to her will you? Tell her we love her. We don’t, but tell her anyway. If she wants to finish college this year Gianni and I will look after the kid. Talk to her.
Selina had moved out of the shared apartment into a second-floor studio on East 6th Street, which because neither Virginia nor her stuff was in it seemed palatial. There was a sitting area with a pull-out and a fireplace overlooked by two windows. A breakfast bar sectioned off the small white tiled kitchen. Overnight Selina had abandoned slovenliness. Augustus, astonished that he was legally entitled to do so, moved in with her. He did it in the low-profile manner he’d made an art form—unnecessarily, since the building was full of aspirant bohemians who, if they thought about it at all between performance verse and body collage, claimed it as a countercultural victory.
Pregnancy was rough on Selina. She threw up every morning, went in and out of nausea all day, suffered headaches, insomnia, constipation. She and Augustus began referring to her breasts as the Grenades of Tenderness. He might forget and cup one—the result was what Selina described as “white light detonation.” Naturally prohibition re-eroticized them. It’s just as well, Selina said. You were beginning to take them for granted. It wasn’t only her breasts; he was newly crazy for her. You’re doing something, he said. You’re doing something with your pheromones. Selina, whose libido had all but disappeared, said: Baby, let me make this unequivocally clear. I’d rather eat a leper’s sock than have sex right now. I’ll jerk you off and you can look at my boobs but it’ll basically be a tedious act of charity. I don’t knock charity, Augustus said, unzipping his pants. Holy mother of God I don’t knock charity.
Then at around ten weeks Selina’s mood changed. Abstracted silences and vicious lashings out. Nightmares woke her in a sweat. She wouldn’t talk about them. Twice in the small hours Augustus found her sitting on the can in the brightly lit bathroom staring at the floor. Everything he did irritated her. The tedious acts of charity stopped. He absorbed it for a couple of weeks without complaint. Then one night much against his inclination they went to see a rerun of Rosemary’s Baby, which they’d missed first time around. When they came out of the theater Selina said, Don’t say anything. Especially don’t say, Wow, that was a hot idea. They walked the eight blocks home in silence. When they got back to the apartment and it appeared she was ready to go the rest of the night without uttering a word, he said: What the fuck is wrong with you? She was at the sink with her back to him, had begun putting away the washed dishes without even taking her coat off. Oh nothing’s wrong with me, she said, not turning to face him. Nothing at all. What could be wrong? I’m twenty-two and having a black man’s baby and not graduating and throwing up the whole time and crucifying my fucking parents and killing my brother and wondering what it’s going to be like trapped in a fucking apartment waiting for you all day and thinking it’s only a matter of time before everything starts to feel Sylvia Plathish and something like a door handle or a lamp says yeah baby this is your life. Jesus fucking Christ.
Augustus stood still behind her with his hands full of useless life. The kitchen countertops were white Formica and the breakfast bar stools were stainless steel with pink vinyl cushions; everything shone. He thought again of how she’d gone at a stroke from mess to order. A baby arrived in a woman and she could do these things, snip off habits as if pruning a bush. He made himself keep his mouth shut.
Selina turned and moved past him, leaning away so as not to touch. She stood in the middle of the room for a few moments, then sat down on the edge of the bed. I had a letter from Michael, she said.
In the years that followed this was one of his abiding images of her, sitting hunched forward in her fawn woolen overcoat, hands thrust into its pockets, her face’s confidence gone. Michael had gone back to Vietnam in January and written her a cri de coeur. Didn’t she know she was what he carried between himself and death? She was lying to herself. The life—any life other than their life together—was a lie. He had power over her. That was the letter’s refrain, that he had power over her. Augustus didn’t like her voice’s edge of fascination. Selina looked at the floor. He’s not wrong you know, she said, quietly. He does have power over me. With him I don’t ever have to be better than I am. He’s like a palliative darkness. I don’t think you know how much I disgust myself.
Augustus wanted to lie down. For the first time in the three years he’d been with her he wondered if he had what it took to keep her. One of her soul’s voices never tired of telling her she was rotten, stained with sin, as she satirically put it. The cosmic fairy-tale world shivered under the real one with its appealing absolutes and paradoxes. We always know what the right thing to do is, she’d said. We always know.
I wrote back to him, Selina said, then looked up.
When?
If you could see your face.
What?
Full of doubt.
Yeah I guess I shouldn’t have a shred of doubt.
He wanted to fight because there was something worse than fighting. It was in her eyes, the concession that there was no point in fighting, a look that said she’d resigned herself to the gulf between them.
I wrote back to him a while ago, Selina said. She lifted her toes, balanced on her boot heels, lowered them. He’ll have had the letter by now.
She’d written and told Michael everything, that she was in love with Augustus, that they were secretly married, that she was having his child, that what had happened the summer she was fifteen would never happen again, that she loved him still in the wrong way, didn’t blame him, felt the deep, awful connection, but was absolutely resolved on making a life, family and future with Augustus. There was a different love, she said, one that called you out of your weaknesses, like Christ commanding Lazarus to pick up his bed and come forth. In a life with him, Michael, too much of her would be stuck at fifteen. The morality was neither here nor there; it was that between them love would be a kind of stasis, a force against growth, a willful deafness to the call forward into uncertainty. He must find someone else, make an adventure of his own, let her be his sister once and for all.
That’s why all this, Selina said, meaning the moods, the bad dreams, Rosemary’s Baby.
They’d remained in the same places, her hunched forward on the edge of the bed, him standing behind the breakfast bar. Augustus had registered that the apartment’s heating wasn’t working properly—the studio was freezing.
I’m going to have a bath, Selina said. I’m sorry about everything. Tomorrow we’ll go see my parents and tell them and they’ll just have to deal with it or keel over dead if that suits them better. I’m sick of all this sneaking around. You should go have dinner. I’m not hungry. Just bring me back a maki roll from Tomoko.
They’d got through practically all of this without looking at each other, but now they did look, and she said: Assuming you still want to do all this. Assuming you still want me.
Later, Augustus would remember the bounce with which he went out that evening. A new bar had opened on the corner of Eighth Street and First. He went in and had a drink,
chatted with the bartender, watched the band set up, exchanged smiles with a couple of white hippy girls at a corner table, all with an energized benevolence, an alert love for the ordinary world. It was five below outside. Sidewalks glimmered, he felt his shoulders packed with strength, thought goddamn it he should’ve boxed. He wasn’t hungry either but stayed out an hour for the pleasure of going back. He kept seeing her in the bath, hair pinned up, face moist. You forgot the beauty. Then you watched her soaping her lifted leg. There was a flower stall open next to Tomoko. Realizing with a surge of panic that he’d never done it before he bought an armful to take home for her. Why hadn’t he ever covered her with flowers? What was wrong with him? He was insane!
When he got back to the apartment she was naked on her knees throwing up into the toilet. The bath was full and quietly crackling with foam.
Tell me you didn’t forget my maki roll, she said.
Augustus dumped the flowers and takeout in the kitchen and joined her on the bathroom floor.
I’d rub your back but I don’t think you want hands this cold on you. Did you get in the tub yet?
While she lay in the bath Augustus found a vase for the flowers (given her pronouncement that she felt “like death” he didn’t think it worth strewing them on the bed) and ate a few mouthfuls of sushi. The heat came on.
I don’t want food, she called. But how about a peppermint tea?
He wondered where Michael was at that moment, pictured him in waterproofs under a dripping tarp rereading the letter. There’s a love that calls you out of your weaknesses, like Christ commanding Lazarus. Assuming you still want to do all this. Yes, he wanted to do all this. Pouring her tea he realized (with, he thought, staggering belatedness) how much living with her evoked the best moments of living with his mother, and how awful that would sound if he told Selina. Juliet had been crazy and unreliable but she’d known how to make boiling a kettle or sending him down to the store or reading a dumb magazine an adventure. (He wasn’t kind enough to his mother these days, he knew, had never forgiven her for being a woman beyond her motherhood. It was still shocking to consider that your mother when you were six or ten or fourteen was just as much in a phase of her life as you were in a phase of yours.)
Oh, Selina said, when she came out and saw the flowers, and for a moment Augustus thought he’d made a terrible mistake. But she swallowed, tried to blink away tears, failed. Sorry. It’s my lady hormones. Don’t surprise me with kindness like that. Sorry. She sniffed, had to go and get a Kleenex from the bathroom.
I had a twinge, she said, sipping her tea.
A twinge?
Like a cramp.
A period cramp?
Kind of. But it was just once, then I threw up and it was gone. I think it’s from throwing up so much.
Around which hypothesis they knew not to leave too much silence.
Are you okay now?
Yeah, it was fleeting.
They had the flowers by the bed. Augustus confessed he didn’t know the names of any of them, which she said made it an even sweeter gesture, as from a retarded person. These were irises, those crocuses, these big ones camellias, the red ones white ones and purple ones tulips. As a matter of fact, you uncanny man, tulips are my favorite flowers. As they were falling asleep she said: Do you love me? He held her close to him, hypersensitive to the femaleness of her, the softness and curve and swell. He was full of pride that his child was alive inside her, that she was his woman after all. He felt archetypal, simplified, needful of very little, though his modern self knew that wouldn’t last, started already conjuring up diapers and job interviews. He wished they were cave people, felt a memory of another life, fire, meat, stone, darkness beyond the flames, the shape and warmth of her body there in his arms. It was a wonderful thing to be a man. Yes, I love you, he said.
In the night she had a violent dream, whimpered, flailed, and before Augustus could grab her, sideswiped the vase with such force it smashed against the wall. He had to shake her to wake her up, and when he did she curled into a ball with her back to him. No, I can’t tell you. It was horrible. I’m sorry. He made her stay put while he cleaned up the broken glass. There was no other vase so he filled the sink and put the flowers in there. It was getting light when he got back into bed and put his arms around her. Sorry, she said again. He held her, pressed his nose into her nape, kissed the soft hair there, whispered: Shshsh. Everything’s going to be all right.
At the tail end of a confused dream he heard her say: Baby, wake up. Wake up—then he was suddenly wide awake and it was fully light and his first thought was he’d missed a piece of glass and she’d cut herself. She was standing a few feet away, holding her abdomen. There was blood on her fingertips. For a dreamy moment he watched as she bent her left knee and touched herself between her legs and brought her hand away wet with more blood. The action had a ritual aspect, like a gesture in a Balinese dance. She looked up at him and said: It’s going wrong.
Everything that happened in the hour after that was both blurred and studded with detail. Dialling 911 for the first time in his life a disinterested part of his brain registered it as a dreary rite of passage and wondered why start with a 9 since it took a precious second longer than a 1, why not 111? He spent an eternity impotently existing by the bed unable to do anything to alleviate the pain and the horror. She curled into the fetal position but kept having to move, make adjustments, none of which made any difference. He gave her a towel for between her legs in obedience to the instinct that says blood shouldn’t just be allowed to run out of a person, brazenly. She clutched it there for a few moments but soon stopped bothering. He’d seen her cry before; he’d never seen her in misery. The face changed, revealed a version of the person you realized to your horror had always been there, waiting for the circumstances. The torment of being unable to do anything brought him to absurdity: he could laugh, smash crockery, do a little dance, jump through the window, maybe just calmly leave her and go to the bar for a drink. Helplessness yielded an exhaustive equalization: if there was nothing you could do you could do anything. There was a seed of hatred for the person who was doing this to you, rubbing your nose in your own uselessness. He imagined grabbing her and quickly breaking her neck. She couldn’t look at him for more than a moment, her eyes moved away with disgust. He could see pain debunking her myth of him. She moaned low in her throat. You forgot we were animals.
The ambulance took her to Beth Israel. She was put on a gurney and wheeled into a very small examination room with a curtain and a huge angle-poise lamp. Augustus was allowed to sit on the room’s one chair. A Polish nurse said a doctor would be there in a minute. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Augustus had been high on relief when the ambulance appeared and two medics in peppermint green took charge. Then higher when they got to the hospital and she was taken in. Now, after twenty minutes of saying to himself, any second now, any second now, he was internally frantic again, at the edge of hallucination—then a doctor appeared and he got high on relief again. It wasn’t until he was in the hall, where he’d been asked to wait, that he realized the whole time possibly since he first woke up and saw her standing there he’d been praying to God for her to be all right even if the baby dies she has to be all right in fact I’ll make a deal take the kid if you want but leave her all right. If you really don’t believe spit on it. Go on, right in Jesus’s face.
He asked if I wanted to see it.
Augustus and Selina were in a cab on the way back to the apartment. They’d kept her in overnight. Augustus, having been told to go home and come back in the morning with clothes for her had in fact gone home, collected a bagful of things and returned to the hospital, where he’d spent the night in a waiting area chair. He’d wanted to call her parents but she’d said no. He knew what “it” was. But what was there to see at three months? He held her hand. The cab bounced over a welt in the road. When he’d stepped out of the hospital with her he’d thought: It’s going to snow. Now sure enough the first flakes were falli
ng. Selina said very quietly: It was a girl.
Storefronts were vivified. COFFEE & BAGELS. BREAKFAST SERVED. KEYS CUT. The cab stopped at a red light, overcoated pedestrians crossed, deep in their own details.
At least now I can graduate, Selina said.
Augustus realized he had his jaws clamped, forced himself to relax. He wanted to surround her, let her sleep in him for a long time. He thought of the place in her where the fetus had been now a little well of blood as when a tooth’s first pulled and how she’d said: I had this twinge. The word “twinge” gave him a twinge somewhere, maybe his bladder.
It was about this big, Selina said, holding her thumb and index finger two inches apart.
Augustus knew he ought to be feeling some sort of grief but all he felt was throbbing relief that she was still alive, a person sitting next to him in a warm coat and scarf, Selina, with the little scar under her lip. The bleeding had seemed so bad. He’d thought he was watching her die. Now here she was with her hair tucked behind her ears, talking to him, his wife. God bless the sidewalks and the snow and cabs and everything he’d never take for granted again.
Her father was standing on their stoop when the cab pulled up. Oh my God, Selina said. I told you not to call them.
I didn’t.
What?
I didn’t call them. Augustus gave the driver his fare and rushed around the cab to get Selina’s door but she was already out, standing at the bottom of the steps looking up at her father.