Moonface

by Angela Balcita

  Unlike that apartment we had in Iowa, which was low and flat, our apartment here is high and narrow. It has only a few rooms, and I’m sure in our apartment hunting there were larger, more spacious options within our price range, but I liked the old glamour of it: the red-painted walls, the marble non-working fireplace, and the ever-entertaining pocket doors. In our new apartment, I wake up in the mornings and stretch my arms by the window to see a believe sign hanging from the school across the street, and I begin to like the city more and more.

  Charlie is not only sick of gallivanting around the country; he is sick of having crappy jobs. We sit on the terrace of a coffee shop, and Charlie plays with his cocktail napkin, folding and refolding it into different shapes. “I need to start something,” he says.

  “Maybe you should start writing again,” I say, knowing that he already has. I’ve seen the notebooks of handwritten pages piling up by his bedside. “Go back to school.”

  “Yeah,” he says, still fidgeting with the tabletop origami.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Write,” he says, “draw, read, sing, make dioramas . . .”

  “Then you should,” I say.

  I know how he feels. Now that I have the time, I’m ready to focus my energy toward a project. I take a part-time adjunct teaching position at a community college to make ends meet, and on the days I don’t teach, I pull out a folder of old essay drafts I wrote in school. I sit at my desk at the window and leaf through them, trying to feel a spark.

  Beth calls almost every week and gives me updates on what is happening with the people we know: who’s getting published, who’s moving where, who’s dating whom. She also tells me that a woman who graduated before us is expecting.

  “Whoa!” I shout into the receiver. “A baby?”

  “Yup!” Beth says.

  I rub my belly and imagine something growing there. I’m wearing skin-tight jeans and a tank top, so this image exercises all my imagination. I arch my back and push my belly out, and it doesn’t feel as uncomfortable as I thought it would.

  Beth tries to think of more gossip. “Let’s see,” she sings.

  I realize that if I want to know anything about what’s going on with her life, I’m going to have to ask her point blank.

  “How are you and the professor doing?” She pauses on the phone, and then confesses: “We might buy a house together.”

  “What?!” I shriek.

  “Do you think we should?” she asks, sounding like she just needs one nudge more to commit.

  “Yes! So, what does this mean? Are you just playing along?”

  “No,” she says firmly, “I think we should buy a house together. I think I like having him around.”

  Apparently they tried to work out some scheme where he would sell his little house and move in with her, or where she would sell her little house and move in with him. But after talking to a real estate agent, it made more sense to sell both of the little houses and buy a bigger house that they would both fit into comfortably.

  “What if you guys got married?” I tease her.

  “What if you guys got married?” she snaps back.

  “What if you guys got pregnant?” I say.

  “What if you guys got pregnant?” she says.

  Then the two of us hang on the line silently, one waiting for the other to say something.

  In the fall, Charlie starts a graduate program in writing and publishing arts at a university nearby. It seems perfect for him: he shapes his drafts into stories, then turns around and creates what he calls a “physical container” for them.

  “One might call such a container a book?” I suggest, as I watch him sitting on the floor, cutting figures out of magazine pages and pasting them into a shoebox.

  “Yeah, one might say that. But a book isn’t always pages collected and bound. Sometimes, it’s a video you watch. Sometimes it’s a box with pictures. Sometimes it’s something you haven’t even thought of yet.” He turns away from me and dives into another magazine with a pair of scissors.

  Charlie is often gone in the first few months after we get to Baltimore, sometimes in the computer lab at school or in class or at a bar talking shop with his classmates. I get home from teaching some afternoons and have the place to myself. I make myself a pot of coffee, open up my folder of drafts, and force myself to pick one, just one, page to rework. But I don’t. The damn window keeps catching my eye, or rather my skinny reflection in it. At first, when Beth told me about the pregnant woman in Iowa, I couldn’t help but imagine how her life was changing: from being half of a couple to part of a family, from identifying herself as a writer to a mother, or both. Now when I think about her, I feel just a tinge of jealousy. And I find myself thinking about an unborn baby that doesn’t even belong to me.

  During our winter break, we fly to Las Vegas to meet up with Beth and the professor and to stay with my former classmates Violet and Raj. Violet and Raj married in Iowa the summer after we came, then moved to the desert so Raj could start a writing fellowship. Raj, with his dark beard and his fashionable gray glasses, picks us up from the airport and grabs us like we’re long-lost relatives. “Vegas sucks,” he says. “I’ve been craving some intelligent forms of life.”

  When we get to their house, Beth, Violet, and the professor are already in their pajamas, laughing and smiling on the living room floor. We catch up on each other’s lives, which, though miles from each other, seem somewhat parallel. Beth and the professor settled on their house—a mammoth, rehabbed Victorian on Washington Avenue. We tell them that we have started to look at buying a house somewhere in Baltimore, but nothing as giant as theirs. Raj is back in school getting his Ph.D., and Charlie is back in school working on his masters. They sit in the corner and talk about what’s on each other’s reading lists.

  Violet says she wants to get pregnant.

  “Me, too!” I spit out. It comes out of nowhere.

  “Really?” she says. “We should get pregnant at the same time.”

  “Yes!” I say, arching my back again and pretending I’m already in my third trimester. “I would love to have a baby.” This is the first time I say it out loud, and I feel that when I say it, I can’t stuff it back in.

  “Would you get married first?” Beth asks.

  “I don’t know yet,” I say.

  “Because I think we’re getting married,” she says, “... tomorrow.” I freeze. I look over at Violet, and she’s nodding as if to confirm that Beth isn’t joking.

  “What?” Charlie yells from the corner.

  The sneaky rascals have planned it out. We thought we were just spending New Year’s Eve getting drunk on the Strip. But now we learn that we have a wedding to attend at a little white chapel presided over by an Elvis impersonator.

  The next afternoon, I have to borrow a dress from Violet’s expansive closet and buy shoes at the local department store. We buy bottles of champagne from the market and red roses for Beth to hold as she walks down the aisle. Before we head out for the chapel, Violet and I help Beth get dressed. She wears a clingy satin dress that comes up high on her legs, nothing like the shapeless tunics she usually wears. She looks slim and sexy, and Violet and I catcall her from the corner of the bathroom.

  As we stand in the vestibule of the chapel, I whisper to her, “There’s nothing ambivalent about that dress at all.”

  She turns around and winks at me before heading down the blue velvet aisle.

  A mysterious crying begins next door to our apartment. I hear it in the afternoons when I am sitting on the couch. The wailing pierces through the brick wall in short bursts. I suspect a cat is trapped or a teakettle whistle has gone wonky, but before I have a chance to put a finger on the sound, it ends. I think that it might be my imagination, but once, Charlie hears it, too. He stops pasting together the pages of the book he is constructing and presses his ear against the wall behind the bed.

  We don’t yet know our neighbors, but sometimes when we hear their shoes s
tomping up the stairs, Charlie runs to the peephole on the front door and looks out. “Old lady with bad wig from the fourth floor,” he whispers to me in the kitchen. “Biker dude in spandex.” He has never once mentioned a pregnant woman or a baby.

  Around the neighborhood, there are even more new sounds and sights emerging every day. At night, helicopter blades often sputter overhead like the city is being sprayed with bullets from an automatic weapon. The searchlights glare into our window while we sleep. Despite the chaos of Baltimore, it means something to me now: a whole new world, one free of surgeries or hospitals, trips to the emergency room. In another place, far from Iowa, it feels like there are things that can happen that I haven’t even considered yet.

  For instance: being inspired by an Elvis impersonator.

  It is a moment that starts about as unromantically as you can get. Charlie and I are paying bills on the living room floor, sitting close to each other in the space between the coffee table and the couch. The rent for our spacious two-bedroom basement apartment in Iowa was almost half the rent of our one-bedroom with a narrow galley kitchen. Things are becoming tight. Money, too. Charlie has a full-time position at a nearby music conservatory, while still taking a full load of classes. As our bills begin to pile up, my health insurance from Iowa slowly begins to wind down. I’ve started looking for other plans, but insurance companies aren’t particularly welcoming when you have kidney disease and when you’ve had two kidney transplants. Bills and envelopes are spread out on the hardwood between us like a heap of kindling, and Charlie suggests that we should get married.

  “Right,” I say, resting an elbow on the seat of the couch behind me. “Then I could kill you for the life insurance.”

  “I mean, we might as well,” Charlie says, shrugging his shoulders. “And it was actually kind of sweet in Vegas. The tiny chapel, none of the fuss.” I have not looked at Charlie closely in a while, the way his beard contours the sides of his face. His cheekbones are more defined now; he looks older. He is a man now, different from that young college boy with whom I escaped to Hawaii so many years ago.

  I have never actually imagined the moment Charlie might propose or the wedding we might have. For years Charlie and I cleverly evaded the subject of marriage when our families brought it up, mostly because it meant that we had to start taking our lives more seriously. But after the transplant, it was cleverness that went out the window and the seriousness that lingered. The hot subject has lost its heat, and now, we find ourselves sitting on the floor asking ourselves, “Why don’t we get married?”

  We follow Beth and the professor’s lead, but, unlike them, we don’t tell anyone. Not even our closest friends. In the spring, we hop a plane to San Francisco and are married by a female Russian judge in the rotunda of City Hall. It seems like the perfect place to marry, not only because it’s the city where we first fell in love, but because when we go to buy our marriage license, a seven-foot-tall drag queen in a red patent dress collects our money and tells us where to sign. I am in awe of her. I can’t stop staring at her fake eyelashes and her long cascading curls.

  “You are beautiful,” I tell her, looking up from two feet below.

  “So are you, baby,” she says, puckering her lips and kissing the air between us. “Happy wedding day!”

  Despite the majestic marble steps and columns, the ambience is not particularly romantic. It is a Monday morning and there is a group of elementary school students touring the building with a docent who leads them up to the grand staircase. They stomp their feet and try to listen for the echo of their voices against the walls. “Hellooooooooo,” they call. The sounds come back and make rings around us. They make their way past us and wait for our tiny ceremony to take place. Charlie and I wait and watch as they slowly make their way across the mezzanine, like a gaggle of geese, the stragglers and all, to the other side of the building to stand in the balcony that overlooks the steps, the dome, and the whole first floor below.

  Under the stately dome, a Russian judge with dyed red hair and burgundy glasses begins the ceremony but interrupts herself, suddenly curious about her state-issued script: “Do you think that line is from Shakespeare?”

  “Uh, no. Maybe the Bible?” I say, curious myself.

  “Ha!” she snorts. “How about that?”

  She says “Charles O”Doily” instead of “O”Doyle,” and Charlie looks at me cross-eyed. The entire scene looks like an awkward dress rehearsal of a cast of understudies who don’t quite know their parts. We had finalized Charlie’s costume at a vintage store on Haight Street the night before: a brown cowboy shirt with pearlized buttons and dark brown chinos. I had flown to San Francisco with a white, knee-length eyelet dress, collared and belted around the waist, folded in my carry-on. While we waited for our time slot, Charlie went around the corner to a flower shop and bought me a bouquet of bright yellow tulips bound with a thin ribbon. He squeezes my fingers as we face each other to take our vows. I’m not actually sure if we’re supposed to say, “I do,” or “yes,” or something from Shakespeare. But when Natasha the Ab-sentminded Judge finally tells us to kiss, Charlie pulls me close, holding my face in his sweaty palms. As I stand there on my tiptoes, my lips pressed against his, the judge lets out a sigh, and the tour group of young people, who have been watching the entire ceremony in silence from the balcony, explodes in cheers and applause.

  My mother is speechless when I tell her on the phone what we have just done. The pause is remarkably long, and I just want to make sure she didn’t hang up.

  “Hello?” I say.

  But the person who answers is not her but my father. “What’s wrong with your mother? She looks white,” he says. When I tell him the news, he is not quiet at all, but screams with joy. “What news! What news!” he says. “We love you both!”

  “Mom does, too?” I ask him.

  “Yes, she’s just caught off guard. She’s happy.” Then I hear him whisper to her, “Tell them how happy you are.”

  She gets on the phone and starts to tell us off in Tagalog just as

  Charlie and I turn onto Fulton Street, and I look at him like we’re two kids in big trouble. She tells us we’re selfish and irresponsible, and just before she hangs up, she says, “Pag-u-untogin ko ang ullo ninyo!” Translation: “I’m going to take your heads and bash them together.”

  “Uh-oh,” Charlie says, when she finally hangs up.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell him. “She can’t stay mad at us.”

  We walk up the hill back to our hotel to change before we get dim sum and take a ride around, up past the Golden Gate. We keep making calls, though, enjoying the different reactions we’re getting. Charlie’s brother cackles into the phone for three minutes straight, unable to contain his laughter. My brother refuses to believe us.

  “Is this a joke?” he says. “For real. Tell me the truth.”

  “No,” I tell him.

  “I won’t believe you until I see the marriage certificate.”

  Charlie’s mother starts crying immediately. We hear nothing but sobbing for several minutes. “Mom?” Charlie says.

  “Yes, I’m happy, I’m happy,” she says, sniffling between breaths. “Now it’s time for grandbabies.”

  My mother calls us back several hours later. We have already driven up to the coast, hiked a trail, and sat on the beach looking out over the Pacific. I pick up the phone, and she says, with the same singsong tone she usually uses to tease me, “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. O”Doyle.”

  Poor Charlie can’t catch a break. On our honeymoon in Belize, I stand on the beach in a bikini and push out my belly as far as I can without falling over onto the sand.

  “Chaaaaaaarlie,” I sing to him.

  He looks up at fake-pregnant me, rolls over in his lounge chair, and hides his face in a beach towel. He’s just barely been forgiven by our parents for our clandestine wedding, and already his wife is hitting him up for sperm.

  Once we get back to Baltimore, we visit our three-year-old niece Gene
vieve often, as she and her parents live just a few blocks down from our building. Charlie comes home exhausted after a day of tossing her in the air, stumbling over his own feet just to make her squeal, and tickling her from her neck down to her feet. He falls like dead weight on the bed, and I stand over him looking disappointed. “Yeah,” I say. “You’d never last a day as a dad.”

  He pops up on his elbows. “What? I’d make a great dad. I’m offended,” he says with a scowl.

  “Prove it,” I say.

  When we circle the issue of having a baby, Charlie doesn’t avoid it. He looks me square in the eyes and explains his resistance.

  “You’re not losing this kidney,” he says.

  “I don’t want to lose it,” I tell him.

  “Okay,” he says, like the conversation is through.

  “That’s it?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “I want a baby, too. If you can find a way to have one without losing this kidney, then the conversation will continue.”

  I never officially asked my doctors if having a baby was out of the question for me. Despite the envy that grows in me when I see pregnant women walking down the street—their bellies protruding over their toes—and despite this craving I cannot ignore, I know that my health is always precarious, tilting on the edge of a cliff. But at night when Charlie sleeps, I look at him and know that I cannot lose this kidney. I devise ways to get what I want without putting us in danger.

  In a meeting at an empty office building one weekday evening, a woman who appears to be the facilitator has high hair from the Glam Rock era and a harsh orange tan from a bottle. Charlie and I squeeze into narrow office seats between several other fresh-faced young heterosexual couples. As the woman clicks through a slideshow of orphans, all categorized by country, she chooses the saddest faces on which to pause. A toddler walking on a cement floor in Guatemala. A baby girl with the sweetest face from China. It is like watching one of those commercials with Sally Struthers—the babies have wide eyes and are swaddled in blankets that look like they have come from flea markets. It tugs at your pathos until you cough up seventeen cents a day.