by Brett Lott
Lawrence came to the bed, sat beside him, his hands in his lap. He shrugged.
Still Larry smiled, smiled at this faithful wife, a loving son, lights and water. He smiled at Citibank, and the mortgage, and the miracle of the mailman, the graceful bestowal of fortune he'd signaled was on its way with a smile and wave of his hand. All this, in just the smallest of gestures.
"Can I show it to you now?" Lawrence said. "In the light?"
"What?" Larry said, his smile grown to beaming now, the way the world worked no surprise at all, finally: a representative from the United States Postal Service had arrived, taken up those obligations, and sent them on their way, the world a wonderful place, full of possibility and courage. The way things worked.
"My tattoo," Lawrence said.
"You're just kidding, right?" Larry said, still beaming.
"No," Lawrence said, his own smile grown into its own beam, and he looked to Debbie, beaming all of her own. They beamed.
Lawrence rolled up his T-shirt sleeve. He said, "I saved up for this for five months."
There at the top of his son's shoulder was a tattoo, a jagged bolt of red lightning six inches long, its edges crisp and keen, beneath it a scroll, the word Dad stitched into the skin of his thirteen-year-old son's arm.
It was beautiful.
"This isn't one of those wash-off kid's things, is it?" Larry asked.
"Nope," Lawrence said. "Permanent," he said, and nodded.
"Good," Larry said. "Young people these days need something they can depend on," he said, and put his free arm around him. He held his wife, held his son, and decided he would give his son a raise in his allowance, give him a boost toward the next tattoo, one for Debbie, and imagined a heart, pink and plump, on his other shoulder, Mom stitched there.
Ed Hemley served with papers. That was something. And the janitor's family would come out all right after this, once they'd settled out of court.
Water flowed, light fell.
What more could he ask?
BRET LOTT is the author of eleven books, including the best-selling novels Jewel and A Song I Knew by Heart. His work has appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and textbooks, and has been translated into five languages. For eighteen years, he was writer-in-residence and professor of English at the College of Charleston, but in 2004 he and his wife, Melanie, moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he is now editor of The Southern Review and a professor of English at LSU.
FIRSTBORN
LARRY WOIWODE
IN THIS CLASSIC SHORT STORY, A YOUNG MARRIED COUPLE must face—both together and alone—the life-and-death struggle of childbirth, a struggle that reveals the tenuous nature of their marriage itself, as well as their own confessed and hidden sins, and the confrontation with the self that a believer must face boldly and humbly in order to know the true forgiveness only God can give us. This emotionally and psychologically and physically intense story is a portrait of the battle with the sinful nature of our fallen selves, and the free but hard-wrought gift of freedom from ourselves that we can know only in Christ.
—BRET LOTT
Charles tried to settle himself where he sat on the edge of the bed. It was a bed they had bought from the couple who had lived in the apartment before them, and consisted of a mattress on a metal frame equipped with casters (concealed by a dust ruffle Katherine had sewn), with a loose headboard that had to be wedged against one wall in order to stand upright, and a footboard that kept falling off—too capricious an affair to sit comfortably upon. But comfort has never been an asset to me in any crisis, he thought. Actually, the opposite. Lack of it kept you alert.
He looked up from the book between his knees, keeping his place in it with his index finger, to the clock on the top of her oak secretary: 5:15.
The clock was rectangular, white plastic, a remnant of Katherine's single life, with a crack down its face and her maiden name written across its back in slanting exuberance, with a marking pen, as if the hand that didn't bear his ring would always dash away on its own under that other name, denying that marriage had made them one, proving her to be as divided on this as he was. He looked over his shoulder at her. She was still on her side, turned away, the covers over her hair, her knees drawn up; one arm flung over the other edge of the bed, her hand hanging limp from its swollen wrist. As far as they were able to tell, she was in labor. Their first child.
Faint beginnings of morning light appeared as milky blueness at the windows in the turret off their bedroom—one window oblong, one circular, one square, with a balanced shapeliness to them he hadn't noticed until now. He was seldom up at this hour. Drapes that matched the mahogany of the dust ruffle, drawn back in eloquent swags from the ceiling, framed the alcove of the turret, where an ivory telephone sat on a steamer trunk below the windows. It was September. The crown of the pin oak outside, which he could begin to see in outline, was straggly and insubstantial from shedding its leaves.
He'd been reading to her from War and Peace, a last straw in the whorl, or a raft in it, and she'd fallen asleep. That quick. But he'd gone on to the end of the section, after Andrei has learned of Natasha's attempt to elope with Anatole Kuragin and, like anybody afraid of his anger, has sent a go-between, Pierre, to return to Natasha her portrait and her letters, signifying the end of their betrothal, and Pierre, who can't think that this is final, plans to lecture her for falling prey to his frivolous brother-in-law, but finds himself so moved by her and her state that he says if he were not Pierre but the handsomest, dearest, best man in the world, and free, then he'd be down on his knees asking her to marry him (the first intimation of what is to come), and then goes out in "twenty-two degrees of frost" and sees from his sledge the comet of 1812 arrayed among the stars above Moscow—a comet that is supposed to portend a multitude of disasters but, for him, speaks to "his own softened and uplifted soul, now blossoming into a new life."
A residue of the moment and Pierre's emotion still troubled the room; the shapes of the three windows sparkled as if out of that night's moment of change. Which came at the middle of the book, indicating the swing the story would take in the opposite direction from that point, as if pulled by celestial powers. Charles looked down at the parted pages, as if to measure their ability to affect him in this way. He'd begun the book the month they were married, when they first moved into the apartment, and she had picked it up; she'd completed a major in Russian but had never read War and Peace.
They dropped everything and let the apartment lie in disorder around them during three days of immersion in this Russia that bore the dimensional stability of Tolstoy's moral stamp. And just as they looked up from the end of the book, blinking still, or so it seemed now, the Soviet film of it appeared, and they sat through the eight-hour extravaganza of that. (Just as when they'd met, two years ago, he'd finished Doctor Zhivago to appease her, and then the movie of that appeared.) He was appalled at the paucity of his imagination within Tolstoy's world, or at the timidity of it, so far as it went, since it was leagues removed from the actual opulence of that life as it was lived on the grand scale, according to the movie's depiction of it—or was this Soviet propaganda?—and she was furious that it was dubbed. She kept shifting in her seat, as fitful as the images reflected over her, he noticed, uneasy, and when they went out for dinner during the break that was provided, to an expensive restaurant he'd chosen with her in mind, she said, "I wish this place were old-style Roman, so we could lie down and eat, I'm so sick of sitting through those ugly Britishy accents. Ugh!"
"Vomitorium?" he asked. It was at about this time that they'd become a kind of comedy team, with him responding to her puzzling pronouncements in these quirky, semisequitur twitches.
His reading was meant to recall those days to her—a form of reconciliation, and the closest he could come to being straightforward with her, now. She was pregnant when they were married, four months ago. He assumed the child was his, since they'd been planning to "legalize their status" whenever circumstances were rig
ht for them both, and she assured him it was. And then recently, in the center of this same bed, hysterical, her hair down over her newly ample nakedness, she had confessed to another liaison while "finishing" the relationship she was involved in when he met her, meanwhile insisting that the child had to be his, or she wouldn't have married him. As if she'd reached the ultimate in logic at last.
He had started for the telephone, to call a lawyer about a divorce, but since he hadn't carried through on the impulse, he could never mention the possibility to her, though he still considered it. Then, as they were leaving a neighborhood party a couple of weeks ago, and he was stepping down the stairs with that practiced carefulness that too many drinks can bring on, her provocative backside suddenly seemed packed with such shifting and separated willfulness he kicked at it, and when he could next see, he saw her thumping like a child down the bottom stairs of the flight. He'd been in a remorse that gripped under his ribs like talons ever since: for the danger to the child, the bruises she still bore, and his lengthening vision of the sick fits that any marriage, even theirs, which he'd presumed to be one of the best, could find itself thrashing within as if for life.
They'd had arguments, loud shouting ones that had caused the neighbors below to pound on the ceiling with the handle of a mop or a broom—and these got worse, until his senses felt worn raw with an endless colloquy of his rights and wrongs, as if even the halves of his brain were in conflict. He'd always thought that one of the most fatuous statements he used to hear was "I don't see how she puts up with it," meaning injustice in a marriage, since it never considered a woman's ability to turn around and walk off, but now he saw how it applied to them, and he was grateful that she hadn't left yet.
He stared at the clock and then through it, in the outpouring of his impulse still to crush and break, and was retrieved by the thought that it was up to him to time the intervals. 5:17. She'd seen the secretary in an antique shop on Montague, the Madison or Third Avenue of Brooklyn Heights, depending upon which side of the street you were on, and he'd walked over one Saturday afternoon and talked to the dealer until they'd arrived at a price he considered bearable; and then, after he'd paid, in cash (the only medium that satisfied his sense of anonymity in the city), the dealer said that the price of course didn't include delivery. So he came back the five blocks to their apartment, got one of the burlap carrying straps the movers had left behind when they'd brought up the heaviest pieces, returned to the shop, and carried the secretary all the way home on his back, in the bent-over shuffle he'd watched the black movers adopt, and had been so invigorated by the look on the dealer's face, and the flex of strength returning to muscles he'd hardly used for years, he hadn't once set it down. He'd been a high-school athlete, a quarterback of the sort who would spend so much time trying to outthink the opposition, from the coach on the sidelines to the tackle hurtling toward him, that he'd have insights he never should have had in the middle of a pass, or become impulsive, led by his imagination, "like a girl," his coach would growl—unpredictable.
The secretary was solid oak. He had scraped and sanded and worked it, from its squat turned legs to the fragile basswood of its pigeonholes, and now yellow-gold striations rose in relief from the broad hashmarks of black grain in the growing light. It had become her niche, or nest. Her nature was to be in control, to the penny, to the framing of the proper response in writing at the proper moment, and she worked on their accounts here, running down his cash outlays; and sometimes sat for hours composing letters to her family or to friends, many of which she never sent. Or, when she did send them, most remained unanswered. None of her family knew that she was pregnant. Nobody in his family did.
They had both come to the city separately, far from those connections, largely to sever them, for their own complicated reasons and to their own satisfaction. He was from the Western Upper Plains, she was from the Northwest (two unrelated regions that in New York came under the category of "the Midwest")—Wests they wanted for the moment to be free of, and here be Eastern, as was true of most of the disenfranchised people their age that they met in the city. He had worked before as a performer and an announcer—"live talent," in the creeping jargon of the medium—and could do that again, but for now preferred a shadowy role. He sold time for an FM station, his hours his own.
"Katherine," he said, sure that she'd moved, and turned and put a hand on the covers, over the thigh he'd bruised, he realized, and drew it away. He thought he'd felt a revelatory swelling, but there were so many unpredictable areas to her now, extra padding in unexpected spots and new curves over the familiar ones, it was as if the body he'd charted so many times were being withdrawn inside this other. "Katherine, did you fall asleep?"
There was no answer; then a wash of the covers as she moved. A contraction, as she and her OB, Harner, called it? He'd begun to shy from their technical vocabulary at about the time she came home from a visit to Harner and stripped and lay down on the bed to demonstrate her "Braxton-Hicks contractions." 5:22.
He turned. "Are you awake?"
No answer.
"Are you"—he couldn't quite get out "contraction" but didn't want to say, "labor pain"—"feeling another—?"
Nothing.
"Would you like something to eat?"
"No! I'd puke it all up!"
"Do you want me to go on with the chapter?"
"No!"
It was as well. Her attitude had eroded any equilibrium left in him, and the events of the last day had worn his nerves to visionary frailty. She'd hear that in his reading voice. She was stronger than he would have suspected—it was all he could do to keep her nails from his face during some of their arguments, as they rolled over the bed or the floor—and stoic, usually, shifting without a hitch into the next situation and moving through it at her own speed, her eyes ahead, as if she'd been raised in the absence of any expectations and whatever arrived, no matter how troublesome or perverse, was a gift to get open and onto her desk and put into place. She was able to shake off circumstances the way she shook off her umbrella, entirely, so that she didn't have to leave it open in the apartment to dry, and after she'd recovered at the bottom of those stairs, wiping a hand under her eyes, smearing her running mascara, she looked up at him and said, "I deserved that."
But through yesterday and the night, into this morning, she'd been absent from the level of the commerce of life, as if the child in her had taken hold and was drawing her under. He'd never pretended to be able to enter her inner state, but he was usually able to reach her. Or she was able to reach to him out of her concentration that became so pure she could take on the aspect of stone. Artists and photographers came up to her and asked her to pose. She gathered her intellect like an essence in her, unreachable, and its concentrated power drew your eye over a harmony of lines of resolved womanhood, or that was her impact, at any rate, and she'd begun to get work as a model, which was her work now. In the last months, she'd withdrawn to even deeper recesses of solitary silence, into an intensity of beauty that left its mark on every eye (or negative; she continued to work), until he feared she'd be refined away into oblivion. As now. As it seemed to him.
They had gone to the city the day before to look at a lamp she liked, which might well have been a chromium sculpture, it was so expensive, and on the way back, on the subway, as he rocked in a semitrance on the seat beside her, as content as he'd been, in spite of her recent revelation, she took his hand and said into his ear in a breathy moistness, "You'll never believe this. I think I've lost control of an essential function."
"Faction?"
He tried to study her, as full of interior upheaval as the car shaking over its rails; lately, any reference to her body took on this evasive, almost clinical cast. There was a sunken expression of fear in her eyes, which had widened so much over the last few weeks he felt he was looking into a diminished face overtaken by their enlarging, liquid presence. But her face was broader, too, and her nose and nostrils were, as if every cell in her were ma
king accommodation for the child; the arch, even, of each nostril had heightened, along with an accompanying looseness he could feel in her limbs (present now in her hand), which made him wonder with uneasiness whether the cartilaginous parts of her weren't being consumed.
She drew him closer, so he couldn't stare, and, in the pretext of putting her head on his shoulder, whispered, "It seems to have really given out this time—ah, I mean, you know, my bladder."
"You're joking."
"You know how improvident I've become."
"Incontinent?" he asked, somehow in time and tune to the train, so that the syllables seemed shaken from him, not voiced, and once out of him not spoken.
"Well, neither, literally," she said, and settled against him as if to sleep. "Neither, but both. Sometimes it's an affront to reason to be at the mercy of a body you don't know." Then it was their stop. "Get up before I do," she whispered. "Walk one step behind."
He obeyed and noticed only what might be a spot of rain at the back of her trench coat. He maintained his position across the platform and up the ramp to the elevators. Outside the hotel, in the September sun extending a rich spill of copper over car tops and bricks, he felt a rush of renewed hope for their marriage, as if it had just begun. He looked across the street and up the block to their corner, at the ornamental iron fence whose scrolled yet jagged lines were like his impatience for this newly perceived future, and was about to say, Let's get home.
"How do I look?" she asked.
"Great!"
"No, I mean"—she tipped her head as if glancing into a mirror, and her hair swung wide in a whitish shine—"there."
"Oh, fine. Wonderful. Nothing "
"Good, then let's go to the store." She took his arm. "We haven't shopped for days. It's time to. What a weakling I've become!"
"And me?" he said, and saw that she didn't catch this, and was relieved. When she planned to do anything, she carried it through, shifting the expected order of things into an altered state resonant of her, until the doing itself took on her distinctiveness—a new aspect he kept trying to compare with what once had been, but never could, since it was gone. That quick. It was a pleasure for him merely to witness her effects.