by Brett Lott
But at the supermarket, as she lingered over every item in her new, slow, considering inwardness, which he'd forgotten about, as if she were agonizing over the details on each label, he wandered off. His impulses had become as unpredictable as hers, and when the fatherly internist who saw them both suggested that this younger crop of American husbands had a tendency to enter into couvade at the onset of pregnancy, long before birth, and they'd returned home holding the word like a sweet on their tongues, and had looked it up in the dictionary, and then looked at one another, they both had to nod.
The man's name was Weston, and he was a forensic expert and a collector of first editions of nineteenth-century philosophy, and a dispenser of it—one of their few real friends in the city, in their consideration, even though they had to pay to see him. He was a willing participant in the tragedy (as they saw it) of their daily, domestic unease within the dedicated depths of their love. As they saw it. How were they to go on, given that imbalance? There were some good discussions, they felt, or dialogues, as Weston called them; he was well enough read in current literature so that his apparent mintings of this month were next season's jargon.
He kept careful records, and whenever they stepped into his inner office after an exam, into the sunlight from French windows that looked out on a balcony with a stone balustrade, and found Weston at his desk in a suit jacket already exchanged for his smock, every hair in place, jotting down notes, they couldn't help smiling. The thickness of his file folders on each of them was that reassuring. Home, Charles almost sighed, feeling as particular as family under the care of this scrupulous man, who knew absolutely what he was up to, and who, with his Century Club manner and Manhattan dapperness, was valued highly, Charles realized, among people in the places that matter most.
When they had got their apartment decorated to the degree that suggested a newly married couple on their own in the city and making it, they had a party, and the first person they invited was Weston, who of course didn't come. They invited all the tenants in their building, but only the couple from the apartment below showed up, as if to observe firsthand what sort of degenerates were able to cause such resounding bedlam. On their way out, after a quick drink, the husband of this couple suggested putting padding and carpet down in all of the rooms. "Bathroom?" Charles asked, as they started down the hall. "Let me know with a bang of the mop if the thickness isn't suitable to you, okay?"
"Yardstick," the man said, and turned on him in a sudden, reddening fury. "I use a yardstick!"
A can of imported corned beef caught at an urge, and Charles looked around to ask her about it. She was at a freezer case with her back to him, her head held as if listening, and he saw her, with a shock, as separate from him, an abstract, pregnant woman, and then felt a chill as if from the case where she stood. A clear liquid, like the pure line of a song, was pulsing in a threadlike stream down her inner calf. The top of her tennis shoe was wet. He hurried over and saw a wet track on the floor behind her, where she'd taken a step. He put a hand on her shoulder.
"We better go," she said, without looking at him. "Get what you want."
At the apartment she dropped her coat and pulled off her dress—a lime-colored shift imprinted with miniature flowers, which she'd removed the belt loops from and wore wherever they went, drawing the line at maternity outfits, or "advertising costumes," as she called them—and got into the shower. He picked up her coat and hung it in their closet and paced around as if pursued and then went into the bathroom and drew the shower curtain aside. She was soaped, soaping, and when she shifted her weight he could see the liquid dart in a pulse down her leg through the suds. "Kath!" he cried. "That's not—" And didn't know whether to use "urine" or a commoner term.
"What are you doing in here!" she cried, the sunken fear again in her face, and covered her stomach with her hands.
They called Harner, her obstetrician. He'd been recommended by Weston, who said that a woman's response to her obstetrician was apt to be "chemical." So Katherine might like this man, he said, and might not. If she didn't, she was to ask him to recommend another. Harner was his wife's OB, Weston said, but his daughter couldn't stand him. "He's fairly brilliant, I believe, but a bit impulsive." Katherine was vague about Harner, as she recently was about so much, and seemed to stay on with him mostly to keep from calling the taste of Weston's wife into question.
Charles had met Harner at her first interview, and he had appeared to Charles too ready to pass off their questions with a humor that didn't seem natural, as if he'd learned it from somebody else, or with his authority, which didn't rest lightly on him. He was young, portly, going bald on top, and his remaining hair looked combed back in haste with heavy oil, which offended Katherine; she'd mentioned that much. He promised them that Charles could be with her all the way through labor, right up to delivery, which was what they wanted, and then he went off with Katherine to perform an examination.
Over the phone, as Charles sat on the steamer trunk and stared at her on the bed, with a towel around her after her shower, Harner said, "Well, we'll soon know whether it's the amniotic fluid or not."
"How's that?" Herr Harner, as Charles thought of him, because of his smiling Germanic demeanor, which Charles could picture over the phone.
"She'll go into labor. If she does, call me right back."
"But this is only her seventh month."
"I'm quite aware of that, you can rest assured. We'll have to handle the situation as it develops."
"Isn't there anything I can do? I mean, wouldn't it be better if we went to the hospital now, and—"
"Oh, no, I don't think that will be necessary—not till we see where this is headed. Unless you're afraid. Give her some hard liquor, if you like—it's marvelous for premature or false labor—and keep her in bed, on her back. If things stabilize, I'll have her in in a day or two for a checkup. These things happen. Give me a call otherwise, okay?"
He hung up.
She'd been in bed ever since, and when it seemed to them that labor had begun, in the middle of the night, Harner said, "You might be getting a reaction to losing some of the fluid. Don't call me again unless the contractions get real hard—it's unmistakable—and about ten minutes or less apart, okay? Time them." He hung up.
Charles had gone over to the St. George and persuaded a bartender to sell him a bottle of Old Bushmills, her favorite whiskey, but after a couple of sips she set it aside, as if it were a placebo she wasn't about to be taken in by. He had poured it straight over ice cubes, and its pale remains now sat on a wooden chair beside the bed where her arm was outstretched. He hesitated to touch her, and then did.
"Kath, do you want to leave for the hospital now?"
"I can't believe this is happening to me! I'm worn out just from the movement inside! My stomach's like a rock!"
He tried to modulate calm into his voice. "Well, Harner said if—"
An arm struck him as she rolled and drew up with the force of another struggle, starting to pant. He knew why this was called labor—for the effort it was—and why travail; he was sure he'd never be the same as he watched her features flatten as if by extragravitational force into a face that wasn't hers. Then she began going "Gur, gur, gurr" as every shade of color emptied from her.
"Katherine! We have to go!"
"Ah! All right!" she got out, and her tight-shut eyes fluttered open on unfocused depths. "Just—stay with me through this!"
He took her hand, icy, its veins going vivid in wheyey paleness, and held on tight. Her fine blond hair was whitened from bleach and afternoons spent sunbathing on their roof (ghostly came to him, as he stared down on its snowy disarray), except for an area over her crown in the shape of a skullcap, coming in in her natural blond shade—an effect he'd noticed from their windows one day when she'd gone shopping. Now it seemed the place where the power of her will was concentrated, vulnerable. He placed his other hand over it, wondering how he'd let her go off on her own that day, and she said, "Thanks. Thanks. Oh, t
hank you a lot."
All he wanted was to have this over, so she would be herself again. But it was clear she couldn't admit that it was already beyond her control. He didn't even care about the child anymore, for her sake. The child seemed the cause, and he was well aware that women died in childbirth.
"Put your hand here!" she said, still fighting for air, and pulled it with both of hers over her stomach. Her skin was extraordinarily sensitive, delicate as a baby's neck over her entire body, but here so much more so it was nearly a profanation to touch, and now it rose tented over a hump like a stone. An elbowish bulge revolved under his palm from beneath, and he started to pull his hand away, then felt a sensation spread from there and concentrate in an unsettling tickling under his chin.
"Must be his head," she got out. "Currents from it."
What? He didn't dare ask. They were so convinced it was a boy they'd named it Nathaniel.
Then her eyelids, shiny and purplish, closed down, and her lashes went flickering over crescents of white. And then it was over, as if a wave had passed.
"All right," he said. "That's it. Get ready. We're going."
Once something like this gets off the tracks, he thought as he ran down the street, his throat still tickling, it keeps plowing into places that get worse. There wasn't a cab in sight in the early-morning quiet of the streets. There weren't any at any of the hotels he ran to. He took off for Fulton Street, and the rattle of being winded brought up a picture of her alone and fighting for breath, which sent a shock through him he couldn't contain, and then he was on the curb at Fulton, beside a chain-link fence clogged along its weedy bottom with paper and wrappings like leavings of the bulldozed lot it enclosed. He was aware now of the cold and of being in shirt-sleeves, probably the picture of a burnt-out derelict suffering his ultimate vision of absolute destruction—the worst sort of prospect to pull over a cab at this hour—and he couldn't keep from jumping off the curb, and then wading out into the street, as if to bodily stop one. Finally, an old Checker swerved over, and he was in the back, spilling his situation to the driver, who seemed incredulous, already enmeshed in it all.
He was an older man, with twists of gray in his tangled curls, which he pulled at, wide-eyed, as if to pull them out, and his rumpled clothes were aromatic of the nervous hours, or days, spent in them. Charles directed him down the narrow streets to theirs, lined with cars on both sides under the slim oaks and maples (too early for the alternate-side-of-the-street parkers to have started their morning shuffle) and barely wide enough for the bulky Checker cab to squeeze its way down. Charles had hoped she would be outside their building, waiting, but she wasn't. "Here," he said, and hopped out before they were stopped. "It'll just be a second."
"Hey, you haven't paid—"
Which the door clopped off. But he was reminded to get money as he went up the steps to the vestibule in two bounds, and was inside. He'd forgotten his keys.
He rang the buzzer. No response. Then he remembered their signal and repeated it several times. There was another mind-dimming shock he couldn't contain, and then the lock went into its rattly vibrations, and he took the steps in leaps and swung around on their landing to see the door ajar. He hit it with his shoulder and felt it thud against something inside. Her tennis shoes. Their soles were facing him, their laces loose, and she was on her elbows and knees, her head down, hair splashed over the carpet, her spilled makeup and compact beside her, its mirror shining up at him, rocking on her haunches and crying, "Ahh! Oh, ggaaah!"
He tried to lift her up.
"No!" she screamed, then got control of her voice. "No, wait—till this is over. Can't talk when—"
He hurdled her and was in the spare room, which was to be the child's but wasn't fixed up yet, and where a plain door was laid across stacked milk cases filled with ring binders and station logs. His desk. Under this he jerked open the drawer of a file and fumbled out his manila folder of cash, and noticed at a glance, as he stuffed the bills into his pocket, over two hundred dollars. He sprang into the bedroom to their closet and jerked on a suit jacket, coat hangers clashing, and with an emerging hand swept up the watery whiskey from the chair and knocked it back (seeing an image from somewhere of a well-dressed man down on his knees, head thrown back, draining a bubbling bottle)—a mistake. He would need every ounce of clearheadedness and nerve he could summon, the convulsion of his stomach suggested. And from the altered angle it took to drain the dregs his eyes rolled toward the bed: it was disordered, gray with damp over one half, and across its center were streaks of blood.
She was at the table, her hands pressed on its top, leaning so far forward her hair hid her face in a whitish cloud. Her lime dress looked stained. He put his hands around her from behind. "Do you think you should wear this?"
"It was all I could do to get it on, and it's all I've got on and I mean all!"
He went down on his knees and started tying her shoes from behind and realized what a blur his haste had built to, and forced himself to slow down by watching his trembling hands attempt this simple task, with its folding intricacy and—
"Oh, this is absurd!" she cried, identifying for him the feathery ascension troubling his throat, and then they were gripping one another for support at the laughter that broke from them in diabolical barks.
The cab was gone. No. The man had parked at the hydrant a few buildings down. Charles helped her into the back with the premonition that they'd never make it and felt this undercut by the realization that the cab needed new shocks. They pulled away, and she closed her eyes against the lurching and uncushioned impacts. Her mouth drew down at its corners.He put an arm around her but felt at such a distance he wanted to lift her into his lap.
"Move over," she said, and as he slid to the other side she lay down, dropping her head into his lap so hard it hurt, as though she'd read his thought at least in part. He drew away filaments of hair caught in her eyelashes and stuck to her lips, and smoothed them back. Her forehead, with bits of perspiration glittering in its pores, was as icy as her hands, and as the cab yawed around a corner and she groaned, he yelled, "Can't you speed it up?"
"Who'll pay the tickets?"
"I will."
There was a surge of acceleration, and then the purling of the bridge's grid beneath their adhering tires, and he experienced their rising suspension over water as a chasm opening under him, seeing the idiot uprights of gray-black stone ahead, with their paired, churchlike arches, apparently in the process o f sinking, both still to be passed through, while the swoop and stutterings of the cables out the windows were like projections of his nerves in strumming onslaughts across the city below. Then he pictured his keys on the grain of the table, next to her outspread hands, forgotten again, and felt his focus narrow in on them as on a vision: he had held the keys that would have opened up an easy passage for her through this, and had let them slip. Every lie he'd told and every person he'd hurt had led to this, he saw, and started pulling at his hair, like the driver, as if to tear his thoughts loose from the tangle this implied.
"Take it easy," she said, and smiled crosswise below. "It'll be all right. Can you move over more?"
"I'm against the side."
This time she chewed at her lips in her attempt not to cry out, as her body went into its arch, sending her darkening crown in a crush against his privates, like an assault on the cause. Then she raised her knees, gripped them, and pressed down on him with her entire force. "Ow!" he cried as they slid underneath a red light somewhere, and he had to grapple with her and an armrest to keep them from striking the seat ahead. There were cars with people in them on all sides and horns were going off.
A man at a wheel an arm's length away, out her window, looked over and did a take, eyes widening, and Charles wished he had a pistol to blow the pervert away, for taking advantage of her in her helplessness. He gave the fellow the finger as they squalled off, and then reached up and dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the driver's seat.
Inside the emergency e
ntrance, he was told he'd have to check her in before they could go up to the maternity ward. "But she's fainting!" he said, because she appeared to be. He had to support her; her legs were giving way. The nurse was young, with blonde hair up in a French roll—exactly as Katherine wore hers whenever they went out, to look older—and now she touched an arranging hand to some wisps at her neck at his attention. She'd been summoned by phone and had appeared pushing a wheelchair. "I'm sorry," she said, and looked appealing and flustered. "It's procedure here." But Katherine grew worse, so that he had to lock his arms above her breasts to hold her up, and the nurse said, "All right, I'll take her up and go ahead and prep her, if you'll admit her right away. Then come right up with her papers. Okay?"
The procedure took a half hour, carrying him to the opposite end of the building, where he had to fill in a four-page form in the forgotten cramp of a student's writing chair. A woman behind a counter, at a teller's window he was directed to, wondered if it could be true that they actually didn't have hospitalization insurance. "We pay for everything by bank draft or cash," he said, and pulled out what he had in his pocket.
"Oh," she said, and stared at the bills as if in distaste, while covertly trying to tally them, it seemed. Then she paged through a floppy book of computer printouts, turned her back and made a phone call, and finally said, "We require a three-hundred-dollar deposit for maternity."
He counted out a hundred and fifty and said he'd bring the rest later.
"We'll have to have it before three this afternoon."
"What will you do if you don't?" he asked. "Kick her out?"
It took him some time to get to the seventh floor and find the correct "suite." A graying nurse in half-glasses, at a desk inside the swinging doors, accepted the papers and said he'd have to wait. Katherine was being prepped, she said—whatever that was. He felt a cold caul of air-conditioning over his scalp; a fluorescent-lit anteroom swung off behind the nurse in lines that verged on circularity, with doors leading off it all around, as in a maze. A huge column at its center was encircled by a desk partitioned into pie shapes with slabs of glass. Nobody was at the desk. Heads of bolts showed in uprights and ceiling beams and in the metal panels of the walls, as if he were in the interior of a ship, and horizontal strips of chromium reflected the unsettling curves of the place upon itself.