The Birthdays

by Heidi Pitlor

  He looked over her shoulder at something about decorating one’s lover’s body with flowers. He thought of the small clinic, its hallways lined with maps of the uterus and fallopian tubes. He thought of the bottles of pills she’d kept beside the sink in their bathroom—the countless bottles, the shots he’d had to give her in her thighs with each cycle of treatment, the ovulation-predictor kits, the different types of thermometers, how she’d cut caffeine and alcohol from her diet, stopped exercise, restarted exercise. All the doctors, the five failed IUIs, two failed IVFs, the bad moods, her sore abdomen, her cramps, the endless complaints. Nothing at all joyous had gotten her pregnant, nothing remotely sexy or loving, merely a speculum, an embryo-transfer catheter and a doctor.

  Jake was suddenly embarrassed that he’d given her this book. Who read this stuff anyway? Who kept porn stashed away in their underwear drawer? People who thought sex was only a form of play, nothing more, nothing less. Hormonal teenagers, maybe. People who didn’t need to think about procreation and biology, that was who. He tried to remember when he’d been such a person, and it seemed like a hundred years ago.

  He placed his hands on Liz’s shoulders and massaged them. She leaned back and said, “That feels good.”

  He leaned over and kissed her forehead, then her nose, her mouth. He reached his hand over her stomach, pulled up her shirt and drew his fingers across her belly button. Like her face, her stomach was spotted with hundreds of freckles. Back in college, Jake used to look for constellations on her stomach and breasts. Even then she was squeamish and faintly reluctant about sex, but he found it old-fashioned and endearing. Most of the girls there were anything but squeamish. They wore snug jeans and cropped shirts. They covered their eyes in black paint and blue powder and slunk around the boys like predators. Liz seemed to come from a different species, this healthy, tall girl dressed in baggy drawstring pants and loose, hand-knit sweaters. The two dated and drifted apart after graduation, never guessing that they’d reunite eight years later.

  “Jake,” she said.

  “Let’s go mess around a little.”

  “Jake, my dear, I don’t think so,” she said, but he managed to pull her from her seat and guide her into their bedroom. “Right now I don’t feel at all … I’m not feeling—” She sat on the bed before him.

  “Come here,” he said. He stepped in front of her and pulled her head against his stomach. How could she not miss sex? “Let’s just play around a bit.”

  “The Kama Sutra did this to you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. And what did it matter why he wanted to make love to his wife? It only mattered that he did, and that they had the opportunity and the time and the space right now. He ran his hand over her hair, which was smooth and soft, the color of tea, he’d always said, though she thought it had no color. “Blond, brown, red, nothing,” she called it. He placed his hands against her breasts and she squirmed and straightened her back, then wilted. “They’ll be here soon,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I’m not really feeling it, sweetie.”

  “Because you’re sick? Do you feel nauseous?” he asked as innocently as he could. He couldn’t help himself.

  “I mean I’m just not feeling it on another level. I’m sorry.”

  “The thing is that it’s been ages, and in a few months you’re really not going to be in the mood, and after the babies are born, who knows when we’ll have the chance.”

  “So I should feel obligated right now? We should do it out of obligation?” She shook her head. “We should probably get started on dinner.”

  “Yes. So.”

  “So. Let’s go to the kitchen.” She stood. “Come on, my silly, horny husband. Let’s go.”

  “Please don’t talk to me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  He forced himself not to yell. Focus on the real issue. “Don’t I turn you on at all anymore?”

  “Where is this coming from?”

  “I just love you, okay?” he mumbled. “And you love me, right?”

  “Of course I love you, but I’m pregnant, and with twins. Remember? I’m tired and I have to pee, and we have a lot of things to do before your family gets here.”

  “I know, but—” and a jumble of words stopped short in his mouth. If she really, truly loved him, and if he weren’t so—but he was taking it too personally, as he often did. “We have time for a quickie,” he said. “Come on, I insist,” and reached for her left breast. She turned just as he cupped her there, grabbing her harder than he intended.

  “Ouch!” she snapped. She elbowed him away and covered her chest with her hands.

  “That was meant to feel good,” he said.

  She simply looked at him, dumbfounded.

  “It wasn’t meant to hurt.”

  “Okay, can you drop it now?” She massaged her left breast.

  “I’d rather not,” he said, and why should he? For so many weeks he’d tended to her every need. He’d rubbed her back each night and run to the kitchen to get her saltines whenever she felt nauseous. He’d bought her flowers countless times, cooked for her, kept the freezer stocked with her favorite oatmeal ice cream.

  “Well, you’re going to have to let it go,” she said tersely. She shook her head and turned. “You’re just going to have to,” and she rushed out of the room.

  “A lot of women like to have sex with their husbands,” he called after her. “Even when they’re pregnant. Especially when they’re pregnant.” He began to pace the room. He’d read in one of her many pregnancy books that over the nine months women’s sexual organs became enlarged and more sensitive, thereby increasing their sex drive. One woman described pregnant sex as the best she’d ever had; her breasts were fuller now, and in her first few months she thought she looked better than she ever had in this one particular black teddy. She met her husband each day for lunch wearing nothing more than her raincoat and said teddy. Liz’s breasts were already a little larger, a little rounder, but because she found them the most comfortable, she wore only gray jog bras or thick, broad beige contraptions with enough wires and seams to support a small car. “You know,” he yelled, “you’ve got more blood flowing down there, and everything is bigger and more sensitive right now. You might actually like it. Maybe you’ll find yourself getting into it. Just try, all right? Just give it one goddamned chance. For me.”

  He heard the toilet flush down the hall. She hadn’t heard a word.

  His face hot, he stuffed his hands in his pockets and felt the gritty pacifier he’d found on the beach. Where had he put that box? He glanced around the room and remembered it was in the middle drawer of his dresser, so close to all those magazines stacked neatly at the bottom of his underwear drawer.

  —

  “What’s this?” Hilary asked Alex.

  “A field.”

  “That I can see.”

  He stepped out of the car, but she stayed inside. A brief image passed before her: Alex pulling a gun out of his pocket and then, blast, all gone, no more Hilary, no more baby. But no, Alex had said it himself: the island was in no way that sort of place. People here were trustworthy. In the rearview mirror, she saw him looking at the sky. He seemed interested in something up there, and she grew curious, so she joined him. But the only things in his line of vision were low, heavy clouds.

  “Where are we?” she asked. The air had grown chillier and a cool breeze pushed past them. She smelled the faint perfume of flowers.

  “We’re at the exact center of the island. Bellows’ Field, named after Edward Bellows, the first man to live here. He was a lobsterman, I think. The island used to be named after him, but it changed seventy-five years ago when this salt magnate and his family moved here and bought out the place. They lived in a mansion at the other end of this field, but it burned to the ground in the sixties and he died in the fire. His family left, moved to New York and L.A., and none of them ever comes here anymore. Some folks on the island want to rename it B
ellows’ again, but it’ll never fly. The heirs still own too much of it.”

  “Ah. The rule of money.” Hilary nudged a mound of dirt with her shoe. She imagined a mansion in the middle of this field, stone columns and marble stairs, gardeners and servants rushing around. Parties of badminton and croquet on sprawling green lawns, men and women sipping iced tea and lounging in the sun. The thought was almost seductive. The clichés about money always were, and even though she knew it was silly, she sometimes thought that if she were rich, life would be richer and more full of unending possibility. She could travel, she could buy houses in faraway places, she could fly her favorite people to these houses. It was pleasing to think that happiness could be so tangible.

  “It’s going to rain. Later this evening,” he said, his eyes still on the clouds. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “I’m having this sort of reunion with my family,” she said, and he nodded. “It can’t rain or we’ll be stuck inside with nothing to say to each other.”

  “Mm. I can’t help you with that. It’s definitely going to rain later.” He glanced at her feet. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”

  “You can leave your car here?”

  “Sure,” he said. “They know whose it is.”

  “They?”

  “People here.”

  Hilary followed Alex through the grass. “Does your family live here?”

  “No. They live on the other coast now. I almost never talk to them,” he said.

  “How come?”

  “Well, for starters, they’re active Republicans. My father campaigned for Reagan and Bush—both Bushes—and my mother runs the church youth group.”

  “Ah. Scary stuff.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  “I bet they’re constantly nagging you to come home,” Hilary said.

  He looked at her and shrugged. “They are, but I don’t really listen.”

  She liked him. She liked him, though she knew he was putting on airs, or anti-airs, as it were. Still, there was no denying that there was something about him. She was pregnant, not dead, and it was certainly okay to feel a little turned on by someone. She wondered if she was at all appealing to him. He probably only saw the stomach, as everyone else did, though maybe not—after all, behind the stomach was a distinct personality, arms and legs (though a bit thick at the ankles, especially now) and a decent chest, an attractive enough face. She smiled to herself as suddenly the opportunity came into focus—he was a gift, really, one more little adventure before her life changed completely.

  *

  The last time she spoke to Possible Father #2, she told him she was heading East, maybe for a while, maybe to see what it’d be like to live there again. Over the phone, George had remained quiet and removed. A carpenter, he lived in a small house on a beach in San Diego with his daughter, Camille. Hilary had met them at a wedding almost ten years ago outside Los Angeles. She’d sat at their table and the three were the only ones not to get up and dance when the Frank Sinatra impersonator started singing. George and his daughter smiled at her across the empty table. Camille was eight but had the expressions and mannerisms of a much older person. She seemed to Hilary sad and graceful. George too exuded a sadness, an appealing liquidity in the way he reached across the table for salt. He asked her about her job and told her about his, and they discussed the newly married couple. Later that evening George invited Hilary back to his house and the three ate chocolate cake on the beach and talked about the movies they’d recently gone to. The sky was overcast and the stars and moon invisible. The only lights around were the distant spots on a pier and those on a few boats. Hilary, George and Camille could barely even see each other. When Camille left them alone to go to bed, Hilary said that she should leave too, but George persuaded her to stay with the promise of meeting Boris, a homeless old man who slept on their beach and told stories of his earlier life as a movie star, an astronaut and a senator. In fact, Boris appeared shortly after with a bottle of wine and a candle—“He always shows up right around midnight. Every single night,” George had explained. Boris was someone Hilary would have whisked right past on the street. But George asked him questions about stories he’d probably heard thousands of times without a hint of condescension or bemusement. Boris apparently loved to talk, and he was oddly poetic and as such almost believable, and if nothing else, engaging. Soon it seemed they were sitting on this dark beach with an aging astronaut, now telling them of the vast red oceans of Mars as if they were as familiar to him as the Pacific in front of them.

  In the end, George wouldn’t move north. Camille’s mother lived in Los Angeles and they shared custody. Hilary tried but couldn’t convince herself to move south to the sun, the beaches, the surfers. The place just didn’t suit her at all.

  *

  She and Alex walked up a gradual hill and stopped. From here Hilary could see a stripe of silver ocean to the east. To the west were only the sky and its clouds, to the north more grass and what looked like a small group of cows.

  “Did you grow up here?” she asked, reaching into her bag for a deck of cards. Sometimes she found she still needed to hold something the size of a pack of cigarettes.

  “Yeah,” he said. “What’s that?”

  She looked down. “Nothing,” she said, and hid the cards between her hands. “You’ve never lived anywhere else?”

  “No. I have,” he said.

  She turned the cards in her hands. “Where?”

  He didn’t say anything more and in a moment began walking again. She waited for an answer as she followed him down the hill and up another, steeper hill, and by the time she reached the top she was winded. She leaned over and caught her breath. From here she could see more of the ocean, and the clouds looked lower and solid, as if they’d become another sky.

  “Out West,” he said, “Montana, this tiny town there,” and it took her a moment to realize what he was referring to.

  “Oh. Really?”

  “Yes. But I missed it here. When you grow up surrounded by water it’s hard, you know, being so far from it. It’s like you lose your orientation.”

  “This must have been a unique place to grow up.”

  “It was, but it was also pretty great. It’s a great thing to be a kid in a small town. It’s safe and everyone knows each other for the most part,” he said.

  Hilary imagined looking at the two of them from above. What would a stranger have thought? Maybe that he was the father and she his wife. She tried to imagine what might have been passing through Alex’s mind right then—annoyance with her constant questions, maybe—and she examined what was going through her own: sudden dread mixed with anticipation about her family’s reaction to her pregnancy; the desire to press a cigarette between her lips; a heightened self-consciousness in front of Alex. And a pleasant slowing down of time. She wondered if her baby was experiencing shades of the same sensations.

  “I don’t know who the father is,” she heard herself say.

  He turned to her. “Oh.”

  “It could be one of several people,” she said. She had the strange sense that he might be intrigued by this information. “It could be someone who’s already a father. It could be another man who’d make a terrible father.”

  “Doesn’t several mean at least three?”

  “Yes,” she said, and shrugged. The word had just slipped out.

  “So?”

  “So. What does that make you think of me?”

  “I don’t know. Is there something it should make me think?” He took a step toward her and glanced at her lips.

  “Yes. People are supposed to be appalled. People are supposed to shake their heads and pity the child that’s now inside me.”

  “Okay,” he said. He knelt down, tore a blade of grass from the ground and slipped it between his thumbs. Pressing his lips to his hands, he blew a long, shrill sound that poured around them like a wounded goose screaming. He licked his lips and blew again, now in staccato, and when he finished he s
miled up at her proudly, like a child who’d just done this for the first time.

  “My family doesn’t know I’m pregnant,” she continued.

  “Ah.”

  “Well, my brother does, but not my parents. And not my other brother.”

  He tossed the blade of grass on the ground. She wasn’t getting anywhere with him. She didn’t know what kept her here beside this person, this stranger, really. She looked at him. Maybe the fact that he resembled Bill David, his hands now in his pockets, his mind a million miles from anywhere she recognized. And like Bill, Alex seemed staunchly unattached to anything, not money or family, not anything. Except, maybe, the ocean. She supposed it was a little romantic. Maybe she wasn’t completely finished with men like Bill, though she liked to think she was. She knew she should have been, at least.

  She used to be free of all attachments. She didn’t know when she’d changed, but she remembered once upon a time thinking more openly about the future and making decisions based on amorphous feelings and whims. Moving to the West Coast because it was far from home, to San Francisco because it seemed the opposite of everything she’d grown up near—hills instead of flatness, style instead of tradition, the urgency of politics instead of the conservatism of history. She’d decided to study archaeology because of the posters of the mummies in the halls of the university’s anthropology department, these beautifully wrapped bodies like large babies, permanently swaddled. The promise of worlds underground, of ancient rites and religions and the eeriness of the painted mummies’ faces—the expressions that had been chosen for them in their afterlife. These seemed unsolvable mysteries. But she decided to drop out of school after she’d failed too many anthropology tests. It wasn’t the terminology that interested her, she reasoned, it wasn’t all the reading she’d been after. It certainly wasn’t the knowledge of ancient embalming practices and photographs of brains being tugged through nasal cavities. It was those exotic ideas, the art and mysticism, the unknown lives that the teachers dissected and deflated and pulled apart with their scientific identifications until all the beauty of these ancient worlds had vanished. And sometime after dropping out of college she realized so many things she’d previously thought dichotomous weren’t, after all, and what she’d chosen as her new life had become tedious. The hills were impossible to bike; her style had become redundant, for she’d never stopped wearing only black; her politics had become lazy, and eventually warped once she’d begun earning a paycheck and losing a big chunk of it to taxes each month, once she’d seen enough college students demonstrate against this or that policy, then step into their exorbitant car and drive back to the dorms. The mystery of archaeology became science, which became mathematics. What was once clear was now a big blurry mess, and a part of her missed the romance of dichotomies, and the clarity and promise that came with such things.