Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  She bumped her stomach against me.

  “Come on, big shot, you take a punch too, okay? If your demure little wife can do it, why not a big hunk like you? Let’s get rid of the damned thing right now and then you won’t be able to tell me for the rest of my life that I trapped you. Come on, big shot. Punch me, kick me, whatever you want to do—now’s the time. Come on, I said—”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Scared, huh?”

  “No.”

  “Okay then. How about you go call your uncle while I beat up the baby. Division of labor, right? Get it? Division of labor. Oh Lord, but you do have a way with words, Kogan. So let’s divide the labor from the mother and the mother from the labor and kill two birds with one stone, okay?”

  She swung her arm to the side, as if taking a backswing in tennis, and then she banged herself in the stomach with a vicious roundhouse. I gasped, felt my own stomach close on itself. She gagged, doubled over, moaned.

  “Oh Jesus.” She groaned and looked up at me, her arms locked around her stomach. “I think I went too far. I think I finally did. Oh Jesus, it hurts, David—oh fucking Jesus. Oh Jesus F. Christ—help me lie down. Please? It hurts so bad….”

  I helped her to the bedroom. She lay on her back, knees up, her forearm across her eyes. I sat next to her, watched her cry. She stopped for an instant, then let loose with a long high-pitched wail. She clutched her stomach and began sobbing, rolling from one side to the other.

  “Should I call your father?”

  She shook her head sideways, bit down on her lip.

  “Oh Jesus, it hurts so bad, David. I—I—” She groaned, then exhaled. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but it just hurts so bad….”

  I put my hand on her forehead, then on her stomach. She made rasping noises when she breathed in. She lowered her knees.

  “That helps.”

  “Stretching your legs out?”

  “No. You touching me, stupid.” She moaned. “Oh God, David. Do me a favor and see if there’s any blood leaking out. I’m afraid to look. I think I feel something wet.”

  I looked. “Just sweat. But what should we do? Tell me—I’ll do anything….”

  “Just wait. Try not to imagine things, all right? Please?” She breathed in, sighed. “I think I’m getting some relief. I think it may just be a big muscle cramp. Can you really knock the wind out of yourself?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her stomach was hard as a rock, like a smooth piece of round marble, a thin layer of skin pulled tight over it. I remembered how we’d argue when we were kids: could you actually kill yourself by running as fast as you could and ramming your head into a wall, or would you always pull back just in time? Was there some built-in reflex that kept you from committing suicide that way? Had guys in jail been able to commit suicide by cracking their heads open when everything else—ropes, belts, spoons, knives, blades—had been taken from them?

  “Do you think the baby’s starting to come?” I asked. “Are you contracting?”

  “I don’t know. Subcontracting maybe. Putting the burden on you.”

  I massaged her stomach, using both hands.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Really.”

  “Me too.”

  She let her hand rest on top of mine, took in a long breath, let it out.

  “Did you hurt him?” I asked.

  “Him?”

  “Him. Her. Whatever’s in there. You know what I mean.”

  “No. I don’t think so. I’d be bleeding or breaking water or something like that if I had, I think. It just hurts like hell. That’s all. I never felt anything hurt so much.”

  “Worse than when I slapped you?”

  She lifted her head, propped herself up on her elbows. “I did mean a lot of what I said and I don’t want to take any of it back and I won’t. I’ve been wanting to say those things for months, David. Half the time when you’re gone with him I roam around the apartment making speeches in my head, trying to come up with the right words so that I can persuade you, so that I can force you to change. I know how much your uncle means to you, but I don’t really think it’s him you love. I figured that out way back. I don’t really think you even know who he is anymore. I think it’s some idea of him you’re still in love with, and I guess I keep hoping you’ll outgrow it.”

  “And use your love instead?”

  “Exactly.” She smiled. “I’ve got lots. Endless reservoirs. Wells at the bottom of wells. I’ll never run out of love for you, David. And everything I want to say comes down to this: that he’ll ruin your life, and mine with it.”

  “You don’t know everything. You don’t know what his life was like.”

  “I’m sure. But I don’t need to know everything either. I know enough. Like you said he says—people always have choices. He may not have asked for the life he has, but he didn’t have to keep it either. It seems so crazy, doesn’t it?—us talking calmly like this, and then you off with him, getting in deeper and deeper. What I keep thinking is that you’re so young, David! We are. We have so many years ahead of us—”

  “It’s mostly legitimate now. The rough stuff ended with the war pretty much. He’s always been good to me, to us. Who else ever cared? My father worked for him. He’s taken care of my mother. He knew how to be very gentle with me when I was a boy in a way no one else ever was.”

  “I think I’m all right.” She lay back down. “Can you touch me a little bit to be sure. Press here and there and I’ll tell you if it hurts. Like playing doctor, all right?”

  “Does this hurt?”

  “No.”

  “This?”

  “No.”

  I probed, pushed with my fingers the way I recalled our doctor doing when I had exams. A muscle along the outside of her right thigh was twitching.

  “David?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you afraid to make love with me now because I’m bigger and fatter?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not what you think. I mean, since we got pregnant, it’s what I said before—that I’m just afraid of hurting you.”

  “Do you still look around a lot? I mean would you rather be doing it with somebody who looked more like Sheila, who had a figure like hers?”

  “I’d rather do it with you, but—”

  “I feel better. You said ‘we’ before, did you know that?”

  “We?”

  “When we got pregnant.”

  “I’ve been distracted too. I didn’t want to tell you yet, because I guess I keep hoping things will blow over peacefully, with my uncle. The stuff with Vincent wasn’t only about Sheila.”

  “I figured.”

  “And I was thinking too—about your question—that when you were screaming at me I wanted to shout back that this wasn’t the first time you’d lied to me.”

  “Really?” She looked hurt. “I didn’t mean to, if I did. I don’t want us ever to keep things from one another—”

  “What you said to me the night we got married, that now we could do anything we wanted, remember?” She nodded. “It’s not true.” I stroked her stomach, felt it softening. “Even after you’re married the way we are—

  “Is there something special you’d like to try, darling?”

  “Don’t make jokes. I’m serious. I thought a lot about that and what I decided is that it’s not true. You can’t do whatever you want in life, and it’s not always because of others, because of the world. It’s—”

  “David?”

  “What?”

  “I meant what I said before about your uncle. It gets so complicated sometimes and day follows night and night follows day and we just get carried along, trying to cope, and I guess I’d stick by you no matter what, but it does make me so very unhappy. I mean, it’s complicated but it’s simple too.” She looked straight at me and spoke very deliberately then, as if trying to pour the words through my eyes and down into my heart, to fix them there. “Because your uncle and the men he deals with, t
hey kill and they steal and they hurt.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Not unless they have to,” she corrected. “Despite his great love for you, your uncle won’t be able to protect you from that part of his life for five seconds if he gets squeezed badly, and you know it. All I want is to look at you and for you to look at me and to say what I said: that it’s bad to kill and to hurt and to steal and that you’re a good person, and that you shouldn’t ever do it. You’re not your uncle, David. Not really. You still have choices—”

  “Your father said the same thing.”

  “Don’t hold that against me. I’m not my father either—”

  “I think about it, though. I can’t not think about it lately. Only sometimes it’s hard to know what to do.”

  “Yes, but is it—dare I hope?—is it because you’re beginning to agree with me, to see a way out for us?” She put her fingers to my lips. “Don’t answer. That way I can hope more, yes?” She smiled. “Do you know how I used to think of you up at Smith? I used to get this picture of you in my head, as if you were the hero from one of those medieval plays I studied—a kind of Everyman—and you were walking through a dark and terrible world, along a subterranean corridor of some kind, and being pulled at from all sides, being stretched one way and then the other: by Beauty and by Ugliness, by Love and by Hate, by Helplessness and by Anger, by Darkness and by Light, by Cruelty and by Tenderness.”

  “You still idealize me.”

  “Aren’t you glad?” She kissed the back of my hand. “I’m okay now, I think. Nothing hurts, except that I’m a bit bruised. I can feel him moving around the way he always does.”

  “Him?”

  “Oh you are so good inside, David, don’t you know that? You’re a truly good and strong person, and there aren’t many of your kind left. It’s just so hard for me to watch you walking through the world, pulled on from so many sides, without my being able to help. I keep wanting to run out in front of you—the court jester, yes?—so I can steer you away from Evil and Hate and Anger and Cruelty and all the forces of Darkness—so I can point you to the true path—to righteousness and to light and to happiness. To a world that doesn’t turn in on itself only. To contract and grow narrow. That’s so much the style these days—to contract and compress life—and what I want for us is a life that keeps expanding, that keeps opening and growing larger and larger and richer and richer. Let me be your guide and companion, please, David? Please? You won’t be sorry. Not ever—”

  “I know.” I felt light, weightless. The words were there, waiting, and they came easily: “I’ll call Abe in the morning.”

  “May I take the phone off the hook, in case they try to get to you before then?”

  “Yes.” I pressed my lips to her stomach, kept them there. “It makes sense—that play you saw, with me in it. I don’t know why, but it makes sense to me. I like those pictures you get inside your head. Is that okay?”

  “At least.”

  “Beau Jack wanted us to look at his present before we went to sleep.”

  I went to the kitchen, came back with the package and with a dish full of ice cubes, for her cheeks. She smiled, said that with her complexion nobody would notice the marks anyway. I untied the ribbon, opened the white paper. There was a box inside. Gail opened it, lifted the lid. Two small gold hearts, about an inch high, rested on cotton.

  I lifted one heart, turned it over. There was an inscription on the back:

  David loves Gail.

  “This one is yours.”

  I gave it to her and she turned it over, read the words, pressed the heart against her own. I looked at my gift.

  Gail loves David.

  I turned out the light and lay down next to her.

  “I’m glad you don’t do everything I say,” Gail said after a while, and she could hardly get her next sentence out, she began weeping so freely. “I’m glad you didn’t whack the baby when I told you to. Because you are strong, and if you had…”

  “Shh.”

  10

  WAS IT POSSIBLE that so much life could be contained in such a small body, and that merely to hold it close to me could fill me with happiness? Her head was nestled now against my neck, her soft body curled around my shoulder. Her thin legs hung down, kicked every time she let loose with a pained cry. I kept one hand on her bottom, the other on the back of her head, and I talked to her, told her that everything would be all right, that her father was with her. Did she know how much I loved her, what a sweet thing she was? Did she know that she weighed just a little more than a bag of sugar?

  Her body contracted, eyes pressed tight so that they were two black dashes, and she let loose with a long, watery explosion of gas that, for such a little thing, seemed miraculous. Then her body sagged and she nuzzled against me as if she were trying to crawl inside my neck headfirst. She breathed more easily, regularly. I set her down gently on the changing table, careful to cup the back of her head with my hand, but she whimpered and clung to me. I told her that we had to change her diaper again because if we didn’t her rash would get worse. But when I took my hand out from beneath her head, a head no larger than a softball, she started crying hysterically again. I lifted her to my shoulder and she stopped. I walked back and forth with her for a while, until she seemed relaxed and drowsy, then tried to set her down again.

  She wailed furiously, tiny legs thrashing. I gave in. I cradled her head against my shoulder, kissed her tiny ears and the top of her downy little head. I sniffed at the indentation there, the fontanelle, where the skull had not yet closed. Such a sweet, vulnerable little thing! Was it possible that everyone in the world had once been this small and weak?

  “Are you still up?”

  Gail stood in the doorway, shielding her eyes from the light. Emilie was asleep in my arms.

  “Have you been walking with her like this all night?”

  “Come look—”

  Gail leaned on me lazily, kissed my breast, then kissed the baby.

  “See how beautifully she can sleep? Isn’t she amazing?”

  “No more amazing than you are, sweetheart. It’s almost four in the morning. I gave her her last feeding before eleven. You’ve been doing this for hours. Come on. Come to bed and let me feed her and then she’ll go back to sleep again.” She sniffed. “You forgot to change her—”

  “Every time I tried to put her down, she squawked.”

  “But David—!” She sighed. “Come on then. My breasts are starting to drip.”

  “She knows me, Gail. She knows who I am. I mean, her body knows my body in some mysterious way, don’t you see? And when her body is unhappy—”

  “Come on, Dad. You may have manifold and marvelous powers, but the power to produce milk from your breasts is still not one of them.”

  I brought Emilie into the bedroom and set her next to me. Gail lay down, flicked her nipple against Emilie’s lips. Emilie gurgled, whimpered, reached up with her fists. Her mouth closed around Gail’s nipple and the last thing I heard before I tumbled into sleep was the liquid sound of Emilie’s mouth drawing the sweet, warm milk into her.

  Abe sat at a table in the rear of Garfield’s, his back to the wall. He smiled at me, but I sensed that something was wrong. His smile was too broad. It reminded me of my mother’s smile.

  “How’s the proud father this morning?”

  “Kind of beat. The baby was up most of the night.”

  Abe stood, offered me his hand, and I felt a piece of cold metal between his palm and mine. Still smiling, he sat and whispered through his teeth that I was to show no reaction. I was to reach for a handkerchief, wipe off some sweat, drop the key into my back pocket.

  I did what he said. He talked about having visited my mother the day before, having seen his father for the first time since the war. While he talked he motioned with his eyes, toward the window. I waited a few seconds, took my grilled cheese sandwich and Coke off the tray, turned to set the tray down on an empty table, and saw that two of Fasali
no’s men were sitting near the entrance. Abe talked about the fur blanket his father was making for Emilie. He twisted his Army ring, red stone to palm, and laughed to himself.

  “It was crazy, the way I felt warm toward him suddenly. He was good to me when I was a kid, Davey. Proud of me. Maladyets, he’d say, when he took me around with him. ‘Maladyets—my fine American son.’ I loved to watch him work. I give him credit there. He had a real talent.”

  Abe reached across, touched the back of my hand, then looked away quickly, as if embarrassed.

  “I found myself thinking of you, of the way you used to draw so well, of what a good ballplayer you were. It’s hard to do something well in this crazy world, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.” I hesitated, then asked the question that had been with me all morning: “What was I like when I was a child, Abe? Would you tell me?”

  “What do you mean, what were you like?”

  “I mean, what was I like when I was a baby like Emilie—what did you feel toward me when I was her age and you held me—when I was the age before I can remember things about myself?”

  “You were a swell kid, Davey. The best.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “Now you listen to me and you listen carefully,” he said. His voice was low and hard. “And while you do you nod and you smile and you eat as if we’re talking about your kid, or about why the Dodgers keep losing to the Yankees in the World Series. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear.”

  “The key is for a safe-deposit box in a bank upstate. It’s in the town where we used to go before the war, to the bungalow colony. You take a bus from the Port Authority Terminal to Ellenville, and from Ellenville you go to Parksville. The Parksville Savings Bank. You get a taxi or you hitch a ride. If anything happens today—I’ll get a message to you at suppertime, so you be at your mother’s place then—you don’t wait, is that clear? You don’t go back home and you don’t telephone anyone and you don’t send any messages. You just get your ass to the bus terminal and you get on the bus.”

  “But why—”