Angels Go Naked

by Cornelia Nixon

  Margy wasn’t home. A peach, half eaten, rotted on the music stand. The bed was an explosion, pillows flung and sheets erupted in waves, sprawled on the floor. He put his nose down to the sheets, saw faint brown stains. His heart began to thunder in his ears.

  He found her calendar, nothing on it for today. Underneath it, casually flipped back, the rehearsal schedule for Ravinia. Today there was no rehearsal, no program. But three nights ago, they’d played Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, with a piano soloist. Michael Sein, it said. Michael Sein, the Bagworm, who had done things to her Webster would not think about. He would not. She hadn’t even mentioned that the Bagworm was in town.

  His mind shut to a pinhead, thoughtless as a creature with no brain. On instinct, cerebellum, his hand found the phone, punched Calvin’s number. Calvin had probably gone out with his gay friends, none of whom conformed to anything Webster thought he knew about gay men. They wore jeans and flannel shirts, trooped around like lumberjacks, maybe talked a little too much on the phone. Two of them were portly guys about fifty who drove a big-wheel pickup, had brown teeth and cauliflower ears, looked prepared to lynch the only gay man ever seen in Lubbock, Texas. But they’d been lovers thirty years. Once when Webster went downstairs to look for Margy, a young man he’d never seen before came to Calvin’s door. Tall and dark, broad-shouldered in a black T-shirt and jeans, he looked more or less like Webster, who also happened to have on a black T-shirt and jeans. The young man’s glance swept down his shoulders, belly, crotch, then back up to his eyes, ending in a soul-divining gaze.

  “Margy,” Webster managed to say. The young man stepped aside.

  “Too bad,” he murmured as Webster passed.

  Calvin wasn’t home. His machine picked up, gave a serious greeting about the Men’s Emergency Health Network, which he had organized since half his friends had lately come down with strange cancers, or stomach parasites that usually affected only sheep. The greeting was long, detailed, gave assignments to the volunteers, and Webster did not listen to the end. Clearly, Calvin was no help. Hanging up, he removed all signs that he had been home and vanished down the stairs.

  Rolling the bike a few blocks off, he hid it under a tarp. It was an August afternoon, the sky shellacked, the sort of day when old people expired on sidewalks, trying to reach shade, and teenaged fathers shook their infant sons to death. Across the street from their building, in a finger of the park, drug dealers loitered by the public phones. A game of vicious basketball surged back and forth across the courts, one team all black, the other white. Webster found a spot under a tree, where he could guard his back and watch his front door without being seen.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Margy’s car flashed up the block. Driving fast, impatiently, the way she always did, she accelerated till the last second and slammed on the brakes. The only open spot along the block was by the hydrant, and she whipped into it, shrugged out of the car as if it were a negligee she let drop to the floor. Her hair was like a mustard field in bloom, her round breasts bounced as she clicked up the sidewalk in high heels. Her black skirt barely reached her thighs, blue circles underneath her eyes. Were those fingerprints all over her? Clacking to their building, she swung her hips, loose-boned, as if she didn’t care who knew.

  Ten minutes later she was back, with the slouchy shoulder bag she used to carry concert clothes, though she wasn’t going to a concert now. She must have needed clean underwear, more birth control. Tossing it into the car, she drove quickly away.

  Webster had to sprint, but he stayed half a block behind her yellow car, trotting in place when she stopped at a light. His eyes had recently gone bad, using computers in the lab. In the average wolf pack now, he would be left behind to starve. But he was lucky, since she stayed on crowded streets, not turning out to Lake Shore Drive, and he could keep up well enough to watch her twirl her hair around one finger, chew her nails, beat time to the radio on her car door. Parking at a drugstore, she came out with a plastic bag, then made complicated turns through residential streets, slowed to a creep.

  Finally she left the car, a half block from the park, not far from their own place. It was a nice block, flowers in the yards, elegant old brownstones blasted clean, with potted plants that trailed from balconies. From behind a large oak tree, he watched her use a key on the front door of one and disappear inside it with the plastic bag.

  Streaming with sweat, he leaned his wet face on the tree’s rough bark. For a long time he managed not to think. He checked the bark for ants. There should be ants here, but there weren’t, just as spiders didn’t blow in the windows of his apartment house. He could just leave Chicago. He didn’t even have to tell her where he went. Oh, God, what was in that plastic bag? Condoms, sponges, foam. How long had she been doing this? It was the basic rule of field-sighting. For every one you saw, there were a hundred you did not.

  Knees stiff from standing, he walked up and down the block, not caring who saw him. Peering through the window of the brownstone foyer, he tried to read the mailbox names but couldn’t see in the dim light. Inside, a door closed.

  “Careful,” said a voice that might be Margy’s.

  Lurching to a run, he loped the half block to the park, willing himself to keep going. Did he really want to know? But his feet would not go on. He had to look.

  The front door of the brownstone opened slowly, and the two of them came out. The man was tall and dark, and draped around her shoulders, Margy’s bright hair massed against his black T-shirt. One of her arms clung tightly around him, hand no doubt in the back pocket of his jeans. They drifted toward the stairs, slow as in a dream. Oh, it was a cozy scene, cozy. Did he kiss her like he meant it? Fuck her, of course she meant. Fuck her, with sincerity.

  She bent down, took hold of the man’s knee, lifted his foot, set it on the stair below. She picked up the other leg, braced herself against the rail. The guy lost interest in the operation. His eyes wandered, found Webster’s down the block, and fastened onto them. Webster took a step back toward the trees. Where had he seen that look? On a man with wider shoulders, cheeks more full? Now he looked gaunt and pale. Ill. But still it was a soul-divining gaze.

  Nothing looked the same. The whole street rearranged itself. Webster rushed toward them.

  “Margy, my God.”

  “You never listen to me,” she said mildly, reintroducing him to Todd. Todd lifted a stiff finger, waggled it at him, scolding. One side of his face looked slightly bent. He couldn’t seem to talk. Margy’s small arms held him, and her face looked soft.

  “Todd was a wee bit forgetful about how to walk after his meningitis. But now look at him. He’s a champ.”

  Webster walked around the park with them. No drug dealers appeared. Old women in babushkas nattered together on benches, in Polish, Serb, or Croat. A young woman walked a Great Dane bigger than a calf. Light seemed to pour from Margy’s hair. Margy, his wife! Not lost! A man who looked Armenian, in a brown suit, walked toward them carrying a baby in a party dress. All these people seemed to know the secret of happiness.

  Margy touched his arm. “You’re shivering. You’re soaking wet. Did you run in these clothes?”

  He shrugged. He wasn’t cold. But he let her send him home. The apartment seemed to glow, while he showered, put away her shoes. Making the bed, he bent to smooth the sheet and saw her chart, tucked under the mattress. Unfolding it, he checked. Her temperature had spiked the day before, right on schedule, day fourteen. It meant a live egg was at large, packed with fifty billion years of evolution, Margy’s music talent, green eyes, frothy hair. Prickling swept Webster’s back, as if a bed of nails had been applied to it, briefly. The timing didn’t mean a thing, of course. It was only a coincidence. He made the bed.

  He heard her coming up the stairs, rattling a grocery sack. She dropped her keys, sang bits of opera. Her voice was low and smoky, but trained from years of music school, so she could hit the right notes, hold up both ends of an intricate Mozart duet.

  “Là ci d
arem la mano. Vorrei e non vorrei . . . ”

  Her heels kept time, click, click, sprezzatura on the hardwood floor, up the hall toward him.

  He stood in the middle of the living room, too agitated to sit down. When she saw him, she stopped and tipped her head.

  “What’s the matter, sweetie? Your hair’s standing on end.” Shifting the groceries to one arm, she reached up, tried to smooth it down.

  He took the sack from her and set it on the floor. He put his arms around her, pressed his nose into her hair.

  “Sweetheart. Would one child satisfy you?” He felt himself quiver, from somewhere in his abdomen.

  She laughed. “Is that a theoretical question?”

  He watched this scene from eight or nine feet in the air, the guy down on the floor some other man.

  “It’s an offer, I think.”

  She pulled her head back, frowned. “How long have you been thinking about this?”

  “About five seconds. If I thought about it longer, I’d be too afraid.”

  She gave him a flashing grin. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen my chart.”

  “I have, actually.”

  “Better watch what you offer.”

  “I know exactly what I’m offering.”

  Laughing, tipping back her head, she lifted his hand and looked at it. Casually, as if she wasn’t doing anything, she started strolling up the hall. His breath rasped in his ears. He couldn’t hear. The walk was too short. By the bed, he paused.

  “I’m not sure I recall the procedure here.”

  She took his T-shirt off, his jeans. He could remember everything he’d ever read by Kierkegaard, Camus. Someday this kid would ask why it was born. Why was it here? What was the purpose of its birth? It would grow old, lose what it loved, feel pain, and die. Webster wilted, not yet inside.

  “Stage fright,” he said, grimacing.

  She chuckled. “Look at it this way. It’s not your body on the line. It isn’t you who’s never going to be the same. You could do this ten times a day across the countryside, and not be changed.”

  Possibly not ten. But that was all he needed now. Resuming, he waited for the tornado that usually arrived to whirl away the feel of their bodies. But this time a big light in his brain switched on. He knew exactly where her skin met his, thighs around his hips, tissues parted slippery. He could calibrate each upward ratchet of his heart, hydraulic rushings through small tubes, valves that opened or did not, just like a motorcycle speeding toward a cliff, wind in their faces, lots of time to swerve aside, they couldn’t fly, the cliff too high, the air too thin, how could they fling themselves out into it? Then they were in the air, her head thrown back, his face pressed to her neck, his body pinned on top of hers, both of them crying out, about to plummet to the ground.

  They did not make love again for weeks.

  Diarrhea, Webster thought as he opened his eyes. The only time he had ever taken care of a baby, it was a huge boy with the runs, and it kept wobbling to its feet, giving him a toothless grin while huge dollops of yellow shit dropped to the floor from its exhausted diapers. He tried to change them, but it got up and careened around the room, emitting happy shrieks, tipped over chairs and lamps. He looked around their small apartment now. Where should he begin? Buy rubber sheets? Bolt down the furniture?

  Margy seemed to shine, with a moist radiance, like a lightning bug. Humming, she stopped by his chair to kiss his head. One afternoon, when he came home from the lab, a T-shirt and jeans lay on the bed, no bigger than his hands. They appeared to be a person’s clothes. A person with arms and legs, another person in their home. A fat kid with small eyes, riding in the back seat of the car, disapproving of their every move.

  “Jesus, Dad, you call that a haircut?”

  “Yeah, my dad’s a scientist, sort of.”

  Two excruciating weeks oozed by, one millisecond at a time. Margy had a textbook cycle, always the same. Furtively he checked her chart. It was day fifteen, then sixteen, twenty-one. Twenty-five, when would it end? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight at last. Then twenty-nine. Thirty, thirty-one, dread cresting up like nausea. In the bathroom cabinet, the tampons disappeared, replaced by a new box, lurid pink. Seven days after missed period, ten drops of urine in the tube, stir with the stick.

  In the mirror she admired her breasts, already bigger, sore. On their way to huge. She laughed, holding them.

  “The Irish are very fertile. My mom got pregnant four times in three years. She could conceive from a sultry look. Of course, she lost the other three. She couldn’t stay pregnant, till me.” Margy looked more sober, as if starting to brood.

  On the morning of day thirty-two, she kissed his back as he got out of bed, put her arms around him from behind.

  “Don’t ever let me throw you away,” she said.

  Webster was arrested in the middle of a yawn. Was it up to him? Was she thinking of it?

  “Okay,” he said, and waited till she let him go before he stood up, pulled on jeans, loaded his pack. He was especially busy now, collating data from his trip, plus giving extra hours to the frogs. The university was all the way across the city, on the Southside, and he had to leave early to beat the traffic, stay down till late at night, stare at a computer screen until he couldn’t see across the room. Sometimes he didn’t make it home till Margy was asleep.

  Day thirty-three, after almost three sexless weeks, he stayed in the lab long after everyone was gone, and masturbated quietly on his lab stool. Margy was too close to think of, and mixed up now with yellow babyshit. Instead he saw his first girlfriend, whose father had spotted a footprint on the chimney, planted there one muddy night as Webster shoved his way into her room. Then the new student in his lab, who must be all of twenty-two, some awful name like Tiffany. She watched him with sad eyes, brought over slides and asked, could he help her? Silky hair slid past her neck, and earrings tinkled, blouse gapped at her breasts as she bent down to watch what he was showing her.

  He caught some on a slide, used the big lab microscope. Thrashing was all he saw at first, lots of mobility. No hope of failure there. He focused in on one of them, nothing but a tail and a wish. Was he supposed to live its life? The rest of him just legs and feet to carry it around, get it properly injected, build a nest?

  “Salmon, squid, all that stuff spawns and dies,” he told the creatures on the slide. He washed them off.

  Lights burned in the living room when he got home, violin case in the corner by the couch. But she was not in any room. Checking the kitchen counters for a note, he picked up the phone and started to punch Calvin’s number when he heard a small sound like a gasp. Following it up the hall, he tried the bedroom, then the bath.

  She was in the empty tub, clothes on. His eyes adjusted to the dark. He saw a small box, not the new one but the old kind, blessed blue, tampons. Wings unfurled in his chest. Flinging aside the shower curtain, he put his arms around her in the cold tub, picked her up.

  “Sweetheart,” he said. “Sweetheart.”

  Carrying her to the bed, he folded around her. She felt so good! He pressed in close and put his nose against her head. She smelled warm, a little acrid, sweet.

  “You bastard,” she said.

  He was just hauling in a breath, and he went ahead and finished it. Okay. Okay, sure. He could feel it now, her skin clenched like starfish armor, Echinodermata, spiny to the touch. He pulled back to look at her.

  “Why, exactly?”

  Even in the dark, her eyes were fierce.

  “Oh, come on. One grand gesture, as if that means anything. And then you were so cold to me. What would have happened in another month? You would have slept at the lab by then.”

  His head hurt suddenly. He rubbed his forehead, but it didn’t help.

  “I tried to give you what you wanted.”

  That wasn’t the whole story, but it was part of it. How could he explain? It was as if he had been tricked, or tricked himself, and then the trick had stopped.

  She searched hi
s face. “I didn’t want to do it by myself. I thought if I just waited a few years . . . Men want children too, don’t they, when they grow up?”

  Name two, he might have said. But he could name them himself. Whole cultures of them, chanting on the evening news, demanding six sword-waving sons. Muslims, Hindus, Baptists, Mormons, Catholics, all responding to some urge he didn’t feel, to swim upstream, be fruitful, multiply, make four where there were two, then six or eight or twelve, a baseball team of one man’s progeny. The pope traveled the world, saying a special mass for women who had borne fifteen, answering the call of God. Which God exactly, though? The one that made the manatee, the snow leopard, the dodo bird?

  He felt staked to the bed. “We can do it, if you want. But I can’t make myself want to. It doesn’t work like that.”

  She lay crumpled next to him. An hour seemed to pass. Then her body settled, like a door clicked closed. She looked calm, relaxed. Reaching out one hand, she gave his chest a pat, once, twice, with finality.

  It was a tiny gesture, but something lifted off in him. He was not such a bad guy! He was a friend to jellyfish, freshwater shrimp, and frogs. He’d given life a chance. Life had its own reasons, and he would keep an eye on them. Raising his arm, the way he always did, he made room for her against his chest and waited for her to roll toward him.

  Last of the Genuine Castrati

  Down the hill, the city of Dante and Michelangelo wavered in the heat, red tile, and ocher clay, Duomo rising like a mushroom cloud of stone. Margy picked up the hotel phone, tapped in her former number in Chicago. Waiting, she could see a gray hair, curled into a question mark beside her face. Carefully, she yanked it out. The phone began to ring a quarter of the way around the globe. As a child, she had thought the sound you heard was the real ring of a phone in someone’s home. Now she knew that it was just a buzzing on the line and would sound the same after the house burned down.