“Do you think they’re pretty?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He came closer, sat down on the side of the bed, stared at Rue, whose head nested against the underside of Margaret’s breast as she slept. Then he looked briefly at Rosemary in the box.
“This one’s prettier,” he said, head gesturing to Rue.
“How can you say that?” Margaret asked. “They’re practically the same and if there’s any difference . . . anyhow, you’re just saying it because she has more hair.”
“Mm,” David said without interest.
Margaret shifted the baby to the sheet so she could lie on her side, but as she did so, the pressure on her unmilked breast made it squirt milk.
“Oh, Christ, I’m leaking,” she said. “It’s just as well. I’m so full it hurts.” David stared at the wet breast “Mother’s milk,” she said playfully. “Want some?”
With utter seriousness he reached out a finger, touched her nipple, licked the finger.
“It doesn’t have any taste,” he said.
“Cocoa Marsh hadn’t been invented yet,” she said. “Anyway, it’s probably not the real milk. Some other stuff comes out first.”
He was thoughtful.
“What are the other people like?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “They’re pretty old. Like you, maybe. De Witt’s wife is all right. Then there’s this girl . . . I’m supposed to go looking for kindling with her now.”
A small pang at having been replaced in David’s heart without actually having reached there in the first place. That he found Mira nice she wouldn’t even think about.
“Don’t let me keep you,” she told him.
“I don’t really feel like it,” he said.
“How come?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think she’s a phony. She’s got this phony acid name.”
“What?”
“Baby Butterscotch.” He grimaced.
“Is she pretty?”
“I don’t know, I guess so. But I think she’s a phony.” Without seeming to be thinking of what he was doing he reached out the same finger, touched her nipple again, sucked the finger for a moment.
“David?” A girl was at the door, a pretty girl with a soft voice and hair the color of butterscotch.
Margaret smiled in what she hoped was a benign fashion. The girl smiled back.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said. “I just wanted to know if—”
“Don’t be sorry,” Margaret said. David didn’t look at the girl. “Would you like to see the babies?”
The girl nodded eagerly but seemed hesitant about actually coming into the room.
“Come on in,” Margaret said. “They’re both sleeping.”
The girl glanced at David, who was looking out the window. Then she tiptoed into the room and over to the cradle.
“Oh, she’s beautiful!” Baby Butterscotch exclaimed softly. “They’re both soooo beautiful.”
It was the first time anyone had said to Margaret the thing people used to say about babies in the old days, and only now could she admit how she had craved to hear it. Margaret’s heart went out to Baby Butterscotch, who was certainly not a phony at all, just a lovely girl with the right instincts, but David fixed on the girl a gaze at once harsh and remote.
“Aren’t they really?” Margaret said. “Their names are Rosemary and Rue.”
“Oh, those are beautiful names,” Baby Butterscotch said. “Really beautiful groovy names.” She stood quivering with pleasure and admiration, seemed about to reach out to touch Rosemary but unsure that it was all right to do so.
“You can pick her up if you want to,” Margaret said, and was about to add that the baby’s head should be held so it wouldn’t wobble, but Butterscotch had already happily picked up the baby, supporting her head, cradling her, running her lips over the baby’s downy head. Finally she looked up and smiled at Margaret, the author of her pleasure.
“God, I love babies,” Butterscotch said.
“How old are you?” Margaret asked.
“Eighteen,” Butterscotch said. “I used to babysit a lot. Not just for the money, I mean I liked it. I used to think that was all I wanted, you know, to get married and have babies and have a house and a car and, you know, the whole suburban bit. It seems ridiculous now when I think of it.” She rocked the baby as she spoke.
“Why?” Margaret asked.
“Well, you know,” Butterscotch said, “it’s just the whole suburban bit, that’s not my thing. My parents . . . I mean the whole nine to five bit . . . meeting the commuter train and putting in the flowers in neat little . . . well, the flowers, that’s okay I guess . . . but what I mean is, that whole routine, that life style . . . can you see me?”
David said, “I can.”
The girl’s eyes filled with tears. Gently, sorrowfully, she lowered the baby back into the crate, gazed at it for a moment, turned back to David. Her expression was tragic. She seemed about to thank Margaret but then decided against it—after all, such a small gesture might prove to be another unwitting step toward damnation. Her body sagging with defeat, Butterscotch turned and left the room.
Margaret watched David. If he felt any satisfaction at having destroyed the girl, his face didn’t show it; he looked about as emotionally involved as if he’d just ordered a BLT down. Roger never attempted to conceal his satisfaction after having put Margaret down in some cunning new way; his smile would become benign and expansive and his posture, as he moved around the house, briefly changed from caged beast to lord of the manor.
“I wonder,” she said, “what Roger is doing now.”
“Roger?” David repeated.
“My husband.”
“Where is he?” David asked.
“At home,” she said. “In the suburbs.” My husband’s name is Roger, we live in Realestatesville and he sells Rorschachs. Or vice versa. “He’s a film maker.”
“You miss him?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t slept together since I got pregnant, practically.”
“Are you allowed to?”
Are you allowed to? By that Great Obstetrician in the Sky?
She nodded. “There are men who like it better that way.” Remembering Howie Ard, the Pregnant Lady Freak she’d slept with once around her fourth month, who’d begged her to keep in touch.
David took another lick.
She’d thought about Howie for a long time, trying to decide whether she had reason to feel rejected at his nocturnal admission that he had no interest in seeing her after the baby was born. She’d thought of Howie before she thought of Roger, when the doctor told her she was having twins; Howie would go wild, was her thought.
They’d met at a party given by old friends of Roger’s in a huge loft on Broome Street full of inflatable furniture and representational paintings which had repelled and upset Roger; when they were in school together this friend had been the most far-out of his painting friends, and now the guy had deteriorated into someone cranking out this traditional garbage. In Roger’s lexicon the word traditional was invariably followed by the word garbage. For him the only thing the past had to offer was money, a philosophically difficult situation for Margaret, to whom tradition meant the house at the Cape and beach bottles and a fire burning all day in the hearth at the aunts’ and uncles’ houses on holidays. She and Roger had had one of their most bitter arguments when somewhere near the beginning of their marriage he’d insisted that what all the pleasant things represented by the cousins and the past really came down to was that the cousins had been richer than she. Margaret had refused to let it go by although she had let other far less reasonable arguments go by. It was unbearable to her to have the pleasure taken out of those particular memories and it was unbearable to him, a permanent thorn in his paw, that she should remember the past fondly. He claimed that he had parents who were no worse than most and a filthy rich childhood and if he hadn’t enjoyed being young, nobody could have. If she didn�
��t remember how miserable she’d been it was because she was a mass of repression. She’d asked if it wasn’t equally possible that he was repressing the times he’d had fun and he’d called her a dumb vapid cow and said he was going to buy her a block of salt for Christmas.
Roger had never been addicted to the small amenities like introducing her to other people they met, and in the months of her pregnancy he seemed to have developed a specific resistance to letting anyone know they were related, so that she was pretty much on her own at parties unless someone paid attention to her, at which point Roger might materialize from nowhere and tell her he was ready to leave. Now as she sat in a suggestively shaped, round rubber chair, a man plopped down in back of her, grabbing her hair.
“You have magnificent hair,” he whispered in her ear. “I bet you’re pregnant. Sell me your hair.”
“Oh, no,” she said quickly. Her hair was the only thing about her that had Roger’s unqualified approval. It hadn’t been cut since she was twelve and came down to her waist, between auburn and chestnut in color, thick and silky in texture. On their first date they had gone to a party from which Roger had taken her at an extremely early hour with the words, “I’m taking you home now, I have an overwhelming urge to come in your hair.” To Howie she said, “I couldn’t do that. Why don’t you buy a wig?”
“Real hair wigs are prohibitive,” he informed her. “And there’s no guarantee they come from pregnant women, I could be cheated easily.”
“How did you know I wasn’t just fat?” she asked.
“As a truffle is to the nose of a truffle hound,” he said solemnly, “so is a pregnant woman to my whole nervous system. Is your husband here?”
She nodded.
“Are you very close to him?”
“I suppose so,” she said. “In a strange kind of positive-negative way.”
“Show him to me,” Howie said. “Show me the lucky bastard.”
The lucky bastard was in a far corner of the room, surrounded by the four beautiful wives of four other artists, with one or more of whom he would undoubtedly be in the sack before the evening was over since he had to be getting it someplace.
She pointed out Roger to Howie.
“The stupid bastard,” Howie said. “How can he bother with those skinny broads?”
“He doesn’t like fat women,” Margaret explained. “For that matter he doesn’t seem to appreciate pregnant women, either.”
“Come wiz me,” Howie whispered in her ear, “and I weel show you what iz it to be apprezhiated.”
With a readiness astonishing to herself, for she had been married to Roger for more than five years and had been unquestioningly faithful to him in that time, she hoisted herself out of the rubber chair and followed Howie out of the loft to his apartment in Washington Square Village.
“How come you live here?” she asked him.
“A specific response to specific needs,” he responded mysteriously as they rode up in the elevator.
It was a good-sized apartment for a bachelor, furnished beautifully, but in a conventional—nay, super-bourgeois, manner that was somehow surprising in a person of Howie’s otherwise unconventional tastes. Soft blue wall-to-wall carpeting, a deep blue velvet sofa, colors of rose and gold in the drapes and chairs. There were no paintings but a large number of enlarged, well-framed photographs hung on the walls. Howie went into the kitchen to make drinks and as she inspected the photographs more closely she found them all to be of pregnant women: a pregnant Jackie Kennedy, a pregnant Colleen Dewhurst, a pregnant Jeanne d’Arc after the painting at the Metropolitan, a pregnant Happy Rockefeller, a pregnant Venus on the Half Shell, a pregnant Sophia Loren and several ladies of equal pregnancy if not equal renown.
Howie came back with the drinks. “Let’s go into the bedroom,” he said. “That way you won’t have to get up again.”
Obediently she followed him into the bedroom where a six-foot-high photograph of a pregnant Eleanor Roosevelt dominated an interior that was otherwise straight Marjorie Morningstar. Howie set down the drinks and carefully pulled back the yellow satin quilted bedspread, then beckoned to her to stretch out next to him.
“A pregnant woman,” he said, running his hand along the mound that had barely begun to specify itself, “has different needs than an ordinary one. I shouldn’t say needs, I should say desires, because basically a pregnant woman has no needs, she’s the most complete, un-needy person in the world, but what she wants . . .” His voice was low and hypnotic, like the man on the astrology forecast records. “What she wants is comfort. The part of her that grooves on dirt and discomfort and being miserable is submerged. Tradition and pleasure are in the ascendancy.”
They sipped at their drinks.
“This is delicious,” she said.
“I invented it for my wife during her pregnancy,” he said. “My ex-wife. She was pregnant when I married her. I should’ve realized it couldn’t last.”
“Maybe you should’ve married an elephant,” Margaret said.
“It has lemon and honey in it,” he said, “which is why the appeal to pregnant women. I won’t tell you more because it’s part of my total plan to lure you back.” He put down his drink, leaned over her, kissed her ardently while massaging her belly.
“How come you care so much?” she whispered, already pleasantly excited, putting down her drink and encircling him with her arms. “I mean, what is there about us?”
“Arrogance,” he whispered back, kissing her neck, drawing up the skirt of her flowing maternity dress and pushing down her pants so that he could fondle her stomach without interference. “Pregnant females are the most arrogant fucking creatures in the world . . . You can’t touch ’em . . . All you can really do is keep trying.”
“I don’t feel arrogant,” she said truthfully.
“Sure you do,” he told her. “You just haven’t thought about it. If you reflect for a while . . . c’mere, sit up, I’ll help you get your clothes off . . . if you think about it you’ll realize that you have a certain good feeling these days. You’re sort of satisfied with yourself, right? You don’t sit around worrying about what you should be doing because you have this sense that whatever you’re doing is good enough. And you’re right! It is! It’s magnificent!” He took the barrette out of her hair so that it fell loosely down her back and over her shoulders. Naked and happy she reclined. For the first time since she’d begun to put on weight she felt no shame, no desire to hide under the covers. Once or twice in her third month Roger had still made love to her but he had made it quite apparent that he was using her very much as he would have used a knothole if that happened to be the most readily available place for him to come, the result being that she had experienced just about as much pleasure as a knothole would have in the same circumstance. Now, feeling like a marvelous jewel for the first and last time during her pregnancy, she made love with pleasure, and if she still tended to be submissive rather than active, that seemed to be perfectly all right with Howie, who had, after all, said that what she was doing just by being pregnant was so magnificent that there was no need for her to be doing anything else.
Not two weeks later she had gotten the call that her mother was dead.
“So how come you haven’t been sleeping with him?” David asked.
“With my husband, you mean? I only said some men like pregnant women. I didn’t say he was one of them.”
“So who’ve you been sleeping with?”
She started to point out that she hadn’t said she’d been sleeping with anyone, but stopped herself. David had a shit-detector astounding in one so young and so detached.
“It was only once,” she told him. “A few months ago.”
“How come?”
“I was afraid of getting too attached to him. He only liked me because he had this thing for pregnant women.”
“How do you get attached to people?” David asked.
She stared at him, not having the vaguest idea of how to answer, not even sure
what the question was. It was almost like a straight request for lessons, yet that couldn’t really be it. How could you not get attached to people? She got attached to everyone, even people she disliked. She liked David and De Witt and Baby Butterscotch and she loathed Mira, yet already in some unbearable way she was attached to Mira just as much as to the others. A part of the same jig-saw puzzle.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just something that happens. I’m extremely attached to Roger, even if we haven’t made love in half a year and even if I’m mad at him. Even being mad at people . . . probably you wouldn’t get mad at people if you had no attachment to them.”
“Is he attached to you?” David asked.
There it was again. She smiled. “I guess so. I don’t know. I’m not sure.” Why did her sense of irony seldom enter directly into her speech when she was with David? Because it was such a superficial part of her that she knew it wouldn’t even register through his armor? He waited. “I guess we’ll know by whether he shows up here. De Witt is sending him a telegram for me, with the address on it.”
“What did you say in the telegram?”
Unwillingly (although at first she wasn’t sure why) she told him. “I just said I was at this farm with some other people, some girls and boys and some married people, and I had the twins.”
“So if he comes,” David said slowly, “you won’t really know why. Whether he’s curious, or he feels like meeting the other people . . . or he’s attached to you.”
She took a deep breath. “David, tell me about yourself.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“Here,” he said.
“Where did you grow up?” she asked.
“In the suburbs,” he said (with a flickering smile).
“Which one?” she asked.
“What difference does it make?” he said.
“None, really,” she admitted. “It’s only that you’re a very mysterious person to me. I’m trying to sort of solve the mystery by finding out something specific about you.”
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