Your mother answered the door. She was cradling you, and I could tell by her loose blouse and the gloss of milk on your lips that she had just been nursing you. She had cut her hair short, and her face was still full from the pregnancy, and for a minute, I didn’t recognize her, and it occurred to me that my friend Josh Gottlieb might have had the good sense to move and abandon me, but she recognized me. Her jaw unhinged, and her eyes moistened, and she said, “Jesus Christ,” which is a funny thing for a Jew to say. She balanced you one-handed and reached the other out to me, and said, “Come in. Jack, come in.” I stepped inside of the house, this house that is always clean. Your sister was running up and down the halls dragging a doll by its hair. She stopped to stare at me. She cried. She ran to her mother’s leg and clung to it, sobbing and terrified. Without thinking, your mother said, “Here, Jack,” and handed me the baby. You were wrapped in a white blanket. With your full belly, and already knowing your place in the world, a world that wanted you and welcomed you, that set a place at the banquet for you the minute you arrived, you looked up at me and I swear you smiled. I couldn’t believe your mother trusted me to hold something so precious. My arms felt weak and fuzzy, not up for the job, and I stood perfectly still, terrified of dropping you, stunned. Your mother picked up Katie, whose sobs switched to wails, and they disappeared for a minute. Your face has never changed, the shape of your doe eyes, the tiny upward tilt of your nose. You looked at me so intently and frankly. I would like to say that those few minutes I spent holding you were enough, that the kindness your parents showed me was enough, that your father’s embrace or the roast chicken dinner we all ate together that night was enough. The most I can offer is that I believed it may have been the start of something.
We had to pick your brother up from the bus stop. It was springtime—you know that since your birthday is in April, the month of diamonds. We walked up the street. Annette pushed a pram, and you lay swaddled in your blanket watching the blue sky, the clouds, the azaleas in bloom, the daffodils. The world is beautiful. Atlanta in the spring, the jungles of Vietnam, the play of sunlight on the Hudson River, the blue mountains of North Carolina where I grew up. This is an observation that has been made by the joyful and the troubled alike. I daresay it may be the last thought of many a suicide. Those four simple words often floated in my brain before I drifted off to oblivion. The beauty of the world is not enough to sustain a human being. In fact, it can be your undoing, the knowledge that it exists, existed before you and after you, your own inconsequence. We waited with a few other young mothers, a spattering of toddlers. Annette said hello to them and introduced me. “This is Josh’s college friend, Jack.” A yellow school bus groaned to a stop, and like something magical, it released a set of children, girls in white shirts, boys in blue shorts. Benji jumped down, skipping the last step. He was carrying a spelling book wrapped in brown paper and a lunch box. He peered into your pram and waved. I pushed the pram back so that your mother could hold Benji’s hand while we walked. The politicians told us that this was what we were defending. That the plague of Communism would spread from Asia to Europe to America, and all the mothers pushing prams would be turned into slaves, their pink blouses and white pants ripped from their bodies, replaced with gray woolen shifts. The green lawns would be plowed under, and the houses torn down and replaced with cement blocks. But we lost the war, and here it all was, as perfect as ever.
Back at the house, I took a long hot shower and used your father’s razor to shave off my beard. Annette gave me a pair of his pants and a clean T-shirt. She must have called him, because Josh came home from work early, and without asking how I felt about it, he drove me to Marty’s office, where I got a physical exam. Marty saw the track marks on my arms. When he parted the gown to listen to my heart, he saw the curvature of my empty belly, the ribs, the scars. He told me he could put me in the hospital to help me over the withdrawal. I said I just needed money. Marty had lost a lot of hair. He was left with just a rim of dark curls around his skull, so he looked like a monk. A Jewish monk. He told me that when he was in training—at Bellevue in New York, it turned out, only blocks from where I lived—he had seen many heroin overdoses, many deaths. Then he asked me a question that no one, I think, had ever asked me before. He said, “Jack, what do you want to do with your life?”
I didn’t have an answer for him at the time, but I thought about it when I put my clothes back on. He came back with a prescription for Percodan and said to use that to ease my cravings. I said, “You know, Marty, I’ve always wanted to be a painter.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “If you want to be a painter, shouldn’t you be painting?”
I got off the drugs. Not right away. If I were a better man, I would buy your mother a pair of diamond earrings to replace the ones that I stole, the ones I hope she never noticed were missing or just wondered where they were or at least blamed me for their disappearance, not the maid. I was in and out of their lives for a few years after that, and I fail to believe they didn’t notice how things went missing after my visits, but somehow, miraculously, the door was never closed to me, and eventually I got my shit together. I started teaching. I sold some paintings. I sold some more. There is one hanging in the living room of this house. After all I took from him, your father tried to pay me for it. At least I can say I didn’t let him. After all they gave me, I gave them one of my best, a giant slash at the sky, stabbed through with stars and pools of tears. Most of my paintings are untitled, but that one is named Come In. Those two words, with their double entendre, were what your mother spoke to me before she handed me a baby to hold: Come in, yes. Come in. We aren’t all equally blessed in this world. You have had and will have so much more than most others, growing up in this house with those parents, loved and safe and beautiful. They will raise champagne glasses to you and your new husband. It is a sunny day, and you know what I say about sunny days. They are timeless and free, shared by the rich and poor at the same time on the same patch of earth, and therefore, like you, and love, and newborn babies, miraculous. Come in.
The fucked-up nipple
Elizabeth Gottlieb has one nipple that dimples inward. I know this because my sophomore year of college I got to second base with her. I think I may have been the first one to get that far even though she was already a junior in high school and I would have thought someone would have at least fingered her by then, if not more. She was pretty hot, so this must have been because of her saying no instead of a lack of interest from your average high school boy who is, in general, not super picky. Don’t ask me why I’m at this wedding. I’ve barely seen Elizabeth since that night when I got her drunk (also maybe a first for her), and that was more than ten years ago. My mom said I had to come today because my sister Debbie is a bridesmaid and Mrs. Gottlieb was my mom’s sorority sister a million years ago, so they are tight. I feel ridiculous in this suit; I can barely breathe; it’s way too small for me. I’m just hoping I don’t see anyone I know because they’ll probably freak out at the sight of me. The meds make me fat and pimply, and if Elizabeth Gottlieb remembers me at all, she probably remembers a pretty good-looking guy, popular, on top of his game.
So here’s how I met Elizabeth. I was talking to my cousin in front of the frat house, and he mentioned something about Debbie, and one of my brothers overheard and asked who Debbie was, and when I said she was my little sister, he said, How little? And I said, Sixteen, and he said, That’s the good kind of little sister. He told me I should have her come up for the party that weekend and tell her to bring friends. I said I didn’t want him touching my little sister, and he said, Duh, that’s where the friends part comes in. Then he asked if she was hot, and I said, How should I know, she’s my little sister. He said, C’mon, you know. I looked at him like he was crazy, and then he said she must be a dog, so I said she was pretty. He asked if I had a picture of her, and I said no, which was true; what nineteen-year-old has a picture of his little sister in his dorm room? Debbie had been begging for an
invite since my freshman year, so we lied to Mom and Dad, and said she was coming to go to the Georgia-Florida game—which is huge, and I am just lucky that my dad was on call that weekend or he would have wanted to come too—and then she was going to look around the campus because it was time for her to start thinking about colleges.
The truth was we didn’t have tickets to the game—it was huge, like I said, and had been sold out for months, mostly to rich alums and season-ticket holders. I thought Debbie would share that fact with her friends, but she assumed they didn’t care, and then when they got there and found out we weren’t going to the game, they were all okay with it except for Elizabeth because it turned out her dad was going to be there, and he wanted her to come find him. I told her nobody could find anyone in the stadium anyway because it was so huge, but she was really nervous like she was going to get in trouble, so I found a guy who said he’d look for her dad and tell him Elizabeth wasn’t feeling well and had gone to this girl in Kappa Delta’s room to lie down. The girl was a friend of her family’s, so she thought that would be okay with her dad. But even after we worked all that out, she still didn’t look so happy. It turned out she actually wanted to see the game, and it was the promise of the game rather than a party with college guys that had made her sign up for this trip in the first place. Debbie and the two other girls, Jennifer Abrams—who I see is also a bridesmaid and as fuckable as ever—and a girl whose name I can’t remember, had come for the party, and before I knew it, they were downstairs (where we were watching the game on TV), drinking beers and cozying up with some brothers. I pulled Debbie aside and told her not to get too cozy, but she shrugged me off, and I got pretty drunk later and I’m not entirely sure what she did that night except she promised me she didn’t fuck anyone.
Of course, I got stuck with Elizabeth, who was sipping her beer as if it were a fine wine, and the beer got warm in her hand and looked like piss before she was even a third of the way done. She was trying to watch the game, but people kept getting in front of the TV. She told me she wanted to go home, and I said Debbie’s too drunk to drive, and she said, Why don’t you take me? And I said I was too drunk too. I said her beer was warm and got her a fresh one, and she drank it down. She got giggly, and said, I don’t even know why I care about this stupid game. I want to go to Yale, so I should be rooting for the Yale Bulldogs. I told her she must be pretty smart if she was going to Yale, and she shrugged. I said, Don’t be fake and modest, you just said you’re going to Yale, so obviously you’re smart. She said, I didn’t say I’m going to Yale, just that I want to. That’s not the same thing. I said, It’s not fair to be smart and pretty, usually girls are just one or the other. She said, Why just girls? And I said that was just how it was in my observation, and she said that there’s lots of pretty girls at Yale and Harvard; she knew because she visited Harvard once. Then she looked at me sideways and said the guys were cute too.
I got her another beer. She asked me what my major was, and I told her premed, and she was drunk by then so she said that was lame, that premed was a job, not a major, and she suggested I study literature or history because I would spend the rest of my life being a doctor. I said that was fine with me as long as being a doctor put a good chunk of change in my pocket. She said I wasn’t very idealistic, and I told her I guess I was just mature for my age. She laughed so hard she spat beer all over me, and that was how we ended up in my room, and I wrote a note to my roommate on the memo board outside our door: FGA, which meant Fucking, Go Away, but, in fact, there had been very little fucking in the room, a few make-out sessions, some what my school sex-ed teacher called “heavy petting,” but the only girl I fucked that year was Margie Herman, and she was a dog who’d already been humped by half the frat house.
I didn’t fuck Elizabeth Gottlieb; though my cock was willing, my conscience was not. We kissed; I unbuttoned her shirt and saw that weird nipple—which, having not seen that many tits in person, I thought might be common—felt her tits, tried to undo her pants, had my hand swatted away, and felt her actually pass out in my arms, so I laid her down on my filthy comforter with her shirt unbuttoned so I could take my time examining her chest, her pretty breasts, her small belly button, the soft hair on her belly, and the peek of some pink lacy panties, even a few dark hairs springing free. It’s horrible to admit, but I jacked off while I was looking at her—part of me wanted to come all over that pure white chest, but I wouldn’t know how to explain that to my sister’s friend, so I used Kleenex, cleaned myself up, and left her there to sleep it off. I have never told anyone this, not even Dr. Gruber—who I have been seeing twice a week now for four and a half years with my parents footing the bill—and certainly not Debbie, who pities me now when she used to admire me, and least of all Elizabeth, but I am pretty sure her pretty white tits were seen—and perhaps even fondled—by several of the brothers that night after I left her there and went back to the party because I came up later to find the door open, her shirt wide open, the pants looser, and my roommate typing on his computer as if there weren’t anything more interesting than a half-eaten sandwich on the bed. I pulled up her pants and buttoned her up and covered her and told him to get the fuck out of there, and when she woke up, I was working through a chemistry problem set, and she thought I was some kind of fucking hero or gentleman, and she used to ask Debbie to bring her up to see me, but I couldn’t face her again, so I told Debbie that Elizabeth had gotten too sloppy drunk and that she wasn’t invited to any parties anymore.
My mom is all excited about this wedding, since my sister is engaged now to a nice Jewish attorney—hah, one better than Elizabeth’s Lutheran or Protestant or whatever—and she is on some kind of anthropological mission to attend as many weddings as possible and synthesize their customs so Debbie’s wedding can be a life-changing experience for everyone who attends. Maybe she’s hoping it will be life changing for me too, will accomplish what Dr. Gruber, olanzapine, electroshocks, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, and lithium have not—get me over this persistent sorrow, this certainty that happiness is not for me, not for anyone, really. Even people who think they are happy are just in some kind of altered state, a fugue, a fog, a dream, from which they will all eventually wake up and either see the truth or take a drug that, if they are lucky, works for them or decide to just sleepwalk through life. I have to admit that a lot of people are doing a good job looking happy here. Elizabeth’s mother gave my mom a big hug, and she had these tiny tears in the corners of her eyes. (Hasn’t anyone besides me ever wondered why people cry when they are supposedly their happiest? It seems so obvious that the incredible effort expended in forcing their fake joy beyond its natural boundaries makes them sort of, well, leak.)
She said it was the happiest day of her life, seeing her daughter married, though, of course, that is a relative term. The day a refugee from the Sudanese civil war lands at the shitty Atlanta airport and tastes his first Wendy’s hamburger and settles into a crappy apartment with stained wall-to-wall carpeting in some distant suburb of this polluted city is the happiest day of that guy’s life. The day the Russians rolled into Auschwitz and the living skeletons that were the survivors (one of whom, legend has it, is a distant relative on my mother’s side) hobbled out to meet them, smiling so hard that what was left of their teeth fell out, was the happiest day of their lives. You get it. It seems weird to me that this could be the happiest day of a mother’s life, because all it means is that tonight her daughter, her little baby—who, based on this collage of photos someone has assembled next to the guest book we are supposed to sign, used to have a poochy belly that showed through a lemon-yellow bathing suit she wore to the beach when she was about five years old—this girl in Mickey Mouse ears standing in front of Cinderella’s castle, this girl in a pink leotard and ballet slippers, is going to have the shit fucked out of her tonight by the guy who is smiling stiffly for the cameras right now. She is going to be turned every which way so he can find novel ways of sticking his cock in her hole and is probably going
to have to put that lovely mouth with its perfect teeth around said cock and suck. Is that really a mother’s dream? Well, at least there’s some old guy drooling in a wheelchair who has been left directly in the sunlight and totally forgotten, and who is about to have heatstroke in addition to the stroke he has clearly already had, who seems to be as miserable as I am.
I am thirty-one years old. In two months, I will turn thirty-two. I should have been married, living in a big house with two kids, and been on the board of the synagogue by now. That has been the fate of most of my Alpha Epsilon Pi brothers, whose holiday cards and wedding invitations and birth announcements I continue to receive. My mother opens them and insists on sharing the news with me, to which I reply with a vacant uh-huh, refusing to either cry or pretend to be happy for them. Then I tell Dr. Gruber that Joel Rosenthal had a baby girl last week, and she asks me how that makes me feel, and I tell her it doesn’t make me feel anything, and I am not lying. Joel Rosenthal had terrible acne in college and used to beat off to pictures of tied-up girls and kept a pair of someone’s dirty panties in his desk drawer. Now he is Dr. Joel Rosenthal, completing his ophthalmology residency at Columbia, married to a girl he met in med school, who, according to my mother, is gorgeous and, apparently, fertile. I wonder if he ties her up. Dr. Gruber says it is important to let things go, but I find that these meaningless facts are branded in my memory. While I cannot remember the elements of the periodic table, which I once had memorized, or the twelve cranial nerves or stoichiometry, I know that Joel Rosenthal has a big mole behind his ear, because he showed it to me once and asked if I thought he should have it removed. Dr. Gruber wants to know why I think this happened to me. I don’t know. Is it because my father put so much pressure on me and had a temper and had affairs? Or because my mother starved herself close to anorexia so that she could wear a bikini well into her fifties, by which time, although she looked good from a distance, she was actually a crinkled, deflated mess of a body, a blow-up doll with the air let out of it that sagged in all the wrong places? I have explored all these things with Dr. Gruber. She says it is biochemical.
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