Milk

by Darcey Steinke

  The girl in the leather pants came out of the kitchen carrying a drink and her husband began again to follow her with his eyes. Mary felt her ears ringing and, though she didn’t have to, she said she had to pee.

  Inside the bathroom, the porcelain was white as bone and the shower curtain covered with tiny black skulls. Someone had left a half-cup of eggnog on the sink and she remembered that it was the night people wait for the birth of the überbaby. Her own labor was stitched into her mind. The pain made her penetrable—air, light, noise; all these moved through her. Blood, mixed with amniotic fluid and scented like seaweed, had run down her legs as she bore down and felt her pelvis opening, her consciousness as if made from paper, ripping in two. Somebody knocked on the door; she flushed the toilet for effect and ran the faucet.

  When she got back her husband was talking to a girl with a choker, whom he introduced as Sonya. The music was louder now, so Mary had to yell to be heard. Sonya said her mom was in Saint Bart’s with her boyfriend and her father was with his third wife up in Westchester. She rolled her eyes and pointed out that the expression on the Virgin Mary’s face was like a porn star’s. Mary’s husband stared at the band of black leather around Sonya’s neck and her small well-delineated breasts under her tight T-shirt.

  It’s so weird you have a baby, she kept saying. Mary felt her breasts swell with milk. I mean, I could never handle a baby. A baby. God, that would totally freak me out.

  The lamp was on in John’s apartment. An orb of light fell over his table, but he wasn’t sitting in his chair and he wasn’t sleeping on his futon either. Cold bit into the tips of her hands, and she took her fingers off the iron fence and sunk them into her pockets. Tinsel was woven into the snow sloped against the brownstone, and there was a wreath, with a red ribbon, on his door.

  “Are you waiting for me?”

  She spun around, and there he was with a swing bag of groceries hanging from his right hand. His head was bare and a puff of steam dispersed before his lips.

  “I can only stay a minute,” she said, waiting for him to unlock his front door. Inside he nodded to the chairs by the table and went into the kitchen. Mary heard the sound of crinkling plastic as he put away the groceries. He’d bought himself a few things for Christmas, a pumpkin pie and a rotisserie chicken. She laid her coat on the bed and sat at the wood table; she read the word “aniseikonia” in his journal and the definition—“when one eye sees an object as bigger than the other.”

  “You look nice,” he said as he carried in the teacups and the bottle of brandy.

  “I was out at a party,” she said. She watched him settle into his chair and lay down a stack of napkins.

  He was wearing a blue sweater with holes at the elbows and his face carried a flush of cold. He looked at her intently.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday.”

  “It makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” Mary said.

  “It’s not that,” he said, walking over to the mantel and picking up a snapshot. He handed her the photo. “You see,” he said, “I almost had a family.”

  The photo was faded, curled at the edges. A woman in a calico dress smiled at the camera. She wore feather earrings and her stomach was huge. “It happened twenty-four years ago. I got the call right around dinnertime. My wife had pulled off the highway to help a lady with a flat tire. But it was foggy and a truck hit her while she walked along the shoulder.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mary said as she stared at the photo. The woman held one hand under her stomach and one hand on top, displaying her pregnant belly. Her pale hair hung around her face, and her lips were open as if she were about to speak. Mary handed the photo back and he slipped it inside the pages of his notebook. He sat very still and stared down at the gold liquid in his cup.

  Mary moved her hand across the wood and touched his fingers, and he leaned forward and kissed her mouth. His lips were not food exactly, but just as sustaining, and she opened her mouth and his tongue came inside all delicate flickers and so much more lively and nuanced than she would have anticipated.

  Everything was going pretty well except that she felt bad about his dead wife and baby. Felt bad for crack addicts, bad about the Middle East, bad that people got operations they didn’t need because of the American medical machine. But then she opened her eyes and every object seemed as delicately constructed as the baby’s loose tummy. Everything had soft bones configured into beautiful skeletal patterns; she was just a fragment of the world seeking another fragment. He came around to Mary’s side of the table and turned off the lamp and picked her up and carried her to his futon.

  Light from the window made a little shadow-puppet theater of snow coming down on the wall above them. He said into her hair, It’s been a really long time. And she tugged at his belt and helped him pull down his pants; boxers over skinny white legs. She yanked off her tights and lay back in her bra. Her nursing bra, which was wide and puffy. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to take it off. Her breasts might leak.

  A couple walked by on the street talking. She remembered the baby; her breasts were so tight she knew he’d need to nurse soon. But John was kissing her neck, all down the raised tendons and on the soft skin between, and she began to feel his cock defining itself, like a little god, against her thigh. Hadn’t she been a good person? Hadn’t she sold Girl Scout cookies and collected every Halloween for UNICEF? Didn’t she recycle? she thought as she moved between his legs and set her tongue against that delicate circumcised V. Tasting the first bit of cum, musty, green, she closed her mouth and sucked as if his cock were a tiny breast, and she slid her tongue inside the slit at the tip and tasted salt; and there began the slow descent into the animal kingdom where the halos around streetlights seemed to be singing, and she remembered how, when the baby’s head first appeared between her legs, she’d felt for a moment like a circus freak.

  She put her hand between his thighs, traced her fingers over his balls, then reached into the crack of his ass and pressed her pointer finger against his anus and she wanted butterflies to gather in a heap on her abdomen and the ice teaspoon to spill its dirt. She needed soil for the garden and the rose trestle and the little lamb who recited French poetry. He pulled her up to his face, and Mary rocked her pelvis against his and looked up at the tiny black shadows falling down over the wall and over his features; his face was wet. Water trickled out the edge of his eyes. Mary rolled on top of him, and they kissed until his cock dug into her stomach. She reached back and unlatched her bra; her breasts fell forward, heavy as water balloons. The sensation made his eyes jump open and he strained his head up, took her nipple into his mouth. His brow furrowed and his features compressed with intense pleasure at the taste of her milk.

  When she finally got home her husband still wasn’t there, and she paid the sitter and walked to where the baby slept. He’d kicked the blanket off and she pulled it up to his chin. She turned the Christmas tree lights on in the front room and sat down in the blue chair. The lights illuminated the pine needles and tinsel. She saw the silver church with the snow on the roof and the miniature present wrapped in green paper and the painted rocking horse and the crocheted snowflakes and the little silver bell; and she watched snow fall into the dark alley and brush against the window.

  Walter always said that the chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separate from him. But really, at the moment, that sounded to her like a bunch of bullshit. She walked down the hall and swung open the closet door. On the floor was a box filled with shoes, her mother’s house slippers mixed with sneakers and vinyl thrift-store boots. The mop lay in the bucket beside a lampshade and a bag of old videos.

  She kneeled down. The sleeve of her ratty wool coat brushed her forehead. Inside her coat pocket was a half-sucked cough drop. Inside the cough drop were atoms, and she knew that atoms, like flowers, had individual parts, protons and neurons. Mary pressed her palms against each other and squeezed her eyes shut. The world was on the edge of revolution, pregnant w
ith a different kind of life.

  PART II

  WALTER

  ONE

  THROUGH THE DOORWAY of his office, Walter watched Mary help Junot paint the hall. The trustees had agreed she could stay in the rectory rent-free as long as she helped with the church’s renovations. Mary painted the baseboard with a brush, while Junot, using a roller, got at the wall higher up. She was on her hands and knees and Walter could see the dark roots of her hair and how tendons stood out from her neck.

  It’d been a month since she’d left her husband. Christmas had transpired as had New Year’s, and while her crying jags diminished, she still felt flimsy. Her features were not unified, but seemed at odds with one another. Shades of pink, yellow and a delicate blue showed through in her complexion.

  The baby lay in a basket beside his desk; the former laundry hamper now tricked out like the reed-boat that had carried Moses. He coughed as he held an athletic sock in a tiny fisted hand. Mary insisted the baby had allergies but he worried; the cough sounded harsh and adult. Walter grasped the end of the sock and jiggled; the baby smiled and bicycled his legs. He felt responsible for Mary; if he were straight they’d be married and the baby would be his own. He loved how the baby sometimes held his hands out when he wanted to be picked up and how the rectory now smelled like melted butter. In the evening when Mary nursed the baby by the fire, the white skin of her breast marbled with blue veins, her face flushed with exhaustion and the baby’s face was as new and uncorrupted as a peach.

  He glanced back down at the bills, slips of perforated paper, spread out next to the computer. The gas was the most substantial; even with the thermometer at sixty the cavernous church was ridiculously expensive to heat. Walter’s calculator was beside him. All told, St. Paul’s expenses were twice as much as the amount in the checking account. Walter thought of calling Mrs. Newberry, though he’d just made his New Year’s visit. He’d been as explicit as possible, given the form of the pastoral house call, but she had not written him a check. Silk was the only answer, and he dialed the bishop’s private number at the cathedral and left a message about getting together for lunch.

  Walter heard Junot’s roller in the tray and then paint spreading over the wall; the delicate sound was akin to snow falling but wetter and less ethereal. He glanced over to his computer screen; the picture of a man in a brown fedora still hovered. Walter couldn’t decide about his face, though he did like that he’d named his dog Elmo. And he wasn’t too faggy; those guys obsessed with ABBA and Liza Minnelli made his skin crawl. Under favorite book was listed Barbara Kingsolver, Poisonwood Bible. Ugh. But not everybody was into Meister Eckehart and Julian of Norwich. What the hey. The man had nice ears, like shells, the lobes oversized and artistic-looking.

  “Mary?” Walter said, as he swung open the closet door. He’d seen what looked like her black boots and then realized her legs and knees where attached. “What are you doing in there?”

  Her face poked through the sleeves of coats dangling from wooden hangers, and she stood up between brown boxes of Carlos memorabilia, her head floating as if in water above the blue and gray collars of the woolen coats.

  “Praying,” she said. “Closets are like little chapels, don’t you think?” Her expression was sheepish. Earlier that day she had asked if he thought there was any connection between astrology and Christianity, and what did it mean that Jesus was a Capricorn?

  Her face seemed narrower than usual; there were burgundy circles under her eyes and sweat on her upper lip. Walter had seen her like this before, like last summer when a voice had instructed her to fill her bathtub with dirt and plant flowers. The time before she’d gotten fascinated with the mailbox at the corner of Cranberry and Henry. But the worst was in college when, in a dream, God had urged her to save the world through prayer. Mary had rushed into his dorm in the middle of the night with this news, her pupils dilated and her voice solemn with stewardship. She’d told him that all the furry animals being born in the woods around their university were divine, that they’d bring into existence a common language, one that the entire world would understand, people as well as dolphins and butterflies. When he’d suggested she take one of his Valiums, she’d been offended and locked herself in her dorm room, praying for seventy-two consecutive hours until, exhausted, her sweatpants damp with urine, she’d fallen asleep.

  “Did you take your Saint-John’s-wort today?”

  Mary nodded. “When I’m sad, sometimes I go into my closet and lay on my shoes.”

  A part of him wanted to insist again that she wean the baby and get on Zoloft. He wanted her to act normal, to behave in a conventional manner so he could worry less. But what difference did it make really if you prayed by the side of your bed or underneath it?

  “My dog did that during thunderstorms.” He saw his umbrella, a thrift-store model with a handle shaped like a tree branch. “Will you pass me that?”

  She complied.

  “Don’t wait up,” he said, and there was an awkward pause. “You can carry on if you’d like.”

  “Okay,” she said, her head disappearing again between the jackets.

  “Do you want me to shut the door?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind,” she said, her voice muffled by the wool and cashmere coats.

  * * *

  The man from Match.com had a sandpapery voice and a rapid delivery that mesmerized Walter. His hair had grown since the photo into a strawberry-blond mop; strands fell over his eyes as he gesticulated. He’d been raised on the Upper West Side. His mother was German and his father the editor of a cooking magazine. He pronounced his name Sta-fon. He was an actor, mostly TV commercials. He’d been the fire ant in the Ortho spot and the voice of a character called Tiny Duck Man in a popular Saturday-morning kids’ cartoon.

  Walter watched him as he moved his hands, relating the story of his first sexual experience—always a mainstay of these encounters, or the good ones anyway, the ones where a pretense of connection had to be established before sex. Walter was pleased that he found Sta-fon engaging; he was trying to be good. He’d always been attracted to teenagers, but after Carlos died they had an almost magnetic pull. Particularly that boy at Heavenly Rest. Nothing physical had happened, but when the boy’s mother found The Love Letter she went ballistic, complained to Bishop Silk and forced his resignation from the Upper East Side church. Silk threatened to send him overseas to do missionary work but in the end he’d arranged with his friend the bishop of Long Island for the job in Brooklyn.

  He listened to Sta-fon’s story intently, as he moved through the attributes of the lecherous drama coach, a familiar archetype in any gay adolescence, interchangeable with the lecherous basketball coach or the lecherous priest. The dramatist wooed with emerald cuff links and a collection of Picasso prints. At the end of the semester, he’d invited Sta-fon over for a private performance of Krapp’s Last Tape and a bottle of scotch. Walter could tell he had told the story before but not how many times. His eyes kept changing from sea green to lavender.

  Walter’s own seduction story was grim, its main components being a kitchen table and an evil stepfather, and so he always lied. There were several versions he relied on; the lifeguard at camp was the most popular. But today he decided to go free form, explaining how his mother’s family owned the largest ranch in Montana. This fantasy mother, he explained, had taught him to rope and ride as well as make a venison chili that the Quilted Giraffe would be lucky to serve. A half-dozen cowboys ran the place, and when he was thirteen, a couple of them agreed to take him up-country on an overnight.

  “There was an individual,” Walter said—he could tell Sta-fon believed him by the way he leaned forward, his sweater almost brushing the foam of his second latte—“a half-Mexican fellow known as Juan. He ate M&M’s and was always singing Led Zeppelin songs.”

  “Jesus,” Sta-fon said, “it’s like a movie.”

  “Yeah, it was,” Walter said. “So anyway in the middle of the night I got up to go to the bathroom
and on my way back I saw Juan walking toward me. And that was, as they say, a fait accompli.”

  “Wow,” Sta-fon said, and he adjusted himself in his chair, a pained expression infiltrating his features. He had a potbelly, and Walter assumed all the talk of hard-chested cowboys had made him self-conscious.

  “Do you ever make stuff up just for the heck of it?” Sta-fon said as he looked past Walter’s head to the snowy street. Hairs on the back of his neck stood up and he had the sensation that he was cornered, each shoulder blade touching a wall. A thump of blood moved from his heart out into his veins. No one had ever questioned his seduction story before. Maybe he should have stuck to the standards like the Little League coach or the heterosexual one that featured a best friend’s mother. He was confused. These Match.com encounters were typically friendly; men who dated online rarely wanted to see you more than once.

  “It’s all true,” Walter said, “right down to his straw cowboy hat.”

  Sta-fon stared into his coffee cup and there was an awkward silence as Walter watched the waitress with the ponytail carrying a cappuccino topped with whipped cream and sprinkled with cocoa to a table nearby.

  “You seem like a nice person,” Sta-fon said. “Do you want to tell me what actually happened?”

  Walter felt his face get hot; the way Sta-fon spoke reminded Walter of a schoolteacher instructing children, and his face, while open and friendly, seemed premeditatedly so. Probably a twelve-stepper, Walter thought; soon he’ll begin his drunk-a-log and start reciting all those platitudes. One day at a time. Fake it till you make it. Easy does it. Do the next right thing. Walter took out his wallet, laid down twenty dollars and stood up.