Parallel Play

by Thomas Rayfiel

  “After you walk, you're supposed to fly. You're supposed to flap your wings, which are really your ears, apparently, and become an adult. Don't ask me how. I never saw that movie.”

  The doors opened. We entered a tropical rain forest. Because it was so messy outside, the contrast was even more striking. The plants had doubled in size. There were buds everywhere. The Gro-Lites beamed their energy right down into the leaves. I un-snapped Ann and got her out of her little cocoon.

  Io was wearing the same shoes. I could tell by the banging they made on the floor.

  “Here are some towels.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It looks terrible out there.”

  “It's not so bad.”

  Wooden stakes were driven into each tub at an angle. He did that right before he harvested. The shock to the root system sent resin rushing up to the leaves. Resin made the buds stronger, more potent. I smiled. The past was coming alive for me, as it had not, for many years.

  “I'm making tea.”

  “That sounds great. Where's—?”

  “In back.”

  She went off in the other direction, to the kitchen.

  She wasn't any friendlier than last time, but no worse, I decided. It was just her manner. Anyway, I wasn't here to see Io.

  Ann didn't go anywhere at first, just checked out her new surroundings, getting in touch with its invisible forces. I took a deep breath, nervous. Then she began to crawl. She'd picked up his scent.

  I rehearsed a third and final speech.

  I want you to save my marriage by occasionally reminding me of who I am, or who I used to be. You can shower Ann in your love, and if you just let a little of that love come my way too, that's all I need. That's all I want. From you.

  We broke through the last row of plants to the braided rug and lamp where I'd first met Io. But the big chair had been pushed aside and there were people sitting on the floor, women, six or seven of them, all young, without babies.

  “Was he actually a shark? Or was she just hallucinating?”

  “He was the spirit of a shark. He could turn into a shark at will.”

  “No, he was a shark. He could turn into the surfer dude at will.”

  “But only for short periods of time. His essential nature was that of a shark, wasn't it?”

  Nobody was quite sure.

  “But when they were in the water together, it seemed like—”

  “That's where I was confused too. Especially when she feels that fin growing out of his back.”

  “Hi there!”

  Because they were all low down, they saw Ann first.

  “Hello! Who are you?”

  My eyes swept past them—they were so irrelevant—looking for Mark. He must be here somewhere. Ann had paused too, as puzzled as I was, but then saw a plate of cookies in the middle of the rug and starting crawling again, all elbows and knees.

  “Isn't she cute?”

  “Ann, no!” I said, in my Awful Voice.

  Years before, for no reason, I had found a copy of Dog Training for Dummies, which I now realized was where most of my parenting ideas came from.

  “Oh, can't she have just one?”

  They had tippy little teacups, which they didn't know enough to keep their hands on. She had already knocked one over. The whole area was a minefield. I stepped in the middle and scooped her up before she reached the platter. She started to cry.

  Io appeared behind us.

  “It's herbal. I hope you don't mind.”

  “That's great,” I said, trying to make the grip I had her in look like a warm motherly hug instead of a wrestling hold. I was desperately looking around, seeing if we could somehow get past these strangers, keep moving to that different part of the loft where he was waiting for us.

  “Everyone, this is Eve and …”

  “Ann.”

  “Of course. Ann. Sit over here. Next to me.”

  Oh, shit! I almost answered, seeing they all had the same paperback he had brought that night. It was the book club. When Io had said, “Why don't you come over Saturday morning?” I thought that was because Mark would definitely be here, that he wouldn't be out on some job, not because it was when her stupid I-Have-Time-to-Read discussion group met.

  “This is Ginny, Christine, Debby …”

  The company of women. Which was supposed to be so restorative. I settled on the floor with that uncomfortable feeling of trying to fit in to something you know you can't wear anymore, the persona of a single girl, all these hopes and dreams it was just assumed you shared. It used to terrify me that either they sincerely did, and I was left out, a fraud, faking my way through life, or none of us really believed what we'd been taught, that it was a universally accepted lie, and the main reason we gathered was to reinforce each other's delusions, those myths everything pointed us toward: that we would find that special someone, that we would in some unspecified way succeed, that we would be fulfilled.

  “Where do you guys know each other from?” I asked.

  They looked around, as if they weren't quite sure.

  “School, mostly.”

  I was far from that now, even in terms of appearance. It wasn't that they were all pretty, but even the least pretty of them was still putting out this aura of availability. Io and I were the only ones not dressed up. And she's married, I remembered. A quick survey of everyone else's fingers told me we were the only two. So I actually had more in common with her.

  She sat cross-legged on the floor. Her jeans rode up. She wasn't wearing socks.

  “What's that?”

  “What's what? Oh, a tattoo.”

  I looked more closely. It wasn't really a tattoo, not of anything. It was more of a blur, a band of color going around her ankle.

  “Did you read the book, Eve?”

  “Some of it.”

  “We were talking about when Kaz turns into a shark.”

  The heat was making noise, that steady background sound that makes you think for a minute you're tuned to a cosmic frequency, the key the whole universe is vibrating in, but then you realize is just air. Io was in a sleeveless goosedown vest. She was so resolutely unsexy. Except she had on earrings, I noticed. Fancy ones with what looked like real diamonds.

  “Where's Mark?”

  “Up there.”

  She nodded to the ceiling. I looked and saw we were under a skylight, and then remembered he wasn't allowed to smoke down here, most of the time.

  “On the roof, you mean? Isn't he getting wet?”

  Does he know I'm coming? was what I really wanted to ask. Does he know I'm here now? With an offer that will change his life?

  “He has an umbrella.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, what could she have done?” someone was arguing. “I mean, he was perfectly fine as long as there was no blood in the water.”

  Ann was hungry, blindly head-butting my chest. I had a bottle of formula in the bag. It was hot when I made it but had cooled off during the walk down. I shook it and felt Io watching.

  “I could get him,” she offered. “I have this stick I use, to bang on the glass.”

  “No. Never mind. Do you want to do this?”

  I held out the bottle. She stared at it for a minute.

  “OK.”

  I helped get Ann settled in her lap, then gave her the formula. She was awkward at first, concentrating.

  “Just hold it like … that's right.”

  She tilted the bottle too far over. Ann coughed and sputtered. I put my hand on hers and guided it back to the right angle.

  “Look. See the bubbles? That's how you know it's working.”

  I had that sympathetic reaction, a physical twinge, as if I was still nursing. All these invisible ties, I thought. Everyone caught in webs of feeling.

  “I've been meaning to tell you something.” She talked, not quite in a whisper, but in a very flat, private tone that was meant just for me, not for people even an extra foot away. “It wasn't exactly true. Wha
t I told you before, at the party, about how we met.”

  She stared down at Ann.

  “Really?” I asked, just to be polite, and edged closer.

  “I took this self-defense class for women.” She still wasn't making eye contact, speaking even more quietly, while everyone else talked about the book. “What to do in case, you know.”

  “Sure.”

  “And the instructor— I don't know where she knew him from, but Mark was there.”

  “I don't understand. Mark was taking a class in women's self-defense?”

  “He was the example. The attacker. He was the one she demonstrated on.”

  “Oh. He does like to volunteer.”

  I remembered him posing for us, that first time. How he came out from behind a screen. The first naked body I had ever seen. In that way. With beauty first and lust coming after. Instead of how it usually was, desire knocking you over and then finding the beauty, frantically looking for it, convincing yourself it existed, as a way of justifying what you were feeling.

  “He's very community-oriented,” she agreed.

  I looked to see if she was joking.

  “So what did he do?”

  “Well, he would approach, from either in front or behind, and you'd have to kind of fend him off, with all these moves you were supposed to have learned.”

  The cover of the book was on the floor in front of us. It had a Polynesian-looking guy wearing a tiny bathing suit, seen in profile, holding a surfboard in front of him, with that curving, hooked rudder that sticks out the bottom corresponding to just about where his penis would be, if his penis was eleven inches long and shaped like a triangle.

  “Sounds kinky.”

  “No. He was very professional. He showed me what to do in different situations, if I was grabbed or choked. Whatever was supposed to be happening.”

  “And that's when you got together.”

  “Not really.” She flipped her hair. It was a gesture that didn't go with anything I'd seen in her before. Haughty and upper-class. Her diamonds glittered. “It was just how we started to talk. When I found out what he did, that he was a contractor, I told him my parents needed work done on their house. And that's where we really got to know each other. But it's not like I met him there. Which is what I said before.”

  “And why exactly are you telling me this?”

  “I don't like having lies between us. Not with people I care about. That's something I've learned from therapy.”

  “Well … thanks,” I said uncertainly.

  Ann shifted and Io shifted with her, getting more comfortable.

  I looked at her ankle again and saw, as the border of the tattoo became more exposed, what it was supposed to be: the fluorescent pink spray paint he marked his tool handles with, so they wouldn't be lost or stolen on a job, so they wouldn't get mixed up with someone else's.

  “Kaz Kala-KU-au? Or Kaz Kala-ku-AU?” somebody wondered.

  He's hiding from me, I realized. He doesn't want to come down.

  I tried to peer up through the skylight, maybe make out a shadow holding an umbrella, a silhouette smoking a joint, staring out over the rooftops, waiting for us to finish. But all I could see was snow.

  “I don't want there to be lies with someone I'm friends with,” she went on, still looking away from me, down at the bottle.

  • • •

  We left before the others. Ann got restless. Io had put our coats on the radiator, so they were dry.

  “Thanks for inviting me. I had fun.”

  “If you want to go up on the roof, there's another staircase, past the last landing.”

  “No, that's all right. Tell him I said hello.”

  Mark wasn't the answer. I didn't know when it had become clear, but sometime during the afternoon I had made up my mind. I felt more of a bond with Io, linked by our shared feeling. She could deal with Mark, now. Alone. He was her problem.

  “There's something we've been meaning to ask you. Both of us.”

  “What?”

  “It's a favor you could do. But if you want to, you can say no. It's OK.”

  “Anything,” I said.

  I was feeling generous, hoisting Ann back into the Snugli, resuming my burden. This had been a nice break, this flight of fancy. Now I could handle whatever came my way. She opened the door to the loft—I'd never been on the stairs before, only ridden up in the elevator—and led us out, as if we couldn't discuss whatever it was inside her home.

  “He told you, right?”

  “Told me what?”

  “About kids. How I can't have them?”

  “He might have said something,” I answered, not sure how much I was supposed to know.

  Everything on the landing was creaky and dusty. It was still a factory out here, not renovated yet. The paint on the square banisters, just big sawed-off lengths of wood, was thick and gray You could sense years of layers underneath. The light was almost black. When you looked up, the walls disappeared in darkness.

  “It really sucks.”

  “I'm sorry. Have you tried—?”

  “There are these women you can hire. But the contracts aren't legally binding. So half the time they just disappear. Or else they hold you up for more money. Plus, you never know if they're really taking care of themselves, the whole time. They could be doing drugs. They all smoke, all of them. And you know they're not going to quit. In general, they're poor and unreliable.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “So they say you should use a sister. Or a cousin. But I don't have any of those. I come from a small family. And none of Mark's sisters are interested.”

  “I don't really get what you're talking about, Io.”

  “We want you to be our birth mother.”

  “You want me to be what?”

  “We want you to carry our baby.”

  “I already have a baby.” Whom I'm already carrying, in case you hadn't noticed, I wanted to add.

  I still didn't really understand what she was saying. I mean, the conscious answering part of my brain did, but not the place inside where things connect with each other and supposedly make sense.

  “Well, that's the point. The odds are less that you'd have any sort of complication. And of course it's much easier the second time.”

  “What is?”

  “Delivery.”

  “Oh.”

  “We'd pay for everything. My parents would. It wouldn't even be in a hospital. There's a clinic on Park Avenue.”

  “You know,” I said, “I lied too. Before.”

  She actually had a brochure. She was taking it out of her back pocket. So this was all a trap. A setup.

  “About the charcoal sketch, I mean. The one I made of Mark, that first time.”

  “It has these birthing suites where there's a pool of warm water and special lighting and even your choice of music. You can bring your own, or they have a selection. There's rock, folk, light classical—”

  “I didn't draw his penis. I traced it.”

  She looked up, puzzled.

  “With my tongue.”

  “I really don't want to know this, Eve.”

  “But there shouldn't be any lies between us, right? Otherwise it's not”—I reached back and, for once, found the perfect word—“therapeutic.”

  “Will you at least look at the brochure?”

  “No, I will not look at the brochure.”

  “We'd pay you a fee, of course. Or get you something. A car. Or a bigger apartment. My father owns a few buildings in—”

  “Go fuck yourself!”

  • • •

  The wind had changed direction. It was snowing up, hitting me under the chin. I couldn't figure out which way to go. I wasn't familiar with the neighborhood. Clumps of sleet were pelting me from different sides. I got confused and headed downhill because it was easier, because that's where my momentum took me, but also to shield Ann, who was trying to burrow deeper into my coat. “When the snow did come, it stayed,” I resu
med, telling her my memories of Iowa winter. “Flakes multiplied on the ground. A few inches became a foot. And then more. One foot became three, instantly. It was never less than knee-high. And when the sun finally reappeared, it was weak and distant, melting the tops of the drifts so they would harden again in thin layers that supported you for maybe a few magical seconds, if you were light enough, if you were young enough—”

  I remembered a glimpse of soft, untouched, rolling glitter.

  “—before breaking under your feet and trapping each leg. Getting anywhere was impossible. Grown-ups complained, but not me. You could eat it. You could scoop your hand deep down and pull out a lump of white that tasted like nothing else. It was so pure.”

  My foot got soaked in a freezing puddle.

  “Not like here,” I muttered.

  I had this recalculating to do, re-seeing all our encounters since we had met each other that day in the playground. I was aware of how my body had played a trick on me, put itself in a mode it had no business being in, how it had convinced me there was all this evidence he was interested in me again when really, when really—

  “When really he's a jerk,” I pointed out. “A jerk, a weakling, and a coward.”

  So that's why Io had wanted him to get close to me again. They had talked. They had used me. And he hadn't come down from the roof today because he knew what she was going to ask and didn't want to be around for it. He let her do his dirty work.

  We stayed close to old warehouses being transformed into stores, to posters and plywood in front of suddenly gaping lots where new condos would go up. Ann was dragging me down. She was too big to be carried, but the stroller was impossible in this weather. Besides, it felt right to suffer, not to let go. After all these months of wondering what I could do, the answer had finally been presented to me. I had found my calling at last, the only thing I was qualified for.

  Baby maker.

  The street ended in a wide pier that looked up to Lower Manhattan. Definitely the wrong direction, I registered mechanically. Snow was accumulating on my eyelashes and shoulders. I pictured myself white and stooped over. I hadn't pulled that aging trick on myself yet, but now I felt it coming, all at once, a wrecking ball swinging through my stomach. Skyscrapers stuck up, spearing the slop as it fell. I waited to cross the last road. A few cars hurried past with sooty carbon-monoxide-soaked chunks of ice hanging down behind their wheels.