by Ann Bauer
“Isn’t that the test with the long needle?” Jobe’s face was long and sad. He wasn’t going to let her hope and she knew very soon she might hate him for that. “I don’t think you should. I mean, I don’t think there’s any point. The doctor isn’t wrong.”
Fury rolled in Carmen. She felt like slapping him but balled her hands so she wouldn’t. “How can you know that?” Slowly, the impulse ebbed.
Jobe shrugged and stared at the fireplace in which there was no fire. “I just do.”
“The same way you know you’re going to die?” She was taunting him, but also considering. If both things were true, what else did Jobe know and how much of it did he control? Why was she alone tumbling through life without information, making all the wrong choices?
“Not really,” Jobe cut in. “That’s more of a …” He stopped and kneaded his head. “That’s a feeling; I’ve had it for years—practically as long as I can remember. But this is a fear. It just started a few days ago. I told myself it was irrational.”
How’s the baby doing? she remembered him asking. Was that just last night?
“But,” he continued. “When I saw you today, I thought …”
She waited. “You thought what?”
“I was sure.” He put his hand out and covered her belly with it, long fingers draping over in a melting way. “But I also thought it was …” He paused again. This was, Carmen noted, the first time Jobe had reached for her in weeks. “Necessary.”
“Necessary for what?”
The doorbell rang then and Carmen heard it echo from a distance inside her head. “Just a minute,” Jobe said, and extracting his hand slowly, as if it had been suckered to her stomach, he got up. “I ordered dinner,” he announced when he returned holding two brown paper bags. “Chinese. I didn’t know what you’d want so I just …” He dragged the coffee table over and started unloading the bags. Little white cartons piled up like toy soldiers. “Got a lot.”
Carmen lay against the couch and mused while he went to the kitchen for plates and one fork. Jobe would use chopsticks, but she never could quite master them and didn’t have the patience tonight. “It’s handy, isn’t it?” she asked when he came back, napkins fluttering like birds on top of the stack he was carrying. “You never, ever have to stop and question. Do I have enough money? Should I order dinner? Can I pay for this? You just go ahead and do whatever you feel like.”
“Yes.”
He’d agreed with her, but his one-word answer seemed inadequate. It made her angry, even as she piled her plate with Mongolian beef and moo shu pork. “I mean, you do get that the rest of us don’t live that way, right? We can’t just do or buy anything we want. It’s harder than that.”
Jobe stared at her. He hadn’t even begun filling his plate. It was as if he was doing this deliberately, further separating them. Making her eat alone. He didn’t speak but she heard his answer anyway: But it’s not harder for you, Carmen. You’re like me now. She looked around at the ornate, expensive furniture she’d purchased on a whim. She had spent more than a year’s salary for the average art history major on outfitting their apartment and still, they sat on the floor.
“Okay,” she conceded, though Jobe had not yet said a word. And finally he began spooning out food for himself. “It’s just weird that having all these options can make you feel so … trapped.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” he said, as Carmen sat up. He’d sounded, during those five words, like the person she met in Kensington Park. She ached for that day, for the gangly, sweet boy whose grin had flashed so unexpectedly. “All my life, whatever I’ve wanted, it’s been there. Money to travel, the schools I want. You.” He was concentrating on the inside of a carton of fried noodles. “It’s too easy, too much. There are no rules. There’s no, you know.” Jobe raised his head and locked eyes with her. If she were encountering this brash, free-speaking man every day, she might not be collecting travel brochures. “Order.”
“And this”—Carmen gestured at her body, the part that looked like a snake’s belly after he’d swallowed a baby giraffe—“gives you order.”
“It does.” Jobe lay back and dangled the noodles into his mouth. Truly, she had never even met this guy before. He was like a slightly older version of that strange, brave boy from London, and so much more interesting than the man she’d awakened next to fourteen hours before. “It gives us order. Hell, I think it probably gives the whole world order. Seemingly random events provide the structure in any complex system, mathematical or otherwise. It sounds backward, but I really believe it’s true.”
“You believe?”
“Yeah, that’s actually the basis of my research project.” He’d already had a couple of beers but now he emptied the wine bottle into his glass and drank, eyes glinting. Carmen moved a tiny bit closer to where this different new Jobe lay sprawled on the rug.
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “You never told me.”
“I never thought you’d find it interesting. People don’t.”
“I’m not people, I’m your wife.” The word felt strange and antiquated in her mouth, like a dusty thimble.
Jobe snorted, bull-like, which made her smile. It didn’t fit him at all. “I guess. Whatever that means.”
She liked him so much more this way: coarse, confident, almost rude. “It means, we have to decide what to do about this baby.”
“Yup. The ugly genius and his pretty little wife are going to have a retarded baby. Did you ever hear that joke about George Bernard Shaw?” Carmen was leaning in, one hand gathering to stroke his chest, anticipating the narrow lines of it. Her stomach was pleasantly full. The baby was sloshing around in its private place. The spot between her legs was warm and wet. “He met this beautiful woman at a party and she told him they should have a child together because it would have her looks and his brains. So he said to her, But what if the baby has my looks and your brains?”
Carmen pulled herself up straight and didn’t breathe. The room around her expanded, darkness unfolding in all directions. There was a moment’s pause so loud she thought it might make this whole conversation moot because her inadequate brain would simply explode.
Jobe eyed her from where he lay then sat up hurriedly, gathering his long legs in his hands and folding them. “Carmen, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“Really?” She ached to go back in time and make this true. But there was no way, ever, to erase what Jobe had said. And how it sounded. Woozy, she rose slowly, her hips sore. Her mind felt even more battered: squeezed and dented, like a car’s engine that had been crushed. Maybe Jobe was right: She had grown dumb in addition to everything else. That would explain how she’d walked straight into the wrong life.
“Please, Carmen. I’m worried about the baby and I drank …” He nudged the bottle and it careened demonstratively across the wood floor. “It’s just. No, don’t leave.” He caught her hand, his Venus fly-trap of a hand closing over hers, but she shook him off and backed toward the stairs. Sleep, that would make all this go away. “I’m just worried. About the baby. About you.”
“You’re worried that I’m just too stupid for a genius like you?” It made sense now that she considered it from his point of view. He was not in her league looks-wise. She was not in his when it came to brains. The joke about … who was it? George somebody—she didn’t even recognize the name, which only proved Jobe’s point—was mostly true.
He was staring at the floor. “No, I’m worried you’ll leave.”
Carmen stood, hands fisted at her sides, thinking but not saying a dozen cruel things. Everything tilted nightmarishly. It felt as if she were on some lifelong carnival ride, strapped in to her seat no matter how desperately she wanted to get off.
“I know you don’t love me.” Jobe still sat with his head bowed, talking to the floor. “I’ve always known. Marrying you was the worst, really, the most idiotic thing I ever did in my life but I convinced myself that we were fated…. I thought over time, w
e’d have a baby together and make a home and eventually, you’d feel connected to me.” Jobe rolled to a stop and sighed drunkenly. “But I don’t know if that can happen now.”
“Because?” Carmen’s whole body was twitching, she was so tired.
“Because, honestly, I’m not sure you can fall in love with anyone who isn’t beautiful. It wasn’t you who was dumb about this, it was me. I was the one who expected this baby to have your looks and my brains. I was, in fact.” He hiccupped loudly and Carmen almost laughed. “Counting on it,” he finished. And the moment for laughter passed.
“So what happened to random events providing structure?”
“I believe that. But you …”
“I can’t really understand?” She waited, silently willing Jobe to rise and move toward her. Even if she were going to reject him—and she didn’t know if she would—Carmen was rooting for him to try. “Is that what you’re trying to say? Or that I don’t have it in me to love a retarded child? What?”
As if the baby heard, he kicked at precisely that moment and Carmen closed her hand over one tiny heel, holding on. “I’m sorry,” Jobe said, though what specifically he was referring to was not clear. Carmen thought about asking, sitting down next to him and touching his bony shoulder. But the thought of it—after all of this—remained unappetizing. It was the only word she could think of and again she nearly let loose a frantic, inappropriate laugh. Touching her own husband was like eating soggy eggplant; it was something she had to muster her will to do.
“I really need to go to bed,” Carmen said and meant it. Her legs were growing numb and she was in danger of toppling forward. She turned without another word, groped her way up the dark staircase, and got under the covers without removing her clothes or brushing her teeth. Hours later, she awoke in total darkness and a sense of being anchored. She had to pee, desperately, but something was pinning her. Bad thoughts she could not quite remember were swimming in her head.
She moved like a fish, thrashing. And Jobe made a sound. He was lying on top of the quilt, as far from her as he could on the queen-size bed. She recalled in a gauzy, vague montage leaving him in the living room. He’d been on the floor. Why? she wondered, as she lurched toward the bathroom. Her mouth tasted of wine, which was odd as well.
Sitting on the toilet, hunched over her body, her meeting with the doctor replayed and hit her with full force. Their baby: He had Down’s. She remembered that now. Weeping, she leaned even farther forward. There was no way out, no escape from this. She had made terrible mistakes and now both she and this baby would have to pay.
“Carmen? Are you alright?” Jobe appeared in relief against the murky bedroom, his body outlined like an Indonesian shadow puppet—all long neck and jointed torso and arms. She had been in such a hurry to reach the bathroom that she’d forgotten to shut the door.
There had been another bathroom door, in London, firmly shut. She thought of this now. What if she had never opened that door but had crawled out a window instead? Was there even a window in that long-ago WC?
Jobe hunched down and put one hand on her knee. This was the benefit of being married to someone you weren’t attracted to, Carmen told herself with a strange, internal motherly voice: You didn’t mind his finding you squatting and urinating because there was nothing to lose.
“Are you in pain?” he asked, and she saw that the real Jobe was back. Not the one from last night whom she could picture, fuzzily, lolling on his back. This Jobe was upright and taciturn. Almost mournful, though she couldn’t recollect exactly about what.
“I’m fine.” She stood sniffling, dribbling everywhere. Pulled up her underpants without even wiping. It was like she was trying every way she could to turn off her husband. “I need to brush my teeth.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be waiting.” As if this, after the past few moments, was private. She took a long time with her toothbrush, reapplying the paste twice and scrubbing out every remnant of white wine. She was appalled that she could be so irresponsible, no matter what the doctor had said. This was her baby, as much as it was Jobe’s. And she needed to protect him.
“Better now?” Jobe helped her as she lowered herself backward into their bed.
She didn’t know the answer. Was she better now, or worse? But she simply said, “Yes.”
SEPTEMBER 2007
The descent was abrupt. Twenty-six hours after Carmen’s lunch with Danny at Domaine Thérèse she was huddled in bed, damp with fever, vomiting into a metal bowl.
For days, various people appeared at her side—Olive, Siena, Luca, Jana—each holding a glass of water. Their only mission, it seemed, was to get her to take a sip. Once she did so, whoever it was would fade backward, as if dematerializing in the air, and Carmen would be left alone until the next person arrived with a straw to insert into her scorched, tired mouth.
Twice she got up to use the bathroom and had to be helped. Luca could support her alone; he was four inches shorter than her but deceptively strong and as stable as a three-legged stool. The second time it was Olive who took her and they tilted against each other in a rickety way. Carmen tried not to lean but nearly fell on the way back and Olive had to catch her by the arms. For one perilous second, they stood locked together and swaying. It was Carmen’s only flash of real clarity: She saw her mother-in-law’s face, determined and beading with sweat. Both women mustered what force they had and somehow righted each other. After she had tucked Carmen back into bed, Olive slumped in the chair alongside it, breathing in short gasps.
“I think,” she said between inhalations, “next time I may ask for help.”
But there was no next time. Because Carmen descended even further, into a soup of memories and dreams, tingling nerves, aching bones, and swimming head. Her body felt fragmented in the bed. She wouldn’t have been surprised to discover one of her arms lay separate from the rest of her. Her feet seemed miles and miles away.
There were flashes of her childhood: the smell of pot roast when she walked in the door from Girl Scouts, learning to drive her father’s enormous New Yorker, sleeping with her sister in some hotel room—where? she did not know—and feeling the soft curve of her leg.
Then Jobe appeared by her bed and sat straight in the chair, lit as if from a spotlight from below. It was night, that darkest part of it. His hands were enormous, moving and glowing like starfish. They were floating luminous above the arms.
She couldn’t keep her eyes away from them.
“You came,” she said. Or didn’t. It was hard to tell whether the words were spoken aloud or appearing like subtitles inside her head. “Did you solve it? Riemann? Is the answer in the box?”
It doesn’t matter. These words clearly did not come from him—the man, or the ghost, or whatever he was—but unfurled in the space between her ears, which was very confusing. How was Carmen to know who had spoken, whether it was her dead husband or she herself?
“Of course it matters.” She was angry, and this was cleansing. A wash of pure emotion that dulled her nauseating pain. “Tell me.”
The answer is there. You will find it. You will understand. His hands were on her head now, cradling its hot, egglike shape and soothing it, like a cap made of cool water that stilled the fires in her skull.
“But I never understood,” Carmen said petulantly. “That was the problem.”
Remember? The golden Jobe leaned forward, but like a doll—all at once, tilting rather than hinging. Seemingly random events provide the structure in any complex system…. He was beginning to fade away.
“But why?” There was a question bubbling around on her brain, like something in boiling water that kept moving, rising, going under again. “Why did you?” She concentrated, hard, still watching his hovering, translucent spaceship hands. Finally, she grasped the idea by its tail. “Why didn’t you tell someone? Althea—that woman in Greece. You had time. You could have sent her the solution.” Jobe was disappearing, growing smaller and darker, disappearing the way a televisi
on screen used to into one center spot. “No, wait. Tell me why.”
Because the solution is yours. It’s up to you. He was collapsing, contracting, becoming as tiny as Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole then smaller still. Carmen sobbed and reached out as her husband vanished. Then she, too, was falling, tumbling backward into a dark space.
Shutter glimpses appeared to her. Dr. Woo and an endless trail of zeros rising and falling like golden doughnuts behind him. Olive holding a wine glass and looking at the sky. Jana wearing Carmen’s rings, turning her hand to make the diamonds flash in the light. Siena and Troy walking with Michael as if they were his parents. Luca contemplating her room from the doorway (was this real?). Young Carmen lying on the table while the doctor ran his ultrasound wand over her belly. Pictures flashing from an unseen screen.
Carmen and Jobe, so young, sitting in a restaurant with scarves like billowing sails between the booths.
“At least no one will ever throw away my work,” he said. “I know you would never let that happen.”
“The same way you know you’re doing to die?” she asked.
“I was wrong,” he answered.
“No, you weren’t. You’re already dead.”
He placed his elbows on the table and leaned forward, looking her straight in the eyes as he spoke. “Seemingly random events provide the structure in any complex system, mathematical or otherwise.”
“You’ve said that before. Or no. Wait.” She struggled. The plate before her was steaming with the strong scent of curry. “You’ll say that in the future.”
“Life isn’t a single path, Carmen. That’s only an illusion. I’ve proved it.”