by Nell Zink
He realized he had to leave. He couldn’t take it. The rough beast had been slouching toward Bethlehem for two solid years, and nobody had been willing to take dead-center aim and empty a can of Raid. The reactionaries could not have reacted without their catalyst. They lacked the pure core of bigotry—unadulterated by religion—around which Trump’s movement had crystallized. He and his court sociopaths had shown them that God was dead. He rose to power saying, “Thou shalt kill. Thou shalt covet.” His bloc was snapping into place like the Borg, and Hillary’s was openly, insanely blaming the working class.
Mentally, he abandoned political Washington at that moment, feeling he might never return. It wasn’t hard to do. He would go home and riffle through his advertising contacts, look for some people to call. He was born outside the Beltway. He knew how to man up, renew old friendships, play golf in Georgia.
HIS PLAN WORKED FOR A FEW WEEKS, UNTIL HE SETTLED IN AT HOME. THEN, DESPITE Flora’s efforts to amuse him with sexual requests and viral political atrocity videos, he was bored. Unemployed, unwanted, and unhappy, he resolved to write a book.
He was too young for an interesting memoir. He couldn’t name names, even of people he’d worked for in the eighties. They were very much alive and might remain so for decades to come. He decided instead to author an introduction to electoral strategy for novices. He regarded the human race, with about four exceptions (all of them third-world dictators—he was having a dark moment), as being clueless about electoral strategy.
He intended to start in medias res with some straightforward recent history. He finished six paragraphs and stopped forever. His manuscript in its entirety read as follows:
Memorably in 2008, America’s failure to regulate its banks’ invention and marketing of imaginary products led to a global economic meltdown. America was not spared the consequences of its error. Not even close.
Its economy in ruins, desperate America did something odd. It elected an African American president. Not a black guy, obviously. That would have been unthinkable.
One would have thought that the nation’s corrupt Plutocrats (sic; conservative alien beings from the frigid dwarf planet) would eagerly have reaped the spoils of massive stimulus spending. Instead of handing off America to a hapless Earthling, they could have strained for hitherto unknown omnipotence.
But life on Pluto had taught them the virtue of austerity. Pluto didn’t give back. Everything they had on Pluto, they built with their own eight hands. Earth offered the aliens endless renewable bounty, living richness theirs for the taking, whenever their weapons were adequate to drive the Earthlings off the land and enslave them, which was always.
Best of all: Earth had Plutonium.
With the seismic shift of the 2016 elections, the day when Earth would resemble Pluto shifted from the cosmic timescale to the near-term future. The Plutonian concept of the middle-term “foreseeable future” was unknown among Earthlings.
His mood was one of thoroughgoing hopelessness, focused on possibly seeing things get better over the course of about the next thirty years, if he caught all the breaks and lived that long. He was, to borrow a word from the novelist Emile Habibi, a peptimist.
EVEN A MONTH AFTER THE ELECTION, THE TENOR OF CONVERSATION AMONG HIS PROGRESSIVE friends hadn’t changed. They were mournful, rueful, and defiant without a concrete plan. It was the mood that had been engraving itself on Obama’s face for months in anticipation, before anyone knew why. Democrats allowed ex-Green-candidate Jill Stein to sue for recounts and Republican judges to block her, as though reenacting the shared childhood trauma of the court-ordered installation of George “Dubya” Bush as beery dullard in chief back in 2000. The unhealed wounds of Republican gerrymandering and rigging were compensated with screen memories of pro-Trump Russian interference, including the candidacy of Jill Stein, who was rumored to be a Russian mole.
When Flora said to Bull, “You came inside me, and now I missed my period,” it fit right in.
“That’s weird,” he said. “Give it a week.”
THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, THERE WAS WET SNOW ALL AFTERNOON. FLORA LEFT GREEN-LAND early, stopping off at a drugstore near her bus stop on M Street. When she got to Bull’s house, he met her at the door with a hot toddy (tea, rum, lemon, ginger, cloves), but she waved it away. “I bought a pregnancy test,” she said. She kicked off her wet pumps. She turned up her skirt to peel off her wet nylons and dropped them on the welcome mat.
He backed away, toward the kitchen. “Wow. My mind would be blown.” He said it flatly, and it sounded literal: her pregnancy would disable some key component of his brain. Nothing life-threatening. Recent events had regularly blown out components that required retrofitting with aftermarket spare parts.
When she was done she met him in the kitchen with the test in her hand, not looking at it. He was relaxed again, already used to the idea. Again she refused the drink, saying, “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Don’t be paranoid.” He took the test from her and said, “Well, what do you know.”
“What?”
“It’s positive.”
“No way.”
He showed her the wand-like gadget’s distinct plus sign. “Definite baby alarm. In twenty-three years, you’ll be the proud mother of a Phi Beta Kappa Georgetown graduate. Congratulations.”
She stood there, barefoot, looking at him, not sure what to feel. He was extraordinarily hard to read at that moment, because he knew he was infertile. He hugged her to hide the inscrutability he could feel was written all over him.
Her chief feeling was that her feelings depended on his, and it wasn’t a good feeling. From the following list, he could favor one: cohabitation and shared parenting; single motherhood; or abortion.
Abortion had little appeal for her. Her life plan had always included children. He was more than qualified to be their dad. She was young and underemployed. Why not go for it? Unless, of course, he asked her to abort it, in which case she would feel like crap and hate him. A man who loved her ought to act thrilled about a baby and leave the abortion choice up to her.
Single motherhood? No, thanks. She wanted the baby, but she couldn’t imagine facing Ginger and Edgar, or even Pam and Daniel, to confess that her ancient boyfriend—whom Pam had expressly praised for being too vintage to want a family—wanted to pay child support in absentia, much less that he had left her before she left him. Single motherhood was unimaginable humiliation. To avoid it, she’d have to get an abortion and break up with him.
Nor was marriage an option. He was almost twenty-five years older. She wanted help with baby diapers, not to spend her fifties changing an old man’s. They shared many values, but she’d never heard long-term commitment mentioned as one of them. Besides, she was too young. He was a hired gun who preferred his principles to most people, which was a good thing; she felt it was a key reason his loyalty to his child would know no bounds.
No-strings-attached cohabitation with co-parenting was the one acceptable way out. Her wanting it made it his only possible choice, if he loved her. She moved closer and stared up at him, waiting for his answer.
“Do you want to move in here?” he asked. “It’s weird enough that you live with your grandparents, but your having my baby there would make it super weird.” He kissed her tenderly.
“We should have lots of sex before I get blobby,” she said.
SHE DIDN’T MOVE RIGHT AWAY, THOUGH. SHE DECIDED THAT BEFORE SHE PUT HERSELF through the ordeal of confession to her family, she would get confirmation from a gynecologist and then maybe wait a few months in case the baby went south on its own, as sometimes happens.
At Christmas in Cleveland Park and New Year’s on the Upper East Side, she justified her refusal to drink by saying she was getting a cold. She didn’t feel like drinking anyway. She had manageable but persistent morning sickness. She zoned out reflexively when Pam and Ginger got keyed up about politics. Their feelings bolstered each other in a rising nexus of fear. Daniel’s jokes only irritated them. In D.
C. she crept away to the den to watch classic Christmastime movies with Edgar. At her parents’ place, she slumped in an easy chair, looking out the window at the tops of the neighbors’ trees. The street-level odors in New York made her feel weak.
JENNIFER CALLED BULL TO ASK WHY HE HADN’T BEEN OUT AND ABOUT LATELY. SHE caught him standing in a deli on M Street, puzzling over a Greek yogurt label, trying to figure out whether it was fattening.
“I’ve been lying low because my girlfriend’s going to have a baby,” he replied, putting the yogurt back on the shelf. He didn’t specify that he was the father. The statement incorporated the rhetorical escape route political commentators call “plausible deniability.”
“Wow!” she said. She was also a parser of sentences, particularly his, but the inference was clear enough. Whether he had anything to do with the child’s conception or not, he was telling her about it, and that meant he was going to be a father. “That’s amazing! Let me buy you a drink. I’m close to you. I’m in Georgetown.”
“I’m at the Dean & DeLuca.”
“Just stay there.”
“I just got here,” he said. “I’m shopping.”
He had walked down the hill to get ingredients to cook with, because it was nice out and he didn’t have anything better to do. Mentioning the baby to Jennifer made his heart swell, right under where the baby would soon be riding around in a knapsack strapped to his chest. He could almost see and feel its little head and body already.
Originally he had invited Flora over for dinner, but she said the smell of cooking made her nauseated and the idea of eating was worse. She was living on lime Perrier and white rice. Since she wasn’t coming, he wanted to make oysters Rockefeller and bouillabaisse. He was tempted to invite Jennifer to eat with him, but that seemed like too much of a good thing. A martini at the bar next door would be plenty.
She showed up just as he finished checking out. They walked over to sit in the roped-off outdoor café area and drink to Flora’s health. The temperature was in the fifties, but it rose whenever the sun broke through the clouds. It was warm enough to sit outside and cool enough not to spoil seafood.
Jennifer ordered sparkling wine and made fun of Bull’s order. “Martinis are not festive,” she said. “Martinis are for two years from now, when you’re losing your mind with a screaming kid in the house and you haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep since, like, what, six months from now?”
“Your point is well taken,” he said. “This could be the beginning of the end.”
“So, wow. A baby. I still can’t believe it.”
“It makes me happy,” Bull said. “The world is going to shit, but we’re not, personally, going to shit. That’s how it makes me feel. Not a ray of hope, but the real thing. Hope itself as a substance. I’m completely crazy about this kid.”
“You’re sentimental enough, God knows,” Jennifer said. “Know the gender yet?”
“It’s a boy,” Bull said.
She was startled to get an answer. He seemed strangely blithe and guileless to her, as if he were turning into this young girlfriend. She said, “Congratulations. You’re the man.”
“It’s not my doing. It’s the fates.”
“Enough of this,” she said. “What’s new in the world of Democratic politics?”
“Oh, Jesus.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s Prometheus tied to the rock, with the vultures tearing out his liver. Ask me this time next year, when I’m back on the horse.”
“I suppose ad strategy is secondary now that U.S. elections are rigged by Russian hackers.”
“Says the CIA! This is Putin taking the fall for Citizens United. It’s our Supreme Court that’s the dead, rotting elephant in the room. Fuck them, seriously.”
Jennifer was silent for a moment, digesting the notion that he might have retired from public life without knowing it. She asked whether he was going to the inauguration.
“Some kind of commiseration party might be hard to avoid, but no. I’m not hosting one either. I’m taking a year of paternity leave. The timing couldn’t be better. Trump is going to be hoist with his own petard, but we have to be patient while he fumbles it.”
“‘Petard’ means ‘bomb.’”
“I know that.”
“He’s going to have the bomb. Doesn’t that scare you?”
“Sweetie, Pakistan has the bomb. Israel has the bomb. The French and the English and the Chinese have the bomb.”
“The real bomb, or just little Hiroshima-style atom bombs like you can buy at the five-and-dime?”
“The Soviet Union had thermonuclear devices that would make a fireball five miles wide.”
“What are you saying?”
“That my girlfriend’s going to have a baby, so a thermonuclear device sounds to me about as risky as smoking a pipe. They can both get you killed. It’s all relative.”
In a gentler voice, she asked, “Are you going to marry her?”
“She hasn’t asked me, and I’m not about to bring it up. Marriage is losing its cachet, now that everybody’s doing it.”
“Maybe not much longer!”
HE GOT A PART-TIME JOB TEACHING AT GEORGETOWN FOR THE SPRING SEMESTER. IT WAS an adjunct position, the sort of thing a twenty-four-year-old could have gotten with a master’s degree. But he didn’t have a master’s degree, much less any academic publications, so he figured he was doing all right.
It didn’t pay—or rather, it paid approximately what he was used to spending on bar tabs—but he wasn’t in debt. He needed time off. He enjoyed regular contact with young adults. As a happy man, he even managed to enjoy their inviolability. Touching one of them would have meant instant lights out on college teaching forever, and he didn’t want that.
There was an incredible-looking woman in his Classic Mayoral Races seminar who flirted with zero adroitness, moving closer when she couldn’t think of anything to say, at heart nerdy and scared, from a conservative community out in the Virginia hills. In an earlier life he might have resented her for coming on to him like a booby-trapped intern. Instead he spoke to her with kindness, calmed her nerves, pointed her toward eligible classmates, and otherwise mentored her in a dad-like manner that made her personal growth a matter of pride.
The students reaffirmed his hopes. Most were committed leftists, if vague on doctrine. They thought aloud in terms that would have cost him his college career. Resistance was futile, since his continued employment was linked to their course evaluations. He would never have said that they displayed a sense of entitlement. Universally, they felt dispossessed. Each was a node of expropriation, an intersection among vectors of domination they labeled in a kind of factor analysis—black, female, queer, of color—and they deferred to those more numerously impacted in a manner he found quite chivalrous.
That is to say, if he let everyone else speak first, a rich white man could still have the last word.
FLORA BOYCOTTED THE INAUGURATION, EVEN ON TV. IT WAS STRANGE TO ATTEND THE next day’s Women’s March on Washington with waves of disorienting queasiness and a rose-and-fuchsia “pussy hat” on her head to demand, among other things, “choice.” Ginger had knitted three nice ones. Edgar wore Pam’s and looked extremely cute. Flora put hers in her bag, saying it was too warm. It reduced her to something she was afraid of being reduced to. She put it on and took it off again three times.
XXVI.
At fifteen weeks, on the glassed-in back porch in Cleveland Park, Flora confessed to her grandmother that she was expecting. Ginger was too stunned to react beyond hugging her and saying, “Gosh, what a fabulous surprise!” She asked whether Pam and Daniel knew and offered to call them, but Flora said she’d rather tell them herself.
“Well, well,” Ginger said, sitting down in a wicker chair. “You’re starting a family. I never thought I’d be a great-grandmother in my lifetime. Never thought I’d be one at all, to tell the truth. You’re an only child, and so is your mother. You could have been the end of the line, knock on wood.”
Ginger laughed a little nervously. She stood up and returned to her nasturtium repotting project. After a moment of silence she said, “You know, there are some questions in my mind. You didn’t mention marriage or say anything like, ‘Bull is so excited.’ You didn’t say his name. So I’m a little concerned about whether he’s good with this.” She glanced at Flora, whose expression was noncommittal. “Wait. Are you thinking of raising your baby here at home, with us?”
“He asked me to move in with him,” Flora reassured her. “He asked me right away. Literally his first reaction. For me, it was moving a little too fast. I was scared that then, if I lost the baby, people would know, and it would be harder on the both of us. But now that I’ve told you, I could move in with him tomorrow.”
“Flora, we’re not ‘people.’ We’re family. You can always come to us, no matter what the issue is.”
“I didn’t mean you! I was thinking more like his professional contacts. He doesn’t have any family really.” It struck her as sad that he had aged out of having a support network like hers.
“I take it that you wouldn’t have been moving in together otherwise.”
“We never talked about it. He is so busy. But we’ve been exclusive for two years, anyway, so, I mean, it makes sense. There’s never a convenient time to have a baby, but right now I don’t even have a job lined up or any concrete plans.”
Ginger sighed. “Maybe it was meant to be. You’re just the right age to become a mother, and you’ve got a man who loves you, apparently. I’d love to meet him sometime. This isn’t where I expected to see you at this time in your life, but I guess it’s destiny. It’s fate.”
“You mean predestination? Like the invisible hand?”
“You know, I keep thinking of your mom. You were not a product of family planning, but the truth is neither was she.”
Flora raised an index finger in protest. “That’s not true!” she said firmly. “Abortion is birth control. Mom had access to it, and so did I, and I bet you could have too, if you tried. It’s craziness for people to pretend they’re surprised.”