Doxology

by Nell Zink

  “You make me proud, Flora. You’re sharp as a tack.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s your fault for sending me to fancy schools, when you could have sold me to a pimp.”

  Ginger leaned down and hugged her, mostly with one forearm, because she was wearing gardening gloves. She perched on the arm of the overstuffed sofa and asked, “Tell me—no jokes now—how do you feel inside?”

  “I feel a baby inside, which is weird,” she said. “By the time I get used to it, it’ll be gone.” Seeing the worried look on her grandmother’s face, she added, “I’m elated. Ecstatic. I mean it.”

  When Edgar heard the news, a few minutes later, he pretended she was already too huge to get his arms around. He insisted she call her parents immediately, saying she shouldn’t make them wait another minute to share the joy.

  SHE TRIED PAM FIRST. SHE CAUGHT HER AT HOME AND HAPPY TO TALK, BUT OPENED THE conversation by asking whether her dad was around. “He’s downtown walking Victor’s dog,” Pam said. “Victor got this white rag-mop-type thing that hangs out in the store. It’s got to be fifteen. It just lies there panting all the time. Daniel thinks it’s younger and didn’t get any exercise at the shelter.”

  “I have weird news, Mom.”

  “Bring it on.”

  “I’m four months pregnant and I’m moving in with Bull.”

  “Oh, my God! You’re still a little kid! What is this? You’re barely older than I was. Did you tell your grandma?”

  “Yeah. She’s psyched.”

  “So how did this happen? It must have been Election Day! Are you going to name it Donald?”

  “That is so disgusting.”

  “You don’t know what disgusting is. Welcome to motherhood.”

  “You can’t scare me.”

  “Okay, so you’re moving in with my contemporary and peer in a mansion in Georgetown and having his baby. Whoa. I’m just in shock! I almost wish you’d texted me.”

  “It’s not a mansion. It’s a row house. It’s not even semidetached. We’re going to be poor. He got himself in so much trouble during the election, he’ll probably never work again.”

  “I get it. The devoted full-time househusband. Believe me, nobody in any industry has a memory longer than two years. When that baby comes, he’ll be back at work before you can say Jack Robinson.”

  The joke was possibly too true, and they stared at their respective walls.

  Pam didn’t want to say how disappointed she was to see Flora repeating her mistake. She didn’t even want to think it. She made herself approve, and the anxiety came boomeranging right back in her face in the form of concern for herself. She was forty-seven and a half and becoming a grandmother. While her face, with total lifetime sun exposure that could be measured in weeks, remained smooth as a pickled egg, gray roots disfigured her vermilion hair, and the meaning of life still eluded her. Her job would pass any cost-benefit analysis, but it was not a creative outlet. Her industrial blues band was not avant-garde. A grandchild sounded like an atavism or a throwback, not progress. Something had to give in the art department.

  Flora interrupted her reverie by saying, “I should call Dad. Bye. I love you!”

  She reached him as the dog sat stubbornly on its tail end in the middle of Forsyth, refusing to be dragged. She recommended he either leave it there or pick it up, but most definitely get himself out of the middle of the street.

  “Under the fur, this dog is vile,” he said, his fingertips meeting bulbous protuberances as he scooped it up. “It’s like Victor went in the shelter and asked which animal nobody in their right mind would take. It’s beautiful—I mean, he’s a saint—but this dog’s a whited sepulcher. Why in hell does it smell like garlic? Maybe it’s some flea thing he did. The one positive aspect to this dog is it can’t climb stairs.”

  “I have weird news, Dad,” she said. She sketched her situation.

  His response was an announcement that he’d be coming down on Friday, most likely with Pam, with the intent of meeting Bull on Saturday if at all feasible. He was enthusiastic and firm. He didn’t see the need to feel disappointment until and unless something major went wrong.

  “I don’t know about Saturday,” Flora said. “He might have plans. We don’t even live together yet. Couldn’t you wait a couple weeks?”

  “Grant me this moment. He’ll get through it. He’s pushing fifty and he’s having your baby. Meeting me is the least of his worries.”

  AFTER SPEAKING WITH HER PARENTS, FLORA FELT BETTER THAN SHE HAD AT ANY TIME since she first suspected the pregnancy. She had unloaded her irony at the source, where it dissipated, her drops of irony dissolving in her parents’ irony buckets, leaving her alone with her joy, which was sincere, straightforward, substantial, growing, and better suited to life in a conservative southern town like Washington.

  It happened as Daniel predicted. Bull finessed the situation by inviting her parents and grandparents to dinner in Georgetown and grilling steaks. While Edgar perused his collections, he stood with Daniel at the monumental Weber on the rear deck and talked politics. The hot meat steamed in the cold as if they were camping on a hunting trip. Daniel was taller than Bull. With his coat on and his hands in his pockets, he felt massy and secure. Flora gave Pam and Ginger a tour of the house, emphasizing its many desirable qualities and fine woodwork.

  Ginger and Edgar took a cab home after dessert, claiming persuasively that it was late and they were tired. The conversation turned to New York and how it had changed. What had been where, when, and what had vanished. What bars Bull remembered from visits in his twenties.

  It was strange for Flora, watching him reminisce with her parents about the three of them being her age. The conversation about old New York continued without him, in the car back to Cleveland Park. Flora drove because she wasn’t drinking, with Daniel in the passenger seat. Over her shoulder, her parents conducted a loud and lengthy analysis of Bull’s claim to have seen Elvis Costello at the Palladium. Eventually she interrupted, saying that she didn’t care what they thought of him as a family member. This was just in case they were refusing on principle to advance an opinion, trying not to alienate her.

  “What’s there to say?” Pam said. “He’s great. He’d better be, or I’ll knock his block off!”

  “Obviously I wish he were thirty,” Daniel said, “but I guess then he wouldn’t have the resources he does. You like him fine, and you’re convincing as a couple. He’s what any father would hope for his daughter. You’re moving up in the world. The kid’s going to be socioeconomically privileged. I guess it’s old-fashioned, in a good way. Upward mobility. Just give me time to get used to it for a while. You kind of took us by surprise.”

  “I second that emotion,” Pam said. “I don’t understand it, but you’re obviously happy. You planning on getting married?”

  “We didn’t talk about it,” Flora said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Was he ever married?”

  “No.”

  “Are you in love?”

  “That’s a state secret!” She wanted to sound coy but managed to convey only ambivalence.

  “In my opinion,” Pam declared, “you’re not all that heavy into him. The whole deal has a pragmatic cast. But pragmatism’s not a bad thing, when there’s a baby involved. I’d rather see you use a reliable guy than be madly in love with some ditz-ball.”

  “Mom! I’m not using him! We’ve been a couple for two years!”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Pam said, not specifying what other way she meant it.

  “Your mother traditionally has low expectations for young love,” Daniel said, reaching back to pet her leg.

  “I’m crazy about him,” Flora said. “He’s an awesome person in a lot of ways. It’s just not what I expected to be doing with my life. I’m as surprised as you are.” She was guiltily conscious of propounding the surprise narrative she’d ridiculed to Ginger, but she let it ride.

  “Sorry I brought up marriage,” Pam said. “
You’ve got enough on your plate already without planning your retirement.”

  Flora reflected that it might have been smarter to introduce Ginger and Edgar as her parents. They would be about the age of Bull’s. She realized that despite her intimacy with his views and opinions, she didn’t know anything about his family. She had assumed his parents were dead and that he lived in their house. For all she knew, they were alive and well in a condo in Annandale.

  SHE DIDN’T ASK HIM ABOUT HIS FAMILY, AND SHE KEPT PUTTING OFF THE DATE WHEN she would move in. But on a Sunday in early April, after they woke up together in Georgetown, he said, “Today’s the day. Let’s go get your stuff. The reason it’s so hard to move you is that you have no stuff. Right? You don’t have furniture. It’s theirs. So it’s just a matter of packing a suitcase. It’s a formality. Let’s do it.”

  “We can have lunch with my grandparents,” she said. “But I was wondering, actually. What’s the deal with your parents? Are they still living?”

  “My dad died of AIDS,” he said. “In Tangier. He was super gay. My mother lives in Idaho, and I have a little brother who’s an actor in Japan, with a Japanese wife and kids. We’re not close. I’m sure I’ll go see Mother again, now that I’m a college professor with semester breaks. I went out there in the summer of 2013. She’s living on this experimental multigenerational old folks’ farm. She can rope and ride. Maybe not with authority anymore.”

  “Wait. Do you get along with her? Do you talk?”

  “She never paid much attention to us. I grew up in boarding schools.”

  “So was this house in the family?”

  “No. We had a little farmette in Berryville, out near Winchester. They sold it before they moved to Japan for a while. That was, what, eighty-eight? I was here, in college. I’ve been fending for myself a long time. I’m getting primed right now to have the only family I ever had in my life. That’s how it feels.”

  “So when did you buy this place?”

  “Twenty-ten.”

  That was only seven years before. The house had seemed the epitome of stability in colonial brick and immense oak beams. She had imagined it to have been in his possession forever, or at least to have been something other than a post-crash bargain.

  “Hillary in 2008,” he explained. “She lost, but I got paid.”

  “Was it a foreclosure?”

  “No,” he said. “I think the seller felt a little pressure to get her dad out of here and into a nursing home, though.”

  HE SUGGESTED SHE GET AMNIOCENTESIS. SHE PROTESTED THAT SHE WAS TOO YOUNG TO have a mutant baby. He insisted that he was an old man who had flown on a thousand planes and taken every drug in the book. Given how slight the risk of miscarriage was for someone as young and healthy as she, she could submit to a long scary needle for a second to make sure she was expecting the kind of baby she expected.

  She submitted. The baby was declared perfect.

  The esteemed amnio specialist was a personal friend of Bull’s. He assured Bull in confidence that the baby was not his.

  He answered, “Well, that’s one less worry.”

  AMERICA’S INEPT NEW ADMINISTRATION REELED FROM ONE HOURLY CRISIS TO THE next. It was unclear how America would survive the next four years. Dependent on mass media for their news, Democratic activists far from the center of power argued that the party’s logical next step was political martyrdom: a pivot to socialism reminiscent of the puputan suicides with which the people of Bali rebuked their Dutch colonizers as late as 1908.

  Nonetheless, Bull’s mood improved by leaps and bounds. When the health care debacle story broke—Trump’s failed attempt to repeal and replace Affordable Care—he was jubilant and grinning, on the phone for days, reiterating his predictions to skeptics far and wide. “He’ll accomplish nothing after this,” he told everyone. “His legislative agenda is dead on arrival. It’s over before it started!”

  Jennifer called him to ask for a live interview on the local NPR morning show. She said they’d been running enough doom and gloom, and it was time for Democrats to get a chance to feel good again.

  He had a certain routine with WAMU. He knew which studio she worked out of and where to grab an espresso on the way in. He got there just in time to sit down, put on headphones, and hear himself being described in a short bio. The red light went on, and he braced himself for her first question.

  “First of all,” she said, “I hear congratulations are in order.”

  Bull said, “Thanks. Though God knows it wasn’t my doing. This administration isn’t even running on fumes. It’s out of gas. From here on out it’s downhill or nowhere.”

  “You weren’t directly involved with the Clinton campaign. Why was that?”

  “The tactics I was pursuing weren’t considered a good fit with the central campaign strategy, and that’s fine. There’s a time and a place. I was involved tangentially and with a number of congressional and local campaigns.”

  “You wanted to go negative.”

  “Jen, a positive message, when it’s not simple, can be confusing. There was a tremendous proliferation of positive claims in the Republican space last summer. It was crowding out almost anything Democrats could say. Given all the platforms on new media, there’s room out there for dark prophecies as well. Frankly I think we flubbed an opportunity to reach out to this administration’s early supporters and communicate the risks of their position. That had to be a dark message, even an ugly message. At this point I would say I’ve been vindicated by the reality of what we’re seeing.”

  “It’s also been said you may have had some hand in sabotaging the campaign of Jill Stein, who was the Green candidate for president, in Pennsylvania. You’re romantically involved with someone who worked on that campaign, is that right?”

  “My private life is private. You know that.”

  “I’ve also heard you’re starting a family with this Stein campaign staffer, so the question does arise of possible collusion in that party’s frankly miserable results in Pennsylvania.” While he pulled off his headphones and rolled his chair away from the microphone, she continued: “This was a classic battleground state, where Clinton was expected to win narrowly, with Stein taking up to two percent. Ultimately Stein came in under one percent, and as we know, Trump took the state. That could create an impression that Stein supporters shifted over to Trump. Wouldn’t you say it would have been better to keep them with Stein, even at the cost of letting them think they were throwing away votes on a third party?”

  He rolled back toward the table. With his voice only a bit tighter and higher than usual—it took some concentration—he said, “I have and have had nothing to do with either the Green Party or the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Now, if we can get back to talking about the present situation, which is hopeful and encouraging for all progressives. We have a legislative deadlock between a party and its own radical wing. This is historically unique. The traditional saying is that ‘the Left will eat itself,’ but what we’re seeing here is a Republican Party that bleeds lighter fluid.”

  “I’m afraid we’ve run out of time. This is Jennifer Wang, and I’ve been talking to Democratic campaign consultant Bull Gooch.” She flipped a switch and took off her headphones.

  “That was uncalled for,” Bull said.

  “I have your back, but I’m a reporter first.”

  “I had you pegged as a friend.”

  “We’re still friends. I should have warned you.”

  “If you’d warned me, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “You want to get coffee?”

  “If you’re going to dox me, you should get used to drinking alone and watching your back,” he said, putting on his coat.

  He stalked out, longing for the days when gossip was invisible. There was a fine line, on social media, between candor and backstabbing. Apparently it was so fine that even Jennifer could forget the difference between talking to him in private and talking to him on live radio.

  Within minutes she calle
d to apologize, or justify herself, by saying that no one would be listening that late in the morning. It had been almost ten o’clock. He told her to go fuck herself.

  THE NEWS REACHED ELAINE THE SAME DAY. THE STEIN CAMPAIGN SHUT FLORA OUT JUST as it was shutting itself down—a six-month process—so she never knew what hit her. She had expected to see her hours gradually reduced to zero, and she was right.

  She didn’t try hard to find another job. She had started showing in month four. An unmistakable appearance of pregnancy is not the first thing employers look for in a prospective hire.

  By mid-May she was waddling around under a whopping monster baby. She wasn’t under orders to lie down, but she was spending a lot of time watching Netflix on the couch. Bull treated her with kindness. While working, he no longer paced around the ground floor. It became their common room. He retreated upstairs to his office to make calls and came out ready to socialize. He cooked delightful meals and accepted invitations to eat in Cleveland Park. On weekends, they drove to pretty places to take walks. He was a gracious host to Pam and Ginger, whenever they turned up on his porch, even if they hadn’t been invited. Whenever he placed his hand appraisingly on Flora’s belly, she could tell he was thinking, This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.

  News of Flora’s state didn’t reach Aaron. He never listened to NPR. Its fair and balanced perspective—it attacked “liberal hypocrisy,” the conservative term for having good intentions in a conservative-dominated world, as readily as career criminality—annoyed him. He missed her with nostalgic longing, as if they’d met on Atlantis or Avalon and could never be reunited in this life.

  He had too little sexual experience to know that when a woman says she has a boyfriend, a husband, or the like, it doesn’t mean she will always have those things. In practice, the choice of audience and setting can render such a claim questionable on its face.

  He sought traces of her online, but her presence was political, not personal. So were most of her friendships, based on a footing of impersonal small talk she could have offered a cabdriver. She was a political person.