The Adulterants

by Joe Dunthorne

  “Let’s get you changed,” Jenny said.

  She showed me to a small room where I put on a green gown, little sheaths over my normal shoes and a shower cap over my hair. When I arrived at theater, an older male doctor with visible blood vessels in his cheeks immediately shook my hand.

  “I’m Dr. Phil,” he said. “I’ll be operating today.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “You don’t need to worry about your wife. For her, it’ll just feel like someone’s rummaging in her handbag.” He laughed at his own joke. Garthene didn’t own handbags. He had no idea what kind of people we were. “And have no fear, I’ll keep it neat. All incisions below the bikini line.” He squeezed my shoulder. It was easy to imagine him posting YouTube comments under the name TrustMeImA. Barbecue is still barbecue.

  Garthene’s body was divided along the line of her shoulders by a blue curtain. On one side was her head, with Jenny and me. On the other were her reproductive organs, lit by surgical lamps on ceiling-mounted cranes, and flanked by two obstetricians, Dr. Phil and a female doctor, both gowned, gloved, and masked.

  “I know you weren’t planning it to happen this way,” I said to Garthene’s head, “but at least we’ll get to see baby sooner.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  In some of the birth books aimed at fathers, they even suggest specific lines of comforting dialogue.

  From behind the curtain, there came the chinking of tools. I had expected them to wait a while, to let us get in the zone. But, peering over into the spotlights, I saw the female doctor swab Garthene’s midriff and paint it yellow, before the other one, Phil, made a horizontal incision about six inches long, then made a deeper incision along the same line, and then again, deeper, his eyes narrowing, slicing through fat and connective tissue. Much less blood than you’d expect. Hardly any.

  “Ray?” Garthene said. “It’s rude to stare.”

  Dr. Phil said: “No talking please,” and she made an oops face and gave a laugh and I realized the opiates had lowered her humor threshold. As they cut through the five layers of flesh, I patted her forehead with a handkerchief I had bought for this very moment. Then, from behind the curtain, there was a short creaking noise, and Garthene blew out air.

  “Pain or just pressure?” Jenny said.

  “Pressure,” she said.

  I didn’t mean to look but, once I did, there was no turning away. The wound was bigger now and Dr. Phil was holding open the bottom of it with a stainless-steel device that looked like a shoehorn. The female doctor dabbed at a membrane with an electrical device that resembled a fountain pen. A shoehorn and a fountain pen. I took comfort in bourgeois likenesses. Then out came the watery blood. It had been there all along. That was followed by the smell of burning flesh. In my head, I introduced the soft jazz chords of medical-emotional detachment. But the smell got stronger as a twist of smoke rose from the wound. My only other mechanism for keeping calm was to take a deep breath, which I realized, too late, was counterproductive. Particles of my wife’s carbonized womb were inside me now. I hoped to see horror in Dr Phil’s eyes but found only psychotic professionalism. He was probably secretly finding the smell appetizing, thinking of ordering his rib-eye bleu, as his gloved hands stretched wide the wound, from which emerged two blue and wrinkly feet. It was all happening too fast. The female doctor held the ankles and began to lift. There was no warning. No drum roll. No bugle call. The boy’s legs kept coming and coming, legs upon legs. I heard Garthene say my name but it was not possible to look away. This was a must-see. The female doctor was holding the baby by his feet while his head and shoulders remained submerged. With a hooked finger, Dr. Phil pulled the arms through and they hung limp and lifeless, which was fine, I reminded myself, because we had been warned that all babies enter a semi-conscious state, almost meditative, for passage through the birth canal. The baby’s waxy gray torso was also fine because we’d been told about a special word, vernix, from Latin, meaning fragrant resin. Fragrant resin. Then the boy’s head slid through, displacing pink liquid, wearing his cord like a scarf, and even this was fine because obstetricians unwrap them every single day, routinely, as you or I might untie our shoelaces. Nothing was not fine about this limp, gray, offal-smelling, unbreathing thing emerging upside down from a wound that looked like a mouth. Still, it was hard to control my feelings. Everything was different in the flesh, especially the flesh. Jenny said my name more sharply but I could not look away. I was waiting for the cry. No noise could have been more appropriate, but no sound came. Doctor Phil unwound the cord. A nurse I’d not noticed before shoved a blue rubber pipette, a kind of baster, into the baby’s mouth in a manner that was perhaps necessarily brisk but felt violent. The baster rasped as it sucked at the back of his throat. There was no cry. There was no jazz piano. The lights in the room darkened. Our underfunded NHS. I had not slept well in weeks. The walls began to narrow. They say this happens to women in the final stages of labor. The room closes in. There is nothing in the world but their body and the child attached by a slug-textured visibly throbbing cord. I went down on one knee to get a more stable center of gravity. Once I was down there it was hard not to look at the fluids running into the drain in the middle of the room. A little pink stream. It was either beautiful or terrible, I could no longer tell the difference. It would be wrong to say I “passed out.” I simply decided to cool my cheek against the plastic floor and, as I did so, I heard a small animal whelp that I later learned, with disappointment, came from my own mouth.

  That I had failed as a father and husband seemed certain until I saw myself in the wider context of other men on the postnatal ward. Everywhere were new dads, lost and incapable. While the convalescent mothers and babies remained hidden behind the partitioned blue curtains—their pains and joys purely auditory—I joined the useless daddies adrift in the bays, holding bundles of sodden bed sheets, ferrying jugs of tap water, obstructing gangways, constantly peckish, and all wearing shorts and flip-flops and stretched T-shirts because we’d been told the ward would be overheated so that we all looked weirdly surf-ready, but with the wide empty eyes of the drowned.

  I filled another jug of water and took it to Garthene. She and my son were not in a room, merely in the idea of a room, a small curtained-off cube of well-lit windowless space that, at any other time, would have seemed profoundly depressing. It was testament to the power of my new son that I found it just fine. Garthene was tilted up beneath thick blankets, an IV in her arm, our perfectly healthy boy on her bare chest. He wasn’t blue any more; he was the color of a hammered thumb, lying face down, locked on to her left nipple as though he’d fallen from the sky and landed there.

  Jenny was leaning over the bed, observing the latch. “How does it feel?” she said.

  “Like he’s grinding broken glass into my chest,” Garthene said.

  “A miracle,” I said.

  Jenny had positioned the boy so that his legs wouldn’t kick down at Garthene’s staples. He lay diagonally across her chest, like a winner’s sash.

  Just then, Dr. Phil appeared at the gap in the curtain, holding sweet, strong tea for both of us. I took the cups from him and told him he was a brilliant genius.

  “You’re too kind.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

  It was impossible to remember why I had disliked this man.

  Once the boy had finished feeding, Jenny held him while I helped Garthene shuffle to the accessible bathroom, with a plastic two-pint jug. I waited outside and, after a few minutes, Garthene emerged holding the same jug, but now full of bloody pink urine. We both looked in horror to Jenny who, against all possible expectations, said: “Well done—that’s perfect.” This was a world in opposites.

  Time passed at an unsettling speed. The phrase that I had previously regarded as a symptom of repulsive sentimentality—they grow up so fast—now seemed brilliantly profound. In just one afternoon I had watched my son change color, shape and temperament. Now it was seven o’c
lock and approaching my curfew. I did not want to miss the next thirteen hours. I bent down and kissed Garthene on the mouth. She wasn’t able to lean forward and reciprocate because they’d severed all her stomach muscles.

  “You are fucking incredible,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  There was a little hiccup that, for a moment, I thought with excitement was my son’s first hiccup, before I recognized it as her phone receiving a message. She did not read it. Our lives had deepened. I would never check my email again.

  “I’ve got to head back for curfew now, but I’ll be first through the gates, tomorrow morning.”

  “We’ll be here,” she said.

  “Can I hold him again?”

  “Of course.”

  I unbuttoned my shirt, then lifted the sticky baby off her chest and on to mine. For a single gorgeous moment he mistook my nipple for something worth his time. Then he shut his eyes and I watched his face relax into one that was unmistakably my own.

  As I walked away, I found it necessary to put a hand on the wall for balance. Maybe it was like how deep-sea divers have to take decompression breaks on their way back to the surface. I stopped a while by obstetrics, watched the midwives chatting behind a long desk. Eventually I made it outside but had to stop in the car park for another breather. That’s when I spotted Peter’s Vauxhall Astra in the staff bays. It didn’t seem right that he should be allowed to remain in the same building as my son and wife while I was on curfew. I went over to have a look at his vehicle. It had quite a number of unsightly scratches on the bodywork. The fact that he didn’t feel it necessary to have the car resprayed illustrated his limitless humility. On the back seat, I noticed a cuddly knitted egg with arms and legs. That meant he was already buying toys for my baby. I noticed a pack of WaterWipes in the car door’s pocket. Typically, these are used for tending the sensitive skin of newborn children, but I chose to believe his were for other purposes, unrelated to my child. Dusting his dashboard, perhaps, or wiping clean his genitals after having condomless sex with my wife. That wasn’t a helpful thought. I shook my head and exhaled a breath that organized nothing.

  I needed to sit down and the bonnet of his car was very convenient. I sat hard on it. I got up and did it again, kind of jumped bum-first, making sure to aim for the bonnet’s middle, where the metal was most vulnerable. It made a satisfying wub sound. I wasn’t quite ready to leave the hospital grounds yet, that much was clear. So I decided that I would walk back through the building and out the other exit in order to make my journey home a little longer.

  I let myself be led instinctively toward the east wing. It didn’t feel like I was planning any of this, but I did approach ICU and it did suddenly seem totally rational to pop in and have a quick, friendly word with Peter, let him know that he should play no further part in our lives.

  I told the nurse at reception that I was here to visit my partner and she let me straight in. That was one upside to looking hollow and haggard. She mistook me for a regular. Inside, the ward was much busier than it had been in the night-time. I saw the hospital priest prowling the bays in his robes, smiling and scanning for weakness. At the far end of the ward, I walked slowly past three blue-screened booths, looking for the top of Peter’s head through the curtain-rail hoops. When it’s really bad news they keep the curtains drawn. It was quieter down this end, too. That suited me fine because I wanted to speak with Peter very softly. A long shadow passed across a curtain and I peered through. He was there, hooking up bags of green and red fluid, as though hanging baubles on a tree.

  “Peter,” I whispered, “Peter. Can I speak to you for a minute?”

  He turned, a pouch of clear liquid in his palm.

  “Ray,” he said quietly, “what a surprise. How’s it going?”

  “Really well,” I said, my voice as soft as a breeze. “Really, really well.”

  “Glad to hear it. Just give me a minute.”

  I could barely hear him.

  “No problem at all.”

  We were trying to out-whisper each other.

  Through the gap in the curtain, I could see a young man in the bed, his eyes open, texting. He had a drip in each arm and an oxygen probe, like a clothes peg, clamped to the tip of his right forefinger. Apart from that, he looked perfectly alert and healthy. It’s the ones with no visible damage who are in the most trouble. Peter slid aside the curtain and stepped out, shook my hand with great accuracy.

  “Garthene’s got our beautiful little boy asleep on her chest,” I said.

  “That’s wonderful,” he said.

  “I just wanted to give you the good news in person. He looks just like me.”

  “I’m so pleased,” he said, and he did sound pleased. “They say they come out looking like their dads.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  It was clear by his steady smile that Peter had not been haunted by questions of possible paternity. Behind him, the patient’s motorized bed was very gently yawing, battling bedsores. He glanced at my scrubs, all crinkled from where they’d put me in the recovery position.

  “And how did you find the birth?”

  “Amazing,” I said.

  “That’s great,” he said. “Because I know a lot of people find it challenging.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “But I appreciate your empathy.”

  “Some men pretend childbirth isn’t difficult when, in truth—without ever going to war—witnessing a Cesarean can be the single most traumatic experience of their lives.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “We treat quite a few new fathers for PTSD.”

  “I did not know that but thank you for the information.”

  “Don’t be too proud to ask for help is all I’m saying. There’s support if you need it.”

  “I won’t need it.”

  “Okay good,” he said. “You go get some sleep.”

  I put the palm of my hand on Peter’s chest and told him not to fucking patronize me. I said it so nicely.

  Peter did not react. I could feel his heart through his chest.

  “What time does your shift end, old pal?” I said.

  “Technically, two hours ago,” he said.

  “I see,” I said. “The thing is, I have to go home for curfew now, but I don’t feel comfortable leaving you alone in the same building as my wife and newborn.”

  It felt good to be honest.

  As he looked into my eyes, I could sense him listing my pathologies. Call it what you will, I felt wonderfully alive.

  Behind one of the curtains, machines began to chirp. The birdsong of bloodwork. New dawn in the city of death.

  Peter offered to drive me home. He changed into his civilian clothes—navy chinos and a bright yellow T-shirt—and we walked out together. I stayed just a couple of paces behind him, the most disconcerting distance. His strides were too long. For every four, I needed five.

  We got into his car and went slowly out of the car park. He drove as though there were a newborn on board. Even on the Lower Clapton Road, he kept to the actual speed limit, twenty miles an hour. Nobody drives at that speed. It’s just an idea. Reflections of street lights slid through the dent on his bonnet, which Peter noticed but did not mention. As we approached a pedestrian crossing, the light turned amber and any normal person would have pushed on through, but Peter braked steadily, not a stamp but a squeeze, and the car halted without even engaging our seat belts. The sky was dimming and I needed to clear up a few things.

  “Why did you sleep with my wife?” I said.

  Peter stared, listening to the beeps. “I know it’s not enough, but I’m truly sorry,” he said.

  “It’s not nearly enough,” I said.

  “I feel terrible about it. We both do.”

  “Don’t say we.”

  Peter pulled smoothly away. His driving dictated the pace of the conversation.

  “There’s something I’ve been wondering,” I said.

  “Okay.”

 
“And I feel I have a right to know.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did you and Garthene use a condom?”

  Peter fed the wheel, turned a corner. I felt the weight of his respectability with each click of his indicators.

  “Yes,” he said. “We used one.”

  He didn’t realize that not using one was the right answer.

  We drove on for a while. He pulled out wide around a helmetless cyclist. What would it take to make this man lose control? I grabbed the colorful knitted toy egg from the back seat and propped it up in my lap.

  “Nice of you to buy a present for my little boy.”

  “Ray, that’s my daughter’s.”

  “Oh, sure it is, and what’s her name?”

  “Melina.”

  “Melina,” I said, in an incredulous voice, though in truth I already knew he was not lying.

  “It’s a German name. Her mother’s German.” Then he eased his phone from his trouser pocket, unlocked it with his left hand, opened the photos and handed it to me—all without taking his eyes off the road. I looked at a picture of a cute toddler dressed as a skeleton. “She’s four,” he said.

  I swiped left, past photos of his adorable daughter attempting cartwheels, posing among double-jointed cacti. I saw no pictures of anyone who might be Melina’s mother, and that seemed an opportunity.

  “Are you and the German mother still together?”

  “Unfortunately not. We’re divorced.”

  A police van overtook us, momentarily filling the car with light and noise.

  “Sorry, I didn’t catch that,” I said, just to make him say it again.

  “We’re divorced,” he said.

  “That’s a shame.” I swung my head back and forth extravagantly. “That’s a huge shame.”

  “We didn’t have a good relationship,” he said.

  “Right,” I said. “So your daughter was a mistake?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, so you intended to bring a child into your horrible lives?”

  We were below the speed limit. It would have been faster to run.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “And why was that?” I said.