To keep transmitting such an affliction, though: was that not a moral failing? I used to wonder — I still wonder, Danny or no Danny — if Judith ought not to have had an abortion and just let the God damn thing end right there. But at the time — bear in mind how young we were — there seemed something mystical in the way this child was coming to us past diaphragm and spermicide, as if determined to win through to life. Although now I’m talking about him as if he’d come shooting out of my dick, a Danny-shaped homunculus, and become implanted in her, which is wrong.
He was born in 1971. August 14. Which is V-J Day, I found out. No particular meaning to that, just a thing to remember. Judith and I were living in the rent-controlled apartment I’d grown up in. My father had moved to his place in Connecticut for good, and had given us the keys to Barrow Street and a box of checks and deposit slips from his New York bank. We tore each month’s rent check out of a different checkbook, on the off chance the landlord, who’d wanted to get him out for years, might be keeping track of the check numbers. And we just let the faucets drip, afraid the super would tell the landlord a young couple had moved into the old man’s apartment.
I remember it had rained all morning. Then, around noon, the clouds broke apart, fled to the horizons, and out from behind one old gray-black brute burst the sun. I was watching it all from a bench by the fountain in Washington Square Park, sitting on a New York Times to keep the seat of my pants dry, drinking from a can of Bud in a paper bag. “I’m in a vile mood,” Judith had said. (I’d noticed.) “You’d be doing yourself a favor and me a favor if you just went out for a walk or something.”
“Me a favor,” I said. “Is that like Mia Farrow?” I was twenty-three years old.
“I am going to scream,” she said.
As I was going out the door she said, “I understand that you mean well.”
I finished the beer and got up to walk back to Barrow Street. The pretty girls had begun to come out, and I decided to go home in part because I was ashamed to be looking at them instead of keeping my mind on my poor pregnant cow of a wife. At this time I had never been unfaithful — we’d been married what, all of a year? — and neither, I’m sure, had Judith. It was so hot walking back I unbuttoned my shirt. Hotter than Tophet, Grandpa Jernigan used to say. I used to imagine Tophet as something hot, wet and sticky: taffy, I guess I was thinking of. Christ I hated the city that day. Every day. The puddles already gray and stinking. Filthy, dying men with their palms out God-blessing you. One thing for sure: I would never raise a child in this. Never be able to afford to anyway. Even if the landlord never found us out, a safe private school that might actually educate a kid was going to bleed us white. I had never meant to end up with a kid, but now that it was happening I was by God going to do it right.
When I came back in, Judith’s face looked softer. “My thing broke,” she said. I thought she was talking about the string of African trade beads her brother Rick had given her as consolation for feeling fat and hideous. “Can we go?” she said. “We better go, I think. Am I going to need a jacket?”
“A jacket?” I said, not as nicely as I might have. “It’s ninety degrees out there.” I suppose I was terrified. Though I was also just being a prick because now I wouldn’t even get to sit for a second in front of the God damn fan.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You find out you just don’t know anything.”
The rest I remember only in patches. The point is, we got to St. Vincent’s okay and our son, Daniel, was born at about eleven-thirty that night. In the waiting room — that was how long ago this was — I tried to concentrate on making sense of “The Comedian as the Letter C,” figuring I might as well use the time intelligently. That was how young I was. I kept staring at this one line—“The ruses that were shattered by the large”—and wondering how personally I should take it.
They brought me in when it was all over and Judith was lying exhausted and at peace. Stoned, the nurse told me later, on Demerol and whatever else. The baby bundled at her side.
“Oh Peter,” she said. “Isn’t it amazing? But I really really thought I was going to die.”
I sat down on the tight sheets and put a hand over her hand.
“They told me you had a tough time of it,” I said.
“You have no conception,” she said. “Little joke.”
“I love your little jokes,” I said, relieved that she was still Judith.
“You better, pal,” she said. “You’re stuck with this one for life. You want to hold him?”
“Can I?”
“Can you?” she said, and laughed. “He’s yours , Peter. Sure you know how?”
“You just be careful, right? Support the head and everything?”
“You’ll figure it out,” she said. “God, listen to me. I sound like the Voice of Motherhood. I don’t know anything either, you know?”
I picked up my son and looked, for the first time, into his tiny face. I recognized neither Judith nor myself: just generic human. Branching blue veins under the red, delicate skin. He was sleeping, lips parted. Tiny tiny lips.
“Cat got your tongue?” Judith said. I don’t know how long I’d been staring.
“Yeah,” I said. “We just have to be so careful with this little guy.” Already I thought I could see my eyebrows and her upper lip, with its wide philtrum. And then something else, which wasn’t either of us: first intimation of Danny, himself.
“You’re going to be one of the all-time great fathers,” she said. “You can teach him all about baseball and Chekhov.”
“Enemy wessel approaching, sir,” I said. She laughed. “Oops,” I said. “Guess you meant the Cherry Orchard one.”
“All of the above,” she said. “He has to have everything in the world.” She was talking very drifty.
“You want to go back to sleep, babe? I’ll hold him for a while and then give him back to the nurse if you want.”
She shook her head, but slowly, and with her eyes already closed. “Don’t want to miss any of it,” she whispered. Then her eyes flew open. “Peter don’t let them put him in the wrong thing. You know people end up getting different babies.”
I was confused for a second about why that would be so terrible at a stage when our baby was so undifferentiated from all others. Then I remembered that wasn’t the way it worked.
“Easy,” I said. Carefully I leaned over, still holding the baby, and kissed Judith a soft kiss on the cheekbone below her staring eye. When I opened my eyes after the kiss, her eyes were closed. “You sleep tight,” I said. “I’ll take care of him.”
And I did, in however half-assed a way.
Until now.
4
I sat at the kitchen table, still in my coat, and listened to Danny trudging back upstairs. I refreshed myself (little joke) with a good big burning suck on the gin bottle and, when my eyes stopped watering, another one. And now heigh-ho for some coffee. Need that coffee, boy, if you’re seriously shooting for New Hampshire tonight. So I got up and ran some hot water, dumped I don’t know how much instant coffee into a glass, filled the glass with water and stirred the mess with a spoon until the lumps went away, leaving a dingy foam on top. Then I quaffed the son of a bitch like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And sat down again to wait and see if I could feel it take hold. Drank a little more gin while I was waiting. Now what the hell , I wondered, was a gun doing on the kitchen table? Then I remembered. I stuck it in my pocket and went down to the basement.
Читать дальше