Miranda July - The First Bad Man

“ ‘Week seventeen,’ ” I read, “ ‘This week your baby develops body fat (join the club!) and his or her own unique set of fingerprints.’ ” It was hard to tell if she was listening. “So, make fat and fingerprints this week,” I summarized. She pulled a snail off the coffee table and handed it to me. I dropped it into the covered bucket by the front door; Rick was collecting them.

“ ‘Your baby weighs five point nine ounces and is about the size of an onion.’ ”

“Just say ‘the baby,’ not ‘your baby.’ ”

“The baby is the size of an onion. Do you want me to read ‘A Tip from Our Readers’?”

She shrugged.

“ ‘A Tip from Our Readers: No need to splurge on maternity wear, just borrow your husband’s button-down shirts!’ ”

She looked down at her stomach. It looked like a beer belly peeking out under her tank top.

“I have a shirt you could borrow.”

Clee followed me to my closet. The clothes were all clean but collectively they had an oily, intimate smell that I had never noticed before. She began sliding hangers around. Suddenly she pulled out a long green corduroy dress and held it up.

“It’s the lesbo dress,” she said.

The dress I’d worn on the date with Mark Kwon, Kate’s dad. She’d found it awfully quickly. It was long sleeved with tiny buttons running the whole length of it, from the edge of the calf-skimming skirt to the high collar. Thirty or forty buttons.

“It probably still fits you.”

“I don’t think so.” An older, blue-blooded woman with white hair and real pearl earrings could have been elegant in it. Anyone younger or poorer would look like a soldier from one of those countries where women hold automatic weapons. I pulled out my pin-striped men’s shirt. She took it into the bathroom with her but when she came out she was still wearing her tank top.

“It’s not my style,” she said, handing it back.

“Does it feel natural to you?” I asked. “To be pregnant?”

“It is natural,” she said. “It’s the medical establishment that makes it unnatural.”

Her friend Kelly had given birth at home in a bathtub. Same with her friend Desia. There was a whole group of girls in Ojai who had put their babies up for adoption through a Christian organization called Philomena Family Services. All of them home-birthed with midwives.

“But here, in LA, the hospitals are really good, so you don’t need to do that.”

“You don’t need to tell me what I don’t need to do,” she said, narrowing her eyes. For a split second I thought she was going to push me against a wall. But no, of course not. That was all over.

EVERYONE AT OPEN PALM KNEWand thought it was big of me to take her in like this.

“She was already in — I just didn’t kick her out.”

“But you know what I mean,” said Jim. “Risking your job.” My job was in no danger; Suzanne and Carl routinely sniffed out news of Clee from my coworkers. After each prenatal checkup I made sure to circulate the update. Everyone assumed I knew who the father was, but I didn’t. I didn’t know anything. It seemed impossible to broach the subject without also recalling our past, the scenarios, my betrayal. The unspoken agreement was we wouldn’t look back.

In the middle of the second trimester I saw Phillip. He was parking his Land Rover just as I was leaving the office. I ducked into a doorway and waited for twenty minutes while he sat in his car, talking on the phone. Probably to Kirsten. I didn’t want to think about it. Everything was in delicate balance and it needed to stay that way. When I finally walked to my car my legs were shaking and I was drenched in a foul sweat.

Each night I listened as she stumbled to the bathroom, bumping into the doorway and then hitting it again on the way back. It was torture.

Finally one night I yelled out from bed. “Careful!”

She stopped abruptly and through my half-open door I watched her stand in the moonlight and touch the swell of her stomach with a look of shock, as if the pregnancy had just come upon her right then.

“Was it Keith?” I called out.

She didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if she was awake or had fallen back asleep, still standing.

“Was it one of the men from the party? Did it happen at the party?”

“No,” she said huskily. “It happened at his place.”

He had a place called his place and it happened there and it was sex. This was both more and less than I wanted to know.

“It’s a nightmare,” she said, holding her stomach.

“Is it?” I was desperate to know more. She lurched back to bed. “Is it?” I cried again, but she was done, already half-asleep. It could only be a nightmare, someone growing inside you who you hoped never to see the face of.

IN THE MORNING I TRIEDfor a more hard-nosed approach.

“I think for safety’s sake I should know who the father is. What if something happens to you? I’m responsible.”

She looked surprised, almost slightly moved.

“I don’t want him to know about it. He’s not a good person,” she said quietly.

“Why would you do that with someone who’s not a good person?”

“I don’t know.”

“If it was nonconsensual then we should call the police.”

“It wasn’t nonconsensual. He’s just not the type of person I usually go for.”

How did they form the consensus? Did they vote? Did everyone in favor say aye . Aye, aye, aye. I went into the ironing room and returned with a pen, a piece of paper, and an envelope.

“I won’t open it, I promise.”

She went into the bathroom to write the name. When she came out she slid the envelope between two books in the bookshelf and then carefully placed the tab from a soda can in front of the books. As if it would be impossible to re-create the position of a soda can tab.

I ACTED QUICKLY, SETTING UPan emergency therapy appointment before Clee had a chance to think harder about trusting me. Once I was behind the pee screen I asked Ruth-Anne to look in my purse.

“There’s a sealed envelope and an open empty envelope,” I said. “Open the sealed one.”

“Rip it open?”

“Open it the way you would normally open an envelope.”

A clumsy ripping sound.

“Okay. It’s open.”

“Is there a name on a piece of paper?”

“Yes, do you want me to read it to you?”

“No, no. It’s a man’s name?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” I shut my eyes as if he was standing on the other side of the screen. “Write that name down.”

“On what?”

“On anything, on an appointment card.”

“Okay. I’m done.”

“Already?” It was a short name. It wasn’t an unusual, long, foreign name with many accents and umlauts that one would have to double-check. “Okay, now put the paper back in the unsealed envelope and seal it.”

There was a complicated rustling of papers and some banging.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I dropped them. I hit my head on the table picking them up.”

“Are you okay?”

“A little dizzy, actually.”

“Is the envelope sealed?”

“Yes, now it is.”

“Good, now put the envelope in my purse and put the card with the name somewhere safe that I can’t see.”

She laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing. I hid it in a really good place.”

“It’s done then? I’m gonna come out. Okay?”

“Yes.”

Ruth-Anne stood wide-eyed and smiling with her hands behind her back. The envelope was in many torn pieces strewn all over the rug. When you get something notarized, there is a dignified feeling about the proceedings, even if the notary is just a stationery store clerk. I had expected this to be more like that.