Miranda July - The First Bad Man

“I can guess what’s on your mind,” Dr. Kulkarni said.

“Really?”

He nodded. “It’s too early to tell but he’s recovering beautifully so far.”

We told Jack we would be back in the morning and then we left and then we doubled back because I hadn’t said I love you— I love you, my sweet potato —and we left again, walking shakily out the front doors and into the sunlight. We held hands in the back of the cab. My street looked the same. My neighbor two doors down was wheeling in her trash cans and watched us hobble to the door. Clee started to slip off her shoes.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“No, I want to.”

“It’s your house as much as mine now.”

“I’ve gotten used to it.”

Everything was as we had left it. There was dried blood all over the bedroom. Snails were clustered on the kitchen ceiling. Towels lay in strange places. Rick’s bowls of hot water were waiting on the dresser, cold. I cleaned quickly while Clee pumped, whipping her sleeping bag off the couch and stuffing it into the linen closet.

Before she climbed into my bed for the first time she mumbled an apology about the way her feet smelled.

“The color therapy didn’t work.”

“It didn’t work for me either.”

“Did you know Dr. Broyard’s wife is the famous Dutch painter Helge Thomasson?”

“He told you that?”

“No, someone in the waiting room did.”

“The receptionist?”

“No, another patient.”

We got under the covers and held hands. Cheating on a housewife was understandable, he might have done it for the intellectual stimulation alone — but shame on Dr. Broyard for not rising to the challenge of Helge Thomasson. I had never heard of her but she was obviously a formidable woman. Clee put her hand on my stomach for a moment and then took it off.

“Dr. Binwali said I could have sex in eight weeks.”

I smiled like someone’s nervous aunt. The topic hadn’t come up since that first day. Some women just kiss and give back rubs and leave it at that. I wondered if her old aggression would come back. Perhaps it would be like a simulation. We might begin on the “park bench”—she grabs my breast. But instead of fighting her off I just let her rape me. Would we need to buy a rubber penis? I had seen a store for things like that next to a pet store in a strip mall on Sunset.

“The muscles,” she said. “They won’t contract.”

An orgasm. That’s what she couldn’t have for eight weeks.

“But I could, you know, for you. If you want.”

“No, no,” I said quickly. “Let’s wait. Until we both can.” I liked this way of talking where the verbs were left out. Maybe we would never say them.

“Okay, good.” She squeezed my hand. “I hope I can wait that long,” she added.

“Me too, it’s so hard to wait.”

I WOKE WITH A STARTlike a passenger on an airplane — for a moment I could feel how high I was and had an appropriate terror of falling. It was three A.M. We had just left him there. Tiny him. He was alone in the NICU, lying there in his plastic box. Oh, Kubelko. A howl was curdling inside me; the ache felt inhuman. Or maybe this was my first human feeling. Would I put on my clothes and drive to the hospital right now? I waited to see if I would. I looked at her yellow hair spread across the pillow that I usually wedged between my legs. None of this would last. It was all a preposterous dream. I pushed myself out of consciousness.

The radio and the sun were blaring. “What kind of music do you like?” Clee said, rolling through some staticky stations. I rubbed my eyes. I had never used my clock radio as anything but a clock.

“I bet you like this.” She paused on a country music station and looked at me. “No?” She scrolled, watching my face. Different kinds of jangly and upsetting music passed by.

“Maybe that.”

“This?”

“I like classical.”

She turned it up and lay back down, putting her arm around me. I didn’t have a favorite kind of music. Eventually I would have to tell her that.

“This can be our song,” she whispered. She couldn’t wait to get started on having a girlfriend.

We listened until the end to get the name; it was unendurably long. Finally a snobby British man came on. It was a Gregorian chant from the seventh century called “Deum verum.”

“This doesn’t have to be our song.”

“Too late.”

WE VISITED JACK EVERY MORNINGand evening. Each time we entered the NICU in our gowns and clean hands I dreaded the news, but he was getting stronger every day. Clee thought we were out of the woods and it seemed like we probably were; all the nurses said he was the toughest white baby they’d ever seen. We converted the ironing room into a nursery and bought onesies and diapers and wipes and a crib and a changing table and a changing pad and a changing pad cover and a soft tray called a “sleeper” and a first-aid kit and a whale-shaped bathtub and baby shampoo and baby washcloths and towels and swaddling blankets and burp cloths and squeaky toys and cloth books and a video baby monitor and a diaper bag and a diaper pail and an expensive personal breast pump with its own carrying case. It would still be at least a week before Jack could nurse but he was drinking her milk handily through a feeding tube.

“It has a really powerful motor,” Clee said admiringly. “It’s the same motor that’s in power tools and the blenders professional bakers use to make dough. Same exact motor.” She wore the strap of the case diagonally across her chest like a bike messenger bag.

BEING IN STORES TOGETHER WASa new pleasure, as was being in the car, or a restaurant, or walking from the car to the restaurant. Each time the scenery changed we were brand-new all over again. We strolled around the Glendale Galleria mall, arm in arm, chins held high. I liked to watch men ogle her and see the way their faces changed when I put my hand in hers. Me! A woman who was too old to qualify and in fact had never qualified, not even at her age. Anyone who questions what satisfaction can be gained from a not-so-bright girlfriend half one’s age has never had one. It just feels good all over. It’s like wearing something beautiful and eating something delicious at the same time, all the time. Phillip knew — he knew and he’d tried to tell me, but I hadn’t listened. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d heard the news about me and Clee.

She was more than young, she was chivalrous: holding doors open, carrying bags — not paying for things, because she didn’t have any money, but pointing out what she thought would look good on me. She steered me into a lingerie store so I could get some “curtains,” as she called them. The stuff she picked out was frilly and girlish looking, totally inappropriate for someone my age, with my body. Wiry salt-and-pepper pubic hairs poked through the sheer pink panties, but she never saw — she just asked me to wear them out of the store.

“You’ve got the curtains on?”

“Yes.”

She threw her arm over my shoulder.

WHEN TAMMY THE PIG-FACEDnurse asked us if we’d started skin-to-skin yet we both went red. We had never even been naked together.

“Skin-to-skin helps to regulate the baby’s heart rate and breathing, and of course it’s great for the mother-baby bond.”

“No,” I whispered, catching up. “We’ve haven’t held him yet.”

“Who wants to go first?”

“Cheryl,” said Clee quickly. “Because I really have to go to the bathroom.”

Tammy glanced at me. She had thought I was Clee’s mom right up until the moment she saw us kissing by the elevator. I took off my blouse and bra and hung them on the back of a chair. Tammy wrangled Jack’s lines and tubes, carefully lifting him out of his case. He grimaced and twisted in the air like a caterpillar. She placed him between my breasts and adjusted his limbs so that his skin and my skin were touching as much as possible, tucking a thin pink cotton blanket over the two of us. And then she left.