Elisa Albert - After Birth

How traaaaagic . Jenny gazed out her bedroom windows at the tops of other buildings. What terrible circumstances. Such a difficult thing for a young girl .

She’s gonna be fine , I said, and almost had to laugh. She was not going to be fine. She was not going to be alive very much longer. She could be dead right then and I wouldn’t know it until I went home. But something about those self-aggrandizing bitches makes it impossible for you to be weak, and so you wind up sorta becoming one of them, at least temporarily, to deal with them, which is so goddamn sad. It’s a trap. You must avoid those bitches at all costs.

I don’t think so , Jenny said. And she’s only in her forties! And with such a young daughter! So, so sad . She looked like she was trying to make herself cry, like it was some kind of acting exercise. She reached out to pat my shoulder, and what did I do? Why, I punched her in the face. With closed fist. So satisfying. I can just about feel the shameful, electric pleasure of it reverberating up my arm even now.

Faculty party at Cameron and Betsy’s tonight. An opportunity to put on decent clothes, something I don’t have to yank down or up for boob access. Maybe a piece of jewelry, maybe go totally nuts, dab something shiny on the lips. Feels downright like Halloween.

Well, well , Cam bellows as we make our way up their stoop, three blocks away in a cold drizzle, the baby asleep under the care of a student babysitter. I pray she’s not as stupid as she dresses, this babysitter. With her obnoxious ringtones and hot-pink sweats, COME HERE OFTEN printed across the ass. I pray she’ll keep righteous watch.

Cam means well and wants to chill but doesn’t know how and so channels all this crap energy into an aggressive sense of humor, like a mean older brother. Psychology department, I think. I try to ignore the details. He’s a friend of Paul’s, which because they’re dudes seems to imply uncomplicated amiability from a remarkable distance, occasional scotch.

Betsy’s chipper, constantly compensating for Cam. They have this whole act, these roles they play in their own little mutually agreed upon lifelong theatrical production. I fear that this is what long-term relationships are all about, at base: full-time role-playing, memorized and inhabited. They’re always guzzling coffee, these two, as though trying to fortify themselves for another curtain.

Looks like Paul and Ari made it!

Looks that way, Bets. Looks that way.

Welcome! Come in, come in! How are you guys? What’s up? Welcome! I like Betsy, really I do, but she is jittery as fuck, and she says everything twice.

They don’t have kids, and they’re closer to fifty than forty, some years past the point when they might have had kids but chose, or were chosen, not to.

Fairly badass on the one hand not to do this main thing we’re forever exhorted to do, say no thanks , decline to buy an embryo from some God complex in a lab coat, decline to hire a hooker to cook it up. But the too-late-ness, on the other hand, the vanished possibility. The empty space. A lot to live with. A lot to live with either way, actually. Good title for a memoir! Fuck my dissertation. Life: It’s a Lot to Live With.

Couple dozen people standing around. There’s the French-theory bitch in Kabuki makeup, the sad divorced English department dude and his townie girlfriend. Art department stoner, hot sociopathic sculptor-in-band, insanely tense history couple, Cat. Jewish studies guy who’s been extra special sweet to me since he found out about Grandma surviving the last Big Euro Jew Purge.

And oh, oh, oh: Mina.

Here she is, in the flesh. Leaning on the newel post talking to condescending poli-sci guy and his dead-eyed wife.

Go get her, tiger , Paul whispers.

Cam hands him a tumbler and turns to me.

Nothing for you, Ari? Still doing that whole —he waves a hand in the direction of my chest like he’s trying to shake off something sticky— baby… thing?

It’s not very hard to take Cam down: just flirt a little and he crumples instantly.

A demure smile, slide the shoulders down, tits out, reach calmly for a glass of wine, tall and proud, let the lips melt into repose, hold his gaze. Hold it… hold it… until he turns red and looks away and starts to perspire. And, done. Offer up the glass for a clink and walk away nice and slow.

I’ve always had a hard time differentiating between people who hate me and people who want to fuck me. Usually because, I finally realized, there’s often a great deal of overlap.

I move toward the familiar disappointment of Cat, who’s on the fringe of the Mina conversation. She takes me in (down, up) with that mysterious mixture of approval and disapproval, envy and superiority.

Hey , she says in her tight way. Cat was hired last year having only just barely lost out on a plum job in Seattle. We immediately became friends, and about five minutes later realized we didn’t really like each other all that much. But you pretty much take what you can get around here.

Hey . I give her an awkward hug.

Mina looks more or less the same as in pictures, but older, realer, breathing. Very pregnant.

Condescending poli-sci guy is talking about a political candidate.

It’s just so fucking predictable.

People nod.

I hide my face behind my wineglass. Talking politics is so stupid. You either agree or you don’t; either way you’re no closer to a human exchange.

Mina’s gone crinkly around the mouth and eyes. Amazing laugh lines. Still those full cheeks. Hair half-silver, maybe three-quarters. Soft, ragged old man jeans, none of the Lycra butt-crack prefaded grotesquerie. Ancient brown boots. Asymmetrical navy poncho in a low-key cotton/cashmere blend — unmistakably quality but appropriately pilled and loved. It’d look prissy new, and that right there’s the thing most women don’t understand about style: clothing must be worn, lived in, assimilated into uniform. Otherwise it’s mere costume.

Six feet tall, I’d guess. Tattoos all up both arms, nose ring. Careworn. Hair in her eyes. Messy, artless, doesn’t give a shit. Not like trying to look like she doesn’t give a shit, actually does not give a shit. Probably the only comfortable woman in the room.

I wore my dumb punishing pointy boots from way, way back when they were in style. Cat’s hair is dyed and shellacked a deep, awful magenta; Betsy’s panty lines have panty lines. In the kitchen the French-theory bitch with the Kabuki face teeters on idiotic spike-heel contraptions resembling staplers. Someone should offer her bunions a glass of wine.

Mina meets my eyes. Bam . Yes. Energy transfer. We smile.

Now poli-sci guy’s lecturing her about the influence of the Misogynists on a band he heard once in Brooklyn who were kind of lame but it was interesting how they appropriated your ferocious textuality, like Le Tigre but less cerebral and more melodious than Sleater-Kinney . She looks like she wants to stick a knife into her ear. Maybe I’m projecting. Poli-sci guy’s wife is riveted. Her wordless stare makes it look like she’s on acid.

Mina sticks out a hand to me.

Hey. Mina.

We emailed about Crispin and Jerry’s. Ari.

Oh, right. Hey. Warm, genuine. Emanating the ballyhooed glow. I never get over the wild spectacle of pregnancy. It’s so outside of time. So elemental. So (fuck it) sacred. Who’d really think twice about those Manson kids murdering Sharon Tate? Yet another slashed-up chick: next. Poor thing was pregnant, though, so bona fide atrocity forever.