Elisa Albert: How This Night Is Different: Stories

“You think this is fun?” she had said, gesturing down at her giant belly where the seat belt cut into it. “You think I don’t want a glass of wine? You think we’re all comfortable ?” He had, actually, assumed she was comfortable. It was a natural process, after all, right? He’d thought about and sort of envied her the space inside her that had been empty and now was full. She looked like a painting, all aglow. When he told her as much, she’d snorted.

“Yeah, Mark, I’m happy as a clam. I have no ankles and my butt is leaking and I can’t eat sushi. Thank you so much for knocking me up. This is pretty much the nexus of my female existence, and I owe it all to you.”

Hormones, Mark told himself. All the pregnancy books, the what-to-expect-when-your-wife-is-expecting books, spoke forebodingly about the hormones. It had become his own mantra: hormones, hormones, hormones. Faith that she meant very little of what she said during those months became a kind of religion for him.

When she freaked out about unwashed dishes, screaming and crying about how she couldn’t possibly do everything herself and how was she supposed to take care of two babies, let alone the one she was about to have, Mark just apologized and hugged her, thinking: hormones. When she went to stay at her mother’s for a week in her seventh month, unsure if she “really wanted to share the parenting of this child” with him, he just rode it out, smiled, bought her a pregnancy massage gift certificate, pretended everything was normal.

He cultivated the notion that she really did love him, love being pregnant, love the imminence of motherhood, despite the fact that in the face of her hostility those things seemed about as likely as creationism.

Kimberly was looking at him as though it was entirely possible he had duct-taped Beth in the basement and fed the baby to the dog.

“So where is she?” Ah, yes, it was all coming back to him now. How could he forget? This was Kimberly , whose partner, Lynda, was having a sperm donor’s baby. A six-foot-one sperm donor with blond hair and green eyes, an IQ of 175, and no family history of cancer or heart disease, Beth had relayed dreamily to him after group one week. She’d affected the sigh of a twelve-year-old opening up the centerfold in Teen Beat , seized by lust for the perfect genetic makeup. Oh, Mark, she’d said to him, eyes glazed over. Can you imagine? Can you even imagine what a gorgeous baby they’re going to have?

“I’m going to find her,” he said, not quite used to the fact that where Beth had once been a single person she had now split off into two. Every time he blinked he had to pry his eyelids apart again. Please, his brain wept. Just a little rest. Just a few seconds. A minute. He attempted brightness. “We gotta get this show on the road, right?”

Kimberly stared at him in disgust. Kimberly, whose partner, Lynda, was giving birth to a hardy little Hitler youth. Kimberly, who for the past six months had given Beth nonstop shit about the barbarism of the particular ritual they were gathered here to watch performed on their child by the small and trembling man conspicuously, thankfully, not holding a mimosa.

“She doesn’t want to do this, you know,” Kimberly said to him.

“What?”

“She doesn’t want to do this. You’ve pushed her into it, and she doesn’t want to do it. It’s a really fucked-up ritual. There’s no medical reason to subject Lucas to something so painful and invasive.” She hooked her thumbs into her belt loops and jutted out a hip, pleased with herself, Mark thought, for blowing her sanctimonious wad. It did nothing, truth be told, to diminish his half-inflated boner. “It’s incredibly selfish of you to push your religious beliefs onto an infant.”

“Kimberly? Thanks. I think we disagree. Let’s not get into this.”

She shook her head. “Whatever. The least you could’ve done, if you really, like, needed to surgically alter his penis, is do it at the hospital. Instead of in some barbaric, public act where we’re all supposed to stand around and cheer or whatever.”

He was about to say something jocular along the lines of ‘Lady, relax! Look at me! I turned out okay!’ but decided in the nick (tee-hee) of time that it was not a good idea to reference his own ritually circumcised member. Had he, in fact, turned out okay? In high school he’d developed a mortifying fondness for some not-quite-mainstream porn, hiding it under his bed, where it glowed shamefully red and hot like coal until, inevitably, Shirley had found it. He’d gotten gonorrhea in college, passed it on to a girlfriend who’d furiously broken up with him after warning most of her friends and their friends, effectively destroying any chance he had to sleep with half the girls in his class. He’d loved — truly, deeply — the woman before Beth and for no good reason had fucked her best friend. He’d impregnated Beth a few months before their wedding, necessitating a prenuptial abortion that had so upset her she almost backed out of the marriage. One could argue that he had not, in fact, turned out okay. One could say that he’d actually Darth Vadered his dick a bit over the years, used its powers for evil rather than good. And now there was this matter of passing down its shape and purpose to the new person he’d created with it.

He played his only trump card. “Listen, Kimberly, we know how you feel about this. But it’s a religious matter, and it’s highly personal, so.” Ha- ha. Take that, goyishe dyke. “I’m going to find Beth. She’s probably feeding him or something,” he said as he turned down the hall, self-conscious that he sounded characteristically, necessarily, detached from that process. Kimberly and Lynda, with the help of a cash-strapped Nazi jerking off to a dog-eared Hustler, would gladly evolve his sorry, balding, five-nine-with-genetic-disease eating-away-at-his-entire-family-tree ass right out of the picture and be no worse off for it.

“Whatever,” she said to his back. “His penis is going to look just like yours. How special for you.”

Coming out of the bathroom, Mark’s once beloved, corruptive older cousin Michael zipped up his fly. “Is this happening soon, man? ’Cause I gotta be at a meeting in the valley at ten.” Michael worked for a media conglomerate referred to by Beth as “Satan Incorporated.” He’d hired a half dozen strippers to show up at Mark’s otherwise entirely tame bachelor party and had been excoriated by Beth, who’d found out. It had been the definitive end to a mentor relationship that, at one time, had filled the void left first by Lou dying and then by Rich turning out to be such a total douche.

“Very soon. Need find baby. Then start.”

Michael pressed his palms together and bowed at the hips.

“Ah, yes, Markus-san. Need baby boy before penis ritual can proceed.” He raised a fist into the air. “Find me baby boy!” he boomed, and cracked himself up.

“Working on it,” Mark said. Michael went into the kitchen and gave Kimberly the once-over. ’Sup?

Beth was not in the living room. Beth was not in the kitchen. Beth was not in the hallway or the bathroom. This, their first house, bought with a thirty-year mortgage and loans from both Shirley and Beth’s parents, was not in theory actually large enough to warrant such a lengthy search. Mark poked his head into the master bedroom, with its tapestry over the bed and the four-foot-tall bong stashed in the back of the closet.

“Don’t you think maybe it’s time for a design overhaul?” Beth had said to him some months ago, lying on the bed, just beginning to show.

“Why?” he’d asked, innocently enough.

“Because, Mark. I’m about to have a child, here. Do you get that? There’s going to be another person here, who we’re responsible for. We’re, like, bringing someone into the world, and it’s our job not to fuck this person up completely. Do you get that?” Here she’d started sobbing uncontrollably.