Elisa Albert: How This Night Is Different: Stories

The crowd was bloodthirsty, crunching on crudités and getting antsy for some action. The eighth day after the birth, nonnegotiable, a Tuesday. Everyone had to be at work shortly.

“Let’s get this show on the road, yeah?” Rich materialized next to Mark on the lip of the sunken living room and suggestively chomped the tip off a baby carrot. “Where’s the kid?”

A good question. Mark, in a sleep-deprived haze, had registered the nonpresence of Beth and the baby in the living room and set about in slow motion locating them before forgetting his mission’s objective in the fog of exhaustion, the lull of the din in his living room, the colorful array of vegetables and dip, the insistent pierce of his mother’s voice.

“My baby with a baby !” Shirley shrieked from across the room, waving her mimosa. She was beside herself, had spent the earlier part of the morning cooing bubbe, bubbe, bubbe over and over again at tiny Lucas, who just stared, wide-eyed, at nothing in particular, balling his itty-bitty hands, his little hungry bird mouth ajar.

“I forgot to find them,” Mark said, thinking about how the well-spaced f s of his response pleasantly anchored the sentiment in his fff- ace. He was a fff- ucking mess. Five hours of sleep, maybe, total, in the week since he’d become a father.

“You okay, man?” Rich offered him a hearty smack on the back, burlesque frat-boy compassion. “You look like shit.”

Mark took a deep breath, cast his gaze fruitlessly about for his wife, his child. “Thanks.”

“I saw Shaky McSnips-a-Lot taking a swig of the Manischewitz. I’m serious. You gonna let that guy take a knife to my nephew?”

The mohel, an elfin, gray-bearded old man, had struck in Mark an unexpected chord of affection when he’d arrived half an hour earlier to set up his little folding table and methodically lay out his gleaming tools. Now he stood by the buffet, waiting, looking vaguely lonely the way only very quiet, very compact, very old men can, starting slightly whenever Shirley busted out with one of her grandmotherly whoops of joy.

“Shut the fuck up, Rich.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Shut up, Rich.” It felt good to Mark to have this; to have accomplished the manufacture of an entirely new person while his older brother was still paying off his condo, throwing keggers, and trying to get into the pants of C-list starlets on the Sunset Strip. Rich popped another baby carrot into his mouth and chomped on it.

“Hello, Uncle Richie,” screeched Shirley, somewhat teetering over, giggling. “And Daddy Mark!” She held up her flute, knocked it back. “ L’chaim! Where’s? My? Grandson !”

“Hiding from the man with the cock ring and scissors, like he should be,” said Rich. Mark shoved him hard, spilling the ranch dip Rich had balanced precariously on a Tostito down the front of Rich’s Polo shirt. It was a thoroughly branded mess. And why were they having crudité and chips at 8:30 in the morning? Everything seemed totally off. Rich gave Mark a retaliatory shove, but a pitying, softer one. A shove that said: Yes, okay, you just fathered a child, and that’s not bad, dude. Way to go.

“Boys,” said Shirley. She batted her eyelashes at them, leaned in. “What do you think of Henry?” Her newest beau, a curtly self-identified “businessman” with an honest-to-goodness cowboy hat and a sparkling silver Lexus. “Cute, huh?” Shirley got even more action than Rich.

“Mom, why don’t you lay off the champagne for a while?”

Shirley was wearing a too-tight, too-bright, too-low, turquoise V-neck, her bony excuse for cleavage fairly heaving. Mark felt suddenly like the father of everyone in the room, of everyone in the world. The desire to simply lie down on the floor and close his eyes crashed like a wave over him.

“Sandy Weinstein wants to know what a nice Jewish baby is doing with a name like Lucas ,” Shirley offered, her voice low and conspiratorial. “She said: ‘Lucas. How very New Testament.’ I told her the real right-wing Christians are Israel’s best friend these days and to just shove it.” At this she cackled happily. She’d bristled a bit herself when she first heard the name, naturally, but had been happy they’d picked an L name, at least, for Lou.

“Mom, it’s Lev, in Hebrew, for Dad.” Lou Roth had been dead now some twenty-five years. Testicular cancer at thirty-eight, poor man. But it was the kind of father loss that had been a bigger deal for the vacuum it had created. Mark didn’t really remember his father’s death as a particularly traumatic event. He and Rich had simply been spirited away to relatives for a period of weeks. It was more the lack that resonated, the absence of Lou that loomed largest. The guy simply was never and had never been around.

Beth had hoped to name the baby after her grandmother Rose, who’d managed to escape the Nazis and achieve low-grade fame for a thin volume of poetry spared proper criticism only for the import of its historical context. But in the end the specter of Lou had won out in the tragedy tug-of-war. He was cut down in his prime, hadn’t gotten to see his kids grow up, had been robbed of his life: Mark played it to the hilt. Grandma Rose had lived a long life and met eight grandchildren, three of whom were already named for her. The Holocaust notwithstanding, Lou was the clear winner. They pondered Leonard, Lew, Lawrence, Lance, and settled eventually on Lucas because Beth had known a guy in high school who went by Luke and was, as she put it, a total hottie. Lev would be trotted out ceremoniously once in a while, starting today; for Lucas’s bar mitzvah, his wedding, his eventual funeral.

“Well,” said Shirley. “He’s healthy, is all that matters. I certainly don’t care that he’s named after an apostle. He’s got ten fingers and toes, is all.”

“And soon he won’t have a foreskin,” Rich said, pleased with himself. They squinted at him.

Mark took a deep breath, clamped his hands over his face, and rubbed vigorously. “O-kay,” he said, slapping his cheeks with both palms like in an after-shave commercial. “Yes, indeedy. Okay. All right. Conversation for another time.”

In the kitchen, where Beth also wasn’t, an ash blond with a streaked mullet grabbed Mark by the arm. She had a small pacifier tattooed on the inside of her wrist, poking out from under a leather cuff. Mark caught himself staring at the pacifier, the way it seemed nestled in the softest, loveliest spot imaginable, near a plump vein, and quickly looked away. The beginnings of an erection stirred in his pants. On the fridge behind them, Beth’s KEEP ABORTION LEGAL sticker loomed large, like a grinning face. This exhaustion resembled nothing so much as an acid trip he’d taken the summer after college, everything shifty and fluid, everything itself at first giving way to other things, which themselves became the things, and so on.

“Where is she?”

“Hi,” he said, sticking out a tired hand. “I’m Mark.”

“Kimberly. You know me. From the group.” Ah, yes. Shit. Beth’s natural-childbirth-slash-new-moms’ support group.

“Right,” he said. “Hey.”

The group had been central to Beth’s pregnancy; she’d prattled on endlessly about this one’s polycystic ovaries and that one’s idiot sister’s awful scheduled C-section. “Birth is not a medical problem,” they all repeated, mantra-style, at the end of every meeting. “Birth is a natural process.” Beth went once a week to work on visualization exercises, talk about the sacred space new moms need to create for themselves, and get the dirt on the best doulas in town. There had been a virgin cocktail party in Beth’s sixth month, all the women either expecting or breast-feeding, and Mark had made himself quite unpopular by wondering aloud whether the men couldn’t possibly have a beer or two. It wasn’t like they were pregnant. Except, as Beth made clear in the car on the way home, hissing at him, the least an expectant father could do was behave as if he were pregnant, too. What was the matter with him? He had embarrassed her, he had embarrassed himself.