Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

I spun away from there just as Hickey turned in front of the window holding that monkey over one shoulder (was he burping him?), and then I sat down at my desk, too overcome by my primal fear to focus on the notebook open before me.

It was August before Betty and I touched each other again, and then we only did it because we felt we had to: it was our first anniversary. In retrospect, I see we should have gone somewhere after the French restaurant, a Holiday Inn perhaps, because as we lay together in our bedroom, my attention moved to the wall over our headboard, through which could be heard the voices of our neighbors in 345½. Such a jeremiad! He railed against her meatloaf (“Not again!”) as she went on about his drinking (“Never stops!”). Listening to this, I rolled away from Betty, unable to finish, and looked up to the ceiling. What did I really know about my wife? Only recently had she started defecating when I was under the same roof as her; on our honeymoon in Hawaii, she’d taken the ice bucket as cover each morning and used the facilities in the hotel lobby. Had we married too soon? I feared asking the question was answer enough.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No, it’s me,” she answered, before adding in a smaller voice, “We won’t wind up like them, will we?”

I rolled my eyes into the back of my head, looking up at the wall over the headboard. “ Them? No.”

“Or my parents,” she said.

We were like all young people, I suppose, certain we wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the past, that our family would be stronger, healthier, more loving. I reached for her hip. “I love you,” I said. I kissed her. “Do you hear? We’ll be fine. Better than fine.”

And then we turned out the lights, and our despair recaptured us in the dark.

Not long after this, I accompanied Betty to a doctor’s office and learned that my wife’s uterus was heart-shaped and blanketed by an abnormally thick mucus at ovulation. Betty fled into the hallway in tears and convulsed violently in my arms near the elevator while repeating the words the doctor had told her. “‘Have you considered adoption?’ Adoption? ” She might as well have been saying “cancer” or “double homicide.” And for good reason, too. We wanted children, our children, so we went for a second opinion, and this time heard my sperm described as “sluggish” and “listless”—everything but alcoholic and unemployed. “You should consider adoption,” the doctor said.

Instead, Betty insisted we redouble our efforts at baby-making, which immediately rendered our sessions in bed more workmanlike and desperate. She stopped wearing those sheer outfits of pink and yellow chiffon that had once made my groin thrum like a struck tuning fork; now the pendulum had swung back in the other direction, so far so that one evening I found my wife in bed in a white bra and her everyday panties, with a bowl of Rocky Road ice cream balanced on her belly. When she saw me in the doorway, she licked her spoon and set the bowl on the bedside table, then lifted herself up at the hips to slide her panties free. “We have to try extra hard tonight,” she said, a phrase that troubled me even then as a fit young man. “Extra hard,” she said, bringing to mind the piece of graph paper, stashed in her bedside drawer, on which she charted her basal temperature.

At times such as these, when our likelihood for conception was increased, I knew we’d be going at it every thirty-six hours, until we’d passed back through into a period of reproductive doubt. Betty was relentless. Not even sleep would slow her. More than once I awoke in the middle of the night to find her moving atop me like a figure in a dream, here and then gone, my memory of this uncertain by morning, when I’d be yawning over my first cup of coffee at work and being reminded of the excellent reproductive performance of my rats.

One sleepless morning I set E3CL9, a rat I’d taken to calling Louie, into the wooden maze and watched him turn round in a slow circle near the starting line. It was strange behavior, considering he had for several weeks been racing off toward the cheese he knew would be waiting for him at the end.*

I drove home slowly that night, stopping for milk at one convenience store and eggs at another. Since the death of my parents, I had become a master of compartmentalization. But no matter how bad things had ever been, I had always had a sanctuary, a place where I could box myself off from worry and doubt. Before I joined Goldstein, Olivetti, and Dark, it had been my studies and dreams of becoming a flavor chemist, and before that — my grandfather’s shoe store. It was there that I had settled for a year after graduating from high school. While all my peers launched off into college life, I stayed at my grandfather’s side and learned how to hold a woman’s ankle and smile whenever she insisted the shoe I’d slipped on her foot was a half-size too large, never too small. Now, though, where but in my car could I find any peace of mind? At home I had to bunker down in front of the TV or roll over in bed and pray the magical spell of sleep would hold, while at work I needed to avoid looking into the window of the primate room and concentrate on my rats.

That evening, I expected to come home and find my apartment darkened, as it had been so many nights of late. Instead, it was all lit up, no different from my wife’s face.

“C’mon,” she said, grabbing me by the hand and leading me back out through the door. “We’ve been down in the dumps long enough. We deserve a night out.”

It was only a Wednesday, so I thought the Howard Johnson’s out by the interstate would suffice, but Betty had me take note of her makeup and hair and insisted we treat ourselves to something more extravagant than that.

“How about Le Petit Cochon?”

“French?”

“Why not? I’m worth it, aren’t I?”

“Yes, but…”

“We’re young, David. Let’s live.”

So on we went, and then we were sliding into a corner booth and sharing a memorable roast duck with a side of buttered turnips. It was delicious, as good as you could get in North Central New Jersey at the time, and then it only got better. When I reached for the decanter in the center of our table and went to pour my wife a second glass of house red, Betty raised the flat of one hand and couldn’t help but grin.

“A baby?” I said.

She nodded. “I’m two weeks late. I wanted to wait until Dr. Orrey could say for sure, but he’s away at a conference until next week, and I just couldn’t keep it to myself any longer. I know it, though,” and she smiled as she had on our wedding day. “I’ve never been late like this before.”

“Oh, Betty!” I squeezed her hand, and then, to the great horror of the maître d’, ducked down beneath the table-top and buried my face in her lap. “A little Baby Leveraux, at last!”

Believing this was just the start, I fell asleep that night picturing a teeming family reunion in the country. Betty and I sat at a long wooden table decorated with a gingham table-cloth, watching as our many sons and daughters and grandchildren passed fat pies back and forth. We took a walk through the arbor after dinner, the young following the old as birds swooped down over our shoulders, jealous of the fruit that was so ripe it dropped from the trees and rolled to a stop at our feet. Paradise.

The following evening Betty and I went to the supermarket together, though usually she completed this chore alone. How could I want to be apart from the family? That little force of life in her belly was like a magnet pulling me toward her, so as she filled our cart with jars of pickles and a pyramid of canned soups that were unconscionably salty, I smiled and nodded at passing shoppers, rejoicing at my wife’s newfound “cravings” no less than she enjoyed describing them to me.*