Steve Toltz - Quicksand

‘Hey.’

Stella was gliding towards him in her bathrobe like a weary traveller on an airport walkway. Aldo remembered she wanted to go to the cinema tonight but they couldn’t even afford the tickets, and the dumb thing was she only went to the movies to eat popcorn. ‘Hey baby, you’re awake,’ he said, putting his face through a sort of grinder to make a smile.

She leaned her hand on the fridge and loomed over him, oversized and fretful.

He asked, ‘Are you OK?’

‘That depends on your idea of OK.’

‘Well, are you —’

‘Pregnant,’ she said. ‘If that was your question. Yes I am. Thanks for asking.’

UMM-ING AND AHH-ING IN THE ABORTION clinic car park, they were horribly, almost comically indecisive, having peeked inside at the receptionist’s bouffant, the unfortunate red carpet and jittery clientele, and were now sitting on the bonnet of their ’94 Corolla arguing against each other’s counterarguments as thoughts came in pairs with opposites attached. They used to have talks, now they had conferences. Stella’s eyes were wide and steely, as if she’d evolved to a place beyond tears; she was saying how motherhood sets your career back five years, and in a world where five male years is equal to twenty female years, that just about fucks her. The sun was burning through the clouds and the puddles on the pavement had already grown hot. This baby in her belly wasn’t the issue, she went on, because what you’re betting on — or against — is a future child. If years later you can’t fertilise an egg to save your life, then the one you threw back will be the one you regret.

‘It would be an easier decision if I was established like Francesca, but I’m far from it.’

Her frenemesis Francesca had released her debut album to acclaim and was now recording her second and touring the southern United States.

‘On the other hand, we’re about the right age to get going on this, biologically speaking,’ she said. ‘On the other hand —’

‘The first hand?’

‘As breadwinners, we’re fucking losers.’

Hot shame flooded his body. ‘We’re so chronically in debt, I just honestly don’t know how we’ll manage,’ she said. Aldo felt blindsided by this obvious truth. Stella had come through for Leila, selling the Steinway grand left by her parents, allowing him to consolidate Leila’s debts into one monthly payment, and while Stella had not given him a hard time about it, now he saw her nonchalance as all veneer. ‘I know you believe wholeheartedly in your high expectations and the yield they’ll bring us, but what if they don’t? I mean, sure, having a baby would give purpose to our lives,’ she conceded, ‘but bringing a child into a purposeless life to give it purpose is a strange sort of logic that ends nowhere, don’t you think?’ Aldo had never seen her so manic but knew she was worried that the integrity of her uterus had already been compromised by an earlier, half-regretted abortion, thanks to one of those mentors she’d slept with in high school (one of those older, bearded guitarists from her pre-Aldo days), and that this might be her last chance.

A woman pushing twin boys wrestling in a shopping trolley passed by them and Stella slid urgently off the bonnet, as if late to an ambush. She startled the stout woman with her sudden approach and then had to bend down so they shared an eye-line, their faces close enough, Aldo thought, to transmit conjunctivitis.

While she was occupied he reached through the car window and grabbed Stella’s journal, wedged open on the backseat. Two lyrics on the dog-eared page caught his eye: Hitler brought his A-game/to the genocide , a phrase taken verbatim from Aldo in conversation with her uncle Howard, the Scientologist, and I’m going to fuck you/back to the Stone Age, which he’d expressed in a private moment of passion. He was, in all honesty, growing tired of being the source of inspiration for her songs — if he was parasitic financially, she was parasitic artistically, and what had at first felt flattering and mutual now felt weirdly draining.

Stella returned looking unsatisfied.

‘What did you say to her?’

‘I asked why she had children.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She didn’t know.’

Stella put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it. Aldo imagined an ancient-looking newborn hacking like an old Vegas comedian.

‘Should you be smoking?’

‘Right now not smoking is like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic .’

Aldo thought about sleeplessness, incessant laundry, and repurposed breasts. He alternated between a vision of a monstrous apparition of a deformed baby and one of a perfect baby, with negligent parents, falling down the stairs. He imagined the abortionist’s backstory: a young man with a hook for a hand getting into medical school. He imagined Stella giving birth to a terracotta warrior, to an eel.

Stella crushed out the cigarette with self-disgust. ‘Drinking and smoking are part of my musical identity,’ she said, and added that on Sunday night she heard the smoke-torn bluesy voice of God tell her she should keep this child.

‘Were you stoned?’

‘So what?’

‘Have we manoeuvred ourselves into the position in which we can only do the negative act, the act of not-doing — in this case, not having the abortion? Because when your chief aim in every dilemma is to avoid excruciating regrets, once you’ve overthought something, doing the positive act — in this case, having the abortion — could haunt us forever.’

‘This! This is what I’m worried about.’

‘Meaning what?’

Since learning of her pregnancy, Aldo had voiced random facts: statistically, human mothers are more likely than fathers to kill their own offspring. He had raised concerns about heart defects, cleft palates, spina bifida, clubfoot, Tay-Sachs disease, phenylketonuria, and meconium aspiration, where the baby ingests its own first shit and washes it down with amniotic fluid — every horror story he had ever been upset and haunted by in the Sunday papers. ‘Why not us? We’re youngish, the odds are against anything terrible happening, but that’s what makes them so frightening! We’re one chromosome away from becoming nurses and carers!’

He thought how the older Stella got, the greater the risk of birth defects and age-related dangers and illnesses, and Aldo started to feel annoyed; he wanted to say the words he couldn’t: this was her fault, always skipping her pill. She couldn’t remember to take it, then would cram them in all at once to catch up; it was she who had said, ‘It’s OK to come inside me.’ Stella turned up Jeff Buckley on the car stereo. It was inconceivable to have a major life moment without a soundtrack.

‘OK. Let’s be logical,’ Aldo said. ‘On the one hand, the problem with having children is that on your deathbed you’re surrounded by people who’ll profit handsomely from your death. On the other hand —’

‘Hey look!’

The clinic was closing. It was already six o’clock. The stocky receptionist locked the doors and climbed into her white Holden and drove away. There was suddenly nobody around, as if a set had been cleared. Aldo imagined he heard the orange sun grunt with relief as it fell behind the buildings. Night was coming swiftly and the streetlights fired up.

‘So I guess that’s that,’ she said impassively.

‘We can come back tomorrow.’

‘No.’

It was all there in her eyes, a growing merriment, a decision. They stared with nervous excitement at each other, formulating the same future.

‘It’s going to be tough-going,’ Aldo said.

‘Rule number one. We can’t both have one foot out the door at the same time. When one person is feeling hateful the other isn’t allowed. Second rule. We can both be depressed, but only on alternating days. You can take Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I’ll take Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.’