Dirty Love (20 page)

“What?” Inside Robert an elevator cable seemed to snap.

“Jackie or Kimberly?”

The descent was terrible.

“Kimberly?”

“No, Thea, honey, what are you talking about? Let’s go inside.” Robert touched her hip, was hoping to turn her toward home, but she gripped his wrist and looked into his eyes: “Jackie.”

The elevator slammed into the pit. Robert shook his head, but Althea was nodding; she dropped his hand and walked quickly over the broken shells toward Jackie’s cabin. There was a great silence and time seemed to slow down to nothing, as if he were in a car breaking into speeding pieces on the highway and all he could do was roll with the fragment he was strapped onto; he watched her go, her curly black hair and white sleeping gown and bare feet as she stepped up onto the porch. Now time moved again and he bolted after her, but his foot slid out behind him and he did a near split and had to catch himself with his hands, then his knees, and then he was up. But Althea was already inside, the screen door a slam Robert was late for, stepping into the room just as his wife grabbed Jackie’s empty hand and jerked her completely out of the loft onto her back and buttocks, her bare feet slamming the floorboards and wall, Kimberly jumping to her knees in her cot, screaming. Jackie was screaming too, flailing behind her; then Althea screamed, and it was the only one Robert heard now, a long wail followed by a panting whimper. She held Jackie’s hair with two hands but no longer to do damage, it seemed; more, it was to hold herself steady. She was bent over, squeezing her knees together, and blood was coming in slow, sure rivulets, moving down her olive calves onto the floor, onto the floor and Robert’s black bartender’s vest.

I
T WAS
J
ACKIE
who called the ambulance. Althea kept moaning, her face empty of color, and Kimberly had her lie on the floor and rest her bare feet up on the cot. Robert had just stood there a moment, saying nothing, doing nothing, but then Althea began to cry, covering her eyes with her arm. He knelt down and touched her hair, but she shook her head away from him so violently that he stood again, then ended up sitting on the cot, holding her bloody feet in his lap as Kimberly squatted and did something with a towel beneath his wife. Jackie stood off to the side in nothing but light blue panties and a New England Patriots T-shirt, her hair still ratty from Althea’s grip, looking from Robert to his wife on the floor as if this were something she couldn’t possibly have invited upon herself.

Robert had wanted to ride in the ambulance, but the EMT shook his head no and closed the doors, his partner already inside there wrapping a blood pressure cuff around Althea’s arm. Robert followed in the Subaru, the ambulance in front of him impossibly white, its siren off but its orange and red roof lights blinking and spinning as the van sped down the empty boulevard. And the sun was the same color, sitting on the water, the beach deserted. Robert had to push down on the accelerator to keep up with the ambulance, and he felt he was actually chasing it, that they were fleeing him, whisking his wife off to safety and high ground. He began to feel afraid. The towel Kimberly had wedged beneath Althea was dripping when the EMTs arrived. And when they lifted her onto the gurney her face was yellowish and she didn’t look at him or anyone, just closed her eyes tightly against what must be a terrible pain.
Two months early
. And what about the baby? Was the
baby
in pain?

The ambulance left the boulevard and barreled past the wide salt marsh. Robert kept the Subaru two car lengths behind, though they were moving close to fifty. He wondered what the EMT was doing to her behind those white doors. How could you stop the bleeding if it was coming from inside? Robert’s face prickled with heat and he felt nauseated, his mouth nothing but a sticky shot glass, his head aching behind his eyes. Over the years he’d sometimes cheated on his girlfriends, but never anyone as loving, trusting, and faithful as his wife. The wind was blowing in against his cheek, the smell of the ocean and the mudflats of the marsh, and for a moment he could feel his heart beating in his ears and he heard nothing else as the wind pushed silently at his face like unrelenting bad news:
What if you lose her? What if you lose your child, too?
He got an image of himself alone in the fall, working at Skinny’s in Florida, a youngish man with all his promise gone: squandered and lusted away. If he’d ever had any in the first place.

The ambulance hit its siren once as it pulled into the emergency bay. Robert parked his car nearby. He was shutting his door when they wheeled Althea through the doors, her profile small and anemic. He hurried inside, his head pulsing with no sleep and the leftover Maker’s Mark. But there was only an emergency waiting area, a woman at a desk typing something into a computer, her glasses pushed to the tip of her nose. He approached her and was conscious of his bloody white shirt. He wanted to tuck it in, at least, but the thought felt ludicrous.

“Where did they take my wife? I think she’s having the baby. Where would they take her?”

The woman glanced up at his shirt, then up at his face as if she weren’t sure she heard him correctly.

“Have you preregistered?”

“Excuse me?”

“For the delivery, sir. Are you in our computer?”

He told her no, they were going to do that later. His wife wasn’t due to deliver for two more months. “She’s bleeding. Where would they take her?”

The woman looked at him over the rim of her glasses.

“I need to see my wife.” Robert’s voice cracked. His eyes began to fill.

“Of course you do, dear. But first you need to sit down so I can enter her into the system.”

Robert sat in the chair facing her desk. His legs felt momentarily useless and he was grateful someone had told him what to do. The woman pressed a few buttons to clear away old work, then sat forward and, looking only at the computer screen to her left, asked him questions about Althea: her full name, her date and place of birth, her next of kin—“Me, her husband.” And as he spelled out his name, he began to feel the strength return to his legs and feet. He sat up straighter and perched himself on the edge of the chair. He answered that they had no medical insurance, she could bill him directly. And he gave her the address of The Whaler Hotel—they would either be there or they wouldn’t, but at the thought that he and Althea and their son or daughter might
not
be living in The Whaler cabins, Robert forced himself to imagine it was only because they would move, and not because there would be only one returning there instead of three.

Soon enough she let him go, directing him to the maternity ward where a man in a turquoise smock told him his wife was being prepped for surgery.
Why? What’s wrong?
But the man just told him to have a seat, then disappeared behind a swinging door. The small waiting area was six cushioned chairs, a table spread out with magazines, and a watercooler and Coke machine. His mouth and throat were dry. There was an evil taste in his mouth. In his right pocket was the cash from last night’s tips, and in his left were a few stray coins, enough for a Coke. As the can came clacketing down through the machine, two women in those same turquoise smocks walked quickly and quietly down the hall. Their shoes and hair were covered with blue-green netting. Their white breathing masks were hanging loosely beneath their chins. They pushed through the swinging door, and Robert did not know if they were going in to help with Althea, but their silent and urgent rushing left him feeling queasy and lost, like he was falling backwards away from all this, his mouth dry, his stomach a terrible mistake, his knees liquid. He sat with his unopened Coke, rested his elbows on his thighs, and breathed deeply through his nose. He saw his shoes were still untied and left them that way. He remembered Jackie’s heels on his shoulders; he remembered the sound Althea made as she wrenched Jackie off the bunk, a deep sustained cry that could only come from a well of quiet.

He sat there a long while. He felt he should call someone. There had been a friend in college, before he quit over a decade ago: his roommate, a thin, sad-eyed existentialist with whom Robert would often go drinking.

Robert thought of him now and suspected that even if he knew his phone number, he wouldn’t want him here; at a local bar or at a dorm party, the existentialist would get morose and sneer at the young men and women dancing or huddling together over a joint in their loose jeans. “We’re all going over the falls, man. Drink up, Doucette! God drowned in the first boat!” And Robert
would
drink up, then leave his friend and join the others—women mainly, those with delicate throats and wispy hair which, when they danced too close, would catch on his face if he hadn’t shaved—women who smiled at him because he was almost handsome, which meant cute; and when he told them over the music and through the smoke that he was an English major and wanted to be a poet, their interest would deepen and some of them wanted to drink alone in a corner with him, talk about life and beauty. And so he adopted the sentences of his poetry teacher and he’d tell them that life was a song that had to be sung and
forget
iambic pentameter—too cold. “Life’s a burning building; life’s a ride through the rapids before we all go over the edge, and we only have so much time to get things down. Like your delicate throat,” he’d say to one. “Like your eyes,” he’d tell another. “The way they make me think of minks in Russia, a family of minks in the snow.” He’d leave with one of them and later, after he’d ejaculated into her, after he’d slept in her room, the dawn’s hopeful light piercing the windows, he’d
know
he was a poet; he just hadn’t put it all down on paper yet. He’d slip out of her warm bed, sometimes taking one last look at her naked buttocks as she slept, or at that sweet triangle of pubic hair between flaring hipbones, and he’d dress and leave the dorm that smelled of cigarettes and cold pizza boxes and beer soaked into the carpet. He was Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Wilde; he was all the rascal poets he’d been reading. And as Robert left the smells of the dormitory and stepped into the cold New Hampshire air, he was grateful he no longer smelled hay and silage, warm udders and oak-handled shovels and hoes, cow manure and diesel fuel, the smells of a life he thought he’d never escape: in the winter, the twice-daily mud-and-ice trek to the barn to lead six dozen holsteins eight at a time to the milking room; to clean the valves and tubes after; to rake manure and haul corn silage from the silo to the feed bunk; to keep the calves dry and fed in their stalls; to inseminate heifers, then calve them months later, changing the hay they slept in, hauling bales as if he hadn’t hauled enough in August, the baler shooting them out at him when he only had a few seconds to hook his fingers into the twine, heaving and tossing the bale into place onto the trailer behind him, the sweat in his eyes, his back a tight cord about to snap. And in the fall they’d have to pack the silo with load after pickup load of the corn they’d planted in the spring, and the vacuum chute was always getting clogged or breaking down, so while his father climbed the ladder with a tool apron, Robert would build a huge mound of corncobs he’d have to load into the silo once it was fixed. There were always things breaking down: the tractor, the picker, the baler, the milkers. One summer the freezer went and hundreds of dollars of bull semen thawed and died. And if all the machinery was running smoothly, a storm would come in and there’d be a roof leak, soaking some of the stock who were too stupid to move, and then they’d get sick or just more dopey than usual, and one might trip on her way to feed and cut a foreleg, and Robert would have to nurse that, clean it and wrap it with gauze. But sometimes an infection would come anyway and the cow would get a fever, and even if she could make it to the milking room the milk itself might be tainted, and Robert’s father would have to sell her off for scrap beef: cat and dog food, hotdog filler.

In college, Robert tried putting all of this and more into a poem. And when he finished he felt it was the most honest thing he could possibly have written, the most passionate. How could anyone read it and not know how life at Doucette Dairy was for him? How could they not know all of its tedium? He stayed up till almost dawn typing it and retyping it into the shape he wanted, the right stanza length, the right verse. After a few tries, he found the title too: “Dairy.” He slept in his clothes on his bed but woke before his alarm went off, then went to poetry class, handing his professor, a resident poet and Pulitzer Prize nominee, his manuscript. His professor said he would read it that morning and to stop by before lunch.

“It has the authority of lived experience, Robert, but I don’t believe there was no joy in any of that work. You’ve written in the voice of the suffering hero and I don’t buy it. Try writing a poem without you in it. Show me the cow’s fever without your bitching about having to change the bandage. The farm life’s the subject, not your whining about it.”

Robert had just stood there, his mouth a dry web. The Pulitzer Prize nominee sat down at his desk and began to read a hardcover book. “Write it again, if you like.”

Robert had spent the day in his room lying in bed. He had an afternoon class but didn’t go. He read the poem over and over, but kept hearing the poet’s last three words,
if you like
. They were completely apathetic. Would he say those same words to someone he thought had talent? The following week he skipped all three poetry classes. At a dorm party he got drunk and next morning at dawn he woke up at the base of a red maple tree planted by the Class of 1945. He was hungover and cold and could see he’d covered himself with leaves the color of bright blood. There was a stone engraving on the ground:
Dedicated to the valiant young men of this university who gave their lives for freedom—1945
. And Robert wished there was a war
he
could go fight, but it wasn’t fighting he craved, or danger even. More, it was something to be honored and known for—an ability, an act, anything. The night before he’d told a girl that the poet had praised one of his poems, saying it had the authority of lived experience. She’d had a sweet milky face and thick red hair and she’d looked at him askance, as if he were a real blowhard for repeating praise like that.