Milk (3 page)

She looked up to the lower Manhattan skyline. Office windows lit up like links in a gold chain. Flakes whirled around as she stood on the cobblestones between
Bargemusic and the River Café. Bee lights covered the maples. Above them, the stone base of the bridge, steel girders fanning out. Through the restaurant’s sliding doors she saw a bartender in a white jacket move into view, pick up a glass and step toward the liquor bottles, which were tiny and radiant as jewels.

When she got home her husband was sleeping fully clothed on the bed, his hair reeking of cigarette smoke. She watched him for a while, his chest moving up and down, his eyelids jerking in REM sleep. He was very beautiful with his long face and narrow shoulders, like a stone prince on top of a crypt. When she first met him her own father had just gotten married again and she’d been new to New York City and lonely. He was a bike messenger with a long ponytail, he smoked joints in the back of churches on his rounds and on the weekends took her to raves where they took ecstasy and danced in crowds of sweaty people. Stellar sex always followed and she wanted him past all of her experience of wanting. Wanting him was like wanting the moon, an aloof and glamorous disk of shifting light.

The baby began to whine. She changed his diaper, then sat with him in the blue chair, but each time she offered
her nipple, he pursed his lips and turned his face away. To calm him she walked around the apartment. It was as ritualistic as the Stations of the Cross, beginning with her polka-dot shirt; she held up the shirt on its hanger and he grew pensive. Before the pattern ceased to interest him, she moved on to the ivy plant, that one particular leaf that fascinated him, and she felt him relax his weight against her shoulder; his head fell into the crook of her neck and he slept.

MARY ORDERED MINT tea and a cranberry muffin and sat in a chair in back listening to Christmas jazz and watching snow blow horizontally past the front window. The wood tables were mostly empty, just a young woman in a ponytail writing out Christmas cards and the Man at his usual table in back. She glanced at him as he wrote in his notebook. Sometimes he used a felt-tip marker and other times she saw him use a pencil to trace a blueprint, a long sprawling single-story house. He always wore the same outfit: khaki pants creased down the front and a white button-down shirt, each cuff folded back neatly to the elbow. His shoulders were heavy and wider than her husband’s, and he had wrinkles around his eyes.

She sat down. The baby’s face was smushed against the side of the carrier, and he was elfin in his little green cap and matching mittens. He grimaced in his sleep. She shouldn’t have had that slice of onion on her tuna fish at lunch. Onions did odd things to her milk. She rocked forward to comfort him. Snowflakes outside zigzagged across the window, and inside, the wood grain of her table glimmered. She watched the counter girl use silver tongs to lay glazed donuts out in the display case.

Her husband’s story about last night was rickety, particularly his account of the hours between two and when he reached home at five. Instead of being contrite, he was angry about her questions. She’d ruined everything by being jealous; now he didn’t want to stay home Christmas Eve. They’d planned to make dinner and watch a video, open the presents she had bought for the baby. Now he was going to the Orphan’s Party his friend Roger threw every year.

Mary yelped and sprang up; something had bitten her leg. A hand laid down a wedge of napkins over the spilled tea, and when she turned she saw the Man leaning forward, so close she could have touched his face.

“Sorry,” Mary said, motioning to the tipped paper teacup. “I’m clumsy.”

“Not to worry,” he said. “Are you wet?”

Mary examined the baby and then her coat for spots, but the tea had only stained her pant leg. “I’m fine,” she said.

The Man hesitated; he didn’t seem to want to go back to his own table. “You look tired.”

Mary blushed. “I guess I am,” she said. “You know, not a lot, just a little.” She pressed her fingernails into the palm of her hand and thought of herself in her ratty coat moving around the neighborhood.

“My name is John.” He held out his hand.

“Mary,” she said, touching his thick fingers.

“Can I sit here?” he said, pulling out a chair.

Mary looked at the empty chair and nodded.

“What are you reading?” She pointed to the book splayed in half on the table.

“Poincaré this evening. I’m rather taken with his claim that he could move material objects from one closed container to another.”

“Could he?” Mary asked.

“Probably not. He also insisted that once when he rotated a cup”—he swirled his coffee—“a little sparrow flew out of the bottom.”

Mary saw in his blue eyes a few specks of white which shifted slowly like plastic chips in a snow dome.

“Did he have any theories about air having the same properties as paper?”

John’s expression didn’t change but his eyebrows shifted up. “How do you mean?”

“It’s going to sound crazy,” Mary said, “but reality can get these little pinprick holes.”

John leaned forward conspiratorially; the tea bag in his paper cup looked like a blouted trout. “What you describe sounds like an aleph, a point in space that contains all points. The most famous one on record was in 1938. A boy living with his mother in an apartment in Barcelona claimed he saw the night sky swarming with tiny lights whenever he rolled up his mother’s bread bin.”

“Just the one scene?”

“My guess is that the poor boy confused what he was seeing—the entire world from every angle simultaneously—with a meteor shower. You can understand his mistake, all those light sources swirling at once.”

“So other people have seen it?”

John nodded and blushed from the rim of his hairline all the way out to his earlobes, and Mary saw that the scar over
his eyebrow was shaped more like a raisin than a sunflower seed. She looked over to his notebook where he had drawn a star configuration. “Canis Major” was written out at the top and there were little arrows pointing to Sirius and Aludra.

The baby slept sprawled out on John’s futon as he carried the bottle of brandy over to the table. He was not as handsome as her husband. John’s face was plain, but there was something behind it, not light exactly, though light’s focused beam was part of her understanding of his appeal. As she laid out the details of her life—baby, husband, how she wanted to write poetry but had become a schoolteacher instead—she took in the décor of his apartment, the futon, chest of drawers, marble fireplace. No television or radio, just a dozen books on the window ledge. Hanging over the mantel was a crucifix; a wasted wooden Jesus on a metal cross.

“That’s the only thing I brought from my cell.”

Mary felt her jaw drop and her mouth fall open. His thick upper arms, his crew cut; she glanced at his hands for jailbird tattoos.

John laughed. “No. No. No. It’s not what you think. I use to live in a monastery.”

“With the monks?”

He set two teacups on the table and tipped the brandy bottle into each. “I was a monk.”

Mary saw him in a long robe walking along a stone corridor. “What happened?”

He sat back in his chair. “It’s a good question. I think if my dissatisfaction had been parceled out, things might have been different. But one day during the long silence in the middle of diurnum, I just realized that after fifteen years I was no closer to God than the day I entered.” He looked out onto the dark street.

The baby began to cry, and Mary picked him up and pressed him against her shoulder. “I’m afraid he’s hungry,” she said. “I need to get back.”

“You can nurse him. I don’t mind,” John said.

Mary looked at him tentatively, but the baby was animated, agitating his head like a baby bird and crying so hard his face was red and his whole body trembled. She took the cloth diaper out of her pocket and laid it over her shoulder, unbuttoned her shirt and reached under to unlatch the flap of her nursing bra. Her face got hot as he slurped, and she stared down at the baby’s tiny elbows, his hands under the cloth cupping her breast.

John held his body at an awkward angle, as if she wasn’t nursing but amputating somebody’s leg.

“I can stop,” she said.

“No!” he said fiercely, his expression drawn, his eyes flooding with water.

THE ORPHANS’ CHRISTMAS Party was in the East Village. Chili-pepper lights encircled the windows and the refrigerator was filled with beer. All the furniture was pushed back to the wall and there were sagging bodega roses around in coffee cups. About a dozen people had already arrived, all younger than her, and mostly women who worked at the production company with her husband. Her husband got her a glass of seltzer, and they leaned on the window casement and talked about the baby.

He liked the goofy expression the baby made when he was angry and how much he loved that one leaf on the ivy plant in the living room. How he’d suck on anything, a dirty T-shirt, the side of a cereal box. As he talked, his eyes followed a young woman in leather pants around the
party.
You’ve been so freaked out lately. I wish you could be mellower
. She could tell by the way he moved his hand around that he was getting drunk.
The God stuff, you know that’s a bunch of bullshit
.

A guy that her husband used to know came up and he talked about how happy he was not to be at his mother’s condo in Florida. He wore a porkpie hat and a Kraftwerk T-shirt.
It was so depressing down there with all the old people
. A tall girl joined them, introducing herself as China.
Thank the Lord, I don’t have to go to Memphis. My father is so Republican and my mother is a Zoloft zombie
. Mary’s husband smiled widely. Mary looked around at people gathering on the couches and chairs. Most had dressed up; a girl wore silver eyelashes, and one of the guys had on a tuxedo jacket. The Christmas tree was decorated with matchbooks, and below the tree the ceramic crèche was painted with garish colors. The Wise Men were kitsch of the highest order, situated between a lawn flamingo and a ceramic bust of Elvis.

The girl in the leather pants came out of the kitchen carrying a drink and her husband began again to follow her with his eyes. Mary felt her ears ringing and, though she didn’t have to, she said she had to pee.

Inside the bathroom, the porcelain was white as bone and the shower curtain covered with tiny black skulls. Someone had left a half-cup of eggnog on the sink and she remembered that it was the night people wait for the birth of the überbaby. Her own labor was stitched into her mind. The pain made her penetrable—air, light, noise; all these moved through her. Blood, mixed with amniotic fluid and scented like seaweed, had run down her legs as she bore down and felt her pelvis opening, her consciousness as if made from paper, ripping in two. Somebody knocked on the door; she flushed the toilet for effect and ran the faucet.

When she got back her husband was talking to a girl with a choker, whom he introduced as Sonya. The music was louder now, so Mary had to yell to be heard. Sonya said her mom was in Saint Bart’s with her boyfriend and her father was with his third wife up in Westchester. She rolled her eyes and pointed out that the expression on the Virgin Mary’s face was like a porn star’s. Mary’s husband stared at the band of black leather around Sonya’s neck and her small well-delineated breasts under her tight T-shirt.

It’s so weird you have a baby
, she kept saying. Mary felt
her breasts swell with milk.
I mean, I could never handle a baby. A baby. God, that would totally freak me out
.

The lamp was on in John’s apartment. An orb of light fell over his table, but he wasn’t sitting in his chair and he wasn’t sleeping on his futon either. Cold bit into the tips of her hands, and she took her fingers off the iron fence and sunk them into her pockets. Tinsel was woven into the snow sloped against the brownstone, and there was a wreath, with a red ribbon, on his door.

“Are you waiting for me?”

She spun around, and there he was with a swing bag of groceries hanging from his right hand. His head was bare and a puff of steam dispersed before his lips.

“I can only stay a minute,” she said, waiting for him to unlock his front door. Inside he nodded to the chairs by the table and went into the kitchen. Mary heard the sound of crinkling plastic as he put away the groceries. He’d bought himself a few things for Christmas, a pumpkin pie and a rotisserie chicken. She laid her coat on the bed and sat at the wood table; she read the word “aniseikonia” in his journal and the definition—“when one eye sees an object as bigger than the other.”

“You look nice,” he said as he carried in the teacups and the bottle of brandy.

“I was out at a party,” she said. She watched him settle into his chair and lay down a stack of napkins.

He was wearing a blue sweater with holes at the elbows and his face carried a flush of cold. He looked at her intently.

“I’m sorry about yesterday.”

“It makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” Mary said.

“It’s not that,” he said, walking over to the mantel and picking up a snapshot. He handed her the photo. “You see,” he said, “I almost had a family.”

The photo was faded, curled at the edges. A woman in a calico dress smiled at the camera. She wore feather earrings and her stomach was huge. “It happened twenty-four years ago. I got the call right around dinnertime. My wife had pulled off the highway to help a lady with a flat tire. But it was foggy and a truck hit her while she walked along the shoulder.”

“I’m sorry,” Mary said as she stared at the photo. The woman held one hand under her stomach and one hand on top, displaying her pregnant belly. Her pale hair hung around her face, and her lips were open as if she were
about to speak. Mary handed the photo back and he slipped it inside the pages of his notebook. He sat very still and stared down at the gold liquid in his cup.

Mary moved her hand across the wood and touched his fingers, and he leaned forward and kissed her mouth. His lips were not food exactly, but just as sustaining, and she opened her mouth and his tongue came inside all delicate flickers and so much more lively and nuanced than she would have anticipated.