Quicksand (20 page)

She is not walking so much as being borne along solemnly by limbs on autopilot. It is clear to Aldo that for Stella this is the split event, the moment that will divide her life in two. Was it also his?

Her name is called over the loudspeaker. At the same time, Aldo's phone rings. It is his mother. He lets it ring. Aldo says, “This is not the end of us, we will live to love another day.” The irritated male voice on the loudspeaker calls for Stella a second time.

“Just tell them to stop calling my fucking name.” In order to take her mind off their tragedy, Aldo says the seven words he'll regret his whole life: “Why not get out there and sing?”

The agonizing silence and this is how he fills it. Stella gazes at him in astonishment that quickly dissolves into a horrible blankness, a new kind of nothingness that settles and defines her. She says quietly, “Sing?”

Aldo stands his ground. “Sing! Sure, yes. That's why we came here, after all. You should.” As he is saying it, he thinks: Unless you shouldn't. Unless it's a terrible, possibly fatal idea. Without a word, she waddles onto the shadowed stage, and Aldo, like the Sherpa of old, carries her guitar and amplifier with trembling hands. She settles on a stool as he sets the amplifier up, glancing at her belly; they had hoped her womb was some kind of Xanadu, now it's a crypt where their heartache is coordinated.

The wind blows sand and red dust against the stage. With moonlight
splashing her skin, Stella steps up to the microphone. Aldo thinks about the things women have had to do throughout history with dead babies inside them. Plow fields, fight off hard Viking penises, bake. The doctor stands beside Aldo backstage, now just another tattooed, neck-bearded groupie. In a soft voice Stella begins to sing, so tentatively at first, Aldo has to call out and ask her to turn it up. Is she even touching those strings? He calls out, “Louder, baby!”

Staring across the plains, she takes a deep breath and violently expels the song, cracking the desert silence with a voice so unnervingly beautiful, Aldo becomes lost in the wonder of it. An optimistic mood envelops him, an expansive glee, a thought that this magical moment would kickstart the child and people would talk about it for years, the baby pronounced dead and resurrected through song.

His commiserating gaze gives way to a smile of pleasure, of pride, of love. Stella meets this smile with an unfeeling mask and he thinks maybe she can't see it, so he smiles even more broadly, then adds two thumbs-up to the picture.

This evokes from Stella the most resentment a human face can carry. Later he will say that even though he then gave frantic glances, and miserable looks of solicitude after the show, it was too late, and what killed his marriage was that unforgivable smile and those dopey thumbs.

At the end of the song, the audience gives an uncertain spattering of applause. It is not havoc out there. The song barely registered. Stepping off the stage she is handed a joint that she smokes in one long jaw-dropping drag.

During the drive back to Perth the next morning, she has phantom kicks that give them new hope. Then Stella and Aldo huddle in the waiting room, and are told she has to be induced to deliver their dead child. Fetal demise, he hears the doctor say on the phone.

“You'll have to deliver the baby vaginally.”

“No, no,” Stella cries.

“Can't you just cut it out? Like a C-section?”

“You don't want your wife to go through unnecessary abdominal surgery on top of all this, do you?”

“So this will be . . . ?”

“Just like a normal delivery.”

So Stella would get her natural birth after all.

She is wheeled into an echoey delivery room. The unused heart monitor
sits there, incidental, accusatory. The nurse is saying, “We can give you all the pain medication you need because there's no risk to the baby,” as if that bright side were actually bright. Aldo finds himself unable to stop his old worries, and speaks out against an epidural—she doesn't want a spinal injury on top of this, he says—and then it all happens quickly, and despite himself Aldo thinks of the seventies- and early-eighties comedy trope of the surprise black baby and how that would play in a stillbirth situation.

Everything they'd read and heard about in the classes is happening; Stella is induced and has painful contractions and Aldo is beside her saying things like
push
and
breathe
and everything's a nightmare, everything, expelling the placenta, the episiotomy, the icepacks, but when the baby comes out, no one says “It's a girl,” and there's no monitoring of the heartbeat, there's no cry. There is only silence, an incredible silence, like the silence of the desert, or the silence of a plane gliding without engines over a menacing seascape, or of a body submerged in bathwater, or of a mute television showing an exploded bus, or soundless like a Portuguese housekeeper seen sobbing through a picture window. As Aldo looks at his child, he remembers his very first memory on earth: the detestable quiet of a summer's day, the hottest day on record, and the Benjamins sunburned as a family, him and Veronica and Henry and Leila, all four lying naked on the floor like underfed animals in a zoo during a heatwave unable to move for food or water; everyone ordering everyone else to empty the kitty litter. He wants to tell Stella this memory, but doesn't. There's something else on her mind. They haven't yet named their child—it was Aldo's idea to wait until they saw her and now, on Stella's insistence, they struggle to name this dead girl. He buys a book of baby names from the hospital gift shop. They settle on Ruby.

The doctor asks Stella if she wants to hold the baby. Oh Christ no, Aldo thinks. Say no. She says yes. She holds onto her as if the baby were a souvenir, something brought back from a holiday in a war zone. Her translucent skin and stillness make her look like some bloodless Cupid. Stella also wants to be photographed with the baby. They do a series of gruesome family portraits: Ruby wrapped tight in a blanket, distraught mother and father holding onto her, onto each other.

Stella is holding her fingers and her fingernails and kissing the palm of her hand. She gets plaster casts of her feet and hands, imprints of her footprints. They dress and bathe the baby, and say the final good-bye as Ruby is taken
away for an autopsy. Aldo organizes the funeral and Stella overhears him ask if they give a discount for stillborns.

They do.

•  •  •

They went back into their lives like fellow commuters on a train stuck in a tun
nel due to a body on the tracks. Stella put her guitars in the storage cupboard and shut the door and never went in and never sang or played guitar again. She also stopped sharing her thoughts, or her thoughts became unshareable, and threw herself into her depressing sales job as though she enjoyed it. They were too young to assimilate this kind of tragedy, so they partied, and they partied separately, and their own vitality and lack of gloom was horrifying to them. They had sex but only occasionally, and as unobtrusively as possible, got it down to the brevity of a haiku, or else she gave him furious hand jobs that were best avoided; who dreaded the ritual of bedtime more, it was hard to say. Aldo spent his weekends at the retirement village consoling Leila for the death of her granddaughter, and set about on a new real estate venture to buy up all the state's murder houses for a song. That was principally to disguise his grief, but there was no real sympathy for him anyway. He hadn't carried the child; people treated him as if she had not been his to lose, and he resented Stella for that. And now that she was no longer deeply in love with him, his financial failures, crippling debts and overall bad pecuniary fate came to define him. Money and Aldo's irresponsible loss of it became a contentious issue in their relationship, the default issue. He owed her money, and she wanted him to pay up.

The night he knew it was over, they'd just eaten Chinese food; he cracked open the fortune cookie and pretended to read a made-up fortune. “May all your enemies be beautiful so you might one day hate-fuck them with pleasure,” he said, and glanced up at Stella to see if she would write it down or make a mental note. Nothing. Hands trembling, he opened another cookie and fake-read, “Only schoolchildren masturbate to mermaids. Outside of the face, those sea-hotties have not a single workable orifice.” Stella sat stone-faced, and Aldo felt swept away in a current. He smashed opened another cookie: “Be satisfied with your looks. The almost-but-not-quite beautiful people don't have the burden of being gawked at 24/7, and can go about their lives without looking in
the mirror and seeing a plate of dog's balls.” Nothing. He could no longer affect, influence, or help her. Now he was going over a waterfall in a barrel. He was her muse no longer.

•  •  •

Zetland High's ten-year reunion was held in the same beer garden of an old hotel
we used to be denied access to when we were underaged. Everybody laughed about their lives as if they were simulations; those who were successful seemed visibly so, and those who were undermined for a living displayed that too. Some people were so bald and so fat your eyes felt callous just looking at them, or were so sick and so thin you started the grieving process as you bought them a drink. Well, that's a high school reunion for you. Divorce, dead kids; even a ten-year reunion has some points of interest. Yet there was an unexpected feeling of genuine warmth; these were the people who'd known you when you were still callow and the fault of your parents, before you were the product of your own missteps.

Together, the group regressed, like a cast reunion of a long-running soap where it's unseemly to break character. An orgy of reminiscences, pasts that needed verifying. It was a socially weird and artificial environment. Unhappily married men trying to fuck the same girls they once rejected for reasons they couldn't remember now, and which suddenly seemed their greatest regret. Every now and then you made a fatal error. You didn't recognize someone, and to cover, you pretended they'd changed, when actually you couldn't remember their names back then either. The faux pas added up. Aldo confused one of the Norton twins for another set of twins altogether, the Goldsbros. It was a colossal mistake. Yet not the worst of the night. The ultimate insult was when Jeremy, the fortune-teller's son, projected photographs of my out-of-control party while Natasha Hunt stood frozen in the back of the room, displaying no outward signs of life.

It had never occurred to me until that night that people in general think I'm a ridiculous human being; almost everybody laughed mean-spiritedly about the school play I'd written,
The Vagina of Ill Repute;
after a few laps in
that
pool of memory I was ready to run, but I hung around for Aldo's sake. A good number of people there had invested in some of his schemes and so he was forced to apologize, make excuses, impossible promises. He leaned heavily
on whoever he talked to, and I overheard him say at one point, “I even miss the sound of Stella smoking on the other end of the telephone.” He was greeted with amusement, old Aldo, but there was something so sad about him it no longer seemed funny.

Around ten p.m., there was a moment of old-fashioned hubbub when Stan Maxwell sauntered in and was greeted like a scallywag coming from the headmaster's office (his conviction had been quashed on appeal). He made a beeline for Aldo. “I hear we both lost a child,” he said. For the first time in his life, Aldo was speechless.

Stan said, “I'm living by myself now; we should get a drink sometime.”

It seemed Stan's post-grief self was something he was just now unveiling to the public, and he was giving us a sneak preview. Aldo, who had never instigated violence in all his life, tightened his fist.

“We
could
do that.”

“How's that musician wife of yours?”

“We split up.”

“Yeah, me and Vicki did too. Losing a kid, a couple can't survive that. And the ones who can, they must be psychopaths.”

Aldo looked like he was having trouble breathing.

“How's Lola?”

“Leila. She's good. She moved to a . . . she's in a home, settling in well. She's . . . not far. Edgecliff. I get out there as often as I can. I try to.”

Maybe the chill in the conversation had lasted long enough for Stan to begin to see himself from our vantage point; that might account for the sudden drop in civility on his face. His look turned steel cold and if eyes could gnash their teeth, then that is what his were doing. I said, “Nice to see you, Stan,” and shepherded Aldo outside.

We sat on a bench and watched people through the window; women's heads that clashed with their bodies; men who had been styled by their uncles. Aldo said, “You know how people neurotically fear their imperfections are the most visible thing about them?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, in the case of this room, they're one hundred percent right.”

He examined the group carefully. “Bipolar,” he said. “OCD. Intimacy issues. Super depressed. Compulsive liar. Mythomaniac, really. Morbid dependency
on his two-year-old. Abandonment issues. Cold turkey from something. Passive-aggressive crisis of masculinity. Battered other woman syndrome. Narcissistic personality disorder. Grandiosity, hypervigilance. He's coked up. Stuck in a grim cycle of abuse that's just warming up. Serial adulterer. Sex addict. Cannabis-induced psychosis.”

“Oh come on, how could you possibly know that?”

Aldo shrugged.

“You're a judgmental son of a bitch.”

“You don't call a doctor judgmental for diagnosing a cancer.”

“You bet I do.”

We watched a little longer the unhappy parade of old friends and foes, this lengthy queue for the grave. Aldo was transfixed.

I asked, “Hey, did you speak to Brad?”

“Yeah. He's got cardiac neurosis. It's iatrogenic.”