Relativity (37 page)

“I'm going to pretend you didn't say that. He's probably hungry again,” she said, throwing her hands up. “I'd better feed him.”

After she left the room, Mark marched to the kitchen and grabbed a beer. He slammed the fridge door shut—its contents clattered—and swore. Claire was so willful and manipulative. Complaining about all the sacrifices she'd made, then dictating he make a massive one—all in the same breath. How could she be that inconsiderate? Forget the critical importance of his thesis on top of not noticing his stress.

He sat down at the kitchen table, covered in unpacked groceries. Sure, Mark could admit he'd zeroed in on his research, maybe been oblivious to her training. It was true: the barre was back up, pointe shoes dangled on the banister again. He knew ballet meant a lot to her. Claire was simply being her determined self. And he'd fallen in love with that tenacity—it resonated with him. He took another swig of beer.

When she'd first moved in, they'd both become so immersed in their own work they wouldn't speak all day. Neither felt neglected or ignored, not like Mark's previous girlfriends who'd pout and sulk, then make him feel guilty about working. Claire got it. She was just as single-minded and industrious as Mark, if not more so. There was something special about it, their solidarity, their tacit agreement to chase big dreams. He'd get lost in quantum theory; she'd fixate on perfecting spins. Preoccupied and tranquil, in unison. Worlds apart, but they were in it together.

In the bedroom, Claire lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Clean laundry was piled behind her, waiting to be folded and put away. The baby had settled in her arms; he'd fallen back asleep.

Mark stood in the door frame. “I'm a dickhead. I said a lot of things I didn't mean.”

She kept her eyes on the ceiling. “I just didn't think this would be so hard. I didn't realize being a parent would be like this.” Her voice was uneven, like she'd been crying.

“I know,” he said, sitting beside her. “Having a baby is completely shithouse. They're helpless, they smell, they're really bad conversationalists.”

Claire smiled at him. She looked down at Ethan and stroked his downy hair. “He's pretty cute though, isn't he?”

“Yeah, I'll give him that.” Mark placed a hand on her shoulder. “Claire Bear, you're so much better with the baby than me. I'm just scared about being left alone with him for the first time. But we'll be fine. I want you to go to your audition.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

He nodded. “Just don't literally break a leg.”

Ω

HER FLIGHT WAS LEAVING
in three hours, but Claire worried she hadn't pumped enough milk. She held the pump to her breast again, cringing as its rubber mouth sucked at her nipple. It made her eyes water. Even though Mark had agreed to the audition, he still sulked about her leaving. And she was still quietly fuming about their fight. How apparently she was too dumb to understand the stupid thesis. She knew exactly what it was about; he hardly talked about anything else. She could sum it up in a sentence. Who did he think he was, Einstein?

What especially annoyed Claire was how Mark accused her of playing the martyr and insisting that he gave her lots of help. Friends help, neighbors help—shouldn't he be just as invested as her in the baby? When Claire looked after Ethan, nobody called that helping. Motherhood was full of these uneven expectations and assumptions, an exasperating disjuncture between what was demanded and what was fair.

Ethan sat in his bouncer, his eyes searching the room for his mother. Claire kneeled down and tickled his toes. He seemed to love looking at her face, blinking his glossy eyes, mimicking her expressions. The baby smiled and reached out to grab her hair.

She hid behind his tiny feet, and then surprised him with a silly grin. “Peekaboo!”

Ethan giggled hysterically. His laughter was the most wonderful noise Claire had ever heard; it filled her with a giddy euphoria. She'd pull strange faces and make weird noises simply to hear the baby laugh, like his chuckles were a drug and she was a junkie craving another fix.

Claire didn't mind being a slave to her oxytocin. Sometimes it made her cry for no reason, or misfired and made her go into raptures over cornflakes, and every time she looked at Ethan, she fell in love with him a little bit more. But it was bigger than simply chemicals and hormones. It was the way the hair on the back of his head smelled sweet. Babbling noises he made, expressions on his face. When he coughed, she jumped. When he grinned, she beamed. It sounded stupid, but she'd never known herself to be capable of this much love. This love was infinite; this love was primal.

She lifted the baby from the bouncer and rested him on her hip. Ethan gurgled happily in her arms. “This'll be hard for me too,” Claire said to Mark. “I've never been away from him for more than a few hours.”

“Stay home then.” His voice was at once jokey and serious.

All week, he'd been like that: saying one thing, meaning another; making sarcastic remarks with underlying intent. Perhaps Mark was right, maybe the timing was off; there'd be other auditions. But her bag was packed, her flight booked and she knew her choreography of the variation she'd dance inside out. Claire brushed the thought aside. Ethan and Mark would survive; so would she. In no time at all, she'd be back home.

She placed the baby back in the bouncer, distracting him with a rattle. The clothes he was wearing were already too small; the snap buttons were coming apart. Claire thought to herself how fast he'd grown. Ethan didn't fit in any of the little suits he'd worn fresh out of the hospital.

Mark searched frantically through papers on his desk. He exhaled through his nose. “Great, I can't find the bloody outline again. I can't believe it; my filing system is all out of order. I don't have time for this.”

Claire stood behind Mark's chair and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Don't worry. You'll be fine,” she said, resting her chin on his shoulder. “And you've been working so hard lately. You probably need a break.”

“Looking after the baby isn't a break.”

Claire didn't respond. She took out a handwritten list. “Okay, I'm pretty sure there's more than enough milk in the freezer. You can give him some baby cereal once a day, but make sure it's not too thick. He's due for his nap in about half an hour. There's clean laundry in the dryer and I bought new diapers and wipes yesterday. I'll call before I take off and when I land.”

He gave her a perfunctory nod—she could tell he was tuning out her voice—and continued rummaging through his folders.

A horn outside beeped.

“That's the taxi,” Claire said.

“Already? You really can't reschedule? It's almost Christmas; why are they even holding auditions this week?”

“Please don't make this more difficult than it is already.” Claire picked the baby up again and held him close. Ethan nuzzled into her chest and gripped the sleeve of her shirt. “See you soon, pumpkin. Be good for Daddy.”

She handed Ethan over to Mark. Immediately, the baby started to scream.

“I know how you feel, buddy. I don't want her to go either.”

“Love you,” she said, quickly giving them both a kiss. Then she grabbed her bag and exchanged a look with Mark. Worry tightened her chest. Ethan's cries turned his face bright pink; his cheeks were covered in a slick of tears. The baby reached for his mother in desperation while Mark tried to hold him back. Claire feigned a reassuring smile and blew them another kiss. The taxi's horn honked again.

She closed the front door. As Claire walked down the atrium stairs, she still heard Ethan screaming from the other side of the building. Hopefully, the neighbors weren't too annoyed. Nobody had knocked on their door and complained yet.

Humidity leaped from the atmosphere; sweat crystallized on her skin. Mark hadn't even wished her luck. She exhaled, deciding to forget about their silly fight, suppress her separation anxiety, and just focus on this audition. Clear her mind.

Claire crossed the street to where the taxi waited. What she didn't realize at the time—walking under the scalding sun, wading through the tropical air—was that Mark's pleas for her to stay and Ethan's desperate cries would haunt her for years to come. That each heated word of their argument would become an obsession. That she'd always wonder if what happened next could have been prevented.

Ω

MARK STARED
at the baby. It continued to holler at the top of its lungs. How could somebody so small produce so much noise? For someone who never stopped crying, Ethan sure had a lot of stamina. What did it want? Babies were such irrational little things. Mark couldn't wait for his son to grow up, so he could finally reason with him. Communicate.

After Claire walked out the door, Ethan didn't stop screaming for two hours. Mark tried to feed him, changed his diaper twice, and then attempted to rock him to sleep awkwardly. By the time it was noon and the baby still wouldn't settle, Mark was already falling apart. He knew Ethan wanted his mother; the baby didn't want him. These were the wrong arms, this was the wrong smell, that was the wrong voice. Holding Ethan as he wailed for Claire—kicking and struggling to escape his father's disappointing embrace—felt like trying to save someone from suffocating inside an airless cell.

“Daddy has to work,” he said, placing the baby back in the bouncer.

At last, Ethan had run out of steam, exhausted from his screaming session. He bobbed in the bouncer, calmly sucking on his fist. Saliva collected between his fingers and the baby went cross-eyed as he tried to examine his wet hand. Ethan's eyes were dark violet when he was born, but recently they'd changed color. Now they were Claire's eyes: iridescent blue with fractures of yellow.

Mark skimmed over his research but his mind was elsewhere. Claire had deserted him; she needed to stop acting like she was the center of the universe. Since Ethan was born she'd become deranged, getting cross with Mark for the smallest things and picking fights several times a day. He couldn't understand her frustration. She wasn't writing a thesis; she didn't have a supervisor telling her she wasn't working hard enough or the weight of a deadline hanging over her head.

He'd struggled in the last few months, and Mark couldn't entirely blame it on the baby or Claire. Nothing was clear in his mind—as though it were made out of antimatter itself. His antibrain only had antithoughts. Days were spent at the desk idly pretending to work. Instead of writing, he hesitated, distracting himself with computer games and porn.

All Mark wanted was a single innovative thought, a real idea, but that was like finding a subatomic needle in a quantum haystack. The more he thought about how unattainable that was, the more it clogged his brain—his pursuit of originality was an impossible Möbius strip.

He reread the paragraph he'd written and rewritten this morning. Lucky he'd completed a whole paragraph at all. The blinking cursor taunted him—demanded another word to follow the last—like it knew Mark had nothing to say. He checked his emails, checked the news, and checked to see that all of his software was up to date. Then, as always, he came back to the white space of the document. The cursor continued to blink.

Afternoon sun burst through the window and onto his laptop; the glare made it impossible to read the screen. Mark stood up to close the blinds. Squinting, he stared briefly at the sun—it seemed to flicker, like solar flares were erupting on its surface—before it irritated his eyes. Mark blinked and looked away. Bright light had left a gray blotch floating across his field of vision. Like an optical illusion, sunlight in reverse: a negative afterimage.

“Negative afterimage,” he whispered to himself. Mark pictured a solar flare. How the sun ejected energy: radiation streaming out, particles accelerating near the speed of light. Particles of antimatter.

He quickly took out a pen and scribbled some notes. Huge amounts of energy with a small mass, traveling at the speed of light—E=mc
²
. Relativity would apply. Mark drew a diagram of a solar flare releasing magnetic energy. As the particles accelerated, they'd become more and more massive but the nucleus would shrink. They'd melt into their quarks, creating smaller particles. Antiparticles.

Suddenly, he felt a rush of adrenaline, his thoughts beginning to click and align. Mark tapped his feet and wrote more quickly. Something was interfering with the oscillating particles, making fewer of them decay as antimatter. But what? He tilted backward in his chair. Maybe it had something to do with quarks. An original idea felt within his grasp.

The baby screamed.

Mark's thoughts scattered; now he couldn't hear himself think. Great, his concentration was broken. It'd take him ages to get back into the flow again. He put his pen down and lifted the crying baby into his arms.

Ω

CLAIRE LAY IN BED,
thinking she'd relish her first night in months of uninterrupted sleep. But the sheets were rough and she was restless. She ached for her baby; she could physically feel his absence. Like a phantom limb, Claire kept sensing Ethan—reaching for him, expecting to find him there beside her body—but he'd been briefly amputated. She clutched a pillow tightly to her chest and tried to fall asleep.

Her audition played on her mind. This morning, she'd been uncharacteristically jittery. Claire usually never had butterflies. Now her muscles ached, and she had a severe cramp in one foot. Uncertainty about the audition's outcome—and whether it was worth the trip—troubled Claire. Before entering the mirrored studio, she'd strapped down her breasts in the bathroom, just in case they started swelling or leaking milk.

During the interview the artistic director, James Mitchell, asked lots of questions about her new baby. There were already plans to share the lead role of the Swan Queen between two soloists; one of the principals was retiring and the company needed to consider her replacement. But James was concerned that, even with role-sharing, Claire wouldn't be able to handle the demanding rehearsal and touring schedule. That perhaps having a baby was incompatible with dancing a lead. She had to suppress an urge to stamp her foot and scream—why did everyone think motherhood suddenly made her incompetent? Claire quickly assured him of her dedication and promised family wouldn't ever get in the way of work.