Ten Thousand Saints (21 page)

“How you doing, Mr. Keffy,” Johnny said. The kitchen was as crammed as an elevator.

“How about a little sundress, honey?” said Les. “It’s spring.” These days Eliza was as hard as Jude to keep up with. Now she was back in the city on weekends, running around with Jude and Johnny, no longer Bookworm Betty. “I don’t get it. The boys are dressing like girls and the girls are dressing like boys.”

“See?” Di rapped Eliza on the elbow. “I say that and she takes my head off.”

“You ready to go?” said Jude, distracted, glum.

“Wait.” Di made a gun of her hands and aimed it at Jude. “We’re having a birthday dinner for Eliza. Not this Saturday but the next. You’re coming?” She swung the gun around at Johnny. “You come, too, Johnny.”

“I told you I don’t want a party.”

“Can’t you just get her some magnets?” Les suggested.

With excruciating slowness, Di lowered her hands. The look on her face could have cracked ice.

“I like the magnets,” he said gently.

“We’re going,” Eliza said and kissed her mother’s cheek.

“Now, where is this temple?”

“In Brooklyn,” said Eliza. This seemed to satisfy her mother.

“How come Eliza doesn’t go to the matinees with you?” Les wondered.

The three of them exchanged a distinct look.

“It’s a little rough for girls,” said Johnny, just as Eliza said, “I had to study.”

Les picked up the bong and held it under Jude’s nose. “A little Gertrude before you go? Offer it to Krishna. It’s godly stuff.”

Jude said nothing as he followed Johnny and Eliza out the door.

“It was great meeting you,” Johnny called to Di. “Thanks for the invite.”

“Not this Saturday,” said Di, “but the next!”

The door slammed shut, the children’s voices disappearing down the chamber of the stairwell. Di sighed. “We might as well go, Lester,” she said, clapping her hands soundlessly together.

A
ccording to the book Jude had given her, the fetus at eighteen weeks was the size of a bell pepper. Eliza couldn’t decide if that was incredibly big or incredibly small. She was still nowhere near certain she had made the right decision, but it was too late now, and that, at least, was some kind of relief. Too late. Oh, well. No turning back. The fetus, whom she’d named Annabel Lee, had fingerprints, eyelids, and nipples.

Eliza’s own nipples had gone tender with goose bumps, expanded and purpled; her breasts, scrawled with blue veins, were full. She had been fairly certain, before getting pregnant, that they had reached their full dimensions—she had not set her hopes above an A cup—and this sort of monstrous growth was not the final spurt of puberty. She wished she had someone to show them to. Wives had husbands to marvel with. Other women had boyfriends or doctors or sisters. Teddy had handled them in the dark, more timidly than the other boys, but just as vacantly. No one had studied them, like a painting or a car or a song. They were hers alone.

Night after night she’d climbed into the narrow bed across from Shelby Divine, listening to Shelby’s peaceful snores in the dark, more awake than she’d ever been on any drug, her body riveted with her secret. And morning after morning she’d woken up sicker than she’d been with any hangover, so sick she’d felt she was full of a poison. She threw up only once. Mostly her sickness just simmered inside her, suffocating her from the inside out.

Thankfully, the nausea had subsided, and in its place, just as persistent, were Johnny and Jude, bringing her prenatal vitamins, bringing her an
IT’S OK NOT TO DRINK
button from a Pyramid show, calling her on the hall phone to remind her to eat breakfast (“
Neither
of them’s your boyfriend?” asked Shelby), waiting for her at Penn Station on Friday afternoon to fight over carrying her backpack, bearing Yoo-hoos and bags of sugared peanuts they’d bought from the street vendor outside. Throughout the week she craved those peanuts, the sweet, salty beginning of the weekend, Jude and Johnny standing at the end of the corridor like two dopey grooms.

O
n the following Friday afternoon, Johnny surprised Eliza by meeting her at the train station in Jersey instead of picking her up in New York. He wanted to hang out, he said, just the two of them; he wanted to see the town where she went to school, and she was so pleased to see him that she didn’t object to being away from the city for a few more hours. They walked from the train station to the movie theater, down the sidewalk lined with patches of gray ice, and saw
Friday the 13th Part VII,
sharing a bag of Twizzlers. When they emerged from the theater, it was dark outside. Two guys skating down the middle of the street cut over to the curb when they saw Johnny, calling, “Mr. Clean!” Turned out they’d met in the city, at a show at the Ritz. They talked for a few minutes, comparing tattoos, while Eliza watched the traffic pass by. One of them wanted
DRUG FREE
across his knuckles. Or maybe
STR8 EDGE
? Johnny told him to stop by.

“Must be nice,” Eliza said after they’d ordered at the Italian restaurant next door, “to be known by everyone.”

Anyone who needed a tattoo, or a double tape deck, or space to practice, went to Johnny. He would have made a fine drug dealer. Last fall he had organized a benefit show in Tompkins Square Park, with eleven bands and food donated by the Krishna temple. And last weekend, some band from California he’d met through the mail—the
mail
—had crashed at his apartment, four guys and another four roadies. Eliza had knocked on the door early the next morning to find them sprawled out over every surface, tangled in and out of blankets, in boxers of every imaginable pattern and color. She had never felt so full of desire and so undesirable, pregnant in a gray Harvard T-shirt big enough to be a dress, standing before ten half-naked boys.

“I might as well have been invisible to those guys out there,” she said. “Do I really look pregnant?”

Johnny unwrapped his silverware and pressed his paper napkin neatly to his lap. “Don’t take it personally. They’re probably not into girls.”

Eliza studied the tablecloth. She aligned her fingers in the red and white squares, as though she were playing piano. “What about you, though?” she asked.

“What about me?”

She looked up. He was leaning on the edge of the table, his chin cupped in his hand, scoring her with his watery blue eyes. She was staring back so hard, hunting for a fragment of Teddy, that she had to drop her eyes again. “I mean, we know how
I
got here.” She patted her stomach.

“I don’t need to know the details.”

“Well,
I
do. Come on, Johnny. We’re friends?”

Johnny cleared his throat. “We are.”

She leaned across the table. Dean Martin was singing “That’s Amore.” A white-haired couple was seated two tables down, each poring over a paperback. “So are you really going to wait till you’re married,” she whispered, “or what?”

“Eliza—”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, I’m a walking advertisement for abstinence. I just mean—”

“What makes you think I haven’t . . . ?” Johnny showed his empty palms, then turned them over on the table. Through the ink on his bony hands grew the finest blades of gold hair.

“Oh.”

“Just because . . .”

“Oh. Wow, Mr. Clean. You’re full of surprises. I just figured, you know . . .”

“I mean, I’m not a freak,” Johnny said, avoiding her eyes. “I’m, you know, as red-blooded as the next guy.”

“Sorry. It’s none of my business.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I mean, Teddy—I can see why he liked you.” He managed a smile, and now it was Eliza who couldn’t look him in the eye. “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, okay? You look great.”

They were walking back to the train station to catch the nine-forty-five to New York when he said, as though he’d just remembered to mention it, “So when your mom finds out you’re pregnant, I think we should tell her I’m the father.”

He was carrying her backpack over one shoulder, like a schoolboy walking her home. She stopped, and he turned to face her. She was about to spout something smart-ass, but she stopped herself.

“You do?”

Johnny shoved his hands in his pockets. “People are going to notice soon. They’ll want to know who the father is. There’s no way your mom is going to let you keep the baby if she knows the situation.” Eliza said nothing. She nodded. “So this is the best way. This way we’ll be twice as strong. We’ll tell her we
both
want to keep the baby.” His voice was soft, apologetic, but he was sure of himself.

“But will we?”

The old couple from the restaurant tottered slowly down the sidewalk, propping each other up. Eliza and Johnny stepped aside until they passed by.

“What we’ll do is we’ll say”—he put his hands on her shoulders—“we’ll say we’re together. A couple.”

“We’ll
say
we are?”

“Well, maybe we should be.” Johnny shrugged, glancing out at the traffic, as if suggesting maybe they should get dessert. “I want to help raise this kid. Why not do it together?”

Eliza stared into the blank screen of his white T-shirt. When she didn’t answer, he placed his finger under her chin and tilted her head slowly, slowly up until her eyes met his, the way a parent will prepare a child for a reprimand, or the way a man will prepare a woman for a kiss. It had been a long time since anyone had touched her so intently, and a hot little hummingbird quivered in her chest.

“Okay,” she whispered. But he didn’t kiss her.

By the time they took their seats on the train, she was so exhausted, so thoroughly confused, that she fell asleep against Johnny’s shoulder, and although Jude had been in and out of her thoughts all evening, it wasn’t until the next morning, when he called her at her mom’s, more than a note of panic in his voice, that it occurred to her he might have been waiting for her the day before, at Penn Station, a bag of sugared peanuts in his hand.

“Johnny didn’t tell you? He picked me up in Jersey.”

“He didn’t tell me anything. I went to his place and he wasn’t there. I went to the station and you weren’t there.”

Eliza sat up in bed. She slipped her hand under her nightgown and over her stomach. She said she was sorry. She said she didn’t know. She told him about Johnny’s idea, relating the details as they came back to her, aware of the stony silence accruing on the other end of the line. “It’s the best thing,” she said, “don’t you think?”

J
ude skipped temple the next day. He told Johnny he had a headache. Instead he went to Johnny’s, sat down on the couch, and picked up
The Laws of Manu
. A new set of passages was marked by the envelope and underlined in blue ink.

59. On failure of issue (by her husband) a woman who has been authorised, may obtain, (in the) proper (manner prescribed), the desired offspring by (cohabitation with) a brother-in-law or (with some other) Sapinda (of the husband).

60. He (who is) appointed to (cohabit with) the widow shall (approach her) at night anointed with clarified butter and silent, (and) beget one son, by no means a second. . . .

63. If those two (being thus) appointed deviate from the rule and act from carnal desire, they will both become outcasts, (as men) who defile the bed of a daughter-in-law or of a Guru.

“What’s with this voodoo shit?” he asked when Johnny came home, a full three hours after the ceremony had ended. Jude had been dozing on the couch, and now he did have a headache. He held up the book. “Fucking clarified butter?”

Johnny dropped his tattoo case and placed a styrofoam container of leftovers on the record crate in front of Jude. “It’s all that was left.”

“You got it for me?”

Johnny crossed to the kitchen and brought back a fork. “You can have it.”

Jude, in fact, had not had dinner. He removed his retainers, opened the box, and began efficiently to eat, unhappy with himself for being hungry. Johnny returned to the kitchen sink, the single sink in the apartment, and dispensed a caterpillar of toothpaste on a toothbrush.

“Did Eliza go with you?” Jude asked, his mouth full of naan.

“She did. She likes that voodoo shit.” Johnny jammed the toothbrush in his mouth. “She’s a spiritual person.” He cleaned his teeth with a ritual fervor that involved both arms, his eyebrows, and his hips. A yeasty lather of Colgate drooled down his chin.

“Where have you been, though? It’s like midnight.”

Johnny turned to the sink, spat, and rinsed his mouth. When he faced Jude again, a spot of toothpaste had blossomed over the heart of his T-shirt, white on white. Jude pointed it out.

“I had a house call.” Johnny peeled off the shirt and tossed it into the empty laundry basket. Across the rather pale, rather hairless plain between his nipples, Krishna was playing his flute. This among rubies and sapphires, ocean and fire, sinuous Sanskrit dictums the meaning of which Jude did not know,
X
s and more
X
s,
TRUE TILL DEATH
hanging from his clavicle like the iron plates of a necklace, none of which Jude had glimpsed but through the tissue of Johnny’s T-shirt, though he wondered now if Eliza had.