Baby Love (4 page)

In the end Mark was not present for his son’s birth. Sandy’s labor lasted fourteen and a half hours before the doctor told her she was ten centimeters dilated and could start pushing anytime. She had planned that when this moment came she’d focus on Mark’s eyes and that would give her strength, but Mark looked like a stranger to her in the green hospital mask, and also he looked scared, so she focused on a fluorescent bulb on the ceiling that was flickering very slightly. Then she remembers hearing Mark, as if he were far away, saying, “I think I’m going to be sick.” When they put the baby on her stomach and cut the cord, the nurse brought him back in. The doctor was stitching her up. “Jesus,” he said. “What a mess.”

There were many reasons why Ann knew this was the house she wanted. The house came completely furnished, for one thing, and while it didn’t contain any particularly valuable antiques, there were things like old tin canisters that said Bensdorp’s Cocoa and goose-down pillows and a really solid-looking Mixmaster from the forties, and a waffle iron. Mrs. Richards had died and her daughter lived in Florida, in a mobile home, and didn’t have room for anything. So except for a few pieces of silver plate and a couple of crystal candlesticks, everything was left in the house when Ann moved in. A pantry full of china: pale-green Depression glass, eight complete place settings of Fiesta ware, a Blue Willow tea set, a soup tureen with swans for handles. There were linen dish towels hand-embroidered with “R” in the corner and a purple martin house in the yard that was an exact replica of the real house. On the beds upstairs—under the mattresses, for some reason—Ann found a Dresden plate quilt and a Log Cabin quilt, both in pretty good condition. In the garage there was an old croquet set and a completely outfitted picnic basket with a huge silver thermos and blue enamel plates and cups and silverware with bone handles and a blue-and-white-checkered tablecloth. Ann found it the first time the real estate agent was taking her around. She imagined a picnic she would have, if Rupert and Trina came for a visit, with Cornish hens and homemade bread and Brie and chocolate chip cookies and watermelon. She couldn’t get that picnic basket out of her mind, and when Cassie Richards turned down her first offer on the house—$35,000—it was the thought of that picnic basket that made her say, without thinking more than half a minute, “O.K. Forty thousand.” That was nearly all the money she had—her funds are down pretty low now, and she will have to get a job soon—but Cassie Richards sent back a mailgram: Offer accepted.

Down the road from her house—less than half a mile—is the prettiest waterfall Ann has ever seen, even in a tourist brochure. People in Ashford seem to take Packers Falls for granted: it’s never crowded, even on the hottest Saturdays in August. Somebody has built a summer house right next to the falls, but it’s usually empty, the yard scattered with trash. Kids throw beer bottles against the rocks along the falls and shampoo their hair in the water, leaving empty tubes of Prell floating downstream. Even so, the water stays clear and full of trout. On a day like this the falls rush so fast Ann can hear them, standing in her driveway. She looks at her dog, asleep under the car, and feels guilty that she doesn’t play with him more. “Come on, Simon,” she says.

He’s excited—runs ahead of her, then backs up, circles so close she almost trips over him. When they reach the falls he jumps onto a rock and takes a long drink. Ann is thinking: I should do this more often. Bring a book. She follows Simon out onto the rocks and cups her hands to taste the water. She spreads her jacket on a flat rock and lies on her back, studying the stone-arch bridge that runs over this section of the brook. It’s very old, made without mortar, supported just by the tension of the stones.

She sees them then, in the shadows under the bridge: a boy and a girl on a blanket spread over the largest stone. His jeans are pushed down to his thighs and his buttocks are dead white. The girl lies still underneath him. He pulls away suddenly, his penis still erect. He holds it like a fishing pole.

Ann wishes she could leave, but she knows if she gets up Simon will come splashing toward her, and the boy and girl will see. She feels the way she used to at college, lying on the top bunk listening to Nona, her roommate, whispering to her boyfriend. Nona was very tiny and doll-like. She wore Villager skirts and Lady Manhattan blouses with only the top button undone and wrote to her parents twice a week. Ann could never believe the girl she saw getting out of bed in the morning to do her twenty-five jumping jacks was the same one she heard whispering “Fuck me” and “My cunt’s on fire” over and over through the night.

“So he orders a cheeseburger and three pepperoni pizzas to go, with fries and Cokes, and two grinders, right?” the girl is saying. “And when I bring that he says, ‘Make that three grinders and a couple side orders of cole slaw.’ So I bring him that and he says, ‘Do you have brownies?’ And you know what he leaves me? Three pennies and some Green Stamps.”

The boy has just urinated. Now he’s zipping up his pants. The girl folds the blanket very neatly, redoing the folds when she doesn’t get the corners just right. The boy brushes a leaf out of his hair. They will be gone in a minute. Ann closes her eyes. Then she hears a voice almost directly above her. The boy.

“Yeah, well, I guess that’s how some people get off.”

An engine starts, the radio comes on—it’s some punk group she doesn’t recognize. The car tears down the road, laying rubber.

No one has touched her in a year.

Carla and Greg have been together seven years now, since she was twenty-two and he was twenty-four, but they aren’t married. Greg used to suggest, every six months or so, that they go ahead and do it. “Think of the great party we could have,” he said. Carla can’t imagine leaving him, or who she would rather be with, but she doesn’t want to feel trapped either. More accurately, she doesn’t want him to feel trapped. She asks him often, doesn’t he sometimes fantasize about other women? Which of their friends, for instance? She tells him she could understand this perfectly. She tells him she would rather have him leave her than stay, anytime he starts feeling stuck.

But the truth is, they might as well be married. Greg always sleeps on the left-hand side of the bed. Carla knows not to talk to him until he has been awake twenty minutes. Greg does not pour her coffee until her English muffin is ready, and knows not to butter her muffin until it’s cold.

Sometimes, when she’s pushing her cart up and down the aisles at D’Agostino’s, Carla observes a couple in the early stages of a love affair. She can always identify these couples—the very young ones, at least, the NYU students, young actresses and musicians, recent graduates of bank training programs. For one thing, it takes two of them to choose the groceries. (Greg has not accompanied Carla to D’Agostino’s in six years.) They don’t buy twenty-five-pound bags of flour or cleanser. They buy things like artichoke hearts and the ingredients for brownies, have comical discussions about whether to get creamy peanut butter or chunk style. The man may put his hand in the girl’s back pocket as they move down the aisle—closer, even, than the crowds at D’Agostino’s necessitate. They sometimes whisper, but also they tend to make most of the other shoppers aware of their presence in the store, and while Carla finds herself feeling annoyed by the young lovers, she can tell that the housewives—the ones with babies in the front of their carts and envelopes of store coupons in their purses and red plastic bill calculators—really hate these couples.

Carla met Greg at the Museum of Modern Art, in the sculpture garden. Her friend Joan, who used to spend many nights listening to Carla tell her how lonely she was, had said museums were the best place to meet “a preselected group of sensitive men,” but that was not why Carla had come to the museum. She was just out of college and working as an assistant to an editor at a women’s magazine, writing a play at night. She liked sitting in the sculpture garden and listening to people’s conversations. They gave her ideas for dialogue.

Greg was standing in front of a very large Henry Moore of a naked woman. He was wearing neatly pressed corduroy pants but there were paint spatters on his shoes. She liked the fact that he wasn’t wearing paint-spattered pants, the way some people did who wanted you to know they were painters. He also wasn’t looking at anybody else in the sculpture garden, the way a lot of people were. He stood in front of the sculpture long enough to smoke one cigarette. When he put it out he stroked one of the naked woman’s enormous breasts. He did this very slowly, and Carla thought it was an extremely erotic gesture. She tried to think what a character in her play might say, as a way of opening a conversation with this man. She pictured herself going over to the sculpture of a naked man that stood next to the Henry Moore and patting the buttocks or stroking the penis, looking meaningfully in the direction of the painter. She wished she were dressed in an artier way, but she was wearing the black gabardine suit she had bought for her job at the women’s magazine and carrying the kind of purse her mother would use. Her mother had given it to her.

She thought she might send this man a message through extrasensory perception. She had tried this sometimes, mostly as a game, on buses—getting a man to talk to her, using just her eyes. One of these men had got off at her stop once and asked if she’d like to have a drink. A pleasant-looking man carrying a briefcase. She stared straight ahead. She is not brave or adventuresome.

Several years ago when she was coming back from Europe on the
Queen Elizabeth
(a package deal) she had met George Harrison. She was at the salad bar, trying to figure out which was the blue cheese dressing, and a thin man in an Indian shirt had leaned over and said, “I wonder if you’d like to join my friend and me for dinner.” The friend—wearing a Nehru jacket, recently returned from India—was George Harrison. He asked what she’d been doing in France and she said junior year abroad, told him about getting a flat tire on her bicycle tour of the Loire Valley and the fourteen-year-old French boy in a red beret who had fixed her bike and tried to have an affair with her. George made up a song about “
Je voudrais parler à Carla
” which was pretty good. She asked him how things seemed in Bangladesh, but did not mention the Beatles. He asked her if she’d like to come back to his room and listen to some sitar tapes. She had said—her friend Joan still can’t get over this—“I have to get up really early tomorrow” and went back to her cabin.

The painter was moving toward the door. The guard looked at her watch. In an hour Carla would be in her apartment on East Thirtieth Street stirring canned blueberries into a bowl of ricotta cheese, sitting on the floor by the TV set, watching the news. She would probably get a call from Michael, who was in his third year at Johns Hopkins medical school, was studying for his gastrointestinal exams and didn’t want her to visit until the end of the term, because it might break his concentration.

She tapped the painter on the arm. He turned around, looked interested but not (as she would be, if it happened to her) startled. She wouldn’t have done this if she had realized how handsome he was. She said, “Do you want to have dinner?”

Normally, if there was going to be a man coming over, Carla would take at least half an hour arranging things in her apartment. She would bury the magazines like
Family Circle
underneath a stack
of New Yorkers
, put something classical on the stereo, or a very unmelodic jazz album somebody once gave her that she doesn’t really like. When she came back to the apartment with Greg there was a pair of underpants on the floor in the hall (she had been late for work, dressed in a hurry, hadn’t remembered those were the ones that never stayed up). There was a three-quarters-eaten Mounds bar on the kitchen counter and a copy of the
National Enquirer
, bought for a story on Marlon Brando’s life in Tahiti.

She was not embarrassed. She was surprised to realize that she wasn’t asking a great many questions—where did he come from, what did he do, what brought him to New York, did he have brothers and sisters. He did not volunteer much, but she didn’t find the silence with him uncomfortable. She said, “Like an omelet?” He said, “Sounds good.” She put on the Rolling Stones’
Out of Our Heads
and turned on only one light. They sat on floor pillows across from each other. When he chewed she could see all the bones in his face. He smiled at her. She took off her shoes and pulled a couple of bobby pins out of her hair. He said, “Do you have any coffee?” She ground the beans while he chewed one. She put on Bob Dylan, “Lay Lady Lay,” and didn’t worry that it might seem too obvious. He put down his cigarette and moved beside her on the floor. She let the telephone ring for about a minute before it stopped. He unbuttoned her shirt and said, “How does this work?” when he couldn’t undo her bra, which hooked in the front. She had never slept with someone right off like that.

“You know who that was back at the falls?” Virgil says to Jill, after a minute. The song on the radio is “Rock Lobster.”

“Some woman that bought the house down the road from my parents,” she says. “She comes into Sal’s sometimes for a doughnut.” They don’t say anything for a minute, listening to the song.

“Why?” says Jill, grabbing at his crotch and tickling him. “Modest?”

“I’ve got to get the wheels on this thing realigned,” says Virgil. “Damn potholes.”

“You know,” says Jill, “you don’t have to pull out before you come anymore. I’m pregnant anyway.”

“Are you going to start in on that again? You’ve been hanging around too much with crazy girlfriends.”

“You’ll see,” she says, smiling.

It’s five-thirty when Greg and Carla reach Ashford. Carla takes out the envelope that has Sally’s instructions on the back. They turn onto Big Pine Road. “Now we’re supposed to watch for a waterfall,” says Carla.

A bright-orange truck tears past the Volkswagen, with a couple of teenagers inside and music blaring. “So much for the peaceful bucolic existence,” says Greg.

Then they see the brook, and up ahead, the falls and Dan and Sally’s cottage. Greg shut off the engine. Except for a young woman and a dog, just heading up the hill maybe a quarter of a mile away, there is no one, and no other house, in sight. There’s a piece of an old condom lying in the dirt. Greg gets a stick and pushes it into the woods. Carla has already gone on ahead with the bagels.