She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me (7 page)

Priscilla was in the kitchen. “You like her?” I whispered.

“You already asked me that about every time I see her. Look, you're the guy's in love. I'm only the guy who sees what you see in her.”

“Thanks.”

“The rest is your own business, pal.” He didn't believe in keeping his voice down. “Yeah, I like her.”

She was in the kitchen a long time. Mingus was with her, and quiet. I headed for the kitchen to help with whatever she was doing.

Priscilla was on her knees, head down, lovely tail up, arms flailing with a dishcloth. Mingus was very quiet, whimpering guiltily. Priscilla was wiping at wettish dog doo on the floor. “Damn!” I said. “Let me get him in here to do that—the goddamn mutt—he said he'd be housebroken.”

She looked up, her face purple, and said, “No! No! He'll be so embarrassed.”

“Ought to be, come in and clean it up—”

“No! He's your friend—”

I stared. I was so amazed I didn't take the wet dishcloth away from her to scrub the floor myself. Something in me may not have wanted to scrub dogshit after a good meal, dessert on its way but delayed by puppy circumstances. But cleaning up wasn't what I thought of first; seemed to be an instinct I lacked. I was still thinking Alfonso should do it. “You're gonna be pissed with me—”

She looked up again. “Later maybe,” she said, “not now.” And then she thought it through. “Yes. Later.”

Maybe this was the evening when romance began to turn domestic. Maybe marriage, that's what it is or comes to be, complications of who cleans up what and why. Priscilla should have said what she wanted. Dan should have known what she wanted. If Alfonso wasn't doing the cleaning, I should have done the cleaning. The sure thing, surest of all, was that Priscilla should not have been down on her hands and knees wiping away at a yipping puppy's wet and runny plumbing error.

In a dream later I grabbed Alfonso's dear face, rubbed his nose in Mingus shit. A person can rethink history in dreams, but that doesn't do anything about it. Alfonso never knew how he once stood at the turning point.

When Mingus and Alfonso left, after he said her flan was sure different from any previous custard in his life, Priscilla started to put things away, I washed the dishes, we shut down the lights and double-locked the door. She was pregnant. Sometimes nowadays we didn't have sex but just went to bed, went to sleep, snuggled a little and grunted, turned over. But always the lovemaking was at least present in our bed. This time it wasn't.

It'll be there tomorrow, I thought.

In fact, it was there tomorrow and I could forget about a little domestic nonoccurrence. But something was started, there was a precedent. It could be said our marriage was becoming normalized.

“Hey, whyncha at least say goodnight?”

“I said goodnight.”

“Kiss?”

Long wait. Slow breath. Stranger sleeping alongside.

*   *   *

When Jeff was born, he wasn't just our baby, our son, the hyphen between us forever. A new world had been created. We were discovering a world others had explored before us—even the greedy vanity of new parents could admit that—but I was Columbus in that delivery room in Children's Hospital, and as I watched a knee appear between Priscilla's legs—it was actually a dear bald head, with a few stringy wet black hairs—the nurse faded to my left in a clever delivery-room maneuver, ready to catch me if I fainted.

I didn't. Priscilla, wan, face and hair drenched, defenseless it seemed, said, “We did it.”

“Thank you, thank you,” I said, sobbing. Even in the turmoil of childbirth she remembered good manners and said “we.” And maybe it wasn't only good manners; she meant that
we
had done it together, were doing it, would do it. Oh welcome to the world, sweet son. And to parents who love each other.

Not even then forgetting that the world is a place crisscrossed with nerves meant to be tickled, Priscilla asked sweetly, eyelashes still wet with tears, “Darling … now say—”

“What?”

“Dan. Now say, Thank you, ma'am.”

Welcome to your family forever, Jeff.

Chapter 7

I watched her from our bed. Maybe she thought I was sleeping. She stood before the full-length mirror, briskly drying herself after a morning shower, no nonsense about it, humming under her breath in the new day, bidding pearly droplets of water to be gone. Then she stopped and stared. She liked what she saw in the mirror. She eased off in her scrubbing, she slowed down. It was a pleasantness to continue the work of probing crannies for moisture that came from outside the universe of her body. She noted herself with interest, worthwhile changes after childbirth, worthwhile resilience. She was at peace with the mirror and in life.

I admired her ass as she bent to dry between her toes. I admired it partly because she also loved it; blessed soul, free of doubt; blessed lady, ass in the air.

Then she straightened up and saw me watching. She smiled into the mirror. “Jeff's still asleep,” she said. “Second time he slept through three nights in a row.”

“What a considerate lad.”

“Knows the worn-out parents need their rest.” And she wriggled back into bed, careful in so doing to awaken me thoroughly.

*   *   *

I may have seen more clearly before early cataracts began to bathe everyday matters in mist and glow. Calcified shell hasn't yet blacked out the lens, no clogged duct or glaucoma, but that common disease of age, call it pernicious memory, slides a series of tinted postcards into the collector's album. Nostalgia sneaks into daydream like a preview of deteriorating eyes. Vitamin E capsules, yellow fish oil, are supposed to eat up the impurities, oozing off with their cargo of calcification. They can't sweep away the past.

No ripened cataracts yet, no glaucoma—it's a case of Retroactive Clairvoyance.

There's Dan Kasdan on the bus heading down Columbus to a dental checkup when he sees long-legged Priscilla, hair reddish golden in the sparkly North Beach midday sun, striding along with Jeff bobbing up and down in the baby pack on her back. Jeff is a few months old, still a bald young person, but already my brilliant son has learned to laugh when he is jiggled. Priscilla's walk jiggles this fine upstanding little fellow, his paws clinging like a monkey's, his hair getting ready to sprout through his scalp, the future on its way.

“Hey!” I cry out, too loud, an emergency appeal to the bus driver. “Let me out! That's my wife and kid!”

The driver says, “Man, this ain't a family unification service.”

“That's my wife.”

“Not doubting your word, man. This ain't the stop.”

Everyone on the bus is laughing except the Chinese passengers, but then one man says something in Cantonese. White ghost begs to leave in violation of transit system regulation orders because of wish to share rice plate with his wife—probably not the precise translation from the Cantonese here—and now the Chinese travelers are also shrilly laughing and poking each other. We are in the middle of an all-American new-father city bus melee.

“Man, this ain't the rules, but I'll tell you what I'm gonna do—”

He has done it already. He stopped the bus. The passengers are enjoying an urban laughter break as the husband and father is running—getting jostled by a blue VW but pushing against the fender as the stoned motorist shouts, “Groovy end run, asshole”—and yelling, “Priscilla! Priscilla!” because she disappears pretty fast when she is striding along like this, even with a baby on her back. And she hears me and we kiss ungainly (the pack, the straps, the baby).

The bus stops again alongside us. The passengers are applauding. A black guy yells, “Gimme back my wallet!” The driver has violated the rules, but a Muni inspector might determine that he has demonstrated empathy for the potential for the blues in marriage and parenthood. Priscilla asks: “Where did you come from?”

Just more blessed luck. It was an accident. Wasn't intruding on her maternal bonding time—no, no, not this paternal dad. I kiss our son and he comments filially, “Urrggh,” a most melodious moist blending of vowels and consonants.

The smells of bus, baby, and Priscilla surrounded me. Life is good, life is the very best. Here is what I felt: Love, love, love. So I lack all proportion and cry aloud, “I love you! I love you!”

Priscilla slips me a sidelong glance of smile-suppressed forgiveness for uttering such language on the street, on Columbus in North Beach, in the full brisk light of midday and well outside the normal and appropriate marital context. But what was I doing here, performing vocabulary stretches, interfering with her sandwich at noon with her baby? The business of motherhood was a woman's earnest, dreamy hormonal work. The father's business at that hour happened to be getting his teeth cleaned.

Fuck dental hygiene.

“You'll have to pay for the appointment if you don't show up,” she says.

“I floss, I floss! I love you so much!” I answer.

“Thanks. Me too.”

As we stand on the street, then turn to go to the sandwich shop, the Minimum Daily Requirement—hippies, beatniks, newspaper readers with shreds and stems of green stuff hanging from their mouths, sprouts, lettuce, meat, avocado; Jeff still bobbling on Priscilla's back, half asleep, half giggling from the motion—she forgets to remind me again to call the dentist's office. That would be nagging repetition, the enemy of marriage—one of them. In twenty years, when her stride may be a bit slower, her hips heavier, Jeff in college and doing well, we might take a senior tea in the afternoon instead of a fast and noisy sandwich amid folks who could be defined as “denizens.” She was saying something over the noise of the shop, which didn't disturb Jeff, who was trying to get his mother hopping again. “I have an idea,” she is saying. “Dan? You want to?”

I like the sound of that.

“After we eat, because I'm real hungry,” she says.

I assent to that.

“Hey, I'd like a roast beef on rye—no mustard for me because it upsets Jeff's tummy—”

“But I can have mustard.”

“True enough, you don't make the mother's milk, you only make the father's milk—”

Where is this heading? To reproach because a woman's work is never done, even in the automated factory of lactation?

“So then I'll feed Jeff and he'll stop that bouncing, get some sleep, sack time you used to call it, World War II, didn't you? But if you come home with us, okay, I know it's the afternoon, Dan—”

Her hand is creeping from location seven to location ten, from my knee to my crotch, where the mother's fingers give a clarifying squeeze to what she finds there. A simple explanation always works.

Her voice is softer now, with the delighted energy laughter tuned all the way down. “I know it's afternoon and you've got to do the work of the world, and you always get sleepy afterward too, just like Jeff after a feeding, but—”

“I'll call the dentist,” I say.

“So let's go home and fuck, dear man,” she answers.

The sun is high. Jeff is gurgling and jumping a little, wanting the pleasure of that long stride rocking him. My roast beef has mustard and too bad hers can't have. My happiness takes a pedantic turn, bound to correct her formulation of the program for the rest of the day: “Let's make love.”

“Sometimes I have trouble expressing myself. You've got to learn my WASP style.”

She expresses herself well enough. Under the table, well beneath the roast beef sandwich, she was squeezing what she found there. I guess I'll settle for what she gave.

*   *   *

In his high chair, propped on a telephone book for greater height, Jeff leaned forward with his little neck and his now downy head of hair, mouth open, eyes wide, as I extended the spoon of cereal, saying, “Here comes the airplane,” me buzzing like an ancient prop cropduster, and his hangar snapped it down with a fake look of surprise and we both laughed and then I did it again. Why does every father with every child play airplane with spoonfuls of mush, and why does every child gurgle happily at the father's idiot crooning? Jeff and I didn't mind sharing everyone else's family pastimes; playing airplane during the child dining procedure is part of the great chain of being. Sneakily I hoped Priscilla noticed that father and son were essential to her housekeeping arrangements.

“Jeff,” said Priscilla, “now why don't you give your father an airplane ride?”—getting it wrong deliberately—and he extended the dripping spoon and I ended with a face of Pablum.

The Kasdan Family, Open for Business. This firm under new management, Jeff's mom and Jeff's dad accepting clerical and cleanup duties as experienced, sleep-deprived partners in the merged enterprise. Jeff busy eating, drinking, shitting, and sleeping on a twenty-four-hour schedule, not excluding Sundays and holidays. The new CEO, Mr. Jeff, doesn't bother to wonder how he got into this. The father accepts conditions he had not anticipated. The unearned perfect intimacy of family, like sunlight, doesn't need discussion. Pride happens. Contentment happens. The years happen. The mother begins to wonder if this is what her life was supposed to be.

*   *   *

And here is what I feel now: Love, love, love, horrible desolation and regret, love.

We make love and say to each other, “Yes … Yes … Oh yes … Yes,” and then the baby is crying when we get out of the bath together.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she says to Jeff as she picks him up, holds him to her breast, and he subsides into happy feeding sucks. I lie near the other breast, dozing, loving the Chinese on the bus, loving the bus driver, loving Jeff, loving Priscilla. Even daring to say yes to myself as I pick up clothes blown hurricane-style around the bedroom, one of my socks miraculously planted inside one of the legs of her silken panties. Pale sweet silk, smelling of her sweet strong stride. Yes for sure, forever and ever.