The Hunger Moon (28 page)

“See you,” she echoed. Whatever chemistry they had had between them was as flat as an old soda now. His smiles and winks came across as sleazy to her; she couldn’t believe that a few weeks ago she was actually charmed by them.

W
HEN SHE GOT OFF WORK
, the moon was nowhere to be found. The city lights drowned the stars, if there were any. She hadn’t called Bryan on her break, and wasn’t sure exactly what she would find at home.

He was watching an old war movie, his feet up on her coffee table next to a pizza box and two empty Coke cans.

“Hey,” he greeted her.

“Hi. How was he?”

“Fine. He ate cereal and carrots, played around a little, had a bottle and fell asleep watching TV with me. He didn’t wake up when I put him to bed.”

Renata flinched. She and June had always gotten Charlie to drop off to sleep in his crib. Now Bryan was going to undo all his good habits by hypnotizing him with the television. But she kept her criticism to herself and tiptoed into the nursery to see Charlie lying pressed up against the rails, curled on his stomach with his rump in the air. Bryan had him dressed only in a diaper and a T-shirt, even though the room was cool. She pulled the blanket up around his shoulders and kissed the back of his head. Charlie rolled over and began moving his lips. Renata picked up the pacifier and slipped it into his mouth just as he was beginning to sputter into a cry. As soon as he latched on to the rubber nipple, his body went limp again with sleep.

“Okay?” Bryan asked, looking at the screen instead of her. He had removed his feet from the coffee table.

“Sure. Thanks. You didn’t have to order out, you know. I told you there was food.”

“Yeah, I know. But I didn’t feel like making anything. This was easier.”

“How’s the job going?” she asked him, sitting down in the arm-chair opposite. She wished he would turn the television off or at least down, but he kept staring at it.

“It’s okay. Tending bar is tending bar.”

Renata noticed his camera lying on the kitchen counter. “Did you take some pictures of the baby?”

“Yeah, practically a whole roll.”

He didn’t elaborate and Renata didn’t press. She was a little hurt that for almost a month he had been taking pictures of Charlie and had given her none. She was too proud to mention it, but it seemed almost intentionally cruel.

“Were you late today?” he asked, finally looking at her.

“A few minutes.”

“Sorry. I’ll be earlier tomorrow.”

“Well, I’m sorry I was such a bitch about it. I was tense today for some reason.”

“New sitter,” he said, grinning.

“You can’t baby-sit your own child. I mean, you can’t call it that.”

“He is mine, isn’t he? It’s just beginning to sink in, that this isn’t some sort of vacation. That he’s really my son.”

Renata didn’t quite know what to make of this comment. Was he thinking of leaving them?

“You had nine months to think about it, and then you had the birth and all. You must have been able to ease into it.”

That wasn’t exactly how she would describe it, the sweaty July day she pushed Charlie into the world, feeling like it would tear her in two. It wasn’t how she felt staring amazed at him in his bassinet afterward, either. The shock of him stayed with her for weeks. There was no easing into it.

She shrugged. “I guess. You getting cold feet?”

“No, of course not. It’s just that it feels weird to wake up to, some days. It would be different if we had lived together first and then split up. It’s just kind of tough never to have been under the same roof with him.”

They let that one drift, hanging in the air between them. Bryan picked up his pizza box and cans and carried them to the kitchen.

T
HE NEXT FEW DAYS HE WAS ON TIME
or even a little early, and they settled into a routine, as Renata had done with June. Charlie seemed content, except for his general angst over all the places he would like to go but couldn’t quite manage to, his crawling still in neutral gear. Renata grew used to having Bryan around again. They traded stories about customers they waited on, trying to top each other with outrageous caricatures, just like before. She told him stories about the pregnancy, and the natural-labor classes she took with Marcia, even showing him a picture Marcia had snapped of her in the ninth month. In it, Renata was wearing a striped maternity bathing suit in the backyard, and Jess was
spraying her with the garden hose. Some of the drops had gotten on the camera lens, so the effect was that of seeing Renata’s swollen body through bleary eyesight. Bryan asked to keep it, and she was surprised but said yes, feeling a pang for him over the phases of Charlie he had missed.

One night after she arrived home, and Bryan had his usual feet and Coke cans on the coffee table as he watched TV, he asked her to tell him about Charlie’s delivery, and she sat there for a moment, trying to get back to it.

She remembered labor to be like riding ocean waves with your body: at first the waves were spaced, so you could keep up with them if you concentrated. Then the contractions got rougher, but you could still pretty much hang in there and arrive at the other side with your wits about you, though you had less and less energy to fight with. Toward the end you were rolled over by waves so enormous you couldn’t even see them coming; they slammed you to the bottom with a viciousness that almost shattered you there. At the dark bottom you had no idea which way the air was, or when you would be released. You knew that nothing you could do would slow this thing down or make it stop. It was just a matter of hoping you wouldn’t die, or hoping you would, and feeling yourself at the mercy of the force that ground you to the bottom again and again. Finally, the thing spit you out of its jaws, and you lay sprawled there, abandoned by it. Except now there were two of you.

She tried her best to describe it, and after a silence Bryan said, “I wish I could have been there.” The way he said it was not accusing but wistful, and Renata felt again that she had unwittingly stolen from him something she couldn’t give back.

“I’m sorry, Bryan,” she said, meaning it.

O
N
S
ATURDAY THE TWENTY-FIFTH
, he arrived with a flat package wrapped in brown paper. He put it on the table and said, “Happy birthday.”

She was astonished that he remembered. She scarcely had herself,
running errands all day with Charlie. She was twenty-seven today. About a year ago she had left Bryan, and a year before that she had met him. Who could have said that the day she let him buy her a margarita at that restaurant in Malibu would be the day the cosmos started working to create Charlie? And the day that Renata and Bryan would be forever tied in some way no one could undo.

She opened the package before she left for work, and found an album of matted black-and-white prints of herself and Charlie. The first one in the collection was the snapshot she had given him of herself pregnant in Marcia’s backyard, but Bryan had somehow copied it and enlarged it, printing it in black and white. The water-smeared lens gave the photo a dreamlike aspect, as if Renata were made of some element other than flesh and bone as she stood there with long white arms and legs, and huge pregnant belly, warding off the spray of the garden hose. The other eleven prints were taken during moments when Renata had not even realized she was being photographed. Bryan’s camera had been so ubiquitous that she had soon learned to ignore it. Renata got to see for the first time just what the bond between herself and her son looked like: Charlie nursing at her breast, their eyes locked; Renata down on hands and knees trying to get him to crawl, the two of them grinning at each other; Renata leaning back to avoid being splashed as she kneeled beside the tub to bathe him. She was surprised at how professional the work was. The pictures glowed with suffused, complex light, and the printing was so crisp that she and Charlie seemed revealed in the photos as their essential selves.

“This is terrific, Bryan. You’re really good at this.” She was so happy to have the pictures that the photo she was staring at misted over. She had a million pictures of Charlie, but almost none of her holding him.

“They’re not bad, are they,” he agreed, pleased. “Of course I had to take a lot to get these good ones. I’ve got some other shots here in the envelope that didn’t make the album, but that you might like to have.”

She took them with her to work to look at on her break, and pulled them out over dinner. She was startled by some pictures of herself and Charlie taken at a distance, presumably when Bryan had been watching them before he announced his presence in town. He had used a telephoto lens to shoot a couple of pictures of Charlie as he sat in the stroller glaring into the winter sun. The photos had the look of being taken by a sly journalist, with Renata’s blank expression unconscious of the photographer, and their blown-up faces slightly grainy, like newsprint. Then came a few pictures of Eleanor carrying Charlie, ones Bryan must have taken that Saturday as he followed her. She was stooped with the baby’s weight, and the telephoto zeroed in mercilessly on her anxious, confused face. There was one of her sitting on the curb, just as Bryan had said he had found them, an image of a thin old woman wrapping her arms around a shawled infant. The background was obscure. The photo could have been taken anywhere, anytime, a picture of a forlorn refugee. As disturbing as it was, it was a stunning picture. Renata found she could barely look at it. She doubted Bryan was taunting her with the photo; he simply wanted her to see his work. She had been too absorbed in worrying about Charlie and in the tumultuous feelings accompanying Bryan’s appearance to give much thought to Eleanor’s fear on that day. Now she saw it before her, and it made her ashamed of her self-centeredness.

Driving home through the quiet streets, she felt restless, too keyed up to be alone; she realized she wanted Bryan to stay with her that night.

It was not just the fact of her birthday that made her want him to stay over. It was how everything had lately shifted, her balance becoming counterpoised against his presence. It was the queer way they were and were not a family; it was Charlie’s new habit of raising his hands to be picked up and given a ride whenever Bryan entered the room; and now these photos—evidence of how closely he looked, how well he had seen the two of them. Right now she longed for someone to know her, someone whom she had a
little history with. The fact that she had spent only a year with Bryan seemed insignificant next to the fact that together they had made Charlie. They had changed each other’s life; what more can you know about a person than that?

W
HEN SHE LET HERSELF INTO THE APARTMENT
, Bryan was dozing on the couch. His expression was one of almost wounding sweetness, the way Charlie’s was in sleep. Renata turned off the television, and the silence startled him awake. He rose to his elbows and looked at her, his eyes opaque and blank for an instant. Then he stretched and rubbed his face.

“Already?” he yawned.

Renata smiled. “It’s twelve-thirty.” She kicked off her shoes and sat down to put her feet up on the coffee table, nudging aside an empty beer bottle with her toe. Maybe she would have one, too.

Bryan swung himself up to a sitting position. The cushion had imprinted a line from his eye all the way down the side of his face, as if he had been scarred in a street fight. His flannel shirt was unbuttoned at the neck, and she could see how he still had some tan from California, slightly orange in this light. Her eyes kept straying back to that little triangle of skin; she used to know every part of him.

Renata had never had to seduce anyone. She had always been the one to say,
Maybe
;
we’ll see; well, okay
. Now it seemed to her that Bryan should somehow fathom her willingness, should cross the room and need to ask no questions.

Instead he rose to get his coat.

“Um, Bryan?” She suddenly felt that if he left now, they would forever be watching each other from separate places. Like looking at someone in his car stopped next to you at a light.

“Yep. Do you know what did I with my hat? I thought it was right here.”

Renata saw the hat on the floor beside the couch. She twirled a lock of hair.

“Would you like to stay and have a drink? For my birthday?” She felt cheap adding that, but she could see how he already had momentum toward the door, and thought she needed to throw out whatever ballast she could to slow him down.

He looked at her, and it seemed to her that his expression was the wrong one, his face softening in the wrong way.

“Oh, jeez, Renata …”

She felt herself close up, as surely as if she were one of those anemones in the glass tank at the restaurant, pulling their little spears of flame into a puckered fist meant to pass for a rock.

“Not tonight, okay? I mean, I know it’s your birthday and all, but I didn’t think—”

“That’s okay.”

“It’s just that I promised to meet someone.”

“Look, forget it. I’m wiped out, anyway. Your hat’s over there,” she added, pointing.

“We could do it another time.”

“Sure, fine.”
Just leave
, she thought.

The door closed behind him and she lay faceup on the sofa where he had been. It was still slightly warm from his body. Of course he had a girlfriend by now. Men didn’t just wait around for months without finding someone. She felt a comforting anger begin to build. He probably had had two or three lovers in the year they had been apart. How dare he appear on her doorstep and pretend to be all wronged and outraged? As if her leaving him had been even a minor blip in his life. Well, fuck him. She had erased him once, and she could do it again.