Touchy Subjects (6 page)

"OK. What the hell," said Margaret. He winced, but not so she'd notice. "We've both done it before and it didn't kill us."

Then she laughed until he laughed, too, and she came over and kissed him on the ear.

But as he was signing his name in the register—his ballpoint pressing the paper a little too hard—he knew that this time wasn't going to be like those other times. Neither he nor his first wife in DC nor Margaret nor her first husband in LA had had the slightest idea what they were really doing. This time would be the real thing, because now he knew what a promise was. Now he knew what the words meant.

To show she wasn't taking the whole thing too seriously, Margaret was wearing red. He didn't care; it looked good on her. "You can bring your God buddies if you like," she'd told him, but he said that was all right, he'd rather keep it small, just the two of them and a pastor (not Pastor Tull,just some Unitarian) and a few friends who drove down from Seattle and Vancouver.

After the ceremony he was high like he hadn't been since that time he tried cocaine at the prom. He was a bank robber who'd made it to Acapulco.

The next Sunday after church he said the word. "My wife and I are taking a vacation," he mentioned to Mrs. Keilor, and relief stabbed him through the ribs.

For their honeymoon—about ten years too late, according to his mother in San Francisco, but she sent them a check anyhow—he and Margaret were going to drive right down the West Coast. That first night in a motel in Mount Saint Helens he lay under the weight of his wife and moved and shut his eyes. It felt like he was running down the right road at last. But later when he was letting the condom slither off him, he wanted to cry.

They hiked up a volcano the next day, cinders crunching like cornflakes under their feet. Later they squatted over tide pools and saw anemones blossom like green doughnuts and purple sea urchins as big as their hands. Margaret tilted her face up to the sun while he took pictures and figured out the distances between towns.

In Eugene, Oregon, he woke up in the middle of the night and had to shake her awake. "Honey," he said urgently. Then, apologetically, "Honey, I just realized, we're meant to have children."

The words shocked his ears.

At first Margaret didn't answer, and he thought she was still asleep, till he saw the line of her jaw. Then she said, "For god's sake."

Exactly, he was tempted to say, but didn't.

In the morning he woke up to find her packing.

He stared at her knotted hands, ramming two pairs of his socks into a corner. "Who was it," Margaret asked, "just remind me who was it who talked me out of it all those other times?"

"You were never sure—," he began.

"That's right, I wasn't sure, but you sure were." A little bead of spit on her lip caught the sunlight. She plucked up another pair of socks but didn't put them in the bag. "Who was it always told me it would be madness to go off the Pill? Who was it said we'd lose all our freedom, tie ourselves down?"

His throat felt like it was full of wadding. He cleared it. "Guess everybody gets tied down one way or another."

Margaret's hands were jammed into the pockets of her silky dressing gown; her nails were stretching the seams. "Who was it kept saying he wasn't ready?"

"I don't know," he said, nearly whispering. "I don't know who that guy was." There was a silence so complete he could hear the chambermaid vacuuming at the other end of the motel. "But I'm different now."

"You can say that again." She stared at him; her eyes were hard as hazelnuts. "You're on another planet."

"I'm finally ready," he pleaded.

"Oh yeah?" Her voice was bigger than the room. "Well I'm forty-two, so you and your friend Jesus can go to hell."

It took them two days to drive home. Awhile before they stopped for a burger on the first day he thought Margaret was crying, but she was looking out the window so he couldn't be sure. At the motel he called his mother and told her there'd been an emergency at work and he'd been called back. She'd always been able to tell when he was lying, but she didn't say so.

When they pulled into their driveway at the end of the second day, Margaret laid her hand on his thigh and said, "OK."

He wasn't sure what it meant. Pax? Or, this marriage is over?

"OK," she said, "let's give it a shot."

She got pregnant twice before the end of the year, which he took as a good sign. The first one made it to two months, the second to five. That one was a boy. He made the nurse give him the little body, for burial. Quite a few people from the Church of Jesus Our Lord turned up, though Margaret didn't come back with them for the chicken supper afterwards, which everybody said was understandable.

The strange thing was that he had known the boy wouldn't make it to term. At the funeral it was like there was cotton wool round his heart, keeping the pain at bay. He and Margaret were going to have a girl; he just knew it.

He didn't mind waiting a little while longer so Margaret could build her strength up before trying again. It felt strange to be buying rubbers—in a drugstore in the next town, so no one from the church would see him—but he thought Jesus probably wouldn't have a word to say about it, under the circumstances.

On Christmas Eve he asked Margaret to come to church with him, just for once. On the way home she said, "One last shot, OK?" as if she were talking about pinball.

That night as he came his legs shook like bowstrings. His mind swam inside her. He could almost see the egg, glowing at the end of the dark tube; he registered the shock when the single chosen sperm, blindly butting, felt the membrane give way and seal him in.

The next day he started making a list of girls' names. He kept the list in the glove compartment so as not to annoy Margaret, who didn't believe in counting chickens.

Nothing happened till March, when Margaret started throwing up her Cheerios and smiling at strangers. "Third time lucky," he told her on the way home from the ultrasound. His head was so full of a single image—the tiny curled chipmunk that was going to be their daughter—that he could hardly see the road. The nurse said you couldn't be sure so early, but yes, it did look kind of like a girl.

"Laura?" he suggested, idling at a traffic light. "Leona? Lucy?"

"We'll see," said Margaret, smiling. And then, "The light's changed."

As the time went by, he bloomed. It was no hardship, he found, to be patient with a pushy new guy at work. When Margaret's strange uncle who picked his nose came to town, they put him up on the sofa bed for a whole week. Prayer was easy; he'd never had so much to say.

Margaret, on the other hand, was getting more wired by the month. She wouldn't let her forty-third birthday be celebrated in any way, not even dinner out, not so much as a bunch of flowers or a card. The bigger she grew, the more substantial their future seemed to him, and the less she seemed able to believe in it. He wondered if she was frightened about the birth; it did seem to him a terrible prospect, and he cracked a joke about how the human race would soon die out if women were as cowardly as men.

Margaret didn't laugh.

"You'll have to trust God, hon," he said, a little nervously, as he knew the word made her twitch, but it was the only one he could think of.

She laughed then, and said, "I've never even met him."

He had a feeling everything would be better once they were a family. With Laura coming to church with him every week, first in one of those slings on his chest, and then in her little black patent shoes, surely Margaret wouldn't want to be left behind. It made sense that once she saw how good Jesus had been to them, she'd understand all the rest of it.

Meanwhile, she didn't understand the slightest thing he said. She was always taking offense. She thought he was looking for sex when he was just as happy stroking her belly. She said the baby kept kicking her in the ribs. One day he was playing chase-the-foot when Margaret shoved him so hard he fell off the bed.

When he got to his feet, she was laughing in that appalled way of hers. "Oh, I'm such a bitch these days," she said between snorts. "I'm so sorry, honey, I'm so sorry. I'm scared, you know?"

"Of the birth?"

"No, moron," said Margaret, still laughing. "Scared it won't happen."

He could tell she was an inch away from tears so he lay down beside her.

San Francisco should be leveled to the ground, he thought, when his mother called to tell him about her knee. It was only a little fall, but she'd rolled about twenty feet down the sidewalk till she landed against a fire hydrant.

He knew he should be there to take her home from the hospital. If there was ever a time to be a good son, this was it. But he rested his ear on Margaret's drum of a belly and couldn't lift it away.

"Get out of here," she said, pretty gently. "Those bastards owe you two weeks of vacation."

"Not now."

"Yes, now. Get out of my hair for a while. It'll be a good three months before this baby lifts a finger."

So here he was, back on the coast. By the time he passed the Oregon state line he was breathing easier, and the farther he drove, the more peaceful he felt. He took his time; he saw all the places he and Margaret had missed on their truncated honeymoon. He could feel the horizon curving around him like a hand.

It was then he started writing again. Just on beaches, at first. There was a little cove beside a lighthouse, washed clean as a slate by the morning tide. There was one small girl picking up shells on the waterline, and her family sunbathing farther up the beach. He stood staring out to sea, and all at once he knew what to write.
J
E
S
U
S
is
T
H
E
W
A
Y
, he put, in letters so big and clear they could probably be seen from a low plane. All the time he was marking them with the toe of his shoe, he was thinking of the surprise people would get when they wandered down the beach that afternoon. That's how you did it: by surprise. Minds were like mussels: You shouldn't try to force them open; it was better to catch them at an idle moment and slip inside.

He was just finishing the
Y
when he noticed the little girl's mother. She was standing at a distance, reading the words upside down. When his eyes met hers, she grabbed the child's hand and hurried back up the beach.

It gave him an odd feeling, as if she thought he was some kind of pervert or something. But you couldn't expect people to understand if they hadn't gone down their road to Damascus yet. That's all he wanted: to give people a glimpse of it, to throw strangers a split second of the joy that was filling him up these days so he hardly needed to eat except for a bag of grapes in the car.

Whenever he got a surge of happiness, he wanted to ring Margaret, but she'd said the sound of the phone was getting on her nerves these days, and he knew she needed a break from him, so he sent her postcards instead. He told her things he'd never thought to mention before. "Did you know you are the most beautiful woman in the world?" he wrote on a picture of a glacial lake, and "I love you more every day," on a shot of a leaping salmon.

Words were pouring out of him. He was a bit shocked with himself, the day he wrote on a wall outside Portland. He hadn't done a thing like that since he was a kid. But this wall already said
D
O
N
T
M
E
S
W
I
T
H
T
H
E
M
O
F
O
B
O
Y
Z
,
L
O
L
A
S
U
C
K
S
D
I
C
K
, and
M
E
N
U
4
E
V
E
R
'03,
so he felt he could only improve it by adding
J
E
S
U
S
S
A
V
E
S
with a little can of white spray paint he got at the corner hardware store.

Then, when he was walking through a grove of old-growth redwoods the next afternoon, his heart started to knock like a rattle. The forest was bigger than the biggest cathedral, but humans had had no share in the building. He felt like an insect. The trees were wider than he was tall, and taller than anything; all he could hear was a lone woodpecker. At one point where a huge tree had fallen across the path, the rangers had cut a section away to let walkers through. On the weathered wood, ridged by the chain saw, someone had cut
A
N
G
I
E
L
O
V
E
S
J
E
F
F
. He couldn't resist; he took out his Swiss army knife and carved the words
J
E
S
U
S
L
O
V
E
S
us
A
L
L
.

These days Laura was so clear in his mind that he could nearly see her, running along beside him. When he rented a gas lantern to go down an old lava tube, clambering down from the glare at the tunnel mouth into the cooling darkness, he promised himself that he'd bring her here someday. Haifa mile in, where the floor was slick with ice and the roof of the cave reached its highest point, he'd hold the heavy lantern up to show her the ridges and grooves the lava had left when it flowed away, the tiny kiss shapes of its final drops. Then he'd turn off the lantern for a minute and she'd yelp with fright, but she'd grip his fingers and know that everything was going to be all right.