1
They drove to the hospital at dusk in a slanting rain, the radio announcer forecasting possible light showers throughout the coming week, his voice feebly optimistic. For the previous thirty-seven hours they had been laboring at home. Benjamin was revising a review talk he had co-written on the early stages of massive star formation, Zelda scrutinizing the final images for her latest series of photographs. When her water broke, the shallow, choppy pain, which she had managed until that moment to navigate with her customary stoicism, quickly turned treacherous. Contractions, one after the other, battered her pelvis and lower back, and the images on her computer screen lost their coherence, blurring into fields of rioting color. Zelda attempted the measured breathing she’d learned in pregnancy yoga class, but her focus had deserted her. Benjamin, slow-moving and cautious under ordinary circumstances, whipped the car at top speeds through a labyrinth of side streets, ignoring stop signs, one hand on the horn. As he glanced at his wife, her face deflated and wan, she seemed to retreat to a small glass house inside herself, where Benjamin could see her but couldn’t reach her.
By the time they arrived at the hospital, Zelda was shaking, each outbreath a high-pitched eruption. They plodded unsteadily through the rain toward the emergency entrance. “The suitcase,” Zelda moaned, glancing back at the car. She’d packed it weeks ago and set it by the front door; every time she left the house or returned, she touched the handle, as if for good luck. “I’ll get it later,” Benjamin said, his hands trembling, and urged her along the path.
Thirty-seven hours and Zelda had dilated only four centimeters. The midwife recommended a warm bath. Benjamin knelt at the side of the tub, anxious, envious, though of what he didn’t know. The couple held hands, breathing together while the midwife poured water over Zelda’s belly. One hour, two, rippled through the tub and down the drain, cooling water replaced by a hot torrent from the faucet. During every contraction, Zelda flailed and struggled for breath, as though she were drowning. She would occasionally glance at Benjamin from the glass house, her expression so nakedly beseeching he felt a powerful urge to break down and sob. Only a steely exertion of will prevented him from begging the midwife to make the right adjustment, perform the right procedure, utter the right incantation, to make it stop.
As soon as the midwife rechecked Zelda’s cervix, she concluded that the labor had stalled. “Stalled?” they said and shook their heads. Nothing in their lives had ever stalled. Perhaps a mild narcotic, the midwife suggested, to take the edge off the pain and allow the labor to progress. “The birth plan,” Zelda murmured, close to tears. They had penned a lengthy document prohibiting the use of all unnecessary medical interventions. “Forget the plan,” Benjamin called through the glass. A nurse injected Zelda with Demerol and strapped a fetal monitor to her belly. Violent shudders swept through her during every contraction, and she whimpered, her breathing turbulent. Benjamin offered her ice chips and encouragements, just as they had practiced, but Zelda had withdrawn so far inside the glass house she no longer appeared to hear him.
When the midwife positioned Zelda on all fours to reduce the strain on her back, the baby’s heart rate suddenly plunged, indicating fetal distress. More interventions were necessary, the midwife informed them, or they would be buying themselves a one-way ticket to the operating table. With his wife’s tearful permission Benjamin gave the go-ahead, his heart banging away. An anesthesiologist materialized. Within minutes a glucose drip snaked from Zelda’s arm, an epidural from her spine, nose and mouth covered by an oxygen mask. Zelda wept silently behind the mask. Her body had failed.
When the pain faded, Zelda removed the mask and smiled in relief at Benjamin, a wide, quivering smile. The glass house receded, though Benjamin sensed it nearby. After the baby’s heart rate had stabilized, the midwife ordered Pitocin added to the IV, to ensure that the labor progressed. “Get some sleep,” she advised and left them alone.
Benjamin wedged himself into the hospital bed. They shared the bed’s single pillow, their bodies pressed together, blanket pulled up to their chins, breathing in unison with the electric peal of the fetal monitor.
“This is definitely not what we had in mind,” Zelda whispered. She gazed at her husband in bewilderment and gratitude, as if he were a wish she had just been granted.
“I was scared as hell,” Benjamin said, still trembling.
“Were you? I didn’t notice. Strange. Now that we’re lying here and everything’s calm, it almost seems like it was happening to someone else.”
“You were heroic, Z.”
“Hardly.” Zelda fingered the IV tube. “We wanted natural childbirth.”
“A healthy mother and baby,” Benjamin said, parroting a phrase the midwife had used during their childbirth classes. “That’s what we wanted.”
The two of them held hands. Trying to distinguish the beat of Zelda’s pulse from his own, Benjamin remembered his mother’s definition of adventure: disaster narrowly averted. Zelda mentally improved the room’s composition. She intensified the light under the door, changed the blue of the blanket to white, spotlighted the IV bag hanging over her like a disemboweled organ, and swiveled the television screen so that it reflected the couple on the bed, the woman staring up at the window as if praying for flight.
“We’re ready for this, right?” she asked.
Benjamin forced himself to nod. “More than ready.”
The fetal monitor throbbed above their heads, in counterpoint to the staccato patter of the rain.
“Maybe the drought’s finally over,” Zelda whispered.
“We’d need a Biblical flood.” The urge to sob rose again in Benjamin’s throat, and he willed it to subside.
Zelda buried her face in her husband’s neck. “Everything’s going to change now, isn’t it?”
“I thought that was the idea.”
“I’m worried about taking so much time off.”
“Z, try to focus. We agreed. It’s just for the summer.”
“But what if we don’t like having a baby?”
“How could that be? We made it, the two of us. We wanted a family.”
“You’re right. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” The contractions registered now as a pressure vaguely reminiscent of pain. “But what if it’s deformed? Or extroverted? We might not be able to handle it.”
“Whatever happens, we’ll be together. What’s the expression? Come hell or high water.”
Zelda smiled. She still had trouble comprehending the luck that had led her to such a good man.
Benjamin squeezed her hand. Though he hadn’t left his wife’s side for nearly forty-three hours, at that moment he yearned to be closer to her.
As exhausted as they were, neither could sleep. They lay shoulder-to-shoulder and listened to their child’s heartbeat, which pulsed on, cheerful and ominous, as night submerged them into deeper night, and into the still deeper, and on through the dawn into morning, when rain-heavy light filtered into the room, and the midwife returned to examine Zelda, pronouncing her fully dilated, ready to push.
2
By the time they drove home, Benjamin at the wheel, Zelda in back beside the sleeping baby, the drought had returned, with its relentless shine. Benjamin pulled into the driveway and left the car running. As they listened to the idling engine and the wheezy whistles of the baby’s breathing, they gazed at each other in the rearview mirror.
“Do you think they made a mistake?” Benjamin asked.
“What, letting us take him home so soon after all that drama? Probably. We don’t really know what we’re doing.”
“A baby should come with an instruction manual. You wouldn’t try to operate a new telescope without the proper training.”
“Well, parenting is just another set of skills, right?”
“Oh, absolutely. We can learn anything.”
“Yes, between the two of us, that’s true.” Zelda yawned. “I’m excited, of course, but also a little anxious. That’s normal, don’t you think?”
“Totally.”
“It’s an adjustment, to go from duo to trio.”
“Yes. Now all we just have to do is get to know the little fellow.”
Zelda rubbed the baby’s pimply cheek. “He looks a wee bit undercooked, doesn’t he? We probably should have had them stick him back in for a few more weeks.”
“He’s cute,” Benjamin said, “but in an ugly kind of way. Or maybe he’s ugly but in a cute kind of way, like one of those loveable movie aliens.”
“I feel like we’ve been gone a hundred years, don’t you?”
“A million. I wonder if anyone we know is still alive.”
“Imagine the email waiting for us. I need to contact the framers.”
“We should settle into a routine before we dive back into work.”
“I know, Benj, but…”
The baby stirred, made noises like a squeaking hinge.
“Listen to him, Z. Already interrupting. Think he’s hungry?”
Zelda shrugged. For a moment she felt a strong urge to flee. “How should I know? I don’t speak baby. Do you?”
“No, sorry.” Benjamin had read about postpartum mood swings in his favorite of their baby books, INFANTS IN FACTS: The Absolute Essentials by the eminent Hungarian-born pediatrician Dr. Zoltán Mészáros, known to his devotees as Dr. Zoltán; he would definitely need to revisit this material. “I should’ve taken Baby in college. I mean, after a point, how useful is French? I haven’t spoken a word of it since our honeymoon.”
They’d married late in their thirties, much to the relief of their respective colleagues and families, who’d given up hope that either would find a suitable match. Similarly reserved and analytical in temperament, slyly deadpan, slow to anger, they both seemed destined for work-centered solitude, the fine art photographer and the astronomy professor, the spinster aunt and the bachelor uncle, content to remain on the far margins of domestic life, both eccentric, driven, and more than a little self-involved, both socially awkward, both gazing incurably elsewhere.
The baby began crying in fits and starts. Zelda tapped one breast, as if checking the ripeness of a cantaloupe. Benjamin glanced at the gas gauge—the tank was half-full—feeling not only his habitual need to take charge of any stressful situation and find an immediate solution but also an unfamiliar weightlessness.
“I guess we should go in,” he ventured.
Again, the urge to flee. “Well, we definitely can’t live in the car, right?”
Benjamin opened his mouth, closed it. If Zelda went inside first, he could simply put the car in reverse, back out of the driveway, and he and the baby could head for the highway. “I’ll take the suitcase,” he said, cutting the engine. As soon as he opened the door, a dry stillness seeped into the car.
Zelda tried to release the car seat from its base; Benjamin slammed the trunk and walked the suitcase up the footpath. Brownish yellow patches flecked the grass and the hedges along the foundation. The baby’s crying rose in pitch and volume. Finally Zelda found the latch and liberated the seat. She swiveled the handle into place with a startling snap. Benjamin waved from the front porch. Their house, with its pair of rockers and its drooping ferns, looked both familiar and foreign, like an ancestral photograph of a place they were visiting for the first time.
“I’ll take the baby,” Zelda muttered to herself. She could leave right now—no one could stop her, could they?—walk to Sherry’s, bury herself in the guest room California King for a few days, get back to her photographs. One eyelid twitched at regular intervals, like a ticking clock. She gave her husband a thumbs up through the window, the baby sobbing at full blast.
3
The timing couldn’t have been better for the arrival of a baby. It was late April, warm and dry during the day, the sun ever-present, not a cloud in sight, skies a chalky blue, nights dry and cool. Benjamin had just finished teaching and been granted a sabbatical for the fall. In mid-April he had completed the final draft of a book, Exploding Stars and Other Ways the World Might End, and he had forwarded the manuscript to his editor. Additionally, he had dispatched his final revisions to the review talk on the early stages of massive star formation to his collaborator, Dr. J. Douglas Smith, who would deliver it at the June meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New York City. Zelda had spent the first half of her pregnancy on location in a new subdivision near her neighborhood, overseeing the shoot for her latest series, a set of suburban tableaux she had titled “Cul-de-Sac.” Though nominally a photographer, she thought of herself more as an image creator, like a film director, and over the years had assembled a team to produce the shots she envisioned. In fact, she rather disliked cameras and had long ago entrusted the handling of the machinery to her director of photography. During her third trimester she was deeply engrossed in the post-production process, choosing and perfecting the final images. The work would debut in the fall, with solo shows at her Atlanta and New York galleries.
The lull in their work lives allowed the couple ample time to focus on baby Oliver and the daily miracles of his infancy. Which were manifold. His tiny, purplish hands, for instance, with their scaly fingers and their jewel-sized nails. He poked and scratched himself, curled them into fists, his grip displaying a surprising force. Sometimes he even seemed to wave at his parents, who waved back in awestruck delight. And his crying, what a strange little symphony, orchestrated with surprising subtleties of tone and dynamics, wide-ranging instrumentation, somewhat dissonant to the untrained ears of his parents, but they were learning to understand and even to appreciate it. By God, he was a marvel of helplessness, of fussiness, of softness and innocent smells, of bodily expressiveness and inarticulacy, of wonder, of pure need. Fascinating bowel sounds erupted from him unpredictably, like gunfire in a warzone. He appeared, from the first moment, to possess a distinctive personality, and at the same time he seemed completely alien. He was irritable, snuggly, attentive, quick to startle, sometimes strangely silent for long periods, often purple-faced from crying. The drama of getting to know Oliver was absorbing, wildly so, exhausting and exhilarating, a lot like falling in love.
“Was that a smile?”
They were staring at Oliver, who had awoken from one of his infrequent naps in an inquisitive mood. Rather than napping while the baby napped, as Dr. Zoltán recommended, Zelda had been attending to a flurry of email. Benjamin had fallen asleep on the sofa, his computer sleeping on his chest.
He nodded with groggy enthusiasm. “I know a smile when I see one.”
“Yes, but was it a real smile?”
Benjamin grabbed INFANTS IN FACTS. Before Oliver’s birth, the couple had forgone their Sunday paper to pore over the available literature on pregnancy and childbirth and babies.
“According to Dr. Zoltán, a baby doesn’t start smiling for real until two months of age. So that was technically what is called a reflex smile. An evolutionary development, he theorizes, to make the infant more appealing to its caregivers.”
“Well, it’s working, isn’t it? I find him very appealing when he smiles.”
“Absolutely. He’s terribly charming, our Oliver. I wonder where he got it. Neither of us is much of a smiler.”
“No. But maybe he’s trying to teach us something.”
They waited for another smile but were rewarded with a scowl.
“Oh, Benj, by the way, when does Dr. Zoltán say he’ll sleep through the night?”
“I’m pretty sure I looked this up yesterday, Z.”
“I just keep hoping if I ask enough times, you’ll tell me what I want to hear.”
“Possibly by six months. But Dr. Zoltán says there are no guarantees.”
“By six months I’ll be dead from exhaustion.”
“You should nap when the baby naps.”
“I’ve never napped in my life, and I’m not going to start now.”
Although Dr. Zoltán warned that infants didn’t follow a schedule, Zelda and Benjamin assumed that their own infant would come out as reasonable and regimented as they were; therefore, a loose schedule might be attempted. Unfortunately, Oliver seemed disinclined to follow any sort of schedule. He nursed constantly, slept sporadically, messed his diapers whenever the urge hit him, howled at random hours. They had never slept so little. Parenthood was, perhaps, aging them prematurely. Luckily they had agreed to stop at one child; another would do them in.
Then there were visitors, a non-stop pageant of relatives and coworkers marching through their living room with wrapped gifts and oohs and ahs and advice of all stripes. This show of support was gratifying to the couple but also unsettling. For one thing, they had rarely interacted with their colleagues under such personal circumstances. Now Zelda’s location scout and a physics professor from Benjamin’s department sat on the sofa, admiring Oliver’s sober countenance and predicting revolutionary artistic and scientific output from him, thirty years hence. Their relatives also began to exercise a new, unspoken ownership over them, now that a baby had arrived. As family members passed Oliver around and snapped photographs, they beamed with conspiratorial satisfaction, as if the baby had used his influence to garner for Zelda and Benjamin the familial promotion previously denied them as childless workaholics. “Look at you!” their relatives would say to the baby. “You’re so big and strong and handsome!” They preferred speaking to the baby. “You’ll make Mommy and Daddy stay home more often, won’t you? Yes, and maybe they’ll even learn to cook!”
Time passed.
Or did it? Each day spiraling around the right nipple, the left nipple, the dirty diaper, the clean diaper, the wakeful darkness, the drowsy daylight. They walked around the neighborhood, pushing Oliver in an old-fashioned pram Benjamin’s mother had insisted on buying, ambling past the crackling grass and brittle leaves. There were no clouds. They reminisced about clouds, about Oliver’s birthday storm, about sleep, the blessed oblivion, dreams. They exclaimed over Oliver’s small pinched face, his lashes like the wings of primitive insects and his lovely pucker the color of red wine and his mottled cheeks and his patchy, indecisive hair, possibly blond, possibly brunette, possibly curly, possibly straight, it was anyone’s guess. Zelda stared down at the baby’s mouth, which was pressed to the veined expanse of her breast as if he were inflating a balloon to the point of bursting, and she marveled at the natural efficiency of her equipment, no mixing, no heating, no cleanup. Benjamin felt a shiver of something like awe, or fear, and the weightlessness too, the thrill of not mattering.
Neither had spent such long, uninterrupted stretches of time away from work. Zelda considered the attentiveness they now directed toward their child a grueling form of happiness, akin to an extreme sport. Benjamin felt a strengthening of the intimacy they enjoyed as a couple, the quiet passion of their romance now anchored in sturdier bedrock. They were settling into it, into the dry summer heat, the workaday moods of their house, dishes and laundry, the baby’s unceasing demands, the teamwork, the personal opera writ small, the trivial nobility of daily life, family life, domestic life, call it what you will, they were settling into it. And the season loomed before them with its long, idle days, and work receded into the future.
4
A calm afternoon in mid-June. The time had come. Her stitches had dissolved, and the ravaged area downstairs had healed. In addition, the baby, and consequently his parents, had slept for five—five!—hours in a row the previous night. Given that the couple had spent barely an hour apart during the last seven weeks, had grown lax about grooming, and wore mainly pajamas and slippers around the house, they were not exactly ablaze with lust, but the desire for desire was alive and well.
Zelda put Oliver down for a nap and Johnny Cash on the CD player. The rose bushes in the back garden were turning brown; laundry overflowed the hamper next to the window. Benjamin stuffed the hamper inside the closet.
When he returned to bed, Zelda was lying naked on the covers. Benjamin kissed the stretch marks on her belly, Zelda stroking the scruffy hair above his neck. She sighed with pleasure, trepidation. He shucked off his pajamas, his skin already moist with the proximity of his wife’s nakedness, as if she were leaking from inside him. Mouth on mouth, chest on chest, the two of them panting, almost dizzy with desire. Or was it exhaustion? Maybe both, their limbs now loose and searching in a practiced way. When they caught each other’s eye, they started to laugh with the enjoyment of rediscovery, the scandal of being alone again. He lowered his mouth to her leaking breasts, and she guided him inside her. As soon as they began to move, she could feel pain flare up, a small struck match, but she pulled his mouth to hers, and when the phone rang neither went to pick it up. The ringing persisted, and the baby started to cry, in a crescendo that seemed to vibrate the monitor, until finally they pulled themselves apart. Zelda retrieved the baby, who stopped wailing the instant she plucked him from the bassinet, and Benjamin answered the phone. “Impossible,” he said.
The baby was lunging for Zelda’s breast.
Benjamin covered the mouthpiece. “J. Douglas wants me to go to deliver the AAS review talk.”
“I thought J. Douglas was dying to deliver the talk.”
“He’s come down with Bell’s Palsy.” Benjamin frowned. “He insists he can do it with half his face paralyzed, but his wife already cancelled his ticket.”
Zelda sighed. Should she rinse off her nipples or slather them with hand sanitizer before letting the baby latch on? Nonsense, why bother, they were family.
“Your wife is right,” Benjamin said into the phone. “You’re obviously in no shape to go anywhere. We can send Roderick.”
“They can’t send Roderick,” Zelda explained to the baby, who slurped noisily away. “He was two hours late to his own wedding.”
Benjamin continued the conversation with eye rolls and grimaces.
“You should go,” Zelda said, the word go with a tentative uplift.
“What’s that, Z?”
“You should go.” Go now more sturdy-sounding, though not quite emphatic.
“I don’t want to leave you and Oliver.”
“It’s just for the day, right?”
Benjamin nodded. “I’d have to leave early Friday, but I’d be home by evening.”
Nothing happened at that moment, though Zelda felt a fastening inside her, like a lid snapping shut. “Well, it’s settled then,”
Hand over the mouthpiece: “This is a bad idea, Z.” He felt something too, a coil constricting, a doubling of a knot. Into the phone: “My wife and child need me.”
Zelda held out her hand; Benjamin surrendered the phone. “He’ll go,” she proclaimed, go vigorous and muscular, a hard g, an o echoing with authority.
After Benjamin hung up, the couple leaned against the headboard. Johnny Cash crooned his heart out—Ain’t gonna work tomorrow. They held hands, avoiding one another’s glances. Zelda regretted insisting that Benjamin go, and Benjamin regretted relenting. But why should they? A day trip to New York to deliver an invited review talk at the June meeting of the American Astronomical Society was a reasonable undertaking for a professional astronomer, and they were reasonable people, always had been, baby or no baby. Benjamin didn’t want to leave; on the contrary, he wanted to stay. And Zelda could manage without him for twelve hours, she’d always tackled practical problems with competence, could handle a drill more skillfully than Benjamin. The whole situation? Eminently reasonable. You couldn’t exactly blame J. Douglas—could you?—for getting Bell’s Palsy, for God’s sake. It was just one of those things.
5
Benjamin awoke before the alarm and crept out of the room without waking Zelda or the baby, whom they had brought into bed around midnight. As he closed the front door, the house dark and silent behind him, he felt as if he were leaving the scene of a crime. He drove to the airport listening to the weather report, which promised sun and more sun and repeated the ban on sprinklers, hoses, and kiddie pools.
The plane to LaGuardia was filled with bleary-eyed men with briefcases and bad haircuts and abundant electronic devices, which they attended to with the focused devotion of nurses to their dying patients. Had they all left sleeping wives and children? If they had, they weren’t letting it bother them. As the plane lifted, the sun was just surfacing on the horizon. Bereft of their devices, the men fell asleep, and Benjamin watched the gradual retreat of the newly constructed subdivisions, white houses along cul-de-sacs, their skeletal trees and empty swimming pools.
6
Zelda awoke wrapped in a supple warmth, feeling exceptionally peaceful. Oliver dozed beside her, where Benjamin usually slept, her husband’s lanky limbs always splayed, starlike, as if he were reaching for the sky’s far corners. When she opened the blinds, ruddy morning light seemed to carry the faint sound of bells. Oliver opened his eyes, thrashing like a swimmer swept out to sea, but as soon as he spotted Zelda, he grinned, his whole body shuddering in delight. His first real smile! Zelda started to call Benjamin but stopped herself. Instead, she opened her mouth in a wide O and gave an exaggerated gasp of astonishment. “You are the cleverest boy in the universe,” she cooed. Oliver smiled again. Magic. She could die happy now. Poor Benjamin.
She scooped up the baby, nibbling at his neck, and carried him downstairs, where light whistled along the walls, chiming from window to window. Breakfast unfurled in an agreeable hum, the close-up props—sugar bowl, coffee mug, burp cloth, diaper—in sharp focus, the background scenery hazy, as if she were seeing with a shallow depth of field. Reclining in his bouncy seat, Oliver raised a fist in royal approval at the lights and shadows made by breeze-shaken branches. Zelda sipped her coffee. The lone call of a bird rang in the air. A moment of earthly perfection. This baby thing wasn’t so bad after all. If she had to, she could get along just fine without a husband.
7
He coasted along Sixth Avenue with a tide of tourists, passing time until his talk. Thick clouds shadowed the city, the buildings and streets and traffic monochrome, as in a film noir. Benjamin had trouble identifying the sensation that had worried him the entire morning: he was alone. Except for infrequent, hasty showers, he hadn’t been alone for months. Now as he walked back into solitude surrounded by strangers, he had the hysterical, guilty urge to laugh, to sprint into the street, to spend money on something extravagant and useless. As Zelda liked to say, the boy was never far away.
He glanced at his cell phone: nothing. Should he call home? Not yet. Better not to appear over-concerned. It was just one day.
In the hotel, enormous ballrooms were crowded with posters and their proud creators, an oversized, high-powered version of a science fair; special areas set up by the powerful contractors and the major observatories; corridors and lobbies and elevators and meeting rooms and lecture halls infested with astronomers, like a massive family reunion, with its affections and old wounds. Almost immediately he spotted several former students and his rival from graduate school. And a woman with whom he’d carried on a short-lived affair, begun at the AAS meeting in Chicago the year before he met Zelda.
“Did I hear you had a baby?” his former lover asked. She was aging well, her dark skin minimally lined, her figure still angular.
“A boy,” he said, smiling despite himself.
“Do you have a picture?”
He retrieved his phone. He’d missed a call from Zelda. As soon as Oliver’s wizened face appeared on the screen, he felt punctured by guilt. The fluorescent light of the hotel corridor seemed tomblike, the chattering astronomers like throngs of mourners wandering among the graves. Then his former lover smiled at the picture of his baby and the guilt dissipated. She had a particularly radiant smile—he had forgotten it—with heartache at its edges.
Inside the conference room participants were studying the program, their badges hanging on lanyards. The room was full, and he smarted with anticipation. Several of Benjamin’s former collaborators waved in greeting from the audience. At 10:59 a conference organizer gave Benjamin the nod. Although time was relative, the American Astronomical Society was punctual. A colleague introduced him, summarizing his work observing the early stages of massive star formation in the Milky Way galaxy. He strode up to the podium, loosened his tie, cleared his throat.
8
Baby and mother on the back patio enjoying the late morning, baby in the motorized swing, mother in the rocker. Zelda was tempted to uncoil the hose and give the grass and bushes a good dousing but felt guilty about draining the Chattahoochee for the improvement of her view. The morning’s sounds emerged from the garden itself: an insect hum, the trees whispering, a piercing bird whistle, the wheeze of the swing’s motor. Zelda switched off the swing; silence settled over them like dust. They were the only house in the world, the lone patch of ground inside the lone fence, the sole survivors in the last garden on earth, under the shallow sky, the sun standing over them like a loyal soldier. If only a camera were mounted near the far corner of the fence, on a crane looking down, if only to capture them, still and satiated, silent, empty of thought.
A squeak of complaint from the baby. Zelda switched on the swing. She imagined creating a garden even more yellowed and brittle, everything shriveled, trees bony above gnarled bushes, grass like the bristles of a broom. More squeaks. “What’s wrong?” she said, peering at Oliver hunched in the swing, chin on his chest.
He held his breath for a brief eternity, his face crumpled like a paper bag, and started to wail.
Zelda rushed him inside, tripping on the threshold and nearly dropping him. She laid him across her lap, unbuttoned her pajama top and disgorged a breast. Oliver continued to sob as he groped for her nipple but soon he was suckling and sniffling at the same time. The phone rang. Zelda could feel herself tensing to rise, to run to the phone as if to a lover, but she stayed.
One thought: I have the power to ease my child’s suffering.
Another: This is my flesh and blood and I am his hostage.
The baby began to choke and splutter, his whole body tensed. Zelda switched to the other nipple, but Oliver sobbed. She walked him the length of the room, jiggling him, making soothing sounds, rubbing his back, but he was inconsolable. She could feel the anguish in his body and the panic in hers as she traveled through the house, all these rooms full of furniture and books and photographs, useless nothings, and she alone with this wretched baby, who for all she knew was in the throes of death, succumbing at last to the fatal congenital defect that had entered the world with him. She set the baby in the bassinet, went searching for INFANTS IN FACTS—where in God’s name was Dr. Zoltán when you needed him?—and dashed back to the baby, whose face had purpled with rage. How was it possible that so great a wrath, the wrath of all humanity, could come from such tiny lips? She whisked him, a howling two-by-four, back to the living room, because it was the living room, not the dying room, and noticed that she’d missed a call, not from her husband, that traitor, but from the owner of her New York gallery. Just as she managed to dial the traitor’s number, a blast gushed from the baby’s caboose with a sweetish, sourish, pasty smell. Liquid, warm and viscous, the color of baked beans, oozed out of the diaper and the onesie, and the baby stopped screaming.
Zelda hung up the phone, carried the dripping baby to the changing table. After she sponged off the baby and herself, she snapped him into a fresh diaper and onesie, buttoned herself into fresh pajamas, ran the laundry. Having a baby was a bloody nightmare. How could anyone possibly manage alone, much less with a husband who flew off to New York City at the drop of a hat? The baby fell asleep. She set him down in Benjamin’s spot and collapsed on the edge of the bed.
There was INFANTS IN FACTS, on Benjamin’s bedside table. Zelda consulted the index: nothing under M for Murderous Thoughts, nothing under N for Never Again, nothing under O for Off Her Rocker, nothing under P for Perhaps Divorce. She tossed Dr. Zoltán in the trash, cried a little, and lay down next to the napping baby for a nap.
9
The talk had gone well. The technology had functioned properly and so had the lecturer. Afterward the audience had tossed questions at him, and he’d fielded them competently. Benjamin was satisfied. Oh, who was he kidding, the talk had gone smashingly well; lecturer and computer had functioned as finely-calibrated machines; the audience had peppered him with probing questions, his answers unrehearsed yet articulate, clear without forgoing complexity, and witty to boot. Yes, the world bestowed no gift quite like professional triumph.
Now he had hundreds of new acquaintances and the approbation of the conference organizers and, best of all, a gleam of understanding from his former lover. She suggested a drink and he agreed, since he had time to kill before meeting his editor at a nearby club. Though he called home repeatedly, Zelda didn’t answer. His wife’s silence was out of character, vaguely demoralizing; he would try her until he reached her.
They floated downtown like two balloons let loose, through the muggy air and the honking and the snarls of tourists with their cameras and their shopping bags, the sky a low ceiling, charcoal-smudged. Her name was Kennetha, after her father, an optician. She was, she liked to say, a son in daughter form. She shouldered a smart leather messenger bag and a cream-colored cardigan, its arms crossed over her chest in a loose embrace. The scent of her perfume prickled his nostrils, and the hotel room in Chicago fluttered into memory, its nubby comforter and broken remote. Benjamin called Zelda’s cell phone. No answer.
On 44th St. they stopped at Virgil’s, a barbeque restaurant. “I’m starving,” Kennetha said. Or maybe she didn’t say anything, maybe it was her knowing smile, or her posture, tensed and angled toward him, but they found themselves at the bar, with a plate of ribs and two pints. Zelda disapproved of drinking during business hours—he sensed her disapproval in her voicemail recording—and so did he, for that matter, but business was done for the day, and where was he now but nowhere, sitting on a barstool, Kennetha on one side and Chicago on the other.
They traded professional gossip, tiptoeing around anything personal as around a sleeping baby. She asked about his observation time at the Jansky Very Large Array, a radio telescope in New Mexico; he inquired after her work on the companion stars of black holes. She complimented his talk again, praising the confidence with which he’d fielded questions. Women loved confidence in a man, Zelda always used to say, and she would again if only she’d pick up the phone. Benjamin attempted an impression of J. Douglas Smith delivering the talk with Bell’s Palsy, and Kennetha laughed, but behind one hand. It was something that had delighted him, laughing behind one hand, and he had even laughed behind his own hand for a while, until he met Zelda and started laughing too hard to hide behind a hand, or anything else.
Should he worry? Should he, now that Kennetha was signaling for a third round, her skirt riding up her thigh; now that the alcohol had started a small fire in his gut; now that afternoon was attempting to pass for night; now that he’d phoned his wife all afternoon and received no answer?
While Kennetha stood in line for the bathroom, Benjamin paid the check and stumbled out into the gloom on 44th. He breezed up to Sixth Avenue, joined the throng. Stimulated by his encounter with Kennetha but not, in the end, tempted. Flushed and triumphant. Buoyant. The best thing about an untethered balloon? No hand on the string. The worst thing about an untethered balloon? No hand on the string.
He turned east on 43rd, arriving early for his meeting at the League Association, an exclusive Midtown sanctuary for New York City’s cultured elite. The doorman informed him that his editor had not yet arrived.
“Steiner’s never on time,” said a tall, stately, white-haired man. The man eased Benjamin’s computer case from his shoulder and placed it in an empty cubby beside the coat check. “Steiner’s been my editor for thirty-five years. Since I was a kid.”
“He’s been mine for about six months.” Benjamin had been pleasantly surprised when his book proposal had attracted the attention of a senior editor at a major New York publishing house. “I’ve never met him.”
“So I assumed.” The man patted Benjamin absently on the shoulder and guided him into the lobby. “Let’s go up for a drink, shall we?”
Benjamin nodded, following the man up the carpeted stairs. Floating still. They emerged on the second floor, threading through occupied tables until they reached the far corner of the room. The man, whose name was August Wolf—such a familiar ring to it, August Wolf—waved and nodded at various acquaintances, most of them pale septuagenarians, one a famous newscaster, the others unfamiliar to Benjamin but no doubt equally distinguished, based on the cut of their blazers and the dark, wood-paneled smell of accomplishment that pervaded the place.
August ordered a beer for Benjamin and for himself a double scotch neat. He lifted his glass and sniffed. His nose was long and regal, as was the rest of his face, pale blue eyes, flawless teeth, the skin of his cheeks like creased parchment.
He took a swallow, sighed. “Do you read poetry?”
“Not any more, I’m sorry to say. I’m a scientist, an astronomer actually, and pretty dull and cerebral these days.”
“‘When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, / How soon, unaccountable I became…’ Well, anyway.”
Benjamin groped around in the dark corner of his memory where poetry resided. “August Wolf. The poet.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Amazing. I read your work in college. You’re famous, aren’t you?”
“For a poet.” August removed a pair of red glasses from his breast pocket, perched them on his nose.
“It’s an honor.” He couldn’t wait to tell Zelda about his encounter with a famous poet. “You must have written many books by this point.”
He shrugged. “A few too many, perhaps. How about you?”
“This is my first—it’s for a general audience, about different ways the world could end.”
“Excellent topic. I’ll certainly have a look when it comes out.”
“I plan to buy all your books as soon as I get home.”
“I need the sales.” August waved for another scotch. “Home is where?”
“Atlanta.” A slight lurch of the heart. “Oh, do you mind if I call my wife?”
“No, but don’t let anyone see you,” August warned in a droll voice. “Cell phones are verboten.”
Benjamin turned discreetly toward the wall. Above him hung a portrait of an illustrious League member of yesteryear, black fedora tilted smartly across his forehead. The phone rang and rang. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, after the tone.
“Marriage trouble,” August said to his scotch. “A tautology.”
“I have a baby,” Benjamin exclaimed. He showed August the photograph.
“A baby.” The poet’s patrician mouth sagged a little. “Brave man.”
“You don’t have kids?”
With a look of thoughtful perplexity August extended a hand, palm upward, as if he had paid a bill and were waiting for change. “I had one chance,” he said, closing his hand. “A gift from the blue, you might call it. But I wasn’t. I’m not. Brave enough.”
“What do you mean?” said Benjamin in a pleading voice. Something about the poet’s eyes, a glittering flatness, unnerved him. He pressed his hand over August’s fist. “Trust me, bravery isn’t required. I don’t know what I’m doing. You just have to pretend.”
August gazed into the murmuring room, raising his hand to wave. He rose to greet a small, stout man in a seersucker suit, a checked bow tie rooted below his egg-shaped head.
Steiner kissed August, then Benjamin, Parisian-style on three cheeks. “Champagne!” he called. “Quickly, before I perish!”
The waiter dragged over a bucket of champagne, three flutes. The cork popped; the bubbly poured. Steiner regaled them with the latest publishing scandals and conquests, expressing hearty enthusiasm for Benjamin and his book. Stifling a yawn, August acknowledged several compatriots at the next table with a sardonic salute. Benjamin remembered Zelda’s hand in his, the veins underneath her skin, her crescent nails, her grasp, sure and firm. The trio raised their glasses, which they touched rim to rim with a shallow clink, toasting the success of the end of the world.
10
Benjamin returned to Zelda that night in a box, which she picked up at luggage carousel 7. The box had a handle, and she lifted it from the conveyor belt, only mildly surprised at its lightness, and carried it to her car. However, the box wouldn’t fit. It had grown cumbersome, and heavy, and soon slipped from her grasp, landing on the asphalt without a sound. When she tried to lift it, she wrenched the handle off. Should she leave her husband in the airport parking lot? Yes, she decided, what harm could come to him? So she started her engine and woke beside Oliver wondering, Why carousel 7?
“What does it mean when you dream your husband is dead?” she asked Sherry as they rambled through the neighborhood, Zelda pushing Oliver in the pram, Sherry at the handle of a jogging stroller, which held her six-month-old, Jacob.
“It means you want your husband to die, obviously.”
“Really, Sherry, you can be so harsh.”
Zelda and Sherry had met in pregnancy yoga class. Sherry had taken an immediate liking to Zelda, luring her into conversation after class and eventually into the first close female friendship Zelda had allowed herself since college.
“Joan told me dreams don’t mean anything.” Joan was Sherry’s therapist. “They’re like the brain’s leftovers molding in the fridge.”
“I thought Joan went off to the loony bin.”
“Yes, but she’s back now. She just needed some rest and the right meds.”
“And you’re still seeing her?”
“Of course. A baby’ll make anybody loony, don’t you think?”
Zelda laughed. “Benjamin must be done with the talk,” she said. “He’s probably meeting with his editor as we speak.”
She imagined her husband at a podium, hundreds of pairs of glasses focused on his every word, dust scintillated in the funnel of light from the projector, nodding heads hinged at the neck, and hundreds of hands applauding, like a flock of flapping birds.
“Henry’s at the lab, as usual.” Sherry’s husband was a chaired professor of Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech, where he led a team of scientists who researched microorganisms for higher purposes that had once interested Sherry but no longer did. Soon after Zelda and Sherry became friends, the two couples had met for dinner; after the science professors spent the evening exchanging subtly competitive remarks, the women decided not to repeat the experience.
“Do you know what he asked me?” Sherry said.
“Uh oh.”
“He asked me—I kid you not—if we could take a night off from the baby and go to a motel.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. But how about he take the baby and give me a night off? Maybe after a few hours on my own, I’d feel like going to a motel.”
“Did you say that?”
“No. I just cried and made him feel guilty. My new specialty.” Sherry sighed.
“Benjamin and I tried to have sex the other day,” Zelda said in an offhand way. “He had a little taste,” pointing to her nipple, “just before I nursed. Do you think that’s unhygienic?”
“Probably.” Sherry peered at Jacob, who was gnawing on his fist and drooling. “Think Henry would taste my breast milk?”
“I don’t like to imagine other people in bed.”
“I’ll tell you one thing, when Jakie’s old enough I’m going back to get my doctorate and…Holy shit!”
Sherry pointed to a hedge. Nothing terribly arresting about this particular hedge, or this particular house, which resembled all the others on the block—two stories, wide front porch, siding in muted colors, well-trimmed lawn—except that, on closer inspection, the hedge was shapely and robust. And vividly green, with something moving underneath it.
“Is that a baby?” said Zelda.
“Looks like a baby to me.”
In the immediate vicinity: birds, a cat asleep in the shade of a station wagon, ants marching in single file along the curb, a teenager in shorts and combat boots smoking under an elm, leaf blower strapped to his back. Zelda and Shery pushed the pram and the jogger onto the grass, which was also luxuriant, a vibrant green, almost gaudy next to the washed-out lawns on either side.
The baby was lying on its back on a white blanket watching light speckle through the jewel-like leaves of the hedge.
“What’s a baby doing there?” Sherry whispered.
“I don’t know, but it seems pretty contented,” Zelda whispered back. The Technicolor green of the bush and the grass reminded her of the Emerald City. A baby alone under a bush, like baby Moses in landlocked suburbia. What an image, just waiting for her to stumble across it.
“Where’s its mother?” Sherry asked.
The baby made a cooing noise, like a dove, and flailed its arms as if trying to lift off.
“Maybe we should call the police,” Zelda murmured.
“Yes, call.” Sherry nodded. “My phone’s charging at the house.”
“I didn’t bring mine.” Zelda had left the phone on purpose. For the first time in her relationship with her husband she didn’t want to talk to him, she wanted to worry him, to punish him. Her new specialty, perhaps.
“I’ve never seen you without your phone. What’s the world coming to?”
“We can take the baby back to my house and call the police from there.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Sherry hissed. “We can’t just take a baby.”
“Well, we can’t leave it here.”
Suddenly, the rustle of branches, and a man emerged from the shrubbery, his head bobbing. “Oh,” he said and unplugged himself from a pair of earbuds.
“Is this your baby?” Zelda inquired.
The man shook his head. “He’s my nephew.”
“Do you always leave him by himself?” Sherry stared at the veins in his tanned, muscular arms.
“I was just behind the bushes,” he said, “taking a piss.”
“Why is the yard so green?” Zelda asked.
“They got a guy to rig up a grey watering system. You know, the dirty water from the sinks and the showers. So it’s legal and all.”
Jacob started to cry.
“He’s hungry,” Sherry said, unbuckling Jacob from the baby jogger, “do you mind if I…” and the man said, “No problem, make yourselves comfortable, I’ll get us some drinks, what’s your pleasure?” and Sherry said, “Think it’s too early for a beer?” and “Nah,” said the man, “but I know where my brother hides the scotch,” and Sherry said, “A scotch for my friend and a beer for me,” and to Zelda, “It’ll help Ollie sleep,” and the man said, “They have crackers and fancy cheese and by the way that’s Nick,” gesturing toward the baby, “and I’m Stephen,” and “Bring on the fancy cheese, Stephen,” said Sherry, introducing herself and Zelda as she unbuttoned her shirt, and Stephen moseyed into the house on his strong ropy legs and returned with a blanket and a cooler and a baby bottle and an extra burp cloth, and he spread the blanket in the shade beside the hedge and emptied the cooler—Grapes, too! Green grapes, hurrah!—and they arrayed themselves across the grass a little like the three figures in the foreground of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, except that they were clothed and holding babies, and “This is the life,” said Stephen, and Sherry said, “Do you babysit regularly?” and Stephen said, “No, I build houses, I just do it once in a while for my sister-in-law,” and Zelda, in love with green, the luminous fiery green, the green of an oasis, and in love with the grapes, green and sweating, and the shimmering of the scotch, and the babies and their devouring eyes and greedy mouths, Zelda said, “Do you have a camera?”
11
He hailed the first cab he spotted, even though it was headed the wrong way. As soon as he slammed the door, the rain started, striking the windshield in shards, as if the sky were a shattering pane of glass. Everything flooded with gray, the clouds, the buildings, the gutters, as the cab snarled through gray traffic. Here was another way the world might end: its hues washed away, painted over in gray.
If only he could carry the rain home with him to the parched grass and the roses shriveling in the garden. What if it never rained there again? What if it rained only in other places, places to which one must travel alone?
The airport terminal was flooded as well, with frantic travelers and their dripping luggage and chattering children. All flights leaving New York were delayed, and a loud aura of urgency and frustration hovered around the lines for check-in and security. Benjamin joined the latter, which weaved through the terminal. The line inched forward, Benjamin barely restraining himself from calling Zelda again. To what sort of bravery could the poet have been referring? Almost nothing in domestic life required physical bravery, and what was emotional bravery but the willingness to plunge into the deep and the murky with your eyes open? A poet’s eyes had to be open, like an astronomer’s, in order to do the work. Poor Wolf.
And the rain kept coming, walls of gray, and the line crept along. Families were camped out on the floor, generations slumped over suitcases and wilted shopping bags, snacks and money passing from palm to palm. A small dog trailing a leash trotted across Benjamin’s feet, the small dog followed by a small boy. Benjamin caught the handle of the leash and handed it to the boy. “Gotcha!” the boy said to the leash and dragged the puppy back to a man, who was talking on a cell phone. The man took the leash and eased the dog into a carrier.
When Benjamin reached his gate, the departing jostled for optimal position around the gateway. Benjamin slipped through the crowd, found a spot near the window, and watched the rainfall washing over the plane. Nearby, the small boy and his father sat on the floor, the dog in the carrier between them. The boy tried to lure the dog out with a potato chip; his father, on his phone, didn’t notice. “Come on, fella,” the boy called into the carrier. “Don’t be afraid. I’m not gonna hurtcha.”
The phone vibrated inside Benjamin’s pocket. Zelda. When he answered, the bellowing loudspeaker invited people needing extra time to pre-board the plane. “Hello!” he shouted. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”
The boy attached the leash to the dog’s collar and tried to haul it out of the carrier. “Don’t be afraid, little guy,” he grunted.
Was it Zelda’s voice on the other end of the line or her silence? Never mind, either would do. “I’m on my way,” he called into the silence.
The boy pried the dog out of the carrier and forced it onto his lap, smothering it with kisses. “We’re going for a ride,” he said as the dog struggled to escape.
Benjamin pressed the phone to his ear, listening to the silence as he boarded, listening until the flight attendant asked him to turn off the phone. As the plane sawed through the walls of water and into the clouds, Benjamin looked for the receding city lights, but he could see nothing but gray. Seeing nothing didn’t worry him. Early massive star formation was usually obscured by natal material—clouds of hydrogen gas—and couldn’t be detected even by powerful optical telescopes. However, it could still be observed using radio telescopes. There were other ways of seeing things that didn’t want to be seen.
12
She posed them on the grass, the sun burning a hole in the sky, high above the houses, the intense afternoon light saturating their plot of green, the adjacent lawns as bleached as wheat. With the Manet painting a vague outline in her memory, she arranged the scene: grapes and cheeses and one of the babies at the near edge of the blanket, empty beer bottles beside the scotch bottle, a faceted half-full tumbler, golden in the emerald grass, Stephen barefoot and shirtless, pants rolled to the knee, his sneakers and socks and T-shirt in a jumble next to the blanket, Sherry leaning on her hands, face tilted to the light like a sunflower, Jacob asleep in the seam of her pressed-together thighs, and Oliver off to the side, alone on the far edge of the blanket. When she was composing a shot, Zelda secretly thought of her human subjects as soft props and was occasionally startled when they moved or spoke. After placing the camera on a kitchen stool, Stephen talked her through setting the self-timer. After they counted to three, Zelda pressed the shutter button and she, the softest prop, ran through the grass and lay down next to Oliver, knees pressed to her chest, holding her breath until she heard the click of the shutter.
Now she sat in the rocking chair, laptop warm on her thighs, Oliver asleep in the bassinet. She opened Stephen’s email with a sense of anticipation, as if unwrapping a surprise gift. Well, Stephen’s brother owned a crappy point-and-shoot and it was a low-resolution image and the whole thing hastily staged but, God, still, what a startling scene, three forlorn adults and the bare-limbed babies—babies were such expressive props, who knew?—and the bottles, oddly somber, she could add more of them, and the green, oh the green, its adamancy, its indecency, imagine the green she could accomplish with the proper lighting and the large-format camera, she could almost see it.
The phone in the living room rang three times, stopped. A series with babies. A baby in an empty room. A baby under a hedge. And mothers. A mother gazing out a shuttered window. A mother sitting in front of a telephone as if before an empty fireplace. And pregnant women, yes. There were oodles of them in the pregnancy yoga class, with nothing better to do than pose. A naked pregnant woman in a withering garden. Holding an apple? No, too obvious. Holding a bird. A sparrow. Her producer could find a realistic stuffed sparrow. Lighting the dryness—that would be a challenge, finding the right deadness of yellow, an apocalyptic yellow, making the dryness palpable to the eye. Babies at the end of the world. Fantastic. The babies would have to be crying—bawling would be ideal—but it would be unethical to make them miserable on purpose, obviously. You’d just have to ready the shot and wait. Because no matter what you did or didn’t do, babies cried eventually, that much she had learned. And there it was, the next thing, in that place in her mind where her images came to life.
Feverish with excitement, Zelda called Benjamin. She missed him. After one ring, two, she heard voices, a torrent of intonations and blares, as if she’d called a crowded amphitheater. “Benjamin? Are you there?” No answer but noise, incomprehensible, strident. As she stood over the bassinet, listening to the noise, the baby’s lips began to smack, as if he were nursing in his dream. Zelda felt suddenly breathless, ripped apart and turned inside out, her organs exposed, her whole body devastated by tenderness, the noise swirling in her ear like parade confetti, and tears at her lids, the perfect sweetness of her sleeping child almost appalling, his dark lashes like commas on the paper-thin skin under his eyes, his radical helplessness and his compact body, curled up, just as he must have slept in the womb. When she turned her head a fraction of an inch, the computer appeared in her periphery, gleaming on the rocker, and she was halfway in the world again. And the noise thickened, and the baby suckled, and she suspected that it was just the beginning.
