Milk (20 page)

Gregg just likes to have sex, he doesn't want to talk about it.

“Was she good in bed?”

“God, Theo!” Gregg gets up and storms out of the room. “I need a smoke. I'll be outside.”

I haul myself out of bed and follow him outside to the small flagstone patio. “Okay, I'm sorry. I got carried away.”

He flicks a spent match down the steep hillside in front of the house, where I imagine a slight breeze sends it tripping and spinning past mustard weeds and paste-colored gravel.

“You shouldn't do that, Gregg. The drought. Everything's so dry.”

He won't even look at me.

“I'm sorry I upset you,” I continue. “Can't we forget all about it? Please?” I press up against him. My belly bows out to meet his pubic bone—how can he pretend to ignore my pregnancy? Soon I'll have to buy more maternity clothes, not to mention things for the baby.

“You're still mad,” I say, “aren't you?” For being so clumsy sometimes, Gregg can be stiller than a rock when angry. “Why are you mad?”

“I don't know,” he says.

“Is it because I'm pregnant?”

Whenever I dare to bring it up, he always looks at me as though I'm prevaricating. And what does he think of the subject? Who knows? Maybe it's because he's not the verbal type that the subject of my pregnancy seems more avoidable than unavoidable. Despite all the hints I've thrown his way of late:

“God, I miss lying on my stomach. I can't sleep on my back anymore either—so the books say.”

Silence.

“Do you like this maternity top? It's new. Not bad for J.C. Penney's.”

Silence.

Just the other day I mused out loud: “I wonder what it will be like, having a baby.”

That one seemed to really throw him for a loop. He looked at me, alarmed, as though just hearing the news for the first time.

“Gregg,” I say now.

“What?”

“I'm having a baby.”

“I know.”

“So what do you think? Are you happy? Are you sad? Mad? You never say anything.”

He smashes out his cigarette on the side of the house. “I'm not sure what to say.”

“Say what you feel.”

“I'm not sure what I feel.”

He isn't mean about it, Gregg is incapable of true meanness, but he won't respond, won't simply say,
I'm not the baby's father
. That's what's really bothering him, what's bothering us both. Meanwhile my hair grows thicker by the day, my complexion as creamy as when I was twenty. I sweat more and pee constantly and keep a stack of baby books in plain sight at the pool house, where Gregg drops by now and then. He doesn't notice. He does notice what's on the radio and asks if he can switch the station.

My belly is like a drum when I thump it, like a watermelon—there is something growing, something delicious. My nausea long over with, I feel incredibly sensual, my nipples constantly erect. I bought a nursing bra (this too Gregg didn't notice or maybe he thought it was some kind of erotic contraption), just so I can let down the flaps now and then.

Day in and day out I ask myself this: why don't I just confront Gregg? Maggie asks me this as well. At first she found the situation amusing, like a prank we might've cooked up as teenagers, but now she is worried. I have no idea what I'm getting into, she says, being a mother.

“A single mother no less,” she says one morning, standing over me while I sit outside, where the pool used to be, my nursing flaps down, sunning my breasts.

“Maybe I'm not going to be a single mother.”

“If you're referring to Gregg, isn't he having a little trouble accepting the fact you're pregnant? By another man? Not that I can blame him exactly.” She stares down at me, her blue eyes iridescent.

“Stop hovering, Maggie. Don't you have to go deliver some babies or something?” I've volunteered to sit with the boys today while she's at work, since their babysitter is sick.

“Put your flaps up,” she says, breaking into a laugh that sounds irritated nonetheless. “Here come the kids.”

N
INETEEN

After a night at Gregg's I stop at the grocery store on the way home and when I pull into the driveway, there's the Blazer with its Colorado plates parked in front with a trailer hitched to it.
Oh hell, he must've gotten a job
.

Trying to act unperturbed, I lift the bags of groceries from the trunk, prop them against the sides of my belly (figuring my hands can't shake this way) and start towards the pool house.

There's Jackson. Reclining in the chaise, in jeans and a T-shirt, sunglasses on so that I can't see if he's asleep or awake.

“I got the job,” he says. “Here I am.”

“Congratulations,” I say stiffly. “You sure didn't waste any time moving out here, did you?”

“The job doesn't start till August but I wanted to get settled.”

“Oh. Right,” I say, the grocery bags still framing my belly. Jackson stares.

“Wow,” he says. The baby stirs, lands a good kick to my ribs. Damn. How after all this time even I began to believe this baby wasn't his.

“Let me get those for you,” he says, rising from the chaise and reaching for the bags. He follows me inside, sets the bags on the counter while I turn on lights, open the small window on the north side.

Jackson brings in more groceries—bread, milk, juice, fruit, cheese—and I put them away. Just as we did at Stonewall Creek. An entirely normal and domestic moment. We pick up where we left off, an everyday sort of feeling, as when we used to make our own breakfasts side by side in the kitchen, cereal for him, yogurt for me.

“I'll finish up,” I say. “Have a seat.” I gesture to the carpet; there are no chairs, only my futon on the other side of the room. He remains standing and if he's knocked out by the sight of me this pregnant, he's careful not to show it.

Only a little. His eyes drop to my belly, as if he's waiting for me to remove it, like a jacket or a sweater.

“It doesn't come off, Jackson.”

“What?”

“My stomach.”

“I know.” He sounds doubtful. I notice he's still wearing his wedding band, and wonder if he's noticed yet that mine is missing. “Does it hurt?” he asks. “Your stomach?”

“It feels good, like a good hard peach.”

“Can you feel the baby move?”

“All the time.”

So when are we going to get to it? The subject or subjects we're avoiding. Jackson takes me out for an early dinner. We drive in the Blazer—how many times did we drive to town in this car?—which I greet like an old friend (though I glare at the trailer), patting its road-ragged hood, splattered insects on the windshield, mud on its flanks: more warmth than I can show Jackson.

At Margaritas on Rosemead, I hold my breath to see what Jackson will order to drink.

“I'll have a—” Jackson pauses. “A Coke,” he says. Casually.

“Still not drinking?” I say.

“Nope.”

I gather there's more to say on the subject, but he's not going to enlighten me just yet. With some sadness I realize we're not close anymore; we're like former compatriots about to go our separate ways, or we would if not for the baby.

“So where are you going to live?” I ask.

“You sound so tired,” he says.

“I
am
tired.” I eat a tortilla chip, noisily.

“Theo, why shouldn't I move here? Thousands of people do each year.”

“Don't you read the paper?” I say, my mouth full of chip. “Everybody's leaving California. They're moving to Colorado.”

“Aren't you even going to ask who offered me the job?”

“Who?”

“Costa Mesa Junior College.”

Down by the beach, Orange County. “Oh.” I bite into my next chip, which shatters. I brush the shards into my hand, not knowing what to do with them. I arrange them into a little pile on the table. “Jackson, I'm happy for you that you got the job, congratulations and everything, but it's probably unrealistic to expect me to be ecstatic about your moving here, okay?”

“I'm not expecting anything, Theo. I figure we'll just—adjust. Over time.”

Our food arrives and I lose myself in my chimichanga. I'm off baby carrots and macaroni and cheese these days and craving Mexican. At least every other day I get take-out from this place, chimichangas for Maggie and me, quesadillas for Dylan and Willy.

“You've got sauce on your belly,” Jackson says.

I look down and sure enough, a red glob of salsa stares up at me with two chunks of green chile for eyes. “This keeps happening,” I say. “No matter how I drape the napkin, no matter how careful I am.”

“It's like a big shelf,” Jackson sympathizes. “It just catches things.” He tries to dab it with his napkin but I veer away from him. The baby starts kicking again, one-two, one-two; I wonder if my belly trembles, if Jackson can see.

“I wish you all the luck with your new job,” I say in the car, “but your moving out here isn't going to change anything between us.”

“You know, you keep making that speech,” Jackson says. “Why? What are you really trying to say?”

I lift a hand in the air futilely: who knows? Then for some strange reason we both begin to laugh. For a moment, I think we're going to hug each other, the bad months between us gone, simply evaporated, the baby with its rightful father … but what about Gregg? No, too much has happened, I'm in too deep, I can't change my mind now just because of an impulse. And there's my lawyer to consider; when do I tell Jackson about her? The forms waiting on my desk, forms I must fill out and sign. The first step toward filing for divorce.

“Jackson, tell me again. Why do you want to move here?” And go and spoil everything, I'm thinking. “If it's because of the baby, there's so much traffic between here and the beach. It'd take you less time to fly in from Colorado.”

“I've changed, Theo. Things have changed. I quit drinking, for one thing.”

We're stalled at a light by the racetrack now, tall skinny palm trees and the mountains beyond that, suffocating in smog. A pounding behind my eyes, a smog headache.

“Doesn't it make any difference to you that I quit drinking?” he asks me.

“That you
say
you've quit drinking.”

“I nearly killed myself in the car, you know, myself and some other people.”

“What?”

“On 287, about a month after you left.”

Highway 287, our main road to town, that stretch of it is one of the most dangerous roads in the state. Still, I find myself skeptical. “You had an accident?”

“Almost. The car in front of me was going too slow, I decided, and I was pissed. You were gone, you'd left me—I was pissed all the time, drunk all the time. So I passed him.”

“In a passing lane?”

“Nope. Passed him on a double yellow line.”

“God, Jackson.”

“Just missed a head-on with a Safeway truck on its way to Laramie. By seconds. Inches. The Safeway truck swerved, then just kept on going. Probably thought, ‘Just another crazy drunk fuck on the road.' It would've been a two-car, one-rig crash, four people dead including me.”

I nod slowly, picturing the near-slaughter of it all, having seen it when other people had lost their lives on 287—the paramedics, the jaws of life, the medi-vac bearing its gory load to Poudre Valley Hospital. The white cross by the side of the road a couple of months later.

“After that I decided to drop in on an AA meeting.” Jackson smiles wryly. AA, what he said he'd never do. “I've been sober 189 days now.”

The light turns green and the stranglehold of traffic loosens its grip; one by one the cars creep onward, the majority peeling off into a turn lane for the racetrack. I expect my headache to ease up—the relief of Jackson's being alive, sober,
in recovery
, as it's called—but now my head threatens to burst. I seem to be stumped for words, shaken. “I can't quite think what to say, Jackson.”

“Don't say anything. I wanted you to know.”

We don't speak again until he parks in front of the house. He reaches behind him, grabbing his canvas bag from the backseat. That oddly titillating canvas bag of his, though I hardly recognize it. It's usually full of books, but now it's full of what appear to be clothes.

“Uh, Jackson, what are you doing?”

“Getting my stuff.”

“Your stuff for what?”

We don't even make it past the front lawn before Jackson launches into questions about the baby.

“Is this where you plan to live with the baby?”

“Why, is something wrong?”

“Nothing wrong, I guess.” From across the lawn a peacock spots us and unfurls his tail, turning this way and that, shaking the iridescent feathers violently. “What's with him?” Jackson says.

“I don't know. It's not mating season anymore, but this bird seems to have forgotten that.”

The peacock approaches, eyeing my dun-colored shirt and strutting half-circles around me.

“Listen,” I tell the bird, “you're confusing me with somebody else.” I hurry up the driveway, only to be pursued by the peacock. And Jackson, who continues asking questions. Do I have a doctor? How often are the appointments? When's the due date again? What about an amnio? I explain over my shoulder why I decided against it—how at age thirty-five the risk of Down's goes up just slightly, whereas it rises more significantly at thirty-six. The peacock calls forlornly,
He-elp, He-elp
, before flapping off to the roof of Maggie's house.

“You should know something, Theo. I want this baby. I always wanted a baby with you.”

“You did?”

We're standing at the sliding glass door of the pool house, the red sunset reflecting warmth on our faces, our skin, as when we said our vows. I invite Jackson inside.