Ten Thousand Saints (24 page)

“They don’t
take
it,” Di said. “They don’t sell it into slave labor. They give it to parents that can take care of it properly.”

“Like my dad?” Jude said.

Through the picture window, Manhattan was now curdled a pale twilight blue. No one had moved to turn on a light, and Jude could feel the darkness sifting through the room. He was glad his father’s face was shadowed by his Yankees cap.

“You’re angry that Di found out, but I didn’t tell her,” Les said. “I chose to cover for
you
.”

“Of
course
you chose him. Anything to make
Jude
like you. Anything to be a
pal
. Leave the fathering to someone who has the time.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Has it occurred to you,” said Di, “that Eliza might not be in this situation if she weren’t desperate for a little attention from a father figure?” Raising his wineglass to his lips, Les momentarily lost his grip. He fumbled it like a football, a red tide rising to find the lapel of his shirt, before he caught it again. No one moved to get a cloth from the kitchen; no one offered the soda water that sat, untouched, on the table.

“You can blame me for fucking up my own kids,” said Les. “But don’t blame me for fucking up yours.” He put down his glass, gouged out his cigarette in the ashtray, plucked up a cupcake, and kissed the crown of Eliza’s head. “You’re not fucked up. I’m just saying.” Eliza sat with her elbows on her knees, hands covering her face. “Happy birthday, sweetheart. I tie-dyed you a Yankees shirt—it’s around here somewhere. You can call me.” His sandals slapped the marble floor as he crossed the room. The door closed noisily behind him.

From behind her hands, Eliza smelled ginger and garlic and cooking meat. She kicked off her shoes. In her bare feet, she stood up and wandered in the direction of the window. She said, “I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you, Mother, but I—”

“Darling, no.” Di put down her glass. “I’m not
disappointed
that you’re pregnant. I’m disappointed that you didn’t
tell
me. If you’d come to me, we could have
done
something about it.”

Eliza rested her hands over her belly. “Well, that’s why I didn’t tell you.” Typical of her mother, she thought—who cared whether the problem was school or drugs or boys or a baby, as long as she got to choose the solution?

But Les was right: they were two of a kind. Eliza was as stubborn as her mother. She was halfway through this solution of hers, and yet standing there she was not at all sure whether she’d chosen it because it was what she wanted or because it was what her mother wouldn’t.

Or because it was what Jude and Johnny wanted. She looked at them, two pairs of blue eyes watching her as though she were an afterschool special.

“What are you looking at?” she demanded of them. “Don’t just sit there. I’m doing this for
you
.”

“What do you mean?” asked Di.

“She means,” said Johnny, standing up, “that I want this baby as much as she does.” He crossed the room, sneakers squeaking against the floor, and pressed a palm to Eliza’s belly. “Right?”

Her stomach fluttered. She could feel each of his fingertips through the layers of taffeta. No one but the ER doctor had touched her pregnant belly, and now, as if the baby had been awoken, she felt a tiny quiver again, like a goldfish swimming against the fishbowl of her belly.

But Johnny didn’t feel it. He was digging in his pocket for something, dropping to his knee, saying, “I’ve got a present for you, too.”

“Oh, mercy,” said her mother.

Annabel Lee was telling her something, but she didn’t know what it was.

“You can’t marry her. She’s sixteen years old! Not without parental consent.”

A tail-stroke, a wing-beat, a slither through the grass.

“I can in New Jersey,” said Johnny, opening the box.

T
he boyfriend’s boxer shorts were gone, his toothbrush, the glass pipe he kept cinched in a chamois sack at the bottom of the hamper, where he thought no one would look. His crossword puzzles were not in the basket in the master bath; his bottles of beer did not roll in the crisper. Whether these things had been fetched or discarded Neena did not know. She was not particularly sorry to see them go.

The morning after her birthday party, zipping an enormous cowhide suitcase on her bed, Eliza announced that she was leaving. “Don’t let her out of your sight,” her mother had instructed Neena before leaving the apartment herself an hour earlier, but when Eliza threw her arms, quite abruptly, around Neena’s neck, the woman did not feel she could hold her captive. Neena was not confident she could construct a sentence in English adequate to express her confusion, embarrassment, worry, and joy. With gratitude she had several times accepted the girl’s cocaine, which her son had traded a friend for a VCR, an interview suit, and a 1972 Dodge Coronet, but she did not know how to accept a good-bye hug.

D
owntown Les was chasing a fly with a flyswatter when the buzzer buzzed. When he opened the door in his undershirt, Eliza was sitting on her suitcase, breathing heavily. “What are you doing, crazy woman? You carry that up the stairs?” Les dragged it through the kitchen and into the living room, where Eliza collapsed on the futon. Then he brought her a glass of water.

“Where’s Jude?” She gulped from her glass.

Les, standing, swatted at the drone that swept by his ear, his hangover indistinguishable from the insect that orbited his head. “Gone somewhere on his skateboard.” With his flyswatter, he indicated the suitcase. “What, are you moving in?”

“Not with you. I’m on my way to Johnny’s. I don’t think he’s home yet.” She placed her glass on the coffee table, lifted her necklace out of her collar, and gently bounced the charms in her hand. “I had to get out of there before my mom came back.”

Les turned the flyswatter on Eliza, fanning her. “Just so you know, it’s a terrible idea.”

“Moving in with Johnny?”

“Marrying him. Jude told me.”

A sticky strand of Eliza’s hair batted in the draft of the fan. “Papa, don’t preach,” she said. “You have any better ideas?”

“You can stay here with me. Sleep in the loft. Jude can sleep in the bathtub. When the baby’s born, we’ll sell it on the black market. I know a guy in Jersey City who can get ten thousand bucks for a white kid.”

“What if it’s not white?”

“Five,” said Les.

Eliza unzipped one side of the suitcase, slipped her hand in, and withdrew a chamois bag, which she tossed to Les. Les caught it against his chest. “She must have junked everything else last night. When I woke up this morning, she was gone.”

Les opened the drawstring and slid out the glass pipe. It was baby-shit brown marbled with streaks of green, squat as a mushroom and smooth as a stone. Not the prettiest thing, but she was reliable. Inside the bowl was an ancient bud, which he dug out like a booger and dropped on the carpet. “Harriet!” he said. “This old girl must be twenty-five years old. My ex’s earliest work. You meet my old lady when you were in Vermont?”

“I didn’t have the pleasure.”

“She’s a piece of work.”

He thought about her while he stroked her namesake, the curve of the woman’s thickened hips not unlike those of the pipe. He thought about the way, back in February, he’d approached her bedroom door—
their
bedroom door—the five musical knocks he’d played on it. He had intended only to say good night. Instead he’d found himself smelling the patchouli and cigarettes in her hair, the warm mama scent in the crook of her neck, like borax and breast milk and the sawdust of their bygone household, and as he walked her backward to their bed, she had smelled him back.

Now he went instinctively for the cookie jar on the kitchen counter, took out a thimbleful of pot, and packed it in the pipe. They’d been like a couple of teenagers, pawing at each other, up all night, like the teenagers they’d actually been when they’d first smelled the crooks of each other’s necks. He was back on the couch by the time their children, now teenagers, had woken the next morning. And now Eliza was pregnant and her suitcase was packed and out of it snaked the black lace of some undergarment he preferred not to identify.

“What do I call you now? My ex-almost-stepdaughter?”

“Don’t get sappy on me, Lester.”

“Will you still come visit me?”

“I’ll be down the street.”

Les sat down beside her and took a hit on the pipe. It settled him, loosened his bones. It tasted, somehow, like Vermont. “When’s the wedding?”

“Sunday, I hope. Johnny’s out taking care of the details now. It’s going to be at the temple.”

“I’m guessing you don’t mean Emanu-El.”

“Are you coming?”

Les took her hand in his and examined the ring. The stone was no bigger than a lentil, and almost certainly not a diamond; he knew a guy who sold these on Fourteenth Street. “You really love this kid? This Hare Rama with all the jewelry?”

Eliza withdrew her hand sharply. She took up her necklace again, jogged the charms.

“He appears to be noble,” Les went on. “A stand-up guy. But why marry him? You’re already knocked up. Why not cohabit for a while, play it by ear?”

“That’s what you’d do, isn’t it. Play it by ear.”

“I find it’s the best organ to play by.” He swatted at the fly. “Although I’ve been accused of playing by others.”

Eliza was scrunched down on the futon, her body practically horizontal, her hand absently rubbing the T-shirt stretched over her belly. “What if it was Jude’s kid? Would you and my mom still want me to give it away?”

“If it was Jude’s kid, well, we’d all get married and live in one big incestuous duplex.”

“It would have been better, wouldn’t it,” said Eliza, gazing into space.

Les tried to picture it: a new age sitcom family, the four of them taking turns with the nighttime feedings. A grandfather at the age of forty-three. It was no more outrageous than the idea he’d had, in the early hours of St. Valentine’s Day, his ex-wife catching her breath beside him, of returning to his old life. Not taking any vows—just staying there in that bed. Just playing it by ear. But in the morning Harriet had wordlessly deposited a plate of scrambled eggs in front of him, and then he’d whisked his son away. And now neither of these options was available to him, his old family or his new. The phone rang, and Les got up and went eagerly to it. He found himself hoping it was Jude, the thread that now held his families together.

Instead, he heard the familiar static of a cordless phone.

Les listened to the voice crack through the noise, to the voice and the static and the fly and the door-buzzer peal of his headache. The voices in his head. Had he seen Eliza? He had better tell her if he’d seen Eliza, he had better tell her where that punk lived, if he didn’t want the cops involved, if he didn’t want a drug-sniffing dog at his door, if he knew what was good for him.

Les was not entirely sure that he did.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t hear you very well.” And he placed the phone in its cradle.

“Oh, God. Is she coming over?”

“Hold on.”

“She’s coming to find me, isn’t she?”

“Hold
on,
girl. I’m thinking.” It was over, he was thinking. It was not the first time he had hung up on Di, or she on him. There had been other fights, accusations, betrayals, the obvious incompatibilities, but now he had crossed a line. He had stepped between Di and her child.

“I wish there was a place we could
go
. Someplace safe where she won’t find me.” Eliza was sitting up now, leaning over her belly, her face in her hands. “We can’t stay at Johnny’s! He doesn’t even have AC!”

Les picked up the phone and dialed the number that, the dozen or so times he’d dialed it in the last seven years, he was always surprised to remember.

“What are you doing?”

He listened to the dial tone, fanning himself with the flyswatter now, fanning himself as though putting out a fire. He had a wild idea as he waited: that his ex-wife was pregnant with his child, that this child would be the one he wouldn’t screw up, that he could have his old family and his new one under one roof.
Honey,
he’d say,
I’m coming home
.

“Is Jude okay?” Harriet asked when they’d said their hellos. She sounded impatient, or maybe just anxious, out of breath, the way she had when he’d admitted to her that yes, he’d told Jude about the kids who’d broken into her studio. She had just run inside from the garden, or upstairs from the basement, where she was doing a load of laundry. She was not a woman longing for her husband to come home. Their children were the players in a business arrangement, and what had happened in their marriage bed was an olfactory fluke.
What did you do to him now?
said her voice, which might as well have been the voice of the woman he’d just hung up on, the other woman he’d deceived and failed, whose faith he’d neglected to earn.