The Birthdays (12 page)

Liz stood and headed back inside to get started on dinner. He looked at the house, the one light still on in the kitchen. She was so good about electricity. She always nagged him about his laziness with lights, how he left them on when the two of them went out even though he’d told her again and again that he’d felt uncomfortable leaving a house so dark when they weren’t there, as if they were abandoning it. “Why the strange empathy for something inanimate?” she’d said once, and he had no ready answer. What would she say if she found out about his box of rescued things?

After a while, Jake headed back inside too. He walked into their bedroom, collapsed on their bed and glanced up at a smallish, no, medium-sized crack by the light on the ceiling. He would have to examine all the ceilings in the house. What if he found more cracks? He’d need to have the roof redone. Again. It had been no small job redoing the original roof. The guy had charged double his estimate and the men had left muddy footprints all over the new floors. Not that it would matter, as God knows when he and Liz would be able to come to the island next, given his full roster of meetings this month. And the quarterly reports that were soon due, the revised budget, the taxes. When would he be able to spend any real time with her?

He felt his pulse ticking and told himself to slow down,
breathe, breathe.
He’d read several books about reducing stress and had adopted various breathing methods that did, he thought, help.
One, two, three
, he breathed and closed his eyes,
one, two, three.

Liz turned on and off the faucet and the house grew quiet.

One, two, three.
He slid a hand down his shorts and rested his fingers on the warmth there.
One, two, three.
Slowly his fingers, as if independently from his brain, began to stroke himself, slowly, slowly, and the warmth gradually bled out, through his middle, and he began to move faster as he tried to recall the twin cheerleaders—their blond pigtails; their tan, full, round breasts; their long legs wide open—and he grew hotter and thicker, his heart beating, and soon he felt nothing but the warmth and the speed, and he continued, on and on, until he almost burst and opened his eyes to see his wife, at the end of the bed, several leaves of arugula in her hand.

“Jesus,” he said.

“I think I understand.” She smiled kindly.

He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow. “Can you leave me alone?” he said through the pillow.

“Feel better?”

He made a noise like a wounded cat, repeated it louder, and kicked his feet against the bed. In a moment he heard her walk out of the room and her footsteps grow quieter.

It was some time before he lifted his face from the pillow and turned over onto his back. He noticed the wooden box of odd things on top of the dresser. He rose, retrieved it and set it on the floor. He took the pacifier out of his pocket and placed it on top of an earring shaped like a heart. Here inside this box was dignity. Here was something good that he’d done. Let her find it and wonder what the hell it was. And in the end, let her think he was pathetic, a person made solely of desires lately. But she was too. Her desires and needs—rest, comfort, peace, support—overrode his by necessity of the situation,
and soon there would be two other sets of needs and desires that would override both of theirs.

He was sitting on the floor like a wounded child. It occurred to him he lacked a protective skin around his emotions. They seemed to him more raw than other people’s, closer to the surface and more urgent.

He stood, smoothed his shorts and placed his feet hip-width apart, grounding himself. He was a man, not a child. He was a successful man at that, and he had an incredible wife—beautiful and virtuous and smart and fun, and as for the tornado of needs they’d soon face, well, they had both wanted children from the beginning, he reminded himself. It’d been something he’d always known he’d wanted. When he first met her she was forthright about it and he appreciated this. She’d said, on one of their first dates, “How many children do you want?” and he’d said, without much thought, “Two.” Maxims flooded his head now:
Beware of what you wish
for; Que sera, sera
. Of course they never helped much, these words.

He looked out the window at the top of the rosebushes. The only actual, concrete problem was that Liz had just caught him going to town on himself. She was probably repulsed by him right now, despite her nonchalance (undoubtedly feigned) in the moment.

But he was human, after all, and so goddamned what if he’d indulged? She hadn’t touched him in weeks, no, months. It wasn’t such a terribly big deal. For that matter, he might as well finish what he started. Emboldened, he rushed to the underwear drawer, burrowed beneath his socks, grabbed the magazine with the twins on the front and went to sit on the bed. Liz coughed and he heard her footsteps approach. Losing his
nerve, he quickly shoved the magazine under his pillow and walked into the hallway, where she stood, pulling towels from the linen closet. He kept his eyes on the floor, brushed past her, continued on through the living room and on out of the house again, to where, he wasn’t quite sure. But he felt certain he needed to be moving. Liz hollered something to him, but he didn’t slow down to listen. He needed a minute to himself, at least a minute to decide what he would say to her now, and he rushed down the back path, down to the beach, and when he finally stopped moving, he looked around at the ocean and the gray sky, and sat down on the sand.

He picked up a pebble and tossed it forward. What
was
she thinking right now? What would he have thought if he’d walked in on her doing the same? He smiled. That never would have happened—especially now. She was not and had never been a person driven by sexual desire, and again, it was one of the things that initially impressed him. She seemed above this, above temptation of all kinds. She never drank in college, never smoked. She was an excellent student and such a promising artist—her drawings had even been displayed in the library during their final year. And she had friends, so many friends who seemed to adore her. Jake had always wanted to be someone like this—someone good and admirable and talented, someone genuinely liked by a group of people, and when she came up to him and asked to borrow his notes after their psychology class, when she said she’d meet him at his dorm later to return them, that she’d buy him an ice cream to thank him, he felt he had won some sort of lottery.

Later, he’d been so proud to introduce to her his family, especially Daniel, who’d never met any of Jake’s girlfriends. Liz engaged them all in easy conversation, bantered with
them, even joked with them about Jake a little, something that at first made him prickle. But in the end, he was just glad that she meshed with them so well. In a sense, he became more a part of his family when she was by his side.

A few blocks past Books & Beans, Alex pulled his car into a dirt driveway. Tucked behind the shops was a tiny white house, its paint chipped on its clapboards. The front lawn was all dead grass and dirty toys and rusted bicycles. He turned off the ignition, and Hilary, a little surprised by the condition of the place, followed him around the back of the house. The air smelled of cigarette smoke, and she heard the buzz of a radio struggling to receive a station. He led her down cement stairs and into a dark room where she heard the sound of panting. When he switched on the light, an enormous black Lab lunged forward and lapped at her belly.

“That’s Rita,” Alex said.

Hilary tried to fend off the dog when Alex disappeared into the next room. Around her were piles of books, magazines, clothes strewn across sagging or torn furniture. The walls were covered in tilted posters, enormous photographs of mountains and water and trees.

Rita had fastened her teeth to Hilary’s shoe and was chewing and yanking, a low rumbling rising from her throat. Hilary tried to kick her away as she went over to what looked like an easy chair beneath a pile of shirts and a hammer and a camera and a cardboard box. She set these things on the ground and eased herself into the chair.

Alex appeared in the doorway holding two glasses of water. “Drink?” he said, and handed her a glass. He sat down on the
floor in front of her, evidently unaware that his dog was now mangling what looked like one of his socks with her teeth.

“She your girlfriend?” Hilary asked.

“Funny.” He reached over and stroked Rita’s head. “She’s my baby. I’ve had her since I was a kid.”

“She’s something.”

“Indeed,” he said. He pulled the dog onto his lap and vigorously scratched the top of her head. She squealed and licked his lips.

Hilary looked away. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what she would tell George about this place and this person.
Young, aloof, outdoorsy—your typical Berkeley type,
she’d say, and George would ask her why she spent so much time with him, and she’d say,
I don’t know, something just kept me there,
and quickly change the subject. George didn’t know she was pregnant. She hadn’t been down to San Diego in months, and she hadn’t been able to figure out a way to tell him, or even whether to tell him at all. Now she imagined breaking the news to her family.
You’re what? And no father for it,
they’d say.
How could you let this happen? You’re too old for such irresponsibility. Haven’t you grown out of this stage yet?
They still treated her like the baby of the family. They still assumed she had no idea how to be responsible. Every other month Jake sent her books about investing money. Her father assumed she had no idea how to take care of her car or computer and asked her, whenever they spoke, if she’d been changing the oil, checking the tires, backing up her documents.
You can’t be both a child and a mother,
they’d all think when they saw her, all of them except Daniel.

Rita looked up at Hilary with widened jaws, as if she were smiling, and began slapping Alex’s nose and mouth with her pale pink tongue. He turned and gazed at Hilary with a blank
expression, blissfully blank. His hair curled in boyish waves around his face. His eyes were dark, his lips full. He was handsome, objectively handsome.

“I’m beat,” she said, tentatively at first. “I’m absolutely fried. Maybe I should lie down for a little bit.”

He looked at her in surprise. “All right.”

“Bedroom in here?” Hilary asked, pointing to the next room. “You mind?”

He shook his head but stayed where he was.

With great effort, she pulled herself from the chair and lumbered into the next room, just as squalid as the other. A mattress lay on the floor covered with clothes. The room smelled of unwashed bodies. If her mother could see her now, or Jake.

“Families make you uncomfortable,” George said about a year ago over the phone.

“Not yours.”

“Yes it does. You don’t want to be a part of something so traditional.”

“Yours isn’t traditional. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, George.”

“Still. You like being on your own. You like to think you’re making your own decisions, that you’re not being swayed by people around you who expect certain things,” she remembered him saying. “You hate having to live up to expectations.”

She set her hand against the wall and lowered herself slowly onto Alex’s mattress. Knots of clothes pressed into her back.

“That’s why you don’t want to move down here,” George said.

“You know that’s not true. Can you honestly see me living
in that sort of environment? With all the blondes and the sun and the surfers? I’d hate it. I’d go crazy.”

“Yes, I can see it.”

She pulled a pair of shorts from beneath her back and tossed them on the floor.

“No you can’t.”

“You would laugh at them just like you laugh at those kids demonstrating in Berkeley and the healthy couples riding mountain bikes in Marin.”

It was cement, the mattress, and she tugged the clothes away as she rested her head on a stained pillow with no case. The room reminded her of college, of the boys freed from their families to neglect their laundry and diet and hygiene. She’d been in rooms like this many times before, but not in years. This could have been the last time she’d find herself in such a place.

“Okay. And what would I do for work?”

“Anything. It doesn’t matter. You could work at a little gallery. You could work at a bookstore. Something laid-back, something more you than filing papers for some company.”

“You know I hate all that sun. It makes bad moods impossible. It doesn’t allow for sloth or irony or nastiness or anything good, really. People would hate me there, and I would hate them. It’s nothing against you and Camille. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

“Right.”

“George.”

“You don’t like expectation. You don’t like families.”

“I’ve never been too good at being a part of one. Mine can attest to that. Have I told you how many times I ran away as a kid?”

“You’re thirty-five, Hil.”

“Twenty-six times. Of course most of the time I just went to the woods in the back of the house, but later I took a bus into Boston. Twice I hitchhiked to New York.”

“Should I pity you?”

“Maybe.”

“When was the last time you ran away?”

“I suppose when I moved here thirteen years ago.”

“I rest my case.”

“George. I’m sorry, but I’m just not moving down there.”

There was silence, a swallowing and a fizzing on the line, and then the dial tone. She looked up at Alex’s ceiling speckled with mildew and closed her eyes.

Alex stood above her, Rita by his side. “Everything okay in here? You’ve been out for a while. You want to keep sleeping?”

“No,” she said. Her head was heavy, dizzy, and she blinked several times.

He sat down on the end of the mattress. “How you feeling?” he asked. He looked at her belly.

She screwed up her face. “Oh my God, I think it’s coming. I think my water broke!”

He froze, then jumped up. “What should I do? What should I do?”

She smiled. “I’m kidding. I still have three more months to go. You don’t have anything to worry about.”