“Anything? No? Keep going. Think about your baby. What’s your baby’s name?”
“Jack.”
“Think about Jack.”
Clee tethered herself to the machine. She didn’t want to go to the NICU with no milk so I went up alone and told Jack how hard his mom was working to make him a delicious meal. When I got back she was pumping. Empty bottles.
“I told him how hard his mom was working.”
“You called me Mom to him?”
“Mommy? Mother? What do you want to be called?”
Shoop-pa, shoop-pa. Her eyes seethed with frustration.
“Fucking shit.” She banged on the pump with her fist, knocking a cup and a fork off the table with an incredible clatter.
Shoop-pa, shoop-pa, shoop-pa.
IT WAS DAWN AND SHE was touching my ear. I was dreaming that the pump was on, but it wasn’t, everything was very quiet, it was dawn, and she was touching my ear. Tracing its perfect edges with her finger. The first light of the day was creeping into the tiny room. I smiled at her. She smiled and pointed at her bedside table. Milk. Two bottles, each with an eighth inch of yellow milk in them.
Clee was discharged the next morning. But Jack, of course, was not. Dr. Kulkarni said he would be released when he was able to drink two ounces of milk and digest them properly.
“I’m guessing two weeks,” he said. “Or less. Or more. He needs to show us he can nipple his own feeds; suck and swallow.”
He started to move away. Clee was waiting with her purse and street clothes on. I grabbed his sleeve.
“Yes?” said the doctor. I hesitated; it was taking me a moment to draw together all the facets of my question. I was wondering if my life, the life in which I had a son and a beautiful, young girlfriend, could exist outside of the hospital. Or was the hospital its container? Was I like honey thinking it’s a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?
“I can guess what’s on your mind,” Dr. Kulkarni said.
“Really?”
He nodded. “It’s too early to tell but he’s recovering beautifully so far.”
We told Jack we would be back in the morning and then we left and then we doubled back because I hadn’t said I love you—I love you, my sweet potato—and we left again, walking shakily out the front doors and into the sunlight. We held hands in the back of the cab. My street looked the same. My neighbor two doors down was wheeling in her trash cans and watched us hobble to the door. Clee started to slip off her shoes.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“No, I want to.”
“It’s your house as much as mine now.”
“I’ve gotten used to it.”
Everything was as we had left it. There was dried blood all over the bedroom. Snails were clustered on the kitchen ceiling. Towels lay in strange places. Rick’s bowls of hot water were waiting on the dresser, cold. I cleaned quickly while Clee pumped, whipping her sleeping bag off the couch and stuffing it into the linen closet.
Before she climbed into my bed for the first time she mumbled an apology about the way her feet smelled.
“The color therapy didn’t work.”
“It didn’t work for me either.”
“Did you know Dr. Broyard’s wife is the famous Dutch painter Helge Thomasson?”
“He told you that?”
“No, someone in the waiting room did.”
“The receptionist?”
“No, another patient.”
We got under the covers and held hands. Cheating on a housewife was understandable, he might have done it for the intellectual stimulation alone—but shame on Dr. Broyard for not rising to the challenge of Helge Thomasson. I had never heard of her but she was obviously a formidable woman. Clee put her hand on my stomach for a moment and then took it off.
“Dr. Binwali said I could have sex in eight weeks.”
I smiled like someone’s nervous aunt. The topic hadn’t come up since that first day. Some women just kiss and give back rubs and leave it at that. I wondered if her old aggression would come back. Perhaps it would be like a simulation. We might begin on the “park bench”—she grabs my breast. But instead of fighting her off I just let her rape me. Would we need to buy a rubber penis? I had seen a store for things like that next to a pet store in a strip mall on Sunset.
“The muscles,” she said. “They won’t contract.”
An orgasm. That’s what she couldn’t have for eight weeks.
“But I could, you know, for you. If you want.”
“No, no,” I said quickly. “Let’s wait. Until we both can.” I liked this way of talking where the verbs were left out. Maybe we would never say them.
“Okay, good.” She squeezed my hand. “I hope I can wait that long,” she added.
“Me too, it’s so hard to wait.”
I WOKE WITH A START like a passenger on an airplane—for a moment I could feel how high I was and had an appropriate terror of falling. It was three A.M. We had just left him there. Tiny him. He was alone in the NICU, lying there in his plastic box. Oh, Kubelko. A howl was curdling inside me; the ache felt inhuman. Or maybe this was my first human feeling. Would I put on my clothes and drive to the hospital right now? I waited to see if I would. I looked at her yellow hair spread across the pillow that I usually wedged between my legs. None of this would last. It was all a preposterous dream. I pushed myself out of consciousness.
The radio and the sun were blaring. “What kind of music do you like?” Clee said, rolling through some staticky stations. I rubbed my eyes. I had never used my clock radio as anything but a clock.
“I bet you like this.” She paused on a country music station and looked at me. “No?” She scrolled, watching my face. Different kinds of jangly and upsetting music passed by.
“Maybe that.”
“This?”
“I like classical.”
She turned it up and lay back down, putting her arm around me. I didn’t have a favorite kind of music. Eventually I would have to tell her that.
“This can be our song,” she whispered. She couldn’t wait to get started on having a girlfriend.
We listened until the end to get the name; it was unendurably long. Finally a snobby British man came on. It was a Gregorian chant from the seventh century called “Deum verum.”
“This doesn’t have to be our song.”
“Too late.”
WE VISITED JACK EVERY MORNING and evening. Each time we entered the NICU in our gowns and clean hands I dreaded the news, but he was getting stronger every day. Clee thought we were out of the woods and it seemed like we probably were; all the nurses said he was the toughest white baby they’d ever seen. We converted the ironing room into a nursery and bought onesies and diapers and wipes and a crib and a changing table and a changing pad and a changing pad cover and a soft tray called a “sleeper” and a first-aid kit and a whale-shaped bathtub and baby shampoo and baby washcloths and towels and swaddling blankets and burp cloths and squeaky toys and cloth books and a video baby monitor and a diaper bag and a diaper pail and an expensive personal breast pump with its own carrying case. It would still be at least a week before Jack could nurse but he was drinking her milk handily through a feeding tube.
“It has a really powerful motor,” Clee said admiringly. “It’s the same motor that’s in power tools and the blenders professional bakers use to make dough. Same exact motor.” She wore the strap of the case diagonally across her chest like a bike messenger bag.