The art-handling job is long forgotten. Now they say he is the real deal. A painter the likes of which they haven’t seen in years. He gets a studio space across town. When she is seven months old, I strap the baby in, go to visit. It is cavernous, a row of giant oils along the walls. He comes to us, grabs the baby and kisses her, snuggles her against his chest, where she coos, gloriously happy.
He lives in a different world now. Peopled by art dealers, museum curators, rich benefactors. I leave her with the sweet old couple next door and go with him to an opening in the city. We walk in hand in hand, but then he is swirled away from me. Everywhere people in angular clothes, women in sharp lines and black that drapes away from exposed shoulders, large-framed glasses and red-lipsticked mouths. I feel my body under me still ungainly, still bloated, an oddity among all these slim and svelte physicalities. On the wall, his new paintings. They are huge, bursting off the wall in riotous colors, none of that disciplined illustrative style he had had before. These are bold figures, almost abstracts. I go from one to the next. Each of them is a stranger to me. I do not recognize our life together anywhere.
A woman slips next to me, says, “You’re his wife, right?” a glint in her sideways glance.
I nod, startled to be recognized.
She says, “What’s it like?”
I raise my eyebrows at her and she says, “You know, to be married to so much genius?” She waves at the vivid canvas in front of us.
I turn my eyes away from her. “Amazing. So inspiring. To see that his talent is finally being rewarded.”
“Oh yes, you were with him through the lean years, weren’t you?”
“Yes. We were together.”
“You supported him? Financially?”
“We supported each other. It’s what couples do.”
I walk away. She’s right. I had supported him. I had been the pillar and he the creeping vine. I had worked. And because of that, he can do this. I had been such a good nurse. It comes to me in a flood. I had been good. I had made a difference. It had been important. The difference between life and death, even. While what he does, this glorified playing with color, it cannot even compare in importance. But there he is, in a knot of people who will praise him, who will buy his work, who will pay him so much more than I could ever even have dreamed of.
But I am mommy now. Every single other thing is secondary. Even if I did go back to work, back to that other life, that umbilical cord stretched thin would nag and pull and then perhaps snap, and this I cannot risk.
*
We have agreed I will stay home for the first two years. These are the most important times of her life. These are the years that will dictate the whole of her life, that will set how she feels about love and need and desire. I will give her all that. The whole of my world revolving around her. She is the sun and I am every planet. I love my baby.
He’s gone a lot, but I don’t complain. I walk around with her. We sit in the rocking chair, her lips latch on my nipple, those eyes look up at me, her head rests in my palm. We follow the sun and the shadows across the rooms of the house. It is silent except for my voice, her small sounds, her crying. A sort of peace. Just her and me, like a big animal and a small animal curled together for safety. Like all the pictures of mother animals and baby animals in her picture books. Here is the mama duck with her soft yellow baby under her wing; here is the mother horse with her foal between her legs; here is the sow with a row of pink piglets suckling at her. We are just like them, I tell myself over and over. This is the most natural thing in the world. This is normal. This is only a mother and her child alone together.
But then why is there this noise like nails on a chalkboard somewhere behind my eyes? Why is there a thudding panic in my blood? Why do I feel as if some childhood door is inching open? Sometimes when he’s gone, something secret happens to me. Sometimes I put her in the crib, go into our bedroom, close the door, and fall into bed.
Her screams come loud and piercing, but the heaviness is stronger. I can lift no inch of myself. It is as if I inhabit a different planet where the rules of gravity are stricter, each of my limbs pinned mercilessly to the bed. I lie there listening to her scream and rage and sob, and then, maybe hours later, silence. Finally, finally, she has released me, and sleep drops over my head like a shroud.
I wake up in a panic, shoot out of tangled, humid sheets. She is tearless, her eyes huge as I lift her out of her crib. She is learning the unnatural lesson that crying is in vain. Already I have trained her well. Her diaper sags heavy. I clutch her to me, kiss the sweet slope of her forehead. I coo and rock her. I change the filthy diaper; I pull out my tit and attach her to it. I think I’ll never do that again, never. I won’t leave her despairing, unsure if I will ever return.
By the time he comes home, the baby and I are starved for his love.