The Birthing House Page 18

‘I need a drink.’

  Conrad was on the TV room floor, leaning against the wall, the remaining half of the Budweiser twelve-pack between his legs. He felt like he’d just passed some test and the beer might as well have been iced tea for all the buzz it gave him. Nadia was sitting crossways on the couch, the dogs sleeping soundly at her feet, as Troxler had promised. Nadia’s suspicions and weariness of their ordeal seemed to have vanished. She was smiling more, talking him through it, helping him cool off.

  ‘God, look at them,’ he said. ‘No idea it happened.’

  ‘We saved them, didn’t we?’ Nadia said.

  ‘Yeah, we did. I don’t know what I would have done without you.’

  ‘When you came to my house you looked like someone died.’

  ‘I thought they were goners. Just fucked.’

  ‘Oh, you’re okay now, girl.’ Nadia kissed Alice on the nose. ‘You’re not fucked.’

  ‘I don’t know what I . . . I wouldn’t make it without them.’

  ‘They’re like your children, huh?’

  ‘You have no idea how much.’

  ‘I might,’ she said. ‘Some day soon, I just might.’

  ‘Yeah, you might.’ Conrad sighed, watching Luther. ‘I’ll tell you this. The woman from the rescue shelter found him tied to a street post on La Cienega when he was seven months old. Ribs like a xylophone, mange, broken leg. He was terrified of the endless honking taxis and banging trash trucks. You could tie a steak to the stop sign, he still wouldn’t walk down a loud street.’

  ‘Oh, Luther, you just can’t stay out of trouble, can you?’ Luther snored. ‘So, you just found him at the pound?’

  ‘No, no. It was a bit more than that. It took us six weeks to adopt him. This rescue group, Mighty Mutts. Run by a veterinarian, total non-profit. They don’t mess around. They put us through a lot of waiting, came to our home, made us fill out a ton of forms. I kept calling, pleading my case. Jo was against it at first. She can’t stand the hair on her clothes, if you can believe that. But I knew. I never wanted anything so bad as I wanted that dog. He’s my boy.’

  ‘Why’d it take so long?’

  ‘The rescue people know. Dog bonds with his master. People will give up a dog like it’s a hobby. A bag of garbage. You give him up it breaks his heart and he rarely gets over it. Lot of dogs walking around out there, nervous wrecks, all faith in life shattered. Some turn mean. But the ones that do get over it, they never forget. They love you like you have never been loved.’

  Nadia watched him drink. He knew he was getting dopey-eyed, slurring a little.

  ‘Luther never really got over his fear of walking, and he was destroying the house with the separation anxiety. People said medicate him, but that’s not right. He was only a year old. We tried herbal supplements, more toys, a litter box, pads on the floor, short trips to the front porch, forcing him, letting him take his time. Jo said get rid of him. I told her she could leave anytime she wanted. Finally the rescue group said get another dog. Jo and I fought about that. A lot. We adopted Alice, who didn’t have any fear. She helped Luther get over it in one day. He wouldn’t leave her side, followed her right down the street.’

  ‘So you saved two dogs’ lives.’

  ‘Best thing we ever did. Sometimes I think they are better than us.’

  ‘You and your wife?’

  ‘People. Better than people.’

  They sat quietly for a minute. Nadia said, ‘She couldn’t have kids? Before, when you got the dogs?’

  ‘I don’t know that she ever wanted them.’

  ‘But you did.’

  ‘I never avoided it . . . I think it’s better not to plan too much. You take what life gives you.’

  ‘But eventually you need a plan,’ she said.

  ‘Like Seattle?’

  ‘Hey now,’ she said, scolding him. ‘Unless you have a better one, Seattle it is.’

  It came out light, but then she paused like she’d just realized what she’d said and she became very still. He’d never seen her look so scared.

  ‘Nadia.’ Conrad smiled and wagged his beer and set it down before rising from the floor. ‘I want to show you something.’

  Nadia followed him up the front stairs.

  ‘Watch your step,’ he said as much to himself as to Nadia. ‘This banister is a hundred and forty years old.’

  When they reached the guest room, he pushed the door open and pulled the switch on the safari lamp. Warm light filled the room, floating a halo over the crib.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Conrad. This is very nice. Did you do this by yourself?’

  ‘Yes. You really like it?’

  ‘It’s more real than any room in the house.’

  He liked that. ‘Nadia?’

  She turned and faced him in the doorway.

  ‘We didn’t . . . we were not together in any way. Not for months before we moved here, and we haven’t been since. What she carries inside her, it did not come from me.’

  ‘Come on. Don’t say that.’

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘But I’m more worried about you,’ he said, pulling at her shirt with two fingers. ‘I told you I would help you.’

  ‘Conrad. You’re a nice guy. But I’m leaving soon.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘Yes, I do. And she’s coming home, eventually.’

  ‘There’s another guy out there, in her room. I heard him. I don’t think she is coming home. And maybe I don’t want her to.’

  Nadia shook her head slowly.

  ‘Something is happening inside this house,’ he said. ‘And we are a part of it. Maybe fate. I don’t care. I want to take care of you. I can’t stop thinking about taking care of you.’

  He leaned forward, his breath beery and loose. She stared up at him, unmoving. He kissed her on the mouth. Her lips hung open, undecided. Then her tongue pushed in first and he swooned, literally. She pushed him back against the wall, holding him up.

  ‘You’re kinda drunk,’ she said.

  ‘But I know what I know,’ he said.

  ‘And you’re exhausted. Come on.’

  She led him into the bedroom. She was so small in front of him. He could look right over her blonde hair and he wished he had the strength to lift her up and set her down on the bed, but he was too tanked to be gallant.

  ‘Here.’ She turned him sideways and he leaned over to kiss her again. She put one palm against his chest and pushed gently.

  ‘My dogs.’ He flopped on the bed, clothes and all. ‘We can’t leave them down there.’

  ‘I’ll watch them.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yes.’ She turned off the light. ‘I promise.’

  ‘Nadia,’ he said in the dark.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t leave me alone here. I won’t make it without you.’

  She lingered a minute, and he passed out before he could hear her walk away.

  HOLLY

  If you ask men when they are happiest, their first and rather unimaginative answer is usually something along the lines of, right after I come. And that is a peaceful time. All the fighting and working and wooing and pleading are past; the lucky man has been satisfied and done his best for her, and now the siren has him down. Time to drift and recharge and meet the world another day, which fills us up with more longing, anger and madness until we start all over again.

  But remember I said happiest, not most peaceful. If someone were to ask me when I am happiest - have you guessed this by now? That our boy is me, that his story is my story? Of course you have, for you are a very bright girl who only happens to be a little lost, as he, as I, once was lost - I would answer, not at the end, when it has been done, but at the beginning. The moment when you know it is going to happen, and you have the whole event, in all its twists and turns and tests and mystery lying directly on the path ahead. And here I should add I am not speaking of sex, or no
t only of sex, though it was sex that taught me this. How I am most alive when I am standing on the precipice of the next beginning.

  Consider the steamed lobster and melted butter and tender-loin and home-made bread are set before you by a kind waitress and you have not eaten all day. Consider iced tea with mint, its tall glass dewy with waiting for you to finish mowing the lawn on a hot July afternoon, that first bite as it washes over your scorched, panting tongue. The way the lighted Christmas tree looks when you come downstairs in padded feet to see all those gleaming boxes and ribbons and bows. The puppy whining in its crate that was put on this earth to be your best friend for the rest of his life, whether you prove him worthy or not. The smell of your crisp white Stan Smiths on the first day of school and how that fertile green emblem is going to telegraph to that one girl in the hallway exactly what you cannot find words to say, that you could have gotten any current style in the store but you are cool enough to have gone classic, old school, and this might be the year you become her boyfriend. That is what any good beginning does - takes you back to the moment when it was the first time, when it was all new, when you had nothing but new experiences in front of you and it was all magic.

  Of all the beginnings, this night, in these strangers’ home, though I could not know it then, I was standing on the precipice of the last and only true magic I would know until I found this house.

  It was to be a miracle. What other miracles are there but beginnings? It is being born. And if birth is a miracle, it is a shame we cannot remember it. Because this I remember, and, in some ways, it was the moment I began to live.

  Which is to say, also, that it was the beginning of my death.

  When my twenty minutes were up, I made my way down the hall, passing family photographs I did not linger over. My mind was focused and relaxed, but I locked the front door just in case.

  When I reached the door at the end of the hall I saw the orange flicker of light. Candles. I should tell you now, in case you’re wondering what was so special about this night, that though we had made love and the other kind, that fast, quickie sex perhaps two or three hundred times, we had never made love in the light. Whatever position we found ourselves entangled in, however raw our hunger was expressed, as dirty as we spoke to each other (we had covered a lot of ground, as I said before), it had always taken place under cover of darkness. As a child of divorce and possibly some madness on her mother’s side, Holly had suffered from anorexia before she came to our junior high school. I was told, though she didn’t like to speak of it, that she had to be institutionalized for a period of four months. Since the first day I saw her in the halls when we were fourteen, she always had the body of a young woman: curves, breasts, thighs a bit chunky, though she would slap me to hear that now. Her butt was what you would call a bubble butt and the rest of her had a perfectly healthy weight and shape. I don’t know if she ever accepted this new version of herself, but I know she trusted me when I told her I liked her body this way better than the other way, the one I could only imagine. If she still heard the voice in her mind that said, You’re too fat, lose some weight, because no one, especially Daddy, will love you this way until they are afraid of you, she was not listening to that voice now, tonight, as I entered the bedroom.

  I understood immediately that she had not been preparing herself with lotions, creams and lingerie for the past twenty minutes. Nor had she showered or primped. It was the candles, dozens of them or perhaps a hundred that had taken her twenty minutes to light. Had she delivered them earlier or found some stash in the house? I do not know. They were on the night tables, the headboard, the dressers, the leather trunk at the foot of the bed, the window sills. I say that like I was studying the décor, but that is absurd - my eyes went the only place they could go, directly to her.

  She had stripped the bed and remade it with only one layer, a fresh fitted sheet of sky-blue Egyptian cotton, five-hundred-thread count. I know this because for months after I searched for the exact texture and weight of that sheet. She had two pillows behind her head, and all was bare.

  She was stretched across it diagonally, so that she faced me upon entering, the tips of her toes pointing at me like two hands in prayer. She smiled at me with a slow, involuntary widening at the corners of her mouth, her lips spaced just so. One arm was up under her head, her hand buried somewhere in the thick fan of her hair, which hung loosely and combed out over her shoulders to the tops of her breasts. Her other arm was at her side, her hand resting flat on her belly somewhere between navel and the lowest rung of her ribcage. She was the color of honey. Her eyes, normally wide with daring, were now low and glistening like an addict’s, so that she was looking down at me even though it was I who stood above her, moving closer to the foot of the bed as I removed my zippered sweatshirt, the tee shirt under, and kicked off my jeans.

  Now is where you will ask me to skip ahead to the outcome, but I’m afraid I cannot do that. What seems like sparing you the details is to rob myself of the better understanding that comes with telling the thing the way it happened, and some details matter more than others. So cover your ears if you don’t appreciate what I am about to say, but understand that to me, to the seventeen-year-old me and the man I have become, these seemingly tawdry details matter. They matter very much.

  My Holy Girl, she let me look at her.

  She consented to my inspection, so I stood there, now in my loose boxer shorts, the pink Oxford ones she had stolen for me at the outlet mall, and I studied her. It was not so easy as head to toe or toe to head or anything like that. I would watch her chest for signs of heartbeat until I saw it, the skin over her breastbone literally pulsing, perspiring. I remember sitting beside her looking down and noticing for the first time her tiny purple dots where the hair follicles on her calves had been traumatized from her last shave. I saw the curve of her toes, thick and characterless. The balls of muscle on the inside of her knees were shiny in the firelight of the room.

  No doubt I said things that were juvenile and ill equipped. ‘I can’t believe how beautiful you are’ and ‘you’re a goddess sent here for me’ and ‘don’t move, just wait, I want to memorize you for all time’ and all those things you will laugh at now, but I meant them, and they were true. When I said she was a goddess, I understood that she held a power over my soul, and that if she were to command me to end my life with her at that moment, I surely would have. I believed in her the way one comes to believe in any other god, a work of genius, a fact of life, that song. The horizons revolved around her soul and her soul was the sun. Holly Bauerman was love incarnate.

  Her heart was strong and rapid, so different from her expression, which remained languid like her pose. I traced her breasts with the speed of a tortoise traversing a desert, I marveled at the pebbled brownness of areoles, the network of veins, the fine blonde hairs sprouting around them. I’d looked at them a hundred times before, but I had never seen them. At my touch she tensed and told me my fingers burned. As I traced her belly and hips I let my fingers rest on the stretch marks, those clues to her history like white tiger stripes in miniature.

  I suppose this watching went on for hours, but it could have been minutes. Each moment was condensed and stretched out like a rubber band as time elasticized. When at last I could not resist I drew my two middle fingers from her calf behind her knee and up her thigh in a slow arc until they brushed against the lips of her sex (she called it her chi-chi, which at the time sounded to me like a toy poodle but now recalls something more accurate, the chi, or life force, in Eastern philosophy) and they came away instantly wet in a way that shocked me. She had remained so calm, I did not realize what had been going on inside of her. I looked down, of course I did, and watched my fingers exploring her, trying not to gasp as I saw not only the color and quantity of her desire but the markings we were making on the sheet. I confess that my adolescent mind did not understand fully what was happening at first. I worried for a moment she had lost control and truly wet the bed. She reacted t
o my touch by reaching out for me - Enough is enough, she said without so many words. Come to me now.

  But I could not, yet. I needed to understand, to create, to wallow. I let my fingers roam back to that spot and around and inside and over her hips and thighs and back inside until she was covered in her own salty sweetness and on the verge of her first of this night’s orgasms, and only then did I lose all thought and sit upright to allow her to pull my shorts off.

  I felt clumsy on top of her and we slid against each other, searching for the right angles. The prospect of feeling all of her made it like the first time again. The heat of her soft belly flesh pressed against me as her hand encircled me and slid down, and in the confusion I assumed I was inside.

  She was staring at me, wide-eyed with desperation and patience. That she had planned this and wanted me without protection, that when she said she loved me like no one else and would always love me, filled me with the power and purpose of a righteous man.

  ‘I want to be with you forever,’ she said, whispering to me, watching me as I watched her. ‘I want to love you forever. Can I love you forever? Will you promise me there will never be anyone else and that we can have each other and be like this forever?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘More than anything. I love you.’

  We spoke fast, repeating these declarations until they became vows.

  I moved against her and slid into her and up against her and out again, over her triangle and to her navel. I was shaking all over and she cradled my head in the back of her hand, pulling me down, moving her hips up against me. Without guilt or thought I cried out in actual pain and shuddered as the pulses of my ejaculate made us comically wet and still we had not done the ‘it’ part of it.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .’ I was mortified.

  ‘Shush, no, it’s beautiful,’ she said, kissing me. ‘This is only the beginning.’

  I felt her hands reaching for me, or pulling on me to keep me up. This latter, if it was her intention, was not necessary. At seventeen and coming down from one of the most powerful climaxes of my life, I had lost nothing. In a way it was better, for now I could start again and do it for her.