The Birthing House Page 19

  ‘This is what I want,’ she whispered. I waited for an explanation while her hand circled between us, on me and then elsewhere. ‘I want you, I want all of you. Inside me. I want you forever. I want to have your baby.’ Her eyes glowed as she said it again, making sure I understood the words she had never spoken, not even in jest. ‘I want to have your baby.’

  I lifted myself off of her so that perhaps twelve inches of space remained between our bodies and I watched as, eyes closed, her breath coming in gulps, she gathered the threads of my semen and applied them to her sex with a repetitive motion that was somehow repulsive and graceful. I did not understand. Just know that, whatever distortions you are tempted to assign my recollection, don’t make the mistake of thinking she was putting on a show for my benefit. Though it was the most erotic act I have ever witnessed, it was also without thought, instinctual. Her hands moved as if she were not in control, efficiently cleaning up the mess like the sweep of that woman’s hand in the paper towel commercial, only more primal, the way one imagines our ancestors weaving reeds. Each sweep of her palm gathered whatever fluid it could find, and then smoothed it over the cusp of her belly and further, down into the place God intended. She pressed her fingers into herself, rubbing herself until she was bucking against me.

  I watched. I kissed her. I watched.

  What did I know, at seventeen? She could have been performing some secret act only women learn when they have sought counsel to help them conceive. I certainly did not know that this was an act no woman, including my wife, would ever perform in my presence again. I knew only that this was it, the greatest proof my girl could offer that she loved me, that when she said forever she meant forever. Because, when you think about it, what is more risky to a teenaged girl than getting pregnant? What commitment is more long term than having your child, knowing she will likely be ostracized for it?

  On another, more selfish side, my ego soared. What so many women understandably find repulsive - this thick, bleach-smelling substance - Holly was devouring to a place so much more dangerous than her mouth. I watched her hands do their work until her muscles clenched and pulled my seed deeper within her, and I understood the degree to which I had misjudged her love for me, how all-encompassing it had become, and that our future was sealed, that we would forever be us. I understood I would never, ever be alone again in this world.

  Whatever you think happiness is, whatever you think it really means to be safe and secure and loved, I can tell you this. It is never more present in us than when we have coveted and loved and risked everything to claim another, and having done so found our equal, having reached the mutual understanding that we want the same thing, and that the thing we want is nothing. Nothing. Not money not fame not cars not houses not artistic greatness not even children, nothing except the person we are mated to, lost and found. This ecstatic mental state so perfectly in tune with our physical design is our home, the only real home we are given a chance to find in this life, the place we are lost, found, safe, forgiven, remade and forged into better men, the home we are forever trying to get back to, the one true birthing house.

  When she had become almost frantic and I could bear observing her from a distance no more, I pulled her hands away and pushed myself inside her again, and this time I stayed.

  We stayed this way for more than seven hours. I keep telling you it was not about the sex, but now it was the sex and nothing else. I know that I came inside her three more times, and she every time with me, pulling me deeper. The candles burned to their foundations before we drifted off to sleep.

  Are you sleeping now? Is my voice soothing, or does it frighten you? If you want me stop, that is okay, too. Not every story needs to be heard to be understood. But I think you have heard this story before, or at the very least have felt it growing between us. That is why I’m telling you now - so that you will know everything about me, so that nothing will grow between us.

  When you wake up, in the end, we will be together.

  That is all that matters now.

  26

  It was a beginning, and he was a man who loved beginnings more than middles or endings.

  He told himself he was being foolish. He told himself he was being a fucking idiot. He told himself that his wife was smart, beautiful, decent, forgiving, working to preserve their new hope in the ongoing experiment that was their marriage, and most of all that she was pregnant with his child.

  Or a child.

  But every child needs a home. He’d given Luther a home. Then Alice. It wasn’t enough. He needed the other half. Wasn’t that what the Bible said? Eve was the rib, and you missed her forever. Except, in this age of MBA wives and husbands who were good at cooking and cleaning and wringing their hands but not even handy enough to change a pipe under the sink, Conrad knew he was the rib. Jo, his host body, was her own strong woman and she was pulling away.

  Nadia Grum was here. Half a family, waiting for the right man.

  He had admitted that he wanted her. Wanted her, but wanted what of her? Not sex, or not only sex, because he was if anything painfully aware of her condition and the preposterous nature of their situation. Sex was a distant thing if it was there at all. In its place, something unnamable, and more powerful.

  Oh yes, he could see how a sane man might decide it was time to seek counsel in the form of one’s doctor, one’s wife, one’s family. But Jo was his only family, and like a man running from the avalanche of emotional debt but not yet bankrupt of pride, he chose to leave Jo out of it. To call his wife and inform her of his experiences, his utter emotional fucked-uppedness, would be an Armageddon, what the marriage shrinks called a relationship-ending event. No, whatever the end turned out to be, he would determine the course on his own. He knew that seeking advice would not change his wishes. Because the real horror is that when you’re busy ruining your life, self-awareness doesn’t stop you.

  Sweating out the beer in their new cotton sheets, thinking of her one story below, he could see all these things, but he was powerless to them. And to one more thing.

  The house.

  Something had happened here, maybe several somethings involving life and death and the things that slip through the cracks in between. Something had been born here and it lived here still. He did not have all the pieces, but he felt it. He felt the will of the place working on him every time he returned home and it was not going away. It was, in fact, getting stronger. It had broken the mirrors, out of anger. Angry that he was next door with her, or that they hadn’t been here, where they were supposed to be, tending to business. He wanted to know it. He wanted to touch the ghost, if that’s what it was, maybe even help it. Her. He was terrified, repulsed, and drawn to it as he was drawn to the girl and the destruction she would bring down. And never mind Dr Alexis Hobarth, the animal sage, and his scientific explanations for what was, in effect, a miracle birth. He wasn’t religious, but he wanted to be faithful, to find something deserving of faith, even if it cost him his marriage. Maybe this house would offer such an article. And maybe this thing inside him, driving him, was but a quaint strain of madness. And if so, so what? Wasn’t love like that? An excuse to go mad, just for a little while? Who didn’t wish for that? A padded room to protect you while you flipped out, a chamber where your most vile stench will be expelled and ventilated, a darkened theater to project your dreams on to the willing patrons of your all-too-human freak show.

  A house to call a home.

  She slept on the couch that night, and stayed with him for the next sixty hours. The incident with the dogs had put them together and unlocked a hidden need to abandon reality, together. He supposed she was interested in more than money for a plane ticket. Maybe not a father for her unborn child, maybe not yet.

  But if circumstances made it possible, the next days made it real. What was once a hidden thought, a phrase tinted with flirting, a lingering question, now became a tactile sensation, the electric of the boundary pushed.

  There were no long conversati
ons or weeping confessions. They did not make love physically.

  Instead, theirs was a time of domestic gestures and offerings. The bump of the hip while he cooked over the stove. The looking out the window saying nothing, seeing how it felt to stand side by side. Once, when he had come down from a shower dressed in a clean shirt, she squinted and plucked lint from his shoulder. It was a small thing done like she’d done it a hundred times before, almost simian in its normalcy, but it was a statement. The female claiming a small right. After seeing the baby’s room prepared that way in the warm light, she moved through the house no longer a guest, but a new resident.

  They woke late the next morning. She was at the refrigerator, searching, grumpy.

  He understood what to do. ‘Stay here. I’ll be right back.’

  Into the bloody car to fetch real groceries. He spent three hundred dollars on good food and fell in love with feeding her. He prepared omelets with mushrooms and tomatoes, flipping them in the pan like a pro while she watched. Hash browns he’d shredded himself. Buttered toast. Fresh juice. What else did she like?

  The stint as a prep cook in college came back. He cooked three meals a day. She would sit and watch him move around the kitchen. Never seen a man cook, she said, fascinated. He put things together she’d never eaten: Thai green curry and miso soup, green chile stew with warm tortillas, London broil with twice-baked potatoes and asparagus sautéed in olive oil. Salmon filets, sweet beets, mesclun greens with walnuts and Michigan cherries and crumbled blue cheese. Dozens of rolls and a loaf of home-made bread from the wedding present breadmaker. Cheesecake, pound cake, pecan pie and strawberry ice cream. Her appetite was astonishing. She ate for two, then three and sometimes four. She smiled the most after finishing a meal.

  She helped him change the bandages around the dogs’ legs. He could not be sure, but it seemed that the cuts were healing almost despite the sutures. The dogs no longer limped or slept all day. They acted like they had never been wounded. He was reminded of the quick healing in his hand, but he did not dwell on the idea that had struck him since he first moved in.

  This is a healing place, and we are healing.

  They lounged, watched movies, soap operas. He hadn’t seen Days of Our Lives since high school, when Holly had forced him to watch it with her after school. Usually he would indulge her for half an hour, then get restless, horny, until Holly caved in and they had sex. Holly. They had been the craziest couple in high school - or the only real one. Watching TV with Nadia was different. It was a way to be together without doing anything. It was safe. Nadia said her feet hurt and he rubbed them from the other end of the couch until she fell asleep in the late afternoon.

  The clock ceased to matter. They stayed up late, woke early, napped. They played Scrabble through the afternoon thunder-storms and she surprised him by beating him two out of three.

  She slept on the couch even when he offered her the upstairs bed, insisting he would behave and stay in another room. She refused. On the second day he came down to find her lying still like one of Laski’s kids. He sat on the couch next to her and she sat up suddenly, startled, then pressed her mouth to his. He tasted her morning breath and she pulled his hair. They pushed against each other’s mouths for fifteen minutes without anything else. He somehow knew to keep his hands down, and that was better. She moaned when they kissed, and he stopped, thinking her crying again. But she wasn’t. Nervous, excited, don’t want to talk about it. He couldn’t remember if Jo had ever been so moved by a kiss. Nadia would kiss him that way for ten minutes, then push away. She would disappear into the bath for half an hour and resurface wearing his old tees and boxers. She came down one time in his Sebadoh and he thought that was perfect.

  The dogs were warm to her, but he sensed they knew. He would catch them looking at him and he would think, They know. They know she is not Jo and something is wrong with this picture.

  The second night he could not sleep and he went to her on the couch. She was sleeping. He sat next to her on the couch and watched her. He placed a hand on her swollen belly - she must be seven months now - and she woke to his touch. He did not pull his hand away and she left it there, looking up at him. I’m falling for this whole deal, he thought. The woman and everything inside her and what it will cost. When she sat up he said sorry, but she said it was okay, she just had to pee.

  When she returned she held the blanket open for him and the morning passed in a cocoon of unmoving, unsleeping silence. Two bodies learning something before their brains could catch up.

  He was dozing spoon-to-spoon when she said, ‘I don’t know why, but I feel safe with you.’

  ‘You are.’

  She sighed heavily with contentment, and he felt now was the time to ask.

  ‘Nadia,’ he whispered.

  ‘Mh-hm.’

  ‘Is that why you tried to run away? Because you weren’t safe with Eddie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He is the father.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was it here? In this house?’

  A minute passed before she answered. ‘The Laskis moved out over a year ago. The house was empty last fall and winter. Eddie and I . . . we had nowhere else to go. I’d spent so much time here growing up, it felt almost normal, like I deserved to be here. We spent the afternoons hiding out in the rooms, drinking wine, smoking cigarettes. For a while we were both happy, but kinda out of control. But then it happened, and my parents would not allow us to see each other again. Eddie was always wild, but he got mean after that. How did you know?’

  ‘It just makes sense. The house wants life.’

  ‘Does it? Because sometimes I feel like it doesn’t want me here.’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘I dunno. Maybe because I’ve always been an intruder.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s true. First I was the babysitter. Mrs Laski was always suspicious of me, and I saw the way Mr Laski looked at me.’

  ‘You are beautiful enough to halt birds in flight. Can you blame them?’

  ‘Then I was with Eddie, when no one owned the house, and I became pregnant. I was never really frightened here, not during those afternoons, but I always knew I was breaking the rules. I always felt like I was angering her somehow.’

  He did not think to clarify whether if by ‘her’ Nadia meant Mrs Laski, the house itself or someone else.

  ‘I thought about getting rid of it. Eddie asked me to. But I kept putting it off and putting it off. And then one day I didn’t care what anybody else wanted. It was like the time I was babysitting, when the zeks came for me. I’d already lost it once, and I couldn’t go through that again. This baby is my baby, but now I am an intruder again.’

  ‘You’re not. I invited you in.’

  ‘But I am not the woman of the house.’

  ‘Is that something you heard from Laski?’

  ‘I don’t remember. It just feels that way.’

  ‘Well, it’s my house now. And I want you to stay.’

  He kissed her neck, fell asleep in her hair.

  On the third morning he woke to find her in the kitchen banging around, looking for a pot. He made her peaches and cream oatmeal and he could tell something was gnawing at her.

  ‘What’s on your mind, Ms Grum?’

  ‘I’m antsy,’ she said. ‘I need to get out and do something.’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ He nodded and looked outside. It was sunny, with a light breeze coming through the front screen door. ‘You wanna go for a walk?’

  ‘Actually,’ she said with a shining fear in her eye. ‘I think I need to go home. Just for a few hours.’

  He didn’t ask for what. He went to her and kissed her. This seemed to calm her momentarily. She gave in, sucked at his tongue for a minute, then giggled and ducked away from him. Back to grumpy.

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s getting too easy.’

  ‘Too easy?’


  ‘Comfortable. We’ll forget ourselves.’

  ‘That’s a good thing.’

  ‘Not if we get caught.’

  ‘I’m not afraid,’ he said. ‘Let’s get caught.’

  ‘No one knows, Conrad.’

  He smiled. There was something to know.

  ‘Are you for real? Is this - are you sure you want this?’

  ‘Not a few hours,’ he said. ‘One.’

  ‘Promise you won’t change your mind?’

  He kissed her. She started to cry and he heard himself speaking before he’d even made the decision.

  ‘I’ll call Jo. I’ll tell her—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘—the truth.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nadia. We have nothing to be ashamed of. This stuff happens. If we’re honest about what we want, they will understand. Not right away, but I’m not afraid.’

  She smiled through her tears.

  ‘Come right back.’

  But he was afraid, and he did feel guilty.

  He sat for a while at the kitchen two-top with the phone in his hand. It seemed so natural when she was here, but now, trying to shape his . . . no, not plan, it wasn’t even a plan yet . . . desires into a thing his wife would understand, he was terrified. There would be no understanding, only screaming.

  Rage, accusations, pain.

  Get it over with. Come clean. Because this situation here, right now, is untenable.

  He dialed Jo’s room. No one answered. He dialed her mobile, got voicemail. She could be out. She could be ignoring his calls. She could be with That Fucker Jake. She could be studying.

  ‘God damn you, Jo. God damn you for leaving me,’ he said. ‘If your father had died, I would never have left you. Never. Just remember this was your choice. Leaving me alone here in this house was your choice.’