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Description DESCRIPTION WHERE TO BUY PRAISE TITLE STORY Her green eyes narrow, appraising him as he stands beside the bed holding her hairbrush. "You're going to start hating me." He opens his mouth to protest but she cuts him off, gesturing impatiently as though she is shooing away a cat. "Go into the city and try out your new camera, practice for the big event." John sits down on the edge of the bed and lifts a strand of matted blond hair away from her mouth. What self-tormenting irony had possessed him to say he was going to shoot the birth? All he wants now is to try and forget it. "I don't like leaving you like this." He glances restlessly out the window at the sailboats scudding across the bay, then back at Anna. "Besides, I have six months to practice." Her skin feels clammy under his mechanically stroking fingers. Is he imagining it or is it getting darker? There is a shadowy patch like a raccoon's mask over her upturned nose. Since she has gotten pregnant he almost doesn't recognize her. "Go on," she repeats, "you know you want to. I'll be fine." He kisses her forehead, avoiding her eyes. Seeing her now, he would never guess she was a designer of elegant dresses. A chic, modern woman. She looks like some nesting feral animal curled up in her burrow of blankets. Nibbling toast. And all the while that thing is battening on, clamping itself to the wall of her womb. He imagines reaching inside to pluck it out and flushes with shame. "Remember, you're my precious love," he tells her, thinking what a bastard he is. He picks up his Armani jacket from the chair, blows her a kiss and slips out the front door with his camera equipment in a metal box. He half expects a policeman to be waiting for him on the lawn. Arrested for murder in the heart. Speeding along the bay towards San Francisco, seabirds swooping and soaring alongside, he replays the awful night of Anna's revelation. She'd been lying warmly ensconced in his arms and out of the blue she'd said, "I hope he has your eyes." "What?" he'd asked, breathing in her wild-flower smell, still dazed by their lovemaking. "Who?" She'd laughed a light, tinkling laugh. "The baby. We're going to have a baby." Her laughter cut into his exposed skin like glass splinters from a shattered windshield. Now, watching the speedometer edge towards eighty, he wonders why he is so undone by this pregnancy. After all, he is an adult man, not a mewling child. When his brother was born, he'd cried inconsolably for his mother and wouldn't sleep until his father took him into his bed. His grief had vanished from his memory but the humiliating image lasted of himself, face pasted with snot and tears, clinging like a monkey to his father's chest. "Sissy," he tells himself in his father's voice, "Namby-pamby mama's boy." Maybe it is because the idea of the fetus growing in the rank blood-sodden soil of Anna's womb unnerves him that John decides to photograph skyscrapers. He is hungry for clarity, brightness, clean lines. He parks in a garage on Union Square and walks over to the Financial District. Offices are closed because it is Saturday and the streets are quiet, relatively free of people. He breathes deeply, the nervous pains in his stomach quieting. After a few minutes of pleasantly aimless wandering, he is struck by the Trans-Am building, a broad-based steel and glass structure tapering to a needle point. It pleases him by the cocky way it is set off from the others. He plants his tripod on the sidewalk and then, afraid that someone will walk off with his equipment while he is concentrating on his pictures, chains his metal box to a parking meter. The surge of bitter liquid in his chest when he thinks of being ripped off reminds him how his mother pressed a handful of quarters into his palm, his last trip to Miami, "So you shouldn't get a ticket." What she meant was that he shouldn't forget himself and have fun. Not even for an hour. Reflected clouds drift over the surface of the brown glass building. He wonders if his mother had ever had a pleasure not contaminated by worry. Sex with Anna was that pleasure for him, he thinks, taking out his 28 millimeter lens. Though he still wasn't sure how she had broken down his defenses and persuaded him to marry her. Part of her appeal had been that, though bursting with youth and beauty, she didn't want children. That he was enough for her. Damn! Why was she doing this to him? He screws the wide-angle lens angrily onto the camera and bends to focus. Only half the glass skyscraper is visible. He moves the tripod back but it doesn't help. If he moves any further he'll have nothing but street traffic in his picture. He unscrews the camera from the tripod and leans backwards trying to get the full sweep of the building, its soaring effect, but no matter how he contorts himself, he can only get half of it in view. For a minute he wishes he were back in his office in City Hall. Being District Attorney was stressful, but at least he knew what he was doing. He frowns, thinking of his latest case. Did that dumb kid really think he'd pull off a stick-up like that? No getaway car. No back up. Just running until they trapped him in an alley. What was happening to kids these days? First drugs, now guns. The controls he grew up with just didn't seem to function anymore. He presses his eye against the camera again and resignedly shoots the lower half of the building. Just as he is pressing the button, someone walks in front of him. "Watch it," John says, annoyed. "Cool it, man," the boy shoots back. "You're the one in the way, cluttering up the street with your stuff." He has dark hair with short bangs, high Indian cheek bones, a square jaw and full pouting lips. Almost too pretty for a boy. As he goes by, he swishes his butt provocatively at John. Dismissing the slight embarrassed flush he feels spreading up his neck, John aims his camera again and takes the upper half of the glass building, tip impaling a cloud. Late that night, he wakes up in a sweat, dreaming of earthquake, gets out of bed quietly so as not to wake Anna and spreads his photos out on the big rosewood desk in his study. Most of them are terrible. Truncated buildings. It occurs to him that if he pastes the top and bottom parts of the glass skyscraper together he'll feel a lot better. He wants to see it rising in front of him the way it did on the street, confident, whole, reassuring. He imagines a whole block of photo buildings, absolutely straight. Maybe he can even construct it in his study. Make it three dimensional, have a real block you can walk around. Why he wants this he doesn't know. Hunching over, unconsciously holding his breath so not to jiggle the paper, he glues together the two halves of the building with crazy glue. But the color doesn't match—the top is much browner than the bottom—and the sense of power he hopes for isn't there. Feeling as disappointed as he did when his father forgot his birthday, he goes into the bathroom and stumbles over a book next to the toilet. The Growth and Development of the Fetus. The fetus stares blindly up at him with its protruding frog eyes. It is shocking pink with a huge bulging umbilical and a skeletal face like a wizened old man. Disgusted, he pushes it away with his foot, sits down and starts thumbing through his discount catalogue looking for the perspective-correcting lens he's read about. With the right technical help he is sure he can capture the elusive glass building. * * * By the time Anna is six months pregnant her morning sickness is long past and she radiates energy. She not only decorates the baby's room, but she does an exuberant series of spring dresses, restores an antique cradle, and makes two wall hangings and a quilt. The only thing she seems lukewarm about is lovemaking. She strokes John languidly as though she is moving underwater. Once, afterwards, she draws his hand down to the curve of her belly. "You never touch me there anymore," she says. "It's all right, you know. He's not fragile. You've got to start getting acquainted." He feels her stomach heave violently against his palm. "He's kicking me." He recoils as though he'd touched a cactus. "The little bugger wants me to take my hands off you." "Nonsense," she says sharply, and then, more gently as though explaining things to a child, "he's active, that's all. It's boring being cooped up with no TV." She smiles, encouraging him to smile, too, but he can't. Her belly bulges ominously like a time bomb in an old cartoon. "It was a kick," he says stubbornly, "a hostile kick. I felt it." She pats her belly affectionately. "Maybe he's going to be a soccer player and win the world cup." "Great," he says, "I love competitive sports." He hates them, in fact, has no hand-eye coordination. His brother is the athlete. She tousles his hair, pulling at it a little too hard. "Hey, lighten up, this is supposed to be fun." "Maybe for you." He hates the plaintive whine in his voice. This isn't the way he acts. He doesn't know what is happening to him. It is like being stuck in a time warp. Helpless, impotent. Two years old. A few days after his conversation with Anna, John begins to photograph store window manikins. He'd bought the perspective correcting lens and constructed a whole block of buildings but once he'd overcome the technical difficulties, he found to his distress that the skyscrapers no longer held his attention. Nothing happened, nothing moved. Especially now that Anna is so involved in preparing for the baby, he needs something more substantial. Something he can get his teeth into. At first it is kind of a joke. He sees a pretty manikin that reminds him of Anna in Magnin's window and he feels an irresistible urge to take her picture. He pretends to be interested in a Harley Davidson parked at the curb while he glances up at the window surreptitiously. He is afraid people will think he is ridiculous, a distinguished middle-aged man with gray at his temples wearing an impeccably tailored Italian suit. What is he? Some kind of voyeur? But when he finally stations himself directly in front of the model and starts shooting, some girl comes up to him and tells him quite seriously that another window down the street has great costumes. To his surprise, he realizes that she respects his craft. The camera is my cover, he thinks with a start. I could do almost anything now. Since he started to photograph, he has kept a notebook recording the film, the exposure speed and the filters. Now, because for some reason it amuses him, he begins to write as though he were a fashion photographer with real models in the window-settings instead of plaster figures. He gives the manikins names." I shot Gilda again today," he writes, "the smashing red head with the great legs." Or, "I'm going to use the blue filter on Tina tomorrow. It makes her look as if she's carved of ice." Gilda is his favorite, the Anna look-alike. He shoots her on Valentine's Day when her hair is swept back on one side to show off a delectable sea shell ear pierced by a huge dangling earring. Ruby red. Her evening dress is heavy, metallic silk with enormous flowers in gold and dusty pink and she is perched on the edge of a brocade seat. He has to admit that the seat gets to him. It has a fantastically curved back like an unfurling leaf, or better still, like an elephant's white head and she's sitting on it leaning back against his upraised trunk still clenched at the tip. What excites him is the way she sits on it as though she weren't aware of all that power under her, looking out into the street. She leans forward slightly, her left arm resting on the seat, and her dress slipping off one white shoulder. She should have a necklace around her throat, John thinks. Something barbaric. Thick rows of heavy beads in gold and pink. He wants to walk into the window and shake her until that preoccupied expression gives way to recognition, passion. This thought gives him an erection and he bends further over the camera to hide it. There is a large oval mirror to the girl's right, surrounded by white sculpted waves. In the mirror, he sees her back, and behind that, the reflections of a bulging white building with a black door gaping wide. It disturbs him. He tries to shoot so he doesn't get the gravid, white building in the picture but now that he knows it is there somehow it spoils his pleasure. While he studies the reflections through the camera, a figure comes out of the door and reappears next to the model's hip where the fabric is pulled tight. John sees the figure's face. It is that boy with the full lips John saw his first day photographing. Now he sees the boy's square jaw is the same as the model's. The planes of his face mimic hers. For a minute John isn't clear whether the boy is outside in the street or inside with Gilda. John turns around sharply and sees the boy watching him shoot. He is wearing a black silk shirt open at the neck to show a gold chain. John wonders whether he carries a knife. Or a gun, like his stick-up case. That kid had a pretty face too. "Want to buy some coke?" the boy whispers, fishing for something in his pocket. "I can give you a real good price." When John hurriedly says no, he gives him the finger, and slips away into the crowd. Again John feels his neck flush but this time it covers his chest as well. That night he dreams of fondling the boy's slender brown penis. * * * At nine months, Anna can't find a comfortable position to sleep in. She is swollen as if she has dropsy and waddles like a duck. The doctor says she is already three centimeters dilated and the baby's head has dropped. Shipping out, John thinks. Restless, she walks around in her robe. She has been converting some of her dresses to nursing dresses, making flaps and hinges to let her breasts out. He surprises her trying one on in front of the mirror and she lets her robe fall open and holds her breasts out to him. The blue veins on the surface are rich with blood. "Look, aren't they great? I never thought I'd be a c cup." She laughs. Her laugh is getting lower, like a smoker's. Soberly, he studies her. For a minute he sees her magnificence the way a primitive man might have seen it. Swelling with life. Ripe, the skin stretched taut over her belly. But it is somehow too much for him. Too full. He studies her soberly, concentrating on a detail. The dark blond line of hair running down from below her breasts to her pubis. "I brought you a present," he says, making himself look into her face, away from the fascinating furry trail. While she takes the box in her hand, he closes her robe and ties it. Anna undoes the shiny red paper and gasps when she sees a gold choker wound with lapis. "So that's what you were up to. Going out with that secretive look. I almost thought you were having an affair in the city." She is smiling but he notices her voice quivers. "I'm surprised you noticed," he blurts out. "I'm not much use to you now. Just a royal pain in the neck." "Is that it? Is that why you've been so," she hesitates a fraction of a second, searching for an inoffensive word, "quiet?" "I've been working at it," he offers wryly, "trying to make myself a comforting presence." He thinks what she needs now is a feather pillow, not a man. "It's not that kind of quiet," she says putting her arms around his neck. "You feel neglected." He detects a note of condescension and stiffens. "On the contrary," he says coolly, wishing he were the kind of person who could kneel and put his head against her legs. Beg her to keep on loving him. "You're unfailingly sweet and cheerful." "You make me sound like a convalescent nurse," she nuzzles his cheek softly and he smells her light, fresh perfume. "Can't you kiss me?" The perfume gives him a pang of remembered nights. He brushes her lips. A cousin's kiss. Less than kind. "Here," he takes the necklace from her hand. "Let me put it on for you." She sighs and bends her head forward. As he fastens the heavy strands around her throat, he thinks of the baby's umbilical cord swollen as a leach with sustenance. Bulging and twisted and blue. How easy it would be for the thick cord to wrap around the baby's scrawny neck. It happened sometimes. He pictures Anna weeping in his arms. How sweetly he would comfort her. Next time he sees Gilda, he thinks she has a disdainful expression. He has taken hundreds of pictures of her by now but he has never seen her so harsh. He puts on a blue filter and shoots her face. The skin shines like the white underbelly of a dead fish. Her gorgeous gown is gone. She's wearing a fantasy costume. A red tulle skirt and a gold bustier laced tight up the back covered with tiny glittering scales. On her head is a crown of playing cards. Hearts. She looks as if, if you played with her and lost, you were going to get the big one. She has blood red lips and there is a glittering bottle in her hand that looks to him like a huge hypodermic. From this angle she seems to be staring at him, needle poised. He imagines that there is a man coiled up in pain at her feet. That reminds him of his witness in the stick-up case. Yesterday when they finally got to court after months of delay, she told how the boy forced her to lie on the floor, gagged her and put a gun to her head. John had cautioned her to speak softly, to be sure not to leave out any details, to make the jury understand the ordeal she'd been through. "He gave me sixty seconds to open the safe," she said, "before he blew my brains out." Her voice broke telling it. The jury was mostly female. John passed the gun around wrapped in a white cloth. He made them feel the weight, hold it in their hands. Up till now they had sympathized with the boy. He was so young, frail, almost a child. But the gun made them think again. John could see he'd won from their faces. Now he imagines Gilda's red lips round the black muzzle. Toying with it. This had been the kind of thing that obsessed him before he married. Before he fell in love with Anna. He pushes the image out of his mind and shoots another picture with a pink filter. Suddenly he sees the gun in Anna's mouth. Her face is distorted with fear. Trembling, he dismantles his camera and hurries back to the car. Locked in the safety of the garage he opens his pants and fingers himself, hunched over, pretending to be reading a paper spread on his lap. Once he looks out the window and catches the eye of a woman going back to her car. He comes imagining what her face would look like if she saw what he was doing. When he finishes, he feels an intense pressure to go out with his camera again, photograph something new. He drives over to the Tenderloin District, parks and begins prowling up and down the seedy streets. He shoots quickly as the mood strikes. A giant mural of an ad for Yes Clothing. A girl with a purple dress up to her thighs, ass protruding, her fingers around in back as though she's looking for a place to stick them. Two semi-nude men in jockey shorts advertising safe sex. A high, narrow window in a shabby brick building with a manikin in black garter belt and stockings and a sign at her feet saying "Sorry, we're CLOSED." He moves fast, not giving himself time to think. Not wanting it to start all over again. The crazy wants, the fantasies, that he hadn't allowed himself to give in to, that had finally driven him to take a wife. He is horrified at the thought. No. That wasn't why he married. He loves her. Finally he comes to a red door with a poster of Marilyn Monroe standing on a grate in a white dress, laughing as she tries to hold down her billowing skirt, hands right there. The interior of the store is dimly lit and at first he doesn't see that it's a tattoo parlor. Then he sees that the walls are covered with photos of bizarrely decorated bodies. There is a sign on the counter that says "YES, IT HURTS." He stands for a minute letting his eyes adjust, taking in the low couch covered with towels. There is a man cleaning some equipment next to what looks like a stack of bandages. "How much for a tattoo?" he asks, wondering what the judge would say if she saw him in a kinky place like this. He makes his speech clipped, East coast, respectable. To show he doesn't really belong there. "It depends on the size. A small one on your arm, say a heart or a flag, is fifty. A big piece, say, on the back, could run up to $1500. Check it out." The man hands him a book with ideas to choose from. Women with butterflies and bracelets. Women covered with jungle flowers or dragons. Men with bloody vampire mouths or skulls. All I need is a woman with fangs on my arm, he thinks, and coughs to cover a snort of laughter. He wonders if he is coming apart. If he's going to end up in Napa. Driven mad by his wife's pregnancy. One man has a tapestry of interwoven vampires covering his whole back. Wall to wall bloodsucking, he thinks and snorts again. He makes an effort to control himself. "Something like that must take all day," he says carefully to the man. The man yawns. He is awfully clean cut for this place: blond, blue-eyed, he looks like a college student. "You can't do it all in a day. The skin won't take it. You need at least four sittings, maybe five." "And the smaller ones?" John stretches his thumb and his index finger apart. The distance between them is about five inches. "A couple of hours. See anything you like?" He seems to assume that John is going to do it. John glances down at the counter and sees a tattoo bird with a gorgeous plumed tail, half peacock, half phoenix. "This," he says impulsively. He feels as though chunks of ice are breaking up inside. He doesn't know whether to laugh now or cry. "No problem," the man says. "Where do you want it?" He wants it on his chest with its wings spread over his heart but then he'll never be able to wear shorts or a bathing suit again. Unless he swims with a shirt. It occurs to him that he is a very hidden person. Except to Anna, he never shows what he feels. And even she doesn't know much about his awful childhood. For an instant he can imagine what it's like to be her. Heavy, vulnerable, needing him, while he's off in space somewhere. "Here." He pats his belly, picturing the bird rising from the nest of his pubic hair, beak stretching towards his navel. That way only Anna will know. As he takes off his trousers and lies down on the couch, he wonders if she'll mind. Or worse, laugh. He sees her in her maternity dress, laughing, and begins to sweat. Then he remembers her hair is still brittle from dying it pink when she was sixteen. "Incipient signs of my future career," she told him with a touch of pride. "I was designing myself." Her acceptance of herself relaxes him. She doesn't judge. He realizes he trusts her. The man studies the photograph and then turns on the machine. It emits a low steady buzz like a dentist's drill. John can see the tip of the needles barely emerging from the sheath, like a cat flexing his claws. Then he feels a stinging pain. Not too bad. He pictures the colors flowering on his skin and thinks about Anna. Everything about her is becoming more violently colored, darker. Her swollen nipples dark as wine. He remembers how she held them out to him the other day and suddenly, strangely it's all right, he wants her again. He has to add a column of figures in his mind to stop himself from getting an erection. Just as he is finishing, the boy with the Indian cheekbones walks in. Somehow John isn't surprised. He feels almost as if the boy is a kid brother. He notices for the first time that he has a slight limp. "Hey, that's a cool bird," the boy says, staring down at John with uncontained curiosity. "Too bad you couldn't get it right on your dick." He laughs, not unpleasantly, climbs up on the table next to him, and takes off his pants. For a minute John thinks of getting up and leaving, but then he relaxes. The boy isn't so sinister really, just young. Macho. Frightened. He has a heavy black outline covering his whole leg. John is curious despite himself. He tries to figure out the design's intricate interlacings. "It was a bitch to get this thing right," the boy says. "So much depends on the movement. It's a tribal." He beats an imaginary drum shaking his shoulders. "Yours is more artistic," John's tattooer whispers to him, "more room for improvising." The boy glances at himself in the mirror over his couch, flexing his biceps. "I'm going to have a leg that's solid as a totem pole." "He's going to an Iron John workshop," John's tattooer explains. "If those guys take to tattooing, it'll be great for business." John remembers reading something about men beating tom-toms in the wilderness. Dancing in circles. He thought it was childish but maybe better, howling and sobbing in company, than jacking off alone. "You'll knock 'em dead," he tells the boy. "If you ever need a model," the boy starts, "I'm good. I do movies, too." John shakes his head, fending him off. The boy has a bruised look around the eyes. A naked hunger. John feels an involuntary response, a flash of desire. Then, just as clearly he knows this isn't what he wants. He wants Anna. Her special warmth, her body. She is the best thing that's ever happened to him. He prays it isn't too late. That he hasn't ruined everything. The tattooer smoothes some Neosporin ointment on the wound and covers it with a gauze bandage. Later, John is sitting at his desk at home pretending to work, trying to think of how to talk to Anna. "Come to bed and make love to me," she says, tugging at his hair. "It'll bring on the contractions. I want this baby born." He feels insanely happy. She is tired of the baby, wants no more of the baby, wants him expelled. She is going to come back to him. He follows her to the bedroom, holding her hand the way he had the night she told him she was pregnant. "What is this?" she touches his bandage. "Did you hurt yourself?" "It's nothing. It's a tattoo. It has to heal." "A tattoo? Not a heart with my name on it?" "Don't laugh. Okay? Just don't." He touches her lips with his fingers. "It's a phoenix." Rising from the ashes, he wants to say. Us. Starting over again. Instead, he turns her on her side, grips her hips and pushes himself into her as far as he can. It is so delicious he doesn't want to leave. Ever. He thrusts. Draws back reluctantly. At the next thrust he thinks he feels the womb opening and something reach out, push against his penis. He pushes back. "En garde mon fils." he thinks, "You're vacating now. Time's up." "Harder," Anna whispers, reaching her hand back to stroke his thigh. "I don't want to hurt you." "Don't worry," she pinches him lightly, goading him. He thrusts again, spiraling around the edges of her, mining, digging like a dog down a burrow. Sparks flare in back of his closed eyes. Washes of red and purple. He imagines the baby crouching just out of reach of his spade like a terrified rabbit. Little trembler, little pinknose, fuzzy ears. How could I have been so scared of him, he thinks. Why he's nothing. He's going to be flat on his back in a diaper in a few hours. It increases his pleasure to imagine puny hands flailing the air, unable to do anything without help. While he has this perfect, this peerless pleasure. This is his, anytime he wants, this velvet sheath to tuck into. To burrow in, to warm himself from the cold. At his next thrust a great burst of liquid floods down his legs. At first he thinks he has urinated. Or she has. He can't tell the difference between them anymore. "That's it, the water," she breathes, exultant. "It's started." She reaches behind to pat him. He struggles back to consciousness. "What shall I do? Pack? Get the car?" He feels close to her again. Shrunk and tired but tender. "In a minute." She takes a big watch and starts to time the contractions. "Just hold me a minute more." "We're going to be all right," he says against her ear. But he is thinking of the child. He doesn't want his son to grow up the way he did. Without feeling for so long. Frozen. He feels a deep sadness where the hatred had been. A swamp of unshed tears. Anna is intent, counting under her breath. "Five minutes apart," she says, "we ought to go." He pictures the baby lying beside her, wrapped in his blue receiving blanket. Sees her gently offering her breast. Then he puts his face against her warm back and, just for a minute before he goes to get the car, he lets himself cry. |
