Bobcat and Other Stories (16 page)

Berber and Bryan were standing under the television, newly married and with their turbans off, thankfully. Bryan had cornered David and was asking him about his newest book. “Are we meant to believe that there is or isn’t a God by the end?”

This made David laugh. “I really don’t know,” he said, as he hugged me hello.

Lesley and David had lined up two lasagnas end to end—she had made one vegetarian and he had made one meat, and they lay there under the candlelight, awaiting us. I was so hungry. I’d been so sad for the last two weeks that I hadn’t been able to eat. I was in the middle of a protracted miscarriage—the baby still alive, but with a heartbeat measuring once a minute, like one of those sea creatures that live at the floor of the ocean.

“I saw it,” David said to me. “I saw the show.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “What’d you think?”

“I thought it was great,” he said. “I really did. All that derring-do. And the culture is ready for a big dose of feminism.”

“You think?”

“Yes. If I were a woman, I’d want to be an Amazon.”

“Thanks,” I said. And then he touched my arm, just like that, which so surprised me that I nearly fell into his arm. It must be exactly what men don’t want—you reach to touch a woman lightly and then she falls into you, her whole weight, which in this case included another man’s dying baby. “Sorry!” I said. Sorry to David Booth for falling into him, and sorry to baby, for everything. For no life.

But anyway, life isn’t that good always. I wished I could let the baby know that. There’s a lot that’s lousy. It’s true there are large turning structures—Ferris wheels
—
that will carry people high into the air above the ocean, that is true, and then around the next corner there are funhouses, those are great, and then there are just ordinary playgrounds on every corner, and there are things not even for children that are for children, like church spires that look like weather vanes, and there is one downtown that actually spins, a little spinning cross, an image that would live in the child’s mind maybe forever, gathering ideas to it, spinning madly but also stable there, and in tonight’s wind it wouldn’t even be a cross, it would be distorted into maybe a little question mark, and standing for all the children in town as a kind of fervent lasting joyful little thing they always know. So there is a lot, admittedly.

But then you grow up and you get a wonderful man and he cheats on you, or you get somebody like Bryan, who at your wedding says this as his vow—“I will be your teacher and you will be my team.” Or you get David Booth, in which case you marry somebody else.

We sat down to the his and hers lasagnas, right as the last levees were breached and the ninth ward completely overwhelmed. See, I said to the baby, look at the seawater rising, look at the cats and dogs on the roof, it’s okay to just pass along,
(I will miss you!),
just keep going.