Milk (8 page)

John watched her walk to the futon, pull off her boots and spread her legs, exposing the crotch of her black panties. John assumed there’d be conversation, but he appeared to be mistaken, as he watched the woman arch her back and look at him with her mouth open. Her underwear was slick, the skin around the black material pink and hairless. He walked over to the futon and removed his shoes. His tennis shoes looked pathetic. Kathy pulled at his arm and he lay down beside her. He noticed that in the center of her right eyebrow was a patch of white hair.

“Do you want to fuck me?” Kathy said. She sounded like Natasha from the Bullwinkle cartoon. He closed his eyes and nodded. Kathy undid his pants, loosened his cock and crawled backward; her mouth was warm and wet as she moved her head. He thrust his penis up toward her face and opened his eyes. Kathy’s head moved up and down like the needle in a sewing machine, and her eyes were open, the pupils dilated big as dimes. On the nape of her neck was a small scar. Pleasure had been rerouted over humanity and he wanted to try and change that.

“How did you get your scar?” He touched the raised pink flesh.

Kathy jerked her head to look at him. She was clearly annoyed. “It’s a scar.”

“I know,” John said. “How did you get it?”

“Oh somehow, I can’t remember now,” Kathy said, moving her wet mouth toward his crotch.

ALUMP OF CREAM cheese, crackers and a little bottle of capers; this was his last dinner at the Heights apartment. He ate on his futon; everything else was in boxes. He figured the car service could haul his possessions out to Sunset Park.

Opening his journal, John turned to the pages at the end, which were clean and white. He’d gotten a brief note from Holy Cross asking if he wanted to be exclaustrated, released from his vow, and he’d been thinking all day about what to write. “Dear Mac,” he began, but then thought of addressing the letter to the whole community. No. The only brother he felt any real affection for was Mac.

He read over the letter and put in a P.S. about Molly the monastery dog. He was pleased with what he’d written and ripped the page out of his journal, addressed an envelope and leaned the letter on the mantel. He lay down on the futon; the comforter was already packed, so he pulled his coat up to his shoulders. He watched snow fall at the curtainless window; the flakes were big, and it must have gotten colder, for they were sticking, gathering on the sidewalk and in the rents of the wrought-iron fence. He lay there with his eyes closed, occasionally looking up and out the window and thinking. Darkness overtook him and at some point he began to dream.

The Dog Star hung like a radiant ice cube in the black sky. Bits of ice hit the back of his ankles as he passed a jewelry store; its windows were empty of merchandise. He saw the dog moving along the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The mutt’s fur was ratty and tiny headlights shone out from each of his eyes. John followed the dog down an alley, long and white and warm. The alley narrowed and John had to squeeze his body sideways, his nose grazing the bricks. At the end he saw the velvet chair from the monastery and he knew by a strain of hair, half-black, half-blond, that he’d just missed Mary.

He heard a noise and opened his eyes to the glowing numbers on the clock. The veridescent numbers rolled on the seventies clock radio and he felt his heart like a water balloon in a metal vise. He craved her. Mac had warned against this. Mac argued for detachment, and that was reasonable when talking about middle-aged brothers but not Mary whom he wanted to imbibe; he wanted to taste her spit and put his tongue up inside her.

He sat against the wall, squeezed his eyes shut and tried to find that dark shining passage of peace, but it was like an elusive dock, unanchored in night water. He tried the Jesus Prayer.
Lord have mercy on me
. And then the Lord’s Prayer. Neither helped. He thought again of walking over to the rectory, but this was impossible. She had said she wasn’t ready to see him. If he knocked on her door in the middle of the night, he’d seem both pathetic and insane.

He turned on the lamp and picked up the baby book. He was learning about diaper rash and what foods were hard on a baby’s stomach, about how to deal with nighttime crying and pink eye. He read about how to make homemade baby food by mixing mother’s milk and sweet potatoes. He read about homeopathic cures for ear infections and how babies need fewer baths during cold months.
He thought of his wife’s hips, how her pregnant belly had sloped up, the skin stretched so tight it was nearly translucent. The snow at the window glittered in the streetlight and he got up, in just his boxers, the skin on his spindly legs goose pimpled. He stood by the window and watched snow as it fell into the orb of streetlight and then out again into the dark.

DARK WET MUSH of snow under frozen rain. Everything curtained in purple grayness and ice. Mrs. Chin, a Chinese lady with a wide face and bright lipstick, rented him the new apartment. It was half the price of his studio in the Heights and twice as large, a railroad flat with a kitchen in back, a metal rack for pots, a spice shelf. He opened the cabinet: Zwieback wafers, rice cereal, baby bottles. He’d bought a secondhand high chair and two new terry-cloth bibs.

Down the narrow hall was the living room, where he’d set up his table. The room was gray, but come spring, leaf light would fall over the walls. The adjacent bedroom had a large closet and a small alcove where he’d set up the crib. Decals of rabbits decorated each side. He’d bought
organic cotton crib sheets and a bumper pad that would protect the baby’s head. He imagined Mary and he curled together on the futon. The scent of her skin like vanilla yogurt. The things she loved, his monk’s fringe, his barrel chest, the feminine way he moved his hands, were all things he found humiliating, but she loved them—he kept having to remind himself of that. Mac would argue that he was filled with manic passion. He was, as Mac loved to say, out of spiritual whack. Mac would try to convince him that heaviness was not real presence. But Mac was wrong. A weightless soul was worthless.

John lay on the futon but could not get to sleep. Legs sore from carrying boxes. Back hurting. Heart empty and desolate. He lay there thinking. And thinking some more. Obsessed with the idea that Mary might find her way out to Sunset Park, though she’d never been and had no idea how to find the place. But if only there was a knock on the door and he opened it and she was standing there on the steps. He couldn’t take it anymore and got up. Minnows swam at the edge of his eyes, and he realized it was way past midnight and he still hadn’t eaten anything.

* * *

Outside the snowflakes were huge and the bodega at the corner was still open. Fluorescent panels lit up a bucket of porktails, plastic packages of cornmeal and ginger biscuits. A sleepy-looking Asian man in a hooded sweatshirt made him a cheese sandwich, and he got a carton of chocolate milk, paid with a ten, sank the change into his pocket and walked back out onto the cold sidewalk.

Stepping off the curb, he looked up the street to his new apartment and imagined Mary, her shoulders, her hair, her body moving in a white nightgown across their living room, and the world was what it was, not a metaphor for something else. John saw its quivering supernatural quality, the electric clarity of its form, its matter, its sharp edges. He saw his palm moving up, disembodied and miraculous.

JOHN PUT ON the mask and found his way to the back corner of the hospital room where Mary held the baby. The vaporizer sent out a ribbon of steam and John’s shirt stuck to his chest. The baby’s face was red and he began to cough, dry and metallic, the sound like the crude devices inside toy dogs. Mary held him high up on her shoulder and patted his back in a firm spiral motion. He shivered along the whole length of his body; his eyeballs stood out and he spit up a stringy line of blood. John grabbed a towel.

The baby lay back on Mary’s shoulder, his head resting in the crook of her neck. His breathing was short, his stomach contracting as if choking for breath after a race. The vaporizer kicked on again, sending steam into the
room, obscuring Mary’s feet and ankles. She pointed to the chairs by the bed. She seemed to want John to say something. Mac always insisted that a period of meditation was crucial before any emotional response. But with Mary premeditation was impossible. Her chest shook and drops of water fell from her eyes and he felt bewildered. The baby lay out on her shoulder like a piece of wet cloth.

“Should we pray?”

Mary tipped her head and closed her eyes; water continued to leak out the sides and made dark spots on the knees of her jeans.

“Dear Father.” He sounded stiff and official and he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Be with us here in this place. Let us feel—”

“If anything happens to the baby, I’ll kill myself,” Mary broke in. “I’m not kidding either. I’m going to steal a surgical knife and slice my wrists.” She glanced up at John, her eyes wide and slightly insane.

John felt his face heat up. She was threatening God, not a particularly good strategy, at least judging from the characters in the Old Testament. He tried to touch her hand, but she swung away.

“Visiting hours are over.”

“You want me to go?”

Mary nodded and John got his coat. He couldn’t feel his head, only a cloudy spot of anxiety that floated between his shoulder blades. Mac would say to breathe deeply, Mac would say to withdraw into prayer, Mac would say he was a fool for getting himself into this situation.

As he walked down the darkened hospital hallway, each room was like a little boat sending out an aura of light. In one room John saw a little boy in pajamas watching television, and in another a mother held a child in a pink sleeper, a drainage tube sticking out the back of the baby’s bandaged head.

The hospital’s waiting room contained fica plants and plaid couches and smelled of stale coffee and sweat. A Latino man slept on the couch across from John and an older lady in a Miami Beach T-shirt and floral skirt sat with her eyes glued to the television. He thought of the baby’s arms draped around Mary’s neck and walked to the information desk, the polished wood reflecting the fluorescent light, and he asked the guard if he could call up to the pediatric floor. A nurse answered and said Mary was
talking to Dr. Lankwell, but she’d let her know he had decided to wait.

The pressure of the receiver against his ear felt good and he kept it there even after the line went dead; then he walked back and lay down on the couch. He heard the steady stream of cars whooshing past on the BQE, and he was holding a girl’s hand. Not Mary but a girl who represented her. Her hand was small and they walked in an apple orchard. There was a teacup resting in tree branches and when she took the cup down, it was filled with blood. Then he was in the monastery basement in the room where the founding monks were buried. A tibia stuck out of the wall and he tried to force the bone back but the tibia broke and a car horn honked; somebody yelled something in Latin, and he was pouring a bottle of Evian over the baby’s forehead, darkening and splaying the fine hairs against his small pink scalp. Brother Peter’s toothpick crucifix hung on the wall, and he cleared cum off his chest with a Kleenex. Mac grasped his arm and said it’s absurd to search for God in terms of preconceived ideas. Mac shook his shoulder until John realized the guard was trying to wake him up.

“The janitor needs to clean,” the guard said. He pointed
to a grim-looking man in green driving a metal floor shiner, then motioned to a row of plastic chairs attached to the wall outside the gift shop. “Would you mind moving over to one of them?”

THE BABY SLEPT in the Baby Bjorn while Mary waited in the pediatrician’s office. He wore the cotton cap with the ducks on it, and his body slumped to one side of the carrier. She was worried about the kid who coughed as he ran his Tonka truck over the carpet. His mother read the newspaper, and the boy made dry barking sounds without covering his mouth. She watched the receptionist with the complicated braided hairdo and big gold earrings answer the phone and write down a message. The boy coughed so violently that his mother offered a bottle of water from her pocketbook. As the child drank, Mary saw tiny particles, like dust motes in a ray of light, floating around in the liquid.

The nurse walked into the waiting room and called the
baby’s name. Mary followed her down the hallway. The walls were papered blue and patterned with tiny rosebuds. She passed the counter with tongue depressors, cotton and gauze in glass canisters and rolls of stickers on wax paper. The eye chart was on one wall and on another, a poster showing all the vegetables that help prevent cancer.