I CALLED THE POLICE. THEY TOOK MICHAEL’S NAME AND description, and then Olivia and I left the house, walking into the cold, damp darkness of the night. A long cloud swam like a crocodile across the face of the moon. A few scattered stars shone here and there, like illuminated houses in a sparsely populated valley.
We had no idea where to begin. We drove to what Michael called “beautiful downtown Leyden,” that oppressive Lionel-like line of Federal storefronts, closed from five on, with all that sexless merchandise suffocating behind the plate-glass windows.
We drove in a silence that seemed designed to make me miserable. We saw a few kids Michael’s age around a Mobil station/convenience store: black jackets and Marlboro Lights, their pants belted a half-foot below the waist, making them look like dwarves. A few blocks away, we saw a knot of teenagers hanging around a boarded-up bowling alley. “They’re on a vigil, waiting for the fifties to return,” I said to Olivia. Silence. In the park, where the father-son softball game had been played, a couple of dogs chased each other from street lamp to street lamp, darting in and out of the circles of light.
“Small-town Saturday night,” I said. At this point, I didn’t expect a reply, but talking relieved a little of the pressure in my head. I turned onto one of the residential streets, past the ample houses that faced us like Dutch merchants, stolid, expressionless.
“Where is he, Sam? I can’t bear this.”
I reached for her left hand, but it was in her lap, clutching the right. We were aimless now, just driving around. If we had been looking for a dog, we could have rolled down the windows and called its name, whistled; yet somehow searching for our son made us not more demonstrative but more circumspect.
“We need some kind of plan,” I said, but I had no more than that to offer.
We were on Parsonage Street. One of the streetlights sent its crime-stopping cadmium glow into the car like a fleeting inspiration, and then we were in darkness again, with only the acid-green lights on the dashboard.
“You said you saw Greg Pitcher today,” said Olivia. “Where’s he staying these days?”
“At the Connellys’.” And just as I said that, we passed the Connelly house. It seemed, in the quiet anxiety of the moment, something of a miracle. I pulled the car next to the curb in front of the Connellys’ historically correct black-and-white colonial, its large porch filled with bicycles.
I turned off the engine and looked at the house. The second story was dark; only one window was lit on the first.
“It doesn’t look like much is going on in there,” I said. “Don’t you sort of despise Russ Connelly?”
“What do you have against him? Oh God, Sam, please, not now.” But the truth was she was glad for a few more moments in the car, a few moments to imagine that Michael was in there.
“He walks around his appliance store with a walkie- talkie clipped to his belt. Come on. I mean, is that necessary? He has only one employee. And his wife—she gives the Japanese a bad name. There’s fifteen percent unemployment around here and she’s got seven different jobs. She teaches skiing, she’s a caterer—”
“All right, Sam. I had no idea you made such a study of them.”
I could feel some internal movement within Olivia, a move in my direction. I reached again for her hand and this time I connected. She laced her fingers around mine.
“They’re the perfect family,” I said. “They belong on a cereal box. Russ is full of hero talk. Have you ever heard him? ‘Dare to be great.’”
“You’re not going to start in on how heroism is a form of fascism.”
“Olivia. The man has a snooze alarm on his clock radio. How can you be a hero with a snooze alarm?”
She leaned her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her. We only had this moment and we wanted to make it last.
“All right,” she said, “we better go.”
Though the spring was slow in coming, the Connelly landscaping design, dominated by early-blooming bulbs which only they could obtain, was already in full flower. The magnolia was sweet in the night air, ringed by narcissi, their heads bowed in devotion. A gaudy chorus line of tiger-striped tulips blew in the breeze, their tops illuminated by the living-room lights.
I rang the doorbell, and somewhere in that interstice between the ding and the dong I realized we were making a terrible mistake. We were humiliating ourselves in the Connellys’ eyes and, more importantly, in our own. But before I could translate that thought into a suitable action—say, leaping off the porch, catapulting over the hedge—Russ Connelly, all six-and-a-quarter feet of him, dressed in wide- wale corduroy trousers and a tight taupe turtleneck, threw open the door and grinned at us with his apocalyptic high spirits.
“It’s the Hollands! Whatever brings you here on a night like this?”
I moved back a step and made something of a show of looking up at the sky, as if wondering if perhaps Russ had noticed something about the weather we might have missed. I was just trying to amuse Olivia.
“We’re looking for Michael,” Olivia said.
Russ’s smile was replaced by a show of concern. He was a master of the cardinal emotions—happiness, sadness, rage—and he hit each of them dead center, like an Army bugler. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Sharon!” he called over his shoulder. “Visitors!”
The Connelly living room was patriotic-casual. Currier and Ives prints, a framed Declaration of Independence repro, beanbag chairs, a tweedy old sofa festooned with big floral pillows probably sewn by Sharon one rainy Saturday afternoon. A fire burned in the brick hearth; the Connellys owned a wood lot just outside the village and through careful arboreal management were okay on logs for the next hundred years. Above the hearth hung a painting by Louis Tiffany, the Connellys’ prize possession. I could sense Olivia appraising it with her keen, practical eye. Though the painting itself wasn’t remarkable—a man, a cart, a horse, a serpentine smudge of river, all dutifully rendered—the fact that Tiffany had gone on to greatness in stained glass and that the world’s most famous jewelry store bore his name made the painting valuable.
Sharon Connelly was sprawled out on the carpet in front of the fireplace, where she and sixteen-year-old Cliff Connelly were categorizing old baseball cards, in preparation for a Baseball Card Swap-a-Thon at a nearby Holiday Inn. Sharon was slight, girlish, with bad teeth, the legacy of her deprived childhood in Japan. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail; her eyes glittered feverishly. She always seemed exhausted, propelled by black tea and diet pills. Whenever I met her she seemed uneasy, as if she had recently said something mean about me.
“Look, Russ,” she said, “we just found the Elston Howard rookie card.” She held it tightly, waved it back and forth. “It’s worth two hundred dollars.”
“The Hollands are looking for Michael,” said Russ.
“Michael?” Sharon’s voice was high, evasive, as if she’d been accused of something. “He’s not here.”
“Well,” I said, “we’re just checking. It’s probably nothing, we’re just being ridiculous, I suppose….”
“Ridiculous?” said Russ. He had small, lusterless eyes, and when he squinted they all but disappeared. “I don’t understand. Is he missing or not?”
“I don’t know if he’s missing. He’s not home, that’s all.”
“That’s all? I’d say that was quite a lot.”
“We thought maybe someone here would have seen him,” said Olivia. “Is Greg Pitcher still staying with you?”
“Greg is not here!” said Sharon, with an air of innocence and desperation. “He goes out. All the time. It is not our place to ask where he goes.”
“You know where I’d look?” said Russ, bringing his hands together with a meaty slap. “The mall.”
“Greg is the original mall rat,” said Cliff, looking up from his cards on the carpet. He was on the swim team: short hair, a lean body, his eyes stained red by the chlorine of a thousand pools.
“The Windsor Mall?” asked Olivia.
“He might have gone there with Michael,” I said to her. I heard the enthusiasm in my voice. I sounded as if we had already spotted him, and I thought to myself: Calm down.
Russ escorted us to the door. He was glad to be rid of us; our tale of woe, the chaos we dragged in our wake, didn’t go with the domestic regularity he had established in his own house. They were playing the music of family life; there were easy harmonies and the click-click of a metronome—and Olivia and I were coughing compulsively, wrecking the recital.
“We haven’t seen much of Michael lately,” Russ was saying. “Maybe he is with Greg.”
“I certainly hope so.” I felt an almost absurd levitation of spirit—just the thought of being out of that house, into the night air, on with the search. I think I must have believed that the act of looking for Michael was a sacred ceremony at the end of which he would be magically restored to us.
We scurried from the Connelly house, as if involved not in leave-taking but escape. We slid into our car, full of merriment. We were shaking with suppressed laughter— we often felt closer, luckier to have each other, after leaving others. But when the doors shut and the pitiful few watts of overhead lighting were extinguished, our shared ripple of hateful glee had expended itself and we were plunged into a sudden, devastating exhaustion. If not for the fear that Russ might be peeking out his window, I would have rested my forehead on the steering wheel.
“Let’s go, Sam,” said Olivia, in a murmur. She used my name so gently, so naturally, it actually gave me a chill.
The Windsor Mall was eight miles from Leyden. It was a mall like all the rest—a Sears, a Kmart, a J.C. Penney, a Gap, Kaybee Toys, a couple of banks. It was the place I would want to conjure while gasping my last mortal breaths, so as to not feel all that bad about dying.
It was nearly ten o’clock when we walked in. We spotted no other adults in the mall. Even the other parents were teenagers—pale youngsters pushing collapsible strollers in which toddlers slept with scowls on their faces. The clerks in the stores were teenagers, for the most part girls with ruinous makeup habits to support. The stores were relatively empty. The mass of teenagers—there must have been about five hundred of them—prowled the faux-marble corridors of the mall, the boys in packs, the girls in less threatening clusters of three and four. The occasional boy-girl couples were on their own, holding hands or staggering around with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders, as if helping each other limp out of a war zone. Yet their faces were proud, like those of people who have just bought their first piece of real estate.
Olivia’s eyes combed through the faces, dividing the mall into quadrants. I was circumspect. Like a white man in Zaire, I felt suddenly bereft of my status as a member of the majority.
Olivia must have seen it in my face. “You’re the only guy here with a collar on his shirt,” she said.
“But the girls dress like you. Or are you dressing like them?”
Suddenly Olivia rose onto her toes and touched the fingers of her left hand against the bottom of her chin. “Wait! Isn’t that him?”
I followed her eyes into the crowd.
“Michael? I don’t see him.”
“No—Greg, Greg Pitcher. Over there, near the Fashion Barn.”
The Fashion Barn had a red neon sign, the letters shaped like logs, and there below it, more or less out of the restless flow of teen traffic, was a moody-looking, dark- complexioned girl in a floral print dress. Her arm was around a tall, bewildered-looking boy in jeans, who if he didn’t go home soon and get some rest would be milking his father’s cows in his sleep tomorrow morning.
“That’s not Greg,” I said. “It doesn’t even look like him.”
“It doesn’t? Are you sure?”
“That kid is the president of the local 4-H Club, for Christ’s sake. Greg was living in our house. Can’t you remember what he looks like? Like an athlete with drinking and alimony problems.”
Olivia presented a blank face. Her soul could leave her body like someone slipping out of the house for a smoke.
“Let’s surprise everyone,” she said, “and not turn on each other during this crisis.”
In a fit of penance, I took her in my arms and stroked the back of her head, the enduring silkiness of her long hair, the abrupt Nefertiti-like curve of the back of her skull.
The mall closed at eleven. We stood by the exits—Olivia near the Cineplex, myself near Penney’s—and watched the teenagers leave, and when that was over and the lights in the stores were going off, one at a time, right down the line, like dominoes falling, we met back at the car, and it was difficult to speak, or even make eye contact. We were in the throes of an emergency which remained maddeningly dim.
Olivia took the wheel and we got into line with the hundreds of cars leaving the Windsor Mall.
“I think we should go home,” I said. “For all we know, Michael’s there.”
“I called. There’s no answer.”
“Oh.”
“Exactly. ‘Oh.’”
“What’s that for?”
“Sam, you have to tell me something. I’m not blaming, but I have to know. Did anything happen between you and Michael today that might have caused this? Something, anything—an argument, a comment, some caustic remark, a misunderstanding?”
If life was a story written by God, then this was the moment in which I could fearfully light the flickering flame of my confession. Olivia looked at me through the corner of her eye, awaiting an explanation. There might never be a better, or even another, time for me to tell her about Nadia, about my feelings of ridiculousness and remorse. Olivia had set the scene for me, relieving me of the most terrible part—that moment in which you say, in effect, “Darling, there’s something I must tell you….” I considered the moment, tried quickly to imagine what the rest of my life would be like once I uttered the words “Michael may be upset because he found a letter….” In front of us, teenaged drivers sailed past the flashing red traffic light and out onto the state highway, bordered on one side by hills and on the other by a desultory commercial strip— one-hour lube joints, Roy Rogers, Penn Auto Glass. It amazed me: the power of words, the corrosive power of a lie, how I could say one thing and ruin my life and say another and ruin it in a different—though possibly, in the short term at least, more tolerable—way.
I took a deep breath. The moon had risen out of range of the clouds, a cantaloupe-colored hole in the sky.
“It was just like any other day,” I said.
In Leyden, the town’s occasional crimes were easily handled by the nearby branch of the state police, which was headquartered in a small, low-slung brick building a couple miles out of town, on Route 100. There were four blue- and-tan patrol cars parked in front, a desultory, unkempt air in the gravel parking lot—scraps of tissue such as come with hot dogs, a dying rhododendron packed with last autumn’s leaves.
When we pulled in, Olivia shut the motor off but then just sat there, with her hands on the steering wheel. She breathed deeply, trying to calm herself.
“I don’t want to cry in there,” she said.
“Don’t worry, you won’t.” I meant it to sound encouraging, but I detected something hard in the remark. I was so compromised, my words were turning to salt. “Anyhow,” I said quickly, “maybe we’re heading into good news.”
“Do you think so? I don’t. I don’t have the feeling we’re anywhere near good news.”
She pulled the key out of the ignition and dropped it into her purse. She went to open the door but I stopped her, taking her arm. She turned toward me, the whites of her eyes alive in the darkness of the car.
“I love you, Olivia.”
She settled back in the seat. I was immediately and ravishingly sorry I’d said it. It had come from nowhere; an emotional hiccup.
“I love you, too,” she said, softly.
It broke my heart. I looked away from her, toward the police headquarters. The windows were lit, but somehow none of that light left the building. It was as if the glass had been painted to look as if the lights were on.
I had never asked the police for help. I didn’t even ask them for directions. My only contact with cops had been as a potential defendant—the campus police wading into the University of Wisconsin administration building to remove antiwar students during a Vietnam War protest, highway cops zapping me with their radar guns, street cops on Second Avenue eying everyone in line for the Albert King show at the Fillmore East, hoping for a quickie drug bust.
But now I had to hand myself over to them, willingly, imploringly. I was turning my life in a new direction, and things would never be the same. I would always be, among other things, a man who’d come to the police and said, “My son is missing!”
“Name?” asked the cop behind the desk. A young guy, he wore his blue shirt open-necked; a tangle of dark fur grew in the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple.
“We called a couple of hours ago,” said Olivia. “About our son?”
“Holland,” I said. “Michael Holland.” I felt the requirements of the drama into which I’d been cast. I was there as the steady male, the one who can dispassionately handle matters of fact. Olivia would play the woman with emotions.
“Have you heard anything yet?” she asked.
“Not yet, ma’am,” said the young officer. His nametag announced him as Sergeant Rick McGrath. A good name for a ball player. Good old semireliable Rick McGrath, with his brilliant plays in the outfield and his weakness for the off-speed pitch. As good-field, no-hit McGrath delivered this disappointing news, he tightened his jaw, looked away, as if to shield his ego from jeers and catcalls after popping up with men in scoring positions.
“Can you tell us what’s been done so far?” asked Olivia.
“All of our personnel have been alerted and a description of your son has been circulated.”
Olivia colored. She looked at me, but I wasn’t sure what she expected me to do just now.
“Isn’t that just saying you’ve mentioned it to people?” she said.
“No, ma’am.”
Again, Olivia looked to me. Your turn, I said to myself.
“How many officers are specifically assigned to look for Michael?” I asked. There. When in doubt, revert to statistics.
“Well, no one, at this point in time, sir.”
I saw the cop was trying to be nice, had been taught to respect his elders. “Your son’s only been out for a few hours.”
“‘Out’? Is that the new way of putting it? What about ‘missing’?” I looked at Olivia; her gaze had softened, she stood a little closer to me—in fact, she was reaching for me, to touch my elbow.
Just then, the door to the station opened and two more officers came in.
“Were you out checking that break-in on River Road?” McGrath asked, speaking to them through the space between Olivia and me, and adding to his inquiry a certain tone that let us know that now he was devoting himself to real police business.
At home that night, we tried to sleep, while anxiety hummed in the force field between our bodies.
“Olivia?” I whispered.
She was on her back, her eyes not so much closed as unexpressed, like a Roman statue on which the sculptor has merely indicated the shape and location of the eye but nothing more. A gnarled twig of moonlight trembled on her bare arm; the vanilla blanket gently rose and fell with her Methodical breaths. Truly, Stanislavsky had nothing to teach Olivia about what had become her premier role: the woman too tired to talk to her husband.
Where in the fuck is that kid? I asked myself. For all the effort we had put in that night, I was left feeling we might only have managed to obscure the path that could lead us to Michael, that we had kicked up dust, trampled clues, somehow driven him further away.
I closed my eyes and saw Michael’s face before me. It was too unnerving to have the boy appear unbidden. I turned in my bed, looked at the shadow of our budding maple, a slender, trembling thing, a piece of filigree placed upon the bedroom wall by an aged hand.
There is something dangerous in this boy, I thought, and the complaint hit me with the force of revelation. I thought back to the preceding spring when I brought Michael over to the schoolyard to play a little ball. I wanted to make some unspoken point about the casual pleasure of country life—Michael might be giving up the greasy, cumin- drenched smells of souvlaki, but in return he was getting a bit of batting practice with Dad. We walked behind the school, where there was a baseball diamond with a backstop. I pitched slow to Michael; he seemed perfectly content to whack them over my head and send me chasing. Not once did Michael ask me to pitch a little faster, and I was happy to let him succeed. I shagged his hits through the white and cinnamon-colored clover of the outfield and tossed high pop-ups to myself during the trudge back to the mound. Finally, Michael asked me if I wanted to take a couple hits. It had been at least fifteen years since I had swung at a baseball, but once I had enjoyed it and hadn’t been bad at it, so I agreed, and Michael handed the bat to me and I handed Michael his glove and we changed places.
The first pitch Michael threw hit me square in the head, and I could never explain why but I was certain it had been deliberate. The pain had a kinetic power; it bored its way down from my skull to my bowels. The world looked as if it were a quick sketch—Michael was a few shaky lines, the grass a mere suggestion of green, no one had filled in the sky. But then reality returned and the pain jumped up a couple of notches and I threw the bat down.
“Goddammit, Michael!” I said.
“Sorry,” Michael said, in a tone so casual, as if he had stepped on my foot, not at all appropriate to having brought his father to the cusp of concussion.
In all likelihood, the casualness of his apology was meant to provoke me. I picked the bat up again, threw it down again, kicked it, and then stalked out toward the mound. Instinctively, Michael turned and ran. I set out after him, moving almost as fleetly as Michael. I knew I was losing this contest but took a certain brutish satisfaction from it anyhow because I knew I was frightening him. Phrases like “wring his neck” and “kick his ass” droned within me. Michael zigged, I zagged; Michael streaked and I lunged. We circled the school building, and when we reached the parking lot Michael went toward the Dodge. He flung his hands onto the hood, as if he could not be harmed while touching it. I caught up to him, accepted the fact that the chase was over.
“That hurt,” I said, my voice unstable with exhaustion.
“I said I was sorry,” Michael said. His tone was mild, unrepentant. What is happening to us?, I had thought, my heart suddenly breaking in two.
In fact, Michael had a long history of hitting me, breaking my things, adding a measure of misery to my daily life. As an infant, he liked to flail in my arms, and often his little pink fingers with their razor-sharp, obdurate cuticles would make contact with the side of my nostrils, the corner of my eyes. When he learned how to control himself a little better, he graduated to grabbing the tip of my nose, as if to pull it off. He scattered my papers, jammed and bent the keys to my typewriter, and on and on and on. I accepted the existence of a certain oedipal rivalry between father and son; I could conjure memories of those feelings in myself, that little boy whom my father so liberally bounced around through the fifties. But to this inevitable Freudian fandango I also added a certain specific culpability of my own: that is to say, Michael destroyed my silk ties and dropped my cat’s-eye cuff links down the drain because he felt on some fundamental level that I was not a fit father.
And that was what broke my heart all through Michael’s childhood—my own inescapable inadequacy. Now, next to my supposedly sleeping wife, with the poised and intimate spring night lurking like the bird of death outside every window of our house, I, for the fifty thousandth time, berated myself for being so congenitally unequal to the tasks of fatherhood, beginning with Olivia’s pregnancy and continuing with the undulating implacability of a Möbius strip to this very insomniac instant.
“We’re going to have a child,” she’d said.
“Oh, great,” I had replied. I eventually got back on track, but the race was lost; I was like a horse who spooks in the starting gate, and it would have taken a miracle to win the race, or to place, or even show.
When Olivia announced her pregnancy, I had been at the kitchen table, typing my second novel. We were living on Olivia’s Rolling Stone salary and the remains of my advance.
“Aren’t you excited?” she asked.
“Excited?” I turned off my Olivetti; the red indicator light stayed on for an extra moment and then faded to black. “We’ve only been married two months. You don’t even know what you want to do when you grow up.”
She smiled at me; it was important to her that she remember this day in a certain way. “Aren’t you happy?” she asked, giving me another chance.
“I don’t know.”
“Sam, you know Dr. Mead always told me if we wanted to get pregnant I’d probably have to take fertility pills. I only get my period three or four times a year. This is a miracle, Sam. I really think it is.”
“I never thought Dr. Mead was much of a doctor,” I said.
Yet I did get caught up in the whole miracle-of-life angle of Olivia’s pregnancy. I read the popular books on the subject, like So You’re Having a Baby!, written by a fellow calling himself (certainly pseudonymously) Lawrence Kindheart, author of So You’ve Got Cancer! and So You’re Going to Declare Bankruptcy! I made lists of names, boys and girls; shopped for baby furniture on Orchard Street. Olivia eschewed any of those tests available to pregnant women—no peeks behind the curtain for her, no shaking of the wrapped present for some telltale rattle within. What if it’s a terribly deformed…well, you know, I asked her, as delicately as I could, since I thought we should avail ourselves of the entire array of tests—amniocentesis, sonograms, whatever. But she insisted she was far too young to worry about things like that, and she said it in a way that fairly implied that my concern was perhaps a form of projection, that I had turned our unborn child into some kind of translucent Quasimodo because that’s how I felt about the poor thing. I love this little guy, I had insisted, and fell to my knees before her, wrapping my arms around her ample waist, resting my suddenly tear-slicked cheek against her bountiful belly, and the strange thing about these declarations is that they become resonantly true as you make them—function follows form and you say what you think you ought to be feeling and then, lo and behold, you are feeling it.
Not only did Olivia avoid any sneak previews of this progeny, but she chose to have the child delivered by a midwife, a woman named Gloria Wurtzel, with tight auburn curls, pop eyes, and a rotting tooth somewhere in the back of her mouth. “Sometimes God makes people look that way to warn others about them,” I said to Olivia, but she was blind to Wurtzel’s defects. She told me that in the Middle Ages the so-called witches who were burnt at the stake were in many cases midwives, whose familiarity with the mysteries of birth was construed as a kind of sorcery. Makes sense to me, I thought; but really there was nothing more to say. Olivia wanted Wurtzel, so Wurtzel it was. I was somewhat mollified to learn that at least Nurse Wurtzel made her deliveries at a real hospital, so if any medical intervention was necessary it would be available.
And it was necessary, at least in my opinion. When we arrived at the hospital, with a portable Sony and a few tapes of favorite music—Albert King, Samuel Barber, Billie Holiday—and a bottle of Moët, Olivia was brought to the midwife’s birthing room, where she stayed in useless and excruciating labor for eight hours, until she was finally transferred to a more conventional labor room, where such things as fetal monitors and an intravenous drip of some labor-inducing drug were added to the program. She was suffering so much. There was nothing like natural childbirth to make you despise the natural world.
We had taken our Lamaze classes. I had attended them faithfully and had looked around the little gray-and- boysenberry classroom in the Ethical Culture Center, at the other prospective fathers, most of them, like me, trying to play catch-up ball with their utterly absorbed wives. What are we doing here, gentlemen? I had wanted to say. Do we really think we can escape the spells of our own fathers by becoming fathers ourselves? Well, of course we were there to learn ways to lessen our lovers’ pain when the child within began kicking and twisting its way toward the light—breathe, darling, puff puff puff—but at least for Olivia and me it all turned out to be a waste. Olivia was in far too much pain to follow the rules of rhythmic breathing, and when she could it did no good anyhow. She held my hand and wept silently. I looked at her pale, sweaty, stricken, appalled, and overworked face, and then at the oscilloscope upon which our baby’s heartbeat was recorded, and then at the IV bottle of Pitocin, which was meant to induce her contractions, and then, finally, at Nurse Wurtzel, who continually jabbed her fingers into Olivia and scolded her for not dilating.
“Let’s get a doctor in here,” I said to the midwife. She pursed her lips, furrowed her brow, and shook her head no. “We’ve been here for fifteen hours,” I went on. “She’s dilated four centimeters. I think—”
“I know what you’re about to say,” said Wurtzel, now adding mind reading to her medieval bag of tricks, “but I can’t interrupt Olivia’s labor. She came here for natural childbirth.”
“No,” I said, “you came here for natural childbirth. We came here for a baby, and I want that baby, and I want it now. You understand me? Get that fucking baby out of my wife.”
“Sam, Sam,” said Olivia, feebly, her voice of reason making its way to me through a gauntlet of pain. Her lips were white, cracked. She patted my hand: more than a little humiliating, that.
Wurtzel extended her fingers into Olivia and manually stretched the recalcitrant cervix. Olivia shrieked with pain.
“What are you doing?” I bellowed.
“It’s all right, Sam,” said the midwife; like many people uncertain of their status, she spoke in a superior tone.
“I want her to have a Cesarean, right now. I want a doctor in here and I want her taken out of your hands—”
“Sam,” said Wurtzel.
“Look here, this natural childbirth is all you’ve got. Without it, you’re selling frozen yogurt. You understand me? Why do you have that peculiar expression?”
“Stay with Olivia, Sam—she’s pushing, and I don’t want her pushing.”
“Don’t push, Olivia,” I said. “Breathe.”
“Okay, okay, we’re getting some action, folks,” said Wurtzel, evidently going through a bit of a personality transformation once the child’s head poked through, which was why she must have gone into this line of work to begin with, for these very necessary personality transformations. “We’ve got a baby coming through. Come on, Olivia— you’ve been wanting to push, now’s your chance….”
And so forth and so on, all of that cheerleading and self- help lingo and gentle scolding and passionate rooting; but it would only be in retrospect that I could be arch about it—at the time I was as crazed as Wurtzel, practically shouting my encouragement into Olivia’s ashen face. In all the excitement, I didn’t notice Wurtzel had taken a pair of surgical shears to Olivia and widened her for the baby’s premiere. There was so much wetness, so much pain, redness, and chaos. I heard in my own voice a certain desperate quality; I was screaming and cheering like some loser on the rail of the clubhouse turn. Olivia held on to me, she squeezed my hand. She lifted herself off the bed as she made the effort to push the baby out, and she pressed her forehead into mine. The optimist who had told us these breathing techniques would greatly reduce the woman’s discomfort during birth had also warned that at a certain point in the labor it is not uncommon for the woman to turn savagely against the man, but this too did not turn out to be true. She clung to me as if I was her best friend as well as her husband and lover. I had never been so happy in all my life.
“It’s a boy!” cried Wurtzel. She sounded jubilant, triumphant, and greatly relieved, as if—and this only occurred to me for a split second—this were the first time she had ever pulled one of these deliveries off successfully.
I kissed Olivia. I placed her soaking, boneless hand upon her stomach, which even now was deflating. Wurtzel wrapped the boy in a blanket and handed him to Olivia, and in a frenzy of joy I kissed Wurtzel hard on the mouth.
Michael was not an easy child. He seemed to miss the floaty darkness of the uterus, and we kept the apartment as dark as possible. He seemed also to dislike gravity—his face contorted all day long as if he were in a rocket ship going through G-force. Born with a full, minky head of hair, he soon lost it all save a few long, silky strands, and his naked scalp grew little scabs. He loathed having his diapers changed; cold pee and slimy shit were better than the intrusion of my hands. It had been agreed upon that this was my job, since Olivia had to do all the feeding. I warmed my hands near the electric heater, smoothed baby oil on them, tiptoed, smiled, cooed; but still Michael howled, arched his back, hovered above the changing table as if he were being given shock therapy.
Michael slept in two-hour segments, a revolutionary howling in the hills of his own colic. Olivia and I walked him, but he was inconsolable. We rocked him back and forth, devised little dances that might jiggle him to sleep. “Go to sleep, go to sleep, you fucking asshole,” I would sing in a lilting whisper, as I held my miserable, squirming child in my arms.
Eventually, inevitably, Michael would fall to sleep, and I would place him into the crib with almost psychopathic gentleness. And looking down at my son’s troubled face and his angry little body, I would suddenly love the boy with a kind of punchy rapture. He was so small, so tender; the will to protect him was so fierce that it must have somehow been there to govern an errant desire to do away with him once and for all. “My little guy,” I would whisper. “Son.”
And now, beside me in my bed, Olivia truly was asleep. Her breaths were deep and slow. I slid next to her, held her warm body close. Some shrink I once interviewed for one of the men’s magazines told me that touching your wife while she sleeps is a return to taboo; it is our mother’s haunches we caress in the deep, timeless darkness of the boudoir. It amazed me that whatever a man does, there is always another man willing to charge money to tell him he is doing the wrong thing.
I fell asleep for half an hour and then reawakened, my heart pumping stones. I thought of the first words of the Inferno: “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and awoke to find myself in a dark wood.”