CHAPTER

44

In Rebecca’s last weeks of pregnancy, there was a huge resurgence in her libido. Maybe her fear that she was going to kill our baby expressed itself in arousal, or maybe she just got horny while she was pregnant, as a lot of women do. In any case, I responded in full force. Maybe I was afraid she was going to kill our baby, but I don’t think I was. Maybe what I was writing in support of Ismail had removed the guilt from my body, or at least diluted it to manageable levels. True, on any given day I was mostly not writing, and what I was not writing was unlikely to help Ismail even if I managed somehow not to not write it, but at least I was no longer actively working against him. Guilt, misery, and a dead child seemed like what I deserved, but given a choice between what I had and what I deserved, I would take what I had. And what I had was the living room rug below and my wife on top of me, her person-filled stomach bouncing down on my Doritos-filled one.

One morning, after a particularly intense bout of fucking, I took one of thousands of showers I have taken that have not removed my tattoo, though it did a decent job with the lube. Toweling off got me hard again and I hoped that Rebecca would be ready for another round. Instead, she was on the phone with her father, arranging for him to come pick her up and take her to the hospital.

“I thought our birth plan was for me to get an Uber,” I said.

“I trust my father more than I trust Uber drivers.”

I felt a rush of affection for her, and a rush of respect for her recognition that I was not to be trusted with even trivial tasks once they became important. I also felt a rush of pride in myself for not being offended at her realistic assessment of me.

Rebecca, having examined both the thinness of the evidence against epidurals and the lowness of her own threshold for pain, asked for a shot as soon as we reached the hospital. Her friends had tried to pressure her into some kind of natural birth, and I was glad that she had resisted; I was glad that she was not DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. As a needle was prepared by an old man in green who, despite my squinting, looked nothing like Adam, Rebecca told me that she had called Leah—“I wanted her to be here more than I wanted you to be here, I think”—but that Leah had hung up without responding. After the epidural was administered, I excused myself to find a vending machine, and I wandered around the halls for a long time, thinking seriously about walking out and never coming back.