American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [62]
She took off her jeans and slipped back under the covers. Suddenly, he rolled over onto his back. Instinctively, she put her hand on his chest and then she remembered the body inhabited by a demon. He moaned in his sleep. His eyes were still closed. He was clenching his fists and he was crying now. She lifted herself onto him and from up above, for the first time, she touched his face.
1937
The feeling that his life would be a series of revelations, the feeling that Joe had had in the little kitchen while Vivian stood in the weird lavender light that afternoon in September so long ago, was not a feeling he would ever have again. There were no more revelations.
The streets were deserted after dusk.
He walked along the same Brooklyn streets that she had covered so many times without him. He could see her family’s house now up the block and he felt his heart pick up the pace and run ahead of him, up the street, up the sloping steps of the dark brownstone. He had put on a tie for this occasion and now he felt too formal and so he took it off and stuffed it into his pocket. He walked faster and then he was standing at the landing. Lights were on within and he waited in the yellow glow. Her mother opened the door. He stepped inside and although he had been to the house only once before he felt oddly at home amidst the heavy carpets and dark wood furniture and he moved down the hall after Vivian’s mother as if he had moved down this hall many times before or in a thousand dreams. The older woman floated in front of him like an apparition, paused at the entrance to Vivian’s room, and then walked away.
She was sitting up in bed under a faded quilt. She was wearing a demure nightgown he had never seen before. Her hair was down and it fell softly below her shoulders, longer than he had ever seen it. He had not seen her for some time. She put the book she was reading down on the bedside table beneath the lamp with the red silk shade and he stepped forward into the pinkish light.
Come closer, she said.
She nodded her head toward a basket next to the bed.
He looked inside. She’s beautiful, he said. She looks like you, he said. He was trying to smile. Vivian reached out her arms and he realized that she wanted him to hand her the baby and with great trembling and a swimming feeling in his head he bent over and picked up the infant and handed her to her mother. Oh Vivian.
And then he broke down. Vivian, he said, are you sure you want to do this?
He would not do this if she had the slightest hesitation. She looked so beautiful, he said, holding her child. And Vivian rocked the child gently and for a moment the girl opened her eyes slowly like nature changing under time-lapse photography and looked up at her mother and then closed them, contented, and fell back to sleep. He kept saying Vivian and he was crying and his hands lay helplessly in his lap and then she said to him:
I’d like to name her Iris.
Of course, he said, whatever you want. A darkness was outlining everything he saw like a border that separated his vision from the rest of the world. Somewhere in the house a door closed. It seemed as though a million doors were closing in his mind each at a slightly different time and the effect was of a virtuosic drumming, a percussion of endings softly building to a final slam.
The baby let out a small cry.
Vivian’s face was red and splotchy. She looked like she had been in battle, and she had the worn beauty of the still standing. She looked down at the infant with a weary expression full of love and unbuttoned her nightgown and began to nurse her. She seemed older to him, and possessing a dignity that he knew he would never be able to approach.
They had been through so much, he said, the two of them. Was she sure …
She did not look at him. She looked at his open collar and the strength of his neck.
I couldn’t do this alone, she said—
You wouldn’t have to, he said.
But I don’t want to take you away and I need, I need other things.