Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [134]
The baby’s eyes were shut, and its mouth open slightly, bubbling. Jack felt its forehead. Cool, but not cold. He picked Billy up and held him for a long time. By the way he felt now, he knew his previous wish for the baby’s death had been a lie, and he absolved himself easily.
Jack went back into the front room. Sally looked up from nothing and said, “What took you so long?” There was a terrible anxiety in her voice which she did not bother to conceal.
“He’s fine,” Jack said quickly, passing up the temptation to be dramatic and torture Sally. “He’s cooled down and breathing easily. Jesus Christ Almighty, no wonder they call it `The Crisis’! Whew!”
But Sally got up and went in there and took the baby’s temperature with a rectal thermometer anyway, and came back with the exact figures. “Ninety-nine,” she said proudly. “That’s nothing.”
“Nothing at all,” Jack said happily.
Every once in a while, Jack wondered how long Sally could take it. The incident with the flu was just one—admittedly dramatic—example of the things a mother, a parent, had to put up with. Jack could take it because he was away more than a third of the time, but Sally—she was there day and night, and being responsible for the care of a child, especially one you were learning to love more and more each day, was a dangerous, complicated, and boring job. Day after day it could sap your inner energy until there was nothing left; it could nibble at your courage until one day you awakened in terror and hatred. Jack felt all this in himself sometimes, and he knew it must be even worse in Sally. Of course she was a woman, and women were supposed to be better equipped to handle this kind of thing, but still...And anyway, this housewifely business was not Sally’s world at all. She had been used to a more exciting life, running around with famous and wealthy people, drinking a lot, being admired and chased and desired—and now she stayed home most of the time, did dishes, washed diapers, cleaned house, played with Billy, read magazines, watched television on their tiny set, and that was about all. They didn’t go out much. Jack worked afternoons and nights, and on his one night off a week he liked to sit home and watch the fights on television. When they did go out, it would be around the corner to the Royal Theater to a movie. Once they saw Sally’s ex-husband playing a dogcatcher with a conscience who ends up letting all the dogs loose, and somehow gets himself a big country estate and a rich, lovely wife, and they all live happily ever after, 87 dogs and all. It was a terrible movie, but her ex-husband was good—he was really a very good actor—and it was fun watching all those mutts running through the town.
Afterward Jack and Sally walked home, and Jack paid off the Chinese baby-sitter while Sally got undressed right away and went to bed without saying anything to Jack. He followed her, thinking she wanted to make love, but when he put his hand on her shoulder she shrugged it off. He wanted to be angry at her, but he couldn’t. He understood. She was thinking about the fact that she was now a lumpen-proletariat housewife, scrimping pennies and washing the shit out of endless diapers (you had to do that before you took them to the Laundromat), and was losing her looks; while her ex-husband was rich and famous, and getting handsomer every year as his face grew older and more manly. All because she had married Jack. He wondered if all the housewives in the world felt this way sometimes, even without the rich and famous ex-husband. He wondered why they didn’t all flip their lids and go on periodic rampages. Especially the beautiful or formerly beautiful ones. Life promises them so much, and then it all comes to nothing. It has to, because the promises are false; they have to be false, because they are too promising.
It was all right for him, he got out of the house every day, he was in the midst of the Broadway crowds and could see how stupid it all was, this frantic search to be entertained and enraptured which ends up with your