We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [50]
When the elevator clanked and shuddered, I was just noticing that a small patch under my right breast had turned bright red, tender, and strangely stiff, mirroring the much larger such patch on the left. You opened the lattice gate and went straight to the crib. I was glad you were turning into such an attentive father, but of the two other inhabitants of our loft it was only your wife who appreciated the meaning of the word hello.
“Please don’t wake him up,” I whispered. “He’s only been down twenty minutes and he’s outdone himself today. I doubt he ever goes to sleep. He passes out.”
“Well, has he been fed?” Deaf to my imprecations, you had laid him on your shoulder and were poking at his conked-out face. He looked deceptively content. Dreams of oblivion, perhaps.
“Yes, Franklin,” I said with immoderate control. “After four or five hours of listening to little Kevin bring the house down, I thought of that. —Why are you using the stove?”
“Microwaving kills nutrients.” Over lunch at McDonald’s, you read baby books.
“It isn’t so simple as figuring out what he wants and can’t ask for. Most of the time he has no idea what he wants.” I caught it: Your eyes flicked toward the ceiling like, oh-brother-not-this-again. “You think I’m exaggerating.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You think he’s ‘crabby.’ He’s ‘fussy’ sometimes, because he’s hungry—”
“Listen, Eva, I’m sure he gets a little ill-tempered—”
“See? A little ill-tempered.” I waddled to the kitchen in my blanket. “You don’t believe me!” I had broken out in a cold sweat and must either have been flushed or pale. Walking hurt the soles of my feet and sent pains shivering down my left arm.
“I believe you’re being straight up about your perception of how hard it is. But what did you expect, a walk in the park?”
“Not a carefree stroll, but this is like being mugged in the park!”
“Look, he’s my son, too. I see him, too, every day. Sometimes he cries a little. So what. I’d worry if he didn’t.”
Apparently my testimony was tainted. I would have to bring in other witnesses. “You realize that John, downstairs, is threatening to move out?”
“John’s a fag, and they don’t like babies. This whole country’s antichild, I’m only just starting to notice.” The severity wasn’t like you, except that for once you were talking about the real country and not the starspangled Valhalla in your head. “See?” Kevin had roused on your shoulder, then took the bottle peaceably without opening his eyes. “I’m sorry, but most of the time he seems pretty good-natured to me.”
“He’s not good-natured right now, he’s exhausted! And so am I. I know I’m run down, but I don’t feel right. Dizzy. Chills. I wonder if I’m running a fever.”
“Well, that’s a shame,” you said formally. “Get some rest, then. I’ll make dinner.”
I stared. This coldness was so unlike you! I was supposed to belittle my own infirmities, you to make a to-do over them. Forcing you to go through the motions of your old solicitation, I took the bottle and plastered your hand to my forehead.
“Touch warm,” you said, withdrawing the hand right away.
I’m afraid that I couldn’t stand up anymore, and my skin hurt wherever the blanket touched it. So I staggered back to the couch, as if reeling from my revelation: You were angry at me. Fatherhood hadn’t disappointed you; I had. You thought you’d married a trooper. Instead your wife was proving a whiner, the very peevish sort she decried amid America’s malcontented overfed, for whom a commonplace travail like missing a FedEx delivery three times in a row and having to go to the depot constitutes intolerable “stress,” the stuff of costly therapies and pharmaceutical redress. Even for Kevin’s refusal to take my breast you held me dimly accountable. I had denied you the maternal tableau, that luscious Sunday-morning loll amid the sheets with buttered toast: son suckling, wife aglow, breasts spilling their