by Terri Favro
“Funny how?”
“Funny wet.”
Benny looks down and sees a puddle spreading beneath the plastic chair. An elderly woman sitting next to Claire moves her bag away and says something to Benny in a language he doesn’t understand. He is trying to knit together her meaning, when another woman takes his arm. “Your wife’s water just broke. Better tell the nurse or she’s gonna have the baby on the floor in front of us.”
At the front desk, the nurse gives Claire a disinterested glance, then focuses on Benny’s injured hand: “You look like you could use medical attention yourself.”
Benny shrugs. “I got bit by a dog. I’m okay though.”
The nurse lifts her eyebrows. “Let’s have a doctor look at you while Mum gets squared away in Obstetrics.”
As her wheelchair disappears through a set of double doors, pushed by an orderly in blue scrubs, Claire turns her head to look back imploringly at Benny. He feels uneasy about being separated from her, but the nurse makes it clear that he is not allowed to be with Claire during the birth, the delivery room being no place for a man unless he’s a doctor. Besides, there’s always a long wait for a first baby. The nurse points out that he’ll have plenty of time to get his dog bites treated in Emerg, before he needs to go to the waiting room for expectant fathers.
Benny senses he shouldn’t tell the nurse he’s not the father. If he’s not, who is?
Nobody, Claire would claim. At least, nothing human.
Benny sits on an examination table in his underwear, listening to cries of distress in every possible language through the privacy curtain. He feels a powerful urge to put his jeans back on and walk away. Who’d stop him? He won’t announce to the nurse that he’s leaving, just casually stroll through the hospital doors and back to the flat, where he’d collect I, Robot and a few other things. With fifty bucks in his pocket he could go almost anywhere. He has to get away from Scott, from the car wash—even from Claire, to be honest. With the baby coming, it’s time to move on. Maybe he’ll fall back on his original plan and go out west to find Ida and Marcello.
But as he stands with his wounded leg half-in, half-out of his jeans, he remembers that look on Claire’s face as they pushed her through the double doors. Her backward glance of fear and trust. If she comes out of the delivery room and he’s disappeared, he’s not sure what would happen to her.
Well, they’ll send her home where she belongs, he reassures himself, and starts putting his jeans on again.
What about the baby?
Well, what about it? Not my baby.
So, whose is it? The black ooze? Or the sleazy stepfather?
Either way, do you want to send Claire and her kid back to that?
If the stepfather is hurting her, he’ll hurt the baby, too, when she’s bigger. He likes little girls. Look what he did to Claire. Sure, she’ll cry the first few times, but pretty soon, being some grown-up’s special friend will start to seem normal. At least, until the ante gets upped and the grown-up starts bringing her to parties where he passes her around like candy.
And you know what that’s like, don’t you, Bum Bum?
Benny slowly removes his jeans again. Sits back down on the exam table. Puts his head in his hands. He’s suddenly aware of just how exhausted he is. How much pain he’s in. Oh fuck. Now he’s crying, as if he’s a baby himself.
When the privacy curtain whips open with a ring of metal on metal, Benny sits up fast and wipes the back of his hand across his eyes. He’s ashamed of being found in tears but the doctor is looking at a clipboard, not him.
“Mr. Pesce? I’m Doctor Ferguson. What seems to be the problem?”
“Nothing much. Couple of dog bites.”
The doctor has already taken Benny’s hand, turning it back to front.
“Do you know who owns the dog?”
Benny shakes his head.
“We’d better contact Public Health. They’ll want to talk to you and see if they can locate the animal. Might attack someone else. They’ll need to isolate it and see if it shows rabies symptoms. Speaking of which, we should start you on the shots. But for now, let’s just get you stitched up so you can join the other guys in the waiting room. I see by your chart that you came in with a woman in labour—your wife, I assume?”
“Claire’s just a friend,” clarifies Benny.
The doctor is scribbling something on his clipboard. “Well, if you’re taking responsibility, you might as well know you could be here for a while. First babies are almost always a long labour.”
After stitches, a Tetanus shot, a dose of painkillers, and a prescription for more if he needs them, Benny is escorted to the delivery ward by a nurse. At the front desk, a sheet of paper is presented to him. Fill it out with your wife’s information, then sign here, here, and here, she tells him.
Benny stands with his pen poised over the form, wondering what to do. He doesn’t even know Claire’s birthdate. He makes it up, along with everything else on the form.
When he gets to “name of father,” he hesitates. Will the nurse notice if his name doesn’t match the one on Dr. Ferguson’s clipboard? He thinks he can feel the nurse’s suspicious eyes on him.
Benny identifies the father as Scott Chrysler.
Address: 45 Robert Street.
He leaves the space for a phone number blank. Benny and Claire have never been able to afford a phone. If the hospital wants to call Scott, they can get the number from directory assistance.
As Benny fills out the forms, a plan starts to take root. He can’t look after this baby. Neither can Claire, living in a windowless, airless basement flat. Scott and Monica, on the other hand, have all that room—a nice big house with a yard where a kid could play. Not to mention, Monica wants a baby. Now, she can have one without Scott needing to get her pregnant. From what Benny’s witnessed, there’s no percentage in carrying a baby. It’s misery, start to finish. He’d be doing Monica a big favour by handing her a perfectly good baby without her having to do any of the work.
Once the forms are completed, he follows the nurse to the fathers’ waiting room. It’s full of men Rocco and Marcello’s age. Most of them look like shit. Five o’clock shadows, sprawled on vinyl couches in front of ashtrays overflowing with half-smoked cigarettes, half drunk bottles of Coke, and dirty coffee cups. One man is stretched out across several chairs, snoring, a battered copy of Maclean’s shielding his eyes. A TV bolted to the wall with the sound turned down silently broadcasts news from the world outside the waiting room. Benny sees a house reduced to rubble, fire trucks and police cars all over the place. Must be a disaster, or maybe a war zone —some place in Israel or Ireland, maybe. When the camera focuses on a blonde woman in a stewardess’ uniform, sitting in a lawn chair, Benny has a sudden sense of dejá-vu. Is that Ida? It couldn’t be. She’s out west with Marcello. But she sure looks like Ida. Benny rubs his eyes. He’s got to be imagining things. Must be the painkillers.
“We got a young one here,” announces the nurse brightly and the men look at him as if he’s a newly caught animal dragged in by hunters.
“Welcome to purgatory, kid,” says one of the men.
Benny nods hello to the men, then looks back at the TV. Ida has vanished, the disaster scene replaced by a weather report.
Most of the fathers-to-be are first-timers, but one, a bricklayer named Angelo, is waiting for his third child; an older Italian, Vince, his sixth. “Three in the old country, three here,” he says, holding up his fingers in front of his face and pulling them down like ducks in a shooting gallery. “Maria, Giuseppe, Gianna, Carlo, Bruce, and now this one.” He shrugs. “Gets to be old hat.”
“Zat what your wife says?” jokes one of the men, and the rest of them laugh.
Angelo raises one eyebrow. “Bruce?”
Vince shrugs. “My wife, she thinks that guy on Batman’s good-looking.”
&n
bsp; “Bruce Wayne,” supplies Benny. “Batman’s secret identity.”
Vince frowns at Benny. “Look at you. You’re a baby yourself. How old’re you?”
“Eighteen,” lies Benny, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to give himself an extra year.
“Jesus,” says Angelo, making a ramming motion with his fist. “Big man on campus.”
Benny shrugs. “Shit happens.”
The crowd grunts in agreement as if one man.
“At least you done the right thing and owned up to it,” approves Vince.
Some of the guys have already been here for a day and a night. The longest is in his thirtieth hour. The nurse comes in and out, calling men’s names—Mister Franco you have a beautiful boy. Mister Perreira, it’s a girl. Mister Di Michaele, it’s twins!
Waiting his turn, Benny drowses in the fug of cigarette smoke. He bums a few off the guys. As the room empties, he finds himself drifting off on the couch. When he wakes up, his cheek is stuck to the vinyl cushion. He’s alone in the room. The clock reads four a.m. He can hear the distant ping of an intercom, female voices gently calling code blue, code yellow, code red, Doctor McDonald, Doctor Blainey, Doctor Lee.
He wonders if the baby has been born and the nurse has forgotten to tell him. Maybe Claire had them call her mom. Maybe he, Benny, is off the hook. As quickly as the thought occurs to him, he rejects it. Claire would never take her baby back to her house on Love Canal, no matter how pretty it sounds. There’s love, and there’s love, thinks Benny. One kind breaks your heart. The other kind—the dirty kind of love—destroys your body and soul. Love Canal must have been named for the second kind of love.
He ponders, for a moment, which kind of love he and Scott had. Because even though Scott turned out to be completely bat-shit crazy and almost got Benny eaten alive by wild dogs, there were good times too. Love isn’t simple. Benny thinks again about how great it would be to be like Mr. Spock on Star Trek. All logic. No love.
Late Late Movies silently flickers across the TV screen. A pretty brunette—a girl—is in bed with a young blond man. His shirt is off, his chest smooth and hairless, like Scott’s. Benny turns up the sound.
A hundred dollars. I must say, she’s very generous, says the brunette.
The blond man’s temper flares. He starts to pull back the sheet to get out of the bed so he can throw the woman out, then realizes he’s naked and hesitates. Benny snorts in disbelief. This chick just called the guy a whore. Is he really going to care if she sees his dick?
The brunette flops on the bed and tells the guy to simmer down. That she understands far too well.
So does Benny. He watches, fascinated. The movie takes place in New York City, a long, long time ago. Benny can sort-of remember people dressing like the brunette and the blond guy back when he himself was a very little kid. Yet there’s something about this story that’s reassuring. A girl from a grubby little town in the middle of nowhere runs away to the big city and makes money off men. Every time she goes to the powder room, she asks a guy for fifty dollars. Turns out, the blond guy is doing the same thing, more or less. Only, he’s actually a writer. Like Scott.
Watching the brunette and the blond takes Benny’s mind off the dull throb in his hand and leg. The painkillers have worn off. In a haze of pain and exhaustion, he starts to think that the writer in the movie is really Scott, and that the woman, Holly Golightly, is really … well, is really Benny.
Because isn’t Holly’s story Benny’s story too?
Holly has a wild party and plays loud cha-cha music, not rock and roll. A whole squad of cops show up to arrest everybody—for a noise complaint? New York isn’t like that anymore. It’s dangerous these days, full of muggings and rapes and riots, but it’s also a place where a smart hustler can get rich. Especially a young, good-looking one, like the smooth blond writer. Even Benny knows that.
Oh, how I love New York, sighs Holly. She’s smoking a cigarette outdoors, looking up at the skyscrapers before she flies off to Brazil with her super-rat boyfriend. The writer sits next to her in a jacket and tie. He’s not a whore anymore (what do they call it when men do it—a gigolo). He’s got a real job now, writing for a magazine. Outside of being in love with a woman, he seems very much like Scott.
Benny wants to know what will happen to Holly, whether she’ll end up with her super-rat Brazilian boyfriend José or the formerly slutty writer, Paul. Will Paul try to feed Holly to the dogs, the way Scott did to Benny? He tries to keep his eyes open but falls asleep before the ending.
He wakes to someone shaking him and calling him sir. On the silent TV screen, a pair of hands are slicing open a tin can with a knife. “Sir, sir … the doctor would like to speak with you about your wife.”
“Friend,” mutters Benny groggily.
“Come with me, please,” says the nurse.
As Benny follows her down the windowless hallway, he can tell that it’s early morning. Rattling racks of metal trays rumble past, pushed by men in blue uniforms. Benny can smell soggy eggs, oatmeal, buttered toast, and coffee. He’s suddenly ravenous. When was the last time he ate?
“I never knew it took so long to have a baby,” yawns Benny.
The nurse’s mouth hardly moves. “Mum gave birth to a girl forty-five minutes ago.”
She isn’t smiling. There’s none of the joy in her voice that he heard yesterday from the nurses announcing the birth of the other men’s babies.
“Is she okay?” asks Benny.
The nurse opens and closes her mouth. Benny can see she’s not sure whether he’s asking about Claire or the baby. “Would you like to see her?”
Now it’s Benny’s turn to be confused. He nods.
The nurse leads him further down the hall and points at a window into an adjoining room. “Third bassinette from the left, front row.”
A tiny head covered in thick black hair pokes out of a swaddling cloth. Claire’s baby. Benny stares at her through the window. Somehow, he could never imagine the baby being so … real. He’s amazed. To his own surprise and dismay, he feels a flutter of protectiveness. He reminds himself: she’s not yours.
The nurse is gently moving him along now. “How’s Claire?” Benny remembers to ask again.
The nurse doesn’t look at him. “In here, please. The doctor’s waiting for you.”
Later, he’ll remember that the room had pale green walls and that the dingy yellow privacy curtain was closed. A doctor was standing outside the curtain, his hands limp at his sides. Doctors never stand like that. They’re always doing something. This one is absolutely still, as if he has nothing better to do than talk to Benny. As if time has stopped. When he sees Benny, the doctor says: “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
The doctor explains, step by step, how the birth presented. That’s the word he uses—presented—as if childbirth were a presentation, like a movie or a carnival sideshow. Or like a TV commercial selling a knife that can slice a tin can in half. He says that Claire had something called gestational diabetes—did Benny not know that? There’s a record of Claire having been given a prescription and being told to follow up at the hospital, but she never came back.
The baby was born healthy enough, all things considered. Unfortunately, and despite everything medical science could offer, Claire didn’t make it.
Benny feels a wave of dizziness and leans against the wall to steady himself. The doctor puts his hand on his arm. Benny shoves him away. “I want to see her.”
When the doctor pulls open the privacy curtain, the metal rings making a zipping sound. Someone is lying in the bed—Benny can see the outline of a body—with a sheet over its face. The doctor carefully folds it back. The lips are slightly open. The eyes are closed.
“I’m so sorry for your loss. We did everything we could,” says the doctor.
Benny is startled by the realization that the doctor thinks that the bod
y in the bed is Claire. It doesn’t look like Claire. Not at all. The body’s cheeks are slack and mottled, probably from whatever drugs they were giving her, but mostly it’s as if Claire has simply vanished, leaving behind this sack of bruised flesh. She looks deflated. A dead balloon. The real Claire must have hitched a ride home to Love Canal, leaving this body in the bed to fool the nurses.
“You’ll probably want to make some calls,” suggests the doctor.
Benny can tell that the doctor is nervous—probably thinks that Benny thinks that it’s his fault Claire died. He’ll ask to see the baby. Then he decides, no, don’t ask. Act like Rocco. Demand it.
“I want to see my baby now.”
“Of course,” says the doctor and pulls a cord to summon the nurse. Benny can tell he’s relieved to escape any more talk about the dead body he’s mistaken for Claire.
The nurse leads him into a place they call the Mum’s Room, invites him to take a seat in a rocking chair, and places the baby in his arms, telling him to be careful to support her head. She softly closes the door behind her as she leaves.
Benny stares down at the blue-black eyes, which look up at him. The baby’s gaze is intent. As if she’s trying to figure out who he is.
Don’t I know you from somewhere?
Benny realizes with startling certainty that the baby already recognizes him. As he does, her. They know each other well. Well, yeah; didn’t he lie beside Claire all those months, this baby growing under his hand as he rubbed Claire’s belly?
He wasn’t sure, at first, how to hold her, but it turns out to be easy enough. She feels warm through her swaddling blanket. Like a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven.
Be Mr. Spock, Benny tells himself. Be Rocco. Be like stone. Feel nothing.
It’s not working. The warm little muscle in his arms, the little person, clearly belongs to Benny. He can’t not feel something for her.
Benny starts rocking, humming, the way he can distantly remember his nonna humming to him. The baby yawns, making a soft chirping noise. Her lips form an O. Benny offers her his pinkie. She sucks on it intently, her eyes stuck on Benny.
