The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

  Sabine passed Ben without noticing him and went into Amsterdam Bank. Ben watched her through the plate glass while she ordered and the redhead squinted at her. Then Sabine came out and noticed Ben and startled.

  “Hi,” said Ben. “I was going to say hi before, but you just walked past. I almost called out.”

  Sabine narrowed her eyes and said without preamble, “Did you hear Martin’s having a baby? Garden designer Martin. He’s having a fucking baby with a mail-order bride. Not just a mail-order bride. Oksana.”

  “Huh,” said Ben, caught off guard. “I thought he was gay.”

  “Jesus. Keep up. He still produces semen. He can still engender babies.”

  “No, you made it sound as if it was—”

  “Oh, a mistake? No, totally planned. They did it with a cake-decorating syringe. He’s giving her thirty thousand dollars.”

  Now, despite himself, Ben got swept up. “So he’s keeping the baby himself? He’ll raise it alone?”

  “Yeah. He doesn’t even have a boyfriend. He bought a house, though, so that’s good. I never thought in my wildest dreams I’d get Martin out of my apartment. But having a baby like that? With Oksana?”

  Ben tried to conceive of this, remembering Oksana’s duck-like nudity and vacant affect. Oksana was clearly an adult, she ran that organization and made those films, but it did feel weird. It felt a little like abuse. Nonetheless (because Ben and Sabine had a combative relationship; Sabine would always say to Ben’s face that he was going to abandon Kate, because men did, and when he retorted, “Sure, we’re all cads,” Sabine rolled her eyes and said, “We’ve got a live one here! I like your spunk!”) Ben now said, “It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. He wants a family. It could be nice.”

  Sabine snorted. “Fine, Pollyanna, it’s beautiful. It’s the circle of life when you pay a crazy person to knock herself up with a cake-decorating syringe. That works out great for people.”

  “It could.”

  “Dude, no. And I’ll tell you another thing. Martin is not ready to take care of any baby. His longest relationship was seven weeks. The guy’s thirty-eight years old and he gets drunk every night. So he thinks he has a baby and everything falls into place? What gets me is, people have babies and they’re thinking what the baby will do for them. It’s sick. We’re supposed to be the good guys. I mean, he’s a decent guy, don’t get me wrong. I’m not gunning for Martin. He makes gardens for low-cost housing developments, he does a lot of that pro bono stuff. He’s awesome. But this thing? Honestly, sometimes I look at the world, and I think it’s going to sink under, just, people’s personal insanity. I can’t …” Then she caught her breath and said, “Oh, shit. I don’t believe it. I’m starting to cry.”

  Tears were in fact welling up in her eyes. Ben stiffened. He wanted to say something comforting, he should have been able to—but he had a flashback to Kate’s tearful face, her saying Don’t go yet, and to his horror, tears welled up in his eyes. It was Kate and the squinting girl and Martin’s baby who would never be happy, and the tears came fast; even if he had wiped them away it would have been too late. Sabine saw and grinned with absolute warmth. “Christ,” she said nasally. “Look at us. Well, I hope Martin makes it work. I mean, you realize that? I don’t want it to go wrong.”

  “I actually had a fight with Kate. I’m not just …”

  “Ha!” Sabine touched his shoulder. “You were prepped? That’s cheating.”

  “Yeah, we had a really bad fight.”

  “Aw, don’t cry about fighting with Kate. I mean, fighting?” Sabine shook her head, dabbing at her eyes with one mittened hand.

  “I was just such an asshole to her.”

  Sabine smiled over her mitten. “Were you a beast to her? I bet you were a beast.”

  Ben laughed, sniffling. “I don’t know. Kate was being weird about getting a job.”

  “Oh, I know what you mean. Kate does that. But she’ll get a job.” Sabine uncapped her coffee and sipped it experimentally. “Shit, how is this still too hot? No, Kate will get a job. You just have to keep after her.”

  “So you’re saying I did the right thing?”

  “Whoa, don’t put words in my mouth. Goddamn, I still can’t believe fucking Martin. Anyway, Kate gets jobs, she just has to … You have to yank her out of her fairy tale. Don’t listen to her bullshit, she’s fine with jobs.”

  “I didn’t think you wanted me to be with Kate.”

  “You thought that? Really? I talk a lot of garbage, honestly. I just want you guys to be happy, but how do you achieve that? I’ve got no idea.”

  Ben thought of saying this principle could also be applied to Martin’s baby, but he remembered Oksana again and didn’t. They both sipped their coffees and sighed. The crying had left a pleasant heaviness in Ben’s head that reminded him of childhood.

  He was thinking again of calling Kate when Sabine jabbed him with her elbow and said, “Check it out.” She nodded across the street, where a wedding party was now spilling out of the revolving doors of the Hotel Ariane. The celebrants were Latino, lustrous and obviously well-heeled. The bride wore traditional snow-white tulle, but the bridesmaids were in hot-pink minidresses and hot-pink boots. A tiny flower girl, also in a hot-pink minidress, hopped down the hotel’s steps waving her posy of flowers back and forth as if dispensing benedictions. Dark-suited men filtered out in half steps, somber and subdued, while the girls laughed helplessly at something, gathered against the long black flank of a limousine. At last, the bridegroom came out of the hotel in a white tuxedo. All the girls fell silent and turned to him. That man’s life would never be the same, Ben thought.

  “Wow,” said Sabine. “I fucking love those people. They should be having the babies, not us.”

  It took Ben an hour to get home to Kate. He’d decided not to call, having used his last change to call in sick. Then on the train, he wished he had. What if she wasn’t there? The idea of it kept frightening him, the thought of the hours he’d have to wait for her to come home, of another wrong decision.

  Then coming out, and the Christmas trees again, different people in the same bright coats. Everything was now infected, an emotional blur. He broke into a run when he saw their apartment building, and went running up the stairs and flinging the door open on that silence. But Kate was there. She was curled up in bed. She didn’t move when he came in.

  He caught his step, his heart instantly pounding. It beat in its injury, its terrible injury. He didn’t know what to do. Why did she have to still be upset? Sabine had said it would be all right. He couldn’t stand to see her in pain. She must have known he couldn’t stand it. She was doing this.

  But she suddenly stirred and looked back at him, smiling. His anger fled, he could feel it passing dizzyingly. He was full of endorphins. Weak and so grateful.

  “Baby,” she said. “You’re here.”

  “You’re not still angry?”

  “No, I was falling asleep.”

  “Asleep?” He laughed unsteadily.

  “I always fall asleep when I’m upset.”

  He came to sit beside her on the bed. She was wearing one of his old flannel shirts, and the masculine cut of it gave her face by contrast a Madonna-like softness, a glow. He took her hand, and she stroked his knuckles with her fingertips, consciously and tenderly.

  “You were right,” said Kate. “You were right about everything. When you came home, I was going to tell you that, and then I thought you would forgive me. I had this plan.”

  “I already forgave you.”

  “No. You’re supposed to say I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  They both laughed mutedly. Ben lay down beside her, and she gave him room on the pillow, so they were smiling at each other at point-blank range.

  “Are you okay?” she said. “Where did you go?”

  “I was going to work, but then I ran into Sabine. At Amsterdam Bank. She told me Oksana’s having a baby.”

  “I know. I just got off the phone with Marti
n about a job.”

  “Really? Martin?”

  “I was thinking he could hire me as a gardener. But instead he’s going to pay me to paint a mural in the nursery in his new house.”

  They both looked up at the drawings above them. On that section of the wall, there was a poster-size picture of a sea that was improbably thick with pirate ships, each of them manned with dozens of tiny sailors. The sailors and the boats were in pencil, but the scenery around them was painted in watercolor, faint green and blue and the yellow of sunlight. Around it were a dozen smaller pictures of bears, each meticulously drawn and with a distinct personality. The drawings were odd, warmhearted, pretty. There had always been something comforting about them, but it was the first time Ben had realized how good they were, that they were something rich people would pay to have.

  He said, choked up, “You’re going to do a great job.”

  She said, “It’s going to be a really happy baby.”

  10

  When it came again, she didn’t wake in bed. She woke in the middle of a gesture, in the middle of a facial expression, in the middle of dinner. A dozen other people were seated at the table, in the nonsense clothes of dreams—stout velvet sleeves and lacy ruffs, gilt buttons and little plumed hats. All were gesturing, talking, spearing meat on their knives. That multifarious motion, resuming as she woke, was dizzying. She had the sense of falling into it and continuing to fall as she understood where she was.

  It was Surrey, her cousin Andrea Bassano’s house, his new-built house of brick. He was there at the head of the table, a man with the weather-beaten, paunchy looks of a horn player and the important manner of a householder who can afford to feed ten guests. The guests today were all Londoners driven from town by fear of plague: Old Lupo the viol player and his hunchbacked granddaughter, Anne; a Portuguese mercer and his teenaged wife; three fiddlers from the London Waits; and, across from Emilia, two actors of Lord Strange’s Men, turned vagrant by the closure of the theaters. All had an air of pleasurable shipwreck. They’d washed up on this quiet, irrelevant shore of the ocean London and were pleased with each other and with their imperiled peace. Pleased with their overcooked meat. An airy hall, open to the rafters; a hearth with a fire. An orange cat stalking in the rushes. Two mullioned windows with flaws in the panes that distorted the view of branches outside, all black from rain and hung with glistening raindrops.

  Now Old Lupo was telling a story Emilia had heard a hundred times before: how good King Henry had driven the monks from Charterhouse—and how he had had most of those monks killed for their bad heresy. A fearful thing, said Lupo; may God preserve us from such wrong thoughts. Well, the lodgers who took the monks’ rooms in that monastery of Charterhouse were Henry’s fiddlers—Lupo himself, and Emilia’s father Bassano, with ten other Lupos and Bassanos and Galliardellos, new-brought from Italy and speaking no more English than a Barbary hen. And a scandalous noise they made in the monks’ old lodgings with their pipings and blowings and bellowings of outlandish songs, so the neighbors feared them as very devils. And came a day—the occasion being the receipt of their pay—so, on this fortunate day, having drunk some Spanish wine, the Lupos and Bassanos and all their heathenish tribe ventured forth and paraded in the street with their horns. Toot toot! (Lupo sang like a sackbut then, and Andrea laughed and sang the cornetto part, and some others laughed and cried, “Toot, toot!”) Then—Lupo went on—the whores and prentices and idle wives came out, and being given wine to share, all followed behind, singing five different songs at once. After that, all in the neighborhood were the fiddlers’ good friends. And ’twas well done, for, before that day, the musicians were in hazard of being murdered in their sleep, as diabolical foreigners and outragers of the honest friars’ beds.

  He told the story in Italian and his granddaughter Anne translated it in a tone of jaded tolerance. In the dream, Emilia knew the story well. She knew it in English and she knew it in Italian; in the dream, she knew Italian, and its lilting cadences soothed her. It was the language of her dead parents. She listened along unthinking and tried to focus on the task she had woken for, the unknown thing that would save the world. But her body was exhausted, still tender from childbirth. She’d been drinking ale since dawn; she couldn’t think. It was there, in the shape of the air—or it wasn’t. She felt confused and weak.

  And, as Lupo told his tale, the two actors tried to catch her eye. She understood, through her dream weariness, that she was the mistress of the Lord Chamberlain, Hunsdon; her favor might determine if a troupe of players would perform at court. Both actors were Williams, both brown haired and wearing the same ill-cut spade beard. The leftward Will was a comical type, with puffy reddened eyelids and a slack, sly grin. The other was masculine and morose; a Will that had seen bad weather. Red Will pulled faces at her, mimicking the pompous glare of Old Lupo. Sad Will only watched her with the frank, tired gaze of a friend.

  Old Lupo finished his tale and sat back triumphant. At that moment, the fat orange tomcat leapt onto the table and plaintively miaowed. All the company reached for him; he dodged among the plates to general laughter. Red Will said, “Signor Lupo, the beasts acclaim you, as they did the fiddler Orpheus.” Anne said, “Nay, ’twas cat-calling plain. Why, the cat himself hath heard this tale every month since he was a kitten. An old, old story.” The cat miaowed again protestingly, and Emilia said to Lupo, “Belle parole non pascon i gatti.” Anne laughed and explained to the company: “’Tis a saying of our noisy people, that we tell each other often and heed little: ‘Pretty words will not feed the cat.’”

  Then the cat turned and jumped unceremoniously into Emilia’s lap. She gathered it instinctively toward her, and everyone was looking at her, grinning.

  Sad Will bowed in his chair. “Madam, you are also a Bassano, I think?”

  “Ay,” said Emilia. “So I was born.”

  “And are you … musical?” He made a shape with his hands that could have been a recorder and pouted his lips toward it suggestively. The company equably laughed.

  “My cousin plays many instruments,” Andrea Bassano put in, and when this also raised a laugh, added nervously, “And hath played the flute before Her Majesty.”

  “The flute?” Sad Will turned his airy recorder lengthways. “Why, I would give all I have to hear such a piping.”

  “An easy promise,” Anne said, “as the fellow has nothing.”

  “Then I would give what I have not,” said Sad Will.

  “Wit,” suggested Anne.

  “Nay, you are very hard.” Sad Will let his hands fall pitifully. “You put me off my jest.”

  Everyone laughed again. The cat miaowed peevishly and made them laugh still more. Only Emilia and Sad Will were silent. He was looking at her. Now his hand was on his beard, a long hand with ink-stained fingernails. As she met his eye, there was a shock of unpleasantness. A feeling.

  Then it was there in the air. It was her task—or it wasn’t. It was like a giddy turning in the world. When she tried to focus on it, it zipped away like a mocking fly. Then Sad Will grinned and it was gone.

  She turned from him, annoyed, and said to the cat, “Well, Grimalkin, ’tis a brave man who jests of pipes and nothings, whilst in London our friends are laid into their graves.”

  It was her tone that affected them, a mean black tone. The company fell quiet and frowned at each other while Sad Will smiled at her.

  He said, “If it be a crime that I am merry, I am sorry for it.”

  “Certes, madam,” Red Will put in, “the pestilence is no friend to us. As you see, we must wander abroad to seek our food.”

  “Ay, we wander very madly and merrily,” Sad Will said. “As you see us, we are very Toms o’Bedlam, beggars with no man’s love. But if thou wouldst but favor us with a letter to your great friends …”

  “Ah!” said Anne Lupo. “There it is! Do you hear, my lords, the fellow wants our Emilia to write his begging letters.”

  “Ay,” said Sad Will readily. “If she
would write to any great man of her knowledge, ’twould be a blessing to make the world smile.”

  Emilia said, “I know not why I should be put to such a labor.”

  “Then I myself will write,” Sad Will said easily, “if I may but name thee as my friend. Faith, I will use thy name gently, madam, and dress it in velvet flatteries. It shall go before their eyes as a queen.”

  Anne said, “But she does not know you, sir.”

  Sad Will smiled at Emilia, and the shock passed again. “Perhaps she will know me anon.”

  Now the company relaxed and laughed approval. The cat purred against Emilia’s belly. It was warm in the room. Outside, the shiny-wet branches were sparkling in the wind. She took a deep breath (and in the fabric of the dream, she was aware of a static-like interference. It had the tinniness of AM radio, but it wasn’t words or music. Wasn’t sounds. Instinctively, Emilia shut her eyes, and in that blink, Kate saw a broken city. It was like a burnt Manhattan, its abandoned towers scabbed with dirt and ice. It had no air. No sky. It was a city from a time when all the planet was dead.)

  Then she opened her eyes. The vision was gone. All the company was looking at her, bemused. She was here to save mankind.

  Then the choice was before her, so clear it was importunate; an open door in a room with nothing in it but one open door. She said (and the words came from a black distance): “Well, you may name me in your letters, sir. We shall see what it may do.”

  Then she was on her feet with the cat in her arms. She went out the open parlor door, while Andrea called after her solicitously. When she kicked the door shut behind her, the room had fallen into startled silence.

  In the parlor, she balked. She was suddenly afraid. The words had come in a black flood of certainty. The moment had opened and closed. She had chosen. But how could that possibly have been the right choice? If she helped some unemployed actor get a patron, how could that do anything to save the world?