Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  Afterward they lay side by side, holding each other quietly. Gottlieb closed his eyes and saw the lines of waves against a dark horizon and felt the bed beneath them sway.

  When he opened them again, he wasn’t sure where he was. Hattie was dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed. What was happening? “What are you doing?” She reached for something on the nightstand.

  His wedding ring. No, please, no.

  But she was lifting the fake-deco Sunset Tower pen, writing something on his palm. Had she seen the band? He looked at his palm in the dim light, a phone number beginning with 323.

  “Stay till the morning,” he said, meaning it. Wanting it, aroused again. She put her fingers to his earlobe and stroked it with tenderness. So much promise, her face was saying. He felt it, too, in the blood running through his veins, and felt it after she left, and then he went to sleep and dreamed of nothing.

  Rebecca

  “Eatin’ ain’t cheatin’,” Rebecca told CC. “Just like Bill Clinton said.” They were sitting outside Connecticut Muffin. CC was feeding Harry pieces of bagel to keep him quiet while they talked. Sonam had Benny, so Rebecca was in mom nito—a mother in disguise, without her child.

  “You mean you don’t feel even a little bit guilty?”

  “Less guilty than I would if Theo hadn’t been lying to me about his pot habit.”

  “What you did is way worse,” CC said. “Who’s Theo betraying?”

  “His kids.”

  “Kid.” Harry was reaching for her coffee, and CC gave him a sip.

  “Why are you letting a two-year-old have coffee?” Rebecca said. “It’ll stunt his growth.”

  “I don’t have the energy to fight anymore. With Sam, I did. Not with Harry. So tell me more about your date with Stuart.”

  “Shhh.” They were surrounded by other mothers. It was impossible to find privacy in the Slope. One weekday afternoon, pregnant with Benny and distraught about her lies, Rebecca had turned onto Fiske Place just so she could sit on a stoop and cry. She’d put her head in her hands and sobbed. Not five minutes later, a couple came up the block, staring at her curiously and forcing her over to Polhemus Place, which, it turned out, was holding its annual block party.

  “Did he ask about the—you know?”

  “Oh God,” Rebecca said, inching closer and lowering her voice. “I hated it. I had to tell him how difficult it was to terminate.” She explained the leaking and the lactation fabrication.

  CC clapped her hand over her mouth. “He must know you have a baby if you were leaking,” she said.

  “I don’t think he did. In Park Slope women nurse a long time.”

  They sipped their coffee. There was nothing special about the Connecticut Muffin coffee and no room to sit inside, but Rebecca kept coming because it was convenient. She figured she had drunk two thousand takeout cups in her time in Park Slope. She imagined them all in a landfill next to everyone else’s.

  “Anyway, he keeps calling me,” she said to CC. “I get a little jolt every time I hear his voice. I think I miss being chased.”

  “I know what you mean,” CC said. “Gottlieb hasn’t chased me in a long time. He fucks me, but he doesn’t really need me.”

  “Sure he does.”

  “I was so upset that he was going to L.A., but now I kind of prefer it. I do my own thing. The boys miss him, which is hard, but I started playing piano again, which I never do when he’s around. And tomorrow night I’m getting a sitter, and Joanne and I are going to Brooklyn Boulders and Zuzu Ramen.”

  “That is so great. You see, that’s what’s important. You have to treat yourself when he’s gone so you don’t feel burdened. You should get your nails done. Get a massage. This mother at Beansprouts said she got the best massage of her life from some guy on Sixth Street.” Rebecca took out her cell. “I have his number. Seth, his name is. You should go to him.”

  “That’s a really good idea.” Rebecca rattled off the numbers and CC entered them into her phone. “Are you going to see Stuart again?”

  “Do you think I should?” Rebecca asked.

  “I guess it depends what you want.”

  “That’s the problem. I feel like he’s Kryptonite, and if I don’t stay away, it’s dangerous. But I already had his baby, so I feel like if I, ah, went further with him than I did the other night, it would just be the icing on the cake of immorality. It felt so good to be with him. Sooo good.”

  “Can I say something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Theo is hands-down the best father I know, and you’re the only one who doesn’t seem to appreciate it. Why would you want to mess that up?”

  A young mother in short shorts and green knee-high Hunter boots was trying to go through the door of Connecticut Muffin with one of those enormous sports strollers. She struggled mightily as Rebecca and CC sat there not helping her, pretending they hadn’t been the same person she was. Her body wasn’t bad, but the shorts were too tiny for a mother. Whose attention was she seeking? Other mothers’? Other husbands’? Rebecca felt a pang of pity for her for trying so hard to look hot. “I don’t want to mess it up with him,” she said. “At least I didn’t before I knew he was a stoner. How come you didn’t tell me that was his pot in Wellfleet? You said it was Joanne’s.”

  “He thought you would be upset. Anyway, he’s still a good father. Which do you think is worse, honestly? A movie star or a pothead?”

  “That’s a very tough call.”

  On her walk down Garfield Place to Seed, Rebecca saw trailers parked up and down Sixth Avenue. She went to a lamppost to see what was shooting. The David Keller Show. David to her was like Newman to Seinfeld. She could never escape him, even in her day-to-day business. She crossed hurriedly so as not to spot him accidentally and go into a depressive rage at his success.

  Down one block, at the corner of First Street, she did see David. He was merrily conferring with a man who was a dead ringer for Theo. The back of the man’s head had the exact shape of Theo’s, and his stance was like Theo’s—protective.

  Why was Theo talking to David Keller? They weren’t friends. Until recently, when he started watching the show, he had hated David Keller. When they would bump into David in the neighborhood, Theo would say later, “What a pompous ass.” Now they were buddies? It had to be someone else.

  She felt a tap on the shoulder. A production assistant. Small, with black glasses, in love with her own power. “We’re about to shoot right here, so if you could move it along, it would be great.”

  “I was already going,” Rebecca said, and took one final look before walking off. On her cell phone, she tried Theo at the office but got his voice mail. She hung up on the second syllable of his name.

  Karen

  Wesley picked up Karen for their date in a Dodge SUV. She had sent Darby to her parents’ in Midwood for the night so she wouldn’t have to worry about getting back by a certain time. She and Wesley were going to Roberta’s, a pizza place in Bushwick that she’d read about in the Times dining section a while back but never tried. She figured it would be casual but good. They had e-mailed to finalize their plans, and she learned that his e-mail quote was “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Proverbs 27:17.” She knew it was meant as an athletic reference, but she got a strange flash of warmth in her pelvis every time she read about one man sharpening another.

  He was wearing a white cotton button-down and tan chinos, and his clear skin was glowing. She had put on the wrap dress that she had worn to the potluck after deciding that on a date, it was all right to look curvy. On her feet she had her most expensive pair of shoes, silver slingback Christian Louboutins that she had worn to her wedding.

  It was hard to climb up into the SUV in the heels, but Wesley came out of the driver’s seat and helped her. Matty had never done stuff like that, and Karen was reminded once again of how different the two men were. Matty had retained a lawyer, and Ashley Kessler had told Karen that the next step was for her to fill out the
net worth statement. If he was spending ten, twenty thousand dollars on luxury items for Valentina, they could get a credit for it later when they reached a settlement. Once they both got them filled out, Ashley would try to work out a temporary agreement with Matty’s lawyer, so the wires would go up to what Ashley considered a fair amount, six thousand or more.

  Roberta’s was on a well-kept industrial street that could have easily been Williamsburg. It was inside a former garage, a light gray building with graffiti and an ATM parked in front. There was a big pizza oven in the back of the restaurant. She had expected the clientele to be mostly black because it was in Bushwick, but every customer was white. The seating was casual, cafeteria-style, big long tables. She wished she had chosen someplace more romantic.

  The waitress gave them menus. “Do you want to get a bottle of wine?” Karen asked.

  “All right.”

  She moved her finger down the list and asked the waitress if they could taste two Italian reds. She decided on the Valpolicella. The wine was just right, not too full, and the pizza turned out to be phenomenal. While they ate, he told her about plyometrics, the fitness technique that he used with his clients. He said it utilized the body’s weight to build endurance. “I would definitely hire you as my trainer,” she said. “I have about fifteen pounds I need to lose.”

  “You don’t need to lose anything.”

  “I do. They say nine months on, nine months off when it comes to pregnancy weight. I’m seventy-two months off.”

  “I could give you some pointers, but I might get too distracted,” he said.

  She blushed. As they talked, she compared him mentally to Matty, who was often on his BlackBerry when they went to dinner, worrying about cases. Wesley made her feel important and smart. Matty would probably be horrified if he knew she was dating an ex-con from Crown Heights named Wesley Harrison. But for all Matty knew, Valentina was an ex-con from Crown Heights named Wesley Harrison, too.

  A couple walked in, a middle-aged woman in a peasant blouse and a man in a fitted forest-green tee. Karen said he looked gay, and Wesley agreed. Flirtatiously, she said, “But you wear tight shirts. Does that mean you’re gay?”

  “Black men can get away with stuff white men can’t.”

  “Oh yeah? Why?”

  “We started everything. We started shaving our heads before gay men did. Then gay guys did it, and now every white guy with a balding pattern does it. We started wearing outdoor clothes all the time, like hiking shirts and Tims.”

  “Tims?”

  “Timberlands. Now every guy wears boots and hiking gear.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “You didn’t think I was funny?”

  “You seemed so serious that day we went for coffee.” The wine was going to her head. “Why did you go to prison?”

  He hesitated and said, “I used to deal heroin.”

  “Really? Did you use?”

  “Never. I was doing it to pay my way through Brooklyn College. I did a semester and a half, but then I got caught. All my friends from the neighborhood dealt. I thought I was better than the others because I wasn’t using and I was taking the money for tuition, but it was wrong. This is maybe too much information for a first date.”

  “It’s not too much. I used to be a school social worker, remember?”

  “I don’t want you to be scared of me. I used to be not a good person. Now I’m a better person. I wanted to finish my degree in prison, but they eliminated the program I was in. I’d give anything not to work in this stockroom, but our society has no systems of support for the excarcerated.”

  She was in awe of his industriousness. “I thought I had it bad after Matty left, but I never appreciated what I did have. I still don’t.”

  “We all get handed our lot.”

  After dinner he drove her back to her place. They lingered in front of the building. She wanted to kiss him but was too afraid. “Do you want to come upstairs for a few minutes?” she asked. “I made pear-pomegranate pie today.”

  “How’d you know I have a sweet tooth?”

  They sat on the couch. She put on the Karen O soundtrack to Where the Wild Things Are, because it was the only music she could find easily that wasn’t explicitly for Darby. In the kitchen she took the pie out of the foil and put two slices in the toaster oven to warm them up. She had made the crust herself with fresh-rendered lard she’d bought from the Flying Pigs farm stand at the greenmarket. When Matty was around, she never could have used lard; he wasn’t kosher, but he didn’t eat pork because he hadn’t been raised to. The pie was made with Anjou and Bosc pears and pomegranate molasses with a lattice crust.

  Wesley had come to the kitchen island. “That looks delicious,” he said. “How’d you get the top like that?”

  “It’s so easy. Lattice looks really hard, but it’s not.”

  She spooned a scoop of Alden’s vanilla ice cream from the Coop on each plate and carried them to the living room. When Wesley bit into his, he sighed and threw his head back.

  “That good?” she said.

  “You know the way to my heart.”

  She tried a bite of hers. It was good. Maybe she was meant to be a baker, not a chef. She enjoyed baking more than any other part of food prep. They ate in silence for a few minutes, the pears warm in their mouths. “Can I ask you something?” she said. “How can you find someone like me attractive?”

  “Don’t talk that way about yourself,” he said.

  “I wish I weighed less.”

  “I like a woman with a little meat on her bones.”

  “That’s just a polite way of saying I’m fat.”

  “You’re not fat, you’re a goddess.”

  “An African love goddess, you mean.” They laughed and then he was kissing her, softly and slowly. She unbuttoned his shirt and ran her hands up and down his perfect chest. He had a six-pack of abdominal muscles. She was in a Terry McMillan movie. He rubbed her breasts outside her shirt. She felt she could orgasm from that alone.

  “Let’s go into the bedroom,” she said.

  “What’s your rush?”

  “I haven’t had sex in a long time.” Immediately, she regretted saying it. What was she thinking, making herself pathetic to him? He would never want to sleep with her now.

  “Then we should make the circumstances right, don’t you think? Get to know each other first.”

  “You’re not attracted to me. I knew it.”

  “It’s the opposite. I don’t see the point of rushing when I know I like you.” Matty had never said things like that to her. Even when he was courting her, he had never been romantic. There had been an aspect to their relationship that was predetermined, and it wasn’t until now that she realized how much it hurt her.

  “How can you say things like that to me?” she asked. “I feel like a camera’s going to come out and it’ll turn out I’m being Punk’d. Or you’re in a dogfight or something.”

  “I like you, Karen. Now stop saying this stuff or I’m going to like you less.”

  After he left, she drew a bath and splayed herself against the bathtub faucet, feet hiked up on the tile wall. She hadn’t masturbated in months. Lately, the whole endeavor had depressed her—reminded her of the sex she wasn’t having.

  The water was hot as it rushed against her. She had done this at twelve, discovered the pleasure of the faucet, and for years this was the only way she came. Later, with Matty, she rarely orgasmed during sex. Orgasms were for solo time. It was easier to relax and give in when she was by herself. She tried to explain this to him early on in their relationship, and he fought her on it, as though his ability to make her orgasm during sex said something about his own masculinity. This insulted her—it seemed to be all about him in the name of being all about her.

  Eventually, he gave up, and they settled into the kind of sex Julianne Moore had in Safe, where she lies there as her husband writhes on top of her, and then she pats his back at the end. Once in a while Matty would get what he
called a “wully” for cunnilingus, which he said meant “a keen desire,” and would go down on her until she came. But she usually felt it was more trouble than the pleasure was worth.

  After the separation, she had realized the shower head was old and moldy and had splurged on a three-hundred-dollar Speakman Neo handheld massager, which offered gentle rain, full-flood, and pulsating massage streams. One morning, she had discovered its pleasures, and now, whenever she took a bath, she took care of herself.

  This was perfect, to be alone, with only the image of Wesley to help her. Not totally perfect—she wanted Wesley there—but it was a good way to ease herself back into sex. If she ever got him into her bed.

  She was embarrassed to note that at the precise moment the orgasm came on, she was envisioning herself in the bathing scene with Sethe and Paul D in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She definitely wouldn’t tell Wesley about that.

  Gottlieb

  In the shower Gottlieb imagined Hattie naked, her curvy waist, her beautiful, high breasts. He could see her riding him, suffocating him, his hands holding her ass, he was close now, and he was using Kiehl’s liquid body cleanser in coriander and it took a lot to get a lather, he couldn’t breathe with his head inside her, he glanced down at his hand and he remembered faintly from the night before she had written something on it.

  “Shiiittttt!!!!”

  He yanked his hand up. All that remained was a nine and an eight, gray ambiguous traces. He raced out of the bathroom, dripping wet, and examined his hand under the desk light. It wasn’t clear that the nine was a nine. A seven? On the hotel stationery, he desperately wrote down what numerical variations he recalled from the blurry flashback that was last night. Or was it this morning? He had lost track of time, and now he had lost track of Hattie.