Up, Down and Sideways

by Patton, Robert;

  “We’ll be allies, Carrie.”

  “That sounds okay.”

  “I agree.”

  “And Philly?”

  “Yes …”

  “Were you honest about what you said about abortion being not heinous. I mean, you’re having it, too, you know.”

  About abortion, I feel we should admit to the slaughter and otherwise be at peace. I told her, “Yes. Sleep well.”

  I was falling asleep myself when a strange distress signal roused me. A moment of bafflement careened into chaos as I ripped through laundry and Chinese food cartons in search of the fucking beeper. I realized I didn’t need it. Phone! Phone the woman who carries your heir! I dialed furiously. The beeping had stopped and I pictured Susan hemorrhaging in bed. On the first ring the receiver picked up.

  “Good boy.”

  I launched into a tirade about girls who cry wolf; secretly I was gratified. Susan needed me. She never could have admitted this, but the beeper spoke it plainly. She needed me more than I needed her. The beeper, I realized, was power.

  18

  The next day, though busy, did not include my renting a car. This had some bearing later.

  Carrie picked me up at five on the dot. I took the wheel and she the passenger’s seat, predictably sullen of course. I’d been uncertain what to wear. I wasn’t sure if during the abortion procedure, as in Lamaze, the man was expected to participate. To avoid mussing a good suit I wore sneakers and jeans. Carrie wore black.

  She directed me to the crosstown expressway. I asked where we were going and she named a commuter suburb. “I didn’t wanna go someplace local. I don’t wanna see someone I know.”

  Glancing over, I noticed the crucifix she always wore she wasn’t wearing today. In respect for her feelings, I turned off the top forty radio station I’d had on to lighten the mood.

  We’d been driving ten minutes. Rain started to fall. The beeper started to beep. “What’s that?” Carrie said.

  “What’s what?”

  “That.” She pointed to my belt.

  An instrument from hell, I wanted to say. Instead I lied: “My new broker must want me to phone him. We’re very high tech these days.”

  “Isn’t the stock market closed by now?”

  “There are other exchanges. Money’s global, Carrie.” I turned off the beeper and switched the radio back on.

  Susan was testing me again. She wasn’t due for a month. And if she did think her contractions had begun, chances were they were false or, at worst, very early—with luck, her labor would last fifteen or twenty hours and I’d only miss the beginning. But a month premature? No way. She wasn’t a ghetto mother. I turned the beeper back on. It was blessedly silent.

  Carrie directed me off the next exit. “How did you hear of this place?” I asked her, calming.

  “On the ladies’ room wall at the bus station. There was even a map.”

  “That’s not funny, Carrie.” She wasn’t smiling. “Is this place respectable?”

  “The best,” she said. “All their hangers are sterilized.”

  “Now come on!” Then I saw her chin tremble. Her attempt to prepare, to toughen herself, by hating me began to crumble before my eyes. I moved my hand from the stick shift to her leg. “I’ll be glad when it’s over.”

  “I’ll bet.” The beeper beeped, startling both of us. It beeped and kept beeping over the sound of the rain on the car roof. I yanked it off my belt and held it before me like a hand mirror, like a crystal cube in which I could conjure the face of my tormenter. “Must be important,” Carrie said dryly.

  “It can wait.”

  “You sure? You can drop me off. I’ll find some guy to drive me there—for a blow job, maybe.” Clearly she’d recovered some of her toughness. Her hatred of me was galvanized, armored. She’ll survive, I thought with relief.

  “Don’t keep testing me,” I said. “I want to be here.”

  She laughed. “To make sure, I know.” Her laugh was cold steel and resolved me in my plan. If the worst had happened, if Susan indeed was having her baby, then I’d ditch Carrie at the clinic and drive her car back to the city, back to Susan. Carrie couldn’t hate me more than she did already. Her hatred would protect her. I’d be doing her a favor.

  An insane person’s plan, it never would have occurred to me if Susan’s beeper hadn’t been beeping six inches from my face. So I threw the thing out the window. In the sideview mirror I saw it bounce into traffic and die.

  We approached a new-looking brick building across from a shopping mall. “Here,” Carrie said. Inside, to my chagrin, the receptionist said yes, if we wished, I could accompany Carrie through the procedure, hold her hand or whatever.

  Begging off, I said I was squeamish, but that I’d rejoin her in the recovery room. A nurse led her away down a carpeted hallway decorated with plantings and cheery prints. Carrie’s eyes gazing back at me were angry and scared. I mouthed to her, I like you, impulsively. Her anger and fright turned to amazement, her face taking a stunned, euphoric look, as if she’d been injected with painkiller. It’s possible she’d misunderstood me.

  I paid the receptionist in advance, with a credit card. Before taking a seat in the lobby to wait for Carrie to come out, I thought to call Susan, in case. On a pay phone I dialed her private number at Neil’s, getting an answering machine. “Just me. Checking in. Catch ya later.” The receiver was slick with sweat from my hand.

  I dialed Gray Realtors. Alison answered. When she heard my voice she hung up. My pulse upshifted.

  I dialed once more. Alison answered, heard my voice and hung up. Dialing again, I jabbed the buttons with the blank-minded grit of a bombardier punching a target code on his home town. “Alison!”

  “What?”

  “Where’s Susan?”

  “Susan who?”

  “Don’t start. Is Neil with her?”

  “Neil and Dominique went away for the weekend.”

  “With Susan home alone pregnant?”

  “Susan insisted. She said she had you in case of emergency.”

  “And here I am.”

  “And there you are.”

  “Don’t hang up! Just tell me, is it happening?”

  “Is what happening, Philip?”

  “The baby, goddamn it!”

  She paused, loving this. I felt movement:

  “Don’t hang up.”

  She hung up. But in the affirmative.

  Seeing no other course, I gave the receptionist cash for Carrie’s cab fare home. The woman was horrified I was leaving, abandoning Carrie here. I didn’t have time to explain my side of it, much less to win her support.

  Outside it rained from a dusky sky. I could blame the rain, the dim light, my speed or my messing with the tape deck for making me wreck Carrie’s car halfway between the clinic and the hospital. The car jumped the shoulder of the expressway off-ramp and plunged down an embankment, planting its snout like a foraging pig into a mud bog at the bottom.

  I was unhurt. Too bad. A minor, profusely bleeding head-wound would have come in handy later, for sympathy. I did suffer a bump on the forehead, coming to to a radio traffic report after five or six seconds unconscious. I turned off the ignition, climbed out of the car and out of the mud bog. Perhaps due to the head bump, the world possessed the vibrancy of an hallucination, brain chemicals mixing to weird effect. Cars I couldn’t see roared by on the expressway high up the embankment. Headlights were searchbeams above me. The rain was a special wonder. Its sound was multilayered, the whisper of a single plummeting raindrop overdubbed a million times, creating a lushness within which I could hear any sound I wanted, from bloodhounds baying on my trail to a welcoming heavenly choir. Mostly I heard a voice urging, “Flee, fool! Make a new start!” But I didn’t flee, precisely because I didn’t want a new start. I was twenty-four, far too set in my ways to change. Had I run away then, clambered up the embankment and hitched a ride west toward the fallen sun, all that I’d accomplished in the past three years, everyt
hing good and everything bad, would have been for naught.

  I saw the lights of a bar under the expressway underpass. There I phoned for a taxi. I was soaked with rain and drank two martinis to still my shivering. As I sat at the bar I wondered what Carrie was doing at this moment, what Susan was doing. Last night I’d felt like an immortal angel, knowing each woman’s certain future; tonight I felt like an angel’s opposite. I drank another martini. When the taxi arrived I was mildly drunk, yes—but my actions the rest of the night would have been the same regardless. If anything, the booze resigned me to the virtue of humility.

  Yesterday’s Lamaze tour had shown me where the maternity ward was in the hospital. The elevator was mirror-lined and gave me the feeling of being caged with a wild twin brother. It was in that mirrored box that I first glimpsed the bald spot on the back of my head, a quarter-sized defoliation in a jungle of thick auburn; it was a bad night all around. I exited the elevator with much of the fight drained out of me. My bald head throbbed. Fluorescent lights beat down malevolently. There must have been people around—patients, doctors, orderlies—but in my memory the ward is deserted except for Lyle, Neil’s secretary, who was seated by the nurses’ station alertly awaiting me.

  He stood, hands loose at his sides as if ready to draw six-guns. His grim look brought me up short. “Susan’s dead?”

  “She’s fine, Philip. Go home.” I tried to step by him. He cut off my path. “You had your chance. You didn’t come through.”

  “I had a situation.”

  “You’ve been drinking. Susan told me it’s a problem.”

  “The fuck! I don’t have to talk to you.” Again I sidestepped him. Again he cut me off.

  “If we fight, security will throw us both out. Is that how you want it?”

  “I want you out of my face. I’m here to see my kid.” I heard my own words. “How is my kid? What is my kid?”

  “Susan said to say nothing. But he’s a beautiful baby boy.”

  “Healthy?”

  “But undersize. He’s a month premature.”

  “Tell me about it. Nervy bastard.”

  “Will you leave now? For Susan’s sake? She really doesn’t want to see you.”

  “How is she doing?”

  “Exhausted. Healthy. Happy.”

  I accepted this, to my own amazement. It was beyond me. This place, this buzzing hive with its babies and mommies and daddies, its proto-families nestled in semiprivate rooms, this place wasn’t my place. I felt able to turn and walk away; hence the only honest course was to do exactly that. I said to Lyle, “One favor. Don’t tell Susan I was drunk. Tell her I was …” I laughed. “Tell her it was business.”

  “I’m sure she’ll believe it.”

  “I should thank you for driving Susan over.”

  “I just got here. Gershom brought Susan. He was with her through the delivery.”

  “What!” It’s true—I yelled. “Not Gershom, no way!” The ward that had seemed deserted all at once seemed overrun. I saw women in bathrobes. I heard babies crying. Nurses and orderlies chased me like asylum guards as I dashed down the corridor, trying as I ran to read nameplates on the doors to find out which room was Susan’s—and Gershom’s! “No! No! No!” The martinis had spoken. Lyle tackled me from behind.

  I got to my feet with help. The door in front of me opened to reveal Susan in a pink robe and slippers. Her face was swollen and pale. “Where is it?” I demanded. “Where’s my son?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “I wanna see him.” Did I? I was torn. I was saying the words a spurned father ought to say, in hopes the words would get a reaction, in me.

  “If you don’t see him now, it will be easier for you never to see him. And I want you never to see him.”

  “Hey, I fucked up.”

  She shook her head wearily. “You didn’t fuck up. I fucked up. I lost sight of what mattered. But today made it okay. Today made it perfect.” She began to cry. “Please let it stay perfect, Philip. It’s something you can give.”

  About ten people were listening in. A nurse said, “You should be in bed, Mrs. Graulig. Your stitches—”

  “Mrs. Graulig?” I said. “Is that what’s happened here? You and him—”

  “We’ve fallen in love. That’s what’s happened.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Because of the baby. With the baby. With each other.” She covered her eyes wearily. “And sure, because of you.” The nurse took her arm. Susan pleaded, “Please try and understand. It was a magical day.”

  “I understand perfectly. But I wonder if I’d been with you, would you have fallen in love with me?”

  “You weren’t here. Gershom was.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Home, getting stuff.” Her voice raised. “Don’t you dare try anything.”

  “He won’t,” Lyle said.

  “Like hell,” I said. “Gershom? Fuck him. You? Fuck you. But I will be part of my son’s life! Starting tomorrow, when I’ll be here at visiting hours like the proud daddy that I am.”

  “Please don’t.” The nurse pulled Susan into the room. “I’m begging you, Philip. Let us live!” The closed door muffled her cries. The anguished emotions I’d evoked in her saddened me. I was barely flattered at all.

  Down the corridor, Lyle got in the elevator with me. I asked him why he was following me. “To make sure you leave.”

  “Since when are you Susan’s bodyguard?”

  “I’m anything for the people I love.”

  “Don’t put yourself out for my benefit.”

  He offered to drive me home. I was suspicious—something true about gays is that they think everyone else is gay. I said I’d appreciate the favor so long as he pulled no funny stuff. “Trust me, you’re safe,” he said. “I prefer a good build.”

  “Jeez, kick me when I’m down, how about?”

  From his laugh, he felt like a friend for a second.

  Pulling up outside Chinaland, he asked me what my intentions were regarding the baby. I told him I would fight for custody; but in my mind I was thinking, What baby? In the next interlude I thought Lyle’s sexual pass might come. It didn’t, of course. Good thing. In my state of mental disrepair, there’s no telling what I’d have done, and one thing I didn’t need that night was another odd biographical tidbit.

  Upstairs, I called Carrie’s apartment. I was dead calm as I dialed, prepared for her outrage, her entirely justified invective against me. I wasn’t prepared for no answer. The phone rang and rang. My imagination went wild, projecting her death by abortion malfunction, by suicide, projecting me standing at her graveside with the weight of the world on my shoulders. Then I realized where Carrie was. Peace came over me, peace in knowing I was part of a plan that now must run its course. The plan was my own. Its course was down. It had a kind of beauty.

  “Yes?” Timmy Donley said when I dialed his number.

  “How is she?”

  Silence. I thought he might hang up. He launched a speech he doubtless had been rehearsing all night: “What you did to Carrie was the most despicable, sadistic thing I’ve ever seen. Forget she’s my wife. Forget you got her pregnant. Forget you made her get an abortion—but to abandon her in that situation? To steal her car? Philip, it scares me to think what makes you tick.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “They gave her Valium after the procedure. She was whacked out and traumatized—and utterly alone.”

  “I had a situation.”

  “Can you imagine her fear? Her humiliation?”

  “As long as she’s okay now.”

  “She’ll live. That’s about all I know.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “She’s sleeping. Not that it matters.”

  I nodded as if he could see me. “I’ll make good on her car. I wrecked it.”

  “I’m going to wreck you.”

  “I figured you might try.”

  “I can do it. I know all about your scam with Peter R
ice.”

  “You profited also. You’ll be indicting yourself.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fired. So what? I’ve got evidence on both of you—phone records, notes, receipts. I’m not as stupid as you thought.”

  “How could you have been?”

  “My old school chum,” getting wistful now, “nailing my wife for years.”

  “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” But Timmy wasn’t into situational ethics:

  “You shithead! You scum!”

  I hung up. I’d heard it all before.

  Six aspirin made a sour lump in my gut as I tossed in bed. My thoughts flitted over the day’s twin imponderables of two babies I’d never seen. I chose to perch on a lesser regret and there settled down to sleep. I regretted that I hadn’t apologized to Carrie or Susan. I regretted it—and then again I didn’t, for otherwise it was back to those babies. Apologies could wait. The babies were a done deal.

  19

  The next morning I was awakened by knocks on my door: the police. They informed me that a complaint of violent harassment had been lodged against me by Mr. and Mrs. Gershom Graulig of—

  “I know where they live! Where she lives. She has my baby. Our baby. Because it was my sperm, officer. It was not Gershom’s sperm!”

  They told me to stay away or I’d be arrested. They seemed to want to arrest me anyway. I probably should have put clothes on.

  The phone rang. It was my attorney, Jeffrey Masters. He said some cops would soon serve me with a complaint of harassment, but that I shouldn’t take it personally. “It’s a formality, Philip. Susan and Gershom have every confidence that you won’t threaten them again.”

  “I’ll kill them, Jeffrey. Then I’ll kill you.”

  He laughed. “Always a joke, Phil—I love that. But I should tell you I’m recording this conversation.” He said that Susan and Gershom intended to adopt the new baby.

  “They’re kidnappers! I’m the father, I have rights.”

  “You have abusive tendencies. And I understand there’s a drinking problem.”

  “What!”

  “Gershom has testified to an episode, and a Jill MacDougal. Susan tells me you drank heavily at your luncheon dates together. And I gather last night was quite a show.”