SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

“Or die rather, like Paul.”

  “Oh? Was it really so bad, what we had? I never heard you complain.”

  “How could I? You worked together, you and your mother. To trap me, to make me helpless against you.”

  “Did we? You poor little man.”

  “All that girlish flirtation.”

  “Do you think I was kidding?”

  “Or the night I undressed you. Did you call Angela from the bedroom after that? Did you tell her to phone me, so I’d come to you a second time?”

  “Stop. You’re losing it, Jack. What’s wrong with you? With your mind?”

  “You, Melissa.”

  She half-smiled, holding my eyes. “Really?” Her voice lowered. “Me now, love, or me back then?”

  “You always.”

  Slowly, her face took on a distant cast. “It was all so, so long ago, darling. When I was just little. It seems like a dream, doesn’t it? Let’s not blame each other for dreaming.”

  “Your mother says there’s a way I can know for sure.”

  Melissa paused, regarding me evenly.

  “There’s a way to know everything, Jack. If you want to search for it hard enough.” She reached out and took my right hand, holding it warmly. “But do you?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Missy placed my hand on the swell of her belly. She held it down, pressing lightly, until I detected a faint stirring beneath my palm, deep inside her.

  “Can you feel it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say you can feel it, Jack.”

  “I can feel it.”

  “You can feel my babies?”

  My glance betrayed my surprise.

  “Twins, Jack, a boy and a girl. If they don’t kill each other inside me first. I feel so nauseous, like a hungover drunk every morning.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Should I lie for you—the way I did in the old days?”

  “No.”

  “Say you can feel them, then.”

  “I can, yes. I do.”

  “Now tell me. Exactly how much do you want to know?”

  Melissa put her other hand on top of the first, pressing my palm more firmly to her swollen womb.

  “How much truth can you live with?”

  I peered at her desperately, still my beautiful Missy.

  “How much, Jack?”

  I had no answer, then or now.

  Epilogue

  The new child, I suppose, is what we have to compensate us for failures and losses, for the early deaths of Mandy and Philip, for the slow demise of my Nathalie. Always and only the coming on and coming on and coming on of new life. Not as a corrective—since nothing in the past can be redeemed, least of all the unchanging dead—but as a fresh start, a perpetual beginning. Melissa is not living out the balance of her parents’ lives; she is living her own. So, too, will her daughter. That is the terrible beauty of it.

  One evening when Hogan and I were drinking at Pravda, I asked him about the security tape. He turned his head away and shrugged.

  “Forget it,” he said. “I made that up to see what Angela would say. She said plenty.”

  “And you wouldn’t be saying that now just to protect me—the way you protected Melissa back then?”

  “Come on, Jack. Do I seem like that kind of guy?”

  Even now, those questions—Missy’s, Hogan’s—still come to me sometimes at night, when I hear the baby’s cry below me, as piercing as a car alarm.

  Don tells me we could soundproof the intervening floor and make the money back on tax deductions and an improved rental rate, once I decide to stop underwriting the increasingly affluent, ungrateful young family downstairs.

  Not so large a family as expected, however. Melissa returned from the hospital with only one child. The male twin, she told me, vanished in the womb.

  I didn’t quite understand.

  “He died and was absorbed,” she said. “It’s fairly common.” Reclining on the cushions of my couch, Missy was having her first cup of chamomile at home after a painful delivery. “The pediatrician said not to feel bad at all. It just happens.”

  “Absorbed by what?” I asked

  Missy sipped her tea. “By his sister, naturally.”

  No doubt Don is right. I might be happier without the sounds from below. But it is not a matter of reason. Melissa’s daughter has spoken, long before words have been granted her—a message less of fear or discomfort than of sharp impatience. Or accusation. This child, this Jacqueline, is like ourselves reborn, fierce in her innocence, demanding the world at any price. Each night, her shrill voice rouses me from my imperfect sleep, and I lie patiently while the room composes itself around me in the dark.

  So be it. Someday, soon perhaps, I will go down and retrieve the buried tape. Someday, if it exists, I will sit in my chair near the window and watch the grainy footage. And someday I will live alone, with only strangers in my building, steeped in full and awful certitude.

  But for now, in these last nights together, I choose to lie awake and listen, attuned to the slightest change in the infant’s wail down below, as Melissa, ever the attentive mother, rises and shuffles across the floorboards to her antique crib, my costly gift. With those few steps, I know, she delivers soothing words—mixed with the comfort of her ample breasts, her tepid milk—to the little monster howling for our SoHo sins.