Contrary Motion

by Andy Mozina

  I hold Audrey. She cares and feels, and this shouldn’t be a bad thing. She fights with her sobs, until she lets out a tremendous hiccup.

  “Oh, now, hey, that was some hiccup!” I say.

  She hiccups again.

  —

  At Maggie Moo’s, an ice cream “shoppe” in an upscale Wilmette strip mall, Audrey is crying because the hiccupping won’t stop.

  “Peppermint ice cream is just the cure for hiccups,” I say.

  Ten minutes later, most of the cone and a tree’s worth of napkins go through the slimed swinging door of the trash receptacle. Audrey’s lack of appetite may be the most disturbing symptom yet. And the hiccups persist. “It hurts!” she complains, putting her hand on her chest. Her eyes have a wild, haunted look. Now that it’s crunch time, her unicorn proves useless. In fact, when I suggest that she imagine her unicorn has the hiccups, she shrieks, “That’s not funny, Daddy!”

  The unicorn is a poor substitute for what she really wants—a dog. But Daddy is nervous around dogs, and fragile harps and pets don’t mix, so Audrey has her unicorn.

  It’s only two-thirty, and I’m not supposed to bring her back to Milena’s house until four, but Audrey has been crying and hiccupping for almost an hour now, fifty minutes longer than any bout of hiccups I’ve ever witnessed. I’ve suggested holding her breath, the only cure I know, but this hasn’t worked. The dangerously thin girl behind the counter suggests drinking a glass of water from the wrong side of the rim, and Audrey tries this to no avail.

  “I can’t make it—stop!” Audrey cries miserably, hiccupping, flaying my last nerve and breaking my heart all at once.

  I take her outside Maggie Moo’s, into the open world, the only space commensurate with her pain. “Look at those clouds,” I say. She leans back, looks straight up into the sky—and sneezes! Surely this has reset her upper respiratory tract.

  She blinks a few times, smiles, and hiccups.

  “Let’s go see Mama,” I say.

  On the way, the hiccups occur roughly every five seconds. We pull up in front of Milena’s house an hour early. Milena answers the door in yoga pants, bare feet, and a T-shirt with super-short sleeves and an inch-of-midriff-revealing hem.

  “What’s going on?” she says, tucking some hair behind her ear.

  “Mama!” Audrey shouts, and she runs into Milena’s arms, dropping her unicorn in the doorway. Milena crouches to give her a hug and looks at me over Audrey’s shoulder.

  “We just did a wedding. She’s got the hiccups,” I say, picking up the unicorn. “Really bad.”

  “The hiccups?”

  “Like for the past hour and a half,” I say.

  “I can’t stop them,” Audrey whines.

  “We’ve tried everything,” I say. “Or, actually, we’ve tried a few things.”

  “Come on in,” Milena says, her eyes wary. She sits on the couch with Audrey on her lap. The couch is fine caramel leather, no doubt Scandinavian, and probably cost close to what I’ll pay T.R. this year in rent. “My tummy really hurts,” Audrey says, putting her hand near her diaphragm. She hiccups yet again. Now, fully aware that her mother is no magic cure, she lapses into nerve-shredding wails of pain and despair. Milena gets a paper lunch bag, stands over Audrey, and says, “Breathe into this bag.” She brings it toward Audrey’s mouth, then abruptly crumples it. “I can’t do this,” Milena says, turning to me. “What if she passes out?”

  “I don’t want to pass out,” Audrey says, total terror in her eyes.

  “Oh, sweetie,” I say.

  “Maybe I should take her to the ER?” Milena says more quietly.

  The singular pronoun stings. I wonder where Steve is.

  “Maybe,” I say, though I don’t want her to do this. I want us all to stay in this living room together for as long as possible. “But what do you think they’d do?”

  “Give her a shot of something?” Milena says.

  “I don’t want a shot!” Audrey yells.

  Milena closes her eyes and puts her slim fingers to her temples.

  “You know, I could play harp for her,” I say, because it occurs to me that maybe I could entrain Audrey’s hiccups to a safe stop or at least use the attempt to show I’m a helpful egg whose presence might be suffered a bit longer. I give Milena a smooth explanation of why entrainment might work, which makes her stand up and pace. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll take her,” I say.

  “I don’t know, Matt,” Milena says. She looks away with her arms down straight and her palms parallel to the floor. It’s her trying-to-keep-catastrophe-at-bay pose. Maybe she’s thinking about Steve.

  Audrey hiccups as violently as ever. “Ow!” she whimpers.

  The distant echoing roar of a plane coming in for a landing at O’Hare grows in the room. It sounds like someone rolling a laundry cart on the roof.

  “It’ll relax her,” I say. “It can change her breathing. It’s magic.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Milena says in a low voice, one hand to her brow.

  I go out to the Volvo and get my axe. Despite Audrey’s agony, I catch myself wishing she’ll still be hiccupping when I get back, so I can be a hero. I’m too impatient to put the harp on the dolly, so, glad my 85P is slightly lighter, I just pick the sucker up, one hand gripping the column, one hand hooked in a sound hole, and walk up two sets of stairs and through the door Milena is holding open.

  I put the harp down and have a terrific headrush that nearly makes me pass out. My heart is racing. Taking stairs too fast exacerbates my mitral valve leak. I smile, a little dazed, and pause to catch my breath.

  Then the old family unit assembles in Milena’s new living room: Audrey lies supine on the fancy-ass couch, Milena sits next to her, and I’m across the room, standing at the harp, facing them.

  I choose the first ten notes from the third movement of Saint-Saëns’s Fantaisie, a duo in which a supporting harp eventually draws even with a pensive and lyrical violin. These notes at the beginning of the third are low and stealthy in the bass, and I play them over and over, trying to land the tenth on Audrey’s hiccup, which is still coming about every five seconds. After a few tries, I am timing it perfectly, and when Audrey notices, she smiles briefly and looks up at her mama, who smiles, too. Audrey and I are in sync for about two minutes, and then very gradually I begin to slow down.

  By the end of the next minute, I’m playing ten notes in six beats, and Audrey’s hiccup still lands on the fifth note. I bust a sweat, because keeping in sync with her feels as precarious as balancing a bottle of beer on my nose. But my training kicks in, and I make myself into a metronome running down: ten notes in seven beats, ten notes in ten beats, ten notes in fifteen beats. Ten notes in thirty beats. One hiccup every five notes—and Audrey’s eyes close.

  And then comes a tenth note with no accompanying hiccup, but instead an all-but-silent snore. Milena puts her hand on Audrey’s forehead, smooths her hair to the side. Personally, I wouldn’t touch Audrey when she is this shallow in the ocean of sleep, and if we were still married, I probably would have said something sharp about that. No wonder Milena kicked me out.

  Milena looks at me with no small amount of gratitude in her eyes. She rises carefully from the couch and motions for me to follow her around the wall and into the kitchen. Near the sink, she turns and faces me.

  “What a head case, that kid,” I say, louder than I want to.

  Milena puts a finger to her lips, then she puts her hand on my neck to pull my ear toward her and whispers, “Thank you.”

  I pull away and look into her smiling face. Her misaligned eyes peer into mine.

  “Do you want some water?” she asks, keeping her voice down. She grabs two pint-sized blue glasses from the cupboard.

  “Dang, Mil,” I say involuntarily. Between the touch on my neck and her vulnerable eyes and the view of her stretching to retrieve the glasses, she’s acting on me in a powerful way.

  “Dang what?” she says, working the faucet. I wish I could see h
er face.

  I don’t answer because I sense she knows.

  She turns, with her eyes down, and hands me a glass.

  I lift it. “Here’s to getting along well enough to do right by the kid.”

  She raises her eyes to me. “Yeah,” she says, smiling shyly.

  We clink and have a sip.

  “How are things?” I say.

  “Things are all right,” she says evenly.

  We get very interested in drinking our water.

  “Better go,” I say. I put my glass on the counter and she does, too. I raise my hand toward her in an ambiguous wave, half pointing at her, half suggesting I want to bring her close for a pat on the back or a hug.

  “Good seeing you,” she says. “You’re not as bad as they say.”

  She makes frank eye contact and steps in my general direction, though maybe just to lead me to the door.

  I move toward her, and our bodies decide on a quick hug good-bye, because after the Audrey trauma we can’t part as distantly as we usually do. As we separate, my hand touches her hand and she holds on to my fingers. She looks up at me. I smile at her but fear I’m staring like a robot. The side of her mouth opens, possibly just from nerves, possibly on the way to an encouraging smile.

  I lean down and she rises up, lifting her lips, and we kiss.

  Soon we’re making out standing up in her kitchen like a pair of teenagers. Then she turns and, holding my hand, leads me downstairs into the family room, where there’s a knockabout couch, a TV, an elliptical machine pointed at the TV, and an expanse of carpet populated with Audrey’s toys. A dark beer bottle stands on an empty plate on the floor near the couch.

  Over the years, she taught me what she likes, and I kiss her and undress her and touch her in those ways now. This is how she breathes and puts her head to the side and shows her lower teeth. She stills wears the same sly floral perfume that mixes with her Caress soap. She undoes my belt and corkscrews her hand into my underwear. Her first touch on me is almost scalding, creating a crazed ticklishness I have to get past, but in no time I do. When I touch her, she’s as turned on as I’ve ever felt her. She slips back onto the couch and pulls me on top of her.

  My pants are still around my ankles, but I’m inside her, and it’s as if I never met Cynthia and my father never died and we’re twenty again and Audrey isn’t born and everything is possible. The familiarity of her body is so profound that I seem to get my own body back. Pleasure rushes up with surprising force, like being pushed from behind off a high cliff.

  I pull out at the last second and finish myself. And maybe it’s this gesture that turns everything from loving passion to something else, because when I’m done it’s like waking up from a dream.

  Through sliding glass doors that lead to the patio, I see a vehicle, a red Ford Escape, slow in the alley, and then I see the garage door rising.

  “Shit!” Milena says. She bounds off the couch and pulls her underwear and yoga pants over one ankle. She hops three times before she can get them over the other ankle and pull them up.

  My pants never got past my shoes, so I quickly follow suit. The faster I try to button my shirt, the clumsier my fingers behave.

  “Shit, Matt, shit!” she says, making for the stairs blind with her top over her head.

  I follow, doing my belt.

  “Hey, girl!” Milena says in a totally new and loud voice, suddenly stopping at the top of the stairs. “Feeling better?”

  My whole body seizes on the stairs at the glimpse of Audrey I get from around Milena’s hip. It’s like seeing a ghost. I hunker on the steps and tuck in my shirt, though I’m not finished buttoning.

  Milena steps into the kitchen and crouches down to give Audrey a hug. I continue up the stairs and onto the landing, crowding them a bit, trying to get as much out of Steve’s view as I can. Audrey stares at me over Milena’s shoulder, as if she’s not sure who I am. I try to imagine Audrey’s angle of vision from the top of the stairs, or what it would have been had she come down a few steps.

  “How about a glass of water, sweetie?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Milena says, breaking the embrace, moving toward the cupboard. Audrey keeps staring at me, but her eyes move from my face to my chest.

  The door on the lower level opens.

  Milena runs the faucet with a glass in her hand. “Go sit,” she says.

  I button my last two buttons on the way to the living room, glad Audrey is following me.

  “Hey, Steve, Matt’s here,” Milena calls out. Her voice is not natural.

  I sit in a chair in the living room and Audrey sits on the couch and flicks on the Cartoon Network to an episode of The Powerpuff Girls.

  I can’t hear what’s going on on the lower level. There’s probably a smell down there. Steve could be brooding over discoveries, making inferences, because he doesn’t come upstairs right away.

  “How does it feel?” I ask Audrey. “No more hiccups, hey?”

  “Good,” she says, staring at the TV.

  Milena hurries into the living room carrying two glasses of water. Her face is still flushed from sex. She gives me a glass and puts one on a coaster on the coffee table near Audrey’s knee. Then she sits on the edge of an armchair. Steve finally comes upstairs, carrying a box, and Milena rises to greet him near the passageway to the kitchen.

  Steve is tall and handsome in jeans and a nice dress shirt. He actually looks a lot like Brian Williams, the news anchor, with a forehead the size of a billboard, keen blue-gray eyes, and large feet. It’s very hard not to like him, just looking at him—his big loafers and the way his legs angle give him a big-lug/gentle-doofus stance—though in his eyes you can see the streak of canny coldness that I imagine it takes to make big bucks as a securities analyst. The box in his arms has a picture of a bread machine on it.

  “Hey, it’s the breadwinner,” Milena says, slyly getting in a dig on me that Steve might appreciate, and she kisses him on the cheek.

  “Hi, babe,” he says, with half an eye on me over her shoulder. Then he disappears into the kitchen with the bread machine.

  “We had a medical emergency with Audrey,” Milena says. She’s twisting her hands together at her waist. “It’s all right now, though.” She reaches for Steve’s hand as he comes out of the kitchen and leads him into the living room, until he pulls his hand away. I stand and put down my water glass.

  “Sorry I brought Audrey back early,” I say to Steve. “She had a bad case of the hiccups and wanted her mommy.” This sounds unbelievably idiotic, and I’m so keyed up I almost burst into laughter.

  Steve looks to Audrey, who is in full slouch, apparently lost in her TV show. I can sense the wheels turning in her head; every instant she is quiet is a good instant. Steve seems about to say something to her.

  “What’s with the harp?” he asks instead, hands on his hips.

  “Believe it or not,” I say, “we used it to get rid of the hiccups.”

  Steve makes a face. He doesn’t trade in hiccups bullshit.

  “Audrey had hiccups for two hours,” Milena says. “She was freaking out. We were ready to go to the emergency room.”

  “The hiccups, Audrey cat?” Steve asks her in his fun, aspiring-stepdad voice.

  Audrey nods, eyes on her show. The Powerpuff Girls are kicking ass again.

  “Matt played music to calm her down and the hiccups stopped,” Milena explains.

  “Never heard of that,” Steve says to Milena.

  “It was scary,” Milena says, looking warmly into Steve’s eyes, as if it’s Steve who saved everything.

  “I should take off,” I say.

  Steve looks at Audrey, who is not reacting with glee or gestures or talking to the TV as she often does when watching her shows.

  I turn to Steve. “I guess I’ll just take this with me, eh?” I say, referring to the harp.

  “What?” he asks, his eyes sharpening just enough to let me know he’s capable of punching me, if it ever comes to that.


  I put on the cover and pick up the harp. At first no one rises to get the door for me. Then Steve moves to do it.

  “Watch your step,” he says as I carry the instrument over the threshold.

  13

  HOUR BY HOUR, I swing between elated, guilty, hopeful, and unsure. Then there’s poor Audrey. I don’t know what she saw.

  Meanwhile, Cynthia’s Denver trip has drawn nigh, and after apparently working crazy hours to get things in order before she flies out tomorrow morning, she suggests a Sunday afternoon Rollerblading excursion.

  Though I haven’t used them in years, I happen to have a pair of stiff blue Rollerblades from some desperate phase in my marriage, when Milena and I were going to “get out more,” a euphemism for escaping the b.o. and anxiety that clouded our apartment after I practiced every day. This is definitely a nineties dating activity, and maybe marks Cynthia and me as aging, work-obsessed dorks, which only makes me more sympathetic to her for having the idea.

  We’re lucky to snag a free parking spot by the Diversey Marina. Sitting in our seats with the car doors flared open, we put on our skates. The giddy intimacy that often overtakes bowling parties, I think, has a lot to do with that brief interlude of stockinged feet as shoes are changed before hitting the lanes, and I get a fizzy version of that.

  Almost forgetting Milena, I take Cynthia’s hand as we set out on a wide path of fine-packed white gravel. I try to stride forward, clack against Cynthia’s skate, she cries out, I fall on my ass.

  “I forgot to tell you that I fall constantly,” I say as a jogger swerves to avoid me. “I rarely get more than fifty yards from the car before it’s time to turn back.” When Cynthia laughs, I add, “Sorry about banging your skate.”

  “Make sure you fall forward,” she says, possibly misunderstanding the essence of being uncoordinated. “It’s safer.” She manages to stay stable as she reaches a hand and helps me up. “There you go,” she says.

  We follow the path past beds of yellow daffodils, take the Fullerton Parkway underpass beneath Lake Shore Drive, and soon we’re cruising down the busy lakefront trail. As we roll, I wonder why Cynthia is apparently interested in making this relationship work. Why does she like me? Is my general lameness appealing in a nonthreatening sort of way? Does she hope, as I do, that we can get back to our happier early days? Or is she still afraid to see herself as the type of woman who would dump an impotent guy with a freshly dead dad?