Baby's First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit

by Robert Devereaux

  He turned the deadbolt and opened the door. Marcie stood there, one arm behind her back. Striking redhead, her love-scent clinging to his mustache from their lunch hour together, Marcie gliding the rubber Metro back here from the symphony office, flumpfing down naked, raw, and ready on her bed, crying for Pierre as Travis roused her, but he didn’t mind, not with the vulnerable taste of her sex filling his mouth and the way her coming brought his name to her lips as Marcie sheathed him, stabbing at his eyes with that voracious hunger of hers.

  “Hi, Marcie.” How obscenely normal he sounded, how hollow. Past the mailboxes, Madame Robichaux was coming through the vestibule door, juggling bulgy grocery bags.

  “Have you told her yet?” High-strung, a taut steel wire toe-gripped, every muscle working against tilt.

  “Marcie, why don’t you—?”

  “Told me what?” Laura had the coats folded over her arms like wheat sheaves. He barely glanced at her, but it was enough to see recognition glimmer and flit, denial her first impulse.

  Again to Marcie. Love was so complicated. He wanted both these amazing ladies, but if he were forced to choose, he preferred, truth to tell, Marcie’s passion, her quirky big-boned ways, the refreshing raft of musical friends she brought with her, a far cry from Laura’s Bell Canada dullards. But there was the baby to consider; not his idea, true, but a daughter was a daughter, no matter how you sliced it, and he—

  Marcie shot daggers at him, then turned to Laura, and he saw Madame Robichaux’s eyes widen at what Marcie’s hand gripped behind her back, even as it was coming around, the movie glint surely imagined, but it flashed by so fast and sank into Laura’s chest, right above her armload of coats, faltering blood-parabola darkening the fur as she fell and Marcie shouting, “He’s mine!”, turning then to chase down a hapless neighbor frozen in place but then bolting, her two bags of food absurdly clutched to her and slowing her down so that the knife hilting into her back sprang her arms up and open and celery stalks and egg cartons flew like birds alarmed out of the bag-rustle of her flushed life.

  In her apartment on Rue Peel, between l’Avenue des Pins and Docteur-Penfield, Aysha sat grieving by her dead son Vish. Three years old, looking hurt and bewildered in his high delirium, Vish had had his father’s dark eyes, if none of his realized serenity. Her fault, that. Her year in the ashram, becoming Rajib’s preferred wife in his last months here, had done nothing to conquer the unquenchable ego-longings in her. They still plagued her, despite her ongoing efforts to purify herself, and they’d given Vish, who deserved better coming from such seed, not the quiet mirror that suited him, but a restless, breeze-perturbed, disease-inducing, Western jitteriness. High fever, food and drink refused, all her natural remedies for naught— and all she could do was watch Vish dwindle and die, her tears for him a weakness she despised, even as she cried them.

  The shutters accordioned over his window rattled as a gust of wind shook the glass. The oil lamp’s flame danced in its glass chimney, then settled. It reassured her, as it always did when she meditated on it—not the pasteboard reassurance of the material world, but a true soothe from her inner depths.

  Surely, it said, Vish’s dying, arriving as it did on the day of Rajib’s return, was an irrefutable unmistakable sign. And that was particularly so given the report, six months past, of his death and burial in India, and now the rumors that he had returned, like Christ long ago, from the grave. If that were true, these rumors of resurrection, it might well be that Rajib would pass his hand over the boy, his unknown son, and flood the breath back into his airless lungs. It might well be that Vish would once again unlid his eyes and, in the calm depth of his father’s love, find his way swiftly to nirvana.

  Aysha raised the old watch she’d put away years ago, held it close to the light, saw that soon they would need to be on their way.

  He turned the deadbolt and opened the door. Marcie stood there, one arm behind her back.

  “Well, look who’s here,” he said.

  “Hello, you two,” she said, bouncing in behind a huge grin and whipping out a wrapped gift. “A little something for my two favorite people in the world.” Juggling a pair of grocery bags, Madame Robichaux finagled her way through the vestibule door.

  Laura came up with the coats. “Jeez, you didn’t have to do that.” Her eyes bubbled and brimmed. Lovely Laura, the Canada Dry of his life. “Open it, Travis,” she said.

  “Okay, okay. Hardly guess what it is.” Marcie gave his shoulder a playful punch as he unribboned the telltale rectangular shape and husked the wrapping paper off.

  “My boss’s latest.” Maestro Dutoit’s face, a skilled musician and an engaging personality from the brief hello they’d shared with him at the opening night reception that fall.

  “Tchaikovsky’s Sixth,” Laura read aloud.

  Marcie nodded. “Good crying music,” she said.

  A raw twist to her tossed-off words gave his heart a twinge.

  “Come here, Marcie love,” he said, gathering his upstairs neighbor’s big-boned body to him. Laura let fall the coats in a floomph to the floor and joined in a three-way hug. “You’re so sweet and good and giving, the world owes you a good long cry-free zone, and if you can’t find that upstairs, you just come down here any time. It’ll be waiting right here.”

  Marcie’s eyes were moist. “I love you both so much,” she said, planting a huge soft kiss on his cheek and then dipping down to cover half of Laura’s petite face with her lips. What a turn-on these two women were. If he weren’t blessed with dear Laura, he would surely, he thought, make a play for Marcie. Passionate thing. He fancied she’d be the sort to take the initiative more frequently than Laura did, surprising him with silky nothings, stripping for his delectation to sultry music, cherrying those luscious lips about his arousal and deepening downward.

  Laura broke the embrace first, a fluster in her ways.

  Madame Robichaux went past on the way to her apartment, an odd look on her rubbery face. “Bonjour, Henriette,” Laura sang out and after a pause, the woman’s answering “‘jour,” clipped and suspicious, came floating back.

  Travis placed the jewelbox on a small drop-down table near the door and rustled up the coats from the floor. He held Laura’s for her, then shouldered his own on, as Laura jabbered inanely about where things were, how often Marcie was to look in on Jenny, how late they thought they’d be, where (for God’s sakes yet again) the diapers and the pins and the formula and the bottles were. For some reason, he could not catch her eyes as she gabbled. Overprotective, hyper, even paranoid—that’s the way Laura had been about Jenny from the first, dressing her too warmly, leaving the thermostat on way too high, fussing interminably over her face and clothes when she held her. But something beyond nervousness was working at Laura now.

  And when he tested his puzzlement on Marcie, the flat plane of her gaze told him she knew what it was, that they were both holding back from him, and that Laura was ready to spill something that made Marcie at least mildly uncomfortable.

  “…oh, and in case of emergency, I’ve put a signed medical form on the kitchen table. You know where to find us, and… oh shit, Marcie, I know it’s not a good time but it never seems to be a good time, please can’t we tell him now, it’s—”

  “Tomorrow. Now you two go and have a good time—”

  “Tell me what?” The air felt odd. Were they hiding a great gift, a bludgeon, what?

  “Take a hike, ya lousy swami-lovers,” said Marcie in her best tough-guy voice, hustling them toward the door, “or the baby buys it.” God she smelled great, her sweet strong face set off by her chop-cut red hair, new kind of tai-kwon-do affectation, but it looked great on her. And he loved being strong-armed by her; what a wrestler she’d be bare-naked, the full spread of her huge firm breasts a treat in teased evasion, her flexed oiled thighs coming up and about to encuntify his mouth, to force him to feast as she devoured him below, parting her labia nose-deep around his nasal wedge and—

  “Marcie an
d I are lovers.”

  With barely a hitch, Marcie freed him, veering Laura off to the right. “Now you’ve done it,” she said.

  His mind went umpteen ways, putting together dropped hints, unanswered phones, misinterpreted looks. Confusion passed. Elation lit and flared. “Oh, but that’s—!”

  “No!” Laura’s voice exploded through her sobs. “You don’t… he doesn’t…” She grabbed breath, riding its blast.

  “You’re out of it… it’s just Marcie and me… and the baby, I’m taking her with me.”

  Marcie seemed put off by Laura’s display, even as she put a protective, supportive arm about her. In the baby’s room, Jenny cried sharply as if a safety pin had opened to stab her out of sleep.

  “Take a hike, ya lousy swami-lovers,” said Marcie in her best George Raft, “or the baby buys it.”

  Laura blurted out, “Marcie’s pregnant.”

  Marcie veered Laura off, then with overblown disgust and genuine dismay: “Jeez, you had to tell him.”

  “Well I think it’s great,” his wife protested, “and I’m sorry—I won’t tell anyone else!—but I just couldn’t keep it from Travis one second longer.”

  “Marcie, that’s incredible,” he said, going after her to catch her in a hug. He was amazed at his thoughts. He wished the child were his, though his lovely neighbor had, God damn her eyes, rebuffed his one early advance and had never invited a return attempt; he wondered which ungodly creep it was, or whether—and he imagined that this would be worse for her—

  it had been Pierre, in one of his final dribble-shots into her; he saw instantly their households fusing, him as her Lamaze coach, loving her child, as she and Laura did likewise, and welcoming her inevitably into their marriage bed.

  Then, two feet shy of an embrace, the baby screamed. It was not a troubled whine ready to lapse as soon as it began, nor was it even a wide-awake startle and wail that required backpats and pacings-about and soothings before she could be replaced in her bassinet. No, these sounds meant sudden pain or upset, a slipped pin rolled over on, or something worse.

  Laura reached the door first but he was close behind and felt the blast of frigid air over the incessant whine of the space heater. He saw the window thrown wide and a lingering glove gripping the casing and then gone, flings of slush still flying through the air from a disappearing boot.

  Race to the sill, past the empty bassinet, Laura’s misgivings about a first-floor apartment replaying in his head, and there, through the diminishing squit-squit-squit of boots on snow and the wrenching wails of his child, he saw her kidnapper, her white-slaver, dwindling swiftly in the ill-lit alley, pools of light by backdoors, dumpsters lined along brick walls. “Catch him, catch him!” Laura’s hands were shoving him over the sill, almost throwing him off balance, but he kept his eye on the nightmare, so that just as he found his feet and felt the cold seep up inside his pantleg and was poised to run, he saw their ski-masked nemesis look back even as two shadows emerged from the dun of a dumpster and shudder-halted him so jarringly that his boots went awry and his bundle of baby flew into the hands of a slighter third figure. Saved, thought Travis, elated as Laura and Marcie joined him out the window.

  But then, instead of beating the man into submission, they appeared in the dim light to be pushing their heads against him so that he jittered and screamed as though electrified. And the third carried Jenny into the light, and he saw a meat-slung jawbone and a wandering eye and his daughter brought like some corncob to that mouth; and her sleepsuit bunched and reddened, her cries punched quiet from her, as, behind them, packed snow squeaked and Travis turned too late.

  Laura reached the door first but he was close behind and took in the overheated room, the space heater humming at full capacity as Laura lifted Jenny into her arms.

  “She okay?” Marcie asked.

  Laura nodded, arching her back and soothing the tiny face open wide in terror at her shoulder, features almost lost in the laced, peaked, buttoned sleepsuit-head.

  “Must’ve been gas pains,” he said.

  Laura replaced the baby in her bassinet, zip-slashing the zipper, reaching in to feel diaper, rezipping, kissing one mittened hand. Travis was starting to sweat, the room was so hot and his heavy coat was meant for fierce cold.

  “Diaper’s a smidge damp, but she’ll be fine.”

  The baby sneezed but her lid-heavy eyes did not open. Her lips parted for air, a soft pooch of pink budding. No more than two dark dots, her nostrils.

  “Poor baby has the sniffles,” Laura said and pointed them toward the door. The instant it closed behind them, Jenny’s face winced as if to scream again, but her bowels and bladder gave way then, emptying, and her face relaxed into sleep.

  Where Laura had felt for sop, a lip of cotton bridged between the freshly soaked diaper beneath plastic pants and the layers of cloth working outward to the soon-to-be-ammoniated sleepsuit.

  “Say,” said Marcie, “hadn’t you two better be on your way?”

  Travis checked his wrist. Quarter to eight. “We’re a brisk ten-minute walk away, so we’re cutting it close, I guess. One last hug, Marcie dear. Mmmmwah! What a woman you are.”

  Her kiss lingered like a warm slap on his lips.

  Laura began: “Now don’t forget to—”

  Marcie swept his compact woman up in a tremendous hug and stopped her frettings with a kiss, short, startling to them both, not wet. “Hmm,” she said, “what an interesting impulse.”

  “Hold that thought,” Travis said. “If Apadravya can no longer strut his stuff, we may be back quicker than we expect, ready to explore other paths to salvation.”

  Laura’s eyes still held shock. “Help yourself to the fridge.

  Nothing’s off-limits.” She brightened, kept back from saying something, then tugged him out the door. Try as he might, Travis couldn’t shake two contrary feelings: that something very wonderful awaited them at the end of a very wonderful evening; and that venturing out tonight was a terrible mistake, one they might not live long enough to regret.

  As she dressed her dead son, Aysha only kept herself from coming apart by holding Rajib’s eyes centrally before her. She had had to call him Swami Apadravya when others were about; but alone in the quiet calm of his room, dark hands sculpting her white flesh, he was her Rajib, loving her so totally it hurt.

  And when he entered her, his eyes a searing mirror of bliss, the world split open anew until she thinned and thickened into slow explosion.

  Vish lay cold under her fingers. As she joggled his body, she expected any moment he’d inhale suddenly out of sleep, find his thumb, offer a long protesting groan, and eye her archly.

  But the chill of his skin and its pal or, like an all -over faint, kept his death at her fingertips. Underwear, undershirt, tight white socks, futile nonsense, must be insane, long corduroy pants, a pull over shirt with dead arms at angle around a halfwit’s lolled head that made her break down weeping—until Rajib’s eyes, cased in quiet brown wrinkles and containing the wisdom and compassion of all the world, brought her out of it. Sweater played his arms the same way, but by the time she rocked his coat on, it was like dressing a weighty ragdoll, both her and Vish more insulated from his death. But no. Had to experience it, had to keep it before her like a candleflame. Visions required faith, and faith could only function in the harsh light of the truth.

  She would carry her boy to his father and he would interrupt satsang—or rather, he would surely incorporate her arrival into what he was saying (no agenda that excluded the world’s surprises) and then Rajib would touch his son, re-blood his cream-tan skin, re-bellow his lungs, infuse through the eyes his resurrected boy. But no. She couldn’t count on that. “Make no appointments,” he had said, “receive no disappointments.”

  Why was that such hard advice to fol ow?

  Aysha zipped up her boots, then muffled her neck and double-buttoned her night-blue coat. She jammed the knit cap down on her flattened blond curls and, Vish’s pillow cold against
her knuckles, worked his cap over his scalp and down around the tops of his ears. She blew out the oil-lamp and stagger-lifted her son until he was snugged on her left arm and his head rested against her shoulder. Would be a test of her will, this walk: five blocks west and nearly as distant south; no new snow for two days but brisk winds, and there’d be snowbanks and patches of snow between scraped sidewalks.

  She prayed she’d meet no one on the way out of her apartment building, and that proved true. A blast of air, caution on the icy concrete of her front steps, and she was on her way.

  The moment they cornered off Drummond and headed west on Maisonneuve, Travis sensed something wrong. They were still three blocks from Sir George Williams University, a mostly evening school in one several-story building where the talk was to be held. Couldn’t guess what it was as he and Laura crunched along, her enthusing about their baby’s precocity as he tuned her out—but it increasingly nagged at him and then turned to disappointment. Volumetrically speaking, pedestrian traffic was too light: a first sign. And when they crossed Crescent and had a clear view of the corner of Bishop and Maisonneuve ahead, Laura interrupted her parental ravings with an “Oh shoot!”

  Save for security lights on the central stairs and on the walkways left and right around them to the auditorium, the building was dark. “Look at this!” Laura said, and he joined her at the glass doors. Her hands were thrust into her coat pockets; she jiggled from the cold and her breath was dragon steam, comical from her Cupid’s-bow lips. Upon the door, taped askew on the inside, was a pasteboard sign in bold black: SATSANG POSTPONED UNTIL NEXT WEEKEND. SRI APADRAVYA IS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. NAMASTE.

  “Didn’t you check the paper?” she asked, accusing.

  “Yesterday’s.” He caressed the back of her coat with his thick gloved fingers. “Hey, no big deal. We’ll go to the Cafe Au Lait, have some steamy roasted coffee and that honey-drenched dessert you like.”

  “Baklava.”