Baby Blue

by Pol Koutsakis

  “Great. I can’t feel it kick yet, but the doctors say that in a first pregnancy it’s normal not to in the first twenty-five weeks, so I’m not worried. All the tests show that everything’s fine.”

  “Good,” I said, failing in my happiness and awkwardness to think of anything else to say.

  “For just this once today can you sit in the chair?” she said, and although she didn’t move, I could feel her distance herself. I stood up, feeling like I’d been kicked in the gut.

  “Let’s hear it,” I whispered as we sat facing each other. There couldn’t have been more than a couple of feet between us, but it felt like an entire ocean.

  “You know Sotiris and I broke up. He wasn’t expecting it, the pregnancy. And he couldn’t handle it. He’d been trying to come to terms with it for about a month to see if he could stay with me, but …”

  “You weren’t expecting it either.”

  “Yes, but he’s innocent. The only innocent person in all this. For years he’d suspected that something was going on between us, but since he was happy with me and I was happy with him, he convinced himself he was wrong.”

  “So the definition of innocence is choosing to ignore reality?”

  “Yes – if you’re not responsible for that reality.”

  “No. The minute you pretend to be unaware of reality, you’re no longer innocent.”

  “Don’t try to make me feel better with your theories. That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Don’t you go blaming yourself for things that aren’t your fault.”

  “It is my fault. It really is. I never dared broach the subject. It’s called hypocrisy.”

  “And what exactly would you have told him, Maria?”

  “The truth.”

  “And there’s only one truth here, is there?”

  “Yes.”

  I considered telling her that we were far too old to be buying into this fairy tale, but I didn’t want the conversation to veer off course.

  “There’s only ever one,” she repeated.

  “And what is this one truth?”

  “That yes, it’s not reasonable to expect your partner to live without sex just because you can’t offer her that personally. But we should have talked about it. That’s why we were together in the first place, a couple, rather than two separate people. When I married him, I knew about the MS and that it would get worse. I’m the one who should have brought it up; what was he supposed to say to me: ‘run along and find someone else’?”

  “And what would you have said to him? ‘I want to find someone because you’re in a wheelchair’?”

  She went on as though she hadn’t heard me. “He knew that you and I have loved each other since we were kids and you’re so close, right here downstairs from us. He suspected it but said nothing; if we didn’t talk about it, it would go away.”

  I stretched out my hands. She held them and put hers between mine.

  “Nothing ever goes away just because you don’t talk about it, does it?” she said.

  “It doesn’t go away even when you do talk about it. It just gets easier. Sometimes.”

  “But at least if you talk about it, you’re trying. Trying to make it go away.”

  “It’s always the person who has the problem who brings it up – it’s a sign of how much they care. If you had brought it up, it would have humiliated him even more.”

  “When I got pregnant, he felt that I’d been fooling him for a very long time. But I was just scared.”

  “Scared because he didn’t have the guts to talk about it. He transferred his own fears and guilt to you.”

  The tears started flowing from her eyes and the only thing I could think of was that the baby shouldn’t be distressed. Who cared about Sotiris anyway? Only the baby mattered. But I said nothing, and didn’t even attempt to wipe away her tears. She was here to straighten things out.

  “We’d often talked about adoption, but we kept putting it off. But now … it’s over.” She spoke as though she wanted to believe it. As though she would quite like to learn how to say it without crying.

  “Did you suggest …?” I asked after taking a deep breath.

  “Suggest what?”

  The deep breath proved pointless. I would need entire tankfuls of oxygen to get through this. I had come face to face with death many times in my life, but right now I couldn’t find the courage to come out with the words that were boring through my head. They were that unbearable. Maria could see that I had no intention of carrying on, and decided to say it herself instead.

  “Suggest that he should bring up the baby himself?” she said, touching her belly.

  “Yes.”

  “How could I? How could I make decisions about the baby without consulting you?”

  I said nothing.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “You need to say something. Not about Sotiris. About us.”

  “What do you want to hear that you don’t already know?”

  “A lot. The baby changes everything.”

  “Before we go any further, there’s something I need to know. There’s no other way of asking, so I’ll just come out with it.”

  If she stared hard enough, her eyes could demolish entire walls. Now she was staring at me. And there were no oxygen tanks visible on the horizon.

  “Your answer won’t change anything. I just want to know,” I added.

  “We said we’d talk frankly. Get to the point.”

  “Is there any way that Drag could be the father?”

  Twenty years. From the age of sixteen to the thirty-six we were now. Twenty years together as friends, lovers, family, lovers again, and all that time she had never once hit me. Perhaps she’d been building up to it, something between a slap and a punch, which felt to me as if it had come from a different body, a furious wild animal which seemed to be punishing me for my insult. This incensed beast was looking at me with eyes I had never seen the like of. With eyes so very different from the ones I had fallen in love with. It seemed to relieve her anger and turn it into limitless sadness, a thousand times greater than her anger. A silent kind of sadness, a wave of enormous disappointment at what she was hearing. It felt like I was the one who had landed the punch rather than being on the receiving end of it. But the question was a fair one, not irrational – or at least I liked to think it wasn’t. Drag, until we were thirty, had been the love of her life – after they split up they didn’t speak to each other for five years, but the last three years they had become inseparable again. Drag and I never discussed his relationship with Maria, and we never talked to Maria about how she felt about either of us. Talking about things does show willing, as Maria said, but it can also make things a whole lot worse. We didn’t want to do that.

  “Stratos – Drag and I haven’t been together in that way for eight years. I haven’t even seen him for two months. We only talk on the phone. And when we do get together, all we do is meet for coffee, you know, to stay in touch. And yes, we do care about each other a lot, just like Teri and I care deeply about each other, just like we’ve all cared about each other since we were kids. Do you really think I could … with both of you? At the same time? Is that why you think I’ve come here – so you could humiliate me?”

  “I …” I stopped. What could I say to her? That when the three of us were together I’d noticed her legs would turn slightly towards his under the table, and that every single analysis of human behaviour shows that we turn unconsciously towards the people we love or like most? If I did, she would have lost it and told me to go straight to hell, and to take all those analyses I read with me. She waited a while and then saw that I had no intention of finishing my sentence. I think this only deepened her sense of disappointment.

  “We’ll talk about this some other time,” she said, using my desk to help herself up.

  “Please …”

  She walked towards the front door, pressed the wrong button to open it, pressed it furious
ly another three times, and eventually turned round and looked at me.

  “Open the door! So you think I’m capable of sharing a bed with three men at the same time and playing games with you all about the paternity of the baby and who’s going to step up and who I’m likely to saddle with it. Well, none of you need worry. I’m not going to saddle any of you with it.”

  “Maria, I couldn’t care less who the father is!”

  “It’s you. You’re the father! And you’re making me feel like a whore!”

  “I love you just the way you are, whatever you do, whoever you want to be with! I want this child so much that the mere idea of it paralyses me. It had never crossed my mind that I might become a father one day. I want it like crazy. There’s nothing I want more. Apart from you, maybe.” I had never said any of this to her. Ever. Not even when we were seventeen and first together. I saw how she stopped in her tracks when she heard it, and walked over to hug her, but she put her hand up to stop me.

  “Not now. I need to be alone for a bit.”

  “I’m sorry about earlier. I want it more than anything. I’ve dreamed about what it will be like, a little girl like you.”

  “A little girl like me … You’ve got an opinion about the sex … Great. And we’d bring her up how? What job will we tell her that her father does? What do you want the child to call you – ‘Stratos’, or the one written on your ID? Will our home be surrounded by weapons and sensors? Are you going to frisk her friends and their parents before you let them into the house? Are we going to be living with the fear that someone who’s after you could kidnap her or kill her at any moment in revenge? Or blow us all to pieces? Will she be able to walk as far as the school gates, or will you have to go with her to keep her safe? We’ll be just another ordinary middle-class family, won’t we? You’ll disappear now and again for a few days to get rid of someone, and then you’ll rush home so we can all visit the soft-play centre together. How are we going to explain it all to her? Explain to her that one day you might not come back, ever, and she might never find out what happened to you, and there might be no body to bury and mourn. Explain to her the odds that she’ll be growing up without a father? Yes, I did think about raising the child with Sotiris. I didn’t say anything to him. But I did think about it. But not here, of course, living literally on top of you. We would have to move far away from you and all the dangers around you. And never let the child know you. Where you would be invisible and non-existent. But Sotiris has left and I have to make my decisions. Open the door,” she repeated. Only this time there was a calm in her voice. The calm that comes with desperation.

  10

  I spent most of the day staring at the ceiling. Where you would be invisible and non-existent. Some words go together perfectly. So perfectly that they don’t just form phrases but bombs that explode inside your head. I tried to get up twice to drink some water and then a third time to do some exercises, hoping that the latter would provide some temporary relief. The trick is always to concentrate on something else, to force your brain down a different route to avoid the collision it’s heading for in its terror to escape everything. But it turned out that squats and thrusts were not the antidote to misery. For years now I had been hiding behind the security that her marriage brought us all: the sense of stability that I could never offer. And now when things were tough I had fallen short. I gave the impression I didn’t trust her and had no answers about the future. How could I? The kind of work I do defines who I am. Who I am defines the kind of work that I do. I am my work. It gives my life meaning. I clear the world of filth and get paid for it. I didn’t ever want, didn’t know, didn’t think about doing anything else – and probably couldn’t. If I wanted to be with her, I would have to change my job. Change my life. Become someone else. And neither she nor I would be able to recognize this someone else. I wondered whether life would be different if I could just cry. The ceiling had nothing to say about this, even when I shouted at it after downing three vodkas.

  While I was thinking about Maria and the pregnancy, my mind blocked out all other problems, as though it was aware of them but just didn’t care. As though I wanted to believe that I would find out that the baby wasn’t mine after all. Or that because what was happening to us was so unbelievably amazing, everything would work itself out. Denial.

  Somehow the time went past. One hour passed the baton on to the next, recognizing that they could not stay on a minute longer and disturb the smooth flow of events. Perhaps I should find Sotiris and talk to him, explain how much Maria loved him and persuade him to raise the child, and having talked him round, disappear. Become invisible and non-existent. To be like time, once my time was up, pass the baton to the right person.

  I threw on some clothes and went up the steps to the front door. I didn’t look to see if Maria was in her bedroom. If you can’t find an answer, at least don’t become a pain in the arse for somebody who is searching for one. Out on the street, my first thought was to escape that thankless ceiling; my second was to drink myself to the point where I wouldn’t be able to remember my own name. That wouldn’t be difficult. In any case, Stratos Gazis has been officially dead for years, and my ID is in a completely different name, as Maria had pointed out. After walking for a while, a short distance past the primary school and a bit before Agia Sofia Square, where I intended to get wasted at the café bar that I liked there, I suddenly felt the need to sit down. Perhaps the vodkas had numbered more than three. I had a vague recollection of a bottle and someone breaking it in the sink, cutting his hand on it and then looking at his bloodied self in the mirror, threatening it with the broken bottle.

  I sat down. As there were no benches on this stretch of Seferis Street, I had to sit down on the ground. This was an excellent second choice. That’s the nature of second choices. They’re very appealing when no third choice exists. And for years I’d felt like a very appealing second choice for Maria. How could you expect a second choice to have all the answers? How do you promote second to first just like that? They might not want to be promoted. They might not be up to it. The sun, struggling to break through the clouds which had it surrounded, finally did so right over the spot where I was sitting. I could feel my forehead burning. I would have liked to have been able to get up and move on, but I couldn’t. I could have crawled, but chose to stew in my own humiliation instead. I looked at the gym across the road which was advertising Pilates classes and saw two fifty-year-old women with the bodies of twenty-year-olds emerge from it. One of them had wavy black hair, a narrow forehead and a nose on the large side; the other one was a blonde with small brown eyes and freckles and was so petite that there should be a law obliging her to eat. They saw me and walked past, crossing over to the edge of the pavement, pretending not to have seen me. They carried identical oversized designer sports bags, which maybe they’d bought from the boutique next to the gym where none of the items in the window were priced, the kind of shop that says if you’re worried about the price tag, don’t come in.

  I thought about Emma and her father – what was his name again? – Themis. Yes Themis, that’s right. Dead. Perforated with bullet holes. And she had found him! I imagined what it had been like for them before all of this happened: sitting down on pavements, in the squares around the city, the sun burning their heads, the rain piercing their bones. Women with oversized designer bags and well-dressed children walking past them, just like the ones I had just seen here in Neo Psychiko. People who always had something to eat. And men looking at Emma – not yet a teenager – dreaming of kidnapping her like so many kids at the traffic lights who had vanished without trace in recent years. Kidnapping her and doing everything that entered their sick heads. Child molesters. A different species – not human. However many the Avenger managed to get rid of, there would be others. What he didn’t seem to able to grasp was that no matter how hard you try, it’s never going to be enough. How far is it possible to rid this world of its filth? Somebody needs to make a decision, wake up and see th
at we’re dealing with a genuine seven-headed Hydra here – not the one in the myth but a real, living monster. All the shit inside us, all the shit around us. For each head that you manage to cut off, another two emerge in its place. Invincible, like cockroaches. Perhaps the time had come for me to acknowledge my limitations, quit and save the day for Maria and the baby. Fight the scum by bringing up an amazing child – now, there’s a better plan. It was just that I had no idea how to do it. There was so much violence inside me that I really didn’t know if I could learn how. I had been doing what I could for years, with success. I did the best I could with what I had. People have their limits: Endurance. Tolerance. Ability. When they try to exceed these limits, they stumble. They fall. They feel like failures.

  Two more women emerged from their Pilates classes. Same style, same walk, same heels, same age as the previous two. A man came out at the same time. Young, smiling, toned. Pilate himself, perhaps. On the other side of the gym was an old villa now operating as a café, with a sign outside on the pavement boasting a garden round the back. A mother with twins in a double buggy came out. She was flanked by two bodybuilders, while a third pushed the buggy. This would be an interesting alternative career for Jimmy if Angelino ever fired him. There’s always work to be had if you only know where to look.

  None of these people tried to talk to me. For them I was probably nothing out of the ordinary – just one more Athenian down on his luck. I made absolutely no impression on them at all. In the words of Seferis himself, Strange people! They say they’re in Attica but they’re really nowhere. Maria worships Seferis. Sometimes when she was able to stay with me a bit longer than usual she would read him to me. She might appreciate the fact that I was now sitting in a street named after him. At least the irony of it. Maybe I’d call her and let her know. Yeah, right. Perhaps not. Man – on bended knee. So many wrong combinations of words. A country that is forced to keep looking down because of all the slaps in the face it gets is not a country fit for people. Right. But was it in the days before the slaps started coming? Only Pilate could perhaps wash his hands in a manner that would answer my question. Unfortunately, he’d already hopped into his BMW and vanished into thin air. I had no intention of vanishing. Where could I go? This place was as good as it got.