Hush, Little Baby

by Judith Arnold

  Meanwhile, she and D.J. could go to the zoo and eat ice-cream. Or mashed bananas.

  It was a nice fantasy. The reality was that she had to climb into the elevated cab of Gerald’s macho new SUV—a telling contrast to Levi’s macho sports car. The reality was that she had to settle onto the stiff leather seat, inhale the distinctive new-car smell, and figure out a way to survive what was certain to be a tension-filled lunch.

  *

  HE’D ORDERED sweet-and-sour chicken and Szechuan beef. And a large tub of fried rice. People could eat whatever they wanted.

  He was acting like an ass, and it bothered him. He wasn’t used to feeling possessive. It was like a quivering alertness running through his body, a wariness regarding a man about whom he’d never entertained a single negative thought. Gerald Mosley was a client. He and Corinne had known each other and worked together for years—of course they’d be friends. Meanwhile, Corinne had spent last night in Levi’s bed. Why was he feeling so threatened?

  He’d never experienced jealousy before. Never. He hadn’t been jealous of his siblings who’d been his parents’ favorites; he could have been among the favored if he’d yielded to his parents’ rigid views. Nor had he ever felt jealousy toward classmates who got higher grades, friends who got prettier dates, any of those challenges that were supposed to bring out a man’s primitive warrior instincts. He could fight for what mattered, but pissing contests had never interested him.

  Just that morning, he’d been thinking of Corinne in terms of marriage. As he unloaded the cartons of Chinese food on the kitchen table, careful not to step on D.J., who was practicing his crawling moves on the kitchen floor, he remembered that odd, exhilarating whimsy about marriage—and he also remembered the way she and Mosley had gone off to confer in private. And where the hell were they now? He’d stopped for food on his way home; they’d supposedly been driving straight here. They should have arrived ahead of him.

  He heard the rumble of Mosley’s pumped-up vehicle out in the driveway. “They’re here,” he informed D.J. none too graciously. Some host he was going to be.

  Get over it, he ordered himself. Corinne had told him she had no other boyfriends. Mosley was her pal, nothing more.

  The thing was, Levi didn’t want to be just her lover. He wanted to be her pal, too. He wanted to be everything to her—the man who made her laugh, made her think, made her come.

  Damn it. He seemed to have gone and fallen in love.

  “I’m in trouble, buddy,” he whispered to D.J. “And I think it’s your fault.”

  D.J. gave him a wet grin, showing off his front teeth, and let loose with a barrage of meaningless syllables.

  “Thanks for the advice,” Levi muttered, abandoning the kitchen in response to the chiming doorbell.

  He tried to read Corinne’s expression for a clue as to what she and Mosley had talked about on their drive over. But her face gave nothing away. Her eyes were luminous, her lips pursed. She looked, if anything, a bit tense. “Sorry it took us so long,” she apologized. “Gerald wanted to see a little of Arlington.”

  “Corey has spent a lot more time in town than I have,” Mosley added.

  There was that nickname again. She’d never asked Levi to call her Corey. It irked him that Mosley received that personal privilege.

  “Lunch smells good,” she said, preceding Mosley into the house.

  “I’m figuring we can eat out on the porch,” Levi suggested. “It’s not too hot.”

  “Fine. Where’s D.J.?” Before he could answer, she vanished into the kitchen. Her lilting chatter drifted through the house to him: “Hey, D.J. How’s it going? Ooh, you feel damp. What do you say we change your diaper?”

  D.J. screeched with pleasure.

  Levi glanced at Mosley, who appeared dumbfounded. He was a smart man—it took a certain degree of intelligence to make a multi-million dollar fortune—but the idea of Corinne’s changing D.J.’s diaper, and doing it cheerfully, was apparently more than his high IQ could absorb.

  After a few seconds, Corinne swept back through the entry. D.J. was in her arms, gleefully swatting at her hair. Without sparing a look for either Levi or Mosley, she ascended the stairs with the kid.

  “Well,” Levi said, staring up the stairs as if he could will her speedy return. “Can I get you a drink?”

  “Sure,” Mosley said, his gaze also fixed on the vacant stairway.

  Levi started for the kitchen. Mosley followed him. Levi produced a couple of beers from the refrigerator, displayed them for Mosley, and handed one over when Mosley nodded. He wished he could revive the feelings he’d had for the guy in December, when they’d first started negotiating on the house. Back then, Mosley had been a client with an open mind and an open wallet; back then, Levi had been a bachelor with no dependents and no desire for any.

  Everything was different now, thanks to the invasion into his life of the two people upstairs.

  He couldn’t help but view Mosley from his new perspective. Mosley was still a compact man with generously wavy hair and an adolescent fashion sense. His smile seemed benign, his eyes honest. Whatever negatives Levi saw in him were caused by his own resentments, not by anything Mosley had said or done.

  “What’s with the baby?” Mosley asked as he wrenched the cap off his beer.

  “What do you mean?” Levi busied himself arranging serving spoons, forks and plates on a tray.

  “She’s changing a diaper. What’s that all about?”

  “I guess it’s about her not wanting D.J. to get a rash on his butt.”

  Mosley shook his head. A vague, airy laugh escaped him. “When did she ever give a hoot about a baby’s butt? She’s tough. She’s smart. Baby rashes never registered on her radar screen before.” He sipped some beer and shook his head again. “I don’t get it.”

  Levi felt a pang of sympathy for Mosley. “I think it has something to do with D.J. himself.”

  “What? Not to insult him, he’s just fine as far as babies go, but what is it about him that makes Corey care about rashes, all of a sudden?”

  Levi drank some beer, his eyes level on Mosley as he tipped the bottle back against his lips. Swallowing, he set the bottle on the counter and shrugged. “She feels some kind of kinship with the kid. Maybe it’s because she didn’t have a solid relationship with her parents, and he’s a baby who has no real parents at all. All he’s got is an uncle.” He lifted the tray and beckoned with a nod for Mosley to follow him out onto the screened porch.

  The air out there was warm and fragrant, heavy with the scent of rain-washed foliage. Levi set down the tray, gestured toward a chair and folded himself into another chair, gripping his bottle by the neck. Mosley sat as well.

  “The thing of it is,” Mosley began, then took another sip of beer. He looked dismal, his face poised as if he were about to sneeze. “I mean, she and I never discussed it in so many words, but I always just assumed she’d be sharing the house with me.”

  That brought Levi up short. He remembered her arguments with him over the initial design for the house. She’d been passionate, full of conviction, as if arguing for her own sake as much as for Mosley’s. But he’d never actually thought—certainly not once he’d made love with her—that she had a personal stake in how the house came out.

  He took another long, slow drink, buying time to collect his thoughts. “Okay,” he drawled once he’d lowered the bottle. “Do you and Corinne have some kind of understanding?” He really hoped they didn’t. He couldn’t bear to think Corinne had lied to him about any involvements back in New York.

  “No, it’s not like that. It’s…” Faltering, Mosley picked at the label on his beer bottle. He worked his thumbnail under a corner and pried it free of the glass. “We never really talked about it. It was just kind of there. Corey and I are two of a kind, that’s all.”

  “Two of what kind?”

  Mosley glanced up and smiled sheepishly. “Misfits.”

  Levi couldn’t suppress a bark of laughter. “I
’m a misfit, too. Who isn’t?”

  “Yeah, well, it’s just—neither of us ever date. We don’t have lives, you know? All we ever had was work and each other. And work was each other.”

  But now Corinne had something more. She had Levi and his nephew, a baby to whom she was so attached she was taking fifteen minutes to change his diaper instead of socializing with men of her own generation.

  “Do you love her?” he asked Mosley.

  “Of course.” Mosley’s answer shot out so quickly, Levi wasn’t sure how seriously to take it. “You?”

  He couldn’t answer glibly. To him, speaking the words would be committing to them, hammering the truth of them into place like a nail straight through the heart of a two-by-four.

  He pictured her upstairs, smoothing D.J.’s diaper across his belly, sliding his shorts back into place and lifting him into her arms. He pictured her feeding him, peering into his eager face, raising him to the window so he could see outside, crooning, Hush, little baby, don’t say a word…

  He remembered how turned on he’d been by her, watching her sing to his baby.

  “Yeah,” he confessed.

  Mosley sighed. “It’s not like she and I are…well, you know.”

  Sleeping together, Levi surmised—and the notion relieved him. Even so, he felt a kinship with Mosley. Both of them were in love with her, each in his own way and for his own reasons. “That doesn’t mean your love for her is less valid than mine,” he said generously, all the while thinking, Please, let her love me for real. Let her love for me be more valid than her love for Mosley. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think she intended to get involved with me. Our first few encounters weren’t exactly warm.”

  “She was fighting you over the details of my house,” Mosley recollected. “She was really bothered by that big window in the kitchen.”

  “The wall of glass?”

  “She thought it was way extravagant. Pretentious and useless.”

  “It’s going to look terrific.”

  “I thought it was pretty cool, actually. I’m glad it survived in the final design.” Mosley poked at another corner of the label with his thumb. “She mentioned something about how you think the inside should be outside and vice-versa.”

  “That’s the general idea.” Before Levi could go into greater detail concerning his philosophy of architectural design, he heard footsteps nearing the porch from inside. Corinne and D.J. appeared at the sliding door, and Levi leaped from his chair to open it for her.

  D.J. announced their arrival with a barrage of gibberish. “Baa-baa! Baa-lee-lee!”

  “I couldn’t have said it better,” Levi concurred, smiling for D.J. while he searched Corinne’s face for a sign of her mood.

  “D.J.’s hungry,” she said mildly, giving nothing away. “So am I.”

  “Then let’s eat.” Still smiling, still wishing with all the power in him that whatever existed between him and her was love, real love, true love, a love that could encompass everything he needed and wanted in his life—he headed inside to get the food.

  *

  THEY TALKED about the house. They talked about construction techniques, roofing materials and Rick Bailey’s neurotic beagle. They talked about the irascible CEO of Bell Tech and Gerald’s impetuous purchase of the Range Rover that morning. The men drank their beers while Corinne nursed a glass of iced tea and D.J. scooted around the porch in his walker.

  Three guys, she thought, observing them as they filled the air around her with their presence, their energy. Three guys and she loved them all—she, who had never believed herself truly capable of love.

  She wondered what D.J. was thinking. Did he carry any memories at all of his first few months? Levi had told her his sister had shared a house with other artisans. Were their lunches like this, a group of unrelated but intricately connected adults gathered around a table, talking half the afternoon away? Did they discuss cars and multimillion-dollar deals, the chintzy practices of some builders who used of particle board instead of plywood to save money and installed insufficiently large hot-water tanks?

  Did it matter what they’d talked about? D.J. probably couldn’t understand a word of it. His vocabulary seemed limited to “lee-lee” and “baa-baa,” with an occasional “bo-bo” mixed in. Oh, and his brand-new phrase, “poo-poo-poop.”

  She tried to imagine him thirty years from now, seated at a table with his friends, surrounded by the faint scent of soy and tangy ginger. In her mind he looked like Levi, tall and ruggedly chiseled, his face a sculpture of harsh angles, his shoulders broad and his hands leathery. His voice would sound like Levi’s, a low, slightly husky drawl, and like Levi he would think before he spoke. He would talk about whatever his passion was, and his eyes would be simultaneously dark and bright, lit from within.

  She wanted to be there to see it. Thirty years from now, she wanted to know that D.J. had grown into a strong, confident man like Levi. She wanted to help bring him to that point.

  If Levi let her… She wanted to be a part of D.J.’s life forever.

  *

  THERE WERE more people than usual on the porch, but he didn’t care. He was in his walker and the woman was close by. She’d taken him upstairs and changed him and talked to him, telling him things in a sweet voice that wasn’t singing but he didn’t care.

  He loved her smile, and the softness of her hands.

  She’d brought him down, and he’d eaten apple sauce and small chunks of cheese and a bottle, and then he got to roll around in his walker while the grown-ups talked.

  Mostly the men talked. She watched them, and she watched him. He wished he could tell her how happy she made him, just by being close. He wished he knew the words to say it. For days she was gone. But then she came back, and it was like the sky opening wide, filling the world with light.

  He wanted her to stay. He wanted her to be a part of his life forever.

  Chapter Fourteen

  LEVI USED TO MEASURE his time in terms of work: how far along a house was toward completion; how much time until a proposal was due or a bid needed to be submitted; how many weeks until he could take his annual vacation in California, visiting Ruth.

  Now, time’s measurements were completely transformed. Days were marked in what new things D.J. had learned, what he had accomplished, how much he’d grown. One day he might taste a peach for the first time, or gnaw on a hard chunk of pizza crust. Another day he might throw a ball with both hands. Yet another day, Levi might discover a new tooth cutting through his upper gum.

  Weeks were measured by Daddy School classes. He attended religiously, every Monday night. He sat in the community room at the YMCA while Allison Winslow discussed digestive problems in babies, dysfunctional sleep patterns, the pros and cons of flash cards and all manner of child-related topics he would never have wasted a thought on if not for D.J.

  Nights were measured by Corinne: five nights without her, two nights with her. Every Friday, the late afternoon train would carry her from New York City to Arlington, and they’d enjoy two intense weekend days behaving in a way that looked an awful lot like a family to Levi. He and D.J. and Corinne would do things together. They’d take long walks pushing D.J. in his stroller, or attend a free evening concert on the lawn in front of the Arlington Public Library—the performers had been a mediocre brass band playing John Phillip Sousa marches at pathetically sluggish tempos, but since he hadn’t had to pay for tickets, Levi hadn’t had a right to complain.

  Some weekends, they’d rent movies and eat popcorn. One Saturday night he’d hired Tara from across the street to baby-sit and taken Corinne to Reynaud, the most elegant restaurant in town, where they’d lingered for two and a half leisurely hours over a gourmet feast.

  Corinne would tell him about her projects with Mosley in New York, and he’d tell her about the office complex in Boston for which his partner Phyllis was the primary architect. And once D.J. was in bed, he and Corinne would go to bed, too.

  He couldn’
t get enough of her. He would spend those five weeknights alone, thinking of her, dreaming of her, counting the seconds until her head would once again rest on his pillows, her body beneath his. Or above his. He’d realized early on that she was not the most experienced lover in the world—but she was willing to try anything, willing to trust him. They experimented with new positions and laughed when things didn’t quite line up, when they tumbled off the couch or wound up resembling drowned rats after a particularly adventurous outing in the shower. One night, they’d tiptoed down to the porch and made love there, bathed in the fresh evening air and serenaded by crickets.

  By the end of July, he began to tire of the long, lonely stretch from Sunday night to Friday afternoon, when she was in New York. Other Arlington residents endured daily commutes to their jobs in Manhattan; it wasn’t a trip he would wish on the woman he loved, but maybe he and Corinne could work something out that would enable her to spend at least one more night a week in Connecticut. If she found a job closer to Arlington or quit working altogether, he would gladly support her, but he doubted she would care for that. She loved her job and relied on it. For her entire life, until that past June, she’d believed her career was the only dependable aspect of her world, the only thing she would dare to love.

  Besides, Mosley meant a lot to her. Levi was willing to accept that, now that there was no more talk about her moving into Mosley’s weekend retreat once construction on it was completed. “I never thought about a home,” she’d told Levi just last week, during one of those wonderful moments when they’d finished making love and were simply lying together in bed, holding hands and whispering. “A house was a place where you lived. It was a building, a roof over your head. I didn’t know what a home was, because I never really had one.”

  “Do you have one now?” he’d asked, almost afraid to hear her answer.