Happy Baby

by Stephen Elliott

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you think I care about that?” she asks. There’s a long pause, like she’s considering what to say next. “Listen. You will see me when I want to see you. You will make time for me when I tell you to. You will,” she says. “You will.” Then she hangs up on me. I place my fingers against my forehead and try to block out the sounds of the city, the shoes on the pavement and the sewers. I lean against the Currency Exchange, next to a street vendor selling old magazines, and sit down for a second on the sidewalk.

  Valerie is running from the cauldrons to the toaster, a bright, pink flash of light. I close the lid on the pickle bucket and she shoves a square tub of peanut butter forward and I grab it before it smacks the side of the machine. “Back so soon?” she asks. One click, one shot. Two clicks. Bagels at the toaster. Jam. Cream cheese.

  “I’m taking a cigarette break,” Valerie says. She stands in the fire exit with a cigarette, looking back at the counter to make sure a line doesn’t form. There’s never been a fire here. Valerie is thirty-five and twice divorced. She dresses like a schoolgirl with her pink pigtails but the creases around her mouth and her eyes give her away. Her turquoise pantyhose, intentionally torn at the calf, stop before her skirt. A sack of onions sits next to the slicer, waiting to be peeled. We used to go to concerts together before Philc started coming around. Now she has one arm crossed over her chest holding her elbow. Philc has a small BMX bike as high as my knees and he is standing on the front wheel of it now, bouncing near the muffin boxes. “Check this out,” he says to Valerie, swinging the little bicycle under his leg.

  “That’s so good, Philc.”

  ***

  I think I expressly said I was looking for a sub in my ad. If you are now my sub, then by definition I am your mistress. Please address me accordingly.

  Forget about Friday if it is such a hassle. I shall see you in a few weeks.

  Pat owns a string of bagel shops but this one was his first. They used to make the bagels next door but now that’s a photo studio and the bagels are baked in a warehouse near Potrero Hill. The store was opened in the ‘60s, a gathering spot for protesters. We have a news article framed on the wall above the ATM and it’s a picture of a young Pat on a stage speaking to an enormous crowd on a grass lawn with university buildings in the background. The headline reads “Students Say: Not Our War!”

  He comes in while we’re closing. He likes to tell us stories of San Francisco’s past. “You used to get a lid of grass for twenty dollars. You could have sex with a thirteen-year-old girl and when her mom asked about it you did her too.”

  “I doubt it,” Valerie says.

  I lock the door for the night and Pat sparks a joint. I take a hit and hand it to Valerie. We’re tired. We’ve been on our feet all day.

  “Yeah, well. I exaggerate sometimes. Keeps life interesting.” Pat folds his hands across his large stomach and lets out a sigh. Valerie’s laugh is like birdsong. “I ought to start drug testing you guys. If it’s OK with Clinton that makes it unanimous. Fucking Reagan. Here’s your war on drugs.” Pat takes a long smoke and leans his head back, smoke gurgling out between his lips and dribbling up his face. A fifty-year-old hippie in a tie-dyed shirt and blue jeans. He’s probably worth a million bucks.

  ***

  Report in immediately. I’m waiting.

  At the Dress for Less I tell the saleslady I’m buying underwear for my girlfriend and she asks me what size my girlfriend is and I say, “Oh, she’s about my size.”

  The apartment’s never clean enough for Ambellina. I don’t own very much but what I have lacks character. Just white space. I live on the third floor and dust seems to collect from the windows. I have new dust every day. She told me to prepare her something to eat so I bought chicken breasts and spinach at the BiRite and they’re ready for her but she doesn’t seem hungry. “Did you get any wine?” she asks. I pour her a glass of wine, hand it to her, kneel down in front of her. She smells thick, like milk and brown sugar. “Amuse me,” she says. I look around my own apartment. There is nothing here. I have a small television on a short, dark stand. I have a Monopoly game, a table, a mattress, a small couch, a phone, an answering machine with blue buttons. I don’t even know how I amuse myself. “Are you trying to manipulate me?” Ambellina asks. “Is this what I want or what you want?”

  I flinch when Ambellina raises her hand. I close my eyes and wait. At Prairie View they said I had a twitch. Out in the woods by the border of Wisconsin with other bad children, miles from the nearest hitchhiking road, surrounded by brown trees, trunks as thick as truck tires. All the doors are locked and you have to ask permission just to use the bathroom. They run it on a point system. Henry Horner Children’s Adolescent Center on the grounds of Reed Mental Hospital uses time-out rooms and drugged Kool-Aid and straps you to a bed when things get out of hand. Thorazine was big for kids in the 80s. They never let you speak in court. They keep log books full of your flaws. Pass notes about you back and forth, from social worker to case worker to therapist to hospital intern. They never let you read what they’ve written.

  I want to tell Ambellina something, but I don’t trust her. She squeezes the handcuffs closed on my wrists. She also has a blindfold, which she wraps over my eyes. She runs tape over my mouth and I start to shake my head no and scream but it’s just muffled and she’s telling me to shut up again but I can’t. I knock into the wall. Bang my head against the wall. Everything inside of me is black and rushing forward, stopping in front of that big wad of tape. She pins me with her leg while she chains my ankles. I’m telling myself not to scream but as I struggle the handcuffs get tighter, cutting the circulation to my wrists. I keep screaming strange, muffled sounds into this tape. I can’t control myself. My mouth fills with glue. And she’s slapping me and then punching me. “Stop it,” she says, reaching between my legs, squeezing hard, her other fist landing against my eye. “Stop it.” It’s like glass, like a car crash, like being held underwater.

  I’m on the floor and Ambellina is on the mattress, my face between her legs when she rips the tape off my mouth. I feel the skin of her thighs. It feels warm and it feels like it is everywhere around me and I’m floating and breathing somehow in this dark pool. “Do you want me to take the blindfold off?” she asks and I whisper no. But it hardly comes out so I shake my head no and she touches my hair. I’m damp. I feel her body moving around me and the dark room. I feel safe. She says something about her child. A girl. She sounds sad but I can’t make out what she’s saying. Something about her husband and her child. She’s very sad about something.

  ***

  In the morning Valerie has a black eye and I do too. She’s stacking plates. I heft a forty-pound sack of beans from beneath the counter. Somebody knocks on the door and then runs away. We’re still closed. My body hurts and I feel like I will never get better.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Valerie says. Valerie’s black eye extends down her cheekbones where it becomes yellow.

  It’s seven o’clock. We’re done setting up. Neither of us makes a move to open the door. A lady in black pants, a white shirt, and a blazer is knocking. Valerie stares at her but doesn’t do anything. Valerie shouldn’t worry. This is our café. I pull out a rag and rub down the display case. The lady knocks harder and pulls on the handle, cack cack cack, as the deadbolt rattles through the plate glass. “She doesn’t need any coffee,” I say. “She’s already awake.”

  But Valerie goes to the door and lets the woman in. The woman has a tight face that pulls forward to the tip of her nose, her skin stretched over the hollows of her cheeks, her mouth small and circular. She looks from Valerie to me, sees our black eyes, and decides not to say anything more than “One large coffee please.” She looks at her thin gold watch. “I’m late,” she says helplessly.

  The lady leaves but more people follow and Valerie and I run back and forth, turning the crank that keeps the shop operating. The junkies fill up the back room. We pour old espresso
into the ice coffee jug, stack orange juice and mini-containers full of lox spread and white fish salad. Philc comes in at some point. He pushes the girl who is on the nod at the table near the dishbin. “Get up,” he says. “You owe me a soup packet.” She looks up from her arms, her face covered with tattoos. “I’ll cut you,” Philc says, sorting through her bags—a black garbage bag and a Barbie lunchbox.

  “Theo.”

  A line of customers is forming in the front of the store. But I’m watching Philc and when he realizes I’m watching him and that Valerie is watching him he jumps up and spreads his arms in the middle of the floor.

  “Ta-da!” he says. He does a dance step where he walks a perfect square. Then he tries to walk behind the counter but I stop him with the broom.

  “You can’t come back here. You don’t work here.”

  “What are you doing?” he asks me, his face turning red, throwing his hand slightly forward and spreading his fingers, like he’s letting go of something and that I should be wary.

  “What are you doing?” Valerie asks.

  “He doesn’t belong behind the counter,” I say to Valerie and her black eye and back to Philc, who is looking at the floor now and rummaging in his jacket pocket for the handle to something.

  I poke Philc in the sternum with the broom.

  “You think you could take me, bro?” Philc asks, turning his head ninety degrees into his shoulder, crunching his ear against his collarbone, then walking away from me, slapping a fist into his palm. He walks straight back to the emergency exit muttering, “You think you could take me?” Philc kicks open the emergency exit. It opens to a small yard filled with garbage and recycling.

  “C’mon,” Philc says, standing next to the bathroom door, biting at his lips.

  “Get out of here,” I say.

  “You’re not part of this,” he tells me. He raises his boot and lowers it as hard as he can onto the foot of the girl with the tattooed face and she wakes with a loud scream and falls to the floor holding her foot. Philc pulls a rock out, whips it past my shoulder, and a bottle of syrup breaks. He runs up and puts a foot into the glass display case.

  “You don’t belong here,” I say.

  “You don’t belong here,” he answers me back as the front door closes behind him. The girl in the back has curled into a ball and is making small, high-pitched noises. Glass and syrup are everywhere. It’s just glass and syrup but I don’t know what to do about it.

  I look over at Valerie and she’s crying so hard she’s choking. She looks like a mermaid, her pink hair, all those tears.

  We’ve closed up. Pat is coming to look at the damage. Pat knows, with all of his talk of revolution, this is junkie central. The cost of doing business. I’m cleaning up the glass and mopping the syrup. There’s glass in the bagels so I throw all of the bagels away. Valerie straightens the countertop, dumps out the coffee that’s getting old and starting to burn, fastens the cap on the purple onions sliced from this morning. Picks up the pastries and throws them away.

  “That’s where you get that black eye,” Valerie says. “You like to fight. You like to pick fights. You like to pick fights with people’s boyfriends.” She’s still puffy-faced and red.

  “No,” I say. “That’s not how I got this.”

  “Fuck you, Theo,” she says. “Fuck you and your problems.”

  I’m wearing women’s underwear and leather pants at the 16th Street BART station, worried that someone will see me when Ambellina gets off the train. We walk back three blocks to my apartment, past the liquor stores and the transient hotels. Men with blankets on their shoulders huddle between doorways next to the Quick Mart. “You should have gotten me a cab,” she says. There’s been a fire in the red building on Van Ness. It’s a single-room occupancy, and spraypainted on the brick is Death to landlords. “I’m in marriage counseling. You didn’t know that.” Ambellina pulls out a cigarette. She never smoked before. She shakes her head. I almost tell her that I was married once. How I got thrown out of the abortion clinic downtown. But I think better of it, because she’d want to know why, or she wouldn’t want to know at all. And anyway years have passed, and this is today. “I have a daughter,” she says. She hands me her lighter and when I light her cigarette for her she blows the smoke in my face. “Yesterday, in front of our counselor, I told my husband I was leaving him.” She stops and I stop with her. She doesn’t even seem to care that I almost kept walking. “What do you think will happen to my little girl? Answer,” she says. We’re in front of my building.

  “We should go inside,” I suggest.

  “You can do better than that.”

  “Bell, I don’t know anything about children.”

  “Open this damn door,” she says.

  I make her a cup of coffee. She stands by the window peering cautiously through the blinds to the street. I crawl to her on my knees. She looks down at me skeptically. “You couldn’t give me what I want in a million years,” she says. She places her leg on a chair and guides my face to her and tells me where to lick and where to suck. “That’s where my husband fucks me,” she says. I’m stretching my neck as she lifts beneath my chin, surrounded by her legs. “Stop,” she says, pushing me away. Stripping her top and skirt. She’s getting fat. “Do you think I’m the most beautiful woman?”

  “I do,” I say. We’re going through the motions. The next forty minutes is spent with me trying to please her with my tongue until my mouth is dry and sore.

  She slaps me a few times over by the couch and for a moment I think this is going to work. She hits me particularly hard once and I feel my eye starting to swell again and she stops. “Lie down on the bed,” she says. “My husband doesn’t want me to do this.” She slides over me. Of course I’m not wearing protection. Nothing is safe. She rides up over me. Like an oven. She says, “Theo, darling.” She grabs my hands and places them on her thighs. She lies on top of me, biting me lightly. I grip her legs and stay quiet. Her chest against my chest. This is sex. There’s no real threat. If I yell loud enough she’ll stop, which leaves us with nothing. And when I say I exist only to please her I don’t mean it. And when she tells me how beautiful she is it’s because she doesn’t believe it. Or when she says she has to punish me and asks me if I’m scared, she doesn’t mean it. We don’t mean it.

  Ambellina is wrapping a belt around her skirt. I turn away from her and watch the door. “My husband would like to see me with you. He wants to see me with a submissive. Then he’ll realize it’s not a threat to him. Because, of course you are not. Then, when I’m done with you, he’ll make love to me like a real man. We’ll discuss it first. I want you to come over to the East Bay.”

  I walk her down the stairs, past the bicycles locked to the stairwell and onto the Mission streets. Ambellina gets in the cab and I give the driver my money. “Take her to Oakland,” I tell him. “She has to meet her husband.”

  “I’ll see you on Tuesday,” Ambellina says.

  “I love you,” I tell her back.

  Pat and I meet at the Uptown on 17th Street. A holdover from the revolution. The walls are covered with slogans for left-wing political movements. The tables are carved and stickered. There are two red couches in the back, a jukebox and a pool table, a view of the hookers who walk by at street level. Pat orders us two Speakeasys and two shots of whiskey and he pays for them. He always pays for the drinks and we never talk about it. He starts like he always does. “In the sixties,” he says, drinking his beer, “we were trying to change society.”

  “So much for that idea,” I tell him.

  “You’d be amazed how much fun you can have if you get out of your own head. The problem is that now people are only interested in themselves. What we have is a non-voting generation. That’s what they should call you guys, the non-voting generation. You think you can’t fix anything until you fix yourselves. Well, let me be the first to tell you, you will never fix yourself.”

  Somebody throws some money into the jukebox at the same t
ime a rack of pool balls slams into the gully. The Pixies, I will grow, up to be, be a debaser.

  “My wife,” I tell Pat. “I didn’t always sell bagels.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “Oh man. She was a sweetheart. Long legs, black hair. When people met her they said she had breeding. Because she walked so straight. But you know, she didn’t. I mean, we didn’t always get along. Like, we didn’t agree on a lot of things. We hated each other. She wanted things from me. I felt like I could never give them to her.”

  Pat’s looking in his whiskey glass with one eye waiting for me to finish. I know all about Pat’s marriage. His childhood girlfriend. And how her head isn’t right anymore. “So what’s wrong with selling bagels?”

  “Nothing wrong with it.” I drink my beer. Pat’s good for at least one more round. Maybe two. A perk of the job, I suppose, but still, I’m the one that has to be up at six in the morning. I only live two blocks away from this bar. I come here when the phone is ringing, when the fog is falling over the hills. I sit here at night with a beer, not trying to get drunk, just trying to make it last. I like to watch the young couples that come in here and sit next to each other on the couch. I love it when they lean into one another even though the couch is long, cutting off their own space.

  “Listen,” Pat says. “There’s a whole world out there. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “Keep going, man. You’ll be full manager. What would you do if you were the manager right now? If I said, Theo, you are now the manager of Hoff Bagels. I’m talking profit sharing. The whole business. What would you do?”

  I look at Pat slyly. “I’d change the world,” I tell him, putting down my beer. “If I was manager there’d be no more war.”

  Pat looks at me for a second like he’s going to laugh, but then he gets the joke and a queer expression passes over his face. It’s like somebody’s taken the air out of him. He sips on the bottom of his whiskey shot and then chases it with his beer. I give him a blank stare. “Yeah, well,” he says, and I feel guilty already. “No need to worry about that. Have another one, all right?”