Happy Baby

by Stephen Elliott

  “I’m going to leave,” she says. “Because, you know what, some people can’t be saved.”

  “I’m glad you’re leaving.” I turn on the light switch so we can see each other better. “It’s the right thing to do. You’re just hurting yourself.”

  She places her hand on the stove burner. “Just like you.”

  “I was married,” I tell her.

  “What did Toine do to you?” With a small movement she is only inches from me.

  I hold my beer in both hands, practically between her breasts. “Nothing,” I say. “And he probably won’t as long as you’re here.”

  “Really? I think he did. I think you get him off. Hey,” she says. I don’t answer her. “Look at me.”

  I take a long sip on my beer. She pushes closer so when I lower my hand I brush her nipple with my knuckles.

  “Leave me alone,” I say.

  “Why are you so scared?” I can hear the light bulb over us. “You want to be Toine’s girl? You can’t be, you know. You can’t be someone’s girl.” I take a step back from her and bump against the cabinet.

  “I was born here in Amsterdam,” she says. “Two weeks ago, I was barricaded inside of a house and there were men on the other side of the door with torches and guns. Maybe you read about what happened. It turned out they were sponsored by the government. I was sure I was going to die and all I thought about was what I had done to Toine. Have you ever cared about someone that much?”

  “No. Not really.” I wonder if it’s true.

  “Look at me, Theo.”

  “What about what he did to you?” A cockroach scurries behind the fridge. Maybe Toine isn’t coming back here at all. Maybe it’s time I go back to America.

  “Look what he’s become. There’s nothing left of him. I don’t know what else I can do. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life trying to fix him.” She dumps the rest of the wine into the sink and it splashes over the sides and across the faucet. She drops the glass into the garbage. “Stop looking like that. You’re like a scared child. I’m not going to try to do anything about it.” I’m wondering what she’s referring to, what it is she had planned that she’s no longer going to do.

  It’s almost morning. I feel her weight pressing over the blanket. I wake, then I startle.

  “What are you doing?” Jessie is lying next to me, naked, on top of the blanket. I scroll over her body with my eyes as I adjust to the dark. I stare from her ribs to her belly button, over her stomach to the mound of black pubic hair between her legs. Her pressure on the blanket forces the sheet across my shoulders. I’m also naked, but covered. I pull my arm out. The apartment is cold. The windows must be open. She smells unshowered and sweet. There’s a key turning in the lock. The moment quickly passes where I can push her away.

  “I want him to see me like this.” So calm, she stares into the ceiling.

  “Don’t use me that way. What about me?”

  “You’re not losing anything. I’m doing you a favor.”

  “I am losing something. No.”

  The door opens and then the kitchen light goes on. The yellow light twists its way around the corner and over us. The refrigerator opens then closes. I feel the outline of Jessie’s hips through the sheet with my fingertips. Toine’s dark silhouette crowds the doorframe. From the floor he seems eight feet tall. Jessie parts her legs just the slightest bit, bends her knees up, reaches forward for her ankles. The room has the dry smell of a hospital. In his shadow all I can make out is the smile spilling across Toine’s lips, before he retreats into the other room.

  ***

  The show is the same as always. We’re in the balcony. Down below, Lucy, with her legs scissored, cigar between them, blows puffs of smoke into the rafters.

  “Amsterdam is like nowhere else,” I say.

  Toine motions toward Rynant with his pinky finger and leans toward me while nodding at the stage. “He has to clean that every night. How do you think he does it?”

  Rynant sees Toine pointing at him and bellows, “Homie number one!” Rynant is the strong man in the circus, furrows of skin on his face like a Chinese bulldog. He hoists a keg of beer on either shoulder and marches them down the stairs. I’m drinking whiskey tonight, since we can drink whatever, and Taco clucks at me and shakes his head, smiling. Nothing matters to anyone.

  “How could you leave this?” Toine says, waving his arm before him. “Are you sure you can’t be converted? Nowhere else in the world.”

  “Stop it,” I say. “It’s not fun anymore.” Winter is coming soon and when winter comes there will be no more work for anyone except Toine and one or two of the others. Jessie has left. Toine and I watched her from the couch. She folded her clothes carefully into two bags and then stood with one in each hand. Toine was as happy as I had ever seen him. I thought he was going to clap.

  “You’re like a stone,” she said to Toine. She wasn’t even looking at me. She left the door open and I considered running after her.

  An American woman, older and thick with bleached blond hair, someone who was probably never beautiful, is standing in the audience and has taken off her shirt. She’s hefting her breasts in her hands and pushing them to her face where she tries, unsuccessfully, to lick her own nipples. Her lipstick is heavy and her rouge is too thick. She climbs to the stage knees first, where the lesbians have just finished. She strips and sits on the edge and spreads her legs for everyone to see inside of her. This happens sometimes.

  If I had the courage of conviction I would ask Toine why he wants me to stay when we are only days away from when he moves out. He knows I would stay if he would stay with me. Since that night he never walks to work with me and we don’t have dinner together anymore. I told him I was sorry and he waved away my apology. “Don’t apologize for other people,” he said. We still see each other in the evenings. His jacket is open now and his shirt unbuttoned at the top. He wants me to stay in that apartment alone so he can come and check on me. Toine likes misery. We all like different things.

  Hank returns from the back wearing the gorilla suit, waving around the big plastic penis and the crowd is laughing and clapping. The man the American woman came with, her husband I guess, watches her on the stage. He looks like Peter O’Toole, a thin mustache stuck across his upper lip. Hank gets down in front of the lady and enters her with the gorilla dick.

  “Look at that,” Toine says. “An American being fucked by a gorilla.” The lady puts her hands against his chest and puckers her lips. Music is playing loudly and people are clapping. The woman is clawing at the mask until it comes off and she sees Hank’s black face and screams. He looks to the laughing crowd and smiles sheepishly. She struggles out from under him.

  “That’s what I love about you Americans,” Toine says. “You’ll fuck a gorilla before a black.”

  “That lady,” I say. I want to say something so profane that it cripples her but I can’t find the right words. The day after Jessie left I went to see Adel and gave her half of what I had. She was wearing a white body suit and asked how I knew her name and I said Toine told me. She said everybody knew her name so it didn’t matter.

  “I’m not going to take my clothes off for you,” she said. “You’re like a dog.” Then she fashioned a collar and a leash around my neck and led me down the stairs. She took me to a room below street level, with linoleum walls, where there was a changing table and a crib. I laid naked on the changing table and she smeared me in Vaseline then dressed me in large diapers. She tied straps around my knees, locked my wrists into the table, and placed two leather pads next to my ears so I couldn’t move my head. She stuck a pin through my nipple and I let out a steady moan. She burned me first with candle wax, but then lowered the candle to my body and I caught my breath as the hair on my chest sizzled. She quickly pulled the candle away, lit a cigarette with it. She pulled up on the piercing while pressing the lit cigarette into my chest. She did it over and over again until I couldn’t stop screaming. She held my nose closed a
nd dropped the cigarette into my mouth. I left an hour later, my chest covered in burns, my mind clear.

  Yuen has turned on all of the lights and Hank’s wife is on the stage and Hank is holding her in his furry gorilla arms to stop her from attacking the American woman. As the American is leaving, pulling her husband behind her, I lean over the balcony and launch my glass toward her. The whiskey lands on her head and the glass bounces down the aisle and rolls under a seat. She looks into the balcony, loosing a string of curse words. Toine’s hand searches through my collar. “What’s gotten into you tonight?” he whispers into my shirt. “This is no way to act.”

  It’s December and a light snow falls. The barkers who stay at work have the bottom of their shoes lined with rubber. The morning shows are cancelled. The hotels advertise lower prices and many restaurants close for the season. Space frees up in the jails and the thieves who have been waiting to serve their sentences disappear from the streets.

  Two days before Christmas my plane lands safely in San Francisco. You can tell a lot about a person’s childhood by whether or not they like Christmas. I pass through the gates and customs with my one bag. Toine didn’t want to say goodbye. He said it was meaningless since we’d inevitably see each other again. A line of yellow and white cabs wait for fares while the blue shuttles stop in the center of the median and claim their passengers. “Last one,” the driver says, shutting the door.

  I push my pack into the back of the van. “You’re going to love San Francisco,” a man says to his companion. “Cleanest air in the world.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MY WIFE

  JOE PUNCHED PETEY square in the face and Petey’s nose exploded and his blood hit the garbage cans and a garage door. Petey tried to get up but Joe kicked his feet out from under him and his head cracked on the entryway to someone’s garage. Then Joe stamped all over his legs and hit Petey over the head with a garbage can lid, then a bottle, which put Petey out for good until the ambulance came. At least that’s how I heard it. Someone at the bar said he had it coming.

  “Guess we won’t be seeing Petey around anymore,” Marco says, raising yet another beer, showing off the burn on his forearm where his tattoo used to be. Someone puts a song on. The pool players continue to shoot. Honey, who always sits on the end near the jukebox in a tight shirt with a leopard print across it, says, “Ain’t that a shame?”

  I order another beer, one more than I usually have.

  “That’s my boy,” Marco says, slamming his bottle on the counter so the foam pours out, covering his fist. “Let’s live a little.”

  ***

  Petey had been stalking Joe’s girlfriend, Maria. He’s been stalking Maria for years. When Maria and I lived together in that yellow efficiency over Jonquil I’d look out the window at night and see Petey’s cigarette burning on the corner. I knew he was staring up at the window and that he saw me looking at him. I knew he was waiting for Maria to walk to the front of the room where our little half-fridge stood. There were trees on that street with gym shoes swaying in the branches, and a park across from the building where the twins hung out, sitting there all night on the monkey bars.

  “He bothers me,” Maria would say from behind one of her books, sitting on the couch she’d pushed away from the window as far as possible. I’d watch Petey out there and wonder why he wouldn’t just go away. And at some point Maria and I would crawl onto the mattress, below the lip of the windowsill. I’d slide my arm around her shoulders and pull her into me, smell her brittle hair, feel the thick scar across her back fitting into my ribcage.

  “I have an old friend,” I tell Zahava. My wife is sitting at the table in the dining room with a calculator and papers spread out in front of her. She’s studying them, pushing them this way and that, like a puzzle. I’m leaning against the doorframe with my head on the wall and she looks up at me and there’s color in her cheeks as if she’d just been for a run. “He got beat up really bad tonight.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Zahava says. She takes her glasses off and pulls on the bridge of her nose. She has large cheeks and her eyes become small. She’s thin, but with wide hips, and she uncrosses her legs as she turns toward me.

  “When we were kids, I used to stand on his bed to look out the window. We had a falling out a while ago. He has this weird face that was just dying to get hit. Got beat up all the time. We were roommates for years. When I was locked up. I’ve told you about that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Zahava says again, placing a hand over the papers, holding the corner of the paper between her thumb and finger, not wanting to let go of it. “I know you had a hard time growing up.”

  “Me? I didn’t have a hard time.” I unzip my jacket and throw it over the chair.

  “Can you hang that up, please?”

  “You can’t imagine. Petey got beat up so many times he didn’t even care anymore. Petey had a hard time growing up. Compared to him, nobody had a hard time growing up.”

  Zahava stands and passes me, letting out a patient breath, picking up my jacket and walking it to the closet. She crosses the glass cabinet, which is something her grandmother left her. There are dishes in there that we never use. “Was he nice?” she asks, buried in the closet.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I’m just trying to gauge if he brought it on himself or what the circumstances were. And then I intend on getting some work done. Try not to give me a hard time.” She crosses back to her seat at the table.

  “He was plenty nice,” I say. “He never did anything to anyone. So there goes your theory.”

  “Fine,” she says. She returns to her papers, pen in hand. This conversation is finished.

  The bathroom is down a hall, before the kitchen. We live in a long two-bedroom apartment on the third floor not too far from the lake and the El. We keep the apartment clean. We used to stay in a smaller place on the ground floor where we were robbed three times, but that was before we were married. Was he nice? I run water over my face and sit down on the toilet. I think of my wife smiling and comfortable, drifting along with the crowds downtown. There’s a little rack next to the toilet where Zahava puts her magazines when she’s through with them. I stare between my legs into the toilet water.

  Zahava’s eyes are closed and the light is off. I sniff at her armpit. I slide my hand up her leg. Zahava makes a quiet noise, like a giggle. “Sweet baby,” she whispers, parting her legs as I press between them with my palm. I lay my palm on top of her vagina and gently slide a finger inside of her. We keep our sex toy in an orange shoebox beneath the bed. We bought it together at Fantasy Makers on Broadway. I pull the box out, take the vibrator from the box. The moon is full tonight and the shades are up. I rub my face along her side and over her breast and kiss her cheek. Zahava places her hand on top of my head. The vibrator looks like a mermaid and a dolphin comes off the side, meant to stimulate the clitoris. The top half of the vibrator is filled with silver balls that rotate around inside a silicone casing for easy washing. Zahava also likes oral sex and sometimes I do that. I consider doing it now. I run the vibrator along the outside of her vagina and I feel her fingers tense in my hair. She knows I like it when she pulls my hair.

  Zahava takes her hand from my head and grips the sheets. She slides down and the vibrator sinks and disappears between her legs and then out. Her head presses into her pillow.

  Zahava lets out a low moan. I press my hand onto her stomach and spread my fingers over her bellybutton. She came here from Texas to attend law school. At the firm where she works, she puts in long hours but she doesn’t complain. I pull the blanket over my head; it’s dark and hot. Her legs are spread in shadow in front of me. I kiss my wife’s nipple and I watch the toy come in and out of her black pubic hair. We’ll both have to go to work in the morning.

  I board the train at Morse and head toward the loop. Sometimes I switch at Belmont to the purple line, which drops me closer to my office. Other times I don’t bother. I ride the old
north-south through the city that I’ve always lived in, through Edgewater, Lakeview, Lincoln Park. I watch the streets get cleaner until Fullerton, where the train ducks underground. If I were to stay on the train, like I did when I was fifteen, then when the train rose back above ground I would see a switch. As the train reached Cermak the last white people would get off. At Thirty-fifth I’d be at the hard corners of Stateway Gardens. After that the streets are wider and the buildings are like broken teeth. At Fifty-fifth I would have gotten off the train and attempted to walk to my home, through the Vice Lords and the El Rukns. And sometimes I would make it and sometimes I wouldn’t.

  I stop in the cafeteria at the bottom of the building and buy a coffee and a bagel, and head upstairs. Jim Thompson, the former governor of Illinois, has an office in this building and one time I saw him in the elevator. He was six-and-a-half feet tall and wearing an olive green suit. He had a smooth fat face and thin red hair and looked like an angry child. I said hello.

  I put my bagel and coffee on the desk, turn on my computer, check for internal company memos. There have been layoffs recently. I wait for my name to come up. I figure they don’t pay me enough to fire me. I’m a senior file clerk and sometimes I joke with Zahava that I’m in charge of the alphabet. “Don’t misplace any letters,” she’ll say, laughing. “We need all of them.” But it’s more than just alphabetizing. Employees are ranked by skill set and necessity, factors that determine the color of their folders. The senior executives occupy entire cabinets along the top while admins and messengers are crammed into small drawers close to the floor. It would seem like a joke except that a couple of years ago when I tried to change the layout of the cabinets, placing a handful of janitors in the third tier and a vice president closer to the floor, I was reprimanded by my supervisor. There are thousands of green cabinets with thousands of records in each, documenting every employee that has ever worked here since the company was founded in 1933, during the Depression.