The First Bad Man

  Clee chuckled nervously, holding the pump at arm’s length. “I don’t know. Yeah. No. I don’t think so.” She handed it back to Cathy. “It’s not my thing.”

  That evening a barrel-chested old woman named Mary wheeled a pump into our room. “I’m the lactation consultant for this hospital and for Cedars-Sinai. I can get milk out of a fly.” I explained Clee wasn’t going to nurse; Mary retorted with a short speech about breast milk decreasing the baby’s risk of diabetes, cancer, lung problems, and allergies. Clee unbuttoned her shirt, blushing, with her head down. Her breasts hung long and pink. I’d never seen them before. Mary pressed different cones over the nipples with a brusque efficiency.

  “You get me, you get properly sized. You’re a size large.”

  Clee’s lowered head was motionless, her face completely curtained by her hair.

  Mary attached the bottles to the cones and turned on the ancient machine. Shoop-pa, shoop-pa, shoop-pa. Clee’s nipples were rhythmically sucked in and out.

  “Just like a cow. Ever been on a farm? No different from a cow. You hold these now.” Clee held the cups against her own chest.

  “Anything coming out?” Mary peered at the bottles. “No. Well, stick with it. Ten minutes every two hours.”

  As soon as Mary left I turned off the machine.

  “That was awful, I’m sorry.”

  Clee clicked it on again without looking up.

  Shoop-pa, shoop-pa. Her nipples became grotesquely elongated with each suck.

  “Can you give me a little space?” she said.

  I quickly walked to the other side of the room.

  “I don’t like my chest looked at. I’m not into it.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I wish I could be the one who did it.”

  Shoop-pa. Shoop-pa.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I just don’t think I would mind it.”

  Shoop-pa.

  “You don’t think I can make milk?”

  “No. I didn’t mean that.”

  “You think a cow can do it but I can’t?”

  Shoop-pa, shoop-pa.

  “No, of course you can do it! And a cow can! You both can.”

  NOTHING CAME OUT THAT NIGHT. She set the alarm on her phone for two A.M., four A.M., and six A.M. Nothing. At eight A.M. Mary came by and checked.

  “Anything? No? Keep going. Think about your baby. What’s your baby’s name?”

  “Jack.”

  “Think about Jack.”

  Clee tethered herself to the machine. She didn’t want to go to the NICU with no milk so I went up alone and told Jack how hard his mom was working to make him a delicious meal. When I got back she was pumping. Empty bottles.

  “I told him how hard his mom was working.”

  “You called me Mom to him?”

  “Mommy? Mother? What do you want to be called?”

  Shoop-pa, shoop-pa. Her eyes seethed with frustration.

  “Fucking shit.” She banged on the pump with her fist, knocking a cup and a fork off the table with an incredible clatter.

  Shoop-pa, shoop-pa, shoop-pa.

  IT WAS DAWN AND SHE was touching my ear. I was dreaming that the pump was on, but it wasn’t, everything was very quiet, it was dawn, and she was touching my ear. Tracing its perfect edges with her finger. The first light of the day was creeping into the tiny room. I smiled at her. She smiled and pointed at her bedside table. Milk. Two bottles, each with an eighth inch of yellow milk in them.

  Clee was discharged the next morning. But Jack, of course, was not. Dr. Kulkarni said he would be released when he was able to drink two ounces of milk and digest them properly.

  “I’m guessing two weeks,” he said. “Or less. Or more. He needs to show us he can nipple his own feeds; suck and swallow.”

  He started to move away. Clee was waiting with her purse and street clothes on. I grabbed his sleeve.

  “Yes?” said the doctor. I hesitated; it was taking me a moment to draw together all the facets of my question. I was wondering if my life, the life in which I had a son and a beautiful, young girlfriend, could exist outside of the hospital. Or was the hospital its container? Was I like honey thinking it’s a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?

  “I can guess what’s on your mind,” Dr. Kulkarni said.

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “It’s too early to tell but he’s recovering beautifully so far.”

  We told Jack we would be back in the morning and then we left and then we doubled back because I hadn’t said I love you—I love you, my sweet potato—and we left again, walking shakily out the front doors and into the sunlight. We held hands in the back of the cab. My street looked the same. My neighbor two doors down was wheeling in her trash cans and watched us hobble to the door. Clee started to slip off her shoes.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “No, I want to.”

  “It’s your house as much as mine now.”

  “I’ve gotten used to it.”

  Everything was as we had left it. There was dried blood all over the bedroom. Snails were clustered on the kitchen ceiling. Towels lay in strange places. Rick’s bowls of hot water were waiting on the dresser, cold. I cleaned quickly while Clee pumped, whipping her sleeping bag off the couch and stuffing it into the linen closet.

  Before she climbed into my bed for the first time she mumbled an apology about the way her feet smelled.

  “The color therapy didn’t work.”

  “It didn’t work for me either.”

  “Did you know Dr. Broyard’s wife is the famous Dutch painter Helge Thomasson?”

  “He told you that?”

  “No, someone in the waiting room did.”

  “The receptionist?”

  “No, another patient.”

  We got under the covers and held hands. Cheating on a housewife was understandable, he might have done it for the intellectual stimulation alone—but shame on Dr. Broyard for not rising to the challenge of Helge Thomasson. I had never heard of her but she was obviously a formidable woman. Clee put her hand on my stomach for a moment and then took it off.

  “Dr. Binwali said I could have sex in eight weeks.”

  I smiled like someone’s nervous aunt. The topic hadn’t come up since that first day. Some women just kiss and give back rubs and leave it at that. I wondered if her old aggression would come back. Perhaps it would be like a simulation. We might begin on the “park bench”—she grabs my breast. But instead of fighting her off I just let her rape me. Would we need to buy a rubber penis? I had seen a store for things like that next to a pet store in a strip mall on Sunset.

  “The muscles,” she said. “They won’t contract.”

  An orgasm. That’s what she couldn’t have for eight weeks.

  “But I could, you know, for you. If you want.”

  “No, no,” I said quickly. “Let’s wait. Until we both can.” I liked this way of talking where the verbs were left out. Maybe we would never say them.

  “Okay, good.” She squeezed my hand. “I hope I can wait that long,” she added.

  “Me too, it’s so hard to wait.”

  I WOKE WITH A START like a passenger on an airplane—for a moment I could feel how high I was and had an appropriate terror of falling. It was three A.M. We had just left him there. Tiny him. He was alone in the NICU, lying there in his plastic box. Oh, Kubelko. A howl was curdling inside me; the ache felt inhuman. Or maybe this was my first human feeling. Would I put on my clothes and drive to the hospital right now? I waited to see if I would. I looked at her yellow hair spread across the pillow that I usually wedged between my legs. None of this would last. It was all a preposterous dream. I pushed myself out of consciousness.

  The radio and the sun were blaring. “What kind of musi
c do you like?” Clee said, rolling through some staticky stations. I rubbed my eyes. I had never used my clock radio as anything but a clock.

  “I bet you like this.” She paused on a country music station and looked at me. “No?” She scrolled, watching my face. Different kinds of jangly and upsetting music passed by.

  “Maybe that.”

  “This?”

  “I like classical.”

  She turned it up and lay back down, putting her arm around me. I didn’t have a favorite kind of music. Eventually I would have to tell her that.

  “This can be our song,” she whispered. She couldn’t wait to get started on having a girlfriend.

  We listened until the end to get the name; it was unendurably long. Finally a snobby British man came on. It was a Gregorian chant from the seventh century called “Deum verum.”

  “This doesn’t have to be our song.”

  “Too late.”

  WE VISITED JACK EVERY MORNING and evening. Each time we entered the NICU in our gowns and clean hands I dreaded the news, but he was getting stronger every day. Clee thought we were out of the woods and it seemed like we probably were; all the nurses said he was the toughest white baby they’d ever seen. We converted the ironing room into a nursery and bought onesies and diapers and wipes and a crib and a changing table and a changing pad and a changing pad cover and a soft tray called a “sleeper” and a first-aid kit and a whale-shaped bathtub and baby shampoo and baby washcloths and towels and swaddling blankets and burp cloths and squeaky toys and cloth books and a video baby monitor and a diaper bag and a diaper pail and an expensive personal breast pump with its own carrying case. It would still be at least a week before Jack could nurse but he was drinking her milk handily through a feeding tube.

  “It has a really powerful motor,” Clee said admiringly. “It’s the same motor that’s in power tools and the blenders professional bakers use to make dough. Same exact motor.” She wore the strap of the case diagonally across her chest like a bike messenger bag.

  BEING IN STORES TOGETHER WAS a new pleasure, as was being in the car, or a restaurant, or walking from the car to the restaurant. Each time the scenery changed we were brand-new all over again. We strolled around the Glendale Galleria mall, arm in arm, chins held high. I liked to watch men ogle her and see the way their faces changed when I put my hand in hers. Me! A woman who was too old to qualify and in fact had never qualified, not even at her age. Anyone who questions what satisfaction can be gained from a not-so-bright girlfriend half one’s age has never had one. It just feels good all over. It’s like wearing something beautiful and eating something delicious at the same time, all the time. Phillip knew—he knew and he’d tried to tell me, but I hadn’t listened. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d heard the news about me and Clee.

  She was more than young, she was chivalrous: holding doors open, carrying bags—not paying for things, because she didn’t have any money, but pointing out what she thought would look good on me. She steered me into a lingerie store so I could get some “curtains,” as she called them. The stuff she picked out was frilly and girlish looking, totally inappropriate for someone my age, with my body. Wiry salt-and-pepper pubic hairs poked through the sheer pink panties, but she never saw—she just asked me to wear them out of the store.

  “You’ve got the curtains on?”

  “Yes.”

  She threw her arm over my shoulder.

  WHEN TAMMY THE PIG-FACED nurse asked us if we’d started skin-to-skin yet we both went red. We had never even been naked together.

  “Skin-to-skin helps to regulate the baby’s heart rate and breathing, and of course it’s great for the mother-baby bond.”

  “No,” I whispered, catching up. “We’ve haven’t held him yet.”

  “Who wants to go first?”

  “Cheryl,” said Clee quickly. “Because I really have to go to the bathroom.”

  Tammy glanced at me. She had thought I was Clee’s mom right up until the moment she saw us kissing by the elevator. I took off my blouse and bra and hung them on the back of a chair. Tammy wrangled Jack’s lines and tubes, carefully lifting him out of his case. He grimaced and twisted in the air like a caterpillar. She placed him between my breasts and adjusted his limbs so that his skin and my skin were touching as much as possible, tucking a thin pink cotton blanket over the two of us. And then she left.

  I looked behind me. Clee was in the bathroom. Jack’s little chest pushed in and out; his machines were quiet. He made a snuffling noise and his enormous black eyes lurched upward.

  Hi, he said.

  Hi, I said.

  We’d been waiting for this since I was nine. I leaned back and tried to relax with my hand cupping the whole of his legs and bottom. I felt like a statue of something virtuous. Here we are. Here we really are. It was hard to stay present, the moment kept jumping around like a sunspot. Across the room Jay Jay was settled on his mom’s chest in the same position covered by the same pink blanket. We smiled at each other.

  “What’s his name?” she whispered.

  “Jack,” I whispered.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s his name,” she said, pointing to Jay Jay.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  “What are the chances?”

  “Don’t move.” It was Clee; she took a picture on her phone and then kissed my ear.

  “Guess what that baby’s name is?” I said.

  “Jack, I know,” she said. “That’s where I got the idea.”

  “You named our baby after their baby?”

  Clee looked annoyed. “We don’t know them—we’re never going to see them again. I thought it was a nice name.”

  The other Jack’s mom looked both flattered and offended. Clee patted our Jack right on his soft spot, undeterred. Was all this real to her? Did she think it was temporary? Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  She behaved a little more like a guest now, folding her clothes and putting them in a careful stack on my dresser while inadvertently knocking over all my lotions and jewelry. For the first few days back we tried to eat at the kitchen table and have conversations, but I could tell it just wasn’t her thing, so I sat with her on the couch and we watched TV during dinner. I even ate microwave meals sometimes; they all had the same brown sweetness, even the very salty ones. I washed her breast pump parts and helped her label the bottles with the date; she took pictures of us and decorated them with an app called Heartify. We were kids playing married—it was exciting just to brush our teeth side by side, pretending we were used to it. She may have thought I’d done all this before because I had a late-blooming flair for cohabitation—ideas just came to me. The first weekend I bought a chalkboard and hung it next to my calendar, above the phone.

  “For phone messages. The chalk is in this dish. There’s all the colors plus white.”

  “Everyone calls me on my cell,” she said, “but I can write your messages there. If you want me to answer. Usually I just let it go to voice mail.”

  “You can really write anything on the chalkboard. It could be for encouraging sayings, like each Sunday we put a saying for the week.” I wrote DON’T GIVE UP in blue chalk and then erased it. “That was just an example. We can alternate weeks.”

  “I don’t know that many sayings.”

  “Or tally marks—like if you need to keep track of anything, you can do it here.”

  She looked at me for a moment and then picked up the purple chalk and made a little mark in the upper left-hand corner of the chalkboard.

  “Exactly,” I said, putting the chalk back in the dish.

  “Do you want to know what it’s for?”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Each time I think: I love you.”


  I straightened all the chalks so they were in a row before I looked up. Not smiling, no, she was serious and excited. I could tell this was the kind of thing she’d been planning to say to a woman for a long time.

  “See how it’s up in the corner like that?” Her lips against my ear. “I left lots of room for the future.”

  TAMMY SAID IT WAS TIME to try nursing. “Come back for his four o’clock feeding. First child, right? The nurse on duty will help you get the hang of it.”

  I looked at Clee. She was squinting at the ceiling.

  At four there was a new young nurse with short hair, Sue. She looked at her clipboard.

  “So it looks like the mother”—her eyes moved back and forth between us—“will be nursing for the first time?”

  “Actually, no,” said Clee firmly. “I’ve decided to stick with the pump.”

  “Oh,” Sue said. She was looking around the room hoping another nurse would be interested.

  “Is Lin your married name?” Clee asked, touching the nurse’s name tag with a roguish frown.

  Sue Lin smiled at the clipboard, adjusting the pen on it until it dropped to the floor.

  “No, I mean it is, I’m not—I guess it’s okay if you give a bottle.”

  I watched Clee swagger over to the Isolette.

  “Isn’t it important that she nurses?” I said. “For bonding?”

  Sue blushed. “Yes, of course. Next time she should breastfeed.”

  But she didn’t, she dodged it every time. I learned to hold the tiny bottle like a pencil, tease his lips until they opened, point the nipple at the roof of his mouth.

  This is Clee’s milk, not mine.

  It was important to give credit where it was due. He sucked and swallowed with his eyes locked on me.

  THE PICTURE CLEE CHOSE FOR the birth announcement was the one of me and him she’d taken with her phone. She kneaded my shoulders while I designed it on my laptop.

  “Can the writing be a little more fun?” she said.

  “You mean a different font?”

  “Maybe.”

  I put everything in chubby cartoon letters as a joke.