First Light

  In two weeks she develops a light fever. She has been staying at home, concentrating on her own work, and after a few days the fever passes, and she forgets all about it. Now that she’s pregnant, he has stopped trying to call. The days are getting longer. It’s spring. She’s made some calculations: at this rate, and even with some help from Hugh, she’ll run out of money in six months.

  There is this man she keeps running into at the Safeway, especially in produce. He’s always pushing a cart in front of the vegetables, never hesitating to squeeze heads of lettuce or eggplants or tomatoes or anything else that’s round, and the manner in which he grasps the merchandise is innocently sexual, an open pleasure in clutching résiliant circular objects. When Dorsey again catches a glimpse of this man, whose face is neither handsome nor ugly but is instead stripped-down to its unidentifiable essentials, he beams at her. The second time he sees her looking at him, he says, “Don’t you love vegetables?” The voice is smoothed out, like something from a radio. She’s trying to think of where she’s seen him before; there’s something about his face that she associates with the kitchen. “This is typical. You’re wondering where you’ve seen me,” he says, pushing his shopping cart around so that it blocks hers. “Commercials,” he says. “I’m the teller in the Pacific Savings and Loan ad, the one who says, ‘Why yes, Mrs. Robinson, we’re here—’ ”

  “—Now I remember,” Dorsey tells him. “But your hair is combed in the commercial. And you’re wearing glasses.”

  “Horn-rimmed. I told them that bank tellers don’t wear glasses like that, they’re all very vain people, bank tellers, being in public, they all wear contacts, but …” He reaches for some green onions. “Sorry.” He catches himself. “I didn’t mean to be rude.” He holds out his hand. “My name’s Simon.”

  “Dorsey.” His hand is small, almost the same size as hers.

  “Dorsey. What a funny name.” He gazes in distaste at the parsnips.

  “I was named for an aunt,” she tells him.

  “Well, I was named for an apostle. My parents were Catholics. They named the boys for apostles and the girls for stigmatized saints. So tell me, Dorsey, what do you do?”

  “Me?” She smiles. “I’m a pregnant astrophysicist.”

  “That’s quite a job, Dorsey.” He doesn’t wait. “I notice you’re not wearing a wedding ring. Is this pregnancy the result of scandal?”

  She nods, smiling. “Yes, it is.”

  “Good.” Simon is beaming at her. “Want to come over to my place for dinner?”

  “No, Simon, I don’t think so.”

  “Ah,” he says, “you still have some shreds of honor left. So who’s the lucky man, Dorsey?”

  “This old guy.”

  “Ah. One of them.” He scratches his cheek, as if he were trying to think about old people. “You haven’t put anything into your shopping cart.” He points down at it.

  “You’re blocking my way.”

  “Yes, I am.” He moves so that she can pass. “Just a minute.” He writes his name, address, and telephone number on a worn yellow piece of paper he has fished out of his pocket, and he hands it to her. “Just in case,” he says.

  “Just in case of what?”

  He shrugs. “You’re a pregnant astrophysicist. Maybe you’re going to need some help from strangers who will come when you call.” He looks suddenly serious, all the facial lines of joking gone. “I’m one of those people who offers to help, and the thing is, I actually mean it. You should believe me. I’ll actually help you, if you want it.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “I’m unusual,” Simon tells her.

  “Everyone’s unusual.”

  He shakes his head. “No, no, they aren’t. People are not unusual, Dorsey, believe me. They say they are, but they’re just like everyone else. But you take me: I’m really odd. For one thing, I’m not the same person from day to day. And I’m so interested in people, I can’t stop myself.” Dorsey looks puzzled, but he will not explain the sentence.

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “Well, come over and find out,” he says, and smiles. This smile is a promise, a bonded guarantee of surprises and disillusion. Even after Simon is gone, his smile somehow remains, drifting unattached in the fluorescent lighting above the produce, the lettuce and zucchini, a spirit of benign interest in Dorsey and her situation. As she drops a bag of grapefruit into the cart, following behind Mr. Bryant, the store’s manager, Dorsey tries to think of the last time anyone was playful with her. But no: she has been surrounded by ambassadors from the serious world, grim-faced men sworn to carrying around their terrible dignified weights. Now, turning the corner in the produce aisle, she sees this same guy, Simon, stopped in front of the dairy case, bent over, closely talking to a somewhat pudgy woman wearing curlers under a pink scarf. The woman says something and Simon leans back and laughs. His laughter carries down the length of the supermarket, the last row of the balcony. It’s impossible, Dorsey thinks. He can’t be interested in everybody.

  • • •

  A month goes by. She has felt the chemistry of her body changing, sending up a kind of repetitive chemical chant, above and below the audible frequencies. It is a song without demands. It is just there, going on, as if she knew how to sing back to it without anyone for once teaching her how.

  She has seen Carlo Pavorese twice in the Physics Department. Both times he pretended not to notice her, though he has put a letter in her placement file that carefully and containedly glows. On one occasion he has walked down the corridor, speaking to a colleague, and he neither nodded to her nor waved. The gargoyle face passed, talking, floating above its body. Then, a week later, she sees him standing in the hallway under the red EXIT sign, speaking to a student. He glances at Dorsey, then looks away. He is back to business as usual.

  Then she receives a letter from him.

  Dear Dorsey Welch,

  I do not feel the need for justification, but I do want to say something true, something that is not a lie. This is not as simple as it sounds, especially in a letter. I have, in this house, cartons full of odious letters, filled with lies: the lies of business, the lies of love, the lies of promises not kept and futures that did not come to pass. I don’t want to add to the current oversupply of lies.

  So I will say nothing that is not true. Here is something that is true: in New Mexico, when the sun rises, the air is so clear that you feel that you are seeing light in its purest form. It is the most beautiful place in which I have ever lived. I notice beauty, despite what you may think. In the Southwest the sun’s light reaches your eyes in some sort of unmediated radiance. Down there, light arrives raw.

  You have read about the Trinity test, I am sure. I have only one thing to add about it. It happened before sunrise, as you know. I was out there. I had dark glasses on, but I saw it. And I will tell you something about the light of the bomb, the first light like a momentary morning star, and how it changed my life.

  Remind yourself of one thing. We all begin as children, gazing at the stars. We want the stars to come down to us. We want to have a star right here, on Earth. We want to have a star we ourselves have made. And that’s what it was, that morning. It was the first star that men had made, it was pure light, the sun’s rival, brilliant and unmediated and beautiful. I will not say that it was God. But I will say that if there is a God, then we had stolen one of His largest wonders. And we are still looking around to see who will volunteer as Prometheus, to have his body made as a payment in return for this perfect fire. Who knows? Perhaps we will all have to be Prometheus.

  I said I would say no lies. So I will not say that I loved you. But I loved the light you gave off. To this day I do not know why you spent so many hours listening to me. I think you were dazzled. I think you love light, as odd as that sounds. And you were not an innocent. It’s complicated, isn’t it, having the brains and the bad conscience, both at the same time?

  Perhaps, as the poet Cavafy writes, the
light will prove another tyranny.

  In America we are too innocent about the prices for things. But you are not. Oppenheimer was not. Whenever the bill came, he paid it. He paid and paid. When he died, his pockets were empty. You cannot have so much light without paying off the gods with sacrifices, with deaths. Light is everything, I swear it. The bills are coming. Someone must pay them.

  Whatever you ask me to do, I will do.

  Yours,

  Carlo

  On weekends she and Maude Ann read the want-ads searching for good deals on cribs and baby toys, but this process is a joke, since Maude Ann has already agreed to sell Dorsey Gerald’s crib for fifty dollars, a steal, once the baby arrives. Late on Saturday mornings Dorsey sits in her favorite chair, one Caesar salad after another on the table to her left, lined up, and as she eats, she reads through the books, becoming an expert on babies and infant development and birth. She reads Spock and T. Berry Brazelton and Selma Fraiberg and the publications sent to her from the Lamaze Institute, and soon she is hinting to Maude Ann that there are certain … things she might try with Gerald, especially when the boy starts to dance on the dining room table after dinner, antagonizing his mother, in reaction to her refusal to take him outside to show him the moon. Gerald is a moon freak. Dorsey is deeply sympathetic to the boy’s curiosity in this matter. Maude Ann is not, and when she begins to catch Dorsey’s tone of smug maternal knowingness embedded in sentences of disguised advice, she says, “You just wait. It’s not as smooth as the books say it is. Keep on reading, and see how much good it does you.” But then she softens. “Don’t get me wrong,” she says, when she sees Dorsey’s worried look in reaction to either her remarks or Gerald’s dancing on the edge of the dining room table. “I never said the books wouldn’t help a little.”

  She is being talked about, she knows, in the halls of the Physics Building. Feeling that she wouldn’t be able to disguise her pregnancy forever, she has told one of the secretaries, and now the news is everywhere. She has excited a microswirl of gossip and speculation and final judgments, and she has discovered this from Danny Anderson, whose bland face gives him unlimited licence to gossip. Standing near the coffee machine, pretending to bend over slightly, conspiratorial, Danny tells Dorsey in a low this-is-the-truth mutter that “people” are “saying” that Dorsey got herself pregnant because she didn’t want to get a job because her new work wasn’t panning out. This pregnancy—no one seemed to be interested in who the father was, fathers could be found anywhere—was going to be Dorsey’s means of self-justification for her failure to publish new work. “Of course I don’t think so,” Danny says, “but I thought you should know what people are saying in the halls.”

  “Thanks, Danny,” Dorsey says, smiling. “That means a lot to me.”

  In her fourth month she invites herself over to Simon O’Rourke’s for dinner. He lives in an old house, painted green, with a broken swing on the front porch. Before dinner they sit together in the backyard, and Simon points with a graceful gesture at the small bells he has attached to the branches of the eucalyptus. “No particular reason for it,” Simon tells her. “I thought it’d be nice.”

  Simon doesn’t have many reasons for much of anything. In this respect, he reminds her of her brother, Hugh, as a very young man. Simon doesn’t think about things. He puts pictures up on the wall—magazine illustrations, reproductions of famous works, and his own pencil sketches—but he says he doesn’t know why he likes what he likes, and he doesn’t care. “I like you,” he says, looking over toward Dorsey, and then glancing back at the kitchen to make sure that his main course, a stuffed fish, isn’t burning. “I like a lot of people.” And in fact the phone rings often. This particular evening his standard answer is that he can’t, tonight, but try him tomorrow.

  “You do have a great number of friends,” Dorsey says, sitting in the rusty lawn chair, clicking the ice cubes in her lemonade against the sides of the glass, as she looks at the California sky darkening toward evening.

  “I’m promiscuous,” Simon tells her. “It’s a fact.”

  Well, who else, she thinks, would try to pick up a pregnant astrophysicist in a supermarket? Someone has to try. She sits back, contented, gazing over toward Simon’s tiny two-row vegetable garden, at his sagging clothes lines, at the back fence, in need of a paint job. Simon, a compulsive talker, is rattling on about working in television commercials and local theaters, the people he meets, and the sexual characteristics (rabbit-like, undiscriminating) of actors. Dorsey detects a slur against her own attractiveness and ignores it.

  In a few minutes he calls her inside, and they sit together at the wobbling dining room table, crested with permanent yellow and gold stains. “I got this at the Salvation Army furniture store,” Simon explains. “It probably belonged to a maniac. Look at these stains. They’re painted on. I can’t get them out.” He serves her the fish and rice, and a Caesar salad by request on the side. He pours her a glass of wine, and she even drinks a little. He does not turn on any lights, and the dining room gradually darkens until they can hardly see each other.

  “I could turn on the lights,” he says.

  “No, don’t. I like this.”

  “Me, too.”

  They lean back together, in their respective chairs. Outside, cars pass on the street, and from the back comes the evening song of a bird Dorsey can’t recognize. Then, this time from the front, she hears the sound of one of Simon’s neighbors turning on a hose, and then the sound of a spray, as he waters his lawn. The neighborhood settles in toward night.

  “Simon,” she says, “you might actually have a talent for marriage.”

  “When?”

  “After this baby is born.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “You’ll think about it?”

  “Certainly. It’s not a bad idea. I’d like to be married.”

  “You must have had some proposals.”

  “I’ve had some,” he says.

  “What do you usually say?”

  “No. That’s what I say. Or I say I’ll think about it, which is the same thing.”

  “Have you ever proposed to anyone?”

  “Not that I remember. Maybe once. I have a terrible memory for things like that.”

  “You’d be an odd husband, but a person could do worse.”

  “You’d be an odd wife,” he says. “But you’re real pretty and I like it that you’re smart.”

  “I didn’t think you’d mind if I mentioned it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I was just feeling so calm here,” she says. “Peaceful. And then when I heard your neighbor—”

  “—Mr. Chesterton.”

  “—When I heard your neighbor, Mr. Chesterton, turn on his hose to spray his lawn, I felt so glad to be here, and I thought, well, what kind of husband would you be?”

  “You hardly know me.”

  “I hardly know anyone.” She waits. “You don’t get to know people better by knowing them longer.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you’d turned the light on, I wouldn’t have said this.”

  “I know.”

  “Is there anything fundamentally wrong with you that I should know about?”

  “I sleep around.”

  “I can manage that,” Dorsey says. “So can I talk to you again after the baby is born?”

  “Sure.”

  She sits in the dark and hears his plate and wine glass being moved out of the way. Then she feels a hand in the dark taking her hand and holding on to it. His fingers are warm. She almost says so but decides to wait to let him speak the next sentence. She waits a long time. Later that night, he makes love to her quietly.

  With Maude Ann as her coach, she practices the Lamaze breathing exercises, the timed and rhythmic inhales and exhales. The Lamaze class is held in a local elementary school library. On all four walls are bulletin boards with displays that sermonize about the value of reading and books. The couples sit on the carpeted floor while the Lamaze
instructor, who is physically and spiritually incapable of using the word “pain” and says “discomfort” or “unanticipated reflex” instead, gives them the breathing exercises and back massages in a brisk, forthright manner. She has had three children herself, she tells the class, and amused herself before the birth of her third by writing the baby’s name in the air with her foot. This lightheartedness strikes Dorsey as much too West Coast for her taste. There is going to be pain, she says to herself, and lots of it. Whatever happens, she isn’t going to be able to write the baby’s name in the air with her foot. She doesn’t know what the baby’s name will be. She refuses to think about names. When the baby is born, then she knows she’ll know.

  Dorsey, who now has no medical insurance, has visited an obstetrician twice and paid in cash. Her doctor, Gerda Hoffmann, has a mild German accent, curly gray hair, and large reserves of optimism. Both times Dorsey has been examined, Dr. Hoffmann has said that everything seems to be going well. “Extremely vell,” she has said, smiling at Dorsey. “And you look vonderful, radiant.”

  • • •

  “What’s going on?” It is Hugh, calling, checking things out. Dorsey has been at home, working. Her desk is covered with her work sheets, and she meant to turn the telephone’s ringer off but forgot. The ringing of the telephone is like a brick thrown through the front window of her concentration.

  “I was just working here,” she tells him. Her secret from him has started to kick her.

  “No more crank calls?”

  “No more,” she says. “How’re you? How’s business?”

  “There’s a recession on,” Hugh tells her. “Business is terrible. I can’t remember when it was worse. Showroom traffic is way down and people aren’t even thinking about anything on wheels. I couldn’t sell a bicycle these days. I think about doing something else. I’d like to be a carpenter. I’d like to make toys by hand. At least it’d fill the time. You can’t imagine how slow a day is in an automobile showroom when no one comes in. You can tell what time it is just by the angle of the sunlight and where it’s moved on the showroom floor.”