Ed pulled a square bottle from behind him in the chair and poured into two paper cups. “This’ll help,” he said.
“So, Ed, tell me about sex,” Noah said. Ed was paralyzed from the chest down, a T-five paraplegic, but he’d been married and divorced. He had a kid.
“What do you want to know?”
Noah swallowed. “That’s my problem. I don’t even know what I should know.”
“When I was in the hospital I was a boy, in a big room with all paraplegics. We were miserable. And then they put one quadriplegic in with us. He was one of the first. There were no quadriplegics until twenty-five, thirty years ago. They died. Sir Ludwig Gartman created an operation. That one man, the quadriplegic, kept all of us happy. He didn’t feel his body at all.”
It was different to be born with a disease than to have a car crash, Noah knew that. He’d never had to relearn the world. He’d never had to adjust to the dimensions of a chair. It grew with him. He could judge a theater aisle instantly. Noah’s disease felt to him natural. Ed was someone whom Noah considered crippled. That guy is really disabled, he’d thought on first seeing him, but he wasn’t then, when you knew him.
The kids on the floor were riling up, their arms wild, chairs spinning, doing wheelies, stopping and starting. Noah looked at his watch. He’d been here three hours. He could go now, to the tree-trimming party Jane and Mary were having with Julie and Peter.
“Leaving early?” Ed said.
Noah pushed out a hand for a high-five. “Yeah, bud.”
Ed clasped his hand. Like a lot of paras, he had incredible strength in his hands. But this touch was more of a squeeze, gentle, a search and a question. “This is sex,” he said.
Noah wheeled along the street, looking for a liquor store. It was a cold night, sharp with every breath. He wasn’t sure now that he wanted to go. He’d bought a coat-hanger angel for the Christmas tree, but he wanted to bring a bottle too. What was the name of that red wine? Well, he’d ask: What could they recommend for under ten? This was the first Christmas party he could remember, besides the elementary school assemblies and office gatherings with cartoned eggnog.
Louise had given him a new red plaid scarf. The wool, when he pulled it up to his mouth, turned wet with a faint rind-edge of cold around the warm.
He had to buy new gloves. He used them up fast; the wheels burned right through. He had certain duties in life, and he’d tended them. He’d found tiny gold earrings, stars for Mary and crescent moons for Jane, and sent them in the mail. He’d woken early to beat the line at the post office. You took numbers now, like in a butcher shop. I’m celebrating Christmas, he’d told himself, waiting his turn. The woman ahead had three stacked boxes releasing a faint cloud of sugar. He liked to think of Jane and Mary opening the brown boxes, not being able to wait, then having the shiny new things to wear. They needed him less now, but he knew Owens would never give the shimmery small luxuries that would make them feel rich for the day.
When he arrived, both the bungalow and Julie’s cottage were brightly lit. Jane was wearing his earrings when she opened the door. The party was here in the cottage, she explained, but she’d take his coat over to the bungalow. Mary’s bed was for coats, and Jane’s room was where they’d put the babies. Noah went with Jane up and down plywood ramps and tossed his coat onto the pile on Mary’s bed.
Back in the cottage, Julie and Mary moved in a frenzy through the kitchen, searching for the nutcracker. Ordinarily frugal, but not tonight, Julie finally sent Peter out for a new one. At this point, if things were lost, they were just buying them; charging, apparently. Looking at Peter, you could see he was the kind of guy who would go and go.
Noah recognized the man in a black-and-white photograph framed on a sideboard. “That’s Niels Carradine. Is he related to somebody here?”
“He’s Julie’s father,” Jane said, as Olivia and Huck joined them. “Isn’t it nice she has all these pictures?”
“Well, I think it’s a little strange,” Olivia said. “They have all these pictures of her father around the house but none of her and Peter.”
Jane wished Owens were here to see how comfortable chairs and sofas made a house.
“Her father’s dead.” Huck shrugged. “She sees Peter every day.”
“Her father was a famous physicist,” Jane added.
“Now, why can’t we live like this,” Mary muttered in the next room, marveling at the vase of flowers.
“Oh, no.” Julie’s voice carried. “We didn’t invite Tim. What do I do now?”
Mary and Julie seemed fonder of each other tonight, gifted with a buoyant humor. They were in this together, and their mutual dependence gave them a sense of invincibility or at least communion. The contours of their individual lives blurred as they opened wine bottles. Bags mounted in the kitchen; an ebullience took hold. They were still cooking, with music on.
When Noah asked if he could help, Mary told him she’d taken Jane riding at a stable in the foothills and that on the bench where the mothers sat she fell into conversation with a woman who knew him.
“I’m trying to think who has a daughter.”
“Oh, no. She was there with her niece.”
Mary looked young to him tonight, her breasts still girl-like in a plain wash-slumped tee shirt, but her mouth was ringed with lines, her chin just beginning to give. He supposed his would, too, soon. The thought of these women, watching their supple-backed, virgin daughters, like beautiful new versions of themselves, just pressing into womanhood, made him feel that he was missing his life.
“Anyway, I invited her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Rachel Gottlieb.”
Just then the aunts arrived, carrying small patent-leather purses and wearing hats. The hostesses tended to them, fighting them out of coats and leading them to the good chairs.
“Isn’t it a magnificent tree,” Amber pronounced.
They enlisted Noah to check the lights for the one bad bulb. To have something to do with his hands was a relief. The tree was by the front window, a bowl of clementines on the table. It was harder to enjoy himself, knowing that Louise was agitated, still working.
“Omigod, what about ice!” Julie called. “Who can we call to bring ice?”
Almost every new person brought an ornament and walked over to put it on the tree. Several people said that the coat-hanger angel was lovely, and Noah hoped that someone tall enough would lift it to the top, where there was no star.
Amber explained that when Julie was a girl, they’d given her an antique angel every year, so when she was eighteen and left home she had this gorgeous collection.
Noah hated this kind of party, where everyone was standing. He was stuck in the sit-down corner with the old aunts.
“That’s a spruce, isn’t it?” Ruby said. “We always have a noble fir.”
“I pruned it today,” Peter offered.
“Pruned it? I’ve never heard of anybody pruning a Christmas tree,” Amber said to Noah. “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
“No,” he said. “I’m Jewish.”
“Well, I never did either,” Amber said. “Bah. Pruning a spruce.”
Across the room, three beautiful girls stood near a wooden bowl of ornaments. Noah felt like Owens, who’d plan out whole parties but then let other people have the fun. During one of his Genesis parties, they’d talked for an hour outside in the parking lot. He suddenly missed Owens, then turned to the old teachers. “I’m going to get a drink. Can I get you something?” Noah asked, thinking how much harder it was to wheel away from someone than to drift off, walking.
“No, no, we’re just fine,” Ruby said, lifting her eyes to the tree.
Noah shoved a window open, leveraged himself up out of his chair onto the ledge, wind riffling his hair. Drinking again, from the bottle, he was in a crazy mood, full of abandon. Then he saw Julie. He hoped she wouldn’t say anything to him about her friend with the O.I. child. This was his daily guilt. Julie
was actually quite pretty, though until now he’d always thought she was too thin. He never would have guessed she was Niels Carradine’s daughter. Niels Carradine was one of the German-Jewish physicists everyone in the generation before Noah envied. Hundreds of guys had become physicists because they wanted to emulate those men. And Carradine died famously young when an ocean liner went down.
“Congratulations,” Julie said, coming towards him. “I hear your discovery’s going to lead to a cure for Alzheimer’s.”
So she knew about his gene. Noah had always tried to stay away from disease, preferring to study fundamental biology. Even so, it now seemed to come down to disease and cure anyway. But since he’d had some success, he minded less. He lifted the bottle to his mouth and threw his head back. For some reason, he wanted her to see him out of his chair like this, drinking.
“How’s motherhood?” Earlier, she’d been carrying her little girl, dressed as an angel, wings made of cotton balls pasted on cardboard.
“Coco’s great. But I don’t know. I still don’t feel like myself again yet.” She laughed. “It’s only been two years.”
“You look like yourself. Better, even.” She’d definitely gained weight. He offered her the bottle and heard himself laughing. With the back of his knuckles he’d touched her chest. Her skin, between the shirt lapels, was warm.
By the tree, someone had persuaded Ruby to take the pins out of her bun, and the hair fell in a coil down past her waist. She and her sister were trying to convince Jane to go into teaching. “You get your summers, a month for Christmas and a sabbatical every seven years so you can travel.”
“Not the most money,” Amber said, with a firm nod, “but the best life.”
“Every seven years?” Jane said. “I’m going to travel more than that!”
Then she and another girl her age started dancing together in a corner, in their tights, shoes kicked off. They looked silly and happy, no different, really, from the kids in the gym, ramming chairs. Don’t change! Noah wanted to call out to them.
“There’s something I have to tell you, Julie. You have a friend whose baby has what I have.” Noah’s hand gestured down at himself.
Julie bent towards him, listening. All of a sudden, the party was still going on around them but they were having a quiet conversation.
“Anyway, she called a long time ago and I never called her back. I’m sorry. I would like to meet the child.”
“I shouldn’t have given her your number without asking you first. I was just … I didn’t know what to say. And I know how hard you’ve been working.”
“No, it wasn’t that. It was me. I’m not big on the crip network.” He laughed his raucous laugh again, but she didn’t smile. “But I’m not proud of it. I’m changing.”
“The girl’s here tonight. Do you want to see her?”
“Yes. And I should talk to her mother later.”
“Follow me.”
Noah left the bottle, now empty, on the ledge and, lowering himself into his chair, rolled after Julie out the back-door ramp, under pines. When they entered the bungalow, Noah noticed animal tracks on the dusty floor. They went through the dim room to Jane’s bedroom, where the nursery was set up. It was dark because the children were sleeping. But soon their eyes adjusted to the orange glow of a night-light. Noah recognized Julie’s daughter, an angel a half hour ago, asleep with her arms above her head.
“There’s the girl,” Julie said.
In a brightly colored plastic fold-up crib, her head turned sideways, the girl slept under a hand-knit blanket. Her breath made a tiny even whistle, like any child’s.
All of a sudden, Noah felt sick. “Excuse me,” he said, rolling back quickly. He moved his chair down the hall to the room where the coats were piled, just to sit still. He shoved the window up so a blast of sharp air came in. He wanted it to stop his reeling. Then Julie came in and sat on the bed. She touched his wrist. “Are you okay? Should I get you some water?”
“I’m a little wasted,” he said.
His arms strong, he swung, landed, wriggled, then they were on the bed together amidst the piled coats.
He was lying on a coat and could feel a button poking him in the back, but his head was still revolving, and before he could twist and move the coat, it was happening—what he’d wanted so long and thought about countless times, but now too soon. “My husband’s over there.” Julie sat up, pushing her soft suede boots off with the fork of her toes. “I’ll shut the door.”
She crossed the room, then returned. He rubbed her heaving back in circles. She turned up in a yawn, knelt over him, her patterned legs on either side, and she was kissing him, and it was not what he’d imagined, but rougher, her tongue sandpaper like a cat’s, and he worried about not knowing how. He tried to do what she did back. She was unbuttoning him, murmuring, and her hand moved on his buckle in the strange gray light.
“Does this hurt?” she whispered.
Her patterned tights bunched at her ankles, an accordioned mural, and he wanted to tell her to wait, he was going too fast. But he felt numb and his body flew ahead, complying without him; it was too late to master himself. Suddenly, a baby cried in the next room, and Julie stiffened. Her head tipped, still. “It’s not mine,” she said. He saw her leg, where the thigh joined, and it was like the pictures he’d seen all his life, and a noise leapt out of his chest, a long pulled rickety chain.
He felt bruised, sensitive. She arched her head back, beautiful, so he could see her neck. They were still on top of the coats. A piece of her hair was in his mouth. The baby was screaming now.
“I’d better go,” she said. She sat on the edge of the bed and lifted her legs, one at a time, toes pointing, to pull up her tights.
“Wait,” he said.
She put a finger to his lips. “Shhh. Thank you.” Then she kissed his forehead, and after she left he felt a weight there, like a coin.
What he’d wanted to say was that she had to help him down. Now he’d have to slide or wait for someone to come in. Once, he was left out on a blanket in the sun, grass pricking through the thin wool and the low world buzzing around him. That was his first memory of being stopped. He also waited in hallways, in rooms. People said, “Just wait here, I’ll be right back.” He was stationary. But he hadn’t lived that way. He was an early crawler.
He tossed his clothes down to the floor first, then slid off slowly, hanging on to the little white tassels on the edge of the bedspread. When he came out of the room, Rachel was walking towards him, dressed up, her mouth dark with lipstick. She knew something was wrong, because she looked down when he said hello. He felt moved by her trying to look pretty; and sorry: Rachel was just arriving, and he was leaving.
Rolling down the sidewalk, he thought of the world outside that was never Christmas. On Main Street the homeless shuffled with their cups; the hospital at the end was always open and every night the same. Louise was probably fierce in a fit of calculation, mad because she hadn’t gone and now the party was over.
Years from now, he thought, Julie would listen for his name. They would be part of a secret network of kindness, watching for each other in silent ways. She knew, wild as he’d been on the windowsill with the long green bottle, that he was losing his virginity to her on top of the coats. She had been with him as if she were unwrapping a package.
He went not home but to the lab. Louise was still there, sternly working. She pretended not to notice when he came in.
“We’ve got to talk,” he said.
“About what?”
“You know what.”
And they began. It took a long time, and then, from the lab door, which he’d locked, came an insistent knocking. Louise stood up to see. “Leave it,” Noah ordered. “Who is that?”
“Never mind.”
“I know anyway.” And then she sighed, and like a dutiful child raised up her arms and pulled off her tee shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
“You’re just doing this because of Rache
l. What do you really want?”
“Enough, I think.”
He was afraid to ask more.
She was also frightened. “I don’t want to lie. I mean, this isn’t like it was with Andy. But it’s some things that wasn’t. It’s different.”
“That’s good enough for me. But you need to decide if it’ll be enough for you.”
She awkwardly bent down to kiss him, there at the drosophila station, cradling her bare, cold breasts in her arms.
“What would you want if you could have one thing?” she asked.
“For years, like I told you, all I wanted was to walk. It wouldn’t be that anymore.”
“What is it now?”
“Same as you. To be a scientist.”
But that was a lie, too, an old truth that had stopped being true only a few hours earlier. Julie’s act of curiosity and charity, a proof of her own wildness and the variety of life, had brought back a linked train of a thousand memories. Noah loved to be touched. All he wanted now was Louise and love.
Later, Rachel slipped a long, painstaking letter under the lab door. Louise, as she left at dawn, marked the white envelope with her high heel.
To the Moon
“Ordinary civilians will be going to the moon in our lifetime,” Owens said, standing on the back porch, looking up at the night sky. “They’ve actually got a list at NASA, and I’m on it. I had the chance to sign up a few years ago. I put down myself and my wife.”
“And who will that be?” Jane asked.
He shrugged. “You can probably come along.”
“No, thanks. I’ll be in college.”
Who would get to be his wife was the eternal question of Jane’s childhood. Spanning the years, it had yielded a good deal of pleasure, as she and her mother pondered why and why not Olivia. To both of them, it had seemed like a long talent search.