The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Please, Drew Barrymore, don't do a dating reality show! Plus: Christmas at 30 Rock, another Gossip Girl couple, and since when is Elisha Cuthbert 'sloppy seconds'?
The Orphan's Christmas Party was in the East Village. Chili-pepper lights encircled the windows and the refrigerator was filled with beer. All the furniture was pushed back to the wall and there were sagging bodega roses around in coffee cups. About a dozen people had already arrived, all younger than her, and mostly women who worked at the production company with her husband. Her husband got her a glass of seltzer, and they leaned on the window casement and talked about the baby.
He liked the goofy expression the baby made when he was angry and how much he
loved that one leaf on the ivy plant in the living room. How he'd suck on anything,
a dirty T-shirt, the side of a cereal box. As he talked, his eyes followed a
young woman in leather pants around the party. You've been so freaked out
lately.
I
wish you could be mellower. She could tell by the way he moved his hand
around
that he was getting drunk. The God stuff, you know that's a bunch of bullshit.
A guy that her husband used to know came up and he talked about
how happy he was not to be at his mother's condo in Florida. He wore a porkpie
hat and a Kraftwerk T-shirt. It
was so depressing down there with all the old people. A tall girl joined
them, introducing herself as China. Thank
the Lord, I don't have to go to Memphis. My father is so Republican and my mother
is a Zoloft zombie. Mary's husband smiled widely. Mary looked around at
people gathering on the couches and chairs. Most had dressed up; a girl wore
silver
eyelashes,
and
one
of the
guys had on a tuxedo jacket. The Christmas tree was decorated with matchbooks,
and below the tree the ceramic crèche was painted with garish colors.
The Wise Men were kitsch of the highest order, situated between a lawn flamingo
and a ceramic bust of Elvis.
The girl in the leather pants came out of the kitchen carrying a drink and her husband began again to follow her with his eyes. Mary felt her ears ringing and, though she didn't have to, she said she had to pee.
She remembered that it was the night people wait for the birth of the uberbaby.
Inside the bathroom, the porcelain was white as bone and the shower curtain covered with tiny black skulls. Someone had left a half-cup off eggnog on the sink and she remembered that it was the night people wait for the birth of the uberbaby. Her own labor was stitched into her mind. The pain made her penetrable — air, light, noise; all these moved through her. Blood, mixed with amniotic fluid and scented like seaweed, had run down her legs as she bore down and felt her pelvis opening, her consciousness as if it made from paper, ripping in two. Somebody knocked on the door; she flushed the toilet for effect and ran the faucet.
When she got back her husband was talking to a girl with a
choker, whom he introduced as Sonya. The music was louder now, so Mary had to
yell to be heard. Sonya said her mom was in Saint Bart's with her boyfriend and
her father was with his third wife up in Westchester. She rolled her eyes and
pointed out that the expression on the Virgin Mary's face was like a porn star's.
Mary's husband stared at the band of black leather around Sonya's neck and her
small well-delineated breasts under her tight T-shirt.
It's so weird you have a baby, she kept saying. Mary felt her breasts swell with milk. I mean, I could never handle a baby. A baby. God, that would totally freak me out.
The lamp was on in John's apartment. An orb of light fell over his table, but he wasn't sitting in his chair and he wasn't sleeping on his futon either. Cold bit into the tips of her hands, and she took her fingers off the iron fence and sunk them into her pockets. Tinsel was woven into the snow sloped against the brownstone, and there was a wreath, with a red ribbon, on his door.
"Are you waiting for me?"
She spun around, and there he was with a swing bag of groceries
hanging from his right hand. His head was bare and a puff of steam dispersed
before his lips.
"I can only stay a minute," she said, waiting for him to unlock his front door. Inside he nodded to the chairs by the table and went into the kitchen. Mary heard the sound of crinkling plastic as he put away the groceries. He'd bought himself a few things for Christmas, a pumpkin pie and a rotisserie chicken. She laid her coat on the bed and sat at the wood table; she read the word "aniseikonia" in his journal and the definition — "when one eye sees an object as bigger than the other."
"You look nice," he said as he carried in the teacups and the bottle of brandy.
"I was out at a party," she said. She watched him settle into his chair and lay down a stack of napkins.
He was wearing a blue sweater with holes at the elbows and his face carried a flush of cold. He looked at her intently.
"I'm sorry about yesterday."
"I makes a lot of people uncomfortable," Mary said.
"It's not that," he said, walking over to the mantel and picking up a snapshot. He handed her the photo. "You see," he said, "I almost had a family."
The photo was faded, curled at the edges. A woman in a calico
dress smiled at the camera. She wore feather earrings and her stomach was huge. "It
happened twenty-four years ago. I got the call right around dinnertime. My wife
had pulled off the highway to help a lady with a flat tire. But it was foggy
and a truck hit her while she walked along the shoulder."
"I'm sorry," Mary said as she stared at the photo. The woman
held one hand under her stomach and one hand on top, displaying the pregnant
belly. Her pale hair hung around her face, and her lips were open as if she were
about to speak. Mary handed the photo back and he slipped it inside the pages
of his notebook. He sat very still and stared down at the gold liquid in his
cup.
Mary moved her hand across the wood and touched his fingers,
and he leaned forward and kissed her mouth. His lips were not food exactly, but
just as sustaining, and she opened her mouth and his tongue came inside all delicate
flickers and so much more lively and nuanced than she would have anticipated.
Hadn't
she been a good person? Hadn't she sold Girl Scout cookies?
she thought as she moved between his legs.
Everything was going pretty well except that she felt bad about his dead wife and baby. Felt bad for crack addicts, bad about the Middle East, bad that people got operations they didn't need because of the American medical machine. But then she opened her eyes and every object seemed as delicately constructed as the baby's loose tummy. Everything had soft bones configured into beautiful skeletal patterns; she was just a fragment of the world seeking another fragment. He came around to Mary's side of the table and turned off the lamp and picked her up and carried her to his futon.
Light from the window made a little shadow-puppet theater of
snow coming down on the wall above them. He said into her hair, It's
been a really long time. And she tugged at his belt and helped him pull
down his pants; boxers over skinny white legs. She yanked off her tights and
lay back in her bra. Her nursing bra, which was wide and puffy. She wasn't sure
if she wanted to take it off. Her breasts might leak.
A couple walked by on the street talking. She remembered the
baby; her breasts were so tight she knew he'd need to nurse soon. But John was
kissing her neck, all down the raised tendons and on the soft skin between, and
she began to feel his cock defining itself, like a little god, against her thigh.
Hadn't she been a good person? Hadn't she sold Girl Scout cookies and collected
every Halloween for UNICEF? Didn't she recycle? she thought as she moved between
his legs and set her tongue against his delicate circumcised V. Tasting the first
bit of come, musty, green, she closed her mouth and sucked as if his cock were
a tiny breast, and she slid her tongue inside the slit at the tip and tasted
salt; and there began the slow descent into the animal kingdom where the halos
around streetlights seemed to be singing, and she remembered how, when the baby's
head first appeared between her legs, she'd felt for a moment like a circus freak.
She put her hand between his thighs, traced her fingers over
his balls, then reached into the crack of his ass and pressed her pointer finger
against his anus and she wanted butterflies to gather in a heap on her abdomen
and the ice teaspoon to spill its dirt. She needed soil for the garden and the
rose trestle and the
He strained his head up, took her nipple into his mouth.
little lamb who recited French poetry. He pulled her up to his face, and Mary
rocked her pelvis against his and looked up at the tiny black shadows falling
down over the wall and over his features; his face was wet. Water trickled out
of the edges of his eyes. Mary rolled on top of him, and they kissed until his
cock dug into her stomach. She reached back and unlatched her bra; her breasts
fell forward, heavy as water balloons. The sensation made his eyes jump open
and he strained his head up, took her nipple into his mouth. His brow furrowed
and his features compressed with intense pleasure at the taste of her milk.
When she finally got home her husband still wasn't there, and she paid the sitter
and walked to where the baby slept. He'd kicked the blanket off and she pulled
it up to his chin. She turned the Christmas tree lights on in the front room
and sat down in the blue chair. The lights illuminated the pine needles and tinsel.
She saw the silver church with the snow on the roof and the miniature present
wrapped in green paper and the painted rocking horse and the crocheted snowflakes
and the little silver bell; and she watched snow fall into the dark alley and
brush against the window.
Walter always said that the chief thing that separates us from
God is the thought that we are separate from him. But really, at the moment,
that sounded to her like a bunch of bullshit. She walked down the hall and swung
open the closet door. On the floor was a box filled with shoes, her mother's
house slippers mixed with sneakers and vinyl thrift-store boots. The mop lay
in the
bucket beside a lampshade and a bag of old videos.
She kneeled down. The sleeve of her ratty wool coat brushed
her forehead. Inside her coat pocket was a half-sucked cough drop. Inside the
cough drop were atoms, and she knew that atoms, like flowers, had individual
parts, protons and neutrons. Mary pressed her palms against each other and squeezed
her eyes shut. The world was on the edge of revolution, pregnant with a different
kind of life. n°
Darcey Steinke is the author of three previous novels, two of which were
New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her novel Suicide
Blonde has been translated into eight languages. Her short fiction has
appeared in the Literary Review, Story, and Bomb, and
her nonfiction has been featured in the Washington Post, the
Chicago Tribune, the Village Voice, Spin, and the
New York Times Magazine. Her Web project, Blindspot, was
included in the Whitney Museum's 2000 Biennial. She currently teaches at New
School University in New York City and lives with her daughter in Brooklyn.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
