“Okay,” he said. “Talk.”
“Why are you here? What do you want?”
He smiled and kissed her fondly on the mouth and through the kiss he is to have said, “I want you to be quiet and let me fuck you.”
And she was grateful, so she did. He slipped both his hands under her ass and lifted her, mounting her bare back against this very spot. Her legs bowed around him. She braced herself against his thick shoulders and he rocked into her. She let herself believe that this could be a beginning rather than an end. That this was them. Then she stopped thinking altogether. When he came he made the same quick half breaths he always did. He slackened and they slid slowly down the wall, their limbs loosely threaded together. They were unmoving and sweat-slick, his head resting on her chest. A car drove by, its tires sluicing cleanly through the rainwater. By then it felt natural not to say the thing that needed saying.
A third, positioned unobtrusively near the unmade bed:
The End (3 of 3). Afterward, he carried her to bed. Before they slept, she got up and nodded toward the fire escape. “I think I’ll have a cigarette,” she said. Without looking at her he said, “I quit, actually.”
Just before dawn she woke to the sound of Ezra gathering his clothes from the hallway. Already she could feel two sore spots like crab apples above her ass where he’d worked her hips against the wall. (See placard two.)
She said nothing. Once he was dressed he sat on the edge of the bed beside her. “I know you’re awake,” he said. She did not move. He rubbed the soft place behind her ear with his thumb. “I love you,” he said, and though she knew it was true she kept her eyes closed and said, “Don’t say that.” She did not want to allow that love could be so fearful and meager and misshapen. He left, and she did not try to stop him. She was through trying to stop him. She had been trying to stop him since the day they met.
That afternoon—after I’d abandoned poor Liam—Carly called me four times. I ignored her. I walked around my apartment, lightly touching the artifacts Ezra left behind in the year we were together. They were pathetic and few: a bag of white tea gone stale, a screwdriver we meant to use to fix a window screen but never did, some books, a toothbrush I bought him. I decided I would preserve these just as he’d left them, convert my apartment into the Museum of Love Lost. I envisioned other exhibits. An installation of all the clever, evasive text messages he ever sent me, a replica of the bar where we met, handmade dioramas of our finest outings. That night I woke to the sensation of the bedsheets against my nipples. In the dark I saw our happiest moments in miniature.
Here we are in my bedroom, just come home from a concert. We are made of clay and our limp limbs are clandestinely pinned in place with toothpicks. We’ve been to see a band whose music was frantic and heartsick and whose lead looked so much older than the last time either of us had seen them that we couldn’t help but grow a little older ourselves as we listened.
Dawn is pressing lightly to the cellophane window beside the bed. My yarn hair is tangled, and if you look closely you can see a slight sweat sheen on us both. I am lying on my back on the handkerchief bedspread, wearing tall red heels that have been hurting my feet. They are Barbie shoes painted with careful strokes of ruby nail polish. Ezra sits at the foot of the bed with my foot in his lap. He is bent over, unclasping the tiny-toothed buckle at my ankle. When he is finished with this shoe he’ll remove the other, then run a finger softly over the place where that strap cut into my ankle. His hands will cup the belly of my calf, make their way up underneath my dress. We’ll make love. Afterward he’ll say, I know I’m a pain in the ass. I’m sorry. I’ll kiss his chest and say, Tell me you’ll be true. I can’t, he’ll say. You know that. But in the diorama he hasn’t said this yet. In the diorama we are frozen, his head bent, his sweet mouth gathered in concentration, his ossified clay fingers fumbling softly at my aluminum-foil buckle. I call it Man Removes Shoe.
In this one, we are papier-mâché in a restaurant alongside the Truckee. We sit at a dollhouse table on a Popsicle-stick patio stretching over a river of blue and green tissue paper, its crinkled rapids daubed white with foam. A shapely decanter of red wine stands in the center of the table, near empty. We have ordered a meal consisting entirely of appetizers. See the card-stock plates crowding the table. See the remnants of colored-pencil anchovies, prosciutto, bruschetta, oysters, soft white cheese coated with candied nuts, a gutted half round of once-warm bread. We smoke cigarettes rolled from wisps of cotton, and his fingers are sunk deep into my hair of soft felt. He is openmouthed, laughing that laugh of laughs. I am thinking, I would do anything to make you laugh. I call it Us at Our Best.
I hadn’t talked to Ezra in six weeks, and I hadn’t had my period in at least eight. I took a test, then another. I called Carly.
When I told her she said, “That’s fantastic!” and meant it.
I said, “Go fuck yourself.”
When Carly came over that night I was in the bathtub and had been for some time. She set the Miracle on the floor. The turnip sprout was ornamented with a blue velvet bow that perfectly matched her blue velvet dress.
I handed the Miracle the cardboard core of a toilet paper roll, which she accepted grudgingly and inserted into her mouth. “Is that her birthday outfit?” I asked, though I knew it was. I’d been at the party.
Carly said, “Have you told him yet?”
“Please don’t start in on me.”
“You need to.”
“Why? I know exactly how it’s going to go: ‘We fucked up.’ ‘Oops. Here’s four hundred dollars.’”
“He won’t say that. He’s a good person.”
“No, he’s not. And I know you know that.” I reached for a peanut butter cup. “You should be ashamed of yourself, contributing to the romantic delusions of an unmarried woman with child.”
She leaned down and placed her hand under the Miracle’s chin. She said, “May I have that?” The baby allowed a wet shred of cardboard pulp to drop from her mouth to her mother’s palm. Carly said, “Thank you,” and the Miracle said, “Thank you!” Carly recrossed her legs and looked around.
“No wine tonight,” she said. “No cigarettes. No pot. That’s a good sign.”
“It doesn’t mean what you think.”
“Tell him first, Nat. It’s the right thing to do.”
I sat up in the tub and extended my hand to my niece. I wanted her to grab hold of my index finger, wield for me some of that heartening babystrength. I wiggled my fingers at her. She regarded my hand and went on gnawing the tube, perturbed. The Miracle has dignity bordering on cruelty.
“I’m waiting,” I said.
“For what?” asked Carly.
I eased back into the water. “I want there to be something else to say.”
I used to tell Ezra that I knew no man’s touch before his, that I was conjured up on this Earth for him, my virgin flesh materializing among the video poker machines in the back of that bar on Fourth in the same heavenly instant he walked through the door. We used to laugh about this. But before Ezra there was Sam. Poor, good Sam.
Sam and I once had a baby, technically. He wanted to have it and I didn’t. Sam said he would support me, whatever I decided, which he did. Of course he did. This was maybe three months before I met Ezra and left Sam for him.