“How did it go?” Ana would ask, watching him vibrating with eagerness to tell her what had happened to him and what she had missed with her early-to-bed rhythm, her morning-person status.
“Excellent,” he’d grin, his tongue broad with drink. “I got right to the front around midnight.”
James would wear the shirt to cut through the crowd, calling: “Excuse me, excuse me! Paramedic coming through! Medical! Injured woman!” He did this when the lights were low, timing it perfectly so the music was just beginning, and the crowd was distracted but not drunk enough to be ugly. Oh, man, it was miraculous: The fans parted for this compassionate professional.
Ana was charmed when she heard the story the first time, and laughed. But later, she came to identify the gag as a piece of a bigger problem. James got older, but his great sense of entitlement stayed around: the stacks of unpaid parking tickets; his clear conscience over buying a shirt, wearing it, and then returning it to the store a day later. He had many theories, rationalizations about Dada and culture jamming and upending a system that was inherently disadvantageous to … well, not him, maybe, but people who didn’t even recognize they were disadvantaged. Somehow, it was his duty to get the best of the world. After a while, Ana tuned out that particular strain of James, the yammering of the kid from the suburbs justifying why his hand was reaching for the last piece of cake.
But back in the beginning, it intoxicated her to be with someone who handled everything, everyone. This was new to Ana, who had paid her mother’s bills at nine, worked after school at the doughnut shop at thirteen, wiping the drink fridge clean of broken juice bottle shards and bugs entombed in gelatinous substances.
In the beginning, she wanted to curl up inside James’s certainty. She loved him, she loved him, and how he fell into bed next to her those late nights. His slick skin, sweat and beer. The lean muscle of his thigh flung open on the sheets. She pulled him closer in his paramedic shirt.
From the window, Ana watched James outside in the yard. He stared up at the darkening sky, which was much too light for stars. But she took note of the fact that he looked anyway. He was hopeful. She felt something shift inside her, as if, to make room for all this love, she would have to rearrange her insides. James was gigantic that way. When she wanted him, she wanted all of him. When she didn’t, he felt murderous, unstoppable. A superhero gone mad on a busy downtown street. It had been a while, Ana realized, since she had experienced the scope of her love.
Not wanting to linger on this absence, she turned to her vegetables. While James showered, Ana walked through the house, placing small glass pots of candles on the mantel, on ledges. She turned down the lights, put a single bloodred gerbera in a white vase in the center of the table. Her hand moved across the place mats and linen napkins. In the living room, as she half lowered the blinds, a man walked by, his hair softly blowing, his spine curved, hands in pockets. He looked up, and their eyes locked. Ana marveled that while he was a grown man, he was still far too young for her to romance, to have sex with, even to know. At thirty-nine, she was too old not just for boys but for full-fledged adults. A male temp at work had called her “ma’am” the other day.
But Ana knew also how she looked through the window: “good for her age.” Attempting a moment of private flipness, she thought: My body has not been ruined by childbirth. She savored it, then abandoned the thought as too cruel.
Ana turned her head to a flattering angle, but when she glanced sideways, the man had already walked on. All she could see was concrete and an old oak tree that threw moving shadows across the line of parked cars.
The baby was in a blue-checked sling across Sarah’s body like something worn by a contestant in a beauty pageant.
“Hands-free,” Sarah joked, waving her glass of wine. The baby nursed covertly. Only the extra crescent of Sarah’s pale chest peeking out of the sling confirmed to everyone in the room that there was a naked breast close by, and a mouth upon it. Each discomfort provoked by this was unique to its owner.
It had grown late, but Ana did not want them to leave. These dinners, which Sarah and Marcus protested over in the beginning, had become regular Friday night gatherings, always at Ana and James’s house, with the excuse that they were all working together to break Sarah’s maternal isolation. Sarah complained about the “mommy circuit,” as she called it. She liked to mock the neighborhood mothers with their fear of strangling stroller straps and sudden infant death syndrome and uneducational toys. They bored her. She described a kind of narrowing that happens to women when they have children, a trivializing. Ana listened, rapt, to the traveler returned with her tales. She had a colleague, Elspeth, with secret children. She hid them away from the men in the firm, like Jews in attics. Occasionally she confided in Ana, usually when complaining about the nannies.
But the mothers Sarah knew existed entirely in public. They met in the daylight in coffee shops and at baby yoga classes, speaking of nothing but their children. The mothers had left their jobs and were shrinking, hunkering down, backing into their stalls. At first, during these litanies, James cast concerned glances at Ana that she could feel, though she refused to meet his eye.
“I like it,” she told him later. “Sarah knows about us. I like that she doesn’t treat me like an outsider.” And so he was relieved to be able to enjoy it, too, this refracted life that might have been theirs (that might still be theirs, she reminded herself).
Tonight, Marcus and James were talking about Jesus. James had recently finished a segment for his show about a new church that gathered in movie theaters downtown. James was bulimic when in possession of fresh information; as soon as it came in, it had to come out.
“Jesus is back in vogue. These kids relate to Jesus like he’s straight out of Japanese anime.”
“Yes, but at the end of the day, you have to see it as completely fictional, right? You can enjoy the fairy tale, but it’s sad, isn’t it, to see grown people subscribing?” asked Marcus, in his question mark–inflected way. James’s own sentences were stubby and leached of doubt.
“And dangerous,” added Sarah. “I had a horrible incident in my class just before the baby. I was hugely pregnant and I actually told a student: ‘You can wear your hijab in here, but know that it changes nothing about your fate.’ ”
“Wow,” said Ana. James laughed, slapping his knee.
“I was so hormonal!” said Sarah. “But this girl is impudent, truly. She’s a total bitch. She makes fun of nerds.”
“Is she popular?” asked Ana. These were the only terms through which she could understand high schooclass="underline" popular and unpopular. When her mother had settled them down long enough, Ana had often been popular and felt guilty for it.
Sarah didn’t answer, because James had moved into the space. “Diehard secularism is just as dangerous as institutionalized religion.” Ana knew this speech. “Secularism becomes religious, then you have Stalinism, all the iconography of religious faith in a secular package.”
“What are you saying?” Marcus was smiling, always smiling. This placidity was broken only by a small, angry scar below his lower lip in the shape of check mark, a hint of past violence. He seemed to take great pleasure in James, which surprised Ana, and was a relief to her, too. James’s verbal girth had become less appealing to people over the years. Ana didn’t say this to Sarah. She didn’t want to draw attention to her petty worries. She was sure that the smallness of her inner life would appall Sarah, that this was not how Sarah wanted to think of her new friends. She often got Ana to talk about her life with her mother, her itinerant upbringing among the downtown artists and drunks. These stories made Sarah red with excitement, and they woke up Ana, too. She felt breathless sometimes to talk about herself in this way, as if she were recounting the racy chapters in a book she had read. But there were details Ana would not share, because she knew they would sour the bohemian fantasy. She didn’t tell Sarah about the famous blues musician who breathed cigarette smoke onto her hair and ran a finger under the collar of her sweatshirt when she was eleven years old, stopping there only because her mother entered the kitchen. That time, her mother did something: She slapped his hand away. A week later, they moved again.