“Party’s over,” he said. His jacket was mottled with cake stains, and his hair was stiff in places with icing. She reached out and brushed her hand through it. Past him she could see people still dancing and drinking. A section of tables had been cleared away to make room for a soccer game, organized by Jarvis.
“Can we leave now?” she asked him. He straightened up and offered her his arm, and they proceeded to their wedding buggy. It was just a fancy wooden cart, built to roll down the ramp like an oversized pinewood-derby racer, but much slower. Pickie Beecher had begged for and received the job of coachman. He looked the part, in his old-fashioned suit, a tall faux-beaver hat on his bald head. People threw flower petals and glitter as they climbed in, and as they rode slowly down the ramp, Pickie carefully steering around people and tables and the odd photographer who jumped into their path to take a picture. Jemma waved and smiled, caught glitter and petals and threw them back. “I’m so tired!” she called out.
On the fourth floor they got out and walked the rest of the way to the call room. Jemma had quashed a movement to install them in a suite, and was glad now that she had, because this was almost like coming home, enough like it to be nice, and enough unlike it to be bearable. Rob opened the door and they held hands as they jumped through sideways — Jemma had not wished to be carried in. “How tired is tired?” Rob asked her.
“Not that tired,” she said. She liked undressing him out of fancy clothes, how smoothly the jacket slid back from his shoulders, how the bow tie came undone with one pull, how she had to reach around his back to undo the cummerbund. His shoes popped off with hardly any effort, and she could pull off the silk socks just by pinching them at the toe and drawing back her arm. His pants fell in a pool at his feet once she unbuttoned them, unzipped his fly, and pushed back his suspenders. She pulled his undershirt off his head and undid the buttons on his fancy underwear, only having to push a little to make them fall on top of the pants. She took his hands and pulled him forward; in two steps he was free of everything. Still in her whole outfit, she put her arms around his waist and her face in his shoulder. He smelled of cake.
Jemma had been thinking about this night, and considering different ways to make it special, had almost asked the angel to make them a pill that would make them forget they had ever had sex before, so they would approach each other as if for the first time. But she worried about the baby, and the whole thing seemed like something only the very bored and desperate would do. She didn’t even mention it to Rob. There was something very nice about it, though, even without any special additions or considerations. When they knocked their wedding bands together it was oddly sensual, after all, and their mutual fatigue led to a new thing. He stretched out behind her, and they held their hands together above their heads, and moved less and less until they had both fallen asleep. Then Jemma dreamed of the evening that had just passed, and saw again the march down the ramp from the second floor, and the various choirs performing, and the tumblers, and the speeches, some dull, some not, given by various citizens and Council members. She saw Father Jane and John Grampus pronounce them wife and wife and husband and husband, and friend and friend, and family all together. But all these things were flavored and interrupted by furious little bouts of sex. No one seemed to mind it. No one looked away when they took a break during the vows for a few urgent thrusts. In fact Father Jane leaned over and whispered to Rob that he ought to bite her ear, teaching him by example how to muffle his teeth with his lips.
The long procession up the ramp to the roof was punctuated with thrusts delivered and received in every conceivable position, a few requiring support from bystanders. Upstairs it continued through the first, second, and third toasts. They did it while they danced, breaking apart to spin all the way across the dance floor, bowing to each other from afar, and then rushing back together for more mad coupling in the middle of a clapping circle of guests. They did it under the fireworks, and by the cake, and in the cake, Ishmael in the dream being entirely sober. He watched them from the same table from which Jemma had watched him.
In the cake, amid the odor of cake, they finished together, and the new thing was not a dream of sex after sex — Jemma had had those before — but when they woke together, crying out together, and discovered that the dream had been made real. In the dream your cry turns to a long stream of cake that flies from your mouth and spells words — oh! oh! oh! — in the air, and you feel the whole hospital trembling underneath you, and all the little cake people feel it, too, and roll on the ground in an agony of pleasure until they melt. Then you feel Rob pressing his chest into your back, and he squeezes you with an arm thrown just north of the swell in your belly, and you feel his panting breath against your shoulder, and his nose scraping across your wet neck. You lie there a moment more, both fully awake now, and then you scramble away from him, and sit up as he scrambles away from you, falling half out of the bed. You look at him in the dim light. He wipes his nose and sniffs, blue eyes still wide with surprise, and somehow it seems not unusual at all to have shared a dream with this person, and even the content of the dream seems usual — of course everyone does a little poking all through the wedding ceremony, everybody except for the terribly backward Amish and the grimmest of Orthodox Jews, and what is a wedding cake for except to fuck in? Every groom stands behind his bride in the wedding buggy, thrusting his hips and cracking a horsewhip in the air, but does anyone, has anyone before, and will anyone ever again, wake in the middle of their wedding night and look at their new husband and be so utterly astonished by love?
51
I am not supposed to use my imagination.
I am not supposed to write better lives for them, or even different lives for them. I watch, and I listen, and everything is recorded, and nothing is lost. This is the Book of the King’s Daughter, and do you see it is not written but lived.
Once it was my gift and my curse, to remake the whole world. Not anymore.
52
Rob Dickens was asleep beside Jemma, one arm under her and the other thrown over his eyes, one leg straight and the other bent with the knee raised toward the ceiling. It was the attitude of a man just resting and not actually asleep, but he really was asleep. He was dreaming of dolphins. In an orange suit of scales and a pair of green gloves and green panties he rode a pair of them, a foot on either back and the double-bridle in his left hand, sending telepathic inquiries out into an empty sea, asking, Is anybody out there?
Outside Kidney paused at the door to mark it with a giant invisible K before continuing on her way. Some days she woke up feeling like something bad was going to happen and so she proceeded through the hospital marking the doors of everybody she liked because she hoped it would keep them from harm, though lately her apprehension has always been groundless, and she never has saved anyone from a bad thing by marking the door with her letter. How many K’s had she drawn on the front door at home? Still a body has to try, she told herself, and did the hopscotch pattern in the carpet before she entered the crèche, where nurses in white robes were feeding the babies or singing to the babies or playing with the babies. She hopped and skipped, now working a pattern only she could see, toward Anna, who was playing a recorder over a crib. “Let me hold one,” she told her. Inside the crib the King’s Daughter sucked on her fist, kicked her feet, and listened not to the recorder but to the plaintive sighs of the drowned.