Two sounds follow: a snap of fabric, like someone quickly shrugging on a jacket, and a crack, like someone cracking their knuckles.
Arthur stands cupping his face.
Enjoy, the man says, and clomps with his friend out of the row — perhaps not as gracefully as they might have liked — and down the aisle. One takes a bow before banging open the double doors.
Arthur sits.
Here, Penelope says, let me help. She digs in her purse, for what she doesn’t know. Her words come out hollow, like she is acting them out. She can feel everyone’s attention on them. She urges him to go. Arthur is bleeding; she can see the glistening down his lip on his chin and neck. His nose is swollen; even in the dark she can see this. They need to go to a hospital.
But he refuses. He wads her scarf, which she has handed him, and puts it in front of his mouth and faces the screen with wet eyes. I just want to finish watching this movie. Okay?
That was Arthur. He wore his hair long in those days. It was wavy and hid half of his face, while the rest was tucked behind one of his large ears. He was pretty, even in his unshaved scruff, and the crush Penelope had on Arthur had about it the crush for a girlfriend, a crush of envy — what she wouldn’t do to have that jawline, those eyes, those thick natural curls! His nose never healed correctly after the punch. She tried getting him to go to Health Services for it, but he refused. What’s done is done, he’d said. It went from a nauseating gray that first night, to olive, to jaundice. The swelling of course receded, but it was still bent oddly, and a knot under the skin at the bridge remained. Penelope thought of it as her nose. Its new shape marked the beginnings of their lives together. She would touch it sometimes and shiver.
The way he towered over her. She was reminded of a school trip to a farm, the way she felt putting her twelve-year-old hand on the flank of a horse. The damp hair, the shiver and twitch of that muscle’s power beneath her hand, a synchronous twitch in her own groin. This moment formed the basis of her early sexual fantasies. She wasn’t one of those horse girls who read Misty of Chincoteague and collected Breyer models; she had girls in her grade, in art class they drew nothing but horses, at lunch they carried their horse lunch boxes and horse backpacks, in their rooms they papered their walls with horse posters. Penelope made fun of those girls. Hers wasn’t an interest in horses, or even this horse per se, but rather this particular moment in this particular stable, with the brute feel of horseness in general. It was a small grain of shame that she worried over and returned to until her interest in boys replaced it, and she later learned somewhere, overheard from someone once at a party, that this was a common girlhood phenomenon, and when she felt Arthur hovering just over her, or when being drawn into the power of his writing, she felt that old twitch. He shared that equine contradiction of beastly and pretty — the beautiful monster — blind trampling power of hoof at the end of each slender, precarious leg. She liked to think of Arthur as a green stallion, barely broken, the one the ranchers called her crazy for even bothering with. He was wild; he had fire and terror in his eyes.
Arthur was an infuriating kind of ecstasy. As the baby of the family, Penelope had always been cooed at and coddled, showered with encouragement. And even though in time Penelope came to understand that much of this attention was a form of condescension, she nonetheless grew up with a healthy sense of self and an expectation from a loved one of a certain amount of coo. So Arthur was a rude awakening. His affections were sporadic, unpredictable. He had the ability to undo her with a single word. With Arthur, she became a wallflower and found herself craning toward any glimmer of affection as though her survival depended on it. Her brother, never known for pulling punches, had told her she could have done a lot better. She had the goods. She knew this about herself, and even without her own esteem there was proof in the stares she got, not to mention the offers. Stopped on the street or alone in a café. Even pregnant, even afterward with her postpartum paunch. They just couldn’t help themselves, they would say. Then how was it Arthur could? The one person from whom it mattered. Cruel irony! And this indifference, these surprise attacks of affection and long stretches in anticipation of affection, made her hypersensitive to Arthur’s needs, quick to compliment him on the simplest accomplishment, quick to come to his defense.
They honeymooned — she eight months pregnant — in her parents’ timeshare in Maine, an A-frame cabin with a wood-burning stove and a steep set of steps that led from the deck to the clear blue lake the cabin overlooked. They drank water out of a well and shat in a shack without a door into a hole onto which they’d sprinkle lye from a bucket when they were done. A Boston whaler and a kayak tapped against the dock, a reassuring sound at night that lulled them to sleep.
She came home to their brand-new empty apartment in Queens fully invested in her brand-new life. She indulged her role as wife, unpacking the registry gifts that were waiting for them, setting them away in the cupboards, in the sideboard, in the closet. It was a fairy tale, and she indulged it. She was never one to play house or dream about weddings. Her childhood was spent in tomboy competition with older boys, proclaiming her disdain for all things girlie. Girlishness, when it came in her late teens, was about dress up — black lace and black eyeliner, an ironic subscription to Cosmo—but now she saw what she’d been missing out on. Playing house was fun! She enlisted her mother’s help, which her mother was thrilled to offer.
And in this way, maternity was a kind of surrender, too. A giving in. She relinquished her body to this being inside her and found the rest of her following suit. This was uncharted territory. She was vulnerable and in need of help. Wasn’t there something thrilling in this life she suddenly found herself in? Something oddly transgressive? In the kitchen, pregnant, barefoot? So this was the thrill her mother got out of her winning jello molds and Tupperware parties. And finally her surrender to Arthur. She tried out different cocktails on him: sidecars and martinis and sours — when he came home after a full day at work — and sipped her virgin versions of them, gauging his reaction. She cooked for him and was thrilled when he asked for seconds, hurt when he didn’t. She washed his socks and his boxers and his T-shirts and his sweats and folded everything neatly into the dresser drawers for him to discover and marvel at, gratefully. She was grateful for his gratitude. This was the idyll of newlyweds Arthur and Penelope.
Her brother Ryan was appalled. You’re so young, what are you doing?
I’m happy, she said.
But what happened to your brain? You’re a poster child for the pitfalls of marriage! In one fell swoop you’ve managed to get yourself pregnant and enslaved. What happened to apprenticing in Provence? What happened to owning a restaurant?
I can still do those things, she said.
How? You’re grooming yourself to be somebody’s maid.
What about Martha, Penelope said.
Martha’s different. She has the ankles for it, the double chin. From my baby sister, I expected something different.
But Penelope was proud to be engaged in this fertile life of hers, this fertile marriage. Her brief status as biological celebrity. There were maternity clothes that attempted to deemphasize the belly — dark colors, loosely fit — she didn’t understand this. Why would anybody want to hide the only clear evidence of her biological worth — her fifteen minutes of fame? She walked down the grocery store aisle grandly, like royalty. She bared herself, weather permitting, in spandex scoop-necked tops, pulled up so that the crown of her belly was showing, belly button like the tip of a thumb.
Neither, though, was she one of those hippie freaks who went on about how “beautiful” this all was, about “body wisdom,” who hennaed their tummies and braided their hair and performed their deliveries in rivers while chanting in time to a drumming circle. Nor was she like those yuppie freaks who invited their girlfriends to make papier-mâché pregnancy casts over sparkling grape juice and Manchego. She had no illusions about the ordeal of pregnancy. The morning sickness was brutal. She had to breathe delicately through her mouth because any smell, savory or otherwise, would have her groping for the bucket, and not just in the morning, it turned out — it was constant, unrelenting — it was a twenty-eight-week hangover, a boat cruise in bad weather. She lost her balance, her composure, her sense of dignity, and when it finally went away in the beginning of her third trimester, she was left with this thing inside her, floating, ravenous, feeding on her from the inside out — it had gills, apparently, and fed on her blood — it was an alien implant, sucking the life out of her, bleeding her dry, growing stranger every day, and it would eventually emerge triumphant, tearing its way through and leaving her a shell, a lifeless shell of spent meat. The sonogram reinforced this image — it looked like an ancient fossil, some extinct creature from a time when the world was more dangerous, or a satellite photograph of life on one of Jupiter’s moons. The technician handed it to them and, sure, she and Arthur stammered over it, cried over it, and, yes, in part that blubbering was because they were stunned by this ancient biological miracle that had visited its everyday magic upon them, but it was also the blubbering of the sole survivors in a horror movie being chased by the monster. She tacked it on the fridge. My God, what was this thing they were about to unleash?