While Bill was running across the Boulevard des Indiennes towards the Mater, Wally was using all his charm to persuade Claire to slide 5 dollars out under the door. He did not run to hospital. He went by cab. Thus he was already in the foyer when Bill came striding in. The two men, both six foot tall, rode up in the lift side by side staring at the numbers above the door.
When they opened the Maternity waiting room door they found Vincent Theroux — forty-six years old, not very tall, wide in the shoulders but now plump, even portly. He was sitting in a plastic chair, still wearing his broad-rimmed black hat, smoking an Havana cigar. Like Bill, he had a remarkable mouth — a rose-bud which shone like a flower in his neat sandy beard.
‘Cigar?’ he said.
Bill turned his back without answering. Wally nodded, took a cigar, and tucked it in the pocket of his iridescent pink shirt.
Bill inspected the water cooler, looked out the window at the sky. Wally selected a chair on the long wall, facing Vincent.
Bill also sat. He folded his arms across his chest and watched Wally flipping through a zine. Though he did not like Vincent being there, he was offended by Wally’s presence.
Wally claimed to have been raised in a touring circus and to have spent his early years as a ‘Human Ball’ being thrown in an act from mother to father, but this cut no ice with Bill, to whom he was nothing more than a small-time crook, one of those Efican facheurs who hang out in artists’ bars, carrying books of poetry for the purpose of attracting middle-class women. Certainly he had done time. He did not deny it. He talked like a crim — said ‘violin’ for jail, ‘musico’ for con-man, ‘riveter’ for homosexual. He was now the production manager — a good one — but he had become so attached to Felicity, during the pregnancy, that he had begun to give the impression that he had been responsible for it.
So Bill found his presence impertinent.
Yet when the santamarie entered the waiting room and asked, ‘Which of you gens is the dab-to-be?’ Bill could not publicly lay claim. He began to fear that someone in the room knew something he did not.
He felt his neck burning. He folded his shirt cuffs. He began to button his red and black plaid shirt.
‘It’s you,’ the santamarie smiled, locating him by his high colour. She touched his sleeve. ‘You’re the dab.’
He moved sideways.
‘You’re Mr Smith, right?’
Of course he was not Mr Smith. He drew further away, pressing his back against the window. His brows pushed down over his dark eyes and his blush spread right behind his pierced flat ears and disappeared down the collar of his work shirt.
‘The doctor,’ said the santamarie, ‘says Mr Smith might as well go home and rest.’
‘Actually, Nurse’ — Vincent put his fat backside on the window ledge; it touched Bill’s elbow — ‘there is no Mr Smith. There is a Ms Smith, but no Mr. It’s Felicity Smith,’ he said.
Bill tried to make eye contact with the santamarie.
‘Felicity Smith,’ Vincent said, ‘the actress.’ He unbuckled his two-inch wide belt and tightened it an extra notch. The gesture was worldly, confident, sexual. ‘There is no Mr Smith. There is only us.’
The santamarie smiled at Vincent, nodded. ‘I see.’
‘What I see about our situation,’ Vincent persisted, ‘is that it’s vaguely ludicrous. The three of us, all smoking cigars.’
‘OK,’ said Bill, who just wanted the santamarie out of there before something embarrassing was said. ‘That’s nice of you. Thank you.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Class dismissed.’
‘Was I brusque? I’m sorry.’
‘I don’t know what brusk is,’ the santamarie said. ‘But I know when I’m not wanted.’
‘Why don’t you leave?’ Wally turned to Bill. He folded his zine and returned it to his back pocket. ‘If you can’t be decent you’d be better off not being here.’
‘I’m here,’ Bill said, ‘because my son is being born.’ He turned back towards the Sirkus in the park. A giant mouse with a white stick was dancing on the video.
‘So you are Mr Smith,’ the santamarie said. She opened the door to the hallway. ‘The water closets are one floor down or one floor up.’
‘I sympathize with your enthusiasm,’ Vincent said, as the door slammed shut behind the santamarie. He laid his hand on Bill’s shoulder. ‘I sympathize, but you don’t know it’s a boy, and you don’t know it’s yours.’
‘You should go home and check your diary,’ Bill said. ‘If you’re the father you must have put your pecker in the post.’
‘Go home,’ Wally repeated. ‘Just like the doctor says.’
‘Maybe Wally is the father.’ Bill held his palms upwards in appeal. ‘Now there’s a vision.’
Wally had pendulous ear lobes, soft like wattles, fair-haired arms with small round scars where no hair would grow. Now his austere face contracted a fraction more. ‘I have not had the pleasure,’ he said.
Bill whooped.
‘You petticon,’ Wally said. He sprang from his chair, stepped on to the coffee table, and launched himself at Bill, his neck tendons tight, his pale lips stretched across his teeth, his right fist raised like a hammer.
Bill leaped over a row of blue plastic chairs, yelping with pleasure, his teeth white, his eyebrows arched high.
‘For Chrissakes,’ Wally said. ‘You didn’t even ask why we can go home.’ He let his scarred and tattooed hands hang limply by his side. ‘You didn’t even ask her how she was.’
He went to stand beside Bill, to look out of the window at the Sirkus. In a moment Vincent joined them, his large black hat silhouetted against the bright arc lights in the park. Vincent put his arm first around Wally’s shoulders, then Bill’s. ‘She’s going to be all right,’ he said.
It was the first time it had occurred to Bill that she might not be.
As for Tristan — not a word about me. I did not exist for any of them — I was a thing, an idea, a ripple on the other side of a beautiful woman’s large white belly.
But by this time, just after noon, I was, regardless of what the santamarie had said, already two hours old.
*
The critique of an actor’s performance normally offered by the director and, sometimes, the playwright. In the leftist Feu Follet these critiques might be offered by other actors, assistant stage managers, the house manager — by any member of the company.
4
My three ‘fathers’ were treated badly, as if their alliance with my maman were unnatural or perverse, and they were separately and jointly responsible for my peculiar condition. They were lied to. They were given to understand the labour was long, that the labour had not begun, that there was a C-section to be performed, that Ms Smith had been shifted to another hospital. They were told, bluntly, to go away, to wait at home for a call, and what is incredible is that they tolerated this treatment. They were not meek men, but they were men, intimidated by birth, and so they went meekly, and with so little idea of what was happening to Felicity that they could not even answer each other’s questions in the street outside.
Five storeys above their heads, in a small windowless examination room, two doctors were nervously trying to persuade Felicity that it would be better, although they did not use so blunt a word, for them to kill me.