About what? you might well ask.
He was dry, he was fed, he had slept. I would have tried blanket on, blanket off; he was neither hot nor cold. He’d been burped, and I have a gut instinct that he didn’t have colic; Kevin’s was not a cry of pain but of wrath. He had toys dangling overhead, rubber blocks in his bed. His mother had taken six months off from work to spend every day by his side, and I picked him up so often that my arms ached; you could not say he lacked for attention. As the papers would be so fond of observing sixteen years later, Kevin had everything.
I have theorized that you can locate most people on a spectrum of the crudest sort and that it may be their position on this scale with which their every other attribute correlates: exactly how much they like being here, just being alive. I think Kevin hated it. I think Kevin was off the scale, he hated being here so much. He may even have retained some trace spiritual memory from before conception, and glorious nullity was far more what he missed than my womb. Kevin seemed incensed that no one had ever consulted him about turning up in a crib with time going on and on, when nothing whatsoever interested him in that crib. He was the least curious little boy I’ve ever encountered, with a few exceptions to that rule that I shudder to contemplate.
One afternoon I started to feel draggier than usual, at times a bit light-headed. For days I’d been unable to keep warm, and it was late May; outside, New Yorkers were in shorts. Kevin had pulled off a virtuosic recital. Huddled on the couch in a blanket, I reflected crankily on the fact that you’d stacked up more work than ever. Fair enough, as a freelancer you didn’t want your long-term clients to find an alternative scout, whereas my own company could be trusted to underlings and wouldn’t just go away. But somehow this meant that I was stuck all day with hell in a handbasket while you tooled merrily off in your baby-blue pickup to window-shop for fields with the right-colored cows. I suspected that if our situation were reversed—you headed a thriving company while I was a lone freelance location scout—Eva would be expected to drop the scouting altogether like a hot brick.
When the elevator clanked and shuddered, I was just noticing that a small patch under my right breast had turned bright red, tender, and strangely stiff, mirroring the much larger such patch on the left. You opened the lattice gate and went straight to the crib. I was glad you were turning into such an attentive father, but of the two other inhabitants of our loft it was only your wife who appreciated the meaning of the word hello.
“Please don’t wake him up,” I whispered. “He’s only been down twenty minutes and he’s outdone himself today. I doubt he ever goes to sleep. He passes out.”
“Well, has he been fed?” Deaf to my imprecations, you had laid him on your shoulder and were poking at his conked-out face. He looked deceptively content. Dreams of oblivion, perhaps.
“Yes, Franklin,” I said with immoderate control. “After four or five hours of listening to little Kevin bring the house down, I thought of that. —Why are you using the stove?”
“Microwaving kills nutrients.” Over lunch at McDonald’s, you read baby books.
“It isn’t so simple as figuring out what he wants and can’t ask for. Most of the time he has no idea what he wants.” I caught it: Your eyes flicked toward the ceiling like, oh-brother-not-this-again. “You think I’m exaggerating.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You think he’s ‘crabby.’ He’s ‘fussy’ sometimes, because he’s hungry—”
“Listen, Eva, I’m sure he gets a little ill-tempered—”
“See? A little ill-tempered.” I waddled to the kitchen in my blanket. “You don’t believe me!” I had broken out in a cold sweat and must either have been flushed or pale. Walking hurt the soles of my feet and sent pains shivering down my left arm.
“I believe you’re being straight up about your perception of how hard it is. But what did you expect, a walk in the park?”
“Not a carefree stroll, but this is like being mugged in the park!”
“Look, he’s my son, too. I see him, too, every day. Sometimes he cries a little. So what. I’d worry if he didn’t.”
Apparently my testimony was tainted. I would have to bring in other witnesses. “You realize that John, downstairs, is threatening to move out?”
“John’s a fag, and they don’t like babies. This whole country’s antichild, I’m only just starting to notice.” The severity wasn’t like you, except that for once you were talking about the real country and not the starspangled Valhalla in your head. “See?” Kevin had roused on your shoulder, then took the bottle peaceably without opening his eyes. “I’m sorry, but most of the time he seems pretty good-natured to me.”
“He’s not good-natured right now, he’s exhausted! And so am I. I know I’m run down, but I don’t feel right. Dizzy. Chills. I wonder if I’m running a fever.”
“Well, that’s a shame,” you said formally. “Get some rest, then. I’ll make dinner.”
I stared. This coldness was so unlike you! I was supposed to belittle my own infirmities, you to make a to-do over them. Forcing you to go through the motions of your old solicitation, I took the bottle and plastered your hand to my forehead.
“Touch warm,” you said, withdrawing the hand right away.
I’m afraid that I couldn’t stand up anymore, and my skin hurt wherever the blanket touched it. So I staggered back to the couch, as if reeling from my revelation: You were angry at me. Fatherhood hadn’t disappointed you; I had. You thought you’d married a trooper. Instead your wife was proving a whiner, the very peevish sort she decried amid America’s malcontented overfed, for whom a commonplace travail like missing a FedEx delivery three times in a row and having to go to the depot constitutes intolerable “stress,” the stuff of costly therapies and pharmaceutical redress. Even for Kevin’s refusal to take my breast you held me dimly accountable. I had denied you the maternal tableau, that luscious Sunday-morning loll amid the sheets with buttered toast: son suckling, wife aglow, breasts spilling their bounty over the pillow, until you are forced out of bed for the camera.
Here I thought that I’d brilliantly disguised my true feelings about motherhood thus far, to the point of dereliction; so much lying in marriage is merely a matter of keeping quiet. I had refrained from throwing that self-evident diagnosis of postnatal depression down on our coffee table like a trophy but had kept this formal accreditation to myself. Meanwhile, I’d brought home loads of editing work but had only got through a few pages; I was eating badly and sleeping badly and showering at most every three days; I saw no one and rarely got out because Kevin’s rages, in public, were not socially acceptable; and daily, I faced a purple churn of insatiable fury while rehearsing to myself with dull incomprehension, I’m supposed to love this.