Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead

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СКАЧАТЬ “You should get cards printed up and go around tossing them in people’s laps on the El. Anyway, I thought I got custody of this place.”

      “I wanted a beer,” he said. “It’s too cold to walk anywhere else.”

      They have not spoken much for a year, not since he dumped her, which he had only done because, perplexingly, she had not dumped him after he told her about Joan’s pregnancy. She takes off her jacket and turns it inside out over a barstool; snow drips off it onto the floor. The bartender sets a beer in front of her.

      Her wispy blond hair, recently and unwisely cut to chin length, lies limp against her head, but the cold has flushed her cheeks and lips in a way that makes him think of sex. He chides himself for being so predictably horny, like a lab subject responding to stimuli. Since Harry’s birth, Joan has not been interested in sex, but, for Jacob, the relentlessness and insistence of the baby’s physical being draws constant attention to bodies and skin and nakedness and his own maturity and virility. He finds himself getting turned on in the most inappropriate situations, such as by a pissed-off ex, in front of her boyfriend.

      Liesel doesn’t attract him as strongly as Joan, but he likes her looks, which are ruddy and earthy. She had tried to couch their breakup as a rejection of her appearance. Sorry I’m not a ballerina, she’d said, bending the last word into a long, sarcastic sine wave.

      “What do you do, Ray?” he asks.

      “I’m a cop.” Ray smiles.

      Liesel leans against him, and he wraps an arm around her waist and tucks his fingers into her pocket. “No more academics for me,” she says. “I can’t take all the narcissism and insecurity.”

      “Fair enough,” Jacob says.

      “Really, though, what are you doing out drinking all by yourself?” Liesel asks.

      He has no answer, of course, beyond his simple desire to be drinking and by himself and not at home. But to say this would suggest discontentment. One of Jacob’s greatest fears is that his life will not appear intentional. Had he subconsciously wanted to run into Liesel? Maybe. But only to use her as a reminder that he is happy. “I was supposed to meet a colleague, but I’m afraid I’m being stood up.”

      “A colleague,” Liesel says, imitating his haughty tone. “How unfortunate.”

      It is, Jacob realizes, time to leave. “I should go.”

      “Great running into you.” Liesel smiles. “Here in my favorite bar. What a coincidence.”

      When he opens the door, piled-up snow falls inside. “Nice move!” calls the bartender. But there is nothing Jacob can do. He clambers out into the cold, wedging the door closed behind him as best he can. The stairs are buried under a ramp of powder, and he climbs carefully, clinging to the frigid handrail, probing for each step. At the top, in a streetlamp’s soft orange circle, he pauses, enjoying the cold, which settles on his body like a weight. He turns for home.

      A BLAST OF heat strikes him when he opens the door, and he strips off his coat before he even takes the key out of the lock. Joan is sitting on the floor with her back against the hissing radiator and her legs open in a wide V around the blanket where Harry is sitting upright, unsupported, in a diaper and a University of Chicago T-shirt, studying an assortment of rattles strewn around his plump legs. They turn to look at Jacob, Joan with the absorbed, private smile she gets around the baby, Harry with grave hesitation that turns to open-mouthed delight, showing his gums and two bottom teeth.

      “Hello, sweethearts,” Jacob says, tugging his sweater over his head and stepping on the heels of his boots to pry them off.

      When he stoops to kiss Joan’s cheek, he slides his hand down the neck of her shirt. She gave up on breast-feeding as abruptly and conclusively as she had quit dancing, even when the doctor said she should keep trying. Jacob suspects she had simply disliked it. Her breasts are bigger than they were before Harry but still no more than gentle hillocks on her chest, self-supporting, nothing pendulous. She looks up at him, not lusty, mildly amused. He tweaks her nipple. “Knock it off, they’re sore.”

      “Do you know how many times we’ve had sex?” he asks her. “Ever?”

      “I’m not keeping a tally.”

      “Thirty-six. Eight when you came to visit. Twenty-one when you were pregnant. Seven since the baby.” He lies down on the floor, curved on his side, his body closing the wedge of her legs, penning Harry in, who cranes around to look at him and tips over.

      “Oops,” Joan says to the baby. Harry sweeps his limbs like four oars.

      Jacob smoothes Harry’s spider silk over his scalp. “It’s not that many, is all I’m saying.”

      “There’s no hurry. You’ll have plenty of time to get bored with me.”

      “I won’t get bored.”

      “Also,” Joan says, “I still feel—I don’t know—off. I mean in my body. I did when I was pregnant, too. I don’t feel like myself. I don’t feel sexy. I feel strange.”

      Jacob does ordinary, utilitarian things with his body: eat, drink, sleep, walk, jog, swim occasionally, have sex if the opportunity presents itself. He doesn’t do any of these things with unusual finesse or grace or stringency. Joan talks about her body as though it were her primary stake in the living world, an entity capable of moods separate from her own. Jacob wants her to say that both she and her body want him, that she is looking forward to a lifetime of sex with only him. But begging for reassurance is unattractive, unmanly, something he can permit himself only in tiny, rationed bursts. Joan’s father left when she was a baby and never came back, and Jacob thinks, psychoanalytically speaking, she should be the one to worry about him leaving. It’s worrisome that she doesn’t seem to worry. In fact, in all the time he’s known her, he can’t remember her ever seeming as relaxed as she does when she’s home with the baby.

      Harry curls his toes and claps his feet together like two scoops.

      “I like how he gestures with his feet,” Jacob comments, giving up the subject of sex. “I should start doing that. Just wave them around when I want to make a point.”

      Harry pushes out his legs and, rolling sideways, swivels up to a sitting position. He flaps in celebration. Gently, Joan grasps his hands, and Harry pumps his torso and bows his legs and is suddenly, startlingly upright, balanced on those gesticulating feet. His diaper hulas for balance. He has been doing this for a week. Seven months is early for a baby to stand—Jacob knows this even though infancy isn’t his field. His dissertation is on the identification of gifted children, but he is wary of getting attached to the idea of Harry being gifted, of inadvertently pushing the boy or making him feel like a disappointment.

      “Do you want to show Daddy?” Joan asks Harry. “Do you want to show him what you can do?” She releases the baby’s hands, and for a breathless moment he balances on his own, feet spread wide like a surfer’s. Then he flexes at the waist and falls onto his padded butt.

      Jacob picks Harry up under the arms, turns him around, and looks into his face. “You,” he says. “We’re going to have to watch you.” Joan had asked him to name the baby, bestowed complete power on him to do so, and he had chosen Harold after his grandfather who died early in Joan’s pregnancy.

      Joan stands and goes to their tiny kitchen nook to warm up СКАЧАТЬ