Doxology

“That’s so not true! There’s prenatal care. I have to get sonograms and do Lamaze and La Leche League and turn into my mom. You’re going to love that. Not to mention giving birth and the next eighteen years.”

“It’ll be easy. We’re young and healthy.”

“I should get a pregnancy test,” she said. “Maybe it’s just ovarian cancer.”

THE DISTANCE SHE HAD PUT BETWEEN HERSELF AND HER PARENTS KEPT HER FROM indulging the notion that her child would inherit her traits. It would be its own person, transporting nothing of her into the future. It would be raised differently from the way she had been raised, in a different world. Yet already it seemed to embody personal weaknesses she thought she had learned to repress.

Nausea and latent disquiet, for instance. While still the size of a pushpin, Flora reopened Pam’s eyes to the horror of existence. The Cold War had ended. The peace dividend was pouring in. All the thermonuclear warheads were still there. All, what, ten thousand of them? Twenty thousand? In any case, enough to cook every animal on Earth and leave the survivors licking their eyeballs off their maggoty faces.

Nuclear deterrence was a variant of predestination. Whatever happened to you was your fault, if you hadn’t deterred it. It was life as an endless stud poker game in which folding equaled death. Any day now, life could become The Day of the Triffids, if the Triffids had been defense policy wonks and not evil plants from space. The Triffids in turn reminded her of The Genocides, a novella by Tom Disch in which alien farmers sow the unfortunate Earth with giant sugarcane. Millennia might pass before that happened, but by having a baby, she would be involving herself directly in the tragedy. It was no consolation to recall the survivors’ stubborn capacity for joy or their relief at the conclusion of the harvest. As a willingly pregnant woman, she would at once be placing a long-shot bet that life on Earth would be idyllic forever and condemning a stranger to have its heart broken by her death.

She even worried about the coming Asian century, which she imagined as resembling Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts. Western imperialism was still going strong. It would take fifty years to decline—and there stood the baby, all grown up, undernourished, lopsided from twelve-hour days in the sweatshop, enslaved by happy-go-lucky taskmasters who decorated its dormitory in red and gold. The red tide of slave labor was all around her in Chinatown. She just had to open her eyes to let it engulf her.

She was not getting any work done. She called Video Hit from her office and made Margie wake Daniel so she could say, “There’s no way I’m having this baby. I’m sorry. It’s over.”

“All right. That’s a shame.” After a moment of dead air, he added, “Now I’m sad.”

It crossed her mind that killing Daniel’s baby might not be the most efficient method of removing heartbreak from the world. She said, “In fact, I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“I wish you were here,” he said. “I’m going crazy. I’ve been thinking about names. What do you think of ‘Irene’? It means ‘peace.’”

“Too nasal for New York. Plus I might not even be pregnant.”

WHEN THEY WERE DONE TALKING, SHE WENT DOWNSTAIRS TO A DRUGSTORE ON JOHN Street. She had put off buying a pregnancy test. After all that time without her period, she wouldn’t have believed a negative result, and a positive result wouldn’t have told her anything she didn’t know, so the parsimonious solution was to skip the test. It was positive.

She didn’t call Daniel. Instead she walked into Yuval’s office, closed the door, and told him that effective immediately she would be disappointing her clients at the insurance companies in Omaha. Flying pregnant was out of the question, due to cosmic gamma rays. When the baby came, she would go on vacation for at least two weeks.

Yuval said, “Mazal tov!” It was not the Ashkenazi one-word MA-zel-tov that means “Congratulations,” but the Sephardic two-word ma-ZAL TOV that means “Good luck with that.”

THAT NIGHT SHE WAITED UNTIL DANIEL WAS JUST ABOUT TO LEAVE FOR WORK TO TELL him. Lying back on his bed, in the shade of the narrow section of wall between his two bright rear windows, she said, “We’re going to have a baby.”

He said, “I feel this is a good time to confess that I love you.”

IN THE MORNING, HE CALLED JOE TO SAY HE COULDN’T AFFORD TO RECORD ANY SONGS, because he would be needing every cent he had to finance his baby. He would lose the $200 deposit on the recording studio, but that was better than paying the balance.

Joe said, “I guess she didn’t tell her parents yet.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you’re worried about money!”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re so rich, they live in a house with a yard and trees!”

As a native of Wisconsin, Daniel didn’t consider a yard and trees proof of affluence. But that night in bed, resting up before work, he did go so far as to ask Pam to explain Joe’s insinuation. He had always assumed she came from a working-class background similar to his own, if only because she hadn’t finished high school. The news about her pregnancy had prompted him to subordinate his artistic ego to the expense of raising a child. Now he wasn’t so sure. Was it conceivable that fatherhood might improve his finances instead of bankrupting him?

She said her dad was a career civil servant with a desk job who planned to retire at sixty. At that point he would commence a second career as a “double dipper,” exploiting his contacts as a defense consultant while drawing half of his former salary. He wasn’t rich, far from it. He made a little under a hundred thousand. In Washington that meant he could have a decent house in a safe part of town, with a wife who didn’t work, living like it was the sixties. He also had—she said this was the problematic part, for her—a clean conscience, though she knew, or could guess, what he’d been involved in during the Vietnam War. She hadn’t talked to him since she left home and had hardly talked to him before that; he was a distant, authoritarian father.

“I know you can do math,” Daniel said. “Do you have any idea what a normal person would have to save to retire on fifty thousand dollars a year for life?”

“They’re not rich. They’re, like, slow-drip rich. They’re middle class.”

“You parents have zero worries!”

“Oh, no. I gave them plenty of wrinkles and gray hair.” It sounded like a boast, so she added, “Or maybe it was napalming old people and kids that gave Dad wrinkles and gray hair. I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“What’s your mom like?”

“I don’t know. The last time I saw her, she was a stingy, controlling bitch.”

“When was that?”

“Nineteen eighty-six.”

“So call her and find out.”

“Call yours first.”

“There’s no danger mine will offer us money. More like secondhand baby clothes from the church basement. Mom will start crocheting a layette set and be done by the time it’s ten months old.”

“Racine’s a safe distance. You can tell them. Though I guess they might want us to be married.”

“I’ll lie. If there’s one thing evangelical Christianity teaches you how to do, it’s lie.”

“You can lie? I can’t say I noticed.”

“It’s not a skill I get much use out of anymore. Christians unearth the innate lying talent of little kids and hone it like a razor. Like when they ask you to raise your hand in youth group if you’ve ever touched yourself, and then raise your hand if you’ve ever touched a girl.”

“So does everybody pick door number two?”

“Hell, no! You’d be getting some girl in trouble. The point is to make you feel guilty and trapped. That’s all. It makes you bond with the other Christians, because you’re all telling the same lies together all the time and everybody knows it. It’s like your platoon did a war crime, so now you’re blood brothers.”

“Did you raise your hand?”

“One time I did raise my hand and say I touched myself, and they acted like I’d come out of the closet. I guess it’s the same thing. My hand touched dick.”

“Can’t have that,” Pam said, touching his dick.

THE INITIAL PLAN WAS FOR HER SOMEHOW TO GET RID OF SIMON, SO THAT SHE AND Daniel and the baby could share the one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment in the doorman building. The size was perfect. They might never have to move again. Daniel’s share would be double his current rent, but that would still leave it in manageable territory.

It was such an elegant solution that Pam presumed Simon would instantly see their side of the question and vanish from her life, if he had any utilitarian model of ethics whatsoever. He refused to budge. He liked his half-bedroom, which allowed him to live in a fancy apartment in an enviable location without paying Manhattan-style rent. Little Jersey wasn’t chichi; it wasn’t Soho or Tribeca; he couldn’t brag that he lived there. It was more of a drinking theme park with shoe stores. But at least it wasn’t a bridge-and-tunnel neighborhood where finding an affordable apartment required reading knowledge of Greek or Polish.

He said he’d be happy to look for a new roommate. With that location, so close to the bars, he could basically run auditions and keep interviewing until he found somebody who’d fuck him. The new roommate was guaranteed, he assured Pam, to be a better fuck than her, because she had never been anything special—too cerebral. He advised her to grow some hair, because it’s sensual for men when women have some hair to grab on to.

He got what he was aiming for. She left in high distress. She couldn’t imagine spending another night under one roof with him. In effect, she evicted herself.

THEY RENTED A U-HAUL TO DO THE MOVE A FEW DAYS LATER. SIMON HELPED CARRY HER dresser and platform bed from the elevator to the truck. He was unwilling to laze around like a pasha in front of Daniel. Daniel in turn noticed Simon’s discomfiture when he packed up Pam’s microwave. “You’re going to miss this,” he prophesied.