Milk (8 page)

The reek of this bar; how did I ever, ever hang out in such places?

Seeing my face, green and probably glowing in the dark, Gregg immediately crushes out his cigarette. Like Aunt Lyla used to do. Puff, puff. Put it out. Exonerated. “There,” Gregg says, half yelling the way people do in bars. “Enough. I only smoke when I'm playing, a couple of drags between sets.”

“Yeah,” I say, yelling back.

“When did you quit?” He sounds disappointed.

“After I saw you last.”

We had met at a restaurant, the smoking section. To be with a man who smoked! It was heaven to me, after Jackson's nagging.

“I quit after that,” I yell. “Allergies.”

“That's why you quit?”

“Part of the reason. Not my allergies,” I mutter, glad for the din of this place, so he won't hear me. It was Jackson who had the allergies, sneezing and wheezing whenever I lit up, even when I smoked outside. He said he could smell it on my clothes, my hair. I quit for him, penance for spending the afternoon in Gregg's bed. After our lunch. That we didn't go all the way was small compensation. I figured I owed Jackson something if not total fidelity, so why not quit smoking? After all, he'd begged me the entire first year of our marriage and I'd resisted, afraid I'd get fat. Which I did. Voluptuous, Jackson said. Luscious. Fat, I said and turned to coffee instead, drinking so much some days that my hands shook. My stomach ached. Finally I grew to resent him. All those afternoons I spent snapping a rubber band on my wrist, which is how I quit cigarettes. A tight rubber band, like my mother's hand on me, I used to think. Not that I could recall such a thing. I couldn't remember anything about her. But whenever I thought of smoking, I snapped the rubber band hard, for some reason thinking of her. Maybe because she had smoked. Anyway, it ended up with me blaming Jackson; I gave up cigarettes for him. Couldn't he quit beer for me?

“Why else did you quit smoking?” Gregg asks, toying with a straw.

“My marriage.”

His eyes flicker off, on, coldly. He doesn't like to hear about this; wouldn't he just love to hear about the fruit of that union? Then he's not toying with the straw anymore but staring at me—calculating, I realize.

“What year did you get married?”

“Five years ago. I was married when I saw you last—I know that's what you're trying to figure out. Jackson and I had been married about a year. We were having problems at the time.” At the time? When didn't we have problems?

“I gotta go,” Gregg says, standing. The other band members are milling around on stage, waiting for him. Time for the next set.

In any case his piano playing has the usual mesmerizing effect on me—electric piano tonight—this band, one of many he's in, being of a jazz-fusion strain, as far as I can tell. Maybe because I'm not a musician and know so little about music, it's never mattered to me what kind of music Gregg plays. It's
his
playing I like, his soul. I drink it in like a cocktail, an espresso. A drug, a cigarette. I watch his hands, his mouth … I think about what we might do later tonight, if things aren't sabotaged beyond repair, that is. As Gregg said last night, I really am free. Little does he know I don't even have to worry about birth control, although somehow this isn't a cheering thought.

The set's over and I don't leave. The bar empties out, and still I don't leave. Last call, I order another seltzer. Gregg and the band are breaking down equipment, carrying it out to their cars; he keeps looking at me over his shoulder.

A late bloomer, Gregg always called himself.

In college he did two things well: play music and make love. I could never figure out how Gregg, who couldn't change a tire, who couldn't catch a football or even a pillow if you handed it to him, who couldn't dance, who couldn't talk to people except other musicians, who couldn't pour a cup of coffee without spilling—how someone so lacking in normal everyday skills and most social graces could know so instinctively how to please a woman. And it wasn't that he'd had a lot of experience, like me. He was practically a virgin. He
was
a virgin, he finally admitted to me our first time together, as if it were something to be ashamed of.

“Things,” he said, “didn't work out the other times.” I gathered he meant his erection, which looked fine to me, all the better once he admitted his virginity.

If I was a first for him, he was for me, too. The first man with whom I'd had an orgasm. Which made me a virgin of a different sort, I liked to think.

In college, aside from playing music or making love, everything else Gregg did was a mild ongoing seizure, nerve-wracking to watch. He fidgeted, he grimaced, he smiled, he frowned; he ran a hand through his hair, then on down his spine until an audible crack was heard; he burped, he sighed; he lit one cigarette to another; he pushed his glasses back up onto his nose; he squinted; wrenched his shoulders up and down. He crossed his arms, his legs, his ankles, his feet, simultaneously, twisting them in and out—basket weaving, it looked like.

He was fascinating, embarrassing, annoying. Stoned, I saw him as a god, the Indian god Shiva, the one with all the arms.

Straight, he drove me crazy. “Can't you sit still?”

“What?”

“Sit still.”

I disliked being in social situations with him, although others didn't find him irritating—just nervous and rather lovable, and amazing, which he was. I mean, how could he go from knocking over a bowl of dip, stepping in it, and tracking it across the floor—all without noticing—to sitting down at the piano, boom, a complete transformation, every movement sure and smooth, timed and sexual. He loved to perform, but only at the piano. Anything else, except sex, made him uncomfortable. People, conversation, talk, human interaction (unless somehow paired with music), made the parts of his body appear mismatched, clanking and tangling together like a wind chime in a gale.

Never mind. Everybody liked him. Correction—adored him. Women thought he was cute; men admired his piano playing. At parties he always wound up at the keyboard entertaining everyone, the women who could sing hanging all over him like yowling cats in heat, while I stewed in the corner. I couldn't sing or play piano or any instrument, so there was nothing for me to do at these parties besides admire Gregg and drink, or get up a little game of flirtation in the next room.

After the club closes, he's trying to help me find my car.

“A block away,” I tell him. “I'm just not sure in which direction.” My ears ringing, I almost do feel drunk—that feeling you have after leaving a bar late at night, scoured out, cleansed somehow.

We walk another block in the wrong direction before he broaches the subject. “Why didn't you tell me you were married, Theo? You could've just told me.”

“You could've asked. You didn't even ask if I had a boyfriend.”

“I figured that was your job. To tell me.”

“I asked you about you. You didn't ask because you didn't want to know,” I say.

He doesn't deny it. One more block in a different direction, down a side street with no palm trees, just concrete and stucco walls of buildings gleaming in the night and the smell of the ocean. Every step we take echoes and again I forget I'm not drunk, that I haven't had a drop.

“I didn't know how to tell you, Gregg.” I recall the words stuck in my throat, like dough. The same feeling as now, only different words. How to tell Gregg I'm pregnant?

“I guessed anyway,” he says.

“You did? You knew I was married?” For some reason I'm feigning surprise. He guessed I was married and I knew he knew. “How did you guess?”

“The way you breathed, the way you moaned. Like you were acting.”

Even though we're arguing or at the least having a ‘discussion,' he's kept his hand on my waist all this time, tethering me. I nearly spit it off. “I wasn't acting. I don't act with you.” It's something I hate to hear—any insinuation that my passion is simulated. I can't say why it upsets me so. Acting is what whores do. Is that it? Only a handful of men ever ventured such an opinion; most couldn't tell the difference. And in a sense, it wasn't true. I wasn't acting out my attraction. I wasn't acting out my excitement. I was acting out a specific part, the orgasm part. Helping myself along. Maybe I could act my way into coming, if I got carried away enough. But not with Gregg, not four years ago, not now.

“I wasn't acting,” I say again. “And why would my acting make you think I was married anyway?”

I realize we just passed my car and I swivel around to face it, white and spectral. I persist. “Why would acting make you think I was married?”

“Guilt,” he says at last. “Forget it, Theo. It's just a theory.”

“Maybe we shouldn't see each other, Gregg. It's too complicated.”

“You're probably right.”

But his hand is on my waist again and when I unlock the door and get in, he gets in beside me.

When we make love, which happens almost immediately—on the drive to his house we're already unbuttoning, unzipping—we don't bother turning on any lights; we barely make it to his bed. Afterwards my belly is still for once, peaceful, as if the baby, too, has reached a decision about our allegiance, or is at least considering the possibility of somebody other than Jackson: is considering Gregg.

Then he turns on the light and ruins everything. His mattress is on the floor, which is no big deal, but the floor is a stained, filthy linoleum that's chewed up in one corner, as though a dog attacked it. On the bureau is the same clock radio he had in college—a miracle the thing still works—a small, round, cut-out picture of John Lennon's head taped to the front. This, if nothing else, makes me feel at home: how many nights I lay there sleepless staring at John Lennon, whose face you could just make out in the clock's glow.

“Last time you were living someplace different,” I say. A decent little bungalow in Altadena.

“I was house-sitting.”

His room doesn't smell exactly. It does smell, but of Gregg, a sweet-sweaty odor I remember from college. I try to see the charm in this place, as he gives me a tour. More frayed linoleum in the living room that needs scrubbing, a mopping with bleach. A smelly can of cat food on the kitchen counter with the fork still in it. I count exactly seven pieces of furniture (nine including Gregg's mattress and bureau): a dinette, a leather chair mostly robbed of its stuffing, an old TV with a wire hanger for an antenna, the beds of his roommates (musicians also, away on tour, Gregg says), and Gregg's piano, a Yamaha shiny as obsidian, the only thing cared for in this house, a can of Pledge on top of it and next to that two stacks of score sheets, one for the opera he's working on, he says, and the other a stack of various pop songs he's written.

“Will you excuse me?” I say. I go to the bathroom, sit on the john and bend over, holding my stomach, feeling wretched. It isn't that Gregg is poor; poor is okay, I
like
poor, looking back on my choices in men. It's rich men I don't trust. But Gregg is living like a college student still, and he's thirty-six, and I've just slept with him. I'm not simply here for the afternoon as I was four years ago, and this is Gregg, not a quickie one-night stand. This time I've made some kind of commitment, or a mistake; I can't say why this has happened except that I love him. I must. Who understands love? People can change, I tell myself, and it's just a place, a rental, for God's sake, and it's Gregg's character that matters—but what sort of person would live here? I could pretend it's a fixer-upper, although Gregg wouldn't know which end of a hammer to use. But maybe he's changed, maybe he tore up the linoleum himself and plans to refinish what's underneath. Fat chance. What's really different now as opposed to four years ago is that we're four years older, and that I'm pregnant, looking for a nest to have my baby in. Why not admit it?

Some nest.

He seems a little anxious when I return, as though he's guessed what I'm thinking. He's always been sensitive on the subject on financial success or lack thereof. “I thought you were doing something,” he said.

“Something?”

“You know. We didn't use anything. Last time you had a diaphragm.”

“Not that we needed it.” We had changed our minds at the last minute.
I
changed
my
mind, and Gregg isn't the pushy sort. As if doing everything but made me more virtuous. I brought my diaphragm all the way from Colorado, leaving the case for it there, in the medicine cabinet, so Jackson wouldn't suspect. Actually what I did was put my old diaphragm in that case, because I feared he would check, and, being a man, he wouldn't know the difference between the old and new. It's not a happy memory. The sex part, yes, the subterfuge, no. Since I had the diaphragm, I felt compelled to use it—I mean, I wore it out to lunch, every so often catching a whiff of spermicidal jelly wafting up from under the tablecloth.

“I don't use a diaphragm anymore,” I say. On the drive over here, I nearly asked Gregg to stop for rubbers, old habit—an awareness I didn't have my diaphragm and we should use
something
—all the years of pregnancy prevention.

“You're on the pill?” he says.

“Can we not talk about this?”

“Or that shot? Or one of those deals they put in your arm?”

“You mean Norplant,” I say.

“That's it.”

Subject dropped. He thinks I've got Norplant, and I let him.

We circle the room—there's no place to sit, just a piano bench and the leather chair depleted of stuffing—the desire between us like live electrical wires, which I try to ignore, a little ridiculous since we're not wearing any clothes, and when Gregg catches up with me, I give up, he knows I'm ready, and we head for the bedroom again.