Relativity (36 page)

Mark laughed. “You know I'm a sucker for nineties heartthrobs.”

And even though Claire had often wondered if she'd felt the baby move—small shudders here, a possible bump, maybe indigestion—there was no doubt about it now as she felt the baby kick. It was real. It was there.

Ω

CLAIRE PERSEVERED
with her ballet classes—two hours a day, five days a week—until the seventh month of her pregnancy. She maintained her rigorous stretching routine until the day before she gave birth. But as the baby grew, her body changed—it became a stranger. It spoke a new language of edema, cellulite, and varicose veins. Claire's strong connection with it severed; she lost her precise awareness of the bend of her spine and turn of her feet. This swollen body didn't belong to her anymore. When she tried listening to it, it no longer talked back.

When the baby kicked all night and she couldn't sleep, Claire obsessed over pregnancy books—studying diagrams of childbirth as if they were dance notation, poring over the growing size of the fetus as it developed fluidly from first position to fifth. She was fastidious about her diet and avoided every variety of forbidden bacteria. Pregnancy had so many rules, but she enjoyed following them. They gave Claire a sense of purpose, made her feel like she was getting something right.

Ω

ETHAN WAS BORN
on a Sunday morning. Claire had expected labor would be worse than it actually was; she'd pictured a slaughter, her imagination ran wild. But she was strong and athletic, and knew how to push herself. She could work through pain, was accustomed to it, understood its brevity. When she held her son for the first time, the brutality of labor was quickly forgotten. Ethan was perfect. Looking at her new baby made Claire feel like she couldn't see anything else in the room. Mark cut the umbilical cord. Three days later, they brought Ethan home.

Those early weeks were full of contradictions. Days went by quickly and in a blur, but were boring and endless. Claire felt displaced but experienced an overwhelming sense of belonging; she'd lost her individuality but felt self-assured. Ethan was brand-new and unfamiliar; nonetheless, they were instantly close. The baby frayed Claire at her edges but she was tightly bound to him. When he wailed, she'd be confused yet instinctively understand—his cries were both explicit and a mystery. As she watched him sleep, she felt fearful and fearless. Claire fell in love with Ethan immediately but in an abstract and obsessional way, like he was an object, but it was also the purest love she'd ever known. Theirs was a binary relationship; its complexity split Claire into two.

In the first four months of his life, Ethan didn't sleep for more than ninety minutes in a row. When he wasn't sleeping, he was eating, and the rest of the time he cried. He cried in the morning, he cried throughout the day, he cried in the darkest hours of the night. Ethan cried so much his face was always red. He cried with his entire body, tiny hands shaking and chubby legs kicking, hollering and hollering until he wore himself out.

Claire was the only person who could comfort Ethan. She'd wrap the baby in his bunny rug and dance him around the room. But it didn't soothe him for long—the crying always started again. Sometimes she fed Ethan just to keep him quiet, shoving her breast into his screaming mouth. Was that cruel? Feeding him when he didn't need it, to buy herself five minutes of peace?

Pregnancy was over, but Claire felt more disconnected from her body than ever before. She'd assumed it was elastic, that after childbirth it would simply snap back. But it didn't. Wrinkled skin on her stomach she could grab in handfuls, stretched skin hanging from her arms, padded thighs, engorged breasts. Looking in the mirror made Claire start to panic. Mark wasn't allowed to touch her; he might discover the loose folds around her waist. She found herself repulsive and feared he'd think so too. Although her revulsion had little to do with vanity—it was more about lost control.

She'd seen enough dancers stumble and break: at puberty when they developed the wrong physique, after a fall during an audition, following a serious injury that ended their career. Claire thought back to those defeated faces, that precise moment when they'd realized it was all over. How they crumpled, winced, and shrank as their ambition collapsed.

Claire wasn't going to let herself become another casualty to failure, another dancer forced to forfeit her dream. Ambition might be the wrong size for her body right now, but she wasn't going to throw it away—she'd fight to make it fit again. In stolen minutes without the baby, she resumed training. Nightly exercises to stabilize her ankles, stretches to open up her shoulders, routines with resistance weights, until Claire snapped back to her original shape.

Ω

MARK WAS CONVINCED
the baby was gifted. He was positive Ethan had smiled two weeks before it was considered normal, and was sure he'd seen him roll over at ten days old. Claire told him this was silly, Ethan could hardly hold up his head, but Mark knew his baby son was advanced. To stimulate Ethan's brain development, Mark made a black-and-white mobile to hang over his cot, and at two months was teaching the baby to crawl. Clearly, the baby was a genius.

He devoured parenting books—detailed manuals for this puzzling new device—trying to keep track of how early Ethan met milestones. One book advised playing newborns classical music, another suggested having meaningful conversations with your baby. So Mark spoke to Ethan like he was an adult, explaining his doctoral thesis to the baby as it wriggled in his arms.

His thesis was about antimatter. Conceptually, it had always intrigued Mark. Quantum theories of corresponding opposites kept him awake at night. He loved the symmetry of antiparticles: same mass as their particle partner but with opposite charge. Electrons and positrons, protons and antiprotons, neutrons and antineutrons—they were all symmetrical. Antimatter's volatility had a lacerating beauty—when it collided with matter, they annihilated each other.

But there was a fundamental problem with antimatter and it irritated Mark. Why had the Big Bang left us with an observable universe made up almost entirely of matter? The standard model of particle physics predicted it should be half and half. So why wasn't the universe symmetrical? And if matter and antimatter destroyed one another, why did the universe even exist? Theoretically, there should be nothing, but something had been left behind.

His thesis topic was anomalous parity asymmetry in the Cosmic Microwave Background. Mark knew his paper wouldn't disprove the standard model, but it was certainly publishable. His research was solid and innovative, but he needed it to be perfect. There'd been talks of getting a job overseas; maybe he'd do a postdoc. His supervisor even hinted at the possibility of working as an academic in the faculty. These were only dreams if he couldn't finish writing the bloody thing, though.

Since Ethan's birth, Mark had felt more and more isolated. He missed Claire. He'd reach drowsily for her in the early hours of the morning, but she'd shift away from his touch. The baby's constant crying formed a barrier between them. Ethan was primally attached to Claire—knew the patterns of her smell, touch, and voice—so he'd cling to his mother and want her alone. Her patience with him was monumental. Even though he'd devoured the parenting books, Mark still found parenthood tedious but Claire never looked bored; he was terrified of Ethan's urgent cries but she seemed unafraid.

But Claire had come back from the hospital altered. Attention and affection she once gave Mark now belonged to somebody else. When Claire breast-fed the baby, it made Mark blush—he had to look away. Like he'd intruded on something private and sacred, something he wasn't supposed to see. Like they'd formed a secret alliance that excluded Mark.

Ω

THEY WERE TOO TIRED
to speak once they'd finally put Ethan to sleep. Claire sat on the floor and stretched her legs. Mark wanted to touch her, but knew he'd be rebuked. Instead, he sat at his desk and tried to work, stealing furtive glances at her profile as she pulled her body into different shapes.

“So, I have some really good news.” Claire reached for her toes. “I have an audition.”

Mark kept his eyes on his laptop. “That's great.”

“Next week. Isn't that exciting? Problem is, it's in Melbourne. I missed local auditions, but they can squeeze me in there. I'd need to fly down and probably stay overnight.”

“And you'd take Ethan?”

She stepped forward into a lunge. “I thought he could stay at home with you. I wouldn't be gone long. Forty-eight hours, max.”

“Hold on.” Mark closed his computer. “You can't go away for two days.”

“Last month, you went to a conference for three days. Ethan and I coped.”

“But that was different. You're still breast-feeding; you can't leave him. And an audition? Isn't this all happening too soon?”

“I'll pump enough milk and freeze it before I go. Ethan's started solids anyway. My doctor has cleared it, I'm in great shape.” She looked at him with an expectant expression. “Haven't you noticed me practicing?”

“Slow down, Claire. Can we talk about this first?” His mind darted from possibility to possibility. “The issue isn't that you'd go away for two days. What if you actually get the role, then what? Daily rehearsals? Touring? Performing several nights a week? You'd be going back to work.”

“Yeah, I think I'm finally ready.” She smiled and crossed her legs. “My flexibility is back to normal now and I've lost most of the pregnancy weight. I've been training at home every day. I want to get back to work.”

“You don't just make that decision by yourself. We need to talk about it. Decide together. We're a family.” Mark paused for a few seconds and ran his hand over his face. “I'm not sure you can go back yet. We can't juggle that at the moment.”

Claire stiffened. Her cheeks were flushed from stretching. “Decide together? Sounds like you're the one making the decision by yourself.”

“Couldn't you put it off a little longer, maybe until my thesis is done? There'll be other auditions.”

“No, I can't,” she said, standing up. “I've waited long enough. Do you realize I've already lost eight months? My career has an expiration date, unlike yours. You can be a crazy scientist until the day you drop dead. But I don't have all the time in the world to dance professionally.”

“It just makes more sense for me to finish my thesis first.” Mark glanced at the pile of notes on his desk. “You don't understand the pressure I'm under right now. Let me focus and get this done, then we can talk about your dancing later.”

She pulled at her tights. “That's not fair. Dancing is my work.”

“Let's be practical,” Mark said. “Maybe it's not worth it. Financially, I mean. You don't make enough money, at least at the moment. Dancing pays sweet fuck all. Think how expensive it'd be for you to work again. By the time we've covered childcare, plus all your ballet paraphernalia, we'd only just break even. Unless you became some prima ballerina superstar, it's not sustainable.”

“Like you can talk. Last time I checked, theoretical physicists weren't rolling in cash. You've never even had a real job, Mark. You've spent the last decade at uni. And you should know better than anyone, it's not about money.” Her voice was strained. “Why do I have to be the one put on hold?”

“You're a mother now, Claire.”

“So what? I'm still me. I still want to dance.”

“Listen to yourself. You sound like a princess. Exactly like a spoiled child. Don't you care about Ethan?”

Claire didn't look at him. “I can't believe you'd say that. Honestly, I thought you'd be fine with this. You even said you could be a stay-at-home dad so I wouldn't have to give up ballet.”

“When did I say that?”

“Now you can't remember? How convenient! Just like you to rewrite history.” Claire removed her leg warmers and threw them across the room. She raised her voice. “So much for equality, then. So much for thinking you weren't like every other man. Wow, I really thought you got it. But no, let's preserve your identity at all cost, and forget all about me because I'm a mother now. Better step back and embrace my womanly destiny of breast-feeding and sleepless nights. Is this what you assume I'll do with the rest of my life? Raise your children?”

The baby started to cry.

She shook her head. “Great, now we've woken him up.”

Mark sighed. “Don't be like this; you're blowing it out of proportion. Please don't act like a victim. You made your own choices. It shouldn't be a surprise that a baby would change our lives. You knew you'd need to give up ballet for a while.”

“I didn't know you were a prick, though,” she said under her breath.

“I'm a prick? You're playing the martyr, Claire. You're not some down-on-her-luck single mum; I help. Ethan keeps me awake all night too. And now you're demanding I look after him while I finish my research? You don't understand how difficult it is to write a thesis. You don't even understand what it's about. If I don't meet my deadline, they'll cut off my funding. Then we won't have any money to support the baby. Would you like that?”

The baby's wailing grew louder.

“I'm sorry I'm not smart enough for you.” Claire adjusted her nursing bra. “I'm so sorry you're stuck with this stupid wife and inconvenient child while you're trying to solve scientific problems beyond my understanding.”

“You know what?” Mark yelled so he could be heard over Ethan's cries. “I knew it was bad timing. We shouldn't have had him now.”

There was a long pause, as Claire balked at him. “But you're the one who wanted to have the baby. Practically insisted.”

Mark couldn't believe her; she made his blood pressure surge. Putting this on him. Pretending to be this innocent dupe to shirk her responsibilities. “And you didn't? I didn't force you, Claire. Great story to tell him when he's older. Sorry, Ethan, Mummy didn't really want you.”