The doctor wrote something on a pad and gave it to Victoria.
“Your next appointments will be in our uptown office.”
He shook her hand and passed his folder to the nurse, giving her a wink.
“You don’t worry about a thing,” he said. “The baby is going to be fine.”
The doctor walked out, his white coat stiff behind him. Joseph felt hollow and weak. He looked at Victoria. Her eyes were set on the door, which was closed again. Her lips were loose with trust for the doctor. Joseph imagined her asleep, so that he could love her again. It embarrassed him, but that was the only way. All of this frustration would be over soon, he told himself. The next phase would be something different. It couldn’t be worse. That was the first positive thought that had crossed his mind in weeks.
The nurse underlined various things on a piece of paper. She explained certain points with little movements of her hands and stood very close to Victoria. Every now and then, the two women had a little laugh.
“Some women forget how big their bellies are,” the nurse was saying. “They get themselves into the oddest places.”
Joseph could tell that Victoria trusted her too. Joseph motioned that he was going to the bathroom. His stomach. As he walked out, he realized he could barely understand what they were saying, the two of them. They spoke in some language he didn’t know. He thought of birds chirping to one another. His beautiful Victoria chirping, chirping with this leggy, redheaded American who knew everything that seemed to matter.
Maybe,
he thought,
maybe she’s my only hope.
For Joseph, the months after the doctor’s visit were quiet, timid ones. Victoria wanted to exercise and so they walked. Often, they took the subway uptown, made a loop around Central Park, and whenever they passed a vendor with an ice cream cart, they bought one or two, as if to prove again and again to themselves that something like that could exist. In Baghdad, you couldn’t find a cold drink if you tried, let alone something frozen. Joseph thought of all those days in Iraq when he’d trekked so far west across the city for a dish of non-kosher kebabs. Such delicious sacrilege. He ate it in the shadows of old ratty furniture that would never be sold, careful not to be seen. What he would have done for an ice cream then.
They liked to sit at the fountain. Victoria put her face to the sun, and Joseph could admire her long neck that way. His auntie used to say that a man should marry a woman who had the height of a sail and a neck a yard long. And Victoria did. She had a long, beautiful neck. When she lifted it up and back to look at a fast screen of birds moving across the sky, Joseph felt that he saw a secret in the skin there. That delicate, wonderful skin. And then he’d remember himself. Themselves. They would be one fewer. This buoyancy would not last.
Joseph went to work every morning. Victoria stayed home. She gave up her job, finally, and she didn’t seem to miss it. Her belly grew and grew. When she stood, she clasped her hands below it as if lugging a sack of grapefruits. At seven months, she seemed on the brink of bursting. She appeared comfortable though, and more beautiful than ever. Her breasts were rounder, somehow closer to her face. Her lips and neck were plumper, and more pink. She had a new kind of confidence, which Joseph saw as an improvement. He wanted to ask her if she felt less lonely. He wanted the answer in his head to be right. He wondered what it would be like to have another person with you constantly, in your belly. Someone who knew all the secret things you did—crying over some classical music and talking while on the toilet, perhaps. He could never share those thoughts with Victoria. She’d call him sentimental.
She paced the apartment all day, back and forth, tapping gently on her belly to a song she hummed, comforting it. He liked to imagine that she talked to the baby when he wasn’t home. He imagined that she named the child something amusing—Mazel Tov or Aloe Vera. Her belly, it seemed to Joseph, was like a friend she hadn’t seen in many years who had come along and reminded her of a careless youth. She stood for hours at the window, braiding various pieces of her hair. From the side, Joseph thought, her belly emphasized the knobbiness of her knees and bulbousness of her toes and the way her nose was somehow jumpy. The belly made a pattern out of her—toes, knees, belly, nose. It seemed perfectly natural and right.
One day, Joseph recited the rhyming phrase to himself as he watched her slicing
samoon
in the afternoon sunlight. Knees, toes, belly, nose. Knees, toes, belly, nose. He had just come home from work, and his shirt and shoes were off. The bakery ovens had left a thin, strong sweat all over his body and it had begun to dry and ice on his skin. Victoria’s yellow nightgown was tight against her stomach. She was wearing Joseph’s boots as she clunked around the kitchen. They slouched around her ankles.
She hoisted one knee onto the stove in order to reach for a jar. Joseph jumped up, lunged toward her.
“I’m all right,” she said. “I can do it.”
Joseph sank back onto the mattress on the floor. Victoria took the date spread from the high shelf. She winced as she turned the lid. Suddenly, she put her hand to her head.
“Are you all right?” Joseph asked.
“Just dizzy,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
He had asked Isaac’s wife about this. The one who’d had a baby too. She said that everything happened to pregnant ladies. Tiredness, nausea, screaming in their sleep. There was rarely something to worry about. But Joseph couldn’t help it. He felt that maybe it was in his blood to worry.
Victoria slathered the bread with thick
halek.
She began to walk over to Joseph with her hand stretched out in front of her, the bread on her palm. Then she stopped. Right there in the middle of the floor. She wavered slightly, then threw her arms out for balance. The bread flipped and fell. The date spread made a quick sucking sound and stuck to the floor. Victoria’s face was surprised, and she cradled her stomach from the bottom. She moaned. Joseph got up but stopped, unsure.
The baby had kicked. That’s what it was. He wanted to hug her, lift her, laugh out loud. He walked a bit closer to her, wanting to feel it but she put one hand up to block him. His heart sank. She stood still with her eyes shut tight and a strong chin, as if dispelling a terrible fantasy and then waiting for it to rear up again. Joseph rescued the bread from the floor, his hands shaking with denied anticipation. He stuffed it into his mouth whole, dusty, and when the sugar stuck to the sides of his throat he coughed, letting the wet crumbs fly like kamikaze birds.
The next afternoon, Joseph found himself back on the bus, passing Abingdon Square, crawling along Fourteenth Street. It wasn’t like him to feel this way, furious, irrational, his feet yearning to stamp, shouts bobbing in his chest. He considered himself a patient person—and understanding. But enough was enough. He’d been patient. He’d been understanding. And where, he wondered, had that gotten him? Any food will go bad, he thought to himself, if you leave it out long enough.
When he arrived at Dr. Espy’s office, a woman was behind the desk, leafing through a catalog, licking her pointer and flipping the pages, all drama. She didn’t bother to look up.
“Is the other nurse here?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“The one with saffron hair and—” he said, and stopped himself before mimicking her very large chest. He didn’t know how else to describe her. “She is very nice,” he said.
“Carmen,” she said. “No. She’s off today.”
Joseph dropped his hands onto the desk. This seemed like a very bad sign.
Finally, the woman looked up. That’s when her face changed, like he’d handed her a gift.
“Is there something I can help you with?” she asked, adjusting her hair, which let out a lovely scent of flowers he’d never smelled. She stood up, so they were eye to eye, and Joseph wondered if she was going to ask him to leave. But she didn’t. Though she’d appeared large before, her waist, wrists, and neck, he noticed, were actually quite slight. Birdlike, even. He wondered if that’s what made movie stars movie stars—that gist of grandness. These American women all seemed like movie stars. And this one looked very clean in her white uniform, he thought.
“Well—” he began.
“Tell me,” she said. The office was empty. It was late in the day. The woman reached for her sweater.
He was surprised at how easily the words came to him, how directly the woman faced him and with such devoted interest. Her eyes were focused and clear. He realized then how much Victoria had kept him out. She avoided him, eluded him. They hardly made eye contact anymore. They never kissed. And he realized how accustomed he’d become, comfortable even, to speaking to Victoria’s back.
T
HE NEXT DAY
, my mother slept till noon, like she always did on Wednesdays, and I took the opportunity to rip the place apart, looking for hints and clues about why she loved masgouf so much. I hunted down all the dog-eared pages of her cookbooks, went through all the scrawled recipe notes for a particular love of grilled fish that maybe I didn’t know about. I got nowhere. Then I found a website where you put in your favorite ingredients in various combinations and it spit out the “perfect” dish. I listed all the things my mother loved. It came up with nothing even mildly masgouf-y. It came up with pork chop lollipops and rice pudding. My mother would have preferred a sous-vide Christmas tree.
After that, I searched for something about Victoria and Joseph’s restaurant. Anything. I looked through a bowl of old matchbooks, most of which must have belonged to Lou because they were from bars near Wall Street, and Lou liked nothing more than a man in a suit. My mother wouldn’t have been caught dead in a place like that. I went through my mother’s underwear, sock, and jewelry drawers and checked in the freezer, hoping that I’d overlooked something, missed the crucial clue. But nothing. Not a single thing. Meanwhile, in case my mother decided to wake up in the middle of everything, I cleaned the house, made a pot of her favorite white bean soup, and prepared Parmesan croutons on a baking sheet, though I knew she’d never feel like eating them. I made raspberry sauce for vanilla ice cream.
Then, when my mother started to get restless, flinging her comforter off the couch and knocking her knees, I wrote her a note that said I’d gone to a museum to research an extra-credit project that might keep me from getting an incomplete during my suspension. I left for the bookstore.
“Hey,” Blot said. I hadn’t even seen him. He was behind me, and I swung around.
“I’ve been reading a lot of Lorca stuff,” he said. “I have something for you.”
My heart jumped rope. I didn’t want to believe him. He cocked his head and did a full-body twirl.
“C’mon,” he said.
Only then did I realize it was true what my mother had said: that my feet turned in, that I leaned forward and crouched, that I scurried like a pigeon. He was walking quickly, whistling, picking up a stray book here and there, his body moving like a hammock. He took one step to my two. I scurried scurried scurried alongside of him, taking a giant leap every once in a while so I didn’t feel like his midget cousin.
“So,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Well, I went back,” I told him. “To Victoria’s.”
“And?” he said.
“Well,” I said. “I told her what I told you, pretty much, about making it for my mother’s birthday.”
And then I told him what Victoria had said about the masgouf not being chef-y.
“She had a point,” I said. “Because my mother’s other favorites include, for example, osetra caviar and wagyu beef tartare from Le Bernardin.”
“I don’t know what that means,” he said.
“Exactly,” I said.
“Maybe she liked the atmosphere,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, though I doubted it. The review I’d read suggested the very opposite of what she liked. She hated clutter, anything that might collect dust. Even department stores gave her the creeps.
“So did you get the recipe?” he asked.
It occurred to me that if I said I had the recipe, we would have nothing else to talk about. The recipe was something to look forward to, to wait on together.
“No,” I said. “And she didn’t offer it. I guess the timing isn’t right. Yet.”
“Understood,” he said. “It might take a while.”
If I could have patted myself on the back, I would have.
“Here,” Blot said and stopped. We were on the second floor, next to a giant display of coffee-table books. Blot pointed at the one at the very bottom of the pile. The spine was black and white.
“There,” he said. “That’s it.”
Unfortunately, it was under a million Marilyn Monroe books. Marilyn was on a chaise, her head thrown back and her knees bent. I imagined myself in that position. I had bony, knobby knees—the kind that would not photograph well. I picked up the book. Underneath that was another copy. And another. Marilyn again and again. Stupid me, I blushed. I was embarrassed about how long it was taking me to move all the Marilyns and put them down gently. I wondered if Marilyn was the kind of woman he liked and if seeing her again and again was making him like me less. I kept waiting for him to say
Never mind.
“Almost there,” he said, dimples so deep you could store almond tuiles inside.
Finally, I got to the bottom book. It was a close-up of Dalí, Lorca’s lover. He was half looking at the camera. His eyes were open wide wide wide, and his mustache was so long that it extended past the cover on both sides. The spine of the book showed the little swirl of it, like an escargot. I turned it over in my hands.
“I thought you’d like it,” he said. “So I stashed it here. It’s the only copy left. One day, when I’m not so broke, I’ll buy it for you. For now, it’s on hold permanently.”
I looked at him, right in his face. His eyes were gray and sort of blue, like the healthiest sardine pulled straight from the ocean. I wanted to tell him that last year, for my birthday, my mother and Lou bought me a slew of stuff from Victoria’s Secret—ridiculous things that I’d never wear. They thought it was hysterical. They bought me a book on growing breasts too. It was for eight-year-olds and it said,
Do not try to squash them down. They are healthy. Would you kill a flower when it was just starting to bloom?