John Leary

Hope

One

WILSON AND EDIE’S BABY ARRIVED one sunny morning in June. It kicked the front door with its foot, as the doorbell was beyond a baby’s reach. “Hi,” Wilson said. “You must be our new baby.”
    The baby held two small suitcases. “Can you give me a hand with these?” it said. “They must weigh a ton.”
    Wilson called to Edie. Edie said to the baby, “Hello, dear.”
    The baby said, “I imagined you’d be more buxom. And a better dresser.”
    Later that same day Anika arrived in America, a foreign country fresh with forgotten puritanical possibility. Her plane landed outside of New York City. “I will work in ignominy until I am recognized as a brilliant, mysterious foreign actress,” she told the passport agent.
    Hendrick, Wilson and Edie’s neighbor, heard the news and brought the baby a small kimono. Hendrick sat with Wilson and Edit on their back porch and watched the baby uproot the honeysuckle. “Looks like you two have got your hands full,” Hendrick said. “Kids are a bitch. I called my ex-wife yesterday. She was worried because her five year old refused to wear anything but black. The child was mourning the passage of her youth.”
    The baby said, “When are you going to teach me to drive?”
    Jules and Francine, two people Wilson and Edie had met at a cargo auction, lay on top of each other intermittently, dreaming of children.
    Guy the student sat in a café near the medical school and said “puerile,” in a tone that made undergraduates mumble and waitresses flutter.
    Edie taught a class at the university called “Introduction to Hope.” On the first day, she said, “Look to your left, and to your right. Four years from now, two of you will be dead. One, mysteriously so.”
    Guy said to a woman who spilled her machiatto, “All mistakes are intentional.”
    Anika applied for employment as a waitress, an actress, a secretary, a broker, a production assistant, a philanthropist, a static consultant, a vestry maid, a carnivore, a migrainor, a doddering elf, and a bombardier. She said to the walls of her hostel room, “Where is the beauty in this?”
    Jules lifted himself with his arms, rising above Francine. Francine whispered, “Oh please please please this time. Please.”
    Hendrick smoked and thought of his ex-wife: Are we happier?
    Wilson stared at the remains of the VCR, the DVD player, the television, the stereo components, and the speakers. The baby had been left alone in the den, and twisted wires hung from the mangled casings like shattered limbs protruding from a train wreck. Edie sat on the sofa and stared at Wilson’s feet. Upstairs something hit the floor with sufficient force to cause the TV monitor to tumble drunkenly face forward.

Two

WILSON AND EDIE had awaited the baby with blinding flashes of anticipatory joy.
    “Should we hang bunting?“ Wilson had asked. “Don’t babies like bunting?” “I think some are allergic, we need to be careful,“ Edie said. “Maybe scented candles are out, too.”
    “I bought safe nontoxic educational toys,” Wilson said. Edie said, “The bright colors are pleasing to the eye, the rounded edges safe to the touch. Though a child thinks the world is made of colored plastic.” “I know,” Wilson said. “That’s why I also bought these die-cast mini surgical instruments. They’ve got laser-dulled edges. We will take our baby to the zoo, lecturing it on man’s inhumanity as we stroll among the sorrowful animals.” “The sorrow will not be lost on the baby,” Edie said. “But we are raising a child, not a buddha. It is important that we teach the baby.”
    The baby said, “Patsy Cline deserved to die.”
    Guy smoked cigarettes and watched television. He watched “The Nature Show,” carefully noting the bourgeois biases.
    Edie said to her students, “Two years from now, ninety percent of you who are in love will be out of love.”
    Wilson knocked over the mailbox as he was backing out of the driveway.
    Hendrick said, “Train travel is the safest, everyone says so.”
    Jules and Francine analyzed their secretions and diet, then visited specialists.
    The baby said, “Where did Pol Pot go to college?”
    A man on the subway mistakenly fondled Anika. She bought a ticket west.
    The baby said, “Those aren’t raisins you’re eating.”
    Hendrick sat in his sunporch, built with insurance money, trying not to look at his hands.
    The baby said, “Did you have this much trouble keeping housepets before I arrived?”
    Wilson looked at the knots in Edie’s hands, the way her toes and arms never seemed to uncurl. Perhaps a change of scenery? Edie took the baby to Brazil.
    Guy said to the cigarette vendor, “Do you know how to slaughter a cow? You’ll need to know when the Revolution comes.”
    Wilson stopped shaving and walked through the rooms of his house naked, turning lights on and off. He wrote a note to himself to start a savings fund for the baby’s education.
    Francine and Jules and Wilson greeted Edie and the baby on their return. “Búzios is paradise,” Edie said. “All that red meat,” the baby said, making a face. “My bowels hold a pylon of undigested gristle.”
    Edie said, “Did we get any mail?” Wilson shrugged, “Mostly bills.”
    The baby rumbled in the basement, destroying the telecommunications networks of model cities. Wilson and Edie and Jules and Francine sat at the kitchen table holding plastic cups of red wine up to the light. “We think we might like to have a baby ourselves,” Jules said. Wilson sipped and said, “Ours has broken all of our wine glasses.” Jules and Francine looked at each other: Awwwww, that’s sweeeeeeet.
    Edie went to a lecture entitled “Hemispheres of Thought and Man’s Infinite Gaze.” She drank white wine from a Styrofoam tumbler. Guy approached her and told her she was the most intimidating woman in the room. He kissed her hand. She thought, He is not one of my students.
    Jules met Francine as she emerged from the bathroom. “They seem happy,” Jules said.
    Wilson asked Anika to live with him and Edie as an au pair. Anika said, “You cannot afford me, but I have always had a fascination for familial disasters, so I accept.”
    Jules and Francine said good-bye and stood on the front porch. Jules said, “Where’s our car?” The baby said, “That was yours?”

Three

WILSON TRIED WITHOUT SUCCESS to cradle the baby in his arms. “You’re my child, I love you,” Wilson said. The baby said, “From the outset I have been cognizant of my eventual demise-cuddling doesn’t help.” “You are young,” Wilson said. “You will learn.”
    Wilson told the baby a few creation myths, careful to explain that they were myths, for entertainment purposes only. The baby said, “What comes before creation? Creation is a mere component of destruction.”
    Edie met Guy for coffee in a barn-café outside the city. He showed her his thesis. It was cold and brittle. He asked if he could kiss her. “No,” she said. “Not yet.”
    The baby said, “Glycerin is the easy part; it’s the nitro that requires the delicate touch.”
    Wilson watched Anika prepare cheese and potatoes, one of her native dishes. He thought, Anika has breasts younger and more eager than Edie’s. He said, “How long will you stay?” “I will not tell you,” she said. “Please, why not?” Wilson asked. “Your feelings in my absence are not something you should be able to plan,” she said.
    Edie met Guy in a toolshed, her black turtleneck trying vainly to squeeze the rose from her cheeks. They grappled for three hours. “Rapture,” said Edie. Guy smoked a Chesterfield and said, “Primogeniture and couth: division or decision?”
    Anika held the placid baby. She called it liebchen. She offered it a breast. The baby purred, sucking quietly, though Anika wasn’t lactating. Bastard, Wilson thought.
    Edie said to her students, “Twenty years from now, eighty-six percent of you will be dead or broken on the wheel of fate, finding comfort in arcana such as model railroading or tiny purple hats.”
    “When I was a younger man I could fell a tree with my sneeze,” Wilson said. Edie said, “What did they make trees out of back then?”
    Guy and Edie lay on a mattress in Guy’s garret. The mattress was stuffed with cigarette butts. A poster of the Rosenbergs regarded Edie balefully. Guy thought, The proletarian war has battlefields in the bedroom. Edie thought, If I tell him he’s a lousy lover he might not touch me at all.
    Wilson grew a mustache.
    The baby said, “I wouldn’t use that to brush your teeth with anymore, if I were you.”
    Anika was by all accounts beautiful, perceptive, witty, and kind, and roundly despised by everyone in the neighborhood except Hendrick. Anika often visited Hendrick, bringing Swiss chocolates from which she had removed the foil wrappers.
    Hendrick told Anika, “I chose to devote my life to the electric harpsichord. When my hands were broken in the train wreck, I was left with nothing. Yet I go on.” He said, “My silent harpsichord.” He wanted to continue, like the silence of God, but feared she would find him trite.
    From across the kitchen Anika said to Wilson, “Perhaps if you considered the consequences of your actions beforehand.” She is trite, Wilson thought. But nonetheless I could love her.
    Edie ate her crullers, watching Wilson blend coffee beans. He looks haggard, she thought. It is not my fault.
    The next night Wilson crashed the car again. He hit a cement truck from behind. The confetti of broken glass dotted the rain-speckled pavement. The cement-truck driver said, “Are you out of your frigging tree?”
    Anika instructed Wilson on changing the baby’s diapers, lightly brushing her breasts against his back. “Will you buy me a pair of aerobic shoes?”
    The baby struggled, kicking Wilson in the chin. Wilson said, “I will not abandon you. You may not realize that until the instant before your death.” The baby said, “That’s the problem right there, mister.”
    Edie sat at the kitchen table drinking cold coffee and watching the baby dismantle the garbage disposal. She thought, This is not what I expected at all.
    Guy said, “Edie, I am going to New York for a conference on ‘The Nature of the Struggle’ and I wish you would accompany me.” Edie said, “Wilson, I have to go to New York for a few days.” Wilson said, “Anika and I can manage just fine.”
    Wilson thought, To have Anika offer me a breast ....
    Jules said, “And yet I detected a hesitancy in their joy.”
    Francine said, “It will be different for us.”

Four

WILSON SAID, “WHAT DO YOU WANT for Christmas?” The baby said, “Lebensraum.”
    At the Hotel Paramour, Guy reached for his cigarettes. Edie thought, I feel rotten. Rotten as a rotted thing.
    Wilson crashed two more cars. “At a certain point the mechanical impulse of the machine takes over, and I sit strapped in, helpless,” he told the policeman. The policeman said, “Please come with me to the station house. We will give you ice cream and ask you to fill a few sterilized beakers.”
    Wilson asked Hendrick, “What is lebensraum?” Hendrick smoked thoughtfully. “Room to roam,” Hendrick said. “Either buy a larger playpen or consider annexing the Sudetenland.”
    Wilson’s face glided gently toward the airbag.
    Wilson asked the bystanders, “Did I scream?”
    Anika said, “There is more to life than music.” Hendrick asked, “Like what?” Anika said, “Maybe the silence in between the notes.” Hendrick thought, That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Yet l think I’m in love.
    Wilson took the car to the butcher’s, the cleaner’s, the liquor store, and
the bakery, wondering if it would be the day he found himself hovering uncertainly over the twisted wreckage, amazed at the glimpse of his mangled body below. No, he thought opening the garage, I do not want that.
    Wilson thought, If I could hold the baby a moment, it would realize I am not to blame. He searched the house looking for the baby. He found it in the guest bedroom; behind a barricade of sharpened shoe trees. “Let me hold you,” Wilson said. The baby said, “Try it and get a bellyful of tempered brass.” Wilson said, “I only want to do what is right; it’s natural for a father to seek to comfort his child. To see the world together, taking note of the progress.” The baby scoffed, “Progress?” “Yes,” Wilson said. “That inevitable stream that began with your creation. Creation is progress. That which
exists—” The baby cut him off, “Progress is loneliness and death. This urge to comfort is a manifestation of your guilt for bringing me here.”
    Guy said, “You have a baby.” Edie said, “How do we know it’s ours?” Guy said, “Hope clutters the lives of the morally unfettered.” Edie thought, What on earth does that mean?
    Anika emerged from her shower wearing a tiny beige towel. “I have seen you admiring my breasts,” she said. “And I have decided to let you touch them for a while.” Wilson said, “Is it because I have grown this mustache?” “Yes; yes it is,” Anika answered. “A part of me would like not to be superficial, but a part of me revels in the lightness and ease.”
    Edie returned from New York. She asked Wilson, “What will we do with the portion of our lives we can control?” Wilson said, “How do we know which portion it is?”
    Wilson said, “What are you doing?” The baby said, “I’m rewiring the baby monitor to make a detonator.” “Why?” Wilson asked. “Well,” the baby cocked its head thoughtfully, “I guess in my case hope is a learned response. And I’m not yet old enough for pre-kinder, even.”
    Wilson remembered the day Edie approached him, hugging him from behind. She had said, “What would you say about siring a foal?” Wilson laughed, Edie smiled, and they discussed the matter in serious tones. Edie was certain. Wilson was certain. They kissed. The next day Edie picked up the phone and ordered a baby. When he recalled the event for Anika, Wilson said, “We had no idea what we were doing.”

Five

GUY AND WILSON AND EDIE sat on the back porch. The sun came up, the horizon birthing a new day. Guy said, “Tell the day you will not abandon it.” Wilson said, “No one else will listen.” Edie said, “We believe what we want to believe.”
    Wilson introduced Anika to Guy. Anika said Guy’s teeth were too small. Guy said Anika smelled like meat.
    Anika melted glue and pounded nails in the basement, constructing a harpsichord Hendrick could play with his chin.
    Francine felt a stirring. Jules said, “Yes!”
    The baby lay in the nursery on a huge foamy bed, an altar it had piled in the center of the room built from the insides of all its stuffed animals.
    Wilson watched Anika working in the basement workshop. He considered their age difference and thought paternal thoughts. He bought Edie an expensive, impractical bauble. She held both his hands and looked into his eyes.
    “This is our bundle of joy,” said Jules and Francine. Francine held aloft a squirming swaddle. “We chose a name that vexes traditional gender stereotypes. We call her ‘Felatia.’ ”
    Autumn, winter, spring. Days ambled toward the floor like playing cards tossed toward a hat.
    Guy went back to the university. Edie gave him a silk vest, and Wilson gave him a nickel-plated cigarette lighter. They both wished him luck.
    Anika returned to her foreign country.
    Hendrick made music and was happy for a while.
    Wilson and Edie and the baby grew old together, occasionally exchanging secret smiles over the dinner table. Wilson and Edie shared hours, a mail slot, a bed, meals, a child, some tenderness, and some guilt. “This wasn’t quite what I had expected,” Wilson said. “Me neither,” said Edie. “But things have improved, right? I think things will continue to improve.” “I believe that, too,” Wilson said. “I wonder why. Where does that belief come from?”
    The baby dragged the milkman’s transmission into the room. “You don’t want to know,” it said.

JOHN LEARY has had work appear in Pig Iron Malt, Pindeldyboz, Sweet Fancy Moses, and Zoetrope All-Story Extra.

“Hope” appears in our Winter 2001 issue.

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