Why should I object to polygamy? The baby is barely a month old, I need the help. But not from Regina the vagina, the Brazilian princess in a sequined mini hiked to her waist in the hall in front of the elevator, hooked, as it were, to you.
I am calm now, that is obvious. I am remarkably calm, and you have a point: that time in Africa when we filmed a man with ten wives who refused to feed him because he hadn’t paid for the last wife was—funny. But it should have been instructive, at least to me.
Not six minutes earlier, I had asked if you would please consider getting a job. You were on your way out, and I was holding a page I had just typed for a law office, with the baby in my other arm, latched to my breast. I can’t work as hard as before, I say. I was wrong about that—you have to get a job. If you don’t, we won’t have a loft for you to bring your women to.
With Regina tight to your side, you stormed out to wait for the elevator, obliquely mentioning the gun you had hidden in the safe.
How can such a mention be oblique? A gesture toward the aforementioned, a cocked thumb, a trigger finger, a moment last week when I saw a gray-something in Bubble Wrap get moved to a box, a monologue around then about burglars. The baby breaks from my breast with a burst of expressiveness, and you break for the elevator—though it takes a while for Dominguez to slide back the tricky door. Then you snatch the crying baby away from me, saying: Bad mother, it must be your milk.
Regina steps away.
The door closes, and the baby is gone.
You think you are punishing me by taking the baby, but no, I enjoy my few minutes of freedom. Freedom is a big part of the flimsy rationale that you think keeps us together. The baby will only be as free as we are, you said. There could be no compromising ceremony. Nix, then, on help from my parents, grandparent-wise or money-wise. Then there’s this gun on the table, so to speak, and your play-twisting my arm around my back when you don’t get your way, and of course, you have the girl.
What do I have? My name on the lease.
Regina is away, late for her pedicure or facial, something intimate she can pay for, not the rent. Why should she pay rent? She has her own apartment she pays for. She uses only half the bed anyway, dating from the night you went crazy over a film you saw about Bahia and cruised a South American–themed nightclub to find her. She hardly uses the closet.
I am typing.
You pirouette in the nude with the hiccupping baby in your arms; you jump up and down so your penis whacks your pelvis. You wear a headdress, a red crinoline half-slip worn on your head the way they do in Africa. I doubt Regina has seen it. She has not seen much, being ten years younger than I am, practically preteen, she’d probably appreciate your dancing. I’m doubly disarmed. I feel like Shiva, so many, many arms unShivaed. What do I admire about you other than your ability to play?
Thick curls. Even your insults are amusing. Once you chased me down the street under a cardboard box.
Get a job, I suggest again. Or you can pay me for your half of the loft and I’m out of here.
The loft, a fancy word to describe architectural emptiness, now holds a tub, a sink, and a toilet, courtesy of my typing. Who installed everything?, you ask. Why should I pay you anything? We’re even.
I extract the baby.
The baby is just more play to you; I am the ball and chain. My demands practically propel you into Regina’s arms. Surely you will quickly tire of her. She is not me, therefore she is less interesting. Wrong. Besides, now I know she needs the loft for her nascent film career.
Do you see yourself happy in a place where you have to evict your child and the mother of your child to lay claim to it?
It will be easier for everyone, you explain, if I move out.
Yes.
I call a broker. How much is my name worth on that lease, with all the improvements?
Don’t move, she says.
Yet I pack in my head. I am not strong enough yet to move my things—what am I saying? I worked hard gutting the bathroom, repairing the windows, putting up walls, paying for everything, plus the rent. All my money’s in the loft and if I leave, it’s yours. I tie the baby in a scarf that I wind around my neck, wearing him like a broken arm.
I call for the elevator.
Why can’t I be more African than just toting the baby around like that?, you say to me. What’s one more wife?
Dominguez slams the ancient iron apparatus open. Dusty from head to foot from the rags he processes in the warehouse on the second floor, castoffs from Goodwill made into bales for delivery to missionaries like the ones we met in Africa who charge for these rags, who gave you the petticoat—he has overheard.
Wait, warns Dominguez, when I go sniffling out of the elevator. Don’t do nothing, girl.
I am, at least, girl.
I’d already divorced an Ayn Rand devotee who kept The Art of Selfishness in his guitar case, an art I now want to do justice to, but am not wired for. Loathe to admit a second mistake, I give even the dog the choicest bits. You, the child begetter, sobbed that you would die without a baby, your entire line would die out. The very idea of a man with such a want, such emotion! Now apparently your line is secure—within weeks, Regina, too, is pregnant.
Your father, the die-and-tool man for thirty years, hated work, and you inherited only that. Your eyes read sincere and sad after you make that clear, while your body moves toward Regina, albeit probably somewhat unconsciously, as a way to separate you from my insistence. But I am only asking you to work to pay part of the rent, not, god forbid, for Regina to leave. I am so cooperative. Besides, you have worked in the past, you once made a beautiful film, you can repair anything, you spent hours showing Regina how to edit, she who is not about to gift you money to feed your baby or his mother.
You begin to shake when I say for the third time that day you need to get a job.
Not just for the rent. What if the baby, not even me, gets sick? I say. If people with HMOs think six hours waiting for service in emergency is a long time, they should try being indigent. The baby had better not catch anything quick and deadly. The baby will need real food soon, I say. That costs money, too.
You go out with the dog and forage expired wheels of cheese, wild vegetables—mostly dandelions—and little chunks of meat you chop up in the night so they appear ungnawed in the fridge in the morning, “found” in the trash of restaurants and grocery stores. The dog enjoys the rest.
What more can I want? you say.
A week later, you back out the door with Regina, who is not showing—yet—and you say: Get those nails out tonight.
If I pull out all the nails in the floor that stick up, you will put down the carpet you say you will find on the street. The baby needs a carpet to crawl on, not the nails.
I wrap the baby in his scarf and with him at my neck, I get down on my knees with a hammer, and I pull.
Two hours later, I am swinging on the swing with the baby, my hands and neck stiff and sore. All the lofts have these swings, probably in the beginning for sex after art openings and happenings, but next, and inevitably, for the kids. But this one is not only for kids. You have touched your face to the ceiling on this swing, you could have broken your neck.
I swing the baby to sleep. It occurs to me, in my own moment of rest, that if I can rip so many nails out of the floor, I can pack. I lay the baby on top of the bed, surrounded by pillows—no crib-jail for him!—fill an old bug-infested found-on-the-the street trunk with my stuff, and shove it into the elevator hall. While I am changing the baby’s diaper for exit, you return unexpectedly—but your arrivals are always unexpected—with Regina at your heels. I leave the trunk and take the stairs to the street.
I stand on the median, jiggling the baby, looking up at our open window, trying to understand you, the way you insist I don’t. I understand I have an overdeveloped empathy for men who say they love me. After that, there are a lot of ellipses.
My hand around my mouth, I call up to you, I curse you.
Of course it is Regina I hate. Can’t she take that vagina of hers and push it into the face of someone without a woman and a baby? Brazil has a big population of handsome soccer players just her age who also make movies. That combination has to be true, statistically speaking.
Rain falls on me and the median. I hunch to shelter the baby, which is easy, given that pregnancy throws you forward anyway, given that my bones haven’t realigned. No grocery stores, no Laundromats, no restaurants within ten blocks. In the dark, invisible people behind opaque glass drive by. The ripping sound of the water parted by their tires is my heart.
You close the window.
My pap smear isn’t good. I take money for the rent to a procedure to cut out what is going wild. They need procedures to do the same with a bad partner. I leave the baby with Regina at the last minute, my babysitter friend having had her own emergency. When I return, having wept for quite a while on a curb, the baby’s asleep on the bed, Regina beside him.
I could drag her off.
But a rose lies beside the baby. Get well soon, says its note, in handwriting I’ve never seen, and her phone number.
In the morning, I sit up on the couch.
You say, You again? on your way to the bathroom.
Regina is gone already, taxied home to collect a painting she’d like on our wall. You say you are meeting her for lunch and dinner. You never say Get out. Instead, you kiss me hard like a demon and try to get my clothes off, the baby crying when he hears me cry. You are using force and you know it.
I beat you off with the heavy diaper bag. You say you’re calling the police for domestic assault, and I call the elevator, tip the trunk in, then dart back for the baby—the baby on the bed that you stand in front of.
I’m keeping him, you say. You overturn the table between us.
I lower my head and butt you in the groin. It is instinctual, I don’t think about it. I butt you and oomph, you step on the dog who shrieks and bites while I scoop up the baby and run out the door right into the elevator. Dominguez slams the door shut, we hear you shout from the apartment Where the fuck is my gun?, as if I have misplaced it. Dominguez makes no comment, he carries the trunk to the taxi he flags down, he loads it for me.