She tilted her head slightly, held my gaze until I got it.
“Oh,” I said. “You mean you’ve missed me.”
“Yeah.”
I nodded. “How much?”
She dropped the towel.
“That much,” I said and something caught in my throat. “My, my.”
After making love, I live for a time in a world of echoes and snapshot memories. I lie in the damp dark with Angie’s heart beating atop my own, her spine pressed against my fingertips or her hip warming my palm, and I can hear the echo of her soft groans, a sudden gasp, the low, throaty chuckle she emits after we’re spent and she tosses her head back for a moment and her dark hair falls from her face and down her back. With my eyes closed, I see in close-up the bite of her upper teeth on her lower lip, the cut of her calf on the white mattress, the press of a shoulder blade against her flesh, the wisps of dream and appetite that suddenly cloud and moisten her eyes, the points of her dark pink nails sinking into the skin above my abdomen.
After making love with Angie, I’m no good for anything for half an hour or so. Most times, I need someone to draw me a diagram just to dial a phone. All but the most basic motor skills are largely beyond me. Intelligent conversation is out of the question. I just float in echoes and snapshots.
“Hey.” She drummed her fingers on my chest, tightened her thigh against the inside of my own.
“Yeah?”
“You ever think—”
“Not at the moment.”
She laughed, hooked a foot around my ankle, and rose up my chest a bit, ran a tongue along my throat. “Seriously, just for a sec.”
“Shoot,” I managed.
“You ever think, I mean, when you’re inside me, that what we’re doing could, if we let it, produce life?”
I tilted my head and opened my eyes, looked into hers. She stared back calmly. A smudge of mascara under her left eye looked like a bruise in the soft dark of our bedroom.
And it was our bedroom now, wasn’t it? She still owned the house she’d grown up in on Howes Street, still kept most of her furniture there, but she hadn’t spent a night there in almost two years.
Our bedroom. Our bed. Our sheets tangled around these two bodies lying together, heartbeats drumming, flesh pressed together so tightly it would be hard for an observer to decide where one of us ended and the other began. Hard for me sometimes, too.
“A child,” I said.
She nodded.
“Bring a child,” I said slowly, “into this world. With our jobs.”
Another nod, and this time her eyes glistened.
“You want that?”
“I didn’t say that,” she whispered, and leaned in and kissed the tip of my nose. “I said, ‘Did you ever think about it?’ Did you ever think about the power we have when we’re making love in this bed and the springs are making noise and we’re making noise and everything feels…well, wonderful, and not just because of the physical sensation, but because we’re joined—me and you—right here?” She pressed a palm against my groin. “We’re capable of creating life, baby. Me and you. One pill I forget to take—one chance in, what is it, a hundred thousand?—and I could have life growing in me right now. Your life. Mine.” She kissed me. “Ours.”
Lying like this, so close, so warm with the other’s heat, so deeply, deeply enthralled with each other, it was easy to wish life was beginning at this moment in her womb. All that was sacred and mysterious about a woman’s body in general and Angie’s in particular seemed locked in this cocoon of sheets, this soft mattress and rickety bed. It all seemed so clear suddenly.
But the world was not this bed. The world was cement-cold and jaggedly sharp. The world was filled with monsters who’d once been babies, who’d started as zygotes in the womb, who’d emerged from woman in the only miracle the twentieth century has left, yet emerged angry or twisted or destined to be so. How many other lovers had lain in similar cocoons, similar beds, and felt what we felt now? How many monsters had they produced? And how many victims?
“Speak,” Angie said, and pushed the damp hair off my forehead.
“I’ve thought about it,” I said.
“And?”
“And it awes me.”
“Me too.”
“Scares me.”
“Me too.”
“A lot.”
Her eyes grew small. “How come?”
“Little kids found in cement barrels, the Amanda McCreadys who vanish like they’d never lived, pedophiles out there roaming the streets with electrical tape and nylon cord. This world is a shit hole, honey.”
She nodded. “And?”
“And what?”
“And it’s a shit hole. Okay. But then what? I mean, our parents probably knew it was a shit hole, but they had us.”
“Great childhoods we had, too.”
“Would you prefer never to have been born?”
I placed both hands on her lower back and she leaned back into them. Her body rose off mine and the sheet fell from her back and she settled on my lap and looked down at me, her hair falling from behind her ears, naked and beautiful and as close to sheer perfection as any thing or any person or any fantasy I’d ever known.
“Would I prefer never to have been born?”
“That’s the question,” she said softly.
“Of course not,” I said. “But would Amanda McCready?”
“Our child wouldn’t be Amanda McCready.”
“How do we know?”
“Because we wouldn’t rip off drug dealers who’d take our child to get the money back.”
“Kids disappear every day for a lot less reason than that, and you know it. Kids disappear because they were walking to school, on the wrong corner at the wrong time, got separated from their parents at a mall. And they die, Ange. They die.”
A single tear fell to her breast, and after a moment it slid over the nipple and fell to my chest, already cold by the time it hit my skin.
“I know that,” she said. “But be that as it may, I want your child. Not today, maybe not even next year. But I want it. I want to produce something beautiful from my body that is us and yet a person completely unlike us.”
“You want a baby.”
She shook her head. “I want your baby.”
At some point we dozed.
Or I did. I woke a few minutes later to find her gone from the bed, and I got up and walked through the dark apartment into the kitchen, found her sitting at the table by the window, her bare flesh paled by the fractured moonlight cutting through rips in the shade.