Leaving Lucy Pear(42)
Her mouth opened. But instead of grabbing the dolphin she closed the boy’s jaw, planted her mouth over his open nostril, and blew. Out came the dolphin in her other hand.
Brigitte gasped, and clapped. “Le bébé!” The boy began to sob. Adeline held him, and Oakes finally shut up. Julian returned to the prelude, broke through the beginning, moved on to where the melody opened up, the high G-sharps piercing and delicate at once, his eyes locked on Brigitte, who stood and moved toward him. Bea could not help but watch: Brigitte’s stomach rising, her weighty swagger as she made her way across the room. Trapped on the love seat next to Rose, Bea waited for their goodnight kiss. Instead, Brigitte fell into Julian’s lap, pressed her back into his chest, lifted her face, closed her eyes, and cried (a girlish, private cry they all heard): “Un bébé!” And Julian, instead of looking embarrassed or tumbling off the bench at the bulk of her, did the most shocking thing. He reached around Brigitte, stroked her snail, and said back to her, with great tenderness, “Un bébé.”
Rose leaned close to Bea’s ear. “She does look like a whale, don’t you think?”
Bea looked to Ira, a pit rising in her throat. She knew he must be awake now—the shouting, Bea’s need, would have roused him. But he lay still, eyes closed. He wouldn’t rescue her from the despair that swelled inside her at the sight of that stomach, those hands, the odd pietà Adeline and Jack made on the floor, Rose’s whispered insult echoing Bea’s own smothered rage. She remembered huddling with Julian in the attic when they were still children, and inseparable, always hiding together—“little phantoms,” the adults called them—and how she wished then that he was her brother, so she could have him near her all the time, how his smell, and his warm skin, seemed more familiar even than her own. Now his slender hands cupped Brigitte’s vast stomach and Bea considered her options (attempting detachment, considering herself consider), to scream or to leave, and settled on a groan, hoping it would come out more quietly than it did.
Everyone stared. Bea didn’t look up but she could feel them staring—she heard their thoughts traveling the room like arrows. Poor cousin Bea. What’s wrong now?
The abrupt silence was punctured by the whistle buoy’s wail.
“Play a song, Bea?” Julian’s voice was kind—clearly he meant to help her—and Brigitte started playing a staccato “Yankee Doodle,” as if to help her further. But they had made everything worse. Bea could not play.
“Come,” Brigitte said. “A song of the freedom!”
“Independence,” Rose corrected. “Oft confused, but not the same.”
“The freedom of the dolphin!” Oakes cried. “It’s brilliant!”
“Go on, Bea.” Ira spoke gently. Even Ira was in on it now, though he knew the piano for Bea was like alcohol for others, her desire for it verging on lust, disease. She had kept herself from it for so long that she couldn’t imagine touching a key now without losing control.
She couldn’t play. And she couldn’t sit here with her fear flayed, her heart shrinking, as everyone shouted at her. So she stood. And with a jovial, almost peppy wave—hammering this, hammering that, mashing back tears, seeing double—she walked out. “Good night, everyone, I’ve work to do, well done, Adeline, hurrah! Goodnightgoodnightgoodnight!”
? ? ?
Brigitte’s bony rump cut off circulation to Julian’s leg. Her playing was awful, and very loud. She had no shame! He was crazy for her. He loved that she sat there with her stomach knocking against the piano, banging out patriotic songs she barely understood. He worried a bit, too, at how little she had changed. Even her body, apart from her stomach, was exactly the same, long and lean, like a deer’s. You could look at a girl like Adeline and see that she made a natural, good mother. But Brigitte might be more like Vera, always pulled to do something else, an unstoppable wind. Julian feared she might have the baby and forget about it, go off to paint or brew tea or knead clay or dance by herself in front of the mirror the way she liked to do, and just forget.
Then again, he could nuzzle into Brigitte—he nuzzled—and smell her perfume and sweat and want desperately to kiss the string of muscles that stood between her neck and shoulder. So. They could afford a nurse. So they would work it out.
But her playing really was so bad. She knew it was bad, Julian was almost certain, but it was impossible not to wonder. And it was impossible, wondering this, not to think of Cousin Bea’s playing. She had been as gorgeous a pianist as Brigitte was a woman. Julian had tried to let her exit tonight roll off him, tried to focus on Brigitte, but Bea had a way of haunting him when they were in the same house, and Brigitte’s neck was reminding him of Bea’s arms, the way they’d been before the baby, that era so starkly ripped from this one that Julian could almost smell it, summer, boxwoods, saltwater-soaked towels. Before the baby, there had been a length of flesh at Bea’s upper arms, just at the edge of her underarms, secret but not quite, and as she played Julian would watch this flesh, taut and shivering with her movement, and he would imagine, if she were to stop playing and lift her arms a bit more, the scent. This was his first fantasy of a sexual sort, which embarrassed him, because he assumed that other men did not desire women’s armpits. Then he had asked her to marry him and left for school and come back to find her stuffed into the costume of a girl-woman expecting a child, all of her puffed, her skin marked with tiny pocks, those arms bloated, undone, and she seemed either to have no awareness of this or not to care, or Vera had been dressing her, because she wore a sleeveless dress with wide straps that only accentuated the tragic heft of her new arms. And now, ten years later, though she was skinny as a stick, her arms still bore the imprint of that time—they hung, the skin slack, so opposite Brigitte’s tight belly when she undressed at night, the smooth, hard earth she offered up to his hands so that he could feel, if the timing was right, the jostling of their baby. Brigitte said she knew which were kicks and which punches but to Julian they were all the same—they were the baby, saying hello, hello. He was elated and terrified, watching Brigitte’s stomach jump.