“In short, Milly, Boz needs more than your love, or any woman’s love, or any man’s love, for that matter. Like you, he needs another kind of fulfillment. He needs, as you do, a child. He needs, even more than you do, the experience of motherhood.”
5
In November, at Mount Sinai, Boz had the operation—and Milly too, of course, since she had to be the donor. Already he’d undergone the series of implantations of plastic “dummies” to prepare the skin of his chest for the new glands that would be living there—and to prepare Boz himself spiritually for his new condition. Simultaneously a course of hormone treatments created a new chemical balance in his body so that the mammaries would be incorporated into its working order and yield from the first a nourishing milk.
Motherhood (as McGonagall had often explained) to be a truly meaningful and liberating experience had to be entered into whole-heartedly. It had to become part of the structure of nerve and tissue, not just a process or a habit or a social role.
Every hour of that first month was an identity crisis. A moment in front of a mirror could send Boz off into fits of painful laughter or precipitate him into hours of gloom. Twice, returning from her job, Milly was convinced that her husband had buckled under the strain, but each time her tenderness and patience through the night saw Boz over the hump. In the morning they would go to the hospital to see Peanut floating in her bottle of brown glass, pretty as a waterlily. She was completely formed now and a human being just like her mother and father. At those moments Boz couldn’t understand what all this agonizing had been about. If anyone ought to have been upset, it should have been Milly, for there she stood, on the threshold of parenthood, slim-bellied, with tubes of liquid silicone for breasts, robbed by the hospital and her husband of the actual experience of maternity. Yet she seemed to possess only reverence for this new life they had created between them. It was as though Milly, rather than Boz, were Peanut’s father, and birth were a mystery she might admire from a distance but never wholly, never intimately, share.
Then, precisely as scheduled, at seven o’clock of the evening of December 24, Peanut (who was stuck with this name now for good and forever, since they’d never been able to agree on any other) was released from the brown glass womb, tilted topsy-turvy, tapped on the back. With a fine, full-throated yell (which was to be played back for her every birthday till she was twenty-one years old, the year she rebelled and threw the tape in an incinerator), Peanut Hanson joined the human race.
The one thing he had not been expecting, the wonderful thing, was how busy he had to be. Till now his concern had always been to find ways to fill the vacant daylight hours, but in the first ecstasies of his new selflessness there wasn’t time for half of all that needed doing. It was more than a matter of meeting Peanut’s needs, though these were prodigious from the beginning and grew to heroic proportions. But with his daughter’s birth he had been converted to an eclectic, new-fangled form of conservatism. He started doing real cooking again and this time without the grocery bills rocketing. he studied Yoga with a handsome young yogi on Channel 3. (There was no time, of course, under the new regime for the four o’clock art movies.) He cut back his Koffee intake to a single cup with Milly at breakfast.
What’s more, he kept his zeal alive week after week after month after month. In a modest, modified form he never entirely abandoned the vision, if not always the reality, of a better richer fuller and more responsible life-pattern.
Peanut, meanwhile, grew. In two months she doubled her weight from six pounds two ounces to twelve pounds four ounces. She smiled at faces, and developed a repertoire of interesting sounds. She ate—first only a teaspoon or so—Banana-food and Pear-food and cereals. Before long she had dabbled in every flavor of vegetable Boz could find for her. It was only the beginning of what would be a long and varied career as a consumer.
One day early in May, after a chill, rainy spring, the temperature bounced up suddenly to 70°. A sea wind had rinsed the sky from its conventional dull gray to baby blue.
Boz decided that the time had come for Peanut’s first voyage into the unknown. He unsealed the door to the balcony and wheeled the little crib outside.
Peanut woke. Her eyes were hazel with tiny flecks of gold. Her skin was as pink as a shrimp bisque. She rocked her crib into a good temper. Boz watched the little fingers playing scales on the city’s springtime airs, and catching her gay spirits, he sang to her, a strange silly song he remembered her sister Lottie singing to Amparo, a song that Lottie had heard her mother sing to Boz:
A breeze ruffled Peanut’s dark silky hair, touched Boz’s heavier auburn curls. The sunlight and air were like the movies of a century ago, so impossibly clean. He just closed his eyes and practiced his breathing.
At two o’clock, punctual as the news, Peanut started crying. Boz lifted her from the crib and gave her his breast. Except when he left the apartment nowadays, Boz didn’t bother with clothing. The little mouth closed round his nipple and the little hands gripped the soft flesh back from the tit. Boz felt a customary tingle of pleasure but this time it didn’t fade away when Peanut settled into a steady rhythm of sucking and swallowing, sucking and swallowing. Instead it spread across the surface and down into the depths of his breast; it blossomed inward to his chest’s core. Without stiffening, his cock was visited by tremors of delicate pleasure, and this pleasure traveled, in waves, into his loins and down through the muscles of his legs. For a while he thought he would have to stop the feeding, the sensation became so intense, so exquisite, so much.
He tried that night to explain it to Milly, but she displayed no more than a polite interest. She’d been elected, a week before, to an important post in her union and her head was still filled with the grim, gray pleasure of ambition satisfied, of having squeezed a toe onto the very first rung of the ladder. He decided it would not be nice to carry on at greater length, so he saved it up for the next time Shrimp came by. Shrimp had had three children over the years (her Regents scores were so good that her pregnancies were subsidized by the National Genetics Council), but a sense of emotional self-defense had always kept Shrimp from relating too emphatically to the babies during her year-long stints of motherhood (after which they were sent to the Council’s schools in Wyoming and Utah). She assured Boz that what he’d felt that afternoon on the balcony had been nothing extraordinary, it happened to her all the time, but Boz knew that it had been the very essence of unusualness. It was, in Lord Krishna’s words, a peak experience, a glimpse behind the veil.