In November, after vomiting for the fifth morning in a row and fearing some permanent damage, Charlene finally dragged herself to a hospital. The doctor performed some tests and told her she was suffering from a most common condition: she was pregnant.
“What do you mean, pregnant?” she said.
“Do you want me to draw you a diagram?” he said.
As she was leaving, he looked up from his desk. “If I may,” he said. “You’re now responsible for two people. Everything you put into you, you are also putting into your baby.”
Charlene sat in the kitchen with the twins and the malnourished creeper plant, trying to imagine a theoretical child with each of her ghostly mustached lovers, an exercise that caused her to start hyperventilating.
“It’s no big deal,” said Lila. “We know someone who can fix it.”
“He’s creepy but cheap,” Vespers added. Vespers wore a faux-gypsy rhinestone headband, even while sleeping. It was a convenient clue for telling the two apart.
Lila handed Charlene the number, scrawled on the back of a prescription bottle. “Don’t worry, ShaLa, we’ve both used him,” she said. Charlene had no idea where their nickname for her had come from. They were the kind of people who gave nicknames to mark their territory.
From her lineup of potential progenitors — a shady group whose membership grew the more she thought about the extent of her nocturnal encounters — Charlene could not help but gravitate to one man, hoping against hope that it was he who was the father. His name was T. K. — short for what? She couldn’t remember anymore, or maybe she had never known. T. K., the black boy from St. Paul, Minnesota, with the warm eyes and the learned prairie laugh, no doubt picked up from one of his white foster parents. Mere months after V-J Day, buoyed by the promise of a new era, they had adopted T. K. after hearing his story on the radio: his birth family had perished in a downtown slum fire, and he had survived the blaze by being hurled to safety out of a fourth-story window into the arms of a firefighter. He was six months old.
At least this is what T. K. told Charlene during one of their precious nights together, lying naked in her bed, ankles touching, the twins arguing loudly about Gauguin in the next room. Charlene had imagined his little Minnesotan family — T. K. and his progressive white parents, dressed in down parkas, surrounded by mounds and mounds of snow. He had been first in his class at Humboldt High. Full scholarship to Macalester College. He was one of the smartest people she had ever met, and yet quite clearly sheltered to a fault, for he had been raised on Schubert and Robert Louis Stevenson, had never owned a television, and had never even been out of the state before he left on a bus for Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, smack in the middle of Washington Heights.
“Whatever were they thinking?” Charlene could not help saying out loud.
Naked, T. K. had looked over at her and asked her what she meant by this and she said nothing, but she remembered feeling a kind of infinite sadness. To let a kid like him, a miracle like him, loose in the city? The city relished the chance to eat people like him for breakfast. In the end, of course, she was wrong: it was not him but her whom the city would devour, but she would not understand this until much later, when she was already safely in its belly.
She had first met T. K. at one of those sweaty, drug-heavy midnight Bleecker Street parties, where he had shown up with a fellow first-year med student, looking bewildered and comically out of place in an ill-fitting three-piece linen number, as if he were about to participate in a grade-school ballroom dance competition. She had laughed out loud when she saw him like this, and yet she had also fallen hard, very hard — she could not explain why. Encouraged by the lingering buzz of a Nembutal cocktail, she made a beeline across the room, greeting him with an overly familiar kiss and pulling him, despite his earnest protestations, into a round of astrological strip Ouija.
Things had slipped into place that night, as they sometimes do, and they had both surprised themselves by going back to her place and fucking with what she mistook for a mechanical midwestern urgency and with what he mistook for a groovy East Coast blasé. There had been an incredibly awkward moment when he, still naked, had fumbled for his linen trousers and then produced, unceremoniously, a roll of crumpled bills and offered them to her. She stared at him, bewildered, so offended and yet so moved by his innocence that she started to laugh and pushed the money back at him.
“It was a joke,” he said hastily, repocketing the bills, though the look in his eyes told her he had no idea what to think. They lay in bed afterwards, and he pointed to every bone in her body and named them for her — every bone, including all twenty-eight bones of the skull. Touching her own cranium with her fingertips, she marveled at the power of the naming: to conjure twenty-eight things when before there was only one.
For two weeks, T. K. occupied her every waking thought. Together they explored the city, laughing at the intricacies of urban density — the joy of a child leaping through an open fire hydrant, a ninety-year-old woman walking five shih tzus, an impromptu performance art — cum — Mod dance contest in the middle of Forty-second Street as taxicabs blared their horns — she seeing it all through his eyes for the first time. She wanted to protect him and she wanted to be ravaged by him. It was the closest thing she had felt to love. She shot up only twice during this time, and never in front of him. It felt like cheating.
Strangely, he refused to take her back to his apartment in Washington Heights. He claimed his place was too small.
“I don’t care,” she said. “I want to see where you live.”
“It’s not fit for someone like you,” he said and kissed her on the eyebrow, where she had a tiny scar from falling down the stairs as a child.
And then everything imploded, suddenly, as if it had always been meant to implode like this, as if time were only a prelude to all that which must come to an end. He met her outside her apartment one morning and said he could not see her anymore.
“Why?” she said, crying. She felt the panic rising in her chest. And she wanted to ask, “Is it because I’m white?” and she hated herself for wondering this and she hated herself for not asking it.
And he said, “I just need to concentrate more on school,” even though they both knew it was not true, and what was true would never — could never — be said.
Years later, she would see him again, after having spent many nights dreaming of his voice, his body, his laugh, after searching for him in the streets, at the parties, on the subways, in the parks, in the shadows of the skyscrapers that towered above her. He came calling on her in New Jersey, quite out of the blue — she couldn’t really make out how he had managed to track her down. She was already dating Kermin by then, but when T. K. showed up on her doorstep, it was as if no time had passed. They had sat for a coffee, and she had wanted to ask him a thousand questions — how he had managed, whether the world had defeated him or he had managed to defeat it — but they had not talked about these things or about anything else she could recall. Nor did she ever get to ask him what his initials stood for. Maybe they didn’t stand for anything. And then he was gone again, this time for good, and it was as if she had experienced a dream in which she dreamed of a dream she had had long ago.