“It’s on sale, Lu,” Sarah says. “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”
Lulu jumps off Sarah’s lap and runs over to me.
“Daddy! Let’s search for something!”
This is it: getting home from work on Friday, better than cool water.
“Sure thing. Hmm, how about…”
“The world’s tiniest marsupial?”
“Sure thing,” I say.
“Okay, but after dinner,” Sarah says.
“Lemme guess,” Lulu says. “Rutabaga?”
“You bet,” Sarah says curtly.
After dinner Lulu and I search the Internet to find the world’s tiniest marsupial.
“Don’t touch,” I say when she goes to press her fingertips against the close-up of the creature’s fur. “You’ll leave marks.”
She pulls her hand away from the screen.
* * *
Sarah takes the trash out after Lulu goes to bed but she doesn’t come back. After ten minutes I go to look for her. I find her in the concrete enclosure, face glued to the hole in the wall.
“Hey witness,” I say, pushing her aside so I can see.
“Hey addict,” she counters, pushing me back.
“Is that what I think it is?” Mara Stanhope’s low moan stretches over the wall, over the noise of the generator.
“No, sicko,” Sarah hisses. “You think I’d wanna watch that?”
I arrange myself above Sarah, like the next head up on a totem pole, so that we can peer through the hole at the same time.
In the light of many moon-shaped paper lanterns, Mara Stanhope is crouched naked on all fours, clinging to the thick grass of the lawn, rolling her hips around and around, emitting groans that swing back and forth between pleasure and pain. A slender woman in a gray shift pours golden oil onto her back and kneels to rub it in. A second slender woman in a gray shift crouches in front of Mara, also on all fours, groaning along with her.
“Those are the doulas,” Sarah whispers. Sarah had wanted a doula (just one) for a hot second, until we learned how much they cost. Not a biggie, she’d said back then.
“I guess they got sick of the dolphins,” I say, hoping Sarah hasn’t noticed the rose petals floating in the pool.
I await her laugh but she ignores me.
“Wonder where he is,” I say.
Whatever else you might say about Lulu’s birth — that the nurses had cold and impatient hands, that the anesthesiologist didn’t inspire confidence as he poked the needle yet again into Sarah’s spine, that the doctor yawned seven times while stitching up Sarah’s vagina — I was there, instant by instant, and as she pushed Lulu’s head out I said to her, I didn’t think I could be in more awe of you than I already was.
Music swells up from the Stanhopes’ outdoor speakers, music that sounds like it was composed by the cosmos, and Steve Stanhope strides out of the glass door. Mara Stanhope’s moans unite with the chords of the music, and he comes over to her, and the doulas tactfully move aside, and he gets down on all fours facing his wife, and he too moans the moans of the universe, and believe me, I wish it was a laughable sight but somehow it’s not.
“You are now ten thousand times more relaxed than you’ve ever been,” the doulas chant.
If only Sarah would laugh. Instead she mutters something.
“What?” I demand.
“The rich still get to be animals,” she says.
* * *
Lulu emerged with the assistance of K-Y Jelly, but the Stanhopes’ daughter is born into a rush of imported organic olive oil, the doulas pouring cupful after cupful of it to serve as lubrication, and as the baby’s head emerges onto the candlelit lawn, Mara Stanhope seems to be having the deepest orgasm of her life, and I’m ashamed by my hardening, but more ashamed by the way Sarah waggles her butt against me to acknowledge the hardening, but mainly turned on by the idea of going inside with Sarah and filling her up with triplets.
Two people in medical coats race onto the lawn to collect the blood from the umbilical cord. Which, yes, will cost the Stanhopes 75 percent of our monthly income to store in a private blood bank.
“Please no,” Sarah says when the doulas present to the Stanhopes the disk of the slimy, wound-up umbilical cord (Once it dries out, it’s the ideal chew toy for the baby!).
* * *
By Saturday afternoon, Mara Stanhope is stretched out in her lounge chair beneath an umbrella. She looks like a woman at a spa, not a woman who gave birth less than twenty-four hours ago. That smell of newly cut grass. She’s holding a tall glass containing a bloodred drink, sipping the liquid through a long straw.
“OMG,” Sarah says after taking a peek. “A placenta smoothie. Let me take Lu to ballet today, okay? All these good vibes are killing me.”
I saw Sarah’s (or, I guess, Lulu’s) placenta for about five seconds before it was tossed into a container of organs and wheeled away.
A nurse carries a woven basket out onto the lawn. It takes me a minute to realize that the baby is inside the basket. The nurse places the baby on Mara Stanhope’s chest and Mara pulls her robe aside and the newborn takes the nipple easily, almost lazily, like an old pro. Those early days with Lulu, when she barely nursed, and then there was the heat wave, I prefer not to think about, Sarah hooked up to the breast pump for hours every day, me trying to pretend the pump didn’t freak me out. “What’s wrong?” Sarah sobbed, her nipples extending and retracting inside the plastic tubing. “Nothing, sorry, sorry,” I kept saying, cradling Lulu.
The nurse leaves and Steve Stanhope comes out. He looks happy, healthy. He sits at the base of Mara’s lounge chair, stroking her shin. They smile and talk quietly. I can’t tell what they’re saying, except that I keep hearing the word “lake,” “lake,” “lake,” the syllable punctuating their every sentence.
He wanders off and she reclines, closes her eyes. Their vegetable garden is thriving already, even this early in the season. I can see the kale and mint from here.
“Excuse me,” the voice says, or rather the mouth, the mouth right against my eye, breath in my pupil.
I leap back and cover my eye as though it’s been burned.
“Pardon me,” the mouth says. “I noticed this hole the other day. I’ll have our guy seal it up ASAP.”
Steve Stanhope speaks graciously, maybe even with compassion, as though he knows it isn’t good for me or anyone else in my building to witness the activity on his lawn.
“Oh, no problem,” I say, annoyed with myself for how grateful I feel that he’s playing it as though he’s inconvenienced me rather than the reverse.
Then it’s his eye at the hole. His eye upon the deteriorating brick, the row of trash cans swollen with garbage, Lulu’s hand-me-down scooter chained to the communal bike rack. The eye lingers.
“Hey, screw you!” I say.
The eye doesn’t react. Had I whispered it too softly for him to hear? Had I said it at all?
“Say, neighbor,” Steve Stanhope says. “My wife gave birth to a baby girl last night, and I’d love to give you a little something as a kind of celebratory gift, because, well, there’s nothing like having a baby girl.”
As if I don’t know.
“Sort of like the way I’d’ve given you a cigar back in the day, you know?”
“Okay,” I say.
“Just a sec,” he says. And even though I don’t want anything from Steve Stanhope, I stay there at the peephole, waiting. Maybe if he hadn’t said “Say,” I might not have stayed. But it’s a tic of mine too sometimes, to say “Say.”
I’m keeping an eye on the peephole when suddenly I sense a flutter at the top of my head, like a bird just pooped on my hair. I look up to find the tiniest drone I’ve ever seen hovering above me. The drone beeps and drops something small onto the concrete beside me.