Three Short Novels. Gina Berriault
the trembling draw of his mouth on her nipple tugged the womb upward in a most inward, upward pulling that made the sucking a pleasure for her and almost a reason for having borne the child. At these times she would caress his small, round head and his limbs of no angles, no joints, that had a curve like a doll’s rubber legs, trying with her touch to perceive who he was, what manner of person he was to be, touching with a feeling of dread the hair that lay over the soft fontanel where the soul seemed to be contained. And even when, gazing down at his small face, she was disturbed by the inanity of his hunger, by the animal simplicity of his need to be fed and of his satisfaction while he fed, by this simple demand upon her because it forecast unknowable, more complicated demands, even as she felt in her spirit a shrinking away from his demands upon her and her future, her breasts responded to his mouth, her body enjoyed the secret and yet unsecret, the known to all upward pull within, and she was pleased with his dependency on her body.
Once, toward the end of her stay in the maternity ward, as she sat in the chair next to the bed, nursing him, it seemed to her a ludicrous mistake that a man should ever be in the condition of infancy. She wondered if he might be ashamed of her later—of the time of his infancy, and look at other male infants, even his son, and be ashamed for them. The time of his infancy seemed so absurd because there was already present in his person the time when he would be of significance beyond her—the girl who held him at her breasts, her two hands spanning his length. She was so amused by the absurdity of his infancy that she lifted him high to press her laughing face into the almost weightless combination of small dangling body and soft garments.
After one week she packed her few things, nightgowns and bathrobe and slippers. Her father carried her overnight case for her and she left the hospital, holding her baby wrapped in a blanket. She was careful of her step over the elevator threshold because she was wearing very high heels and taking some satisfaction in the fact that the shoes opposed the baby, that they hinted she was not in any girlish elation over the real baby in her arms, that the time of her delusion was over. In the walk along the corridor of the main floor and down the broad steps and out through the parking lot to her father’s car, she fought an urge she knew she would never give in to and yet feared—to stumble in her heels and drop the baby. When her shoe turned a little, out by the car, she clutched the child closer in terror.
2
Almost every day, for the rest of that summer, she guided the canvas baby carriage down the hill to the park and sat on a bench in the sun and the moving shade of the trees, a girl in a pastel cotton dress, her legs and arms bare, her feet in sandals. There were always small children on the grass; and mothers, each with her disarray of kits and bottles; and there was sometimes a solitary man on a bench, a different man each time, who watched her over his newspaper or watched her without concealment. Joggling the carriage with her toe, she imagined herself with the man across the path, imagined a union so amorous that her husband would be wiped from her memory. Sometimes the proprietor of the grocery store gazed at her from under the awning, a small, green-smocked figure across the street, standing watchful. Was there about a girl with her first child, she wondered, the greater desirability of a woman who is innocently pledged? She speculated on her effect as she pushed the carriage home, pausing along under the awning to examine the fruit on the sidewalk stall, catching in the dimness within the store his gazing eye or the quick lift of his head.
The white, frilly bassinet was set up on its stiff legs and rollers in a corner of her room, and, when the child slept, she listened to the radio by her bed or read the novels that her mother bought, and the magazines, and was restless for the use of her body. The use of her body was enough; the rest of it—the belief that somebody else could know her spirit as well or better than she knew it herself—was a delusion. She lay on the bed, listening to popular songs or reading, with the fantasy of her next embrace always in the back of her mind, her body always waiting for the fantasy to claim it. She saw no ending to this time in her parents’ home with her child other than the beginning of a time with another man, and in her mother’s crooning and clucking at the baby she sensed the wish for another man to come and take the daughter away. The wish was in the sweet, ardent, rather weary sounds as her mother bent over the basket, in the feminine ways of her body, ways exaggerated for the daughter to see and to imitate; since the daughter was now again at home and with a child, one must assume that she had not used and was not using her ultimate powers. As for her father, if Vivian were to run off with a man, he would not miss her, she knew. He lectured at medical schools on his specialty, the heart, saw his private patients, and spent almost every evening at his club or with his mistress; his family had become like a group of patients he had treated when he had been specializing in a branch of medicine that no longer interested him but whom he was obliged to look over once in a while. Her brother, Charles, Jr., six years older than she and interning in a hospital across the bay, although he sometimes came home for a night, did not visit with her or show any interest in the child. When he did come into her room, it was usually in the few spare minutes before he left the house, and the contempt in his manner made her stand away from him and answer him grudgingly. She could not bear his loud, drawling voice, his calves bulging importantly against his trousers, and the long legs nervously shifting in professional style from one crepe sole to the other. When he asked her what she intended to do with her life, she told him, turning away from him, that she intended to take a course for charwomen.
She did, however, venture out, after a time. Her father’s mistress, Paul’s sister, was her good friend—a tall, almost harshly beautiful young woman, an advertising artist, who painted in oils and who had black walls in her apartment. Vivian often walked the two miles to Adele’s to drink with her friends—newspaper reporters and commercial artists and actors. She sang for them one night, imitating a torch singer, perching herself on the arm of a chair, crossing her knees, languidly plucking at the drooping petals of a beige rose that Adele put into her hands. She sang again, a few nights later, for one of Adele’s brothers-in-law, who owned a bar where the customers were entertained by singers and raconteurs at the piano. He had come over to Adele’s apartment to hear her. She wore a dark brown silk dress that fit tightly and a long string of amber and jade beads, and her voice was insinuatingly low and warmed by the brandy.
The first night she sang in the bar, her parents came in together, hoping, she knew, that in spite of what they had learned about the lives of aspiring actors and entertainers, their daughter would be famous someday, bypassing the pitfalls. Her hair was cut short like a boy’s, the shining paleness in startling contrast with her large, dark eyes; and her slender, young body affected the sensual indolence of the woman of experience, enticing yet seeming to remain aloof, waiting for the right one. The first few nights she was afraid that the patrons would suspect that she was fooling them. The gestures were not her own—she had learned them from singers in nightclubs and movies; the voice imitated that of an already famous singer, husky and plaintive with a controlled break in it; and the color of her hair was the color that was popular with movie starlets and salesgirls and carhops. As she repeated her act, it came to seem natural because the fixed, absorbed gaze of the audience and their applause led her to believe what they believed, that everything was natural with her, that everything was not a matter of trickery but of her own nature, as if she, herself, had originated all that was imitative and the others were imitating her. And when certain men in the audience became infatuated with her, this was further proof.
She became infatuated, in turn, with a big and amiable radio announcer, a widower in his fifties. He had a small gray mustache and gray curls brushed slickly back with silver brushes. She chose this man to make her body known to her again because he, among the others, seemed most affected by her. When he sat with her at a restaurant table, his fingers trembled touching her wrist and fingers, and his bass voice shook. He was not, she knew, the one who would mean more than her husband had meant, the one to rid her of the desire for others, but he was the one to break the link, her body’s link, with her child. On the unmade bed in his half-empty apartment, he uncovered her breasts that had given up the mouth of the child only a month before and still felt the communion with the child; now the mouth of the man destroyed the link and, though it had to be destroyed, under the excitement she was disturbed by its breaking. Where the child had emerged, the doctor had sewn her into a virgin again, and the pain that resulted in the man’s embrace seemed like an attempt of her body to repulse the stranger who was destroying the link with