Robert Levin
How to Make a Baby
I was, I suppose you could say, in a PRE-partum depression.
It started when my wife, Connie, decided it was time to have a baby. I
was
thirty-one and she was twenty-eight, a circumstance which I reminded
her in
my argument against the idea was no cause for alarm. But after she'd
voiced
her ambition -- and thereby made it real to herself -- the achievement of
motherhood became an obsession for her and she would not leave me alone
about it. Finally, after several months, my reluctance to enlist in her
project compelled her to resort to a not so veiled threat: "Steven,"
she
said. "Either we have a baby now or I'm going to leave you."
All right, I told her, get off the fucking Ovril then.
Now it wasn't that I never wanted a baby, and not that when I had one I
didn't want it to be with Connie. Strong of character and will,
nurturing,
quick-witted and sometimes astonishingly perceptive (not to mention
pretty),
Connie was a terrific wife and more than qualified to be an exceptional
mother. The notion of one day having a family with her was hardly
repugnant
to me.
No. What troubled me when the prospect became imminent -- what troubled
me
immensely -- was a consequence inherent in the making of a baby, a
consequence that I could not stop recognizing. Fathering a child would
tie
me into the hideous plan that Creation has devised for everything
corporeal.
I would be, and by my own hand, replacing myself. Once the deed was
done,
once I had accomplished the only thing we know with any certainty
Creation
wants of us, I would be, in Creation's estimation, expendable.
If Connie, born Catholic but now earnestly New Age in her faiths and
sentiments, soothed her fear of death by believing in reincarnation, I
was a
secular Jew and so had only the void to anticipate. And if I'd always
been
keenly tuned to the price of existence, and lived in a perpetual state
of
medium-grade anxiety as a result, my heightened appreciation of my
mortality
destroyed any semblance of internal equilibrium I could claim. With
Connie's
demand the sinister underside of nature had turned itself toward me and
it
wouldn't turn away. Indeed, my now hyper-consciousness of what it
ultimately
meant to be alive made any vista of extravagant pullulation, albeit as
manicured as Central Park, grotesque to me. On the most festive of
occasions
I would see what William James saw -- "the skull grinning in at the
banquet."
And I understood as well what Burroughs meant by "Naked Lunch." When I
ate I
saw exactly what it was -- the flesh -- on the end of my fork.
I was also, much of the time, in a small rage about the new burden I'd
be
taking on. I'm referring not to the responsibility of child raising per
se,
but to the fact that no matter how large was the contempt I'd developed
for
humanity over the years, having a child would force me to care about
what
the world might be like after I died.
Thoroughly upended, I even began to think about homosexuality; about,
that
is, the solution it afforded to the problem of getting your rocks off
without spinning what Kerouac called the "wheel of the quivering meat
conception." Though a less than appealing option for me, there were
hours
when, oddly and perversely, I could not help but feel...well...titalated by the concept of having sex that was unencumbered by
procreative
implications.
In the petrifying absence of contraception I found myself avoiding sex
with
Connie. And when I could not avoid it, my performance was impeded by
occlusions in my circuits that would leave the both of us in a
condition of
considerable frustration. Worse, my very biology joined in the protest,
forcing me to suffer the embarrassment of a sperm count that a lab I
visited
at Connie's insistence twice reported was "virtually negligible."
Compounding these miseries, locking me deeper into paralysis as it
increased
my sense of urgency, was Connie's evident disappointment in me; a
disappointment that was evolving into disdain. Terms of endearment like
"honey" and "sugar," for example, were routinely being replaced by
"washout"
and "loser." In my timorousness I'd become, in her eyes, something less
than
a man. Recalling her admission to me once that she'd believed that all
Jewish men were extraordinary providers and natural born fathers -- and
having long before disabused her of the former assumption -- I knew that
I
had no choice now but to keep the latter one alive.
Then, reasoning that a change of scene might turn the trick, Connie
came up
with the idea of spending a few days in the country together. When I
agreed,
she arranged for us to stay with our friend Betsy who ran a little
print
shop out of her ramshackle house in a Catskill town not far from
Kingston.
With Connie's patience rapidly disintegrating it was, I knew, something
like
now or never for me and I geared myself as best I could. Scrupulously
adhering to a plan we devised -- a month of wholesome foods and
regimented
exercise; no masturbation for a fortnight -- I made ready to win a war
with
myself.
But arriving upstate, I felt like a German soldier must have felt upon
arriving at the Russian front. It was the middle of winter, the sky was
low
and gray, the snowdrifts were thigh-high and the temperature was near
to
zero. This was not exactly an atmosphere conducive to a successful
completion of the undertaking at hand -- especially not when in the back
bedroom to which Betsy assigned us (and which she used to store old
printing
equipment and bound stacks of yellowing posters and flyers), you could
see
your breath and needed to wear a coat.
But as inopportune and unlikely as the setting may have been, it was on
our
second afternoon there that a child was conceived.
I should say, first of all, that I was feeling physically ill -- and it
wasn't only that I was on the edge of a cold. A city apartment dweller,
I've
noticed that country people who pay for their own heating oil tend to
be
flinty about using it, and Betsy was no exception. On this day,
however, in
a generous but woefully misguided demonstration of support, she had
pumped
the thermostat up to steam bath levels. The oppressive heat, coupled
with an
effluvium of musty furniture and nasty chemical compounds, threatened
my
ability to both keep my lunch AND remain conscious.
In any case, with Betsy at work out front, Connie, after giving me a
thumbs
up sign, took off her clothes and arranged them carefully over a chair.
Deliberately presenting her bottom to me as she bent to the bed to pull
away
the quilts, she followed this maneuver by abruptly turning around and
flopping onto the bed on her back. Then, reaching for a pillow, she
propped
it under her buttocks and spread her legs.
"Stevie, do you feel it too? It's as though there's a spirit hovering
near
us waiting to be born again."
"Great," I said, removing my pants. "I hope it's the spirit of a
heavy-duty
bond trader who happened to have a coronary while he was up here for a
weekend. Please don't let it be one of the local yahoos who ran his
pickup
into a tree."
I entered her immediately -- it had, after all, been two weeks. But just
as
quickly I knew I was going to wither. My deprived penis's rote reaction
to a
welcoming vagina notwithstanding, the gravity of the occasion continued
to
undermine me. Still, I'd made a compact which I had to honor and I
began to
leaf through bodies, shuffle through poses, postures and configurations
in
my personal mental Kama Sutra file -- then, starting to panic and
sweating
obnoxiously -- to ransack my memory and imagination. But no one and no
thing
I could remember or think to want would keep me up, let alone elicit he
participation of my gonads. I tried, with my hand, to STUFF it in. I
would
happily have settled for a premature orgasm.
"Stop," Connie said. She squeezed out from under me and, her hair
trailing
along my chest and stomach, ran her tongue down the length of my torso
to
the numb thing between my legs.
A determined virgin into her early twenties -- she had not permitted a
man
inside her until she was twenty-three -- Connie'd had more than a little
experience keeping boyfriends with her mouth. In seconds, my mental
state
notwithstanding, she got it half way up and we tried again. But once
more I
evacuated her ignominiously and she was obliged to root in me again.
Ten
minutes must have passed before she raised her head. I was expecting an
expression of scorn. Look, I was prepared to say, I'm sorry. This is
really
out of my hands. But Connie was grinning at me. Crawling backwards a
little,
she reached her arm under my legs and lifted them until they were
almost
perpendicular to the bed. Then, holding my haunches up and steady with
both
of her hands, she lowered her head to my starkly exposed ass and drove
her
tongue as deep as she could into my rectum. Lingering there for a
while, she
finally came out from under me and, brushing it against my nostrils en
route, brought her mouth to my ear.
"You little Jew bastard," she whispered. "I wish you'd be the lesbian
you
are right now because what I really want to do is eat your pussy."
Score one for Connie's acumen and her resourcefulness in an emergency.
"Harder," she was instructing me after no more than a minute had
elapsed.
"Go deeper. Yeah! Oh!" Splash.
Cody was born nine months later, almost to the day. Nature being
oblivious
to human expectations of justice and symmetry, he had, contrary to the
circumstances of his conception, both a proper allotment of toes and
fingers
and a countenance that was amazingly genuine in its sweetness and
innocence.
I mean there was nothing unhealthy or freakish about him, nothing that
was
even remotely Damien-ish. By every measure he was a wonderful specimen.
And me? Well, I was worn by then to a physical as well as emotional nub
-- I
lost fifteen pounds during Connie's pregnancy that I didn't need to
lose.
But not dropping dead with Cody's arrival had a salutary effect on my
nerves
that was almost immediate. I was still filled with trepidation, of
course,
but -- my panic significantly less clamorous and debilitating, my not so
quiet desperation much quieter -- it was, relatively speaking, a
manageable
trepidation.
Just days after his birth I was, in fact, as close as I get to all
right
again.
©2007 by Robert Levin
