Devotion. Michelle Herman

he must have noticed that her hair was different, since she always wore it loose—she never even put it in a ponytail, or braided it. With two fingers now he stroked her hair beneath the bun, where it pulled upward from her neck; with his whole hand he stroked the sides, above and underneath her ears. She remembered how he had stroked her hair and neck after he had made love to her for the first time. She had been crying then—she had not been able to stop crying for a long time. He had guessed that she was crying because she was sorry, that she was ashamed of what she had done, and when she swore she was not—”I don’t care,” she told him, “I don’t care about that, about shame”—he asked if he had “hurt” her, if that was what was wrong, and when she shook her head, he gave up, he stopped asking. He stroked her hair and waited silently for her to finish.

      She wished he would be silent now, but he had started murmuring, “All right? Yes? Better?” She didn’t answer him. She was thinking of that afternoon when he had first made love to her. She could remember everything about it, still—every little thing: the way he had leaned over in the middle of a lesson—they were sitting alongside each other on the piano bench—and kissed her, holding her head in both of his hands as carefully as if it were one of the fragile things he kept around the studio perched dangerously on the cluttered tabletops, the thin colored glass bowls and the crystal vases she had never seen with flowers in them. The kiss lasted a long time, just like kisses in the movies, and she remembered telling herself that this was exactly what she had imagined kissing would be like. When finally she noticed that his lips were not quite closed, she opened her own mouth, just a little, just like his, and as she did she told herself, Now everything changes—and all the while that he was kissing her (for after that first kiss, he kissed her again, and then again) and stroking her arms, and after a time standing up and drawing her up too, and taking her hand and leading her to the green velvet sofa (which she learned only later—the next time—converted to a bed), she kept thinking, Now I am no longer myself, I am someone else—I am becoming someone else. And while he undressed her, then undressed himself, she thought, Soon—soon I will no longer be myself. She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t even nervous. She assumed that she would feel some pain but she was not afraid of that—it seemed so small a toll for a new self, a whole new life—but she did not, or she did not especially, feel any pain; she was only uncomfortable, and only for a little while; and then it was over. She lay in his arms and waited, but she felt no different—she felt nothing much at all. It was then that she began to cry.

      She wasn’t crying now, not anymore, but Bartha was still murmuring, still petting her. He had one hand on Alexander and one hand on her. On his wife. Wife, she thought. Wife! Wife and husband. Marriage. Magic words—and here she sat again (again? still!) waiting for a transformation. Always waiting, she reflected. Always disappointed. Always thinking, That’s all? But how can that be? When she first began her love affair with Bartha; when she found out she was pregnant; when she told her parents—and her father for the first time slapped her, and said things she couldn’t bear to think of even now, and ended by saying that he never wanted to see her again, then burst into tears, which surprised and pained her far more than the slap had; when she left home for good that same night after everyone had gone to sleep, taking just one small suitcase, leaving most of what was hers behind—she had imagined, each time, that she was poised on the brink of some momentous change. And each time there had been momentous change—but not within her. Always, she felt that whatever happened hadn’t worked, that her experience of what had happened—her experience of the experience—was smaller than it was supposed to be. Even during her first months in Omaha, lonely and restless (fidgety, her mother would have said), even when she felt the baby’s own first restless movements (and caught herself thinking fidgety) inside her—even during childbirth, even when she first saw Alexander—what she felt was never what it seemed to her she should have felt. It was insufficient. It was never as momentous as she had imagined it would be, never momentous enough.

      And you’d think, she told herself, that by now she would be used to this. She should be used to disappointment. Yet here she was again. Still. She’d convinced herself that this time, this great change, would be sufficient finally to change her. She had tricked herself—had tricked herself again—for, married or not married, she was still herself, the same person she had been this morning. She would always be the person she had been this morning—the same person she’d been yesterday, last month, last year.

      Always, she thought. Now and ever after. Forever.

      How was it that she’d never understood this before?

      She seized Bartha’s wrist. “Please,” she said, lifting his hand from her neck. And then she added, politely, “Thank you.”

      He looked at her curiously.

      “I’m all right. Really, I am.”

      It took him a minute to make up his mind not to say anything. Then he gave a little shrug and used the hand she’d freed to cup the baby’s head again.

      “No,” she heard herself say. “Please—I want to hold him now.” She held out her arms.

      “Now? The food will be here in a moment.”

      “When it comes, I know, you’ll put him in his carriage. I don’t want him in his carriage.” She was surprising herself. Her voice rose. “It’s not fair. This is his celebration too.”

      “Of course it is,” Bartha said. “But he can celebrate with us equally well from inside his carriage. And you cannot eat while holding him.”

      “I can eat with one hand just as well as you can drink with one hand.”

      There was silence then, and as she waited for him to say something she wondered if he might allow himself for once to argue with her. But when he spoke, it was only to say, “Fine. As you like.”

      As soon as she had Alexander in her arms she regretted that she had given him up at all. It was too easy to take for granted how much better she felt holding him, too easy to forget, once she’d been holding him for a long time, that she was always better off with him in her arms than without (and then, when she had him back again, and she remembered, she would ask herself why it was necessary, ever, for him to be anywhere but in her arms). She slipped one outstretched finger underneath the half curled fingers of his right hand, poised as if to play a miniature piano. Lifting the hand, she kissed it—kissed it first below the ridge of tiny knuckles, then turned it around, her index finger and her thumb making a circle (the smallest of bracelets, and yet still too loose for him) around his wrist, and kissed the open palm. His fingers curled reflexively into a fist, closed tight, and Esther kissed that too, then laughed quietly as it sprung open, like a locked box in a fairy tale.

      She bent her head to kiss his cheek and then his forehead. She might wake him, she knew, but she told herself that he had slept so long already, it would probably be better if he did wake up, or else he wouldn’t sleep at all tonight. She picked up his hand again and kissed each dangling finger, and when she was through she started over, at the thumb, and kept on kissing fingers until he began to blink and stretch. She could feel the milk already leaking from her as she watched him. Now came the little sounds he always made before he fully woke: desperate sounds, half gasps, half moans, as if he were in pain, or terrified—and maybe he was; maybe for him each waking moment was like being born, for how would he know how to tell the difference between not born yet and sleeping?

      When he understood that he had woken up, she knew, he would begin to cry. In outrage? That was how it sounded. Or was it not fury but still greater fear—or fear confirmed? Or, as Bartha had once speculated, was it grief? “He cries so bitterly,” Bartha had marveled in the first days of the baby’s life, “you would think the world were coming to an end.”

      She intercepted him, this time, before the crying started—before, she hoped, the others even noticed that he was awake. She untucked her blouse from her skirt and whispered, “All right, it’s all right, I promise you, I do,” while she undid the last two buttons and drew him in toward her. No one was paying attention. They were all talking again.

      She