Renata ♥ Mark: Chapters 7, 8 and 9

Company

Mark went back to work on a Tuesday, four weeks after Owen was born, standing in the doorway in his work boots for a beat too long, eyes on me. He touched Owen's head, kissed mine, told me to call if I needed anything, and then he was gone, and the house got larger.

The preceding month had seen me develop a sophisticated way to exclude both Mark and Owen from my life a few moments several times a day, just for a moment, really, long enough to stand in the kitchen and drink from a bottle of water whose brand I knew Mark hates (tastes of pool chlorine, he says). I’d half-filled that bottle with gut-rot vodka a week after Owen’s birth and stuffed it in the fridge at the back of a shelf behind the sagging bagged lettuce and Parmesan cheese. Had Mark walked in on me I’d have looked simply like a new Mom replenishing myself, taking a break; but that isn’t to say I didn’t fear a day where Mark would spontaneously decide to clear out the fridge and take a whiff from the bottle on some strange impulse before I could stop him. When he was in the living room of our then-new house and seemed at all restless, I would find myself subconsciously guarding the entry to the kitchen, both to avoid the possibility he would do just that and to give myself the easiest access.

I had been careful to try to maintain a buzz that, at most, could be seen as the exhaustion all new parents experience (a very real thing, which only compounded the constant state of nearing a hangover I was in), while still present enough to mix formula in newborn-sized feeders and warm it in the microwave and let it drip on my forearm to test the temperature. I remember one day letting Owen feed as he lay in my lap and I sat on a wooden rocking chair Mark’s mother had brought us in the spare room (she said the motion helped when she breast-fed, and was never satisfied with my decision to stick with formula), unable to completely focus my eyes without squinting, knowing I’d overdone it. Still, Owen got fed and stopped his sharp cries and went to sleep; I splashed cold water on my face and joined Mark in bed, careful to speak as little as possible, terrified I would slur. I entered the pitch-black dreamless “sleep” of being passed-out, unable to be roused, and Mark got up through the night for Owen without mentioning it.

(Around this time is also when I first started doing something I’d continue doing to this day – standing before myself in the full-length bathroom mirror, regarding myself. Initially this was just to closely consider the bruising around my vulva and pelvis from birth, but as that healed I pulled aside the pockets of gut and weight I’d filled out during pregnancy and inspected them, as if they were extraneous. And indeed, over time, as I lost weight – I wasn’t really eating the way a new mother normally does – I started instead staring at my chest, the sagging of it, or even, standing closer, the yellowing of my teeth. I know it started here.) 

That first Tuesday alone, I stood in the kitchen at nine in the morning with eleven hours between me and anything resembling stimulation, and understood, in a way I hadn't quite let myself understand while Mark was still in the house providing cover, that a day with an infant does not move. I feared that, without the need to perform, I would regress; the night my vision blurred and I blacked out was one I feared repeating now as the sole adult in the home. Sometimes, I held Owen, when he wasn’t sleeping or crying, and although he was still too young to see more than a few inches from his face, I could feel his eye-contact on me. It didn’t move me with love, or fill me with judgment or fear; his stare had no preconceptions about me except as the woman who often fed him and held him and cuddled him. He was simply figuring me out as I did him. 

Over the course of those first few days alone, I found my moments of solitude at the fridge synchronizing with the mixing and warming of his bottles without intention. By day two I refilled the water bottle, now down to its dregs, and was forced to comprehend the volume I’d drunk. It was that moment – replacing the no-name vodka bottle in its spot behind the linen and the water bottle I’d decanted it into in the fridge – that I decided I would take Owen with me to see Paige. I put Owen in the car by ten thirty, which I told myself was for him, fresh air and stimulation I'd read off a pamphlet (one of the many pieces of medical literature one will accrue alongside a baby, left by visiting postpartum midwives and nurses, and to which you feel you cannot say ‘no’ despite everything already being on Google, and their advice being meant for someone else entirely), and drove to Paige's.

She answered the door in leggings and what I recognized as yesterday's shirt, Maddox attached to one hip and eating something orange directly from his fist, and waved me in without any of the choreography I'd have performed in her position — no apology for the mess, no quick assessment of whether I'd judge the toys covering the floor like the aftermath of a controlled explosion. She took Owen from the car seat the way you'd pick up a bag whose weight you already knew, settled him against her free shoulder without looking down to check she'd done it right, and kept talking to Maddox about the inane thing he was building with Duplo, the whole transfer accomplished in about four seconds with the same attention you'd give breathing.

I watched her do this for the better part of an hour, the two boys, the two babies moving around her like she was a fixed point they were all orbiting. Nothing about it looked like effort. Nothing about it looked like anything she was doing on purpose at all, which was, I thought initially, the thing I didn't have and had come to her house specifically to borrow for a few hours: her labor. 

I fed Owen on her couch that afternoon with more patience than I had alone in my own kitchen, a softer voice already in my mouth before I'd noticed calling for it from within myself. I found myself doing it anyway. I noticed, specifically, that I was doing it better because Paige was in the room, moving in and out of my sightline with a laundry basket, glancing over now and then in the unthinking way you check on anything in your periphery. I understood, watching her not watch me, that I did not actually want her company or even her labor. I wanted her audience. There is a difference, and although I felt the urge to return home by 3 to stand by the fridge, Paige and I wordlessly developed a routine at this point in Owen’s early life – I’d come by with him, slightly buzzed, stay until it wore off, and use her, without her knowledge, as the person to whom I’d perform motherhood.

Breath

I knelt over top of Mark and guided him inside me; he was looking up at me, making eye contact, the blank look in his eyes men sometimes get when they fuck you, predator eyes, which is intellectually startling but, in the moment, alluring. I kissed him, deeply, feeling his hands on my stomach and tongue in my throat. 

His mouth puckered. “Your breath…”

I sat up and covered my mouth. “Morning breath?”

Mark squinted, studied me. “No.”

“I can brush my teeth.”

Mark rolled out from under me and lay on his stomach, his bare ass facing the sky. “Don’t worry about it.”

In the next room, Owen began to cry lightly, the kind of cry I knew well; he’s not hungry, exactly, and will fall asleep in your arms the moment you pick him up. If you leave him long enough, I learned, he’d fall back to sleep. Mark started getting dressed. “I’ll go get him.”

“Leave him. He’ll go back to sleep.” I laid back down, still repeating the interaction in my head. 

“What? No. If he’s not hungry I’ll just sit with him.”

“Fine,” I said. 

Mark got up and left. I stared at the ceiling and touched myself to sleep until after he left for work.

Provenance 

For our third anniversary, Mark had booked us dinner at Elio’s Secret, an Italian restaurant near Syracuse, whose sausage and cream gnocchi I had seen an Instagram reel of and shown to him at one point. We’d made a conscious effort to dress in outfits it had been some time since we’d had reason to wear — me in a black shirt-dress from Fenrir that I was swimming in and he in a vaguely well-fitted suit from TJ Maxx — and left Owen at Paige and Cody’s for the night. I felt a pang of disappointment when Owen — after I'd passed him, wide-awake, into Paige's arms, doing an overly-expressive wave and saying 'see you tomorrow, my man!' — didn't cry or hold out his arms, and instead buried his head in his aunt's shoulder.

“Have a good night,” Paige had said. “Make use of that hotel room.”

“Gross.” 

“You look lovely,” she’d said, ignoring me, and I did, even though I'd bought the outfit two sizes too large. 

Mark ordered something with shrimp and garlic cloves and thick fettuccine for his entree, which I only realized when it arrived alongside my gnocchi. 

“Brush your teeth when we get back to the room,” I said. “I’m not kissing scampi breath.” 

“I will brush, floss, and gargle a gallon of Listerine for you,” he said, grinning, twirling fettuccine on his fork.

The waiter came by with the bottle of wine — red, he’d insisted, paired best with the entrees — and decanted it into our two glasses. “Would you like our sommelier to speak to you about its provenance?”

I was about to shake my head.

“Sure!” Mark said, cheery as if he’d been asked to hold a door open, and soon we were joined by perhaps New York State’s most intense wine expert. 

“So what you’re drinking is barrel-aged for eight years — take a sip, you’ll notice elements of dark berries and pine.”

“Thank you,” I said, in a tone that I intended to mean that the interaction was done.

“I can taste the berries!” Mark said, Charlie Bucket-like.

“Indeed.”

I guzzled the wine so quickly all I could taste was bitterness, feeling Mark and the sommelier’s eyes on me. “Mhm,” was all I offered them, aware I was making something of a mild scene.

Eventually the sommelier left to bother another set of diners and Mark looked up at me, his eyes round and serious; I was expecting a scolding. Instead he gingerly ran his fingertip around the rim of his wine glass, which made a high-pitched whine, and said “How are you doing back at work?”

I told him, as always, of the things that interest me most: politics and gossip and fights about stationery. I told him I missed Owen every day, which was, in a way, true, but also something I know I would have said even if it weren’t. Mark nodded and told me he felt the same.

“The best part of my day is coming home knowing Owen and you will be in there,” he said, “waiting for me.” He grabbed my hand, which was awkward, and I had to shift to make the movement more natural. “I didn’t know what to expect — having a kid, being married, I never saw it done proper — I like how it feels,” he said. “I like how it feels all the time.”

“I agree.” I knew I was nodding: mhming to demonstrate active listening. Truthfully, his words felt alien and strange, and gave me a chill. I finished the last of my wine in a quick gulp while he watched me.

“Are you okay?” he asked, as if in response to the last thing I did. 

“What?”

“You would tell me if you weren’t?” He shot me a look of near-fatherly concern. “If you weren’t okay, I mean.”

“I’m okay, Mark.” I felt a too-long silence in the air, heavy, ponderous..

“I think about…and I – ” He pushed a shrimp around on his plate.

“You think about what?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.” A smile. “Don’t worry.” He held his hand out again, gripping mine more confidently this time. “We need to get the tiramisu.”

And so we shared a tiramisu dusted too heavily with chocolate powder, cooler in its center as if partway through defrosting. The waiter poured us both a single glass of dessert wine which Mark sipped and nursed while I self-consciously finished the entire thing, letting him focus upon the food between us. 

We walked the two blocks to the hotel – an economy chain, really, the kind of place I imagine people meeting for sordid affairs or to exchange information with a P.I. – and buzzed ourselves up to our room. I turned to Mark as he undressed and said, “I’m just gonna quickly use the bathroom,” and closed the door behind me.

I opened my toiletries bag, next to his, and loosened the lid on an airplane bottle of Smirnoff I’d picked up – among others – on a flight to see my aunt some months ago. I sat on the toilet and urinated while I sipped from it, grimacing from the harshness, trying to finish it as quickly as possible. I wiped with one hand and upturned the bottle into my mouth with the other.

“Can I get in there? I wanna brush my teeth,” I heard Mark say from the room.

“Mm. One sec.”

“Just unlock it, it’s not a big deal.” Mark routinely left the door open or unlatched while he took a  dump, something that started when Owen was beginning to crawl and needed eyes-on constantly, and his own need for privacy was forever reduced and expected mine to follow in kind. “I wanna make my breath nice for you.”

I finished the last of the vodka and stashed the airplane bottle underneath a makeup palette in the bag, so even if Mark, for some reason, opened it, it would be out of sight. I stood up and flushed, opening the door for him.

I watched from bed, on my back, as Mark brushed his teeth – aggressively, as he always did, as if it were a fight – while he stood over the toilet pissing. In pajamas and from my vantage point I could see he’d gained weight (as if he were collecting the pounds I didn’t) and his hairline had suffered in just the five years since we’d met. Still, I wanted to fuck him. I touched the inside of my upper thigh and felt that I was wet, and in some deep dark place I wondered if this desire would be possible if I were different, if I didn’t give in to thirst. I tried to remember my early pregnancy when I wasn’t drinking and I’d wanted Mark, even then, but it was rare to crave him as I did in this moment. This was something else.

Mark spat in the sink, wiped his face, and climbed onto the bed atop me, kissing me. I didn’t want to talk for fear of revealing myself in slurs – I could feel the room starting to spin – so instead I giggled and wrapped my arm around him to let him know I was game. All of the lights were on and he reached for a lamp beside the bed, but I swatted his hand away. I wanted to see all of it, and the light kept me awake.

He went down on me for, I assume, the sake of our anniversary, and before I could come I returned the favor, my spit coming out in long wet strings over his crotch that betrayed an overly-wet mouth, the kind you get before nausea sets in. I took him all inside of me, or so I recall, and he tapped my shoulder quickly, “I’ll come,” and removed it.

I lay back on the bed as he whipped off the underwear I’d chosen seven hours ago and thrust at me, and I made noises, some of them real, some of them just to remind myself of what was happening as I stared at the mosaic ceiling tiles and saw shapes emerge. He finally pulled out and ejaculated, sticky and bleach-smelling, onto my thigh and stomach and I fell asleep to him wiping me down lovingly, like I was an infant who’d shit itself.

I woke to a crack of dawn sunlight that filtered between the curtains, not fully drawn, all headache and pain and nausea. I was panicked because I didn’t have anything else with me, and I considered scheming to raid the minibar, hoping he would say nothing about the bill or that I’d have time to find an excuse. But even that was pointless because I could tell Mark was awake – facing away from me, his back muscles shuddered; he sniffled, quiet, quietly enough that it wouldn’t have woken me in any other circumstances, and lifted his arm carefully from the position we were in to wipe his eyes.

I suffered through the morning with a quick puke and a long shower, telling Mark that maybe the gnocchi sauce was too creamy for me, and he said nothing of note about that. We drove the hours back home with my hand stuffed in my jean pocket to hide a tremor and at no point did either of us discuss the fact that, at dawn, Mark was woken by something – a thought, a realization, a recurring anxiety – so palpable as to make him weep.