He could tell by the look on Brad’s face that he had lost, and as that phrase formed itself in his brain, Nehru wondered what he meant. The look on Brad’s fac as different from the look this morning. He was changed. He was shining a little, a little ethereal, and Nehru was a little… it was hard to say.
“Come and see him,” Brad was saying.
“It’s a boy?”
“He’s a boy, and he’s so little, and he’s so…”
There was the look. But that was his look, the look that was only for him, of love, of devotion, that had never existed for Debbie or Marissa even. Brad had fAllan in love. There was now something that was the most important thing in the world. This morning, Nehru realized, it had been him. Now it was this baby that he had not seen, that they were all being brought to see. Marissa was resting and they were putting the baby in the nursery and Nehru heard himself talking, laughing with everyone else, wrappings hia arm around Brad’s suddenly foreign waist.
Nehru was not sure what he had imagined, but this baby couldn’t have been anything else than what it was. How could something so unformed, so like everything else that it was, small, shriveled, ugly, a little upset with the world for being here, manage to look so like its father? There wasn’t a doubt here this was Brad’s baby, and as Nehru looked through the glass he felt small and unworthy of himself. He hated this baby.
In the Bible, Sara sent Hagar to Abram, and then when Ishmael was born she behaved with a rage everyone who knew the story castigated her for. But at least in the story the baby was Sara’s. She had thought of it, she had sent Hagar to Abram and the whole plan was that the baby be born on Sara’s knees. Sara’s crime was not jealousy, but rejection. The child had been hers. The child was hers when she’d cast out Ishmael and Hagar.
But this child was not his. This was the child of Marissa Gregg, a nice enough woman whom Brad had impregnated on one of his late night fuckings. Perhaps he had been created after Brad had left his house and spent the rest of the night in Marissa’s bed, sprayed his famous semen, the same semen Nehru had wiped from his chest and stomach on many nights, deep inside her. This innocent thing with its eyes rolling under its thin lids was created from that, and as Nehru gazed at him, angrier than he expected to be by Brad’s finger’s on his shoulder, he had sympathy with every evil stepmother in ever fairytale he’d ever heard.
“I know he’s got to stay there tonight, and a couple of nights,” Brad said. “And I know he has to get used to Marissa’s house. It’s baby proofed…”
Yes, it was baby proofed. Brad had spent a week over there baby proofing it with Hale, while Marissa burped her way through the last of the pregnancy. Marissa was still working every day, but by then her feet and ankles were swollen, and gas was just a way of life.
“I know all that,” Brad was saying, “but I can’t wait till the first time he stays with us.”
“Did you name the baby?” Nehru said.
“Marissa named him Timothy. After her father. It’s a good thing.”
Nehru started to make a joke about how it was a good thing she didn’t name the baby Hale after her new boyfriend, but thought better of it.
“Those little hands. Have you ever seen hands so little?” Brad asked as they came up the back stairs into their apartment at the top of the Noble Red. “Those litty bit fingernails. I’m in love with him, but what the hell kind of dad am I going to be?”
“Are you hungry?” Nehru asked.
“I should be. But I’m not.”
“You haven’t eaten all day.”
“I suppose I should eat then,” Brad said, still giddy.
“You should.”
Brad suddenly looked up at Nehru as if he hadn’t seen him all day.
“Have you eaten?”
“No,” Nehru said.
“Well, now what’s not right, baby,” he said, catching him by the hips and kissing him.
“You know, you’ve been up for me all day. Let me think of something to make you.”
“We live over a restaurant,” Nehru said. “Let’s just go downstairs. Let’s just get some pizza or a burger and eat.”
On their way downstairs, on the little inside walkway that came out in the back hallway, passing the kitchen, Nehru stopped and said, “And Timothy is a beautiful baby. And I am happy for you.”
This, of course, is what Brad had been waiting to hear from Nehru in some way all afternoon, but when Nehru said it, there was something in the way that he said it that made Brad sad, and he didn’t understand why.
While Bradley Aaron Long watched Nehru Alexander eat a plate of chicken wings with less gusto than he ever had, he finally said, “You’re a writer and everything, so I need you to use your words.”
Nehru wiped his fingers on the thick orange napkins and said, “Well, do you want me to write you a song?”
“Whatever you need to do, but you’re starting to make the happiest day of my life the shittiest.”
“Really?” Nehru said in a tone that made Brad think he might have done a little too far.
“Since five o’ clock this morning, my day has revolved around the fact that the person I’ve chosen to spend my life with is having a baby. Not our baby, not the baby we talked about and adopted, but the baby he made with someone else while he was starting an affair with me. The baby, let’s not forget, that when it’s existence was known, heralded the end of our relationship.”
“Oh my God, it never did for me. I was prepared to start a life with you. You were the one that kept sending me back to Marissa.”
“I didn’t send you back to her after the first time you kissed me.”
“You….” Brad glowered, and there was nothing like seeing a thirty-two year old six-foot-three man glower.
“You’re being really unfair.”
“If… if you loved me for a long time, loved me before she ever came along, loved me even back when Debbie was around, then it is you who are unfair.”
“I told you, already,” Brad said, sounding tired and hurt even though Nehru wasn’t sure if Brad actually had told him, “I didn’t understand myself I didn’t understand us. I didn’t get it.”
“Well, you should have gotten it.”
“Right, I should have gotten it.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“We can fight upstairs,” Brad offered.
“We never fight.”
“And now you’re making us, because essentially what you’re saying is that you wish my son didn’t exist.”
And just like that, Nehru took his class of ice water and flung it in Brad’s face.
That gained an audience and Brad sat there, his face and hair soaked, his tee shirt plastered to his chest.
“I’m done, and you can pick up the bill.”
“Where are you going, Nehru?” Brad stood up when Neru was clearly turning for the door.
“Don’t worry about it,” Nehru said. “It wouldn’t be fair.”
Brad made the best of the rest of the night. He paid the bill and sensibly took the chicken wings back upstairs then changed shirts and sat in his apartment, only it wasn’t his apartment. It was their apartment. It was one of the few places he’d ever lived that wasn’t his parents’ house, and it was filled with Nehru’s things and there was their bed. He couldn’t really stand to be without his friend, so he put the wings in the fridge and then decided to find him. He stopped at the Alexanders’ home down the street, and then he thought of stopping at Chayne’s house, but couldn’t bear Rob answering the door with that look on his face. They had just begun to get along, and if he and Nehru had fAllan out, then he knew what side of things Robert Keyes would be on. So he set out for Cody’s, skipping the house and heading toward Thompson Road and the house behind the gas station and he parked in the overgrown lot, then rapped on the door.
Russell answered, and he said, “We figured you’d be around eventually.”
He was in boxers and a tee shirt with a cigarette, and he settled down beside Cody on the sofa in a living room that looked more like a home than Brad remembered.
“He’s upstairs,” Cody said. “In the spare room. He’s probably not asleep, but you might want to send a vanguard up, first.”
“I’ll go,” Russell volunteered, unfolding his legs, and Brad said, “I really don’t understand what happened.”
“Well, let’s see,” Russell said, “after whatever you all were going through, while you were sleeping with Marissa and Nehru at the same time, you and Nehru finally get together to start your life, and now you’ve got a baby.”
“And now, instead of Nehru having to compete with Marissa in this very heterosexual world for your affection, he has to compete with said baby,” Cody added.
“And now instead of the two of you having your own life,” Russell continued, “and maybe you two having a baby one day, now he’s got to help you take care of your baby.”
“But it’s not like that,” Brad said.
Cody looked doubtful, but Russell said, “Of course it’s like that. You’re going to have the baby at the apartment, right? It’s totally like that, Brad. And he didn’t get a choice in the matter at all.”
“And,” Cody added, “though he probably doesn’t feel good about that, and though he’d like to rise above the occasion and be welcoming—”
“He has been welcoming and understanding too,” Brad said.
“Right,” said Russell, “And that’s a lot of understanding.”
“It’s a whole hell of a lot of understanding,” Cody said.
“It has to crack a little. Eventually.”
“I skipped going to Chayne’s house to look for him.”
“Cause you thought you’d run into Rob?” Russell guessed.
“Uh… maybe.”
Russell chuckled like something older than a seventeen year old.
“Rob hates me.”
“Rob isn’t in love with you,” Russell corrected. “That’s not quite the same thing. And Rob doesn’t always know what’s best.”
“I—“ Brad began, “and there’s no reason you should have to listen to all this, but I love Timothy. I am so glad he’s here, but I got back to the apartment and the idea of raising him without Nehru, the idea of not having Nehru is…”
“You better go up there and tell him,” Cody said.
Russell nodded in agreement, and went up the stairs ahead of Brad.
