'This is bullshit, Charlie. Male bullshit.'
'Is that your legal opinion or your political one?' She was tough, old Martha.
'I'm going to argue with you when you get back,' she warned.
'Fine-I expect that. For now, please just put the ad in the magazines and get all the documents ready.'
'I think you are a complete jerk for doing this.'
'We understand things differently, Martha.'
'Yes, because you are addicted to testosterone.'
'Most men are, Martha. That's what makes us such assholes.'
'You having erection problems, Charlie? Is that what this is about?'
'You got the wrong guy, Martha. My dick is like an old dog.'
'How's that? Sleeps all the time?'
'Slow but dependable,' he lied. 'Comes when you call it.'
She sighed. 'Why don't you just let me hire a couple of strippers to sit on your face? That'd be infinitely cheaper.'
'That's not what this is about, Martha.'
'Oh, Charlie.'
'I'm serious, I really am.'
'Ellie will be terribly hurt.'
'She doesn't need to know.'
'She'll find out, believe me. They always do.' Martha's voice was distraught. 'She'll find out you're up to something, then she'll find out you're advertising for a woman to have your baby, and then she'll just flip out, Charlie.'
'Not if you do your job well.'
'You really this afraid of death?'
'Not death, Martha, oblivion. Oblivion is the thing that really kills me.'
'You're better than this, Charlie.'
'The ad, just put in the ad.'
He hung up. In a few days the notice would sneak into the back pages of New York's weeklies, a discreet little box in the personals, specifying the arrangement he sought, the benefits he offered, and Martha would begin screening the applications. He'd see who responded. You never knew who was out there.
He sat quietly then, a saddened but prosperous American executive in a good suit, his gray hair neatly barbered, his body still trim even if it had a dozen steel pins and plates and screws in it, and followed the ships out on the water. One of the hotel's Eurasian prostitutes, dressed not too conservatively, watched him from across the lobby as she sipped a watered-down drink. Alert to the nuanced, late-night moods of international businessmen, and perhaps sensing a certain opportune grief in the stillness of his posture, she slipped over the marble floor and bent close to ask softly if he would like some company, but he shook his head no-although not, she would see, without a bit of lonely gratitude, not without a quick hungered glance of his eyes into hers-and he continued to sit calmly, with that stillness to him. Noticing this, one would have thought not that in one evening he had watched a man die, or made millions, or lied to his banker, or worried that his flesh might never go forward, but that he was privately toasting what was left of the century, wondering what revelation it might yet bring.
Women's Correctional Facility Bedford Hills, New York September 7, 1999
Paint a perfect blue sky, paint it the color of a robin's egg or a child's balloon, then frame that perfect blueness with a double set of forty-foot-high chain-link fences, each topped by five feet of double-bladed steel concertina wire, and on the corners of the compound add a tower with a gray-uniformed guard sitting at the ready with a heavy AR-15-firing capacity two hundred rounds per minute, range three hundred and fifty yards. Now move your gaze inward from those shimmering boundaries across the grass being mowed by a handful of women in forest-green uniforms and toward the irregular compound of brick buildings, some, such as the hospital building, one hundred years old, and all of them in distinctly poor repair-paint peeling from window frames, bricks needing repointing, sidewalks cracked-and past the women in green pushing laundry hampers toward the West Wing psych unit, where more women in green, either delusional, depressed, or criminally insane (including the woman from upstate who killed four babies), sit watching television, rocking ceaselessly as a side effect of the medications, and then you must compel yourself onward, past the building where the women sleep in tiny rooms (adorned with pictures cut from magazines, letters from home, small shrines to children and family) toward a facility that awaits the most contradictory of populations. On the top floor rests a set of cells designed for women sentenced to execution, the possibility of that fate coming courtesy of the solemn campaign promises of New York State's latest governor, and, on the floor below, a spotless nursery of sixteen rooms for women who have come to prison pregnant, those who have been impregnated by their husbands on conjugal visits (which, though against the rules, happens), or, less frequently, but not unheard of, those who have been impregnated in one of the consensual sexual liaisons that occur between the male guards and the women, the purposes of which, for the women, include the procurement of cigarettes, drugs, food, cosmetics, and, without being confused for affection, a welcome contrast to the flesh of another woman (that form of intimate contact being easy to find; the prison, all there know, is full of women kissing and hugging and diddling and tonguing and finger-fucking each other). Then you come to the small single rooms, where the women have been bedded with their newborns-where, as did their own mothers, they've learned to nurse and feed and wipe and whisper their babies to sleep. The hallway outside is gloomy but spotless, and it was here, one afternoon heavy and damp with summer, while pushing her dry mop down the linoleum, that a slender woman of twenty-seven stopped and stood listening, her eyes cast over her shoulder. A tight rope of dark hair hung down her back. She was not pretty, not exactly, but something quieter and more complicated-yes, there was something about Christina Welles that you remembered later, her fierce watchfulness, perhaps, or the silent concentration that suggested an intelligence that had no need to explain itself to others, but watch out if it did. Or you may have noticed the sadness that rested in her face when she was looking down, a sadness she felt but preferred to hide. Or it may have been none of these. What you would not have seen was a face that invited attention, welcomed conversation. Her brown eyes cut sideways at people before she decided whether she liked them, and though she had a rather devilish smile, it was rarely seen. She wished she could be more open and generous toward others, and counted her distrust among the things she did not like about herself. I don't say enough, she told herself, unless I am angry or in love, and then I say too much. Then I say everything.
Listening now, she could overhear the ritual that took place each time a woman came to live in the prison nursery with her newborn, a ritual utterly contrary to human nature, yet unremarkable in this place for its bureaucratic regularity, its numbed procedurality; they were taking another baby away from his mother. I don't want to see this, Christina thought, her fingernails pressing the mop handle. But she lingered outside the mother's room, just close enough to see the baby boy, whose name was Nushawn, being held by his mother, Shannelle, one last time. The maternity ward administrator, a kindly woman in her forties, watched, too, as did the relative who would take care of Nushawn until his mother was free-years hence. How long, Christina wondered, how long will they let Shannelle hold her baby? The answer was not long enough, never long enough. Now Shannelle collapsed in grief around Nushawn, who, unknowing, patted at a yellow barrette in her hair. Shannelle had come to Bedford Hills pregnant, after she and her sister had gone out one night to buy candy and two men had come up and asked them where So-and-so lived. The girls, nobody's fools, may have expected an incentive for their trouble, and after a brief negotiation walked the men over to the house in question, a distance of no more than a block, and when they knocked on the door, the police were inside, having just arrested its inhabitants for cooking and selling crack. The two girls got different public defenders, one a realist, the other a fool; Shannelle was assigned the fool, a recent law graduate of Harvard. Her sister agreed to a plea, avoided a trial, and got a year. Shannelle's lawyer convinced her that she was innocent and that he would make an impassioned defense if she'd allow him to take her case to trial. It was the first time a white, college-educated male had ever shown such an interest in her, and so she fearfully agreed to his proposition. The jury found her guilty in forty minutes, and the judge reluctantly sentenced her according to the harsh edicts of the Rockefeller drug laws, which meant Shannelle received three years to life.
