I said I found this upsetting.
Michael said he was only joking. He tried to take my arm and pull me with him into the empty tub. I exited. We did not speak of it for some time.
Over the following months, while Michael bathed, I would watch the clock. Often, I became impatient. I would enter the bathroom and check on him under the guise of keeping him company. I would sit on the toilet seat and watch Michael bathe.
We would talk. I was pregnant. These were pleasant times. We discussed baby names—Michael liked Emma, I preferred Eva—and imagined our lives as parents. Michael would work less, coming home early to cook elaborate meals. We’d walk Nina (my mother’s name, which we’d eventually agreed on) to school, wave goodbye from the doorway. We’d buy appallingly hip children’s clothing. We’d place her on the bed between us and sandwich her with warmth. In a few years, Michael would coach her basketball team. He’d teach her to make omelets, to ride a bike.
We discussed our fears as well. Mine was that motherhood wouldn’t change me as much as I hoped it would. That instead of turning me blissed-out and easy, my new role would make me more tightly wound. I worried that I’d be too stiff to form a comforting cradle. I worried that my performance of motherhood would be unnatural, that my love would not be correctly expressed.
Michael was reassuring. He told me I was being ridiculous. He told me he couldn’t think of another person more suited to motherhood. He said that I had a big heart, that my heart was so big that it didn’t fit on my sleeve like his did, and so I had to hide and protect it deep inside of myself. But he knew it was there, and that when Nina was born all that stockpiled love would come gushing out. I told him it was the cheesiest, stupidest, and kindest thing anyone had ever said. I rubbed soap on his shoulders and shampooed his hair.
These baths continued until Nina’s death. After, I persisted in sitting on the toilet and keeping Michael company, but I began to worry about the possibility of his bathing while I was out of the house.
Michael’s pain came as a comfort in some ways, to know that grief was something we shared. At the same time, I couldn’t help feeling like we were in competition. I was the mother. Instead of trying to outdo me, he should have been consoling me. Not that I wanted consolation. In fact, I became angry when he tried. What nerve he had to think that anything would help. He was constantly encouraging me to let out my feelings, to talk and to cry. He wanted us to see a counselor together. I felt judged.
Eventually, the thought of returning home to a blood-covered bathroom floor and a bathtub filled with Michael’s corpse became overwhelming. When I mentioned it, Michael shrugged and said, “I’m sorry I said that before. Try not to think about it.” His lack of irritation with my pestering made me even more nervous. I got rid of the tub. I replaced it with something simpler and smaller, a less romantic spot for suicide.
The replacement bathtub was fine. It had Jacuzzi jets and a comfortable headrest attachment. I took an Ativan. I lay in the bath and flipped through an old issue of Vogue. I laid my phone in sight.
Michael
The bar was my undergrad haunt, 420, named for its address on Amsterdam Avenue. The bartender was my undergrad bartender, Penny Watt. The Penny I remembered had a thing for zebra-print patterns. Now the animal’s stripes were tattooed from wrist to shoulder. It was, as they say, a look.
“You planning to order anything, or are you just going to stand there staring at me?”
“Penny,” I said, “do you not recall your old pal Michael Mixner?”
She looked skeptical.
“You seriously don’t remember all those times you threw me out after I stood on that table busting freestyle rhymes?”
I pointed at the offending area. We’d been friends, or so I’d imagined. She was a grad student doing a PhD in gender studies. I was an undergrad who gave two-dollar tips and thought it entitled me to hours of banter.
When I first fell for Wendy, I told Penny immediately. She matched me shot for shot as we hatched a plan to win Wendy’s heart. The plan involved arriving at her dorm with a red bow around my forehead and reciting “Bump n’ Grind” with Shakespearean affect. It was scrapped in the sober light of morning. When Wendy and I got engaged, we came to this bar and made Miller High Life toasts, the champagne of beers being the closest thing to bubbly in 420’s fridge.
The bar was different now. Stoners had always been drawn by its fortuitous address, but only after legalization had its owners cashed in. These days it was a full-on vape bar, decorated in a mishmash of Stanley Mouse reproductions and posters for eighties-era gaming systems. A chalkboard menu offered a long list of local and imported strains—one, an indica/sativa blend, was described as ideal for the Columbia film student forced to sit through a screening of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó—and most of the tables had been retrofitted with perma-vapes.
The room was filled with skunky mist and stumbling students, a number of whom wore AR helmets, which was all but unthinkable a few
