Part 3 (1/2)

Three: The Loneliest Number.

Cici's face is wet with tears. Sol can't tell if they're tears of joy or pain. He'd left the baby, who was still sleeping, in the car and gone upstairs to get Cici. She refused to come downstairs, even after he said he had a really, really big surprise-one she was sure to like.

Even before he opened the front door to return to the car he heard it: a wail that began to crescendo and showed no signs of abating. The baby hollered when Sol took her out of her basket, she screamed and kicked off her blankets-it was all Sol could do to carry her up the stairs and into the bedroom. The baby gulped and sputtered and Sol bounced her a little but was having no luck calming her down. Cici must have heard the crying because she was standing at the window, locked in place, facing away from Sol. Waiting for Cici to turn around felt to Sol like an eternity. When she did, her gaze was lowered and he could see tears wet her face. She took a few steps toward him and when she met his eyes it was as if she was seeing him, again, for the first time. Her expression so tender, so grateful, as she reached out toward the baby in his arms. ”Per favore,” she said.

Sol had a.s.sumed they'd talk a bit. He'd explain his decision, leaving out certain specifics, but in his mind, talking occurred. But now, there was no talking. Cici took the baby in her arms and began cooing and murmuring softly. ”I'll just be downstairs, waiting,” Sol mumbled after watching the circle close around his wife and their infant. ”I'll leave the two of you alone, give you time to get to know each other.”

Get to know each other? Sol feels like a galoot. He thinks it's going well, though, because every time he goes upstairs to check on them, they're clucking and cooing, and now the baby's quiet. He makes Cici a sandwich and brings it up along with the bag of bottles and formula and diapers Mrs. Beal had given him. ”I thought you might both be hungry,” he says. He lays down the care package, filled with things he isn't quite sure what to do with. The baby's in bed next to Cici, curled like a lima bean. Sol puts the sandwich down on the table next to Cici's side of the bed. She looks like a child herself. ”Shhhhhhhhh,” she says, pressing her finger to her lips and closing her eyes.

Sol spends the night on the sofa and the next day Cici and the baby sleep until noon. Sol tunes in to the Voice of America, which is broadcasting President Kennedy's response to Khrushchev. ”I think that you and I, with our heavy responsibilities for the maintenance of peace, were aware that developments were approaching a point where events could have become unmanageable.” Kennedy sounds so calm, so restrained. Listening to his voice makes the fact that the world has just been teetering on the edge of nuclear war seem unbelievable. The Soviets are going to stop building bases in Cuba and will dismantle their offensive weapons; they had blinked. High noon appears to be over everywhere in the world, including in his own home. Sol is greatly relieved. Why, then, does he still feel a sense of disquiet, like he's forgotten to do something but can't remember what?

Cici and the baby stay in their bedroom for three days and nights, until both are exhausted from the struggle to feed and be fed, until Cici's milk is flowing fully and the baby is sucking from her breast. Cici refused to use a bottle or formula, determined to nurse this child as she would have her own. Love starts to form underneath the crust of Cici's grief, and she is hungry to protect and keep close the new object of her affection. ”I am your mama, and you are mia bambina,” she says to the baby. ”I am mama,” Cici whispers until she can no longer picture the gray face of her son. ”You are my baby. Mama will not lose you, tesoro mio.”

Sol feels like a stranger in his own home. The closed bedroom door is a barrier between him and what is distinctly female. Sol is excluded from whatever is going on behind that door, and after days of it, he feels a mounting anger. Then again, shouldn't he just be happy that she's taken with the child, that they're forming a bond? Isn't this exactly what he wanted? But Cici is young and inexperienced, and what she needs is the advice of a more mature woman, like one of her sisters. Certainly not uneducated Cookie. He doesn't trust that Cookie, not anymore.

Sol has noticed that Cookie has a spring in her step since the baby arrived. Maybe because she has a free pa.s.s into their bedroom and he doesn't. Sol watches her disappear into the room and reappear with dirty diapers and dishes. Cookie makes trips to and from the baby's room, fetching clothing and ointment and rattles and returning with applesauce, corn pudding, mashed potatoes, yams. Sol has teeth he'd like to use and the rotation is getting tiresome. It's obvious that Sol isn't needed at home, so he calls the hospital and says he's coming back to work. He had another radiologist cover for him for a couple of days, but now it is time for life to return to normal.

By the seventh day of Cici's sequestration with the baby, Sol's back is tied in knots from sleeping on the living-room sofa. Rather than knocking softly on the door and speaking to his wife through a baffling of wood, this morning he barges in, unannounced. Cici is sitting up, a pillow under her arm and the baby nestled at her breast. Her hair is clean and pinned up and she wears no makeup. Sol can't remember ever seeing her look more beautiful. Without taking her eyes off the baby, she motions for Sol to come around beside her. All the words he planned to say-that she needed to snap out of this ethnic nonsense and feed the child some proper formula, that he would be coming back to their bed tonight-are silenced. A breeze from the open window releases the faint scent of powder and something b.u.t.tery, almost like caramel. ”Come, amore mio,” she says. He sits next to her on the bed as she turns the baby toward him. The child has the strangest eyes. They are two distinctly different colors; one blue and the other hazel, heading into green. The baby is alert, locking right onto him. Is he supposed to hold her? He hesitates and Cici puts the baby over her shoulder and pats her back for a burp. She's cooing in some version of Italian baby talk, making round circles on the baby's back. ”Shhhhh, cara mia, tesoro mio, cherie, cara.” Cici looks so peaceful now; except for the scars on her stomach there's no outward sign anything bad has happened. Sol feels uncomfortable perched on the edge of the bed; should he slide his legs up, spoon into the family? He picks one leg up and slides an arm around Cici's shoulders. Is he supposed to watch her and the baby making eyes at each other in wonderment? He tries. The baby has spit bubbles on her mouth and Cici blows on her face, laughing her delicious laugh. But this new position is no more comfortable for Sol than the other, and he waits for Cici to notice and readjust. But she is too busy sniffing the top of the baby's head. Is Sol supposed to sniff it too? Is he supposed to feel something immediately toward this child that bears no resemblance to him, that is not his flesh and blood? Clearly Cici does. Cici squeezes his hand and tells him to breathe, right there; she kisses the baby's downy head. Sol realizes the baby is the source of the caramel smell, the scent he couldn't describe mingling with new car. Sol has a dawning dread that he may have made a mistake, one that can't be undone. They are now three. He feels the unevenness of the number, the potential for gaps, for triangles.

”Don't you want to know her name?” Cici says. She sounds fragile and terribly lovely. It makes Sol want to inhale her voice and sail away. When she finally looks up at him, her gaze fills him up. It feels like forever since she's done that. ”It is Cherie,” Cici whispers. ”Ma cherie amour. Is perfetto, no?”

She's named the baby their term of endearment? The name she calls him when they make love? ”Perfect,” he says weakly as he walks out and quietly closes the door.

And what of the baby in all of this, the newly minted Cheri (without an e because Sol wanted there to be at least a letter of difference between his pet name and hers)? She inhaled the soft woolly smell of blankets, the powdery, sticky scent of white cream, and vanilla from the long hair that she grabbed as it tickled over her face. And there was the smell of something else that was put into her mouth, wet and soft, not like the salty-tasting fingers that touched her lips. This thing that was pressed into her mouth, that made her cough and choke and was dry at first and then became liquid that tasted sweet and slightly bitter. Sometimes it tasted different, it made her sneeze; she'd smell it on the cloth that would wipe her face or on the front of her when she spit it up. The source of the smell, the liquid, had big soft lips and big soft hands that sometimes pressed her hard into the smell, wanting her to drink more when she was full. The source of the smell clutched her and made noises that she'd heard before but that sounded different, like they needed her to respond. Like they were waiting. The smell would sometimes be so close she felt she couldn't breathe and then she'd cry and get pulled closer and closer so she stopped crying to get away. The smell opened its lips and closed them over and over again making ”Mmaaa,” and then ”Maaaa.” ”I am your mama,” so that one day she would know the smell was Mama, so the smell had a name.

Cheri sleeps with Mama and dreams of things she'll soon forget. A woman in a blue dress dances barefoot on the moon. ”I'll fly you to bliss,” she says, twirling to a chorus of voices spoken in words she doesn't yet know; ”Terry's on the mound at the bottom of the ninth and the pressure is on”; ”If I'd wanted another kid I'd go knock up Mab.” ”Cheri, amore mio, I am here. I will never leave you,” she hears as she opens her eyes, as the smell reaches to embrace her, to take her in, grasping tight, too tight. ”Never, ever.”

Part II.

Chicago, 2002.

Somewhere in the Middle.

Eggs.

Monday morning is the cruelest time for undergraduates, especially when they're sitting in the dark, and she suddenly knows she's lost them. Cheri Matzner stands in front of a projector while the ancient fertility idols and horned G.o.ddesses shown in the slides flow over her like a traveling tattoo. She can practically hear her students' heads dropping onto their desks. She can't wait to be free of these baby birds with their mouths and laptops open, partially because it's her last semester teaching and partially because her dine-and-drive breakfast of fried dough and coffee is repeating itself in new and unusual ways. Where did she put all those antacids she just bought? Not in her pockets where she needs them. Cheri always said that forgetfulness was for amateurs and the elderly; if she lost track of something, it was on purpose. She'd blame it on the hamster wheel of fertility treatments she's been stuck on for the past year but this is an off-month. A break from hormones, injections, and, thanks to the threadbare state of her marriage, s.e.x.

The filled lecture hall confirms her worst fear: she's become an academic, someone who tells people the answer is in books; worse still, in books written in dead languages. She's a long way from who she was when she came to the University of Chicago six years ago as the rebel in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, that radical professor with the tattoos, piercings, and past career as a cop with the NYPD. Blame it on the looming bra.s.s glow of tenure or on the erosion from all the loathsome paperwork and departmental service hours, but any idealistic notion she had of shaking up the dusty status quo of academe through teaching undergrads is long gone. But Cheri doesn't like to lose at anything.

”Who's been to a prost.i.tute?” she asks, flicking on the lights. ”Has anyone been to a prost.i.tute, used an escort service, Internet hookup? Anyone?” The students look at each other quizzically, wondering if Cheri is serious. Some s.h.i.+ft in their seats. ”I won't tell your significant other-it's a purely sociological question.” A guy with facial hair like Jesus finally says: ”In Vegas for a cousin's wedding there were hookers.”

”Okay, weddings, good. Anyone else?”

”A kid I knew in junior high got a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b at his bar mitzvah. His big sister's friend came up to him and, you know, did it. She was in high school so it was a big deal.”

”Did you all line up and watch?” a neighboring girl snaps.

”We were h.o.r.n.y boys, what do you think?”

”The point is,” Cheri says, ”in both the wedding and the bar mitzvah, there's a ritual. Let's take Riley's example. A bar mitzvah marks a pa.s.sage into manhood. The initiate receives a s.e.xual favor from his big sister's friend. What do we think of this ritual? Yes, Rachael?”

”The girl was degrading herself; she was probably doing it as a dare, not because she wanted to. It shows how women are brought up thinking they have to wors.h.i.+p the phallus and they get nothing in return.”

”Why is everything about degrading women?” Riley says. ”The girl was the one with the power. She was older, she approached him-she had the control.”

”Oh, please,” a girl wearing a beanie says. ”The girl was a s.l.u.t.”

”Okay, in about a minute, we've called this girl powerful...a victim...and a s.l.u.t.” Cheri writes the words on the chalkboard. ”Who knows what she would have been called in ancient Sumer?”

Rachael raises her hand. ”A sacred prost.i.tute?”

”A priestess. In the third millennium Riley's friend would have gone to the temple where a qadishtu-sacred woman-would initiate him s.e.xually. s.e.xuality wasn't disconnected from religion. It's not until the sixth century that the priestess is thought of as a sacred prost.i.tute and then, as the role of the G.o.ddess diminished, a harlot.”

”Finally, we're back to prost.i.tutes...”

”Riley, since you're eager-define prost.i.tute. As we know it today.”

”A prost.i.tute has s.e.x for money and it's illegal, except, I think, in Vegas. Although there are other ways to prost.i.tute yourself, for power or grades, for example.”

”Let's say, 'to offer s.e.xual intercourse for money.' From a Judeo-Christian perspective, the holy woman becomes a prost.i.tute, the powerful woman a s.l.u.t. When we use the word virtue-the virtue of a woman-it's immediately linked to virginity. But imposing one concept of virtue on another isn't what we're supposed to do in a democratic society-that would be like having a national religion, right? So how we define words is affected by the prevailing point of view.” She calls on a reedy kid who has had his hand up for a while.

”It comes down to what's moral. That's not something that s.h.i.+fts based on the times. I'm Catholic and I believe there is something wrong with prost.i.tution. Back then and now.”

”Mesopotamian families didn't have the structure and a.s.sumed relations.h.i.+ps of Western society. You need to put your judgments and personal beliefs aside-”

”But it's not a personal belief-the Old Testament makes it very clear that being a prost.i.tute is forbidden. A prost.i.tute is someone's daughter. That's about family structure and values.” Cheri feels increasingly dyspeptic-is it the kid, the lack of antacids, both?

”As I was saying, this cla.s.s is not about a literal or religious interpretation of the Bible. If you're interested in that, take a course in the divinity school.” Cheri moves behind her lectern to get the cla.s.s back on track. ”In the Abraham cycle-the original dysfunctional family story-we have polygamy, concubines, surrogacy. All legal in Mesopotamian law. Hagar was like the sacred prost.i.tute, performing a vital function. In a tribal culture it was a numbers game; the more wives and concubines a man had, the more chances for children. The bigger the tribe, the greater chance of survival and nation building. Your next paper will be on Abraham's sons Isaac and Ishmael. Examine their two paths. Do you stay at home and inherit your father's kingdom, where his shadow looms long, like Isaac did? Or, like Ishmael, do you heed the call, either by circ.u.mstance or by choice, and leave home and become, like your father, a builder of your own nation?”

She can't make a clean exit. A few students lurk around the lectern after cla.s.s, trying to get her attention. There's gifted but unlikable Rachael who wants to talk about Cheri's book, which linked the advent of writing to the decline of the G.o.ddess. The Catholic kid, hugging his backpack like someone who never lends his books, and Riley. ”My office hours are posted,” she says, walking past Rachael and the backpack kid, but she can't shrug off Riley. ”I'm serious about applying to the Near Eastern language program for grad school. I was thinking-”

”Based on how you do this semester, I'll consider writing you a recommendation. Now can I walk in peace?”

”Thanks, but that's not what I wanted to ask you. I heard you're going on leave to work with Professor Samuelson on that new Mesopotamian find? I want to apply to be your research a.s.sistant.”

Cheri is surprised undergraduates have heard about Samuelson's project. She certainly hasn't been able to pin down the details. First, there's Bush's ”axis of evil” rhetoric and accusations of WMDs, all of which make it impossible for Western archaeologists to collaborate with their counterparts in the museum in Baghdad. But there's also the black hole of McCall Samuelson himself, Cheri's department chair and head of the Oriental Inst.i.tute. Samuelson has yet to specify for Cheri-a mere mortal scholar-any details of her job description and critical path until they are able to get into Iraq. ”Not now,” she barks, and heads up the stairs to her office.

”They say it's a cache of cuneiform tablets, that it could be as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Is it true, they could trace back to the Old Testament?” Riley tags after her. ”No job would be too small. I'll be your temple prost.i.tute. Not funny?”

In a few seconds she's alone at her desk, popping an antacid. Her office is anarchy. Scholarly books commingle with beach reads stacked randomly in teetering towers. There's a poster for Rock 'n' Roll High School signed by the Ramones; one shelf is home to the upper portion of a llama's skull and an aqua hookah worthy of Alice's caterpillar. Her coat is buzzing. She has several messages, most from Cici. Oh, for the freedom of the cell-free days when everyone wasn't available 24/7. Ever since Sol died, five years ago, her mother war-dials her if she doesn't answer right away. Then there's a message from her editor in New York, chirping, ”How's that next book coming?” Her first book, an extended version of her doctoral dissertation, The Rise and Fall of the G.o.ddess: d.i.c.ks, Chicks, and Mythological Cliques, reached what her publisher called the ”upper mainstream,” a segment of the population Cheri knew well from Montclair-urbane professionals who thought being open-minded was listening to NPR in their luxury vehicles on their commute to work. How ironic that the people she fled from turned out to be her most receptive audience. In academic circles, her colleagues had denounced it as ”populist,” likely because it didn't have enough obscure, dense footnotes, and resented its success. Cheri sits back in her chair as the last message begins to play. It's from McCall Samuelson's secretary, saying he has to cancel the meeting that was scheduled for this afternoon. Again.

It's gray and dreary outside. Hyde Park looks particularly New England-y today, its brick homes and tree branches dusted with weekend snow. Cheri has just enough time to try to track down Samuelson before heading back to the land where twins are made in petri dishes. At thirty-nine, any time off from fertility treatments counts in dog years. Her life has been co-opted by the microscopic of egg and sperm for so long now that she's forgotten what it's like not to think about it. She's burned out on more than baby birds, and her career has suffered because of it. She needs to get her head back in the game and would love nothing more than to be in the thrall of something bigger. Piecing together the puzzle of humanity's ancient past is what drew her to Mesopotamian studies in the first place. Teaching was never Cheri's pa.s.sion. It was research and translation that thrilled and sustained her. Nothing compared to holding a clay tablet in her hands, knowing she would be the first person to read it in thousands of years. Translating known languages was a cakewalk compared to the linguistic detective work of deciphering cuneiform. She's always dreamed of being first in on a new discovery, having her translation become the benchmark for every subsequent generation of scholars. Now that she's part of Samuelson's team translating tablets rumored to be of biblical importance, this kind of lasting contribution is within her grasp. But first, she has to break out of the fog of infertility and pin down Samuelson about her job description.