Degrees of Nakedness Read Free

you. It’s so sensitive you can hear the baby breathe or hiccup. It took a little getting used to. Sometimes it would pick up the voices of children playing on the street, the sound garbled and static as if the baby had been invaded by aliens who were using her as a vehicle to relay a message. Once, at midnight, Cy and I were sitting at the living room table, having a cup of coffee, watching the couples coming up from the Ship Inn, when there was a loud crash over the monitor. Both of us froze for a second and then ran up the stairs, two at a time. In her room, everything was still. The bassinet was in the centre of the table where we had left it. Cy looked out the window. Somebody on the street had slammed a car door.
    The night Marie came over for supper Cy took her up to the bedroom to see the baby. He forgot the monitor was on.
    He said, “Listen, Marie, what happened, if Donna knew about it, it would really hurt her, I mean I really had a good time, but I think it was a sort of solitary thing.”
    His voice was soft and without static. It was as if he were standing behind me, telling me about it. I went out on the fire escape with my cup of coffee, put my feet up on the banister.
    I had been so weak the whole time I was in hospital. The baby was the smallest baby in the neo-natal nursery. I was okay when Cy was with me, but when I had to go into the nursery by myself I was convinced they were going to tell me something terrible. They have huge stainless steel sinks with digital clocks that tell you how many seconds you’ve been scrubbing. While I washed up to the elbow, I would convince myself not to start crying. Once I went in, and they said, “Now, Mrs. Sheppard, I better tell you this before you see your baby, there’s nothing to worry about, but she stopped breathing for a minute or so. That’s common with premature babies, one of the nurses noticed she was a little dusky-coloured and picked her up and she was fine. But we’ve got a monitor on her now and I just wanted to mention it to you before you saw her, so you’d know there was nothing to worry about.”
    I phoned Cy and he said he’d be up right away. I stood in the bathroom of my hospital room looking in the mirror, smoothing moisturizing cream over my face. When Cy got there he held me in his arms for a long time. When visiting hours were over, he went home and phoned me. They had wheeled a patient into my room who had just given birth, so I couldn’t talk, I could only listen.
    Cy read to me from a history book about Christopher Columbus. Columbus wrote to Ferdinand that he had sighted cyclops and mermaids who were not as beautiful as previously reported, in fact quite mannish. They believed back then that the garden of Paradise was on Earth. That the world was pearshaped, and the garden of Eden a protuberance on the top, likea woman’s nipple. When Columbus found South America, he knew he had come to land because fresh water was mixing with sea water and whales played there. He thought that fresh water flowed from the nipple of Paradise. When I woke up, the telephone receiver was buzzing the dial tone in my ear.
    Out on the fire escape, the fog coming up from the harbour penetrated my clothes and a spider crawled over my foot. Cy came out, and I said to him, “Cy, how do I know you won’t leave me?”
    He said, “You don’t know, Donna. I love you fiercely right now, that’s the best I can offer.”
    I thought about that artist, Volker, we’d visited in Germany. He had taken Cy and me into his painting studio and showed us paintings for two hours. Suddenly, he said, “Come here, Cyril, I will show you something.” He grabbed Cy’s thumb and dipped it into a can of gold pigment, powdered gold. Cy held up his gilded thumb. It looked as if a fragment of an ancient statue were somehow attached to Cy’s living hand. It made me think of Hansel and Gretel, how the witch said, Show me your thumb so I can see if you’re fattened up, and Hansel