Middlesex

They began to make love with a frequency they hadn’t known for years. If Chapter Eleven was out, they didn’t wait to go upstairs but used whatever room they happened to be in. They tried the red leather couch in the den; they spread out on the bluebirds and red berries of the living room sofa; and a few times they even lay down on the heavy-duty kitchen carpeting, which had a pattern of bricks. The only place they didn’t use was the basement because there was no telephone there. Their lovemaking was not passionate but slow and elegiac, carried out to the magisterial rhythms of suffering. They were not young anymore; their bodies were no longer beautiful. Tessie sometimes wept afterward. Milton kept his eyes squeezed shut. Their exertions resulted in no flowering of sensation, no release, or only seldom.

Then one day, three months after I was gone, the signals coming over my mother’s spiritual umbilical cord stopped. Tessie was lying in bed when the faint purring or tingling in her navel ceased. She sat up. She put her hand to her belly.

“I can’t feel her anymore!” Tessie cried.

“What?”

“The cord’s cut! Somebody cut the cord!”

Milton tried to reason with Tessie, but it was no use. From that moment, my mother became convinced that something terrible had happened to me.

And so: into the harmony of their suffering entered discord. While Milton fought to keep up a positive attitude, Tessie increasingly gave in to despair. They began to quarrel. Every now and then Milton’s optimism would sway my mother and she would become cheerful for a day or two. She would tell herself that, after all, they didn’t know anything definite. But such moods were temporary. When she was alone Tessie tried to feel something coming in over the umbilical cord, but there was nothing, not even a sign of distress.

I had been missing four months by this time. It was now January 1975. My fifteenth birthday had passed without my being found. On a Sunday morning while Tessie was at church, praying for my return, the phone rang. Milton answered.

“Hello?”

At first there was no response. Milton could hear music in the background, a radio playing in another room maybe. Then a muffled voice spoke.

“I bet you miss your daughter, Milton.”

“Who is this?”

“A daughter is a special thing.”

“Who is this?” Milton demanded again, and the line went dead.

He didn’t tell Tessie about the call. He suspected it was a crank. Or a disgruntled employee. The economy was in recession in 1975 and Milton had been forced to close a few franchises. The following Sunday, however, the phone rang again. This time Milton answered on the first ring.

“Hello?”

“Good morning, Milton. I have a question for you this morning. Would you like to know the question, Milton?”

“You tell me who this is or I’m hanging up.”

“I doubt you’ll do that, Milton. I’m the only chance you have to get your daughter back.”

Milton did a characteristic thing right then. He swallowed, squared his shoulders, and with a small nod prepared himself to meet whatever was coming.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m listening.”

And the caller hung up.

“Once upon a time in ancient Greece, there was an enchanted pool  . . .” I could do it in my sleep now. I was asleep, considering our backstage festivities, the flowing Averna, the tranquilizing smoke. Halloween had come and gone. Thanksgiving, too, and then Christmas. On New Year’s, Bob Presto threw a big party. Zora and I drank champagne. When it was time for my act, I plunged into the pool. I was high, drunk, and so that night did something I didn’t normally do. I opened my eyes underwater. I saw the faces looking back at me and I saw that they were not appalled. I had fun in the tank that night. It was all beneficial in some way. It was therapeutic. Inside Hermaphroditus old tensions were roiling, trying to work themselves out. Traumas of the locker room were being released. Shame over having a body unlike other bodies was passing away. The monster feeling was fading. And along with shame and self-loathing another hurt was healing. Hermaphroditus was beginning to forget about the Obscure Object.