I was, I suppose you could say, in a prepartum depression.
It began when my wife of three years announced it was time to have a baby. Connie was twenty-eight and I was thirty. Given our ages, I pointed out in my argument against the idea, the matter was hardly an urgent one. But after she’d voiced her objective — which must have crystallized it for her — the achievement of motherhood became an obsession and she was rarely off my case about it. Finally, and several months later, my ongoing reluctance to enlist in her project resulted in a not so veiled threat: “Steven,” she said. “Either we have a baby very soon or I’m out of here.”
“All right,” I told her, “get off the fucking Ovral then.”
Now it wasn’t that I’d never wanted a baby, and not that, when I had one, I didn’t want it to be with Connie. Strong of character, nurturing, attentive and sometimes astonishingly perceptive (as well as pretty), Connie was a terrific wife and more than qualified to be an exceptional mother. The notion of one day having a family with her wasn’t at all disagreeable to me. Indeed, I’d talked, and sincerely, about wanting a family quite frequently during our courtship.
But that was in the abstract and far away at the time.
What commenced to trouble me when the prospect became imminent — what troubled me immensely — was a consequence of the prospect that bolted to the fore of my brain and lodged there. Fathering a child would bind me to the hideous plan that nature has devised for everything corporeal. I would be, by nature’s design, replacing myself.
If Connie, born Catholic but now earnestly New Age in her faiths and sentiments, mollified her apprehension of death by believing in reincarnation, I was a secular Jew and had only the void to anticipate. And if I’d always been keenly tuned to the terrible price of existence, and lived in a perpetual state of medium-grade anxiety because of it, the newly heightened appreciation of my mortality destroyed any semblance of internal equilibrium I could claim. The underbelly of nature had turned itself toward me and it wouldn’t turn away. My now hyper-consciousness of what it ultimately meant to be alive was making a magnificent vista of extravagant greenery — albeit as manicured as Central Park — grotesque and menacing to me. In the most serene of moments, I was seeing what William James saw, “the skull grinning in at the banquet.”
I was also, much of the time, in a small rage about the new burden I’d be taking on. I’m referring not to the responsibility of child raising, but to the fact that no matter how large was the contempt I’d developed for humanity, having a child would force me to care about what the world might be like after I expired.
Thoroughly upended, I even began to think about homosexuality; about, that is, the solution it afforded to the problem of getting your rocks off without spinning what Kerouac called the “wheel of the quivering meat conception.” Though it wasn’t an appealing option, there were hours when I couldn’t help but feel titillated by the concept of having sex that was unencumbered by procreative ramifications.
In the petrifying absence of contraception, I found myself avoiding sex with Connie. And when I couldn’t avoid it, my performance was impeded by occlusions in my circuits that would leave the both of us in a condition of considerable frustration. (I was fine jerking off, but I could not for the life of me get functionally erect with her, let alone ejaculate.) Moreover, my very biology added to the predicament, forcing me to suffer the embarrassment of a sperm count that a lab I visited at Connie’s insistence twice reported was “virtually negligible.”
Compounding these miseries, at once increasing my sense of urgency and exacerbating my paralysis, was Connie’s evident disappointment in me; a disappointment that was evolving into disdain. I knew that I was becoming, in her eyes, something less than a man. Recalling her admission to me once that she’d believed all Jewish men were extraordinary providers and natural born fathers — and having early on disabused her of the former assumption — I knew that I had no choice now but to keep the latter one alive.
Reasoning that a change of scene might turn the trick, Connie suggested one morning that we split from our Manhattan apartment and try the country for a few days. When I agreed, she arranged for us to stay with our friend Betsy who ran a little print shop out of her house in a Catskill town not far from Kingston. Connie was excited by her idea and in her phone call to Betsy gleefully told her what we were up to.
The plan was to leave in a month.
With Connie’s impatience only increasing, it was, I knew, something like now or never for me and I made ready to win a war with myself. In preparation for that war, the first thing we did was suspend all attempts at sex. (It was Connie’s idea.) With that, and after adhering to a simple regimen that Connie dictated — four weeks of wholesome foods, vitamins, structured and daily exercise and “absolutely no masturbation” — I actually felt not so bad and I was ready to give it a go.
But arriving upstate, I was seriously frightened again. I felt like what a German soldier entering the Russian front must have felt like. It was the middle of winter, the sky was low and gray, the snowdrifts were thigh-high and the temperature was near to zero. On top of everything else, this was not an atmosphere conducive to a successful completion of the undertaking at hand. Especially not when, in the back bedroom to which Betsy assigned us (and which she used to store old printing equipment and bound stacks of posters and flyers), you could see your breath and needed to wear a coat.
Still, as inopportune as the setting may have been, it was on our second afternoon there that a child was conceived.
I want to say, first of all, that I was feeling physically ill, and it wasn’t only because I was on the edge of a cold. In a generous if misguided gesture of support, Betsy had pumped the thermostat up to steam bath levels. The oppressive heat, coupled with an effluvium of musty furniture and nasty chemicals, threatened my ability to both keep my lunch and remain fully conscious.
In any case, with Betsy at work out front, Connie, after giving me a thumbs up sign, took off her clothes and arranged them carefully over a chair. Deliberately presenting her bottom to me as she bent to the bed to pull away the quilt, she followed this maneuver by abruptly turning around and flopping onto the bed on her back. Then, reaching for a pillow, she propped it under her buttocks and spread her legs.
“Stevie, do you feel it, too? It’s as though there’s a spirit hovering near us waiting to be reborn.”
“Great,” I said, removing my pants. “I hope it’s the spirit of a heavy-duty bond trader who happened to have a coronary while he was up here for a weekend. Please don’t let it be one of the local yahoos who ran his pickup into a tree.”
I entered her immediately — it had, after all, been weeks since I’d last pleasured myself. But very quickly I knew I was going to wither. My deprived member’s rote response to a welcoming vagina notwithstanding, the gravity of the occasion continued to undermine me. Still, I’d made a compact which I had to honor. Inasmuch as the peril the woman beneath me signified was serving to turn me more off than on, I began, then, to leaf through bodies, shuffle through poses, postures and configurations in my private Kama Sutra file. And then, beginning to sweat profusely, to ransack my memory and imagination. But no one and no thing I could remember or think to want would get me up, let alone elicit the participation of my gonads. What I wouldn’t have given for a premature orgasm. I tried, with my hand, to stuff it in.
“Stop.” Connie said. She squeezed out from under me and, her hair trailing along my chest and stomach, ran her tongue down the length of my torso to the numb thing between my legs.
A determined virgin into her early twenties — she would not permit a man inside her until she was twenty-two — Connie’d had some experience keeping boyfriends with her mouth. In seconds, and despite my mental condition, she got it halfway up and we tried anew. But once more I evacuated her ignominiously and she was left to root in me again. Ten minutes must have passed with nothing much happening before she raised her head. I was expecting an expression of scorn. Look, I was prepared to say, I’m sorry. This is really out of my hands. But Connie was grinning at me. Crawling backwards a little, she reached, with outstretched arms, behind my back and, using her shoulders, raised my legs until they were almost perpendicular to the bed. Then, holding my haunches up and steady with both of her hands, she lowered her head to my starkly exposed ass and drove her tongue into my rectum. After lingering there for a while, she let my legs down, lay on top of me and, brushing it against my nostrils en route, brought her mouth to my ear.
“You poor chicken-hearted hymie,” she whispered. “I wish you were the lesbian you’d like to be because what I really want to do is eat your pussy.”
Score one for Connie’s acumen and her resourcefulness in an emergency. “Harder,” she was instructing me after no more than a minute had elapsed. “Go deeper. Yeah! Oh! Splash.”
Cody was born nine months later, almost to the day. Nature being oblivious to human expectations of justice and symmetry, he had, contrary to the circumstances of his conception, a proper allotment of toes and fingers and a countenance that was amazingly genuine in its sweetness and innocence. I mean there was nothing unhealthy or freakish about him; nothing that was even remotely Damienish. By every measure he was a wonderful specimen.
And me? Well, I was worn by then to a physical as well as emotional nub. I lost twenty pounds during Connie’s pregnancy and the run up to it that I didn’t need to lose. But not dropping dead with Cody’s arrival had a salutary effect on my nerves that was almost immediate. I was still afflicted with my chronic trepidation, of course, but significantly less clamorous it was, relatively speaking, a manageable trepidation.
Just a day or so after his birth I was, in fact, as close as I get to all right again.
In addition to authoring multiple collections of short fiction along with commentary on a variety of subjects (see his About page), Robert Levin is also a prominent jazz critic.
Called by Nat Hentoff “a writer from whom I always learn something,” Robert Levin is a jazz critic whose work focuses on free jazz. Writing since the 1950s, he has contributed to Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, All About Jazz and Downbeat. He’s the coauthor of two books on free jazz and has penned more than 100 liner notes for major labels like Blue Note. They include albums by John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. His criticism and memoirs reflect long-standing, first-hand engagement with the musicians and movement he documents.