The eastern perimeter of Central Park, from the waiting room window, was dappled orange and gold and apple red, the first insinuations of fall. It did not remind Jude of sex. There was plenty of that here on the maternity ward, where Jude had witnessed (in the cries of pain from Eliza’s next-door neighbor, a cart of metal instruments wheeled down the hall, the pink-skinned newborns behind the nursery glass) the inevitable end of the reproductive act. On the other side of Mount Sinai a glass pavilion was being erected, eleven stories high and a block wide, which according to one of the construction signs was meant to contribute to the patients’ sense of buoyancy and recuperation.
It was a coincidence that the baby would be born in the same hospital as Jude, but not a big one: it was, after all, one of the biggest hospitals in New York. There were three floors of nurseries, and he visited all of them, looking through the window at the empty incubators, where he’d spent the first hours of his life. They were waiting for the next baby, maybe Eliza’s. Beside Jude, Di tapped her fingers on the glass and made grotesque faces at the babies, as if she were going to gobble them up or kidnap them on the spot. They paid her no attention. She’d been more relaxed since the annulment had come through and the Milans had dropped the adoption suit. In a single envelope, Ravi had returned the annulment forms with Johnny’s signature and wrote that he had decided, with his wife, to adopt a child from India. Whether he had had a change of heart on his own or with Johnny’s help, Jude could only guess. In another envelope, postmarked San Francisco, Eliza found a series of large, crisp bills, and a note, in Johnny’s elegant script, that read simply “For the baby.”
September, going on October. Jude was wearing the new Converse he bought with his dad’s back-to-school money. East Side Community High School, where he was actually reading The Outsiders in English II and had a D in biology for refusing to dissect a pig fetus. He went to an assembly on AIDS, skated the basketball court after school. Two of the guys had devil locks. There was a girl with a Black Flag T-shirt who sat next to him in world history, but he told her he had a girlfriend. He told her she was in Europe. When she got back, she’d be going to Emily Dickinson on the Upper West Side—that part was true. For lunch he went to San Loco with one of the guys from Army of One, who was a senior there, and it was from him that Jude learned Johnny and Rooster had taken a Greyhound to California to start a band and see what the scene was like out there.
It was early evening when the baby finally arrived. Eliza wanted Jude and her mother in the room. Even when the baby was out of her—not a girl but a boy, although this, too, Jude wouldn’t ever have the heart to tell her (dark-haired and terrified, testicles swollen as big as a peach)—she kept her eyes closed tight. She knew how easy it is to fall in love.
He wouldn’t tell her, either, about visiting the baby in the nursery, hours old and sleeping, Eliza’s blood still smudged on his skin. In a rocking chair, Jude accepted the bundle from the nurse, and despite himself, the first thing he did was hunt for evidence of the baby’s genes, the science project—blue and yellow make green—at which no one in the history of the world has ever failed to be amazed.
But the baby looked like no one, not his mother, not his father. If it weren’t for the bracelet cuffed around his inconceivably tiny wrist, he could have been mistaken for any other baby in the room, plucked up by any parent who walked by. For a moment, that possibility seemed within the natural order of things, and before it ended, Jude handed the boy back to the nurse.