Free Milk by Emily Hammond Page B

men admired his piano playing. At parties he always wound up at the keyboard entertaining everyone, the women who could sing hanging all over him like yowling cats in heat, while I stewed in the corner. I couldn’t sing or play piano or any instrument, so there was nothing for me to do at these parties besides admire Gregg and drink, or get up a little game of flirtation in the next room.
    After the club closes, he’s trying to help me find my car.
    â€œA block away,” I tell him. “I’m just not sure in which direction.” My ears ringing, I almost do feel drunk—that feeling you have after leaving a bar late at night, scoured out, cleansed somehow.
    We walk another block in the wrong direction before he broaches the subject. “Why didn’t you tell me you were married, Theo? You could’ve just told me.”
    â€œYou could’ve asked. You didn’t even ask if I had a boyfriend.”
    â€œI figured that was your job. To tell me.”
    â€œI asked you about you. You didn’t ask because you didn’t want to know,” I say.
    He doesn’t deny it. One more block in a different direction, down a side street with no palm trees, just concrete and stucco walls of buildings gleaming in the night and the smell of the ocean. Every step we take echoes and again I forget I’m not drunk, that I haven’t had a drop.
    â€œI didn’t know how to tell you, Gregg.” I recall the words stuck in my throat, like dough. The same feeling as now, only different words. How to tell Gregg I’m pregnant?
    â€œI guessed anyway,” he says.
    â€œYou did? You knew I was married?” For some reason I’m feigning surprise. He guessed I was married and I knew he knew. “How did you guess?”
    â€œThe way you breathed, the way you moaned. Like you were acting.”
    Even though we’re arguing or at the least having a ‘discussion,’ he’s kept his hand on my waist all this time, tethering me. I nearly spit it off. “I wasn’t acting. I don’t act with you.” It’s something I hate to hear—any insinuation that my passion is simulated. I can’t say why it upsets me so. Acting is what whores do. Is that it? Only a handful of men ever ventured such an opinion; most couldn’t tell the difference. And in a sense, it wasn’t true. I wasn’t acting out my attraction. I wasn’t acting out my excitement. I was acting out a specific part, the orgasm part. Helping myself along. Maybe I could act my way into coming, if I got carried away enough. But not with Gregg, not four years ago, not now.
    â€œI wasn’t acting,” I say again. “And why would my acting make you think I was married anyway?”
    I realize we just passed my car and I swivel around to face it, white and spectral. I persist. “Why would acting make you think I was married?”
    â€œGuilt,” he says at last. “Forget it, Theo. It’s just a theory.”
    â€œMaybe we shouldn’t see each other, Gregg. It’s too complicated.”
    â€œYou’re probably right.”
    But his hand is on my waist again and when I unlock the door and get in, he gets in beside me.
    When we make love, which happens almost immediately—on the drive to his house we’re already unbuttoning, unzipping—we don’t bother turning on any lights; we barely make it to his bed. Afterwards my belly is still for once, peaceful, as if the baby, too, has reached a decision about our allegiance, or is at least considering the possibility of somebody other than Jackson: is considering Gregg.
    Then he turns on the light and ruins everything. His mattress is on the floor, which is no big deal, but the floor is a stained, filthy linoleum that’s chewed up in one corner, as though a dog attacked it. On the bureau is the same clock radio he had in college—a miracle the thing still works—a small, round,