The Annunciation

The bear in the driver’s seat wasn’t made of flesh or any other three-dimensional substance, but of light and color, like characters in animated cartoons. The car it drove had approached him from behind, pulled nearer to the sidewalk, and slowed to the pace of his walk. The bear was purple, except for its ears, nose and mitten-like hands, which were red, and as tall as a human, though plumper around the torso and neck. Holding its eyes fixed to the street directly ahead, it maintained the same slow speed just long enough for him to catch a glimpse of the only other passenger: a little girl in a yellow dress, her legs extending to a point just beyond the edge of the backseat, her toes up, one foot turned slightly inward. She was wearing blue and white high-tops; the colors were bright and clean, and because she was too young to walk on them, they hadn’t a trace of wear. When the car suddenly sped up and turned at the corner, he became angry and frightened. He woke then, with Nan’s hand on his chest.

“You all right?” she asked him. “You said something, kind of, and you were rocking back and forth.”

“What did I say?”

“It was like a whole sentence, but it didn’t really have words, just sounds.”

It had been six days since the morning he sat beside Nan, lying on an examination table, and watched, on the screen of a sonogram monitor, a thin tube enter her belly, then come so close to the fetus inside her that the small hand actually reached toward it. “They do that,” Dr. Gisse said, as he affixed a syringe to the end of the tube and withdrew a sample of amniotic fluid. A moment before that the sonographer, an unshaven man wearing a surgical cap, had been impatient with Nan who’d begun to shiver and cry. It was the kind of casually dramatic impatience meant to tell the person it is aimed at that they have made your day harder.

“What’s your fucking problem?” he said to the sonographer, in one angry breath.

“Johnny,” Nan said, as if the man wasn’t there. “Look,” she nodded toward the screen.

“They’ve been through this once before,” Dr. Gisse said to the man, who looked back at Johnny, but not at Nan– having understood the unspoken portion of the statement–and gave a nod that constituted an apology.

A nurse came in, labeled the vial of amniotic fluid and held it up to Nan. “You identify this as your name?” The question was part of the same litigation prevention protocol they’d gone through the last time. Nan hesitated and the nurse looked at Johnny for help. Johnny lifted his gaze to the red-lit exit sign. Two of the four screws that held the plate with the letters to the frame of the fixture were missing and it tilted a degree or two downward to the right, revealing a thin dash of white light over the red I and T that made him think of the diacritical line that means a vowel should be pronounced as it is spoken when not inside a word.

“My last name is Wilk,” Nan said. She’d kept her own name when they got married.

“But on the chart it says Rizzotti,” the nurse said. To Johnny the two missing screws seemed cognate with the sonographer’s lack of manners and unshaven cheeks. Ex-eyet, he said to himself, without even moving his lips. I’m ready to head for the ex-eyet.

“We use my husband’s plan,” Nan explained.

The nurse pulled a strip of labels from the pocket of her smock.

“The post office,” Nan said, then paused as she watched the nurse write her name on a label, peel it off the strip, and wrap it around the vial across the part with Johnny’s last name.

“The post office?” the nurse asked her.

“The post office?” Nan asked her back.

“I work there,” Johnny said.

“And it has the best medical plan,” Nan said, “in the whole damn country.”

The day after Dr. Gisse’s assistant called with the results–normal, a girl– they discussed how they’d announce the good news to the friends and relatives whom they hadn’t told about the pregnancy. Nearly all of their family, on both sides, lived at a distance, and Johnny and Nan had laid low during the last weeks prior to the amniocentesis, at which time she’d begun to show. The few friends and neighbors and coworkers who’d figured it out were sworn to secrecy. Two years ago, when they’d learned Nan was pregnant the first time, they told everyone, even strangers, and the most difficult part was untelling them, undoing what the world around them was still expecting to happen.

Since the day the at-home EPT test affirmed their second pregnancy Nan had kept the test wand in a Ziploc bag in her sock and underwear drawer, and so, the next afternoon, before she got home from work, Johnny set their huge volume of the works of Leonardo da Vinci on the living room floor, opened to the Annunciation they had seen at the Uffizi Gallery while on their honeymoon in Florence, and laid the wand across the space between the hand of the archangel Gabriel, with two fingers gently raised, and the serene yet startled eyes of the Virgin. Johnny then knelt over his composition with his thirty-five-millimeter camera, and from various angles and distances, and at slightly different foci, shot two rolls of color film.

Eight years before, when Nan led Johnny across the huge echoey, marble-walled room to the painting, she had said, improvising on an ad for Kentucky Fried Chicken, “When it comes to angels, nobody does wings like da Vinci.” Johnny’s composition, reproduced as a postcard, would make a unique announcement, a revelation of the knowledge they had kept to themselves for more than four months.

The next day, on his lunch hour, Johnny picked up the two rolls at the one-hour photo counter at Rite Aid. He opened the envelopes in the checkout line and by the time he’d flipped halfway through the second stack of photos his anticipation had eroded to disappointment: the collage he had constructed, that had looked perfectly clear through the camera lens, was unrecognizable in the images he held before him. The flash had bounced off the page where it curved above the spine like a wave of parted hair, spilling a wide oval of white light across half the photograph and leaving the other half too dark to identify anything.

Later that afternoon, before Nan came home from school, he’d shoot another roll from different angles in the consistent, nonviolent light of the overhead lamp. Although the next batch didn’t come out much better, there were three shots in which all the component parts were identifiable. If you knew what an annunciation was, you would know this was one; the implausible object lying across the composition was recognizable as an EPT wand and, most importantly, the red line that bisected the positive box was clearly defined. It was time to show them to Nan, who had much more experience photographing art–she was a professor of art history at City University–and get her advice for the final shoot. He left the three best ones face-up on the kitchen table to see how she’d react to them when she came home from work.

During the last two days they’d been granting entry to feelings they’d held at abeyance for months. They’d reached the top of a mountain so steep that the labor of climbing had kept them from taking notice of the scenery. Now they’d stroll down the other side, enjoy everything, let gravity do the work. “Even so,” Nan had said, thoughtfully, “innocence lost is never regained. And guess what?” she had begun to laugh. “I could give a shit less.” That morning when he awoke, Nan was sitting up, leaning against the wall on her side of the bed, watching him sleep. “You know what I just realized?” she said. “We’ve been pregnant more than nine months combined, and now, finally, we’re in control.” Her exhilaration and certainty frightened him, but he was much too happy to be worried about anything. “Now we’re in control,” she repeated. “We control the horizontal. Do do do do,” she sang the first four notes of the theme from The Twilight Zone.

“That’s the wrong show,” he said. “It’s The Outer Limits where they control the horizontal.”

She slid her hand under the blanket, gripped his penis. “And we certainly control the vertical.”

After they made love–the fifth time in two days–Nan laid the back of her head on Johnny’s stomach and slid her feet up the wall. “I’m telling you right now, there’ll be none of that textbook-sentimental-story-to-tell-later crap. No cravings for ice cream or shrimp dumplings, no belly-hiding muumuus, no sudden mood swings, no sentimental platitudes, no storks on the birth announcement– no fucking storks anywhere.”

Johnny was sitting in the living room, trying to read the paper, when he heard the door to the apartment open, then the sound of Nan’s footsteps crossing the kitchen, the clunk of her shoes, one after the other, hitting the floor, and the whoom of the bathroom door being pulled shut, followed by the clack of the door hook striking wood.

He walked into the kitchen. Her briefcase was on one of the chairs and a takeout bag with a widening grease blotch on its side was sitting on top of the photos. Johnny moved the bag across the table, and slid the photos to the side she would approach them from.

“Not a spot,” Nan said, opening the bathroom door. “Not a spot all day.”

She had been spotting since the fifth week of the pregnancy, and though they had reached the middle of the second trimester, it still hadn’t stopped. Dr. Gisse told them it probably wasn’t anything to be concerned about. He told them they worried too much about everything, “But don’t worry about worrying. That’s not unusual after what happened the last time.” The last time, when the call came, they were sitting in front of the TV, watching Jeopardy, eating dinner. How could anything real happen at such a moment? The genetics counselor told them he waited until evening to make such calls, when both partners would most likely be at home: trisomy 21: Down’s syndrome: three of the twenty-first chromosome instead of two, forty-seven in total instead of forty-six: odd, two parents, two of everything: odd numbers are bad news in genetics. It would have been a boy.

Johnny took Nan’s briefcase off the chair and motioned, like a maître d’, for her to sit. “What do you think?” he asked when she looked down at the three photographs. She picked one of them up but still said nothing.

He could no longer wait. “Da Vinci’s Annunciation. And that’s our EPT test.”

“I get it,” she said, “but I didn’t get it fast enough.”

“I thought we could take a better shot, then make a postcard. Nan and Johnny have an announcement . . . ”

“At first I thought it was some kind of weird submarine,” Nan said.

“Not in a better photograph. That’s where you come in.”

Nan started laughing. “I like it. I like that you want to tell everybody. I do too.”

“I think it’s a work of art,” Johnny said.

Nan opened the bag and began setting the takeout containers on the table. “I’m starved,” she said. “Although the Virgin conceived in a very different manner than I did, I know this: as her belly got bigger, her appetite got bigger.”

“Maybe it’s a good thing,” Johnny said. “That it slowly reveals itself. I mean, that’s how art works, no?”

.  .  .