Kramer vs. Kramer (2 page)

“Do people really say that?” Ted snapped. “ ‘First time’?”

“Listen, fella, I’m just being friendly.”

“I’m sorry. It’s—my first time,” and Ted began to smile at himself.

“Third for me.”

“The waiting. Just when you’re feeling closest to her, they take her away.”

“It’ll be over soon.”

“But I’m supposed to be there. We’re doing natural childbirth.”

“Right.”

“Are you?”

“All due respects, that’s crap. Knock her out, no pain, you got your baby.”

“But that’s primitive.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“And don’t you want to be there?”

“I’ll be there. In a few days, in the middle of the night, I’ll be there.”

They had nothing else to say to each other; Ted fidgeted in the correctness of his decision, the man relaxed with his. The receptionist told Ted he could go up, and he went to the maternity floor, where Joanna was theoretically waiting for his help. On the way, he went over the variety of tasks he was to perform: time her contractions, help her with the breathing, engage her in distracting conversation, dab her brow, moisten her lips. He would be in control. He would not even have time to be scared.

He walked into the room to find Joanna twisted on the bed in the middle of a contraction, and it was then that he received her “Fuck you!” when he tried to introduce the correct breathing procedures. The woman in the next bed was screaming in Spanish. The nurse was pushing him to the side. It was not going according to the course.

Eventually, Dr. Fisk arrived, tall, a full head of blond hair. His first words to Ted were “Wait in the hall.” After a few minutes, the nurse motioned for Ted to come back into the room as Dr. Fisk nodded and walked out.

“Won’t be long now,” the nurse said. “On the next contraction, we’re going to have her push.”

“How are you doing, honey?” he asked Joanna.

“This is the worst experience of my life.”

The contractions came, he encouraged her to push, and after several waves of severe contractions and pushing, he saw slowly appearing a black patch, the crowning of birth, the first signs of his own child. It was all of it outside his control, awesome.

“Mr. Kramer?” Dr. Fisk had returned. “We’re going to go in and have our baby.”

Ted kissed Joanna, she forced a smile, and he went with Dr. Fisk to a room off the hall.

“Just do what I do, Mr. Kramer.”

Ted played doctor. He scrubbed, put on a blue gown. And standing there in his doctor’s gown, looking in the mirror at the evidence of the charade, realizing how little control he actually had over any of it, he was suddenly engulfed by the fear he had been denying.

“Are you going to be all right?”

“I think so.”

“You’re not going to pass out in there, are you?”

“No.”

“You know, when they first started letting fathers into the delivery room, somebody around here came up with a theory. He said that after seeing their wives give birth, some men became temporarily impotent.”

“Oh.”

“He figured the men were either overwhelmed by the birth process, or they felt guilty about their wives’ pain. You know, what had their penis wrought …”

Dr. Fisk had an interesting washbasin manner.

“Anyway, we don’t have any real proof the theory holds up, but it makes for intriguing speculation, don’t you think?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Come, Mr. Kramer. Don’t pass out—and don’t get impotent,” Dr. Fisk said, laughing, his insider’s joke going unappreciated by Ted, whose face was frozen with tension.

They entered the delivery room, where Joanna lay without dignity for this peak experience. She was prepared as though for some bizarre sacrificial ritual, a sheet hung down her middle, her feet up in stirrups, in a room busy with people, doctors, nurses, and three student nurses who were there to observe Joanna with her legs up.

“Okay, Joanna, only push when I tell you and then stop,” the doctor said. They had practiced this at home; it was part of the course. Ted was momentarily reassured that something was familiar.

“Mr. Kramer, stay next to Joanna. You can observe here.” He indicated a mirror above the table.

“Now. Push! Push!” the doctor called out, and then everything went very rapidly—Joanna screamed as the waves of pain kept coming, she tried to rest taking deep breaths between, and then more pushing as Ted held on to her, his arms around her as she pushed forward and forward, “Think
out,
baby!” Ted said to her from the course, and she pushed with him holding on to her and pushed and pushed, and a baby was out crying, Joanna was crying, Ted was kissing Joanna on the forehead, on the eyes, kissing her tears, the others in the room, not cold observers after all, beaming, even the star doctor, smiling, and during the celebratory mood as the baby was placed to the side to be weighed and tested, Ted Kramer stood over William Kramer and counted his limbs and his fingers and his toes and saw with relief that he was not deformed.

In the recovery room, they talked quietly—details, people to be called, chores for Ted—and then she wanted to sleep.

“You were fantastic, Joanna.”

“Well, I did it. Next time I’ll mail it in.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He went upstairs to the nursery for a last look at the baby, lying in a cardboard box. He was sleeping, a peanut.

“Good night, little boy,” he said aloud, trying to make it real for himself. “I’m your daddy.”

He went downstairs, made the phone calls, and for the next few days, aside from visits to the hospital when the baby’s presence was actual, while at work, while at home, Ted kept seeing the recurring image of that peanut face and was deeply touched.

He had not been the helpmate they talked about in the course, but breaking up the traffic jam was special, and then there was the moment—holding on to Joanna, physically holding her at the very moment of birth.

Later, when it all turned and he tried to remember if they were ever really close, he reminded her of that moment.

“I don’t distinctly remember your being there,” she said.

T
HEY MET ON FIRE
I
SLAND
, where he had a half share in a singles’ group house, which permitted him to come out every other weekend, and she had a quarter share in a house, which gave her every fourth weekend, and with what was left of these arithmetic possibilities, they were at one of three open-house cocktail parties that were held on the Saturday of the weekend they both happened to be there.

Joanna was circled by three men on a crowded porch. Ted was watching her and their eyes met, as her eyes met with a dozen other men who were also hunting. Ted had been shuttling between a group house in Amagansett and the house in Fire Island, assuming out of the combined total of two singles’ scenes he would meet a Someone or at least a Someone Or Other. He had acquired the beach equivalent of street smarts by now, which was to know where to stand and what to do to meet the pretty girl on the deck surrounded by three men and about to leave with one of them.

When Ted saw it was a person he had played volleyball with, he walked down to the front of the ramp to the house and leaned against the rail. He stopped him, exchanged banalities, and rather than appear to be rude, the man had to introduce Ted to his friend. She was Joanna and now they knew each other from the deck.

He did not see her on the beach the following day, but he took a guess at her being on one of the three busiest ferries off the island on Sunday night, so he sat at the ferry dock, trying to look like a nonchalant weekender reluctant to part with the sunset. She lined up for the second ferry. Ted noted she was not with a man, but with two girl friends. Her friends were attractive, which would appeal to Larry of the station wagon. Ted’s friend, Larry, was divorced and an old station wagon was left over from the settlement. Larry used it to offer women something of value at the end of a weekend, a ride back to the city. Entire group houses of women could be given rides, Larry in his station wagon looking at times as though he were chauffeuring teams of stewardesses back from an airport.

“Hello, Joanna. It’s Ted. Remember me? Do you have a ride?”

“Are you on this ferry?”

“I was just waiting for my friend. I’d better see where he is.”

Ted strolled to the beginning of the dock and as soon as he was out of view, raced back to the house.

“Pretty ladies, Larry!” and he rushed him out of the house down to the dock.

Heading back to the mainland it was one of Joanna’s friends who asked Ted the inevitable. “What do you do?” He had not fared well with the question over the summer. The women he had been meeting seemed to have a rating system; and on a scale of ten, doctors got a ten, lawyers and stockbrokers a nine, advertising agency people a seven, garment center people a three, unless they owned the business, which got them an eight, teachers a four, and all others including “What exactly is that?”s, which was often Ted, got no more than a two. If he had to explain further what exactly it was and they still did not know, he was probably down to a one.

“I’m a space salesman.”

“Who with?” Joanna asked. He did not have to explain, a possible five.

“
Leisure
magazines.”

“Oh, right.”

“How do you know them?”

“I’m at J. Walter.”

She worked at an advertising agency, good and not so good, he thought. They were in the same field. On the other hand, she was not an undiscovered librarian from Corona, Queens.

Joanna Stern had come to New York with a liberal arts degree from Boston University, which she discovered was not the key to the city. She had to take a secretarial course to qualify as a secretary and moved from “glamour job” to “glamour job,” one less tedious than the next, as her office skills improved, and she was eventually executive secretary to the public relations head of J. Walter Thompson.

When she was twenty-four she took her first apartment alone. She had become involved with a married man in her office and a roommate was inconvenient. The affair lasted three months, ending when he drank too much, vomited on her rug and took the train home to his wife in Port Washington.

She would go back every Christmas to Lexington, Massachusetts and file a favorable progress report, “I’m dating and doing well at work.” Her father owned a successful pharmacy in town, her mother was a housewife. She was an only child, indulged, the favorite niece in the family, the favorite cousin. When she wanted to summer in Europe she did, when she wanted new clothes she had them, but as her mother was fond of saying, she was “never any trouble.”

Occasionally, she would scan the want ads to see if there might be something else she could do in the world. She was earning $175 a week, the work was mildly interesting, she did not have much ambition to change. It was as she had said to her parents, “I’m dating and doing well at work.” Events had become familiar, though. Bill, her present married man was interchangeable with Walt, the married man of the year before, and of the nonmarrieds, Stan after Walt, but before Jeff, was interchangeable with Michael after Jeff and before Don. By the time she was thirty, at her present rate, she would have slept with more than two dozen men, which was beginning to sound like more than she wished to think of for herself. She was starting to feel a little cheap and used up. She informed Bill, the current entry, that weekends were boring without him and, baiting him, said she wanted to be invited up to his home in Stamford. Naturally, this was impossible, so they did the next best thing—they broke up.

Ted was not next. She kept him in a holding pattern somewhere over Fire Island and Amagansett. Ted Kramer had arrived at this point after wandering in and out of women’s lives into his early thirties, as they had wandered in and out of his. He completed N.Y.U. with a degree in business administration, qualifying him to do virtually anything or nothing. He took a job as a sales trainee for a small electronics firm, went into the Army as a six-month reservist, and had a one-year career as a wholesale appliances salesman. He never considered the family business. His father was the owner of a luncheonette in the garment industry and complained for years, “I’m up to my ears in chicken salad and garbage.” Ted did not want this for himself either. An elderly woman, an old-timer in the personnel field, gave Ted what became the most important advice of his professional life.

“Your big mistake is to try to sell products. You’re not pushy enough.”

“What do you mean?” he said timidly.

“You’re smart. You could sell, but not products. What you should sell is ideas.”

A few weeks later she had placed him in a job selling ideas, as a salesman of advertising space for a group of men’s magazines. A salesman in this field had to know about demographics, markets; he had to work with research tabulations. Intelligence was required, and Ted Kramer, who was brighter than he was aggressive, had a calling.

Ted and Joanna finally got together after the summer for their first date, dinner in an East Side pub, spending what would be considered, in the singles’ merry-go-round, a pleasant evening. They were on the scoreboard. They had seen each other in the city. A stockbroker, a copywriter, an architect, like people holding tickets in a bakery, were all lined up ahead of Ted. The stockbroker worried too much about stocks, the copywriter smoked too much pot, the architect talked too much about other women, and Ted and Joanna found themselves with their second date. In this singles’ scene, where anything imaginative would be noted, he did something moderately clever. He took her back to the very same place they went to the first time, telling her, “It worked for me before.” He was reasonably amused by the singles’ predicament they both shared, not as detached as Vince, an art director who had been standing around her desk and who told her he was bisexual, and not as desperate as Bob, a media supervisor who also had been standing around her desk and who was “on the verge of a divorce,” a line which she recognized from Walt and Bill.

“What I usually do with someone I
think
I like—” Ted said.