Leaving the World (29 page)

He was back in the apartment that night, bearing flowers, a very cute denim jacket for Emily, a bottle of champagne and no apology for having left two days earlier. This was, I had come to discover, Theo’s style. He’d never raise his voice or hector or demand. If he didn’t like something or felt cornered by a possible domestic obligation, he’d react by simply vanishing from view or letting it be known through passive-aggressive means that it was pointless to argue with him.

So when I asked him: ‘Is this sort of disappearing act going to be a feature of our domestic repertoire?’ he let it be known that he wouldn’t talk about it. What’s more he wasn’t going to explain his feelings on the matter. Take it or leave it.

‘So why create the hassle, Jane?’

‘Because this is supposed to be a partnership – and in a partnership we share responsibility.’

‘No partnership is ever based on fifty-fifty shared responsibility. Anyway we had a problem with the afternoon pick-up arrangements and now they’re sorted out. And by the way, I’m happy to contribute a hundred and seventy-five bucks towards the cost of Julia. That’s fifty-fifty, if my math hasn’t failed me.’

‘I won’t put up with you vanishing like that again.’

‘You know, Jane, threats do not become you.’

When I tried to continue the conversation he simply walked out of the room and played with Emily in her nursery. When he returned half an hour later I said: ‘I can’t live this way.’

‘Live what way?’

‘You leaving the room every time we—’

He left the room again, returning to Emily’s nursery. I stormed in after him and shouted: ‘Will you please pay me the minor courtesy of at least engaging with me.’

The result of this angry comment was a squall from Emily. My loud voice had frightened her. Theo said nothing. He just scooped his daughter up in his arms and rocked her and gave me a quiet reproving look. At that moment I sensed that I would never be able to win with this man.

But what exactly was I trying to
win
? All domestic relationships become, in one way or another, exercises in power. Even if you tell yourself you’re not trying to control another person, you are, in some way, trying to put your imprint onto the domestic situation. The maddening thing about Theo was that he would never really meet me halfway but would use stratagems that made me seem unreasonable and eventually allowed his way of operating to prevail. If I raised objections he would simply absent himself. He was playing a game similar to the one that my father practiced throughout his life:
My way or the highway
. Only unlike Dad, Theo got what he wanted through silence, stealth and cunning. Though I must admit that the end result in this case – a part-time nanny – was not entirely disagreeable for me.

Once the childcare issue was resolved, Theo was very much around again. He came home most nights about eight. He’d often make dinner and always spent some time with Emily. We’d hang out until midnight and continued to make love at least twice a week. Whether or not we had sex I’d be asleep by twelve-thirty and up with Emily by six-thirty. After she passed the three-month mark she did us a great ongoing service by sleeping soundly for ten hours a night. Theo was very good about dealing with her if she happened to wake up sometime in the middle of the night, and also perfected a way of crawling into bed beside me at four a.m. without stirring me. He would always sleep with earplugs, so he would miss her early-morning wake-up call. All credit to our wonderful daughter, as she never wailed herself awake. Perhaps I’m reading far too much into all this, but what always impressed me from the start with Emily was the way she made her needs known, yet did so in a manner that wasn’t whiny or hyper-demanding. She was also a great smiler and greeted me every morning with a big beaming grin. It made all other worldly concerns fall away for a few necessary moments, reminding me that, yes, parenthood was worth all its incumbent pressures and concerns.

Right before her birth I’d traded in my little Mazda for a VW Touareg. I bought a year-old model, but it still meant adding an additional $8,000 to augment the price I was getting for a trade-in. More tellingly it meant accepting that I was now an SUV-driving parent.

Theo didn’t try to dissuade me out of buying the car.

‘Hey, it’s not a station wagon and it doesn’t have the “right on” prigginess of one of those Toyota hybrids. Fact is, it’s a sharp-looking car – and I sure as hell won’t be ashamed to be seen in it.’

But it was me who was driving it every day as it was me who was bringing Emily to her crèche. Drop-off time eight-thirty a.m. and no earlier – and outside this upscale day-care center off Porter Square, just across the city line into Cambridge, there were always a good two-dozen professional mothers (and no more than three dads), all lined up with the kids in strollers, all dressed for work, all glancing at their watches, all ready to dash as soon as the doors opened and the children could be deposited inside. Then we could race to our respective workplaces and begin the daily well-paid grind – all the while fretting about the dilemma of balancing career and children, and the attendant pressures of sustaining a relationship, and telling yourself that, one of these days, you’ll actually feel fulfilled by it all.

But my fretting was more bound up in the realization that I was dodging a basic truth about my relationship with Theo: I was very much out of love with him. Or maybe I should rephrase that sentence as an interrogative one: Was I ever really in love with him, and would I still be with him now if Emily hadn’t entered our lives?

Perhaps this question was predicated on another: Was he actually in love with me? As Emily approached her first birthday and I was beginning to think that Theo and I had established a decent rhythm between us, he switched course and began not showing up again for several nights in a row. What made this especially maddening was the fact that he didn’t phone me to say where he was and kept his cellphone off just to infuriate me more – or, at least, that’s the way it seemed to me. After one particular stint of seventy-two hours he did deign to answer one of my increasingly frantic calls. His reaction was deadpan: ‘I’m at home, writing.’

‘And you couldn’t bother to simply call me and tell me where you were? I mean, I must have left you a dozen messages on your landline and your cell.’

‘I turned both off. No distractions, that sort of thing.’

‘I’m a distraction?’

‘You sound stressed.’

‘Of course I’m stressed. You went AWOL.’

‘If you had bothered to look at the message I left . . .’

‘I saw no message.’

‘Maybe you weren’t looking in the right place.’

‘I tore the house apart, seeing if you left me anything.’

Actually I’d only checked the kitchen counter and the stand in the hallway where we usually left each other notes. I hadn’t looked in . . .

‘The bedroom,’ Theo said. ‘Your side table, underneath the lamp.’

I put down the phone and walked briskly into the bedroom. As soon as I hit the doorway I looked directly at my bedside table. There, stuck halfway under the lamp in a way that left it half-hidden, was the note. I pulled it out. It read:

That was it: no name, no signature, no further explanation.

I came back into the living room and picked up the phone again.

‘All right, I found it. But is there any reason why you couldn’t have put it in a more visible place?’

‘Don’t blame me for you not seeing it.’

‘I blame you for nothing, Theo. I just wish you treated this relationship like a relationship – and not like a convenience station you stop by whenever you need sex or a home-cooked meal.’

But the next night he showed up before I came home from work and organized a small Thai feast from a local restaurant. A few days later, he took Emily off for a long Saturday afternoon at the zoo, then cooked me an Italian dinner while regaling me with amusing anecdotes about Welles and Huston and Ford and Hawks and all the other great directors he so admired. And when, out of nowhere, he put his arms around me and told me I was wonderful . . . well, for the remainder of the evening I had a glimpse of how good things could be between us. Until all my doubts flooded in again.

‘When will you ever accept the fact that it’s all so damn flawed, and that you will always be hit with doubt?’ Christy asked me one evening when she rang close to midnight and admitted that she herself was nursing a bruised heart. (‘And no, it’s not another dumbshit biker – the guy had some class and some smarts, which makes it all the worse.’)

‘So what you’re saying is: be happy with what you have, despite its flaws.’

‘No,’ Christy said, ‘my thought for the day is: you have an interesting career which will get more interesting once you are liberated from that university. You live with an interesting man who may not be the ideal partner but certainly can’t be described as boring. To add the maraschino cherry to the cake, you have a beautiful daughter – and you are managing to walk that tightrope between professional life and motherhood that makes you the envy of the majority of women I know, this one included.’

‘Now that’s news to me. I mean, you’ve always been so adamant about not having children.’

‘That doesn’t mean I’m not in constant conflict about it. I mean, look at you. I know you consider Emily—’

‘The best thing that ever happened to me,’ I said, finishing her sentence.

‘There you go. And I know full well that, fifteen years from now, if I have let the moment pass, I might well rue the fact that my independence was far more important than the gamble which is parenthood.’

‘You might not rue it.’

‘We all end up rueing everything. It’s the nature of this thing we call “our condition”.
Could, but didn’t
 . . .
Wanted to, but stopped myself
 . . . All the damn statements of regret we can never dodge.’

Maybe Christy was right. Maybe it was best to embrace the ambivalence that hovered over everything. Maybe that which was flawed was also that which was always interesting.

But, as I told Christy, if there was one thing about which I was never ambivalent it was Emily. No matter how frustrated I would get with Theo, or with the inanity of university politics, my daughter would smile at me or say something completely disarming, or would simply snuggle up against me and lift me out of the pettiness and diffidences that characterize so much of life.

‘Mommy . . . Daddy . . . good,’ Emily said one evening as Theo and I sat chatting over the remains of our dinner and laughing at some absurdity he’d overheard in a coffee shop that afternoon.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ Theo said. ‘Mommy and Daddy
are
good.’

I took his hand. I smiled.

Ten days later, he came home with an announcement: He had just gone into business with a woman named Adrienne Clegg.

After that, Mommy and Daddy were never good again.

A
DRIENNE
C
LEGG
. From the moment Theo brought her home, I couldn’t stand her. Check that: I loathed her. Because, from the outset, I could see that she would bring us nothing but grief.

To admit that you loathe someone is to admit failure. Hate is such an extreme emotion. Once in its grip, you often find yourself wondering whether it’s really worth despising someone that much. My father might have cost me my job at Freedom Mutual and left me feeling betrayed, but I still couldn’t bring myself to hate him. That would have been almost like hating myself.

Adrienne Clegg was different. She wasn’t family – and in her own insidious way she helped unpick the entire fabric of the life that I had created for myself. So yes, I hated her – and in turn I loathed myself for not blocking, from the outset, her invasive attack on our little family.

Perhaps that remains the hardest thing to stomach – the fact that, as soon as I met her, I knew she was trouble. So why didn’t I fight back far earlier? What was it in me that allowed her to visit such damage on us?

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Adrienne Clegg. She was in her early forties. Tall. Rail thin. Electric-red curly hair that was worn tightly around her head. Skin that seemed perma-tanned. (‘I’m one-quarter Inca Indian,’ she once told me.) A woman who always wore leather and huge ostentatious earrings and chunky rings on six of her ten fingers. She came across as a cross between a biker chick and one of those relentlessly ambitious Manhattan women who are constantly on the make.

The thing was, Adrienne Clegg had struck out in Manhattan. Just as she had struck out in LA and in London. But then she landed herself in Boston. In that happenstantial way of things, she met Theo right at the moment when he had connected with a local filmmaker named Stuart Tompkins. And Stuart had just made, for around $10,000, a violent/ comic ‘Bonnie and Clyde Go Insane’ movie set in a college fraternity. It was called
Delta Kappa Gangster
– a terrible title. Stuart was a classic movie geek. Like Theo he was in his early thirties. Like Theo he lived in a tiny apartment and also subsisted on a diet of fast and frozen food. But there all comparisons ended. Stuart was tall. Seriously tall and seriously thin, as in six foot five and one hundred and thirty pounds. He had serious acne. (‘His face is like a penicillin culture,’ Theo noted.) He also had serious body odor. Fortunately I was never invited over to his apartment. Theo – being his new best friend – did get asked to drop by one evening and informed me later that night that he would never repeat the experience. There were dishes that hadn’t been washed in six months, cruddy underwear strewn across the floor, a toilet that hadn’t been cleaned since 9/11, and the pervasive stench of someone who didn’t take personal hygiene very seriously.

Given Theo’s anal obsessions with order and cleanliness, it wasn’t at all surprising that he returned from his first – and only – visit to
chez
Stuart looking as though he was in an advanced state of toxic shock.