Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (10 page)

Jack's tears were not manly. They were not reluctant drops wrung from stoic eyes. His tears came in torrents, sending great shudders through his frame. By the time we had crossed the stretch of grass from the car and sat in the folding chairs next to the empty little rectangle in the earth Jack was bawling. When they began to lower the plain white coffin with the gold-painted handles, so small, so light I felt as if I could have effortlessly picked it up in my arms and held it to my chest, he was wailing. The force of his grief, the massive candor of it, was making the people around us—our friends and family, his partners and employees—uneasy. The women started to cry and the men shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. And then something strange happened. His weeping drew a flow of milk from my swollen and aching breasts. Milk dripped through the layers of nursing pads, trickled through my bra, painted circles of pointless damp on the wool of my black turtleneck sweater.

When I didn't think I could stand it for another minute, when I was sure I was going to have to turn and bolt, William ran up and wrapped himself around his father's legs.

“Daddy,” William said. “Daddy, don't cry. Don't cry.”

“Oh God,” Jack said. He picked William up and rocked back and forth, holding the boy close to him. “Daddy is so sad, Will. Daddy is so, so sad.”

William said, “Don't be sad, Daddy. Because I love you. I love you so much.”

“Only the most Orthodox rabbis think that a two-day-old baby isn't a person,” I tell William now, trying to be patient because I remember how he ran to comfort his father. “We're Reform. Reform Jews know that babies are people from the moment they are born.”

William ponders this as he drains his cup of cocoa.

“I think I am Orthodox,” he says.

“You are
not
,” I say. I feel a frightening urge to hit him. “You aren't even really
Jewish
. Your mother has to be Jewish for you to be a Jew. Your mother is Episcopalian.”

“I am half Episcopalian and half Orthodox Jew.”

“Let's go,” I say.

Outside, the rain has stopped. I raise my hand and a cab pulls over instantly. My Orthodox Jewish Episcopalian stepson's God has given us an authentic miracle.

I open the cab door and start to unzip the booster from its cover.

“I don't want to sit in a baby seat,” William says.

“It's not a baby seat.” I realize with a sense of great liberation that I don't care if this child sits in his goddamned booster. I don't care if he is protected by a five-point harness or if he careens around the backseat of the cab like a Lotto ball in a rotating drum.

“Pop the trunk,” I tell the driver. Then I go and throw the booster seat in, alongside an old NY Giants stadium blanket and a box of traffic flares.

“Get in,” I tell William.

His eyes widen.

“Get in!”

“With no booster?”

“What, all of a sudden you want your booster?”

“No, no!”

William is so happy during the cab ride that he can barely contain himself. He sits backward on the seat, on his knees, looking out the rear window. He provides color commentary—now we are passing a maple tree, now there is a woman with a large gray dog, perhaps it's a Russian wolfhound, or perhaps a Scottish deerhound. Meanwhile I am sitting with my lips clamped shut, trying to keep myself from shouting to the driver to pull over so that I can make William safe and secure, protected in his booster seat, where he belongs.

When we pull up in front of our building and Ivan opens the door, William vaults out of the taxicab.

“I don't need my booster seat anymore!” he announces to Ivan.

“Well, that's very nice, young man,” Ivan says, tousling William's hair with one gloved hand.

When we are alone in the elevator I say, “William, if you tell
anyone
I let you ride without a booster seat, I will put you back in it. I will make you ride in your booster until you are thirty years old.”

“You can't,” William says. “It's six or sixty. Six years old or sixty pounds.”

“It's six
and
sixty,” I say. “And you are very skinny. It will be a long time before you weigh sixty pounds. It will be
years
.”

William thinks this over. While I am unlocking the door to our apartment he says, with a faint, conspiratorial smile, “I won't tell anyone.”

Chapter 11
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

C
arolyn
calls the next evening. I know it is her as soon as the phone rings, because it is ten o'clock and she is the only person who would call us this late at night, except for Simon, and it is Thursday night and on Thursday nights Simon volunteers for hospice. (Although Simon is a very altruistic person, he does not do this out of the goodness of his heart—he does it to meet men. Not dying men; he's not that fucked up. He is just convinced that if he volunteers long enough, at some point an attractive gay son will turn to him for comfort in his grief.) Jack is taking a shower when the telephone rings, and at first I intend to let the answering machine pick up, but I hate the messages Carolyn leaves. There will be the beep, and she will pause for a long moment before she speaks, and then she will say, with no preamble, and without identifying herself, “Jack, call me immediately.” Of course we recognize her voice, but would it kill her to say, “This is Carolyn”? I understand that it pains her to acknowledge my presence in her ex-husband's home, but the fact that she behaves as if he is the only one who owns the machine on which she leaves her messages bothers me. What I hate the most, however, is that it never
is
urgent. The immediacy of his return call is never justified by whatever supposed crisis precipitated it.

“Fuck it,” I say to myself, and pick up the phone on the third ring.

“Hello,” I say. There is the usual pause.

“I'd like to speak to Jack, please.” Her voice is so frosty, so
mean
. On UrbanBaby.com, the women all talk about how warm she is, how comforting, how gentle yet assured her manner in the delivery room. I wonder, not for the first time, if there is more than one obstetrician named Carolyn Soule in the city of New York.

“How are you, Carolyn?” I say.

“How am I? How do you think I am? I'm dealing with the fallout of your abusive behavior. So I would not say that I'm very well.”

That little weasel ratted me out.

“I'd hardly call it abusive.”

“Oh, wouldn't you? You don't think it's abusive to give a child a respiratory infection?”

“I'll get Jack.”

“Wait a minute. I'm not done. I don't know what you're playing at, but I hope someday you have a child and a stranger walks him around the city in the pouring rain. Maybe then you'll have an inkling of what I'm going through right now. Maybe you'll understand what it means to see your child suffer.”

The urge is almost overwhelming. I could so easily do it. I could tell her that she is right, I do not understand what it means to see my child suffer, because Isabel died in her sleep. I could so easily tell this awful woman that I would give anything to have my child back long enough to send her out into the street in the pouring rain in a drab green raincoat and a pair of rubber boots. It would feel wonderful to make Carolyn guilty and uncomfortable, to do to her what she has done to me every single time we have spoken over the last two years. But I'm so relieved that it's just the rain she's angry about, that she does not seem to know about the booster seat, not to mention the lactose-laden cupcake, that I merely say, “I'm sorry,” and take the phone to the bathroom. Jack has turned off the shower and is standing on the bath mat, toweling himself off. I hand him the receiver.

“It's Carolyn,” I say.

He holds the phone in one hand and his towel in the other. I stay in the bathroom and draw a picture in the condensation on the mirror while I listen to his side of the conversation.

“Hey,” Jack says.

I can hear her voice, shrill and angry, but I cannot make out the words. I draw a circle, two eyes, a nose, and an angry frown. Then I draw squiggles for hair standing straight up on top of the stick figure's head. I try to draw a stethoscope, but it doesn't come off right.

I look at Jack. “I forgot my umbrella,” I whisper.

He sighs.

I turn back to my drawing and cast a critical eye. There is not much my limited skill can do to improve it, so instead I take Jack's towel, fold it in half, and hang it on the towel rod.

“I think you're overreacting,” Jack says into the phone.

I move behind him and look over his shoulder into the mirror. Bits of Jack are reflected back at me in the lines where my angry Carolyn face has rubbed away the condensation.

“We both know it's a petri dish at the preschool, Carolyn. You're a doctor. You know that he caught a cold from one of the other kids, not from being out in the rain.”

I reach over his shoulder and draw a line on the right side of the mirror. Chalk one up for my husband.

“Yes, I'll talk to her about it. But I'm sure it won't happen again.”

I erase the line with the edge of my palm.

Jack is silent for a while. Then he says, “I think you're misinterpreting that.”

“What?” I mouth.

He shakes his head. “Well, then
he's
misinterpreting it. And what's the point, anyway? It's over, it already happened. And at the time you agreed that he could go. The shrink agreed that he could go. You called him and he said it would be good for William, that it would be part of the healing process.”

“What?” I say again.

He holds his hand up, shushing me. I look down the length of his body. His penis is loose and flaccid after his shower, his testicles dangling. I take his penis in my hand, squeezing gently. He grabs my wrist and shakes his head.

I leave him in the bathroom and go lie down on the bed. He follows and sits next to me, still talking to Carolyn. They talk for nearly twenty minutes, and by the time the conversation is over, I have figured out what is going on. William came home after his night with us with the sniffles, and, between sneezing and wiping his nose on the furniture, told his mother that he and I had talked about newborn babies and funerals. He was upset, or more likely Carolyn decided that he was upset, and she called his therapist. Dr. Allerton agreed with her that, in retrospect, William's attendance at Isabel's funeral had been traumatic, that it had upset his fragile equilibrium, the equilibrium already cast into turmoil by his parents' divorce. Carolyn is furious at Jack, and at me, for having forced William to witness Isabel's interment in the ground of the Linden Hill Cemetery, between the bodies of Flora Marley Moscowitz born August 17, 1984, died October 1, 1984, and Sebastian Jacob Hillman Baum taken from us on the day of his birth 6 Elul 5759.

On the morning of Isabel's death, Carolyn was remarkable. She was empathetic and caring. She was everything the women on UrbanBaby.com said she could be. When Jack first called to tell her about Isabel, she wept. She said she was so sorry; she said she could not imagine how awful we felt; she even told him to give me her condolences. It was Carolyn who broke the news to William, and by all accounts she did it well—simply, seriously, leaving him plenty of room to express whatever were his feelings.

The phone calls began that very evening. What was the
quality
of my grief, Carolyn wanted to know. Because William's therapist was concerned that he not be exposed to any level of emotion
inappropriate
in its intensity. I missed this call because at the time I was lying on my bed, sandwiched between Simon and Mindy, trying to stop screaming into my pillow. But my father was in the kitchen, eavesdropping, and he heard what Jack was too exhausted, too wrung out, too despairing to conceal. Afterward, over a tumbler filled to sloshing with scotch, Jack recounted Carolyn's side of the conversation to my father and, in a rare moment of détente, my father whispered it all to my mother, and she told me, cursing Carolyn's brutal selfishness in a furious whisper while she collected used tissues from the floor next to my bed and threw them into a plastic garbage bag.

I don't know how many times Carolyn called over the next few days, but I do know that every once in a while, I would stumble through the apartment looking for Jack, and find him in the kitchen, or in his office, slumped in a chair, curled around the telephone, absentmindedly rubbing his eyes as he listened to the berating squawk on the other end of the line. There were protracted debates over what the teachers would tell the other children at school, whether William should have his regular Friday piano lesson, whether he could go to a birthday party on the morning of the funeral, whether he should attend the funeral at all, whether he would be allowed to sit shivah, whether Jack would owe Carolyn a weekend because we were, after all, out of turn. I didn't actually care if William came to the funeral or to the shivah, and I came close, once, to telling Jack that.

We were sitting in the living room, and I was huddled on the couch, warming my hands on a cup of tea without drinking it. There were fewer people in the apartment than there had been over the past few days, since Isabel's death. My father had gone to check in at the office, my sisters were home tending to their children. Jack's mother had returned to her hotel to take a nap. Mindy was home with Daniel. Only Simon was there, and my mother.

Jack walked by the living room, carrying the phone, and raised his eyebrows to me, as if to ask how I was, if the pain was overwhelming or only horribly acute.

“Jack,” I said.

He pointed to the telephone receiver.

“Jack!” I said more loudly. “Tell her it doesn't
matter
.”

“Emilia, honey. Don't,” my mother said.

“Hold on a minute,” Jack said, and covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “What is it, sweetie? Do you need something? Can I get you something?”

“Don't,” my mother breathed, so softly only I could hear her.

I narrowed my red and swollen eyes at Jack.

“Sweetie?” he said.

I closed my eyes. “Never mind. Just. You know. Finish up, if you can.”

He nodded. “I'll only be another minute.”

Tonight, by the time he hangs up the phone, Jack looks beaten, all the vigor of his showered and roughly toweled body gone. He sits on the edge of the bed, slumped and slack-jawed. Carolyn has somehow managed to reduce him to a preview of his elderly self. It is as if, in disgust at his grasping for youth in the body of a younger woman, she has conjured a mannequin. She has made Jack into the voodoo doll of her revulsion, has bent him so that his very body now personifies the fundamental absurdity of our relationship. She has turned him into an old man.

I grab him around the waist and haul him back down on the bed next to me, hugging him, curling my body around his. I like how it feels to be clothed when he is naked. I feel powerful somehow, strong, even dangerous. I push him onto his back and climb on top of him, straddling his thighs, pressing the hard seam of my jeans against his penis. I rock slightly and feel him shift underneath my crotch.

He settles his hands on my waist. “
Now
you're horny, Emilia?”

“No.” I push against him hard enough to hurt. He winces.

“Do me a favor, honey,” he says. “When it's raining, take a cab.”

“I
tried
to take a cab. Do you think I enjoy being out in the rain with a five-year-old boy? I couldn't
find
a cab.”

“So call the car service.”

“Funny, that's just what William said.”

Jack laughs. “He's a smart kid.”

I am not laughing. “It's not any easier to get a car service on a rainy day than it is to get a cab. Anyway, you know what, Jack? If you don't like how I pick William up from preschool, you can pick him up yourself.”

“You know I can't pick him up. I have to work.”

Was there a subtle stress on that “I”? Was there a criticism implied?

“Fuck you,” I say.

“What? What did I say?”

“I'm going back to work. I just need a little time.”

“Emilia, why are you jumping all over me? I didn't say anything about you working or not. I don't care if you ever go back to work. All I said is that I can't pick William up because
I
have to work. But if you don't want to pick him up anymore, we can send him home with Sonia, like we used to.”

I can taste the delicious flavor of the words in my mouth: Yes, let's do that. Let's do that, because I don't want to be with him anymore.

I can taste those words, and I have an awful feeling that Jack can see me rolling them in my mouth.

“Of course I want to keep picking him up,” I say. “I just forgot my goddamn umbrella. Jesus.”

The muscle in the corner of Jack's jaw works. He is trying very hard to remain calm. “His therapist is worried about him.”

“So Carolyn says.”

“She's not a
liar
, Emilia. Carolyn is fucked up in lots of ways, but she's compulsively honest.”