Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (29 page)

He frowns and twirls his straw between his fingers. “That's partly true. Part of it is just between your mother and me. But part of it affects you. What happened to us affects you. It's still affecting you.”

I am finished with my drink now, my head buzzing from the alcohol. “I'm sorry, Daddy. I'm sorry I was so mean to you the other night. In front of Jack and William. I'm so sorry.”

“It's all right, honey.” We are sitting side by side and he puts his arm around me. “You're my girl.”

I lay my head on his shoulder. He pats my hair and says, sadly, “You try so hard to be like me, daughter.”

I sit up. I want to tell him that I am nothing like him, but we both know the truth. When my father betrayed my mother, when he humiliated her in the most degrading, horrible way he could have, and in a moment of terrible weakness, she confided in me, I set out to prove our similarity. What was my response when my mother shared her aching shame and curdled the love I felt for my father? I ensnared and entrapped a man like him, who looked like him, who did the same work he did, who loved his child as my father loved his. I dug my claws into Jack, ruined his marriage and his family, turned him and myself into traitors. Just like my father.

And then I was punished. I was punished and I punished.

Oh Isabel. Oh Jack. Oh William. What have I done to you all?

My father says, “You're hopelessly unrealistic about love. You're as foolish as I am, just in a different way.”

“What does that mean?” I am fighting tears now, so my voice sounds more hostile than I intend.

“Your fantasy is as unrealistic as mine, and it's going to end up with the same end result.”

“
My
fantasy?”

“That old wives' tale of your grandmother's, that
bashert
story.” My father's voice takes on a gentle mocking tone. “You fell in love with Jack at first sight. He's your soul mate, your intended. You two were meant to be. How many times have I heard you tell the story of how you first saw him, Emilia? On his knees in the hallway of Friedman Taft? Love at first sight, love at first sight. Do you really think that that's what love is all about?”

“Yes,” I whisper.

“No,” he says, firmly. He grasps both my shoulders and gives me a small but firm shake. “No. That's a fantasy, honey. Love and marriage are about work and compromise. They're about seeing someone for what he is, being disappointed, and deciding to stick around anyway. They're about commitment and comfort, not some kind of sudden, hysterical recognition.”

“That's not what I want. Disappointment and comfort is not what I want.”

“Why not? Because you expect it to be magical and mystical? Because you don't want to work?”

“Why can't it be magical? Why can't it be mystical?”

“Because if you count on magic and mysticism, Emilia, then as soon as shit happens, as soon as life interferes, as soon as your stepson treats you badly, or your husband's ex-wife has a fit about something, or your baby dies, as soon as
life
happens, the magic will disappear and you'll be left with nothing. You can't count on magic, Emilia. Trust me, I know. Sweetheart, little girl, you can't count on magic.”

Fortunately, my father is good at managing scenes. He would have to be, wouldn't he? My sisters and I have been throwing public tantrums since we were two years old. When I lose control of my tears and my sobbing grows loud, he holds out his capacious handkerchief and brandishes it in front of my face like a toreador with a recalcitrant bull. The bartender and waiters shy away from our small table and the other drinkers avert their eyes until I have managed to lift my head and catch my breath. After a while I am still crying, but I no longer need to cover my mouth to keep my sobs from shaking the windows in their frames and breaking the crystal goblets lined up along the back of the bar.

“I'm so sorry, sweetheart,” my father says.

“It's okay, Daddy,” I manage to say around my tears. “I just . . . I do love him. I do.”

“Of course you do. I'm not saying you don't. And he loves you, too.”

“I've screwed this up so badly.”

“That's okay. You haven't got a patch on me, kiddo. If that makes you feel any better.”

I wipe my eyes. “Not a whole lot, to be perfectly honest.”

He pauses for a moment, and then he laughs. “I guess not.”

“I love you, Daddy,” I say.

“I love you too, my girl.”

Chapter 28
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

O
h will
you please give me a fucking
break
?” I say. I am sitting in the toilet stall in the restaurant, my new suede skirt hitched up around my waist.

“Excuse me?” The woman in the next stall is unperturbed, as though used to being sworn at in public restrooms.

I wonder if I should ask her how she would respond to the following: Oh, lady in the next stall, having confronted and confessed your darkest secret to your husband, that you are responsible for the death of your child, and having your husband not only believe you but shrink from you, finally recognizing you for the malignant evil you are, and thus all but ask you leave his house, and having yourself come to the conclusion that your marriage is a farce, born of a kind of proto-Freudian reenactment of your father's infidelity, and having realized, altogether too late, that the worst crimes you've committed in all this mess are directed at the one person who is truly a victim of circumstance, who you've all but tried to kill by feeding him things he's allergic to, sending him to play in dangerous and unprotected circumstances, and pitching him into freezing water, if only accidentally, and doesn't Freud say there are no accidents, having dealt with all this, lady in the next stall over, how would you deal with the nightmare flashing on your caller ID?

I should have known this was coming. I should have realized that the only misery missing from my life was a nice, quick evisceration, courtesy of the miracle of fiber optics.

“It's nothing,” I say to the lady in the next stall, and “Hello, Carolyn,” I say into the phone.

“I need to see you.”

“Is that so.” Why not? I mean, really, why not?

“Come to my office. Can you make it this evening? I only have a few more patients. I'm at . . .”

“I know where you are.” What does she think? That in the months I was waiting for Jack to forget that he was married, I didn't look up her address? That I didn't cast telepathic hexes in her direction, complete with nine-digit zip codes?

“Try not to be late. I have an operating room booked for seven tomorrow morning and I'd like to get home at a decent hour.”

Why would I be late to my own execution?

         

T
he waiting room of Carolyn's office looks just like I imagined, complete with two pregnant women sitting on the sleek leather couch. One of them is reading
Parenting
magazine with a more tortured expression than an article on baby names should inspire in anyone, no matter how influenced by the vagaries of hormonal ebb and flow. The other has a beatific glow about her that I find loathsome. I realize that this is the first time I have been in an obstetrician's office since before Isabel was born. I pretended to forget my six-week follow-up appointment with Dr. Brewster and ignored the messages from his office calling to reschedule. It is not as difficult to be here as I would have expected; I'm not so angered by the presence of pregnant women. I don't like the smug Madonna woman, but the other, the worried one, does not bother me overmuch. Perhaps the prospect of my conversation with Carolyn makes everything else pale by comparison.

“Don't worry, it will happen,” the smug woman says suddenly.

“Excuse me?”

“Your baby. You'll have one. It took me six years and now I'm pregnant with twins. I can always tell when someone else is going through it. Dr. Soule is the best. And the reproductive endocrinologist she works with is amazing. It'll happen for you. I know it.”

This violation of the unwritten rule of conception and infant-loss protocol stuns me. Just as you never, never ask a fat woman if she's pregnant, isn't it true that you never assume a fucked-up-looking woman in an obstetrician's office is trying to get pregnant? Isn't that something that simply isn't done?

“Six years, one baby with hydrocephalus that we lost at nineteen weeks, four miscarriages, and three IVFs. And now Finn and Emmet are due on June nineteenth. So you see, it's only a matter of time. It always works out. Dr. Soule will make it happen. She's a miracle worker.”

“Ms. Greenleaf?” a nurse in lavender scrubs dotted with violets says from the doorway. “Right this way.”

“Congratulations,” I tell the woman, who suddenly seems to be entitled to her complacency. On my way out the door I touch my toe to the doorjamb and surreptitiously tap it three times. I no longer approve of naming children before they are born. It is too tempting of the evil eye to make such assumptions about a baby. Who knows whether a child whose life is so counted on will even take his first breath? Still not even I am superstitious enough to believe that I could have protected Isabel from my own negligence by referring to her forever as “she.”

I imagine for a moment being asked to strip and don a paper robe for this consultation, this dressing-down, and although I know it is absurd, I am relieved when the nurse leads me into Carolyn's office and not into an examining room. It takes me a moment to figure out what disturbs me about this office, why it is at once familiar and strange. Then I realize what it is: the furnishings are identical to those in the office Carolyn decorated for Jack at Friedman Taft. There is the black walnut desk, polished to a high shine. There is the bookcase with the minimal scrollwork, there are the two visitors' chairs upholstered in an elegant interlocking geometry, there is the photograph of toddler William on the beach in Nantucket, sand stippling his skinny legs, his diaper sagging around his bottom. There, heaven help me, are the credenza and the Aeron chair.

“I wish I had known that you intended to join your father and William at the filming of the movie in the park,” Carolyn says. She strides through the doorway and across the room as though she owns it, as of course she does. She is elegant in a long, slim black skirt, with boots and a high-collared sweater, also black. Her belly swells like a small ball underneath the fine wool. I have bought outfits like this, expensive ones, too, but no matter how much of her husband's money I spend, I never look like Carolyn Soule. She is right. In marrying me, Jack did slink back to his middle-class roots. I am not sophisticated, like William and his mother.

She is sitting now behind her desk, rocked back in the chair. Her fingers are interlaced in front of her, the pads of her thumbs and pinkies pressed against one another. Her nails are as clean and well kept as I imagined they would be.

She says, “Jack told me that you left him. He told me what happened the night Isabel died.”

For a moment I am stunned. Then I accept it as inevitable. When he was faced with my ultimate betrayal, he did what would hurt me the most.

“Quite frankly, I've never heard Jack like this, Emilia. He was absolutely distraught. He was crying.”

“When did you talk to him?” My voice is a croak, unfamiliar to me.

“On Monday night. William was very upset when he saw you leave with your suitcase, and I called to speak to Jack about it. Jack told me what you believe about what happened on the night your daughter died. And he asked me if it was possible. He asked if you could really have smothered the baby against your breast.”

“He asked
you
?”

“Jack knows to trust my judgment. My medical judgment, if nothing else.”

“What did you tell him?”

Her composure cracks just the littlest bit. She presses her pinkies together so hard they bend and whiten. She purses her narrow lips and the wrinkles stand out like the tines of a fork. “I told him it was possible. I said, yes, you could have accidentally killed Isabel. And I said you probably had, because any woman who could be so casual with William's safety could just as easily fall sleep and smother her own child.”

Carolyn's manner, the clinical detachment of a physician combined with the suppressed yet still-pulsating anger of a wife and mother betrayed, lends a sure confidence to her words. My own confidence in the accuracy of her indictment stems from no such detachment and no such anger. I have not been betrayed, and I am no clinician. I just know that she is right.

“Don't,” Carolyn says.

Don't what? I wonder.

She pushes a box of tissues across the wide desk to me. I wipe my finger across my cheek and am surprised to find that I am crying again.

“That's not why I asked you to come here today. I'm not proud of what I said. It was a terrible thing to say, and I'm ashamed of myself. What I'm most ashamed of is that it took William to point that out to me.”

“William? William knows?”

She nods. “He overheard the conversation. I'm sorry. My apartment is quite small.”

It is a prewar seven on Fifth Avenue. How loud was she yelling?

Underneath Carolyn's smooth porcelain cheek, a faint, pink flush begins to spread. I have seen her enraged but I have never seen her embarrassed. “He was standing there when I hung up the phone, holding his
Giganotosaurus
and a book. He was waiting for me to read to him.”

“What book?”

She knits her beautifully shaped eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

“What book?”

This is not the part of the story she expected me to latch on to. “
Lyle, Lyle,
Crocodile
,” she says.

I smile.

“He's a very loyal boy, Emilia,” she says.

She doesn't need to tell me that. For more than two years I've watched him be her most loyal accolyte.

She says, “He was very angry with me for saying that about you. He told me that you loved Isabel, and that you could not have killed her.”

I am flabbergasted. The loyalty about which Carolyn spoke was to
me
? William defended
me
? And to his mother, no less?

“What did you say?” I ask.

She pauses, and I can almost see her deciding whether or not to tell me the truth. “I told him that I hadn't said you killed the baby. I told him that you might have accidentally smothered her. The way you accidentally threw him in the Lake.”

“Oh.”

“He corrected me.”

“What?”

“He reminded me that it was the Harlem Meer. Not the Lake. He said that the Lake is much farther south, below the Reservoir. And then he informed me that the word ‘meer' means lake in Dutch.”

And then something amazing happens. Something that has never happened in all the time that I have been a stepmother to this woman's son. We share a smile of rueful impatience, tinged with pride. He is so smart, we say, wordlessly. And such a little know-it-all.

Carolyn pulls the tissues out of the box herself, since I am incapable of actually taking them. She pushes them into my hand. “He asked me to help you. He said that since I was a doctor I could find out what really happened to Isabel.”

I blow my nose.

“Your pediatrician was sent a copy of Isabel's autopsy report. I had his office fax it to me yesterday, and I reviewed it with a medical school classmate of mine who is at Stanford. She's a pathologist and is something of a specialist in neonatal cases. She's testified at criminal trials. She confirmed the coroner's conclusion. She said there is absolutely no evidence to indicate that Isabel was smothered. Smothering always leaves traces—a torn upper lip frenulum, signs of positional asphyxia, dots of blood in the lungs. In Isabel's case there were no physical indications of smothering. You can't have smothered her; you did not kill her. Isabel died of SIDS.” Carolyn's voice softens, almost imperceptibly. “You just had the terrible misfortune to be holding her when she died.”

“Your friend is a pathologist?”

“Yes.”

“A perinatal specialist?”

“Yes.”

“And she reviewed the autopsy report?”

“Yes.”

“And she said . . .” my voice trails away. I need her to repeat it. I need to hear it again, and for some reason Carolyn understands this.

Very slowly she says, “My friend the pathologist said that she is confident from the autopsy report that Isabel's death was not due to smothering. She said that while without an exhumation she cannot make a final determination, she does not recommend that you and Jack take that step. She said that she feels secure in her conclusion that Isabel died of SIDS. She also said that she would be willing to tell you this herself, if you'd rather hear it directly from her, or if you have any other questions.”

I now understand why the women on the UrbanBaby.com Web site like Dr. Carolyn Soule so much, why they so confidently put themselves in her competent and compassionate hands. My husband's ex-wife repeated herself, slowly and clearly, gently and patiently, for as long as it took for me to stop crying and start believing that my daughter was dead not because I was so careless and wretched that I left a swath of ruin in my path but because sometimes babies die, sometimes they just slip away, the electric pulses of their brain turning off, shutting down, shorting out, for some mysterious reason, for no reason at all.