The Heart of Henry Quantum (15 page)

“I can't,” he said.

“Too scary?”

“No, I just can't.”

“That's because you're such a positive person,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek.

It took about twenty minutes to wind down the Panoramic Highway through the deep woods and out onto the grassy hills that led to the last outcroppings of rock that guard the shore, but soon enough they pulled into the little town of Stinson Beach. It was usually empty in winter, but the fine weather had brought out hundreds of visitors. Margaret had wanted the whole place to herself and she couldn't hide her disappointment.

“Maybe it would have been better if it had rained,” she said.

And indeed, Henry had been going on and on about the drought until she wanted to strangle him if he mentioned shower rationing one more time. But today rain would have been a good thing.

They pulled into the small lot in front of the Sandpiper inn, and Margaret grabbed her little overnight bag from the back seat. She'd packed almost nothing but thought she should have some luggage so as not to be too obvious to the innkeeper, even though she knew they were not the first to come just for the day. They'd booked a cottage overlooking the garden and they made all kinds of delighted exclamations to prove to the desk clerk that it was perfect for their vacation, and then they just stood there in the room, listening to each other breathe.

“Maybe we should close the door,” Margaret said.

Peter did as she asked, and Margaret set down her overnight on the easy chair.

Peter looked around and said, “It's a nicer room than I imagined.” And then he fell silent.

“Why are you so nervous?” she asked.

“I'm not nervous.”

“You seem nervous.”

And he said, “I'm
not
nervous.”

“I am.”

“I guess I am, too,” he said.

“It's not like it's our first time.”

“No.”

“So why are we nervous?”

But she knew.

Because, at least for Margaret, it was indeed like the first time. What she had come to realize on the deck of the Mountain Home Inn was that today she would make love to Peter with the knowledge that this might actually mean something; that she was stepping away from the life she had built so assiduously with Henry, her husband of thirteen years. Thirteen years and eight months and sixteen days. She wondered why she could remember such detail down to the number of days. She knew that as soon as she touched Peter, as soon as her hands went round his shoulders and her mouth caressed his lips, her life would utterly change. She realized she was trembling, and she didn't know if it was with sexual excitement or fear or what. This was very disconcerting to her, because being in control, being the one in control, was how she liked to define herself. Not that she was a controlling person, no, no, not at all, she was not a controlling person—but she did know herself well enough to recognize that when she was feeling out of control she did strange things, sometimes cruel things and sometimes destructive things, but this time she did nothing. She just stood there trembling.

She wondered what Henry was doing right then. It was almost three in the afternoon. The days were short this time of year and the sun was already beginning to sink in the sky, but he was probably as oblivious to that as he was to everything else—he was in some meeting, she guessed, or sitting at his desk writing a report, or probably just taking a nap or playing one of his stupid video games. Why did he have to daydream so much? Why couldn't he be more like Peter?

Peter stepped over to the picture window to draw the blinds but stopped for a moment to view the beach. She could see beyond him the edge of the water, gray and a bit foreboding, as it broke upon the shore in raucous waves, leaving fine trails of bubbles that sank into the sand or retreated back into the sea. It was almost silent because of the thickness of the glass, but here and there the call of the seagulls broke through, and then the sound of children romping in the surf.

“Kids,” Peter mused. “They don't feel a damned thing.”

“Sorry?”

“It's freezing. The water's freezing. They're in up to their waists.”

“Their parents shouldn't let them.”

“Oh, why not? They're made of iron. They'll be fine.”

He snapped the blinds shut and turned around to face her.

He was the right kind of man to be a father, strong, easygoing, decisive, and kids are made of iron. He would know exactly what to do. A good father. Although it was obvious he had already put the children out of his mind—if they had made any impression in the first place. Things came into Peter's line of sight and then were gone. No residue. This was an amazing, beautiful thing, because for her, the children's giggles were still hovering in the space between them.

Bones was always going on about having kids. He probably thought she hated kids. She didn't. She just—she always thought she wasn't ready. And now—she was forty-two!

A lot of their crowd had them—one, two, even three little things running around like wild animals. She liked the babies, though. It was fun holding them and doing the coo-coo thing, placing the bottle in their mouths, swaying to comfort them. The way their little lips formed a perfect
O
and their hands squeezed and kneaded her fingers as they drank. It was when they got older that they were intimidating. She didn't quite
get
kids, had no idea what they wanted or what to say to them, and not a few times caused a four-year-old to break into monumental sobs. Which of course mortified her. Everyone told her if she had her own it would come naturally, not to worry. She decided they wanted her to have children to validate what they were doing with their own thwarted lives. But a part of her did believe they were right. She would have made a fine mother. And yet she kept saying
no
to Henry.

It was really only in the last few years she understood.

It was when she landed the job at Regency.

Henry was clearly going nowhere in his job. Whatever had held him back in Chicago was holding him back now and would hold him back forever. But Margaret was filled with hunger, a hunger that had been growing inside her for years but that she'd refused to acknowledge. She had thought of it merely as her “work ethic.” You go for broke no matter what. Hadn't her father told her a million times there were no halfways? No matter how small or stupid the job. You always give 100 percent. That was her mantra: you can't live in a half-built house. But she came to see there was something else roiling that heart of hers, and one day it burst out into the open and she had to embrace it even if it embarrassed her to say it—she was after greatness. Yes, greatness. She didn't want to just succeed. She wanted success on the grand scale. She wanted money, freedom, power—she wanted, well, it was the whole world she wanted. When she admitted that this was who she really was, she had that same floating feeling she'd had when she first met Henry, only this time it was real. It was coming from within; it had nothing to do with anyone but herself. Was it selfish? Maybe it was. But when they took her on at Regency and told her they expected great things from her,
great
things, it all suddenly became real. The path was laid out before her. It was almost sexual, her excitement; her body was in flames, her very pores exploded with vitality, her skin glowed, her eyes sparkled, her thighs shivered. She took Henry out to a nightclub and they actually danced (well, she did; he talked).

And a few weeks later she realized she was pregnant.

Jesus! It was the first time they'd done it in, like, five months! And it wasn't as if she was really having sex with
him
—she barely felt his presence—she wanted, rather, to share her mastery, her triumph—not with him, but over him.

But there it was, and she was terrified. This terror was quite unlike anything else she had faced, a terror mixed with joy, a joy she was flabbergasted to feel.

She went into the closet of her bedroom to study herself in the full-length mirror. She was thirty-eight years old. Still ripe. Still decent-looking. Nice boobs. She tried to imagine herself with a fat belly, a huge, round, bulbous, outrageous belly with a giant belly button and whatever else goes along with it—that strange dark line running down the middle. It was crazy, but she found it somehow pleasant, even wonderful. Everyone says being pregnant is beautiful. She never thought so, but maybe she'd been wrong. Ever since she took the test she'd been touching her stomach every two minutes, half to see if it was getting any bigger, but half to see—it blew her mind even to think it—if she could feel the life growing within her. In the mirror, she was still just Margaret. In a couple of weeks, who would she be? She'd already gone online to Rosie Pope and Séraphine to check out the maternity clothes and then over to Tory Burch and Prada because she read that a lot of their stuff works just as well.

All the really successful women had kids. Arianna Huffington had kids. Margaret loved Arianna Huffington. So what was the problem? What
was
the problem?

And then, as if the mirror into which she had been looking suddenly shattered into a thousand shards of sunshine, she saw what she so long had refused to see.

It wasn't that she didn't want kids. It was that she didn't want them with Henry.

The next few weeks were beyond horrible. At least three times she decided to tell Henry, but something always rose up in her and screamed
NO.
She called Planned Parenthood and the Women's Options Center at UCSF. They were immensely kind and nonjudgmental and incredibly delicate and spoke in soft, consoling voices, all of which sent shivers down her spine. She found herself pacing the hallway of her house or wandering up and down Market Street, talking to herself like a madwoman. She should have been at work, she scolded herself, she should have been able to handle it. But she spent hours in front of the computer reading everything she could about babies and how to raise them, and also everything about abortions and how to deal with one, and also everything about couples therapy and how to have a happy marriage, and also everything about the stages of pregnancy and about Lamaze and about preschool and about divorce.

In the end though, none of it mattered.

About eight weeks in, cramps. She was in the office and tried to hide the fact that she couldn't stand straight as she made her way to the ladies' room. She was hoping it was diarrhea—but it was blood, dark and thick, and some other viscous something that filled the bowl. The intense pain dissipated enough so that she could breathe normally. What does one do when this happens, she asked herself? Miscarriage was the one thing she hadn't read about. In a panic, she wadded some paper towels between her legs and got herself to the elevator. She took a cab to the hospital, the paper towels growing wetter and wetter between her legs. They did a D and C and sent her home.

When Henry arrived that evening he saw she was in bed.

“Why didn't you call?” he said.

“It's just a flu.”

“Jesus, Margaret, you look like shit. You should have called. I would have come home earlier.”

“Why? I'm fine. I'm fine on my own. I'm always fine on my own.”

Margaret never did tell him the truth. Instead, she spent a day or two in bed with the flu, never complaining, though Henry perhaps did not understand why a flu would make her weep so uncontrollably. Especially as he had never seen her cry before in their entire married life.

So when exactly had she begun to despise her husband? She really couldn't say anymore. She knew she felt it that time he left the bathroom door open. She felt it when he touched his tongue to his upper lip when he was thinking one of his long-winded thoughts. She felt it every time he touched her or even brushed up against her, every time he flipped the pages of a magazine from back to front instead of from front to back, every time she noticed some of his hairs in the sink or socks on the floor or crumbs from his toast adhering to the front of his shirt. But all this was so silly, so superficial and priggish. And yet these moments did happen. These flashes of repulsion. Not always. Just sometimes. But each was a kind of awakening. A warning.
Despised
was too strong a word. She didn't despise him. The word
contempt
sometimes came into her head, and she tried very hard to dispel it, because she knew what that meant—when couples had contempt for their partners it meant the marriage was over.

But now, at this very moment—in this faraway hotel room with the closed blinds and shut door, and the salty, damp air, and the surf rolling somewhere in the distance, and the tinkling laughter of children in the waves, and the blond man standing by the window—the sad truth dawned on her. She could no longer suppress words like “contempt” or hide from other words like “despair,” or put her hopes into some lockbox and make believe there were no regrets. Her face revealed nothing and her voice was the same as before, but it really wasn't until this very second she admitted she was ready to end her marriage to Henry.

Peter let go of the blinds. He stepped toward her and took her hands in his, roughly, like he was crushing two walnuts. When Henry took her hands it was more like he was holding two wafers at Communion. She could see that Peter was pleased that she was trembling, and he drew her to him so forcefully her breasts smashed upon his chest, and when he pinned her hands behind her back their bodies were touching from head to toe and there was no space between them, no space at all, and for a moment she couldn't breathe, but then he released her hands and slid his palms down onto her hips, her thighs.

To be taken by such a man as this! So alive, so vital. His eyes were so blue, so full of steel, and his hair so blond, like a laurel of gold.

She wanted to be inside this man, inside this moment.