The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel (13 page)

“You should go,” John had said. He spoke to her from some great muffled distance. She couldn’t get through that space and didn’t have the energy to protest, although leaving the house now, leaving Clara while on her ostensible maternity leave, felt like capitulation.

She had mixed the meager one ounce of milk she’d been able to pump with the new goat formula and stored it in the refrigerator, then moved hesitantly into the elevator and onto the baking street. She was not free: She was incomplete without them. The cloud that surrounded her was amplified by the humidity. When Veronica arrived at the apartment, Art was sitting in the red chair like the Cheshire cat. “Art has an idea,” Ines said, rolling her eyes but smiling too as she stood by the air conditioner in a lavender bra. The atmosphere was cool but stale, but it was clarifying to be someplace else. Art opened his palm, where three small white pills rested. “John wouldn’t be interested, but the three of us might be,” he said.

They looked wonderful, cutting through the haze, precise and finite as punctuation. How she wanted to gobble them up. “What are they?” she asked.

“X,” Ines said with deliberate nonchalance.

“Wow.” She’d never tried Ecstasy. The dot looked so clean, like a piece of candy. “No, thanks. But do you have any Vicodin?” There were rows and rows of pills in their medicine cabinet. There had to be some.

“Out of vikes,” Art said. “This’ll be better.”

Veronica looked at her watch as if disinterested, then flipped through an issue of
Dwell
that lay on the coffee table. In a glossy spread, a couple with a towheaded toddler emerged from a wood-paneled RV. “I’d rather see the movie.”

Art ignored her protest while Ines pointed out an Eames chair in the magazine that she especially liked. “I took some last week with some people from Bard. It’s all good,” Art said, “F-ones. It might make you a little queasy at first, but after that, no problem.”

Ines quickly said, “No pressure.”

“I can’t, but you two go ahead,” Veronica said. When she got home she would try pumping again. She had drunk three cups of fenugreek tea to improve lactation, and the cloying sweet taste still clung to her teeth. How much could she hope to get? Another half an ounce, at most. Clara needed at least four ounces in a feeding. Ines glanced at Arthur while slipping her T-shirt back on.

“You know, he has a really reliable source,” she told Veronica. Her new vulnerability muddied her volition. She didn’t know what she wanted. Maybe she only wanted to forget for the evening. It was safe if Art said so. But she couldn’t.

Her hand dangled in her purse and clutched the empty prescription bottle. Her incision pulled as she adjusted the waist of her still-tight jeans. “I could use some Advil if you have it. Maybe a beer.”

Ines went to the fridge, then handed her a Stella Artois.

Ines and Art proceeded as if she weren’t there, swallowing the pills with a bottle of water. For a few minutes they had penetrated that fuzzy distance. Now she was alone again. She rose as if to go to the movie, but she was not up for it, being by herself in the dark, and she found herself sitting back down on the sofa. She would go home, take the baby from Rosemary, be a mother. But tears of exhaustion stung her eyes. There was no needle, no smoke, no totemic feature that made the drug seem transgressive. The little white dot sat before her on the glass table.

“I’m not really doing this,” she said as she swallowed the dot.

They wandered into Central Park to see what they would see. People were everywhere, ambling along in the heat, barefoot, damp-skinned, loud on their cellphones, vibrant in their new dresses, their odors. It felt good to sweat. In the beginning she threw up in a bush next to Sheep Meadow and then felt a bit better. She kept sweating more and more and it was like being washed, some sort of wringing out that she needed. She didn’t know how much time had passed before she felt uncommonly good. Her body was loose and relaxed, her skin like some miraculous silky tube she’d been poured into. She adored her friends, touching the smooth whiteness of Ines’s teeth, threading her fingers through the black spiral curls of her hair. Art had brought a sprayer and gave each of their faces a mist. Veronica told stories about Clara, about how her wrists and ankles were becoming ringed with beautiful fat. The world was returning to her in bright pieces. They sat in a row on a bench, melting into it as dancing roller skaters zoomed past. Roller skaters! As if it weren’t the impossible future, that ledge of time that fell off after the year 2001, but rather 1975 and she was a child again, set free from Kay for an afternoon.

When they got back to the apartment, it was dark, and Veronica had no idea what time it was. They took turns standing directly in front of the window box air conditioner to cool off. Then Ines, who wanted to renovate her kitchen, showed Veronica veined chunks of quartz and samples of gray soapstone. They marveled at the smoothness of the stones, holding the cold pieces up to their cheeks. When Ines and Art began to discuss the merits (Art couldn’t see any) of a certain thousand-dollar Italian faucet, Veronica left them to their happy dispute.

When she got home, she threw her arms around John, nuzzling his velvety neck. Had she ever even
felt
skin before?

She told him; she’d still been in the habit of telling John everything. He was shocked and looked very young while he stared at her from the doorway of the bathroom. “You did
what
?” he asked, a look of confusion in his round eyes.

“We all did. I won’t pump until—” He came into the room and leaned on the bathroom’s double sink. She grabbed his hand and squeezed it. She tried to lace her fingers through his—how good that felt!—and he pulled his hand away.

“You’re making it so much worse than it is. It’s one night.”

“You have a child. What if something happened to you?”

“But it didn’t. I feel so much better.” As she said it, her high started to fade, to pivot into regret.

“A child,” he said again. “Did you forget? What kind of mother does that?” She was briefly aware of the double standard; he routinely went drinking with people from work even though he, too, had a child. She was not yet back to work. She was always at home trying to feed the baby. But she knew; she knew no good mother did it.

“I can never forget I’m a mother—don’t you see?”

*   *   *

Two days later the heat broke; one night they had to put another layer on their bed. It drained her, stuffing the comforter into the white duvet so that they weren’t clumped together. Such a gorgeous bed and Veronica still hadn’t slept through a single night in it. John, who’d failed to help with the comforter, then offered to take Clara up to see his mother. “I’ll go tomorrow morning and we’ll spend the night. You’ll sleep.” The next night, she didn’t sleep but met Ines at Adele’s gallery, where the three of them took X before the opening of a video installation.

And there was one more secret time, with a bunch of Art’s college friends. They’d driven up to the Storm King sculpture garden for the day, while John stayed home watching Clara and, Veronica guessed, playing Scrabble on his computer. The large oaks were beginning to shed their leaves, and Veronica laid in the grass as the autumn clouds collided overhead. Her pain evaporated. What she’d done was impossible, unthinkable. She was a terrible mother. But the problem (and the solution, in a way) was that each time she did it, she was whole, uncut.

One afternoon when Art and Ines were visiting—Ines was holding Clara awkwardly in her thin lap—Art blew the secret by casually referring to it. John reddened. Ines looked at Veronica as if to say that they’d reached the end of the experiment, that it was fun while it lasted; to Ines, John’s feelings, the integrity of their little group—more like a family than any of their families actually were—was more important than any adventure. It was a relief that the whole phase was over just when it was becoming not only habitual but also savory, something Veronica had begun to look forward to.

*   *   *

In the red booth, she looked at Art for absolution.

“You’re an excellent mother,” he said. “You need to stop going in that direction.”

“I’m mortified about the X.” She was Winnicott’s “good enough” mother, or she was horrendous. She was too attentive; she was too distant.

“We were experimenting and you liked it. A lot. It was only a couple of weeks.”

A waiter came and piled up the thick off-white dishes. “But I had an
infant
. She was two months old!”

“Drink your water.”

She did as she was told. “It’s not who I wanted to be,” she said, as Art slid one of his fat hands to her across the table. She gave it a perfunctory squeeze.

He looked at her awkwardly.

“Onward,” she said, to relieve him of the pressure of her confidence.

“It was my fault,” Art finally said. “We should have known you were … uh, in a state, I guess. With the new baby and everything. You can one hundred percent blame me, and John can too, if he’s still mad about it.”

She was simply too suggestible. She remembered the hospital’s anesthesiologist, Todd, who’d administered the epidural. “All the moms love Todd!” a nurse had exclaimed, urging Veronica to get some pain relief. Jovial and muscular, Todd strode into the room but approached gently, like any guy eager to turn you on to a new drug.

“Thank you for saying that, but it was me. It’s not you.” John had had a glazed and distant look in his eyes as Art and Ines left that night. It was a look she recalled from their earliest meetings, of pure apprehension. He’d gone to bed angry that night, but she didn’t stop him. She just wanted to go to bed too; each bit of sleep, however truncated, provided another chance, like a do-over granted in a children’s game.

“You need to forget it,” Art said, sipping his martini.

“It’s getting harder and harder to forget.” An ache tightened in her breastbone. “Nothing works. A drink. A nap with a good dream that is too short. You can’t sleep as you used to. You’re in some state of permanent vigilance. I’m not watching her now, but—”

“No, you’re on vacation today.”

Veronica laughed. “There is no vacation anymore!” She stood up and checked the contents of her bag, checked the ringer on her phone.

“Maybe you need a break,” he said, then signaled to the waiter for the check.

A blast of cool air tumbled into the restaurant. She was drunk. Closing her eyes, an opening formed, like a rip in a black piece of paper with light coming through.

“Okay, I’ll stay,” she said.

*   *   *

In a few minutes, they arrived at the diamond district and ogled the faux diamond light posts on Forty-seventh and Sixth. White sleet drew down from the sky in thin sheets, startling against the blackened alleyways. A lone bearded man with tallis and curls walked by, like a specter down the long east–west block, his black briefcase no doubt stuffed with jewels.

“Where is everybody?” Art said.

“Wait, it’s the Sabbath.”

“Shit. It’s Saturday. Why is it that the half goy knows this and I forgot?” It must have been close to four in the afternoon, because the winter sun hung low in the white haze. “We’ll just check in with Abe Zelnick,” Art was saying. “He might be there. I know he’s not very religious. And then we’ll go meet Ines. She’s making us a reservation.” Veronica watched the sun slide down in the west, like a pregnant woman sinking into a bathtub.

“It is all there already, Art. Clara has
ovaries
, all the eggs she’ll ever have—they’ve been there since birth—a genetic arsenal, little half people stowed away for the future.”

“Don’t cry, V.” she heard him say, as she fell with relief into one of Art’s squeezes and the peachy orb of the sun slipped quickly beneath the horizon.

9

Saturday

John

In Derek’s Corolla, the scent returned to John: sugar air, rum, white flowers. The very molecules that danced about his face and neck mingled with the pain in his skull. He closed his eyes on the way to Speightstown, knowing no one would object;
after,
moments of rest arrived unexpectedly, like dollops of whipped cream one hadn’t asked for but could never refuse. The carful of people—Clara in his lap, Derek and Monika and Mum—murmured around him.

His face was starting to itch, prickly from missing one day with his razor. When he was twenty-five, when he only had to shave his face every three days, he’d teased Veronica about patronizing Glittering Sands. The resort stood sentinel on this island that had once—because of its location and its arable soil—been the center of the slave trade. Somehow Veronica’s good liberal maternal grandfather and her timidly proud mother, who boasted of the several Quaker abolitionists in her family tree, had overlooked the history of the place. They returned again and again to the onetime English colony. John had defended Veronica while the Reeds, too earnest to completely condone a surrender to pleasure, criticized John for going on the trip with Veronica’s family. They’d sent him off with a bitter autobiography about life on the island and the grim nature of its violent history.

Veronica had extolled the island’s many virtues: the orchid jungles, the variety of indigenous animals, the cuisine, and even, she said, the plantations themselves if seen
as cultural artifacts
and viewed for historical and architectural interest. She had said she would not be made to feel like a terrible person for having come there. And John, in thrall to her completely, in a sexual haze, had agreed emphatically: She was a wonderful person. In the morning, as she walked bleary-eyed to the bathroom and peed with the door open, their subsequent talk was small again and not charged. When she returned to the bed, the sunlight slipped through the glass louvers like bleached swords, then danced around the shadows on their intertwined legs.

In the Corolla, it occurred to him: That very dance of light on breathing limbs must have been what Art had been talking about lately, what
happiness studies
was all about. Those mornings had been so great. He’d been happy. After their long waking chats, John would to rush back to his official room to shower, because David Edelson had called breakfast for eight-thirty sharp, and attendance was mandatory.