The tempo of the music quickens, something about a “bustle in your hedgerow.” What the hell does that mean? “Yeah,” I say, “I’m so happy for me, too.”
THE CALL COMES EARLY one morning, a few weeks later, on a cold December day. Paul and I are lying in bed, snuggled warmly underneath the covers, watching the ice chunks flow down the Hudson River. To pick up the receiver, he has to take his hand away from my now sixteen-week swollen belly, which he’s been gently and proprietarily rubbing. “Do you feel the baby moving around inside you yet?” he asks, reaching for the phone.
“No, not yet,” I say. “Who’s calling so early?”
Paul picks up the phone. Says hello and then after a pause says “No!” with such softness and pain, I can tell somebody has died. Then he hangs up, sits on the edge of the bed, and starts to cry.
“Who was that?” I ask. I touch his shoulder, but he recoils.
“Andy’s brother,” he says. “Andy killed himself last night.”
We spend the rest of morning in our robes, wandering around our living room, staring blankly out at the ice chunks, reminiscing about our friend and former roommate from Moscow—Remember when he came home with that bloody nose? Remember when he was building the barricades during the coup? Remember his laugh? Trying in vain not to conjure up the image of him walking down the steps to his parents’ basement, sticking a gun to his head and pulling the trigger.
We’d been feeling optimistic about Andy lately. He’d recently moved back from Moscow to finally get on with his life. He’d found a job with a bank. A respectable suit-and-tie job in midtown Manhattan. He was looking for his own apartment. He made vague promises about giving up the drinking. He was desperate for renewal, he said, for a second chance to prove himself a capable, responsible, trustworthy man.
He lasted at his spiffy, new job less than a month before blowing his brains out.
Paul is pacing around the living room, mumbling, trying to make sense of it all. “I just saw him last week. . . . He was acting so strange . . . drinking again, telling me he loved me, saying bizarre things . . .” He stops in his tracks. “Oh, Jesus. Debs, I think he was saying good-bye.” He puts his head on my shoulder and leaves it there, shuddering, for a very long time.
At the funeral a few days later, while staring at Andy’s embalmed, serene face, at the shell that used to be our friend lying completely inert in a satin-lined coffin, I feel in my womb the first internal flutterings of the life that will become my son, Jacob.
The signs are everywhere, if you just pay attention.
IT IS A FRIDAY AFTERNOON, sometime after five. I’m sitting in my windowless closet of an office at Dateline, finishing up some work. I am seven months pregnant with my second child, a daughter, and I am tired. My ankles are swollen. Jacob, my now nineteen-month-old son, is at home with Dolly, his baby-sitter, our savior. This morning, when I promised him that after I got back from work we could light some candles together, he looked up at me as if he actually understood what I was proposing. Light. Calm. The comfort of an ancient ritual, of a mother’s presence. It’s been a long week for both of us, deserving of candles, with a fruitless two-day business trip to Boston thrown in for good measure.
I turn off my computer and put on my coat, feeling that phantom piece of rope tied between Jacob’s chubby wrist and my rib cage growing taut. I’m halfway out the door when my phone rings. It’s Jim, the senior producer in charge of assignments. “Don’t hate me,” he says, his voice appropriately apologetic. “I need you to crash a story for Tuesday.”
Shit. So much for candles. “On what?” I ask, with more than a just a slight snap to my tone. Poor Jacob. Poor unborn baby. Poor family.
He pauses. “Tall women.”
Now, incredulous, I pause. “Tall women?! You’ve got to be joking.”
“No, I’m not.”
But wait. I’ve gotten ahead of myself.
JACOB PAVLOVICH KOGAN was born on a balmy spring day in May 1995 after eighteen hours of labor. Toward the end of the third hour of pushing, when the epidural had worn off and things were looking kind of static and grim, I grabbed Paul by the collar and told him if he didn’t eject the fucking “Goldberg Variations” from the CD player and throw on Abba’s Gold: Greatest Hits instead, the goddamned baby would never come out. Tiny Jacob was finally able to extricate himself from the birth canal in the middle of “Fernando,” much to the delight of our nurses, who tried to convince us to name him accordingly. As if birth to Swedish disco weren’t bad enough.
Motherhood quickly engulfed me. Jacob had reflux for the first six months of his life, which meant his stomach and esophagus were in constant, burning pain, he cried nonstop, he projectile vomited on every carpet and piece of upholstered furniture in our apartment, he had to swallow and keep down four servings of Mylanta a day, he could never breast-feed for more than five minutes at a time and he had to be held upright, even to sleep, twenty-four hours a day. Which can get pretty tricky. But if I danced with him with just the right amount of sway to “Son of a Preacher Man,” or took him on a two-mile walk in the now barf-covered navy-blue Scandinavian baby carrier with the cute little anchor appliqué, or threw him over my shoulder and sang a rousing version of any minor-key song—the Israeli national anthem worked best—or if I just held him close enough and tight enough and whispered, “It’s okay, little duck, it’s okay,” he’d stop, forget his pain and smile. And when that happened, I could think of nothing else I’d ever done of equal import. Or any experience or lover or orgasm or sunset or story or song or substance that had ever, in my entire thrill-seeking life, made me feel that good.
I took as long a maternity leave as I could. I thought about leaving my job altogether, even pondered the logistics and seed money I’d need to start my own baby photography business—which I’d already begun on the side—but after six months without my steady NBC income, our household credit card debt was fast approaching the gross national product of some lesser Third World countries. Paul, meanwhile, was rediscovering his roots as a computer geek. Though he’d just accepted a job building some bizarre new thing called a web site, the two of us knew there was no way we’d be able to survive on his salary alone. Besides, who knew whether this whole Internet thing would stick anyway? Remember this was 1995. Paul could be out of a job at a moment’s notice.
So I hired Dolly, an angel of a woman from the Philippines, and begrudgingly went back to work.
Back at Dateline, where I spent the majority of my time missing Jacob and weeping with my office door closed, I knew I had to figure out a way to cut back my hours and responsibilities, to trade fewer dollars for more time at home. Then, two months after my return to work, my then eight-month-old son was rushed to the hospital with intussusception, a potentially fatal blockage of the intestines. The fourth barium enema Jacob had to endure, without sedation, cleared the blockage, but timing in intussusception is everything. Had Dolly called me a few hours later than she did to tell me that my son’s diaper was filled with gelatinous blood, I would have already been on a plane to shoot an interview in D.C. instead of where I needed to be: in the hospital, holding my baby’s tiny hand, wiping his tears and praying to whichever god would listen for his survival.
After the ordeal with Jacob, I started earnestly looking into the possibilities of part-time work. Ideally, what I wanted was to be able to work on two or three stories at a time on a three- or four-day-a-week schedule, instead of juggling five stories at a time and having to work not only five days a week, but often nights and weekends just to get everything finished. The all-too-frequent travel was becoming impossible for both me and for Jacob, who in time began crying at the mere sight of my suitcase.
It’s not that I didn’t want to work. I knew I needed to work, not only to keep us from going bankrupt but also to keep me sane. However, paid work did not, in my mind, have to mean all-consuming work. My gut was tellin
g me that my son and his welfare and the time Paul and I would be able to give him while he was young was equally, if not more, important.
Unfortunately, without that stupid producer title, I was stuck. The NBC brass made it abundantly clear what they thought about associate producers working part-time when they denied the request of one of my female colleagues, another associate producer who gave birth a few weeks after me. She was extremely upset about having to make such an all-or-nothing choice, but she could afford to quit and did. I did not have the same luxury.
Knowing I’d have to suck it up and bide my time, I decided if I couldn’t ask for fewer work days, at least I could ask to produce stories that required minimal travel. Unfortunately, I never bargained for the type of pieces this meant I’d be assigned. (Never mind that the travel time and stress were often the same, if not worse in certain cases.) In rapid and increasingly less newsworthy succession, they were as follows: a very boring story about the credit card industry, another very boring story about the credit card industry, a story about wedding dress dry-cleaning scams, a story about a fight that broke out in a sandbox between two toddlers, a story about calming fussy babies, a story about getting your toddler to go to bed. When they tried foisting the picky eaters story on me, I finally rebelled. “Please, no more parenting stories!” I begged. It was hard enough being without my own kid, let alone spending hours upon hours with other people’s crying, fussy, sleep-deprived children.
True, I was one of the few producing mommies on the show at the time, but I couldn’t help but notice that none of the ample supply of producer daddies was being asked to do stories on topics like picky eaters. And in fact, after I refused to do it, the picky eaters story was passed on to my friend Diana, who was—big surprise—pregnant with her first child.
“I promise. I’ll do anything else. Even hurricanes,” I said to Jim, desperate to get off the mommy track.
And that’s how I finally hit the nadir of my career as a journalist: Tall Women.
“WHAT ABOUT TALL WOMEN?” I ask Jim. I take off my coat, lay it on the back of my chair with the false hope of swiftly retrieving it. I look at my watch and picture Jacob. In thirty minutes or so, if I can reach Paul and tell him he has to get home now, my son will be sitting down to a dinner of chicken nuggets and broccoli. Without me. Without candles.
“I’m not sure,” he says, laughing. Jim has a gift for turning everything into a joke, even bad news. “But I think it’s some zeitgeist thing about how there seem to be a lot of tall female celebrities around now. Call People. They’ll give you the scoop.” I try probing a little deeper, but the only other fact Jim can tell me about my tall women story is that People magazine has decided to devote the entire cover of their next issue to the subject. Since People and Dateline have a new exclusive deal to coproduce stories together, this means that I—all hugely pregnant, swollen, five-two, of me—will have four days to shoot, write and cut a ten-minute spot celebrating everything I am not and do not believe in, not to mention having to live with myself and my feminist guilt afterwards. As if short girls all over America don’t already have a thousand other reasons to feel inadequate. “Oh, and it better be good, ’cause Andy’ll be watching. He wants these People stories to, you know, spice up the show.”
Andy is Andy Lack, president of NBC News.
“You mean Andy wants to see tits and ass,” I say. I sit down, search around for my notebook and pen. “Tall tits and tall ass.” I’m not naïve. I understand a network’s need to garner rating points. Each rating point translates into higher ad rates, which, in turn, allows our parent company, GE, to pay all of our salaries, keep us on the air and turn a handsome profit.
Jim, ever the smooth office politician, chokes back a giggle. “Honey, those are your words, not mine.”
I turn to a fresh page in my notebook and scribble, Tall Women. Then I underline it. Twice. So, I think, it’s come to this.
I reach Paul at his office, tell him he needs to get home to relieve the baby-sitter. Then I call Jacob to hear his spunky voice, to tell him I love him and to try to explain to him about the candles. “Sorry, Jakey, we’ll light them tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay,” he says. Then he starts to cry.
Then I call one of the reporters at People to find out her specific angle on the subject of tall women, but she is curt and rushed, in the way even nice people get when it’s Friday evening and they just want to go home. “Beats me,” she says. “Far as I know, it’s just an excuse to put Carolyn Bessette Kennedy on the cover.”
Great, I think. There’s no way the publicity-shy new Mrs. JFK Junior will ever speak to People or to me. Nor, I soon learn, will Brooke Shields or Uma Thurman or Gina Davis or Tyra Banks or any of the other dozen or so tall female celebrities whose PR representatives I am able to reach or leave sheepish messages for that Friday evening (“Hi, uh, yes, um, I’m calling from Dateline, and, uh, we’d like your client to speak with us on the topic of being tall. . . .”).
The only female celebrity who agrees to do an interview about her tallness on such short notice is Daisy Fuentes, who says she’s happy to have the publicity on account of her new calendar, the one with the photographs of her semiclad. So that Monday, with my pregnant belly bulging underneath the tent I’m currently using as a dress, I get to spend the entire morning listening to the long and leggy Revlon model/ex-VJ/actress/calendar pin-up girl rant about the tremendous suffering she endured growing up so horribly tall, thin and beautiful. Then, ignoring my increasingly frequent and uncomfortable Braxton-Hicks contractions, I stay up all night writing the script.
When I arrive home very late the following evening, Jacob is already asleep. The next morning, toddling around in his pajamas, he sulks and ignores me. “Mommy at work,” he says, echoing his father. “Mommy no come home.”
“Just don’t tell him Mommy is crashing a story on tall, naked celebrities so Andy Lack can jack up his Nielsen ratings,” I say to Paul, as I rush out the door once again. “It might be hard for any kid to forgive that.”
The next day, with Michael Jackson’s impending fatherhood dominating the celebrity headlines, People decides to shelve their cover story on tall women for a later date. Which means all of the insane hours I spent ignoring my own impending motherhood were for naught.
A few weeks later, now thirty-five weeks pregnant, stressed out and exhausted, I’m putting the finishing touches on yet another similarly insipid, celebrity-driven story assignment when I suddenly go into preterm labor. The story’s about the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, which seemed to embarrass Mr. Bacon during his interview as much as it embarrassed me to produce it, but while I’m lying in the maternity ward of New York Hospital, surrounded by worried nurses fluttering about and monitoring my contractions—watching them drop from four minutes apart to three to two (“Come on! Where’s the doctor! We need to get her on terbutaline or she’s gonna have this baby tonight!”)—I can’t help thinking about a silly thing Kevin told me off camera.
“I’m a father first, an actor second,” he’d said, amongst other surprisingly sane nuggets of familial wisdom. So as I’m watching the painful contractions peak and valley on the graph paper sliding through the monitor attached by a wire to my belly, worrying about the lack of surfactant on my daughter’s immature lungs, holding Paul’s hand and trying not to cry, all I can think about is when will it be my turn to say the same thing? When will I be able to say I’m a mother first, a journalist second? That is, if I can even call what I’ve been doing journalism.
My obstetrician finally arrives, after rushing to the hospital in her sparkly black cocktail dress from a party my emergency at the hospital has interrupted. She is livid, but not about missing her party. “What have they been doing to you at work?” she asks wearily, as if she’s seen this kind of thing one too many times before. “I just don’t get it. Why don’t these companies understand that a woman
in her third trimester cannot be treated like a mule. That’s it,” she says. “You’re staying in bed until this baby is ready to come out.”
Strong prescription drugs and modified bed rest will keep my daughter in utero for another two weeks, just long enough to make sure her lungs will be functional at birth. It’s becoming more and more clear to me that one needn’t go to war to risk the life of an unborn child. Any asinine story with a strict deadline or a strenuous job with long, irreducible hours will suffice.
Sasha Rachel Pavlovna Kogan arrived three weeks early, minuscule, but thank God healthy in March 1997. She was an easy baby, my little gift, with tiny, delicate fingers that, the moment I saw them, made me think of a line from e. e. cummings: nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.
“WAIT A MINUTE,” I say to Paul, pointing at the television screen. “That’s Jacques. And there’s that guy from Sipa. Nicolas, I think. What the . . . they’re being carted off to jail!” It’s Labor Day weekend, 1997. I’m still on maternity leave with Sasha. It’s after midnight, but Paul and I are awake and sitting in the living room of my parents’ house in Bethany Beach, Delaware, glued to CNN. Princess Diana has apparently been killed in a car crash with her lover Dodi El-Fayed, son of Harrod’s owner, Mohammed El-Fayed. CNN keeps cutting back to footage of my former photojournalist colleagues sitting in the back of a police van, all of them under arrest and under suspicion of having caused the accident.
“How weird,” Paul says.
“Poor Jacques,” I say.
I call Marion, who’s now working for Paris Match, at her apartment in Paris. It’s the wee hours of the morning for her, but it sounds as if she’s been up all night. I ask her what she’s heard. “Oh, Debs, it’s just horrible. They have Langevin. And all the others.”
I spent some time with Jacques Langevin, a well-respected war photographer known best for his Tiananmen pictures, when we were in Bucharest together covering the elections. He is a decent man, modest and intelligent, definitely not your typical, in-the-face paparazzi photographer. His arrest as a homicidal menace makes no sense.
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