by Anna Monardo
The first few times he’d made this speech, he had actually succeeded in getting her to cry. Now, after hearing it so often, she sat and stared just over his head, sickened by the sound of him. Finally, she told him, as she’d told him before, “I can’t do it. I don’t feel enough trust in our relationship. I can’t ignore what I feel.”
“You have to make a decision, Nora.”
“I have made a decision, honey. I love you and I want us to work through this. I know you feel an emptiness because we haven’t had a child yet, and I’m very sorry you feel that. I think I would love to have a baby, but before I can begin to talk about that, I need for us to talk about what happened with Natassia and see you take responsibility for that, and for what’s happening now.”
Another scornful burst from his tight lips. “You think you would like to have a baby. You think. Want to mince up your words any more?” For a long minute, his eyes went up and down between her feet and her face. “You made a mess of yourself,” he said, “in case you didn’t notice.”
She looked to where he was looking. Her crotch. Her gray sweatpants were blackened with blood. “I forgot to change my Tampax. I don’t have any more, either. I have to go to the drugstore.”
“So you’re ending the conversation like that? Nail me to the cross and walk away.”
“I’ll be glad to talk more later, not now. Maybe tonight.” She stood and saw that she’d dripped blood onto the rug and the floor. Her periods were never like this, never this heavy.
“I just want to tell you one more thing.”
“Christopher, I have to go to the drugstore, unless you’ll offer to go for me.”
“What you still haven’t figured out yet is that your psychoanalysis doesn’t explain everything. My God, Nora, have a little forgiveness.”
She looked straight at him. Standing, they were eye to eye. “Christopher, I do forgive you. I forgave you thirteen years ago, when I married you. You know that. But we’re talking about a young girl who’s in trouble, and what I can’t forgive is your insistence that it has nothing to do with you. And I can’t forgive your insisting that I’m the one keeping us from having a baby. I would love to talk about babies, I’ll talk about babies all you want, but not until I can trust you to be a father. I just don’t have that faith in you. And why do you force me to spell this out again and again? Why won’t—”
“You. You’re tired? I’m tired of my sisters’ making me an uncle.”
“I’ve asked you to end this right now. I’m tired, and I’m bleeding.”
“And I want a kid of my own,” he screamed.
So she screamed back, “Just to play baby bingo with your sisters? A nice life to propagate. Contribute to the Kansas City Mafia.”
And then he laughed at her, laughed in the most evil way, as if it satisfied him to see her pushed so far into ugliness. He turned to leave the bathroom but stopped and looked back at her from the door. “You’re not going to the drugstore like that, are you? In those sweatpants you’re big as a cow.”
Nora said nothing. And they both knew that during the next days, maybe a week or more, she would continue to say nothing. It was her way of fighting. “WASP artillery,” Christopher called it. Another of his inaccuracies. Nora’s background was Irish Catholic, not WASP. What Christopher was right about was this: She was a master of angry silence. Absolute, wordless silence.
CHAPTER 12 :
SEPTEMBER
1989
AND THE YEAR BEFORE
Christopher felt that slimy relief as soon as the metal door of their building slammed shut behind him and he walked out into the street. Fucking bitch, he thought. She never lets up. She was going to push and push until he lost it completely. As if he needed this now. Sometimes he thought he should just tell Nora what was going on, but that would be a one-way ticket to divorce court, no turning back from there.
She wasn’t even supposed to be home at this time. He’d been planning to spend the afternoon alone at the loft. He needed to use the phone to figure things out with the medical insurance and the bank. He had so much on him these days. He didn’t know how much more he could take. He had to hurry up, get stuff done. There wasn’t a lot of time.
He turned onto Second Street and headed toward Avenue A. When he reached the avenue, the place was there, just like Denise had said it would be. Christopher walked in.
“Hi there. Help you?” a blonde asked. It was always the girls walking up to him in stores. Why couldn’t he get some guy to wait on him, somebody who just wanted to get business done?
“I need a stroller,” Christopher said, looking beyond the girl’s face. “For a baby.”
“Cool. Come on back here with me, this way.” Brushing through a narrow aisle of high chairs, she asked, “For a toddler or infant?”
“What?”
“How old is the baby you’re buying the stroller for?”
“Not born yet.”
“Okay. A newborn.”
For fifteen minutes, the blonde showed him strollers. One faced a baby backward. Three faced the baby forward. Some lifted, some detached. Italian strollers, Swiss strollers. The clunky GM-type that Denise had told him to buy was the ugliest, but that’s how she did things, based on Consumer Reports.
But that wasn’t how he did things. “That Italian one, the three-hundred-dollar one, that has the smoothest lines. I like the chrome wheels. I’ll take that one.”
“Awesome choice.” As the blonde led Christopher up to the cash register, her long black skirt clung and showed no underwear lines. Her Doc Martens looked tacky with the skirt. She looked back at him over her shoulder. “You’re decisive, aren’t you?”
He lifted his eyebrows, didn’t answer her.
While he opened his wallet and pulled out cash, she tried to get information from him. “First baby?” He answered again with eyebrows only. “Your wife not interested in seeing this first?”
“It’s a gift.”
“Oh. Great.”
Palming the wad of money, Christopher had felt good, responsible; handing it over, he felt like a fool. He might never even see the baby who’d be riding around in this stroller. Just pay, he told himself, and shut up.
The blonde pushed a big chunk of her hair away from her face. “And we’re sending this to where?”
“Nyack. To Denise Wojciekowski. W-O-J—Here, I’ll write it.” He took the delivery order sheet from her, also the pen from her hand.
“Enclosing a gift card?”
“No, it’s my sister. She’ll know it’s from me.”
OUT ON THE STREET, Christopher found a pay phone—it seemed all he did these days was look for pay phones—and dialed the number in Nyack for Denise Wojciekowski, who was not his sister.
“Hey, it’s me,” he said after her grunted hello. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. Nothing great, but okay.”
“Okay is good, Denise. Hold on to okay. Listen, I just bought a stroller. I went to that place you said. On Avenue A. It should get to you in a couple of days.”
“It’d better not be big. Where’m I supposed to put it?”
“I made room in the garage until I get those bookshelves out of your hallway. Do not try to move anything, you hear me? Denise, you hear me?”
“Relax. I’m not moving anything. I can barely move myself.”
“He’s kicking?” he asked.
“He’s nonstop.”
“Ten more weeks, he’ll be kicking you from the outside.”
“I’ll kick him back,” Denise said. “Listen, you sound tired.”
“Yeah. We had a fight. She flipped again.”
Silence, then Denise said, “This is all costing you, isn’t it?”
“Not your problem, Denise. Nora and I will manage. Listen, Friday I’m coming up there to put that crib together. Do you need anything from down here?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“How’s the work? Are you writing?”
“S
till on the same chapter.”
“Are you eating okay and all?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“See you Friday, Denise.”
She hung up, as always, without a goodbye.
Just my luck, Christopher thought, to be married to one bitch, and having a baby with another.
DENISE’S PLAN had been in place for nearly a year now, and still, sometimes, just walking down the street going about his business, waiting on line to pay for his groceries or to buy subway tokens, Christopher was astonished by the thought: Baby. He could hardly believe he’d had the nerve to try to become part of Denise’s plan; he absolutely could not believe that the plan seemed to be working. In the early stages, it had been all exaggerated guy pride, and he’d gone around thinking, My baby, my baby. Lately, though, since he’d been spending more time in Nyack at Denise’s, he’d begun to see the reality of baby: day-care interviews, pediatrician interviews, and every day the outpour of money, money, money. Christopher was driven through his days 99 percent by fear.
Thank God that Denise seemed to know exactly what she was doing.
CHRISTOPHER HAD FIRST HEARD about Denise Wojciekowski and her plan a year earlier, October 1988, while he was having a beer with his friend Piper, another painter. They had just been to the New York Film Festival and were sitting at the bar of the Saloon restaurant, across from Lincoln Center. Christopher hadn’t even wanted to go out that night, not after the fight he and Nora had had that afternoon, but he wasn’t going to let film-festival tickets go to waste. So, when Nora had issued her definitive I’m not going, Christopher had called Piper, for no other reason than that the film was French and Piper spoke French. “Nora’s sick. Are you free tonight?” Miracle of miracles, Piper had a free night. That was the random beginning of Christopher’s involvement in Denise Wojciekowski’s plan to have a baby.
The Saloon was crowded, and it took a while for Christopher and Piper to gather two stools together at the far end of the bar. They signaled the bartender to give them whatever he had on tap. The film they had seen was 36 Fillette. “Good movie,” Piper said.
“I didn’t like it. Pernicious adolescent girl.”
Piper looked at Christopher and asked, “You mean promiscuous?”
“I don’t know, just watching her screw around kind of made me sick.”
“Paying together or separate?” the bartender asked.
“Together,” Piper said. “My treat,” he told Christopher.
“Thanks, Piper.”
“No problem, my man. Thank you.” They clicked their glasses together. “Cheers.”
“Yeah, cheers.” Christopher took a long drink of his beer. He turned on his stool and rested with his back against the bar, facing the crowds filling up the tables. He scowled. “The film tickets were part of an early birthday gift for Nora that I got to surprise her.”
“And here you are, stuck with me. You’re making me feel guilty.”
“You’re not guilty. She just—I’m just glad the tickets didn’t go to waste.” Christopher avoided Piper’s eyes and shrugged.
“And she’s sick with what? Flu? Lady troubles?” Piper asked.
Christopher, for a moment, considered telling Piper the truth, telling him about the fight, how Nora had flipped that morning when she’d read a review in the paper about the film Christopher had got tickets for. “Christopher, this movie is about an adolescent girl who comes on to an older man. Are you taunting me with this? What’s going on?”
“Nora, you said you’re homesick for France. I just got tickets because the movie’s French. I didn’t even look what it’s about.”
“You won’t go to therapy with me to talk about these issues, but you got—”
It was that word “issues” that had made Christopher pop a cork. But when she side-swiped him like that—all he was trying to do was give her a nice surprise, and according to her, he was being bad. Thoughtless, she said, insensitive. Taunting! When she sideswiped, he couldn’t stop himself, and when he started it was nearly impossible—it was completely impossible—for him to stop. “Fuck you, Nora,” he had yelled, “I’m telling you, don’t you get started, don’t you—”
It went on, got worse; she locked herself into the bedroom. All he wanted to do was explain himself, but he knocked on the glass door too hard, and a small pane shattered, then another one. He cut a finger and got blood on the dhurrie rug.
“Yeah,” he now told Piper, “a lady thing. Last-minute. Don’t feel guilty.”
“Christopher, my man, just for the record, in case you don’t know it, we are, all of us, every single one of us, as men, we’re guilty of something when it comes to the women. That’s just how that particular cookie crumbles, man, no way around that. Maybe you can’t figure out what you’re doing wrong while you’re doing it—or even after you did it, not even when she’s trying to spell it all out to you real slow, because of the dummy that you are—but if you’re a man and you’re dealing with a woman, chances are you are now doing or you just have done or you are just about to do something wrong, quite wrong, which makes you”—Piper held out his hand to present the word—“guilty.”
Christopher looked at his friend. Even now, ten years into this friendship, Christopher had to pay extra attention to follow Piper in conversation. Smart, funny guy. Piper had a nice dark globe of a head, close-cropped fuzz of hair. What Christopher envied was Piper’s style. The guy never had money but always dressed nice, never a painter-slob. Tonight: ironed dark shirt, black trousers, leather belt, suede tie-up shoes. Italians were supposed to have so much fashion sense, but blacks beat Italians on that any day.
“And you know what?” Piper continued. “I think they’re right, the women. We’re jackasses. All we really want is, we want to play. The girls, they like to play, too, don’t get me wrong, but the women, they got this whole inner-body thing going, like a little ocean inside every one of them. Tides coming in and out, with all this erosion going on, and we’re like shameless, irresponsible morons trying to ride the waves.”
“Men have erosion, too, you know.”
“I know we do. I know it.” As Piper spoke, there were his hands to watch—fingers and pink palms always moving, shaping the air. “But, basically, what I’m saying to you, Christopher, is that between women and men there exists an unholy alliance. By their thirties, like the age of our wives, man, it’s a lie for anybody to think that the woman’s main tie is with her man. Hell, no. Her tie is with her body, that’s her A-number-one information center.”
“Nora used to do the aerobics thing. She was in great shape. But she doesn’t even bother anymore.”
“No, no, no. You’re being too literal. Not the body shape, not the external body, which is the man’s preoccupation. The inner body is where the woman lives. Those famous cycles we hear so much about. Those eggs riding in and out every month. Counting days off, taking the temps, trying to be alert for this and that. Meanwhile, all we want to do is shoot our wad. Bless the women, is what I say.”
They laughed. A waitress glided by on roller skates. Christopher said, “What I love is, I love a woman’s feet.”
“The feet, yeah, the feet are good. I had an uncle told me, years ago, I was a little kid, he said to me, ‘Pierre, you want to know about a woman, hold her foot. Is it smashed down, rough, showing she got no time to take care of herself? ’Cause, if she not taking care of her own self, she won’t be interested in taking any kind of good care of you.”
“Micaela? Nice feet?”
“Beautiful, like a young girl’s. She’s a nurse, you know, and they wear those padded shoes. She works hard, but she knows how to take care of herself, my wife. Speaking of who, I better go call and check in.” Piper slid off his bar stool—talking, Piper seemed so much taller than he did standing up—and went to find the pay phone.
Christopher, watching the waitress on roller skates, wished he could call Nora, say something sweet, and hear her say, “Come home, I’m in bed waiting for you,
I love you.” Would be even nicer to hear, “Sorry I made you upset today.” But that wasn’t going to happen. She was convinced she had a case against him. He had no clue. He never did.
Piper, back from the phone, spun around on his bar stool and ordered another round. “I’m in good shape. She wants me to stay out late so I’ll owe her a full night out.”
“You and Micaela,” Christopher said, “you really figured out how to get along.”
“It’s survival. With four kids, we’d be eaten alive if we presented a weak front. They’d demolish us. The problem with you and your wife,” Piper said, “because—I hope you’ll forgive me for being presumptuous here—I do have the sense there is some kind of a problem in your paradise, the problem is you have too much closeness. Too much intimacy. You need to have kids to create distance between you.”
Christopher smirked and reached for his glass of beer. “She says we’re not ready for kids.”
“I’m not kidding. You need to create obstacles. If you want to save your marriage, man, that’s what you have to do.”
Christopher asked Piper, “You’re totally into your wife, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Piper said, and winced. “Seventeen years and I still haven’t reached the point I’m bored or I want someone else.”
“You don’t lust for other women?”
“What is it, Chris? You lusting? Nora paling on you?”
“Nora? No way, I don’t want anyone but Nora, but I keep feeling, like, I don’t know.” Then Christopher told Piper what he’d never told anyone: “We fight all the time.”
“That happens.”