by Anna Monardo
Up through a manhole cover, steam rose. “I think I’d like to go away,” she said, “by myself.”
He paused. Then paused some more. “Well,” he finally said. “Okay, if that’s what you want.”
“We’re going to have to let everyone know we’re not doing Christmas Eve at the loft this year.”
“Or New Year’s Eve supper?” he asked.
“Right, or New Year’s Eve supper.”
“Okay,” Christopher agreed.
“What will you do?” Nora asked him.
“I’ll find something,” he said.
LATER, as she lay sleepless in the bedroom, she heard him on the phone in the living room. Dialing lots of numbers, using his calling card. Nyack. She heard him ask, “Everything okay? No change?” She heard, “Early train in the morning.” She heard, “Take care. Call me if there’s a problem.”
An overnight problem for a house-remodeling job?
After a while, Christopher came and stood at the door of the bedroom. “You’re awake. I can tell,” he said. And Nora could tell he was standing in the doorway with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, looking down at the floor. He said, “About Christmas. I wanted to say it myself, but you were the brave one to say it first.”
“So you want it separate, too?” Nora asked, and she felt shaky with sadness and had to work to stay very still underneath the comforter.
“Yeah, I do want it separate. This year I do.”
He came to the bed, lay down next to her; they turned to each other, and for the first time all night they hugged. Once that familiar world of body, scent, touch was created, Nora’s emotions changed course abruptly. “I’m scared, Christopher,” she whispered into his salty neck. “I’m so scared.”
“Me, too, Nora. Me, too.”
The next morning, he left before her alarm went off at seven o’clock. Without waking Nora, he had packed a duffel bag. When he bent to kiss her, she woke slightly. More asleep than awake, she barely saw him leaving the bedroom, wearing his big down jacket, carrying his bag full of clothes.
LATER THAT MORNING, after her ten-fifteen appointment, Nora found a message from Abe on the machine in her office. He was free Thursday night, and, yes, he wanted to go with her to see Babette’s Feast. Nora and Abe hadn’t slept together yet. She hadn’t brought him into the loft yet ( just the thought still made her squeamish), but the relationship seemed to her to be progressing favorably.
EVERY DAY, Nora dressed thinking of Abe. Shopping or cooking or washing dishes, she thought of him. Thinking of him, she showered. At her office, in between appointments, she replayed his telephone messages.
Wednesday evening, with less than twenty-four hours until she saw Abe again, Nora decided to go through her closet and drawers to finally switch her warm-weather and cold-weather clothes. With Christopher no longer straightening out the bedroom, Nora was having troubles in the morning finding something to wear.
Also, a lot of her clothes no longer fit.
By now Nora understood that her eating was out of control, and that the body she had had—and been envied for—was gone.
She loaded the CD player with a Billie Holiday CD Mary had given them for Christmas the year before, and two Bonnie Raitt albums. She turned the volume up and started clearing out the farthest end of her closet, where she found a half-dozen pairs of rumpled black pants on the floor, including size-two jeans. The only pants on the floor that still fit were polyester, and Nora had no idea how they had arrived in her closet.
Nora forced herself to try on every item hanging there. Anything that no longer fit (hardly anything fit, just a few elastic-waistband silk skirts and the long tunics that went with them) she folded into black plastic garbage bags to give to the cancer thrift shop. In a shopping bag she stacked four long wool skinny skirts and two cropped sweaters to give to Natassia. Then Nora hauled all the bags across the loft and into Christopher’s studio.
It was past midnight when she finished her work. Miraculously, she’d worked for hours without eating a thing. She rewarded herself with a very full glass of Chardonnay, an expensive bottle Christopher had stored high on a top shelf of the kitchen, probably saving it for Christmas. Wrapped in the robe Kevin had given her, she sat in the corner of the couch, her perch, her safe spot, and wrote in her journal, I am eating large quantities of food, and the eating is changing my body.
Just this afternoon, her pregnant patient, the single woman who had decided to keep her baby, had stood to show Nora the outfit she intended to wear to disguise her pregnancy at her family’s annual holiday party. “My parents are getting older. I don’t want them worrying any sooner than they have to. My brothers, too.” She stood sideways, her long, flowing jacket hanging gently over her flowing pants; a bright-patterned scarf draped over the jacket diverted the eye from the woman’s waist. She was six months pregnant now, having successfully distanced herself from the baby’s father, who’d lost interest in the baby when his wife began talking about divorce. The mother-to-be was now using her sessions to prepare for single motherhood. “This doesn’t look pregnant, does it?”
“It’s a very nice outfit,” Nora said.
“Yeah, I got the layering idea from you.” The woman sat down again, looked at Nora for a long beat of silence, until she finally said, “Would it be okay if I asked you a question about yourself? Yes? Well, I’m wondering, are you, by chance, pregnant?”
Maybe, in gaining so much weight, Nora was testing herself, “trying on” pregnancy—so she could then reject it? Whatever her body was trying to accomplish, it certainly was forcing the question Are you pregnant? Perhaps a more useful question was Are you going to have a baby? As in Ever? Sitting on the couch, Nora asked herself out loud, “Am I ever going to have a child of my own?” Christopher had forced that question for so long, maybe Nora was finally giving herself a chance to—literally—hold the question within her body. Or maybe she was just dissing him: Here, you want pregnant, I’ll give you a pregnant wife, fat and thick and hungry for junk food.
THE NEXT NIGHT, as Nora and Abe were leaving the theater, there was a lot to say about Babette’s Feast, but he interrupted himself and said, “You really need to see the view from this place I’m staying in. You can see the river.” I’d be a fool, Nora thought, to say no. As they walked from the Village all the way up to Gramercy Park, the blocks passed quickly. Nora was trying to avoid stepping into puddles; Abe walked right through them in his thick-soled boots. Animated, talking all over each other, they listed the scenes they’d liked best, the shots they’d admired. And then they were standing in front of an elegant doorman building and Abe was saying, “This is it. Come on, I’ll make some tea.”
When they got upstairs, it wasn’t just an apartment, it was a penthouse, with a terrace and lots of fancy landscaping. “How do you know these people?” she asked him.
“Don’t ask,” he told her. He was digging around in a tall walnut bookcase. “Do you really want tea? I just found some nice Scotch here.”
“We can’t drink their Scotch.”
“Yeah, we can. I’ll replace it before I leave.”
About a week earlier, in a restaurant, Nora had begun to tell Abe a little of the truth of her marriage, that she and her husband were living different lives, and so it only made sense now to fill him in on what she and Christopher had decided on Tuesday night about spending the holidays apart.
“So you’re separated?” he asked.
“Not in any official way,” Nora said, “but, well—”
“But if he knew you were here with me now, it wouldn’t be completely cool, would it?” They were sitting on the floor in front of a gas fireplace. Abe was fingering the bands on the fourth finger of Nora’s left hand. “Is something here a wedding ring?”
“One is. Lots of them aren’t,” Nora said. “The wedding ring is the smallest one.”
Abe gently left Nora’s hand in her lap and, leaning against the far end of the couch, began to talk about his Ava.
They were still seeing each other, though she wasn’t very happy with him. Next, Abe brought up another woman, a political scientist who was in Prague on a Fulbright. All his romances involve women with high-profile careers. Out in this new world, away from Christopher, Nora was being forced to deal with a lot of successful women. She didn’t like that.
But Nora put in her time, listened, because, as he talked, Abe was doing things all over her with his eyes. When Nora yawned and stretched out on the rug just under a skylight, Abe followed her. He lay on his side next to her, leaning on his elbow, looking at her, not touching, but it was like being touched. She ached.
And, eventually, Abe got to the unhappy part of the story about his romance with the woman in Prague: she had begun to feel he was using her and her life to provide details for the characters of his novel. “She understood zilch about the creative process, nothing about intuition. It was all empirical knowledge with her. I hate it when you come up against the limits of an intelligent woman’s intelligence.”
How about an intelligent man’s limits? But by now Abe was leaning over her, saying, “At least with you, you get it about people. You’re willing to host the chaos.”
Yeah?
Abe continued, “You’re not reductive, you’re not simplistic. You got the stomach for contradiction.” He brushed his lips against hers. “Ambivalence.” And there was a kiss, and then deeper kisses, then Nora’s shirt unbuttoned, and then Abe was pulling away, saying, “But you’re married,” and he stopped.
No! Come back!
By now it was close to midnight. Nora was lying on the rug, watching Abe sit up, grimace with an ache in his back. She loved the cigarette taste Abe’s kisses had left in her mouth. He was sitting a bit away now, but she could reach him with her foot. As he yawned and stretched, she ran her toes up his side and under his arm.
“Don’t,” he said, grabbing her wool-socked foot.
“Why?”
He tried to tell her it was a guy thing, he didn’t believe in poaching on another guy’s wife. She listened. And then they were kissing again, his big left hand cupping her breast, enjoying the size of it. He didn’t mind her new thickness, she could tell. To him, it wasn’t new. It was her—Nora now. I’m not the Nora that Christopher fell in love with. With this thought, she felt very free. Abe was fingering her nipple. “Then what do you call this,” Nora whispered, smiling, “what you’re doing? This isn’t poaching?” Abe liked that. He growled and squeezed her breast and kissed her neck. She remembered, from her teenage dating life, that if she intended to go home, now would be a good time to quit.
Abe took Nora downstairs to get a cab. They stood out in front of his building, kissing and groping as taxi after taxi passed them.
A FEW DAYS LATER, Abe wanted to go to the movies again. Cinema Paradiso. His body and his tongue and his mouth—Nora had thought about nothing else since the evening at Gramercy Park. But when she greeted him in front of the theater with a quick kiss, Abe was withdrawn, unresponsive.
The movie alternately enthralled him and repulsed him (“sentimental nonsense”), and he held Nora’s hand limply. Finally, they were back at the penthouse, under the skylight, Scotch in hand. Nora hadn’t worn a bra, and she’d worn new lace underpants, but Abe discovered none of that. He lay beside her, not looking at her, not doing what he was able to do to her with his eyes. He treated her like a friend, talking about the movie, talking, talking. He was rereading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and he talked about how sexy the book was. He was thinking of having a character in his novel be a therapist, and he asked all about her training. The evening was going nowhere, and eventually Nora feel asleep.
AT SOME POINT he had covered her with a blanket, put a pillow under her head; the next morning, that’s how she found herself. And walking toward her with a mug of coffee was Abe, his hair already tied back and his eyeglasses on.
“Good,” she said, sipping from some stranger’s mug.
“There’s nothing to eat,” he told her.
“That’s okay,” she said, and, oddly, the thought came to her that he still hadn’t asked her why her hair was all white.
Abe sat in the low chair close to where Nora lay on the floor. She could look up the loose legs of his boxers. She saw his leg hair thicken. The plaid cotton bulge of his groin—and she had an erotic jolt so potent she reached out and wrapped her hand around his ankle, pulled herself up. Then she did what she would have done with her husband. By the time she thought about it, she was already doing it, running her hands up Abe’s legs. She felt unbearable desire for Abe’s newness, and also for the familiar touch of male skin. She hadn’t made love in two and a half months. Nora knew herself well enough to know she wasn’t going to stop what she was feeling and doing.
She was rubbing up his legs. Her face went to his lap, and she breathed lightly on the inside of his thigh. Breathed lightly, then brushed there with her lips, a lick. His thigh. Licked his knee, the other knee. He wouldn’t let her linger long there, he pulled her up and kissed her face. Her hand went inside his shorts; everything was loose, and both her hands held him, rubbing him up and down. Abe was lifting off Nora’s sweater, but she wasn’t paying attention. He lifted her, but now she was urgent, she climbed onto his lap.
Still in her jeans, she straddled him, felt him through the jeans. Her breasts were in his mouth, his face in her chest, his hands rubbing her back. She arched; her eyes, when they opened, looked up at a skylight. “Too much,” she murmured, but she was already coming, pushing and pushing against him. While her back arched, his big hands cupped her armpits. “Come on, baby,” he whispered. Big bouquets of orgasm were rising up and breaking into shouts, and he rubbed his hands into the backside of her jeans. He was still hard and she was still rubbing, and the second orgasm surprised them both. She was calling out again. He leaned her down onto the carpet and let her slide him out of his underwear, off with his T-shirt. “Your body,” she whispered. He was so much of everything Christopher was not. Kind of sloppy, a bit of a hairy paunch, a deeper scent, firmer hands. Calmer. Not so eager, a bit detached. Christopher’s immersion in Nora when they made love was complete, deep; but this, with Abe—
Abe never came. When he was naked, Nora touched him, wrapped her hand around him, but he began to fade from her, and she was aware of how thick her waist was, how heavy her thighs. “That was great,” she told him, “what you did to me.”
“You needed that,” he told her gently.
“I needed that,” she echoed in a whisper. He had let her have her utter pleasure, without taking any for himself. It wasn’t until later in the day, when she was sitting in a session struggling to listen to a patient, that the thought crossed Nora’s mind that maybe Abe wasn’t all that attracted to her.
TWO DAYS LATER, at home, while she was emptying the dishwasher from a week’s worth of dishes, another thought occurred to Nora. If she’d been with Christopher and fallen asleep on the floor, he never would have let her spend the whole night down there, the way Abe did. Christopher would have done something—lifted her and carried her if he had to—to make sure she spent the night in a comfortable bed.
But then she forgot about all that. She had to get ready quickly to get to the restaurant on time to meet Abe.
CHAPTER 22 :
DECEMBER
1989
What if I hadn’t made it on time? Christopher was standing in the operating room watching Denise, who was lying on the operating table. The attending physician was the one doctor Denise had hoped would not deliver the baby, but that’s who was on call, Dr. Baerent, who had just announced, “I’m doing a cesarean.”
It was five o’clock in the afternoon, Wednesday, December 6, ten days before Denise’s due date. Earlier, when Christopher had arrived in Nyack, Denise was in excruciating pain, back-to-back contractions that lasted a long time. Then she began to bleed. Christopher immediately called the doctor’s office and rushed Denise to the hospital, and there was Dr. Baerent, waiting. She
examined Denise and said it seemed the baby had somehow turned and put his little hand through the amniotic sac. On the external heart monitors, both the baby’s and Denise’s heart rates were lowering. And the next thing Christopher knew, a nurse was shaving Denise’s pubic hair to prepare her for surgery. A couple weeks earlier, Denise had told Christopher she’d read that the shaving wasn’t necessary for delivery and she didn’t want it done, but when they started shaving, Denise said nothing.
“Okay, Denise,” the nurse said, “now I’m inserting a catheter into the urethra to empty your bladder.”
“Can’t she just…” Christopher heard his voice sounding as afraid as a boy’s. Calm down, he told himself. “Couldn’t she make it into the bathroom? Or get a bedpan?”
“Too late, honey,” another nurse told him. “From now on, we’ll need her as still as possible. Hear me, Denise?” This nurse was inserting an IV needle into the top of Denise’s right hand. Christopher watched the nurse tape the tube down and then cover Denise’s hand with a white fishnet glove, which looked like a Michael Jackson accessory and gave Christopher the creeps.
He had studied photographs of these procedures. He’d even done drawings for an article in a paramedics’ newsletter on how to insert an IV needle, but now, watching, Christopher felt a humming shock.
For the past two months, Denise had been practicing her breathing with Christopher and with friends of hers who had planned to be in the birthing room during the delivery. Now no one was focusing on Denise’s breathing; they were all busy with tubes. None of Denise’s support group was here, just him.
A tiny red alarm buzzed on the IV pole. “What?” Christopher demanded, too loudly, and Denise echoed, “What?”
“Hey, calm down, you two. What, you never had a baby before? My little IV soldier here isn’t cooperating.” The nurse pushed buttons, patted Denise’s arm. “Not to worry.”
It got worse. Christopher was watching them begin to attach the internal fetal monitor. “How will that monitor find the baby’s heartbeat?”