by Anna Monardo
CHAPTER 40 :
APRIL
1990
As soon as they had left the therapy session, Christopher could tell he was going to be sick, so he had asked Nora to drive. She hated driving into the city. He was letting her down. Again. One more small way. But he had to ask her. “I’m sorry, Nor. I can’t drive.”
“All right,” she’d said in that way that meant it wasn’t all right at all. “I’ll drive.” They were now about twenty miles north of the city, and he had just asked Nora to pull over. As soon as the car came to a stop, he leaned out the open window and vomited all over the outside of the passenger door. Holding on to the top of the lowered window, he felt like an animal in a bad zoo: unkempt, barely fed or watered, caged into a small space.
Nora was gawking. “God, are you all right?”
“No.” And he chucked up another block of decomposed food. His innards felt like a freeze-dried pack of coffee that had just been punctured, so the air loosened up and sent things rolling.
“Here. Here, take this.” Nora was shoving a bunch of Kleenex onto his lap.
Finally, he stopped retching. He wiped off his mouth and his chin, and sat back in his seat with his head against the headrest. “Thank you.” Trucks were speeding past, lifting dirt, forcing Christopher to close his eyes tightly. He turned away from the traffic and looked out his window down at the gravel roadside, grateful for its stillness. It seemed that a long time passed. “You want a divorce from me, don’t you?” he asked. She said nothing. “Are you going to say something, Nora?” Nothing. He said, “Divorce. Say it.”
“I’m sorry,” she told him, “that Ross said those things to you. I knew it would get ugly, but I never expected that.”
“That? Shit, it was a relief. I always knew what he thought of me. I never imagined that’s what David thought. Did you know? Did you ever think?”
“It’s always been pretty clear to me that both David and Lotte were completely nuts. And, no, I don’t know that I want a divorce. It’s really not what I want.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
Forsythia were blooming. The weekend before, in Nyack, Christopher and Denise had taken pictures of Donby outside, in his little bouncy chair, in front of a blazing wall of forsythia in Denise’s backyard. Husband Don had planted a whole row of bushes, to ease Denise’s end-of-winter despair. He’d also planted patches of crocuses everywhere for her. Now, out here where Christopher and Nora were stopped on the roadside, there were beer cans and a dented, empty turpentine can and a dirty Kotex and a dirty diaper and a clump of clothes-dryer lint that was a startled shade of turquoise. I wonder if I’ll ever paint again.
He said, “I keep seeing Natassia sitting there this morning, like—God, I see her, you know, trying so hard to make something reasonable with her father, who’s such—He’s a sick person, Nora. Did we ever realize that about him?”
“Actually,” Nora said, “I was impressed with Natassia.” She began to say more, then stopped herself. But then she did say more, very quietly. “I was, maybe, a little jealous.”
“Jealous?” Christopher said. “Jesus.”
“Natassia’s still young and she’s getting the chance—it’s rare, you know—to see clearly what went wrong in her childhood. She’s got time on her side. She’s got her parents there, willing to help. Well, Mary is—”
“Ross, God—”
“Yeah, I know. But even that is good, for Natassia to see how Ross is, to see what he’s obviously not capable of, what he can’t give her.”
“Did you see her letting him sit her on his lap, like now he’s really going to take care of his little girl? That made me…I almost cried right then. She’s so fucking smart, but this thing about her father, she can’t see it.”
Nora’s profile was serious, quiet, her forehead wrinkled in concentration. He hated that she was so much smarter than he was. “Yes,” she said, “it was sad. Even in the middle of Ross’s acting out, Natassia couldn’t stop wanting more from him.” Nora stayed focused on some idea in front of her. “What was amazing, though, was how visible it was, right there in front of us, tangible. You could just see how incredibly impossible it is for the child not to love the parent. And how painful to hold that kind of love inside you. How much energy spent trying to change it, change it, get it right. But you can’t change it, ever. So you end up either acting out your anger and your disappointment, or directing it at yourself and becoming self-destructive, like Natassia was last fall, or you lie to yourself and say nothing’s wrong and become a false person.”
Christopher pushed in the cigarette lighter. They both waited for it to pop. “You’re a good psychologist,” Christopher said.
“It’s not because I’m a psychologist, it’s because I’ve done all those things myself. Natassia reminds me of me.”
“You’re not like that.”
“Like what?”
“Unhinged. God, what a dog-and-pony show up there this morning. I just keep seeing Natassia, all dressed up in black like some little hip bohemian beatnik, and this helpless baby-kid look on her face, sucking her thumb.”
“Two thumbs.”
“Did you see that? And Mary, just sitting there, like some kind of trailer-park mother who’s lost her teeth and can’t say a thing. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m saying.”
Christopher opened the glove compartment, closed it. Why do people buy American cars when they could buy something nice and attractive?
“Well, how did you think the meeting would go? What did you expect from it?” Nora asked.
“I don’t know. I thought I’d say my bit, you’d say yours, then the police would come in.” Christopher looked over, but Nora wasn’t smiling. “I just keep seeing Natassia, and then I keep seeing the baby’s face.” Christopher decided just to go for it, say the name. “Donby’s face. He’s got all this strength in his hands. He’s only, what, eighteen and a half weeks old”—Nora was letting him continue talking—“and he can put the squeeze on my fingers; Donby squeezes my nose until I’m, like, Hey, okay, baby. He can make this little fist—I’m sorry, Nora, you don’t want to hear it.” Haggard, she looked haggard. She’d lost some weight lately, but that wasn’t helping her looks at all. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
“I’m listening,” Nora said.
Christopher noticed that she was. She was staring into the rearview mirror, looking for what might come up from behind, but she was listening to him talk about Donby. “He’s one strong baby. And I can’t keep from thinking, if anybody did—tried to do to him—what, you know, I did…to Natassia…Jesus, Nora, why didn’t she push me away? Why does she let? I’m sorry, this isn’t nice and correct, what I’m saying, but—”
“She was six weeks old, Christopher. She trusted you. For several days you consistently fed her. You cleaned her and held her and sang to her. She got used to your smells and sounds and touch. She trusted.”
“She trusted me,” Christopher said disdainfully. “That baby was dumb to trust me. She trusted me, and I went and—If some asshole did stuff to Donby like that…”
“What would Donby do?” Nora asked. Christopher couldn’t believe he was hearing Nora say the name. With no hate in her voice. Donby.
“I’d have to kill anybody who hurt him.”
“What would Donby do if someone he’s around all the time, who takes good care of him, suddenly did something…that was, well, not so good?”
“He trusts me, and he trusts his mother. He trusts her friend Carole. She’s like his grandmother. He’s starting to like the nanny a lot. But he doesn’t really like it if anybody else tries to pick him up.”
Inside the car, all was quiet; outside was traffic.
Nora said, “It sounds as if he’s developed a healthy attachment to his mother, and to you. All that sounds good.”
“You think?” Christopher couldn’t hide his eagerness to hear anything she’d tell him. When it came to his son, Christopher
was shameless. “Am I doing good enough?”
“Sounds like,” Nora reassured him.
This conversation was so much like the way he and Nora used to talk when they lay next to each other in the dark, in bed, talking without looking at each other. He wanted so much to reach over and hold on to her hand. “He’s attached, but, Jesus…”
“What?” Nora asked.
“Nora, I’m in way over my head. I let this baby be born into a real mess of a situation. My baby’s mother. Denise. Her name’s Denise Wojciekowski. Nora, she’s alcoholic. Poor Donby has an alcoholic mother, and he’s got me for a father, and I’m just a part-time father and a full-time fuckup. What’s going to happen to that boy? Is he going to end up like Natassia? What if it ends up like that?”
“What do you mean, she’s alcoholic?” Nora was finally looking at him.
“She doesn’t drink. She quit. But still.”
“Did you know? Did you know when you agreed to father her child?”
“I knew. Yeah, I knew, but I didn’t know what that meant. Recovered alcoholic. I figured the problem’s done.”
“Hardly.”
“Fucking-A. And, you know, I did it for all the wrong reasons. I did it to get back at you. It just seemed so clean.”
Christopher felt as close to Nora now as he ever had. She was like a settled pond right next to him. Unrippled until he tossed a stone. Waiting patiently for him to toss any stone, big or small, and then she’d ride out all the ripples. Wife. He had never felt more grateful to anyone for anything than he was grateful now to Nora for letting him say Donby and Denise and alcoholic. Now, he wanted to say scared.
“Maybe that’s the worst you can do to a person,” he said, just to say something. “Make them think you’re good, then you turn bad on them. Like me with Natassia.”
A cop car pulled up behind the Tempo. The cop came over. “Trouble here?” he asked. “Driver’s license, registration, please.”
Nora was quickly groping around in her big purse for the rental-car papers and her wallet, and Christopher leaned over and told the cop, “I’m HIV and I just started a new medication and I’m not doing too well with it. I had to throw up.”
The policeman stepped away from the car, looked over Nora’s license, handed everything back to her. “Well, feel better. Drive carefully.” He returned to his squad car.
“Why’d you say that to him?” Nora asked. “HIV? What were you doing?”
“Did you want me to tell the truth? Fifteen years ago, Officer, I molested a baby, and now her father wants to tear my skin off.”
Nora laughed.
“What?”
“That thing Ross said to you, about cocksuckers in jail dripping with…Oh dear, I wonder what Heather’s going to do about him.”
“Do you think she’s any good? Heather, as a therapist?”
“We’ll find out.” Nora made a move to turn the ignition key. “Are you feeling better? Can we go on now?”
“Why was it so hard for me to listen to you, Nora? All those years, you tried to talk to me about all this stuff, and I wouldn’t do it.”
Nora’s profile was close enough to kiss. Christopher was so grateful to find he still felt desire for her.
“Can you listen now?” she asked him, taking her hand away from the ignition.
“I don’t know, Nora. I want to, I want to a lot, but, to tell you the truth, I don’t know. I feel like a person who just woke up and lived their whole life wrong. You could find somebody else, Nora. You could.”
“Yeah, I know,” Nora said. “I could.”
He looked out the window, away from her. “Have you?”
“No.” She paused. He knew there was more, and then she said, “I thought maybe I had. But, no, I haven’t.”
“Was it—Never mind.”
“Even if I had found someone, even if I do, I’d still need you to listen to me tell you what I need to tell you.”
“I just can’t stand to hear some of the stuff. I can’t stand to see you so unhappy.”
“Well, you’ve got to get over that, because I am unhappy. I have a lot of reasons to be unhappy, from way before you met me.”
“Yeah, the house fire. I don’t think I ever—”
“The fire, yes,” Nora said, “but there were problems in my family way before the fire. That’s what I’m up against now. Issues I’d have to deal with even if my parents were still alive.” She turned to look at him. “You say you love me completely, but you’ve always rejected my unhappiness, and that makes me feel—I don’t know—left behind.”
“You’re right, Nora. I don’t like your unhappiness.”
They both stared ahead. This was what he’d been told to do, talk straight flat-out truth to his wife. For a month now, he’d been part of a men’s counseling group in Nyack. A domestic-abuse group. He’d almost flipped when the counselor had suggested it. Christopher had gone there to see about their sex-offenders’ group—he really did want to do right by Donby, make sure he really was okay to be a father—but they screened him out of that—Do you rage at your wife? Throw things?—and steered him into this group of domestic-violence offenders. Christopher had serious doubts about the whole deal. How could anything good come of telling bad stuff to the woman you loved, stuff that would for sure hurt her? But the counselors and the guys in the group who’d marinated in recovery for a while kept saying stuff like, And you don’t think it hurts your wife when you keep big secrets from her? Or when you blow up at her?
So Christopher told Nora now, in a voice as calm as he could make it, “It’s an aesthetic problem.” Nora looked at him; he could read the questions on her face. “Your unhappiness. In such a beautiful, beautiful woman as you.” He grabbed her arm. “You’re stunning, do you know that? Do you know how stunning you are? But it’s always sort of offended me, aesthetics-wise, how unhappy you get.”
“Fuck you, Christopher,” she said, but in the mildest way. “Your grammar mistakes offend my aesthetics.” Then she utterly surprised him by turning her face in to his shoulder, resting her head there. Her cedary hair-smell came up into his face, and he wanted to cry. Despite his vomit stink, she’d come close to him.
“You snob,” he whispered, and kissed her hair once, then twice more.
“You smell like throw-up,” she whispered back. She turned up her face. They still couldn’t kiss, not on the mouth, but their cheeks rubbed together. “You smell like Candice’s babies,” Nora said. Christopher raised a hand and held her white head close. They stayed that way a long time. Then another cop drove by, slowed, went on.
“We should get going,” Nora whispered.
“You want me to drive now?”
“No. I can do it.” She started up the Tempo, shifted into DRIVE, then stopped.
“What?” he asked.
“Can you?” She shifted back into PARK. “Show me pictures of Donby. Show me. I’d like to see.” She pulled the emergency brake on. “Especially his ears.” Her voice slipped. She was trying hard to make it light, but Christopher saw Nora’s fingers shaking as he put a photo in her hand. She started to cry.
“Oh, Nor. Oh, Jesus.”
“I practiced asking for this, and looking at it, but I didn’t think it would feel like this to actually see him.”
“Feel like what? What, sweetie?”
“Frightening. He’s really beautiful.”
“Don’t be scared, Nor. There’s nothing to be scared—”
“He’s beautiful,” Nora repeated, “and he’s yours.” There wasn’t a thing Christopher could say. “And he’s not mine,” Nora said. “You did this with someone else.”
Every angry answer caught in Christopher’s throat. What the hell does she want from me? Then he closed his lips together, sealed them with two fingertips, exhaled through his nose. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten. “Yes, I did that. And you got hurt. And I’m sorry.” One two three four— “Nora, please. Don’t leave me. Don’t. Even if you left—Jesus, I
’ll never stop being married to you.”
“So what you want is for me to make room in our marriage for your child.”
“Yes,” Christopher told Nora.
“I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Can you try? Nora?”
Nora told him, “I’m going to try.”
CHAPTER 41 :
APRIL
1990
The morning after the meeting with Heather, Mary was in the dance studio rehearsing the solo she was scheduled to perform in May at a show in Albany. A year earlier, in that other life she used to live, she’d agreed to perform with her company at a memorial performance in honor of the company’s founder. Mary would be in two ensemble pieces, and then she’d do the solo she’d performed most of the years she toured. It was the solo that was killing her now. Eight counts in the middle of the dance, a quick run of turns interspersed with lightning-fast footwork that she just was not getting right. Mary was feeling her age. She’d left Natassia in the cottage doing equations for an upcoming calculus test. The kid had recently started talking about wanting to become a pharmacist. How convenient that would be for Ross, Mary thought. She couldn’t remember when she’d been this angry at Ross. That nightmare therapy session. What she wanted more than anything was to call and scream and scream and scream at him.
But at least Mary could leave Natassia in the cottage now. She was studying with a friend. Mary felt sure Natassia wouldn’t perform any acts of violence against herself, not with exams so close. Mary rehearsed for two hours that morning. Eventually, she came to the conclusion that it was going to be impossible to get that string of turns and footwork as quick-quick as when she’d been at the height of her performance career. She made peace with that by cutting out one turn and two counts of footwork. And still, at each transition, each pivot into a new direction, there was a brief lag, a reluctance that, try as she might, she could not compensate for. She did the only thing she could—she incorporated the lag into her dance.
Six weeks later, after her performance in Albany, a reviewer would write: