Molly was waiting on the couch when I came in. I sat down next to her. My body was oily with perspiration, and I was coated with black soil.
“Thank you,” she finally said, her voice expressionless, a dead weight.
“I tried to say a prayer,” I confessed, my voice splintering. “I tried . . . but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how.”
I began crying and Molly reached for my hand.
“Seth, I know you watch me from the bedroom window. Did you realize that?”
I said I didn’t and apologized if it bothered her.
“I can’t say it bothers me. I just find it strange, like you’re watching yourself have a relationship with me. I’ve had that feeling since the very beginning of our relationship. You’re here, but you’re not really here. I need more than that, Seth. I know you love me, but I need someone who is fully present, someone who is in the relationship and not just watching it.”
“I’ll do better,” I said. “I promise.”
MOLLY AND I WERE MARRIED ON MAY 15, 1988. As she had hoped, the apple trees were blooming with white petals; the day was so clear that we could see the arrowhead summit of Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire on the horizon. We didn’t hire Lydia Cartwright-Preston to officiate, not wanting any reminders of that dreadful day. I had discovered that just about anybody can get licensed to perform weddings in Massachusetts, and so we were married by Mara. She had been right about her tenure— any chance she had disappeared once she was pregnant and gave birth. She was still married to her husband, Jonah, though not very happily, and was spending her days at home caring for her son, Eli, and attending rabbinical classes part-time at Hebrew College in Newton. Mara draped a tallis over her shoulders, bobby-pinned a yarmulke to the top of her head, and, under a purple velvet chuppah embroidered with doves and held up by Molly’s cousins, she performed a service she had written for us. She read some scripture and poetry, told stories about Molly and me that were both hilarious and moving, and then pronounced her final benediction on us: “There is no such thing as absolute time. Our lives on earth go by in a blink of the eye. But what is time when you share your life with the person you love? May the next fifty years for Molly and Seth be an eternity of love and joy.”
Molly and I spent our wedding night at the Charles Hotel. The next day we were going to Ireland for three weeks. We hadn’t had sex since her miscarriage. In the days immediately afterward, Molly had fallen into a depression so deep and paralyzing that she couldn’t get out of bed for many days. Her cousins came over to help attend to her, staying around the clock, sleeping on the couches and the floor of the living room. Her aunt and uncle visited every day. I felt displaced, reminded that all these Quinns were her real family. Molly and I were alone only at night. She lay in a fetal position on her side of the bed, books, magazines, boxes of Kleenex between us. She shuddered if I tried to touch her.
By March I had resumed holding her in my arms every night. I wanted to believe that sleeping next to each other for as many hours as possible would heal us. I wanted to believe that the invisible ether that passed between our pores during the night would restore our love. One night in early April I put my hand on her breast and pressed into her backside. She didn’t say no, but she didn’t respond.
“It’s been a long time,” I said.
“I know,” she replied, “and you’ve been very patient with me. You’ve been very kind, Seth.”
“It’s all I know how to do.”
She squeezed my hand.
“So, is that a no?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, it’s a no?”
“I just can’t, Seth. I’m not ready.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “That’s fine.”
“I know it’s strange, but I want to wait until our wedding night,” she said.
“No, I understand,” I said. “Like a new beginning. Like doing things in the right order this time.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Something like that.” “We can pretend we’re virgins,” I said.
ON OUR WEDDING NIGHT, WE kissed and fondled awkwardly. When I was stiff, Molly lowered herself on top of me. She could see in my eyes that I was wondering about contraception; her own eyes filled with tears. “I want to try again,” she said. “I want to get pregnant tonight.” She rode me with a feral energy, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, her face contorted with pain and rapture, as if trying to outrace the ebbing of blood in my penis, or out-race death. I kept my eyes wide open, feeling mystified and oddly moved, as if I were watching her act out a feverish dream.
Over the next three weeks, we fucked in bed and breakfasts across Ireland, from Dingle to Dublin. We fucked on hillsides, the ground spongy beneath us, and inside ruined abbeys. But her period still came on schedule. I heard her crying behind the bathroom door a couple of days after we had returned. When she came out, her eyes were red. I put my arms around her and said, “I guess we’ll just have to keep having sex.” She smiled wanly, as if that was the last thing she wanted to do.
All throughout the summer we made love every night, and each month I would know her period had come when I heard her crying in the bathroom. For twenty years, except for those three months when she was pregnant, her period had come as regularly as the sunrise, a reminder that she was capable of bearing children. But now, no matter how many times we made love, we couldn’t stop the bleeding.
BY NOVEMBER, WE HAD STOPPED going to bed at the same time. Sex had become joyless, a chore. It numbed our hearts, turned our bodies against each other. Molly had started staying late at the office again, usually not coming home until long after I had eaten and was in my study grading papers and preparing for class. She would help herself to leftovers and read the newspaper at the table. Lying awake and alone at night, I would calculate the number of times we’d had intercourse since our marriage in May. Approximately twenty-seven times a month for six months: one hundred and sixty-two times. I recalled facts from the pregnancy books I had read: A man typically ejaculates three hundred million sperm during intercourse, but the sperm’s four-inch trip up the fallopian tubes is so perilous that only a handful survive. One book I read had compared the odds to those of a person attempting to swim across the Pacific. In a period of six months, I had sent more than forty-eight billion of my sperm jetting blindly through Molly’s reproductive tract, but not one had survived the journey.
FOR CHRISTMAS, WE DECORATED A TREE together, as we had the year before, but Christmas morning we drove to her aunt and uncle’s house to exchange presents there, hiding from each other in the capacious embrace of her extended family. Molly went to midnight Mass with her relatives, and every Sunday after Christmas she continued going to church.
“Does this mean you believe in God now?” I asked her one day as we were driving to her aunt and uncle’s for Sunday dinner. Molly no longer held my hand under the table.
“I don’t know,” she said, looking out the window at the ugly winter landscape, the snowdrifts blackened by car exhaust.
“About God . . . or about us?”
It was the first time either of us had brought up the state of our marriage.
“Both,” she replied after a pause.
“Molly, what’s happened to us?”
“I don’t think you really wanted to get married. The only reason you proposed was because you knocked me up.”
“Molly! That’s not fair!”
“Seth, watch out!” she exclaimed as I nearly plowed into the car in front of me going through the rotary.
“Actually,” I said, “I had planned to propose on Thanksgiving night last year. I was all set to pop the question, and then you told me about how my mother said you should get pregnant so I would have to marry you. It ruined the moment.”
“You had plenty of time to propose after Thanksgiving. You can’t go through life blaming everything on your mother.”
“I was ready! I wanted to marry you before you were pregnant. I was less than five seconds away from proposing
to you before you told me about your conversation with my mother!”
“So what are you saying? That things would be different if you had beat me to the punch that night and proposed?”
“Maybe.”
“Seth, you couldn’t even tell me why you loved me in that minister’s office.”
“How about the time we watched The Searchers and I told you that you completed me, that you turned me into a whole person? You said that was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever said to you.”
“You planned to say that in advance; I could tell.”
“So? I still meant it.”
Molly started crying. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but every time my period comes I feel the loss of our baby all over again.”
We had arrived at John and Jean’s house. I turned the motor off, but we remained in the car, our breath gradually fogging over the windows.
“I know,” I finally said. “I know. I feel like we’ve had to begin our marriage with a death in the family.” But it wasn’t just the death of our baby; I felt her dead parents in bed with us too, as if all that fucking was an attempt to resurrect them.
Molly’s gloved hand reached for my gloved hand. “Yes, that’s how I feel too.”
“Maybe we ought to put the idea of a baby on hold,” I said.
“I’m thirty-five, Seth. I don’t have time to put a baby on hold, especially if I’ve already had one miscarriage.”
“But look what it’s doing to us!”
She began crying again.
The day after her miscarriage, we had gone to her doctor, who had told us that Molly’s age, thirty-five, was probably a factor. Chromosomal abnormalities become more common with age, she had explained. “Yes, we both know that, but does this mean we keep trying?” I had asked. “That’s your decision,” the doctor had replied.
“I just mean,” I continued, “that we became pregnant when we weren’t trying. Maybe if we stop hoping you’ll get pregnant, it might just happen.” But hearing my own words, I knew how impossible that was.
She glared at me. “Are you saying I just need to relax?”
“No—I don’t know . . . I don’t know what I’m saying.”
DURING THE SUNDAY HOURS WHEN Molly was at church, I visited Mara. My name was still on the mailbox by the front door, since I was illegally subletting my rent-controlled apartment.
As Mara let me in the weekend after my argument with Molly, she held a crying, bucking toddler. I sat at her kitchen table, which was covered with open notebooks containing the hieroglyphics of her profession. Despite the fact that she had been denied tenure and was studying to become a rabbi, she still spent hours a day writing out complex and beautiful formulas about time and space.
“Go ahead. I’m paying attention,” she said, as she set her son, Eli, still crying, down in a playpen and studied her notebooks. She knew I wanted to talk about Molly.
“Mara, I think Molly is returning to the church,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Because she goes to church every Sunday.”
“Well, then, I would say you’re right.”
“It feels like a rejection of me.”
“I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. She’s going through a difficult time, and she’s looking for solace, for something to believe in.”
“But I’m not much of a believer.”
“So? Neither is Jonah.”
“Yes, and look at how wonderful your marriage is.”
Mara’s eyes widened with hurt.
“Oh, Mara, I’m sorry. I really am.”
“Well, it’s not exactly a state secret.”
“Do you know if anyone in his lab is working on a cure for foot-in-mouth disease?”
She laughed a little.
“This morning I found this on Molly’s night table,” I said and showed her a card with an image of Jesus on one side. On the other side was written:
May the Sacred Heart of Jesus be Adored, Glorified, Loved, & Preserved throughout the world, now & forever. Sacred Heart of Jesus, please pray for me. Saint Jude, Worker of Miracles, please pray for me. Saint Jude, Helper of the Hopeless, please pray for me. Amen.
“It’s a novena,” Mara said.
“A what?”
“A novena. A prayer of petition.”
“I wonder if I’m one of the Hopeless she’s praying for.”
“Seth, Molly’s going through a hard time. You need to have faith in your marriage.”
“Did you know that a man ejaculates an average of three hundred million sperm into a woman’s reproductive tract? But the sperm’s four-inch journey up the fallopian tubes is so hazardous that the chances at survival are similar to the odds of someone attempting to swim across the Pacific.”
“No, I didn’t know any of that. But it’s very interesting. Thanks for telling me.”
“Faith isn’t one of my strong points. I feel that Molly and I are facing similar odds.”
“But women become pregnant all the time despite the odds. Life is random and mysterious, Seth. It’s not about playing the odds.”
“I guess not.”
“Think of it this way,” she said. “Imagine a bucket in the middle of a huge, empty swimming pool. The pool begins to fill with water, but the bucket remains empty. You keep wondering when the bucket is going to become full, because it’s taking forever for the water to rise. But you just need to remind yourself that at some point it’s going to happen; you just don’t know when. That’s what faith is like. Someday your bucket is going to be full. You just have to have faith and patience.”
I looked down at the table so that she wouldn’t see how moved I was.
“You know,” I said, “I think you’re going to be very successful in the rabbi business.”
The next night, I waited until Molly came home so that we could have dinner together. Afterward, I told her that I had something for her and handed her an envelope. Inside was a postcard of Croagh Patrick.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Turn it over,” I urged. On the back I had written out a novena:
Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us! O sweet Virgin Mary. Amen.
“Oh, Seth, thank you. This is beautiful.”
“It’s a Novena for Impossible Requests,” I explained.
“I know.”
She appeared both touched and embarrassed, and in her expression—and in my gesture—I recognized how distant we had become, how I would have said anything, attestested to any belief, to become close to her again.
“What’s your impossible request?” she asked.
“That we can be as happy as we were before we wanted a baby and still have a baby.”
“That’s pretty impossible.”
“Molly, I know I’m not a religious person, but I’ve been thinking a lot about faith. I think it’s like looking at a bucket in the middle of a huge, empty swimming pool. The pool begins to fill with water but the bucket remains empty. You keep wondering when the bucket is going to become full, but you just need to remind yourself that it’s going to happen.”
Her eyes welled up.
“Someday our bucket is going to be full again, Molly. I know it is.”
She held me tightly. “Oh, Seth, sweetie, I hope so too.”
That night we went to bed at the same time. We held and kissed each other cautiously. I moved her nightgown up and kissed her belly, then her panties. She arched her hips so I could remove them and I felt the coarse spring of her pubic hair against my lips. Tracing my tongue over her complex inner terrain, I imagined that I was sending her a message in Braille, my own prayer of petition: Stay with me. Stay with me. I looked up to see if she had placed her hands over her face in a posture of prayer, but she put them along the side of my head, pul
ling me up. “Love me, Seth. Love me,” she said.
The next month her period came again.
ON THE MORNING of our first wedding anniversary, Molly and I were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, reading the paper, when I turned to the obituary page and let out a cry.
“Oh, my God! I don’t believe this.”
Molly came out from behind the business page. “What? What is it, Seth?”
“Hortense died.”
“Who?”
“Hortense. My cruel stepmother.”
“No!”
“Yes!” I replied, and showed her the obituary of the woman who had been married to my father for more than twenty-five years. I had always hoped Hortense would die before my father, but I had never really expected it to happen. At that point in my life, I was shocked when anything I hoped for actually came true.
Molly retreated back behind the business page.
“It says she died after a long illness,” I said. “Do you think that means cancer?”
“Probably. . . . Why is her obituary in The New York Times anyway?”
“She was a coauthor on most of my father’s papers.”
“Seth, why do you read the obituary page so carefully every morning?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Most people read the sports page first, or the op-ed page, but you immediately turn to the obituaries.”
“Are you saying I’m gay?”
She snorted with disgust and returned to the paper.
“Do you think I ought to send my father a note of condolence?”
She looked up and regarded me with a modicum of sympathy. “What do you hope to get out of it?” she asked.
“Nothing. I just think it might be a nice thing to do.”
“Seth, you always have a motive.”
A Stranger on the Planet Page 18