by Thea Goodman
“Yes,” he answered, he did want the wine list, but then he added, “We’ll get this one,” pointing to a Sancerre.
“So should I leave the place setting, sir?”
“Yes. She’ll be here in a minute.” When the waiter left, he shoveled his food as the baby batted at the plate, intrigued by the grains of jasmine rice that clung to her fingers.
Feeling conspicuous, he asked a busboy if he could wrap up the remainder to go. The busboy anxiously conferred with some senior person, and the two looked at John with unmasked derision. A meal was to be savored, not gobbled and carried away in haste. When had he last eaten without Veronica? It felt strange. And they never went out to dinner. They’d have to do that soon.
When the steaming sack arrived back at the table, he reattached the baby and headed for the lobby. “Is there a business center? A computer I can use?” he asked at the desk. Several slow minutes later, a lanky woman emerged and led him to a very chilly room with three ancient Dells. Each dusty mouse sat on a real linen doily, which completely prevented its ability to roll. He sat down, removed the doily, and opened his email. It had felt right to come here. He brushed some lint off the screen, considering what to say, then wrote a note to Art. He would preempt Joss Saperstein and Adele and tell Art in confidence. It had happened, the way an accident happens, but he had also done it. Done something. Art was more adventurous than he was. Art would appreciate it. The trip had exuberance in it, a sharp break from the quotidian. It had bravado but it was harmless. He paced the room, waiting to see if Art would send a response. After a few minutes, he heard the ping, ran to the terminal, and found the familiar subject heading: PENIS ENLARGEMENT!
He stared at the screen for a long moment, willing Art to reply, while Clara began to whimper. It was way past her bedtime; he couldn’t wait much longer. He leaned forward and logged out.
In their room, he closed the door and sighed. Nothing but the Sapersteins was wrong; he’d leave the next day so he wouldn’t have to worry about running into them. He ate the okra stew on the bed. Clara played with the dolphin in curry, okra with spices, tomato and shredded coconut. Veronica was testing food with the baby, giving her one taste of something at a time—bananas for three days straight to see if there was a reaction. He didn’t even know if they’d graduated beyond bananas. Now Clara had licked about ten new things at once. Hoping there’d be no ill effect, John gulped his wine.
Despite the run-in, he couldn’t remember a meal this good. He offered Clara the bottle of cow’s milk he’d gotten at dinner. She drank it as readily as she did her weird goat concoction. He was amazed at how easy caring for her could be when he was not constantly subject to Veronica’s restrictions.
He picked up the hotel phone to call her. It was seven P.M.; no doubt she was home from work, anxious about where they were. The dial tone was loud, an anachronism in his ear. But his cell would be useless; frugality had prevented him from ever buying a global calling plan. There was a certain period of time where he could “roam” before he’d become officially out of range. He held the receiver, listening to the ringing phone, while a small but distinct hollow, the emptiness of the bereft, opened like a bubble between his lungs. Where was she?
The answering machine picked up. Shock at her absence was followed quickly by relief. He listened to the outgoing message with both of their voices and a gurgling little laugh from Clara in the background. They’d made the phone message in the fall on a monumental Sunday, the second time they’d had sex since the birth. Clara had fallen into a long nap, and Veronica was trying to take her own when John approached her. Afterward, Veronica wriggled free to go get the baby, who was “actually alive!” she’d said. She’d been nude as she held the baby and spoke into the machine. He’d always liked that message, how happy they seemed: the high-pitched cheer of Veronica’s voice and that paternal deepening in his own while Clara cooed in the background. The message, the whole family, sounded perfect.
Art had once spoken of “hetero-hegemony,” how “whole sections of Manhattan, once gripped by something artistic or political,” were now in the throes of this instead. “Everyone’s a goddamn breeder,” he’d said. The four of them were in a bar downtown, and Ines had recently suffered her first miscarriage.
“Is this your way of comforting me, Art? I mean, we’re trying. We are trying to breed here. That’s the goal,” Ines had said. Veronica had sipped her ginger ale, placing a gentle hand on her friend’s shoulder. John admired and slightly envied their closeness. Ines had turned to Veronica, laughing. “Can you believe him?” John had felt a guilty but distinct satisfaction: Veronica was pregnant.
John was so moved by the sound of the message, the sound of their nuclear happiness, that he didn’t flinch when her cell also went straight to voice mail. He spoke into the receiver in a voice full of warmth and distracted optimism. He didn’t feel that he was being at all deceptive.
“Hey, Veronica,” he began cheerfully, “hope you had a good day. We missed you this afternoon, but I thought it would be good for you to get over your cold. My mom was hot to see the baby, so we’re in Irvington.” He paused as the lie took hold. It was plausible. Months ago, when Veronica was recovering, he’d taken the baby there on several Saturdays just for the day. It was right up the Hudson, less than an hour away. He wasn’t contrite but almost proud of the story’s seamless feasibility, and stopped to admire it. “We’re going to spend the night. Don’t bother coming up. You’ve been sick and everything, and we’ll probably go through some of my dad’s stuff. The baby’s been going down easily these days, and my mom has that Pack ’n Play we can set up. Feel better—Clara, want to say hi to Mama?” Clara breathed heavily into the receiver. John reveled in this bit of authenticity, as if Clara’s breath were proof that everything was absolutely normal. “Okay, we’ll talk to you tomorrow when we figure out our train thing.”
A moment later he saw a message from Veronica on his cellphone—apparently it was working—and listened to it. She was going out with Ines. Perfect. She wouldn’t miss them for this one night.
Clara did go to bed easily with John holding her, a bottle tight in her hands and mouth, something Veronica never allowed. Certain books said you could not cuddle them to sleep. “They have to learn, like we all do, to self-soothe,” Veronica had parroted. “Otherwise, the baby will wake up expecting to be cuddled throughout the night.”
“Is there anything wrong with that? To expect to be held when you’re a baby? If not then, when?” he’d once asked Veronica.
So John held Clara. They slept. When she stirred, he placed a big gentle hand on her belly and she was instantly quiet, her kinetic legs, her mobile face, magically stilled. Her belly rose and fell as she breathed, her tiny ribs articulated beneath his palm. The trials of the day were behind him, she was fed, bathed and he felt the satisfaction of having worked hard, possibly harder than he ever had before. He kissed the globe of her pink cheek with a mixture of gratitude (she was doing fine) and exhaustion, as a tear slid down his cheek.
He didn’t know why he was crying or even the last time he had cried. It was near midnight. Nothing was wrong. His breath was calm, composed. Everything was right. The ancient music, the warmth of that yellow cab in the snow this morning, had worked like a time machine. He’d stumbled upon an open door and walked through it. He was in Barbados. The sound of the ocean soothed him. The breeze was balmy but cooler and swept through the glass louvers like a condoning hand. The Caribbean was paradise.
4
Friday
Veronica
Gliding uptown after morning rush hour, she saw the snow packed tight to the gutters, as if cleared for her. The cab sped through an unbroken chain of green lights. Despite the cold, Veronica—slightly claustrophobic in cabs—cracked both windows, savoring the chill on her face. It was disorienting, even thrilling, to be so late for work.
She pulled out her phone to look for a message from John, but there was none. She wondered if he was angry about
something. Ordinarily he called back.
The extra sleep made the office, near Bryant Park, welcoming. The checked floors and frosted-glass doors made her a forties’ movie star, a “career girl,” with adventure awaiting. She could smell coffee, paper, and Alex’s piney cologne. Alex, their twenty-six-year-old assistant, had a prominent Adam’s apple and warm green eyes. His hair was a perpetually golden spot of sun. “Veronica!” he said. “We’ve missed you.”
“I had a doctor’s appointment this morning,” she said, amazed that her cold was nearly gone.
Alex stood there, looking into her face for a beat too long. “Everything all right?”
“Fine,” she said, as he followed her into her office with a sheaf of phone messages from the morning.
“Farmer Mendelsohn just called from New Jersey. He wants us to come up again to talk.”
“Great. Did you look at the schedule?” she said with a flicker of anticipation. Mendelsohn—tall and commanding—was a raw-dairy farmer from Austria. He’d married an American, who’d conveniently inherited acres of rolling farmland that was perfect for a certain type of cow. Mendelsohn’s cheese was delicious, his kitchen a bohemian paradise. The school board would never approve of disseminating his raw cheese, but Veronica was working on him, trying to get him to make a pasteurized version.
John had approved of her dairy swoon. “It’s good to see you enjoying something again,” he’d said one night at dinner.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just good, you loving artisanal cheese.”
“What about loving Herr Mendelsohn?” Art had piped in, whereupon John and Art had begun a German-accented discussion of the merits of raw milk. The beauty of the live enzymes.
Today she did love things again. Alex stood at the edge of her desk, staring at his laptop. “I have the train schedule here, or we could get a Zipcar,” he said.
“Let’s look at trains. His new hard cheeses are amazing. Murray’s is going to carry them this spring.” Thanks to work, the day remained buoyant, the antithesis of the tension that lately prevailed at home. She called the apartment just to see what was going on. No one answered. John must have been putting Clara to sleep. It was exhausting to continually monitor Clara’s day from a distance. After, this was what being at work essentially meant—not being at home.
Everything was fine. But throughout the day she fumed each time she looked at her phone and saw that John hadn’t called. Mendelsohn was also silent, each man amplifying the absence of the other. At noon she spoke, unsatisfactorily, with Jamie, Mendelsohn’s overburdened wife.
“Al’s milking,” she told Veronica disconsolately. “I actually don’t think he can call you back today.” Jamie protected Al’s time as if he were an artist at work.
“Do you know when he can call me, Jamie? Do you think tomorrow?” She scrolled through her contacts list to see if she had a cell number for Al, if she could bypass Jamie and call him directly.
“Tomorrow one of our cows will be birthing,” Jamie said flatly.
“The school board is giving us dispensation to choose the farmers we like for Jasper. We have a deadline. It would be great if you would let Al know we called and we’re definitely interested in coming back.”
“You guys are coming back here?” Jamie was averse to business of any kind—a trait Veronica’s father had, mistakenly, assigned to her. Compared with Jamie, she was a captain of industry.
The day swirled busily around her. Hours passed in calls with Sanitation, which still hadn’t removed the empty vending machines from Jasper. She had several calls with the principal of Jasper as they tried to determine who would pay for the removal. At two o’clock she stretched, realizing she hadn’t eaten lunch. She was about to get up when a bubble floated across her screen.
HI, GORGEOUS.
The sender was Damon King. He was her last boyfriend, the boyfriend right before she’d met John a decade ago. He’d crushed her thoroughly with his erratic affection and his evasions. Damon, peripatetic but indelible. He was a talented photojournalist, so willowy he was nearly feminine, but with a rugged resemblance to Clint Eastwood. Over the years, he’d pop into town and invite her to coffee. She always agreed to meet him, as if to ascertain once and for all whether or not he’d loved her. But he was consistently so flattering that she could never be sure. Why had she needed to know? She watched the message bubble glide to the corner of her screen. By not knowing, she had her answer: He had not loved her. Still, the painful impossibility of union sustained his glamour.
As she pushed herself away from her desk, another bubble popped up.
I’M IN NY.
She hadn’t seen him in three years. At their last meeting, he’d been asking her about John’s name, if it was spelled with an h or was it “short for Jonathan,” when he’d leaned across the table and kissed her. They were at a Middle Eastern place on Avenue A, and the whole room, the green glasses and little oily plates of black olives, vanished into a timeless crevasse for a long, sea-deep moment. Opening her eyes, she realized she’d dipped her elbow in the hummus. Wiping it off furiously with a wet napkin, she felt the tidal pull, the force of his desire, and the sickening certainty of her own. She’d thrown down some bills, flown from her seat, and run all the way home, sweating by the time she reached the loft. They hadn’t spoken since.
She vowed to ignore him when another chime sounded: DINNER AT ISABELLA’S TOMORROW, he wrote. He was so confident of his power over her that he didn’t even put a question mark after his message. His huge arrogance was almost funny. He was funny. And a good kisser. She stopped. She popped his bubble with a single click and went to lunch.
* * *
By the end of the day, John still hadn’t called. What could the two of them be doing? Crawling into a tent at Paragon? Tasting samples of Spanish sherry at the new liquor store on Broadway? It infuriated her not to know. Again, she reached his voice mail.
“Hi. Where are you guys? I’m assuming you went for a walk this morning. Maybe you turned off the ringer while she napped.… Anyway, please call me. I won’t be straight home after work, if that’s all right with you. I haven’t seen Ines in ages. They’re pregnant again, so we’re sort of celebrating. Kiss Clara for me.” The phone felt hollow in her palm, eerily light; it had been too easy to free herself.
She pictured Clara rolling on the fleece rug. The baby had just started giggling too, real belly laughs that seemed to arrive at the right instant.
She examined her reflection in the mirror of a small compact she kept in her desk. From the other room, Alex saw her and quickly looked away. Her eyes were bright and clear, her lips dark even without lipstick. She dabbed a little Orgasm on her cheeks. She looked okay, and it was a shame John wouldn’t see her this way. She and Ines had always thought that if you looked all right you needed to seize the moment. (Without notice, you could look pale and ancient and rush online to research symptoms of rare illnesses.)
Looking up from her desk, she saw Alex hesitating in the vestibule, holding the elevator open for her. Everyone else had left for the day. “Are you walking to the train?” he asked with undeniable hope. She left her office and joined him. In the elevator he ventured, “You seem distracted—the cheese farmer?”
“Oh yeah! Whatever. Can you imagine being that flaky? Not calling back all day when this could be a big opportunity for him?” She wasn’t thinking of Mendelsohn but of John. They pushed through the doors to a street so dark it looked like it had never been day.
“He’s got to ditch the wife,” Alex said, trying to bond with Veronica but merely exhibiting his youth: Mendelsohn and his wife had three blond children under age four. He couldn’t simply excise his wife. She felt an affectionate impulse to shield Alex from these complications.
“Heading home?” he asked as they headed underground to the subway.
“Yup,” she lied. It would mean she could get on a different train from Alex, whose overfamiliarity was starting to feel aw
kward. “Clara’s waiting for me,” she added, and to make her goodbye final she reached up to him on tiptoe—he was quite gangly—and gave him a peck on his cheek. She felt him freeze beneath her touch and then stare at her in mute wonder as she turned and walked toward her own platform.
What was that? Something new, an aura, seemed to surround her. It went beyond the extra sleep—perhaps it was the new cocktail of pills—a blast of nerve endings opening. On the ride up to 72nd Street, she felt men stare at her and glance away. It was Friday night and the trains were packed. She could smell bodies. The tang of sweat through wool. Where was everyone going? She and John went out seldom now, and it was exciting to be alone on the train.
Walking up West End Avenue, Veronica laughed at the sudden majesty of the homey street. She’d never noticed the glamour of the art deco buildings. She was free, yet a sharp longing lingered; she hadn’t seen Clara for nearly twenty-four hours. She’d derided John for getting up to check on her, when it was actually kind of sweet. Why had she not wanted to stare at her sleeping child? Now just a glimpse of the baby would settle the fluttering in her gut.
Her phone vibrated and a message light appeared. John had called while she was on the train. She stopped walking to listen to his message.
“Hey, Veronica, hope you had a good day. We missed you this afternoon, but I thought it would be good for you to get over your cold. My mom was hot to see the baby, so we’re in Irvington.”
She paused it and replayed it from the beginning; he’d taken Clara to his mother’s a few times when she’d been recovering but never without consulting her. She listened as one would to a film in a foreign language studied long ago. He hesitated after he said the word Irvington. Then—and this was sort of unbelievable—he told her not to come.
She had to come. They were always offering each other breaks from child care, which neither person accepted. It was an unofficial rule of conduct between them. But an unplanned trip was unprecedented—he’d never done anything with the baby without first asking Veronica. “Feel better—Clara, want to say hi to Mama?” Clara panted a bit, which made Veronica smile broadly and for the moment made everything seem ordinary. “Okay, we’ll talk to you tomorrow when we figure out our train thing.”