by Thea Goodman
Odd. But perhaps it was also ideal. Her own guilt was absolved. The baby was in love with her grandmother. If they were gone, they wouldn’t miss her at home for one evening.
The wind picked up as she leaned against the building to call Irvington. A loathsome busy signal greeted her. John’s mother, Muriel, had never adapted to call-waiting. Veronica hung up and punched the call in again. She kept calling until her fingers were numb. Tears of frustration stung her eyes. A block away, she saw Ines’s warm awning. Muriel remained enchanted by a conversation with someone.
* * *
Ines answered the door, wearing a tight cobalt-blue dress. Her black hair was thicker, frizzier around her face, and the whites of her eyes shone. She looked striking but older. That was how it was these days seeing Ines, the barometer of Veronica’s own life. Ines, who had once been a teenager in a vintage dress with a creaseless marble face. They were changing.
“I thought you were Art,” Ines said, her disappointment obvious. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Are you okay?”
Ines held a piece of blue carbon paper in her hand and waved it at Veronica. “I got this weird test result. I just had it done, for the nuchal translucency, and there was something off, a number that was close to the border, they said.”
Veronica took off her black wool coat and laid it on a chair. “The border of what?”
Ines paced, her bare feet clenching the parquet floor. “The number they’re looking for. The number that’s normal. They want a two-point-oh at eleven weeks and I have a two-point-six. Art doesn’t know yet. He’s flying. He should be home any minute, though.”
Veronica followed Ines into the kitchen. “Where’d he go?” she asked.
“He’s in Des Moines, Iowa, for a happiness-studies conference.” Art, an unpublished academic, was an adjunct lecturer of anthropology for the tenth year in a row. He was not ambitious, but he was happy, and he was studying happiness.
“Des Moines? How could you be happy there?”
“Exactly. Anyway, I’m supposed to get retested on Monday. I have to wait all weekend. It’s agony.”
“It’ll be fine.” She believed it. With someone else’s trouble it was easier to believe it would be fine. “I’m so thrilled for you. Here.” Veronica unveiled a bouquet of wind-beaten red tulips, and Ines took them and started to search for a vase.
“If the result still isn’t what they want, they’ll retest again next week, just to see—” She stopped speaking and started to cry quietly into a cupped hand.
“Oh dear.” They hugged, the full length of their bodies pressed together.
“This is all really stressful,” Ines said, “it finally happening and then not knowing—” Ines was a believer in unambiguous answers, clear test results. She was the salve, the one with finite answers for Veronica’s constant wavering. Ines pulled away to gain composure. She blew her nose heartily on a dish towel. “I wish I could drink with you. Here,” she said, handing Veronica a bottle of red to open. Veronica poured a small glass and toasted Ines.
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you. I’m cautiously optimistic, but we’ll see.” Ines turned and began peeling a clove of garlic.
“Two-point-six doesn’t sound far off at all.” But Veronica knew it could be. The numbers could be dreadfully wrong. Veronica’s amniotic fluid had been too low: four-point-something when it was supposed to be at least five. Two-point-six, whatever that meant, could be terrible. “How’s Art doing? He must be ecstatic.”
Ines sat down at the table across from her. “He is—my God, he’s so happy he’s speaking with a Long Island accent! You know how he does that when he’s excited?”
“I do.” Outside, it had started to snow again. The lights of the avenue blurred in the purple evening. She wanted to fly right out into it, link arms with Ines, and go drink hot sake around the corner. “You shouldn’t cook. Let’s go out instead. It’ll be easier. What do you think?”
“It’s just that Arthur … He should be here any second, then we could leave. I need to talk to him first.”
“Call him.”
“He’s in transit. Anyway, where’s John?”
“In Irvington, with Clara, actually. He let me sleep in this morning and then left this cryptic note—I haven’t heard from them all day. I may have to go up there tomorrow.”
“How will you get Muriel to stop?” Ines said. John’s mother was a lanky former kindergarten teacher in her sixties, who “loved” public radio and always spoke to Veronica in a hushed voice of her many miscarriages between her two children. Muriel was trying to connect with Veronica, but Veronica, raised to keep her chin up, was embarrassed by her frankness.
“Usually Muriel stops talking about the trials of women of reproductive age when we focus on Clara. She’ll be so involved with the baby, it will be fine. But what’s weird is that John didn’t even talk to me about this.” Veronica pulled open the fridge and peered into it. She lifted a jar of giant capers and examined the label. For a moment she wished she’d called Adele, who was childless and always going out.
“Huh? You all right?”
“Yes. No. I’ve had this amazing energy today. I’m taking these new meds, which might be starting to work.” A new energy presided, but it was shaky, shifting. “Maybe it’s hormonal, I don’t know.… Sometimes I wish we could just disappear in the dark auditorium, watching slides of Giottos.… I just want—”
Ines smiled at the memory. Art history their freshman year. With Ines next to her in that dark room, Veronica had savored Giotto’s blues. The pigments made with egg yolk and their incredible longevity, a revolutionary nuance in expression and gesture. Ines, too, understood the miracle of those colors. They’d become art lovers together. Now they were mothers.
She felt Ines’s steady gaze, the clear, direct vision of her friend who never looked away. Damon! Adele! These undeniably exciting people who had nothing to do with her current life were populating her mind; they came like djinnis, smiling, offering. Here’s a message from the outside world, they seemed to say. There was Adele’s gallery on 25th Street and Damon in war-torn places, photographing Taliban. The world was big and affecting. Where had she been? Inside a cocoon. “See, I wish I missed John, but I don’t.” Instead, she thought of the true hurt in Damon’s gray eyes as she’d run from the café.
“You do miss him. Go to Irvington. Muriel can watch the baby, and you and John can go out on a date.”
“A date!” When she was alone with John, he often looked into her eyes with some unspoken question that she never had the answer to. She wasn’t even sure what the question was. She imagined his curly light-brown hair—cut like a benevolent Caesar—with a pang of nostalgia.
“Come, my love,” Ines said. “We’ll eat.” Ines was tossing a salad and had put on water for the pasta.
“Really, with your partner a day is not long, but with your child, you’ll see, it’s an eternity. You sort of shore yourself up when you have to be apart, steel yourself, and just get busy, but you still miss her.” How could she go on to the newly pregnant Ines about missing her child?
“Go, then,” Ines said, with a note of impatience.
“You’re probably right,” Veronica said, disturbed by John’s seeming indifference to her. At one point in their lives, each parting had been fraught. He used to run uptown to reunite with her after basketball games and would arrive panting, sweat falling in fat drops to the floor. She’d embraced him, inhaling every wet, salty pore. That desperation to connect was gone.
“Where the hell is Art? His plane was supposed to have landed by now.”
The small galley kitchen grew unbearably hot. Veronica peeled off her thin black sweater and sat down, holding the edge of the table. Her heart rate seemed to catapult ahead of her, some lone part galloping on the loose. “At the same time, while John’s gone, I want to do everything I can’t do when he’s here, like—” She paused. Whole chunks of vocabulary had been engulfed by months
of exhaustion. “Like not always reading in bed. Like saying I don’t want to read my book, I want to sleep.”
“Like fucking?” Ines said. A pan sizzled on the stove. A smell like sautéed earth filled the room. Ines’s eyes danced with mischief. She moved to get the pasta. She was a goddess with steam from the colander enveloping her in her blue dress and electric hair. Once, when they were drunk, she and Veronica had kissed. They’d been seeing these pompous men from Harvard, and it had been the most comforting and affirming kiss. A real French kiss in the bathroom of a bar in Cambridge. They’d never spoken about it, but Veronica was immune all evening as her date flirted with other women.
Sweat beaded above her lip. John’s distance pierced her.
“Well, you can’t sleep with John when he’s not here,” Ines added.
“No, I suppose that’s true,” Veronica said gravely.
“Fine, go to Irvington. Or don’t go to Irvington. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Stay in the city with me and Art.”
“Whose heart will grow fonder?” she asked.
“Well, both of your hearts, V.” In the hush of steam, high up on the seventeenth floor with the slim window view of the alleyway, they were just two women standing in a kitchen, about to eat pasta. Veronica was a tiny speck in a vast universe; she was nothing, but in a good way she had learned in college, in a class called Philosophy of Religion. You were everything to yourself, but then, when seen from a certain, non-disparaging angle, you were of equal value as an armrest, a carpet, or a plant. She was composed only of matter.
As she sat down to eat, the speck-in-the-universe feeling evaporated. She thought of Clara and the goat milk she needed to pick up on her way to Irvington. There was no way he’d brought enough. Everything was important again. Ines would know this soon, the ever-present vigilance. “So, what’s happened so far? The seven-week sono, right, and yesterday’s test…”
“It still seems distant, you know, that this will actually continue and I’ll have a baby.”
Veronica squeezed Ines’s hand, wishing she could banish her friend’s fear.
“The next test is the triple screen, then CVS or amnio,” Ines said.
“It’s a nightmare.”
“It’s not a nightmare for me. I love it. It’s like collecting peace of mind, insurance with each test. I only need the result of this one.…” Ines had become an underwriter for an insurance company. She had given up editing independent film forever for something dependable.
“And you like your OB, right?” Veronica asked. “That’s really important too.”
“I do.”
“Are you going to consider the birthing center instead of the hospital? There are so many interventions, so many unnecessary things they do to you in the hospital.”
“Unnecessary? Veronica, they saved your life. And Clara’s too. Thank God you weren’t stuck at the birthing center.”
“It’s just that at the birthing center they don’t induce.” On Veronica’s due date, nothing had happened. Her cervical dilation was zero. “There’s this chain reaction. The low amniotic fluid led to the induction with Pitocin, which led to the bleeding—” She was blathering to ecstatic Ines about her difficult labor. She had to stop herself.
“I want the epidural,” Ines snapped.
“I want you to have a better experience than I did.” She sipped her wine. “And chances are you will.” Veronica had signed and faxed all the right forms, but the doctor’s office still wouldn’t send her a copy of Clara’s birth record. There was a sequence of events she was trying to understand. She was sliding back into that story.
“It was modern medicine. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
“I keep wondering if the fluid was really that low, if some variable had changed…” She looked into her wineglass and drained it.
“You had nothing to do with what happened, and you have Clara,” Ines assured her. “I want interventions. The more medicated, the better. We’re different,” Ines said, wiping the corners of her mouth. “What’s one thing for you is another for me, and I can handle it.”
Veronica put down her fork. “You can handle it? Do you think I haven’t handled it?”
“No—only that you obsess. And you’re fine.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, choked. “I know I’ve been very preoccupied.” She had been too preoccupied to know early on about Ines’s pregnancy, too selfish to have been a confidante.
“Let’s let it go,” Ines said. They ate silently. Ines paused to check her computer. “He landed.”
“They should’ve had the conference someplace actually hedonic—just for fun. If they’re going to study happiness, they should know what it feels like.”
“They should’ve met in Barbados,” Ines said.
“Yes! I remember seeing this orchid cave there when I was ten—the most amazing natural colors. And the air. The tactile air.” She smiled, remembering John there too, on her annual family trip when they were just twenty-five, sneaking into her room with a red hibiscus, cracking open some aloe stems, and cooling her sunburned shoulders.
“At ten, did you rhapsodize about the air?”
“You know I did.” She poured herself an inch more of wine. What was life about if not pleasure? She picked an errant strand of linguine off her place mat and ate it.
“Look at you,” Ines said, gesturing to Veronica’s empty plate. It was as if they were both reminded of the sensual Veronica of before. Fleetingly, with linguine and the very word Barbados, she’d returned.
“I could murder him,” Ines said. “Look, he leaves his crackberry here on the counter. He hasn’t even been getting my emails. He lives in another century, I swear.”
* * *
In the lobby, Veronica bumped into Art coming home. Lost in thought, he brightened when he saw her.
“Art! How was the conference? Are you happy?”
“Hey!” He hugged her firmly, a liberty he took with his wife’s best friend. “I am happy, even though commuting is the opposite of sex—in terms of reported happiness levels.”
“It’s not like you have to commute to Des Moines and back.”
“Where’s John?”
“In Irvington with the baby.”
“And you’re at my house, drinking my Barolo with my pregnant wife. Is there any left?”
“I didn’t polish it off by myself! Congratulations, by the way.”
“I’m a stud, I know.” Arthur was just five foot seven and had a large mop of black hair, a slight paunch, and an overall troll-like look. She adored him. They stood there appraising each other.
“We need to have dinner with you guys, the four of us, soon,” she said. John had told her ages ago that Art found her regal and intimidating, and she liked it, standing there feeling statuesque in his gaze.
“Definitely. Your husband has been hard to pin down lately.”
“I’ve been trying to reach him all day.” Beneath her smile, a shadow flapped vigorously. Pain gripped her abdomen tightly, then released. Yes, a whole day had passed.
“Ah, the elusive John Reed.”
Veronica and Art parted with another tight hug. She felt as if he’d dusted her with something, replaced apprehension with joy.
Outside she huddled under a Gray’s Papaya awning to check her phone before getting on the train. Nothing. She called John’s cell and it went immediately to voice mail. She ducked down into the ground, to the roar and heat of the trains, tempted to throw the phone beneath one.
So he had gone. The fast ride was liberating, the smooth seat of the new train carrying her effortlessly on a silky ribbon of track. Through the inky dark and intermittent flashes of light she flew.
At home, there were no messages. Not even Damon’s ludicrous bubbles appeared. She considered calling Irvington again, but it was late; she didn’t want to wake Muriel. She sighed at the medicinal whiteness of the kitchen, the spare lines of a reclaimed-wood dining table anchored with a bowl of untouched French sea salt. In th
e master bedroom, the huge wall of built-in closets seemed excessive.
She ran a hot bath and submerged herself all the way, feeling the water trickle onto her scalp. Surfacing, she squeezed and released Clara’s purple rubber duck. He could at least call to say good night.
When she got out, she found herself sweating in her robe, staring at Clara’s empty crib. She sat down in the suede glider, the fleece rug plush between her toes, and stared at a framed poster of Celeste, the elephant queen, which hung above the changing table. A Calder mobile made its slow turn above the crib. It was an ideal nursery. Still warm from the bath, she wandered into the kitchen and opened the freezer, where she found John’s ice cream, two-thirds of a pint of Chubby Hubby. Digging in, she felt the fat and sugar coat her tongue and settle warmly in her belly as she read the label, checking it for artificial gums and fillers. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d even had ice cream. She summoned Ines’s words—it’s one night—and ate some more. John really was kind to go away with the baby and give her this break.
Nude in bed, she touched herself. She was never alone anymore. Her own wetness came as a surprise, as if she lay there with a double. But, no, it was her. Something was recalibrating. Maybe it had begun that morning, the extra sleep seeping through her like flour through a sieve. All at once she was thinking he’d be faceless, whoever he was, but with massive hands and a tight ass, grinding into her. All at once, she was coming. She lay in the center of the bed and smiled as she fell happily away into Saturday.
5
Saturday
John
What blooms in the dark? John forgot the name of it, but all night long he dreamed of the white flower. Its heady scent was reminiscent of April in New York, when all the trees are budding with popcorn and all the people are in love. He didn’t know when he’d last felt this giddy, this free of heartbreak; he’d been heartbroken since the birth, living with this Veronica of after, almost mourning. He remembered the name of that flower—frangipani. On the way back to the room, he’d overheard the concierge in the mint-green slacks talking about it to a shy, uninterested teenage girl. When he’d finally cleared the bits of okra stew off the bed and began to doze, he thought he smelled it coming in the window like a ghost of honey.