by Thea Goodman
Veronica adjusted Clara’s hat—her head was terribly coned from three hours of futile pushing—so her mother could see only the baby’s face. Annalena reached out and touched Clara’s cheek with a dry finger. Veronica shifted the pillow in her lap; the baby was too heavy on her incision.
The essential transfer, what she knew was supposed to happen—the baby passing gently from her arms to her mother’s, who had once held her—was not happening. Annalena clutched nervously at a strand of pearls around her neck, fiddling with the clasp. Do you want to hold her? Veronica had been foolish to even ask. She hadn’t harbored hope as much as need. It was like wanting water in a desert. “Just look at those tiny eyelashes!” Annalena said, her blue eyes darting intently as she appreciated Clara’s beauty; for Annalena, perhaps there was no higher calling than finding beauty. Veronica pressed the button in her hand, and a rush of morphine suffused her body. Almost right away, the awkward triangle softened.
* * *
They paid the driver and slammed the doors. Veronica tried to maintain attention as Ines talked about CVS versus amnio. “The prior can be done sooner, but it’s much more painful and the results are not as accurate. Amnio is done later but tells you a lot very accurately. Why are you nodding?” Ines asked.
“Well, I did both, remember?” Both options were fraught in their own ways. She didn’t know what to recommend. “What does Art think?” He was walking a few paces ahead of them.
“He’s crazy and doesn’t want to do either.” Veronica’s tipsiness was fading, but the image of a red painting dogged her, tempted her. How she wanted to dive into the moving tide. Images were encroaching now; the line between seeing and love was beginning to blur. But Ines needed advice, and Clara, in Irvington, needed the bottle in Veronica’s purse.
“I guess I’m leaning toward the amnio,” Ines said, pulling on one of her curls before tucking it back up under her thick hat.
“They’ll probably make you do everything.”
“I like everything, remember?”
Outside the restaurant, a tall man leaned against the side of the building with one long leg bent, his foot resting on the wall. Despite the cold, his white shirt glinted beneath his open coat. Damon. He wore no hat, and his bristly short hair looked almost platinum in the dark. He’d come as he’d said he would, regardless of her lack of response.
“What’s wrong?” Ines asked, then followed Veronica’s gaze. “Oh shit, the photographer.” Because he had crushed Veronica, Ines had decreed she would never again utter his name.
“It’s fine,” Veronica said, a smile playing on her lips, wishing she’d suggested a different place to eat. For a moment, John’s absence, Clara’s distance, colors blurring, all of life, was supplanted by Damon; that old Damon soreness returned to her, like the secret spot where a tooth is loose that you have to keep checking over and over again. As they continued walking, she felt her face grow hot. Ines turned and looked at her sternly. “Are you okay with this?” Art had already ducked into the door of the restaurant to get out of the wind.
“I knew he was in New York, but I was going to ignore him. Do I look all right? Can you tell I’ve been crying?”
“Have you been?”
“I’m fine. I guess I just miss Clara.” Damon was laughing on a cellphone, throwing his head back as if he’d never heard anything funnier.
“You were crying?” Ines said. “Get on a train and go to Irvington.”
“It’s too late.” Veronica took off her wool hat and adjusted her hair. She made the mirror face, which she was embarrassed to see Ines notice.
“It is not too late. Skip dinner and go,” she said.
But a force had begun, surrounding her, pulling her in.
“Oh no!” Ines said. “Do you want to go somewhere else?”
“You know what? I’m fine. This is good for me. It’s been three years at least. It’s sobering. This afternoon I was crying about my whole life for the first time in a long time; seeing him, I can compare now with then and see that even though I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, I know more than I did then.”
Ines squinted. “Liar.”
A sort of bravado—she was not young and totally insecure anymore—seized her. She was a parent. Everything was possible. As she approached Damon, he looked up, and his face brightened. “You! My God. I’d thought I’d lost you forever. You look great!” He spoke as if they’d been separated against his will. He had always gushed when she ignored him. He grabbed her two hands with an old hint of propriety. His hands were so warm that she wasn’t aware of her own reply, couldn’t wriggle away, couldn’t remember that she was now someone else, because with his hands he did own her. They stood there beaming.
“Hey,” Ines said coolly to Damon, before she addressed Veronica. “I’m heading to the table. Meet me there.” Veronica heard herself say to Damon, “Well, you should join us, because my husband isn’t here and we have a table for four.”
“I couldn’t,” he said, a faux demurral.
“Sure you could.”
“I’ll come say hi while I wait for my takeout.” Damon put his hand on her back as they walked to the table, as if they were a couple, and then he cut it by saying, “My girlfriend is home with a cold, but she wants me to pick up some of their meatballs. Have you met Carmela?” He knew she hadn’t. The name Carmela: It was as if he were dangling a piece of candy before her, a sweet caramel.
“I haven’t met her, no, but I’ve had the meatballs. They’re the best.”
“And your husband, what’s his name again?” Damon said, and winked as they approached the table and sat down.
She hit his arm because he knew. “His name is John,” Art said, looking up from the table. Art detested Damon on John’s behalf. This would be more than awkward, so Veronica pinched Damon’s elbow, an old signal they had that could mean all sorts of things. She knew he’d get it. He would get her. Someone had to get her.
Thus prompted, Damon said, “Hey, Art, Ines. Veronica invited me to join you, but my girlfriend is home sick and I need to pick up the meatballs she likes, so…” He scratched the back of his neck as if he were abashed. “I should probably go.”
“Right,” Ines said. Art nodded.
“Are you sure?” Veronica asked, popping up, enjoying the automatic intimacy between them. “I’ll walk you to the door.”
When they stopped at the door, he looked at her, his gray eyes dancing. “I can tell your friends still adore me. I want to catch up with you, though.”
“Me too.”
“I have to wait for the meatballs,” he added, as if to remind her that he was not that disappointed, and then he crushed her. “Once Carmela eats, she’s always sleepy.”
“Maybe I have met her—the food writer?”
“That’s Constance.” With Damon, there were always lots of women. “Carmela has the worst cold. I’m actually heading over to the Parlour after, if you guys want to meet up for a drink—”
“Okay,” she said too quickly. “I mean, I don’t think we have any plans.”
“What’s-his-name is welcome to join us.”
“Can you stop?” she said playfully. Shame consumed her; what’s-his-name who was suddenly gone, what’s-his-name whom she had spent all afternoon missing. For years she had counted on John. How had that sense of certainty been ripped away in one day? Well, he was not here, and Damon stood before her, playing with one of her hands, and there seemed very little to stop that melt-in-your-mouth sensation. “You don’t even know about Clara, do you?”
“Clara,” he said, almost delectably, as if he may have dated a Clara once.
“I had a baby—my daughter. She’s six months old.”
“Go get a picture,” he commanded, and she went back to the table to get her purse. Ines rolled her eyes.
“Wow,” Damon said when she returned. “I adore her. She’s beautiful.” They held the edges of the picture as if she were their child together. After some obligatory questions abo
ut the baby, he said, “Listen. So, so, so good to see you. You look—okay, I can tell you’re not coming out later, but, like, email me or something, even though you’re married and everything, and with a kid!” he said, as if being married in your mid-thirties were especially goofy.
She walked back to the table, safe. She imagined gorgeous Carmela, languid with a fever, craving meat as she sprawled on the couch in a silky white nightie. If Damon was out buying her favorite dish, they were in that first phase of infatuation he plunged into in the beginning, before he grew abruptly cold.
“Good riddance,” Ines said as Veronica sat down.
Veronica said, “Yup,” sort of quietly as she maneuvered in her seat.
“Why are assholes always named Damon?” Art asked, and then looked at Ines for confirmation. “It’s true, or Damien. It means Satan in Latin.”
Ines and Veronica ignored him and started looking over the menu.
“Of course, you always have Angus … as a name,” Art continued. The two women talked about getting artichokes. Ines was hungry; Veronica wanted to get to another topic, to still the fluttering that made her want to race out the door and catch up with Damon. Ines and Art decided to split a salad.
When the food came, she checked her phone and found nothing. She abandoned her artichoke after a few leaves. She could not go to John. She wanted very sharply, for the first time, to hurt him. Her brief insight about seeing and love and how they could perhaps coexist grew muffled; Damon had nothing to do with love. He was stationed firmly in aesthetics, on the side of seeing.
* * *
His apartment was the same. Three cameras hung from hooks in the dark hallway, their huge lenses like trunks. There was a mess of newspapers and magazines on a glass coffee table and the red IKEA sofa where they used to fool around. He had one toothbrush and a tube of French toothpaste with Arabic letters on the back. Veronica opened it and squeezed some onto her fingertip. It tasted like licorice. She spread it around her tongue and gums. Her eyes were shiny in the mirror and she looked away. She was too fuzzy and wanted to be sharper. Art had ordered two bottles of red wine and Ines had abstained. After dinner her friends had promptly gone home, offering her the first cab, which she declined, saying she felt like walking a little bit. She watched them speed off; then she walked uptown. She could see the neon of the Parlour a few blocks away, and, as if in a dream, she had walked there. He’d been sitting alone when she found him, reading Friday’s Financial Times by candlelight.
In a few minutes she would come out of his bathroom—ostensibly to see some of his new work—and they would kiss. That was all that would happen, a reminder of a prior life. She untwisted and smoothed her bra straps, cupped her hand over her mouth to check her breath, then sniffed her underarms. She smelled salty. His old tiles were clean, as if he knew that sodden ladies would sit here alone and stare at the grout before they fucked him, as if Damon, oddly domestic despite his itinerant lifestyle and dread of intimacy, had been in here during his time off with a tiny brush and a special grout cleaner from the hardware store.
She would go out and ask him about the tile grout to forestall the kiss. She cleared her throat for some reason, as if to protest, to say they really shouldn’t, and then she took a deep breath. She was grateful for the smoothness of her shaved legs from that morning. Her shower, her bed, her daughter. She couldn’t contemplate too much. How had John been completely silent for all of Saturday, the fattest day of the week, their day together as a family? Maybe they’d be home when she got back, fast asleep in their beds as if nothing had happened. Maybe something had happened to them. Panic made her breath stop. Recovering, she rinsed her mouth thoroughly and left the bathroom.
She sat down beside Damon on the red sofa. It felt very normal, as if no time had passed. She watched as he went to get a large portfolio by the door. He’d opened two more beers and placed hers in front of her on the coffee table. She stared at a color photo of two soldiers with machine guns standing under a huge amber chandelier. The crystals cast dappled shadows on their faces. One had a cruel smile, teeth like tiny knives beneath thin lips; the other stared ahead with a look of mourning at something outside the frame. “Where’s this?” she asked. They were looking at pictures, nothing more.
“Baghdad.” Damon sipped his beer and leaned back next to her. She could smell laundry detergent and smoke on his shoulder.
“It’s remarkable. The tension between those two expressions. What is he looking at there, outside the frame?” She’d imagined some atrocity.
“You don’t want to know,” he said, then smiled. “He was looking at melted chocolate. I’d brought all these packages of M&M’s, and when my assistant was opening one, we realized they’d melted. This soldier really liked M&M’s.”
When she looked up, he caught her face in his hands and kissed her warmly, then pulled away and smiled as if to gauge her reaction. Desire had returned. She kissed him back. Then stopped herself. “I have to go,” she said, but when she stood up, he wound his fingers through her belt loops and yanked her back down.
“No you don’t,” he said, kissing the inner crease of her elbow. Warmth spread through her.
“I do. I’m leaving.” But she was compelled by a delicate, burgeoning pull. “I can’t do this.”
“Sure you can,” he said, drawing her onto his lap. She fit perfectly there. She was neither too small nor too big. He rubbed her back in warm circles.
“I cannot even be here right now. This is terrible,” she said, as he nuzzled her chest and neck. She could stop then, after a few sweet short minutes in which her body was integrated, but she hesitated another moment and then another. She was no longer simply reassembled but was uncut.
“No, it’s wonderful,” he answered. And it was. “Stay,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“I’m leaving in two days. I won’t be able to see you again.” He stroked the length of her thigh and looked truly sad. In two days it would be as if he had never been here.
“I’m so drunk,” she told him, hearing her own preemptive excuse as she let him peel off her sweater and her tank top, and then, shivering but quite awake, she stayed. Very fast, they tore off their clothes. A part of her could see the stereotype; the rushed moves that both obfuscated and underlined what they were doing. He looked at her as he theatrically tossed his shirt over his shoulder.
This new energy was fragile, unsustainable, like a heart beating in wax paper. She didn’t dare open her eyes and take account of her surroundings.
The discrete motions—the kiss, the toss of the shirt—all linked together and something became of them. Then it was over. When they rested, she saw the long, unadorned window twinkling with lights and spires, the scarred wood dresser, her own blue bra. She wept a bit for the incontrovertible fact of what she’d done and for the closure. This was closure. Two distinct paths lay ahead of them. He would go back to Afghanistan, and she wouldn’t walk through this door again. She had her answer. In his limited way, he did love her.
He didn’t notice her tears as he breathed into her hair. He’d once admitted that he didn’t like it when women cried, while John, oddly, seemed to welcome crying. John was good at comforting; Damon could not console, though he did ask, perfunctorily, if she was okay.
“I am.” Relief, undeniable but brief, washed over her. Even after, she had always been herself, could still be herself. Before and after was a false distinction. There had to be a way to do this—to remain herself—and there had to be a way to change. He looked at her when she rolled to face him, understanding that she wanted him to refrain from saying anything at all affectionate.
Back in his bathroom, she rinsed off quickly, using a black soap from Jordan. She knew Damon would not tell anyone; he prided himself on his discretion. Their connection did not involve another soul. The event was in a parallel universe, and it was all hers.
As if abetting that dream of a parallel universe, a time out of time, the street was unusually light de
spite the dark sky above it. Ninety-fifth Street was a painting by Magritte. She touched her mouth, which was slightly abraded, and relished walking with a secret. A shudder ran through her. What had she done? It had felt inevitable. But it was not too late to go to them. It was not too late for everything. She rushed down the block, peering ahead for a cab. People were moving in cheery clumps up and down Columbus Avenue. She looked at her phone and was exasperated and grateful to find it completely drained of power. She would go to him; she could forgive John his startling departure, his absence. It was only eleven-fifteen. There was an eleven forty-five train to Irvington. They could all wake up together.
11
Saturday
John
Bettine was feeding Clara from a jar of pureed banana. A Gerber baby smiled comfortingly from the label. Bunbury had woken John—during the IV hydration he’d drifted off—and said, “Banana is a binding food, good for diarrhea.”
It seemed that all of life was waking up and falling asleep over and over again. With luck, there was a dream in between, but the residue of this one was gone. His headache was muted and his daughter appeared content. She was recovering from an upset stomach in a foreign country, nestled in a strange woman’s arms, and she was fine. Clara wasn’t picky about her affections. What a gift! How had they not seen her resilience all along? They’d been too busy preening over her every move. He couldn’t wait to tell Veronica how they’d been wrong. Clara was fine when they were not with her; she had an easy temperament, unafraid and trusting. He had no idea where this came from genetically.
Tisbury held a handful of blue pills. “I’ve given you a few of these for the pain, and I’ll send you off with some extra.” He poured the pills into a container. “Take them every four hours, precisely, before the pain returns.”
He recognized the same painkillers Veronica had been given in the hospital. She’d liked them. “Thank you. Is this it? Can we go?”
“On your way. Your ride is waiting,” Tisbury said, handing John a bill and then the baby. Clara felt solid and springy. She giggled when he kissed her cheek.