• • •
My parents had delivered me to Boston in September, my stuff packed into the back of my father’s pickup, but since then I had managed to keep them out of my apartment. This hadn’t been easy. They came to Boston regularly and always wanted to stop in at my place—to take me shopping for towels or something, to lug sacks of vegetables up my three flights because they were positive I wasn’t eating properly. I made excuses, pleaded busyness, finally had to confess to them that my apartment was in no condition to receive them. I no longer believed in my parents’ first commandment: I thrived on chaos, cultivated it, and I could imagine my mother walking in the door, recoiling in horror, then rolling up her sleeves.
I knew I was disappointing them, and they missed me, and I felt vaguely guilty about the situation, so I took the Peter Pan bus line back to Maine every month or so with my sketchbook and a suitcase full of dirty laundry. When I was home, I could fall with a readiness that appalled me into the old easy life of the pampered child, at the center of things and taken care of. The familiar, rigid peacefulness of the house. My mother doing my laundry, sorting the lights from the darks, permanent press from cotton, sewing on a button or fixing a hem. My father’s orderly workshop, where I sat by the stove sketching him and the cats and the shelves lined with toys, while he painstakingly attached fat little wheels to a wooden truck.
My parents wanted to know every boring detail of my life at school, things no one else on earth would have the patience to listen to: what my art history teacher had to say about this painter or that, had my landlord fixed the drip in the sink yet, what did I pay for a tube of paint. My father would pick me up at the bus station, and my mother would have a hot meal ready, one of my favorites, and over dinner they would begin their doting interrogation.
For a while this was pleasant enough. It was like being in some tedious movie: not very exciting, but I had the starring role. But by the time I awoke on Sunday morning, I needed urgently to leave. My parents always wanted me to wait for the late afternoon bus back, but I insisted on catching the eleven o’clock. They never woke me up: I know they were hoping I would oversleep and miss it, but I willed myself to wake up in time. Then I ate my mother’s huge Sunday breakfast, frantically packed my things, and got driven to the bus station with minutes to spare.
As the bus headed south, it took me a while to throw off the despondency that filled me whenever I was in the company of my parents. If they noticed, I don’t think they were aware of the source. They attributed it to the inevitable changes that occur when a child leaves home and is immersed in her own life. To them, the act of giving away my baby had been a tiny blip in the happy course of my life, something a sensible girl like their Wynn would eventually rise above. I doubted that they thought of it very often—perhaps, after all this time, never, and they assumed that for me it was a small, distant, unpleasant memory. And it was true that I managed to put it out of my mind for long stretches. But while I was home in Maine, it returned, and a low-grade resentment simmered behind everything I did.
By the time the bus crossed the Massachusetts border, the cloud would begin to lift, leaving in its place a feeling of relief so dense it was like a real object stored on the rack along with my suitcase. I couldn’t wait to get home, and it wasn’t lost on me how that word had become transformed. Home was no longer that tidy green house with the perfect hedge: Home was the junky apartment where I painted and dreamed of things that were beyond my parents’ comprehension.
• • •
When Patrick came into my life, I already had a boyfriend. I met him at a party: Alec Gunther, a graduate student in art history at Harvard. He was six years older than I was, and awesomely steady and reliable. Alec reminded me in some ways of my father. He was less reserved, but he was kind, competent, solicitous of me. He was perhaps a little predictable, a little tame. But he was my first real boyfriend, and I had invited him home that first Thanksgiving because he desperately wanted to meet my parents, and because I was sure they would approve of him. They were impressed with his manners, his prospects, his degree from Yale, his fellowship from Harvard, the wine he brought for Thanksgiving dinner, his knowledge of art, his general air of tidiness and control. They were probably impressed even by his tweed jackets and his tasteful leather weekend bag, monogrammed ACG. Alec Cavendish Gunther. Husband material, I could hear my mother thinking. A good provider.
The day after my dinner with Patrick, I called Alec and broke our movie date. “I can’t see you any more,” I said over the phone.
He insisted that we get together for coffee, and I met him at a café on Boylston Street. He was there when I arrived—Alec was always on time—sitting at a table drinking cappuccino. I slid in across from him. “This has to be our last date,” I said immediately. “I’m sorry, Alec.”
He looked stricken. Maybe I had done him an injustice, maybe he did passionately adore me, but I suspected Alec had enjoyed the idea of having an arty wife, a genteel sort of painter who would be a pleasant adjunct to his career. I was quiet, unthreatening, younger than he, and I seemed stable—Alec didn’t like what he called neurotic women. We would hang some of my better paintings in our house, one over the sofa, one over the mantel. When he finished his Ph.D., he would teach, preferably at Harvard. He loved Boston, Cambridge, loved his work. He was writing his dissertation on the influence of the Dutch masters on nineteenth-century French landscape painting. He wanted me to go with him to France, to the village of Barbizon where Delaroche and Millet and Theodore Rousseau had worked. He would write and I would paint.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “We’re a couple, Wynn. We have a future together.”
“I don’t know what to say. I can’t see you any more, Alec. I’m sorry. I’m horribly sorry. But I just can’t.”
It was true: I was sorry. I was fond of him, and I knew he was good for me. He was mature and responsible, a born teacher, the most erudite person I had ever known. But when he kissed me no sparks flew, and, sitting there across from him, I desired not Alec and his conscientious kisses but Patrick—an unknown quantity, a boy who didn’t seem to notice I was female, who was so wrapped up in talking, in shoveling in his dinner, in working, in the virtues of koa wood over Honduras mahogany, that it didn’t seem as if he’d ever have time for a girlfriend.
But looking at Alec, I wanted only to be looking at Patrick.
“Please forgive me, Alec.” I kept saying that over and over, with variations. “I know it’s sudden, but I don’t know what to do about it.”
“You’ve met somebody else?”
I hesitated; then I blurted it out. “I’ve fallen in love with someone.”
“Who?”
“A sculptor.”
“A sculptor?” Alec raised one eyebrow, as if in his experience all sculptors were cads or madmen.
“Yes. From school.”
“You’ve been seeing him?”
“No. Not yet. I just met him.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Wynn.” He smiled and tried to take my hand. “This is absurd.”
I pulled away. “I can’t help it, Alec. It’s the way I feel.”
He sighed. We talked a little longer, and finally he held up his hands as if I was robbing him and said, “Okay. Okay. But let me just say this. If this guy doesn’t work out, let me know.”
I stared at him. I could see that he believed this was what would happen. He sounded more than ever like my father: generous, optimistic, determined to look on the bright side. “He will work out,” I said. “Or I will die.”
I left him brooding over his second cappuccino. I went to the nearest pay phone and called Patrick and invited him to dinner again.
• • •
I made dinner for us almost every night: rice with tomatoes and bits of stewing beef, or rice and zucchini and chicken wings, or rice with leftover broccoli and soy sauce from the Chinese takeout place on the corner. I used to spend a lot of energ
y just trying to get a good meal into him. I felt like my mother—like his mother, if he had had one. My stove was a temperamental two-burner, and my cooking was primitive, but Patrick couldn’t cook at all. Lord knows what he was living on before I came into his life.
“Is rice nutritious?” Patrick asked me once, wolfing it down.
I had no idea. It was cheap and filling. “Very,” I said firmly. “Eat.” He ate. Sometimes, after one of my awful little dinners, we would head over to Brigham’s for ice cream sundaes—a great treat that we didn’t indulge in very often because Patrick was so poor. There was nothing left over in his budget for fripperies like ice cream—or clothes. Any extra money went for art supplies. Being a sculptor, he often said, wasn’t cheap.
We ate rice together, we talked, we went for long walks after class, and, two weeks after we met, Patrick and I went to bed together.
I hadn’t made love with anyone since that night with Mark. The idea terrified me. It wasn’t a rational feeling: I had been on the pill since my Edna Quinlan days, and I knew I wouldn’t get pregnant. But though I had dated Neil and Marty during my last year in high school, and then I had been seeing Alec, I hadn’t wanted to do more than kiss any of them.
When I met Patrick, everything changed. It seemed an eternity to me, that interval between meeting and getting him into bed. I ached for him. I thought about him constantly, lying in bed at night with my hand between my legs, wishing for him. I have never wanted anything as much as I wanted Patrick Foss.
The night we ended up in bed, he came over for dinner as he had done virtually every night for those two weeks. It was expensive feeding us both: I remember that I was nearly out of money. My parents sent me a check every month—a frugal one, since they believed that poverty in youth builds character—and it was April twenty-ninth, the end of the month. I improvised a dish made of rice and a can of tuna and, I think, some frozen peas, and with it we drank the cheap beer Patrick always brought, and we talked and talked: art, school, exams, professors, welding, watercolor versus oil, metal versus wood, cats versus dogs, city life versus country life, rice and beer versus caviar and champagne . . .
But something had changed between us. For the first time, sex was part of the undercurrent of our conversation, it was with us there as palpably as the gluey rice or the roar of the crowd from the ball park three streets over. We looked into each other’s eyes, our gaze holding, our conversation stopping, his hand reaching for mine across the table. I thought I would faint from happiness.
“Wynn,” he said, his voice quiet with emotion.
We stood up, we embraced, we kissed, and after a while we went into the bedroom, so hot with the need of each other we could hardly get our clothes off.
Then, when the actual moment came, I froze. I held him away from me and said, “Wait. Please. I’m sorry.”
He stared at me, and then he took me by the shoulders and said, “Wynn,” very gently. “It’s all right. I didn’t mean for things to go so fast, you know I would never want to hurt you. Are you a virgin, love?”
I didn’t know what to say. For the weeks since I had known him, I had hardly ever thought about my pregnancy, my foolishness, my lost child; I’d been able to think of nothing but Patrick. I had thought Patrick would fill the black void that was always there, vast and gaping beneath everything I did.
Now I knew that if I opened my legs to this man I would fall into it. I sat there shivering, and pulled the sheet up around my neck.
Patrick said, “Wynn, tell me what you want me to do, I’ll do it, I’ll do anything.”
The room was dark. I could barely see his face and hoped he couldn’t see mine: the face of a weak and contemptible person. All I wanted was for him to leave so I could be alone with what I was feeling—that immediate, unexpected return of the old anguish. We sat miserably, not touching, and then he said, “Wynn?” and reached out to smooth my hair with such tenderness that I began to cry. I leaned against him and wept into his bare shoulder, loud, hard sobs I had no control over, and he stroked my hair, rubbed my back, wiped my tears with the sheet and lifted my hand to kiss it. “Shh,” he kept saying. “It’s okay, Wynn. Whatever it is, it’s okay, love.”
I knew he was bewildered. I could sense his confusion in the tone of his voice and the slight tenseness of his body as he held me. But he never asked me what the trouble was—he was too much of a gentleman to insist on an explanation until I was ready to give it. And I wasn’t ready: I knew I couldn’t tell him the truth.
How I knew that, and why, I’m not sure, but there was an unforgiving quality in Patrick that sometimes made me uneasy. He was unfailingly loyal to his friends, but he could also be harshly intolerant of art that was overcalculated or insincere, and I knew his attitude didn’t apply only to bad art. He never expressed this, but I sensed that he saw himself as a poor boy who had come from nowhere and who was going to make something great of his life no matter how powerful the odds were against him. He had set the highest standards for his own behavior, and he had little respect for anyone who didn’t. Disloyalty, dishonesty, and pretense: those were for him the deadly sins.
I thought about telling Patrick I gave away my child as if she were a kitten, or a dress that was too big on me. I imagined him looking at me with alarm and sympathy and asking why. And then what?
It was inconvenient, I wanted to get on with my life, my mother talked me out of keeping her, my own father wouldn’t support me, there was no one on my side, I couldn’t cope, I was alone. The baby cried when I held her, Patrick, and I panicked. I panicked!
I heard myself saying this to Patrick, the orphan boy whose parents were gone from his life when he was five, who knew firsthand the meaning of loss and abandonment. I knew how his eyes would change, and the way he said my name, how the look on his face would become detached, appraising.
He stroked my hair, and I lay in his arms thinking of all this. We heard the Fenway Park crowd erupt out of the stadium and onto the streets, fans yelling, cars starting, horns honking, and when there was silence again I said, “I had a bad experience once. Something I don’t like to talk about. It makes this difficult for me.”
That was all I could say. God knows what he thought—that I had been raped, most likely. I didn’t want him to think it, I hated myself for being anything less than honest with him, but the truth, I knew, could take him away from me, and by this time I couldn’t risk it.
That was the first night—a disaster. We loved each other, though. There was nothing clearer than that, except perhaps our desire for each other. And so we tried again. He was patient and inventive and persuasive. He won me over because of his sweetness, and because I wanted to be won over, and because I needed him so much.
Making love, finally, with Patrick was like finding myself—my real self. Making love with Patrick was the first ecstasy I had ever known. I had seen glimpses of happiness—in my work, in friendships, in the old days with my parents—even sometimes with Alec. But this terrifying kind of ecstasy—the unexpected rapture that took the place of what I had feared—went beyond mere happiness. Making love with Patrick was my first complete experience: I had never even imagined such a thing, that every part of one’s being could be engaged at the same time.
This sounds complicated, but it was really very simple. It was love. I loved him. I loved talking to him, I loved kissing him, I loved being near him, I loved guiding him into me, my hands clutching him—my mouth, my legs, everything open to him, his face above me, his face below me, my fingers in his hair, my voice crying out in a kind of abandon I didn’t know I was capable of. It seemed the miracle could happen, the dark void might indeed be filled. Everything, everything was changed.
• • •
I fell in love with Patrick almost exactly two years after my daughter was born, and that piece of my past was the only important thing that I ever kept from him. It was my sleazy little private pain. I hated having secrets, and over and over I tried to find a way to tell him. But when I
searched my mind for the words, I was swept with such overwhelming shame and guilt that I couldn’t speak.
Strangely, my happiness with Patrick made me imagine my daughter in a way I hadn’t before—as if the power of being in love had allowed other, less happy emotions to be released. I thought of her as a real child, one who was getting older, who lived happily with her parents somewhere in the Midwest, who didn’t know I existed. I thought of her especially at the end of March, on her birthday—just as my mother did of her two lost sons. Sometimes the world seemed to be made of memories of lost children. Where was she, that dark-haired daughter? What kind of life did she have? What did she look like? Was she blowing out candles, opening gifts? Did she have a pet, did she like being read stories?
The worst thing was that soon after I fell in love with Patrick, a thought began to pick at the edge of my consciousness that at first I could scarcely acknowledge was there. The thought was this: If I had kept that child, what a good father Patrick would have been. We would be a family, the three of us. I had seen Patrick with children—how easy he was with them, how effortlessly he could make them laugh. These were knacks I didn’t have. He didn’t condescend to them, didn’t batter them with questions the way most adults did: How old are you? What grade are you in? He just talked to them, simply and with interest, as if his own childhood were still vivid to him, what it was like to be six, eight, eleven. He told them little things about animals, or bugs. Once he told a pack of kids we met in a playground about a pet turtle he’d once had, named Greenback. They wouldn’t leave us alone, and when we left the park they called after him, “Bye, Patrick! Bye!” until we were out of sight.
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