Her chief dread was facing Sven, who was into Eros, it seemed to Jane Louise, in a bigger way than ever. She felt this as she walked into the office, but then Sven was on record as finding pregnant women erotically interesting.
Her first day back she stared at the stack of papers and specs on her desk. It was hard to believe so much could pile up so fast. A noise in the hallway caused her to look up.
“So,” said Sven. “You’re back.”
“So,” said Jane Louise, “I am.”
“And there is much more of you than before,” Sven said.
His eyes slid over her body, just as described in cheap romance novels.
“Uh-huh,” said Jane Louise. “Oh, look! The specs came in on the Devlin book.”
“Um,” said Sven, rubbing his hand over his chin. “So, did you find out what you’re having?”
“A baby, it looks like,” Jane Louise said.
Sven gave her a stern look. “Aren’t you sufficiently long in the tooth to need to have that test?”
Jane Louise sighed. “I am, and I will. I just don’t want to know what it is when I get the results.”
“So you’ll know if you’re having a little mutant,” Sven said.
“Thank you for your confidence and support,” Jane Louise said. “I hope it won’t be a little mutant like you.”
Sven ambled farther into her office. He liked to stand around her desk, as opposed to sitting with one leg over a chair and showing his crotch in profile, as he did constantly to Erna. Anyone could see this drove Erna crazy in some subliminal way, but Erna’s powers of denial were formidable.
“I like to think of myself as the potential father of other people’s children,” Sven said.
“Do you mean putative?” Jane Louise said.
“I mean I like to entertain the thought that I might have been the father of your child.”
“That would be sort of difficult,” Jane Louise said. “Since we’ve never had . . . congress, I think they call it in the books.”
“It’s a metaphor,” Sven said.
“You’re such an insect, Sven.”
“Yes,” Sven said. “But I’m your insect. I can’t wait till you get really big.”
Jane Louise sat back in her chair. “How about getting out of here?” she said. “I’ve heard your lecture about ripeness.”
“Ripeness,” Sven said, “is almost all.” He rubbed his chin again, and Jane Louise had cause to notice that his skin was always slightly reddened, as if he had spent the entire day kissing.
There definitely was something about being pregnant that put one constantly in touch with one’s elemental forces. A pregnancy was the dividing line, no matter how old you were when it happened, between youth and something else. The unborn got born and turned into children, and therefore your days of lying on a musty bedspread in somebody else’s house and kissing all afternoon were over forever, as were the days when you could stay in bed on rainy mornings entangled with your lover. Lovers turned into husbands, who then turned into fathers, and those rainy days would begin at six o’clock in the morning with baby shrieks or child demands, and one’s thoughts would revolve around such things as diapers or play dates or pediatric visits. It was definitely the end of something and the beginning of something else.
“So, you had a tornado,” Sven said. “I saw it in the Times. Were you affected?”
Jane Louise gave an inward shudder. The landscape of the tornado spread before her. A few barn roofs had been damaged by falling trees, and no one had been hurt, but up in the wild part of Marshallsville to the east, the landscape had been ravaged. The little shady town of Marshall Plain had lost most of its trees. Entire mountainsides of white pine and hemlock had been snapped in half. Their bare, jagged trunks pointed at the empty skies. The day after the storm she and Teddy and Peter Peering had gone out in Peter’s truck to see what the damage was. In the village people stood outside their houses in a daze. The sound of power saws reverberated in the long valley.
For four days Teddy and Peter and Mokie sawed and hauled, and Jane Louise and Edie stood in the firehouse making sandwiches for the National Guard. There were not even poles left to string the telephone wires on. Route 16 was closed to ordinary traffic. Long lines of telephone company trucks and flatbeds of poles crowded the lanes. Jane Louise attempted to describe this to Sven.
He looked at her closely. “I see it all,” he said. “A wee little baby and a retreat to the country. You and hubs all nice and cozy in a little country house, with a four-wheel-drive vehicle, spending the winter months ordering seed catalogs and waiting for spring. A mud room. A play group. A thriving gossip mill. Embedded in small-town life. You girls. You get knocked up and you instantly retreat.”
“I grew up in the country, Sven,” said Jane Louise.
“Did you now?” Sven said. “I hadn’t really known that about you. You strike me as entirely urbanized.”
“I revert to type when I’m not here,” Jane Louise said.
Sven gleamed wickedly. “I see it now. A flower garden. Membership in the garden club. Jam making. Mushroom hunting. Shut up with your little baby and a commuting husband. There’s no work there, right? These tiny, preserved, useless country towns.”
“Shut up!” Jane Louise cried. “You don’t know anything about a small town. You only know about living in a city and fucking people you will never see again!”
Sven reeled back, as though stunned.
“My, my, my,” he said. “The unstable, raging hormones of pregnancy! We’re just talking about the same thing. I don’t want you to move to the country because I want you around, and you’re upset because you’re not anonymous enough.”
“Get out of here,” Jane Louise said. “Get out of here before I kill you.”
“My darling,” Sven said mockingly. “Is this a fond hello after a long separation?”
“Out!” Jane Louise shrieked.
Sven gave no sign of leaving.
She looked at her desk, a mire of papers, and at her calendar. On Thursday she had an appointment with her obstetrician. On Friday at lunchtime she and Edie were going to have a look at cribs. One of these days she had to adjust to being back in the city which, after all, was home. She did not like to reveal to Teddy how hard it was to leave Marshallsville. She wanted her baby to grow up there; she wanted its first experience of water to be Blight’s Pond. She wanted it to learn to ride a two-wheeler on Cat Hollow Road. She wanted it to know birdcalls and the names of wildflowers. She said as much to Sven, who gave her a terrible look.
“This is your natural world,” Sven said. “Lunatics, weird writers, strange colleagues. You grew up here. You’re a working stiff, not some nature lover like that twit Martin Barlow with his little wife. You in a small town! Surrounded by another set of lunatics, wondering where the nice Wordsworthian serenity got to. Listen, I know from small country towns. Edwina’s mother lives in one. All they do is argue about pesticides at the garden club, and who gets to fish on whose land, and then one person has a fight with someone else, and the whole little cabal takes sides. Last year some guy painted his shutters a dark burnt orange, and they almost lynched him. You’d go over really swell up there.”
“It’s not like that,” Jane Louise lied, because it sort of was like that. There were people who only seemed to recognize her when she was with Teddy, although she had been introduced to them a million times. She ran into friends of Eleanor’s at the grocery store, and they looked at her brightly when she said hello, without a trace of recognition in their eyes.
“It is like that,” Sven said. “You think it’s all lovely walks and autumn leaves and happy, normal people. Just because your husband grew up there, don’t kid yourself. You’re not from anywhere, like me, and you aren’t anything. You just think being from somewhere is wonderful because you haven’t had what you consider stability. There is no stability, kid. The only difference between the city and the country is that in the country there are dead animals on t
he road, and you don’t have to lock your car.”
“Could we please not have this conversation?” said Jane Louise.
“I love this conversation,” Sven said. “After all, I have a proprietary interest in you.” He paused and stared at her.
“Country life,” he continued, musingly. “Those long days, those longer nights. The same faces, year after year. You know where everybody is. You drive by someone’s house, and someone else’s car is parked outside, giving rise to all sorts of speculation. There’s no privacy. It’s a bad place for sex unless you walk to it, and you can’t take your dog with you because if someone phones up, the other person’s dog might bark.”
“You seem to know quite a lot about this.”
“I do,” Sven said. “In one of my marriages we used to own a house in one of those charming small towns. It wasn’t easy, believe me. No nice, anonymous apartment houses. It was like having a thing with a person in a doorman building all the time.”
Jane Louise peered at him. There was, on his face, a look so devoid of anything one might associate with common humanity that Jane Louise gave a start.
“Sven,” Jane Louise said. “I’d be really grateful if you would get the fuck out of here.”
“So well put,” said Sven and left.
At noon Jane Louise’s telephone rang. She knew it was Edie: She always knew when it was Edie. She could tell by the ring, and she had never been wrong.
Jane Louise said: “Is this Mr. or Miss Edith Steinhaus?”
“The jig is up,” Edie said.
“I beg your pardon, madame?” said Jane Louise.
“Nothing fits. I’m popping,” she said. “There’s no hiding now.”
“It’s a common side effect of pregnancy,” Jane Louise said.
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.
“Edie?” said Jane Louise.
“I don’t know,” said Edie in a small voice. Jane Louise knew this voice well. It was the sound Edie made when she was intimidated by her family.
“I see,” said Jane Louise. “You have to break down and tell them. This is going to blow the idea that Mokie is your business partner right out of the water.”
“I guess,” said Edie.
“Listen to me, Edith,” Jane Louise said. This was her job, and she was doing it. “Your mother is awful, your father is awful, and your brothers are too awful to mention. They have known about you and Mokie forever, and this is just the usual dodg’em game they play with you. It’s none of their damn business. They don’t like being confronted by a black son-in-law because their horror at the idea compromises their otherwise impeccable credentials.”
“Thank you for hating my family for me,” said Edie.
“It’s always a pleasure,” Jane Louise said. “Just think! You’re giving them a grandchild.”
“They have four others,” Edie said sadly. “Lily-white. Go to the right schools. You know.”
“Won’t it be nice when we die, Edie, and we can finally be ourselves?”
“I don’t want to wait that long,” Edie said. “No one loves me.”
“You’re a dog, Edie,” Jane Louise said. “I love you, Mokie loves you. Teddy loves you. Your parents don’t love anyone. It’s no use trying. Give it up. You’re having a baby.”
“Thank you for hating my family for me,” Edie said again.
“Try it yourself sometime,” Jane Louise said. “It’s really liberating.”
CHAPTER 24
On an unexpectedly hot autumn day Jane Louise and Teddy drove up the Hudson River to go to the wedding of Teddy’s youngest half-sister, Daphne. Jane Louise wore a shapeless gray linen dress with no sleeves and a striped jacket. She had piled her hair on top of her head with a tortoiseshell pin.
On the highway the haze of the city began to part. They drove into a brilliant yellow glare. The trees, which had turned early, shone as bright as foil in the sunlight.
Teddy, who was in one of his less talkative modes, was driving. He was not much of a chatterer on his best days—this was certainly not one of his best days, Jane Louise knew. He wore on his face an expression Jane Louise called his “suburban visiting look,” which he principally wore around his father and his father’s family. It was a look of such hard-set impassiveness it always left Jane Louise a little alarmed. In order to get your face so devoid of feeling, you must be repressing everything. When Teddy got like that there was almost nothing she could do. He had entered a world he wanted no one else to enter: the world of a small child who was uncomfortable around both his parents; who felt like a betrayer if he felt the remotest twinge of love for his father or missed him while in the company of his mother; who, when he got angry at his father, felt as if at any minute his father had the right to pack him up, stick him in the car, and cart him back off to his mother. These feelings ran so deep, so still, and they were so dull from years of constant pain, that Jane Louise felt helpless before them. She wanted to take Teddy in her arms and kiss him until he cried. She wanted to hold him all night long and let him sob out whatever was in back of that relentlessly pleasant, unavailable face.
She herself was not looking forward to this wedding. She had made her accommodations with Teddy’s mother, who was grateful to Jane Louise for taking such sweet care—the sort of care she had never doled out—of her son. On the other hand, Jane Louise rather dreaded Teddy’s father and his wife.
Cornelius had been a skirt-chaser and a dandy. Why he and Eleanor had ever married was a mystery. It had been one of those classic, terrible mistakes. They had met in the Solomon Islands during the war—Cornelius in the British Navy and Eleanor doing some sort of decoding. She had been a linguist in college, and to an unmarried bluestocking, the intelligence part of the war looked very attractive.
After the divorce Cornelius, who was, after all, attractive and not incapacitated, got a job working for a company whose headquarters were in London but whose branch office was in suburban Connecticut. It was there he met Martine, who was large and bosomy, given to ruffles, lipstick, and flounces. She was much scorned, privately, by Teddy’s mother, for her silly clothes, her interest in the royal family, her Britishisms, her awful shoes. Her three girl children had come in rapid succession: Moira, Lisbeth, and Daphne, names Teddy’s mother felt were distinctly lower-middle-class.
As far as Teddy was concerned, his father’s new family had made him feel as weightless as an air letter circulated between the two households. In her private heart Eleanor had been terrified that Teddy might find life in a big family congenial, that he might adore the idea of being the big brother to these girls, rather than the only child of a single woman in the country. But Teddy had seen his sisters as a blur of female babies or small girls from whom he felt completely disconnected.
Martine’s girls married and reproduced young. Lisbeth and Moira already had four children between them. This, of course, made Jane Louise feel like a Martian. By the time Lisbeth and Moira were her age, their children would be in high school or getting ready for college.
Daphne was marrying her college sweetheart, Dan McGuire, whom Jane Louise had met once and could not remember. Martine had said: “You know, Jane Louise, I mean, Dan’s parents, you know . . . well, not all the time but they seem every now and again to drink a little too much.” She had said this on the telephone one evening in a whisper, as if revealing a terrible secret.
Jane Louise wondered if Martine meant that Dan’s parents were alcoholic.
“Oh, it’s nothing like that at all,” Martine said. “They’re very lovely people.”
Nevertheless, Martine was confused about what to serve at the reception: whiskey? wine? Ought they to have beer for the younger set?
In the car, Jane Louise yawned. She was incredibly sleepy. “They’re very lovely people but they drink a little too much,” she said.
“What?” said Teddy, and Jane Louise realized that she had been talking to herself.
“Dan’s parents,” she said. “Ma
rtine says they’re lovely people but they drink a little too much.”
“Who’s Dan?” Teddy said.
“Your future half-brother-in-law,” Jane Louise said.
“Oh, him,” Teddy said. “Well, Martine and Dad are acquainted with tons of lovely people who drink too much. How do you know, anyway?”
“Well, Martine likes to phone me up,” Jane Louise said. “She’s much too scared of you, so she hits on me because I’ll talk to her. It makes her feel better.”
Teddy’s face tightened ever so slightly. He was definitely getting his suburban face in order. Basically, he hated Martine with a little boy’s hatred. He didn’t like the way she smelled, or her shiny, smeary pink lipstick. When she had had a little too much to drink she became maudlin. Tears came to her eyes, and her blue mascara ran. Teddy remembered as a little boy how this had made the world seem out of control. Teddy was capable of pushing certain things from his mind: In some ways they were too awful to think about, and there was nothing he could do about them, anyway. The birth of his half-sisters; the shut, internalized guilt of his mother; the feck-lessness of his father. He turned for an instant to look at his wife.
Even in pregnancy Jane Louise did not lose her precise edges. He loved the clean cut of her hair, the long, lean lines of her arms and legs. Even her belly seemed discreet, a nice, round size. The clothes she wore, the dishes she favored, the food she cooked, all seemed to him clean and crisp and outlined, as a child outlines a picture in black. She smelled faintly sweet—of lily-of-the-valley cologne—but her natural scent was biscuity and fresh. In moments of despair, when his bad feelings crept through his defenses, he wanted to bury himself in her.
Because she was a good girl, she knew that he trusted her. He was perfectly lovely himself. She ran her fingers down his long forearm.
A Big Storm Knocked It Over Page 14