‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not.’
‘Are you and Dad going to split up now? I don’t get why anyone bothers getting married.’ The way her lip wobbled made me crumple.
‘I have no idea what’s going to happen,’ I told her. ‘You mustn’t tell him we’ve talked about any of this. Please?’
Vanessa cocked her head and raised a single eyebrow. ‘Oh come on! When have you ever seen us have a cosy chat? He’s always yelling at me.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘and you’re always yelling back. Give it time. In his mind you’re still a child. I know for a fact it made him very sad not to see you grow up.’
‘Dad’s so lucky to have you. I don’t have anyone.’
‘Yes, you do. He wants to be a father to you now, if you’ll let him.’ I paused as she stood up to leave. ‘And whatever happens, you have me.’
After she’d gone I rubbed my back and stretched my arms out. My whole body had been folded in on itself for so long I felt pain in every atom. On the inside, on the outside. It was twice my size. On the underside of my wrist was a stripe of blood I’d missed.
Chapter Fifty Two
When the time came, it was hard to let Vanessa go. I was sad that we hadn’t done a great job of looking after her but I also felt I was finally getting the hang of it. After we’d hugged and said goodbye I hung around the Gare de Lyon waiting to watch the TGV leave. In six hours she’d be in Nice and Philippe would get another chance at fatherhood – maybe they’d do better without me.
The receptionist from my doctor’s office had called me at 08.00 to inform me that I’d missed an appointment my insurance would not cover as well as ignoring letters and phone calls. Doctor Lafarge was back in Paris for a few days between trips and had asked her to try me on the off chance.
I was alone in the normally busy waiting room and the doctor came to fetch me herself. ‘Alexandra,’ she said. ‘I was starting to think you’d left the country.’
I found Melissa Lafarge a year ago on the recommendation of a friend. I was so pleased to find an American gynaecologist in Paris and not have to endure the humiliation of French doctors having to speak English to me (the facts were bad enough, who needed the extra stress of foreign jargon?). Dr Lafarge managed the expat experience much better than me. She has a French husband too and sounded like a native even when we were speaking English. Having bilingual kids and raising them here must have played a part in that. Naturally there were no family photos on her desk – that would be insensitive in her line of work – but she’d mentioned her children when we were chatting one time. Now she’d just returned from the States and was about to go to her in-laws’ in Brittany. If it wasn’t her job to worry about my private parts, we could easily have been friends.
‘I’m sorry I missed my check-up,’ I said. ‘It’s been a strange summer.’
She chased away her frown with a tense smile. Women waited months for an appointment with her. ‘You’re here now. So how’ve you been since your surgery?’
I had never felt so good. The procedure performed by Dr Lafarge had been far more successful than previous attempts by other surgeons. She’d been confident she could significantly reduce my symptoms and she was right.
‘How’s the pain?’
‘Hardly any after the first couple of weeks. It’s a transformation.’
‘And the bleeding?’
‘Again, since things settled down, very little. This new IUD seems to be working better.’
I thought she’d be pleased for me. Instead, she pressed her lips together and studied the computer screen, before turning back to me. ‘Have you been seeing someone else?’
‘Excuse me?’ I said, in the same vaguely snippy tone.
‘Are you being treated by another doctor? Is that why you’ve stayed away?’
I laughed. ‘No, absolutely not. Why would you ask such a thing?’
Dr Lafarge brought her hands together and looked at me gravely. ‘Clearly there’s been a misunderstanding. I didn’t fit the IUD during the surgery. That was supposed to happen at the appointment you missed.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s excellent news that the surgery alone has produced such good results,’ she said. ‘But if you agree, I think we should go ahead and sort this out. The device will help to maintain the improvements for longer. What do you say?’
I felt unbelievably foolish at my mistake, like a child dressed up as an adult. ‘Okay, let’s do that.’
‘Have you had unprotected sex since the procedure?’
I nodded.
‘In that case, you need to do one of these.’ She fetched a blood test kit from a cabinet. ‘The lab is very quiet at this time of year so we’ll have the results first thing in the morning. I can see you at midday if that works for you.’
* * *
The following day at 12.02, I was back in her office, heading for the couch.
‘Take a seat first, if you wouldn’t mind,’ she said. I watched the necklace rise on her collarbone as she breathed in. ‘Alexandra, the blood test results came back. You are pregnant.’
I stared at her, waiting for her to take it back, to say she was looking at someone else’s results, that it was a mistake. ‘That’s not possible,’ I said. My head was pounding.
‘You’ll need time to process,’ she said. ‘I’m as surprised as you are, but I never said never.’
‘I know you didn’t.’ By the time she began treating me, motherhood wasn’t even up for discussion. I’d moved on, to the extent that’s possible. I know it destroys some women but for all my sorrow it wasn’t this that nearly destroyed me.
‘I have here that you tried to become pregnant a long time ago,’ she said, looking at my records.
‘Yes, in my late twenties. I couldn’t conceive. We couldn’t afford IVF and they said the chances were poor anyway. Once we had the full picture, we gave up. I was thirty when my fiancé left me and it was years before I was in another stable relationship, when I met my husband.’
On the doctor’s instructions, I undressed below the waist and got up on the couch to have yet another probe. She was studying a screen. ‘See that?’ she said, indicating a tiny flicker, where the image repeatedly deepened and paled. ‘There’s a heartbeat. It’s very early, no more than six weeks, seven max.’
‘What are the odds…?’ I couldn’t say it.
‘Well, the odds were against you ever conceiving naturally, especially at forty. All pregnancies are vulnerable in the early weeks, of course, but now it’s implanted and following your recent surgery, the chances are comparable to those of any other woman of your age.’
My entire body felt rigid, melded with the couch. I couldn’t grasp that what I was seeing, what the doctor was telling me, had anything to do with me. It was such a relief when the tears spilled down my cheeks. Those I recognised.
Dr Lafarge took my hand. It touched me to see that she was blinking. ‘We won’t discuss this further right now. Go home and talk it over with your husband. This is bound to be a shock for him too.’
It was a paralysing shot. The doctor fended off the receptionist as she escorted me to the door. Outside, I leaned against the wall of the building, immobile, and for a while all reality was suspended: the crowd, the noise and motion of the city, my life up to that moment. I braced myself for the battering rush of emotions. All but the one I’d imagined.
Chapter Fifty Three
Sometimes when I look back on last summer, it’s like the woman who had the affair isn’t me. Well, she is and she isn’t. There’s so much that I couldn’t see when I was in the middle of it. I suppose that must mean we’re getting somewhere. I’d hate to be putting myself through this for nothing.
Up to this point we’d all behaved dishonourably to varying degrees, as people do. I’m not saying that to make myself feel better, because it doesn’t. We couldn’t undo what had happened but we could have worked around it, forgiving each other or not, our lives remaining entangled or not. I’m sayi
ng it to distinguish those events from the final act. I know now that I wasn’t the only factor, but without me it wouldn’t have ended the way it did.
It wasn’t my fault I’d fallen pregnant. I was a sterile woman who had never had any cause to think it could happen. Abstract hope, sure, but not signs of hope. They told me my best chances were when I was young and that had come to nothing.
Of all the things I ever thought I was and turned out not to be: prudish, incapable of love and being loved, a decent person, the discovery that I was not infertile after all rocked me the deepest. There’s a kind of logic there. It was cellular; I carried the evidence of this revelation like the longing for a child, which was such an intrinsic part of me I barely noticed it any more, just as I only registered now and again that my nails had grown.
And now there was a fragile chance that I could have what I’d longed for. That I would get to scream with the joy and agony of delivering a new person to the world, to hold a tiny warm body against mine, to love someone I’d created with someone I loved. It was the only chance I was ever going to get.
My original plan had been to go straight into work after leaving the doctor’s to start preparing for the meeting with the American publisher later in the week. Since the others had left for the mountains and the beach my visits to the deserted offices at Editions Gallici had been infrequent and unfocused, mostly spent staring into the middle distance in anticipation of my next hook-up with Jean-Luc, and now there would be no more of those.
But that was before I knew I was carrying his child. I went home.
Every day dealt another blow to my ability to focus. My head was a vat of anxiety and it was as if someone had set an electric mixer on it. Some of this must be down to my condition. I’d heard a lot about Emily’s three pregnancies but when I tried to recall the symptoms I wondered if I’d ever been paying attention: crushing fatigue, nausea, vomiting. Emotional volatility, increased libido, crazed bursts of energy. I had only some of these and even less idea at what stage they belonged. Ten minutes on the internet would have given me the facts but I couldn’t do it. Nothing about my situation felt like a fact, more like something dangling in front of me that would vaporise the moment I started to invest in it.
I decided I would go to the office after all, to get out of the four walls of the apartment. Back on the street, crowds jostled me on the narrow sidewalk of the rue de Seine. As I reached the river the sight of a Ville de Paris trash can – just a metal cage with a transparent sack hanging from it – brought back a recent news story that had made me furious. It was Vanessa who originally told me about the fifteen-year-old girl tracked down somewhere south of Paris after abandoning her newborn baby in a dumpster. The baby had survived but there was talk of the mother – this child – facing criminal charges. It was mooted that she may have been acting out of fear and desperation – as if there could be any doubt. And there was something else: she was reported to be from a good family, which made me want to shake these clueless unfeeling people and demand what difference that was supposed to make? That girl must have felt so frightened and alone – maybe even more so now. Did she have anyone to say I understand? What would her life be like in ten years, twenty, thirty?
I could no more foresee where my own would lead, if the clutch of cells I’d tried to decipher on that screen would ever be a child, a student, a grown man or woman. It could just as easily dissolve into red emptiness at any moment. If I wanted certainty or to limit the damage to us all, at my next appointment with Dr Lafarge I’d have to tell her this had come too late for me.
In pitch darkness even the faintest beam is worth grasping and with my mom there wasn’t anything left to lose. She probably wouldn’t take the call but I had to try. I moved the furniture so I’d be sitting in front of the seascape over the mantelpiece, to give her something pretty to look at if she didn’t want to look at me. Hours after I could have tried to reach her I was still making excuses: she’d be walking Bernstein (she’s had two more dogs since Gershwin), eating lunch, in her studio painting. For the first time in over a week I put on make-up but it looked sinister against the pallor of my skin, so I took it off. I changed my top from blue to white.
If my mom had ever been tempted to break with me, my outburst would surely be all the provocation she needed. But I decided way back not to give up on her, no matter how bad things got. It was the one aspect of my life where I was determined not to fail outright. It seemed to me that for a mother the only thing sadder than losing a child to death was losing one in life.
When my mother pressed the button that proved me wrong there were the usual issues with poor connection, the image buffering. She was rotating the screen, talking when there was no sound. Suddenly her voice filled the room like she was there with me, ‘Can you hear me? I can’t hear you.’
‘It’s okay. I didn’t say anything yet.’
The router was near the front door back home. She walked onto the porch and it sorted itself out. The sun was shining, and I could hear the sound of the Pacific half a block away. No other ocean sounds the same. ‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘This is a surprise.’ I was stunned to realise she thought I was cutting her off when we spoke on Christopher’s anniversary. There must be so many rifts caused by one side believing the other doesn’t want to talk any more.
Despite my procrastinating, I wasn’t prepared. There’s no rehearsing a script where you don’t even know your own lines. I decided to let her speak first.
‘I thought maybe you could use a break from me,’ she said. ‘After what you said.’
‘And I thought you probably didn’t want to talk to me.’
My mother’s face was swooping back and forth with a disorienting effect – she was on the swing seat and any other day I would have asked her to sit still.
‘For goodness’ sake, you do say the silliest things, Alexandra,’ she said. ‘You’re my only daughter and for all my shortcomings, I’m still your mother.’
‘I didn’t mean those awful things I said. I feel so bad about it.’
She must have anchored her feet on the decking and was studying me as if she’d never seen me before. ‘You meant every word,’ she said. ‘Whether you meant to say it is another matter.’
‘Okay then. But I went about it all wrong. I never meant to be so hurtful. I was trying to explain that I miss Christopher too but I know that’s not how it came out.’
In the beat of silence that followed I had the feeling of something giving way. Rupturing, for all I knew.
Finally my mother answered. ‘What you said hurt because it was true. I did the same to you over Philippe when it wasn’t any of my business. I’ve been thinking about you a lot since we spoke. I wish I’d done that more over the years.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘It’s actually kind of a relief that you decided to lash out – people tiptoe around me. Although why you couldn’t have told me you felt abandoned when I could still do something about it…’
‘You can still do something about it,’ I told her. ‘You’re doing it already.’
For once, and it felt like the first time, our words weren’t laced with unspoken resentment. And if we could now speak openly about the past I figured there was no point holding back on the present.
‘Mom,’ I said, without even thinking, ‘I’ve got something to tell you. Hear me out before you say anything, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m pregnant—’
She squealed like a little girl with the gift she’s always wanted. ‘Oh my, that’s wonderful! Well, things can’t be all that bad between you and Philippe.’
I looked away from the screen, knowing I had to go through with it now. ‘After I found out he was cheating on me I started seeing Henri and Geneviève’s son.’
‘Their son? Seeing as in…?’
‘Yes, it’s been going on all summer.’ My mother is obviously aware of the facts of life but the facts of mine would be hard for anyone to absorb. ‘It’s Jean-Luc’s baby.’
‘Nobody knows except you. I’m in terrible trouble here.’
It was understandable that my mother didn’t know what to say; I don’t think anyone would. But I felt her heart go out to me across a continent and an ocean. In her face was everything I’d been missing for thirty years.
Chapter Fifty Four
I never told him not to call me. You can’t say that to a man who’s punched a hole in a wall for you. ‘Jean-Luc…’ I answered.
‘Alexandra…’
There was a pause as we both struggled to compose ourselves.
‘Je n’arrête pas de penser à toi.’ He was never going to stop thinking about me. We’d never spoken much French together – not proper conversations – and his voice sounded deeper, more knowing. Like someone really down on his luck. He wasn’t doing this to put me at a disadvantage. Some things are so hard you just have to spit them out whichever way you can. ‘If this meant anything—’
‘Don’t,’ I said, and then, because it would be a lie of omission not to, ‘I’ve been thinking about you too.’ There was no point asking if he was okay.
‘Meet me, please,’ he said. ‘You’re right, I can’t go on like this. It can be anywhere you want. Outside, if you prefer. I promise not to touch you.’ This week was supposed to be our time for that.
It brought back the cool marble of the Malavoines’ bathroom floor beneath my body, the dress I was barely wearing, buttons at the front unfastened, the skirt pushed up, my legs damp with blood and come and water. The dropped bandage had unwound itself around us in implausibly long loops, like someone was trying to write us a message. That first text Jean-Luc ever sent me said: just to talk. Look where that had led us.
‘Parc des Buttes-Chaumont,’ I said, off the top of my head. It was between the studio and Belleville, where Philippe sometimes talked of moving the gallery because it was an up-and-coming neighbourhood, cheaper and more receptive to the kind of work he wanted to show. I hadn’t been there in years.
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