Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  They were, in fact, so relieved when my parents divorced after almost thirty bitter years that they were even willing to acknowledge their own role in the disaster that was my parents' marriage. Lucy said to me, “It can't have been easy for your mom, taking care of two kids who never wanted her around.” Then she asked if my mother had gained a lot of weight since the divorce and wondered if I'd met our father's new girlfriend yet, who was, Lucy said, “Just fabulous. And beautiful. Really thin.” And then she laughed.

  So when my mother says I shouldn't let Jack know that spending time with William makes me so tired that I feel a headache forming deep in the center of my skull, I listen. I allow myself the ludicrous fantasy that each day will be the day that William and I will magically connect, that this is the day we will find ourselves speaking the same language. My other fantasy involves hiring some pleasant young Columbia student to hang out with William in the afternoons while I go to the movies. When I was working full time William went to his mother's apartment with Sonia on Wednesdays and Jack picked him up after work. But then I quit my job, and we changed the schedule, giving Sonia a free day. It doesn't seem fair to take Sonia's day off away from her just because I find amusing her charge to be unbearably difficult. Especially since I am determined that Jack will never know of my grotesque and unacceptable inability to love his child.

  “Do you know what eBay is?” William says, interrupting my thoughts. As usual, we are having a snack instead of a nap. William is swirling his spoon around in his bowl of nonfat, dairy-free sorbet. William is lactose intolerant, according to his mother. He drinks soy milk, and eats Tofutti and dairy-free sorbet.

  “Yes,” I say, vaguely.

  “My friend Bailey's dad sells things on eBay.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Bailey says his dad takes all their old stuff and sells it on eBay. Everything they don't want anymore. Like Bailey's old bike, and his dad's skis from when he was in college.”

  I nod, but I am not paying much attention.

  “Emilia?”

  “Yes, William.”

  “Bailey's dad makes a lot of money on eBay. A lot.”

  “Good for Bailey's dad.”

  “Do you ever go to eBay?”

  I sigh and look at him. “No, not really.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Or I could just ask Bailey's dad. I'm sure he'd sell me a pair of old skis if I needed them.”

  William wrinkles his brow. “No, no. I mean, you should sell stuff. To make money, like Bailey's dad. Don't you have any old stuff?”

  “We could sell your dad's skis. Or just one of them. How about that? One Völkl ski. Two years old. And one pole.”

  William shakes his head. “That's silly. Nobody would buy one ski. We should sell the baby's stuff.”

  I do not answer. I sit on the other side of the kitchen table and clutch my coffee cup so tightly that I cannot believe it doesn't shatter beneath my fingers.

  “We can sell the crib,” he says. “The crib cost one thousand three hundred and eleven dollars.” William likes to know what things cost. “So if we sold it on eBay we would get two thousand dollars. Or maybe even ten thousand dollars.”

  “No, we wouldn't,” I say.

  “That's how eBay works,” he says, patiently. “You take all the stuff you don't need anymore and people give you lots of money for it.”

  I stare at the top of William's head. He has Carolyn's pale brown hair, but while hers hangs in a preternaturally shiny sheath to her shoulders, swinging smoothly, with never a split end or ragged edge, his is full of cowlicks, standing up on one part of his head, flattened on the other. The hair is fine, and you can see the yellow crust of his scalp through the greasy strands. William has something called cradle cap, Jack says, or rather Carolyn says, and we must rub baby oil into his head every night and brush it with a soft-bristled brush before using a fine-toothed comb to gently lift off the flakes. When Jack refers to this condition, I must clamp my lips together to keep from pointing out that the child is far too old for a cradle, and that as far as I can tell he has nothing more nor less than a bad case of dandruff.

  I say, “We could not get ten thousand dollars for the crib on eBay.”

  “We can sell the stroller, too. I bet we would get five thousand dollars for the stroller.”

  “William, that's not the way eBay works. It's not magic. People have to want something in order to bid on it. Nobody is going to bid thousands of dollars for . . . for a stroller they can buy brand new for eight hundred and seventy-five.” My jaw is clenched so tight the pain is traveling up behind my ears, along my temples and tying itself into a knot at the top of my head.

  “Bailey's dad says . . .”

  “You're just misunderstanding Bailey's dad. Or Bailey's misunderstanding him.”

  William scowls. “You don't even know Bailey. Or his dad.”

  “I don't want to talk about selling the baby's things, William.”

  “But that's what eBay's for. You're supposed to sell stuff you don't need. You don't need the stuffies or the baby clothes or the diapers. That dumb American Girl doll you bought is still in the box. You should sell that stupid Samantha on eBay.”

  And now it is too much for me. “Shut up, William. Just shut up.” I get up from the table. My chair clatters to the floor. I stare at it, already feeling guilty, already resentful of the guilt. It sometimes seems like William is Carolyn's little mouthpiece, her surrogate goad. He prods and pokes until I satisfy their low expectations, until I prove once again that I am a terrible person. I tell myself that he is not trying to trap me, not trying to force me to reveal my failings and my flaws. He is only a little boy. And yet Carolyn and I have both vested in him so much more power than any small boy should have.

  I leave the chair lying on the floor and William sitting at the table and walk out of the room. I stop in the doorway of the little bedroom down the hall, the one intended, when the building was built, as a maid's room. It is moss green with a border of pale pink roses. I painted it myself, so the edges are ragged, almost frayed. If you look very closely you can see that the row of roses is crooked, that it staggers down across the wall and around the room so that when the roses reach the left of the double window they are a full inch-and-a-half lower than when they began on the right. This bothers me very much and I wish I could redo it, or that I had paid someone to do it correctly.

  I lean against the doorjamb, and press my fingers into the soft flesh of my belly. I feel for my uterus, wondering if it is still swollen and engorged. I palpate the loose jelly roll that was once my waist and dig my index and middle finger into the place right below my belly button. It hurts, and for that I am grateful. I would hate to think that everything had gone back to normal, that it had all been erased or blotted out, that the only evidence of what had happened was a crooked stencil on a poorly painted wall.

  I keep my eyes on the stenciled border, and I do not look at the rest of the room. I do not look at the ridiculously overpriced crib, with the pink bedding—fat, overblown roses on one side, gingham checks on the reverse. I do not look at the changing table, the neat stacks of infant diapers, the baby-wipes warmer with the cord wound around it like a dead snake, the pots of diaper rash ointment and baby lotion. I do not look at the antique carpet with the Arts and Crafts pattern, in a shade of pink that the rug dealer told me was so rare that he had never seen it before. I do not look at the glider rocker, with its cream-colored leather seat and matching footrest, special ordered by my mother as a baby present. My father gave us a $5,000 savings bond. I wonder what one does with a savings bond in the name of someone who no longer exists?

  It is only when I lick my lips and taste salt that I realize I have been crying hard enough to make my nose run. I wipe my face on my sleeve and head back to the kitchen. I must convince William not to tell his mother that I have once again proved myself to be a wicked stepmother, that I have said shut up to him, that I have let him see me cry.

&nbs
p; Chapter 4

  Jack was the first married man I ever dated. I believe that women who date married men are cruel and irresponsible, and that they betray their sisters. Worse, I believe that they are fools. If they think that the married men whom they are seducing will be faithful to them, then they are deluding themselves. A man who cheats on one wife will surely cheat on another. Fidelity is a personality trait; it is not case specific. It is a matter of character, not of circumstance.

  The commencement of my relationship with Jack was the most typical of stories. I was a young associate at the law firm where he is a partner. He was my boss. We first kissed on a business trip, outside the door of my hotel room, on the third floor of the Claremont Hotel in Oakland, California. The first time we made love was, as I've said before, in his office. I was thirty years old when we first began seeing each other; he was struggling to come to terms with his impending fortieth birthday. I am Jack's red Porsche.

  It's all very trite and seedy, sordid and humiliating, except that I love him. I love him so much that while I know other people feel this kind of love, I cannot imagine that it is possible that they continue with their daily lives without stopping strangers on the street and declaring the magnificence of their lovers. I love him so much that I am in a state of constant terror that something will happen to him—I want to wrap him in cotton batting and put him in my pocket where I know he will be safe. I only feel totally secure with him before my eyes, in no danger of dying in a plane crash, or getting hit by a taxicab, or having a bowling ball fall from the roof of a building to crush his skull. I love him so much that I want to swallow him, to start with his curled pinkie toes and work my way up to the whorls of his small and high-set ears.

  I never knew that it was possible to feel this way. I thought I was in love before. There was an Israeli who worked for Moshe's Moving whom I was convinced I ought to marry. There was a guy in my orientation group in law school whom I probably would have married but for his conviction that marrying a white woman would ruin his chances of being elected to public office (he and his mocha-colored wife just moved to Washington, D.C., representatives of the Nineteenth Congressional District of New York). There were others, so many that nowadays, when sluttiness has come back into fashion, I am a veritable trendsetter. But I never before felt anything remotely akin to what I have felt for Jack from the moment I first saw him. I loved him for two years before he noticed me, and for another year before he allowed himself to touch me.

  I saw Jack on my very first day at Friedman, Taft, Mayberry and Stein. I was being led down the hall by the recruitment coordinator, on my way to the office I was to share with another first-year associate, a languid, heavy-lidded young graduate of Yale who gave the impression of not caring very much about his work at the firm, who took long lunches and left early, but who would become the youngest person ever to make partner, after structuring a series of telecommunications acquisition deals that left opposing counsel reeling at his unexpected avarice and mendacity. I followed the recruitment coordinator, staring at her heels, which bulged over the back of her mules. Her shoes were too small, and she snapped them against her feet when she walked. I was doing my best to seem bright-eyed and eager, not to appear ungrateful for my job with its six-figure income. I did not want to let on just how depressed this place made me, the gracious wood-paneled lobby, the grim-faced cheer of the receptionists, the long hallways, a crossword puzzle of square offices just barely larger than a cubicle, all with the doors propped open to better permit the sleek-suited attorneys to exhibit their industry to their falsely benevolent taskmasters.

  I had formulated no clear plan about my future when I started law school, and even as the three years drew to a close my ambitions grew no less muddled. To this day I am not sure why I became an attorney, other than because my father is one, although that might as soon have given me reason to avoid the law as drawn me to it. It is not that my father has ever expressed dissatisfaction with his career. On the contrary, he is absolutely content with his professional life. He practices real estate law in New Jersey, near the town where I grew up, in a firm with offices right off Route 17. My father was once the president of the New Jersey Bar Association. It is not any discontentment on his part that might have repelled me, but rather the fact that when I was a child the only thing guaranteed to lay my insomniac brain to rest was a discussion with my father about one of his deals. Further motivation for choosing another career is the fact that my sister, Allison, is an attorney in the appellate division of Legal Aid in Manhattan. They say she will soon be appointed to the judiciary. They, meaning Allison and my father.

  I did not go to law school immediately after graduating from college, as did both Allison and my father. After a few years of travel and the sort of vaguely artistic jobs that college graduates with little ambition and less talent find when they first move to New York City, I took the LSAT. I took it on a lark, I suppose, or perhaps because I was sick of living in an apartment where I could turn on the coffeemaker in the kitchen without rising from the pullout sofa in the living room where I slept. To be honest, I don't really remember why I took the LSAT. But I did very well—better than Allison—and after that law school seemed inevitable. I started out with the vague purpose of doing public interest law, but criminal law was the only thing that interested me in the slightest and I was afraid of following in the aggressively competent footsteps of my older sister. In the fall of my third year at law school, when I was interviewing for jobs, I decided that if my work was doomed to be monotonous, it might as well be lucrative. Thus I found myself at Friedman Taft, following the swishing behind of the recruiting coordinator in the ill-fitting shoes.

  She lost her mule outside Jack's office. I'm not sure how it happened, but somehow she kicked it off, and then tripped over it. I was walking too close behind her and when she stumbled I nearly came down on top of her. I righted myself by grabbing onto the pedestal of a carved wooden sculpture of a naked woman that was displayed in the hallway. The sculpture rocked back and forth, and for a moment I was worried that we would both, the wooden woman and I, come crashing down on top of the recruiting coordinator. We didn't. The sculpture held fast to its plinth, and I found my balance and stayed on my feet. I was immediately sorry that I had. A handsome man was crouched beside the recruiting coordinator, her foot in his hands.

  “Does it hurt when I squeeze?” he said. The muscles of his back strained against the soft white fabric of his shirt. I could see them flex as he lifted her foot gently in the palm of his hand. I felt a nearly insurmountable urge to kneel down behind him and press my body against his, cleave my breasts and belly to his back, slide my fingers around his waist.

  “Ooh,” the recruiting coordinator murmured, wincing. The faker.

  “I think it's probably sprained,” he said.

  He laid her foot tenderly on the floor, blew his forelock out of his eyes—he was going through a floppy-hair phase back then—and reached around her waist. He hoisted her to her feet and half led, half carried her into his office. “Marilyn,” he called out. “Will you see what you can do about finding some ice?”

  His secretary, whose desk was in the hallway outside his office, got to her feet.

  She turned to me. “Was Frances taking you somewhere before the tragic loss of her shoe?” She didn't seem in a particular hurry to get the ice.

  “Yes. She was showing me to my new office.”

  “I think you'll be on your own for a while. What's your name?”

  “Emilia Greenleaf. I'm a new associate.”

  “What number office are you in?”

  I looked down at the folder in my hand. On the page with my code number and my telephone extension and e-mail address was an office number. “Eighteen eighteen,” I said.

  “Double life,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The numbers. That's what they mean.” She looked at me appraisingly. “You are Jewish, aren't you?”

  “Yes.”
r />   “I'm Marilyn Nudelman.”

  “I'm not religious or anything.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Come, I'll show you to your office.”

  Marilyn is still Jack's secretary, and while she danced the hora at my wedding, while she is satisfied that at least I am more Jewish than Carolyn Soule, twelfth-generation descendant of the Mayflower, still she does not consider me Jewish enough. This is clear from the presents she sends me—a Hebrew calendar every year before Rosh Hashanah, a box of fruit jells at Passover, a little mesh bag of gold coins at Hanukkah. Each gift is accompanied by a little explanatory note, as if she really believes I do not understand the significance of gelt or wheat-free candy. There is something passive-aggressive about all this gift giving, but I am certainly up to the challenge. I buy lavish presents for Jack to give to Marilyn—cashmere sweaters from Saks, a Coach briefcase and matching purse, gift certificates for a day of beauty treatments at Elizabeth Arden. Then I insist that he give them to her on Christmas Eve.

  This gentle battle will likely continue forever, or certainly until Marilyn retires. It began on the evening Jack first succumbed to the signals I had been sending him for three years, ever since he failed to notice that I was standing behind shoeless Frances Defarge in the hallway in front of his office.