Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  Yes I'm sorry, of course I'm sorry. I'm sorry about so many things. I'm sorry that your son seems able to pierce my heart with unerring accuracy. I'm sorry I am unable to rise above it, to recognize that he is a child and I am an adult. I am sorry that the baby died and left me an angry and guilt-ridden mess, unable to laugh at the thought of making a killing selling Bugaboo Frogs on eBay. You have no idea how sorry I am, Jack. Would you love me if you knew everything I had to be sorry about?

  I pull out a stack of three shamrock-green Fiestaware plates. “Who wants a squeeze of lime on his pad Thai?” I say.

  Chapter 6

  At night, in bed, Jack says, “William doesn't realize what he's saying.”

  “I know.”

  “He's just trying to figure out how to deal with all this.”

  “I know.”

  “He's misses her, too.”

  I do not reply. Instead I repeat her name in my mind. I chose it when I was a few weeks pregnant, before I had even shared the news with Jack. Jack was telling me about his grandmother, his father's mother, who had left Marseille for the United States when she was a small girl but had persisted in speaking with a thick French accent until the day she died. While he told me about her, he tied a Prada scarf around my neck, one he said his grandmother would have loved; although never wealthy, she had an eye for couture and loved bright colors. We had eaten an expensive lunch at Nobu, and had taken a nice long walk to Barneys. It was the anniversary of the first time we made love, and while we had flirted with the idea of celebrating by reprising our acrobatics in the Aeron chair, we decided to save Marilyn's delicate sensibilities and buy each other lavish gifts instead. There was a dark brown leather jacket in a garment bag hanging from Jack's finger, one that was going to take a good chunk of my next paycheck, and for my part I had to move three or four black bags out of the way so that Jack could expertly knot the length of emerald green silk around my throat.

  “We should name the baby after your grandmother,” I said, as I admired myself in the mirror.

  “Hmm?” Jack said, as though he hadn't heard.

  “I mean, if we ever have a baby.”

  Jack caught my fingers in his hand and squeezed them. “We'll have a baby, Em. Some day. Just not right now, okay, sweetie?”

  I didn't say anything.

  “My divorce isn't even final yet. William has barely begun to adjust to the idea of us living together. And you're only thirty-one; hardly more than a baby yourself.”

  What I wish I had done was laugh musically, trace a long fingernail down his cheek, and sing out, “Ah well, my love, too late! You're going to be a papa!” Esprit de l'escalier. Instead, I burst into a flood of gasping tears that left a shining snail's trail across the Prada scarf, which Jack paid for in cash so that we would not have to wait for his credit card to be processed, before he hustled me out of the store.

  Eight months later, our daughter was born.

  She was a perfectly healthy baby, and her birth was, according to the doula, easy and uneventful. I have my own opinions about that. Those of my girlfriends who have survived long labors (one in particular takes every opportunity to bemoan, with irritating braggadocio, her forty-four hours in hell) have little sympathy for this part of my maternal experience. (They are, however, so crippled with sympathy for the rest of it that most of them cannot even bring themselves to call me on the telephone. Instead, they send supportive, vaguely cryptic e-mails that never mention the baby's name or even refer to her, but merely ask how I'm doing, and hope I'm “bearing up” or “feeling better.” Honestly, who can blame them? It's not like I'd be so eager to call someone suffering from a melancholy sufficiently bleak and contagious that it could infect a person through the fiber-optic wires. If the roles were reversed would I have done any more than send a basket of fruit and a sympathetic but not too schmaltzy condolence card? Probably not.) My labor was a mere nine hours long. We'd planned to spend the better part in our apartment, in the bathtub, or bouncing on the big purple exercise ball that Felicia, the doula, provided us. But we ended up in the hospital instead. I had been so placid in the face of the handful of freezing ice they gave us to simulate the pain of labor while we practiced our breathing in birth-preparation class. I could breathe through my nose and out through my mouth, visualizing the petals of the lotus blossom hovering above my head. But as soon as the first real contraction hit, I began wailing and hyperventilating.

  Off we went to the hospital, with Ivan's best wishes to Mr. and Mrs. Woolf, and a fond reminder to dress the little one warm on the way home, because November is always colder than it feels. On the cab ride through the park I put my head in Jack's lap. He tapped his fingertips gently around my eyes, the way he does when I have a headache.

  “Kiss me,” I said.

  He leaned over and pressed his lips against mine. They were a little bit chapped; he had gone skiing once because he knew he wouldn't get to go much for the rest of the season. I licked the rough skin on his lower lip. He kissed me again. Just then a contraction started, and I tried to pull away, but Jack didn't let me. He kissed me through the contraction, moving his tongue against mine, probing and licking my mouth until I could not tell if the ache swirling around my belly was pleasure or pain.

  Our baby was born at New York-Presbyterian Hospital on York Avenue, even though if I'd had my way she would have been born at Mount Sinai. The obstetrician who delivered her was named Dr. Fletcher Brewster (not Dr. Brewster Fletcher, as it erroneously says on UrbanBaby.com) and he is the first non-Jewish doctor who has ever touched any part of my body, intimate or otherwise, except for a Nepalese dentist who fixed a tooth I broke tripping over a severed cow foot on a street in Kathmandu. While I am neither biased against non-Jewish physicians nor a Jewish chauvinist like my father, I am convinced, superstitiously, and surely erroneously, that if my doctor had been named Abramowitz or Cohen, if I had given birth at Mount Sinai, if I had not been touched by those goyish hands in that goyish hospital, my daughter would be alive today.

  Dr. Carolyn Soule, however, has her obstetrical practice at Mount Sinai Hospital.

  Now, lying in bed next to Jack, I say the baby's name, silently. I mouth it, but without breath so Jack will not hear.

  Isabel.

  Jack sighs. “William is sad, too,” he says again.

  “I know.”

  Jack folds his hands behind his head and stares up at the ceiling. I count the gray hairs over his left ear. Sometimes I do this out loud and while he pretends only to be pretending to get angry; I don't think he likes it very much. It reminds him that he is nine years older than I am.

  “Em,” Jack says, his voice soft and husky.

  “I know,” I say.

  “You know what?”

  “I know we have to clean out her room.”

  Jack doesn't say anything. He long ago stopped wondering how it is that I sometimes appear to be reading his mind, how I know what he is thinking or feeling even before he knows it himself. I have explained to him that it is because he is my bashert, my intended. I knew it from the first moment I saw him. There is a Jewish legend, a Midrash, that before you are born an angel takes you on a tour of your life and shows you the person whom you are meant to marry. Then the angel strikes you on your philtrum, leaving that subtle channel in the skin between the nose and mouth, and makes you forget what you have seen. But not entirely. There remains a vestige, enough to evoke a jolt of recognition if you are lucky enough to stumble across your bashert during the course of your life. When I saw Jack kneeling on the carpet with Frances Defarge's foot in his hand, I knew he was my bashert. I recognized him.

  “I can't pack it away yet,” I say.

  “That's all right,” Jack says.

  He slips his arm underneath my neck and I rub my cheek against the smooth cotton of his pajama sleeve. Jack only wears pajamas when William is sleeping at our house. I don't. I tried to, at first, but during the night I would twist and turn, tied up in the knots of my nightclothes
. I would always end up shucking them off in my sleep. Now I drape a nightgown over the end of the bed, and when William calls out in his sleep or comes into our room, I grab it and slip it over my head.

  “I'm not making a shrine or anything,” I say.

  “I know, Em.”

  “It's just . . . not yet.”

  “Okay.”

  “I'm sorry I said shut up.”

  Jack changes the subject. “What did you do today, before William got home?”

  I shrug my shoulders. “Nothing really. Read the paper. Talked to my dad.”

  “How is Old Man Greenleaf?” Jack says. That is what they call each other, Jack and my father. Old Man Greenleaf and Old Man Woolf. It began, I suppose, because my father was so angry at first about my relationship with Jack, so horrified by the age difference. The irony of this coming from a man who married a woman fourteen years younger than himself, and then cheated on her with a girl who was probably not much more than twenty-one, at first seemed lost on my father. When I pointed out the former (but not the latter, keeping my promise and my tongue) he grudgingly admitted that I had a point, although he then reminded me that his and my mother's marriage had ended in divorce, so perhaps I should derive a lesson from that. I reminded him that the marriage had lasted for thirty years, and once again managed to refrain from bringing up the stripper. Then he met Jack, and immediately took to him. He teased Jack, calling him “old man.” The affection was mutual, and Jack returned the joke. Thus, Old Man Greenleaf and Old Man Woolf. They kid each other, they poke fun, they laugh at each other's jokes and puns. I am grateful for this relationship, although I spend much of the time we are in my father's company thinking about what my husband would say if he knew that Old Man Greenleaf tucked most of his ready cash into the tasseled underwear of a gyrating stripper.

  “Old Man Greenleaf's fine,” I say. “He and Lucy had an argument.”

  “About what?”

  “I don't know; I wasn't really listening. I'm sure Lucy did something bitchy.” I know I am ungenerous with my sisters, Lucy in particular, but I've never forgiven them for their treatment of my mother. They were so horrible for so many years that I don't know if I could muster forgiveness even were they to apologize, although as it would never occur to either of them that they have behaved in a manner at all deserving of contrition, I will never have to confront this possibility. Still, it would be nice if they would one day regret their behavior and say they are sorry, not to me but to my mother.

  It occurs to me, suddenly, that I have not sent Lucy a thank-you note for the set of engraved Tiffany baby silverware and Curious George dishes that she sent. What is the etiquette on such occasions? Does one send a note? And if so, what does it say? Thank you for the gift; so sorry the baby will never use it? Does one return the gift? What if the giver has taken great care to make clear that the gift is an expensive one by shopping at a store that adds a premium for the pleasure of its pale blue box and white ribbon? Perhaps I should write to Miss Manners. Surely I am not the first to confront this issue. Tomorrow I will surf the Web sites where the mothers of dead babies congregate. Perhaps someone has posted an answer to this very question.

  Usually I try to avoid these Web sites as well as the various support groups around the city. The company of other bereaved mothers does not comfort me. It just makes me more depressed. As does the company of nonbereaved mothers. Other than Jack, I can only tolerate people who have never been or will never be parents, like my friend Simon, gay and avowedly single. Jack tried, once, to convince me to attend a meeting of a support group for parents who had survived “pregnancy and infant loss.” I referred him to an article in the Times that quoted studies showing how most people who suffer the loss of a loved one neither need nor benefit from participation in a bereavement group or from grief counseling.

  “Have you talked to your mom?” Jack says now.

  I nod. That goes without saying. I talk to my mother every day, sometimes a few times a day, more when she is worried about me, as she always is, since Isabel died. I have become my mother's current cause, and I am quite frankly worried about the state of the Bergen County Food Bank and the Glen Rock Neighborhood Association.

  Jack leans over and turns off his light. He creeps his hand tentatively across the bed and rests it on my hip, tracing a line with his pinky finger along the joint where the skin is loose and papery soft from pregnancy.

  I stiffen. “Do you mind if I read?” I say. “I'm not tired yet.”

  “No, not at all.” His disappointment is so obvious that it's almost funny. He looks like a five-year-old who opened a Christmas present hoping for a laser gun and found a book instead.

  Poor Jack. I think he assumed, when he married a woman nearly ten years his junior, that his life would be one long letter to Penthouse Forum. And, for more than a year and a half, his nights were bacchanals of the kind of lovemaking that leaves you limp, damp, and sweaty, with stuff in the corners of your mouth and under your fingernails. He probably thought it would last forever. He probably thought he would have to start popping Viagra just to keep up. Instead, it's been two and a half months since I've allowed him to touch me in any way other than the merely affectionate. Two and a half months since the day that Isabel was born.

  I read my book, a novel about young New Yorkers whose lives flame out in a fabulous blaze of restaurants, gallery openings, sadomasochistic clubs, and methamphetamine. This is the only kind of book I can stand to read lately: no babies, not even of the possibility of reproduction. Once I am sure that Jack is asleep I wait a few minutes, my finger marking my place in my book. Then I fold down the corner of the page, settle the book on my nightstand without making a sound, and quietly, so quietly, open the small drawer where I keep the most intimate, secret items of our marriage. Condoms, lubricant, a blue vibrator with a silver ball tip. The tweezers I use to pluck the hairs between Jack's eyebrows and the ones that grow around my nipples. A joint hidden in a box of matches. An envelope of photographs.

  The week before I gave birth, I bought Jack a digital camera. He had been teasing me for months about shooting the birth on video, about how he'd zoom in between my legs just when I was expelling the contents of my colon prior to pushing out the baby's head. I told him I knew these were empty threats—Carolyn got the camcorder in the divorce. She also got the still camera, however, and the only camera I had, a manual-focus Nikon F3, was far too complicated for Jack to figure out. In the end, he didn't even take that many pictures, not as many as I wish he had, not as many as he would have, had he known that photographs would be all we would have left of our baby.

  There are exactly seventeen photographs extant of Isabel Greenleaf Woolf. Jack must have uploaded them before she died and ordered prints from an online photo-delivery service. One day they arrived in the mail and I took them without telling him.

  The first is of her face, purple with effort, eyes closed, cheeks ballooned and dimpled, a smear of vernix over one eye. The rest of her is still inside me. Right after he took this photograph, Jack handed the camera to Felicia and knelt down next to Dr. Brewster. He spread his hands on top of the doctor's, as instructed, and caught Isabel in his outstretched palms. When she felt the cold air and her father's warm touch my daughter let loose a wrenching cry, but as soon as Dr. Brewster toweled her off and put her on my belly, she stopped. Felicia insisted that they allow the baby to nurse for a few minutes before taking her away to be weighed and measured, and Isabel latched on as if she had been nursing all her life, or as if she had been waiting impatiently inside me for the chance to get her mouth on the breast that she considered her own personal property.

  There are two photographs of Isabel being weighed, on one of which you can read the digital scale—seven pounds, nine ounces. A nice, solid weight. Average. Perfect. There is a photograph of Dr. Brewster holding her, and another of her in the arms of one of the nurses. There is one of her with Felicia. There is one blurry photograph of Jack and a second nurse giving Isabe
l her first bath, an hour or so after she was born. There is a clearer photograph of Jack holding her in the hospital room. His smile is so broad that his cheekbones are pushed far up to the corners of his face. One of Isabel's eyes is open and the other closed, and you can just barely see my swollen foot in its pale green, acrylic hospital sock in the right-hand corner of the frame. This is the only photograph we have of the three of us together.

  There are three photographs of Isabel and me in my hospital bed. My hair is lank and unwashed, pressed flat against my head. My face is round and my skin is puffed taut. My whole body looks pneumatic, like it was attached to a compressed-air tank and pumped until it was quite near to bursting. Isabel, on the other hand, is pretty cute, for a newborn. Her cheeks are plump and her head is covered by a fuzz of soft dark hair that curls over the tops of her ears. Jack tells me that William had exactly this kind of hair, and that it all fell out by the time he was two months old.

  Isabel has Jack's mouth, exactly, a tiny plum-colored kiss of a mouth. Her eyes are round, not lashless slits like those of some babies. They are navy blue. I know they are. Jack and Felicia said it was hard to tell, that babies eyes change, but I would know that color anywhere.

  The rest of the photographs are of Isabel on her first and only day at home. Isabel in her Moses basket, asleep. Isabel propped on an upholstered pillow on the couch. Isabel on her changing table without a diaper, her bare rear end covered in black, sticky goo that I am wiping away while making a disgusted face, my tongue stuck out, my eyes crossed. Isabel on her changing table with a new diaper, clean and fresh and wearing a too-big onesie. Isabel on the sheepskin mat someone gave us at my baby shower. Isabel lying on our bed, a tiny form on a vast white expanse, looking, premonitorily, like a negligible dot, too small to last very long in such an empty space.

  I am staring at this photograph, feeling my throat constrict and the tears gather, when I realize that Jack is no longer asleep. He lies still, but I can feel a pulse of energy coming from him. I slide my eyes to his face. His eyes are open, and watching me. The photographs spill from my hand onto the coverlet, the one of Isabel, lost in our bed, landing on top of the pile.