Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  “I hate that one,” Jack says. “I can't even bear to look at it.”

  He reaches across and sifts through the pile of photographs. He pulls out one of the hospital pictures of Isabel and me. We are in profile, looking into each other's faces. I am holding her with my thumbs under her arms, her head supported by the four fingers of each of my hands and her bottom resting in the crooks of my elbows. We have identical double chins. “This is my favorite,” Jack says. “And the one with you changing her diaper. I have both of those framed on my desk at work.”

  “You have pictures at work of Isabel?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn't know that. You didn't tell me that.”

  “You didn't ask.”

  I take the photograph back from him and look at it again. “I look fat.”

  “You look like you just had a baby.”

  That, of course, makes me cry. I am not trying to force Jack to spring into action, but he does. He sits up and hugs me, nestles my head against his chest.

  “Why aren't you mad at me?” I blubber. His pajama top is unbuttoned and I wipe my nose on the hairs on his chest.

  “For what?”

  I push my face into his chest.

  “For what, Emilia? Why should I be mad at you?”

  “For . . . for stealing the pictures.”

  “I just ordered another set and had them delivered to the office.”

  I lift my head. “But weren't you mad at me for not telling you that I had them? For hiding them in my drawer?”

  Jack pulls a tissue out of the box on his nightstand and wipes at the mucus I have left smeared across his chest. “Of course I'm not mad.”

  “Why not? You should be.”

  “You sound like you want me to be angry at you.”

  I press my cheek back against him. He is so warm and the hairs on his chest tickle my skin.

  Jack kisses the top of my head. “Do you want to choose one or two of the pictures for me to enlarge? We can get a couple of nice frames and put them up somewhere. Maybe in here. Or in the living room.”

  “God no,” I say. “I mean, not yet. I'm not ready for that, yet.”

  His sigh is almost imperceptible.

  “It's not that I won't ever want her picture up. Just, you know. Not yet.”

  “Okay.”

  “For now I need them to be private. Mine, not anyone else's.” It takes a moment for me to realize what I have said. “And yours, too. Of course yours.”

  “Of course.”

  I pick up the little stack of photographs once more and leaf through them until I reach the one of Jack and Isabel with my foot in the corner. “Do you like this one?” I ask.

  “Not much,” he says. “She's got that Popeye the Sailor Man, one-eye-open-one-eye-closed thing going on.”

  “You look nice, though.” I trace a finger over his smile. “You look happy.”

  “I was happy. The day Isabel was born and the day William was born were the two happiest days of my life.”

  I say, “I was happy, too.”

  “I know, Em. I know you were.”

  It takes us a long time to fall asleep.

  Chapter 7

  The next day I talk Simon into playing hooky from work and coming with me to the movies. I can tell he really hasn't the time for this kind of foolishness, that he's got serious, adult things to take care of, real work to do. Simon is a labor lawyer, but only while he waits for the ACLU to hire him. He applies, year after year, for every opening they have, even those in the reproductive rights project. Meanwhile he will likely make partner at his union-side labor firm, even though he hates the work. Simon is smart, diligent, and not easily distracted. His devotion to a job he despises is the reason I am forced to play the dead-baby card.

  “That's not fair, Emilia,” he says.

  “Tell me about it,” I say. “It's at the Angelika, it's Cambodian, and it's three and a half hours long. I'll buy you a double espresso.”

  We are the only people at the theater at eleven in the morning, despite the fact that this morose exercise in Far Eastern tedium has been nominated for an Oscar. The movie is so gloomy that Simon begins to supply alternative subtitles.

  “Oh lordy, lordy,” he pretends to read in a thick Southern accent. Simon often affects to be from Alabama or Mississippi. He grew up in Great Neck. “It is so hard to keep my hair clean in these filthy killing fields!”

  I feel a giggle tickle the back of my throat for the first time in a long while.

  “You there, with the gun!Yoo-hoo! Do you have conditioner? A little Paul Mitchell? Some curling balm? I have never seen less body, or more bodies, if you know what I mean.”

  Now I laugh out loud. The female character in the film stumbles along next to a river, driven forward by a bayonet-wielding soldier. Simon keeps up his commentary. “I swear, as God is my witness, I will never go this long without a wash and set again!”

  I poke him in the side and say, “Oh my God, will you stop! This is genocide we're watching here.” By now I am laughing so hard I have to pee.

  “No, girlfriend, this is a bad movie we're watching here,” Simon says, and then he is silent. I look up at the screen. The woman has fallen into the water. She rises to the surface, water streaming from her hair into her eyes. She is surrounded by the corpses of infants. They bob in the water, naked, their eyes open and lifeless. She bats them away, screaming, howling, wailing with terror and revulsion.

  “Fuck,” Simon says. “Let's get out of here.”

  “No.”

  “Emilia, come on. You don't need to see this.”

  I argue with him. I remind him that we have never walked out on a movie before, no matter how awful. We've been to every implacably dull Asian movie ever to flicker on the screens in the city of New York. I list them for him: Raise the Red Lantern. The Scent of Green Papaya. Raise the Green Papaya. The Scent of Red Lantern II. We have gone to see dreadful movies on purpose and stayed to the bitter end, through the credits, even. We can't leave; it's a matter of pride.

  Simon puts his arm around me and heaves me to my feet. “Up we go, lady,” he says, and leads me out of the theater.

  In the lobby we put on our coats and scarves. Simon has a new winter coat, long and black. It balloons when he swings it around to put it over his shoulders and he looks unusually debonair. All of Simon's clothes are black, gray, or white. His apartment is entirely gray. Simon explains the monotony of his palette by telling people that he is color-blind. He is not. He is a gay man with no sense of style. Simon is tall, and a bit cadaverous. His eyes bulge from his head, as though he has a thyroid condition, although he doesn't. His hair is receding and he keeps what is left cropped so short that the lines of his skull are clearly visible. Still, he is handsome, in a lugubrious way.

  “Well, what now?” I say.

  “Shoe shopping?”

  “Why does everybody want to take me fucking shoe shopping?” I ask. “Mindy insisted I go with her to Manolo Blahnik. Why are you all under the impression that shoes are what's going to make me feel better?”

  “Because you like shoes.”

  “Yes, well, I like sushi, but nobody imagines a California roll is going to solve all my problems. And I like Jane Austen, but nobody imagines rereading Pride and Prejudice will make me recover from the loss of my baby.”

  “You like me, and I imagine I will help you recover from the loss of your baby.”

  Simon is not looking at me when he says this. He is looking down while he wraps his plaid scarf twice around his neck and into the collar of his coat. He does not see my eyes well with tears, or if he does, he does not say anything. Maybe that's because his own eyes are filled with tears. I slip my hand into his pocket and say, “Okay, fine. Shoe shopping.

  “At least shoes are better than Mindy's other idea,” I say as we are walking uptown to our favorite shoe store.

  “What's that?”

  “A Walk to Remember,” I say, shuddering.

 
“A walk to what?”

  Unlike me, Mindy has wholeheartedly embraced the grief community, both virtual and actual. She is trying to get pregnant, and has had three miscarriages in two years. She sees a grief counselor, and is an active poster on not one but two infertility Web sites. Sometimes I think my certain derision is the only thing that keeps Mindy from creating a blog devoted to her struggles with infertility, complete with violin concertos and clip art of winged cherubs. She had sucked me into this latest madness of hers by playing expertly on my feelings about the babies in Central Park.

  “What you really need to do,” Mindy said, “is be in the park with other people like us.”

  “People like us?”

  “People who've experienced our kind of loss. So you can take back the park from the smug mommies.”

  Mindy's plan for “taking back the park” involves a group stroll. This yearly event is usually conducted during October, a month given the dubious honor, by none other than Ronald Reagan, of being named National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. An entire month devoted to the memory of babies lost through miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, still birth, and newborn death. Lucky October. This year, we are fortunate enough to be treated to a second group walk, to commemorate the son of the founder of the New York walk.

  “Are we celebrating her ectopic pregnancy?” I asked.

  “Don't be a bitch, Emilia,” Mindy said. “She's lost two babies to a genetic kidney disease. The older of them died eight years ago, on February 29. We're honoring him with a special walk because it's leap year.”

  I was suitably chastened, and sufficiently embarrassed to consent to accompany Mindy and the other grieving walkers.

  “It will be healing,” Mindy said.

  “I doubt it,” I replied.

  “Do you want me to come?” Simon says now, gamely.

  “God, no.”

  At the shoe store, I buy a pair of red leather boots that I doubt I will ever wear. Simon buys a pair of white patent leather bucks that I know he will not wear. He only buys them because the salesman is wearing the same ones, and tells Simon how cute they are and how gorgeous they look on Simon's long, elegant feet. I wait for the salesman to drag out the old saw about the connection between foot and penis size, but he doesn't have to. He is giving Simon a foot job, massaging the arch of his foot, rubbing his heel. When the salesman goes in the back to get a larger size I say, “I'm not sure Jack's grandmother would have approved of white shoes after Labor Day.”

  “Jack's grandmother?”

  “Isabel, the style maven.”

  Simon frowns, his eyebrows drawn together like pigeon's wings. He looks like a sad circus clown and it makes me want to kick him. “The one you named the baby for,” he says.

  “Yes,” I say, and I leave it at that. I have a cruel and entirely unacceptable urge to tell Simon that the only reason the salesman is being so nice to him is for the commission. I do not, because not only is Simon my best friend but he is slowly becoming my only friend. I cannot let myself drive him away, too. I will have nothing to do with my friends who have babies, or my friends who are pregnant. Even Mindy is hard for me to be around. She thinks we are members of the same sorority of pain, that we are sisters in grief, that together we will sit and make bitter faces at the smug mothers passing with their strollers and swelling bellies. But when I am with Mindy I am afraid every minute that I will tell her she has no fucking idea, that a curl of flesh and DNA floating in a toilet bowl full of blood is not a baby, and that feeling the remnants of a pregnancy run down your legs is nothing, nothing like holding your dead child in your arms. This comment would not, I imagine, do much for our friendship.

  Simon is the only friend I have who I am fairly confident will never have children and thus I cannot alienate him, even if he does sometimes react with a false-looking frown of sadness when I mention Isabel's name. Plus, he loves me, and he cries for Isabel. He is, I think, the only person not related to her by blood who does that. It's not his fault that his sadness isn't expressed in precisely the way I would like. It is my fault for expecting it to be.

  I am quiet at lunch, and Simon has to do most of the talking, which is not normally the way it is with us. Normally we banter back and forth. Normally it is the Emilia Greenleaf and Simon Fargo Hour, and we are a team, each other's devoted audience. That is the way it has always been, since the day we met in our first year of law school, at a study group that a few other students in our section were forming. I did not last in the study group—they were far too earnest and serious for me. Simon did, and for the rest of the year he generously slipped me the study group's shared outlines, violating not only the rules of the group but an actual written contract that one of the more neurotic members drew up after learning about offer and acceptance in contracts class.

  Simon picks at his Caesar salad. I eat all of mine, and then order sweet potato fries.

  “I am dreading this weekend,” Simon says.

  “Why?”

  “Another bachelor party. You'd think being gay would absolve me from attending these horrible events, but apparently not. Every time one of my college roommates gets married, I am expected to spend an evening drinking tequila shooters and watching some poor Russian girl spin around a pole. And honestly, Emilia, you would not believe how naked these girls are. If I had a speculum and a couple of Q-tips I could do a residency in gynecology.”

  I think I am going to throw up my Caesar salad. The waitress brings my sweet potato fries and I stare at them. They look like a pile of shorn hair. Shriveled. Dead.

  “I don't understand why these places aren't busted,” Simon says. “It's not like it's hidden. I mean the girls are giving blow jobs right in the clubs. They even try to give them to me, for Christ's sake. You have never seen anything sadder than me trying to explain the word ‘homosexual' to some teenage farm girl from Moldavia. I end up paying more not to get blown.”

  I cannot reply. I cannot say anything. I have in my mind the image of my father and the Russian stripper he claimed he was in love with. The girl in Plainfield, New Jersey, whom he visited every Monday morning for nearly a year, the girl for whose company he withdrew $1,000 every Monday morning at precisely nine o'clock from the drive-through window of the Citizens First National Bank. If I had not sold my mother on the fun of online banking she never would have noticed these transactions. She still might have missed them but for their regularity and the sheer quantity of cash. As the numbers downloaded with a cheerful chirp and ping, linked and synced from their account into her Quicken program, my mother grew more and more befuddled. Finally, a Luddite at heart, she resorted to paper and dug out their old bank statements, reading them for the first time in her life. She finally understood why, with a fancy lawyer husband, president of the bar association, two-time Northern New Jersey Real Estate Lawyer of the Year, she never seemed to have enough money for things like the cruises her friends took every year, the personal trainer that she had always wanted to help her lose weight, a nicer car than the Honda Accord she'd been driving forever. At first she assumed my father was gambling. She confronted him with the bank statements and begged him to go to Gamblers Anonymous. My mother told me the fight lasted long into the night, that it was almost dawn before he finally confessed. He didn't spend it on horses and cards. He never went to Atlantic City. The money was for Oksana.

  In my mind she has a high round forehead, kinked hair drawn into a bun, bee-stung lips. My father told my mother she is only a few years younger than me, but I imagine her much younger, a teenager almost. I've managed to strip her of the ice skates, but the outfit remains, tarted up for purposes of fantasy, no pale pink bodysuit underneath to simulate flesh, but rather actual skin peeking through shredded spangled miniskirt and thong. When I imagine them together, my father and his Russian whore, what I see them doing is some kind of pornographic paired triple lutz. I suppose that if the girl's name had been Nadia or Olga, my fantasies would have involved back handsprings and the uneve
n parallel bars. The most pathetic thing about it all was that my father claimed Oksana loved him. He told my mother that this girl thought that he was special, that she didn't think of him as a client but rather as her lover, her boyfriend, the man she would marry if only she could. He told this to my mother as the sun rose on a crisp autumn day, the trees a riot of color, the air redolent with the coming winter. Then he went to work, and my mother called me. I took the bus from Port Authority and I was there in a little over an hour, so that I could hold her hair while she vomited. I helped her pack his bags, and I crossed my arms and stared her down when she tried to change her mind.

  “We've been married for thirty years,” she said. She was standing in her bedroom holding a stack of wool sweaters in her hand. Her housedress was buttoned wrong, one end sticking up by her ear, and her small, narrow feet, blue-veined and pink-polished, were bare.

  “Twenty-nine,” I said.

  “Almost thirty.”

  “And how much of that time was he cheating on you?”

  “I don't know.” She put the sweaters into a suitcase, layering tissue paper between them.

  I pulled the paper out, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it in the trash can. I pulled open my father's underwear drawer and, holding my breath, dumped the contents into a carryall.

  “He says this Russian girl loves him.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “And were there other Russian girls? Did they love him too?”

  I stood over my mother while she sent my father an e-mail telling him where his belongings would be, and then I drove the suitcases to a Ramada Inn on Route 17, not too far from his office. I took a room in his name, putting the charge on my mother's credit card and forging the signature I had perfected in high school. When I got back to the house she was standing in the front hall, still in her housedress.