Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  I can taste those words, and I have an awful feeling that Jack can see me rolling them in my mouth.

  “Of course I want to keep picking him up,” I say. “I just forgot my goddamn umbrella. Jesus.”

  The muscle in the corner of Jack's jaw works. He is trying very hard to remain calm. “His therapist is worried about him.”

  “So Carolyn says.”

  “She's not a liar, Emilia. Carolyn is fucked up in lots of ways, but she's compulsively honest.”

  I wonder if kissing him right now will be too obvious. I wonder if the naked manipulation, the needy jealousy, expressed by a kiss at this moment will be so unattractive that it will outweigh Jack's pleasure at finally feeling my tongue. I kiss him lightly on the lips. I keep my tongue in my own mouth.

  His jaw relaxes and for a moment his lips soften under mine. Then he says, “Dr. Allerton thinks Will might have post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “William does not have post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  Jack rubs his eyes with his fist. “Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Poor Will.”

  “He's fine, Jack. Will's fine.” This is the first time I've used this nickname in years. When I first met William, I tried on Jack's nickname for him, the way one tries on an unlikely outfit in a favorite boutique, or an unusual pair of shoes. Who knows, maybe these powder blue clogs will suit me. Maybe I've been a silver strappy-sandal kind of girl all along, but have been too conservative, too cowardly to find out. I used the nickname “Will” once or twice, but it did not fit him when it came from my mouth. I went back to calling him William, our relationship as formal as a pair of staid black pumps.

  “I'm so sorry, Em. I'm sorry I keep losing my shit like this,” Jack says, wiping his eyes. He rolls me off of him and tucks me under his arm.

  “You don't keep losing your shit. When have you ever lost your shit?”

  He doesn't answer. I get up and get undressed, tossing my clothes on the little French armchair in the corner of the room.

  I slide under the sheets and turn to face him. He presses his lips into my hair, which has been, ever since he has known me, a brilliant, natural-looking shade of pumpkin red. It is the color Allison's hair was before she went gray, and I have heard that it is the precise hair color of her mother, my father's first wife. My older sisters were four and six years old when their mother divorced my father and not very much older when she abandoned them entirely. As I am not sure that a child can be trusted to recollect color with any real accuracy, particularly when the person at issue is one around whom the emotions are so fraught, I don't know if my hair is really the same color as Annabeth Giskin's. The only pictures of this woman from my sisters' childhood are in black and white, and by the time Annabeth contacted them again, when her daughters were in their thirties, her hair had long since turned white. At any rate, I have the skin and freckles of a redhead, and I envied Allison her russet curls until I realized that they could be mine with a little help from Bumble and Bumble. And so I am a redhead, and while the absurdity of constructing an entire personality around a hair color that comes out of a bottle does not escape me, still I found myself not a little surprised when Isabel arrived with such dark hair.

  I slide my hand along Jack's belly and he moans, but not with pleasure.

  He stops my hand with his and says, “Sweetie, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I don't think I can, not tonight. I'm just so freaked out about William. I'm sorry. Is that okay?”

  I rest my hand under his palm, on his abdomen, and press gently, feeling for any hint of flab. “Sure,” I say, and I am relieved, but only for a moment. After three months in a sexual desert, he is rejecting my advances? After three months of surreptitiously beating off in the shower when he thinks I'm not paying attention, he is pushing away my hand? This is the first time in the not quite two years we have been together that Jack has ever said no to sex. From the very beginning, sex has been one of the most important loci of our relationship, the fulcrum on which everything is balanced. This does not mean our love is any less profound, any less real than that of couples for whom physical passion is unimportant. Abelard and Heloise were not content to exist as platonic companions, reading the Bible to one another and composing poetry. On the contrary. They ravished one another's virginal bodies, defying their sovereigns, risking excommunication, and ultimately sacrificing their testicles to lust—well, his testicles anyway. So too with Jack and me. Except for the virginal part. And the castration. And the excommunication. Although if William succeeds in his conversion to Orthodox Jewry, he may yet convince his fellows in Crown Heights to toss us from the fold as punishment for having ruined his life.

  This emphasis on the sexual between Jack and me undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that Carolyn refused to make love with Jack. Even before William was born, she held him at arm's length, denying him access to the long, golden body for which his assimilated Jewish libido ached. They were married two years before William was born, and together for two years before that, and in those four years Jack swears he can remember, because there were so few of them, every incidence of lovemaking. He remembers none after William's birth, because there were none. They never had sex again, once she became pregnant.

  Jack has told me that Carolyn despised it when he asked for sex, despised him. She said it made him seem pathetic. When I asked him why she refused to make love, he said that after the baby, she was exhausted, drained by work and caring for William. And before? Before, Jack told me, she simply found him repellent. She loved him, Jack said, but something about his body repulsed her. Once she had confessed that it was his small stature. He was like a squirrel, she said, scurrying over her body.

  When Jack told me all this so long ago, when we first began having an affair, in the days when I used to interrogate him constantly about his marriage in my quest to consume the details of his life, become the repository of his every intimate secret, and also rationalize our betrayal, I licked his body from his ankles to the crown of his head. I lifted myself onto him, wrapped my arms around his neck, and whispered in his ear that he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, that he was strong, and powerful, and so sexy that it made me wet just to see his name on the firm letterhead. Only afterward, when we were lying, sweaty and spent on the naked bed, the hotel pillows and blankets thrown to the floor, did I ask him why he had ever married her, this woman who had never desired him.

  He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “We were in love,” he said.

  Now I lie next to him, my hand resting on his belly, inches above his flaccid penis. I am terrified that I have become like Carolyn, cold to sex, unmoved by my husband, uninterested in the passion that once meant everything to me. Worse, I am terrified that this woman who desired my husband so little has now managed to make him desire me not at all.

  “Jack?”

  “What.”

  “I promise I won't take him out in the rain again.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  “I promise I'll call a car service and I promise I'll never forget my umbrella again.”

  “Thanks.”

  “In fact, I'll buy us little matching plastic rain bonnets, and coats, too. The kind that fold up and fit in your purse. William and I will wear them whenever there's even a chance of showers.”

  He smiles perfunctorily.

  “Would you like me to get you one, too? I think you'd look smashing in a little rain bonnet.”

  “Sure, Em. Get me a rain bonnet.”

  I kiss him gently and dart my tongue between his lips. Then I say, “I'll try to be good, Jack, I promise.”

  “I know you will,” he says, and nestles me into the crook of his arm.

  Chapter 12

  Every other weekend, when we have William with us, Jack does not go into the office. Jack is compulsive about structuring his filings, his conference calls, his hearings and depositions, so that he will be free at five o'clock on the alternate Friday evenings when he must pick William up
. But this Friday evening, at the hour when he is supposed to be standing awkwardly in the hallway of his old apartment at 1010 Fifth Avenue, making sure William has packed everything he needs into his stegosaurus backpack, Jack is at George Bush International Airport, in Houston.

  “I don't understand,” I tell him. “You're in Texas. How can you possibly be snowed in?”

  “I'm not snowed in. The plane is snowed in. In Denver. And I can't get on another one until tomorrow morning. You'll have to pick Will up.”

  I am in a cab, heading downtown through the park on my way to meet Simon and Mindy for a movie. They had demanded my presence at dinner, but dinner requires conversation, and my jaw feels too tight to talk. Plus, there were two pregnant women comparing belly-button protrusions in front of the imported cheese case at Fairway this afternoon, so naturally I have been crying. I need to be in the dark.

  “What do you mean ‘pick William up'? I'm not allowed to pick William up. I'm not allowed in her apartment. I'm not allowed in the lobby of her building. I'm barely allowed on Fifth Avenue.”

  “You don't have to go up. Just tell the doorman you're there for William. She'll send him down.”

  “She will not. She'll totally freak out. I'm the abusive shrew who gave him a respiratory infection, remember?”

  “You won't even see her. It's not even five o'clock. Anyway, I left a message for her explaining what happened.”

  “Like that'll help. Tell Sonia to bring him to our house.”

  “I've been trying to reach Sonia and Carolyn all afternoon. You're just going to have to go over there, Emilia.”

  “Did you leave a message on her service?”

  “Of course I did. Many. She hasn't called me back.”

  “But I'm on my way to the movies.” This doesn't deserve a reply and does not get one. I make one final craven attempt.

  “How about if I keep trying Sonia? Or Carolyn? I'm sure I'll reach one of them at some point.”

  “Em, I'm stuck in fucking Houston, okay? I will get home as soon as I can. First thing in the morning. By ten. Or noon at the latest. Can you do me this one favor? Can you just please go pick William up at Carolyn's and bring him home? You can even turn on a DVD for him if you want. Order Microcosmos from Video to Go.”

  “William isn't allowed to watch television. Watching television gives children attention deficit disorder and makes them prone to violence.”

  “Emilia. Please.” This is as close to angry as Jack has come since Isabel died. It excites me. I have finally tried his unceasing patience. I have finally disturbed his imperturbable, loving concern.

  “I'm sorry,” I say. “I'll pick him up. Of course I'll pick him up.”

  “Please don't be late.”

  I can hear the echo of Carolyn's harping voice in his request.

  “I'm on my way right now.”

  “I love you, Em.”

  “Change of plan,” I say to the cabdriver. “I need to go back uptown. To the East Side. Fifth and Eighty-second.”

  Only when I hang up the phone do I realize that this means that Jack will not be home tonight or tomorrow morning. How will I face an entire morning with William? Or, worse, another night alone in my bed? I now take two Ambien before I go to sleep, and I'm worried that that's too much, or not enough. I cannot risk waking up in the middle of the night or, worse, in the half-light of the guilt-edged dawn. Dawn is when Isabel died. No, that's not true. Dawn is when I realized that Isabel was dead.

  I look out of the windows of the cab at the dark trees of the park, and think back to the one night in which we were a family in our own home. After the excitement of bringing the baby home from the hospital, we decided to go to bed early. I took a shower while Jack rocked Isabel in the glider, and as I stood under the hot stream, my breasts, which were aching, the nipples sore, the bottoms and sides tender and bruised, began to harden. By the time I stepped out of the water they were massive—round and cumbersome, like bowling balls covered by a thin scrim of flesh. The nipples were as long and as fat as my thumbs.

  “I think my milk's come in,” I called to Jack. “And it hurts!”

  I put on the white lawn nightgown with the nursing slits that Allison had given me and went into Isabel's room. Jack had slipped his pinky in between the baby's lips. He smiled at me. There were crinkles around his velvet eyes and he pursed his lips in perfect imitation of the baby's. “Good, because this girl is hungry,” he said. “She wants her mama, right now.” On Felicia's instructions we had not permitted the hospital to give Isabel any bottles. She had not had so much as a sip of sugar water since she was born. Every mouthful she had taken was from my breasts. Pure, golden colostrum.

  I took her from Jack and brought her back to our bedroom. I shucked my nightgown, got into bed, and positioned her according to the lactation handout Felicia had given me, ready for more of the same easy nursing that we had experienced in the hospital. We were a perfect “nursing pair,” Isabel and I, so at ease, so natural and flawless, that Felicia had photographed us for her lactation support album. Now Isabel bumped her lips against my protruding nipple, struggled to fit my drumlike areola into her mouth, and began to wail. For the next three hours I passed her from breast to breast, leafed through The Breastfeeding Bible and The Nursing Mother's Companion, hand expressed milk to soften my breast tissue, left tearful phone messages on Felicia's answering machine and on La Leche League's hotline, took hot showers and pressed warm compresses and ice packs against my breasts. Isabel continued to do battle with the engorged spheres that had once provided a trickle of warm comfort and now did nothing but torture her. They had become strong and forbidding, breasts on which to bang your face and cry, not to snuggle against and hug, not to latch on to happily and nurse. By eleven I was crying harder than the baby, and by one, Jack was on the phone offering a lactation consultant referred by La Leche $1,000 to come to our apartment that very minute. She promised to be there first thing in the morning, and suggested a hot bath.

  At one forty-five, after a bath in which my milk and tears fogged the water, Isabel latched on. She was still nursing ten minutes later, and Jack said, “I think you can lean back.”

  “Be quiet,” I whispered.

  We were sitting on the edge of the bed. I was hunched over, with Isabel cradled high in my left arm. With my right hand I pushed my breast away from her tiny nostrils. Her lips were flanged out and she sucked rhythmically, with a little catch at the end of each gulp and a click as she swallowed. We stayed there, immobile, for nearly twenty minutes. Then, out of nowhere, she arched away from the breast and began to scream. I whipped her around to the other side and repeated the position in reverse, this time with my right arm bearing her weight. She settled in with a grunt and began her happy clicks. After a few minutes I shifted slowly back toward the headboard, stopping whenever I felt her shift or stir.

  “Do you want a pillow under your arm?” Jack whispered.

  I shook my head. Very slowly I leaned back until I was half-lying down, Isabel beside me, curled in the crook of my arm, her weight resting on the mattress. I kept my breast away from her nose with my left hand, which meant I was tipped over, my left elbow in the air.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I'm fine,” I whispered. “Turn off the light. I think she's asleep.”

  When we woke, three hours had passed. Isabel lay just as she had, in my right arm, nestled close to my body. My left arm was draped over my waist. Isabel had fallen away from my breast and her mouth was partly open. In the dim light from the windows I could just barely see the tip of her tongue protruding from one side, curled like a small, pink shrimp. She was ice cold. I pulled the down comforter up toward her chin and rubbed one of her hands between my own. It was stiff and waxy. It rolled in my palms. I reared up in the bed and took her chin between my thumb and forefinger. I bent low over her mouth. Then I began screaming. I know this can't possibly be true, but I remember hovering high over our bed, close to the ceiling, watching myself scream, w
atching Jack struggle to the surface of his thick sleep, knock his lamp over, reach across me to turn on the lamp on my nightstand. I remember him on all fours on the bed, his mouth wide over Isabel's mouth and nose, pumping air into her lungs while I kneeled next to them, hands on my cheeks, my fingernails digging into the skin under my eyes, my mouth open in a shriek I could not hear.

  Jack groped for the phone with one hand while he kept breathing into Isabel's still mouth. He dialed 911 and pushed the phone at me. I do not remember what I said. I cannot believe that I was sufficiently articulate, but somehow they understood. I think Ivan let them into the apartment; I'm not sure. There were many of them, in different uniforms. Police officers, paramedics. I have a memory that there were even firemen. They pushed us off our bed with large, competent hands, and hovered over our baby. One of them leaned forward with a knee against the mattress, and I stared at the bottom of his thick-soled shoe. There was a piece of pink chewing gum stuck deep in the tread.

  He stood up, the paramedic who had stepped in gum, and said to us, “I'm so sorry, but I'm afraid she's gone.”

  I went up to the ceiling again. I looked down on myself and I thought, with a kind of dispassionate, nearly analytical curiosity, I wonder when I put my nightgown on? And look, how interesting, when one has had her body pierced by an unbearable pain, one does, in fact, fall to the ground. I looked at myself lying on the bedroom carpet, my nightgown twisted around my legs. On Jack's face was an expression—eyebrows knit, mouth pinched in a puzzled frown. It was an expression that I would remember many times in the months to come, one that we would even talk about on those rare occasions when we could bear to remember that gray dawn. When Jack recalled that expression, which sometimes he claimed that he could and other times said that he had no idea of what I was talking about, he would say that it had been the face of a man bewildered, unable to comprehend the chain of circumstances that had led to this impossible outcome. I always said that I believed him, that of course he was bewildered. But to me it was unmistakably a look of accusation—a look that said, How could you let this happen? Or even, Emilia, what have you done?