Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  From my perch high above the room, I watched Jack fall to his knees and pull me onto his lap. I saw his lips forming my name, over and over again.

  I could not hear a sound.

  Chapter 13

  The Upper East Side doorman's livery is more splendid than Ivan's, the fabric of his greatcoat stiffer, the double rows of brass buttons more highly polished, the gold braid looped more times around the wings of his shoulder pads. I wonder if Ivan wishes for a position worthy of this resplendence. Perhaps he has résumés on file at all these buildings, and is just waiting for the summons that will call him up to duty on the more elegant side of the park.

  Carolyn's doorman holds opens the taxicab door and I step out. I don't walk up to the large front doors; I trudge. I dread entering this building, even though I know Carolyn is most likely to be at work. The thought of stepping foot onto the territory she has marked with her sour spray makes my bowels clench.

  Halfway up the walkway the doorman taps me on the shoulder. “Miss,” he says. “Are you looking for William?”

  Ivan doesn't have a prayer, I'm afraid. He has no lilting Irish brogue to recommend him.

  “Excuse me?” I say.

  “Are you here to pick up young William Woolf?”

  “Um, yes.”

  “William and Sonia are waiting for you at the Three Bears Playground. At Seventy-ninth Street. Just south of the museum.”

  “They're what?” It's dark and cold, and the sun is setting. I look at my watch. It's five minutes to five.

  “They're waiting for you at the playground. It's just four blocks down Fifth Avenue.”

  “Why aren't they waiting here in the lobby?”

  The doorman shrugs, steps between me and the building's entrance, and I realize that he is not going to let me inside. I wonder who told him that I am a potential danger, a hazard to the elegant palace he guards in his nutcracker suit? Suddenly, and only because I am refused entry, I want to go into the building, and I consider making a break for it, bolting past him and bursting into the lobby, grabbing a frond from a potted palm or a Chinese takeout menu as evidence of my successful transgression. Instead I thank him and hurry down the block.

  I cross the street, a foolish decision it turns out, because I am forced to dodge the crowds of tourists in front of the Met. As I am dancing an impatient pas de deux with a group of teenagers who for some reason waited until they reached the curb to don their coats and scarves, it occurs to me that you can pretty much guarantee that someone wearing a Rebel Rebel T-shirt isn't one. I finally push by them.

  “It's five o'clock,” William says. He is sitting on a bench next to Sonia, his stegosaurus backpack on his lap and his booster seat in its cover at his feet. “The playground closes at five. It's against the law to come here now. They could arrest us.”

  The image of William being hauled away in handcuffs is so satisfyingly ridiculous that I almost smile. “They don't arrest people for staying in the park after five,” I say.

  “They do so.”

  “First of all, William, there was nothing I could do. My taxi dropped me off at your building, where, incidentally, I was expecting to pick you up. I got here as fast as I could; I can only run so fast. Second of all, look around you. This playground is full of kids. None of them look like they're being arrested to me.”

  I wave my arm to illustrate my point. The Three Bears Playground is one of the most pathetic in Central Park. It has the statue of the Three Bears and an old-fashioned, malevolent-looking jungle gym on a padded surface. There's a big sand circle with a metal slide, and a ladder to nowhere. The children playing here do not appear to be criminals, but neither do they appear to be having much fun.

  “You should have taken a car service. A car service would have waited,” William says.

  I sigh. “William, not everybody has a car service at his beck and call. Not everybody can afford to just flit around the city in a Town Car.”

  Sonia gazes at some distant point behind my head. She remains bland-faced, although her disgust is as obvious as if she had curled her lip. Sonia knows, as do I, as does William, that we can afford to keep a car service on retainer; we can afford to flit freely from Town Car to Town Car. Jack is a partner at the fifth-largest law firm in the city, one of the largest and wealthiest law firms in the United States. He is a young partner, true, but still his draw is probably three times my father's.

  Who am I kidding? The fraudulence of my carefully contrived parsimony is obvious even to a five-year-old. While my parents would have had more disposable income if my father had not spent the bulk of his days in the throes of a sexual compulsion, I have never experienced a moment's want in my entire life. Sharing a one-bedroom apartment in the East Village with two other girls and eating ramen noodles for supper three nights a week because I was too mediocre a waitress to sustain employment for longer than two months at a time does not count as deprivation. I can tell by Sonia's carefully composed expression that she has experienced deprivation. I do not know if she has ever gone to bed hungry, but I am sure that whatever troubles led her to travel four thousand miles to stand at dusk in the bitter cold of this miserable playground were more serious than having her cell phone service cut off or watching the salesgirl at Otto Tootsi Plohound cut up her credit card while she awaited the results of the LSAT.

  “Go play,” I say to William.

  “What?”

  “You're in a playground. Go play.”

  “I don't want to play. It's too cold. And it's dark.”

  “You won't be cold once you start playing. Look, none of the other kids are cold. They're all too busy playing.”

  There are more children in the playground than I would have expected this late, and there is a desperate edge to their play, as if they are frantically squeezing the last few moments out of the gray light of the day. William sighs as though I am sending him to haul coal from the bowels of a West Virginia mine, not climb a Fifth Avenue spiral jungle gym. He hands his backpack to Sonia and, shoving his hands into the pockets of his coat and scuffing his boots in the dirt, makes his way over to the outskirts of the crowd of children, resolute in his determination to have a miserable time.

  I sit down in the spot he has vacated. His narrow behind has warmed more of the bench than I would have thought possible.

  “I hate playgrounds,” I say.

  “Pardon?” Sonia says. She is in the process of getting to her feet but pauses as I speak.

  “Playgrounds. I hate them. Now. I mean, since Isabel died. Isabel was our baby.”

  Sonia sits back down. “I know Isabel is your daughter's name.”

  I think I will buy her a grammar textbook so that she can learn more verb tenses.

  She interlaces her gloved fingers. Her gloves are very beautiful, fawn-colored leather, with fur lining. Not rabbit, even. Mink, or sheared beaver. The pads of the fingers are darkened and the seams are frayed, however, and I think the gloves must be hand-me-downs from Carolyn.

  It takes Sonia a moment to speak, and when she does I sense that she has made a deliberate decision to stay and converse with me, to engage in a discussion beyond that which is absolutely necessary or required by basic rules of civility. She says, “Why do you now hate the playground?”

  I exhale loudly and wave in the direction of the play structure and swings, just barely visible in the gloom. “All the children. Especially the babies. They make me miss Isabel.”

  “The babies make you sad.”

  “Not just sad. I feel . . .” I pause and look at a woman holding a baby on her hip and bundling a little boy into one side of a double stroller. The baby is wearing a quilted snowsuit, so thick her legs stick out like little sausages. She flaps her arms wildly and her mother jiggles her up and down while she straps in her older child. “I feel angry,” I say.

  “You feel angry when you see babies?”

  “Yeah. You know. It's like, why are those babies alive. When my baby is dead?” I look at the round face of t
he snowsuit-clad baby. Her cheeks are very red, chapped by the cold. “But I don't hate the babies. I hate their mothers.”

  “William!” Sonia calls. “Give the toy back to the little boy.”

  On the other side of the huge sandbox I can just barely make out William crouched down next to a small boy, no more than two years old. The boy is sitting helplessly while William does something to his yellow bulldozer.

  “He's probably fixing it,” I say to Sonia.

  “He knows he does not touch other children's toys,” she says. “William!”

  William sets the bulldozer down and stands up. He pats the little boy on the head and moves to a different part of the playground.

  “I think always people are sad and angry when something terrible happens,” Sonia says.

  “Probably,” I say.

  “I think you have another baby and then you are not hating the mothers. Because you are now a mother, and you don't hate yourself. You don't want your new baby to die.”

  This, I think, is as much as I will confide in Sonia, more than I have confided in most people. A few people know I am this angry. Mindy knows how I feel about the mothers, because she feels the same way as I do. I once told Jack about wishing that another baby had been taken in Isabel's place. What I have said to no one is that I cannot imagine having another baby. I don't want another baby, precisely because Sonia is wrong. I would want my new baby to die—if I could somehow get Isabel in return. If such a grotesque bargain were possible, if there were some pitchfork-wielding Satan I could barter with, I would bear and murder a thousand children, if doing so would bring Isabel back.

  I look up to find William standing in front of me. “The sign says the playground closes at dusk. It's way past dusk,” he says.

  “All right,” I say. “We'd better go.”

  “Goodbye, William. I see you on Monday. Give me a kiss.” Sonia plants a kiss on his cheek, which he accepts far more graciously than he does those I offer. I fear William may be more sensitive than I give him credit for. He knows Sonia's fondness, while stern in character, is heartfelt and thus he responds warmly to it. I fear he perceives the grudging quality of my affection and that is why he stiffens under my embrace. Or else he just likes Sonia better than he likes me.

  William shrugs his backpack onto his shoulders and we watch Sonia walk quickly out of the park. We trail after her. She turns up Fifth Avenue.

  “Where's Sonia going?” I ask.

  “To get her suitcase. She doesn't like to bring bags to the park, because then she has to watch them all the time and she can't play with me.”

  “But she was just dropping you off. There wasn't time to play.”

  “We figured you would be late.”

  “You know, William,” I say as I wait for the light to change and release a new flow of cars in our direction, “I wasn't really late. I came as soon as your daddy called me. And you weren't playing. You were sitting on a bench.”

  “I'm hungry,” William says.

  He will not give an inch, this child. “How about ice cream?” I say. “How about ice-cream sundaes for supper? With hot fudge? Have you ever been to Serendipity? It's the best. They have sundaes the size of your head at Serendipity. And frozen hot chocolate.”

  William shakes his head. “I'm lactose intolerant.”

  “Oh, dear,” I say. “I must have forgotten.”

  “That means I have a dairy allergy. Ice cream is a dairy product. I could get very ill from eating ice cream.”

  “Oh well. I guess we'll just go home and see what's in the fridge. Maybe there's some leftover Chinese or something.”

  A cab pulls over and I open the door and toss in the booster seat. William ducks under my arm and climbs in. Before I tell the cabbie where we are going, William turns to me, an unusual look on his face.

  “Emilia, do you think Serendipity might serve dairy-free ice cream?” he says. “Do you think they might have a kind of sundae with no milk?”

  I realize that the unusual expression on his face, the one that I do not recognize, is hope.

  “I don't know,” I say. I disgust myself. I am so mean, and William is just a little boy. But I will be well punished for my cruelty. There is not a single place in the entire city of New York where there are more babies, toddlers, and children than standing in line outside of Serendipity 3 sweetshop on a Friday evening at five thirty. And there is no way in hell they serve dairy-free ice cream.

  “Sixtieth, between Second and Third,” I say to the driver.

  We have rainbow sherbet,” the waitress says.

  “That has dairy. Sherbet has dairy.” William is close to panic. He is kneeling on the cushion of his scrolled metal seat, his elbows on the fancy Victorian table, his hands spread out on the sticky menu. We waited almost an hour in the cold for this table and William is desperate. He spent that hour discussing the relative merits of dairy-free frozen hot chocolate and dairy-free ice-cream sundaes while I did my yoga breathing and tried not to stare at the families in line with us. I was tremendously relieved when the hostess's announcement that strollers were not allowed into the restaurant caused the family in line behind us to take their four-month-old baby girl in her jogger and roll away to more hospitable climes. Everything about that child felt too close to Isabel; I could not bear her proximity. I am sure William noticed neither the announcement nor my relief; he was consumed by a highly audible debate with himself over whether his failure to move his bowels that day was too likely an indication of constipation to risk the consumption of the bananas in a banana split.

  “I guess I'll have sorbet,” William says, close to tears. “Do you have sorbet?”

  “He'll have a frozen hot chocolate,” I say. “And a banana split. Extra nuts.”

  “I can't, Emilia. I'm lactose intolerant. I could get very ill.” His face is pale and drawn. He looks very ill right now.

  Now is the time to tell him that he is not lactose intolerant, that he once ate a huge piece of ricotta cake just fine, that his grandmother, Jack's mother, routinely fills the phyllo pie she feeds him with Muenster and Gruyère and then lies and says it's soy cheese. She doesn't buy this milk allergy any more than I do. But I'm not brave. Instead I say, “Serendipity has Lactaid. You know, that medicine you take for lactose intolerance? They sprinkle it on their frozen hot chocolate. And on their sundaes.” I turn to the waitress, a middle-aged woman in a frilled apron. “Don't you have Lactaid powder? I know it costs extra, but I don't mind. I'm willing to spend the money.”

  The waitress shakes her head uncertainly and I smile at her, willing her to go along with this, to accept my dubious authority, to help me trick this boy into risking an imaginary stomachache for the sake of an hour of bliss. Because whatever William thinks, I am certain that the pleasures of hot fudge, ice cream, whipped cream, and butterscotch outweigh the unlikely perils of his fictional ailments.

  “My mother is not convinced that Lactaid works very well,” William says.

  “Trust me,” I say.

  The impossibility of this request weighs very heavily on his narrow little shoulders.

  “What kind of ice cream?” the waitress asks.

  “William?”

  “Um, chocolate?” he says.

  “You get three flavors.” She taps her pad with an impatient pencil.

  “Chocolate, chocolate chip, and cookie dough,” I say. “How does that sound?”

  William nods.

  I say to the waitress, “Please instruct the chef to grind up the Lactaid extra fine, so the ice cream doesn't taste gritty.”

  “Right,” she says. “And for you?”

  “I'll have a hot fudge sundae with chocolate chip mint. And a café latte. Low-fat milk.”

  After the waitress leaves William says, “Why do you bother to put low-fat milk in your coffee, if you're going to have ice cream and whipped cream?”

  William eats all of his frozen hot chocolate and almost all the banana split. He licks both the bowl and the ba
ck of his spoon, uses his fingers to scrape fudge from the pleats of the glass dish, and sucks melted ice cream through his straw with the force of a Hepavac. He bends so low over the tall, fluted glass that he fogs it with the breath from his nose. I realize that this is the first time I have ever spent so long in William's company without hearing him speak. An hour with William is generally akin to sitting through a college lecture from a very short professor. Now, other than the nasal whistle of his breath, the slurping of liquid through the straw, and the lapping of his tongue against the long metal spoon, William is absolutely quiet. I have, for the first time, a sense of well-being in his presence. I eat my sundae and drink my coffee and watch him drip fudge and caramel onto his orange pique shirt. In the end, his concern for his bowels wins out over his gluttony and he leaves the bananas sitting in a pool of melted ice cream in the bottom of the crescent-shaped bowl. He graciously offers them to me, but I decline, equally graciously.

  When he is finished, when his cheeks are slick with cream and sauces of various hues and his belly sticks out like a small, round drum, we leave. As we stand on the corner, waiting for a cab, William slips his hand into mine. My palm goes stiff and my fingers tremble. I realize that I have pulled mittens onto his hands, I have scrubbed them clean, I have put Band-Aids on them, but I have never held them. I grip his small, soft fingers firmly in my own.

  “That was excellent,” William says.

  “That was another secret,” I say. “Like the booster seat.”

  He looks up and gives me a sly wink. “Deal.”

  Chapter 14

  The next morning, as soon as Jack arrives home from the airport, we are back in a cab on the way to Allison's for my niece's birthday party. I like my niece and nephew, but I generally avoid spending time in the company of my sister and her family. While Allison's brand of judgment is not as hard to endure as Lucy's—she is more earnest and well meaning—the fact that she lives her ideals with a religious devotion can be tiresome. She is also arrogant, and though Jack reminds me that this is a Greenleaf family trait, I am convinced that Allison's failure to inherit from my father the self-deprecating sense of humor that I cultivate so assiduously makes her more insufferable than I. At least I hope that's true. What is the point of all this self-loathing if not to temper an otherwise repugnant egotism?