Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  Jack used to joke that I seduced him under false pretenses, that because our first real sexual contact was a blow job, he was misled into believing that I was an aficionado of oral sex, that it would be a routine part of our lovemaking. “You tricked me,” he would say.

  I used to think this was funny. Tonight I am determined to reprise that first time. I must have sex with my husband, because I wanted to fuck that gay boy at Opaline. But I cannot bear to have Jack inside me. My belly contracts and twists at the idea. It closes tight. I can't do that yet. But I can do this.

  When Jack wakes to find himself in my mouth, he is so grateful that his navy blue eyes, the eyes I love so much, fill with tears. After he is done, he holds my head in his hands, smoothing the hair from my temples, and tells me that he loves me. Then he moves me onto my back and begins to give me fluttery kisses down toward my navel.

  “It's okay,” I say.

  “I want to.”

  “No.”

  “But what about you?”

  “I'm fine. I'm good.”

  He rests his cheek on my belly.

  “Allison called. Three other kids came down with whatever William had. She thinks it was the rainbow-pesto hummus. She said she's very sorry.”

  I am so relieved it was not the ice cream. “Rainbow-pesto hummus. It would have killed her to order pizza?” I say.

  He laughs softly and the puff of air from his mouth raises goose bumps on my stomach. I wriggle. “Are you sure you don't want me to make you come?” he says.

  “Definitely. I'm fine.”

  He kisses me again, but does not insist.

  I stare into the dark room, his head heavy on my belly, and remember the beginning. After that first brush in his office, after Marilyn closed the door and left us bent over the credenza in an attitude of animal sex, we moved apart and finished editing. Ever the conscientious associate, I took the marked-up pages and returned to my office where I meticulously rewrote the brief to Jack's specifications.

  We did not see each other for two weeks, until he called my extension late on a Tuesday evening. I had been avoiding him, had been keeping away from the seventeenth floor altogether, printing entire cases out from Westlaw rather than go to the library to pull a volume off the shelf. I had pushed too far, I thought. After years of patiently tracking my bashert like a red-tailed hawk tracks a prairie dog, with a sharp and forbearing eye from a full mile's distance, I had lost it all by striking too soon, moving too close, pressing myself where I wasn't wanted.

  “Hi,” I said into the phone, a little gasp in my voice, like a thirteen-year-old on her first telephone call with a boy.

  “Hi,” he said. “Um. You're working late.”

  “I have a lot to do.” I wasn't working. I was shopping online while I waited for Simon to call and say he was done for the day so we could go out for sushi.

  “Oh.”

  “Do you have something you need me to do?”

  “Not if you're busy.”

  “I lied. I'm surfing the Web. I'm not working at all. What do you need?”

  Jack laughed. “I need someone to help me prepare for a discovery production. It's not very glamorous. It's pretty awful, in fact. There's a warehouse full of old hard drives and handwritten documents. Notes and sketches. Junk, really. I need an associate to help me go through it all.”

  “I'll come by your office and pick up the pleadings and the document requests. Is tomorrow okay, or should I come now? And where am I going? Is it local, or am I going to need to book travel?”

  “It's in Emeryville, California. Do you know where that is? Outside of San Francisco, near Oakland. And you won't be going alone. You'll be with me. You can read the papers on the plane. That is, if you can leave tomorrow morning.”

  “You're preparing for a document production?” Partners almost never sift through dust-filled bins of papers and files. That kind of scut work is left to those lower on the totem pole.

  “It's an important client. Marilyn made reservations for us. She'll e-mail you your ticket.”

  “You already booked my plane ticket?”

  There was no sound on the line, no buzz of static, no hum of empty air.

  “JFK or LaGuardia?” I asked.

  It was March, and in the Bay Area it was the height of spring. The Japanese cherry trees had already shed their pink blossoms and were covered with red leaves. It was the plum trees' and the dogwoods' turn to flower and they were doing so riotously, shaming the tulips, the daffodils, and the paperwhites with their hysterical efflorescence. Our hotel sat regally atop the hills of Oakland, a sprawling Victorian Stick–style mansion, a white wedding cake with blue frosted edges, a turret, and rows of pruned and scentless roses. Jack and I arrived at the hotel just as the sun began to set, after a long day of business class and the deciphering of scrawled documents under too-bright fluorescent lights. We ate our dinner on a small terrace overlooking the lights of San Francisco. The night was cool but there was a heat lamp next to our table so we took a long time over our meal, our conversation alternately animated—we shared childhood memories, favorite books, office gossip—and strained. Sometimes our voices would just fade away as one or the other of us remembered that this trip was or could become illicit. We were in a hotel, far from home, and it had been clear from the moment we had arrived at the warehouse in Emeryville that this was not and had never been a two-attorney job. Jack had brought me across the country under false pretenses, and I had come hoping that that was so.

  When it was no longer possible to sit at the table, when we had ordered and eaten a plate of gourmet ice-cream sandwiches that neither of us wanted, when we'd each had a second cup of coffee, when Jack had looked over the digestif menu and considered and rejected a glass of Fernet Branca, we left the restaurant. We stepped into the elevator and I pushed the button for the third floor. We stood silently in the small, wood-paneled box, did not talk as we walked down the long hall. We had left our suitcases with the bellman while we ate, and now they bumped along behind us, the muffled squeak of their wheels on the carpet the only sound in the hallway. I looked down at the little folder in my hand, and then at the numbers on the doors as we passed them. When we reached the door to my room, I stopped.

  “Well, this is me,” I said. “Where's your room?”

  “On the spa level,” Jack said.

  “But that's the floor below the lobby.”

  “I know.”

  He leaned forward and kissed me. I let go of the handle of my suitcase and opened my lips to his. Jack planted his hands on the wall on either side of my head and pressed his mouth to mine, licking and nibbling, sucking my lower lip into his mouth, traveling his tongue over my teeth and gums, tasting me. Swallowing me. We kissed and kissed, standing in the hall outside my hotel room. I wanted him so much; I was delirious with wanting him and with happiness at finally feeling his mouth against mine.

  After a while, Jack pulled away and said, “Okay, enough now. Is that okay? I don't think I can do anything else right now.”

  “As long as you don't say that you're married and you've never done this before and you're afraid of hurting your wife.”

  “I'm married. I've never done this before. And I'm afraid of hurting my wife.”

  “That's what they all say.”

  The next morning Jack received a call that the plaintiffs had tentatively accepted our client's settlement offer. The case was no more. We were at the airport an hour early for our flight, and Jack arranged for me to join him in the American Airlines Admiral's Club. We settled in abutting armchairs with our individual copies of The New York Times and mugs of coffee. While I was scanning the headlines I felt Jack's eyes on me. I looked up.

  “Jesus Christ,” he whispered. “You're so beautiful.”

  I smiled and looked back down at my paper.

  A few minutes later he stood up. “I'll be back in a minute,” he said.

  I watched him cross the room and then I leaped to my feet. When I reached the r
estroom there was a man in an expensive four-button suit coming out of the door, shaking his hands dry.

  “How many people are in there?” I asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “In the men's room. How many guys are inside?”

  “Just one,” he said.

  I winked at him and ducked through the door. Jack stood at the urinal, his legs planted slightly apart, his hips jutting forward. When he saw me, he opened his mouth in astonishment. I walked across the room, grabbed him by the belt, and dragged him into the last stall at the end of the row.

  If they had looked under the half door, our fellow admirals might have seen my legs, in flared jeans and high-heel boots, crouching on the floor. Some would surely have objected to the presence of two people in a single bathroom stall. Others might have enjoyed the vicarious thrill; they might have lurked next to the sinks, washing their hands for far longer then necessary. But no one came into the men's room of the Admiral's Club in those few minutes. Or perhaps they did; I didn't notice. I was far too busy listening to Jack whisper my name to listen for the sound of men's dress shoes clicking across the tile floor.

  Chapter 16

  I spent the Wednesday after the Brooklyn birthday party debacle with my mother in New Jersey, leaving Jack to take the afternoon off work to be with William. The next weekend was Carolyn's. I have tried not to think about the boy at all during these last ten days. When he does cross my mind the guilt I feel for having failed once again to rise to the simplest occasion of mothering makes my own stomach hurt. I remind myself that at least I'm off the hook for Serendipity.

  William seems to have forgotten what happened and is his usual self when I pick him up the following week at preschool. His greeting is no more nor less stiff and uncomfortable than usual, and neither is mine.

  As he gets ready to leave I watch the other children. One, a small girl wearing very pink gloves and a spangled ice-skating dress, spins on one foot while her nanny tries to stuff her into a fluffy white coat. She is graceful and delicate, a pixie child. She bends her back nimbly, nearly touching her toe with her dangling ponytail. If she were my companion for the afternoon instead of William, I would take her ice-skating.

  I love to skate. I'm not especially talented, nor was I ever a competitive skater. I left that to my sister Lucy. She had practice three afternoons a week, and when I was a little girl I had no choice but to ride along with her and my mother. At some point my mother got tired of my whining and began renting me skates, and I would circle the rink during the hour of Lucy's lesson. There was something about the speed, the smoothness of the glide, and the sound of my blades slicing along the ice that entranced me. When I got to high school I even tried out for the girl's hockey team. I might have made it, too, but I am just over five foot two, and light-footedness could not make up for that fact when a six-foot monster of a girl with linebacker shoulders came barreling across the ice with a hockey stick in her hand.

  While William is bending over to strap the Velcro on his boot, he stumbles and falls on his behind. He pulls himself to his feet and drags on his coat, but he is stepping on one of the sleeves so he manages to trip himself up once again. Maybe the reason this child is so clumsy, so unlike the supple little girl with the pink gloves and white coat, is because no one has bothered to try to make him any different. Jack has not taken him skiing since the divorce, and I'm sure Carolyn's accepted activities are all of the cerebral variety.

  “Hey,” I say, hauling him up. “Want to go ice-skating?”

  “What?”

  “Let's go to Wollman Rink. It shouldn't be very crowded on a weekday afternoon.”

  “I don't know how to skate.”

  “It's easy,” I say.

  The dancing girl says, “I know how to skate. I skate all the time.”

  “See,” I say. “Skating is great.”

  She says, “My father is a skater. He won a silver medal in the Olympics.”

  One of the mothers laughs. “Kendall, your daddy is a banker. He owns a bank. He's not an Olympic skater.”

  “No, she's not kidding,” another mother says. “Misha was an Olympic figure skater. He really did win a silver medal. At Innsbruck. That's how Colette met him. She was a skater, too. But not in the Olympics or anything. In Ohio.”

  “Oh my God!” the first mother says. “Kendall, you are a very lucky little girl.”

  “Come on, William,” I say. “You're never going to win that silver medal if we don't start training today.”

  William is horrified by the failure of the rink to provide helmets.

  “Rollerbladers need helmets,” he says. “And ice is just as hard as asphalt. Harder.”

  “Ice is not as hard as asphalt,” I say, lacing up my skates. There is a knot in the middle of my lace and I have to yank it through the hole.

  “Yes, it is. Much harder. Asphalt is actually quite soft. Softer than concrete. That's why my mother runs on the street instead of on the sidewalk. Sidewalks give you shin splits. My mother knows that kind of thing because she's a doctor.”

  “Why don't you just put your skates on?”

  “I don't think I should skate if I don't have a helmet. Skating is like rollerblading and you're not supposed to rollerblade without a helmet. And pads. You're supposed to have kneepads, elbow pads, and wrist pads. The wrist pads are the most important because you catch yourself with your wrists when you fall.”

  “The park is full of rollerbladers who don't wear helmets or pads.”

  “Well that's very stupid. My pediatrician's office has pictures of kids on their Rollerblades with their helmets and pads. They have pictures of kids on bikes, too. My picture is there, from when I got my tricycle when I turned three, two years ago. In the picture, I'm wearing my blue helmet. I also have a red helmet. If you really want to go ice-skating we can go home and get one of my helmets.”

  “We're not going to get one of your helmets. Do you see anyone else wearing a helmet, William? No. You do not. No one wears a helmet when they skate. Now stop wiggling so I can put your skates on.”

  While I am lacing William's boots tightly, wrapping the strings around his ankles, he stares around the rink, his brow furrowed, as if evaluating it.

  “It looks bigger than 33,000 square feet,” he says.

  “Oh, it does not.” I frown. “How do you know how big Wollman Rink is?”

  “It says so in my book.”

  “What book?”

  “My Central Park book.”

  “Which book? The one I gave you?”

  He shrugs. Last year, on his birthday, to the mountain of toys, stuffed animals, puzzles, models, and various dinosaur books that Jack chose for William over the course of what must have been hours of concentrated shopping, I added a reference book about Central Park. I bought the book on a whim one day, as I passed the Dairy, where the children of New York once went to receive fresh, clean milk and where now tourists can buy sweatshirts advertising the park's baseball leagues, mugs decorated with miniature park maps, Beanie Babies wearing I ♥ NY T-shirts, and books about the park. I had gone into the souvenir shop because I wanted to see what it looked like; I'd never been inside the refurbished Dairy. The book, part photo essay, part reference book, caught my eye not initially as a gift for William but because what I know about the park I have gleaned almost accidentally, from inscriptions on the bases of monuments and archways or from pamphlets I've picked up in my meanderings. I leafed through the volume and found a sepia-toned photograph of a camel hitched to a lawn mower.

  Even though the book was quite clearly beyond the ken of a small boy, I knew that it would be replete with the kind of factoids that delight William. I figured we would just look at the pictures and read the captions. I bought it, wrapped it in a map of the park, and added it to the heap of gifts. That year William was much more interested in a building set made of magnetic rods and balls. He looked at the book just long enough to express his thanks, and then tossed it aside.

  “It's a
pretty cool book, isn't it?” I said. “Did you see that picture of the camel mowing Sheep Meadow?”

  “No,” he says.

  “Oh. Well, what else did the book tell you about Wollman Rink?”

  “Nothing.”

  As we make our slow way around the wooden barrier at the side of the rink a small boy whizzes by us, singing a loud song as he skates. He is wearing a helmet. And wrist guards.

  “This is very scary, Emilia,” William says. He is holding on to the side of the rink with both hands, his ankles falling in toward one another so far that the knobs graze the ice. His feet look like daisies that have been bent at the stem, right below the flower.

  “It isn't scary. It really isn't. Just let go of the wall.”

  “You can't say what's scary to me. Only I know when I'm scared. You're not scared because you know how to skate. And that boy's not scared because his mother brought his helmet.” This last is said in a wail.

  I pry William's hands off the wall and skate backward very slowly, pulling him with me. At first he jerks along the ice, his feet moving spastically, as if he is trying to catapult himself back to the comfort of the side of the rink. Suddenly he seems to give up. He puts his skates side by side and bends slightly at the waist and I continue to skate backward, facing him. I risk a smile.

  “See?” I say. “This isn't so awful.”

  “Maybe not for you,” he says.

  I imagine spinning into a sudden spread eagle, faster and faster, until the rink is a blur, the only thing in focus is William's face, whirling at the end of my outstretched hands. Then I will snap my hands out of his and he will pinwheel across the ice.

  We make another slow circuit and I return William to the side of the rink. “I'm going to go around once by myself,” I say. “You just hold on to the wall and go slow. You'll be fine.”

  I skate away and begin to circle the rink, skating faster and faster as I go around. I am suddenly aware of a form at my side. I turn and see a boy, maybe seventeen. He is very handsome, with dark curly hair, red cheeks, and a chipped front tooth. He is a boy who would never have looked my way when I was his age.