Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  “No.”

  “Oh sweetie.” She rubs my arm and then squeezes it. “You'll feel better soon. It'll take time, but you'll feel better.”

  “Why did you like the movie so much? It was a romance. I would have thought it would make you sad.” We have arrived at the car and I hold out my hand for the keys. She tosses them to me, lightly. She is springy, like one of her special holiday sponge cakes. “Wait a second, have you met someone? Are you dating someone? Do you have a boyfriend?” My mother has not been on a single date since I helped her throw my father out of the house. She has slept alone for four years.

  “No, I haven't met anyone,” she says. She gets into the car and slams the door behind her.

  I open the driver's side. I turn on the engine but do not pull out of the parking space. “So if you haven't met anyone why are you behaving so strangely? Why did that movie put you into such a good mood?”

  “Oh Emilia!” my mother says. She is bursting with news. I realize suddenly that she has been like this all weekend, that underneath her patient concern there has been a little sizzle of excitement. “Emilia, you're not going to believe this, but your father and I spent some time together on Thursday evening.” There is something embarrassingly girlish about her laugh, it tinkles, twitters almost. “I guess you could say your father and I went out on our first date.”

  “Did you fuck him?” I say. “Did you fuck on your first date, Mom, or did Dad kiss you good night and then go pick up a hooker?”

  The thing about a helium balloon is that once you have driven a pin into the bright rubber, you cannot reinflate it and send it back up in the air to hover cheerfully above your head. Once it is popped, it can never be repaired.

  My mother is quiet. She holds her hands in her lap, palms up. I can see her soft belly resting on her thighs through her heavy winter everyday coat, the full-length, quilted down coat she has been wearing for as long as I can remember.

  “Mom.”

  “It's okay, Emilia,” she says. “I know you didn't mean it.” She reaches her hand across the bucket seats and cups my cheek. I press her hand between my cheek and my shoulder and rub back and forth, like a cat.

  “Mom,” I say. “It's just . . . I love Dad but he . . . he hasn't changed. What makes you think he's changed?”

  “Oh, I don't think he's changed,” my mother says. She shakes her head ruefully. “There are things you don't understand, sweetie. Things about your dad and me, about our relationship, that you don't know.”

  “Well then tell me. Help me understand why you would take him back after what he did to you.”

  “I haven't taken him back. We haven't gotten anywhere close to that. We went on one date.” She takes her hand away from me and starts playing with her gloves. “It's only been one date. So far.”

  I pull the car out of the parking space and start heading up the block. The street is full of restaurants, and despite the fact that it is almost ten o'clock and we are in the suburbs, the sidewalks are crowded. “Wasn't it hard not to think about what he did to you? I mean, didn't you keep thinking about how he cheated on you?”

  My mother bites her lip. She is looking straight ahead, out the front window. “We talked about it. We talked about it all. Everything. He told me about everything he used to do. He . . . he showed me.”

  “He showed you?”

  My mother shakes her head. “You don't understand, Emilia. I don't understand myself, but hearing about it was . . . well, it was very exciting. Your father and I . . . well, that part of our relationship was always good, and even after the divorce I always had feelings for him. Hearing about it was . . . I don't know . . . It was very exciting. It made me very excited. Sexually.”

  And that's as much as I can take. I make a sharp right, ignoring the four-way stop sign. I pull over at the taxi stand in front of the train station and jam the car into park. I heave open the car door and, ignoring my mother's cries, run across the pavement and jump into the back of a cab.

  “Manhattan,” I say. “The Upper West Side.”

  Chapter 21

  The first time Jack and I have sex—full-on sexual intercourse—after Isabel's death is also the first time I've ever faked an orgasm. This is surprisingly easy to do. A few well-timed gasps, a shiver, some rhythmic vaginal clenching, and Jack is deceived. Afterward I wait for him to thank me, but he is under the impression that we made love; he is unaware that I did him a favor.

  But of course, why should he be? I've never done anything like this before. More important, this has never been the context of our sexual relationship, not from its inception. Before Isabel's death, I was voracious in bed and there was no reason to doubt the veracity of my passion. The same was not always true of Jack. From the first time we made love, in Jack's office, the night after we came home from San Francisco, there was always a tiny hesitation on his part, before his capitulation to the frenzied insistence of desire. I did not force myself on him. On the contrary, it was Jack who booked the hotel rooms, Jack who lifted me onto his office chair, Jack who tangled his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck when he passed me in the firm's library. But there was always a second when his velvet eyes clouded over before we made love, when I caught my breath and waited for him to remember that he was married, that he had a little boy, that what he was doing was wrong.

  He broke up with me after three and a half months, when we had made love twenty-seven times. Twenty-eight, if you count the Admiral's Club, but I'm not sure a blow job in a public restroom really counts as making love. We were eating pizza at Two Boots in the East Village, which used to be one of my favorite restaurants. Jack and I only ate out in the East Village and occasionally in Chelsea, two neighborhoods in which we were guaranteed never to run into Carolyn or anyone she knew.

  I had burned my tongue on my first bite of blackened chicken pizza and was cooling it by trying to stick it into the neck of my bottle of Dos Equis. Jack wasn't eating.

  “Aren't you hungry?” I said. Then my hands started to shake. “Don't. Please don't. I love you.”

  “I know.”

  “You love me. You know you love me. You love me too much never to see me again.”

  “I'll see you. I'll see you every day at work.”

  “That will make it worse. It will drive you crazy.” I wasn't trying to hide my sobbing. I cried big, fat, hiccupping tears, letting them slide all over my face and down my chin.

  “Emilia, I have a child. I can't do this to Will. It's not fair. You don't understand what it's like when you have a child.” Jack's face was very pale under his deep summer tan.

  “Did you lose your right to be happy when you had a child?”

  “I lost my right to be selfish.”

  “Why did you marry her?” I cried. “Why didn't you wait for me? You knew I was coming. You should have waited.”

  Jack did not tell me that I sounded like a crazy person. Instead he got up and came over to my side of the table. He started kissing my cheeks, rubbing away my tears with his lips. Then he put some money down on the table and led me outside. It was an unbearably hot night, even though it was only the beginning of July, too early for such thick and sluggish humidity to have settled so firmly over the city. We walked over to First Avenue and Jack flagged down a cab and put me in it. He told the driver my address—only a dozen or so blocks uptown—and shut the door. I watched him through the rear window, a small man in a suit, looking overdressed and ridiculous standing among the pierced and leather-clad art-scene pretenders of a Friday night in the East Village.

  That night Jack confessed to Carolyn. He told her that he had had an affair but that it was all over. She threw him out. Three nights later I slept with him in his room at the Carnegie Suites on West Fifty-eighth Street.

  Tonight Jack does not mention our fight, or the ugly things I screamed at him. He is so glad that I have come home that he does not ask why. He does not even ask why we are having sex, and I wonder if he thinks it is a substitute for making up.r />
  Before Jack falls sleep he tells me that he is dropping William off tomorrow evening. Jack has had to tell Carolyn that William overheard him talking about her pregnancy, and she wants the boy back early, to formally give him the news.

  The next morning Jack is distracted at breakfast. I have been trying to tell him about the Walk to Remember, and why I think I have decided that we should go, but he isn't paying much attention to me.

  “What's wrong?” I say.

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  He pushes the newspaper across the table to me. “Here, I'm done with the magazine and the book review. Would you be really pissed off if I dropped by the office this morning? Just for half an hour. An hour, max. I've had some people working on a discovery motion all weekend and I'd like to show my face.”

  “It can't wait until tomorrow?”

  “I just want to check in, so they don't think I'm off playing golf all weekend while they slave over the brief. I won't stay very long. I'll take Will if you like.”

  “I don't want to go to your office,” William says. “Your office is even less fun than Mommy's office. At least where Mommy works there are models of people's insides.”

  “It's fine,” I say. “He can hang out with me. I need to get out, anyway. I feel like I'm going kind of crazy cooped up in here.”

  Jack raises his eyebrows but does not say that I have only been home since eleven last night; I have hardly been cooped up.

  “What do you think of this walk thing?” I say. “This memorial walk? Do you think we should do it?”

  “I don't know, Em,” Jack says. He finishes the dregs of his coffee and pushes his chair back. “You've never wanted to do anything like this before.”

  “Well, that's sort of the whole point.”

  “What do you think you're going to get out of it?”

  This question, phrased so baldly, stops me short. I am about to tell Jack what I have told my mother, about the healing properties of the companionship, even for just one evening, of those who have undergone similar experiences. But Jack knows how I feel about support groups; he has heard me deride their supposed merits too many times. He will not accept an about-face. Neither will Mindy's claim that the walk will allow me to take back the park make much of an impression on him. After all, he knows how often I retreat to the park, despite the omnipresence of children and mothers. Jack knows me too well to accept such facile explanations.

  What I realize only when I try to explain it to Jack is that I hope that this walk, for all its maudlin, syrupy language of honoring lost babies, will do something about the stasis of my life, will act as some kind of gentle shock to liberate me from the catalepsy which has frozen my limbs and thoughts since the night of Isabel's death. This deathless yet furious torpor has got to end; it is too boring to continue. Perhaps this might catapult me into a new, less tedious stage of grief.

  “Can I come?” William asks, when I am done explaining my hopes for the end of entropy.

  “It's not for kids, Will,” Jack says.

  “No, it is,” I say. “I mean, it's for families. I think he should come. I think it would great. It makes sense for all of us to be there, together, don't you see? So we can sort of start over together. The three of us, and Isabel, too, in a way. Her memory. It's like a whole new beginning. Or an end. Or something. But we all should be there. You, and me, and William, too.”

  Jack looks from William to me, and I can see that the boy and I are once again seducing him with our hopeful faces, the possibility of repair and reconciliation.

  “Are you sure about this?” he says.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Even at night Central Park is one of the safest parts of the city, Daddy,” William says. “Last year there were only 127 crimes in the whole park, and no murders.”

  Jack laughs. “I don't really have a lot of safety concerns, Mr. Man, but I'm reassured that murder is not going to be an issue.”

  “The thing is,” William says, “I would really like to see the park at night. I've never even seen any of the luminaires lit up, except when they sometimes forget to turn them off during the day.”

  “The walk is in the afternoon,” I say. “It ends at dusk.”

  “That's all right,” William says. “I still want to go.”

  Later, I ask William what he wants to do today, where he wants to go.

  “Let's go to the park,” he says.

  “Are you sure?” I am eager to go, but don't want him to feel like he has to go to the park, because that is where he knows I want to be.

  “Yeah.”

  On our way out of the apartment I remind William to go to the bathroom. He informs me not only that he does not have to go but that because he is a boy, there are no impediments to him simply peeing against a tree should the need arise.

  “Because I have a penis,” he says. “You should go, though. You don't have a penis.”

  “Thanks for the anatomy lesson.” While I am in the bathroom the telephone rings. “Just let the machine get it,” I call, but William has already picked up the phone. I cannot hear him, but I know how he's answered it. He has an impeccable phone manner; he'd make an ideal receptionist. He always says, “Woolf residence, this is William speaking.” Jack tells me that when William answers the phone at his mother's house, he gives the same greeting, smoothly substituting her name for Jack's. I'm sure he never confuses the two. William is far too careful for that.

  “Who was it?” I ask when I'm done.

  “Nono.” William has used this name when referring to my father from the very first day that they met, which was a few weeks before our wedding. My father introduced himself thus, and because the word was unfamiliar and had no familial connotations or weight to the boy, he adopted it easily. “Nono” is a Ladino word, the language spoken by the Jews in the part of Bulgaria from where my father's grandparents came. My father makes all his grandchildren call him Nono, probably because it would make him feel like an old geezer to hear the word grandpa shouted in his direction.

  “What did he want?” I say.

  “Nothing. I told him we were going to the park. He said we should go to the Ross Pinetum. Most of the trees in the pinetum are coniferous.”

  “Well, they would be, wouldn't they? It's a pine-etum. Not a deciduetum.”

  “Deciduetum is not a word.” William frowns suspiciously. “Is it?”

  “No.”

  “Nono says to go there, because the trees will be nice and green.”

  I hand William his coat and pull mine closed. It seems to button somewhat less hideously. I still look lumpy and sausage-like, but not enough to justify braving the weather with insufficient protection.

  “Do we have to go there?” he says. “Do we have to go to the pinetum?”

  “Of course not.” I don't want to go anywhere my father suggested, because last night with my mother has reminded me how very angry at my father I am.

  “Because it's right next to our house,” William says. “I want to explore. I want to go to the Ramble. Don't you think that's a much better idea?” He stomps his feet in his thick-soled winter boots.

  “It's an excellent idea. We can be explorers. I'll be Christopher Columbus. Who do you want to be?”

  “Christopher Columbus?” He shakes his head, but his disgust has a rueful, playful quality. “That's so boring, Emilia. I'm going to be Coronado. I'm going to search for the Seven Cities of Cibola.”

  “What are those?” I ask.

  His mouth drops open. “You don't know who Coronado is?”

  “Well, I mean I've heard of him. I'm just not up on those seven cities.”

  William is so busy telling me about the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his search for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola that he passes the Diana Ross Playground without even asking to go inside. Every third step or so he skips, with a kind of shimmy. He also bends down to poke things with a stick he has picked up.

  �
�The Ramble is the perfect place to play explorers,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “It's the part of the park that's the most rugged. Most like a wilderness.”

  “I know.”

  He pauses, suddenly. “Is the Ramble dangerous?”

  I think of the homeless man in the garbage bags, the man who either attacked me or whom I attacked, depending on which of us is more insane.

  “Nope,” I say. “The park isn't dangerous. People who say the park is dangerous are just stupid.”

  William pokes at a clump of hardened slush with his stick. “I think there's a dead bird frozen in here,” he says.

  “Gross,” I say.

  He prods for a while until it becomes obvious that what is underneath the ice is just a clot of dirt and leaves.

  “My mother says that the man who paid for the Delacorte Clock got mugged right in the park.”

  “Does she?” It is typical that Carolyn, who to my knowledge has never set foot in Central Park, would know that George Delacorte, one of Central Park's great philanthropists, was mugged, at the age of ninety-two, in a pedestrian tunnel near the very clock he endowed. Carolyn is a repository of any information that could siphon the fun out of our day.

  “The Seven Cities of Cibola are in a little hut in the middle of the Ramble,” William announces.

  “What?”

  “There's this little thing called a rustic shelter in the middle of the Ramble. I saw it in that book you gave me. That's the Seven Cities.”

  “Or one of them. You know, I think I sat in that hut once, a couple of years ago. It was neat, because it was summer, and it felt really cool inside. I think it's much colder inside that hut than outside in the rest of the park.”

  “It's full of gold.”

  “I remember that. It was totally full of gold. Heaps of gold, everywhere. The only reason I didn't take any was because I was wearing a sundress and didn't have any pockets.”

  “Let's go!” William says.