Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Em?” Jack calls after me. “What's going on?”

  I shake my head again.

  “Emilia!”

  Rodrigo is nowhere to be seen. He has melted away into the bowels of the building or disappeared out the front door to huddle under the awning in the rain until we are done making an exhibition of ourselves.

  “Can we do this upstairs?” I say.

  The ride up in the elevator is silent, punctuated only by the rattle of William's sniffles, mucus sucked through his nose and throat with dramatic intensity.

  Once we are inside our apartment Jack says again, “What happened?”

  William says, “Emilia threw me in the lake,” and then he bursts into tears.

  “Don't be ridiculous,” I snap. Then I explain briefly what happened, how we slipped and he fell into the Meer. How it was an accident. “We were having so much fun,” I say, wincing at the pathetic, pleading tone in my voice. “We were actually having a good time.”

  Jack turns away from me and bends down to William. He uses his thumbs to wipe the boy's tears away. “Let's get you out of these wet clothes and into a hot bubble bath.” He picks William up and is immediately wrapped in the clutch of the boy's octopus legs and arms.

  “I'm so wet, Daddy,” William says, piteously.

  I say, “This is ridiculous!”

  Jack says nothing. They are halfway down the hallway when I call out, “Just a minute.”

  Jack pauses in the doorway to William's room.

  “What?” he says. His voice is taut, stretched close to breaking.

  “Aren't you going to tell him that he's overreacting? Explain that he shouldn't get so crazy over a little mud and water? We were having fun, Jack! Aren't you going to say something to him?”

  Jack narrows his lips into a thin line and his nostrils flare as he inhales. His face is pale, white with anger, especially around his eyes. “You want me to say something, Emilia?” he bites off each word and spits it out like a bitter morsel. “You really want me to say something?”

  Don't say anything. Don't release the words that I can see swirling in your mouth, even across this dark and lonely room.

  “It was an accident!” I insist. “We tripped. We were running, and we fell.”

  “You don't even give a shit. He's cold, and scared, and you couldn't care less.”

  “I do so care. But he wasn't scared. You know William, Jack. You know he's just being dramatic. It's like he can't bear the fact that he had fun with me. Like it's a betrayal of Carolyn or something. But that's just silly. You need to tell him that's just silly.”

  Jack gently puts William down, propels him through the door, and then pulls it closed. He leans toward me and says in a low voice, “You have no idea what your face is like when you look at him, Emilia. You are so cold. You are colder than the fucking frozen Harlem Meer.”

  He jerks William's door open and walks through it, slamming it shut behind him. I was not cold before. Before, I was warming to his son. I was. But now his words and those unsaid that have spilled over me like liquid hydrogen. It is his words that have frozen me, made me brittle and immovable. Colder than even Jack knows.

  I am white with cold and for some reason I think of this moment's polar opposite, so long ago. When I felt like someone had opened a small door in the top of my head and poured sunlight into my body, filling me from the tips of my toes and fingers up through the filaments of hair on my scalp. That moment was all the more precious because of what had led up to it. All day long, and for at least a week before, I had been convinced, had known the way I know my own telephone number, the way I know now what Jack is not saying, that he was going to break up with me once again.

  Since Carolyn had thrown Jack out three months earlier, we had been dating, like a regular couple, like normal people. We had gone out to dinner, seen movies. We had gone to a play, to the opera, even twice to the ballet before I confessed my loathing for it. We had gone to three Mets games, and to Yankee Stadium once, but only because Jack had a friend with season tickets right behind home plate, and because they were playing the Red Sox and ever since college I have been partial to the Red Sox. We were having an office romance, surreptitious only in the way those always are. We no longer slipped out for long lunches, snacking on room service and one another's bodies while pretending no more than a passing acquaintance in front of other people at work. Not that we were obvious. We refrained from heavy petting in the firm cafeteria, but we allowed ourselves to arrive at the same time in the morning, even to stand side by side in line for our coffee at the Italian bakery in the lobby of the building. We made love at night, always in Jack's new apartment on the Upper West Side, on the mattress and box spring that lay on the floor of his bedroom. Jack never came to my apartment. I slept over at his place three or four nights a week, never more, sometimes less. But I kept none of my things there. Instead, I carried a large purse with extra panties, a toothbrush, and a makeup bag. I kept two or three suits and a few blouses hanging in dry cleaning bags on the back of my office door and six or seven pair of shoes lined up under my desk.

  I was never at Jack's apartment when William stayed over; I was never there unless we had a prearranged date the evening before. That we would spend our nights together was not taken for granted. If Jack called during the day and asked me to dinner, then I knew we would sleep together. If I asked him on a Tuesday to go to a concert that Saturday, then we would make love on Saturday night. Sometimes, when we were both working late, Jack would call and ask if I wanted to come over to his place for a late dinner or to watch a movie. There was always a pretext for the evenings Jack and I spent in each other's company. Never would one of us suggest simply going home from work in order to be together, to make love, to sleep. We were dating, which meant we had to do something, even if that something was as simple as watching a DVD.

  But in the week before the perfect moment, Jack had called only once, to cancel a date we had with Simon and his boyfriend to go to an opening of an art show in Chelsea. We had planned to meet at seven, to take a quick whirl through the pieces—the artist did something with pulleys and string—and then go to dinner at Man Ray. Jack begged off on account of work, unmoved even by my pleas that without him I would not have the strength to face a pretentious art show and a pretentious meal in the company of the pretentious lover of my best friend. Then the artist, the newly coronated darling of the West Chelsea gallery district, put the moves on Simon's boyfriend and Simon and I ended up alone at the Red Cat, sharing a plate of fried sardines and bemoaning the perfidy of men.

  Jack and I ate only one meal together that week, dinner at his desk. I decided to surprise him one night, and ordered in and billed both meals to the client I was working for, figuring that the waste management company could afford the extra tempura udon. Jack's office was empty, but I found him in the conference room down the hall, eating a slice of pizza with the team of associates he was keeping busy working long hours on a petition for certiorari that would be denied later in the month. He saw the white paper bag in my hand and put his half-eaten slice of pizza on a paper plate.

  “Take your time,” he said to the young lawyers. “I'll be back in a bit.”

  We were about halfway down the hall when we heard the room break up into a quickly hushed burst of laughter.

  “Well, that was humiliating,” I said as I followed him into his office. “Sorry.”

  “No, it's fine,” he said.

  We ate quickly. I could tell right away that the piece of pizza Jack left behind had not been his first. He sipped at his soup, taking only a few mouthfuls of noodles before laying his chopsticks across the top of the bowl. After I was done eating, Jack went back to work and I went home to my own apartment. By Saturday morning it had been five days since we'd slept in the same bed, and six since we'd made love. I waited for Jack to call, hovering over my telephone like a character in a Dorothy Parker short story. I forced myself to go to the deli for coffee and a doughnut, but lacked t
he fortitude to leave my cell phone behind. I put it in my pocket, with the ringer on both high and vibrate. By two in the afternoon I was terrified that Jack was planning on leaving me, and by four I knew that he already had. At that point, with nothing left to lose, I went to Jack's apartment. Those were the days before I took cabs so readily, when I was still paying off student loans and had more patience for changing trains. I sat on the subway and stared at my fellow miscreants, the rest of the city's rabble who, like me, had no place to escape even on a holiday weekend. No one looked particularly pathetic, except for a crippled man working the Times Square Shuttle. He slid from car to car on an upholstered cart, his wizened legs origamied beneath him. I gave him five dollars, as a reward for being more miserable than I was.

  Ivan, working on a rare Saturday, let me wait for Jack on the divan in the lobby, the one on which I have never since seen anyone sit. I think mine may be the only buttocks to have creased the floral silk upholstery. If that's true, and if the purple ladies from the other floors find out, they will not be happy. I have never, after all, been approved by the co-op board.

  Ivan gave me a Time magazine and a shortbread cookie. I felt like a small child, little Miss Greenleaf waiting in the lobby. When Jack arrived, carrying his squash racquet and a gym bag, I had just declined, for the third time, a Dixie cup of Diet Coke.

  Jack looked neither happy nor surprised to see me. He held the elevator door open with his arm and, once we were out of Ivan's view, bussed me lightly on the lips. We walked into his empty apartment—despite having lived there for three months, Jack had not furnished it with more than a kitchen table and chairs, the mattress and box springs on the floor of his bedroom, and an ugly highboy foisted on him by an aggressive antique dealer. The only room in the house that was fully furnished was William's. Jack had allowed William to decorate his own room, and the resulting design was a combination dinosaur hatchery and pirate's lair. They had found a bed and matching dresser at a furniture store out in New Jersey that had a vaguely seafaring air to it, with loops of rope across the faces of the drawers instead of pulls. William had distributed his collection of two-foot dinosaurs on top of the dresser and along the floor in front of the built-in bookcase. He had dozens of these rubberized plastic dinosaurs, every species the Museum of Natural History had to offer, even ones I'd never heard of like Maiasaurus and Hypsilophodon. Jack had done his best to replicate exactly the contents of the bookcase William had at Carolyn's house, and there was something heartbreaking about the rows of hardback books—Ferdinand the Bull; the famous House on East 88th Street; Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel; Dinosaur Bob—jackets bright and shiny, bindings firm and unbent, pages bearing none of the smudges left by years of a child's eager fingers.

  Jack propped his racquet in a corner of the empty living room. “Do you want something to drink? A glass of wine or a beer? Some water?”

  I shook my head.

  “I think I'll have a beer. It's so incredibly hot out there,” he said.

  I followed him into the kitchen and watched while he opened the fridge and took a bottle from the cardboard six-pack on the shelf. Except for the beer, Jack's fridge was stocked for a lactose-intolerant three-year-old, with packages of tortellini, grapes and baby carrots, and a dozen containers of soy milk.

  I watched him lift the bottle to his lips and tilt his head back. His Adam's apple was sharp in his throat, a perfect triangle shifting up and down with his swallow.

  “I think I should move in here with you,” I said.

  Jack set the bottle down on his kitchen table and looked at me with his velvet eyes, soft and dark as navy blue ink.

  Here is what we did not say:

  I did not say, I know you are planning to leave me. Don't. Don't leave me.

  He did not say, I'm sorry, Emilia. I can't do this. I can't move so quickly into another relationship. My marriage has barely ended. I'm not in any shape to start over again with someone new.

  But you love me, I didn't say.

  That doesn't matter, he didn't reply. I just can't right now. I'm confused. I'm in pain. I need room to figure out how to be without Carolyn and William before I can figure out how to be with someone else.

  Here is something else we didn't say:

  I did not say, You are mine. You cannot leave me because you are mine.

  He didn't reply, I cannot bear how much you want me. I cannot stand the force of your desire. It has burned through my family, separated me from my son. I cannot be with you because I am afraid you will burn through me, too. You will set me on fire and there will be nothing left of me that isn't black and smoldering.

  I did not say, You love me, too. You want me that way, too. I didn't burn your house down by myself. You are your own arsonist.

  He did not say, That may be true, but that's even more reason for you to go away. Arson, fire. Who needs this shit? Take your thermal haze and get the hell out of here.

  And here is yet more we didn't say:

  He did not say, My son does not love you.

  I did not say, It doesn't matter. I love you so much that it will spill over you like golden light. My love will fill your ink blue eyes and blind you to what I don't feel for your son.

  This is what was said:

  Jack said, “Can you live without furniture?”

  Chapter 23

  Since Sunday night Jack and I have spoken in modulated voices, treating each conversation as if it is an outing over cracking ice too thin to bear the weight of our remorse. We do not discuss William, or the Meer, or how close we came to uttering unthinkable words. We just tiptoe around each other, taking such exaggerated care with every comment, every gesture that it feels like we are a couple of lunatics trapped in a very pretty three-bedroom asylum. Even the refusal of a second cup of coffee is suddenly so fraught that breakfast is exhausting enough to force me back to my bed for two hours of restorative napping after Jack has left for work. One of the blessings of Jack's being a partner in a law firm is that he can arrive home at ten or eleven o'clock at night without having to make even the excuse of an unusually heavy workload, so at least we are spared achingly courteous takeout dinners.

  This morning Jack wakes early and stands over me, elegant and handsome in his dark gray suit and pink shirt, his hair wet from the shower, his fresh-shaved cheek fragrant from the astringent lotion I buy him.

  “Are you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you sleep well?”

  “Yes, very well.”

  “I have a deposition this afternoon so I can't pick up William after school.”

  “That's fine.”

  “Would you prefer it if I called Carolyn and asked her to have Sonia stay with him until I finish work?”

  “No, I'll get him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because it's no problem.”

  “I said, I'll get him.” My voice is harsh. I have violated our rule of polite discourse and I cringe.

  Jack leans over and wipes a speck of invisible lint off the toe of his shiny black loafer. To his shoe he says, “What are you going to do with him?”

  “I don't know, I thought I'd pitch him into the model boat pond. Unless it's frozen over, in which case I'll try the Lake.”

  He stands up, his face grim, unsmiling.

  “I'll bring him home,” I say. “I'll give him a nondairy snack, and we'll play Lego or dinosaurs until you get home.”

  “You could rent a DVD.”

  “I don't need to rent a DVD. He's not allowed to watch TV, remember? We'll be fine.”

  “If you're sure.”

  “I'm sure. It will be fine.”

  Jack nods. He buttons his suit jacket, and then unbuttons it. “I've been thinking about that thing in the park. That Walk to Remember.”

  “You have?” I haven't. I have not thought about it at all.

  “Do you still want to go?” he asks. He does not give me time to answer. “I think we should go. A
ll three of us. I think it'll be good for us. We should do it together.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  He leans over the bed, stopping with his lips a few inches from mine. I lift my face and close the distance between us. It is the first time we've kissed since before the incident at the Meer, since our fight. It's a plain kiss, not particularly soft or tender, but it is familiar and firm.

  “I'll see you tonight,” he says.

  “Don't worry. William and I will be fine.”

  We aren't, of course. When William sees me waiting for him outside the Red Room, he frowns. He cocks his head to one side, seems to be considering his possibilities, evaluating the situation. Then he walks over.

  “I'm not going with you,” he says.

  “It's Wednesday, William. On Wednesdays you come to our house.”

  “Not today.”

  “Yes, today. Today is Wednesday.”

  “No, Emilia.” William shakes his head firmly. “I'm not going with you. Not anymore. You threw me in a lake. In Harlem.”

  “It was the Harlem Meer. And I did not throw you in. You slipped. We slipped. It was an accident. Accidents happen. Get your coat on.”

  “No!” William yells.

  Sharlene pops her head out of the Red Room, her attention attracted by the vehemence of his cry. “Use your inside voice, William,” she says.

  “Tell Emilia I'm not going with her,” he says and runs to the door. He ducks under Sharlene's arm and into the classroom.

  “Oh for God's sake,” I mutter, following him. One or two of the nannies give me sympathetic smiles. They've been there; they know what it's like to deal with a recalcitrant child whom you are not permitted to discipline but for whose behavior you are responsible. The mothers, on the other hand, shake their heads or cast disapproving scowls my way. Who am I to impose my adulterous presence on a little boy who wants only his mother, his real mother, the one who should never have been usurped in the first place?

  “I'm sorry about this,” I say to Sharlene when I walk into the classroom. “Come on William. We've got to go.”