Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  “This is Emilia,” I shout.

  “Emilia?”

  “Yes.” I try to explain about today, how it is the first Thursday of the month and they are filming the zoo scene of Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, but she keeps saying, “What?” over and over again.

  Finally, she says, “I'm sorry, I can't hear. There are too many people here. They are making a movie and there are men with loud microphones.”

  “You're at the filming? In Central Park?”

  “I'm sorry, I can't hear you.” And then she hangs up.

  In the middle of the day it is much faster to take the train, and because I know this, I make it to the park in twenty minutes. What is more amazing, miraculous even, is that I find them, standing beneath the Delacorte Clock. I arrive on the strike of two. The animals begin their dance with a jerk, the bronze monkeys banging their hammers on the bell, the bear playing his tambourine, the penguin drumming, the hippo fiddling, the kangaroo tooting his horn, the goat playing the pipes, and my favorite, the elephant, jamming on the concertina. It is to the tune of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” that I begin to cry again. I am crying because William is jumping up and down, excited to see the animals revolve in their circle, and I can remember the very first time that we met, right here, in this zoo, in the park. He was so small, up on his father's shoulders, and so sad. In the intervening two years what have I brought to this child's life but more of the same misery? First I destroyed his family—and however flawed, however complicated by lovelessness, misunderstanding, and pain, it was a family. Then I refused to participate in the creation of the right kind of new family, an alternative where he might somehow reinvent the life I had taken from him. And now, I have rent, shattered even, the illusion of our false family, torn it asunder once and for all.

  When she sees me Sonia says, “Emilia, today is not your day. You cannot come on this day. I think Dr. Soule is very angry that you are here today.”

  “It'll be okay,” I say, as if I have some confidence that this is true.

  “I think you go home now, Emilia,” Sonia says. “Today is not your day, and they don't want crying in the movie. I take William to be in the movie. You go home.”

  I want to tell Sonia that I can't go home because Jack has left me, although I am the one gone. But I can see that she is so tired of all this. She is sick to death of these Americans and their self-important histrionics. She is tired of the weeping and the screaming. She is tired of the self-aggrandizement and the self-flagellation, the latter really a kind of variation on the former. She wishes we had some real problems, problems like an economy so bad that teenage girls sell themselves into prostitution to escape it, or an environment laid waste by decades of nuclear mismanagement. Or maybe what Sonia is really sick of is me.

  It makes a dismal kind of sense that here, under the animal dance of the Delacorte Clock, which has never been able to bring him the joy it was designed to produce, I will have to tell William that only now, when I don't know if I will be able to see him again, do I realize how much it matters.

  When the clock is done striking the hour I crouch down. William has pulled off his hat and his sandy hair crackles with static electricity. Something about his eyes looks different and I peer at his face. They are darker, softer, more like ink or velvet.

  “William,” I say. My eyes and nose are running and I wipe angrily at my tears.

  “Why are you crying?” he says, calm and curious.

  “Let me just say this, okay? Whatever's happening between your dad and me . . .”

  “I can't understand you. Maybe you should blow your nose.”

  “William, will you just be quiet for a second, so I can say this? I'm trying to tell that you that I think you're a great kid. And no matter what happens, I'm always going to think that.”

  But William is not listening. He is looking over my shoulder. “Nono!” he shouts. “Emilia is here, too! Did you put mustard on my pretzel?”

  My father has taken off his glove and balances three pretzels on his outstretched fingers. The smile he gives me is tentative, pleading. It softens his face and pleats his cheeks and eyes with deep wrinkles. He looks so old.

  “Hi, honey,” he says.

  “Hi.”

  Before I can ask him what he is doing here he says, “William and I made plans to be in this movie together, remember? Jack said it would be all right if I called his mother.”

  “Carolyn said you could bring him here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  He cocks his head to one side and frowns a little sorrowfully, as if asking what I take him for, do I really think he would have lied? Then he distributes a pretzel to William and one to Sonia. He tears the third in half. “Here,” he says, handing me the larger half. I take it. It's hot and soft, the mustard is tangy against my tongue. I am starving, and this is the most delicious pretzel I've ever eaten in my life.

  “Thank you,” I say with my mouth full.

  “You're welcome. You have mustard on your lip.” He gives me a napkin.

  “Extras who have not yet signed releases, please meet in the zoo in front of the penguin pool,” a voice blares over the loudspeaker. “Extras with signed releases, please proceed to the caiman tank in the children's zoo.”

  “Come on!” William shouts. He grabs my father's hand. “Let's go!”

  Sonia frowns, looking at me.

  “It's okay, Sonia,” my father says. “I'm sure Carolyn won't mind.”

  She ponders this for a moment and then seems to give in to his authority as she never has to mine. We allow William to lead us under the clock to the Children's Zoo, where the cameras are set up around the caiman tank. I think I recognize one of the young men from the Conservatory Garden, but most of the people wearing headsets and busily shifting the crowd from place to place seem to be clones of that trio and I'm not really sure.

  “Where are the crocodiles?” I ask William.

  “There are no crocodiles in the Central Park Zoo,” he explains.

  “Well, doesn't that strike you as something of a problem? The book is called Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile not Kyle, Kyle, Caiman. Are they going to change the title?”

  He shakes his head in exasperation. “They'll use special effects. Haven't you ever heard of CGI?”

  For the next couple of hours we walk back and forth in front of the caiman tank. William frustrates the extras wrangler to no end by ostentatiously exclaiming in awe over the empty area where he assumes the computer-generated image of Lyle will be doing his handstands and crocodile soft-shoe. Sonia, my father, and I don't talk much. We do a pretty good impression of a group of New Yorkers out for an afternoon at the zoo with their child, parading in relatively blank-faced silence past the cages and exhibits.

  After two hours, even William seems to have had enough, and when Sonia suggests that it might be time for the two of them to be heading home, he is only too eager to acquiesce.

  “Can we stop at Le Pain Quotidien?” he says.

  She considers for a moment, and then nods her head.

  “Ask about the strawberry cupcakes,” I say. “See if they've finally started doing them dairy free.”

  “Would you like to join us?” Sonia invites, although it is clear that she hopes we will not accept.

  “No, thank you,” my father says. “I'd better be getting back across the bridge.”

  We watch them as they walk off down the path in the waning light. When we can no longer see them I turn. Across the park lies my apartment—Jack's apartment. And in between a vast expanse of gray and green, Ramble and schist, lawns and gardens. Fanciful wooden, stone, and iron bridges. Raptors and woodpeckers, eastern kingbirds, warblers, ducks, and the ever-present pigeons. Pine-tree nurseries and numbered lampposts. The park. My park.

  My father says, “Would you like to take a walk?”

  “Okay.”

  We head north, walking silently side by side until we reach the statue of Balto the heroic sled dog. We pause in front o
f the bronze malamute and I wonder if my words from Sunday night are ringing in my father's ears as they are in mine. We continue on, walking in silence through the underground arch. Then my father says, “Jack told me you left home.”

  In place of a reply I kick a pebble with my foot.

  “When I called about taking William to the filming, he told me.”

  I still don't say anything.

  We wander past the statues of the writers: Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott. In front of Robert Burns, my father says, “Don't make the same mistake I did, Emilia.”

  “Which mistake was that?”

  He sighs.

  “Sorry,” I say, and because I can't bear to look at my father, I say it to the drunken, philandering Scottish poet cast in bronze.

  My father says, “Jack's a good man.”

  “I know.”

  We start walking again, along the southern path of Sheep Meadow.

  “They had sheep in the meadow all the way until the 1930s,” my father tells me, as he has a hundred times before. “By the time they were taken away, they were completely inbred.”

  “Freak sheep.” I've said this a hundred times, too.

  “They sent the shepherd to work in the lion house at the zoo, poor guy. Wonder what he made of that. Probably ended up feeding his old charges to his new. What do you say we get a drink?”

  “Where?”

  He points to the festive white lights of Tavern on the Green.

  “Really?” I ask. He has taught me that only tourists and dowagers frequent Tavern on the Green.

  “Just a drink,” he says.

  We walk up to the restaurant. I have never been inside, and it is a monstrous chocolate box of Tiffany glass, gilded mirrors, and Victoriana. At once, I understand the hulking topiary out in the garden, the gorilla and the reindeer. It's all of a piece with this lantern-lit insanity. My father orders a Glenfiddich and soda, something I've never seen him drink before. Perhaps he's been inspired by Burns. I want something more suitable to our surroundings, something ridiculous and fancy. Something with absinthe. I settle for a kir royal.

  We sip our drinks. My father and I have not gone this long without talking in all our lives, I think. We are normally loquacious companions. We chat about the law, politics, my sisters. Even after I knew about what he had done, our facile conversations carried on. His continued ease masked any stiffness on my part.

  The bubbles in my champagne tickle the roof of my mouth and the kir is sweet. I take a very large swallow, gearing myself up to speak. Before I can my father says, “I wasn't a very good husband.”

  He rushes on before I agree. “I don't mean because of what caused the divorce.” And this is as close as we will get to referring to what, specifically, he has done. “I wasn't there for your mother in other ways. With Lucy and Allison, especially.”

  I take another sip of my drink. “You don't have to tell me this, Daddy.”

  He shrugs. “Right, you were there.”

  “No, I mean, you don't owe me an explanation. I had no right to say what I did. I have no right be so angry with you. This is between Mom and you. It has nothing to do with me. It's none of my business.”

  He frowns and twirls his straw between his fingers. “That's partly true. Part of it is just between your mother and me. But part of it affects you. What happened to us affects you. It's still affecting you.”

  I am finished with my drink now, my head buzzing from the alcohol. “I'm sorry, Daddy. I'm sorry I was so mean to you the other night. In front of Jack and William. I'm so sorry.”

  “It's all right, honey.” We are sitting side by side and he puts his arm around me. “You're my girl.”

  I lay my head on his shoulder. He pats my hair and says, sadly, “You try so hard to be like me, daughter.”

  I sit up. I want to tell him that I am nothing like him, but we both know the truth. When my father betrayed my mother, when he humiliated her in the most degrading, horrible way he could have, and in a moment of terrible weakness, she confided in me, I set out to prove our similarity. What was my response when my mother shared her aching shame and curdled the love I felt for my father? I ensnared and entrapped a man like him, who looked like him, who did the same work he did, who loved his child as my father loved his. I dug my claws into Jack, ruined his marriage and his family, turned him and myself into traitors. Just like my father.

  And then I was punished. I was punished and I punished.

  Oh Isabel. Oh Jack. Oh William. What have I done to you all?

  My father says, “You're hopelessly unrealistic about love. You're as foolish as I am, just in a different way.”

  “What does that mean?” I am fighting tears now, so my voice sounds more hostile than I intend.

  “Your fantasy is as unrealistic as mine, and it's going to end up with the same end result.”

  “My fantasy?”

  “That old wives' tale of your grandmother's, that bashert story.” My father's voice takes on a gentle mocking tone. “You fell in love with Jack at first sight. He's your soul mate, your intended. You two were meant to be. How many times have I heard you tell the story of how you first saw him, Emilia? On his knees in the hallway of Friedman Taft? Love at first sight, love at first sight. Do you really think that that's what love is all about?”

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  “No,” he says, firmly. He grasps both my shoulders and gives me a small but firm shake. “No. That's a fantasy, honey. Love and marriage are about work and compromise. They're about seeing someone for what he is, being disappointed, and deciding to stick around anyway. They're about commitment and comfort, not some kind of sudden, hysterical recognition.”

  “That's not what I want. Disappointment and comfort is not what I want.”

  “Why not? Because you expect it to be magical and mystical? Because you don't want to work?”

  “Why can't it be magical? Why can't it be mystical?”

  “Because if you count on magic and mysticism, Emilia, then as soon as shit happens, as soon as life interferes, as soon as your stepson treats you badly, or your husband's ex-wife has a fit about something, or your baby dies, as soon as life happens, the magic will disappear and you'll be left with nothing. You can't count on magic, Emilia. Trust me, I know. Sweetheart, little girl, you can't count on magic.”

  Fortunately, my father is good at managing scenes. He would have to be, wouldn't he? My sisters and I have been throwing public tantrums since we were two years old. When I lose control of my tears and my sobbing grows loud, he holds out his capacious handkerchief and brandishes it in front of my face like a toreador with a recalcitrant bull. The bartender and waiters shy away from our small table and the other drinkers avert their eyes until I have managed to lift my head and catch my breath. After a while I am still crying, but I no longer need to cover my mouth to keep my sobs from shaking the windows in their frames and breaking the crystal goblets lined up along the back of the bar.

  “I'm so sorry, sweetheart,” my father says.

  “It's okay, Daddy,” I manage to say around my tears. “I just . . . I do love him. I do.”

  “Of course you do. I'm not saying you don't. And he loves you, too.”

  “I've screwed this up so badly.”

  “That's okay. You haven't got a patch on me, kiddo. If that makes you feel any better.”

  I wipe my eyes. “Not a whole lot, to be perfectly honest.”

  He pauses for a moment, and then he laughs. “I guess not.”

  “I love you, Daddy,” I say.

  “I love you too, my girl.”

  Chapter 28

  Oh will you please give me a fucking break?” I say. I am sitting in the toilet stall in the restaurant, my new suede skirt hitched up around my waist.

  “Excuse me?” The woman in the next stall is unperturbed, as though used to being sworn at in public restrooms.

  I wonder if I should ask her how she would respond to the following: Oh, lady in the next stall, hav
ing confronted and confessed your darkest secret to your husband, that you are responsible for the death of your child, and having your husband not only believe you but shrink from you, finally recognizing you for the malignant evil you are, and thus all but ask you leave his house, and having yourself come to the conclusion that your marriage is a farce, born of a kind of proto-Freudian reenactment of your father's infidelity, and having realized, altogether too late, that the worst crimes you've committed in all this mess are directed at the one person who is truly a victim of circumstance, who you've all but tried to kill by feeding him things he's allergic to, sending him to play in dangerous and unprotected circumstances, and pitching him into freezing water, if only accidentally, and doesn't Freud say there are no accidents, having dealt with all this, lady in the next stall over, how would you deal with the nightmare flashing on your caller ID?

  I should have known this was coming. I should have realized that the only misery missing from my life was a nice, quick evisceration, courtesy of the miracle of fiber optics.

  “It's nothing,” I say to the lady in the next stall, and “Hello, Carolyn,” I say into the phone.

  “I need to see you.”

  “Is that so.” Why not? I mean, really, why not?

  “Come to my office. Can you make it this evening? I only have a few more patients. I'm at . . .”

  “I know where you are.” What does she think? That in the months I was waiting for Jack to forget that he was married, I didn't look up her address? That I didn't cast telepathic hexes in her direction, complete with nine-digit zip codes?

  “Try not to be late. I have an operating room booked for seven tomorrow morning and I'd like to get home at a decent hour.”

  Why would I be late to my own execution?

  The waiting room of Carolyn's office looks just like I imagined, complete with two pregnant women sitting on the sleek leather couch. One of them is reading Parenting magazine with a more tortured expression than an article on baby names should inspire in anyone, no matter how influenced by the vagaries of hormonal ebb and flow. The other has a beatific glow about her that I find loathsome. I realize that this is the first time I have been in an obstetrician's office since before Isabel was born. I pretended to forget my six-week follow-up appointment with Dr. Brewster and ignored the messages from his office calling to reschedule. It is not as difficult to be here as I would have expected; I'm not so angered by the presence of pregnant women. I don't like the smug Madonna woman, but the other, the worried one, does not bother me overmuch. Perhaps the prospect of my conversation with Carolyn makes everything else pale by comparison.