“You shouldn’t even be thinking about her!” Portia’s voice is screechy, like a teenager’s.
“Love can be overwhelming,” Anna snaps, and Portia knows she is on their father’s side. “It’s not something you can control.”
“Sweetheart.” Buzzy gets up from the table and tries to hug his daughter. Portia stands there, her arms dropped to the side.
“Well, doesn’t this answer your weight-loss question?” Portia sighs. Truly sighs. With breathy noise and dropping shoulders.
“What do you mean, this answers my weight-loss question?”
“Everyone loses weight when they have an affair.” She pulls away from her father, sits at the table, and eats her cinnamon roll. Portia wants to tell Buzzy that her husband, who also had an affair, with a lawyer from his office, lost weight, too. But she doesn’t. She can’t even look at him. She looks at her sister.
“Affairs have nothing to do with love and devotion,” Anna says. She flips the bag of peas over, readjusts it on her knee. “I mean, look how devoted Dad’s been since Mom’s been in the hospital. Marriage is complicated.”
“I know how complicated marriage is,” Portia says. “I was married, too. My husband had an affair, too.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t in Mom and Dad’s marriage. You don’t know it. You shouldn’t judge what either of them does.” Anna is staring at Portia like she’d like to smack her. Portia feels like whacking the bag of peas off her sister’s pathetic, swollen, lame-ass knee.
“And you do know their marriage?!”
“Girls.” Buzzy sits at the table beside Anna. “I haven’t seen my friend since your mother had the heart attack. At this moment, I am fully devoted to your mother.”
“Oh, that makes you a great husband, Dad. Devotion at the necessary times!”
“Portia, you’re being unfair,” Buzzy says.
“You’re being totally unfair!” Anna says.
Portia isn’t going to argue. She doesn’t have the energy for it. She is going silent again, like she did when Mrs. White died. At least for a while, so that she can separate her father from Patrick, her mother from herself.
Chapter 16
1985
Patrick was the last boyfriend Portia had in college, an Irish Catholic from Stamford, Connecticut, with unhappily married parents and a long heritage of alcoholics and storytellers. He was funny, fun, and great-looking in that Irish way of thick black hair, green eyes, and shoulders that looked like they had a two-by-four running across them. There were six kids in Patrick’s family, four boys and two girls. His father, Regis, was a pink-nosed silent worker who carried a briefcase out the door each morning and carried it back in at precisely six p.m. each evening, at which point he retired to the TV room with a beer and waited for dinner in a chair that had molded to the shape of his body. Patrick’s mother, Sheila, ran the show at home. She loved her sons, whom she envisioned would take over the world, or the U.S. at least, Kennedy-style, before she died. Her two daughters she ignored for the most part; their job seemed to be to help their mother around the house and laugh at their brothers’ jokes.
Portia saw Patrick’s family twice a year. December, when she flew home with him for Christmas, during which time she was shunned by his mother and sisters because she didn’t have the sense to get up and help in the kitchen (at the time, she was too in love with Patrick to abandon him for the chores, and too enraptured by the manic fun he had with his brothers to leave what always felt like a party). And April, when his family assembled at an uncle’s beach house near Los Angeles where the boys and their cousins played hours of football on the sand while their tall, sturdy mother stood by and cheered them on as if she were at the Notre Dame–USC game.
Sheila’s two daughters did as she expected and married well-employed Catholic boys who fit in perfectly at the April football games. The four sons, however, each eventually disappointed their mother. The oldest, Sean, married a Spanish girl. She was the Catholic Sheila had wanted, but far too dark and ethnic for her tastes. The next son, Paul, remained a bachelor and volunteered at the church more than was considered masculine or productive (outside the family, he was thought of as gay). The brainiest of the brothers, James, married a Russian who Sheila was convinced was in the KGB, as she went to Yale with James, and how else could a Russian get into Yale? And Patrick fell in love with Portia. Portia was, perhaps, the biggest disappointment of all. Patrick was the youngest of the brothers, the last hurrah, the final hope. And there he was, senior year of college, and dating a Jew. “Be careful who your last college girlfriend is,” Sheila had said, as he left home his final year, “as that’s the one you’ll marry.”
When they moved into an apartment together second semester, Sheila stopped calling Patrick for fear that Portia would pick up the phone. Instead, she sent letters that instructed her son to call her every Wednesday and Sunday. He usually made the Sunday call after Portia reminded him. Wednesday eluded them both.
The best thing about Patrick was his lack of intense emotion. Here was a guy who neither complained nor praised. He didn’t cry, didn’t laugh at his own jokes (but would laugh uproariously at others’), and never said how he felt about anything. Patrick seemed emotionally uncluttered in a way that was a relief to Portia after the intense emotions and needs flying around her childhood house. Being with him, compared to being with her family, presented as stark a contrast as the cluttered coffee table at home compared to a shiny, empty slab of marble. Portia didn’t have to tend to his psyche. She didn’t have to think about him, or his needs, or his wants. She was free to simply exist. Peacefully. Quietly. Yet she wasn’t alone. And she was laughing.
They had few conflicts. Patrick and Portia’s first fraught moment came when she found herself pregnant the spring before she was set to graduate (she had stupidly believed that you couldn’t get pregnant when you had sex during your period). Portia called Patrick at the campus bookstore, where he was working, the moment she got home from the Berkeley clinic. It took at least five minutes for him to come to the phone, which was near the cash register. Portia waited and listened to the clinking of sales and the murmuring banter of the cashier talking to the customers.
“Hey,” Patrick almost whispered into the phone. He never liked when Portia called him at work and acted embarrassed by the calls, as if she were his mother checking up on him.
“So, you know how I didn’t get my period?” Portia asked. She was sitting at their shared desk in the bedroom of their tiny two-room apartment. The kitchen was part of the living room. The bathroom was so small they couldn’t stand at the sink together to brush their teeth. There were cockroaches, and neighbors who cooked cabbagey foods whose smells hung in the hallway like smog. The windows wouldn’t stay open unless you propped a ruler or giant textbook in the sills to hold them up, and the bathroom door was too big for the doorway and always remained partially open. But it was rent-control cheap, only five blocks from campus. And in a city where it was nearly impossible to find a place to rent, they didn’t have the luxury to turn it down when a friend of Patrick’s left for law school and passed the lease on to him.
“Yeah?” Patrick said, and Portia thought she could hear him turning his head or shifting his focus away from the phone.
“So, I’m pregnant,” Portia said.
“Okay.” Patrick was using his social voice—the voice that left everyone believing that everything was great in his life. Simply perfect.
“Okay?” Portia asked.
“I’ll go with you to that place,” he said, and she knew he meant the clinic where they did abortions. “All right, I gotta go, I’ve got a lot of work to do here.”
Patrick hung up quickly, leaving Portia listening to blank static and then the rhythmic, pulsating buzz of an empty phone line. This must be too much for him, she thought, a surplus of emotion for a guy who could say “I love you” only when the lights were out and Portia was too tired to respond. She forgave him for what seemed like a lack of sympat
hy—she forgave him everything, always. She was crazy about him.
Portia had wanted a baby since she was a little girl playing with Peaches, her doll. The only thing in her life that she was ever sure she would be was a mother. Portia knew Patrick’s mother was right about his last college girlfriend; they would eventually marry. So, if they were going to end up together for the rest of their lives, why not have the baby now? Hadn’t things turned out fine when Louise had Anna at twenty-one, a month after graduating from college? Although maybe, Portia thought, Anna’s problems were due to the fact that she had popped out before their parents were ready to be parents.
Later that night, Portia lay on the bony mattress of their bed while Patrick sat at the desk beside her, studying for a physics exam.
“Don’t even think about it. Don’t talk to it.” Patrick stared down at Portia as she absently swirled a hand in circles around her bare belly, her shirt pulled up to the bra line. Portia had been talking to it in her head, asking what it would look like, if it would have a good sense of humor, if it would have massive shoulders like Patrick, shoulders that in passing out of her body would work like a crowbar and rend her open.
Patrick repositioned himself in his chair, shifting as if his pants were binding him in the crotch. Portia tried to imagine him as a baby. And then she thought of a story he had told her. When he was eleven, Patrick had been sitting in his backyard, leaning against an elm tree while thinking about nature, God, and his mother when it hit him: Christ had returned, and Patrick was Him. He always got straight Excellents on his report cards, often helped his mother with chores, and was chosen first for every sports team. He had never tormented his sisters by amputating and burying their dolls or by trying to make them eat bug spray as his brothers had. He was clearly the favorite of his multiple aunts, who talked to him like he was a man, and especially preferred over his brothers by his widowed Aunt Patty whose lawn he mowed for free because she had no husband to mow it. Even his father, who didn’t seem to speak to anyone in the household, spoke to Patrick, asking him to fetch a beer, or change the channel on the giant console TV whose brick-sized remote control his brother Sean had disassembled in an attempt to build a robot. Patrick could think of no one as good as himself, no one as kind as himself, no one as smart and talented as himself, no one as pure as himself. He was happy to stand by and wait for instructions from God.
If the baby were like Patrick, Portia wondered, would it, too, be so good that it might confuse itself for God?
Of course, the counter side to Patrick’s stint as Jesus Christ came when he was around thirteen years old and starting to physically respond to the girls at middle school. Within a matter of days he went from believing he was Christ to believing he was the devil, as he did the devil’s work with his right palm full of hair conditioner during forty-minute showers after school every day.
No, Portia thought. The baby would be neither Christlike nor devilish. It would just be. Simply itself, utterly individual in the universe with a wholly unique molecular makeup unlike any that had come before or any that would come after.
“Stop thinking,” Patrick said. He put down his pencil and pushed his hand through his hair.
“How long did you think you were Christ?” Portia asked.
“About two years.”
“Did you think you could heal people and turn water to wine?” His Christ realization was her favorite story. She was insatiable for the details of those wondrous years.
Patrick looked up at the ceiling and thought for a moment. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Or, at least, I never tried. I figured it would all come to me as I got older. I mean, Christ, when he was growing up, was just some kid named Jesus.”
“Emanuel,” Portia said. “Or Yushua.”
“Yeah,” Patrick said. He picked up his pencil again.
“That’s not a bad name, is it?” she asked. “Emanuel?”
“Forget it!” Patrick said, and he looked down at his book as if he were trying to block Portia out of the room. Portia lay there peacefully, not angry or upset, her mind drifting back to the possible outcomes of their cellular fusion.
Earlier that semester Portia had attended the abortions of two friends. Cindy was the first, and she swore Portia to secrecy. They went out to lunch every day the week before the abortion, eating patty melts and shoving down fistfuls of French fries at a local diner as Cindy claimed she had never been hungrier and Portia was happy to eat sympathetically with her. On the walk to the clinic, early in the morning on a Thursday when Portia had no classes, they talked about a guy Cindy had met at Henry’s bar, and how she had scheduled her date with him for one week postabortion so she’d be sure she was no longer bleeding. The procedure seemed to take less time than having one’s teeth cleaned, and after hanging around the recovery room and reading Glamour and Paris Match (which Portia had checked out of the French library on campus), they walked home as if nothing had happened.
The second abortion was a girl Portia barely knew, the close friend of her close friend Stacy. Portia and Stacy were at Café Roma one afternoon when Stacy said, “Can you take Kerri to her abortion? I was supposed to go with her but my father’s going to be in town and I have to hang out with him.”
Kerri was red-haired and near-silent. Portia held her hand before and after the procedure, then walked her to the apartment she and Patrick shared and let her sleep in their bed while Portia studied for an exam and Patrick was at class. Kerri and Portia never talked about the abortion after that day, but every time they ran to each other, their eyes would meet with a knowing flash, as if they’d had some messy affair that neither of them wanted to acknowledge.
“Can’t we think of names for fun?” Portia asked Patrick. She lifted her foot and tapped his leg. The desk chair was that close to the bed.
“No way,” he said. She didn’t expect him to answer differently.
And really, honestly, she knew she’d never have the baby. Portia simply liked engaging in the fantasy of it, the fantasy of motherhood, and marriage. She’d have a clean, quiet house where no one threw furniture or walked around naked. And she’d be with this handsome man whom she imagined would age with the same slow, minutely perceptible changes as Paul Newman. And there would be the baby—a squeezy miniature human who smelled like vanilla and was as warm as fresh bread. Portia would dress it in cute clothes, lime-green maybe. And if it were a girl she’d put dandelion chain wreaths on her head and paint her tiny, gel-soft toenails pink.
Being pregnant then was like trying on a really expensive designer dress at I. Magnin on Union Square in San Francisco. A moment of reality (the dress is on, you exist, it exists on you) within the impossibility of the fantasy (you don’t have three thousand dollars to purchase the dress, nor do you have anywhere to wear it—additionally, it doesn’t even look good on you). Portia knew they couldn’t have a baby. They didn’t have real jobs, income, a decent apartment—they didn’t even have their degrees yet. But she couldn’t stop herself from feeling the dreamy hopefulness of maternity.
Portia expected her abortion to be as peaceful and quiet as Kerri’s and Cindy’s. She expected the same bovine-faced woman to hover over her and speak in silken, humming tones. Patrick went along. He was silent and uncomfortable, shifting in the plastic mold-form seat, not holding Portia’s hand in the pre-op room, when she had held Cindy’s and Kerri’s hands. And then a pretty nurse with an anteater’s long pointy nose took Portia away from Patrick and into a sterile, bean-green room.
The Slavic-looking doctor had various misshapen moles on his face and a pregnant woman’s belly that pushed out under his blue surgical gown.
“You might feel a slight cramp, like a period cramp,” he said, “and then it will be over and you won’t feel anything.”
Portia was on her back and couldn’t see anything, but she heard a low rumbling machinelike noise, as if someone had turned on an old air conditioner.
“It doesn’t hurt,” the anteater-nosed nurse said, wi
th the same tone as someone saying Next in line to a group of people at the complaint desk.
The doctor and nurse were wrong. It wasn’t like a period cramp. It felt like an internal vise was gripping her insides and squeezing them until she couldn’t breath.
Portia thrashed against it. She heaved against it. She tried to upend the table.
Portia had heard once (everyone has heard once) that you are never dealt a pain you can’t handle. Wrong, she thought. Wrong! This was a pain her body refused to handle. She no longer felt human—she was a stringy car-wash rag being twisted into a tight, shredded rope with no room for the elements of life.
More people were called into the room and Portia battled against them. To the death! her uterus shouted. Fuck you! said her cervix! No way, Jose! Portia made sounds that came from somewhere deep inside her animal core, sounds that might be made by a creature that had no language.
And then someone put a needle in one arm and a mask on her face and she was down. They were down.
When Portia woke up, a couple hours later, Patrick was with her, staring out the window. He picked up her hand.
“Something went wrong,” he said.
“Is it gone?” she asked.
“You’re not pregnant anymore,” Patrick said.
The nurse came in, the one with the strange nose. She was softer, slower now. Portia could tell she felt bad for her.
“You said it wouldn’t hurt,” Portia said. Tears swelled in her eyes as she remembered the pain.
“Yours was one in a million,” the nurse said. “Your body didn’t want to give it up.”
“Wow.” Portia’s voice quavered. She felt strangely proud of her reproductive organs—insisting that they do what they were supposed to do, hanging on to the very end.
“They had to knock you out,” Patrick said, and he lifted his eyebrows as if he were holding something in his forehead. Sadness, maybe. Or tears.
Portia understood then that her simple, uncomplicated boyfriend was as complicated and emotionally messy as everyone else she knew. But unless Portia cajoled it out of him, he wouldn’t burden her with his emotional slop—and she, at the time, was happy to pretend that the surface was as clean as it looked.
Drinking Closer to Home Page 21