Part Four
Winter 2008
Elm
It was the strangest feeling. She would be fine. Hungry, tired, but fine. And then the world would turn upside down and that horrible feeling of her insides revolting, the organs contracting violently to expel the poison within, would take hold. She rarely made it to the bathroom, just looked for the nearest receptacle, sometimes missing even that.
Tired didn’t even begin to describe it. She’d heard people say they’d overdone it, but she had never really understood the feeling. However, with this pregnancy exhaustion would overwhelm her. Even her elbows felt bushed. She actually sat down on the floor of the crosstown bus (she wasn’t showing so no one offered her a seat) and rested her head on her bent knees until an elderly woman put a cool hand on her shoulder, asking, “Are you all right, dear?”
At home, watching her retch from the safety of the bathroom door, Moira asked, “What’s wrong, Mommy?”
“I think I have the flu,” she answered.
“Poor Mommy.” Moira rubbed Elm’s forehead the way Colin did when Moira was sick. Her hands were sticky with something—what had she snuck from the kitchen?
Elm and Colin had never spoken about what was happening with his job. It seemed like in the past weeks they had been living in shifts—they were never awake and without Moira. Elm was avoiding him, and wondered if he was avoiding her. What scared her was not that she didn’t know what was going on but that she had forgotten to be worried about it.
She longed to confide her secret to someone—Ian would be ideal, but she knew she couldn’t tell anyone. Her fantasies now involved pretzels and confession—sodium and some lessening of the burden.
It was after eleven as Elm turned the key in the front door and tiptoed gratuitously into the living room. After years of New York living, her family could sleep through fire drills, earthquakes, alien invasions. She set her purse down on the kitchen table and took off her shoes.
Thirsty, she took a container of orange juice out of the refrigerator and stood there drinking it from the carton. Then she became aware of movement behind her. She spun around guiltily, spilling some orange juice down the front of her shirt.
“Hey,” Colin said. His hair was comically disheveled. “How’d it go?”
“Fine. I hate those things.” Part of Elm’s duties as a board member of the New Jewish Institute consisted of glad-handing donors at galas that often ended late. She reached in for a piece of cold pizza. It had gone pale and slack, and Elm wondered what it was that made mozzarella look like dead flesh after refrigeration. How often did they eat pizza? Would it stunt Moira’s growth, being raised only on breaded chicken and tomato sauce? Would it hurt the fetus? She put it back down. “Why don’t you go back to bed?”
Colin turned obediently and sleepwalked back to the room. When Elm went into the bedroom, though, she could feel that Colin was awake, more so than he’d been a couple of minutes ago.
Elm pretended not to notice and took off her suit, hanging it carefully in the closet and then putting on her nightgown. She climbed into bed backward, trying not to wake him, but he rolled over toward her, not touching her. “How’d it go?”
“You asked me that already.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“It was good.”
“Brilliant.”
There was a pause.
“Elm?” Colin asked. He pitched his voice high. It contained concern and seriousness.
“Hmmm,” Elm said, answering but not encouraging. She was tired. She wanted to sleep.
“Are we all right, then?”
“Of course.” Even to herself Elm sounded disingenuous. She tried to change the subject. “Moira go to bed without fuss?”
“I mean …” Colin ignored her. “I just feel …” he trailed off.
Elm felt a sense of panic invade her again, welling up like an undulation of nausea. Without thinking, she said, “I’m pregnant.”
Colin sat up quickly. “Really?” He put a hand on her upper arm. She rolled over to face him.
“Yup,” she said. She watched his face break into a wide smile. Even in the dark she could see that his excitement was unfeigned.
“God, Elm, that’s … great, fantastic, stupendous! When? How do you …? Which?” He was unable to spit out an entire question.
“I think about four weeks,” she said. “I took two at-home tests.”
“Elm, I’m so happy. This is what we wanted. Wait, is it?”
“Of course,” she said. “How can you ask that?” She sat up then too, genuinely injured. Had she really been so hostile these past weeks?
“I’m just … I hope the timing is all right. When do you think? I mean, with my work …” He began to babble, a sign that he was nervous. Now she laid a hand on his thigh.
“June, I think.” She didn’t think. She knew. “I’ll go to the doctor in a couple of weeks. What do you mean, the timing?”
“I’m just worried about work, is all. Don’t mind me. I’m so excited. Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?” He put a hand on the small bulge of Elm’s stomach where the skin was slack and a roll of fat had accumulated.
“Who knows?” Elm said.
There are holes in a marriage, Elm thought, periods of time for which if you were drawing a graph of marital compatibility there would be an absence of data. These dispersals are gradual, like not noticing that someone you see every day is getting fat until you are apart from them and return to find a different person from the one you left. It finally dawned on Elm that she and Colin had been gradually wandering in different directions. When she got married, Elm thought, as all brides do, that it was Colin and Elm against the world. She had assumed there’d be secrets, but from others, not between them, or if there were they would be minor: hiding chocolate in a stash, not necessarily telling him that someone had tried to pick her up at the gym. She had never imagined the need to keep a secret from him and found it incredibly difficult.
The urge was upon her nearly constantly to tell him, not only because she wanted to unburden herself but because it felt like an itch, a continuous low-level irritation, a desire to blurt out what she was thinking. She began to censor herself, and the effort was so great that she cut down on what she was saying to Colin, and then eliminated all but the most essential conversations: What do you want for dinner? Can you take Moira to ballet on Saturday?
From there, she imagined, it would be but a short leap until she found herself emotionally estranged from her husband. And then he would crave intimacy and find it elsewhere. Cheating now seemed inevitable, the end of the divergent paths she and Colin were taking.
It might have helped if Colin had put a stop to the estrangement that wasn’t really an estrangement, but he was worried about his job (they had extended the merger period another three months, and whatever investigation was ongoing was moving glacially, but it felt like a stay of execution, not a pardon). She could see him searching for words with which to engage her. Recently, she had ceased to cede him any emotion. No matter what he said she would reply vacantly as though humoring a pestering child. A couple of times he said things that would have pissed her off just a couple of months before, but she had barely acknowledged that he spoke, let alone risen to the bait.
Elm had seen this in her own parents. Fighting, they’d at least declared their commitment to hating each other. When they quieted, finally, toward the end of Elm’s adolescence, she knew the marriage was over. They remained together, inhabiting two separate sections of the same house. Elm saw the same vacant cohabitation looming in her own marriage. She vowed to herself that she would break this pattern, clenching her fists to seal the promise.
Moira looked adorable dressed as a Trojan for the kindergarten reenactment of the Aeneid.
“Typical posh New York school,” Colin had scoffed, “forcing kindergartners to perform a book I wasn’t even aware of until university.” Still, he was there in the front row with the other parents digitally recor
ding the play. Oddly, the still cameras were the larger instruments, with lenses better suited to shooting football for Sports Illustrated rather than elementary school thespians in a small church basement. The video cameras, on the other hand, were so small as to be nearly invisible, nestled in the palms of hands.
Elm sat toward the back with her friend Patty, who had a daughter Moira’s age. Elm was overheated, as she so often was these days, fanning herself with the program. Patty had a second daughter, eighteen months old, who kept squirming on her lap, shrieking when Patty refused to let her down. “Be quiet,” Patty kept saying, waving a teething ring in front of her, like she was coaxing a seal to do a trick. Elm looked at them, irritated. She had forgotten that toddlers were so willful, unable to say what they wanted or to make logical decisions. Ronan had jumped off the sofa at twenty-one months and hit his head on the ottoman. When he stopped crying, Elm left him for a moment to go throw the ice pack in the sink and he was up on the sofa, leaping again.
The piano music started and the shower curtain parted to reveal a dozen five-year-olds dressed in togas. The teacher stood to the side, her back to the audience. Elm struggled to pick out Moira, but it was difficult even to tell genders apart. And then she saw a child on the end whose unruly hair must be her daughter’s. She waved, though Moira didn’t wave back. She was concentrating on following the teacher’s choreography. Hands went up, hands went down, hands went up, and the children began to sing, something high-pitched and unintelligible. Five children came forward to form a front line and they held hands, spreading out. Then Moira’s row came through from behind, ducking under the joined arms. Then the process reversed and Moira’s line went back through the hands. She bumped into someone on her way backward and got confused, spinning in circles until the teacher pointed where she should be.
Patty was laughing, bouncing her daughter on her lap.
“They’re really cute,” Elm said.
“Cleo has suddenly developed a mouth on her like a sailor,” Patty said. “I think she’s getting it from the nanny. It’s not bad words, really, just, like, a bad attitude.”
“Does it come with eye rolling? Sometimes I say something so stupid that Moira can barely deign to roll her eyes.”
“God, they’re such teenagers already.… Hey, are you expecting?”
Elm blushed. “Yes, how did you …?”
“You keep fanning yourself. The last time I was that hot I was pregnant.”
“Yeah. I’m eleven weeks.”
“Congratulations!” Patty said. She wrapped her arms around her baby to clap at the end of the first number.
“We’re not really telling anyone yet, so … I’m getting a CVS next week. I figured after that …”
So far Elm felt completely different than she had during her other pregnancies. She hadn’t even known she was pregnant until her sixth week the first time, and when she found out she’d had more energy than she could ever remember having.
Michel had explained to her in his slithering accent. “The embryo is the same, but your body’s reaction to it cannot be predicted. You are how old now, forty-three? It is not the same, having a baby at thirty-four and forty-three. Also you maybe eat now differently? Different stress? All these affect the reaction to the pregnancy. You can only expect the same result, not the same process.”
She had had to switch OBs again, and she pretended to this one that she’d just gotten new insurance and was having trouble getting her previous medical records transferred. He, of course, suspected nothing. “Seems healthy,” he said. Elm always wondered if it took practice to be able to speak to someone while your hand was inside her, but all doctors seemed to take it in stride, commenting about the weather or summer camp with their finger up her vagina or palpating her breasts. Maybe it was a course they took, and Elm giggled to think of a classroom full of young med students chatting while patients tried not to move under their fingers.
Michel had insisted on the slightly risky CVS procedure, though her own gynecologist left it up to her. “Really, it’s your choice. You know the risk statistics, though they’re lower than the national average in New York and even lower in our practice.” How like New Yorkers, Elm thought, to consider themselves in a different data category than the rest of the United States. “But you are over thirty-five, so it is indicated.” Michel, meanwhile, had said that there was evidence, “anecdotal, not scientific,” of increased genetic mutations in clones. Diseases that hadn’t occurred to Elm, like Fragile X and DiGeorge syndrome, which occur in utero after conception as cells replicate.
Patty said, “My lips are sealed. Are you going to find out the sex?”
“We’re not sure. Appointment is on Wednesday and we’re still fighting about it.”
“Who’s for and who’s against?”
“Me, both sides, actually,” Elm said. “I can’t decide for the life of me.” Colin didn’t want to find out, but he left the decision up to her. Elm was worried that if she didn’t pretend to find out the sex, she would have trouble remembering to refer to the baby as both he and she.
“My husband refused to find out if Gina was a boy or a girl,” Patty said. “I had to keep it from him for, like, four months. Whenever he pissed me off I threatened to tell.”
Elm smiled, but her anxiety mounted. All she could think about was the amount of paperwork on her desk, and when and how to tell everyone she was expecting. She tapped her foot on the floor in time to the music to hide her frustration.
They went out for ice cream afterward at the parlor that was every kid’s dream: ruffles and hats and oversized parfait glasses filled with sugar-added candied fruits and sauces. Elm had one bite and had to put down her spoon, putting her hand to her mouth in case it came back up. She was confused. With Ronan and Moira she couldn’t get enough of ice cream; for a while it was the only thing she could stomach. Colin gave her a puzzled look when he saw she’d pushed the dish away. He said nothing, though; they were out with Patty and her family as well as another friend of Moira’s and his parents and stepparents and -siblings. Elm slid her sundae over to him and he finished it.
Moira fell asleep in the taxi on the way home, and Colin carried her into her room. Elm stayed in the bathroom, willing the nausea to stop. How was it possible that she was still feeling nauseated? Colin came in and said, “Moira asked for you.”
“Tell her I’ll be in in a second.”
“Are you all right?”
“I think so,” Elm said. She sat on the edge of the tub and rested her head in her hands. After a few minutes she walked back into the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of seltzer and drank it slowly, standing at the counter. She heard Colin close the door to Moira’s room and walk into the kitchen behind her.
He took the glass from her hand and sipped. She experienced a flash of annoyance. The familiar gesture felt like an example of his lack of consideration for her. Of course, he didn’t know what she was going through.
“Elm,” he said. “I have to tell you something.”
She froze, her heart stopping for a second, like being on an airplane as it suddenly drops. She couldn’t help but feel that this would be something catastrophic, something that they would never recover from. He would tell her a secret of the same magnitude as the one she was keeping. He was usually so silly. He had been serious only once, when he had proposed to her, and she had thought that he was going to break up with her. She admitted to herself now that even fourteen years later she wasn’t really able to read him.
“What?” she breathed.
“It’s about work,” he said. “I haven’t been completely honest with you. Or with anyone, really.”
“Did you … Have you lost your job?” Elm was surprised at the way her voice sounded: distant, unperturbed. It was like listening to a watery recording.
“Not yet.” Colin sat at the table. “Can we sit down?”
“Okay,” Elm said. She slumped into a chair and forced herself to look at him. He wore an expression
of anguish, his face contorted by concern and anxiety. It was still the face she knew, nose slightly askew and a little too big for his face, the eyes close-set with nearly blond lashes. She recognized something of Ronan in his face and it would therefore never be the face of a stranger, no matter what happened between them.
“Federal regulators came by,” he said. “They’re issuing subpoenas next week.”
“So you’ll have to testify.”
“Yes …” He strung the word out. “I’m in a spot. Before he left, Al maybe wasn’t quite as forthcoming as he could have been. There were studies and he withheld some of the less positive data. It’s something pharma does all the time; it’s sort of a tacit agreement between the companies and the FDA. You’ve heard me say a million times that if we had to wait for FDA approval on everything, we still wouldn’t have a polio vaccine. I know it sounds like I’m justifying,” he said, cutting off the gurgle that was the start of a protest from Elm. “But really it’s true. If this country had fucking national health care …” He broke off.
“So they asked me, the regulators, and I told them a … softened version of the truth. Now that I’m subpoenaed I’m going to have to come clean.” He paused. “I could be charged.”
Elm stuck her chin forward in disbelief. “Have you talked to Clint?” she asked. “What does he say to do?”
“I haven’t spoken with him yet,” Colin said. “This all happened Friday. But I have a call in to him to talk about the legal.… I wanted to talk to you first, Elm. I hope this isn’t …” He physically reached into the air to look for a word.
A Nearly Perfect Copy: A Novel Page 26