She could feel Henry turning over her answers to his questions with the rigor of a diagnostician heightened by the avidity of a man who, he confided, was eager to open up his life again.
Did she by any chance feel the same way? he asked, after saying that.
Yes, she answered him. She did.
After they finished their prosecco, they fell into a restaurant near the pensione. Now it was Costanza’s turn. She wanted to know about his lectures, about his work. Once he got started, he scarcely took a breath. But it wasn’t his fault. She could have changed the direction of the conversation. Instead she egged him on, gripped.
Henry was a crusader. That much was clear. Helping infertile women—and men—find a way to have children was his life’s mission. So many treatments were available that she was only remotely aware of, or barely understood. He named drugs and described procedures that had been developed to increase the chances of a pregnancy resulting in what Henry repeatedly called a live birth. Costanza kept circling around this term. She had never heard it before. Stillbirth, nato morto, its presumable inverse, yes. But live birth? She wondered how she would translate it into Italian. Nato vivo? That didn’t seem right. She asked herself why he couldn’t just say a baby. A healthy baby, maybe.
But she knew it wasn’t merely Henry’s terminology, Henry’s language, that held her attention so closely. It was the idea; the prospect. A live birth, a baby, a healthy baby: however you phrased it, it was something she had yearned for during a painful interlude toward the end of her marriage to Morton.
Before they married, she and Morton had the Conversation. An astute reader of human nature, he had been the one to bring it up. He was open to the idea, he said. More disinclined than inclined, but open. He was not young; his life was established; marrying late, marrying at all, was bound to shake things up. That was good, he believed, at heart. If being married to her meant having a child with her, well, then he was willing to think about it.
She for her part had said truthfully, or at least truthfully at the time they spoke, that she never thought she would have children. Her own childhood had not been happy. Her mother had been unmaternal, self-absorbed, and severe. And although she felt deeply loved by her father, and deeply loved him in return, he was not, in the end, a successful example of a parent either, since with his suicide he broke what she considered to be the fundamental pact you enter into when you have a child, which is that you will stick around as long as you possibly can to help your child live her life.
There was something else. In the years after her father’s suicide, when she was old enough and distanced enough to try to learn about the subject, she came across an alarming statistic: the children of people who succeed in taking their lives have a sixty percent higher possibility of suicide themselves. Her great-uncle, her father’s uncle, made four attempts before dying of a heart attack at the age of sixty-four. Costanza herself had experienced some very dark periods, including one that she did not know how to talk about because it remained ambiguous even to her and therefore all the more disconcerting. The night her first adult relationship imploded after nearly three years, she went ahead with plans to attend a party in Testaccio at the home of one of her classmates’ parents. A lot of wine was on hand, and she drank it liberally. The party spilled out onto the terrace, which was on the third floor of the building and overlooked a large, lushly planted interior courtyard. Costanza remembered only a few details of that evening. One was that the courtyard had an old lemon tree growing in it whose trunk was covered by a vine that produced a sweetly scented flower, possibly jasmine. The way the vine clung to that trunk made her think of the way she had gone on clinging to Stefano long after she should have cut herself loose. If she had, then perhaps she would not have found him in his office that afternoon, stretched out on his sagging old tweed couch, his pants down and his penis buried in the mouth of Anna Carini, whom Costanza had, up to that moment, considered her closest friend at the university. She remembered that clingy vine, and she remembered that she had still been wearing a Moroccan bracelet that Stefano had brought her from Fez, and she remembered thinking that she ought to have eaten something before she began drinking. She did not remember having written in her datebook, “Next to my father’s death, this has been the worst day of my life”—which her mother, and not only her mother, took to be a sign of intentionality behind what happened that evening.
Certain facts were not in dispute: Costanza had drunk copiously, she had not eaten, and she was upset. She was not normally a clumsy person, but when she hoisted herself up on the parapet of the terrace, intending—as she maintained—to sit up on its little ledge, she misjudged the energy required and missed the ledge completely.
If the lemon tree had not broken her fall, she would surely have died, and with her death she would likely have been categorized among that sixty percent. Instead she came away with a broken arm, a fractured hip, and a scattering of bruises from which she recovered during a miserable three-month convalescence at her mother’s house in Recco.
Her mother, Maria Rosaria, believed that Costanza had tried to take her life; Costanza did not think that people killed themselves because relationships ended, or because they were married to, or the daughters of, difficult women, or because they lost their jobs, their boyfriends, or their way. People killed themselves because their minds were diseased, because their depression was intractable, because nothing and no one they were attached to in life was strong enough to keep them alive.
Costanza was nearly certain that she was not this sort of person or had this sort of mind. But her doubts were sufficient to keep her from telling this story to Morton, or anyone else. What she did tell him was that her feelings about having a baby changed, once they had.
They were four years into their marriage when one day she was on the subway heading uptown from her apartment, which she had been using as an office, when she gradually became aware of a little boy jabbering away on the seat across from her. Costanza looked up from her reading. She was not versed in estimating children’s ages; he was maybe eighteen months old. He had skin the color of wheat bread. His hair was curled into tight whorled buds, his smile slightly askew. He did not stop talking for the whole ride uptown. Not a word of what he said was intelligible, but it was fluent and emotive, like some kind of foreign language she might once have understood but had now forgotten.
First he babbled his charming incoherence at the old lady sitting next to him, then at a hoodied teenager, and finally at Costanza. With Costanza he carried on a full conversation, answering all her questions and appearing to ask his own in return. It was translating of a different order: she wasn’t translating so much as trying to decipher what the little boy was saying.
All this went on for several minutes, while his mother, sealed off by a pair of headphones, ignored her little boy.
Costanza realized then that a thorn had wedged itself into her heart. The thorn had been there for some time, but she had never been so acutely aware of it before. She was thirty-seven years old, riding the subway on a September evening with a New York Review of Books in her lap, and it devastated her to see this sunny little child reaching out to the world with his own strange language. She had a vision of taking him into her arms and at the next station, while his mother was still listening to her music, breaking into a run.
When she got off the train, her back was saturated with sweat.
At first she thought the moment on the subway was an anomaly. But then a few days later she was walking in Central Park. This time it was a little girl, unmistakably younger than the boy on the subway.
The child after that she saw at MoMA, a somber boy of seven or so with horn-rimmed glasses, who had wandered away from his school group and stood in front of a Mondrian, biting his thumbnail, baffled.
She found Morton one October night in his library, writing in one of his hardbound books—writing in his diary, she now understood. Bursting into tears, she told him she had completely misu
nderstood herself, and her life. She told him that she wanted to have a baby, after all.
He offered her a handkerchief—Morton being the sort of man who still carried handkerchiefs—and then, peering over his reading glasses, he said, “You know of course that this means we would have to share.”
“Share?” she said, confused.
“Share our time with each other. Our lives would no longer be about us.”
She felt weak. She dropped down in the chair across from him. “Have you thought about later, when we’re older…?”
“Later is sooner for me, Costanza. Later is now. I can see seventy from where I sit.”
“The actual arithmetic is that you’re closer to sixty, Morton. You do know that.”
“And you know that if we have a child, you’re likely to be her, or his, only parent for a much longer time than we will be parents together?” She merely listened as he went on, “People never really think about how much life changes when a child comes along. How much work is sacrificed. How much freedom is lost. You can no longer move so easily through time and space, or even think the way you used to, your mind is always on that marvelous but needy little creature.”
“All this is so negative. So bleak.”
“I think it’s realistic. It’s important to be realistic.”
“You’ve never had children. How do you know it’s even—even accurate?”
“I’ve observed, haven’t I? My brother, my friends. And I’ve listened, I’ve read and imagined. Imagining is my occupation, after all.”
“Imagining an experience is not the same as living it.”
Now it was his turn to remain neutral. There was no hint, no flash, in his eye that transmitted what he was thinking.
“Obviously I haven’t forgotten that you’re older than I am, Morton. Only you’re healthy now. You could live until our child grows up. Is in college even. It’s not unreasonable. And I do truly believe that you and I could give—that our lives would only be—that we would live more fully if we could experience—”
Even as she said them, the words sounded rote to her, almost platitudinous, while the feeling behind them was anything but. “And besides—”
And besides, a thorn is lodged in my heart, and there are days when I am finding it difficult to breathe.
“And besides, this is what I want more than anything.”
If this is what you want, then this is what you shall have.
She longed for him to say this one sentence, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “Let’s see what Grubman feels after my next checkup.”
Grubman—Morton’s physician—said there was no physical reason why Morton was unfit to be a father, and Morton let that do the deciding for him, for them. He never once came to her and said, “Let’s have a baby together” or “Let’s make our own family,” phrases that Costanza, looking back, realized she probably ought to have heard before they plunged into the year that upended their lives.
Costanza looked down at the thick rubber-banded stack of Morton’s remaining diary pages beside her. She found herself thinking about a story Morton had told her not long after they first met. He offered it as an anecdote, half-amusing, but also half not, that illustrated the centrality of writing in his life. One morning about two years before he moved into the city, Morton told her, Mrs. Gonzales, his housekeeper, heard a stray dog whining under the hydrangeas that bordered the back patio. She had just given birth to four tiny puppies. With Morton’s permission Mrs. Gonzales made the new family a bed in the pantry. Morton kept reminding her that she should be putting out the word in the neighborhood that there would soon be four puppies, and a dog, who needed a permanent home, but Mrs. Gonzales forgot (“forgot”), or resisted. She wasn’t the only person in the house who enjoyed their company either. Little by little Morton found himself drifting downstairs, first just to check on the puppies and then, as they grew more active, to play with them. More than once he took his favorite, which had a big black patch around her left eye like a raccoon, back up with him to his study, where he continued petting the creature, or playing with her, or just watching her … until one morning he glanced at the clock on his desk. It was past eleven forty-five, and he was nowhere close to the five hundred words that were his quota to produce every day before lunch. He called Mrs. Gonzales up from the kitchen, gave her the animal, and instructed her to find another home for the dogs by dinner.
That story said one thing to Costanza when she first heard it, and quite another now, circling back to it from a distance. It told her everything she needed to know about Morton’s capacity for attachment to anything, or anyone, beyond his work. She should have paid closer attention; much closer.
She plucked a page out of the manuscript at random. Well, not entirely at random, but from the last quarter or so, which was where she suspected he would be writing about their—her—quest to become pregnant, thus the beginning of the end.
She had chosen accurately.
“I’m finding it harder and harder to fuck my own wife,” he wrote.
Fuck? Wife?
The act has become something burdensome to me. Costanza is off on this path, lost on this path. It’s all about the day of the month, the twinges in her ovaries, the consistency of her mucus, her temperature. What happened to me? Us? What happened to all the rest of our lives? By some miraculous luck I’ve generally been able to perform (and that is the appropriate word too), but I know that this cannot go on forever. Already I’m not with her when I’m with her; nowhere near. I am elsewhere, in my fantasy life. This is not what I anticipated, in making this marriage. I no longer know what I anticipated. I was deluded; I fear that I was seduced by an idea about life (knit more tightly into what exactly?). Many mornings now I wake up and wonder, How did I become married, anyway? Costanza is a perfectly splendid woman, but she and I want such—
Here she made his skin tingle, and he wanted to slide his penis inside her to forestall death; on page 400 their lovemaking had become burdensome to him and she was a perfectly splendid woman.
For the first time in more than a year Costanza was angry. She could feel this unfamiliar, almost oily sensation bubbling up in her. She could taste it. It came up out of her stomach and into her mouth. Now, all of a sudden, she wasn’t so inclined to be tugged back into the World of Morton. She wasn’t so curious after all, she realized, to hear Morton think aloud about how he decided not to go ahead with the fertility treatment. She didn’t want to know how he justified denying her the experience she most desperately wanted in life. She didn’t want to see how he reasoned his way out of their marriage and back into his selfish, rigid, arid cocoon. She didn’t even particularly want to know what it felt like for him to know he was dying.
She couldn’t very well strike out at dead Morton. All she could do was send him back to the past, where he belonged. She picked up the manuscript and shoved it into her suitcase and shoved the suitcase into the closet. She would return to it some other day.
Or maybe not.
She closed the closet door and stepped over to the window, which looked out onto the terrace and beyond. In the distance, across the familiar sea of red tile roofs, a woman was shaking a mop out on a terrace of her own; Costanza was convinced she could see grains of dust falling like snowflakes through the air. Closer up, on the leaves of the wisteria, she saw the delicately branching veins; she wouldn’t have been surprised if a bud opened into a full purple flower before her eyes.
She turned away from the view and picked up her phone. She and Henry had exchanged numbers the night before. She brought up his and sent him a text asking if he was free to drink prosecco again that evening. On the terrace, at sunset.
Three Months Later
Fall in New York. This was Henry Weissman’s favorite pairing of time and place. His season, in his city, when the sky, scrubbed of its summer haze, seemed to mint an altogether new shade of blue. There was a clarified quality to the autumn light in New York that Henry could perceive even from bed,
even as the sun was just making its way over the horizon. He thought of a story by Chekhov he’d once read in which a character’s state of mind was likened to a house where all the old, broken, and dirty windows had their panes replaced with new glass. Henry had felt something similar several times in the past, but this fall the glass seemed cleaner and more transparent than it had in years.
All this drew Henry out of bed with more gusto than he had felt in weeks, but deep within himself he knew that the real reason his day felt hopeful was that he was having dinner with Costanza that night. He was seeing her for the first time since Florence, for the first time since they’d made love in her room at the Pensione Ricci.
He had replayed the night more than once in the past three months, revisiting it both for its intensity and its oddness and to convince himself that he had not dreamed it. At several points in the past three months he believed he had dreamed it, but this morning was not one of them. This morning he could clearly see them standing outside the door to her room at the pensione, kissing. Then whispering. “Henry, I’m afraid.” “You don’t need to be.” “All this seems hasty. And I’ve been hasty before.” “Before—with your husband?” “Not only him.” “Yet if there’s a feeling, a shared feeling?” She had her room key in her hand. She played with its stiff blue tassel for a moment, smoothing and ordering its fringe. Then she reached over and opened the door. They went inside. She turned toward him, and she began to shake. But she was not cold, it was impossible to be cold on that hot, heavy Florentine summer night. “Are you all right?” he had asked, and she had said, “Just hold me,” and he had held her. She had continued to shake. Somehow they ended up at first sitting together, then lying alongside each other, on her bed. She continued to tremble even as he stroked her hair and ran his hand down her back. “We can just lie here,” he said, “if that’s what you prefer.” She shook her head, then she sat up, took off her blouse, and unhooked her bra. Once she revealed herself to him, she stopped shaking. For a moment he just took her in. Then he kissed her neck, her shoulders, her chest. She unhooked his belt, unzipped his fly, and reached her hand into the depths of his crotch. She freed his cock, then swung around and took it into her mouth. The boldness of the gesture was as disconcerting as her trembling had been earlier. He would never have guessed that she would linger over the underside of his cock, licking and moistening it with her tongue until it began to quiver with such intense pleasure that he was afraid he was going to come in her mouth. He wouldn’t have guessed that she would have known just when to pause to allow him to wrestle out of his pants and shorts and to undo her own skirt and surprisingly minute panties. He wouldn’t have guessed that she would have directed his hand between her legs, either to give him guidance, or permission, or to show him just how saturated she was. He wouldn’t have guessed that she would have said, “I want you inside me” with such clarity, or that she would have followed the remark with a long kiss behind which he felt … ardor. All that dance of conversation over drinks and dinner seemed to vanish into that one kiss.
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