Lucius said nothing; he stared at the fire. Finally he spoke. “What am I supposed to do, Phillipa? Spank you? Say you’ve been bad? You’ve been human. A shitty, pathetic human. But I’d be a hypocrite to say I deserve better; I deserve worse. I really wish it hadn’t happened—”
“But it did.”
“I understand.” He shook his head. “You’re an adult, Phillipa.” I snorted—my so-called adulthood!—and Lucius looked at me. He said, “Is this . . . is Creamer someone you want to be with? Is there more I’m not picking up on here? Are you trying to tell me—?” And I was chorusing a stream of noes, but he kept on: “Is this something you need to explore? Do I have to accept that? I’ve had this entire goddamn conversation before, close enough. I’ve been on both sides of it. What does that say—life repeats itself? We get a chance to make different choices if we can remember the stupid ones we made and manage not to make them again? Or is it Rock, Paper, Scissors? The same choice gets you a different result each—?”
I interrupted: “But what if I’ve lived the wrong life? I didn’t have the foresight—I didn’t wait for you. I was impatient to start my life, whatever that meant at twenty-three. I fell in love, I got married; it felt right. We had Ginny—maybe that should’ve been proof of how wrong —”
“That’s insane,” he cut in. “It’s crazy and you know it. Do I wish we’d met years ago? Sure. But what if we’d met and weren’t . . . We met when we met, as we met, and that’s what’s made any of this possible. You can’t regret circumstances. You’ll what if your life away.”
“But what else is there? Is there anything but what if ? Isn’t that what the future is?”
“The future, fine,” Lucius said, “but not the past.” And he’s right, I know that—I do—but they’re so entwined, and I sometimes can’t distinguish. Causality’s not a line, it’s an unwieldy, un-untangleable knot. “You’re married, Phillipa,” Lucius said. “You’ve been married a long time. Maybe this is your midlife crisis—sow your wild oats, then go back to Michael? Maybe I’m your midlife crisis. I probably deserve that. But I’m not going anywhere. I love you. I’m not out skirt-chasing. I wasn’t out skirt-chasing when we met. I was done, in so many ways I was—I had my work, my teaching. I wasn’t looking for this. But you came along—you came along. You’re tremendous, Phil. You’re it.” He blushed, like a boy admitting a crush: fourteen or sixty-five, love makes adolescents of us all. “And yes,” he said, “if we’d met forty years ago—okay, no, not forty, you’d’ve been ten. Thirty years ago? You at twenty, me at thirty-five? But I was already married by then—I married, too, remember? I had kids. I did it all, too. I also stopped waiting for you. Should I have been more patient? I didn’t know patience like that then. But now, here you are. You exist! But you didn’t then—not for me—and I went and had my life, my children. I’m not sorry for that, for my kids, my far-too-many wives.” He shook his head. “That you and I met before I’m too decrepit to be of use to anyone—I should be thankful for that miracle alone. But I’m greedy, and human; I do want more. I want to live for-fucking-ever! With you—have babies with you, raise them, live a life. But we can’t. We’ve lived those lives already. We don’t get to do that again; we get this. We get now. I was very prepared never to have this, not to know this. I never thought . . . But now it—you—you’re here, and I have to take it—you, this—on whatever terms it’s offered. Do I wish some man in Iowa hadn’t sucked your neck in a hotel room? Yes. But life is complicated, and if your being here with me now means Creamer had to give you a monstrous hickey, maybe I need to make peace with that.”
I probably don’t have to say I was sobbing by then. I’d grabbed hold of Lucius’s shirt, a fistful of fabric in each hand, and bowed myself into his chest, pressing my head to his sternum as if that might keep the top of it from blowing off. Our faces were hidden from each other.
“That party!” he was saying. “I couldn’t care less. I thought it might segue . . . I thought—stupidly! mistakenly!—I thought it would be good to have a destination tonight. Take pressure off us, just do something casual. I never thought about who’d be there. There’s no one else, Phil. Anthea was a long time ago. No one else would be there—I wouldn’t do that to you. Those people know so little of me. They’re colleagues, not friends. They’re perfectly nice, but . . .”
I’d lifted my head as he spoke. My tears had stopped but my face was wet and so was his shirt. “Ginny once accused me of not having friends. She said I alienated everyone, I only had acquaintances. She said I drive people away. How can you love me? How can you possibly?”
WE MADE LOVE that night with a startling, clawing urgency. Lucius can make me come with his fingers inside me moving so slightly—such minute movements to cause what he causes. I heave, begging him to fuck me, wanting nothing in the universe but to feel him full inside me. That night I cried; he came, his beauty excruciating to me. And then we lay together, tears seeping from our eyes. This is sex in old-middle age, replete with gratitude and awe. We come, and we cry, thankful for these bodies, still capable of pleasure.
In bed, in the Christmas Eve eve dark, Lucius said: “Tomorrow I want us to make a plan. Our spring breaks coincide—I checked. I want something on the horizon.” I nodded, unable to bring myself to tell him it was impossible: Ginny was due at the end of February, and I could hear Bernadette’s voice in my head, informing me what decent people did when their daughters gave birth, and it was not jet off with their lovers. No, decent people whipped up casseroles and potpies and cooed at the wrinkly little thing, held it and let its parents steal a few minutes’ sleep. But I’ll say this: if Bernadette did any of that when Ginny was born, I have no memory of it.
In the morning Lucius got up to make coffee and retrieve his laptop. Then, back under the covers, he perched the computer on his knees and said, “Let us enter the travel-expedi-orbitz-elocity vortex!” That’s when I told him why I couldn’t go away during spring break. He understood, of course, apologizing all over himself for forgetting in the first place. We stayed in bed until late afternoon when Lucius slipped on clothes to go pick up the turkey dinner for two he’d ordered from a catering company in town. We’d have our holiday meal on Christmas Eve, he said, like his Scandinavian ancestors, and Chinese takeout on Christmas Day, like self-respecting Jews.
He set the steaming takeout cartons on the edge of the kitchen counter. “No need to dirty dishes,” I said, so we sat at one corner of the dining room table, boxes and tubs open before us like a little model city, and ate with forks, rooting through the cartons. The catered turkey was dry, the stuffing fussy, but we ate hungrily, and I told him, then, about my lonely Thanksgiving, thinking of the Chinese takeout Thanksgivings of my childhood. I should have gone home more, visited my parents. I should have been nicer to them, should have been nicer to Bernadette. I should be nicer to Ginny. I should just be nicer.
That evening we read in the living room, fire in the fireplace, Lucius on the sofa, a scotch on the table beside him. I lay with my head in his lap, a glass of wine on the floor within reach. He read Bellow, I read Didion, so filled with happiness I had to keep touching him, squeezing. He’d say, “I’m so happy to have you here,” and I’d say, “I’m so happy to be here,” or I’d say, “I’m so happy to be here with you,” and he’d say, “I’m so happy to have you here with me,” and we’d burrow closer until one of us needed to say it again. Outside, snow began to fall. Then, around eleven, my cell phone rang. I sat straight up. “Why is anyone—?”
Lucius laughed. “To say Merry Christmas.” He motioned: Answer it.
The number was ours—Michael’s. I missed the call and imagined Michael imagining he’d caught us in bed, so I called back as quickly as I could to dispel that notion.
“Michael, I’m sorry, I didn’t get the phone in time.” He had not, I knew, called with yuletide greetings, and I was instantly back in the French pension, hearing My mother is dead, having to leave Lucius, being called home. Only now it seem
ed Michael wasn’t talking about death, but birth: Ginny and Silas had gone to the hospital. The baby was coming. I was being called home. “But I can’t drive!” I cried. “I’ve had wine!” It was all too preposterous.
“Well, sober up and come when you can,” he said. “We’ll be here.”
I hung up. “She’s in labor,” I told Lucius, “or they’re trying to stop the labor, maybe?”
“I’ll make coffee,” he said, like it was an old movie: Hot coffee—sober you right up.
I followed. “It’s too soon . . .” I felt like Cliff Johnston: Nine months, right?
“How early is it?” Lucius set the kettle on the stove. “Don’t quote me, but I think maybe two months isn’t such a big deal anymore. There’s a week they hit—I just read a piece—it’s about the lungs, that’s the big thing, and once you hit thirty-four weeks, maybe, it’s okay.”
“Is thirty-four where she is?” I asked, as if Lucius were the one keeping track. “Thirty-four weeks? It’s forty all told, right? If she’s two months early, that’s thirty-two . . . that’s two weeks too early. How is it forty total? When did it go from nine months to ten? Did you know it’s ten now? They just decided!”
Level-headed and unflappable, Lucius opened a cupboard. “I’ll make you a thermos.”
“Maybe I should sleep? Not leave now, sleep a little and then get up and go?”
Lucius paused his search. “Could you sleep now? Or maybe you get a little ways down the road and then pull—” He stopped. “Do you want me to come with you?” He waited for my reaction, peering at me, then resumed speaking before I could answer. “We could take turns sleeping and driving. Or keep each other awake, drive a few hours, get a motel. I don’t want to foist myself, but I’m glad to go. What else does a Jew have to do on Christmas?”
And so we drove west, Lucius and I, that Christmas Eve. Crossing time zones felt like cheating fate, as if turning the clock back an hour would help us beat Ginny’s baby into the world. I called Michael at three a.m.; he said meds had slowed the contractions—“They say the longer it stays in, the better”—and everyone there was trying to get some rest. In my state of exhaustion I took this to mean that we, too, could stop for a few hours’ rest, so we found a dirty-carpeted Econo Lodge and lay on scratchy sheets, listening to the ice maker thrum as we held each other, overcaffeinated hearts throbbing in our chests. The tap water tasted like Clorox and sulfur, so we filled the ice bucket and set it on the heater, but the bucket started melting, so we chugged the repulsive tap water like shipwrecked sailors drinking our own piss. Desperate, I went to the vending machine and bought the only noncaffeinated beverage therein: Orange Crush. We poured it over ice and gagged it down, sugar jetting through our veins. Sleep was impossible. Maybe we dozed a bit. When the morning hotel sounds began—doors clicking, trunks slamming—we got up, brushed our teeth, gulped coffee, drove on.
We were three hours from River City when Michael called to say our grandson had been born at 8:52 a.m. Born, and then whisked to Neonatal Intensive Care for tests, the results of which were now awaited. Lucius drove during the excruciating hour before Michael called back to say that the baby was quite small—four pounds, eight ounces—but everything was there, in the right places, and he was breathing on his own. So far, the tests were clear of major red flags. I braced myself anyway in anticipation of some horrific reveal, which is, essentially, parenthood in a nutshell.
It was after noon on Christmas Day when Lucius dropped me at the university hospital. I gave him the key to White Rabbit, but as I started to explain the quirks of the woodstove, I saw his exhaustion and directed him to the Gas Stop instead, closer to civilization, such as it may be.
I consulted a hospital directory, then made my way down hollyberry-bannered halls and through elf-festooned doors. A large window looked into the NICU, and among the crowd of holiday well-wishers before it stood Randall, nose pressed to the glass, hand raised, fingers waggling. Inside, amid a maze of plastic incubators that looked like dog crates, I saw Linda, then Michael. They stood on either side of a crib, arms stuck in through portholes, hands hovering near a hairy thing the size of a pool ball. The head! I gasped. Randall turned, tears in his eyes; “Merry X-mas, Grandma!” He wrapped me in a sumo embrace, lifting me off the ground.
“That’s him?” As if Linda and Michael would be cootchie-cooing some other baby.
“That’s your boy!” Randall said.
“Does he have a name?”
“Not yet.” Randall waggled fingers again toward the sleeping, incubated swaddle. Linda looked up, saw me, and made motions to say she’d come out so I could go in. “Two visitors at a time,” Randall explained. “And you got to wash your hands really good. There’s directions.”
Linda came out and hugged me awkwardly. “Are Gin and Silas up?”
I told her I didn’t know. “I came straight here. Should I . . . ?”
“No, they needed sleep. You stay. They’ll come up to feed him. Go in,” she urged.
I washed and dried my hands, then pushed through the swinging door behind a nurse in a Santa hat with bells on her clogs. Maneuvering around parents and nurses, I passed the incubator of MADELEINE SOPHIA, hand-stenciled in dark pink on light, her birth date and vitals marked on a taped-up index card. A woman in candy-cane-striped scrubs stood folding flannel burp cloths—white with a teal and red stripe, they almost looked Christmasy. LUCAS “LUKE” JOHN and JACOB “JAKE” ARTHUR lay toe-to-toe in separate basinets, beeping and flashing screens at their heads. Another phalanx of monitors and IVs stood beside the twin cribs of MORGYN ELYSE and MADISYN ELLA; their parents sat nearby—she in a wheelchair, he in a rolling nursing seat, each cradling a doll-sized child. Disoriented, I paused to get my bearings, and Morgyn and Madisyn’s parents looked up, smiled vaguely, then averted their eyes. There are rules about not looking at other people’s babies in there. I spotted Michael and edged over, passing a privacy screen behind which AIDEN RYAN’s mom sat, very unprivately, with suction cones vacuuming her milk into tiny cellophane sacks that looked like holiday gift bags.
Michael didn’t see me approach. His hands were through the basinet’s armholes, and I thought of that kids’ game, Operation: Take out his spareribs for one hundred dollars. On my side was another pair of armholes, so I put my hands through; Michael jerked back, startled. He looked to see who was attached to the hands, and I felt a twinge of disdain: All these years, Michael, and you don’t know my hands? I wondered if I’d know his. I’d know Lucius’s.
“You made it,” he said.
I smiled. “I made it. How are things? How is he?” I looked in for the first time at my grandson. He had a tube stuck up his nose. He looked like an iguana in a knit hat, slightly askew.
Michael fixed it. “Ladies make these for preemies—a nurse said they arrive in bulk.”
I got an image, then, of Bernadette stitching, keeping the NICU in beanies. It had never dawned on me that she might have been making something useful, for someone else. I’d only ever pictured a hidden linen chest stocked with doilies or handkerchiefs that she counted, late at night, a miser at her shekels, adding hankies to the stash the way Bena added rabbit skins to the fetid blanket.
“So, he’s okay?” I asked, and Michael said, “As far as they can tell.” Inside his plastic box, the poor thing was covered in adhesive pads wired to hulking monitors. Eyes closed, he drew up his brows as if in concentration, a drowsy smile fading in and out as he breathed. It was probably just gas, but he did look peaceful. I asked after Ginny.
“Honestly?” Michael began, and I felt afraid, but then he said, “Honestly, she seems good. The birth itself sounded bad. She didn’t get drugs—there wasn’t time, once it got going. So, bad, but relatively short. Right after, she got kind of catatonic until they assessed the baby and told her he was okay. I think she was steeling for some horrible diagnosis—” Michael broke off, glanced around. “Once she knew he was okay, she was, too.”
The baby was still asleep w
hen Silas scrubbed in. Michael gingerly pulled his arms from the incubator; mine had gone pins and needles in the armholes. I shook myself out as Silas approached to steal a look at his tiny son. “I need to let Ginny know he’s sleeping,” he said, and went to call her. Moments later he returned. “She’s asked if you’d like to visit with her?”
Downstairs, Ginny sat up against a stack of pillows. My daughter in a hospital bed is not, unfortunately, an uncommon sight, but something was different—her affect, her bearing. Women always have those postdelivery photos with baby, the mother’s face drained, drawn, as if thinned by the exertion of childbirth, skin luminous, eyes strained, barely the strength to smile. None of those in Ginny’s family album, but as I entered her room and saw my daughter as a mother for the first time, she had that look. No child in her arms, but she had the look: spent and walloped, but radiantly alive. It’s an image I will hold all my life.
“Ginny.” I moved toward her. “He’s beautiful.”
“Ma.” Her voice was deep and soft, and she smiled and reached to squeeze my arm. Then her lip crooked to one side. “I think he kind of looks like an iguana.”
“But a lovely iguana—I thought the exact thing! Maybe all babies look like iguanas.”
Ginny was still smiling—I hadn’t seen her sustain a smile since the wedding—shaking her head, saying, “But he’s a live iguana, and he’s okay. They think he’s okay.”
“I’m so sorry I wasn’t here—” I began, but she waved my excuses away, saying, frankly, “It was awful. You were spared—and you haven’t been spared much when it comes to me. Murphy owed you.” She paused. “I’m glad you’re here now.” She squeezed my arm again.
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