Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  When Ben came home from work, they ate and then went out walking or out to the courts for a quick splashy game of tennis. She waited for the nights. She was most happy just lying beside him, the two of them half asleep, bodies fitted against each other like old friends. Life breathed around her, drawing her in and pushing her out.

  “Let’s have a kid,” Ben said one day. Bea smiled blankly. “Don’t you like kids?” said Ben, surprised. “Kids are a delight.”

  “Oh, I guess,” said Bea. “Let’s make popcorn, with melted cheese dribbling all over it, OK?”

  She learned early about her husband’s sulks. They sometimes went out to dinner with his clients. She was always bored, barely listening to the conversation, smiling when she could remember. Sometimes they brought their wives, and then she had a better time; she could talk about food and housecleaning, they could chat about husbands. She would listen to them babble on about their kids, bobbing her head at them, glad the children were someone else’s and not hers.

  One evening, though, she and Ben and a middle-aged man were eating at the Ritz when, abruptly, Ben stopped talking. It was awkward. The client continued to speak, but then he foundered. Bea had to make small talk for the rest of dinner, talking about books and art, and then helplessly realizing she was running out of topics. She was delighted when the man said he had a tight headache and left to call a cab, extending his hand to Ben, who politely glanced at it, and then returned to his dinner.

  Bea confronted Ben as soon as she saw the client was out of the building. “What kind of a way is that to act? That’s your client, for God’s sake, what did the poor man do?”

  “He knows what he did,” said Ben mildly, the angry sulkiness drained from him.

  They didn’t discuss it further. Ben simply refused. But she saw him put on these sulks with others, and at first it frightened her. She began to spot a pattern. He could be silent with someone who had forgotten his name, silent about a missed appointment. With her, though, his anger took shape and then dissipated. His dour face would quickly fade.

  They had been married nearly a year when Walt showed up. Bea was fiddling around in the kitchen, caught between several red plastic mixing bowls of yeasty dough and a whirring blender of egg whites. She had on a blue apron and her hair was carelessly knotted up on her head. She had several dots of brownish flour speckling her nose like freckles. When the bell rang, she cursed, then she went to push open the heavy wood door, all the time brushing off her hands against her apron and worrying about the bread she wanted to make. It was a new recipe and it required careful braiding, and she was a little nervous about it. But maybe the bell was the Avon lady. She collected the pretty imitation gold lipsticks they gave out, kissing her wrists to examine the shades.

  Bea told me she didn’t recognize him at first. He was in a dark suit, his hair roughly cut, and holding on to his left arm was a thin pale redhead. Bea stiffened, suddenly flooded with memory. She fluttered her hands to her hair.

  “Can I come in?” He had forgotten the woman at his side, thought Bea, or maybe he just took her for granted. Bea stepped back, untugging her hair, ruffling it down her back.

  “What a dandy home,” said the woman, looking up at the ceiling. “We have just a tiny place in Kansas. Are all the apartments here this nice?”

  Bea followed the woman’s glance to her ceiling. She stood there stupidly, trying to remember just what it was that a hostess did and how she could possibly speak without stuttering. “Coffee,” she blurted. “We can have coffee in the kitchen.”

  They sat around the white Formica table while Bea cleared away some of the clutter and made coffee. Nobody spoke during her preparations and Bea was acutely aware of every sound in the room. She poured out the coffee and Walt took a deep happy breath and blew on his, spilling a few drops onto the table. He wiped them away with his sleeve and then looked brightly from one woman to the other. “Oh God, what a moron,” he said. “Bea, I can’t believe I forgot to introduce you. What a jerk. This is Jess, my wife.” Jess jabbed out her hand. “I’ve heard all sorts of nice things about you,” she said.

  Bea gulped her coffee, burning her tongue. “When did you get married?” she said, staring into her cup, sightless.

  Walt reached over and tugged at Bea’s hand. “Sit,” he ordered. “Oh, come on, don’t look like that. Jess knows everything. You think I wouldn’t tell her?”

  “Of course not,” said Bea dully.

  Walt grinned sheepishly. “I’m sorry. You can’t know how sorry. Tell her, Jess, tell her how you’ve been screaming at me to make my amends.”

  “I thought it was just plain awful,” said Jess.

  “I got fired,” said Walt. “I was really all set to come and get you, but then they called me into the office and said I wasn’t selling enough, that I wasn’t worth their time. Damn them. I was so ashamed. I holed up at a Howard Johnson’s in Bridgeport, wondering what in hell I could possibly do with myself. Every night I thought about calling you. I’d sit and stare at that phone, I’d will myself to get up and dial, but I couldn’t. I don’t know. I called home and my mother started asking me all kinds of things about you, saying you had called and how sweet you sounded, and what was the matter with me not telling her anything about you? I couldn’t speak to anyone, not to her. I gave her some lame answers. I went out to Kansas. I heard there were jobs opening up like cans. Maybe for some people, but not for me. I went to this bar to get drunk and I met Jess. She’s a dentist, can you beat that?”

  Bea looked helplessly at Jess’s smooth, even face, her white teeth, hard as bone.

  “She kept talking to me. I stopped drinking to listen. She got me a job through her father, who owns a whole chain of those paperback places I kept jawing off about. Remember that was what I always said I wanted? I love my job,” he said proudly. “What else can I say? I was happy. I should have called you, but it was an easy thing to put off, and I was scared the job might fall through. I wanted to give you something secure, not just a promise. I kept thinking, one more month, just one more. And then I was seeing more and more of Jess and—well, look, Bea, you were so beautiful, so worth having, I was sure someone else had snapped you up, someone better.” He glanced around the kitchen. “And someone did, didn’t they, Bea?”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  Jess politely excused herself, asking Bea where the powder room was. Walt watched her leave and then he leaned closer to Bea. “It was hell to find you,” he said. His voice changed; it took on twists and shadows. “I even got dramatic about it and hired myself a detective to boot. Took him four weeks to find you. I felt sick when I thought about it, about losing you, messing everything up. Don’t get me wrong. I love Jess. I truly do. But sometimes in the morning when I wake up, I think the woman next to me is you and—”

  “Stop—” cried Bea, getting up. He reached for her hand, but she jerked it back and held it protectively against her.

  “We’re on vacation,” Walt said. “Jess doesn’t know about the detective. Lucky for me that Boston’s a good place for a vacation. How would I ever explain Akron?” He whispered to Bea. They should meet later, the two of them.

  “What for?” said Bea.

  “I love you.”

  “Are you mad? I’m married. You’re married. What are you trying to do to me?”

  “Bea, would you just listen?” He held up his palm. “Remember? Look. Two lifelines. Two chances, Bea.”

  “Stop,” said Bea.

  Jess reappeared, her cheeks freshly splotched with red, her hair puffing on her neck. Bea idly wondered if Jess had sampled some of the perfumes she left in the bathroom. She gave an experimental sniff, and then saw Walt watching her, and her heart withered inside of her. She fumbled with the coffeepot. She herded them both out. She couldn’t breathe with them in her house. “We’re at the Plaza,” said Walt. “Room 222, easy to remember. Give us a call and the four of us can do the town.”

  Jess clasped Bea’s hand. “We could al
l have a nice dinner. I’d love to meet your husband.”

  “Me, too,” said Walt.

  When Bea went back to the kitchen, her baking fever had burned itself out. She gathered up the yeasty mound of dough and the egg whites and dumped them out. She couldn’t be in this kitchen, not with Walt’s scent in here. She went to the bedroom and stretched out across the double bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to piece things out, to find her center again. She saw the number 222 in her mind, the numbers waving and dancing. She stretched again, reaching for the phone, and called Ben. He was short with her. “Christ, Bea, I’ve got two clients in here. What is it? What’s the matter?” he said.

  She hated him. “Nothing,” she said, and hung up. She began dialing Walt’s number, but then she caught the glittering of her diamond and she slammed the receiver down.

  It was always hard for Bea to make a decision. She liked having fate stage events for her, order things out. She didn’t mention Walt’s visit to Ben; she didn’t want to have the wound opened to his soft probe, and she certainly didn’t want to go out with Walt and his wife. She stopped answering the phone, the sounds stinging her. She tried to keep herself busy, to bake elaborate pastries and make fancy aspics. But there were always spaces of time left over when, despite herself, she went digging through her old photo albums, finding the four framed Woolworth shots she and Walt had taken for a quarter. She fingered the grainy surface, looking for life.

  Bea showered and put on a lacy nightgown and got into bed. When Ben came home that night, she was drowsing. He sat beside her, resting his hand on her forehead. “Sick?” he said.

  “Let’s start a family,” said Bea. “Make us permanent. Right now.” She pulled him toward her, biting him, tasting the salt on his skin.

  She never did call Walt and she got used to the bruising ring of the telephone, the whine of the doorbell. She was hot and jittery the whole week until she was sure Walt had left, that he was out of her state and back in Kansas. Whenever she got a twinge of memory, she placed her hands on her belly. “Bastard,” she said, over and over, out loud, branding the words into her life. Her anger soothed her.

  Every morning she woke up anxious, waiting for a familiar nausea, some secret prickling within her that would tell her she was carrying life. The closer she got to her period, the more nervous she became, examining her panties for the faintest smear of blood, taking cold baths in hopes of stopping any flow. She took long walks, wondering what it would be like to have a child, making herself queasy with fear, but she didn’t see any other way to keep her life intact and ordered.

  Two weeks later, the phone caught her by surprise. It was Walt and he was frantic. “I’m going to have a baby,” she said defiantly, shutting his flow of words before they could claim her and make her his again.

  “What?” said Walt. “What are you talking about? We talked about that, don’t you remember?”

  “You heard me,” said Bea, “and it has nothing to do with you. It was planned, too.” She hung up, staying by the phone, tensed against it, but it was silent. Good, she thought, stroking her belly, her fingers like dowsers searching for water. She had said the words and now Walt would never want her.

  She was silent when Ben came home and she couldn’t eat any of her dinner. “You feeling blue?” said Ben, and Bea burst into tears. He came around the table and put his arms about her, kissing her neck, cooing pet names at her, but her grief made her deaf.

  Bea found out that she was pregnant on a Monday. There was life, a life that would become Rozzy. Even then, that far back, Rozzy was affecting people, was sealing up fates as tightly as any surprise package.

  Ben immediately began planning. He became really interested in prenatal care. He went out to the bookshop and came back with two red crinkly bags full of baby books.Every evening, he and Bea would read aloud, discussing passages.

  “I’m really pregnant,” said Bea, wistfully.

  “Isn’t it terrific?”

  In the morning, Ben made her up a sticky health drink, an old recipe of Emily’s. It was a sludgy orange mixture of apple juice, raw eggs, oil, and oats. It was thick, viscous, with a faint chocolate odor, and Bea puckered up her mouth with nausea. “It gives me gas,” she complained.

  “That only shows how much you need it,” he said.

  “You drink it then.”

  He shrugged and made himself up a drink. He poured it into a glass, tipped the glass at Bea, and drank. “It’s not exactly champagne, is it?” he said, making a face. “Never mind, drink it anyway.”

  Ben enthusiastically began to subscribe to a new health magazine, Prevention. You couldn’t get it on any of the stands, and it was looked upon as an oddity. He studied each issue religiously, and then he spent one weekend cleaning Bea’s kitchen, ridding it of food with high fat content, of spices she didn’t need, of sweets. “But how will I cook?” she wailed. “Simply,” he said. He went through her cosmetics, tossing out her lipsticks and perfumes, even her scented soaps from Avon. “Oh, don’t!” she cried, clutching at him as he calmly tossed a handful of bright bottles into the trash. He ordered her special “natural” cosmetics from Prevention’s mail order service, but when the lipsticks came, they were waxen and oddly colored, the toothpaste was grainy. Still, she obeyed Ben, she let him take charge.

  “He loved my being pregnant,” Bea told me. “He loved it when I started to swell up. He couldn’t keep his hands away. At night he traced outlines on my stomach, ignoring my pleas to stop or I would wet my pants. Sometimes I did, but he didn’t care about that.” He wanted her all the time. She said she couldn’t even cook dinner without his sneaking up behind her, pushing his rough hands down into her shirt, cupping her breasts, which were tender and sore. When she bent to pick up some spilled salt, she would find his hands groping about her, insistently rubbing. He surprised her in the shower, pulling her down on the wet bottom of the tub; he made love to her on the kitchen floor, in the living room. She protested that the shades weren’t drawn, that it was daylight, but his hands kept reading her flesh, kept refusing to hear. She finally lay, detached, and let Ben kiss and touch her and push her into orgasm after restless orgasm. How could anyone make love to a pregnant woman?—Walt had said that.

  “What are you feeling? Is sex different for you now?” Ben was always asking her questions like that, demanding that she tell him her dreams. He would pull himself down and rest his head on her belly, and he began to whisper to the fetus, telling it how brilliant it would be, how perfect. “You talk to it,” he urged. She felt foolish gibbering on to something she couldn’t even see, but Ben’s hopeful face made her speak.

  She showed up one day at Ben’s office wearing a bright yellow maternity dress, feeling pretty for the first time in a long while. Ben was sullen. “What?” she demanded, as they clacked down the sidewalk on their way to lunch. Fie stopped and faced her. “Are you ashamed of being pregnant?” he said. Bea stared.

  “Listen. Pregnancy is beautiful and you go and hide it under all that damned yellow cloth. You look just like a sailboat.”

  Bea cried, but then he told her she was lovely, mesmerizingly so, and that he simply ached to show her off. He wouldn’t let her buy any more maternity clothes, but insisted that she wear pants with elastic waists and tuck-in tops. She felt like some enormous blow-up clown that could be bobbed back and forth. As soon as he left for work, she shucked off the clothes and slipped into the big comfortable muumuus she kept hidden in the closet.

  She was huge with Rozzy. For a while the doctor even thought she might be carrying twins. “Oh Lord,” she said, sighing. She took to standing in front of her mirror, mourning for the old Bea who had died, that slim supple girl who was now being usurped by this bloated cow. She had bluish veins crisscrossing her legs and stretch marks rippling across her belly and thighs. That baby was robbing her teeth of calcium (why did that make her mind flicker on Jess?), stealing the shine from her hair. “You look wonderful,” Ben said, nuzzling her belly, snapping
picture after picture, and Bea wept silently because she had never felt herself uglier or more ruined.

  “He was ahead of his time,” Bea said, “and I suffered for it. No one was having natural childbirth that I knew, not back then. But your father found a doctor who knew the breathing exercises, who was willing to teach them to both of us. Both of us. Ben wanted to be there when the baby was being born; he wanted to help. Everyone gave me advice, told me I was crazy, but it didn’t matter.” Evenings, Ben made her get down on the rug and practice her breathing. On weekends they went house hunting, in the suburbs where it would be good for children.

  The last month of her pregnancy, Bea began spotting deformities around town. She couldn’t get on the subway without being pushed up against someone who was spastic. The loose, drooling mouth, the jittering limbs, made her clutch her belly convulsively. People hobbling on canes terrified her; she kept imagining them as babies, their toes looking innocent and pink and healthy. She emptied her purse into the tin cans of every beggar on the street, running through her house money in days instead of weeks. She thought of it as an ancient ritual to appease the gods, a sacrifice of sorts, guaranteeing her a healthy baby. When she told Ben how frightened she was, he laughed at her. “Come on,” he said, “you eat right, you exercise, neither of us has any disease, what could go wrong?” He cuddled her until she gave him a tearful grin.

  Rozzy gave Bea twelve hours of labor. Bea screamed and writhed while Ben held her hand and talked to her throughout the breathing. “I’m here,” he said, clutching her hand, but when Rozzy’s head crowned, already dusted with downy black hair, Ben fainted and had to be dragged out by the orderlies, leaving Bea weeping, grabbing at the air until she made contact, until she found a nurse’s hand. Bea strained to see the baby, to check its limbs, its face. “She’s perfect,” said the doctor, and Bea relaxed, closing her eyes, suddenly not caring about anything or anyone, save sleep.