by Sarah Dunn
Of course, it’s possible that I’m not being entirely fair to Tom. It’s possible that he was deeper and more complicated than he appeared, and I just missed it, like I apparently missed so many other things that were going on between us. One problem was that I could never figure out what he was thinking. I never really knew what he was feeling either, but the thinking part is what gets me, because it seems so basic. And if I’m completely honest with myself, I suppose the truth is that Tom was always a little bit fuzzy to me. It’s not that he was constantly surprising me, showing new and unexpected sides of himself; it’s more that he was sort of a blank. That sounds much worse than I mean it to sound, but I can’t think of how else to put it. When Tom and I first started dating, I told my sister Meredith all about him over the phone. A few months later, she flew into town on business, and the three of us went out to dinner. When Tom excused himself to go to the bathroom, I turned to Meredith and said, well? He seems nice, she said. I nodded my head for more. He’s not quite what I pictured, she said. I pressed her to elaborate, and she finally said, well, he’s really nothing like you described him. Now, my sister can get like that sometimes, but still. Nothing like I described him? How was that possible? I haven’t thought about that for years, but now that I do, it makes me wonder.
There’s something else I haven’t thought about in a long time, but now that I’m thinking it I suppose I ought to tell you. It has to do with Kate Pearce. I suppose you could call it the history of Kate Pearce as she pertained to my relationship with Tom. It started, as these things so often do, with a photograph.
A few weeks after Tom and I first started dating, I was over at his apartment, looking through his photo album. Tom has a man’s photo album. It completely skips over vast periods of his life, and there are still a lot of empty pages in the back. It gives the impression that he’s going to go on through his life, slowly sticking in random pictures that his friends send him in the mail, and then, when he gets to the final page, he’ll die.
“Who’s she?” I said to Tom when I got to the picture.
“That’s Kate.”
“She’s beautiful,” I said. She was, too. She had big brown eyes and long brown hair and a sort of little-girl frailty that made me want to puke.
“How long were you guys together?” I said.
“Three years,” said Tom.
“That’s a long time.”
“It was college.”
“Three years in college is a very long time,” I said. “What’s she doing now?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to her in ten years.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Things ended badly,” he said.
“Badly how?”
“I don’t feel like talking about it right now,” he said.
I kept flipping through the album. Later that evening, though, I brought things around to the subject of Kate again, and Tom and I had the following exchange:
“So, do you still have feelings for her?” I said.
“I think it would be strange if I didn’t have any feelings for her,” said Tom.
“Are you still in love with her?” I said.
“I don’t even know what that means,” he said.
Of course I should have immediately said, “What do you mean you don’t know what that means?”I should have at least tried to pin him down on what part he didn’t understand. But this was early on in our relationship, maybe four weeks in, and you don’t say things like that at the beginning of a relationship. I’m not even sure you say them in the middle of one. Maybe you could get away with it at the end, I don’t know, but if you’re anything like me you just file away the information somewhere in the back of your brain and then do your best to forget that it’s there. And I had pretty much forgotten about it—Kate Pearce was nothing more to me than a name, a name that had elicited a wistful, faraway look in my new boyfriend’s eyes a long time ago, a look that I decided to interpret as his longing for youth, for freedom, for college girls swinging lacrosse sticks across impossibly green fields—for the past in general rather than for her in particular.
Two years later. A Saturday. Tom and I were buying groceries at the little place on Pine Street. They were his groceries; I was just along for the ride. We got up to the register and Tom swiped his card in the card swiper. He punched in his secret code. It was 5-2-8-3. “Did you pick your secret code or did the bank give it to you?” I said, in a completely innocent, making-conversation-while-in-line-at-the-grocery-store kind of way. “I picked it,” Tom said, and then he got a strange look on his face. That’s all it was, just a strange look, but at that moment I knew. I knew.
“Oh my God,” I said.
Tom took his groceries and walked out of the store. I followed him.
“I can’t believe this,” I said.
“Alison,” he said. “Please don’t make a big deal out of this.”
“I’m not making it a big deal,” I said.
“I’ve had it since college. It doesn’t mean anything,” he said.
“It spells Kate,” I said. “It means Kate.”
“It’s just a pattern to me now.”
“That’s not the point,” I said.
“What is the point?” said Tom.
Well, I knew what the point was. I knew perfectly well what the point was. The point was that Tom’s punching in Kate’s name every time he visited the bank machine was representative of a certain sort of devotion, a certain quality of love that I’d spent the past two years thinking he was incapable of, and here it turned out he was capable of it, only, it would seem, not for me. That was the point. But I wasn’t going to tell Tom that. No sir-ee. Because I didn’t want him to realize that that was the point. Tom loved me. I knew he loved me. He loved me, but he had his issues. He had his baggage. Well, we all have issues, right? We all have baggage. And you must keep in mind that Kate Pearce was, at the point when this disturbing little episode took place, a relatively abstract problem. The man hadn’t spoken to her in over ten years. And I had long given up on the idea of being somebody’s first, last, and only. You have to give that up, it seems to me, unless you marry your high school sweetheart, and there is nothing in the world more boring than a person who is married to their high school sweetheart.
“I don’t know what the point is,” I said to Tom. I started to cry. “It just makes me feel bad.”
Tom changed his secret code to my birthday, and our relationship resumed its course.
Perhaps you’re wondering whether or not the thing between Tom and Kate Pearce was in fact true love. That possibility had crossed my mind on more than one occasion. I mean, ten years after they broke up, the man was still punching her name into the bank machine every time he needed cash. It is, I suppose, the modern-day equivalent of carving somebody’s initials over and over again into the bark of oak trees. And I like to think that I’m not the kind of person who would stand in the way of true love, even if it meant that the person I was involved with ended up in true love with somebody else. Tom and I only had one real conversation about Kate after he came back, only one conversation that had any meat on it, and it dealt with precisely this subject. I sat him down on the couch one night that first week back and I said to him, you should think about this. Because maybe you will regret it. Maybe you love her, maybe you need her, maybe she is who you’ve wanted all along. And Tom assured me, no. It wasn’t about love, he said. It wasn’t about Kate. Come to think of it, he said it wasn’t even about sex. Then what was it about? you’re wondering. He didn’t really say. I do remember that he took my hand in his, and he kissed it several times. He said that he loved me. I said I loved him back. We sat in silence for a moment, breathing.
“Are we through now?” said Tom.
“Sure,” I said. “Sure.”
He let go of my hand and turned on the TV.
Eighteen
THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, ON SATURDAY, I WENT BACK TO the office to clean out my desk. I was trying to avo
id people, and at first it looked like I’d succeeded, too, but I hadn’t. Because in walked Henry. He walked in and, without a word, flopped down on the beat-up couch that Matt had found propped up against the curb a few blocks from the office.
“That couch used to have fleas,” I finally said.
“So did I,” said Henry.
I fished my arm way back into my top drawer and pulled out an old checkbook from Mellon Bank. I started ripping up the checks and throwing them into the garbage can.
“When?” I said.
“What?”
“When did you have fleas?”
“Actually, I’ve never had fleas,” said Henry. “I was just trying to make conversation.”
He stretched out on the couch. “In college, this guy I knew named Judd had a couch with crabs.”
I didn’t respond.
“And, once, I found a tick on my uncle,” he said.
I ripped up the last check. Then I looked over at Henry.
“You don’t find this at all strange?” I said.
“Not really, no.”
“It should be strange,” I said. “You should find this strange.”
“I think you’re a little strange,” Henry said, with a smile.
“I’m the normal one here, Henry,” I said. “And I’m rarely the normal one.”
I pulled out the bottom drawer of my desk and upended it into the garbage can. A few of my old clips fell to the linoleum, and I bent down to pick them up.
“Do you always analyze things while you’re in the middle of them?” said Henry.
“We’re not in the middle of anything anymore,” I said. “And yes, I do.”
“I’m sorry about your job,” said Henry.
“That is not the thing to which I am referring.”
“The Reading Terminal thing.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I see.”
“I especially liked the part where you squeezed my shoulder,” I said.
“Did I do that?”
I nodded. “I’ve never had someone break up with me and squeeze my shoulder before.”
“I didn’t break up with you,” said Henry. “I told you I didn’t think I could handle you. There’s a difference.”
“There is?”
“There is,” said Henry. “And while this might be a technicality, there was nothing officially defined to break up.”
“So, what, you were just telling me that so I wouldn’t wait around for the next thirty years, hoping for you to show up on my doorstep and have sex with me again?”
“Jumping every time your phone rings.”
“With my legs perpetually shaved.”
“Yes,” said Henry. He smiled at me. “I was trying to spare you that.”
“That was very kind of you,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“And I take back everything I said.”
“You didn’t say anything,” said Henry.
“I take back everything I said about you in my head,” I said. “During my hating you period.”
I walked over to the bookshelf and began to go through the books. I could feel Henry’s eyes on me.
“When I was in sixth grade, I used to go to the roller rink every Saturday afternoon,” I said. “One day, I noticed that this really cute boy kept staring at me. He would skate past me, and stare at me, and then skate past me again, and stare at me some more, and I was getting more and more excited each time it happened. Then finally, he skated right up to me and he fell in step beside me and he said”—and here I paused, as I always do when I recount this particular anecdote—“‘Are you a boy or a girl?’”
Henry laughed. “That did not happen.”
“It did. And then, when my mom came to pick me up, I started crying, and I told her what happened, and do you know what she told me?”
He shook his head no.
“She said, ‘He just said that because your skates are black.’ We didn’t have much money, and I had hand-me-down skates from my cousin, and they happened to be black.”
“That’s a good mother,” said Henry.
“Yes.”
“And that’s a good story.”
“I know it is,” I said. “But I’m telling it to you for a reason, and the reason is, I’m hereby officially putting you in that category.”
“What category?”
“The skate-by guy.”
I put the last few books into the box and told Henry I was leaving. He got up off the couch and put the box of my stuff under his arm and carried it into the hallway.
“Do you know what’s going to happen to you, Henry?” I said.
“What?”
I looked up at him. “You’re going to end up with a woman who can handle this sort of thing.”
I pulled an old publicity photo of Woody Allen off the wall and switched off the light. When we got downstairs, I took my box from Henry and thanked him for carrying it. We stood together in front of the building. The Philadelphia Times banner flapped lazily in the breeze.
Henry caught my gaze and then quite pointedly didn’t look away. I never know how to handle that move—the meaningful stare—and this time was no different. I started smiling, and then Henry started smiling, and then I started to laugh. I couldn’t help myself. I looked down at the sidewalk.
“I’d like to ask you one last question,” I said.
“This is the last question?” said Henry.
“Well, I’m going to my house, and you’re going to your house, and I’m not working for you anymore, so yes, it’s the last question. And I’d like you to be completely honest, even if you think it might hurt my feelings.”
“Fire away.”
I tried to think of the best way to put it. “What kind of sex would you say we were having, back when we were having it?”
“What do you mean?” said Henry.
“I mean, good, bad, average. What kind of sex was it?”
Henry looked up at the sky, like he was searching the clouds for the right word.
“Outstanding,” said Henry.
“I thought so,” I said.
I hailed a cab and headed home.
I sat in the cab with the box of my stuff on the seat next to me. I felt good. Henry had turned out to be a pleasant diversion. Like a tantalizing confection you eat someplace foreign you know you’ll never return to. Certain people come into your life, and you can’t hold on to them; you simply take what they have to offer and try to give them something in return. Maybe this is growth, I thought. Not clinging so hard to things. Even my job. I could feel myself letting go of that, too, which was good, since I didn’t have it any longer. I would find another job. And now Tom was home and everything was falling back into place. I gazed out the window. I smiled a smug smile. Outstanding.
I glanced down at the box beside me. My desk calendar was on top, fluttering in the wind streaming in from the driver’s open window. How long had it been since the dinner party? I wondered. I reached over and flipped back through the pages. Just over three weeks. I was amazed. It felt like two years had gone by. I started slowly turning the pages, running the events of the past weeks through my mind. My brain flashed on a pornographic moment with Henry. I blushed, and closed my eyes.
Then I opened them. I blinked hard. I grabbed my calendar and started flipping back through the pages. Back to the dinner party. I flipped further back. Finally I saw it, in the lower right-hand corner of one of the pages.
A small x.
I looked at the date on the page with the x. I counted weeks on fingers. Five fingers. Five weeks!
A wave of nausea came over me, and I felt clammy and panicky and terrified. I grabbed the armrest to steady myself. Take a breath, I commanded myself. This doesn’t mean anything. This could be nothing. I kept trying to calm myself with a rational inner dialog, but down below there was another voice, a much more authoritative one, which was telling me in no uncertain terms that I was pregnant.
“Hey lad
y,” said the cabdriver.
I looked up. The taxi was in front of my building. Tom was upstairs, I knew, watching a golf tournament on TV. Completely oblivious. Like nothing at all monumental was going on inside my womb.
“Um, there’s a second stop. Nothing’s happening at this stop. I just wanted to drive by,” I couldn’t stop babbling. “I thought someone might, but now it turns out they’re not . . .”
“Whatever,” said the cabbie, and I gave him the new address.
I sat back and started furiously flipping through the calendar, trying to remember things I hadn’t thought about since eighth grade health class. Like when ovulation took place. Was it twelve days after your last period stopped? Or did you count based on when your last period started? Sixteen days or so? I realized I had no idea. After that, how many days was the egg in play? Three, maybe? Five? I started to sweat. I pictured my insides as a big cesspool filled with sperm that had managed to bypass the various defenses employed against them, sperm lurking around for days, weeks even, making their own ecosystem, my womb a giant snow globe of foreign genetic material, a single unsuspecting egg floating down like a balloon in a stadium filled with confetti. I tried to remember exactly when I’d had sex. I folded down the corners of various pages. Four times on two separate occasions. Should a second time that took place after midnight count for the following day? I wondered. Because that’s a lot of folded pages. I sat there, staring at my dog-eared calendar, as a truly horrifying realization started to sink in.
I didn’t know whose baby it was.
I didn’t know whose baby it was! It could have been Tom’s, or it could have been Henry’s! It was probably Henry’s, but it might have been Tom’s! And they didn’t even look alike! Tom had blond hair and Henry had brown! I started to hyperventilate. I tried to remember what Tom had said about our children’s eyes. Something about how he knew what color they would be. Well, Tom had blue eyes and Henry’s were brown! I was doomed!