She was called Marjorie.
The bastard puppy of mastiff and bull terrier, with perhaps a little pug thrown in, Marjorie looked like she had been the unfortunate result of an experiment in a film like The Fly where the Mad Scientist combines DNA from excrement on the ground of the dog run in Tompkins Square Park and this was what grew in the test tube. And unfortunately this animal was not compensated for in the personality department. Courtney announced, with a slight tremor in her voice, that Marjorie had had a difficult childhood and certainly there had been failings in her parenting. No one had taught her to cultivate a winning manner, an affectionate demeanor, a perky wagging of a tail. In fact, she emanated the most extraordinary noise, a low, vicious growl, and did amazingly potent farts. But as they sized each other up across the reclaimed floorboards, Julia decided she liked this bitch’s style, and if the truism that people choose dogs that mirror their personalities was actually true and not an “ism,” she was getting an insight into Courtney that she would never have imagined. Only a very uncompromising sort of woman would walk past all the cuddly puppies in the rescue pound, nose round the half-chewed cages at the back, and choose this thing. Interesting.
So every day they went out walking, the ugly dog and Julia. And Julia discovered that, in contrast to the experience of pushing an ugly child through the streets, where people have no idea what to say once they’ve peered at it (an all-too-frequent occurrence, really, as one of her witty novelist friends once said, as few babies are objectively attractive), there was plenty of conversation to be had on the subject of the dog’s repellent aspect. A man playing folk guitar dropped his plectrum, a couple of schoolchildren sniggered in horror, and then, as they started walking along the East River, Julia became conscious of admiring glances from a group of tough men loitering under the Manhattan Bridge. One came over to stroke Marjorie, resting a huge hairy hand on her head, and she growled so ferociously, Julia felt compelled to admire the penmanship of the Tough Man’s tattoos. He just laughed, nodding at dog and owner approvingly. It was all very curious, and Julia walked away imagining herself in the smog-filled streets of the East End of London in 1838, her mastiff beside her, like Bill Sikes and Bullseye in Oliver Twist. (It is a measure of Julia’s mental state at the time that she saw herself as Bill Sikes and not Nancy.)
Sometimes Julia bought Courtney a coffee and a double-chocolate cupcake, and, Marjorie dozing at their feet, they would talk about Courtney’s troubled relationship and her codependency issues—with New York. The city was the only serious relationship Courtney had ever had. She had met it at age twenty-five, full of dreams, a highflier, adored. After ten years in the advertising agency she had gone freelance, designing, copywriting, consulting. She had bought her apartment, she could afford occasional weekends in the Hamptons and frequent microdermabrasion, but Gotham had turned into a cruel and demanding lover, requiring serious money and total commitment. There was no room to consider another way of life when, if you paused to look over your shoulder, you could slip from winner in Manhattan to loser in Hoboken. And Julia had been right about the baby-substitute thing. Courtney had had her ovaries checked, her blood tests were perfect, there was just no man, and, as freezing your eggs is a dodgy business, it was now or never.
Courtney knew she had to do something big, she wanted to break free, she said, she thought about moving. There were other fantastic cities in America, after all; what about San Francisco, or Miami, or Chicago? Julia did not dignify this with a response. They both knew that for a true New Yorker, wherever they come from, only New York will do. She herself thrilled to the dirt and the smells and the noise, for as a young woman silence had terrified her and she had run from the gardens and the convenient two-car driveways of the suburbs to the only place she had ever felt truly at home. She explained it simply as a passion, one beyond logic, for of course one could live sensibly in San Francisco, or Miami, or Chicago. As the children had got older, whenever Kristian tentatively suggested that what passed as bad behavior in their school, or at home (to be discussed at great length or pored over in parenting manuals), might simply be due to the fact that they lived like caged animals, Julia went pale and refused to talk about it. How could she leave the shrimp rolls at Luke’s Lobster? The perfect coffee shop? The life she had lusted after for so many years?
Courtney told Julia she was haunted by a trip to a psychic on West Houston she had made with a group of drunken girlfriends in 2002. The first card the bescarfed woman had dealt Courtney was reversed (Julia knew this meant Courtney was unlucky in love, as she had once written a whole story line about a psychotic transvestite fortune teller), and Courtney was sure this had prophesied her disastrous romantic destiny. Her last boyfriend had moved to Vermont and become an apple farmer and produced cider and children once a year. “Why wasn’t it me?” she asked. “Why didn’t he do that with me? (They had once had a furious argument about nonorganic cleaning products in front of Julia, which she thought was the answer rather than a gypsy curse, but as it was a rhetorical question, she let it go.)
So Courtney had got the dog. Her mother, a devotee of Oprah’s magazine, had suggested it. It might help her get in touch with her maternal side, and she would attract a man who wanted to impregnate her.
Julia thought for a moment, then said the two words she knew would calm Courtney down. Susan Sarandon. Courtney nodded vigorously. And then they found a copy of People and went through the pictures of all the female celebrities with their children and worked out their ages. Courtney was soon feeling much better, particularly when Julia pointed out that most female celebrities, apart from Susan Sarandon, lie about their age so some of them were popping out babies at nearly fifty.
“Oh, Julia,” she said. “I knew you would be the perfect person to talk to about these things. It’s always struck me from how you deal with Curtis at the management company that you are a very practical person.”
In fact, it was not Julia’s practicality that was helping her. Julia was a kind person, which she attributed to her Episcopalian upbringing. She assured Courtney that New York wasn’t just a place that could make you forget to have children. It was a place that could make you forget them if you did.
• • •
DURING HER MONTH’S VACATION at the Wellness Center in Connecticut, Julia devoted several sessions with the family therapist to her complicated feelings about motherhood. Although generally she approved of the “holistic hotel”—it was very A-list, and the food came in on china plates, so it wasn’t for real crazies who might smash the crockery and attempt to slit their wrists—the sessions did not go well at first.
Julia was used to her weekly counseling with Dr. Jenny on the Upper West Side. Dr. Jenny was in her sixties, white-haired and wise; sometimes she held Julia’s hand, she always had lotion-filled tissues available, and when Julia told her she had left Kristian and the children, they cried together. Occasionally Julia worried about the intensity of the bond between them; she loved Dr. Jenny and she felt Dr. Jenny loved her back. She said to her best friend, Christy Armitage, that going to Dr. Jenny wasn’t like seeing a counselor, more like visiting the mother you always wished you had. Christy said, “But you have to pay her?” and Julia decided from then on to keep that opinion to herself.
By contrast, the family therapist at the Wellness Center kept at least a five-foot distance from Julia at all times, expected her to bring her own handkerchief, and asked her leading questions, even when she was crying. Finally Julia, sitting crumpled in the leather armchair, a ball of sodden toilet roll in one hand, announced querulously that she thought the sessions were meant to be nondirective. The Family Therapist looked at her with exaggerated calm and said that the Wellness Center program was therapy boot camp, designed to get results for even the most self-indulgent clients who were used to counseling as reassurance.
Julia took this personally and felt defiant. She folded her arms and stared at the picture of a waterfall on the
door opposite.
Inevitably, the discussions encompassed Julia’s childhood and her feelings about her family of origin. Julia had always been her daddy’s little girl, and when she brought her kids, Romy and Lee, home to Westchester to see their grandparents, she noticed that her father’s teenage boxing trophy had been placed right in front of Kristian’s side of her wedding photo. If anyone accidentally mentioned Kristian’s name, Julia’s father would pound on a sofa cushion, the veins on his muscular forearm throbbing, the gray hairs bristling over the tattoo he had got in Korea, and demand, “What did that man ever do for you?”
Julia’s mother was more circumspect and less partisan. She had given birth very young and devoted twenty-four years of her life to wiping asses and countertops, ironing sheets, and arguing about homework. She did all this for no charge. But it turned out no charge is what you pay for the ultimate guilt insurance. For the day Julia’s younger brother left for college, her mother walked away from that stage of her life without a backward glance. Aged forty-five, she qualified as a swimming coach (she had been nicknamed “the dolphin” as a child) and had taken the local junior synchronized swimming team to the National Championships at least ten times.
Julia described how, these days, she had to make appointments to speak to Coach Kirkland, which irritated her and meant their conversations were often chilly and combative, especially if anything about Romy and Lee’s physical milestones were discussed. But then she realized that what really irritated her was, first, the knowledge that she had much preferred her mother when they were younger and the more comfortable relationship of servant and master had existed between them and, second, the fear that her own children might hate her, because she could not be their slave. Julia, who was quick of mind and fearless of temperament, reluctantly acknowledged that therapy boot camp might suit her.
The tension between Julia and her mother had come to a head one Saturday morning when Julia’s mother was on the sidelines at a swimming gala. Julia rang her, by arrangement, about Thanksgiving. Kristian had taken the kids out for pancakes, and Julia was lying in bed with coffee and toast and peanut butter, and felt decadent and relaxed and deluded. She had made a joke, her mother laughed, and then Julia said that Kristian wanted to have another baby. Julia’s mother kept laughing, but not in an amused way. When Julia fell silent, her mother marched out of the pool area, where the water made the sound echo around her, and asked Julia outright if she was pregnant. When Julia said “no,” her mother said “good” far too quickly; Julia could tell she was gripping the phone so tightly her knuckles were red, and there was a heartbreakingly serious note in her mother’s voice when she finally spoke again.
“Don’t do it, Julia. Please. I love you, but I beg you, don’t have another baby.”
“Mom. I don’t think that’s any of your business.” So much for the coffee and the toast and the peanut butter. Julia’s mother knew before she did that Julia wasn’t coping.
“You’ve got to learn you can’t be the best at everything—”
Julia slammed down the phone.
Then why was there never a prize in our house for “good enough”? she thought.
• • •
KRISTIAN HAD DROPPED in one morning to discuss the arrangements for the following weekend, when, after finally taking his admiring gaze from Julia (even under that day’s multicolored knitted hat with earflaps, which on anyone else would make them look like they were goat herding in Peru, Julia looked amazing), he looked down at the dog and failed to conceal his disquiet. Julia took offense immediately. She was getting fond of Marjorie and had taken charge of her grooming, nail clipping, and even teeth cleaning, as she worried Courtney was not attentive enough to the possibility of canine plaque. Sometimes, though Julia didn’t say this to Kristian, Marjorie stayed for a sleepover.
“You didn’t tell me it was a dealer’s dog. It’s a gangland bitch. They’re used to attack people.”
“Ridiculous. How do you know that? You teach yoga.”
Kristian was having none of her attitude. “Look,” he said, “she’s got a tattoo.”
And indeed behind Marjorie’s ear there was a tattoo, a small star symbol, a sign of something rather thrilling and nefarious. Julia knew better than to tell him about her experience with the Tough Inked Man; the separation had done nothing to lessen Kristian’s protective streak, and he often lectured her, ending with “I care about you; you are the Mother of my Children.” At such times, Romy and Lee, the children of whom she was the mother, always reminded him of reckless things Julia had done in the past, always in the course of research for the TV crime show that had dominated their lives for ten seasons. It was fun for the four of them to banter like that. Only a year before, Julia’s main interaction with her children was to holler at them and then beg their forgiveness.
Kristian was concerned about whether the dog was safe around the kids, and so Julia agreed not to let her near them. She was the very model of reasonableness these days, she had learned the art of compromise at the Wellness Center, and it seemed that, now that they were liberated from the stress of pretending that equality in marriage ever means fifty-fifty, Julia and Kristian were both different people. The rules and the roles were clear, and Julia often thought, Oh, if only he had been a woman, thus conditioned for career kamikaze, if only he could have chosen to be the wind beneath my wings, and sometimes felt that if they had only managed to work that out before what happened happened, what happened might never have happened.
When Julia met Kristian he was twenty-nine and had something of a following in an overdesigned men’s magazine for his witty columns about a patrician, handsome All-American boy whose father had gambled away the family fortune on real estate speculation in Eastern Europe. To his credit, Kristian never pretended this was anything but autobiographical. He lived rent-free in his aunt’s apartment in the Dakota, wore his father’s suits from the 1960s, and drove down Broadway on a scooter. His very existence could have been dreamed up by an art director to advertise handmade Italian shoes, and Julia was incredibly attracted to his sidecar, his gray sharkskin, and his disdain for the grubby business of real life.
Once they had the children, however, in an attempt to impress her or himself with his newfound determination to provide, Kristian lurched into freelance website design, finally starting a business downtown that involved his being in the office sixteen hours a day. To fit in, he wore T-shirts that showed his abs. That was the upside. On the downside he took a loan against their apartment and defaulted on it. Of course, he was suffering from depression (he was an adored youngest son, brainwashed by the cult of New York, living with a woman who was the embodiment of “making it there”); and of course Julia should never have allowed herself to be doing everything. Literally. But Julia would never have succeeded without denial. She read numerous self-help books about work/life balance for women and ignored everything they had to say.
She pondered all this the following week as she and Marjorie strolled along the streets, the locations of many of the scenes from her marriage. She saw the two of them, herself and Kristian, not herself and the dog, of course, staggering hollow-eyed down the apartment steps carrying babies and buggies and bottles and heading into the café opposite so they could pay someone to feed them. But they were still laughing, still madly in love; they made jokes, “If you have two kids in two years, it’s not just the city that never sleeps,” and there were many nights the four of them collapsed on the super-king-size bed together, and if you saw that in a film you’d think, That’s a happy family, that’s a family that will make it. It’s called show, don’t tell.
But then the crime drama got a new executive producer. His reputation preceded him. He was called the Asshole. By his friends. Within a month the Asshole called Julia into his corner office and, with a customized poster declaring ALWAYS BLAME, NEVER APOLOGIZE hanging above his head, announced that he had fired two of Julia’s colle
agues (one for having a vacation, the other for having cancer) and was promoting her.
“You’ll never sleep again,” he said happily, but she figured that this wouldn’t make any difference, because she and Kristian had not slept for three years anyway. She worked her brain, fingers, and ass off, drinking Red Bull and vodka out of a My Little Pony beaker, writing through the nights in a delusional state, and the show’s ratings soared, although Julia still never seemed to earn quite as much as her male counterparts. Her agent told her this was because she had other life “priorities,” but that made no sense.
She had never told the Asshole she had a family.
• • •
EVERY MORNING Julia saw a Ghost of Julia Past among the taut, teeth-grinding women standing outside the day-care center at seven fifty-five.
One day she passed a woman begging her child to stop crying, the woman’s own eyes filling with tears, her voice rising to an operatic pitch, until they actually harmonized in a duet of misery as people scurried past, studiously avoiding them, not wanting to allow themselves those feelings.
Julia went into a café, bought the child a cookie and the woman a coffee. The child, clearly fed muesli and never allowed sweets, a regime Julia had imposed on her own two, which she liked to think of as the “I’m never there, but I feel less guilty if you don’t eat sugar” diet, stopped crying, gobbled down the chocolate eagerly, and the woman sipped some coffee and waited for the inevitable judgmental homily. Julia, who had been on the receiving end of those many times from women she encountered in situations involving children, said nothing except “It’ll be okay,” even though personal experience had taught her that it might well not be. And she was sure the woman would have hugged her, had it not been for Marjorie, who suddenly took an enormous, foul-smelling, yellow shit on the sidewalk, and she had to borrow a baggie to scoop it up.
Julia’s children had been picked up every evening by a succession of resentful, undocumented nannies who watched television with them until she staggered home between seven and eight in the evening, put in a load of washing, defrosted dinner, and bribed them into bed. Her beautiful babies had turned into slow-to-read, anxious, unhappy children, disruptive when they started school and always whining and desperate for attention. Kristian found excuses to stay out later and later every evening, and many nights Julia found herself alone in the kitchen with his uneaten plate of pasta at ten p.m. before steeling herself for three more hours of writing. The alarm would go off at six-thirty the next morning, and the whole ghastly business would start again. It was like Groundhog Day, except it wasn’t funny and occasionally something unusually unpleasant or downright dangerous would occur; Kristian left little Lee, age five, playing with the cutlery drawer alone in the apartment for a morning, simply forgetting about him in a haze of exhaustion. Another day, Julia nearly broke her arm on a cab door pulling Romy inside so she wouldn’t be late for school. They were stuck in traffic, anyway, as a film crew had blocked the road. Julia, curious, wound down the window and asked what the movie was.
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