Leaving the World

by Douglas Kennedy

  ‘I really don’t want such a big television,’ I told him.

  ‘Well then, you should have discussed this with the guy who ordered it for you.’

  I asked the man to wait for five minutes while I ran upstairs and called Theo at the Harvard Film Archive.

  ‘Are you insane?’ I asked him.

  ‘I think you know the answer to that question,’ he said.

  ‘Why would I want such a big damn television?’

  ‘I thought we needed one.’

  We. It was the first time he had used the first person plural to describe us.

  ‘Trying to watch movies on that tiny little set of yours is kind of a sacrilege. So . . .’

  ‘You should have talked this over with me first.’

  ‘But that would have killed the surprise necessary in all surprises.’

  ‘Don’t those sets cost a fortune?’

  ‘Isn’t that still my problem, not ours?’

  Again the use of the plural. Was this his way of telling me he was moving in?

  ‘I don’t know what to say . . .’

  ‘Say nothing until I show up tonight with a new DVD transfer of Pressburger and Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death. You will not believe the hallucinogenic use of early Technicolor . . .’

  Theo was right: the television did fit into the corner space near the fireplace – and Pressburger and Powell’s expressionistic film on war and the hereafter did seem visually lush when viewed on such an absurdly wide screen.

  ‘I knew you’d love it,’ Theo said.

  ‘Just don’t make a point of overwhelming me with such grand gestures again.’

  ‘But I like overwhelming you. Anyway, we both know you’re far too rational and practical for your own good.’

  Ouch – but he was speaking the truth. I did weigh every small financial decision I made, and only indulged myself with something when I was sure that it was not profligate or whimsical. Theo would watch me try on clothes in shops and then reject them because they were ‘too expensive’ (even if it was just the Gap) or ‘more of the same’ (my way of saying I didn’t need it).

  ‘But you don’t have a decent leather jacket,’ he said when I saw one I liked in a shop on Newbury Street.

  ‘I can live without one.’

  ‘But you look cool in this one.’

  ‘It’s nearly four hundred dollars.’

  ‘Indulge yourself.’

  ‘I’m not comfortable indulging myself.’

  ‘No kidding. But you should learn to do so a little more. Life is too damn short otherwise. And you don’t have to continue to prove to the world that you’re not your con-artist dad.’

  ‘Remind me not to tell you my secrets again.’

  ‘It’s hardly a secret if the FBI knows it. Anyway, I’m just asking you to lighten up on yourself.’

  ‘I don’t do “guilt free”,’ I said. ‘I wish I could, but my brain simply can’t liberate itself from the idea that there is a price to everything.’

  ‘You should be the one writing about Puritanism, not Grande Dame Sara.’

  ‘But I do, I do. The Naturalists were as obsessed with our Puritan guilt as Hawthorne. Only they saw it from the perspective of our hyper-capitalist obsessions. Money and God and Guilt: the great all-American Trifecta. And none of us can totally shake loose from it.’

  But I still bought the leather jacket, and I didn’t make any further noises about the extravagant television that now dominated a corner of my living room. Nor did I balk when he suggested we spend a week at a ‘groovy little retro hotel’ in South Beach ‘on my tab’.

  ‘You have a “tab” in Miami?’ I asked him.

  ‘It’s a turn of phrase.’

  ‘Can you really afford to plump for a week?’

  ‘Will you stop being so damn cautious. If I say I can plump for a week I can plump for a week.’

  ‘Because I’d certainly be happy to plump for half of everything.’

  ‘Thank you for draining my romantic offer of all its inherent romanticism.’

  ‘That wasn’t my intention. I was just being – OK, guilty as charged – cautious.’

  But on our second night in Miami I did something incautious. After drinking far too many margaritas in some Mexican dive off Lincoln Road, we returned to our Art Deco room in our Art Deco hotel and proceeded to make very drunken love. When night woke up and I staggered into the bathroom and caught sight of the tequila aftershock in my eyes, a desperate thought hit me: I had failed to insert my diaphragm before we had collapsed onto the bed.

  Counting backwards on my fingers I calculated (with mounting fear) that I was just three days off the middle of my cycle. I knew that if I articulated such worry to Theo it would cast a large uneasy shadow over the rest of our time in the Floridian sun. Surely the mathematics would work in my favor.

  But as the week dragged on – and the thirty-six-hour deadline passed for the use of the morning-after pill – I tried to keep my anxiety out of Theo’s sight. Bar one or two awkward moments when he sensed that I was troubled by something, I did keep my fear under wraps.

  That is, until a month later, by which time I was two weeks late and vomiting every morning. I went to the local pharmacy and bought one of those home pregnancy tests. Back at my place I peed onto the touch paper. I put it in its accompanying vial. I went into the kitchen and made coffee. I returned five minutes later (even though it said to wait half an hour) to discover that it had turned pink. At this somewhat momentous – and thoroughly unwanted – juncture in my life a completely banal thought popped into my head:

  Who decided that pink is the color of new-found maternity?

  Another less-banal consideration followed:

  Is this how destiny works?

  Four

  UNWANTED. IT’S SUCH a big bad word when placed in front of pregnancy. But I was certain of two things as soon as the home pregnancy test blushed into pink: I didn’t want this baby and I couldn’t bear the thought of terminating this baby.

  Still, if I had been that adamant about not getting pregnant back in Miami, I would have made an excuse to slink off for a couple of hours, and found a doctor, and gulped down the morning-after pills, and then made further excuses as I dealt with two days of being absolutely ill and untouchable. But I didn’t follow this course of action. And that begs the question: Was the unwanted something that I actually wanted?

  ‘Of course you wanted to get pregnant,’ Christy said when I called her in Oregon, waking her up at seven her time. This was not a smart move, as she hated early mornings – though when she heard the fear in my voice, she ceased telling me off and said: ‘This must be something rather serious.’ That’s when I blurted out what had happened and how I had mathematically gambled on being just a few days off the middle of my cycle.

  ‘You mean you actually relied on the rhythm method?’

  ‘It was just an oversight on my part. A drunken oversight. And then—’

  ‘Bullshit. Of course you wanted to get pregnant. You may not believe that, but it’s the absolute total truth.’

  ‘So what do I do now?’

  ‘You either have the baby or you don’t.’

  ‘I’m not ready for motherhood.’

  ‘Then find the name of your nearest abortion clinic and—’

  ‘I just can’t do that.’

  ‘Then you have a real dilemma on your hands. What’s the thing that’s scaring you most? The lifetime commitment, the loss of personal freedom, the way this is going to permanently glue you and Theo together?’

  ‘All of the above.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to make a decision today.’

  ‘But once I tell him, he’s definitely involved in the decision.’

  ‘Considering the mechanics of how one gets pregnant, the fact is, he’s already very much involved in the decision . . . whatever that decision is. But before you go talking to him, you’d better figure out which way you’re going to jump.’

  The
thing was, I’d resolved long ago in my head not to have children. But that resolution was borne out of my long-standing belief that a child would force me into a cul-de-sac of my own construction. And given that my parents had engaged in similar self-entrapment with my arrival in the world . . .

  Then there was the all-encompassing question of Theo. Did I love him? I told myself that I did – just as he had made that declaration on several occasions. But underscoring these pronouncements was a deep-rooted worry: could I actually set up house with someone who kept vampire hours and needed a post-coital film fix? Would his hyper-organization make me feel as if I was living with a man whose behavior veered towards the monomaniacal, and for whom the movies were the greatest love of his life?

  Rebutting these worries was my knowledge that if Theo committed to something (like his massive, still-growing book), his sense of responsibility was ferocious. Just as I also knew that ever since that bad outburst months earlier his behavior had been exemplary; that he was very conscious of keeping under control all the dark stuff lurking within.

  Anyway, his heart was very much in the right place. I was ‘the best thing that had ever happened’ to him. I was ‘the person who really got’ him. I made him happy. How can you argue with that?

  But I did fear telling him the news because it was bound to toss up so many damn questions, the biggest one being: Why the hell didn’t you tell me you might have screwed up on the contraception front? I mean, didn’t I need to know about this as well?

  Theo was amazingly sanguine about all that. ‘Accidents do happen – especially after five margaritas. Anyway, it’s great news.’

  ‘You sure about that?’ I asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t say it if I wasn’t. I mean, you do want to have a kid with me, yes?’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ I heard myself saying. As those words came out of my mouth I thought: Here it is now. Your mind has been made up for you.

  ‘You do understand, Theo: this will change so much for us.’

  ‘I’m cool with that.’

  ‘Well, that’s . . . wonderful.’

  ‘But are you cool with all this, Jane?’ he asked, catching the hesitancy in my voice.

  ‘It’s . . . a big step.’

  ‘But we won’t exactly be the first people who ever did it. And it’s what I want. Because I want a life with you.’

  ‘And I with you,’ I said, even though I was still not so sure of that. How can you say such a definitive thing when you’re still so tortured with doubt?

  When I called Christy back and told her about Theo’s enthusiasm for fatherhood – and for a proper everyday life with me – she said: ‘Well, that’s what you wanted to hear, right? And it speaks volumes for the fact that the guy isn’t going to play the slacker dude and throw all the childcare responsibility your way. So this is genuinely good news.’

  ‘I’m not so sure . . .’

  ‘Then stop being a wuss and get a termination. You can always tell Theo that the baby miscarried. It happens all the time. I’m even happy to come back east and hold your hand and all that while you go through with it.’

  ‘That’s a big decision . . .’

  ‘Indeed it is. But remember this Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious: once you have the kid, you have the kid.’

  As George Orwell once noted, all clichés are fundamentally true, and the one which Christy just articulated made me realize that the decision was based on something I dealt with all the time in literature: interpretation. How do you choose to perceive a moral choice? Guilt is all rooted in the interpretation of events. It’s predicated on your take on things. How willing are you to twist reality to your own version of events? What can you (or can’t you) live with?

  This was the deciding factor for me – the realization that if I didn’t go through with this, it would bring me untold grief and would remain an open wound that wouldn’t cauterize. Simultaneously, I knew that I so wanted to keep this child . . . even though it would bind me to Theo in ways that still made me uneasy.

  But Theo’s enthusiasm for impending fatherhood proved boundless. The guy acted like a 1950s dad-to-be – all but passing out cigars and telling just about everyone we met that I was pregnant. Unbeknownst to me he even called Sara Crowe to let her in on the good news. I received a rather tart return call from Sara who, in her best Katharine Hepburn voice, expressed bemusement at my news.

  ‘Well, I suppose congratulations are in order.’

  ‘I did mean to call you, but it seems Theo got there first,’ I said, trying to disguise just how appalled I was that he was dispersing this news as if it belonged on Reuters.

  ‘Theo was very touching,’ she said, failing to mask the irony in her voice. ‘He told me that inviting you over that night had changed his life and he wanted me to know that he would be “ever grateful” to me for that.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘No doubt you’re enormously grateful to me too.’

  ‘There’s no need for sarcasm, Sara.’

  ‘I didn’t realize I was being sarcastic, Jane. Ruminative yes, but . . . well, it is your life.’

  ‘That’s right. It is my life. Thank you for your good wishes.’

  That night, when Theo came over to my apartment, I raised the issue about him informing all comers that I was pregnant.

  ‘You mean, you’re embarrassed about this, us?’

  ‘Hardly. It’s just . . . if something went wrong, if I was to miscarry . . .’

  ‘But that’s not going to happen.’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘Then what’s the big deal? Can I not be publicly pleased about this? And the very fact that Sara was the one who introduced us—’

  ‘That’s not the problem.’

  ‘Then what is the problem?’

  ‘I’m just jumpy, that’s all.’

  ‘We’re going to be fine,’ he said, putting his arms around me.

  ‘Of course we are,’ I said.

  ‘And we do need to start thinking about when I move in with you.’

  This last comment didn’t come as a jolt. Once I told him I was pregnant, I knew it was just a matter of time before we began to discuss long-term domestic arrangements. And as I was the possessor of the far-bigger apartment . . .

  ‘Given you’ve only got one bedroom – and your alcove office will probably double as the nursery – it’s going to be a bit hard for me to move all my stuff into your place. So why don’t I plan to sleep at your place but keep my apartment for work?’

  I was actually relieved that he suggested this arrangement. It would minimize the disruption to my life and would also give us both necessary space. If my parents’ marriage had taught me anything it was that a sense of entrapment is the death knell for any long-term relationship. Fair play to Theo for sensing that we’d benefit from the safety valve of time apart.

  ‘I think that’s very smart and grown up . . . and thank you for suggesting it,’ I said.

  A few days after our conversation, Theo borrowed a friend’s van and showed up one morning with a few basic essentials: his standard collection of T-shirts and jeans, a leather jacket, two pairs of black Converse Hi-Top sneakers, some underwear and socks. It all fit neatly into the chest of drawers I’d found for him. He also showed up with an espresso maker and a special stainless-steel vacuum-packed jug in which he kept his Lavazza coffee. Then he decided to re-alphabetize my entire library. And rearrange all the shelves in the kitchen. And re-grout a corner of the shower tiles that had never been properly filled in. And decide that the front hallway could benefit from a re-sanding. And . . .

  ‘If you start ironing my underwear,’ I said, ‘it’s over.’

  He did laugh at that, just as he also reorganized my closet and sanitized every drain.

  ‘When did this propensity for home improvement hit you?’ I asked.

  ‘When I finally had a proper home to improve. But you’re not complaining, are you?’

  No, I wasn’t complaining, as he w
asn’t one of those mad anal retentives who went berserk when a bathroom towel was out of alignment. And if I happened to forget to sort out the laundry or leave dishes in the sink . . . hey presto, Mr Clean rendered them clean.

  ‘Be pleased you are with a guy who actually cares about such stuff,’ Christy said when I phoned her from my office. ‘It also means he actually cares about you. On which note – are you still having that daily rendezvous with the toilet bowl?’

  Actually the chronic morning sickness had finally left me in peace. In its wake came a bout of manic itchiness. My obstetrician told me that it was a not-unusual side effect in pregnancy and gave me a cream that would relieve the sensation of bed bugs crawling beneath my skin. Theo insisted on rubbing it in every night and then we would sit down together and pore through all the baby and childcare books that I’d been able to find. And when I finally went to sleep, he would sit up until dawn, in thrall to one film after another on our big-screen television.

  The itchiness disappeared after two weeks. When I hit the three-month mark and was starting to show, I decided that the moment was right to break the news of my pregnancy to the two people I was dreading telling most: my department chairman and my mother.

  As I predicted, Professor Sanders was less than pleased to learn that I would be out on maternity leave in five months’ time.

  ‘Your timing could not be better,’ he said, ‘especially given the fact that you yourself were a last-minute replacement. Now I’m having to find a last-minute replacement for the last-minute replacement.’

  ‘Five months’ notice is not exactly last-minute.’

  ‘In the academic world it is just that. Still, what must be done will be done. And I do suppose that congratulations are in order.’

  Word naturally got around the department in three nanoseconds. Marty Melcher cornered me in the hallway and said: ‘So you’re not a virgin after all.’

  ‘You know, Professor – that comment could be considered a form of sexual harassment.’