by Lisa Zeidner
“Well!” Mar said, cheerful now. “I guess I’ll go fix myself up before dessert!”
For a longer-than-usual time after she left, Zachary and I did not speak. We just looked at each other, enjoying the undemanding silence. His gaze was disconcertingly adult. Didn’t therapists have a word for the kids made into divorcées’ confidants and comforters? I hoped the precipitous sophistication would not hurt him too much, turn him into a misogynist or gigolo.
“You were so good with her,” I said. “I’m really impressed.”
“And you were—kind of rough.”
“Sorry.”
“You can’t imagine the progress she’s made. I mean, she got through almost the whole dinner without talking about my dad once.”
“I’m sorry, Zach.”
“You, anyhow, no offense, do not seem like any Michael Jordan of Mental Health, to go lecturing someone else on their game.”
“True. Sorry.”
He shook his head at me, in imitation of a stern headmaster.
Why had I been so mean? Out of protectiveness for him, of course. Out of indignation for him, that she didn’t even pretend to take more consolation from being his mother. Why do awful parents always get such sensitive, self-sufficient kids? It doesn’t seem fair. And because every so often I couldn’t help playing Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen. I was supposed to think she had problems, over a divorce? Still. I felt so bad for turning the woman’s special night out into Lord of the Flies that I thought I might cry myself.
As if reading my mind, he said, “Hey! Forget about it! It was fun! Good clean fun to beat up on my mom! She can take it. Believe me, when she comes back from the bathroom with her new lipstick on she’ll be fine. You, I’m not so sure about.”
“Me,” I agreed.
“Yes. You. As in ‘you.’”
The you hung there, like a reproach.
But Margot had returned, bright-lipped as Zachary had predicted, led by the shiny feet in a runway-model swagger, full of high spirits and forgiveness.
“I haven’t missed the famous Le Bec Fin dessert tray, have I?” she asked. “Have you ever been here? What does your husband do, Claire, incidentally? You didn’t say. Waiter?”
“Surgeon,” I sighed. “Cardiothoracic.”
“How romantic! Did you meet in school? Do you practice together?”
Here was my chance to set the record straight. There was no excuse not to. So I did. Just blurted out the microfiche-condensed version: accident, troubled marriage, unfaithful husband, fictitious kid at Brown.
“I apologize to you both. And to you especially, Mar, because I have no right…”
Zach was craning his neck desperately. Hoping for the arrival of the dessert tray to forestall further revelations. But Mar’s eyes were filling again, with sympathy. “Horrible,” she said. “So hard.” And: “Do you love your husband?”
I nodded to indicate that I did, very much.
“Then let me give you some advice,” she said. “Hold on. Even if you’re not sure what you’re holding on to.”
Our waiter then appeared wheeling twenty or thirty desserts on a cart. He gave us time to rapturously ogle. He explained, caressingly, the identity of each item. We could have whatever we wanted, even a bite of everything. Made much of composing the plates to each of our kid-in-a-candy-shop liking.
We smiled, and ate, and moaned. The waiter put the bill on the middle of the table and Zachary swooped for it. He mimicked all the gestures of an adult man approaching a check—crossing his legs, reading the check sideways in its black folder in his lap, withdrawing a credit card and slipping it in with the folder in one move like a man picking a lock—so well that he would have seemed just like an adult male, until he said:
“Let’s test out this card, Mom. See if it works.”
“Well, thanks!” I said. “To you both!”
Hey, I was entitled to the dinner for services rendered. Sex. Psychotherapy.
But I paid for the cab back to the hotel.
The dessert had stunned us all. We didn’t really talk about anything but our joint satiation.
In the lobby Mar and I shook hands. There was so little between us now we really could have just met at a medical convention. Like me, she was somewhere to the side of inebriated. Zachary seemed to be the only one able to hold his drink. More practice, probably.
Was it me, was it the alcohol, or did every move this kid make have a kind of ironic shadow, a ventriloquized sarcasm? As if he were sitting behind himself making faces at himself, like that old Chevy Chase Saturday Night Live skit. Which he wouldn’t have even seen. Too young. “Doctor,” he said, moving the arm toward me in a slow-motion arc, as if it was part of a tai chi move. “Very nice. To make your acquaintance.”
“To Brown,” I said. “To swimming.”
I was trying to imply I could meet him at the pool, but I couldn’t—I knew that, even if he didn’t—and anyway the invitation swam right by him.
“And remember,” Mar said, “if you ever need to chat—”
“Thanks!”
“—just call! Call right up!”
“I will! And good luck to you!”
If I knew what state she lived in, to which state she fled after the divorce, I had already forgotten. But Zachary, I knew, I could find. He would soon have a PO box at his dorm, an e-mail address.
I also knew I would never see or speak to him again.
Except in the elevator, which we had to share. Nothing like exchanging totally shallow good-byes twice.
My room was too cold and smelled vaguely foul, like ice cubes that hold the odor of the freezer where they’re stored, the bad tap water from which they’re made. My bed had been turned down. My message light blinked spastically.
I turned down the air-conditioning and stood beside the window, rubbing my goose-bumped arms. Tried to take in the city’s twinkling lights as comfortingly impersonal—a big wide world that I was a part of. But there was no solace in the thought. I wasn’t a speck of sand in the desert that God made for some seagull to peck at, part of a grand, melodic plan. I was just a speck. No more momentous than a runway light.
How dramatic, I thought and also, You really can’t drink.
Shortly thereafter I found myself before the toilet, retching. Wretched.
No offense to the famous chef and his touch with butterfat in all of its glorious manifestations.
There’s nothing like puking in a strange bathroom to make you long for the comforts of home.
I returned the phone call to the desk. The clerk said that if I was planning to stay on, they would need an imprint of my card. My card had been stolen, I reminded him. I had paid him cash. But only for the first night, he noted, and that would not necessarily cover incidentals. I said I would call back with the number (which I had not thought to transcribe, on the phone with the bank).
“I’m not sure that’ll work,” he said.
“And why on earth is that?” I inquired, roughly.
“Once you’re here, we require an imprint of the card. Anyone, you know, could pull one of your credit-card receipts from the trash and pretend to be you, use your number.”
“So you want to see my driver’s license? It’s got my picture on it. Anyhow, wouldn’t that be equally true for the deposit you give over the phone, in advance?”
“I’m afraid that’s our policy, but I’ll check with our manager,” he said, with strained patience.
This is the treatment one can expect when one pays? Hotel staffs had been more accommodating to me when I was a squatter. Even if I managed to get back to an ATM, the hotel might not accept a cash payment, just as you can’t rent a car without a credit card to prove you are financially solvent.
I told him I would take care of it, soon. Then I lay down fully clothed on the bed with the thought that, yes, expired: Ken could come now. Ken could come and get me.
Didn’t even brush my teeth. Just crossed my arms like a mummy and waited for Ken.
<
br /> II
Except he didn’t come, of course.
It was—Wednesday? Thursday? Day sixteen, seventeen of my walkabout? On my watch, the day and date had become stuck; at noon they would creep halfway to the next stop and stay there, trembling, like a house cat frozen in the middle of an intersection, until midnight, at which point they’d leap a day or a day and a half. Decidedly not a weekend, in any case, and Dr. Kenneth Leithauser would be at his office, seeing patients, any one of whom could, unlike me, actually up and die at any moment.
Easy enough to stand, turn on the computer, check the date and time. Flick on the stock-market channel, check the date and time scrolling along the bottom along with the quotes. Easier still: twist my neck, look at the clock. Digital. No need, even, to process the meaning of hands along a dial. But it was pleasant somehow, or necessary, to not know.
Leithauser. I lay in bed, cesspool-mouthed, trying to conjure my husband. Trying to think about him. He was a brainteaser, as his name was a mouthful. I wanted to mentally embrace him with a wife’s easy fondness but I kept getting ensnared in some intangible tangle. Leithauser: I tried saying his name out loud to myself, caressingly. Tried to follow lighthouse through the obvious metaphorical connotations—the comforting beam of light leading me home—but the lighthouse kept turning phallic, the sea below dark and matted as pubic hair, and then it would be, as I tried to draw eye and brain upward, not even Ken’s lighthouse but Zachary’s. Pinker. Sex itself a computer-animated game of ring toss where I was the life buoy bobbing nearby, being shot upward toward the mammoth head, but I couldn’t reach that high and I would never fit anyway, then sinking back into the undertow. Wailing, in Betty Boop squeak, Save me!
Zachary also did not come.
Not that he was expected. But maybe a phone call. A goodbye, nice-to-meet-you phone call would have been gallant. I kept semi-waiting for it; when he calls, I thought, I will wake up, get on with things.
Hitchcock again. The climax of Notorious: Ingrid Bergman, steadily and insidiously poisoned by her Nazi hubby, quite fetching on her deathbed, hair combed and lipstick on, pale in her opaque nightgown, groggy and foggy, so that Cary Grant, when he arrives, has to swoop her up and carry her down the long, long stairway. Where was Ken?
Cary Grant, cardiothoracic surgeon. This won’t hurt a bit. How beautifully the lab coat drapes on him. Pulling the bulky stethoscope from his pants as suavely as a pocket watch.
I tried to get out of the operating room by imagining my myopic husband taking off his glasses to kiss me. He always took his glasses off before we kissed, so why was I imagining—why could I only imagine—the first time he did so? It had been obvious we would make love, we both knew we would, when we arranged the date. I sat on his couch after the movie, expectant. He sat not next to me, but across from me, on the ottoman from the matching chair. Stood up solemnly to move the ottoman closer. Here’s the part I kept replaying, how all of these things happened at once: he swooped the glasses off by grabbing the bridge piece and reached beside him to put the glasses down (he wouldn’t have had time to fold them); he emitted the tiniest of moans, not excitement so much as an exhalation of surrender, defeat; and then I was locked blindly into his hard kiss. No romantic farting-about with Ken, not even at the start. He’s not a tickler or licker, no maestro of escalating series of exploratory anythings. He is as functional and forthright as the rented, Scotchgarded living-room furniture he had then as a medical student, which sexually, at its best, translates into a blunt urgency straight out of TV shows about emergency rooms. And at its worst is marriage. Managed care.
But that first time his eyes were open. He couldn’t see, because he’s blind, and when my eyes fluttered open he was watching me. Trying to watch me. More than first seeing his veiny cock emerging like a bald eagle from its bird’s nest of black (now graying) hair—erect it looked angry and put me in mind sometimes, cartoonishly, of the Black Panther power fist—seeing his naked blue-gray eyes felt like being trusted with a secret.
When I think about falling in love with my husband I feel that moan and the vulnerability of his eyes. It is cumbersome to describe but in memory it happens in less than a heartbeat and is etched in me permanently, the strength of the memory in direct contrast to the moment’s delicacy, like a fossil-print of a fern. The intensity because it is a moment only, unrepeatable. As opposed to marriage (washing and meticulously drying his glasses, dropping his glasses, “where the hell are my glasses”). I had had sex with Zachary only the day before and already the memory had less force than my first time with my husband, but that is because you need history—time itself—to give the moment weight. Which is why all the seventies rhetoric about “living for the moment” was such a crock. But then, we were eighteen. Everything was a crock.
Crock, cock, and here is the bleed, the blood: the birth of my son. Another moment, preserved trembling not in aspic but in fetal cheese. The final push and the fact of the flesh of my flesh. During the hospital tours I had been obsessed with the procedures for labeling the newborns. Didn’t want someone else’s. Wanted my own. But I recognized him immediately. Smashed and bloody, splotchy, wrinkled and ragged-nailed, wary, indignant, resigned: mine.
This I cannot describe, even at length. How I knew. Alien as he looked, he had not been sent from outer space, he had just exploded from inside me, and I felt the first second the doctor held him up that you could throw him naked at night into a field of babies, babies multiplying like ears of corn—all crying, a racket like crickets in summer—and I could still pick him out, still hear his cry. Zoom right to him.
BOY NEWBOLD, the wrist tag announced; I never changed my name, and my son’s name hadn’t been definitive for the first day or so. I loved the sound of it. “Boy Newbold”: valiant, King Arthury. We’d wanted a name that swaggered, not the weight lifters or car repairmen of Wayne or Guy, just masculine and decisive without being silly. Those one-syllable Hun/Viking/biblical names: Ned, Luke, Matt, Jake. But then we saw him and we couldn’t do it. Saw his softness—even breast-feeding, purposeful, there was something gentle in him. Courteous. Almost formal. Ken’s parents found it pretentious (and WASPy, of course). “What is he,” Ken’s mother tssked, “a law firm?” But what did they know. “Evan” wasn’t even the top contender until we met him, and it was his name.
“Love at first sight?” Any woman who believes she has felt this about a man is a liar. Not this. You really have to start from scratch, from birth. From the namelessness of creation, before language, before even sex.
And isn’t what makes the love of an infant so profound that it puts you back to the most bedrock layers of yourself, when you barely existed but needed to be loved. Don’t all of us replay, individually, the history of mankind, the evolution from tadpole to mammal. And all of us need to be loved not as accomplished, attractive adults, but as we are when we were born. Ugly as moles. Needy. Blind, open mouths.
If my son had lived, he wouldn’t have remembered a thing that had happened to him so far. Not a single thing. But his life as an infant would have been there, fossilized, in his most secret places. He would have felt it when he kissed a woman, when he held his own newborn.
The head of a penis is not like the head of an infant. It is more like the head of a leprechaun or elf, bald and shiny, cheerful. But the penis has an infant’s eye, that blind and swollen slit.
Speaking of slits. These are the kinds of things I thought about and did, locked in the Four Seasons hotel room, fuguing out as Ken would say. Semi-sleeping, I would follow the circuit of these thoughts and then, at slit, see it as an entry in an old-fashioned, wooden-drawered library card catalogue. SLIT, SPEAKING OF. Typed on an old-fashioned manual typewriter, the kind where the periods struck with such force they’d punch holes through the paper. As illustration of the force I would reach down and simply yank on my underwear—wasn’t there a word for this as a fraternity hazing ritual, cold-cocking, cold-cunting?—until the edge of the cotton was shoved in the crack. Wou
ld attempt to make myself come this way, simply by concentrating on the misplaced edge of lace and elastic, on words like cold and crack, their sharp simplicity. Couldn’t. Would realize I had to pee. Would contemplate getting up. SEE ALSO: HOLE. Wet. Would contemplate getting up, taking a shower, going to the pool. Would envision myself going back and forth, back and forth. You should make yourself come, it’d make you feel better. But I had to pee. Not enough energy, even, to get up and do that, no less swim laps. Not enough energy to get up and make sure that the DO NOT DISTURB sign was in position, so that I couldn’t masturbate because I would be interrupted, momentarily, by someone trying to clean the room. I was in terror that it would be Nefertiti, from yesterday. This time she would be armed. Well let her see, I would think, rousing myself enough to throw off the covers, take off my underwear, openly masturbate. But a stroke or two would remind me I couldn’t. I had to pee. And it was too cold. Not enough energy, even, to get up and adjust the thermostat.
But eventually I would, and go to the bathroom, in time for it to get too hot, and I’d need to start the process over again.
Through all of this a persistent image: the rental car in the parking garage at the Children’s Hospital. Just parked there.
Where, even, was the stamped receipt. I hadn’t seen it. Should go through my purse. Wasn’t even sure I remembered what car it was. Was not sure when I returned to the lot I could find it. Red? Gray? Buick? Camry? I had no idea. None. The rental car had fled from my head.
B.F.D. I would say to myself, you can call Enterprise, they will look it up in the computer, like they care that you are a ditz. That is all you are, you are a ditz. But I knew I was far worse than a ditz and also far better because the connections I was making—the long ribbon of sex, self, procreation—were real and true, even if I had to go a bit crazy to string them together, let myself go out of focus enough to see the faceted beads of these thoughts glinting.