by Lisa Zeidner
Ripped off my T-shirt and went to stand in front of the mirror, to inspect my breasts. Put my fingertips to them tenderly, to check for soreness, swelling.
If I was pregnant, I was only seventy-two hours pregnant. And I’d done my unintentional purge’n’ fast, so I hardly looked fat. Who could tell anyhow with my kerflooey cycles, since I was usually some version of pre- or postmenstrual, spotting or clotting, at the mercy of my perimenopausally creaky plumbing.
Yet again, after a nutritious breakfast, energy temporarily restored, playing with myself: the slightest Braille of fingerprint to nipple, trying to will into being that nimbus of early pregnancy, not even a quickening but the promise of it.
Was in that posture when Kramer called, let the phone ring once and called back, as arranged. What a peach.
By the time I raised the phone to my face, the energy was gone. Sank right through a trapdoor in the bottom of me. When did pregnancy’s exhaustion set in? Couldn’t remember. Certainly not three days, though. I flopped on the bed, thinking Kramer was right. A blood workup was in order.
I thanked him for breakfast and told him I was feeling better, if alarmed by my fatigue. Realized, hearing his voice, that I was very much looking forward to seeing the five-milligram Valium with its scored lug nut hole in the center, tasting its bitterness on my tongue.
But he said in order to get a prescription for even several of them, I’d have to have a little chat with the hotel’s physician. My call. The physician would come to the room, or I could go to him. Kramer had spoken to him, but for liability reasons—“Yeah, right,” I said. Given the restrictions at the swimming pool, I could imagine the waivers you’d need to sign to get even a Tylenol with codeine if your arm was dangling off. “Forget it.”
Perhaps Ken could do something, he suggested. Ken would not have a license to prescribe in Pennsylvania, but maybe there was someone he could call.
He’d like that, would our Ken. He could get right on it, calling the classmate of some classmate, or sweet-talking the (female) resident on call at the closest ER.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m pulling out of it, really. But did I mention to you I might be pregnant?”
“Really!”
“Wouldn’t be Ken’s. Would be the kid at the pool.”
I appeared to have rendered him speechless.
“Not that I’m sure,” I added. “Need to check the computer, see when my last period was. Not that that would be conclusive either. Anyhow it would only be a couple of days. But I have a feeling.”
“Are you happy about this?”
Pregnancy itself one of those travel-distance math problems, a thorny calculation of space-time coordinates. “If it’s true,” I said, “it’s like—God, I sound sixteen. ‘Meant to be.’”
“Do you think Ken would be pleased?”
I let that one go. Yes, it seemed mighty likely that Kenneth Leithauser, MD, would be tickled pink to raise a child who wasn’t his own, born of sex his wife had in a spasm of grief, revenge, mental instability, iron-poor blood, or all of the above. The very threat of the conversation I’d have to have with Ken was a major setback.
“We sure have a lot to discuss when you get back here,” Kramer said, heartily.
I could see what he was trying to do. He was mirroring my own tone of zesty detachment. My life like a great book you missed in both high school and college, but could now, in the fullness of middle age, discuss with your book club. My life as bad art, not quite Elvis on black velvet but the kind of pastoral scene you buy at hotel expos. Maybe, though, that wasn’t his tone at all. I was in no position to evaluate his tone. Already, breakfast aside, I was ready to surrender to another half-life of sleep. I’m melting! I wanted to croak, like the Wicked Witch of the West. But it seemed like too much trouble to say. And if I couldn’t get that out I wasn’t going to be able to explain to my therapist this other symptom, beginning to grow more troublesome: how for these couple of weeks I’d kept translating my own distress into pop-cult references, Hitchcock and The Wizard of Oz, so that my own life had been clouded by a gluey layer of allusion. It reminded me of the coat of anonymous white paint that they slap over the walls of rental apartments when new tenants move in, without even priming.
And what was going to be there when I stripped all that goop away? “My husband is a jerk?” “I still miss my baby?” “I want a family?”
“Oh, Dan,” was all I could say.
“How ’bout we work on a game plan,” he said.
Sure. Let’s get busy.
We walked together through the necessary steps to departure, gingerly as father and daughter at a wedding rehearsal. There was a shower, packing the suitcase. There was the call to work (he had not yet had a chance to make it), the call to the airlines. There was the matter of the rental car in the garage of the Children’s Hospital, which he let me go on about. Lastly, and most anxiously, there was the mounting mountain of unreturned phone calls and e-mail, the ribbon of numbers on my pager. I would need the equivalent of an air traffic controller to figure out where my life was, where I was supposed to be.
“Is there anything so urgent,” he asked, “that it couldn’t wait until Monday?”
“How would I know? I don’t even know what’s out there. But I could march straight into the ocean and never come out and I’m sure it wouldn’t make a ripple in the great wide universe if that’s your point, although a couple of people would be inconvenienced.”
“That wasn’t my point, actually. My point was just that it’s Thursday, heading toward lunchtime. I’m just trying to determine how efficient you really have to be, under the circumstances.”
“I happen to know you can wax existential as well as the next fella. But I guess you’re trying to get me to stick to the point, whatever it may be.”
“Right. ‘The point.’”
For a second, parroting, he sounded just like Zachary. Impatience surged: shouldn’t my therapist be more profound than a college freshman? Shouldn’t he be willing to engage me more fully? I had chosen a down-to-earth, warm kind of guy, quite against the advice of my husband, who of course considered them all charlatans and would prefer to treat grief with a CAT scan and a controlled dosage, and if there were side effects well then he could treat the side effects. (Not that he’d take psychotropic drugs himself. Like a hairdresser with an atrocious haircut, he considered himself above his own ministrations.) Even the term “grief work,” which Dan had perhaps overused during our couples sessions, made Ken twitch—it had kind of endeared him to me, actually. His long, lean legs crossed, his posture studiously calm—the ideal patient, displaying patience—one leg would jump, as if his knee had just been bopped with the rubber reflex hammer.
“The point,” Dan continued, “is to sort out which exigencies need to be attended to there, and which are better left until you return. I know it has been enormously important to you to have your work, and I respect that. It’s also fairly self-evident that you’re not unambivalently looking forward to ‘the comforts of home.’ To be blunt: you’ve run away.”
“Not really.”
“Exactly. ‘Not really.’ Just sort of.”
“Exactly sort of,” I agreed.
“So why don’t you sort of come back, where you and I can at least really talk. If it turns out that you find you need some kind of buffer zone, you could always stay in a hotel here.”
“Now there’s an appealing idea. Hide in a charming Holiday Inn three miles from my house.”
“My trouble, Claire, is that from this distance it’s hard for me to sort through all your layers. You’re clearly being sarcastic, but you also sound kind of energized by the idea. The one thing I can tell is that you’re genuinely distressed.”
He was right. Of course he was right. “All right,” I said.
Together, Dan Kramer and I assembled a list. We discussed each item and I wrote them down, in order, on a piece of Four Seasons stationery. Shower first, pack second, and so forth. I found myself attacking t
his process with gusto, trying to do it like an outline for a “process” paper in college—
I. Shower
A. Remove Clothes
B. Turn On Water
1. Get It To Right Temperature
2. Test With Back of Hand
C. Close Shower Curtain—
—could see myself, in the outline, tipping my head back into the spray. “Take it,” Dan was saying, “not even day by day but just action by action, thinking, ‘What is necessary.’” Was it necessary to tip your head back? Was it necessary to rub the shampoo in? Was it necessary to rinse it out?
Yes. The answer was yes, or I’d end up here forever, a four-star-hotel bag lady, compatriot of Howard Hughes, checking coffeepots for water bugs.
Clean, dressed, lipstick applied even, I felt emboldened to study my punch list, off which I could now cross “shower.” Pack was next, but that amounted to only several garments, and I felt up to something more challenging. Surveyed the game plan: call the desk. Call the office (sick). Then the optionals, extra credit for degree of difficulty:
—Check messages [check only—what’s desperate] (!)
—Swim????
Swimming made no sense; I’d just showered. So I girded my loins and retrieved messages.
On hotel voice mail, three different people, on different shifts, at the Four Seasons desk, threatening me with eviction for nonpayment of room charges. Evidently I had slept straight through all of these phone calls, as well as some frantic knocks at the door. Had they entered, proven unable to rouse me, gotten worried? Perhaps, because the last message said silkily—even apologetically—that everything had been taken care of. I paused only briefly to wonder how (had Dan gotten the credit-card number from Ken?), decided I did not care. Then called my voice mail at work.
Not bad. Only thirteen, fourteen additional messages, some superseding or merely confirming requests or questions already left in previous last calls. It was, I remembered, late August. Hospitals were still open for business, ready to embrace the dying and dead, but in general people took vacation. (Why was my therapist working?) They endured horrific traffic to reach the beach. They ended work early on Fridays and just hung out in their backyards—too hot for urgency.
What if my whole slo-mo dive off the deep end could fall under the perfectly respectable American heading of need a vacation?
So braced did I feel by this thought that I decided I’d return a call or two, and I began with the one I assumed would bring me the most potential pleasure: the clean slate of a new customer. Couldn’t quite make out the name—“Hill Cataract,” sounded like, in the secretary’s harried voice; but it was a clear phone number from New York City, and the geography, outside my usual referral route, made me curious.
This small decision, it would turn out, was a big mistake, unless you happen to believe that there are no mistakes. (I, however, having studied probability as a math major in college, happen to believe in accident. In the accidental nature of accident.) Breakfast and a shower had not made me feel strong enough to deal with my husband’s lover, and that, not a new customer, was the person behind the phone call.
“You’re in luck,” a woman said, chewing, when the secretary put me through, as she had apparently been instructed to do. “I’m eating. I can talk.”
In luck was not what I felt. “I am the woman your husband screwed once in Puerto Vallarta”: someone else might have managed to hang up, but I was so stunned I just listened in cowed silence. My husband, she said, who had refused ever to speak to her again after they made love the one time, who had rejected her efforts at normalizing collegial communication, had just last night called her out of the blue, ranting. At home! Had called her not at her office but at home and, without even inquiring about the whereabouts of her husband or children, proceeded, paranoid, to blame her for deeds she did not commit, including, evidently, the threatened dissolution of our (Ken and my) marriage.
Luckily, the husband was out, the children at camp.
But Kenneth, she said, was insane.
“And I said,” she said, “‘whoah.’ What are you talking about. At which point he told me you had left him, and this, it seems, is my fault. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Did you tell her? Did I ask you to tell her?’ To which he replied that he was not a snake like his esteemed colleagues, that he and you had a committed life together with full disclosure (as if my husband and I do not) and who did I think he was? Didn’t I realize there were real issues here? As if—excuse me a minute.”
I actually waited, paralyzed, while she took another call.
“Okay. So. Anyway. Look. I don’t know what’s going on. Obviously. But I thought it might be helpful if we talked. Because I realized that I was—because Ken—”
Whereupon my husband’s lover’s voice choked. As if she was fighting back tears. Or merely gagging on her lunch. Horrible hospital-cafeteria “chef’s salad.”
“To be honest: he messed with my head. My feelings for him were completely unexpected, and likewise I think, and it was very, very interesting, and I will say—if you want me to, if it helps—‘I’m sorry.’”
“That’s quite all right,” I said cheerfully.
These might have been the very first words I got out.
“Is it?” she said. “How could it be?”
Fair question. I rooted around for an answer. Dug past the mental topsoil of the obvious answers, which were—I noticed that the Four Seasons ballpoint pen was poised over my list, as if this exchange were about to become part of it—(1) It wasn’t all right; and (2) It was not the time to discuss whether or not it was all right. In either case detachment had risen in me again, for protection—a detachment that felt almost wet, slippery, like the fluid protecting an eyeball.
“I’m sorry about your son,” she said (did I imagine this?) roughly. “I do not, believe me, begrudge you going the saint route. But I’ve seen it often enough in my line of work, and it’s a problem. Because alas other people have lives and emotions too, you know. Life goes on, as they say.”
She punched out each word with ghastly flatness. Bitch! At that moment I knew she was a surgeon. She had a surgeon’s cruelty. “Life. Goes. On. As. They. Say”: I saw each word as a musical note on a scale, her voice as the bouncing ball that, in old movies, helped you to sing along. Then the black note got flipped on its side, until it was a cartoon ant, flipped on its back, its antennae wildly waving. Archy and Mehitabel. Alas.
A mistake. I was losing it again. I was speechless. No choice: I just listened to her.
My husband’s lover’s name was Hillary Katzenbach. I imagined her solid, feisty, and short, but that’s not really fair. That’s just Mrs. Clinton with her dolorous piano legs, claiming the name. Bessie, Eleanor—First Lady names. I imagined a kind, firm nurse.
But that’s not fair either, because Hillary Katzenbach was an MD. Not just an MD but a surgeon. Not just a surgeon but a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon, one of maybe a hundred in the country and, it appeared, the cream even of that select crop. Sought after for difficult surgeries. Of course they would all be difficult, if they were pediatric.
She had a surgeon’s voice. I had met enough of them to know the voice. “Cool,” “hard” are polite understatement. Frozen steel more like it. Petroleum by-products for blood: “Alien,” the big mamma. You would think the women would be gentler, but having survived not only medical school, where they still get treated like the only female cadet at an all-boys military academy, but particularly grueling residencies, they tend to overcompensate. They’re even worse than the men. Don’t fuck with me and here are the facts. I had never met a female pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon, but I had met the men and they were the worst. The very worst of the already bad lot that are surgeons. They watch children die every day. How could it not harden them, if they are to go on?
Imagine the flash of hope a parent would feel when Hillary Katzenbach entered a hospital room, thrust out her hand. Meticulously manicured nails—female physicia
ns, I’d noticed, are often fetishistic about their nails. Imagine how fast the hope would fade, the second they heard her say her name, her voice as hard as those consonants. Here’s the procedure. Here are the risks.
I knew that Ken met her at a medical convention. Remet her—in fact he had already slept with her a couple of times, a quarter century ago, as an undergraduate at Michigan. I knew that she was an MD. But I had not, when he confessed the affair to me in the spring, asked for further detail. Did not ask her name, marital status, medical specialty. I was much more interested in what it meant that he’d felt the need to tell me then, since it was my conviction, then and now, that he shouldn’t have told me, certainly not almost a full year after the fact, when it was, he claimed, a totally done deal. I was not on a need-to-know basis on the matter of why he threw someone against the wall of an elevator at a medical convention.
(That is what I saw, if forced to contemplate it. I watched them leaving whatever seminar together. They are alone in the elevator as he begins to kiss her. There is nothing tentative in the kiss, it being Ken. She collapses backward onto the wall. In my home movie he takes both of her hands, low, and as she tries to raise them, to hold him, to hold his back in the conventional fashion, he grips her more tightly, she’s pushing against the pressure of his hands, so by the end they are twin crucifixes against the wall of the elevator, or sucking starfish. This is not a movie I enjoyed replaying and I hardly needed to get sharper focus by asking him her height or the height of her heels, her hair color or her place of residence.)
So I knew she was a doctor. But a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon: this I did not know. Why would Ken choose, as someone to fuck at a hotel, a woman who was smarter than he was? More respected? In the pecking order of medicine, a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon—no less one at a world-renowned Manhattan teaching hospital—would be alpha-wolf to my husband’s scrawny mutt. While she was saving the life of a newborn, working with superhuman efficiency and precision in that tiny chest cavity, he’d be doing a bypass on a crude, ungrateful sixty-two-year-old insurance executive. Ken wouldn’t even know the man’s name, he’d just enter and do the procedure, working against his own best time like any repairman, while the family of that newborn would be gazing up at Hillary Katzenbach as if she were God Herself. She was a wizard, a savior. My husband was a plumber, cranking out cardiological Jiffy Lubes.