Layover

  If you ever want to know where you stand as an American, try gaining admittance to a hospital the computers of which do not already have a record of you. An imprint of my Blue Cross card, a xerox of my driver’s license—I was a citizen. A confirmation call from Dr. Rieff to the reception desk allowed my tall, white, entitled-looking escort to take me right to Labor and Delivery, where the surprisingly young Sharon (“Shar!” Michael exclaimed, grabbing her face and steadying it so he could kiss her loudly on the cheek, a kiss avuncular for public display only) sat among the chattering nurses and residents, doing record-keeping with a big stack of patient files.

  I had not anticipated Labor and Delivery. I had expected an anonymous cubicle in her office. But Dr. Rieff was on call and had told us to meet her right there, at the big steel table in the center of the hub of cubicles, where she was making herself take up the least amount of room, not getting in the way of the nurses, not being distracted in the least by the mingled screams and moans of the women behind the doors.

  I had not been in Labor and Delivery since my own. Had not been there before that except once, for the hospital tour, during which I obsessed about the absolute necessity of being placed in one of the two spacious, pastel new Birthing Suites, just like hotel rooms except for the state-of-the-art equipment. When push came to shove, however, I was not first come, first served. The Birthing Suites were occupied, so I was wheeled from one of the minuscule, decrepit cubicles, mung or glue visible underneath the peeling wallpaper, to the old delivery room. The pain wiped out the disappointment. Who invented the myth that women forget the pain of delivery? “What’s it like” we had all asked about contractions, during the classes. Like King Kong picking you up in his fist and squeezing you, so you are both possessed by the pain and curiously outside it, watching yourself, tiny and distant, in pain’s palm. The thing is that, unlike most pain, it doesn’t linger. No aftermath. The contractions just stop, as if it has snowed twenty inches and suddenly sun out, snow melted, not even a trace of salt on the concrete.

  Dr. Sharon Rieff stood to thrust out her hand. Short, like my OB-GYN. Big, big wedding rock. She asked a nurse if there was a spare room, told Michael he could get some coffee and come back in twenty minutes. “Got a gown for her?” she asked the nurse, and before I knew it, my legs were dangling over the edge of the gurney (hospital fluorescents make even recently shaven legs look bristly, blue, lifeless, the limbs of an unidentified person washed up from the river) and the little lady was squeezing my nipples. Hard.

  “There we go,” she said. “And this started when?”

  I was very hungry. The frozen waffle would have been my last food and that was the morning before. Through the wall, the woman in the cubicle next to me, in the early stages of labor, let out an exploratory wail. A male voice muttered encouragement while Dr. Rieff felt my glands, asked some more questions, had me lie down, screwed in the cold speculum, reached into me with that face OB-GYNs make: staring into space, as if imagining your insides on an overhead projector.

  “Seem pregnant?” I asked.

  “Not obviously. Why? Feel pregnant?”

  “Sure tired enough.”

  She smiled. “What we’ll do,” she said, as she rummaged in drawers for needles and bottles, wearing the universal expression of doctors repressing irritation when they’re performing a task that ought to be performed by an underling, “is run the blood-work, give you a call if it’s clear, get the results to your doctor in—”

  “Ohio. So,” I asked, as she got my vein to pop. “What’s increased libido a symptom of?”

  At the very second the needle entered, the woman through the wall screamed. My doctor laughed, either because of the synchronicity or my question. Probably the latter, for she said, “Michael. It’s a sign of Michael. Lust is not a warning sign of many diseases, except maybe mental ones. Exactly the opposite, in fact, so if you’re hot-to-trot, odds are you don’t have a thyroid problem. Or The Adenoma for that matter.”

  Same as my doctor—that the.

  When I looked up from watching my blood fill the vial, she was checking me out with full-throttle curiosity. She’d registered my wedding band and my home state; she wondered what I was doing with Michael. But she didn’t have to wonder hard, because she thought she already knew. What she was confirming, with pleased surprise, was her own indifference to Michael’s amorous activities. Whatever they had done, whenever, was “in the past,” not ragged and jangling but snug as a bug in a rug. As my blood ran out she was checking the safety of her own marriage, her own life—surreptitiously, as you adjust your bathing suit when you come out of the pool. She seemed like a decent sort (OB-GYNs often are), and I knew I could say a sentence or two about my son, gain from her a sympathy that might momentarily soothe, might also gain her cooperation and haste for the task at hand. But I would not do so. Had spoken plenty to Kramer about the way that I “held” the pain, but those who would argue for “letting it out” did not understand grief’s most essential feature: the pain is exactly the opposite of a contraction. Not clearly outlined and temporary, but permanent. Best you can hope for is pain management. Or distraction. Sleep with this person or that.

  Dr. Sharon Rieff had finished with my blood and now, I realized, had her thumb to my wrist, checking my pulse. “Are you okay?” she asked. “You look really—”

  I was pale and breathing hard, in Labor and Delivery, cold in my blue gown, listening to another woman shriek through a wall. I shook my head: fine. And then Michael knocked on the door and entered, with a show of bashful restraint, exactly as a doctor would, having given you time to get your clothes off. The doctor and I both gazed up at him, tall and glowing in the doorway. I felt preposterously happy to see him. Felt, in fact, like I was in one of those movies where the woman goes into labor while her husband is out of town and he rushes back, gets there just in time. His face, gauging me, so full of tenderness and respect that you’d think he was my husband, even if he had no idea who I was or what he was doing with me—which makes him, I suppose, like most husbands. Toward Michael I felt—still feel—a profound gratitude, an utterly unironic appreciation for the kindness of strangers.

  “Michael,” I said. “Feed me.”

  He did. We were then free to make love. Creditably. Languid, biting—my memory of that sex dissolves into shards. He saw to it that I opened up, exploded, like a tulip in time-lapse. But this session felt like it was superimposed over the original, better print. I could remember, as from long ago, the weight of his first touch on each place he touched now. The memory was Edenic, was of loss. Our sex had been lush and sudden, like an action painting or a flamed French sauce. All of this—all of this was just monkeying-with.

  I should have either left, or planned to stay. But this, the Weekend of Love like an unmoored houseboat: this was awkward.

  By Saturday, before dinner, my whole life felt like a car dangling over a cliff in an action-adventure film. Close-up on the spinning wheels in mud. Close-up on the tree trunk on which the car’s weight rests, slowly cracking.

  He had to go grocery shopping. Would cook dinner, he said, if I didn’t mind something simple. Did I want to come, or stay and rest? I chose, gingerly, the latter, which was, of course, a choice of some significance. Because I could have sat beside him in his car, bantered about his consumer choices in the store. This being Michael—a man so reserved he made my husband look like Heathcliff—even his asking me to accompany him meant something, was fraught with the implication that I could stay, or at least flirt with the idea of staying, if I wanted. That we had, however unlikely it seemed, a future together.

  So I felt bad to say no, flat-out. Felt I had to tell him: “You know how some people are afraid to drive, after a car accident? My thing has been, since then, grocery stores. Hate them. Really have to drag myself. Family life, in its full glory. Aisles of diapers, Jell-O, sugary cereals. The yowling infants in the carts.”

  He smiled. “This is a more elegant emporium, though. Mesclun, go
urmet take-out—little stuffed-quail kind of things.”

  “Right,” I said. “Baby vegetables. Baby squash, baby eggplant, baby corn. Baby, baby, baby. Fiddlehead ferns…”

  Before he left he brought me a glass of white wine. I did not move from the bed while he was gone, even to go to the bathroom. Just sat up enough to sip, the wineglass resting coolly on my stomach. That I had had sex—that I had done, ever, anything—amazed me. But Michael would come back with more food (his job in life, vis-à-vis me, seemed to be to provide sustenance), and I would get through the weekend, and by Monday Dr. Rieff would give me some kind of hint of whether or not I was going to live, or dive straight off the cliff.

  Coffee, bagels, Sunday New York Times. Michael has the business section. I study the wedding announcements as I do every week, reading past the scam of journalistic objectivity—daughter of, son of, alma mater, job—to see what kind of fault lines are most likely to swallow up bliss. Truly, marriage is a glass house on a cliff in Malibu, with a view, but no earthquake insurance. There is always a balance of tales threatening dramatic tension (Dad and Mom both remarried, Dad to bimbo, Mom to minister who will perform ceremony) with wholesome-yet-successful kids from stable families (Jill will teach kindergarten while Jack says “Sure I want to make partner, but it’s family that matters”). Who knows, maybe he will even mean it. Or think he does.

  Some weeks, seems like every person getting married is an investment counselor.

  Then the pull story, in which people with unusual careers (maker of kooky hats, gold-leafer of illuminated manuscripts) meet cute and engage in cagey courtship, not yet aware of what is clear to all their interesting friends, that they are “made for each other.” Laughing at each other’s jokes as they help the homeless.

  Michael wants to summarize for me an article on the fiscal politics of neurobiological research. While we sip our coffee, some lab coat with a grant fiddles with neuropeptide Y, the neurotransmitter for both hunger and reproduction. Someday you can take your pill, get pregnant without having sextuplets. Lose twenty, thirty pounds while you’re at it. Then there’s oxytocin, the chemical for fidelity. The unfaithful, it appears, don’t have enough of it. Take a supplement, save your marriage.

  “’Course it will obtain,” Michael says, “that the Y and the Oxytocin don’t mix too good. Like alcohol and Tylenol—people with, say, high blood pressure will be dropping like flies.”

  “And that’s where you come in,” I offer.

  He nods, almost smirking. “Woman desperate to get pregnant to save her marriage keels over at the wheel of a car, kills Young Ma and babe just out for a stroll, just crossing the street. Who pays off the bereaved dad?”

  I stare at him—fondly, I’d thought. He wears a terry-cloth bathrobe very much like my husband’s and maybe like all men’s, with a belt too thick to properly knot and sleeves that bell, stupidly, mid-forearm, so they threaten to droop into food, knock over coffee cups. Who thought this up? Is it some kind of cruel joke on Samurai getups? A very bad mismatch of fabric and cut, like fur diapers. And why a terry-cloth robe, anyhow, in August. For him to be comfortable, his AC must be up way too high.

  “God, I’m sorry,” he said.

  It took me a second to figure out why he would apologize. Michael in a bathrobe, I in my newly acquired underwear and one of his white T-shirts, washed and folded, clearly, by some Chinese laundry, because it had deep creases going down from the V-neck, like a pressed dress shirt: the differential in our degree of coverage had made me shiver. But he’d taken my hugging myself as vestigial grief triggered by his tactless remark. Here we were snuggling over the paper—pretending that the world was a known quantity, a land we’d gotten the lay of, that furthermore we were known to each other, as lovers and/or pals, when in fact we were missing each other, mostly. Mostly mysteries. Not that we weren’t doing pretty well, for people who had only just met. But any miscommunication, like the one we’d just had, could pull away the trampoline, topple the whole illusion of buoyant ease. Comfort and danger: so hard to get the balances right. Because it’s not as if I knew my husband. Rather I knew him so well I couldn’t see him anymore. I knew him the way I know myself. All of our years together—they weren’t money in the bank. They were cash in a mattress that could burn. Our years together were age, age itself: an indignation.

  No way to summarize this to Michael or even to myself. It was already gone. I just shook my head.

  “The problem is,” he said, “you do so well. You wouldn’t even know. I’ve got clients who—like you said yesterday—could never drive again. Could never sit behind the wheel of a car. One woman, her settlement included a driver and a limousine. Permanently. Limo to go anywhere, even to the grocery store.”

  I nodded, sympathetically.

  “How many kids in your state died that year?” he asked. “Do you know?”

  I did. I told him. “Twenty-eight.”

  “Did you figure your odds?”

  “I did. And the odds of the ALMCA.”

  “The huh?”

  Anomalous Left Main Coronary Artery. A congenital heart disease occurring in one of every 300,000 children. Three-ish in a million. Symptoms similar to, but not identical to, those of myocarditis or dilated cardiomyopathy. Symptoms generally present before two years old, which put my son in right past the bell of the bell curve, unlike, say, that seventeen-, eighteen-year-old rookie who keeled over at the tail end of a slam dunk. They figured it was drugs like the last one, but no, bum heart. Figure the odds for that mother’s son—NBA draft pick, then dropping dead on the court. Or the odds of ALMCA kicking in during a car accident, that unglamorous taker of lives—car accidents, I happened to know, accounted for 37 percent of the annual deaths of children under the age of nineteen, followed only by firearms.

  I gave Michael the basic outline of the cause of death. Then was quiet. He made a face that encouraged me to explain what I was thinking.

  I was remembering how, when my son was tiny, I snuck into his room every night to watch him breathe. To fall asleep he humped his back and tucked his hands under his pelvis—a swimmer’s move, as if he were diving into unconsciousness—and that is how I always found him. His mouth turned sideward to sip air. Asleep, still, he was stretched out to his whole shocking length, so you could study his eyelashes and the soles of his feet. His back smooth as a dolphin’s. There was a surprising little curve where his back met his armpits (“armpits” seems a misnomer, in a person that size), and every time I saw that I would smile, as if my mouth were meeting that curve, imitating the musculature.

  For those seconds I would just drink him up. And every night I’d think (if you could call it thought, because everything with a baby happens in breathless bytes) how deep, how almost sinful is the pleasure of the nightly pilgrimage to bedside. You know that as you’re watching. So while it’s a pure pleasure, it’s also strangely self-conscious. After the flush of the gaze itself you think, I am here, watching the baby sleep, and I fear I won’t be able to remember how good this feels.

  And you’re right. You won’t. Even if the child lives, as they almost all do, you can’t get back the baby. You have just these couple of sweet years and a heap of things too tiny to remember: the way you hold a very small baby on your forearm, its head in your palm, its butt in the crook of your elbow, amazed that you can be so blithe with a creature so fragile.

  You sneak in, listen to them breathe. You can barely believe they can keep breathing, without your vigilance. But then you get over that. They drive their bikes to the pool, your car to the prom. Most of them do not wind up wrapped around trees.

  Ironically, both I and the woman who hit me had been driving Volvos. This was before the advent of side air bags. Given the ALMCA, it was not at all certain that side air bags would have made any difference. Illogically, but understandably I think, I would never drive a Volvo again. I inherited Ken’s Acura and let him buy himself a proper surgeon’s Mercedes.

  This was longer than I coul
d bear, even still, to think about cars. I squeezed my eyes shut to clear away the images.

  “If you’re lucky,” I summarized for Michael, “you’ll be a grandparent someday soon. Hold a baby again.”

  “I never much liked babies. Probably I’ll like ’em even less when they prove I’m old enough to be a grandparent.”

  Picture of Ken, who was terrific with babies, holding a bundle of brand-new grandchild, then the flash reminding me that the thing between him and the grandchild was gone. Not fair to even call this a “flash.” Certainly not flashback. Once the grief was oceanic but now it was, mostly, an absence. Lack on a level almost molecular. Infinite absence because, as per Zeno’s paradox, if you cut “it” in half, then in half again, in half again, it’s still—there. There as absence.

  “You ever try one of those griever’s groups?” Michael asked. “They’ve helped a lot of my clients. Shouldn’t work, but it does. Misery loves company—like AA.”

  As he said the sentence something interesting happened. Ken, holding the baby—the image melded with the line from memory from the other day, a very if not circular then at least convex argument, so that I was looking at Ken in, say, a soap bubble, floating, very far away. But suddenly I wanted to see him whole and in the flesh. Wanted, in focus, his hands around that baby, and it wasn’t the baby I was viewing but the hands themselves: the fingers bony, big-knuckled, pale from overscrubbing, from all that time spent in rubber gloves.

  Suddenly I missed him, ferociously.