Layover

  As if sweetheart would be too much, which it would have been, he was exactly right.

  He let me drink that. Then asked, “Should I come?”

  I said, “Come.”

  Then added, Please.

  Aware, because I was right on the brink of the relieved tears that I knew I was going to allow myself—on the brink of them the way, before coming, a woman is on the brink of that, watching pleasure move toward you in reliable rings like those made by a skipped stone—that what I wanted to do was say his name, and I did. And in Ken I heard Evan, that same soft e; aware too of the long e in sweet and please as some kind of contrast, dramatic as yin and yang, out of which was going to come: ease. Not the beginning of things or the end, but the fine, full middle.

  IV

  There was nothing wrong with me.

  Well, there was something wrong with me. But not much.

  I had slept like a baby. Dr. Sharon Rieff called first thing in the morning, brisk and cheerful, before I had even had time to wonder how long I could survive before hearing from her. Thyroid within normal range. The prolactin reading was only a little off. She recited the numbers as if I would know exactly what they meant, but I did not—only that the two sets of numbers were slightly out of balance.

  Nothing alarming. Nothing, even, that would require treatment. She would let me be, personally. She would send the test results to my doctor in Cleveland for him to evaluate, but odds are he would simply want to keep an eye on things.

  At first I felt not relief, but disappointment. The pituitary microadenoma would have been an explanation. Micro was the right size, and furthermore it was not in my head. A pea for the princess. So much for an immediate, containable cure for fertility problems and whatever else was still going to ail me, once I got over my delight at being restored to my life.

  “You don’t think,” I asked Dr. Rieff, “that it’d be a good idea to try some kind of dosage of the Dostinex?”

  There was really no indication of a microadenoma from those numbers, she said, not enough to even warrant doing an MRI, although, again, I could talk over treatment with my doctor. The galactorrhea—might be related to the elevated prolactin, but might not.

  “Could easily be triggered by stress,” she said. “Or if there has been any dramatic change in your sex life—I mean the way your breasts are touched…”

  This was my opening, it appeared, to shoot the shit about Michael Davidoff, girl-to-girl. Before morning coffee, before I had even brushed my teeth. But gratitude for her excellent service aside, I felt I had done my weekly share of dissecting shared men with female physicians. The night before, I had packed, laying out my clothes for the day, that gray suit I knew I would never be able to wear again once I got home, and in the process flipped through the book of the Other Michael’s poems before putting it in the suitcase; two pages were stuck together, or rather not properly separated by the printing press, and when I unsealed them carefully with a fingernail there was a poem about—swimming. Poolside, Michael watched his prepubescent daughter swim. Brand-new nipples in Speedo. The girl in her bathing cap slick and friendly as a seal, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary, but the coincidence, especially after the fried swimmer from Baltimore, was hard not to take to heart. From my bed, with the phone pressed to my ear, I could see the glint of the book’s pool-blue cover on the top of the open suitcase and the two Michaels mentally pressed themselves together, their edges blurred, as did the two crisp female physicians, at the end of which was an impression of—a nipple. Everything narrowing to the point of that need. Even without one of those exaggerated, conical Madonna bras, a breast like a natural exclamation point, the nipple capping its own amazement with the whole damn business.

  Precisely this kind of thought, a couple of days ago, had made me feel like a Looney Tune. Now I just watched the train of thought bob off. It only took a couple of seconds. Interesting how very short a silence can officially be, with someone you don’t know.

  “No,” I said. “To tell you the truth, though, I wish you had a little more of an answer for me. Something—clearer.”

  She laughed. “Hey, if you read the literature, physicians can’t even agree on how best to treat a yeast infection.”

  “That’s encouraging,” I said.

  “Well, here’s an upbeat way to think about it. You appear to be, as they say, ‘in touch with your body.’ You can read all the signs, how everything interacts. You’d be amazed how few patients—well, you even try to get a clear account of symptoms.”

  I knew all about this complaint, from my husband. Most of his patients can’t even tell their hearts from their stomachs.

  “But you had some intuitive sense,” she went on, “of how everything came together. So all I can say is: trust it. Like listening to the sounds of a car’s engine. Know that doesn’t sound very scientific. But—you get a woman sometimes who, months before a bad mammogram, has knocked out coffee, begun to eat tons of tofu. Like her body knows. Or chocolate—I mean it does, in fact, have documented antidepressant qualities. Releases the same endorphins as strenuous exercise.”

  My shrink was a dietitian. This OB-GYN appeared to be a dietitian, too. “So what’s the tune-up for this old car?” I asked.

  She laughed again. “Sex always helps,” she said. “Take Old Betsy for a spin, floor it.”

  Yet another opening. I declined, yet again, to take the bait. Told her how much I appreciated her help.

  “So are you staying at Michael’s,” she asked, “or the hotel?”

  Persistent!

  Thanked her again, told her where to send the test results. Would call her, actually, with a fax number.

  After Dr. Rieff and I were done, I took Michael’s book from my suitcase. It fell open to the swimming poem, which had been secret, hidden; now it seemed I could not flip through the volume without this poem being thrust in my face. I studied it for clues, as if it were the Bible, or the I Ching. Here is what I felt: nothing. I leaned into it, as if into the vibration of a tuning fork, and heard: nothing.

  Blank slate! The man was a stranger to me!

  And there, just like that, was my Twilight Zone coin landed on its side again. Restored, just like that, to ordinary not-knowing.

  I was right about one thing, though. My husband had, indeed, been on call Sunday morning. He had business at the hospital this morning, too, but then he would come for me, even though that made no sense, really, although maybe it did, because how exactly I would pay for a ticket and get home myself, with no credit-card plate, was unclear.

  On this score, some good news: Ken had not been so crassly controlling a husband as to attempt to entrap me by flagging my credit card. The Fraud Department had called me, rather insistently, at home, to make sure some recent charges were mine—in my early days on the lam, I’d paid for some plane tickets myself, rather than going through the company travel agency as I did when I planned better, and manic travel charges apparently cause alarm. Ken had returned their call, concerned, said he wasn’t sure how or when I could be reached. When they wouldn’t speak to him, since he was not a cardholder, he armed his secretary with my birthday and mother’s maiden name, as I’d guessed, and thus they’d tracked my whereabouts during the frantic message period—at least until the plate number was changed and the new card reissued, at the fraud folks’ suggestion. Ken assumed I had other cards at the ready. And would have gladly given me all relevant details, or FedExed the new plate to me, if I had deigned to speak to him. Why they hadn’t called me at work remains a mystery—I would have gotten the voice mail. But they didn’t, probably because Ken’s girl had worked so fast.

  I almost told Ken, then, about the hotel scam. Decided to pass. Enough of this first, romantic phone call had already been devoted to bookkeeping.

  Logistically, we were left only with the question of whether or not I should keep the hotel room until Ken’s arrival. Or get a different hotel room. The latter option had occurred to me. I was already packed and ready to g
o. My mind had snagged, somewhat, on this complexity. Given how little use I’d gotten out of the hotel room thus far (how long had the rental car sat in the garage of the Children’s Hospital?), it was really no tragedy to keep the room for the extra day, see if it would be of use. Not a big deal, either—save the embarrassment—to check out, give my one bag, briefcase, and computer to the porter, check back in if that was deemed necessary.

  Fact is, I had no idea what Ken would have in mind. Would he think, if it was necessary for him to come and fetch me, that I’d be a shaky, frail Frances Farmer whom he would need to steer by the elbow instead of the floozy who was ready for wild, marriage-affirming Reunion Sex followed by (or preceded by) a nice restaurant, a stroll to the Rodin Museum to see the bronze nudes?

  He could be furious.

  I had to keep reminding myself of this possibility, even likelihood. I had been gone for a month. Soon August would be over. From friends with living kids, I knew how endless those last days of August were, before school started, as bad as the wait for labor. Labor Day: it never lined up quite right with the calendar. Always seemed to come an awkward number of days before the end of August, or jut out too far into September. Tired as you are of summer, itchy as you are to get to fall, it also seems like: already? Wistfully, the way parents talk as their children head to college.

  At home, the grass would be mowed, and green. Ken would have managed to turn on the sprinkler. The maid had a key; the kitchen would gleam. Ken is not the kind of man who cannot manage to put the glass he has just used into the dishwasher. In the den, with its paint colors I’d personally selected, amid much grave indecision about yellowish vs. reddish beiges, at whatever point in my life I had cared about such things, the latest volume of The New England Journal of Medicine might still be open by his reading chair.

  I tried to imagine him single, in a bachelor pad. Could not. A failure of imagination. Of course he would not have to make any effort to “meet women.” They would virtually carom into him in hospital hallways. We would have to sell the house. Could not think about this either, although I had no special attachment to it.

  Nothing wrong with the house. There was the matter of Evan’s room, of course. Parents of dead kids know that there is no way to circumvent the problem of the room as memorial. Leave the stuffed animals on the shelf and you make a sick shrine. Box the toys, reconvert however temporarily into “study” or “guest room,” and you pretend to bury the past. Fact is, the room stays there, stolid, foursquare, box only. The box stays in the ground. Even buying a new house doesn’t help, because the new house simply does not have that room, and who is anyone fooling. Not living in a house? An apartment somewhere foreign, where you have no connections, none of your own things? I’d considered it. Ken’s work made that impossible (he could maybe endure a month outside the structure of the schedule that kept him sane, and how could I begrudge him that?), but I imagined a villa somewhere like Tuscany, room after high-ceilinged, plaster-cracking room just empty, the furniture draped with dusty sheets. Wild, hilly garden to poke around in or not.

  The line came to me sometimes, petulant, You deserve that. Why hadn’t Ken suggested it? Is The Vacation not an obvious salve? But then I would pull back. It would not have helped. Well, the tropical foliage of Puerto Vallarta did help Ken. Opened him right up. I held myself back from the trace of bitterness: no scenery would help us now. More critical to keep alive in my head the fantasy of many rooms, just as keeping alive the fantasy of sleeping with a stranger—you could do it, you still had it in you—had proven more fulfilling than the act itself. It was the time before the sex, the decision itself, that I’d remember. Sex was sex as a room was a room. Both buried in the box of your head, which is finally all you’re married to, pay mortgage on.

  For the foreseeable future I would not be divorced, or dead. In the square bed, in the square room, I felt, if not exactly squared away, at least not crazy.

  Not pregnant, either. This I discovered in the bathroom. The spot of blood was discreet, dime-sized. The shiver of disappointment, emptiness I felt was automatic. Maybe spotting only, I permitted myself to wishfully think before I caught myself. This dot, dark as type on the new white underwear, was decisive and this was preferable, obviously. A true period that ended whatever sentence I’d been running on in. Too much gunk had built up on the mental walls. My extramarital sex had functioned like a D&C, wiping the slate clean. When my husband and I made love now we could do so, for the first time in a long time, in a context outside of procreation. Not that love doesn’t come, always, with the shadow of loss. But at least the thing I’d almost lost could now be the man himself. He certainly deserved at least that much.

  When we did make love I would not have forgotten, even if I didn’t consciously refer to it, his shock, then his smile, when I stood up to go to the bathroom the day after the delivery and the blood gushed out of me. Christ, he said, standing outside the bathroom door, it looks like you clubbed a seal to death in there. And he had been to medical school. But he was still surprised, and alarmed, because it was my blood. Doesn’t matter that the child is dead. He watched the child emerge from me. Sex is different after that. Even if what was required of us now was that we clear the birth canal of birth—no longer think of that space as The Baby’s Room—there would always be the ghost. The little haunting. Not to mention the others who had left their fingerprints on the walls—Hillary, the Davidoff guys.

  But that was who we were. And as such was good. Because it meant we knew each other, which included knowing what haunted us. So when Ken told me during the phone call, endearingly nervous, in the way of making conversation, about a TV show he’d watched the night before, that had disturbed his sleep—a plane crash over the Amazon, a seventeen-year-old girl who stayed alive by herself for nine days, picking maggots out of her wounds with her bent engagement ring—I could say, “I guess she knows the trouble we’ve seen,” and he could laugh, knowing just what I meant. And when I told him about the electrocuted swimmer, the story would have a bite, a solidity. Like buying a car owned by the proverbial little old lady from Pasadena, who hands over meticulous repair records. Here, as per Sharon Rieff’s metaphor, was our marital tune-up, our lube and new filters.

  I had no Tampax. I would need to buy them in the overpriced hotel shop. Found myself wondering how much breakfast in the hotel dining room would be, whether I should spring for both Tampax and food, thinking about my money the way you think about disposing of the foreign currency you have left, in a foreign airport, down to the very last strangely oversized penny. But then I remembered that I could charge the breakfast to the room, and this made me ecstatic. A hearty breakfast—the bounty of it! All I could eat! And Ken coming too, any minute.

  Patience. What is the point of middle age, if you haven’t learned to wait?

  After breakfast and the newspapers (the Times confirmed the electrocuted woman in Baltimore, but provided no new information; I would probably have to track down the Baltimore Sun, I realized, for a follow-up), I left a message at the desk and walked to the park across the street, where I sat on a bench, close enough to the fountain that a breeze—a breeze in summer always feels like a gift—tickled the water to my face, wafting the smell of fresh mulch from the bed of geraniums behind which, on the grass, a couple necked.

  They were grown-ups, not kids, uniformed in full workday regalia, he knotted and belted, she sausaged into pantyhose. They didn’t care. They would go back to work with grass stains for this kiss. Her pointy pumps were not kicked off but lined up neatly beside the invisible magic carpet of the kiss that contained them, carried them away. She wore pink linen. The sun glinted on the wrinkles in the dress. What kind of fool wears light-colored linen to fuck in grass before lunchtime, I thought, but then I realized how good it was to see them, to remember kisses that simply had to be had that instant. Nothing in the world but the smooth moistness of lip. Time itself suspended. This was not a casual relationship; they would marry, these two, but the
y weren’t sure of it yet, and that was precisely what made it lovely. His hand hovered over her back, as if to touch her would simply be too much sensation to endure.

  I realized that I was staring. It was lovely. Don’t put your hand down, I thought. Wait. When that hand lands on her back she should be able to come, just from the slightest pressure of your hand on the linen. This kiss will be a memory planted right down in the soil of her that will bloom, annually, every time she smells summer earth.

  And that second they obeyed me. They pulled apart, they just stared at each other, and I felt a smile flushing my face as I thought, if I truly practiced what I preach I could come from this, from the idea of it: patience! Restraint! Then I almost laughed out loud at myself, a horny middle-aged woman of dubious sanity, with no money, alone in a city.

  I had left The Merck Manual in the end-table drawer, with the Bible. This felt pleasingly ceremonial, even though, as a gesture, it did not mean much (would have to buy a new one, anyway, in a month or so).

  “Zachary!” I heard, and turned sharply.

  “Zachary, you stop right there. Zach!”

  Not Zach Davidoff. A child, two-ish, racing toward the fountain. The mother behind, hot, cross, laden with stroller and the diaper bag bulging with diapers and wipes, the bottle and plastic bag of Cheerios, the extra pacifier, the immense weight of motherhood—“Young man, you stop this instant! I said no! You stop now!”

  The weight of the diaper bag was tipping the stroller with its inadequate plastic wheels as she tried to reach him. I got up too. I ran. I got to them just as the kid deftly hurled himself over the edge of the fountain, laughing as his mother just stood and screamed, her hands held away from her body and shaking—exactly the posture, exactly the scream of that famous Vietnam photo, the nude and napalmed child running away from the mayhem.

  They always warn you, as if you don’t have enough to worry about, that babies can drown in even an inch of water. But the child was fine. Delighted. I reached the fountain and scooped him up while the mother screamed. Clothes, shoes wet but his laughter liquid as I grabbed him, hitched him aloft to the screaming mother and she took him, keening his name.