by Heidi Pitlor
During Cass’s bedtime, I struggled at first over what to tell him and eventually just blurted it out: “Bertie’s going to start watching you less—just one morning a week. And remember that Kurt is going away tomorrow for a while. You and me, we’ll get to be together a lot more during the week. But sometimes I’m still going to have to work like I do when you’re home on Mondays.”
“Then why can’t Bertie keep watching me?”
“It’s getting hard for her. She needs her rest.”
“Where does Kurt have to go?” It was all too much at once for Cass.
“He’s going away on a trip. But he’ll be back.”
“Why don’t you two get married?”
“Come on. It’s time to sleep,” I said, lifting the sheets and guiding him beneath them. “Kurt and I like things the way they are.”
“I wish I had a baby sister or brother,” Cass said.
I kissed his forehead and gazed down at his hair. It needed a trim. “Yeah?”
“Why don’t you two have a baby?”
Being an only child was not easy. You felt different from most of the world. Sometimes you worried that your life might be less fun, less dimensional. Your parents were sort of your siblings, and a lot of limits and disappointment came with that. “I’m probably too old to have another baby, to be honest.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry.” I could think of nothing to add, nothing hopeful and true to say that would ease this moment for him.
The baby in him was still apparent in the roundness of his cheeks, but I swore his neck was longer than it had been even yesterday. His fingers were bigger, too. He did not drool in his sleep anymore. He no longer broke into a grin when I first came into his room in the morning.
I pulled Cass’s door shut and went to find Kurt. He was not in the kitchen, my bedroom, or anywhere else that I looked, not even the basement. He spent most of his time upstairs with us now, and it had been weeks or longer since I had been down here. I had forgotten how spare it was: just a futon, a trunk, and one fold-up chair. That morning after we had first slept together, Kurt and I sat amid the bunched sheets and early sunlight from the little windows and presented each other with what I suppose were our terms, which were identical, for any future sex and cohabitation: no expectations, no demands, no commitments. He had, after all, just left a cage of a life and craved freedom. And for my part, Cass was the only person I felt able to tend and nurture. We congratulated ourselves on so easily reaching an ideal arrangement. How strange, I later thought, to launch this discussion that early, to even attempt to address and define something that was less than twelve hours old.
We had revisited our arrangement a few times since then, and after some heated exchanges, agreed not to alter much other than our patterns of communication. Soon after our first night, he disappeared for one night, and then a week later for another, and so I had asked him to just let me know before he went away. I wondered whether he had met someone else or had a couple of one-night stands, which was mostly fine with me because it meant that I could do the same if I wanted. But after that, Kurt never again disappeared without telling me—and he eventually asked me not to assume that he would always be game to provide large swaths of childcare when I had to work or had other plans.
“I was outside putting new wiper blades on your truck,” Kurt said now from the top of the stairs. “I picked up some new ones yesterday. Yours were shot. I don’t know how you could see anything when it rains or snows.”
“That was nice of you.”
On my couch upstairs, we took turns with his briar pipe, and I sucked in well-being and buttery contentment. I thought I could actually feel my skeleton soften and my brain begin to relax. We talked about Jimmy and Cass and Bertie, and then our biological families. “I wish I’d known my real father,” I told him.
“Yeah, that’s rough.” Kurt had been adopted, something he had mentioned only in passing a few times. “A few years ago, I tracked down my biological mother. She’s Scottish. She was an au pair in France when she had me. Now she builds boats in a small town outside Aberdeen. She has a family, so she didn’t really want to be in touch with me. I thought it was so cool that she worked with her hands.”
“What about your father?”
“He’s an attorney in Westchester who was in France for a month. My biological mother said that he never knew about me. Obviously, she didn’t want me to contact him.”
“Oh. That’s sad.” Outside, wind blew the loose snow upward, sprays of white dust that moved toward the treetops and were visible in the light that shone out from the kitchen. I stood up and wobbled on my feet. “You’ll have a good trip and then you’ll come back here and everything will be A-OK. And this book will come out and Project Fuckface will become a distant memory. And, you know what? Congress will impeach that guy. The country will get back to normal. Everything’ll be great.”
“Project What? You are higher than a building right now.”
I nodded.
We ignored the mess of dirty dishes on the table as we spread bath towels on the floor and lit some old votives in a wide circle around them. Kurt grabbed another can of Guinness and joined me on the floor, and I kissed the nape of his neck. We shared the beer and it felt like an adventure, like teenagehood, a finite piece of time in which we could do and say whatever we wanted. He reached around and coaxed me closer to him. I wanted to tell him that I loved him, something neither of us had said yet, but I did not want my words to wreck the dream of the moment if he answered them with silence.
I had the thought that I had let this person too close to me, and to us.
At last he turned to face me, and pulled his T-shirt up and over his head. “Come here, Al,” he said, and positioned me on top of his lap.
“Wait,” I said, and I rose to blow out the candles. The room went dark.
Despite the bath towels, the kitchen floor was not a forgiving surface. We kept inadvertently hurting each other, mashing the other person’s hipbone against the hard vinyl or leaning too hard on a hand or a knee. He bunched up a towel to use as a cushion beneath his elbow, and he put all his weight on that arm and it collapsed to the side, he and his rib cage landing hard against the vinyl. “Ouch,” he said. “This floor is going to kill us.”
I laughed, but stopped myself. “We’re going to wake up Cass,” I said, and he said, “This will help keep you quiet,” and covered my mouth with his, the sure push of his lips and tongue returning me to myself. Finally, we got into sync, and the floor and my awareness of my thoughts fell away.
Afterward, I lay against him, both of us tacky with sweat as we gathered our breath. There was the odd sensation of a train having blasted through the room, leaving only silence in its wake.
I rose and went for a glass of water, and when I came back, Kurt gazed up at me with a strange look. He wrapped a towel around his waist and moved into a seated position.
“You want some?” I passed him the water and he took a sip.
“Thanks,” he said. “I saw a picture of her the other day.”
It took me a moment to even think of the correct question. “Birgitte?”
“Confession—I googled her on your computer when you were out.” He used my computer every now and then when he needed it, since he no longer had one. The only piece of technology he had kept was a Samsung flip phone.
“You did?” I thought of our first night together, when again he had mentioned her a beat too soon after our bodies had parted.
“I don’t know why. I went to her Facebook page. She’s already moved in with this guy, a restaurateur. She posted a picture of them with his new Jeep.” He made an expression of disgust. “It was weird. I don’t know what made me do that.”
“Oh?”
“I almost wrote to her.” He began to worry a lock of his hair between his fingers. “Everything that happened to me before I came here? Birgitte, the firm, my life in New York? Sometimes it’s like I imagined it all. I can’t s
eem to connect myself to it. I don’t know why.”
I hated that he could access his past and slip into this sort of thinking just by typing a few words into my laptop. “Do you miss her? You miss your old life?”
“No. I guess—it’s still just disorienting. If you could have seen me there . . . I guess that guy wasn’t really me. But I don’t know if this is me here either, I mean, playing father and responsible partner and everything in some random town in Western Mass?” He caught my wounded expression and added, “I’m not talking about you, though. You know what I think of you. And Cass, too. I’m not explaining it very well.”
“Birgitte and I—we’re really different,” I began.
“That’s an understatement. She never learned to drive and she couldn’t change a lightbulb. She shopped at Barney’s and Bergdorf. She went to New York Fashion Week shows with her friends.” He looked down, and maybe to justify himself, added, “But she was whip smart. And she worked hard. She intuited the gyrations of the global markets in a way that I never could.”
“There had to be a reason that you were with her, right?”
“Yeah.” He bent forward to gather a few of the candles.
“I’m going to check on Cass,” I said, a little blue.
“Come back when you’re done, all right?”
I nodded.
My son was starting to look more like me than his father, I thought as I looked in at him, or maybe I just secretly hoped for this. When Cass was born, everyone told me how little he looked like me. I knew that they did not mean this as an insult, but I was taken aback every time. I never had a good or ready response.
I wondered if Daniel ever thought about Cass or me. I tried to remember Daniel’s voice, his hair, his eyeglasses. What was his facial expression when I first saw him, five years ago? What was mine? If only I could retrieve these things and hold them beside the moments of my life as it was now, and know that I was continuing along the correct path, that I was where and who I should be, that Cass was, too.
It had to be an hour before I headed to my bedroom and found Kurt asleep on his side of my bed.
The next morning, I sat on the futon watching Kurt zip up his duffel bags. As he chatted about his plans, I wondered when and if we would see him again, and if there might be anything I could say to stop him. I wondered when I would next have sex; when I would next fall asleep beside a man, if ever; what it would feel like that night to sit at the dinner table with only Cass, and to watch the British spy series by myself. To make myself feel better, I reminded myself of Kurt’s naïve rejection of money, and this helped, at least in the moment.
An hour later, we kissed each other goodbye, and he trotted across the front yard to catch a ride with Ron Garbella to Fitchburg.
PART TWO
December 2016 – March 2017
Chapter Eight
If I had written an account of the time after Kurt’s exit, Colin would have cut it back. He would have told me that the reader wasn’t interested in the day-to-day life of an overtaxed single working mom. Five years ago, when I was deep in the middle of Tanya’s book and he had balked at what I’d written, I’d asked him who this “reader” was that he imagined. “A middle-aged, Oprah-loving, wine-drinking, suburban mom with a bachelor’s degree, a part-time or nonprofit job, and an active book club full of similar women,” he said.
“That is impressively specific,” I told him.
“Good. Maybe you can keep a specific picture of this person in mind when you revise Tanya’s book.”
In the draft, I had described, with no shortage of the frank detail that Tanya had given me, her happy if chaotic toddlerhood followed by her repeated molestation over a stretch of eleven years by her great-uncle; her subsequent bouts of depression; and her suicide attempt that resulted in her stay in a psychiatric ward. Flash forward to her first stand-up show in New York, her appearance on The Daily Show—before which she had an anxiety attack—and her successful career, although she often felt like an imposter. The book ended with a comic—okay, macabre—fantasy of Tanya castrating her great-uncle Hands, as he was called, in front of his poker group.
“Allie,” Gin said, soon after I talked to Colin, “this is a really uncomfortable read. God,” she said half to herself, “why didn’t I ask to see it earlier?”
“Tanya’s not exactly known for her light, breezy humor,” I said. “And her uncle died years ago, so I figured we were on okay legal ground there.”
“Where did you put the feel-good part?” Gin asked. “We need more overcoming struggle, a lot more catharsis, and WAY less violence porn. Make that none.” She informed me of the ratio she preferred in memoirs: 30 percent background, 30 percent struggles and formulation of personal philosophy, and the rest overcoming of struggles, arrival at fame and fortune, enjoying of fame and fortune, name-dropping, gratitude.
“That ending doesn’t count as catharsis, at least?” I joked.
Gin just sighed. “You skipped everything important: the time between the mental hospital and her success. Wring some forgiveness from her. Get her moving on to a healthy relationship, even if it’s with her dog. And end with gratitude rather than this crazed and not funny daydream about murdering a family member.” Gratitude was big for readers, she explained.
“I know—gratitude, hope, a glossier finish. I get it. But she doesn’t like animals,” I said meekly. Still, I agreed to try again.
I called Tanya, and she hated every one of Gin’s ideas. “This whitewashing is bullshit,” she said, and I had to agree.
But the next morning, she called me back. “Just write whatever you have to finish this thing,” Tanya said. “I need the money. I don’t make as much as you probably think I do.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“Yes,” she said.
In the end, she begrudgingly okay’ed even my replacing her revenge fantasy with a scene of her taking her young niece to see Brave, a movie Tanya told me she had secretly found “lame and suffocatingly white. They couldn’t shoehorn one token black person into a crowd scene?”
“I know,” I said, feeling awful, realizing only then the large flaw of this movie that Cass and I had so enjoyed. Our first draft had to have been a far more entertaining and intelligent read than this book version of vanilla pudding, and I told her so. “I’m sorry about all this. Gin is underestimating readers.”
“I’m used to vanilla pudding calling all the shots.”
I apologized again and offered to go back to Gin, but by then Tanya just seemed annoyed with me. Understandably. My guilt was my problem.
For memoirs like Tanya’s, I had been asked to write (and shape and augment) more—and ghost less; I had to be far more present on the page than I had ever been. It would never come easier or more naturally to me—and Lana’s book had begun to demand a new level of fabrication. I reminded myself again, I did need the job.
With Bertie watching Cass far less, and without Kurt pitching in for rent, I had to cut back on Cass’s time at Little Rainbows. Good friend that she was, Maggie took Cass along with Liam and her other son to the playground a couple of afternoons. But from Cass’s postmortems, I knew that the rabbit-faced boy had been there, and that Liam and he had ignored Cass save the two or three times when they—both of them, I was saddened to learn—smashed his sand buildings.
Still, almost a week after Kurt left, I was lucky enough to get a subbing job at the middle school. After a trying day (I enjoyed the kids, but they had no qualms ignoring everything I said and texting each other LeBron James memes), I picked up Cass from Little Rainbows, put on Go, Diego, Go!, and sat down on the couch beside him. I reached for my book—“ ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added”—and drifted off to sleep.
I woke to the sound of a woman’s voice. There on the screen, seated in a hot pink leather armchair, was Jenna Rose, my former client. She wore a white lab coat, her highlighted chestnut hai
r sculpted into a tight orb, her lips a glossy mauve. “This one-of-a-kind makeup has been formulated from Bahamian seashell dust. Are there any colors more beautiful and sensual than those found on the beaches of the Bahamas? Look at this lush bronzer made from the Emperor Helmet and the Roller Conch, two of my favorite shells.” She looked incredible and sounded authoritative.
I had liked working with Jenna. She was nothing like the chirpy, weepy contestant who had won first runner-up on I Thee Wed. She approached me and the book with the cautious air of a woman whose public image had been whittled into a princess figurine. She questioned a few of my ideas, as well as my revisions of the handful of passages that she herself had written, although she eventually accepted them. A client’s approach to her book often stemmed from her station in the world—or her perceived station. Jenna had a lot to prove, and together we crafted what I thought was a fairly intelligent guidebook to creating one’s own definition of attractiveness and worth. It became a manifesto for maintaining integrity as well as interdependence within the context of love.
On TV now, she adjusted her reading glasses as she rose from her chair. “Our scientists vaporize the crystals to create the purest colors straight from the ocean. Let’s go on a tour of our high-tech lab and meet some of these scientists, or as we call them, ‘colorizers.’ ”
I remembered reading that she had married one of the production assistants from I Thee Wed. I was glad that she had continued to find work, something she had confessed to me worried her after the end of the show, and that she had achieved seemingly all of her personal and professional goals. At the moment, this was more than I could say for myself. Even finishing half of Lana’s book had come to seem unlikely.
I opened my laptop and saw a new message from Lana, her response to my draft of the second chapter: Any way for you to treat breastfeeding as more of a revolutionary act? You (I) come across as neutral, even anti-nursing at times!
I replied: I hear you. But to be honest, don’t a lot of people breastfeed these days? Isn’t it more revolutionary to bottle-feed your baby loud and proud? I may have been justifying my own failure to breastfeed Cass. Nursing may be best for those who don’t work and have the resources for lactation consultants, breast pumps, and all those gadgets out there to make the whole—uncomfortable!—process more comfortable.