Bed Rest

by Sarah Bilston

  As we crawled along Third Avenue in a cab toward our apartment on East Eighty-second Street, flakes of snow began whirling in the currents of air beneath the orange streetlamps like schools of tiny fish in an amber sea. Through misted icy windows I watched people rushing along the slippery sidewalks, some protecting their heads with briefcases, others holding up sodden copies of the New York Times with purple fingers. I tried to lean on my left side in the hard backseat, and looked over at my husband. Tom was punching messages frantically into his Black-Berry, his shoulders hunched beneath his navy wool overcoat, his spotty tie askew. He kept pushing his fingers distressfully through his curly black hair, his lips moving rapidly but silently as he typed. Feeling my eyes on him, he looked up, and he must have seen the expression on my face because he reached for my left hand and squeezed it hard. “Sorry, honey, I’ve got to send off these messages, I was in the middle of something when you called. Hey, hey,” he added, softly, drawing me toward his shoulder, “don’t look like that, don’t cry! You’ll be fine, the baby’ll be fine, everything’s going to work out, I’m sure of it.” I buried my head in the dark, comforting place beneath his chin and inhaled his sweet warm smell. He held me close, whispering reassurance into my hair (“we’ll get through this, I promise…”).

  Back in our apartment, I curled up on my left side on the yellow Liberty print sofa in our sitting room. Tom emerged from our bedroom after a few moments with a blue-and-gray wool blanket, which he spread carefully over me, tucking it tightly under my toes and around my belly. Then he went into the kitchen, filled a large jug with water and ice cubes, and placed it on the teak table next to the sofa.

  He stooped down to kiss me, lightly, on the forehead. “Nothing to worry about, I’m sure of it,” he said once again, his voice steady as he settled himself in the leather armchair facing me. But as he turned away from my side I saw—I may be mistaken, but I think I saw—that his eyes were filling with tears.

  2

  It’s now been seven hours since we left the doctor’s office. We’ve called everyone we can think of—my mother and sisters in England, Tom’s parents in Baltimore, his brother and sister-in-law in Sacramento, and an assortment of friends. I prefer to tell the story myself; as long as I’m the one describing it, I can sort of pretend to myself that I’m making it up, exaggerating for the sake of the attention. I can still be the person I thought I was twelve hours ago, a woman who had checked off at least some of the important boxes on the Modern Woman’s List of Things to Do Before Hitting Thirty, that mental list all late-twenty-somethings carry around with them.

  Get good job

  Marry handsome man with good job

  Have healthy bank balance

  Get pregnant

  (There are other boxes, of course, boxes I haven’t managed to check or that I’ve had to uncheck since becoming pregnant. “Have sex three times a week,” for instance. And “Be ten pounds underweight.” Both of those projects are on hold for now.)

  Tom’s father, Peter, is a surgeon, and he sounded quite calm about the amniotic fluid thing, which made us feel slightly better until Tom pointed out that he’s the kind of man who can make a Seinfeld joke while holding a dripping human heart in his hands. Nothing seems to rattle him, which is what you want in your surgeon but not necessarily in your father. Tom admits he spent a fair portion of his adolescence trying to get a reaction from Peter through a succession of X-treme sports—paragliding, off-piste skiing, whitewater kayaking. But none of these elicited much more than a delicately raised eyebrow, and he was on the verge of turning to more illegal means of grabbing his father’s attention when a university professor suggested that he try his hand at a moot court competition. Finally he found something he enjoyed more than needling Peter, and now he’s ostensibly past his daddy hang-up, although I don’t think he’s as indifferent to his father’s opinion as he’d like. After he told Peter about my pregnancy problem, Tom shifted the conversation delicately to the subject of “My Many and Varied Successes at Work.” He’s going up for partner soon at his law firm, one of the biggest in the city, and from the way he described it you’d think he was a shoo-in. This isn’t completely true. He’s got an excellent chance, I’m sure of it, but only a tiny percentage of associates make the final cut.

  Then he spoke to his mother, a brief conversation conducted in the staccato tones of two people who lack the affection for each other that rounds and softens the voice. She’s a thin, uptight Boston Brahmin who’s never quite forgiven Tom for not being a girl through whom she could relive her years as a willowy debutante. “I was sure he was going to be a girl,” I once heard her say to a friend over a cup of Lapsang souchong. “He was lying sideways in the womb, after all,” she added, casting him a reproachful look. She’s received the news of Tom’s various academic and legal successes over the years with the half-glazed look of one who’d rather be attending to her tea roses.

  At the moment Tom is dashing about in our tiny kitchen. He’s hurling slices of ham into some hacked-up pieces of cranberry-walnut bread while yelling into the speakerphone, trying to rearrange a work trip while periodically rushing over to kiss me apologetically and hiss contritely in my ear—“have to explain things to these guys, Q, so sorry, but your dinner’s almost ready…”

  (I’ve been “Q” to everyone, friends and family, for as long as I can remember. Someone at school noticed that the character “Q” in the Bond movies is really called Major Boothroyd; my last name is Boothroyd, my first name is Quinn, et voilà tout. I rather like it. I may be a boringly respectable married lawyer but I sound like the sort of popstrel who drives a pearly SUV with bulletproof windows and champagne-soaked seats.)

  I called my office as soon as we got back from the doctor’s, and after some initial bewilderment (“amni-what?”) and a few very long pauses, Fay—one of Schuster’s partners—agreed to divide my cases among the other senior associates. From now on I’m relieved of all duties, doctor’s orders (“I don’t want any teleconferencing from home, you hear me? Cut all ties to the office. Stress can divert blood away from the baby”).

  Three months away from the office is not, let’s face it, a disaster. Life as a New York lawyer is certainly better paid than life as a London lawyer, but I can’t say the job is everything I dreamed it would be when I upped and left England four years ago. The work is just as mind-numbing, and the hours are considerably longer. Tom and I pass each other in the bathroom at 6 A.M. most days and meet up occasionally on Sunday evenings for a picnic in Central Park. How we conceived a child is a mystery neither of us can solve—or could solve, if we ever found the time to talk about it. I sort of remember a passionate fumble after a black-tie affair to welcome the summer associates at his firm. We flirted outrageously through the main course, groped each other drunkenly under the table during dessert, fell into a taxi cab at two, and I think we made love on the kitchen table when we got home, although I can’t be sure. But I like to think that’s when we conceived our baby, rather than during one of our more conscientious couplings, the sort that occur simply because both of us happen to be home before eleven.

  So at least the next three months will give me the chance to get to know Tom properly again; we love each other, but I’ve been conscious of something happening between us these last few months, a new space opening up, like the dark water between a boat and its mooring. It’s nothing serious, of course, not a real separation; I’m not talking affairs, threats of divorce, that sort of thing. Certainly not. In fact, on our occasional days together the gap closes completely, vanishing over brunch in the West Village and a leisurely wander through Washington Square, where we first met four years ago. Then a week later I’m suddenly conscious of it again. I catch one of us in an ungenerous moment—a scratchy comment, a self-righteous criticism, a thoughtless act, the kind of thing we’d never have done, or said, or even thought when we first got together.

  Partly it’s the long hours at work, partly it’s the pregnancy. For a man, the nine
months of pregnancy pass pretty much like any other nine months of an adult’s life; Tom can refer to “when the baby arrives” as if it’s not already here in the room with us, aiming lusty kicks into the depths of my stomach. My life changed completely within a week of discovering that I was pregnant. One day I was staring delightedly at the second line on a small gray plastic pen, the next I was depositing my dinner into the toilet and discovering that the stairs between the two floors of my office had unaccountably turned into K2.

  Bed rest should give us an opportunity to close the gap permanently before the baby comes. Maybe (who knows!) we’ll even get round to fucking for a change. I’ve hardly been at my sexiest these last few months; I’ve been crawling into bed too exhausted to brush my teeth, much less perform my Glamour-reader-sex-kitten routine. Lying on my side for the next fourteen weeks will at least let me catch up on some sleep—although, thinking about it, I’m not sure it’s the ideal kick start for a lagging sex life. Hi honey, I’ve spent the last thousand hours staring at daytime TV, d’you wanna get it on? And are we even allowed to have sex while I’m on bed rest? Dr. Weinberg didn’t say anything about it, but surely it diverts blood away from the uterus—or is it diverted to the uterus? Must remember to look up that one on the Web tomorrow.

  There are other things I need to research online, this whole condition for starters. I’d barely heard of amniotic fluid until today. And prematurity, better look up that one as well, I completely passed over the section on “The Premature Child” in Yes! You’re Having a Baby. Fourteen weeks early sounds like one of those tiny creatures you see on the March of Dimes ads, little alien beings with translucent skin and fingers the size of pine needles. I can hardly bear to think of it. I think I’ll try Googling “26 weeks’ gestation”—

  Lots of hits for “26 weeks.” Prematurebabies.com informs me that babies born at this developmental stage are at risk for some pretty nasty conditions. But here’s the good news. By thirty weeks, their chances of survival are close to 90 percent and the risk of a serious illness drops dramatically. So I have to do everything I can to make more of this fluid stuff, I have to keep him safe inside me for at least four more weeks. That’s just four weeks of lying on my left side 24/7. Really, when you think about it, that doesn’t sound so bad. Does it?

  3

  Wednesday 11:05 A.M.

  This is the first morning of my first full day on bed rest. I think I’m doing great. My sister Jeanie said last night on the telephone that I’d be bored into depression within twenty-four hours, but Jeanie is the kind of person who can’t occupy herself for a nanosecond. When we were kids she was always trailing after me and Alison, trying to persuade us to play with her and screaming the house down when we wouldn’t. I’m the oldest of the three of us, and I’ve always been the best at keeping myself entertained.

  So far this morning I have:

  Checked my Yahoo e-mail. Twice. Okay, a few more times than that.

  Read the New York Times, including the business section.

  Checked the updated Times on the Web.

  Paid the bills. Even the scarily huge ones.

  (High on the Modern Woman’s List of Things to Do Before Hitting Thirty is “Stop hiding credit card bills furtively in back issues of Cosmopolitan” and “Read more than just the Metro section of the Times.” I don’t think I can honestly check those boxes just yet, but I’m eyeing them with a new feeling of optimism.)

  And I haven’t switched on the TV once! Alison claimed I’d be addicted to Days of Our Lives before the end of the week, but so far I’ve found plenty to do without resorting to soaps and chat shows. Although I might watch Ricki Lake this afternoon at five. Today’s topic is almost relevant to me—it’s about getting pregnant, anyway.

  Tom hurled himself out the door at 7 A.M., then rushed back in at 7:05 in a panic, threw a piece of cheese in between two slices of bread and left it on the table beside the sofa (“I’m sorry, honey, I forgot, shit, I’m SO late—”). This, apparently, is my lunch. I’m tempted to order something for delivery, but then I’ll have to get up to answer the door—

  3:20 P.M.

  The lunch problem was solved by Brianna, this crazy paralegal from work. We started working together on a case about a month ago. We aren’t particularly close, but she came steaming uptown during her lunch hour with, would you believe, spicy pepperoni pizza and a lightly tossed garden salad in tow. I’ve decided I’ll have to answer the door to visitors—I’ll go mad if I don’t—but once I’d let Brianna in I lay virtuously on the sofa wolfing down pizza while she sat on the red Persian kilim that runs the width of our sitting room and told me about her tangled love life and the painful plight of the paralegal (eight months ago she quit the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office for Schuster, where she gets better pay but worse treatment).

  I’ve had five calls from the office since Brianna left, all work related. Nothing I can’t handle. Fortunately I’d already started putting together notes on all my files in preparation for maternity leave. My work in-box is bound to be brimming by now, but I’ve decided to ignore it—once they realize I’m not checking they’ll have to leave me alone. The office already seems strangely distant, another world, another life.

  One hour and forty minutes to Ricki. What shall I do now?

  3:50 P.M.

  At least the sitting room window faces my sofa. I can watch the sky and see the weather, that most English of pleasures. If I crane really hard I can glimpse people walking along the sidewalks at the intersection of Eighty-second and Second. And I can also see the inhabitants of the small 1940s apartment building opposite, the two uppermost floors anyway.

  The window I’m staring out of is rectangular and very large (the real estate agent who showed us around called it a “stunning focal point,” which translated means the room itself is just a plain oblong box). There’s a wooden radiator bench underneath it that’s just about wide enough to sit on. We’ve propped a few chenille cushions on top, and it’s a great place to settle with a book (well, it would be, if we ever had the time). Around the window we’ve hung heavy red curtains that graze the wooden floors from a long iron pole. A few weeks after we moved in, on a rare day off from work, I unearthed a cranberry glass vase to match in an antiques shop around the corner. It lives on the Danish teak table beside the sofa, and when the light shines through, an intense red stain appears on the wood behind it, like a spilled glass of pinot noir. A distressed brown leather armchair stands in the right-hand corner of the room, at an angle, facing me. Along the yellow-painted wall on the left there are two bookcases. The one nearest the window, filled with a jumble of undergraduate textbooks and embossed John Grisham paperbacks, mostly from airport bookshops, belongs to Tom. Mine, which stands closer to the sofa, contains a chronological collection of poetry books, essays, and novels from Austen to Atwood. It’s also decorated with a few family photographs in wooden frames and some English sea-smoothed glass.

  The room is small (this is Manhattan after all), but it’s bright and cozy. The radiator is going full blast; I can see ripples of heat in the air above the bench. I don’t think I’ve spent more than ten hours total in my sitting room since the day we moved in. But it’s become my world for the rest of my pregnancy.

  The building opposite will be gone later in the year; apparently, it’s going to be knocked down and replaced with something bigger and more modern. I heard somewhere—from two people talking in the elevator, or was it by the mailboxes—that it has terrible mold. From what I can see (and if I strain I can see right into the rooms), most of the residents are elderly, many of them even octogenarians; I’ve been observing them trotting slowly backward and forward, passing from room to room, for much of the last hour. They seem to be living in a different time zone from the rest of us, every movement measured, every step careful. I watched as an elderly gentleman in the corner apartment tried to replace a lightbulb. It took him about five minutes to get up his little stepladder. When he reached the top it shook wil
dly, he dropped the bulb, and then he had to start all over again. It was quite entertaining. The lady in the apartment next to him is just watching TV in the semidarkness.

  6:02 P.M.

  Shit—I missed the end of Ricki (got to love Ricki) because Alison decided to call in the middle, so now I’ll never know if Erik or Vinnie fathered Taysha’s baby. Officially Alison phoned to see how I was doing. Unofficially she called to gloat.

  “You have to promise me you’ll take it easy from now on,” she cooed. She was positively oozing smug satisfaction. “Pregnancy is really tough on your body, Q—believe me, I know! I tried to do what you did when I was pregnant with Geoffrey, but I realized in time you’ve got to make concessions to your growing baby’s needs. The hours you work, it’s just ridiculous! It’s one thing for Tom to stay up ’til all hours, but it isn’t reasonable for a woman in your condition. I think this was a wake-up call for you, Q, I really do.”