Once again, the tax for this culinary largesse was thirty-five minutes on the subject of the Married Man. The story gets worse and worse. Married Man and Married Woman have two children, and MW has just told MM she’s pregnant with the third. Brianna thinks it’s all a con on the wife’s part; forget the wife, I thought to myself, maybe it’s MM who’s doing the conning…Of course, he’s had to explain how the woman he can “barely bring himself to touch” has become pregnant with his kid; he told Brianna it was just a one-night thing after the wife’s father had a heart attack a few months back. Had we heard anything about MW’s father’s heart attack before this? Had we heard about MW’s inconsolable distress and her insatiable demand for sex in the aftermath? No, we had not, but this doesn’t seem to bother Brianna. She’s swallowing the whole lot hook, line, maggot, and sinker. You have to hand it to him, MM is doing an excellent job here. He’s found the one woman in the City of New York who hasn’t heard these lines before and he’s peddling them for all he’s worth. Unfortunately, as Brianna gets to know me better, she’s becoming less inhibited about telling me the raw details of the affair. I now know, therefore:
that he likes her to dress up in red velvet bustiers with nipple rings, fishnet stockings, and black suspenders (“my wife gets so self-conscious”);
that his number one fantasy is for her to dress up as a hooker (a red velvet bustier-wearing hooker, you understand), and for him to drive by and pick her up;
that she’s thinking about going along with the above, but she has some serious reservations (“Q, I might get arrested!”);
that his wife taunts him about his flabby body and middle-aging spread, while Brianna makes him feel like a Real Man (ha!).
So I listen with the appearance of interest while Brianna tells me all of this, slurping noodles as I go. Oh, who am I kidding, I’m fascinated by her sex life at this point. My red velvet bustier has been lost in the back of the sock drawer for a long time now, and the last time Tom and I shared a fantasy it involved a three-bedroom house in the ’burbs with a decent-size garden and a Viking stove.
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that I saw Brianna go back to the office with something oddly close to regret. She’s not the sharpest tack in the tool drawer, but she’s a helluva lot more interesting than the four walls of our small yellow sitting room.
8
Wednesday 9 A.M.
I can’t bear it, I don’t think I can bear it. This morning I awoke at six to the sound of the door slamming as Tom left for work, and I began to panic; fear rose like vomit in my throat, I felt as if I was about to choke. I have to get through this entire day, here, on my own—and the next, and the next, and the next, stretching on and on through the next three months (thirteen weeks, ninety-one days, two thousand one hundred and eighty-four hours, one hundred and thirty-one thousand and forty minutes—).
I’m going to lose a whole season. It’s February now, I’ll miss this year’s spring completely. Not that it’s much to write home about on the East Coast, not like in England—the daffodils will be out now in Oxford, banks of purple and yellow crocuses clustering under the trees in the Trinity gardens—but still, I’ll miss that sense of the year’s lightening; the first warm day, the first glimmer of green beneath the snow-killed grass in the park.
I am lonely. I am bored. I am scared. I am hungry.
10 A.M.
I’m going to learn to knit. I just looked up “wool” on the Web and found a Manhattan store that has a Web site. I ordered five balls of something called “cashmerino baby” in pale blue. Then I ordered two pairs of bamboo needles and a book called Knitting for Novices. I finished up the order with a funky knitting bag with matching needle case in pink and taupe stripes. Very 1950s.
10:30 A.M.
Who am I kidding? I’m not going to teach myself to knit. I can’t even sew—I refused to learn at school, decided (aged six) it was a dying art, so instead I devoted my time to learning how to stick pins into the skin of my forefinger without drawing blood. I may have an alternative career as an acupuncturist, but my chances of knitting a pair of bootees for our baby seem slim. And do I really want the bootees anyway? Surely we’d prefer a few pairs of serviceable white cotton socks from the Gap?
What am I going to do—what am I going to do—what am I going to do—?
11:15 A.M.
I am going to commit myself to increasing my knowledge of black-and-white cinema. I’ll draw up a list of the great movies I’ve always meant to watch and work my way through the genres—silent, action, film noir, foreign, documentary. I’ll take notes on them to remind me of all the plots, the actors, the directors, and who won which Oscars. By the time this baby comes I’ll have a compendious knowledge of Great Film—I’ll be the kind of person who dashes to obscure art cinemas to watch newly discovered footage from a prewar Russian documentary. I’ll slip in references to my “favorite” Japanese filmmaker at dinner parties. I’ll talk knowledgably about “cinematography.” I’ll be able to check the box marked “be an impressive conversationalist” on the Modern Woman’s List of Things to Do Before Hitting Thirty.
11:30 A.M.
But I’m never going to go to dinner parties again, am I? And I’m not going to have the time for obscure art films either. After all, who’ll look after the baby? I can hardly take him with me; highbrow cinema-goers won’t think much of a screaming toddler. There’s no point in educating myself in Great Film. I’m going to spend the next ten years of my life attending Disney movies filled with princesses and dancing turtles.
I have no life now, and I’ll never have a life again. I might as well face the facts. My youth is over. This is simply a taste of what’s to come. I’m not me anymore; I’m not a lawyer, I’m not Tom’s lover, I’m a body, a vehicle, an incubator. I’m “a means, a stage, a cow-in-calf,” as Sylvia Plath put it. My whole being is devoted to preserving another life. My own life has effectively ended. Bed rest just means it ended a little earlier than expected.
11:45 A.M.
Cut all of the above. . I can’t believe I was complaining about the restrictions the baby is placing on me when I don’t even know if he’ll live. What kind of a mother am I? If I was any kind of a woman I wouldn’t begrudge losing these last few months of my freedom. What the hell is wrong with me?
9
Thursday
Slept all day, watched TV.
10
Friday
Slept, watched TV, slept some more.
11
Saturday
Tom working. Watched TV. Cried. Ate cookies.
12
Sunday
Tom working again. Cried hysterically. Ate cookies.
13
Monday Noon
Several important things happened this morning:
A visit to Cherise revealed that my fluid level has risen slightly.
The condo newsletter arrived under the door, and I discovered that my funny Greek lady is—how unlikely!—leading a group of local people opposed to the demolition of the apartment building opposite.
My fluid level is still too low; Dr. Weinberg showed me a chart. But at least I’m not at the very bottom of the chart anymore; there’s a chink of daylight now between me and impending disaster. So maybe the bed rest is helping? I can’t quite believe it, I find it hard to accept that lying on a sofa all day affects those irregularly shaped pockets of black at the baby’s shoulders, hips, and toes. But who knows. The important thing is—as Dr. Weinberg told me, a smile pinned firmly to her darkly lipsticked mouth—my condition is not getting worse.
As regards the Greek lady, it seems she’s something of a mover in local politics. Turns out that both our building and the one opposite, the one whose residents I watch when there’s nothing good on the TV, are owned by the same landlord; both were populated in the 1950s and 1960s by a number of Greek and Cypriot immigrants (I always wondered why you find such good dolmades around here). Fast-forward fifty years: the complex opposite is now i
nfested with toxic mold, the black kind, the type that embeds itself deep into the Sheetrock, breeds greedily, then takes over the atmosphere. So the landlord plans to demolish the building and replace it with something more modern and yuppie-pleasing. But the now-elderly residents have no desire to move out of their homes, and they’ve been fighting the development tooth and nail. I have to say, in my opinion, you don’t mess with toxic mold. Just last month I read in the Times about some child in Queens who almost died from respiratory problems caused by the stuff, and there have been megasuits against realty companies for mold-friendly construction these last few years. Personally, I think the residents should cut their losses and hightail it out of there. Black mold is scary.
Anyway, today I feel able to take an interest in the world once again, mostly because:
Jeanie phoned to say she’s found a flight and is coming out on Thursday evening!
I’m not sure which of us is most delighted, me or Tom. He’s finding me pretty difficult to deal with right now. I made him come home early on Sunday afternoon—he called around 2 P.M. to ask if I was doing a little better (he left me a weeping drooling slobbering mess at 7 A.M.) and I said, no, honestly, I’m worse. I don’t think I can take this much longer. I’m going off my head with boredom and fear. After a brief, strained silence he agreed to head home, and he arrived an hour later with an armful of movies and a bottle of merlot (“Doctor Tom’s orders, Q, no arguing, a glass of this and you’re bound to feel better”). But he knows, and I know, that he can’t slip out from the office every afternoon I’m feeling miserable. As he reminded me yet again today, the senior partners at his firm have made it clear he has to be an exemplary employee if he’s going to make partner next summer. He’s a fabulous lawyer, and he has a great deal of support, but Crimpson is one of the top three firms in the city, and it’s promoted only a handful of its senior associates these past few years. Plus he’s had the odd nasty mishap in the last twelve months. Let’s just say the words “Trump” and “Donald” are rarely uttered in our home. He’s got to persuade the partners he’s not only capable but entirely committed to his job if he’s to become a Crimpson partner himself.
Oh where oh where does that leave me…lonely and bored is where—lonely, bored, and hungry. Very hungry. Still, for the next week at least, Jeanie can look after me. I can send her out for different kinds of foods and magazines, I can make her fetch me chocolate chip cookies (the best American invention of all time, if you ask me, with lightbulbs a distant second), play games, and maybe even figure out how to knit something with my five balls of cashmerino wool (currently unopened in their padded brown envelope and stuffed under a pile of bills and unread magazines—did I really think I was going to read The Economist?). I’ll knit myself a scarf I think, it can’t be that hard. It’ll be like when we were kids and we tried to carve totem poles out of sticks we found in the garden. I don’t think we ever managed a recognizable totem, but we had a lot of fun trying. Alison used to get all snooty about our efforts (and she’d threaten to tell our mother that we’d taken the knives from the kitchen drawer), but Jeanie and I were undeterred. Once Jeanie got to be about eight, she was great fun. A lot more fun than Alison. It’ll be fantastic to have her here for a whole week.
Horrible boyfriend is not coming along, which Jeanie is upset about—I think she was hoping to combine looking after me with a romantic touristy getaway in the Big Apple (take in a few Broadway shows, eat at some expensive trendy restaurant, waste wads of cash in Niketown, all the sorts of things my English friends seem hell-bent on doing when they come to visit). But the thought of having the horrible boyfriend in my apartment—in what’s about to become my baby’s nursery—filled me with dread and disgust, although I didn’t say much about it (okay, so I might have mentioned that I didn’t want his smelly feet stinking up the place, but they really are rank). Anyway, it’s a dead issue because he can’t get the time off work, and now that he actually has a job…He also can’t afford the plane fare, and while I’m happy to contribute air miles to the Jeanie fund, I’m sure as hell not paying for that lousy toadstool of a man. So, horrible boyfriend will be all on his own in London, and I can spend seven days explaining to my misguided little sister why he’s Not Good for Her. Perfect!
She’s a funny girl, Jeanie. I’ve never understood why someone so attractive—she has big brown eyes, a boyish slender figure, and long, perfectly straight fair hair (so much nicer than my wispy red stuff)—is drawn to such losers. I mean, Mike Novak was a nimwit, but at least he had prospects in the medical profession, and Alison’s boyfriends, while uniformly irritating, were usually at least talented, titled, or good-looking. But Jeanie has a rare talent for falling in love with men who are singularly ungifted in the looks department—the more pock marks the better—and still have an ego the size of the London Eye. It’s a phenomenon peculiar to the male species, I think; show me a girl with weight problems, greasy hair, and zits and I’ll show you someone who spends her life indoors hiding behind a pair of darkened spectacles and a large-brimmed hat. But you’ll find a man with the same unprepossessing characteristics (and let’s throw in bad breath and body odor for good measure) strutting his stuff in every club in England on a Saturday night, blithely chatting up any babe unlucky enough to come within ten feet of him and confidently telling his mates he’s “in there.”
Most girls, of course, tip their vodka-and-orange over said disgusting slimeball, but Jeanie is one of those weird people who decides he’s “just being friendly.” Dave—the charming beau of the moment—turned up in one of her evening classes (she’s putting herself through a graduate program in social work), and he was, apparently, remarkably “friendly” from the get-go. In fact, his chief appeal seems to have been that, for the first month, he followed her around with the devotion of a dog (its personal hygiene habits also, I must add). The library, the pub, the bus stop—you name it, Jeanie told me, Dave was there, waiting for her with a hopeful look in his eye. I’d have called my lawyer and got a restraining order slapped on the nauseating bit of pond weed, but Jeanie thought this was all rather sweet, so she rewarded him at the end of a month by going to bed with him. Not, she admitted, that she fancied him exactly, but she thought his dogged affection proved that he really cared for her. She was not deterred by the fact that by this point he’d been chucked off the social work course for nonpayment of fees, dragged before the courts for nonpayment of the council tax, and kicked out of his job at the local café for persistently turning up late. He was just at a bad point in his life,” Jeanie told me optimistically; “he really needs someone to believe in him.”
My mother thinks Jeanie is programmed by her experiences with my father to fall for useless men, but I think it has to be more complicated than that; my father brushed his teeth and washed his hair, for god’s sake, and he didn’t exude Dave’s air of disreputable sliminess. Tom thinks Jeanie felt deserted by my father, ignored (in favor of Alison and me) by my mother, and left out by us two older girls when we were growing up, and so she’s now looking for someone to make her the center of their universe. I think that’s nonsense. It’s true that I enjoyed making my two sisters compete for my attention when I was a kid—which was a bit mean, I grant you, but I’m sure I’m not the first oldest child in the world to do it. And Jeanie knows I love her. If I hadn’t left for New York just after Alison’s marriage to the honorable Gregory Fuckwit (as I like to call him), I think we’d have become really close.
10 P.M.
Tom just called to say he’ll be home in an hour. I could hear the anxiety in his breathing as soon as I picked up the phone—“Q, I can’t get out yet, please don’t be mad at me, okay?” But rather than yelling wrathfully at him or whispering brokenly that I need him now, I told him “he should take as long as he needs…”! So maybe I’ve turned a corner, maybe I’m sort of adapting to this curious new life. The pregnancy seems to be going better, Jeanie’s coming here in four days, and Brianna swept in at 4 P.M. and left me with three
boxes of all-butter cookies from some delicatessen in the Village.
14
Tuesday 2 P.M.
Just as I was about to devour my lunchtime smoked-ham-and-Cheshire-cheese sandwich—it was literally on its way to my mouth—there was a knock on the door and there stood Mrs. Gianopoulou (aka my funny Greek lady, aka president of Residents Against Demolition) with an absolutely extraordinary food platter. Creamy hummus, shiny purple olives, zesty dolmades, and fresh warm pita, all excellent, all homemade. I was positively moved. Funny that my two most devoted visitors since I’ve been on bed rest have been a girl I hardly know from the office and a woman I’d never met from my apartment complex.
Anyway, I asked Mrs. G to stay and share some of the platter with me, and after some hesitation she agreed. I’m not sure how old she is—certainly well over sixty—but she’s quite a stylish-looking woman in an older-person sort of way. She wears her silvering hair pulled back in a bun, which emphasizes the strong cheekbones beneath her olive skin, and her green eyes are flecked with gold. I don’t think she pays much attention to what she wears, but she has a southerner’s love of color; most days she sports what my mother calls “slacks,” crease-free trousers in bright pinks and oranges, topped with striped cotton shirts and cheery home-knit sweaters. She isn’t thin, but she isn’t fat either, more cushiony and comfortable-looking, and she has a lovely smile. Her presence in our apartment—these four too-familiar walls—feels like a breath of warm fresh air. (And she helped me tidy up the room a bit as well—it’s amazing how much rubbish accumulates when you can’t get out of bed to chuck things in the trash. Actually to be honest, she scuttled around the room depositing chocolate wrappers and take-out cartons into a succession of plastic bags while I lay on the sofa and chirruped thankfully at her.)
Bed Rest Page 5