His heart rate is comfortably up at the moment; I feel I can risk unhooking myself from the monitor to get into the shower.
9 A.M.
I am clean, I am new. I have never been so pure.
That’s Plath again, although I think in her case it was inspired by something other than a bottle of kiwi-and-lime shampoo and a free sachet of peaches-and-cream conditioner found (by Eddie) under the counter of a nursing station. After slathering myself with these excessively scented unguents I feel like a completely different woman (although I fear I smell like a large fruit salad). I moisturized my face, dried my hair, put on black mascara (why not), and slipped on a clean hospital gown. Okay, so it still has a slit up the back and a cutesy floral print, but at least it has starched creases and a complete lack of tomato ketchup stains (it’s hard to eat home fries in bed). And I’ve rid myself of that pesky bra at last; my newly rounded maternal breasts jiggle about under my gown like two baby seals in a sack.
My little boy is clearly feeling the effects of the last chocolate chip cookie because he is kicking and squirming; my stomach undulates with each movement. He must like cookies as much as his mother.
4 P.M.
Tom has just left.
He was here for about forty minutes, then he received a phone call from one of the partners asking him to go back to the office immediately. I watched him talking into the phone (“Really? Can’t—? No, I see. Okay. But really—okay. Yes. Okay.”) and I knew that something was up, that something was wrong; his eyes kept flicking toward me, then uncomfortably flicking away. At the end of the conversation he snapped his silver phone shut, still without meeting my gaze, then told me that he may have to go to Tucson in a few weeks’ time to work with one of Crimpson’s biggest clients on a series of new hotel leases.
I gasped. Tucson? If they send me home, how will I cope on my own? And if I’m still in the hospital, how will I pass the days without him?
I couldn’t quite believe what he was suggesting. Dimly I heard him saying something about how his mother could come and take care of me (“I know it’s not ideal, Q, but she wants to be more involved in our lives, this might be a real opportunity…”) and I blenched; Lucille of all people, my God, was he serious? I stared up at him for a few moments without speaking. Then I told him to try and get out of the Tucson trip. And before I knew what I was saying I was asking if he really has to make partner at his firm, or if he’d consider switching jobs to a smaller, less prestigious firm, one that actually lets you go home for the weekend and eat dinner with your kids.
He was standing by the end of the bed, fiddling with the tip of his silk striped tie the way he always does when he’s stressed. As my words sank in, he glanced over at me for a second or two, and in his eyes I saw many things: distress, anger, disappointment, frustration—many things. He looked away again before I had time to determine which feeling was uppermost. He has the most wonderful eyes—blue-green, sea-colored, and the sudden sight of them made me remember all over again that I love him (so much). But even as I remembered, words seemed to be tumbling out of my mouth, whitewater words crashing into the air, explaining that something has changed, that from now on I want to feel he’s putting me first. And when this all ends, after we have the baby, I’m going to want to feel the same way.
I’m sick of never seeing you, I told him, carried away on a wave of emotion. I’m sick of having food thrown at me as you vanish out the door—I’m your wife, not a sea lion, what am I supposed to do, gulp down the fish and clap my hands? I’m sick of packing our relationship into fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes at night. I want our weekends back, I want them like they used to be, the first months we were together. I want to get lost in Central Park. I want to get sunburned on Jones Beach. I want to drink dangerously large martinis then feel each other up through the seven languorously served courses of dinner at L’Espinasse.
After a minute or two he turned and walked away from the end of the bed and went to stand by the window. I watched him watch the Manhattan afternoon pass by. The noise of the traffic is muted by the thick hospital glazing; inside, I feel shielded from the busy world outside. I’m still and quiet, lying here, while it rushes loudly past. Until now, I’ve only thought about how oppressive the silence and the stillness are, how depressing, how boring. But today I realize I actually like the feeling of being quietly cocooned in here with the baby. Of course I get scared, and bored, but I like not having to organize my life into increments of time, into fifteen-minute billable blocks listed in an oppressively large black leather desk diary. And I want him to share something of this with me. I want to spend at least part of these long irksome days breathing in time with him, learning again to read his thoughts.
Tom listened to me tell him this with his face half-hidden in the lengthening shadows of a raw March afternoon. He has spent very little time in the hospital with me, and he admitted suddenly that this has been deliberate. He has found worrying about me and thinking about me incredibly tiring this past month, he said, his voice strained and thin. The knowledge that I’m fed and provided for in a hospital has been a relief, he added, and as he turned around to face the bed I saw the dog-tired expression on his face. “I’m sorry, Q, I know this is hard on you,” he went on. “But Christ, it’s hard on me, getting up and going to work, doing all the usual stuff, and making sure you’re provided for as well. As for Crimpson—Q, listen to me, I’ve wanted this job for ten years. I’m trying to make partner at one of the biggest and most important firms in the city. I’m working to achieve my life’s biggest ambition. Don’t tell me to quit, honey, please…”
I stared at him. An ice cube seemed to be melting, slowly, in the pit of my stomach. Suddenly he slumped on the bed beside me, reached out, and took my hand. “Q, I love you,” he said, earnestly, to my fingers. “I love you so much, you know that. But we knew it was going to be hard when we decided to have a baby, right? We agreed we’d make it work somehow, right? And that’s all I’m asking now, for us to do what we said we’d do, a few months ago…”
Mark and Lara called five minutes ago to tell me they are coming to visit this evening. I can’t stand them, but at least they’ll help me keep my mind off all this.
8 P.M.
Something extraordinary has happened.
It’s about Mark and Lara, and—
Wait, I’m going to tell the story in the order in which things happened.
Mark and Lara arrived at 6 P.M. Lara looked impossibly elegant in a monochromatic Chanel pantsuit. The creases in my floral hospital gown wilted at the mere sight of her.
“I’m sure you know I’m pregnant,” she said, settling into the nursing glider beside my bed and kicking off her barely-pink suede kitten-heeled boots. “I’m three months’ gone,” she added, with an oh-so-casual glance down at her oh-so-flat, couture-encased belly. I caught the self-satisfied expression in her eye. By her stage I was already confined to elastic-waisted nylon skirts from Target.
“Yes, I heard,” I said sourly. (What’s this? I thought. Go-wind-up-the-high-risk-pregnant-woman-in-hospital day?)
“Of course,” she went on, swinging her legs off the glider footrest and affecting a look of earnest importance, “the timing is bad. It’s difficult for us to celebrate, obviously.”
I was a bit taken aback. “You needn’t feel that my condition—er—should prevent you—er,” I began, awkwardly.
Lara trilled with laughter. “Oh no, Q,” she said, cheerfully. “I don’t mean you! I mean”—pause to refix expression of earnest importance on her face—“my father. He’s still very ill, you know. Yes, it’s a trying time for my family. Being in this hospital—well, it brings back the whole ordeal, to be honest. I think I shall have my baby at a birthing center; I can’t deal with hospital karma, not after what I’ve been through…”
As she wittered on about birthing suites, doulas, and so forth, somewhere in the back of my brain something stirred. With an effort I managed to pin down a memor
y of a late-night phone call a few months ago, in which Mark asked Tom if he could recommend a heart specialist (Tom’s father is a surgeon at Johns Hopkins). Lara’s father had just had a heart attack, and Mark was trying to do something useful to help out.
“It’s been an appalling shock for me,” I heard her say. “I’ve been on antidepressants since my mother called with the news. But my doctor says they won’t have any effect on the baby, and the most important thing is for me to find peace. And I think that’s right, don’t you? I can’t be a good mother unless I’m at one with myself…”
Mark was standing where Tom stood earlier this afternoon, by the window, staring out at the Manhattan streets. I could see the faint balding spot on the back of his head, the pink skin showing through his coarse, sparse hair. Tom claims that Mark used to be very good-looking; I can hardly believe it, we’re not that old yet, surely, he’s only a few years past thirty—
It was already quite dark outside. Loops of white lights threaded through the trees sparkled along the busy sidewalks, illuminating the crowds of people attending to their infinitely varied concerns.
Lara was still talking.
“Although if we’re going to be honest—just between us girls—I wouldn’t be having this baby if it wasn’t for my father’s illness. So there is definitely a silver lining to this cloud. You must know what I mean!” she said, with a hideous simper.
I blinked. “Sorry?” I said, baffled. “I don’t think I do—”
Mark was still standing silently, hands plunged deep into the side pockets of his blue jeans. He didn’t seem to be paying attention to our conversation. Lara glanced at his back, then leaned in toward me.
“I mean the baby was conceived that night,” she murmured in my ear, with an arch, conspiratorial smile. “The night of my father’s heart attack. Quite a night it was too—I didn’t think Mark could make me forget something so awful, but he was so, well, demanding, it was—mmmmm—just thrilling…”
And she began to whisper all sorts of things about their sexual goings-on the night her father was taken ill, about Mark’s long-standing fantasy for her to don a red velvet bustier and walk the nighttime streets, and her sudden capitulation…
Her final words sunk in a few seconds after she’d uttered them. A red velvet—good God!…“Yes,” Lara continued, mistaking my choking gasp, “I know what you mean, I don’t mind admitting I found the whole thing rather slutty, but my brush with death left me feeling so reckless, and really, Q, it was the most incredible sex I’ve ever had, Mark put on quite a performance—”
“Lara, for God’s sake!” Mark broke in; he’d clearly just realized the turn the conversation had taken. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and planted them firmly on his hips. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked, with a dark, furious expression on his face.
Lara laughed her arch laugh again, then stretched back languorously in the glider. “Oh, baby, you needn’t be so shy, I’m doing you justice after all!” she said, slipping (I’m not making this up) her little finger into her mouth and biting the nail in what I imagine she took to be a devilishly sexy fashion.
Mark folded his arms tightly across his chest. “I don’t think Q is interested in hearing about our sex life, Lara, and it embarrasses the hell out of me, so let’s change the subject, okay?” he said, his body rigid with irritation. Lara shrugged and threw me an amused look. I studiously avoided her eye.
They left about ten minutes later, but I don’t remember a word of what we talked about. Sentences were playing and replaying in my mind, sentences which on first hearing seemed simply clichéd but have now acquired the unmistakable sheen of truth: “my wife’s on antidepressants…” “she’s so self-conscious…” “her father’s heart attack…” “I can’t leave because of the children…” And that red velvet corset, the cause of poor Brianna’s torment—
Because surely—Mark is Brianna’s MM! They must have met at work, when Brianna was a paralegal in the Manhattan Assistant U.S. Attorney’s office. I’d never quite put it together before, but they certainly must have worked in the same office at the same time—and Brianna did tell me her lover was a lawyer with a distinct lack of social conscience…
If I’m right, I bet Mark has broken off the relationship not just because of the pregnancy, but also because Lara has been taking a new view of his sexy little fantasies these past few months. Poor Brianna must have looked pretty tame beside a resplendent Lara in velvet and sables. What man wants a mistress who’s more sexually reserved than his wife?
So how to proceed? Should I call Brianna and tell her what I’ve discovered? Should I confront Mark? Or should I tell Lara? Scrub the last option, I have no intention of exposing Mark and Brianna to Lara. Brianna because we’re friends, Mark because I can’t find it in my heart to blame him for running around on that flat-bellied, tight-assed daughter of Satan. It’s ironic really; I thought Brianna was the world’s dumbest mistress for swallowing lines like “my wife doesn’t understand me,” but as it turns out—I’m sure it’s true!
Tom’s been telling me for years that Mark’s obsessive pursuit of poverty-stricken unfortunates with two grams of crack in their jeans pocket was weirdly out of character. As a law student at NYU, he was extremely active in the Human Rights Clinic; his metamorphosis into a hard-nosed AUSA only took place after his marriage to Lara. Mark’s ambition used to be to move back to his hometown in rural California, set up his own law firm, and provide legal representation to poor residents, on a barter system if necessary, but Lara was having none of it. She wouldn’t consider moving out of Manhattan, and anyway she has precious little sympathy for the drug-embroiled (“They should learn to exercise, that’s how I get high”). Over the years Mark seemed to take her lead, although Tom always said there was something suspiciously self-hating about his transformation into the kind of person he once despised.
Tom can be very perceptive about people.
Tom—Tom. I haven’t thought about him in nearly three hours. I’ve been feeling secretly delighted at the problems in Lara and Mark’s marriage, feeling (if I’m honest) rather smug because my husband isn’t running around behind my back, and now it strikes me that, in a sense, he is. He might as well be having an affair with another woman for all the time and attention he has for me these days. His work comes first, it seems, before me, before the baby.
25
Monday 3 A.M.
Achingly tired but can’t sleep. I’ve been thinking a lot about Tom and our conversation this afternoon. Maybe I’m not being fair. It’s true we knew we were taking on a lot when we decided to try for a baby; I always understood that Tom was fiercely ambitious. It’s one of the first things I loved about him, actually. He told me he wanted to make partner at Crimpson the day we met, four years ago, on a warm Sunday afternoon in early fall (the kind of afternoon that lingers long in your memory, when the heat of the pavements creeps up your knees like a lion’s lick while a polar bear’s breath steals through your hair). He does try to join me for supper, even if he has to go back to the office afterward. He gives me as much time as he has, what more can I ask?
And I know he thinks about me, and worries about me, all the time. A taut, set look settles over his face whenever he sees me trying to keep myself occupied with nothing but a laptop, a few dog-eared magazines, and a plate of food. “I wish I could do this for you,” he said to me once, his voice low, stifled. “I wish I could carry the baby instead of you.” And he tries to think of treats to raise my spirits: one evening, when he couldn’t make it home before bedtime, he arranged for a courier to bring me a bunch of gigantic Asiatic lilies, delicate white and golden stars with bright red stamen. Another time he sent a box filled with cocoa-thick brownie wedges; “sweets for my sweet” he wrote in his crabbed lawyer’s handwriting on the card.
Men like him don’t come along all the time, they really don’t.
3:30 A.M.
But there are the practicalities to consider. We’re goin
g to have a child. Am I supposed to deal with our baby on my own if he wakes up crying in the middle of the night and Tom’s still working?
4 A.M.
I’m getting ahead of myself; there is a perfectly practical solution. I’ll be on maternity leave at the very beginning, so it’s only fair if I deal with the baby when he’s a newborn. Then we’ll get child care for the daytime, and the baby should be sleeping at nights by the time I go back to work. It’ll be fine.
It’s going to be a question of compromise, of balancing Tom’s needs with mine. (Isn’t that what the magazines and talk shows always tell us? Compromise and communicate, then everything will work out.) I’ll tell him he has to eat with our son in the evenings, and after that, I’ll let him do his own thing.
4:15 A.M.
Who am I kidding—according to my friends, sleeping through the night is the holy grail of parenting. The child may be a year old before I’m getting a good night’s rest. Unless Tom cuts back his hours and takes his fair share of nighttime duties when I go back to work at Schuster, I’ll walk blearily under the street sweeper one morning on my way to the office and that’ll be an end to it all.
As for the supper thing, that’ll only work if our toddler likes his spaghetti hoops at midnight. Tom says he’ll be home in half an hour, but then he bumps into Phil or Ed or Ian, and three hours pass by. That’s just the reality of our lives. Plus I don’t see how I’m going to make partner if I end up doing 90 percent of the child care. Schuster isn’t as crazy as Crimpson—it isn’t as high octane, nor as elite—but if you start really trying to cut back your hours, if you get onto what Brianna heard Fay contemptuously call the “mommy track,” you’ll find yourself unaccountably assigned to the firm’s most boring, Byzantine cases. If I’m going to be a success at Schuster, if I’m going to get real job satisfaction, I’ll need to work close to as hard as I did before I went on bed rest.
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