50
Midnight
“There’s something I need to discuss with you,” Tom said to me a few hours ago as I sat by the sink on the wooden stool in our bathroom, brushing my teeth.
I took a deep breath. “Go on,” I said quietly, thinking, at last. The moment has finally arrived. Since he got back from Tucson and Baltimore he’s spent an appalling amount of time in the office, but even when he’s here he’s treated me with a terrifying, aching politeness. I don’t know how to talk to him when he’s like this. I don’t even know where to begin. He’s like an opaque window, a closed vault, a sealed letter.
He leaned his butt against the vanity, crossed his legs, then his arms, and stared into the middle distance. I heard his breathing turn shallow. “Q, a while back, in the hospital, you asked me to quit Crimpson. Then there was that other stupid fight, before I left…I’ve been thinking a lot about everything you said, and you have to know—I’m not prepared to do it. To quit, I mean. Making partner at Crimpson—it’s the most important thing in my life. And realizing that—realizing that…” He paused. The world paused—
“Realizing that has made me see that—that—”
“I’m not,” someone said, and I realized from the peppermint froth bubbling down my chin that it was me.
I put down the brush and reached for the soft green hand towel looped through a ring on the wall. Then I wiped my mouth. There was a strange sound in my ears, as if a huge curtain was being ripped in two.
It took a while for me to notice that Tom was still speaking. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I saw his lips moving in the oval beveled mirror on the opposite wall. I don’t know what you’re saying, I told him. I don’t hear you. You’ll have to say it all again, I’m afraid, because I think I need to know if you’re going to leave me.
He turned and looked at me, and I noticed that his eyes were full of tears. His eyes are the color of the soap in the dish, the tiles on the wall, the door to the shower, sea green, blue-green, my favorite color. “Leave you—Christ, I—Q, that’s not what I mean, at least—I don’t know what I’m going to do. I just know that I can’t settle for some second-class job at some third-tier firm. Because you and I both know I can’t go to any old job. The hours aren’t going to be much better unless I take a big jump down the ladder. You may be happy with that, but I know I won’t be. At Crimpson I deal with huge clients and big issues. I’m not willing to spend my life dealing with the same five zoning issues month in and month out. I can’t do it, Q, I’m sorry. Where does that leave us?”
I don’t know, I said, wearily. Slowly I stood up. Then—because I couldn’t think what else to do—I turned my back on him and, leaving him alone in the bathroom, crept into bed like an animal into its hole.
Tom stood in the doorway to the bathroom, looking at me, his face a mix of concern and frustration. I pulled the covers over my head and closed my eyes in the hot, suffocating darkness.
“Q, listen to me please.” He seemed far, far away. I lifted the edge of the comforter slightly. “I can’t lie to you, it’s always been us, you and me, y’know? We’ve always been straight with each other. I can’t pretend to you I’ll be happy in a different job, now, can I?”
I thought about this. It sounded plausible, but there was some flaw in the argument. Oh yes, we’re about to have a baby.
“We’re about to have a baby,” I said, my voice muffled by the comforter. I lifted it a couple of inches higher to watch the effect of my words.
“I know that,” he said, impatiently, and started pacing up and down. “I know that, of course I do, but that doesn’t mean our life has to stop, does it? That doesn’t mean we have to give up everything that’s important to us, right? And anyway, at the beginning, the baby will hardly know I’m around, I don’t see it’s going to make a big difference if I’m here in the evenings or not—”
“Right, but I take it you think I will be?” I said, furiously, struggling to sit up at last, fighting my way out of the heavy covers, “unless you think that the baby will be happy if neither of us is at home?”
“I don’t see what you mean,” he replied, bewildered. “Look, to be honest, I don’t really know what this is all about, where it’s come from. We agreed we’d get child care, a nanny. That’s what we always said, so yeah, maybe we’ll both be at work—”
“All day, every day, we’ll both be at work, we’ll never see this baby, is that what you think? After all this, after carrying him every day for nine months, lying in bed for three of them, you think I’m just going to walk out that door and leave him with some stranger from dawn to midnight? Is that what you think?” I yelled, picking up a pillow and throwing it at his face for added emphasis. “Is that what you think?”
“Well, yes,” he said, catching the pillow calmly and laying it on the end of the bed. “That’s exactly what I think. It’s what people do.”
“No, it’s not, it’s not what people do,” I shouted, so hard my throat hurt. My larynx seemed to be closing, my voice sounded strangled and hoarse, it was like someone else’s voice, not mine at all. “It’s not what people do, or if it is, it’s horrible, kids want to see their parents, this isn’t a mother-kid thing, this is a parent-kid thing, do you understand? I don’t care what we said or didn’t say all those months ago, it doesn’t matter now, everything’s changed, can’t you see that? We’re having a baby, Tom, please, try to understand…” My voice failed me, and I started to cry, weakly, pathetically. Why do the tears come just when we most want to seem cool and collected? But the pregnancy hormones descended like a huge wet web, sticky and suffocating and inescapable. I tried to claw it away but I couldn’t, the sobs were deep inside my solar plexus now, the web was over my face, I could hardly breathe.
My husband stood and watched me, his weary eyes tense and shadowed.
“Q, I don’t think you’re thinking straight,” he said at last. “If you’re considering quitting Schuster and staying home I guess that’s something we can discuss, although I’m not convinced it’s what you really want. But as for me—look, I have plenty of colleagues with kids, they just manage somehow, I’m not saying it’s ideal, but they survive. They put in quality time when they can, and they hope their kids will understand. They make it up to them, and their wives, later, when they’ve reached the top of the profession. And that’s what I’m going to do. Because I’m determined to make partner at Crimpson. I don’t want to upset you, Q, but we have to get this straight; I’m not going to quit.” He turned and walked out of the bedroom.
I watched Oprah this afternoon, the topic was “building a marriage for a lifetime.” The consensus of the guests (sitting with hands discreetly propped on the spousal knee, the women in looped beads and hand-knit sweaters, the men in uncomfortable trousers) was, don’t forget the romance. Help me, Oprah, please, because I fear it’s going to take more than a candelabra and a filmy negligee to get my relationship back on track.
51
Saturday 8:30 A.M.
I stumbled into the kitchen an hour ago to find a note propped up against the saltcellar. For a terrible moment I thought, that’s it, he’s left me for good. Dear Q, I choose my job, raise the kid on your own, damn you. But the note simply said that he may have to work through the night tonight and asked me (as an afterthought) to call if I needed anything.
Needless to say, I won’t.
Crack open Sylvia Plath’s Ariel when life seems too hard to bear. It’s always good to discover that someone else has been closer to the screaming edge than you are.
11 P.M.
Tom can barely bring himself to look at me, but five minutes ago he arrived home unexpectedly with a large citron tart, which he deposited on the table beside the sofa. Then he vanished into the bathroom to take a quick shower and change his clothes, telling me, tersely, that he’s going back to the office in half an hour.
I’m not sure what to make of the gesture (although I do know what to do with the tart itself, I’ve already s
hoveled about half of it into my mouth, and it’s incredible. The pastry’s light and crumbly, the fat melts in the mouth, the lemon fizzes and zings on the tongue). What does it mean? Is the cake in place of his love?
It certainly doesn’t seem to augur a change of heart on his part, a renewal of intimacy with a bed-bound Q. He dumped the tart heavily beside me, dropped his briefcase by the sofa, then stomped off into the bedroom with a closed face.
I stared at the briefcase resentfully. Rectangular, hard sides, dark maroon, with bright bronze locks. Always in his arms, always by his side, a present from his father to celebrate the job at Crimpson (“Not a bad little job, son, not a bad job at all. It’s not brain surgery, though is it, haha!”). I hate that briefcase, always have, nothing soft about it, a constant reminder of Peter’s excessively high standards, his cold superiority, and the condescending way he treats me, as if he’s thinking, She’s just a girl, she’ll trip up at some point, realize the significance of her uterus, and get back into the kitchen where she belongs. (Some men seem to undress you with their eyes; Peter always seems to take off my skin. Whenever he’s looking at me I have the distinctly uncomfortable feeling he’s stripping off my epidermis and peeking at my innards, reaching in and handling them, heart and womb and liver, inspecting them to see if they’re functioning according to his exacting standards. A most unpleasant feeling.)
Then a terrible thought came to me. Tom is working for the enemy, in a sense he’s the enemy now. What’s to stop me from opening his briefcase (I know the combination) and rifling through it for Randalls-related documents? For something—let’s say—that proves the black mold story is just a way for Randalls to get out of its obligations to its rent-controlled tenants?
For a moment I paused, electrified; I listened to the sound of the shower running in the distance and thought, I could do it right now, I have five minutes at least before he comes back…But, of course, I didn’t. It would be absolutely unethical for me as a lawyer. And there may not be a clause about this in the marriage ceremony, but it’s basically implicit: don’t betray your husband. Under any circumstances. In sickness or in health.
52
Monday 2 P.M.
But there are other ways to pursue my ends. I’ve spent the morning drafting an account of Randalls’s iniquities, which I’ll recommend that Fay send to the New York Times. And a few local TV stations as well. “Randalls is applying to demolish the present 1940s construction, which currently houses a thriving Greek community, and replace it with a yuppie-pleasing thirty-story apartment block. Randalls’s legal representatives, Smyth and Westlon and Crimpson Thwaite (the latter currently have one of the largest real estate practices in New York) are either incompetently unaware of their client’s unethical behavior or culpably supporting attempts to purge the building by giving tenants false information…” That should do it. They can take pictures of Mrs. G and her friends outside the building looking noble but woebegone, the real face of New York City, hardworking immigrants who deserve the opportunity to enjoy the quiet time of life.
My mother arrives tomorrow afternoon. Of course she’ll think Randalls’s shenanigans are only par for the course in a place like New York City. She probably thinks most landlords bury their recalcitrant tenants beneath the tarmac of the nearest Interstate.
3 P.M.
Christ, I’ve just had a phone call from Lucille, Tom’s mother. Turns out Peter is in the city attending a conference today, Lucille’s come up with him from Baltimore, and they want to have dinner with us here this evening. That’s all I need. A surfeit of parents.
I haven’t seen Lucille in a year. (We caught up with Peter about five months ago, he had lunch with us after another of his surgeons’ conferences. “Theo’s delighted to hear you’ve got that wife of yours pregnant at last,” he said to his son jovially, referring to a school friend of Tom’s, and I choked angrily on the soup. “Got me pregnant”? As if conceiving for a woman is all about lying supine while your husband pokes his semen into your belly.) Lucille’s voice was, as always, thin and nasal on the phone, with that faint Bostonian twang, the extra w’s that seem to invade the spaces between consonants and vowels. “We’ve felt so bad for not seeing you these past few months,” she said, calmly. “But Tom said there was nothing we could do for you, and we’ve been terribly busy.” Mmmm, I said, I’m sure you have. Tom told me all about the choral society concert, it sounds exhausting.
It was, she said, sounding vaguely suspicious, although that’s not what I meant. I’m sure you know Peter’s been writing a book on modern heart transplant procedures. I’ve been working with him on the edits, which was quite a performance. The publisher wanted him to cut about ten thousand words, but they were all such good words; I felt he shouldn’t excise a single one. Still, they were absolutely insistent…
I switched off and peered at my toenails, which I can now only glimpse if I kick my feet and twist my head at the same time. They need cutting, but it looks as if they’ll have to wait until after the birth. (“He’s so talented, he has such a gift for prose, so clear yet so elegant…”)
Unless—presumably you can get a pedicure in your home? I reached, with some difficulty, for the phone book on the bottom shelf of the side table.
P for Pedicurists. No, that’s not right. It’s terribly hard to use the yellow pages in a culture that’s not your own; it’s almost impossible to intuit how another country organizes itself. “Cinemas” are “Movie Theaters” in the States, cars are “Automobiles,” and the Brit who attempts to find the nearest “Garage” for a tune-up will draw a blank. And don’t try to use the automated telephone services because the robotic woman on the other end of the phone won’t be able to understand your accent. I often find myself affecting a fake American drawl to placate her. Wait, here we are, pedicures under “Personal Care and Services.” In the comfort of your own home. Maybe I’ll get a manicure as well. And a haircut! That’s a good idea, I haven’t had one in months. And what about a massage?
Meanwhile Lucille’s still talking (“his colleagues say they’ve never met a man with such a gift for communication, such command of the English language…”).
So the pair of them will be here to drive me nuts in three hours, but at least I have a week’s worth of luxurious body-care lined up in my diary. Tom swears he’ll get out of work for a few hours so he can be here when his parents arrive; if you think I’m entertaining those two on my own (I said), you’ve got another thing coming. I’m not opening the door, which means that if you’re not home by six, your parents will be spending a great deal of time in the hallway this evening. You understand?
9 P.M.
“My dear,” Lucille whispered to me over coffee, confidentially, “Tom tells me you’re thinking of giving up work, is this true?”
I glanced up at her, then over at Tom, who was pouring his father a large glass of scotch on the rocks and didn’t appear to have heard. “I—we’re thinking about what to do when the baby’s born, yes,” I said, unwillingly.
Lucille nodded, her pearl drop earrings clicking faintly somewhere within her curled and perfumed hair. “Of course you are, my dear,” she said, briskly. “It was always obvious to me—to us—that you’d have to give it up when the little one is born.” She reached forward suddenly and touched my belly with a smug, possessive smile that made me want to scream. I flinched, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her hand stayed on my navel, sickly warm, encroaching, white and slack and covered in gemstones, a rich old woman’s hand.
“You have to put him first,” she said, serenely. “It’s what a mother does.”
“Tom may leave Crimpson,” I said suddenly, I don’t know why, but my husband heard this time all right. “What?” gasped Peter. “What?” gasped Lucille. Their words, their shock, hung in the air, vivid as a red balloon. All three of them stared at me, three mouths open, three pairs of eyes wide, holes, lots of holes in lots of white faces, but I couldn’t see inside any of them—
“Yes,”
I gabbled, “he may leave Crimpson because of the hours, because he wants to spend more time with his son. You’re right, Lucille”—I moved her hand off my belly, but she hardly noticed—“we have to put him first now. So Tom’s seriously thinking about leaving his firm and trying to find something less exhausting, something less—” I stopped.
Tom was the first to speak. He put down his glass slowly on the table and turned to face his father. “We have been thinking seriously about all sorts of life changes,” he said to Peter, levelly, neutrally, the skin around his eyes white and taut, “including the possibility that I might leave Crimpson. We think, on balance, that this is not the best idea”—there was an audible outtake of breath in the room—“but Q sweetly wants me to be sure. She doesn’t want me to stay in a job for the money. I’ve really appreciated her support on this,” he added, turning to me, his blue eyes virtually black, like the sky before a violent storm. “I can always trust her to support me. Always.”
We held each other’s gaze for about two seconds, then both looked away at precisely the same moment. Peter was nodding sagely. “It’s good to think things through, son,” he said seriously, “although the last thing you want to do when a child comes is lose the bulk of your income”—as though my salary was mere pin money, a few hundred toward the dry-cleaning bill. “And children need someone to look up to,” he added, warming to the theme. “They want a strong father figure, boys especially.” He then clapped Tom’s shoulder. “Not that you need my advice, but if you were to ask me”—he lifts his lip in the semblance of a smile, exposing his pointy too-white teeth—“I’d tell you to stay on the treadmill, keep on with the good work, and your son will thank you for it when he’s got the best education the city has to offer and a father he can be really proud of. You understand?”
Bed Rest Page 16