Bed Rest

by Sarah Bilston

  Tom nodded.

  I opened my mouth and screamed and screamed, although it seems I didn’t, because the three of them just sat sipping their after-dinner drinks as if nothing untoward was happening at all.

  53

  Tuesday 10 P.M.

  I perched illicitly (and precariously) on the window bench for twenty minutes earlier this evening and watched the sun set, the oranges and yellows ceding slowly to greens and blues. There’s a lightness in the sky even now, an azure gleam that confirms the passing of the year. It may even be warm outside. People seem to be wearing sweaters and cardigans instead of overcoats. And they’re walking more slowly now, no longer scurrying, rushing along the streets, but sauntering, strolling, hand in hand, shoulders pushed back, arms swinging, faces lifted to the sky.

  In here it still feels cold—in more ways than one.

  I was bundled up in my robe and the blue-and-gray wool blanket, leafing through this month’s copy of Vogue for about the seventh time, when Tom came home. He dropped his briefcase by the door and produced, from a tall paper bag, a brand-new bottle of scotch. He twisted off the lid and poured himself a large tumblerful, which he drained. Then he poured himself another and turned to face me.

  I saw Mark this evening, he said, his face inscrutable. We had a drink after work. He told me that he came to see you earlier this week to talk about his affair. Why didn’t you mention it to me, Q? Don’t you think I might’ve been just a teensy bit interested? He assumed I must know all about it, he’s been waiting to hear from me all week—Christ! Why did you keep something so important from me, Q? What in God’s name were you thinking?

  I’d been watching him in silence ever since he walked into the apartment, wondering what was going through his mind. I’d prepared withering put-downs on a number of subjects, but unfortunately not on this one.

  I rolled my eyes, feeling like a naughty teenager. Because I hardly see you these days, I said (even I thought I sounded childish, whiny, shrill). You get up when I’m still asleep, you arrive home after I’ve gone to bed. When, precisely, do you expect me to tell you things? Things of—any kind at all?

  That’s not fair, he replied, angrily; there have been opportunities. I admit I’ve been working very hard—let’s not open up that subject again—but there have been times you could’ve talked to me. So again, Q, I’m asking you, why didn’t you tell me?

  I was about to snap back something about how he had no right to interrogate me like this, and would he like to shine a light in my eyes and stick pins under my fingernails—when it struck me: what is the answer to the question? Why didn’t I tell him about Mark and Lara? Probably because I’d gotten into the habit of keeping things from you, I told him mentally, deliberately keeping my expression bland, unreadable. Because I don’t choose to tell you what’s going on in my life anymore.

  “You’ve been plotting to get Mark together with that girl who’s been hanging around here the past two months, haven’t you?” Tom said at last, his voice low with barely repressed fury.

  “What did you say?” I asked, taken aback. “With—with Brianna? Are you serious? Didn’t Mark tell you I basically threw him out of the apartment when he asked for my help to get her back?”

  “Oh sure—he said you were in a terrible mood, started swearing at him when he tried to tell you how bad he feels about Lara. You didn’t want to hear that, did you? You’ve been trying to get him to leave her all along,” he went on, coming to stand by the sofa and looking down at me.

  I felt the magazine drop out of my nerveless fingers and onto the floor. Tom took another swig of whiskey.

  “You know,” he continued, breath reeking of fire and peat, “I’ve been wondering all evening why you’d do this. Were you just bored, did you want to feel important, was this your way to feel at the center of things? Or did you want to net a husband for your dimwit friend? Or—and Q, I’m really hoping it wasn’t this—was this some weird, fucked-up plan to get back at me? Did you want to turn my best friend’s life upside down by getting him to leave his wife for a bonehead who dresses like a hooker? Well, congratulations, Q. Whatever it is you wanted, I guess you’ve succeeded. But if I were you, I’d butt out of other people’s lives, bed rest or no bed rest. And as for meddling in my friends’ affairs to get at me—” He covered his face with his hands for a brief, appalling moment, then turned round and walked out of the room.

  I was left staring speechlessly after him.

  I’ve always loved Jane Austen novels, but I find the characters’ inability to communicate with one another incredibly irritating. Elizabeth, for God’s sake, tell Darcy you’ve changed your mind! Jane, go and ring on Bingley’s door and let him know that you really care! My life lacks the subtlety of a Jane Austen novel, not to mention the pretty frocks and cotillion balls, but I feel I’m inhabiting her world all the same. I don’t know how my husband feels, and I don’t know how to explain the way I feel either. I can’t begin to find the words. And so I fold my lips together when he accuses me and say nothing at all.

  A few moments later I discovered, to my shock, on the side table, a large beribboned box from the Bouley Bakery. I never even saw him put it down. Nestled inside were three banana and rum tarts, four cassis tarts, and a handful of Napoleons in pale rustling tissue paper. I stared at the box for about five minutes. What on earth does it mean?

  54

  Wednesday 11 A.M.

  A delighted phone call from Brianna this morning. She spent the weekend with Mark, and it was “everything she’d ever dreamed of.” They spent both mornings in bed, then wandered the streets of the city with their arms wrapped tight around each other, their bodies as close as they could manage. “And we were back in bed again by midafternoon, and oh, Q! I can’t tell you…”

  Don’t try, I said sourly, but I don’t think she noticed the tone. Mark is contacting his lawyer this week to start arranging the divorce from Lara. I made a halfhearted stab at suggesting they might like to wait a bit (Lara’s haggard face lives on in my memory), but Brianna barely heard me, and it’s not as if she’d take my advice even if she did.

  I’ll have to call Lara and ask her how she’s coping—a phone call I’m not looking forward to making. I’ll have to do it before my mother arrives in—oh, good God, she lands in a few hours. Even as I’m typing this the woman is hurtling toward me at five hundred miles an hour, propelled by four engines and a great deal of determination.

  She’s equipped with a detailed list of instructions on how to negotiate the airport and find herself a taxi. She expressed some suspicion about the ease of making it into the terminal building from the plane itself—“airports are terribly badly signposted,” she announced grandly, with the air of one who was in Dubai just the other week—so I described every escalator, every moving stairway I could remember at JFK. Of course now I’m terrified that she’ll end up on a plane to Reykjavik, although that mightn’t be such a bad outcome. I suspect a land of thin sunshine and spurting geysers would be more to her taste than the close, dark, bisected streets of New York City.

  4 P.M.

  She is on her way. She just called to say she’s in the taxi queue (“They really are yellow, dear, I thought that was just a Hollywood touch”) and will be walking through the door in less than an hour. I called Tom to warn him—he expressed a vague suspicion (or was it hope) that she’d bottle at the last moment and claim an unexpected hole in her yoga schedule.

  55

  Thursday

  “My dear girl, should you be eating quite so many tarts?”

  “It’s a sweet flat—‘apartment’ I suppose you call it—but rather small for my taste.”

  “Heavens, this orange juice has bits in it, if you tell me where you keep the sieve I’ll strain it for you.”

  Meanwhile Tom and I are talking in neutral beige tones; our voices neither rise nor soften.

  56

  Friday 10 A.M.

  Thank God, she’s launched herself into the streets of Manha
ttan armed with a subway map and no fewer than five well-thumbed guidebooks. (“Mrs. Walberswick from the village Bowls club came to New York last year, and she wouldn’t set foot outside her hotel without her nephew, since, let’s face it, the city is a very dangerous place. But don’t worry about me, I have my pepper spray, dear.”) She’ll be home by three, because I have another appointment with Dr. Weinberg at four.

  I think she’s having a nice time. I, meanwhile, am pondering the meaning and the usage of the verb “to defenestrate.” I defenestrate my mother. My mother has been defenestrated. See! She is defenestrating.

  Tom, to give him his due, has behaved impeccably so far. He’s been listening with the appearance of profound interest while she’s regaled us with “stories” about the flight—“and they gave us these little plastic pouches, wonderful really, I think I’ll use mine for my dirty washing. Inside was a pair of earplugs and a little sachet of moisturizer, and an eye mask, not that I used mine, it had a pair of eyes marked on it, and I don’t like to look silly while I sleep, who does? But there was also a pink plastic pen, which you can have if you like, dear, because you can never have too many pens, and the person next to me didn’t take his, so I took a second one when we were ‘deplaning.’ I was a bit worried I was stealing, so I waited till the air hostess was looking the other way, but I don’t think it was stealing really, was it, was it? Do you think it was stealing, dear?”

  Tom assured her that he didn’t think it was stealing and accepted the plastic pen with an air of sincere gratitude. So for the time being, at least, she’s quite impressed with him.

  Rather more impressed, to be frank, than she is with me. “My dear, you’re putting on a great deal of weight,” she told me seriously (as if I haven’t looked in a mirror recently). “It can’t be good for the baby, having such a lethargic mother. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were putting yourself at risk for a heart attack. I think you need to streamline your diet, dear. Oh, it’s a good thing I’m here. You need to eat more raw food, and especially more bean sprouts. Bean sprouts are remarkably good for you, did you know? I’ll get you some today and a few packets of rice cakes as well.”

  My mother has all the zeal of the convert. Bean sprouts = good. Everything else = bad. Not that she is particularly imaginative about her food; the odd thing is, in spite of her yogic ardor, she has many of the prejudices of pre-1970s rural England (she still thinks pizza is a bit exotic). She peered at my list of possible lunch options yesterday with considerable suspicion and only brightened when (in some despair) I suggested a cheese-and-pickle sandwich. Bean sprouts seem to be her one great nod to modernity, and she’s terribly impressed with herself for being so avant garde (“Mrs. Hutchinson won’t eat them, isn’t that ridiculous? I invited her over for dinner one day last week, and she walked round them, wouldn’t try so much as a single sprout. But then your mother was always rather ahead of her generation, I’m sure you remember that I was the first one on the street to use nonbiological washing powder”).

  Both mornings she’s vanished after breakfast to do her yoga practice in her room. She emerges with a cat-got-the-cream look of serenity on her face and a drip of sweat nuzzling her cheekbone. She’s desperate for me to join her, but there’s something very uncomfortable about being led in yoga by my mother—all that getting in touch with your body seems a bit sexual somehow. So I’ve made my excuses, although the truth is, I’m looking forward to my massage on Monday to help loosen up the sword-sharp tension in my shoulder blades.

  Saturday 3 P.M.

  I wonder what the chances are of my mother’s getting out of this place alive? (They may be increased by the fact that I can’t get to the kitchen knives.)

  The lovely Alexis showed up after dinner yesterday evening; Tom wasn’t home, and my mother somehow got it into her head that she had to defend my honor from Alexis’s marauding intentions. So she refused to leave the room, this in spite of the fact that Alexis obviously wanted to talk to me about Brianna, and in spite of the fact that I am eight months pregnant with another man’s child. But my bewildering mother watched him suspiciously over her copy of the New York Times Metro section with a visage that might have been appropriate if I was a nineteenth-century virgin and Alexis a Regency Buck. Poor Alexis obviously realized there was some kind of misunderstanding, but he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. He kept stealing bemused half-glances at her, then at me, as if he couldn’t decide what he was accused of. This, to be honest, was not flattering from my perspective. I don’t think it even crossed his mind that my mother imagined he might have designs on me.

  When he finally left, my mother folded her lips together, crossed her arms, and sighed significantly.

  I said nothing. I picked up the Sports section of the New York Times and began to read about last night’s defeat of the Knicks at the hands of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

  My mother shook her head sadly, tried to catch my eye, and sighed heavily once more.

  I stared at a photograph of Allan Houston and said nothing.

  My mother tutted and did some more head shaking.

  Still, I said nothing. The Cavs had scored 108 points, and LeBron James had a breakout game.

  My mother said, “Oh dear, dear, dear,” then did some more head shaking and finally a bit more tutting in a full-on, pull-all-the-stops-out moment of passive aggressivness that served her purpose.

  “What?” I said, ten decibels louder than necessary, throwing down the newspaper with an expressive rustle.

  “Don’t shout, dear,” my mother said mildly. “There’s no need. I’m right opposite you.”

  “For Christ’s sake, if you have something to say, then say it,” I said hotly.

  “Well, dear, if you don’t mind me saying so, do you really think you should be entertaining young men in your husband’s absence at night? This is New York, after all.”

  Mother, I told her, young men are as able to restrain their passions in New York as anywhere else in the world. And Tom knows perfectly well there’s nothing going on with Alexis—

  “Are you sure he knows that, dear?” she said, seriously, “because I think there’s a weeny bit of tension between the two of you. I may be stepping out of line here, but still…”

  I was hardly going to tell her the real substance of the tension between us, and frankly I’d be damned if I was going to admit there was any tension at all, so we passive-aggressived ourselves silly until Tom came home.

  It was our second major argument. I’d already gotten mad at her for treating Dr. Weinberg like a witch doctor and the doorman—well, like a doorman.

  So far today, we’ve behaved toward each other with a courtly politeness more appropriate to a couple of Arthurian knights than a twenty-first-century mother and daughter (“Would you like some tea?” “Oh yes please, how very kind of you, I would love some tea, would you like the Travel section of the paper?” Oh yes please…”).

  This morning she went baby shopping—leaving me to stare glassily at Ricki repeats—and came back with something she called, rather endearingly, a “lafayette.” The clothes are useful enough and nice quality, which helped make the peace. At the moment she’s in the basement of the building washing all of the baby-wear so it’s ready for use. I’ll restrain my murderous intentions for now.

  57

  Monday Midday

  I’m thirty-five weeks pregnant today, a huge milestone, a day I’ve been dreaming of for nine long weeks. If the baby was born right now, he might be able to come home from the hospital with me. His lungs may be mature already, and he’s already close to a normal birthweight. At my appointment last week the sonographer estimated that he was about five pounds.

  Last weekend was quiet, if hardly tension free. I folded the baby clothes; my mother put the sheets on the bassinet and charitably rearranged the furniture in her room to make it as nursery-like as possible. She hung new curtains and blackout blinds on the window, then moved the single bed against the wall, next to the changing table,
and put the crib in the middle of the room. On Sunday she bought some crates shaped like train carriages for toy storage. She struggled home with them on the subway, three piled high in her arms, then filled them with a suitcaseful of new toys—cuddly bears, board books, brightly colored rattles, plastic teething rings.

  I went to see Dr. Weinberg this morning, and then Cherise in her dark, womblike room. Today’s ultrasound showed that the baby is still breech—not that I needed someone to tell me that a very hard skull is lodged underneath my ribs—and therefore still needs to be delivered by C-section. But my fluid level is stable, so Weinberg has decided to shoot for thirty-seven weeks (“Just a bit further, yes? The pregnancy’s going a little better now, I think we can get that far”), by which time the baby will technically be full term. In the meantime she wants to see me three times a week.

  My mother held my hand very tightly while Dr. Weinberg talked through the arrangements for the operation. I’m overwhelmed with emotions. I’m excited to know that I’ll be holding my baby so soon, but I’m also terrified because, truthfully, I have no idea how involved Tom is going to be. Some days I catch him watching me with a look in which love—naked, transparent love—and wistfulness are fused; on others, I think he’s on the edge of leaving me, so close that a moth’s breath might push him over. So while I’m horrified at the thought that my mother will be here for weeks to come (“I think I can get more cover at the studio, Q, then I can stay for another week or so and help you when the baby is born”), I’m also relieved that she’s here in case I wake up one morning and find a second, final note propped against the saltcellar on the kitchen table.