“You look nice,” I said. “Not at all like your typical mother of the groom.”
“That groom,” she said, ignoring the compliment and elbowing me out into the hallway, “should have been here by now.”
“Traffic,” I said. “You know how it is.”
“You were late on our wedding day, too,” she reminded me.
“Our taxi got stuck in a tie-up. Those things happen.”
“Your mother probably set up a roadblock,” Paulie said.
“Jason’s not really late,” I said, determined to be pleasant. “There’s plenty of time. Do I look nice, too?”
“You’ll do,” she said. I’d hoped she’d make some fussy, wifely gesture—straighten my tie or the boutonniere, or find some lint to pick off my sleeve—but she didn’t.
Guests kept arriving. The door chimes rang and voices rose in greeting. La Rae and Frank were in the living room when we got there, and Katherine and Tony were just coming in. Mike had a stunning strawberry blonde on his arm. I never expected he’d bring Janine, and he swore he was finished with her, anyway, but I was spooked when I first saw the blonde. The room was humming with conversation, the guitarist was into Vivaldi, and there was an air of excitement and celebration. Through the open drapes, I could see the row of sugar-coated junipers at the edge of the snowy garden. It was cold, but very sunny, and everything glittered and shone. “Look at that,” I said to Paulie. How could she fail to be moved by the occasion, by the beauty of the day?
Spence introduced us to the judge who would perform the ceremony. He was a big, hearty man, someone I wouldn’t mind coming up before if I’d committed a murder. “So you’re the groom’s parents!” he said in resounding tones, clamping one hand on each of our shoulders. “Well, well! Congratulations to you both!” After he’d wandered off, I said to Paulie, “I feel as if he just married us.” She laughed and I said, “Can we leave on our honeymoon now?” She stopped laughing and sidled away from me into a group of guests.
I talked to a few people myself, but I wasn’t having a very good time. Jason actually was a little late, and I was getting edgy and worried. “So where’s my handsome nephew?” Paulie’s deaf aunt Mildred shouted, and I saw the judge frown and look at his watch. I went down the hallway again and found Sara by herself, leaning against the wall outside the kitchen. “How are you doing, kid?” I said. “Any last requests?” To my horror, her eyes filled with tears. “Hey, Sara,” I said. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No, no,” she said, just before she really started bawling. I took her arm and herded her into the powder room. After I’d locked the door behind us, I grabbed a few Kleenex from the dispenser and handed them to her. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Then she sat on the closed toilet seat and said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it.”
“That’s all right, it’s your big day,” I said. “You’re entitled to a little nervous hysteria.”
“It’s not that. It’s that Jason isn’t going to sh-show up,” she said.
“Sure he’s going to show up,” I said, hovering over her, wanting to touch her veiled head but afraid of mussing it. I wished there was a bathtub ledge I could perch on, so we could be at eye level. Instead, I crouched before her, and when that proved uncomfortable, I got down on one knee, as if I was about to propose. “Of course he’s going to show up.”
“He’s not,” she said, with stubborn confidence. “I knew it the minute I woke up this morning. I knew that his heart was never in it, and that he wouldn’t go through with it. Now he’s not here, and I’m g-glad my parents aren’t, either.” And Niagara Falls began gushing again.
“That’s crazy, Sara,” I said. “Why would he have agreed to get married in the first place? It was hardly an impulsive decision.”
“It was, in a way,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “He decided to do it after one of our birth-training sessions. We were lying on the floor with all the other couples that day, everybody breathing together in one long, whooshing sound—like the ocean? It was so beautiful. I closed my eyes and pretended I was at the beach—that’s one of our relaxation techniques—and when I opened them, Jason was staring at me. I knew right away that something was different about him. My heart started pounding, and I was afraid to say anything.”
“Did Jason say anything?” This seemed like the beginning of a very long story, and my knee was starting to ache from the cold, hard tile.
“Not then. We walked home, and it began to snow again. The whole world was quiet, and we were sort of in tune with it. But much later, when we were in bed, he said something about the cool way the group breathing had sounded, and that maybe we could make some music like that. I said that was a good idea, and I was reaching to turn off the light when he grabbed my wrist, real hard, and he said, ‘Sara, I love you.’”
“Hadn’t he ever said it before?” I asked.
“Oh, sure, lots of times. But never like that. He looked … angry, almost, or like he was going to cry.”
“Yeah, I know that look,” I said. “And what did you say?”
“You know—that I loved him, too, and all that.”
“Then what happened?” I said, shifting to my other knee.
“Then he said, ‘Let’s get married,’ and I said, ‘Let’s,’ and ‘How wonderful,’ or something, and he said, ‘Let’s call my father up and tell him he’s won.’”
Jesus. “And?” I said, already knowing the rest.
“Well, it was after midnight, so I told him we’d have to wait until the next day, and that’s when we called you.”
“It practically sounds like a religious conversion,” I said. “Why do you think he’d back out now?”
“The last few days he’s been very moody.”
“That’s only natural before your wedding,” I said. “And Jason’s a moody guy to begin with, Sara. You know that.”
“No, I mean dark and moody. I couldn’t say boo to him. He sat at the drum pads all the time, working the same rhythms over and over again.”
Someone knocked on the door then, and rattled the knob. “We’ll be right out!” I called. “See, he’s probably here already,” I told Sara. “They probably want to get started, and they can’t do that without the bride.”
I stood up and tried to rub the circulation back into my knees. Sara stood, too, and we walked out together. All the way to the living room, I silently prayed he’d be there, but I knew that he wouldn’t be. The worst thing was the stupid relief I felt when I saw the other members of Blood Pudding. “What took you guys so long?” I asked Iggy, their keyboard man, who had a string of paper clips hanging from one ear. When he didn’t answer me, and they all looked at one another like guilty kids, I said, “Where’s Jason?”
“He didn’t come with us,” Iggy said, and I heard a little cry from Sara as she disappeared behind me, like a ghost.
“What do you mean, he didn’t come with you?” I demanded. “Where the hell is he?”
“We dropped him off in the Bronx,” Iggy said. “He said he had to take care of some business, that he’d catch a train or a bus in a little while.”
“Did he take his drums out of the van? And his drum box?”
“Well, yeah. Sure,” Iggy said.
“Oh, shit,” I said. Paulie was standing next to me by then, and I could see by her face that she’d taken everything in. “What are we going to do?” I said.
“I guess we’ve done all the wrong things already,” she said.
“He’s a grown man,” I told her. “There comes a time when he has to be accountable for his own life, for his own actions.”
“You say that now,” she said.
“Paulie, what do you want from me? I talked to him, remember? And he came around.”
“You thought he did, anyway.”
Iggy was listening to us, his head swiveling from side to side, as if he was watching a tennis match.
“Oh, shit,” I said again.
“I’m going in to Sara,” Paulie sai
d.
“And I’ll try calling Jason.”
“Hah!” she scoffed, walking away.
I told the guitarist to keep playing until I got back, and she immediately began something jazzy and upbeat. As I climbed the stairs toward Ann and Spence’s bedroom, I thought of the band playing as the Titanic went down. Of course Jason didn’t answer the phone, and when I heard Black Flag screaming on his answer tape, I yelled, “You rotten little bastard, why don’t you get your ass down here!” and I threw the phone across the bed.
I conferred with Spence in his study downstairs. After a while we went into the living room, and he announced that the wedding was being postponed because Jason had been unavoidably detained. There was a stunned silence, followed by an excited buzz of conversation. The guitarist started packing up her guitar, and the bewildered caterer stood at the entrance to the living room, holding a dripping ladle. Paulie’s mother was crying. “Maybe something happened to him,” she said. “Maybe he got sick. Or maybe he was mugged. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.”
It was like an untimely, senseless death, a funeral without a body to mourn. People left quietly, shaking their heads sadly and pressing the hands of the bereaved. I drove Paulie and Sara to the Bronx. As we’d expected, Jason wasn’t in the apartment, and his equipment and most of his clothes were gone, too. Paulie pleaded with Sara to come home with her, and finally she gave in. I took them to Manhattan, and then I drove back to the Island by myself. At first, I walked around the house, kicking things and cursing, madder than hell at Jason for jilting Sara, for screwing everything up like that. As the day wore on, my anger wore off, and by nighttime I was left with only a feeling of flatness and terrible fatigue. When I got into bed, I decided to start looking for Jason the next day, but in the meantime I couldn’t keep my eyes open another minute.
27
We are all living these lives,
four-generation novels
that are plotless
except for birth and death.
Halfway through we’re bored,
we skip pages.
Truth plus fiction
make the best story,
so we lie and invent passion.
Dozing, we dream
a new dream
with tough symbols, without heroes.
We wake, our breath
drugged with ink,
our heads mobbed
with characters
found in subways
and offices.
The dustcover promised more.
Now I was going to school twice a week. There was the poetry workshop on Tuesdays, and every Saturday afternoon I accompanied Sara to her program at the Natural Birth Center in SoHo. I’d become Jason’s stand-in, her new labor coach and potential birth partner. The other women in Sara’s group all had their husbands or lovers with them, but at least she wasn’t alone. I knelt beside her as she lay on her floor mat, and we breathed slowly and deeply in unison. Right after my first class, the instructor gave me a private crash course in everything I’d missed. Howard and I had taken a similar course when I was pregnant with Jason, and maybe that’s why I was such a fast study. Some of the relaxation exercises, and the business of soft lights and soothing music during delivery, were new, but other details came back to me: the various stages of labor, the lower-back massage to ease tension and pain, the panting and pushing near the end. And the language, with words like “show” and “presentation,” still had a wonderfully theatrical quality.
One afternoon I went with Sara to visit the nurse-midwife who would deliver her baby, a stocky, middle-aged woman named Carmen Gomez. She’d been recommended by the doctor who’d confirmed Sara’s pregnancy. Sara clearly had a crush on Carmen, like the one I’d once had on my obstetrician, Dr. Kramer. I remembered sitting in his waiting room among other pregnant women, all of us extolling his virtues, like a bunch of fat harem wives in thrall to our sheik. We were strangely unjealous of one another. Each of us harbored her own obvious, marvelous secret, and each of us lived for her final rendezvous alone with him.
Mine turned out to be a lot less romantic than I’d dreamed. When my contractions were ten minutes apart, but not really strong, Howard stood in our bathroom doorway, timing them with his stopwatch, and watching me comb my hair and put on makeup. “Come on, babe, let’s go,” he urged. “It’s snowing hard out there—we’ll have to crawl. And the kid’ll know you without lipstick.” But I was lovestruck and giddy, and I wanted to be perfect for my child and our deliverer. Never mind that Dr. Kramer was at least fifty years old, and pretty fat himself. Never mind that I had to call him Dr. Kramer and he called me Paulie. When is love ever fair or reasonable?
Twelve hours later, I was in the delivery room with my hair in a matted, sweaty tangle. The lipstick had all been gnawed off, along with little bits of my lips. I was calling Dr. Kramer “Marvin” between screams, but the honeymoon was definitely over. I hated him and I hated Howard—I despised the treachery of all men who brought women to this destiny. Yet now I felt sorry for Sara because she had no men in her life, except for Howard.
On what would have been her wedding night, she and I got into bed together at my apartment. She’d stopped crying in the car, and before I could even say good night, she’d fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep. I lay awake for a long time beside her, and then I escaped into sleep, too. The next morning, Howard showed up while we were having breakfast, and we talked about calling the police to help us look for Jason. Sara became very upset. “What are they going to do—arrest him for not loving me?” she said. “I don’t want him back, especially if he has to be dragged back.”
“He’s our son, Sara,” I said gently. “We’re furious with him, too, but we’re also worried.”
“It’s not as if he was kidnapped or anything,” she said, and we had to concede that. “He’s just hiding out in the Bronx or in Queens somewhere,” she said, “until the baby grows up and I die.”
Howard and I went into the bedroom to confer privately. Sara was probably right about Jason’s whereabouts; he had musician friends all over the city who’d take him in. We decided that Howard would question a few of them and try to track him down himself. Involving the police might only complicate matters—what if Jason was staying with someone who dealt drugs? When we went back to the kitchen, Sara asked Howard if he’d drive her to the Bronx.
“You can’t stay there alone,” I said.
“Why not?” she said. “It’s where we … where I live.” I wondered if, despite her bitterness, she imagined Jason would show up there by and by, languishing with love and remorse.
“It isn’t safe, for one thing,” Howard told her.
“But I can’t stay here,” she said. “You don’t have an awful lot of room.”
I thought wistfully of the privacy I cherished, of Bernie’s visits. But it would have been inappropriate for Sara to stay with Howard in Port Washington. While we were musing over all of this, Ann called to see how Sara was and to ask if there was anything she and Spence could do. Her call seemed providential in its timing, even inevitable, but I broached the subject with extreme care, anyway. “We’d love to have her,” Ann said immediately. “We rattle around in this big old place. And Sara’s so much fun.”
I glanced at grim and gloomy Sara, who sat with her arms folded resolutely across the mound of her belly. Had it risen considerably since yesterday? “Sara, guess what?” I said. “Ann wants you to stay with her! Isn’t that great?”
My enthusiasm wasn’t exactly infectious, but at least Sara sighed deeply and nodded.
“It will only be for a little while,” I whispered into the phone. “Dad’s going to find Jason.”
But three weeks later he was still missing. Howard had spoken to the other members of Blood Pudding, who led him to musicians and booking agents and clubs. He went through all five boroughs, and even spent a day or two in New Jersey. No one had seen Jason anywhere. Howard and I spoke on the phone more often now. He repo
rted in, like a detective calling headquarters. We talked about selling the house; he could rent a garden apartment in Hempstead, near the studio, and we’d have enough money from the sale to provide living space somewhere for Sara and the baby. We talked about future employment for her and about the logistics of day care. Sara had already sublet the Bronx apartment to a couple of her friends. It was as if we never expected to see Jason again.
Howard and I were both anguished, but somehow our own lives proceeded, with the daily persistence of my mother’s soaps. He went to work at the studio, and I continued writing my column and doing the proofreading. On Tuesday nights I went to my workshop at the New School. At last it was my turn to have something critiqued. I’d tried to get out of it by telling Ruth Trueheart that my life was a mess right now, and that I hadn’t had much time to write. She told me to bring in something old, if I had nothing else, although she preferred work in which our interest was still alive. I went through the yellowed pages of old poems, hating them all. I finally chose an untitled one, almost at random, and made Xerox copies for the whole class. The poem looked a little fresher on new paper, but not more accomplished. In fact, it seemed contrived to me now, and terribly simplistic. It was at least twenty years old—I was practically a child when I wrote it—but that was no excuse. What business did I have in this class if I wasn’t writing?
Three of us were scheduled for that session, and I was up first. I distributed the copies of my poem around the table, filled with self-loathing and fear. There was that dreadful silence while it was being read, broken only by the occasional groan of a chair, or somebody coughing or rattling a page. I wished the fire alarm would go off—that had actually happened another night—and that we’d have to vacate the building. I wished I was at the Natural Birth Center with Sara, simply breathing, or asleep in my own bed, where I would wake soon, like Dorothy, from this bad dream.
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