Love Is a Rebellious Bird

by Elayne Klasson

  The problems began not long after we married. Although I tried to restrain myself from asking too many questions, I had a sinking feeling in my gut that Seth was unable to resist the temptation of adoring nurses and student nurses. I didn’t like the jokes I heard from Seth and his friends about those too-available nurses. In the mornings, for he left much earlier than I did, I watched him preen as he got ready to leave for the hospital. He’d squint in the mirror as he combed back his hair, cursing his already-receding hairline. His need to be adored—always and without reservation—increased along with my growing failure to provide him with this adoration. It played a part in the demise of our marriage. There was good reason for Seth’s need, and although I knew this, adoration was getting harder to fake, much like repeated faked orgasms get more and more tedious. More than once, my husband had told me about his mother’s obvious preference for his older brother. This neglect by his mother was a devastating fact of Seth’s childhood, and I thought it was a large part of his need for constant and lavish appreciation by women.

  Soon after we met, Seth’s mother died of the ovarian cancer she’d been sick with for several years. I never even met her. Seth went back to Phoenix for the service. A few days after the funeral, he and his father and his older brother, Alex, went to the bank to open the safety deposit box his mother had maintained. As they looked through the contents, all three squirmed uncomfortably. They lifted out piece after piece of memorabilia. None of it was Seth’s. All belonged to his brother. Things as mundane as report cards and kindergarten art projects were carefully preserved in the safety deposit box. But everything was Alex’s. Their mom had even carefully wrapped two graduation cap tassels in white tissue paper, but the school colors revealed that both belonged to Alex—one from high school, the other college. It was as if she’d had only one son. Why is it like that in some families? Why an obvious preference for one child over another for no apparent reason? When I saw Seth’s face after he returned from Phoenix, and he told me about his mother’s safety deposit box, I was glad I was an only child. He grieved for her death as well as her lifelong abandonment of him.

  But still, even though I understood it, I grew impatient with Seth’s ways. I watched him at parties, flirting with women, loudly clamoring for attention, and it began to repel me. His need for approval seemed fed only by new conquests. I drew away from him. Our once-enthusiastic lovemaking became quieter, my responses more muted.

  And though I was married and knew it was inappropriate, I waited with outsized anticipation for those thick letters from you, still written with the old-fashioned blue fountain pen. I’d run to the mailbox, just as I’d done when I was in college. In your letters, you chatted about high-minded matters—literature, art, the fine points of politics. I read and reread those letters and saved them, along with all the ones that had come before. We sent poems and quotes from books back and forth. Seth was a man of action, brash and adventurous, smart, but not an intellectual. He was a thrill seeker, but every time I watched a foreign film that moved me (and made Seth fidget in his seat), I wished you were there with me—and often framed an imaginary conversation with you in my head. From time to time, I found myself turning away from small, compact Seth in bed, regulating my breathing and pretending sleep. His beard was rough, his chest was hairy, and there was something indefinable about his smell that I began to find unappealing. Always, God help me, I compared the two of you. When Seth was in his second year of medical school (admittedly a difficult time) and my birthday came, he completely forgot it. Only when he saw the gift with the brown wrapping paper folded neatly beside it on our dresser, did he remember.

  “Shit,” he said and smacked his forehead. “It’s today, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I replied with fake cheer. “And Valentine’s Day, too. You get to forget two for the price of one.”

  “What did Mr. Wonderful send you?” Seth asked. “He never forgets, does he?”

  “A necklace,” I said. “Kind of old-fashioned.”

  Seth nodded and was asleep in moments, not even asking to look at it.

  I got up and went into the kitchen, taking the box with me. You’d sent a cameo, a woman’s raised face in profile on a coral background. The note, which I’d carefully hidden away before Seth returned home, said, “I walked past an antique jewelry store on DuPont Circle and saw this in the window. I think she looks like you, the same profile. I hope when you wear it, you’ll know how special you are.”

  I love old jewelry. I always have. I like to imagine the woman who might have worn the piece before me. The lady in this cameo had a long, straight nose. Did she look like me? Sometimes people say I have a classical Roman nose. I’ve never particularly liked my nose, though now, I barely see myself. But as a child, I used to scotch tape it at night, pulling the tip up toward the bridge, hoping it would develop an upward tilt while I slept. I looked carefully at the cameo you sent from Washington. I rubbed my index finger up and down the length of my nose. Was it an elegant Roman nose? I hoped so.

  Poor Seth. Forgetting my birthday and Valentine’s Day, on a year when I received this perfect gift from you. When I finally went to bed, I turned away from my husband. He hadn’t a chance.

  But I kept hearing my mother’s comment about you and Laurie. “Doesn’t seem like they gave it much effort.” I was the one with determination, the woman who wouldn’t turn back when there were no planes out of Indonesia, but hunted for ferryboats to take us island to island. Somehow, I would find a way to navigate Seth and me from island to island in our marriage. I would not give up.

  In a while, I began to find evidence of his infidelities: a phone number scrawled on a napkin and left in a pocket, an unexplained call that he’d end abruptly when I came into the room. He started out denying my accusations, said my suspicions were poisoning our marriage. He called me paranoid. So, like betrayed women everywhere, I questioned my own sanity. Perhaps I was the jealous harridan he accused me of being. Why could I not trust Seth? I didn’t trust my own instincts; I was confused. Our fights were acrimonious, dramatic, and tear-filled. Surprisingly, it was Seth who was more the crier. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t cry. Instead, I became unpleasantly hardened.

  Not even two years after we married, I discovered something devastating, something that could not be explained away by Seth’s excuses. On a day he didn’t expect me to drive his car, I found a letter he’d left on the front seat. In this letter, a woman sorrowfully asked Seth for money for an abortion. She was begging. These were the days, the very brutal days, before abortion was legalized. Women who had unwanted pregnancies were faced with dreadful alternatives. I cannot even abide hearing the foolish arguments now of right-to-lifers. The poor child who wrote the letter, and that is what she seems to me now, a child, told my husband that she was at least eight weeks pregnant. If he could find the money, she’d go to Puerto Rico immediately, where a friend of hers had a contact who, supposedly, could do the job in a clean and safe way. However, if Seth could not come up with the sum required to go to Puerto Rico, and it was a large sum, perhaps he could help her find someone locally in Los Angeles. There was no blame or threat. It was a desperate plea. She was frightened and didn’t know where to turn. I was sick then, and I’m sick now thinking back on it.

  After reading the letter, I set the table in the kitchen. At Seth’s place, instead of a plate, I propped up the letter. He would see it as soon as he came in. I waited in the bedroom, working on a needlepoint pillow I’d started, jabbing the silver needle in and out quickly. When I heard him come through the back door into the kitchen, I listened for his steps, my stitches becoming more and more tight.

  There was a long silence until finally I saw Seth standing in the doorway. He looked truly stricken. This time he didn’t even attempt to lie. “Judith, so help me God, I don’t understand why I hurt you this way. I am so sorry you had to find that letter. I’m so sorry,” he said and his voice caught. I could see he was beginning to tear up.

 
I stared at him. How foolish he looked. Tears running down his cheeks. I resumed stabbing at my needlepoint with the metal needle. I pulled the stitches so tight the canvas puckered beneath my fingers, but still I said nothing.

  “She wasn’t worth it,” Seth said, wiping his eyes. “Just someone who works in the clinic. I hardly know her and now she’s gone and gotten pregnant. All those girls are on the prowl for med students. You should see how they throw themselves at us.”

  When he came toward me, I threw my work down on the desk and moved backward in the room. Finally I was up against our bedroom wall, still staring dry-eyed at him.

  “Listen, Seth, she’s got the real problem,” I finally said. “Not you or me. What do you plan to do? How’re you going to help her?”

  He went to the edge of the bed and sat and put his head in his hands. He began to sob for real. “Judith, I am so sorry,” he said between gasps for air. “I don’t know what to do. I feel like such a scumbag. I want to start a family with you. She’s a bimbo.”

  My voice never rose during this discussion. Instead I watched him coldly: his tears, his shaking shoulders. Many times in my life I’ve wished I had the gift for tears that Seth has. He’s always been quite the crier. At happy or sad times, he mists up. Other people find it appealing. He cried at our daughter’s wedding while he made the toast; he cried when our grandchildren were born. People think him sensitive because of it. They think he’s got a tender heart. Maybe he does. It would be nice to cry once in a while, as Seth seems so able to do, to breathe deeply and sob. It would be cleansing, I think. And maybe people would stop assuming things about me, that I’m so strong and tough. I get colder and more silent in these situations. For the life of me, I cannot cry.

  “I’ll tell you what you’ll do, Seth,” I said in a low, hard voice. “You’ll get her the best and the safest abortion money can buy. Take out a student loan or ask your father, but get her the money she needs. You do your research. Talk to people at the medical school. Somebody will know someone. You haven’t got a lot of time, so start today. And let her know she’s not alone, that you’ll go with her wherever she has to go. You’ll drive her there and you’ll wait for her until it’s over. And then afterward, when you tell me it’s done, we’ll talk. Not until then.” I pushed past him and went into the kitchen for the car keys. I drove to Griffith Park and walked the trails and didn’t go home until the sun was setting and the park was closing. Then I got in the shower and tried to scrub off the filth I felt covering me.

  For about a year after that, Seth was a model husband and I was a model wife. My mother once told me, “Treat him like a prince, and he’ll treat you like a princess.” I tried.

  I think we were both terrified by the thought of the marriage ending, of being divorced so soon after we’d married, so we were careful with one another. I’d looked into the abyss of leaving him and couldn’t abide what I saw. No one I knew, in my family or circle of friends, except of course, you, Elliot, had gotten divorced. I’d be the first. And so I made a vow to myself to be more the wife that Seth needed. I’d keep him from wandering. I’d devote myself to him.

  This was an age of advice books for women on how to please their man. If they roamed, we were at fault. The ones on women’s liberation came later. In those years, we worked at making ourselves more appealing to men. I found articles on how to spice up the bedroom, how to look and act more sexy. One author suggested a wife greet her man wrapped in nothing but clear plastic wrap and a big red bow. I didn’t go that far; I couldn’t figure out how to wind the plastic wrap around me without help, but I did visit Frederick’s of Hollywood and invested in racy lingerie. I cooked meals for Seth that were worthy of a magazine spread, each including a main dish, a vegetable, and a starch. I got up early before work and started these meals—lasagna, beef stroganoff, complicated recipes I’d cut from the newspaper. On weekends I baked my own bread, our little bungalow filling with a warm, yeasty smell that almost convinced us we were happy.

  Seth, for his part, came home directly after classes and the clinic. He called when he was going to be late and complimented me on my lasagna. Then he began to talk about our having a child. The time seemed right, even a bit late. We were twenty-eight and Seth was entering his last year of medical school. He adored children. He planned on becoming a pediatrician.

  Although I was flattered by his desire to begin a family with me, I was less sure it was a good decision. I loved my job and was getting more skilled as a social worker. I found I had a real gift for group work. I’d learned a lot since those days when I’d been an aide in a psychiatric hospital in Chicago and faced off with angry and depressed Mrs. Gideon who had thrown a cup of hot coffee at me. My work, I knew, required years and years of practice before one became excellent. Of course I was also worried about the marriage. Even though we were fighting less, I asked myself many times if what I felt for Seth was indeed love. Or was I just scared to leave?

  What made it more complicated was that I could not stop thinking about you, Elliot. You were always in my head. I was sensible enough to realize that although I idolized you, we’d never had a real, flesh and blood relationship. We’d never lived together. Yet I could not stop seeing your intelligent warm eyes, remembering your vast knowledge of books and music that crept into our every conversation. I remembered how you really listened to my thoughts and ideas as no one else, except perhaps my father, ever had. I thought about these sweet, sensitive gifts you sent each year on my birthday. Most of all I remembered how your touch had made me light-headed. That wasn’t real love, was it? It was a fantasy. But still, it seemed as if I shouldn’t have these thoughts about you. I should have those feelings for Seth.

  By Thanksgiving, when Seth was in his senior year of medical school in Los Angeles, I was pregnant. The maternal urge proved stronger than my doubts. We discussed options for Seth’s pediatric residency. We weighed which parts of the country would be best to raise a child in, spending hours looking at maps and discussing urban versus rural, north versus south, culturally diverse versus homogeneity. Poring over maps together felt like the old days. The whole world was ours and soon we’d embark on another adventure—the single best thing we did together.

  However, a bit of heredity made things more complicated. When I’d first met Seth, we discovered we had an unusual fact in common—an interesting coincidence.

  “Do you have many relatives in Phoenix?” I’d asked when we were exchanging family histories. “Other than your parents?”

  “Just one aunt and uncle,” he’d answered. “They have two kids. My cousins and my brother, Alex, and I were raised all together. My aunt Lena is my mom’s identical twin. They were very close. Sometimes, when we were kids, I’d run to her, not my mom, when I got hurt. Like they were interchangeable. But not exactly, because I’m pretty sure Aunt Lena liked me more than my mom did. She was actually nicer to me.”

  I stared at him. “Your mother was a twin? My mother is a twin, too. My aunt Gussie is her identical twin,” I said, and then laughed. “That’s so strange. Well, we’d better not get married. I’ve been told that twins run in families, but that it skips a generation. With both of our mothers being twins, that would be our destiny.”

  And so it was. Within two months of my pregnancy, a pregnancy marked by severe nausea and violent throwing up almost all day, every day, the doctor informed us we were expecting twins. And, I don’t care what anyone says, having twins is infinitely more stressful and complicated than having two single children. Two for one. Ha. Get it over with quickly. Ha. Only one pregnancy and you’ve got your family complete. Ha. At twenty weeks, my pregnancy was deemed high risk, and I was ordered on bed rest. I had to leave my job and stay at home, recumbent, my belly a huge mound rising in front of me. In our innocence, before we realized twins were coming, we’d planned on taking our new baby to Europe that summer. Seth had been dreaming of the trip all during medical school, a way to repeat the two years of blissful wandering we’d had before we
married. He optimistically thought we could travel before we settled down somewhere and he began his pediatric residency.

  “Man, it’s easy when they’re little,” Seth said to me and everyone we knew. “People all around the world, in Indonesia and Thailand and Fiji, everybody in those countries we traveled to center their lives on children. We never heard crying kids anywhere we visited, did we, Judith? People just tie their babies into a pack, hoist them onto their backs, and the kid becomes part of them.”

  “A newborn, Seth?” I asked. I wanted to, but just couldn’t see it.

  “Of course. That’s when they’re most portable,” he’d replied. “It’ll be easy.”

  People we knew who actually had children would stare at us incredulously when they heard our plans.

  “You want to travel abroad with an infant?” one friend asked. “Jesus, I couldn’t manage getting out of the house for two months after we had our baby. We had no clean clothes and I couldn’t even find time to go to the Laundromat.”

  Seth maintained that it all came down to attitude and flexibility. He said to me in the privacy of our bedroom, “Spoiled Americans. That’s what our friends are. They forget how natural it is to have a baby. They overanalyze everything. You just have to get organized.” And if anyone could have carried this off, it was my ex-husband. But that was before the doctor heard two heartbeats and I was diagnosed with a high-risk pregnancy.

  “I guess we won’t be going to Greece this summer,” were the first words out of Seth’s mouth when we left the doctor’s office that sunny day in December. We had just learned the news and I was in shock. Seth walked quickly through the parking lot, got into the car before me, and slammed the door. Then he must have realized that I was still far behind him, so he reached over and opened the passenger door from inside. He didn’t look at me, just stared straight ahead while we drove home. You could see those Greek islands dissolving before his eyes. No more Mykonos. No more Santorini.