What keeps them together? people wondered about us. What, his family wondered, gives him pleasure in this woman who keeps so to herself? What, my friends wondered, gives her pleasure in this man who orders her around “for her own good,” claiming to know her better than she knows herself? If Tilla and I were continents and our love was a globe, then the floor of the ocean which bonded us was the bottom necessity we felt: to control surprise. The political upheavals of his early life and the alcoholic upheavals of mine formed our ocean floor. Our deep, unspoken pact kept the world as it was, unchanged. Alone together we could be volatile because we had held both time and place in safe abeyance. We ourselves could be the winds of change. But we howled in a frame where our howling could do no harm.
And the frame itself did me good. It was Tilla-size, gigantic and baroque. But as imperious as he could be with human beings, he was modest toward his art—and respectful of mine. When Raw Heaven got its review in the New York Times, Tilla dragged me to Xerox copies, then wrote the mailing labels, and clapped at my readings. When I groaned about judging 300 poetry manuscripts for the National Endowment for the Arts—how would I teach and write and shop for groceries and get to the dry cleaners?—he coaxed me on. “It will be so good for you, darling. First you make your poems. Then they are so rightly admired. Now you will make culture itself!” I rolled my eyes. “Of course it is hard and takes time,” he said calmly, “but you will have the energy because your talent will give it to you. Capitalize on it now,” he advised, quietly as a banker in the gilded hall of art, “say yes to everything.” Though he wrapped his body in persimmon silk, his voice wore tweed, soft, authorial.
Come on, I said to myself, it’s only once. No thirty-eight-year-old woman gets pregnant doing it unprotected only once.
“I know my body,” Tilla said to me as we lowered ourselves onto his futon bed in the corner of the living area of the loft. I hadn’t put the diaphragm in. It was hopelessly wrecked. Usually we made love at my place in Manhattan, but I had stayed in Williamsburg with Tilla because we had come from a family birthday party and were scheduled to go to brunch in Manhattan with Mariah and one of her ex-husbands who had turned out to be a set-designer friend of Tilla’s. “God, do we have time? We’re supposed to meet them at twelve-thirty and we’ve got to drive all the way in.”
“We always have time to make love.”
“I’m not so sure about this, Mr. Treasure.”
“I know my body, Molly, I will withdraw from you and ejaculate on your stomach.”
“Yeah,” I said, kissing him, my turtleneck halfway up and my pants halfway down—it was too cold to make love with all our clothes off. “But what about those little drops in the beginning? That’s sperm you know.”
“I can control those little drops.”
“No man can control those little drops. Men aren’t made to control those little drops. They taught me that in high school.” Tilla, who eschewed facts, once convinced a whole dinner table of the scientific basis of his grandmother’s recipe for insomnia until a Science Times article suggested otherwise, and even then he disputed the reportage. But perhaps he knew a secret older than the medical establishment.
Come on, I said to myself again, it’s only once.
“I am a dancer, Molly, I know my body, and I can control those little drops,” he said. “Relax your jaw, Molly, your lips are so hard!”
I let him in, I invited him in, I gave in, not just to him, but to something very much deeper: a desire to give in. My father was dead. The wall could come down.
We took off all our clothes and climbed under the covers so we could really make love. Then we hopped out again, Tilla to bring the electric heater closer and me to call Mariah to say we would be late. Back under the heap of blankets between the flannel sheets we gave up our vigilance because no one was there to kill us. We were no longer in Hungary or on Pilgrim Road, but free. And in our freedom I opened my legs and he opened the lips of my vagina with his fingers and entered my vagina with the fingers of one hand, and circled my clitoris with the fingers of his other. My jaw relaxed. I could kiss him now. My nipples hardened. When my clitoris was the size of a hazelnut I had my orgasm, coming with him holding me, my eyes open and his eyes watching me, and then I felt the naked entering of his penis inside me without a barrier, that trusted wall now with a chink in it, like the chink in the wall the lovers Pyramis and Thisbe would whisper into, planning their escape. And I watched his eyes open and shut, open and shut with his thrusts, then the twist of his face and the clamping shut of his eyelids as he came, lying exhausted in me with his sweet, turnip-y smell. He was my darling. And I his.
After I became pregnant that morning, we met Mariah and husband number four for brunch.
When my gynecologist’s nurse called and told me the test was positive, I suddenly couldn’t remember what positive meant. “Does this mean I’m not pregnant or I am pregnant?” I asked.
“Oh, congratulations!” she said. “You are pregnant!” I turned cold with despair at the same time as a warmth infused me, like a feeder stream into a reservoir.
Down, down, down I sat in my wing-backed chair while my little pet parrot flew to my side and pulled on my earring, then tore the rubber away from the telephone cord. I had thought I’d bought a male, but one day an egg lay on the bottom of her cage, and there she sat. Of course it wasn’t going to hatch, but I let the bird nest there, contrary to the vet’s advice. It was her nature to sit, I thought. And finally she abandoned the egg. I wasn’t going to get a male parrot and start raising exotic birds in a studio apartment—I had enough guano to clean up. The parrot played, the tulips bobbed in the wooden box I’d planted them in, the paperweights glowed on my desk, the very small expensive Turkish rug under my feet purred its red and blue. I sat in a trance, absorbing the phone call, letting my eyes stroll the apartment I was in the process of buying. We were going co-op. I loved this padded place, the sunlight in my real kitchen, my overstuffed closets, the foldout couch I slept in and had insomnia in ever since my father died. Cookie the parrot chattered on, and a pleasing, gossipy chatter began in my body.
My body was humming like a workshop, complete with elves. I could become pregnant, after all! Shocked as I was, it felt good to discover that I worked. Then a wave of exhaustion. I wasn’t up to it. I felt old—the oldness that is a form of hopelessness.
But in moments I was energized again by my new state, feeling a raw kind of hope.
“What? On a Wednesday?” Tilla said to my request that he come right over.
“It’s an emergency. There’s nothing wrong, but it’s still an emergency.” Tilla hated emergencies. His young life had nearly been destroyed by them, and now they made him hysterical. I so completely dumbfounded him that he immediately got in his car and faced his hated rush hour traffic to come to me. When he arrived, I was still sitting in the chair, smoothing the head feathers of Cookie the parrot, who took her usual swipe at him, then settled down on my shoulder until I removed her, squawking, to her cage.
“We have to sit on the couch, so we can be next to each other,” I said, “because you’ll never guess what’s happened.”
“You got a MacArthur Grant!”
“No.”
“The Ninety-second Street Y called you for a reading!”
“No, no,” I said. “Listen, Tilla, I’m pregnant.”
“Oh my God!” His eyes twinkled. “Oh my God, we’re pregnant!” He threw his arms around me, taking to the thought right away. Look what we had done! It was sweet. It was a darling bud.
We cooed on the couch. “Are you sure? The test was sure?” he asked.
“Positive.”
“How strange,” he marveled, “I love this idea! I am a father—not just a father to the troupe, but a real father!”
And now both of our marathon imaginations were at work. How would we do it? We were overwhelmed. How could we figure it out? What would we do? We didn’t know, we didn’t know, but we hugged each other and I c
ried, and he kissed me, and I kissed him, and we decided to tell no one until…
Until we decided what we would do. Within the hour, and within the powerful fantasy of our baby and our parenthood, grew the twin idea that we could stop it.
“Let’s go have dinner,” Tilla said. It was the first time he’d ever suggested going out. Tilla cooked at home, either his or someone else’s. I was the one who ate out, but by now it was far too late to cook, and we were hungry.
We sat in a little Hungarian restaurant with net curtains on Second Avenue eating noodles. “My mother will really like this, if we go through with it,” he said.
“Oh my God, my mother!” I said.
Not only would there be Szabos above me, below me, and to the left and right, but Polly. Polly doing her duty and hightailing it back to Buffalo ASAP. Polly and the Szabos. Sentinels of Szabos. Advice from Szabos. Criticism from Szabos. Szabos dressing the baby, Szabos changing the baby, Szabos holding the baby until it stopped crying. I would be surrounded by both our families. And by a baby who would need me night and day. And Gail. Polly and Gail and the Szabos.
We could not live in my studio apartment. We could not really live in the loft, which was like a crash pad. A huge amount of money, money I didn’t have, would have to be poured into the loft. Or we would have to rent a new place. Someplace far, far out into a borough that we could afford. Scratch that. That I could afford. Tilla had no money except for grants for costumes and space and he was proud to live on nothing.
Or I could live alone. Alone with the baby. Stay in my little place and have the baby by myself and not marry Tilla or even live with him. A kind of despair set in.
That was my mother’s fantasy. “If only you didn’t have to have a husband,” she used to say, “in order to have children. That’s the way I would have done it, if I could have.” Polly loved the idea of being a single mother. She daydreamed of a de-Dadded heaven of motherhood without Ted.
But it was not my fantasy. I knew how impossible single motherhood would be for me. First, I would have to find a new job. I could not work with children all day long and come home exhausted to my child. There are teachers who do this with equanimity, but I would not be one of them. The demands of the children at school depleted me utterly. How could I offer my child the dregs of me? How would I write? Even now I had trouble writing all I needed to, and that was with summers off. A new job, whatever that was, could not be teaching. What would it be? In an office somewhere. With my child at home.
I would not jeopardize my child with the pipe dream that I could do this alone. I couldn’t do it alone. Everything I did in my life I did with the stops pulled out. My personality was not going to change. I barely had life for one under control. I could not add another without help, without a father. There had to be two partners. But Tilla and I were not partners in the equal, parental sense. We led two lives, and these lives already cost me: though he came to stay every weekend, not once had Tilla offered to pay for groceries, nor did he bring a gift of a bottle of wine or a pound of coffee.
“A toast,” Tilla was whispering, beaming, at the restaurant, holding up his wine. I held up my wine, then thought, If you are having this baby, don’t drink the wine. I compromised with a spoonful.
“Stop worrying, little mother,” he said to me. “We will find our way.” So I gave up on reason, and fell back into the pregnant state, not putting mind over matter anymore. It was lovely not to put mind over matter—I had so rarely had the experience. Vigilance was everything, until now. Now I was pregnant and sleepy. I left my papers uncorrected, and Tilla and I shared a rare weeknight sleepover. After all, things were different now. Now I was an animal, living a life according to my physical needs.
—
The next day I taught in a daydream state, made an extra appointment with Ruta for the following Monday and went home to discover my mailbox jammed—I’d forgotten to open yesterdays mail! In the stack of correspondence was a letter postmarked from Canada. Though it was from Mike Groden, whom I hadn’t heard from in nineteen years, I put it with the rest of the mail. Curiously, I was devoid of curiosity. In this hyperawareness of the feelings of my body, and a deep pleasure that something was growing inside me, heightened by Tilla’s approval and by the fact that I had told no one except Ruta, I felt a skin growing, a skin of protection about my baby and me, a thick, but permeable blood-infused wall about us. It was as if I were in a womb, and in my womb-within-a-womb grew a tiny cotyledon, a speck of a human plant.
I, who had no skin, and who had worked so hard for borders, was suddenly supplied them by biology. All my body wanted was to have this baby. How hard it was to get my mind to think, think! You’ve got to, Molly, I told myself. I can’t, I’m too sleepy. Nature had installed me in a metaphorical rocking chair. I need do nothing but be. I scratched my parrot’s head and stared out the window. It was like summers at La Grange, lying on the lawn of Ruth’s garden in the old apple orchard for hours, drifting, in a state of waiting that was mildly expectant. When an idea came, I turned from the mental window to greet it with the calm, warm statement: Hello, I’ve been expecting you. I was expecting. The sense of pleasant fullness was unlike any other satisfaction.
Think! I told myself, then thought, You can think Monday, honey, when you have the appointment with Ruta. You can think it through then, honey-pie. Honeypie. I wasn’t calling myself a jerk. I wasn’t flogging myself for having made a mistake. For the next three days, I told myself, Just he.
When Tilla came on Saturday afternoon, I had not written my poem. I had read last Sunday’s Book Review and lounged around watering my plants. Then we walked the five blocks to the Frick which seemed like twenty. I stopped in the conservatory to rest. Tilla was solicitous and attending and adoring. We looked at the Vermeer we liked and walked home, stopping to shop for dinner. Tilla cooked while I played Billie Holiday We ate and never bothered cleaning up the table, but just pulled out my convertible couch and got into bed to talk.
Tilla told me the story of his friend, an acrobat, who locked his child in a closet because the boy was making too much noise.
“I’m telling you,” he said, “if my son was annoying me and I could not work…I will not kid you, Molly…If my work does not come first, I’m not myself.”
“So what are you saying?” I asked. “Wouldn’t you just imagine doing what your friend did and yell at the kid instead?”
“I’m not in my right mind if I do not do my work. That’s all I have to say.”
“What if you had a daughter? Would she come first?”
“No difference!” he declared. “But you are carrying a son for me, Molly, I know this in my heart.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Why are you swearing? It is the truth. Such a truth I feel and I know.”
“For God’s sake, Tilla, the truth here is fifty-fifty. Actually, fifty-one–forty-nine.”
“This is not sexism, Molly, this is instinct, and what I feel in my body”
Now I had bodily feelings to match Tilla’s own. The sexism I tried to avoid by my rigorous rules, rules that Tilla, consumed by his art, abided by conveniently, would never be avoided when we were a family, even if we were a family who lived in two places. He was already full of folk advice for me. All his shoulds and should nots multiplied, as if his advice itself were pregnant. Wear a sweater. Put those light socks away. Wear these heavy socks. He was taking things out of my drawers and my closets. Don’t wear those tight pants! Too binding! Molly! Listen to me!
Borders were hacked away. If I had not been safe inside the womb of pregnancy, I would have fought. But I nodded. Somehow I knew that the hormones protecting me would not always surge so strategically. I also knew that Tilla’s story about the acrobat was an allegory I had to heed. I might abuse this child, the story said.
Decisions to abort children do not come from a hatred of children, but from the opposite: the desire to want them. My wish to be a good mother competed with the despair of coping with
Tilla as a father, a father who was already imagining the fetus as a threat to his life. All my images of a baby as a succubus were gone in the reality of biology. I replaced them with the soft, helpless need of a real infant. Yet I might damage an infant too, not by physical abuse, but by simply falling apart. I imagined myself weakened, dissolved in tears, the baby wailing, my boss screaming, poems unwritten, the bills unpaid, my fierce tears frightening my baby, and then screaming at the baby myself, unable to get hold of myself, then getting hold somehow, but the damage to the tiny thing done, the psychological damage. And I myself dying inside from the struggle to support and love while needing support and love in return.
I could not be a mother alone. I despaired of being a mother alone. I despaired of being a mother at all. Do you really want to he a mother? I asked myself, clearheaded for the first time in three days. No. Well. I don’t know. Whatever the real answer was, it wasn’t a resounding yes. I was carrying, if not an unwanted child, a less than desired child. And now Tilla was telling me he could reject this “son” he was sure of having.
“Let’s watch TV,” I said.
—
Usually it was I who made Sunday breakfast, but it was Tilla who was up. I was in my fog again.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 19