As I washed my hands and straightened out my clothes, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. And there was Sally Sin, looking back at me.
Will was walking around Room C with his hands clasped behind his back like an absentminded professor.
“I can see why you love these, Lucy,” he said. “I’ve never seen them before except in pictures.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
“But we just got here. What about the Degas?”
I ran a hand down his chest. “I was thinking it might be time for a siesta,” I said, subtle as a truck. “Back at the hotel.”
Will gave me a slow smile, the one that still turns my knees to Jell-O.
“I like the way you think,” he said. We walked, arms wrapped around each other, out of the room and right past the bathroom door, behind which my mysterious stalker slept off the hit of anesthesia meant for me.
It was the middle of the night and a rhythmic rain fell outside our hotel windows. Drenched with sweat, my heart pounding in my chest, I climbed out of bed and stood looking at the dark shadow of the Eiffel Tower. I’d made a terrible mistake believing I could live a normal life, that I could come and go like any other citizen of the world. I could not. I was not.
But now it was too late.
30
Sometime around 2 A.M., I hear Will’s key in the door downstairs. Or at least I hope it’s Will’s key. I’m too tired to deal with any more intruders. Whoever it is, he’s welcome to steal all our stuff as long as after he’s done, he leaves quietly. Will drops his suitcase in the hallway and takes off his shoes. I can barely hear his footsteps on the stairs as he comes closer. I pretend to be asleep because that’s what most people do in the middle of the night. Will strips off his clothes, dropping them in a heap on the floor, where they will remain indefinitely, and slides under the sheets next to me. His body is warm but his hands are freezing. I recoil from their touch.
“Sorry I’m late,” he whispers, clearly not convinced by my imitation of sleep. “We got hung up in Idaho. Weather.”
“Weather,” I mumble. “You don’t smell so good.”
He nuzzles my ear. His hands grow warmer, stealing my heat. “You should see my shoes.”
“What are you doing here anyway?” I groan, pulling a pillow over my head. “The calendar doesn’t have you back until tomorrow.” Or that’s what I expect the calendar would say if I actually ever looked at it. I’m suddenly overcome with gratitude I didn’t try to hide Yoder in the guest bedroom based on my sketchy memory of the calendar.
“I wanted to be here for Theo’s interview tomorrow, otherwise I’d have just stayed over in Idaho.” His answer causes a sharp, small ache right in the middle of my chest that catches me off guard. He used to rush home from New York or Washington or Boston because he couldn’t wait to be back in San Francisco with me. But our priorities have shifted. Children will do that to you.
“I missed you,” I whisper, curling myself into him. He doesn’t hear me because he’s already snoring lightly in my ear but I’m wide awake now, thinking, for some reason, about Ian Blackford with his shirt off.
In the beginning of my relationship with Will, there were not enough hours in the day. We couldn’t get out of bed without having sex and we couldn’t have dinner without having sex and we couldn’t watch TV without having sex. There were times when we had to run home from a restaurant because we were sure dropping to the floor and doing it right there in front of everyone would get us arrested. Overall, it was a pretty satisfying way to live.
If Will was on the road for more than a day, I experienced his absence as pure agony, as if some important part of my body had been ripped off and nothing could staunch the bleeding. I was in a new city with no job and no friends and I would wander around looking stoned, wanting nothing more than for the hours to pass and for Will to come back to me. There were moments when he was gone that I doubted his very existence. Was any of this real? Had I finally lost my marbles, as Simon Still liked to say?
But if San Francisco and the fog and my new husband were all part of a larger nervous breakdown, it was not altogether unpleasant. I thought I could just keep on going in this manner for quite some time.
Eventually, in a marriage, things have to slow down if you ever plan on getting anything done in life. And I do mean anything. It’s hard to concentrate on something as basic as reading the newspaper when you’re busy pining away for someone who crawled out of your bed not ten minutes earlier.
One way to slow down the twenty-four-hour sexual buffet is to get pregnant and have a baby. Yes sir, that works very well to bring things to a screeching halt.
At first, Will treated me like I was dying, opening doors, helping me out of the car, not letting me walk on the outside of the sidewalk. He brought home a stack of baby books I couldn’t have finished reading even if the gestation period for a human baby were closer to that of an elephant. The books led to conversations I wouldn’t have expected to have if Will and I were locked in a room together for a million years and forced to talk to one another for the entire time.
“Did you know in some cultures they practice placentophagia? That’s when the new parents eat the placenta,” Will would say.
“No. Why on earth would I know that? I don’t even want to know that now. Please take it back.”
Meanwhile, I watched with horror as the body I had grown accustomed to living in stretched and strained in ways utterly alien to me. I was used to a body that did as it was told. When I said run, it ran. When I said hide, it hid. When I said duck, it hit the deck as if life depended on it, which it usually did. But now I struggled simply to get my shoes on. I kept bumping into doorjambs and almost setting myself on fire on the stove. A man actually gave me his seat on the bus and I was so grateful I almost wept. If this was what life felt like being a whale, I was extremely happy to have been born a human. I was no good at being a whale.
“It’s such a remarkable experience,” Will would say, resting a hand on my enormous stomach. “I’m just in awe of it.”
“If you think it’s so amazing then why don’t you carry him around with you for a while?” I’d suggest. And Will would laugh because it was easy to marvel at pregnancy from the male side of the gender divide when there was absolutely no risk of being forced to take it up yourself.
Toward the end, I didn’t want to stray very far from the house. The unnamed baby was sitting on my bladder and every six minutes I had to run off and find a bathroom. And while my doctor assured me this was perfectly normal and happened all the time, it didn’t make it any more dignified.
In a way, I was grateful Simon Still wasn’t able to see me in this condition. Because even though his job was to protect the roughly 7 billion human inhabitants here on earth from mass destruction, he didn’t really like people very much, and pregnant women held a special place in his mental ranking of things that disgusted him.
Nothing was normal. The smell of my husband made me sick to my stomach. I could no longer even enter my favorite coffee shop and it wasn’t solely because the doorway was shrinking. I kept meeting women who talked about the glowing and the empowerment and how they appreciated themselves in a whole new way. They munched on nutritious snacks and carried bottles of filtered water around with them everywhere they went. They read parenting magazines and talked about baby gear with an intensity I had thought was reserved for trying to make peace in the Middle East. I marveled at their ability to shut out the world and all evidence that suggested it was going completely to hell.
I tried to follow their example and not think about the world but the world wasn’t willing to cooperate. In every direction, I was confronted with the downward spiral. In New York, two heroin-addled parents locked their two-year-old in a bathroom with scalding hot water running in the tub. They couldn’t hear his screams through their drug-induced haze. In Detroit, a six-year-old girl was traded to a child pornographer for drugs. When they found her, it was almost as if she had been turned
inside out. In Los Angeles, a four-year-old boy was removed from his teenage mother and her boyfriend after they’d insisted upon using him as an ashtray. The detective on that case broke down and cried on the local news station. The reporter didn’t know what to do.
There was no shortage of bad in the world and that didn’t even take into account things like the nuclear warheads no one seemed to be able to keep track of. It was hard to believe you weren’t committing crimes against humanity simply by perpetuating its existence.
In the last month of pregnancy, when I weighed almost as much as my husband and had taken to wearing his T-shirts, I declared I was never doing this again.
“If you want another baby,” I announced, “you’d better find a different wife or work it out mail-order somehow.”
“But you’re doing so great,” Will said. It really is impossible to empathize with a whale so I shouldn’t have been so hard on him. “I picked up some things you might need today.”
What he was doing cruising the baby aisles at CVS rather than sitting in his office contemplating trash was beyond me. But I didn’t have time to ask because my eyes came to rest on a tube of nipple cream and I could no longer speak. I picked up the purple tube and held it in front of Will’s face.
“Apparently, nursing mothers sometimes need this stuff. That’s what the lady said at the drugstore.” He shrugged. After all, he wasn’t the one who invented the human body. Maybe if he had, he would have done women the world over a great service and made nipples out of titanium.
“So, I’m to understand that this baby is going to suck the nipples right off my body?”
“Something like that,” Will said. “You should read the books.”
I did read the books, at least what I considered a fairly aggressive assortment of them, and not one mentioned the need for nipple balm. They were holding out on me like a critical asset who wants more money. I started to sweat, which seemed to happen with alarming frequency. My internal thermostat was desperately in need of a tune-up.
“I don’t think I can do this,” I said. “Really. I mean it.”
“Of course you can. There is nothing to worry about. It’s all going to be fine.”
Nothing to worry about? There were melting ice caps, dying coral reefs, droughts, floods, tsunamis, terrorists, mad scientists, angry man-eating ants, and a variety of nipple creams for sale at the local drugstore. In my opinion, nothing good could come from any of it. Seeing the panic in my eyes, Will sat me down on the couch.
“Listen, our job is to keep this child safe, to make a happy home for him, to help him to grow into a passionate, responsible adult. That’s our mission. And we’re going to be good at it. It’s all going to be okay.”
There was something about the way he phrased it that calmed me. There was a goal and that was something I could get my head around. I could carry out the mission of keeping this baby healthy, happy, and safe. Two weeks later, Theo was born and I found I had nothing near the energy to contemplate my potential failure as a parent. I was in survival mode and deep thinking suddenly seemed a luxury I could no longer afford.
Will, whose life didn’t seem to change quite as dramatically as mine, kept careful track of the passing days. Part of it was to marvel at how quickly our little lump of red flesh turned into something resembling a baby boy and part of it was to know exactly when he could get back in the saddle and to be ready when that day rolled around.
“The doctor said six weeks, Lucy,” he said, lying next to me in bed, stroking my arm. “We seem to have made it that far.”
I, well into my second tube of nipple cream, stared at him blankly.
“You want to have sex with this?” I asked, pointing to my body, which didn’t actually resemble my body but must have been because it was attached to my head.
“Yes,” he said. “Very much.”
I thought about his request for a few minutes. He waited patiently, hopefully, for my answer.
“Well, okay, I guess. But you can’t actually touch me. Is that possible?”
“Sure,” he said, reaching to pull off my shirt.
“No!” I howled. “The shirt stays on. I said you weren’t allowed to actually touch me.”
He sighed. This was going to be a challenge, but Will never backed down from a challenge.
“Fine. No touching.”
I have to hand it to him, he managed to pull it off by leaving most of my clothes on and indulging in the liberal use of unflavored lubricating gel.
“That was different,” he said afterward.
I’ll say. Before we could dissect the new nature of our relationship, Theo, sleeping in a bassinet not twelve inches from my head, began to bawl.
Eventually, sex tipped the scales back toward pleasure rather than obligation and I think we were both relieved. It would have been terrible to face a lifetime with someone who turned you on about as much as a pair of argyle socks.
But there were a number of things that stayed permanently skewed. The minute Theo was out of his crib and into his big boy bed, he discovered the joys of showing up in our bed at 6 A.M. He would sneak in the door, glide around the foot of the bed on padded feet, crawl up and over Will, and snuggle down between us. He would always bring his blanket and a stuffed animal that had to share my pillow. And most of the time it was sweet. But sometimes it wasn’t.
“Wait! Stop!” I’d whisper, barely able to keep my voice down.
“What? Are you okay? Am I hurting you?”
“No. Get off me. Quick!”
“What’s going on? You’re acting really weird.”
“Kid in the doorway.”
“Oh, shit. I mean, Hi, Theo.”
Yes, the old Theo interruptus. Theo would look at us strangely and shake his head as if he couldn’t understand why he’d gotten stuck with such odd parents. He was a good kid, after all, he ate most of his vegetables. So why the karmic payback of the wacky mom and dad rolling around on their bed like fish out of water? Once I got over the sheer horror of being caught in the act, I kind of felt sorry for him.
After a while, I realized Theo filled my thoughts. He might be in the background, like elevator music, but he was still there. Even in the honest throes of passion, there was a part of me that stayed with my child. I would do anything for him, even when he was screaming like a banshee on the checkout line of the supermarket, even when he overturned his dinner onto the floor or showed up in our bedroom when I would rather he didn’t. I no longer belonged to Will. I no longer belonged to myself.
For now, I belonged to Theo.
31
The first rays of sun creep into our bedroom, illuminating the dust hanging in the air in a way that’s almost beautiful. If yesterday was a full frontal disaster, today promises more of the same. First, we have an interview for Theo at San Francisco Country Day. I had planned on a rather casual approach but now Will is accompanying us, and I may have to reform my ways.
San Francisco Country Day is the sort of private school Will attended as a child where everyone wears navy trousers, maroon sweater vests, and white button-down shirts. Each student is required to have a blazer with the school emblem sewn neatly over the left breast pocket. Right there, I’m already in big trouble. I can sew a button but only at gunpoint. The classes at Country Day are small, the teachers have a collective 400,000 years of classroom experience, and when you talk about squash, everyone knows you mean the game and not the vegetable.
I didn’t go to private school. The very thought of it terrifies me. However, while the idea of my child growing up in such a rarified atmosphere with actual princes and the offspring of extremely rich media tycoons is not ideal, San Francisco Country Day employs a staff of seven private security guards. Normally, the presence of private security guards would do little to ease my fears. They tend to stand around reading magazines, talking on the phone, or texting. Plus, most of them are so out of shape that chasing down a criminal would inevitably lead to cardiac arrest.
How
ever, I checked out San Francisco Country Day’s security company and it seems they’re a subsidiary of a much larger private security company that works with the United States government, specifically in war zones. Shockingly, they’re wholly owned by the family of a student in the third grade.
Public schools don’t have money for crayons, let alone gun-toting paramilitary cowboys who are surely covered in tattoos under their official-looking jackets and ties. For most people, that’s just fine. But I’m not most people. The criteria I use to judge a school’s appropriateness isn’t something I share with my mom friends. There’s no need for them to think I’m that weird.
So it seems I’m willing to put up with diversity being defined as a child with brown hair and dressing my kid up like an accountant in exchange for a campus patrolled by a bunch of ex-marines. I mean, I’m pretty good but I can’t be everywhere at once, can I?
For the privilege of sending my five-year-old into such an environment, I will pay $27,000 a year in tuition. No, you did not misread the number. And that’s for kindergarten. The price increases as the child advances through the grades. After all, a sixth-grader is bound to eat more than a first-grader. Whether he can eat $10,000 more is up for debate.
When I first opened the brochure to a smiling bunch of kids sitting attentively in a classroom, absorbing knowledge like wee sponges, I felt the difference between Theo and me as a blow to the gut. Theo will move in these circles with these people as his friends. But he won’t be pretending. It’ll really be him, not some invented version of himself meant to confuse and distract the other side. Staring at the brochure, I wondered if there was a real version of me lurking around somewhere and what she might be like.
“Can we really justify spending that amount of money for kindergarten?” I’d asked Will. “They read storybooks and decorate pumpkins and things.”
“They have a strong reputation for math and science,” my husband said. How did he know this? Was he doing his homework on the side, stepping into my territory? “They also recently installed solar cells on the roofs of all their buildings. They’re sending the right message, doing the right thing, and I want to support that.” Ah, I knew it had to be more than great test scores in algebra.
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