His face darkened again; his eyes filled. “Fuck. I hate that I’m doing this to you.”
“It’s okay, love. It’s going to be fine.” Her declarations became less eloquent as she focused on the agonizing pressure of the thirty-eight gallons of urine trying to escape from her body.
“I just don’t know if I…”
“Ryan, please. I’ve had to pee for, like, eight hours.” She hadn’t meant to be so harsh. He looked immediately wounded and she hated him then, for just a second.
She started away from him in an awkward gallop. “Sweetheart, I love you, it’s fine; just give me ten seconds, okay?” She dashed off to the bathroom and just as she was releasing a joyful, racehorse-caliber, orgasmically gratifying stream of pee, he appeared in the doorway. He looked like a baby, like a sleepy, agonized toddler, and she felt any annoyance melt away.
He leaned down and kissed her head. “I have to go to bed.”
She finished and stood up, not bothering to wash her hands lest he slip away from her in those few seconds. “Good, sweetheart. I’ll be up soon.” She reached for his wrist and pulled him to her once more. “Get a good night’s sleep,” she said, rivaling her mother, the parent of four recalcitrant kindergarten dodgers, for most placating send-off ever. He shuffled upstairs and she waited until she heard the squeak of their bed frame to retrieve her mess from the front hall. The ice cream sandwiches, delightful monstrosities the size of human faces, had melted beneath her raincoat in a disgusting, sticky pile, and the liquid had pooled around the bottle of wine so that when she lifted it there remained a coagulated white ring around a stark circle of hardwood.
She came down the next morning to find him making breakfast.
“To celebrate,” he said, turning to her, a smile arranged dubiously on his face. “I’m really proud of you, Lize. Congratulations.”
Her eyes filled unexpectedly. She came up behind him and wrapped her arms around him. He turned in her embrace, and she cupped his face in her hands, able, suddenly, to see a glimmer of something she recognized.
It was less outright desire than a kind of willed optimism, a possibly pathetic longing for what they didn’t have anymore, for the ability to be the kind of couple who easily celebrated each other’s achievements over blueberry pancakes. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d had sex, for she had not been aware, whenever it was, that they were headed somewhere so dark.
“I’m wet,” she said, and Ryan said, “Why?” and she said, “I don’t know why,” and they made love against the kitchen counter with an ease and urgency of better times.
She would try, ardently, not to associate the baby with the day it was conceived.
* * *
—
Wendy had left her numerous voicemails after their failed lunch, but Violet waited three days before calling her back. Wyatt was at preschool and Eli was napping and she paced around her first floor as she mustered the confidence to dial the number. Matt had discouraged it over his Grape-Nuts that morning, telling her that Wendy was unfairly fucking with her and that she needn’t engage. And her husband was right, but that didn’t change the fact of the boy. Matt had left without kissing her goodbye. She pressed her fingers into the soil of the pygmy date palm. She’d printed up a watering schedule for the housekeeper, but she had suspicions about Malgorzata’s English literacy and she was afraid that chastisement would be politically incorrect. She went to fill the watering can, aware that she was procrastinating. There was a chance, of course, that the boy wasn’t who she thought he was, but the messages Wendy had been leaving suggested otherwise, as did that feeling in her gut.
She paused midway to the kitchen and dialed Wendy’s number before she could stop herself. Get it over with, as though calling her sister were the final act rather than the very beginning of what she suspected would be a long sequence of events.
“Am I hallucinating?” Wendy asked.
She bristled. “You actually don’t get to make jokes,” she said to her sister.
“I’ve called you eighty times. I was starting to think you’d finally transubstantiated.”
Violet reminded herself that she had a law degree. That she’d once talked a major airline into shelling out seven figures over a case of rancid in-flight OJ. “You had no right,” she said. “You had absolutely no right to put me in that position.”
“Did you listen to my messages? I know that, Viol, Jesus. I misread the situation.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Her voice hit the vaulted ceiling of the sunroom and bled down the walls. They weren’t a yelling household. She didn’t often get upset. It was embarrassing to hear her own hostility. “Wendy, that was— You know how hard that— The universe in which it’s even remotely okay that you—” She pressed her forehead against the window glass, looked into the yard, at the custom cedar tree house that had convinced them to buy the main house in the first place. She resented this conversation encroaching upon the fine-tuned landscape of her life. She resented all the ways it would inevitably encroach beyond this afternoon. “Tell me how you found him,” she said.
“It’s kind of a long story,” Wendy said.
“No shit it is.”
“I got curious,” Wendy said. “A while ago. And I—did a little digging.”
“How long is a while?”
“Not important.”
“I get to decide what’s important and what isn’t.”
“It was a one-off thing, Violet, okay? Christ. I talked to his foster mother once. Ages ago. I never expected to hear from her again. But she called me a few weeks ago, and— God, Viol, if you think I’m flaky; this woman’s like fucking Joan Baez. And she had this whole thing about how she felt like my calling her in the first place was a harbinger of change, and I—”
She quickly lost her ability to follow the narrative thread. “Wait, what do you mean—it was a closed adoption; what do you mean foster mother, Wendy, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“I told you it was a long story.” Wendy’s voice softened, sounded suddenly to contain an amount of compassion similar to that of a normal person.
Violet sank onto the chaise by the window and closed her eyes. “What happened?”
“The adoptive parents—died. Car crash. Total freak thing.”
There was a feeling she experienced when her sons were sick, an internal weakening, sympathetic infirmity. When Wyatt used to cry before preschool, she would too; she felt Eli’s encroaching teeth pressing painfully against her own gums. The feeling originated from a hot mass behind her heart, and she felt the spot pulsing now, thinking of the boy—she still hadn’t asked his name—loving other people, people who loved him back and then one day failed to come home. “How old was he when it happened?”
“Four.”
“Christ. So he’s been—”
“Foster care. Repeatedly. And then a residential place. Lathrop House? Remember there was that kid when we were in grade school who lived there and it used to make Mom so sad?”
Unable to speak, she nodded. Four.
“That’s where he met Hanna,” Wendy said. “Mother Earth. The space cadet. She took him in. They actually only live about half a mile from Mom and Dad.”
“Fuck.”
“I know; how weird is that? Anyway, he— According to Hanna, it was all just a big bureaucratic clusterfuck. Under normal circumstances he would’ve been adopted by another family in a flash, but he just—wasn’t. Fell through the cracks. He was in a bunch of short-term placements—you know, those, like, child-collecting people who do it for the stipend?—but nothing terrible, Hanna said. She said he’s been lucky, relatively, and I don’t even want to think about what the fuck that means. Then he ended up at Lathrop House, and he and Hanna hit it off, and he’s been with them for about six months. Hanna says he’s so quiet it’s easy to forget he’s around, which is pret
ty much true, from what I can tell.”
“Jesus Christ.” She tried to picture Wyatt being ferried through the system like that, tried to envision either of her kids experiencing anywhere near that kind of instability. This is going to open doors you don’t want opened, Violet, Matt had said to her this morning.
“It’s shitty, but he seems like a nice kid,” Wendy said. “Strangely well adjusted.”
“What’s his—”
“His name!” Her sister laughed, an organic startling laugh. “Shit, sorry. Jonah. Bendt, unfortunately; like, cool, why not just cement the kid’s fate as a pipefitter?”
Jonah. She felt the syllables with her lips. Not the name she would’ve chosen, but she hadn’t allowed herself to entertain the thought at the time, so no name would’ve been. She tried to fit the name to the face in profile she’d seen at the restaurant, to the ethereal mass she saw on the only ultrasound she ever allowed herself to look at.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening. There was not a single element of this that was supposed to appear again in the life she’d worked so hard to build; not a single molecule of this road not taken—though of course she thought of him, sometimes, weekly at least—was ever supposed to find its way back to her, especially now, when her husband had made partner and she had made continual strides among Evanston’s social elite, when one of her boys was school age and the other was heading there fast.
“Listen, Viol,” Wendy said, “there’s—kind of a situation.”
“So you said,” Violet murmured, feeling spacey and discarnate. “You being a harbinger of change and all.”
“That’s me,” Wendy said, but her voice got serious. Eli appeared on the landing of the stairs, squinty with sleep, clutching his stuffed platypus. She waved him over and he crawled into her lap. “It’s this—South America thing,” Wendy continued, because of course there was a South America thing, because of course there was no such thing as normalcy when it came to her sister, because of course she wasn’t entitled to a post-naptime snuggle with her baby boy, not as long as Wendy was around to light fires and push her buttons.
She was stroking her son’s back while she forced herself to listen to her sister—rhythmically, ritualistically, like children who comforted themselves by rocking.
1975
The Behavioral Sciences Building was a place where people got routinely, ludicrously lost. The floor plan looked like a genome; the exterior resembled something made from gingerbread; inside, students wandered, wide-eyed, blunted by the windowlessness, looking for classrooms, for bathrooms. All these people getting turned around, dizzied by the double helix of the staircases, yet Marilyn Connolly had just begun to find herself. It was her second semester as a commuter student at the UIC Circle Campus, and though she returned each evening to the house on Fair Oaks, where she lived quietly with her widowed father, during the day she was free to do as she wished.
She quickly mastered the layout of BSB, and there was a particular set of stairs she liked, one that led to a locked classroom between the second and third floors, cold to the touch even beneath layers of clothing, murder on the back, acoustically risky. She was outspoken in her classes, valued and deferred to in a way that she’d never before experienced. Her professors laughed at her jokes; her classmates whispered to her confidentially during lectures. She became, suddenly, very attractive to those around her, not for her ability to hold her head up in domestic crises when her father had had too much scotch or to iron his Oxford collars, but for her mind—and, in the dark corners of this hideous building, her body.
Which was how she ended up on those stairs. Men now looked at her like she was an adult, capable of anything, and it both scared and intrigued her. And she enjoyed the physical part—the deviancy, the feel of the concrete steps beneath her back, the pleasurable filling-in of space that happened with fellow English majors between her legs, their mouths on her neck, her breasts; stuffy Joyce devotee Dean McGillis taught her, somewhat unpleasantly, how to execute a blowjob. Perhaps it was a form of greed, or overcompensation: she’d been deprived for so long—her mother dead, her father broken and firmly opposed to her communing with the opposite sex—of love, of autonomy, of the electric pleasure of another person’s hands on her body, and it seemed only fair that she take advantage of the host of willing undergraduates at her disposal.
An unexpected complication showed up one day in March, a bespectacled complication in a raincoat who entered the building when she was hoping to catch one of the TAs from her Theories of Personality class. She knew only the handwriting of the teaching assistants from the feedback they provided on essays: there was Barely Legible Blue Ballpoint, Left-Slanted #2 Pencil, and—her least favorite—High-Pressure Red Pen, whose comments sometimes tore through the paper. She studied the man. His posture was delicate and tense, almost apologetic despite his stature—over six feet, thin but broad-shouldered. She wondered which handwriting was his.
“Excuse me?” She rose from the stairs—a lower and more visible flight, serving, today, a chaste end—and he looked to her, startled. “Hi, are you— I’m—Marilyn Connolly?”
His face opened, a further softening around the eyes. “Hi there,” he said.
“I hoped you’d have a minute to talk.” She was suddenly aware of how she’d dressed: a snug sweater with a deep-cut V-neck, suede A-line skirt, and—the clincher—her brown calfskin go-go boots. But the man had his eyes fixed on her face; he had not once let them dip down toward her breasts. She couldn’t decide whether to be flattered or offended by this.
“Would you rather sit out here?” she asked. “Or in your office?” Before he could reply, she continued: “One form of windowless ambience versus another, I suppose.”
He smiled at her. “I’m wondering if you—” He paused. “Here’s fine.”
They sat beside each other—she saw him, finally, notice the exposed curve of her knee. His eyes were dark, almost black. There was a gentleness in the way his neck sloped down to his spine. She was surprised to feel nervous prickles of electricity across her scalp.
“Remind me of your name?” she said.
“I don’t think I actually— David. David Sorenson.”
“Dr. Sorenson?”
“Not quite yet. David’s fine.”
“David. Nice to meet you. I wanted to discuss my grade on the midterm paper.” She held it out like a summons. “I realize that the mere mention of sexuality apparently makes all of the men in this department melt into puddles of shame, but Sexual Behavior was on the list of recommended texts for this assignment, was it not?” Before he could answer, she plowed on. “I didn’t choose it provocatively, David. I’d like that to be clear. I chose it based on personal interest, which is what we were instructed to do. I’m an English major. I’m taking this class because I’m drawn to human dynamics. To psychological complexity. So you’ll understand that I found the commentary on my paper—and the resulting grade—to be incredibly problematic.”
“I—ah, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“And I wonder if a male student would have been put under the same scrutiny.”
“I couldn’t say.”
“I’m trying very hard in this class,” she said. “I’m a straight-A student.” Her biggest fear had been that she’d start crying during her speech. She was horrified to feel pressure behind her sinuses. She was, she knew, one of the smartest people in the class, and she felt like she was constantly working twice as hard to assure the people around her that this was even marginally true. A B in an elective class wouldn’t be the end of the world. But it might interfere with her acceptance to certain PhD programs, might cause a roadblock on the path she’d been working so hard to lay out. She swallowed. “One of the comments actually contained the phrase gratuitously indelicate.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“In any case. I feel like I’m being held to different
standards, Doctor. I didn’t deserve a B minus on this paper. It was well researched, even if you object to the nature of the texts referenced.”
“I’m not a doctor,” he reminded her, and she leaned away from him, incredulous.
“That’s all you have to say?”
“This is—uncomfortable.”
“You’re damn right it is. Lord. You want to teach at the college level? I assure you, not everything is always going to fall into some pristine categorical norm where—”
“Not what I meant,” David said.
“Oh, God, you’re— Oh, if this turns into some convoluted sexual thing, I really can’t—”
“I think you might have me mistaken for—someone else.”
“What?”
“I—Marilyn, was it?—I’m not— I’m premed. An undergraduate. I came here to talk to my clinical psychiatry professor.”
She felt suddenly cold, at once mortified and furious. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’m so sorry. I’m—incredibly sorry. I just— You seemed so upset and I—”
“You what?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”
She laughed theatrically—a single, pronounced ha. “How many opportunities did I just give you to tell me that I was embarrassing the hell out of myself? Wasting my time?”
“Not that many, actually. You were on kind of a roll.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, and he met her eyes again. The kindness behind them annoyed her, the warm agendalessness. “And to be honest, I…” He trailed off, looked down.
“For someone who’s so sensitive to interruption, you seem to have an oddly faulty grasp on finishing your own sentences.”
“I liked listening to you talk,” he said. He must have seen the indignant look on her face because he colored. “I didn’t mean your voice. Though—I mean, your voice is nice too. I’m not being—you know, some sort of creep. I meant I like the way you structure your sentences. There’s something musical about it. I’ve never really noticed that in another person before.”
The Most Fun We Ever Had Page 4