Whenever he thought back to that moment, of stepping off the train in New Haven, just one suitcase each, the memory felt as unreal as that first day had. Nancy had had all of her papers and books shipped separately, so she’d narrowed her bag down to the essentials. He remembered that, on the plane, he’d had this strange sense of riding a hot-air balloon without a compass, fire blowing beneath them, this burning lightness to their departure; they were starting over, free to become the best versions of themselves in a new city.
That first afternoon downtown they’d gotten lunch at Claire’s, since Ed had recommended their homemade bread and salads. Nancy had started eating healthier after they married, and he’d watched her poke her fork at threads of carrot, laughing about how the States never had a shortage of fresh vegetables. Unlike in France, where she used to scout out all the best Niçoise options for him. He had always been religious about a light, healthy lunch, especially during the peak of his training. He thought of how Nancy had quit smoking for him, how she’d gotten rid of most of her clothes because of the nicotine. He’d been struck by her discipline, the way she, like him, could achieve any goal she set her mind to.
They’d just had those two suitcases, and it had been easy enough to check them at the gallery—Nancy had needed to see the gallery before they met the broker to see apartments—as if Yale’s own French collection would let her pretend she’d never left Paris. She’d looked up the sole Monet in advance, and the room it was in, European Painting—had circled it on the map she’d procured from an informational office on campus, and couldn’t wait to examine the painting up close, then at a distance. Her thumb pressed to her lip as she thought. She’d said, It’s wonderful, isn’t it?
He’d nodded, said, Yes, and then that he liked that it was a beach scene. He’d always struggled to say something more profound, but it’d been all he could think of then.
It’s about a transitory moment, I think—at least that’s what he thought she’d said—You see how there’s the finest suggestion of movement in the veil from her hat? While the lines of her parasol and chair are fixed . . . He’s able to capture air, I think. Motion.
Right, he’d said. He’d pulled out a pen from his jacket as though he had something to write, some calculation to make. Always something to do, she used to say—and later—that it stopped him from being in the moment. As though she were any better at that than he was.
He heard sound entering the room, and when he turned, he saw a petite woman and her son. She was holding a video camera, slowly scanning each painting, walking in this perfect square around the room. When she reached where he was sitting, she called loudly for her son to meet her, and he hurried dutifully to her side. At one point, the little boy looked at Murray, his brown eyes intent, as if he wanted something, but Murray wouldn’t indulge him—he looked away toward the security guard, wondering why she just stood there and let strangers take video. Shouldn’t it be illegal, like burning movies off the Internet? This was a sacred place, he wanted to tell her, but she just stood there, with her buckled gold belt.
The year Nancy left him, he’d started coming here once a month. He hadn’t yet given up. He’d thought if he came and thought of something new to say about the Monet, something measured, insightful, she might change her mind about him eventually. He thought he’d say something about the child in the painting, the one at the water’s edge. The angle of the boy’s foot relative to the ripple of foam on a wave. He might even have suggested they go on a trip, just the two of them, to the beach, not just to the marina, but to a nice beach in Long Island. He could have taken more weekends off to spend time with her, especially those first years, when he hadn’t had his promotion. Although hindsight, she used to always say, was twenty-twenty. He’d put in all that time so they might have more to work with, a better life as a family. There’d been much to prepare for.
A whole group entered, a French class. The professor, this tall, lithe man with thick brown hair, made a sweeping motion toward the artwork.
Murray couldn’t make out more than the most common pronouns, such as je and nous, a few words like ne . . . pas and jamais and rien, for negation, but he’d forgotten their specific usage.
The professor had his students line up, and a young woman ambled toward the small bench where Murray was sitting. He stood up, and the professor said, “No, no, sir. It’s fine.” He had his hands clasped together under his chin, as if in apology, but Murray shrugged. He couldn’t stand French professors. They seemed the worst combination of pretentious and cowardly.
“I’m leaving anyway,” he muttered.
“Oh, alright then,” the other man said.
But before Murray reached the door, he paused and turned to where the young student stood, hair black as Becky’s—the room was silent as the girl pointed to bits of the painting, her voice trepid, but her pronunciation smooth, and he watched the professor’s overly emphatic nod, his loathsome oui, oui when she finished, in 3:02, almost exactly—if he subtracted elapsed time from the remaining time on his watch. The professor tapped his watch: Fini, and then the girl smiled faintly, shoulders collapsing in relief.
When Murray first called Becky to say he’d put her at the top of his recruiting list, her voice had grown breathless through the phone, energetic and light. Oh my God, she’d said. I can’t believe it!
He heard the sound of her voice then, in its absence now. He couldn’t pinpoint when it had grown dimmer, her words less frequent. Maybe sometime during her freshman year. Those early weeks of practice, she’d spoken assuredly about where she was from, used to ask questions about workouts and meets. Yet with each major accomplishment she’d only grown quieter, more cautious. The little bits of food she ate—he didn’t know when that had started either—but it was like she’d been trying to disappear rather than fill a room, as she should have wanted to, to seize the space that was required of a champion.
Nancy always said he set impossible standards for his girls. That he needed a female assistant, someone comfortable talking about eating issues—not because of anything he’d told her—but based on her own observations at meets. She’d once called Sarah Lloyd skeletal, said it disturbed her. Even worse, she’d said, was his apathy. Your indifference scares me, and he’d felt the words, her eyes glassy with a fear that seemed to run deep within her, beneath both of them. She’d begged him to book a few sessions with a nutritionist, but he’d dismissed her, pretended he hadn’t heard. After all, coaching had always been his field.
Nancy has no business crossing that line, he’d thought, but then he remembered it had been one of those times when she’d grown quiet afterward. In her eyes, he knew she’d had more to say, but he had not wanted to hear it. He saw Nancy in all the things he hadn’t done, the referrals to counseling he could have put in for Sarah, and Becky, too, and the countless others who had shrunk in size, some slowly, others quickly, in the four years he had with them.
It wasn’t all coincidence, maybe. But who knew if things would have been any different if they’d stayed together? If they’d kept trying to be a family, if Nancy had actually changed her mind. Would he have listened then? The only thing he knew was that he could still hear her everywhere, in this empty room that was his life.
SIX
Her contractions began on a Sunday morning. On a whim, Nancy had offered to join Murray at the track, had hoisted herself up the cold metal bleachers for a seat near the top. It was only when the liquid spilled over the seat and made a light tapping noise on a rail beneath her that she looked down and screamed. Murray was crossing the 200-meter mark on the other side—she was yelling as loud as she could—but she had to wait until he rounded the corner and noticed her waving her arms. He sprinted, elegant even in alarm.
In the car on the way over, he handed her a stopwatch to hold while he drove. The next contraction lasted for fifty-eight seconds, exactly six minutes after the first. Nancy was wearing a cornflower-blue sundress, and as a nurse helped her into a wheelchair, she
saw how the damp of her fluids had turned the fabric a splotched navy. Murray jogged alongside the wheelchair as they headed to the laboring room. He helped her into the bed and propped pillows behind her neck, and she had another contraction, this time forty-five seconds. He said he was getting her some ice chips.
“Dr. Weiss will be here any minute,” said the nurse, a middle-aged woman just over 5′ tall with dark brown hair pinned into a bun. “My name is Lena.” She spoke behind a jade mask. “I’m just going to get you set up.” Nancy closed her eyes and waited for a cold needle to enter her forearm. “You have good veins. Lots of exercise?” Nancy nodded, imagining with closed eyes the drip of IV fluids.
Another contraction made her jolt. Her feet cramped, and when she reached for the nurse’s hand, she felt the chill in her own. “Forty-seven seconds,” Lena said. Through watery eyes, Nancy watched her set up the heart rate monitor.
“How are we?” Dr. Weiss had rushed in. He pressed his stethoscope to her belly as Lena began reviewing her chart out loud. “All good,” he said. “Baby’s heart rate is coming in around 130.”
The monitor had already printed two sheets of connected paper folded like an accordion.
“Can I see it?” Nancy reached her arm out.
Dr. Weiss ripped off the first sheet and traced a jagged black line on the bottom with his finger. “That’s the fetus,” he said. “Above, that’s you.” She was five centimeters dilated. “Halfway there,” he said, confirming her baby was still in perfect position. “We are looking at another six, maybe ten, hours.”
Nancy started another contraction before she could answer. She began the patterned breathing they’d learned in Lamaze, short soft inhales, followed by a long blow of air.
“Breathe, Nancy,” Dr. Weiss said. “Look at me. Where is your focal point?”
Murray came a few minutes later, one arm looped through a thick duffel bag, the other with a large cup of ice.
“You are doing great,” he said. He reached for her clammy hand.
When she could rest again, Murray sat down next to her. A half-drawn curtain exposed the next bed over. She noticed a basket on the floor, spilling out a white T-shirt and asthma inhaler. Minutes later a woman entered, dragging her IV pole. She appeared distraught, her eyes and skin shadowed greenish gray. When Lena returned, she quietly explained that the woman had been in labor for the past thirty-six hours.
“That’s horrible,” said Nancy, squeezing her eyes shut for another contraction.
Two hours later and one and a half more centimeters dilated, Nancy would hear that that woman had been rushed out for an emergency caesarean, her baby’s head turned the other way in the uterus. She would recall reading about the effects of such trauma on a newborn’s psychological health, that a mother was likely to harbor more long-term resentment, and C-section babies were often more colicky. No, she didn’t want this. And so, though Dr. Weiss would eventually suggest an episiotomy, an option he’d urged her to consider several times already, she would say no. He would try to persuade her that delivery would be much less painful, that her stretching would be less traumatic. But Nancy would just shake her head repeatedly. If women in ancient times could do it standing up or kneeling over birthing bricks—gravity coaxing out a head, then arms and legs—she could too.
Soon, her patterned breaths regressed into loud grunts, the sweat between her legs indistinguishable from amniotic fluid, urine, the scent of crushed flowers. Just as Lena positioned Nancy into the birthing stirrups, she felt Murray by her side coaching just as she’d hoped, telling her how close she was, over and over—until she got to a certain point, where the pain brought her so high, to a place of such impossibility, that she had no other choice but to let go.
Murray had once called it an out-of-body experience, the moment when physical agony transcends suffering—he’d compared it to a final lap, the cattle bell ringing, when his number one had to kick, give everything she had to the finish. Nancy couldn’t quite say whether this analogy felt true to her, but she found warmth in his investment, his belief that their experiences as parents were shared, equalized somehow. True, she’d felt her body merely gliding, sifting through space, no longer conscious of minutes passing. And some part of her had heard a bell, imagined it acutely in the blur of her numb and throbbing body. There was definitely a sound that echoed, reverberated through the cavities of her skull, when she felt Baby’s head crown, fully, and the wind of the bluish-purple cord, the excesses of her discarded placenta, lay like gold beneath her.
She cried. Tears of joy, or sadness, something in her felt she’d experienced an important departure, but from what, she couldn’t be certain.
Murray cut the umbilical cord. Their child screamed, and Murray smiled at her, his eyes soft, the blue in them hazy.
“It’s a little girl,” he said.
“Congratulations,” Dr. Weiss said. “She’s perfect.”
“Beautiful.” Murray spoke so low and softly, Nancy could feel him holding back his own tears. As Nancy cradled their child, she sensed Murray’s hand reaching to wipe some cold sweat from her face, then to brush a clump of hair away from her eyes. She held their baby tight by her chest, absorbing the sound of her quieting, this soundless rush of air.
“Let’s call her Jean,” Nancy said.
They had mentioned this name only once or twice, after Jeanne Moreau, the French actress they loved, but only one n, no e, fit her best.
“Fine,” Murray said. His eyes glowing brighter than the light. He was still smiling.
Jean’s skin looked very red, no more than a sheer curtain over her circulatory system. Nancy used her pinky to stroke the little dents for temples, the button nose. She admired her shapely ribbon of purplish lips. Her delicate eyelids.
An Apgar score of eight, her heartbeat over 100 beats per minute, her cry full and vigorous, her muscle tone solid, skin color even. “You should try feeding her,” Lena said.
Nancy was terrified, another test of her body. She nodded weakly, cradling Jean nearer her breast, and unbuttoned the top of her gown enough to guide a nipple closer. It took a few attempts for Jean to take, but when she did, Nancy absorbed these new rhythms, this raw energy. She traced a finger over her fuzzy forehead. Lena reminded her that Jean would need to eat often, every one to two hours, that it was normal to experience some discomfort, especially in the first weeks.
“So far, so good.” Nancy laughed nervously. When Jean finished, Nancy wiped some creamy yellow milk from her teeny lips, some more that had dribbled onto Nancy’s gown. She stroked sleeping lids hatched with lines, like rivulets on a map. We did it, she thought to herself.
Then Murray knelt beside her, and he kissed Jean’s head. She wished he’d say he was proud of her, her strength these months, but it was his quiet way, wasn’t it, never able to affirm with words?
The 2:00 a.m. shrieks didn’t help. Just a week in, and Nancy’s resentment seemed to double by the day. They weren’t using formula, she wasn’t pumping, at least not yet, but couldn’t Murray still rise with her? The feedings were painful. Her nipples had become dry and cracked, little trickles of blood she had to blot. She longed for breaks, for Murray to ask about her pain, but he rarely asked or offered to help. Once, in the middle of the night, she’d muttered, Get up, will you? but he’d only grumbled back, You’re talking in your sleep. She’d raised her voice: I was talking to you! But it didn’t faze him; he’d asked her, his eyes closed, What’s the point of sitting there?
She began to believe marriage, parenthood, was full of these little hurts, these little incisions that started one day, only to deepen. It should have been easy to tell him this, what she needed from him, but it wasn’t. She wanted him to recognize his lack, the void he left, even when they were in the same room; she wanted him to acknowledge that and to offer to fill it with his time, his attention—was that so much to ask? Even if it wasn’t expected of him to drop everything like she’d had to—because she could breastfeed, because she’d carried
Jean, because a woman was supposed to absorb these duties instinctually, sacrifice her wants and needs. As though every accomplishment in Nancy’s life had been pointing to this one simple truth: she would be a wife and mother for the world. She’d never disrupt the silence; she’d never complain.
She remembered how her parents used to talk to each other, all the nights they’d spent arguing about where to travel to, which boarding school she was to apply for, which activities would round out her schedule. She thought of all the smaller conversations her mother had wanted to have with her father over dinner, how she’d kept notebooks with talking points, budgets, though money had never been an issue. Maybe her mother had needed something objective to cling to. Her father would eat his food, only half his gaze on her, the other on the newspaper, or his work, nodding as distractedly as Murray did.
Once Nancy, no more than six, had asked her mother why her father wouldn’t listen, and her mother had said, That’s what men do. They can’t do two things at the same time. When Nancy still hadn’t understood, she’d said, Men can’t read and talk, listen and work. They compartmentalize, like it was a new vocabulary word Nancy should memorize for an exam in school. She’d felt that detached disdain in her mother’s voice, indestructible, until eventually her mother had erupted; it had happened one evening, when her parents assumed she was sleeping. Nancy felt she understood it now, her mother’s unquenchable rage.
Nancy wept many nights over the loneliness, but in time she learned to bear her burdens in silence. During the day, when Murray was at work, she bit her lip, drank as much water as she could, even though it nauseated her. Worse was the numbness she felt around her child, to see Jean as no more than this screeching bird she hardly knew at all. Most mothers, good mothers, she was sure, fell in love with their newborns instantly. Happy mothers were delighted to nurse, relished the animal bond—this extension of that symbiotic miracle that had begun in the womb. It was all skin to skin, outside scents mixing, and Nancy wanted to experience joy; she longed for some sign that this was her calling.
Late Air Page 7
