“I don’t know what’s happening here,” Chad says. She hears, in the background, Miguel saying something like What’s going on? Everywhere, couples are making their decisions two by two, like animals on Noah’s Ark; she is the only single. There is no man casually brushing his teeth in her bathroom; there is no voice over her shoulder asking What’s going on? when she is in distress. She is in this alone—and Gray being Gray, his growing up may do little to rectify this fact, and Troy being Troy, any notions she ever held about not being alone in the past have only ever been an illusion.
“Gret,” Chad says slowly. “I know you’re having a rough day. I’m just not sure what you’re talking about here. Listen—I’m not trying to be rude—but Miguel and I barely see you. You live in Winnetka. You send your kid to the school you and I went to and belong to the country club. Before tonight I don’t know when the last time I saw you in the city was. I’m not even sure Gray remembers Miguel’s name, Gretchen . . . since when are you interested in, like, living with us in Wicker Park, among the tattooed hipster contingent? I’m just trying to be clear . . . why you would even be asking me this? I thought you were talking about this week—but instead suddenly you’re talking about summer? Because that isn’t what we agreed to, and I just want to be clear . . . but Miguel and I aren’t thinking about our child having a mother. That isn’t what the arrangement was going to be. That isn’t what any of the documents we signed stipulate. We weren’t planning on you living in our house and the baby calling you Mommy. Just to be totally clear—should we be concerned about this? We were thinking that this child would be . . . well . . . ours.”
And it flashes on her then, like she is Mildred Pierce standing outside the window of her daughter’s house—she can see it all: Troy, ripping her son from her arms so that she sees him a couple of days a week, like a distant aunt; Miguel and Chad with their baby—her daughter, maybe, and a sob catches in Gretchen’s throat—in a home in the city at which she is only welcome on Christmas and Easter.
What the fuck has she done?
Exhaustion slams into her with a tidal force. She suddenly wants off this phone more than she has ever wanted anything in her life. “I think,” she says to Chad, struggling to keep her voice even, “I’m just very emotional tonight. Troy broke into my car and stole my computer and some documents. He seems to be gearing up for a fight, and I don’t know what he’s after. Dad thinks it’s money, but I’m not convinced. Maybe it’s Gray . . . but maybe . . . Chad, I think he just wants to destroy me in some way. And I’m not even sure why.”
“Okay,” Chad says, his voice friendlier again, but still cautious. “Just try to breathe. Troy is a loser, Gret. A judge would see through him. I don’t think you have anything to worry about. If we all have his number, so will anyone smart enough to be a judge.”
But I didn’t have his number, she wants to say.
“You’re right,” she manages. “I really need to sleep. I’ll keep you posted, okay?”
“Of course,” Chad says. “We all love you. We’ve got your back.”
Sure. As long as I don’t want anything to do with the baby I gave you, you do.
She barely notices hanging up the phone, her feet moving automatically toward the hallway, the stairs, until she is standing in front of her parents’ liquor cabinet. She stares at it for a while: the vodka in particular seems alight among the other bottles; they have both Ketel One and Grey Goose. She imagines herself grabbing a glass and pouring it halfway full and the buzzy warmth sliding over her like an electric blanket, but like the things she imagined saying to her brother, this picture stays in her head, and she keeps walking, grabbing her handbag from the table in the foyer, and heading back out to her car.
For a moment, she imagines a bomb going off the moment she turns the ignition. But of course, Troy is not even capable of holding down employment; he doesn’t build bombs in his spare time. She has to get a grip. She drives.
This is all her own fault, and that is the story of her life, really. Who would marry this man—this shiftless and cruelly opportunistic kicker of dogs? She has spent her life looking for love in impossible places, not even smart enough to seek it in the arms of nannies who might truly have cared, but instead living like some codependent little groupie of her parents her entire adult life, searching for some intimacy of which they are clearly incapable. Earlier today, she and Gray seemed to have a breakthrough of sorts, him sobbing and clinging to her under her coat, but she knows her son well enough to realize that already, for him, it is like this never transpired. In the morning, he will eat his Mickey Mouse–shaped pancakes without even talking to her—his mind will spin in a million orbits, inaccessible. Now Chad and Miguel will have her child—this potential new beginning—because she just gave it away, signed her name on every dotted line. Under her own forty-two-year-old skin, her eggs are gone: kept in a fertility center as the property of her brother and his not-quite husband.
His not-quite husband. Not that she agrees with that. Not that she agrees with that at all. But she . . . she is the mother. She is the biological mother of the baby silly, intrusive Emily is carrying, whereas Chad and Miguel are not even allowed to get married, are not even allowed to adopt. What does it matter what lines on which she has signed her name? She is the mother.
Her father wants her to go back to Troy and act like none of this ever happened. Her brother wants her to play nice, to stay in Winnetka, to selflessly sign over her future to him no matter what Troy has in store for her and Gray. But if Gretchen does these things, soon bottles of vodka and bottles of pills will cease to even feel like an escape, and will just become a matter of course. If she continues to just do whatever is “expected” of her, she will either end up as crazy as her mother—as Troy accuses her of being—or she will end up dead. No matter what happens next, there is no going back to her former life. She is already on the other side of a divide she didn’t know existed until today.
She wants more. An end to invisibility. She is hungry . . . for the first time in longer than she can remember, she . . . wants, ravenously.
At the front door of her own house, she stands quietly for a moment, listening inside. The windows are dark. It is unrealistic to think Troy would be sitting in the pitch blackness waiting for her, ready to pounce. Obviously he has gone to bed. She will go inside and get Carrot, and then she will be gone. Her parents will never tolerate Carrot staying in their house, and she cannot stand the thought, now, of going to Chad and Miguel’s, but in the morning when Gray sees Carrot his eyes will light up, and when Troy’s feet seek the dog to kick, that outlet for his frustration will be gone.
She hears whines to her left and realizes—of course—Troy has put Carrot in the garage for the night. He has always said the dog should sleep in the garage, not on Gray’s bed. He has Gray taking allergy medicine that Gretchen suspects he doesn’t even need, to protect him from the filthy dog dander that Gretchen—the unfit mother—allows into his bed. Gretchen rushes to her car and sticks her key back in the ignition, pushes the garage door switch. Inside, Carrot is jumping up and down in the cage they use when they take him to the groomer or the kennel if they go on vacation. It is a freakishly big cage, though Carrot is a small dog—if Carrot were brighter, Gretchen is fairly certain he might even be able to wriggle out between the bars. But it would take eellike ingenuity, and Carrot is a stupid and trusting beast, despite his anxiety issues. At seeing Gretchen, he runs in a circle inside the cage, and Gretchen goes to lift the cage and drag it to her car when she suddenly realizes: she does not need to bring the cage. She can allow Carrot and his “toxic” dander inside her car. If, in the poor dog’s piteous excitement at being inside a car uncaged, he pisses on her leather seats, she can just wet-wipe the mess right up: no blue light needed.
Gretchen crouches and unlocks Carrot’s cage. Her heart is thrumming, every fiber of her waiting for the garage door that adjoins to the house to fling open, and Troy to be standing there, having heard the door
rise. Maybe he will kill her. She doubts it, but men have killed women for less. Still she finds, strangely, perhaps insanely, that even if Troy showed up at the door with a gun, there is no way she is leaving without her dog.
The cage door is open, but for a moment Carrot freezes, continuing to stand inside the door and whine. “Come on,” Gretchen babytalks, “come on, you stupid little dog, come on.” Still, Carrot only tips his head to stare at her, apparently afraid to leave the cage. Who knows what lurks out there? Maybe there will be a shoe to his ribs. Maybe it will be a trick. Gretchen gets down onto her knees, then flat on her stomach on the garage floor, inserting both her head and arms into the cage to stroke Carrot’s fur. “It’s okay,” she says to him, weeping stupidly at the beautiful sight of his black doggy eyes. “I know I’ve let you down.” Twitchy under her hands, Carrot begins licking her face, which is more, she knows, than her own son can manage in terms of affection. “I know you’re not the best dog going,” she whispers while Carrot licks her tears, “but you’re my dog, and I’m getting you out of here. Mommy’s got you, Carrot, you dope, come on.”
But in the end, she doesn’t get up right away, and her shoulders are blocking the entrance to the cage so that Carrot cannot actually get out. In the end, when she finally sits up, she has to pull him out with her by force, because he has forgotten that she wanted him to leave, and has been happy in his confined space licking her face and under her hands. Gretchen’s back hurts and her black coat is full of short, bristly white fur impossible to brush off with her hands, and Carrot’s trembling little body radiates heat in her arms as she carries him to the car.
MIGUEL
Nick wasn’t kidding—Emily glows. She already had this sort of Swedish-farm-wife thing going on—so radically different from the wan-Goth thing she had in high school that Miguel feels spatially disoriented in her presence—but now, seven weeks into the pregnancy, she seems lit from within, the way a pervert might imagine Joan of Arc. It’s only been days since their dinner with the Merrys at the Capital Grille downtown, but Emily’s rosy light has increased even since then. She burns.
“You know that in France, they tell you to only have two glasses of wine with dinner when you’re pregnant,” she says, leaning back in her chair and patting her belly. “In the UK, they say not to have more than two drinks a week. I drank with both of my boys, but if you guys aren’t comfortable with it, it doesn’t mean anything to me—I can give it up.”
Miguel and Chad look at one another quickly. Are they supposed to care about this? At Emily and Nick’s dining room table—also populated by their son Miles, fourteen—Emily is the only one in possession of a uterus. Without speaking, a consensus is reached.
“Whatever works for you,” Chad says.
“Emily’s not much of a drinker anyway,” Nick says. “She just likes scandalizing servers by ordering champagne in the last trimester. Half the time she makes me drink it once it shows up.”
“This time, I can freak them out even more by telling them it’s not my baby,” says Emily gleefully.
“Or mine.”
“Great,” Miles says. He’s an alarmingly good-looking kid, a debut-film teen version of the delicate-featured twentysomething British movie stars Miguel occasionally jerks off to. “So I’m not going to be able to go anywhere with you guys until after this kid is born, is what you’re saying.”
“I feel like I want to tell everyone,” Emily goes on. “It’s just so exciting. I feel like we’re finally doing something, you know? Nick and I are always so agitated by what complacent jerks everyone seems to be . . . we’re always complaining about this and that injustice. But we never do much about it—what can we do, you know? We have no money . . . we’re not really political. We just sit outside the thing and say how it should be different. Now this will be different.”
Nick glances at her, and Miguel can tell he’s attempting some manner of wordless, marital communication, like Miguel and Chad had about whether or not Emily should be permitted to drink while carrying their progeny, but Emily is smiling happily and doesn’t meet his eyes. Nick clears his throat. “Yeah, well, it’s a baby,” he says. “It’s not going to undo history. It’s not going to close Guantanamo. Chad and Miguel aren’t making a political statement—they’re just trying to become parents.”
Emily blushes. It’s a sight to behold, given her already ruddy complexion. Miguel agrees with everything Nick just said, but still, he’d like to deck him for humiliating Emily.
“I get it, though,” Miguel says, and his words surprise him even as he’s forming them. “I’ve been feeling this sense of being part of something, too. Just before all this happened, like, the day I found out about the . . .” He looks at Miles and shrugs. “The things that made the switcheroo necessary . . . you know? I was feeling like, what’s the point anyway? Why bring more children into the world—what’s so great about the world? Just so they can get old and die, too? And it’s not like—believe me, I’m not exactly disavowed of that notion or anything. It’s not like I’ve had some meaning-of-life revelation. But lately, I feel . . . connected to things, in a way I didn’t before—like my life matters. Excited, Em, like you said. I feel really . . . awake, if that makes sense.”
“Yes,” Emily gushes. “That’s it exactly. I mean—I know your motivations for having a child are exactly the same as any couple’s—as Nick’s and mine were—I didn’t mean—”
“Well,” Nick says, putting his hand on Miles’s shoulder. “The same as with Jay, you mean. This guy here was just an accident.”
Emily’s brows gather while Miles and Nick laugh.
“I was a broken condom,” Miles says.
Nick looks at Miguel—that way he has of making things seem like a conspiracy, of drawing you into an illicit intimacy—and in the look Miguel discerns that there was no condom involved, that probably Nick and Emily were just a traveling one-night stand or a booty call in the middle of the night, high, after some club closed down. This fits with the Emily he used to know more than a philanthropic farm wife does, and makes him suddenly happy. Just like that, he likes Nick again.
He likes their house, too. There’s a cozy quality to the chaos. Their stuff all looks cheap, but not in the plastic-coated, plywood way of Mami’s and Carlos’s furniture. Everything seems to languish in a state of pretty decay, romantic like an artist’s garret. There are piles of books and loose stacks of paper under the windows just feet from the dining room table. There’s a bookcase in the small dining room, too, so that the table barely fits. Albums and CDs take up an additional wall of the living room as though Emily and Nick have never heard of iPods. Even the handsome Miles looks like an arty prop, in a moth-eaten sweater like someone’s professorial grandfather might wear, and glasses with a heavy, tortoiseshell top frame, the bottoms rimless. This place is definitely an Abercrombie- and Ikea-free zone. While they don’t actually have any milk crates functioning as end tables or candles stuck into wine bottles, Miguel is still reminded of his apartment with Tomas in Barcelona . . . of smoking together on their crumbling-stone balcony with the wrought-iron rail he sometimes bent Tomas over in the dark; of the stained art-museum postcards taped all over those Spanish walls.
Later, on the porch swing, he and Nick flick cigarette butts into a pottery vase that must contain four hundred such old filters, swollen with rainwater from last night’s storm. Down the street, some kids play on a felled tree that’s still lying in the middle of the road.
“Weird that nobody came to take that away,” Miguel says, gesturing at the tree.
“Take what away?” Nick asks, although he’s facing the tree and seems to be looking directly at it.
Miguel doesn’t answer. He’s taking in Nick’s nose: an older version of Miles’s. Emily’s is upturned and perky, but Nick and Miles have aquiline noses, delicate and perfect at the bridge, with nostrils that flare just slightly, enough that something vaguely feral messes up their elegance.
“So you’re embarrass
ing your son with your hippie ways,” he says, and Nick snorts out of the nose Miguel isn’t supposed to be analyzing this way.
“Poor kid,” he says. “He doesn’t even know from hippies, apparently. His mother’s the assistant principle of a fucking charter school. It’s not exactly Woodstock over here.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know. Pacifist zombies, bearing someone else’s child. I think you might be able to apply for the hippie card and not be turned down.”
“Point well taken.”
Miguel’s throat itches from the cold air; still, he is about to test the waters, to say, So, have you talked to my sister lately? He feels foolish. He’s not certain what he aims to test. Lina is a lesbian now. Still, the “now” implies bi rather than homo sexuality, doesn’t it? But come on: Lina couldn’t have ever been attracted to those other guys—Javier, the Joke from the Hood who even had the same name as Papi as though Lina was painting some sign over everyone’s heads that said, Behold while I make the worst possible self-destructive choice and fuck you all. (Albeit, every fucking Cuban man is named Javier—Javiers are crawling out of the woodwork, should a girl happen to need one for her Oedipal dysfunctions.) Then, Javier’s Replacement, which is how Miguel thinks of Lina’s second marriage to some unsuspecting slacker who looked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo and let Lina live with him while she fought it out with Javier, slept around, and nursed a massive drug habit—from inception to annulment (instigated by Shaggy, on the grounds of Lina’s addiction, since Lina herself, high or clean, couldn’t have given a rat’s ass whether the marriage “counted”), it all lasted under a year. Still, his sister’s ambiguous sexuality aside, with the way Nick talks about his “glowing” wife it’s not an affair that he’s suspicious of, precisely. So, what? Is he afraid, in some junior high way, that Lina is closer to Nick and Emily than he is—that they are closer to her? His motives make no sense to him, so he holds his tongue.
Every Kind of Wanting Page 12
