Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  “The sort of guy to batten down the hatches?”

  “Right,” Chad says. “Except I guess I mean . . . the sort of guy who always has things going wrong.”

  “Of course you aren’t!” Emily agrees. Though then tears spring to her eyes, because she is praising a man who just threw her out of his house, which makes her what her mother would call a chump. Her eyes fly around the room almost madly—she imagines herself sneaking back in somehow, hiding herself, indeed, within the walls, behind the paint, pulling this perfect world inside behind her. She swipes at her eyes, a laugh catching and cracking in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she mutters. “Pregnancy hormones.” Even though they have been each other’s nearly constant companions for the duration of the pregnancy, and he has never once seen Emily cry before now, which is because Emily doesn’t cry, pregnant or otherwise, because what is the point of crying—when did crying ever aid anyone with anything, except maybe helping women get out of traffic tickets if they’re under thirty and hot?

  Lina probably never gets a traffic ticket.

  Emily stands up. She’s so swollen and clumsy that she displaces the heavy duvet and upsets the brioche. “I should really give you a chance to prepare,” she says to the walls. “I’ll be ready to go in five minutes, really—I just have to put on some clothes and . . .” It’s suddenly unclear whether she should presume she is packing everything they gave her and bringing it back to her own stupid house—but of course! They bought these things for her. It’s not like there is another pregnant woman in the wings to whom they would give her pajamas. These things are hers now.

  Pedicures that wore off her toes. “Pink” wine she drank and pissed out; expensive dinners she digested. Expensive maternity clothes she’ll never wear again once she isn’t pregnant. Sporadic cleaners and work teams who cleaned and fixed things that will only mess up again. A pair of gloves so soft Emily wanted to lick them, one of which has already been lost in the bin of constantly disappearing gloves, hats, and scarves that sat in their foyer all winter, and that Emily will, for the rest of her life, berate herself for having left in there. She accepted only $10,000 to carry this life-threatening fetus inside her, on the urgings of Nick, who wouldn’t take more—Nick, that genius about money. All in, Chad has spent maybe seven or eight grand on her—a lot!—but nowhere close to the some $20,000 in extra cash a professional surrogate would have in her hands right now. Emily has been playing a long game. She has been placing her bets on summers in Scottsdale, calculating what renting a comparable house would cost her family year after year; she has been counting on theater subscriptions and nights on the town and bottles of hundred-dollar wine brought to every dinner party. She has been banking on the fact that in-kind money would hypothetically add up and exceed, over the years, what she would have earned with a one-time fee, but she has also been banking on something less precise—on the improvement Chad and Miguel meant to her emotional quality of life.

  That somehow, when they battened down the hatches, she would be one of those left inside.

  “I can call Nick to pick me up,” she says, though who the hell knows if Nick will be home or have his phone on or will say he has somewhere else to be. “I know you need to work, you don’t need to bother about me.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Chad says, and his tone is some awkward mix of jocular and shrill. “You’re supposed to be in bed—I’m not sending you home alone. I’m taking you home myself and putting you into your own bed and making sure you’re comfortable.”

  The shame of it is too much. She can’t bear for him to see the inside of her house, even though he has been there dozens of times.

  “I’ll come by tomorrow or the next day to check on you,” Chad promises. “As soon as things here have cooled down.”

  What is it that needs cooling more than her hypertensive body, carrying their child? What is it that is more important to Chad Merry, perfect man, perfect traitor, than that?

  “I’ll let you get changed,” he says, dashing out of the room.

  Emily pulls out her phone. It would be that easy. That easy. All she has to do is call the doctor and calmly say, “I’m too sick, this is dangerous, I can’t do this anymore.” All she has to do is say, “I’m a mother, and I can’t orphan my sons for someone else’s child.” All she has to do is press the number, wait for them to answer, and that will be that: Saint Emily, making the only call she could make for her own children. Just like that, Chad and Miguel will be punished, and her body will be her own again, and only Chad will ever understand that it was retribution—that he could have played things another way, but he didn’t, and now this is what he drove her to do.

  For a moment, the thought satisfies her so much, she feels half-drunk. She sits at the edge of the bed, imagining, not getting dressed, not packing, paralyzed with thrill.

  Only once Chad knocks timidly, saying, “Just call me when you’re ready,” does she realize she’s being insane. She can’t call today. She can’t fall prey to relishing Chad’s understanding the causality of the situation. She can’t leave an A-leads-to-B trail of any kind. To do so would ruin everything. No . . . what she has to do is wait, continue to act just as she’s been acting: so grateful, so desperate. She has to continue to crawl on her belly before them just a little while longer, long enough for Chad to believe completely that everything is all right. Only then can she do the deed, and no one will be able to blame her, even Chad and Miguel themselves. Only then can she call them weeping, can she say words like postpartum depression, can she talk about how We all lost a baby together, and they will, she understands fully now, not want to have that conversation with her, will not want her in their inner sanctum of grief, and so they will give her things, throw things her way to make her go away, and she will continue to receive the rewards, only they will not have their baby, and nobody will ever be the wiser or blame her for anything, because why on earth would they?

  She has no choice. It’s what any mother would do. It will be the doctor’s idea.

  She just has to wait. A week maybe? That will do it. One more week stuck in bed in the fraternity house she lives in, biding her time. The fetus isn’t viable yet or they would induce. She will only be sicker by then, if things keep going this way. The Prentice Women’s Hospital doctors will be having their aneurisms over fear of lawsuits and the fragile state of Emily’s health. They will pop champagne in the break room after they get this toxic fetus out of her, that she is fine and no one can sue them. Never mind that her grandmother delivered her mother in the back bedroom of their old apartment alone, while her husband was at the factory working. Emily is a white lady walking around with two rich men paying her bills. The doctors cannot let anything bad happen to her.

  She loves her own children, after all. Her own children come first. What else is there for her to do?

  LINA

  The night of my return from Miami, you lick my eyelids. Your tongue lightly traces the sockets, the bones of my nose, and then, like a mother lion cleaning its newborn cub, you suddenly begin to lick my entire face, long and hard and claiming and ferocious, until my smile threatens to split my skin in two. I have never felt this nurtured. I’m floating, flying, without even having to feel any pain at all first, half-moaning, half-sobbing back at you, “I love you,” wet inside and out with every liquid of you.

  “Fuck moderation,” you promise.

  Lucy Grealy wrote:

  When I dream of fire

  You’re still the one I’d save

  Though I’ve come to think of myself

  As the flames, the splintering rafters

  Grealy was an undergraduate. By age thirty-nine, she’d be dead of a heroin overdose.

  We all have our demons. Pain doesn’t make anyone special.

  I am tired of being the splintering rafters.

  So what, in the end, is there to even say about the day of leaving my lover of six years?

  You probably think you have Bebe figured out. You are still assuming
I am a reliable narrator, even though you should know better by now.

  How it starts: I leave my pregnancy test in the bathroom for Bebe to find.

  I don’t have to tell you this part. You will grant me that you were not likely to track Bebe down, follow her to work or stalk her at our old haunts, and interrogate her about the monstrous manner in which I ended the relationship. You will grant me that I could have told you, here, that she simply got tired of me (I was tiresome after all: my cheating, my petulance, my facile remarks about the Patriarchy, my failure to earn a dime) and said, Honey, it’s been sweet but I think it’s time. I could tell you anything, but I’m trying to do this right, even if I’m not sure why.

  I leave the pregnancy test on the bathroom counter. Then I nonchalantly sit around painting my nails, waiting for Bebe to come into the kitchen saying, What the fuck is this?

  Except she doesn’t. Kudos to you if you can see what I was incapable of seeing: that, of course, Bebe would never do that. She goes in the bathroom; she comes out again. Nothing.

  I called her name, over and over again, before giving up with humiliated defeat and pissing into her potted plants. I called her name like my life depended on it, and the next day she looked at me with clear eyes and talked about eggs. And for that, I loved her.

  My nails are the color of blood in a vial, that deeper, less-oxidized red. “Lincoln Park After Dark,” the color is called. It is my signature color, one might say. You might say. You love the color. You love to see it when I’m clutching your prick. Sometimes you call me your vampire girl. I am painting my nails for you, even though I’ve been setting the stage for Bebe. Even though she left the theater months ago.

  “So I guess you know I’m pregnant,” I finally tell her. It takes me five or six hours to get there, from the staged pregnancy test in the bathroom to finally confronting her, to accusing her, as though I am the wronged party. “I’m a month in, though that part seems confusing to me.” I desperately want her to cut me off, to say something, but I’m so afraid of her potential silence that I can’t stop talking. “I conceived two weeks ago, so I don’t know how that means I’m already four weeks pregnant—you’re two weeks pregnant before you’re pregnant—that’s stupid, don’t you think?”

  It’s only once I shut up, Nick, that she looks up from her book and I see she has been crying.

  “Do you honestly think I haven’t known, this whole time,” she says, “that you’ve been fucking him?”

  (Did I “honestly think”? I don’t know, even now. Perhaps appallingly, I hadn’t “honestly thought” about it at all. I was too busy inside my own head to contemplate what this narrative looked like to Bebe.)

  But I’m not ready to own that yet. Instead I demand, “Why didn’t you say anything then?”

  “Fuck that—why didn’t you?”

  “Because I knew you’d lecture me,” I shoot back. “I knew you’d have a field day judging me. Not only am I failing to claim my power by subverting the male gaze, I’m actually—gasp!—sleeping with a man.”

  “Oh, you’re not sleeping with him,” she corrects. “His wife is sleeping with him. You’re using him to knock you up. Let’s at least be clear here.”

  “I was not!” I shout, outraged, scandalized, except of course, yes: when I got home from Beaver Island after the funeral, I bought an ovulation kit. Except, yes, that is in fact exactly what I have been doing, if only for three weeks. They just happen to have been three perfectly timed weeks, and I just happen to come from a family that gets pregnant if sperm is released into the air in the same building. “I know you won’t believe this,” I tell Bebe, but I can’t look at her eyes, the red rims, “but I love him. We’re in love. You don’t really love me, so as sorry as I am that I lied to you, I don’t see why you’d even really mind.”

  What is she reading, you may want to know? Or rather, you don’t give a shit, but only then do I realize that it’s Lithium for Medea, my favorite novel. Maybe she is only pretending to read, a prop like my pregnancy test and my toenails. But the sight of it makes me sob.

  “Why did you have to be so cold?” I blubber, covering my face to hide from her. “Why couldn’t you love me?”

  And she stands, shaking. She’s grown too thin in the past six months or so—from glamorous to drawn—did I do that to her? “Your family,” she says, “thinks love is a nonstop parade of noise. What’s the matter with you? I knew you were fucking that married man, that . . . that guy with a disabled child, for fuck’s sake . . . and I just sat here, patiently, waiting for you to come to your senses. What about loyalty? What about not falling to pieces every time the wind blows? You spend all your intensity like some kind of burning star that’s going to crash to the ground—no one can move at your velocity forever, Lina, even you. You crash and burn and do it all over again with someone new. What the hell do you know about love?”

  I’m throwing clothing into a bag. I’m crashing and burning. I’m shooting.

  Bebe, watching me, starts to laugh. “Look at you,” she says. “Look at yourself! You’re going to have a baby? Are you going to show up at that poor pussy-whipped man’s house and show your flat little belly to his gargantuan wife and tell him how you’re knocked up? What, are they going to invite you to move in and support you? How the hell do you expect to take care of a child without me, anyway? You don’t even have a job! Besides the small matter of your being crazy!”

  “You liked me crazy just fine when I was doing whatever you wanted me to do!”

  And Bebe sinks onto the bed. She sits down next to my open suitcase. She says, “Yes, pet, I did. I know I can be controlling, and I’m sorry. But what are you doing, Lina? You don’t have to go anywhere. Why are you behaving so melodramatically? I don’t want to live with a baby, but for god’s sake, be real. You’re not really having that baby, Lina. You know that. You don’t have to move out. Relationships can be redefined. You were always free to see other people. I never tried to restrict you. I was trying to give you perimeters you could live with, within your limitations. You’re not . . . that stable. You can’t live alone. Where do you think you’re going?”

  I don’t know where I’m going. Somewhere a pregnancy test in the bathroom merits comment. Somewhere I can be unchained when I call out. Somewhere I wouldn’t leave the test to be discovered to begin with, hoping to provoke some emotion. But does such a place exist, or is Bebe right about me?

  Crazy. Not that stable. My head is loud, even for me. I take a benzo and half an Abilify to stave off an episode in case one is starting, then slam out the door with my bag full of useless shit. Bebe and I only have one car between us, so I can’t just drive it away—I drag my bag around the corner and lean against the building, out of the line of sight of our windows, texting you the first of the desperate, frantic texts:

  I need you.

  Then: Bebe and I are over.

  And after no reply: Please don’t feel guilty, you know that train had so already left the station, even if you and I had never met. It’s just that before you, I wouldn’t have believed I could sustain more than she offered. You make me believe, Nick. Not in some white-knight version of romance, but in ME. When I’m shaky, like now, I try to look at myself through your eyes, and it helps.

  I lean against the wall, the voices in my head racing against the letters flying from my fingertips. Sometimes the Abilify knocks me out, and here I am out on the street with my luggage, no car. I’m not tired yet, am wired, if anything, too much energy, but before I crash I’ll have to get somewhere, probably one of our habitual motels. After my slip in Miami, though, I want a drink too badly to go somewhere that solitary: somewhere I can get away with anything and nobody will ever know. My bag isn’t that heavy—I don’t own much—so I decide (I am impressed with myself for this decision) I’ll go to a meeting first, and by the time it’s over, you’ll have gotten in touch with me and we can figure out together what to do next.

  We are going to hold hands on the ledge and jump, Nick.
This is what I still believe, voices like an ocean’s roar in my head, and the first spark of everything that was between us growing in my borrowed-time ovaries. I have not exactly made a career of optimism, but there, in those moments, as desperate as I have ever been, wanting the burn of Jameson running down my throat, no idea where I am going from here, I need you to understand that I truly believe—that it has never yet occurred to me otherwise—that your call is coming, and that I am only this close—this close—to finally becoming a mariposa and sprouting my wings.

  Except three meetings later, I’m still trying to reach you. More than four hours have elapsed since my first text, but you are, for the first time since I’ve met you, unreachable.

  Staying for numerous meetings in a row can be meditative, almost spiritual—I’ve done it on holidays, and felt, in that shimmery, momentary way, transformed, useful, hearing other people, being of service, inching through the minutes together on a hard day. Tonight is not one of those times. I stand in this church basement, in front of a room full of struggling people, and say for maybe the thousandth time in my life, “I’m Lina and I’m an alcoholic,” thinking about the ritualistic words Isabel and Mami have recited over and over again in church, looking for some kind of salvation.

  I’m Lina and my mother who abandoned me is dead. I’m Lina and my ex-lover says I’m crazy. I’m Lina and I’ve barely ever held a real job, but I played a shrink in a burlesque about mentally ill zombies. I’m Lina and I’m in love with the playwright, who is married and not returning my texts. I’m Lina and I’m supposed to get my ovaries ripped out before they kill me, so I don’t have much time. I’m Lina and it’s possible that I’m a product of such violent, ugly inbreeding that I should have been born with two heads.

  The Abilify has utterly failed to knock me out, or even take the edge off my feeling like my brain is a spinning hamster’s wheel, although I’m not feeling on the brink of an episode anymore—the voices have lulled to their usual dull roar. Still, I chew another two Klonopin in the church lobby and don’t even care who sees me. It’s not heroin. It’s not Jameson. I want to drink more badly than before I came.