Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  “Careful with your mother,” Nick tells Jay. “Her body is sore right now. You can hug her all you want soon.”

  “It’s okay,” Emily says, and Jay looks perplexed between her and his father, then settles back firmly against Emily. She doesn’t want him there, but she doesn’t want him to leave, either. It’s unclear what she wants, what she feels. It’s like being at her own funeral—fascinating, giddy—but at the same time an incredible letdown. It’s all over now. She did all that, for what? The baby probably won’t live; nothing in the fabric of the world has changed. She wasted so much of her family’s time, told herself so many stories that were false, and now here she is again, the house cleaner for the moment, but of course that won’t last—nothing will last. Here she is again.

  Lina wasn’t at the hospital. Not once, that Emily knows of. She even asked Nick at one point—she asked Gretchen, since Gretchen insisted on visiting her periodically for reasons utterly mysterious. But no, everyone said (her husband with an air of false casualness): no Lina.

  How is it possible that people are so stupid?

  If the thieving bitch had shown up, Emily might have concluded that she herself had miscalculated. There would be Lina, visiting her distraught brother, not conscious of or worried about Nick’s or Emily’s presence. It’s via her conspicuous absence during a crisis every other Guerra and Merry in the Chicago area has converged for, that Lina might as well have hung a banner over the doorway of the NICU proclaiming, I am fucking your husband and have the decency not to show my face while you’re sick. There, it is out in the open, confirmed—in Emily’s mind, at least. Nick, of course, is clueless.

  And what is Emily supposed to do with all this, now? Now that the surrogacy is over, a failed experiment? Now that Chad and Miguel are likely gone, at least in any significant way, from her life? Now that Nick is what she’s left with, puttering around her acting solicitous as a suitor—is she supposed to confront and divorce him, go on Match.com and meet some other troublesome man? Live alone? Trust, as wives have done throughout history, that this is all nonsense, just sex, and that her husband—an intelligent man, after all; she will give him that—isn’t planning to leave her for an unemployed stripper, and therefore hold her tongue? These are problems for another day. Emily’s body feels all wrong—she feels all wrong in her body. She wishes they had kept her in the hospital, where she had some privacy and calm and people tended to her without expecting anything in return. She has to go back to her regular life now, and she isn’t ready—the whole idea had been to leave her regular life behind, but that was only ever some silly idea her mother would have clicked her tongue and lit a cigarette below rolling eyes and chided Emily for believing.

  Is she supposed to be torn up, texting Chad every fifteen minutes, frantic about Imogen? Is she a bad person because that already feels so far, far away, like someone else’s ill-conceived notion? If she could fast-forward ahead six months, have her body back, have some semblance of her equilibrium back, Emily would.

  She couldn’t go through with it. In the end, she couldn’t go through with her plan. Every single day she woke up, that week after Chad spurned her and sent her home, intending to telephone the doctor, to call it all off, but she never did. Always, she came up with something pressing she needed to do that day (even though she was supposed to be doing all of nothing); always, she thought tomorrow sounded better. She waited too long—or is that even the truth? Maybe she was never going to make the call. Maybe she would have waited all the way through the thirty-seventh week, when the fetus was unquestionably viable, and gone in meekly to do the duty she’d signed on to do. She was on bed rest, festering around her unsatisfactory house, with nothing better to occupy her time, yet failed, day after day, to call the game, to end it. Her eyes were bigger than her stomach in terms of her own capacity to lash out, though the fantasy—taking entitled Chad and Miguel’s bubblegum-baby fantasy away from them—continued to give her pleasure in those days, to help her bored-stiff hours pass. In the final analysis, however, she lacked the guts, the agency, the malice to put it to action . . . she lacked something.

  She didn’t sacrifice the baby on the pyre of her hurt feelings. Isn’t that enough? But . . . enough for what?

  She waited two weeks, when she barely meant to wait one. She had a seizure, then another at the hospital, and her kidneys were acting up and it was a whole passion play Emily spent drugged up enough to barely remember most of it, but never drugged up enough that it stopped the splitting pain inside her head. She “almost died,” everyone kept claiming. And the absurdity of it all was that that option had seemed—maybe it was the drugs talking, though Emily doesn’t feel far on the other side of that veil even now—like not such a bad thing, either: that maybe she would just drift away, and be done. In the hospital, blinding white lights everywhere as she lay on her back on stretchers, on tables, noise and doctors in blue paper shower caps hovering above her, it had seemed an acceptable thing to just close her eyes and not open them again—to be free of her own angry heart. Nobody would miss her.

  Except, apparently, people had. Her lazy men have cleaned the house; her youngest son clings to her like a rhesus monkey to a plush, comforting, false mother who gives no food and will starve it out. Apparently she has been missed, by strangers on Facebook and neighbors who have taken Jay and delivered food and parents and colleagues and students at her school. Apparently there is an Emily-shaped hole in the world that she leaves in her wake, and here she is again, expected to fill it.

  “It’s so good to be home,” she says to the three male faces surrounding her, because that is what people are supposed to say, whether or not it is true.

  They beam back at her, all three. Their relief that she is not dead comes off of them in waves, like steam from a sweltering sidewalk. What does she mean to them, these three people? Is she capable of giving them what they need? Does she want to anymore?

  Save the baby, she told the doctors desperately, in her quasi-suicidal delirium. Don’t worry about me, save the baby. But she woke up anyway, she and Imogen both alive, and outside of the closed box of Emily’s body it was no longer in her control whether Imogen stay that way. Surprise.

  She is glad not to be dead. Clearly, that much is true. Of course. Obviously, she is glad not to be dead. That was madness—hormones, her compromised blood pressure and various obscure organs, something. She is not Anna Karenina. She is not some crazy bitch in a French film from the nineties, when all they ever did was off themselves in the end. She is a mother—an entire school depends on her—and here is Nick, too, still hovering, not going anywhere no matter what he’s up to when she’s not around. He is nothing to live and die over anyway. That’s just something people like to think—that romantic love could matter so much. Of course she is thrilled to be alive, to have it all behind her. She is still . . . not old, even if she is no longer young. If she is dissatisfied with her life, she is supposed to just change it, right? That is what people are supposed to do; that is the American Dream. Emily has done it before. She is a master of reinvention, or was, before motherhood, before economic responsibilities. Maybe this is it for her, then—but would that be so bad? People have worse lives! Most of her students’ families have worse lives. What was she so unhappy about, anyway? Everything is fine.

  “Please,” she says to Jay, “enough now. Mommy needs a little space and air.”

  And nobody looks at her twice. It is her right, it seems, to say that, even if it feels wrong.

  Everything is all right. Even if it all feels wrong.

  That night, Emily rolls onto her side, spooning Nick, her hand grazing his cock, and murmurs “Nicky” into the back of his neck. She is in no condition, physically, to have intercourse yet, and she looks, she knows, far from her best—still, if she is going to be here, if she is going to do this, it feels as though she must offer him something: a gesture, a return.

  “But you’re sick,” Nick protests. “You just got out of hospital.”


  “I’m fine,” she soothes, despite the pain in her head that has been her constant companion now since before the preeclampsia diagnosis, that has not faded even as the doctors checked all their machines and pronounced her good to go. “I’m not building a house with my bare hands, I’m giving a hand job.”

  He half-laughs softly. “Okay. Okay, if you think . . . if you want.”

  They have not been sexual since before she was inseminated. What at first seemed a mutual nervous reverence for “someone else’s fetus” potentially getting knocked around soon grew into an uneasy stalemate: for the first time, Emily allowed herself to behave toward Nick with as much disinterest and disdain as had been slowly festering, but unspoken, for years, and Nick—Nick whose sex drive had always been consistent—gave no complaint or coercion about her closed candy store, it growing increasingly obvious that he must be getting it elsewhere. But he didn’t leave. It has been nearly a year since Emily first began to suspect his affair with Lina, and here he still is, cleaning her house, caring for her sons, so he must not want to go. Emily isn’t sure she wants to stay—maybe?—but it seems imperative to keep her options open, and sex is part of that imperative, part of this, here, remaining a viable, livable option.

  As someone who grew up pretty and female in America, she has always understood and experienced her body, even as it changed and morphed over the years, as a reward of sorts: a gift. She has internalized a narrative in which women, as a matter of course, control the flow of sex in the world, except in aberrant instances of force, and from this position it has been her prerogative to allow or deny Nick admission, and Nick’s position to be grateful or frustrated in turn. This is how the world works, from everything Emily has ever known and seen. If you screw the landlord, he will give you a discount on the rent—Emily learned these truths from her mother, early on, and even having married a man who is arguably more attractive for his gender than she is for hers cannot alter certain immutable biological truths.

  Nick’s cock, however, will not conform to her narrative—will not obey. It curls, soft and shrunken, in her hand, humiliating them both: a rebuke.

  Tears clog Emily’s throat, though she is not even sure she wants him. Their sex since Jay was born has been merely perfunctory, whereas Nick used to be creative; dispassionate where he used to be so intense it sometimes made her nervous. She has told herself that this is just what happens after some fifteen years of marriage. Still, the reliability of Nick’s cock has always been like Old Faithful, whether or not the sex that ensued was anything to shake the rafters. Emily is not sure—she can’t recall (though if it had ever happened she’s sure she would recall it) this happening to her in her entire life, not only with Nick but with anyone.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” Nick says into the darkness. “I’ve been so worried for days, and I’ve had a bit more than usual to drink.”

  It’s not true exactly. He had three beers earlier, yes, but while he’s no hard-drinking Irishman cliché, that’s hardly aberrant.

  “Don’t worry,” Emily says, forcing her voice to sound cheerful. “I’ll blow you, just relax.”

  He used to tease her about these little Chicago dictions of hers—I’ll blow you—he found her white-trash ways charming. He used to say things like, If the other teachers could hear you talking this way, but they can’t, only I know the Emily from the hood. He likes girls from the hood, she suddenly, disturbingly remembers—she was one once—she was not so different from Lina, only with a different skin tone. She was not always a vice principal and mother of two; she grew up worse off than Lina and Miguel did with their mother’s second husband buying them a sweet little house in a safe neighborhood without gangs and roaches—and maybe Nick liked her better back then. Emily can’t shake these thoughts, her own graceless slurping pounding in her ears, the repetitive, unvaried bobbing of her head striking her as rote and bloodless. His cock isn’t exactly recoiling but it’s not standing at rapt attention, either, noncommittal. She pulls back, her chin wet from her own spit in the darkness. “Nicky?” He used to love it when she called him this in bed, but it’s been years and the double-hitter of the endearment tonight feels self-conscious and cloying from her lips. “What’s wrong?” she dares, when really she doesn’t want to dare—she has been right all this time, not to dare. “Are you mad at me? About . . . all of it? About Imogen?”

  “Imogen?” He sits up like he’s overcome with shock, but she thinks he probably just is trying to remove his dick from her proximity. “What . . . why would I be angry about Imogen?”

  “I know you regret our ever having done it,” she says. “I know it’s been a huge inconvenience to you. I know I’ve been . . . preoccupied and sick and no help around the house. I know I’ve been . . . different.”

  “Honestly, Em, I don’t even know what you’re on about, why you’re saying this. I don’t feel those things in the slightest. You couldn’t help getting ill. You were pregnant—of course you were preoccupied. I’m . . . confused.”

  “Things just haven’t been the same between us,” she says, voice faltering. But she isn’t sure what the same means anymore, in this context. The same as seven years ago, before Jay? The same as a year and a half ago, before he knew Lina? The same as fifteen years ago, when they were only sleeping together with gleeful abandon and she had not yet gotten accidentally knocked up? She hates the timidity of her voice, the begging of him to want her. Where is the girl who dropped her recent abortion on the table between them like a ticking bomb on their second date and dared him to flinch? How did they grow into these awkward people whose inner lives feel sealed in separate vaults? “Since I agreed to the surrogacy,” she finishes, because she needs the time period she’s talking about to be finite, short. She can’t face the excavation that ambiguity might invite.

  “That’s ridiculous, Em. I agreed to it, too! We made the decision together. You’re imagining all this . . . I had no idea, honestly—I don’t know what to say.”

  “But . . .” she tries. “But.”

  If he’s going to deny it all—if he’s going to refuse to blame it on the surrogacy, then how will they explain it all to themselves? She is giving him an out—she is giving him a way to avoid saying, I’ve been shagging a younger woman and that’s why I’ve pulled away—but he refuses to take it. What story will they tell themselves about how their marriage has arrived at this pitiable condition, if he won’t accept the one she is handing him like an apple, so easy to bite from then toss behind them and move on?

  “Have you ever wondered,” he begins, his tone as painfully careful as hers, “why we agreed to it? I mean . . . I don’t regret it, really, that’s not what I mean. I swear to you I don’t feel the things you just said. But why would we have done it, you know? Am I making any sense? It seems . . . like we must have been raving fucking mad. We barely knew them.”

  “I knew Miguel.” She doesn’t counter, We needed the money. She doesn’t explain, It seemed a ticket out. None of those things ever made sense to Nick, and wouldn’t tonight especially.

  “You knew some guy called Mike, in high school, Em. You hadn’t seen him in twenty years. You hadn’t even known he was gay, for Chrissakes—you didn’t know anything about him. What were we thinking?”

  She emits a weak laugh. “You’re right, I guess. It was the sort of people we wanted to be—people who would do something like that. It was . . . what we used to talk about, when we were young . . . we wanted to be part of something larger, to do something good.”

  “We were looking for something,” he concurs. “We were looking to feel something that was lost.”

  “Lost? I wouldn’t say lost.” It is all she can possibly risk, and she decides, here in the aftermath of her alleged almost death, to risk it. “I’d say we—I—wanted to feel something I’d maybe never felt.”

  “But what?” He touches her face, a tenderness she can’t recall the last time he offered. “What did you want to feel?”

&nb
sp; “I don’t know, Nick. I don’t know. Maybe I just felt like my body always betrayed us—I got pregnant too soon, and then somehow I’d made Jay sick . . . like I was broken, and this was a chance to fix myself and do something right. Maybe I just wanted to feel like I mattered.”

  “But Jay isn’t broken—you didn’t cause any—”

  “You don’t think I hate myself for feeling that way? But feelings aren’t always something that can be controlled.”

  “I know, I know—it’s just . . . you already mattered to the boys—you mattered to everyone in an entire school—you mattered to me.”

  “It’s not something I can explain rationally. You asked.”

  He falls into a familiar, taciturn silence. This is where he goes when he isn’t sure what to do with her—when she’s said something he doesn’t know how to easily tamp down with his charm. Why couldn’t he have pretended to understand precisely what she meant, even if he didn’t—even if it scared him? He should know that marriage is partially acting, too, just like he likes to say about parenting. He should act like someone who doesn’t leave a gaping part of her empty, waiting to thrash out in ways that have terrified her lately—but who can ever be that, fully, to another person? How could he fill every gap in Emily, every place beyond language and her own darkest impulses? No one can do that for anyone. No one.