by Zoe Whittall
Last month, we’d gone to a record release party our old friend Peter was hosting. Peter had recently divorced and taken up with a younger woman, and begun throwing elaborate parties at his big house in the Presidio. He posted photos of himself on Instagram skateboarding and posing in Joshua Tree, shirtless, with this tiny woman making peace signs in every photo.
I’d lost the enthusiasm for that scene. It bored me, since I didn’t get high or really drink more than a glass of wine. But this party energized Navid. He hadn’t wanted to leave. I had some fun in the earlier part of the evening talking shop with a guitar player I hadn’t seen in a while. I picked up a violin and we jammed a little and it lifted my spirits, but soon I was tired. The people I knew began to leave to relieve their babysitters or be up for work in the morning, and so I sought out Navid. For a half hour or so I couldn’t find him, until I went down into the basement where I found him hovering over a Stooges record doing a line of blow with several young techie kids, something he hadn’t done since he was young. He looked up at me and grinned, offered me the long golden straw. Do kids carry their own fancy reusable straws now? It was so insensitive of him to offer it to me like that. He knew my history. He just didn’t care. I stared at him in amazement, as though we’d never met before, let alone were married.
“Does no one carry bills and you can’t snort coke with your fuckin’ Bitcoins or whatever?”
I thought it was funny. No one else did. It was a deflection of my hurt. That was all that mattered to me. They gave me the up-and-down look of people who didn’t like to get high in front of people who aren’t also partying. I remembered that look. It looked like scorn but it was shame.
“You’re Missy Alamo,” said a thin guy wearing an old Mudhoney T-shirt who probably would have been four years old when their first album came out.
“Yup, thanks for entertaining my husband,” I said, pulling Navid up. “Come on, we should get going.”
He looked at me as if I’d suggested we burn a pile of money, like why would he ever want to leave this basement full of strangers, who were now dancing ironically to the music we’d helped make famous?
I was done with getting high. I wanted to be doing something else. Navid was genuinely confused by this feeling when I tried to explain it on the drive home. The streets were filled with partying kids, jaywalking erratically, Ping-Ponging about. I nearly missed a kid on a skateboard flying down a hill, skirting the front of the car and then hollering into the night.
“You could have just done one line. It’s been long enough now. What could be more fun than this kind of night?” he asked me. His pupils were saucers. I could tell he was rolling in that euphoric way I used to love. I felt a brief pang of nostalgia. I would have loved that party if I’d gotten high, too—it made everyone interesting, and me interesting to myself. The way you hear music when you’re standing in a crowd when you’re high, there’s nothing like it. For a second, I missed that feeling. I thought about going back to the party. But then I looked at my husband again, in the glow of the traffic light. His face appeared to be rapidly aging in time lapse. He knew I wasn’t capable of doing just one line. That there were people who could do that, and people for whom that could easily ruin their life. I was in the latter camp. And if he loved me, he wouldn’t even joke like that.
Suddenly the feelings of malaise cemented into definitive disgust. He said it again, that this was the best kind of fun night. He was being sincere. I didn’t know how to answer him. When I pulled the car into the driveway, I asked him, “Don’t you want to grow up, though?”
“If you think having a baby will make you grow up, that’s kind of sad, Missy. We’re grown up. This is our adult life. Now. We’re not waiting for it to begin—we’re here! It doesn’t have to be a drag, changing diapers and watching TV at night, like, I didn’t sign up for that shit.”
“What’s a drag is you doing blow with kids you are old enough to have sired, Navid.”
The fight ended in tears, in him going back out to the party, and me ordering several memoirs about single parenthood from Amazon.
Standing outside the fertility clinic after my appointment, I unlocked my bike, the sturdy baby-blue commuter with the white wicker basket that could hold a week’s worth of groceries. I had bought it a few weeks back, trading in my sleek fixed-gear for a soft seat. I realized I’d purchased a parent’s bicycle. I leaned it against a post while trying to force my rusty bike lock back together. I’d been meaning to grease it for months and hadn’t. Now it only worked periodically. I could not picture my life without Navid. We were going to grow old together, that was the plan. It felt like a certainty, despite how hard things had been. I was so frustrated with the U-lock not clicking into place that I wanted to throw it into the street, but all around me were young tech workers rushing to work, or standing in a long loping lineup for butter coffee, or almond milk lattes. Around them were flitting spark plugs of desperate people, a man with a ripped white T-shirt and a beard gunked in neglect, muttering about algebra and the coming world war.
A woman walked toward me, a baby wrapped around her chest, a leash attached to a German shepherd. She was the only one who didn’t avoid the homeless guy, so certain in her gait, the dog jaunty yet dangerously loyal. This woman could climb a mountain with that baby snug against her, the dog at her side, solid and competent and like she knew how to re-wire a house or defend her family against a bear. I felt briefly filled with promise. I could do that! I watched her cruise up the block, striding up the steep ascent, and then I caught a reflection of myself in the window of the café—I was a thirty-seven-year-old woman wearing an old KILL ROCK STARS sweatshirt with holes in the wrists for my thumbs; my half-blond hair was unbrushed, growing out an awkward ombre experiment and twisted in a flaccid topknot; an old Tupac song blared in a background whisper from my headphones, the tick-tick of the beat. My nail polish was chipped. I had a bruise on my leg right below my cut-off shorts from where my cello case always bumped when I walked. I did not look like anyone’s mother. I barely looked like I could keep an aloe plant alive.
But Navid was skilled at nurturing plants. Our home was a greenhouse and I rarely watered any of the plants. When he left town he had to write out painfully specific instructions and still I often killed something if he was gone longer than a week. He had three siblings he’d helped raise, and was the favourite uncle to his nieces and nephews. In fact, he was far more comfortable with children than I was. He was a natural—people often remarked on it. As I pedalled away from the fertility clinic, the U-lock atop a mountain of take-out coffee cups in a bin, it occurred to me, why couldn’t that be the solution? I hadn’t always wanted a kid, and that had shifted. Perhaps it could for him? Maybe his vehemence the other night was just coke talk. It could reinvigorate us. But Navid didn’t have the looming deadline of turning forty, this dark gate closing in under two years. He was forty-five.
We got married when I was thirty-two, when I had so much more money than I’d ever had before, and I finally felt capable of making a mature decision. We’d been together for almost five years. Agatha, who became my best friend after we moved to the Bay, who quit music to become an astrologer, said it was the decision typical of someone on the tail end of their Saturn return. Usually I just smiled and nodded at her star-talk, but she’d been right. It felt like a period of rebirth.
I had just bought the cottage in Half Moon Bay. Agatha officiated the ceremony in the yard. She brought Finch as her date, back when they were just newly courting. We invited a few friends and our families—it was the first time my parents had been in the same place since Granny died—but it wasn’t a huge event. Tom, Billy, and Alan played some acoustic songs, Alan’s husband DJ’d a little dance party. Tom’s kids were teenagers, gangly and lost-looking, sneaking joints behind the cars, as Tom and Cory were in the final season of pretending their marriage wasn’t perpetually on the rocks. My mother had invited Tegan, who had been a sort of aunt figure to me as a child at Sunflower
, but who I had barely known for nearly twenty years. When Navid and I left for our honeymoon in Mexico, my mother and Tegan stayed in the cottage, painting the walls and starting a little garden. In the years since, I’d let them visit any time they wanted. Neither of them had any money to vacation, so every now and then they’d come and spend a few weeks there. Originally a rough, slapdash log cabin, we’d modernized it over the years, insulating it properly, adding a new bathroom and a black-bottomed pool. It was our oasis.
The wedding weekend felt like a merging of my childhood and adulthood, a ceremonial push into the next phase of my life.
But now Navid was forty-five, and forty loomed for me, daring us to look at ourselves, decide what was important to us. It was the first time—in a long time—that I had envied men. I was deeply jealous that Navid could wait another decade to have children, if he even wanted to.
“Wait until we’re mid-forties, then maybe we can adopt or foster,” he’d once said, as though adopting a child were as easy as rescuing a shelter dog. We were standing at the market, shucking corn in front of a big bin.
“You’re not understanding how disorienting it feels. It’s an embodied experience, this yearning. It’s not intellectual at all. It is physical craving,” I said, shucking the corn so fiercely the cob went flying into a display of oranges.
The only thing I could compare it to was how I felt at twenty-one, the reverse of the feeling that I didn’t want a baby, ever. It was that definitive.
Navid rescued the cob of corn, putting it far too calmly into our grocery cart with the others, in the nest of bitter lettuce, frozen slabs of salmon, cans of cold-brew coffee. “I just think you might be confusing societal pressure and marketing with something physical happening in your body,” he said. “You don’t need to be a mom to have meaning in your life, that’s just the messaging all around you. I know you, you’re romantic and impulsive. This is just a midlife-crisis thing, and it will pass.”
A woman holding a toddler in her arms walked between us, muttering “Excuse me,” but she gave me a look that said Forget this guy. Or maybe I was imagining it, the signs from the universe telling me what to do.
“Well, I hardly think you’re unbiased in that observation,” I said.
But some days I thought he had a point. There weren’t many women without children at my age. Or at least we didn’t know many. Most of my peers were now parents. Was I mistaken and this feeling of peer pressure was just a run-of-the-mill midlife crisis? Was I just bored and unimaginative?
Agatha told me it was very typical for a Virgo with Aquarius rising to flip from believing one thing to the exact opposite. But I wondered: if my conviction was so changeable, would I ever be able to believe in anything absolutely? I wanted a solid core. I wished for the fuck-you-all certainty I had had as a younger woman. She was a fucking asshole, self-centred, acting out, and confusing vulnerability with weakness, but at least she had a strong sense of self.
So, for a while, I let it go.
After the fertility clinic, I went to see Judy, my therapist. I ran my fingers along the flat leaves of the ponytail palm in the corner, and explained, as I always did, the pros and cons of having a baby. Judy had endless patience. Her office was a jungle of well-cared-for plants and meticulously chosen soothing decor. But this time, after my rant, she said, “You don’t sound like you have a babydecision problem. You sound like you have a should-you-leave-your-bad-relationship problem.”
She usually just asked questions, so I was startled by her assertion. Was that what it sounded like, that my relationship was the real issue?
“Navid and I are solid. The only real problem at hand is the ticking clock of my dying ovaries. All relationships have ups and downs.”
“I wonder if you might reflect on that, though. It’s been a while since you’ve been happy with Navid.”
This observation nagged me on the drive up to the cottage. What gave her the right to say that? But it bothered me because she was right. Standing outside, being an accidental voyeur to my husband’s affair, she had a real point. Fucking Judy. I hate when she’s right.
After staring at their vulgar, unruly display, my thoughts became unstuck—this was my fucking cottage, the one I bought with the money I made from the song that won an Oscar. That was the wall my mother painted antique sea blue, the couch where Agatha and I sat singing Violent Femmes classics at the top of our lungs, before running down the rocky path to the ocean. This was where the band had retreated when our beloved manager died of cancer, spending the summer lying in the grass, eating elaborate meals on the long wooden table on the deck, remembering our early days together. That was the quilt I hand-sewed while my back was out a few summers ago, and that was my regularly half-hard cock, driving into this little baby thing right now. I could tell she had breasts that still pointed upward, because he’d turned her around and was now pounding her still, with even more vigour I hadn’t seen in years; this girl, whose lips were now curled in a gross monstrous shape, eyes rolled back in her head, screeching, was someone who appeared to have left a University of California–Berkeley denim bag strewn on the doorstep, a loaf of bread now being pawed at by a fearless chipmunk, the door half ajar. They hadn’t even waited to unpack. Or close the blinds. That was how desperate they’d been. She was a student, no doubt, from his Intro to Film Studies course. A teaching job I got Navid because I made Tom feel sorry for him, about how little he’d accomplished in the last ten years. How he fucked around teaching yoga and making birdhouses and researching for a documentary he never shot any footage for. Or was she one of the girls from Pete’s party with the gold straw?
I got my phone out and texted Agatha a barely decipherable Navid is cheating on me. I think we’re over.
Then I put Penelope in the car with the window cracked, and heard the buzz of Agatha replying to me over and over in my pocket as I went into the cottage and began to yell at them, throw whatever I could find at their heads as they struggled to dress.
“This is my house!” I screamed like an idiot. “I bought this house!” She grabbed my quilt to cover herself, but I pulled it away from her.
“I made this quilt! I own this house!”
I had never in my life cared that I bought the house; I’d never cared that I was the one who made more money, who floated us in the lean years, whose royalties and residuals kept us housed in the Bay Area when everyone else besides the tech assholes had fled. I’d never felt an ounce of resentment until that moment, and I unleashed it. Every horrible thing I knew he probably thought about himself, I was happy to confirm it.
I made this poor girl cry from fright, gripping the quilt she’d covered herself with. She ran to the rental car, got in, and locked the door. Was I more jealous of those tits, the way they were perfect and taut, than I was of the cock inside her, or any other part of Navid?
Maybe I hadn’t truly wanted him in years?
Though some fucked-up animalistic misfiring made me want him right then.
Or maybe I just knew I was ovulating. Lately whenever I was ovulating I noticed men everywhere. I stared back at them when they lingered on the edge of condo construction sites, beat them to the punch. They would see something in my stare that stopped them from hollering. The way I appraised their biceps, strong hands, stamina, and softness of stubble. Then I would go home and put my groceries away and watch them through the curtains and daydream about one of them coming in and just taking me on the kitchen floor. It felt disgusting to feel connected to this biological mess, these urges.
I yelled at Navid about how he was free to go live in some dorm room with this skank. Even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew I was being horrible. I was turning into a monster.
I threw his laptop onto the driveway. It was amazing how easy it was to hurt someone you love. I didn’t think I could ever stop loving Navid, but I didn’t respect him anymore, or trust him. I’d never felt so betrayed, and in such a humiliating, predictable way.
He stood th
ere, taking it, completely naked, still half hard.
I was actually yelling about my youth, my wasting time with him because marriage was something you stick out, commit to, something you work at, even when you’re miserable every day for years, even when you avoid going to bed, watch reruns of inane shows while claiming to be “working,” just so you don’t have to see them clip their toenails at the edge of the bed, or hear them complain about the thing they’d do anything to change.
The girl, tired of being locked in the car, turned the ignition on and drove away.
“Is she even old enough to drive?” I yelled.
When I ran out of insults, when I had said all the things I regretted later but that felt satisfying in the moment, he sat by the edge of our pool, head in his hands. He didn’t fight me. He mumbled weak apologies. They weren’t enough.
“How could you do this to me?” I asked. I walked back inside, trying to still the heaving sobs that were painful now but felt unstoppable. I took the wedding photo from the mantel, gripping it as though my hands were claws, went back outside, and threw it in the pool in front of him.
“You don’t want me anymore, Missy!” he yelled, standing up. “You cringe when I touch you!”
I was about to launch into a monologue about his fragile ego, his male insecurity, but I knew he was right. I had already left him. Years ago.
“And now you want to have a baby, when you can barely look at me when we fuck? Why? Why now? It’s not just because I’m forty-five that I couldn’t get it up—it’s the visible disdain in your face! You can’t hide that shit, Missy. You can’t.”
