The day I found out I was pregnant was December seventeenth, my birthday, right before Christmas, and I was giving a SIS talk at the University of Pennsylvania. I had spent the entire day driving there with Page (the result of our not grasping clearly the little mileage scale at the bottom margin of the Triple A map).
My talk was “Women’s Liberation—the Next Ten Years,” and I’d been so lethargic the weeks preceding I hadn’t prepared much of anything to say—I’d ended up ripping a few pages of quotes from the Book of Holly Partz.
Just before the talk was to begin, I called my gynecologist in New York City.
“It was positive,” the nurse-secretary said. She sounded tired.
“Positive,” I repeated stupidly. “You mean I’m pregnant?”
“Yes,” she said wearily, “that’s how it works, Toots.”
I put down the phone, walked out of the office my host had lent me as a “private place to look over my notes,” and drifted down the hall and into the library lecture room. There was a podium, a microphone—fifty or so expectant faces.
Someone introduced me; I got up and stood in front of the microphone and listened to myself breathing—I’d just realized that I was drawing breath now for someone besides myself. I smiled. The audience grinned back nervously. I must have looked strange, standing there listing a little, breathing audibly the sweet, pregnant air of the University of Pennsylvania.
“I’m positive,” I said into the mike. The audience looked at me. “I’m positive,” I repeated, then added, floundering, “that I wore a diaphragm.” Someone tittered.
I snapped awake. “This is a quote clinicians hear regularly from women and underscores why solving our birth control dilemma, the inadequacy of contraception available, is the central issue facing us as we look ahead to the next ten years of the movement.”
I noticed Page shaking her head in relief. We drove home after an endless dinner party, through a snowstorm in the mountains. I never left the wheel. I looked over at Page, fast asleep, curled into her leather jacket, her head bouncing against the passenger door, feet against the heater. I felt tenderness for her, sleeping away, unaware of the enormous change sitting next to her. Through the long hours of blowing white, parted briefly, regularly, by the windshield wipers, my eyes hurt, my neck hurt—but I hunched forward feeling wonderful: I was carrying a child.
Did it matter whose child? Oh, yes, yes. I had never wanted a kid before—but suddenly I was with somebody I could imagine as a father (perhaps because he was already a father). I could imagine us, mid-thirty-type grown-up parents who loved each other and loved our kid.
We had lived together for three years. I knew Terence—I couldn’t wait to see his face when I told him.
As I drove through the Upper West Side at 4 A.M., taking Page home, I saw his face as clearly as if it were before me, perfectly radiant. He touched me. He said, “Willy, God, Willy: our baby!”
“I’m pregnant,” I whispered in his ear. He was in bed, rolled around a couple of pillows—in the king-sized bed of the midgets (how did they clamber up its daunting height, and did they swing their tiny feet over the edge?). He reached over and patted my stomach gently, he murmured something, but was asleep again in a second, so I knew he hadn’t really heard.
I lay there and thought about it being an “accident.” “There are no accidents,” my friend Page says, I suspect because Werner Earache or some other self-actualization schmuck told her that, but she was right this time. I had wanted this baby to happen—it had only taken its becoming real to convince me.
The next day Terence was gone early—it was Saturday: two shows, matinee and evening—and rehearsal time before the first. I heard him gargling and running through a few troublesome lines in the bathroom about nine in the morning. “Desire, Zeus, desire!” I heard him intone. “Desire links god and mortal,” he croaked, and gargled and flushed the toilet. I hope I’m not making him sound like an asshole. Because he was not the kind of asshole some actors are: He did not wear leather pants or go to tanning salons or speak in a fake basso profundo at the deli. He did not interrupt normal human discourse constantly with references to “points,” “TVQ,” and “the sweeps.” He did not use coke, or hadn’t for a long time, like everyone else, and if he did anything at all actorly, it was an occasional overembellishment of a description, a memory of truffles sliced on penne in Perugia or something. “Rubber baby buggy bumpers! Rubber baby buggy bumpers!” I heard him declaim, an old warm-up exercise for the thespian tongue—but it seemed sweetly apt this morning. What I’m trying to say is that Terence’s sense of himself as an actor was so innate that he didn’t seem like an actor—but it was always there, a concentration that never ceased. It made him seem strong.
This frame of mind also kept him suggestible—passionate convictions stuck to his consciousness like static cling to a polyester skirt.
When I met him, interviewing him for a special supplement SIS ran one fall called “Feminist Men,” I couldn’t believe my ears. He said things like “Women should run the country, men should not be allowed to vote until they’ve spent a year running a household or working as midwives.” I sat on the edge of my chair in his small dressing room in the theater on Broadway and 52nd and looked at him in the mirror, taking off the makeup of Pancho Villa and talking about child care centers, and I fell in love. “Never trust a guy who says he’s a feminist,” was Page’s comment when I floated back to SIS to type up his remarks. But I didn’t listen.
I slept until late afternoon. He called around five, he was just out for a light supper at Joe Allen’s before the eight o’clock curtain—no time to talk. He didn’t mention anything about the night before. I contemplated getting dressed and taxiing over to the theater, but it was sleeting and I’d already seen the play about fifteen times. I decided to build a fire, put some bubbly on chill, wait for him. (We’d planned to celebrate my birthday the following night, Sunday, which he had off.)
“What a gift,” I thought, hugging myself, taking a peek at my still-flat stomach. “What a gift.”
“Wow,” said Terence. “Unbelievable, Will.” He leaned against the kitchen doorjamb, a glass of champagne in his hand. He looked tired, his curly hair rumpled, dark circles under his matinee idol’s eyes. It was 12:30 A.M.
“We’ve been using something, haven’t we?”
“I thought so,” I said, “but I’ve been thinking back. You know, we’ve been slipping up a lot lately, overlooking things. …” I laughed conspiratorially, chinked his glass with mine. “Subconsciously, we must have meant it to happen!”
He looked at me. “Will. We didn’t mean this to happen.”
A little frost in the air. I smiled. He started talking about “problems.” I stopped listening. I didn’t want to start feeling bad. I just felt too good.
He walked into the living room. He sat down hard on a teeny chair and cursed as the champagne sloshed on his shirt. He set the glass on the weenie-roast-height table and dabbed halfheartedly at the spreading stain. Then he put his head in his hands.
This was not the radiant papa I’d pictured. I followed him into the living room and adjusted my fall into the squat chair opposite him. The firelight enlarged our reflections in the black glass: giants in a child’s playhouse.
“Are you serious about this?” he asked. “You want to have this … kid?”
I felt great again. He was going to raise all the routine objections, and I was going to shoot them down. I’d already practiced this argument in my head—with myself—trying to figure out why the hell I did want this kid. I talked about the difficulties of our lives: his traveling, my demanding job, our mutual desire for freedom and independence. I was rational but passionate. I was witty and self-deprecating. I told jokes.
The straw opponents tumbled one by one. I could do it. We could do it. I stopped myself just short of promising him more freedom than I would have—I stopped myself before offering to handle diaper duty full-time, to take the late-night feedin
gs on my own. Me, a feminist, close to that brink!
I was on that brink.
I took his hand. “Hey,” I said, “we love each other.”
He pulled his hand away. He drank down his champagne, got up with some difficulty and crossed the room to the bank of windows that looked out over the East River. It had started to snow: the same storm that had chased me across Pennsylvania. It bore down on Manhattan’s towers and stone gargoyles, it guttered the lights on the bridge.
“I’ve been through this before, you know. I can’t go through it again.”
When Terence was nineteen, he’d knocked up a South African girl. Her unsuccessful but enterprising father (mastermind of several failed import schemes), in a final attempt to balance his personal trade deficit, had taken his family of five eager daughters traveling through the United States. Pressure was brought to bear on Terence. He and Candy were married and had Troy. Their alliance went, predictably, down the drain, but it lasted long enough to force Terence to drop out of college and out of the acting conservatory. Then came the squeeze. The Ex had been living cheekily in Johannesburg on Terence’s alimony (along with her new boyfriend and two new kids) ever since the divorce. She’d kept Troy for a while, then sent him winging to Terence, who paid for expensive boarding schools. Terence also paid for Troy’s occasional holiday visits to fun-filled Afrikanerland—this Christmas, for example. Terence’s role in all this was to feel guilty a lot and Ex’s was to take her alimony checks and contribute absolutely zip to Troy’s upbringing but the occasional poison-pen letter disguised as friendly chat, telling Terence what a rotten father he was.
“That,” I said, “was different.”
He turned around to look at me. “Why?”
I didn’t answer. I got up very slowly. I put the tulip glass down on a wee table. I felt nauseated. Could it be morning sickness already? Over in the corner stood a squat Christmas tree that I’d hauled in and hung with liquidy gold ornaments. Beneath its stunted boughs were stacked the gold-wrapped presents for Terence. The brightness hurt my eyes.
I stood beside him at the window, watching the whole universe come apart, shake loose into a billion crystals.
“Because,” I said, “you know that line in Tiresias when the gods ask him about sexual pleasure and he says that a woman’s orgasmic experience outdoes a man’s ten thousand by ten thousand?”
“Yeah?” He looked cockily, expectantly at me.
“Well,” I said, “my experience with you has never been like that. What I feel with you is what a homing pigeon must feel, rowing through the air, way up, some metal on its leg: I just have to make it home to you.”
He turned away. I heard him behind me fiddling with the champagne, pulling the bottle out of the ice and pouring himself another glass.
When he stood next to me again, he seemed almost cheerful. He put his arm around me; he kissed my neck.
“You know what you got to do, Will.”
I watched the lights of the bridge stuttering on and off in the snow. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m no stranger to abortion. And I worked at SIS, for God’s sake, I supported the politics of choice. But somehow this was different. “Why?” he’d asked, and finally I just couldn’t say. Somebody wanted to be born, I wanted to say. But that was a little too Yeatsian. His false cheer only made me more determined.
“I love you,” he added, an afterthought. I thought of the skewed etiquette of the late twentieth century. All those “supportive” boyfriends and husbands and lovers standing around lamely in the track-lit lounges of the posh little outpatient clinics around Manhattan, reading the Op Ed page two hundred times. Trying not to sound possessive, just the right note of concern: “How’s she doing, nurse?”
But it wasn’t that either. This is Lily, I thought suddenly. Lily. My daughter.
He began to talk very animatedly about his career, and I tried to listen with sympathy. Yes, he’d finally reached the point he’d longed for, he was getting close … he was getting Broadway and film and television offers. Some leading-man parts. All his life he’d fought for this. He was convincing; my heart did go out to him. I could see him at twenty, a backstage carpenter, the young struggling thespian. The guy who comes and goes in Henry IV or Richard II and announces things: gardener, keep, messenger, groom.
Servant: “My Lord, your son was gone before I came.”
What did he want with another kid? A set builder, supporting a family when other guys were spilling beer on each other at frat parties. I could see that imprisoned, frustrated youth. The thing was, he was also the person standing in front of me, my lover, fifteen years later, a successful actor. And all those nights I’d reached for the diaphragm and he’d pulled my hand back.
“Listen, Terence,” I interrupted. “I love you too. I’m not going to be a millstone around your neck. I’m sorry about your former life and your shitty ex-wife. I’m not going to be a millstone around your neck, but I’m going to have this kid. On my own, if I have to.”
I went into the bedroom and sat on the king-sized bed. Snow drifted down outside the French doors. It covered the terrace and blew up the downspouts with a single clear note like Peruvian pipes.
I had to scrunch to see myself in the vanity mirror. “Hi, little mother,” I growled. Then, sotto voce, in a voice I tried to make sound male, paternal: “What great news, honey. I’d hoped this would happen. Happy birthday!” I touched my stomach. “Happy birthday to you, Lily.” Then I pulled off my clothes, pulled on a nightgown, and went to bed.
The next day I wandered into St. Pat’s. I lit a candle, I stopped at each of the Stations of the Cross, a pastime whose peculiar appeal only ex-Catholics can appreciate. Veronica Wiping the Face of Jesus was always my favorite. I thought of her as the first Fan Club president. I sat in a pew and looked at the altar, still covered in Advent purple. Could I be a single parent? Dear God, I prayed, give me a miracle, I need a miracle now.
When I went outside, it was warming up, the snow was melting. I walked along Fifth Avenue, then over to Park. I looked at a few fat babies in their strollers. Could I raise a kid alone?
I bought a container of rice pudding and a souvlaki: I’d been craving both. I nodded to the doorman and took the elevator to the top floor. Terence was just unlocking the apartment door—he spun around when the elevator opened. He looked unearthly. He wore a flight jacket and jeans, but he’d dressed in such a hurry he’d left his last-act Tiresias makeup on—in the final scene he was half and half, split right down the middle. There was a heavy pancake tan, a dark beard and mustache and shaggy brow on one side of his face. The other side was clean-shaven, pale, with half a Cupid’s-bow mouth below one false eyelash and a perfectly made-up woman’s eye. He wore one dangling diamond earring and one sideburn.
Both sexes looked pretty depressed. “Willie,” he gasped. “All right. Let’s get married. Let’s just do it and get it over with!”
A neighbor came out of the apartment next door and looked, looked again, then hurried off, stealing backward glances all the way. Terence whirled around and glared after him. The earring shook.
“Would you mind turning your head?” I asked. “I think I’d rather be proposed to by a man.”
The made-up eye winked. “Sure.”
“I can’t promise how long I’ll stay,” the beard said. “This is very hard on me, you know. The commitment.”
“Okay. That’s enough. I changed my mind, could you turn the other way again? I think I prefer the woman.”
Page was my best woman at City Hall. She took this opportunity to confer a great deal of unsolicited advice on the bride. She waited till we were both a little sloshed at the reception for thirty or so that Terence and I threw at a posh hotel on the water.
She was eating caviar on tiny toasts, and crumbs showered into her satin bodice. She fished them out cheerfully, crossing her eyes, as she searched her cleavage. She lifted her champagne glass. “The only time a woman who marries an actor gets top billing is on her gravesto
ne.” She pulled at the sleeve of my off-off-off white dress, snorting a little, spilling “Cristal.” She clutched my arm. “But don’t go that far to get it!”
Page had been married at twenty-one to an aspiring soap opera star of twenty-six. They divorced when she was twenty-three, but he claimed he was only twenty-two in the divorce papers. “At that rate,” she said, “if we’d waited till our silver anniversary to divorce, he’d have been a fertilized egg.” (Her ex, Garth Narrows, was now featured on the daytime drama “Escape from Nuance.”)
I kept my old apartment down in Gramercy Park, and we hung out at the Midget Palace while looking for new digs. The midgets extended the lease. I looked for new digs. Terence was performing a lot and couldn’t find the time, so I ended up looking alone. “Be careful,” my doctor warned. She tapped my swollen abdomen gently with her stethoscope. “The first months are touchy.”
Terence stopped wanting to make love. “What’s the matter?” I asked. We were in the wee people’s king-sized bed and it was raining outside. There were satin sheets and there was a candle going. We’d always had a great sex life. “What’s the matter?” I asked again forlornly. My breasts were blooming and my middle had that first sweet curving swell. Yes, I’d studied it—I’d been thinking I looked quite fetching that very night after dropping my bath towel in front of the full-length mirror. I looked over at him. He hadn’t told me once that he liked the way I looked. It had occurred to me to ask him to act a little, feign a little interest. He sighed and rolled over. I stared at his back.
At three months I felt established as a pregnant person; I went into work every day and answered the endless letters with real officiousness. I ate green leafy vegetables and listened to Minnie W-W-G’s lectures on Baby Names. It was hard work, looking for apartments—I climbed stairs, puffing—everything I saw seemed wrong.
One afternoon I had to lie down. I was exhausted, a funny wired kind of exhaustion. I felt knocked out, but revved up in some way. I got up to go to the john and saw the first blood.
Dear Digby Page 7
