“I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“I certainly hope so.”
“I’ll call you first thing in the morning, and see if I can get over here before work.”
But he didn’t call me. When I rang the house at eight-thirty, there was no answer. When I rang the paper at nine-thirty, Tony wasn’t at his desk. And when I tried his cell phone, I was connected with his voicemail. So I left a terse message: “I’m sitting here, already bored out of my mind, and I’m just wondering: where the hell are you? And why didn’t you answer the phone? Please call me ASAP, as I really would like to know the whereabouts of my husband.”
Around two hours later, the bedside phone rang. Tony sounded as neutral as Switzerland.
“Hello,” he said. “Sorry I wasn’t available earlier.”
“You know, I called you at home at eight-thirty this morning and discovered that nobody was home.”
“What’s today?”
“Wednesday.”
“And what do I do every Wednesday?”
I didn’t need to furnish him an answer, because he knew that I knew the answer: he had breakfast with the editor of the paper. A breakfast at the Savoy, which always started at nine. Which meant that Tony inevitably left home around eight. Idiot, idiot, idiot . . . why are you looking for trouble?
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Not to worry,” he said, his tone still so detached, almost uninvolved. “How are you doing?”
“Still feeling like shit. But the itch is under control, thanks to the calamine lotion.”
“That’s something, I guess. When are visiting hours?”
“Right now would work.”
“Well, I’m supposed to be lunching with the chap who skippers the Africa section at the foreign office but I can cancel.”
Immediately I wondered: now why didn’t he tell me about this lunch yesterday? Maybe he didn’t want to let me know, then and there, that he wouldn’t be able to visit in the morning. Maybe the lunch was a last-minute thing, given the situation in Sierra Leone. Or maybe . . . oh God, I don’t know. That was the growing problem with Tony: I didn’t know. He seemed to live behind a veil. Or was that just my hypertension fatigue kicking in, not to mention my cholestasis, and everything else that was now part and parcel of this wondrous pregnancy? Anyway, I wasn’t about to raise the emotional temperature again by kicking up a stink about his inability to get in here immediately. Because I wasn’t going anywhere.
“No need,” I said. “I’ll see you tonight.”
“You certain about that?” he asked me.
“I’ll phone Margaret, see if she can pay me a visit this afternoon.”
“Anything I can bring you?”
“Just pick up something nice at Marks and Spencer’s.”
“I shouldn’t be too late.”
“That’s good.”
Naturally, Margaret was at the hospital within a half hour of my call. She tried not to register shock when she saw me, but didn’t succeed.
“I just need to know one thing,” she said.
“No—Tony didn’t do this to me.”
“You don’t have to protect him, you know.”
“I’m not—honestly.” Then I told her about my charming little interaction with Hughes, and how I refused to become a citizen of Valium Nation.
“Damn right you should refuse that stuff,” she said, “if it’s giving you the heebie-jeebies.”
“Trust me to get aggressive on Valium.”
“How did Tony handle all this?”
“In a very English, very phlegmatic kind of way. Meanwhile, I’m quietly beginning to panic . . . not just at the thought of three weeks’ enforced bed rest in here, but also the realization that the paper isn’t going to like the fact that I’m out of action.”
“Surely the Post can’t let you go?”
“Want to put money on that? They’re financially strapped like every damn newspaper these days. Rumor has it that management has been thinking about cutting back on their foreign bureaus. And I’m certain that, with me out of the picture for the next few months, they’ll evict me without a moment’s thought.”
“But surely they’ll have to give you some sort of a settlement?”
“Not if I’m in London.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions.”
“No—I’m just being my usual Yankee realist self. Just as I also know that, between the mortgage and all the renovations, spare cash is going to be scarce.”
“Well then, let me do something to make your life in hospital a little easier. Let me pay for a private room in here for the next couple of weeks.”
“You’re allowed to upgrade to a private room?”
“I did when I had my kids on the NHS. It’s not even that expensive. Around forty pounds a night tops.”
“That’s still a lot of money over three weeks.”
“Let me worry about that. The point is: you need to be as stress-free as possible right now . . . and being in a room on your own will certainly aid the process.”
“True—but say my pride doesn’t like the idea of accepting charity from you?”
“It’s not charity. It’s a gift. A gift before I kiss this city good-bye.”
This stopped me short. “What are you talking about?” I asked.
“We’re being transferred back to New York. Alexander only heard the news yesterday.”
“When exactly?” I asked.
“Two weeks. There’s been a big shake-up at the firm and Alexander’s been made the senior partner heading up the litigation department. And since it’s mid-term at school, they’re shipping us all back in one go.”
I now felt anxious. Margaret was my one friend in London.
“Shit,” I said.
“That’s about the right word for it,” she said. “Because as much as I complain about London, I know I’m going to miss it as soon as we’re ensconced back in the ’burbs, and I turn into some soccer mom, and start to hate every other WASP I meet in Chappaqua, and keep wondering why everyone looks the same.”
“Can’t Alexander ask to stay on longer?”
“Not a chance. What the firm wants, the firm gets. Believe me, three weeks from now I am going to so envy you. Even though this town may be completely maddening, it’s always interesting.”
By the time Tony arrived at the hospital that evening, I had been transferred into a perfectly pleasant private room. But when my husband asked me how the upgrade came about—and I told him of Margaret’s largesse—his reaction was both abrupt and negative.
“And why the hell is she doing that?”
“It’s a gift. To me.”
“What did you do, plead poverty with her?” he asked.
I stared at him, wide-eyed.
“Tony, there’s no need for . . .”
“Well, did you?”
“Do you really think I would do something like that?”
“Well, she obviously felt so sorry for you that . . .”
“Like I said: it’s a gift. Her very kind way of helping me out . . .”
“We’re not accepting it.”
“But why?”
“Because I’m not accepting charity from some rich American—”
“This is not charity. She’s my friend and—”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“Tony, the bill is already settled. So what’s the big deal?”
Silence. I knew what the big deal was: Tony’s pride. Not that he was going to admit such a thing. Except to say, “I just wished you’d talked this over with me.”
“Well, I didn’t hear from you all day—and until I was moved in here, where there’s a phone by the bed, it was a little hard to get up to make calls. Especially when I’ve been ordered to hardly move.”
“How are you doing?”
“The itch is a little better. And there is a lot to be said for being out of that godforsaken ward.”
A pause. Tony evaded my gaze.
“How
long did Margaret pay for the room?”
“Three weeks.”
“Well, I’ll cover anything after that.”
“Fine,” I said quietly, dodging the temptation to add, “Whatever makes you happy, Tony.” Instead I pointed to the Marks and Spencer bag in his hand and asked, “Dinner, I hope?”
Tony stayed an hour that night—long enough to watch me gobble down the sandwich and salad he brought me. He also informed me that he’d called A. D. Hamilton at the Post to explain that I had been rushed to hospital last night.
“I bet he sounded disconsolate,” I said.
“Well, he didn’t exactly radiate enormous concern . . .”
“You didn’t say anything about how I’d be out of commission for the next few weeks?” I asked.
“I’m not that dim.”
“I’m going to have to call the editor myself.”
“Give yourself a couple of days to feel a little better. You’re shattered.”
“You’re right. I am. And all I want right now is to fall asleep for the next three weeks, then wake up and discover that I’m no longer pregnant.”
“You’ll be fine,” he said.
“Sure—once I stop looking like a battered wife.”
“No one would believe the ‘battered wife’ thing anyway.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’re bigger than me.”
I managed a laugh, noting my husband’s ability to divert me with humor whenever we veered into argumentative terrain, or when he sensed that I was becoming overly exercised about something. But though I was concerned about plenty right now, I was also too tired to start a recitation of everything that was worrying me—from my physical state, to the fear I had of losing the child, to how the Post would react to my extended medical absence, not to mention such trivial domestic details as the state of our half-finished house. Instead, a wave of exhaustion seized me—and I told Tony that I’d best surrender to sleep. He gave me a somewhat perfunctory kiss on the head and said he’d drop by tomorrow morning before work.
“Grab every book you can find,” I said. “It’s going to be a long three weeks in here.”
Then I passed out for ten straight hours, waking just after dawn with that mixture of drowsy exultation and sheer amazement that I had slept so long. I got up. I wandered into the en suite bathroom. I glanced at the mangled face in the mirror. I felt something close to despair. I had a pee. The itching started again. I returned to my bed and called the nurse. She arrived and helped me pull up my nightgown, then painted my stomach with calamine lotion. I dropped two tabs of Piriton, and asked the nurse if it was possible to have a cup of tea and a slice or two of toast.
“No problem,” she said, heading off.
As I waited for breakfast to arrive, I stared out the window. No rain—but at 6:03 AM, it was still pitch black. I suddenly found myself thinking how, try as we might, we never really have much control over the trajectory of our lives. We can delude ourselves into believing that we’re the master captain, steering the course of our destiny . . . but the randomness of everything inevitably pushes us into places and situations where we never expect to find ourselves.
Like this one.
Tony arrived at nine that morning, bearing the morning papers, three books, and my laptop computer. We only had twenty minutes together, as he was rushing to get to the paper. Still, he was pleasant in a pressed-for-time way and happily made no further mention of our little disagreement about the private room business yesterday. He sat on the edge of the bed and took my hand. He asked all the right questions about how I was feeling. He seemed pleased to see me. And when I implored him to keep the pressure on the builders and the decorators (as the last thing I wanted was to walk back into a construction site with a baby in my arms), he assured me that he would make certain they were all kept on task.
When he left, I felt a decided twinge of jealousy. He was heading out into the workaday world, whereas I had been barred from doing anything productive. Complete bed rest. No physical activity whatsoever. Nothing stressful to send my blood pressure into higher stratospheric levels. For the first time in my adult life, I had been confined to quarters. And I was already bored with my incarceration.
Still, I did have one crucial piece of business to get out of the way. So later that morning, I wrote an email to Thomas Richardson, the editor of the Post, explaining my medical situation and how I would be out of action until the arrival of the baby. I also assured him that this was all due to circumstances beyond my control, that I would be back on the job as soon as my maternity leave was over, and that as someone who had spent all of her professional life chasing stories, I wasn’t taking very well to being corralled in a hospital room.
I read through the email several times, making certain I had struck the right tone, emphasizing the fact that I wanted to return to work ASAP. I also enclosed the phone number of the hospital, in case he’d like to speak with me. After I dispatched this, I punched out a short message to Sandy, explaining that Murphy’s Law had just been invoked on my pregnancy and detailing the fun-filled events of the past forty-eight hours. I also gave her the number at the Mattingly. “All phone calls gratefully accepted,” I wrote, “especially as I have been sentenced to three weeks in bed.”
I pressed send. Three hours later, the phone rang and I found my sister on the other end of it.
“Good God,” Sandy said, “you really do know how to have a complicated life.”
“Believe me, this wasn’t deliberate.”
“And you’ve also lost your famous sense of humor.”
“Now I wonder how that happened.”
“But don’t mess around with this. Preeclampsia is serious stuff.”
“It’s borderline preeclampsia.”
“It’s still pretty dangerous. So you’d better stop playing Action Girl for the first time in your life, and listen to what the doctor tells you. How’s Tony handling it?”
“Not badly.”
“Do I detect a note of uncertainty in your voice?”
“Perhaps. Then again, he is very busy.”
“By which you mean . . . ?”
“Nothing, nothing. I’m probably just overly sensitive to everything right now.”
“Try to take things easy, eh?”
“There’s not a lot else I can do.”
Later that afternoon, I received a call from Thomas Richardson’s secretary. She explained that he was away on business in New York for the next few days. But she had read him my email and he wanted me to know of his concern about my condition, and that I shouldn’t think about anything right now except getting better. When I asked if I could speak to Mr. Richardson personally after his return, she paused for a moment and said, “I’m certain he’ll be in touch.”
That comment bothered me all day. Later that evening, during Tony’s visit, I asked him if he detected anything sinister behind her response. He said, “You mean, why didn’t she come straight out and say: ‘I know he wants to fire you’?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Because he probably isn’t planning to fire you.”
“But it was the way she said, ‘I’m certain he’ll be in touch.’ She made it sound so damn ominous.”
“Didn’t she also tell you that Richardson said you shouldn’t think about anything else right now?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Well, he’s right. You shouldn’t think about all that. Because it won’t do you any good, and also because, even if something sinister is going on, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
That was the truth of the matter. I could do absolutely nothing right now, except lie in bed and wait for the child to arrive. It was the most curious, absurd sensation—being shut away and forced to do nothing. I had spent my entire working life filling just about every hour of every day, never allowing myself extended periods of good old-fashioned downtime, let alone a week or two of sheer unadulterated sloth. I always had to be a
ctive, always had to be accomplishing something—my workaholism underscored by a fear of slowing down, of losing momentum. It wasn’t as if this desire to keep on the move was rooted in some psychobabbly need to dodge self-examination or run away from the real me. I just liked being busy. I thrived on a sense of purpose—of having a shape and an objective to the day.
But now, time had suddenly ballooned. Removed from all professional and domestic demands, each day in hospital seemed far too roomy for my liking. There were no deadlines to make, no appointments to keep. Instead, the first week crept into the next. There was a steady stream of books to read. I could catch up on four months of back issues of the New Yorker. And I quickly became addicted to Radios 3 and 4, listening avidly to programs that grappled with obscure gardening questions, or presented a witty and informed discussion of every available version of Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony. There was a daily phone call from Sandy. Margaret—bless her—managed to make it down to the hospital four times a week. And Tony did come to see me every evening. His post-work arrival was one of the highlights of my otherwise prosaic hospital day. He’d always try to spend an hour—but often had to dash back to the office or head off for some professional dinner thing. If he didn’t seem otherwise preoccupied, he was amusing and reasonably affectionate. I knew that the guy was under a lot of pressure at the paper. And I knew that getting from Wapping to Fulham chewed up an hour of his time. And though he wouldn’t articulate this fact, I sensed that he was silently wondering what the hell he had landed himself in—how, in less than a year, his once autonomous life as a foreign correspondent had been transformed into one brimming with the same sort of workaday and domestic concerns that characterized most people’s lives. But he wanted this, right? He was the one who made all the convincing arguments about coming to London and setting up house together. And after my initial doubts, I fully embraced those arguments. Because I wanted to.
But now . . .
Now I still wanted all that. But I also wanted a sense of engagement from my husband—of shared mutual concerns. Yet any time I asked him if something was worrying him, he would do what he’d always do: assure me that “Everything’s fine.” And then he’d change the subject.
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