The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1

by Douglas Kennedy

  Still, when Tony was on form, he was the best company around. Until we had to talk about something domestic and serious. Like my situation with the Boston Post.

  Around ten days after sending that initial email to Thomas Richardson, I was growing increasingly concerned that he had yet to call me—even though Margaret and Sandy both assured me that he didn’t want to disturb my convalescence.

  “Why don’t you just concentrate on feeling better,” Sandy told me.

  “But I am feeling better,” I said, telling the truth. Not only had the itching finally vanished, but I was regaining my equilibrium (and without the help of Valium). More tellingly, the beta-blockers were doing their job, as my blood pressure had gradually decreased—to the point where, by the end of the second week, it was only marginally above normal levels. This pleased Hughes enormously. When he saw me on his biweekly rounds—and glimpsed the new blood pressure levels on my chart—he told me that I seemed to be making “splendid progress.”

  “You obviously have willed yourself better,” he said.

  “I think it’s called all-American bloody-mindedness,” I said, a comment that elicited the smallest of laughs from Hughes.

  “Whatever it is, your recovery is remarkable.”

  “So you think that the pregnancy is no longer in the danger zone?”

  “Now I didn’t exactly say that, did I? The fact remains that we now know that you are prone to hypertension. So we must be vigilant especially as you’re due so soon. And you must try to avoid any undue stress.”

  “I’m doing my best.”

  But then, two days later, Richardson called me.

  “We’re all deeply concerned about your condition . . .” he said, starting off with his usual paternalistic patter.

  “Well, all going well, I should be back on the job in six months tops—and that’s including the three months of maternity leave.”

  There was a pause on the transatlantic phone line and I knew I was doomed.

  “I’m afraid we’ve been forced to make a few changes in our overseas bureaus—our finance people have been insisting on some belt tightening. Which is why we’ve decided to turn London into a single-correspondent bureau. And since your health has put you out of the picture . . .”

  “But, as I said, I will be back within six months.”

  “A.D. is the senior correspondent in the bureau. More to the point, he is on the job now . . .”

  And I was absolutely certain that A.D. had been plotting my downfall ever since I phoned in sick.

  “Does this mean you’re firing me, Mr. Richardson?” I asked.

  “Sally, please. We’re the Post, not some heartless multinational. We take care of our own. We’ll be paying you full salary for the next three months. Then if you want to rejoin us, a position will be made available to you.”

  “In London?”

  Another edgy transatlantic pause.

  “As I said, the London bureau will now be staffed by only one correspondent.”

  “Which means if I want a job, I’ll have to come back to Boston?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you know that’s impossible for me right now. I mean, I’m only married a few months, and as I am having a baby . . .”

  “Sally, I do understand your situation. But you have to understand mine. It was your decision to move to London—and we accommodated that decision. Now you need to take an extended period of health leave, and not only are we willing to pay you in full for three months, but also guarantee you a job when you can work again. The fact that the job won’t be in London . . . well, all I can say is: circumstances change.”

  I ended the call politely, thanking him for the three months’ pay, and saying that I’d have to think about his offer—even though we both knew that there was no way I’d be accepting it. Which, in turn, meant that I had just been let go by my employer of the last sixteen years.

  Tony was pleased to hear that, at least, I’d be able to help with the mortgage for the next few months. But I quietly worried about how, after my Post money stopped, we’d be able to manage all our manifold expenses on one income.

  “We’ll work it out” was his less-than-reassuring reply.

  Margaret also told me to stop worrying about the money problem.

  “Given the number of newspapers in this town, I’m sure you can eventually find some freelance work. But only when it becomes necessary. Tony’s right—you do have three months’ grace. Right now, you should only be thinking about getting through the next week. You’re going to have enough to cope with once the baby arrives. On which note, I don’t suppose I could interest you in a cleaner? Her name’s Cha, she’s been with us for the entire time we’ve been in London, she’s completely brilliant at what she does, and is now looking for additional work. So . . .”

  “Give me her number and I’ll talk it over with Tony. I’ll also need to review the domestic budget before . . .”

  “Let me pay for her.”

  “No way. After arranging the private room for me you’re making me feel like a ‘Help the Needy’ case.”

  “Hey, I’m a sucker for good causes.”

  “I can’t accept it.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to. Because it’s my going-away gift to you. Six months of Cha, twice a week. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Six months? You’re crazy.”

  “Nah—just rich,” she said with a laugh.

  “I’m embarrassed.”

  “That’s dumb.”

  “I’ll have to talk it over with Tony.”

  “He doesn’t have to know that it’s a gift.”

  “I prefer being straight with him. Especially about something like this. I mean, he wasn’t exactly pleased to learn that you paid for the private room.”

  “Well, in my experience, ‘being straight’ is never the shrewdest marital strategy . . . especially when the male ego is involved.”

  “Whether he accepts the gift or not, you’ve been the best friend imaginable. And you shouldn’t be leaving.”

  “This is the problem of being a corporate wife. Those who pay you the big bucks also dictate where you live. I think it’s what’s called a Faustian bargain.”

  “You’re my one pal here.”

  “As I told you, that will change . . . eventually. And hey, I’ll always be at the end of a phone line if you need an ear to scream into . . . though, given that it’s me who’ll be drowning in the vanilla confines of Westchester County, it’s you who’ll be receiving the hysterical transatlantic phone calls.”

  She left town two days later. That evening, I finally got up the nerve to inform Tony about Margaret’s good-bye gift.

  “You cannot be serious,” he said, sounding annoyed.

  “Like I said, it was her idea.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “Do you actually think I’d do something as tacky as talking her into giving us a cleaner for six months?”

  “It’s just a little coincidental, especially after . . .”

  “I know, I know—she paid for this damn room. And you can’t stand the idea of somebody actually making my life a little easier by . . .”

  “That’s not the point—and you know it.”

  “Then what is the point, Tony?”

  “We can well afford to pay for a bloody cleaner, that’s all.”

  “You don’t think Margaret knows that? This was merely a gift. And yes, it was a far too generous one—which is why I said I wouldn’t accept it until I talked it over with you. Because I had a little suspicion that you’d react exactly like this.”

  Pause. He avoided my angry gaze.

  “What’s the cleaner’s name?” he asked.

  I handed him the piece of paper on which Margaret had written Cha’s name and her contact number.

  “I’ll call her and arrange for her to start next week. At our expense.”

  I said nothing. Eventually he spoke again. “The editor
would like me to go to the Hague tomorrow. Just a fast overnight trip to do a piece about the war crimes tribunal. I know you’re due any moment. But it’s just the Hague. Can be back here in an hour, if need be.”

  “Sure,” I said tonelessly. “Go.”

  “Thanks.”

  Then he changed the subject and told me a rather entertaining story about a colleague at the paper who’d been caught fiddling his expenses. I fought the temptation to show my amusement, as I was still smarting after our little exchange . . . and didn’t like the fact that, once again, Tony was up to his usual “mollify her with humor” tricks. When I didn’t respond to the story, he said, “What’s with the indignant face?”

  “Tony, what do you expect?”

  “I don’t follow you . . .”

  “Oh come on, that fight we just had . . .”

  “That wasn’t a fight. That was just an exchange of views. Anyway, it’s ancient history now.”

  “I just can’t bounce back the way . . .”

  He leaned over and kissed me.

  “I’ll call you from the Hague tomorrow. And remember—I’m on the cell phone if . . .”

  After he left, I must have spent the better part of an hour replaying our little spat in my head, taking apart the argument, piece by piece. Like some postmodernist literary critic, I was trying to excavate all the subtextual implications of the fight—and wondering what its ultimate meaning might be. Granted, on one level, this dispute had again been rooted in Tony’s vanity. But what I couldn’t get out of my brain was the larger, implicit realization that I had married someone with whom I didn’t share a common language. Oh, we both spoke English. But this wasn’t simply a case of mere Anglo-American tonal differences. This was something more profound, more unsettling—the worry that we would never find a common emotional ground between us; that we would always be strangers, thrown in together under accidental circumstances.

  “Who knows anyone?” Sandy said to me during our phone call that evening. But when I admitted that I was beginning to find Tony increasingly hard to fathom, she said, “Well, look at me. I always considered Dean to be a nice, stable, slightly dull guy. But I bought into his decent dullness because I thought: at least I’ll be able to count on him. He’ll always be there for me. And when I met him, that was exactly what I was looking for. What happens? After ten years of staid decency and three kids, he decides he hates everything about our staid secure suburban life. So he meets the Nature Girl of his dreams—a fucking park ranger in Maine—and runs off to live with her in some cabin in Baxter State Park. If he now sees the kids four times a year, it’s an event. So, hey, at least you realize you’re already dealing with a difficult guy. Which, from where I sit, is something of an advantage. But I’m telling you stuff you already know.”

  Maybe she was right. Maybe I just needed to let everything settle down, and enter the realm of acceptance and other optimistic clichés. As in look on the bright side, forget your troubles, keep your chin up . . . that sort of dumb, sanguine thing.

  Over and over again, I repeated these Pollyanna-ish mantras. Over and over again, I kept trying to put on a happy face. Until fatigue finally forced me to turn off the light. As I drifted off into a thinly veneered sleep, one strange thought kept rattling around my brain: I am nowhere.

  Then another thought seized me: Why is everything so soggy?

  At that moment, I jolted back into consciousness. In the initial few seconds afterward, I absently thought: so that’s what they call a wet dream. Then I squinted in the direction of the window and noticed that it was light outside. I glanced at the bedside clock and saw that it read 6:48 AM. Then an earlier thought replayed itself in my head.

  Why is everything so soggy?

  I sat up, suddenly very awake. I frantically pulled off the comforter. The bed was completely drenched.

  My waters had broken.

  FIVE

  I DIDN’T PANIC. I didn’t succumb to trepidation or startled surprise. I just reached for the call button. Then I picked up the phone and dialed Tony’s cell phone. It was busy, so I phoned his direct line at the paper and left a fast message on his voicemail.

  “Hi, it’s me,” I said, still sounding calm. “It’s happening . . . so please get yourself to the Mattingly as soon as you get back to London. This is definitely it.”

  As I put down the receiver, a midwife showed up. She took one look at the sodden bedclothes and reached for the phone. Two orderlies arrived shortly thereafter. They raised the sides of my bed, unlocked its wheels, and pushed me out of the room, negotiating a variety of corridors before landing me in the maternity ward. En route, I began to feel an ever-magnifying spasm. By the time the doors swung behind me, the pain had intensified to such an extent that I felt as if some alien were gripping my innards with his knobbly fist, determined to show me new frontiers in agony. A midwife was on the scene immediately—a diminutive woman of Asian origin. She grabbed a packet of surgical gloves from a nearby cart, ripped them open, pulled them on, and informed me that she was going to do a quick inspection of my cervix. Though I’m certain she was attempting to be as gentle as possible, her gloved fingers still felt like highly sharpened claws. I reacted accordingly.

  “You are experiencing severe discomfort, yes?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “I will have a doctor see you as soon as . . .”

  “Is the baby all right?”

  “I’m sure everything is . . .”

  There was another maniacal spasm. I reacted loudly, then asked, “Can I have an epidural now?”

  “Until the doctor has examined . . .”

  “Please . . .”

  She patted my shoulder and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  But ten godawful minutes passed until she returned with a porter . . . by which time I felt so tortured that I would have signed a document admitting to be the cause of everything from the French Revolution to global warming.

  “Where have you been?” I asked, my voice raw and loud.

  “Calm yourself, please,” she said. “We had three other women waiting before you for ultrasound.”

  “I don’t want ultrasound. I want an epidural.”

  But I was whisked straightaway into the ultrasound suite, where my belly was coated with gel and two large pads applied to the surface of the skin. A large fleshy man in a white jacket came into the room. Beneath the jacket he was wearing a checked Viyella shirt and a knit tie. His feet were shod with green wellington boots. Take away the white jacket and he could have passed for a member of the rural squirearchy. Except for the fact that the boots were splattered with blood.

  “I’m Mr. Kerr,” he said crisply. “I’m covering for Mr. Hughes today. In a spot of bother, are we?”

  But suddenly he was interrupted by the ultrasound technician who said that sentence you never want to hear a medical technician say to a doctor, “I think you should see this, sir.”

  Mr. Kerr looked at the screen, his eyes grew momentarily wide, then he turned away and calmly sprang into action. He spoke rapidly to a nurse—and, much to my horror, I heard him utter the words: “Baby resuscitator.”

  “What is going on?” I asked.

  Mr. Kerr approached me and said, “I need to examine you right now. This might be a bit uncomfortable.”

  He inserted his fingers into me and began to press and probe. I was about to demand information about what the hell was going on, but another rush of pain made me scream with extremity.

  “I’ll have the anesthetist here in a jiffy,” Mr. Kerr said. “Because we need to perform an emergency caesarean.”

  Before I could react to that, he explained that the ultrasound had shown that the umbilical cord might be around the baby’s neck.

  “Will the baby die?” I said, interrupting him.

  “The fetal monitor is showing a steady heartbeat. However, we need to move fast, because . . .”

  But he didn’t get to finish that sentence, as the doors swung open and t
wo orderlies with carts came rushing in. The first was pulled up next to me. Then a small Indian woman in a white coat arrived and walked over to the bed. “I’m Dr. Chatterjee, the anesthetist,” she said. “Relief is on the way.”

  She swabbed the top of my left hand with a cotton ball. “Little prick now,” she said, as she inserted a needle into the top of my hand. “Now start counting backward from ten.”

  I did as instructed, muttering “Ten, nine, eig . . .”

  And then the world went black.

  It’s strange, being chemically removed from life for a spell. You don’t dream under anesthetic, nor are you even notionally aware of the passage of time. You’ve entered the realm of nothingness, where all thoughts, fears, worries cannot invade your psyche. Unlike that easily permeable state called sleep, you’re being kept in suspended chemical animation. Which—after the agonizing trauma of the past hour—suited me just fine.

  Until I woke up.

  It took me a moment or two to realize where I was—especially as my first view of the world was a pair of glowing fluorescent tubes, lodged above me. My eyes were half-glued together, making everything seem bleary, obscure. More tellingly, my head was shrouded in a freakish fog—which made all voices seem leaden, oppressive, and also left me wondering (for the first few minutes of consciousness) where the hell I was. Gradually, the jigsaw pieces began to fall into place: hospital, ward, bed, sore head, sore body, baby . . .

  “Nurse!” I yelled, scrambling for the button by the side of the bed. As I did so, I realized that I had tubes coming out of both arms, while the lower half of my body was still numb.

  “Nurse!”

  After a few moments, a dainty Afro-Caribbean woman arrived by my bedside.

  “Welcome back,” she said.

  “My baby?”

  “A boy. Eight pounds, two ounces. Congratulations.”

  “Can I see him now?”

  “He’s in the intensive care unit. It’s just a routine thing, after a complicated delivery.”

  “I want to see him. Now.” And then I added, “Please.”

  The nurse looked at me carefully.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She returned a few minutes later.