The Room Lit by Roses

by Carole Maso

  I am at that stage where people politely notice that I have gained a lot of weight, but they are not quite sure I am pregnant. I blurt it out now at every turn: I am having a baby in June!

  A panel at Columbia a few weeks earlier after which I swore I would never do one of these things again. So why do I? I imagine with a child all that is extraneous or false or simply silly will fall away. One can only hope.

  I am struck at how engrossed I am in every detail of the pregnancy itself and yet have thought very little about the end result. Sometimes I think that after the nine months I will be finished, I will have accomplished a very great thing—and then it will be done. But of course, as everyone is all too happy to remind me, it will only be the beginning. The child at this point is still very, very abstract. I don’t know a thing about having a baby around. Not really. Not where I am the one in charge. But the pregnancy is so mesmerizing and I fall into simply taking it day by day. I will deal with the child once there is one. For now though I find that it is passing suddenly all too quickly and I want to slow it down, to stay in this, to prolong these feelings. Harbor, vessel, rose.

  2 FEBRUARY—FIVE MONTHS

  What moves inside my motion?

  What beats so fiercely, insistently, saying here, here, I am here.

  Love does, love does, love does.

  Thinking of Judith and Zenka again. All our feelings so much on the surface—we cannot help it. Flirting together. They seventy and seventy-five at the time. How they protected me when they could—that terrible and wonderful summer. Rolling in sweet herbs with the next beautiful boy—feeling the end of all things. Waiting to get well. Having ended our life together, this time for good. Oh, Helen. Or so I thought. That autumn of the pot-au-feu. They held my hands. We gossiped about everyone and everything. We dreamt each day of how I might stay forever. I could take care of their dog, Rimbaud, while they were away. Swerving through the streets protected by that soulful golden retriever. Always another tearful good-bye at the airport in Nice. Always another joyful reunion at that same airport. Later the sadnesses would be in London—one of those British taxis—a cab ride in the rain. I remember thinking I had never seen such roses. This through terrible sorrow. Somehow London seemed an apt place to be sad.

  The last time I had been there. Walking into that flat in Roe-hampton. We brought Zenka a birthday present from Paris. Two French engravings: Spring, Winter. Helen and I had come for the day, taking the Chunnel. We ate Indian food. At every table talk of the mad cow.

  I direct the creative writing program as if I were Francis Coppola directing a film from his isolation chamber. It’s kind of wonderful to be so strangely free of the politics, the thousand discontents, the problems at every turn. This will be my last year as director. I must say I have not been exactly suited for the task—and now—I move through the days as if in a dream. Turning inward, sending forth instructions through a tiny microphone in my throat. Even a weirder director than before. If that’s possible.

  Harboring a miracle, who can speak of mundane things? Though I know this is the most everyday and ordinary of miracles—or so they say. I can’t believe so many women have had children and so many seem rather blasé about the whole thing. Most people’s only contact with the sublime. Or perhaps they simply do not speak of such things in their conscious waking life, in which a hundred other obligations obscure the fact. Or they have put it aside. Or, as so many have put it: childbirth—a misery to be endured.

  Someone tells me an outlandish story about a friend who schedules C-sections for herself in order to be spared the whole ordeal of birth. What is the word for the deliberate cutting off in oneself of those experiences that are potentially most profound in order to be spared pain? There must be a word in English, as it seems a particularly American trait.

  And while we’re at it, what is the word in American for the similar phenomenon of deliberately cutting off a dream or potential for the simple reason that it is not profitable?

  I am astounded to imagine what magic a woman’s body is capable of. Though I always suspected… Of course somewhere I always knew.

  Always in the back of my mind the notion that I could still miscarry even if a charmed star hung over me on the night of her conception. Most unlikely and precious night.

  A flood of blood—the only way to prepare—as I do in dreams—should something go wrong.

  Always knew I wanted to have the experience of pregnancy. I am too much body to have missed out on such an event. Maso is flesh in Slovak, a lover once told me.

  That extreme winter of vodka and snow and oblivion. His cigarettes and cynicism. He was a kind man. And I was wild back then.

  He hurt me terribly and possibly inadvertently a few years back and we parted ways. I miss him.

  When I write every day I never remember my dreams. But now that the writing has become sporadic, my dreams come streaming back. They are not altogether welcome, I might add.

  She turns from amphibian to fish to bird to person.

  I grow happily, happily rotund. I negotiate the curves gracefully.

  This for me feels like a natural state. The easy happiness that has always, always eluded me. My intensities smoothed over a little. The sorrow modulated.

  This peace. My friends, who have watched me struggle for years trying to think of ways to make money while I wrote, say, had you known, you could have been a surrogate mother every year, and written to your heart’s content. And have been well.

  In another life I might have had five children, like my mother. But I do not have another life. And I miss writing. Nothing, not even this, can take its place. That dark radiance. It is as beautiful as anything I have ever known. It brings me to a place of unearthly happiness. I have not forgotten…

  Who could she have spoken to about that flood of feelings? Or about her growing body? Or her fears? Having already had two miscarriages. How could she not have believed it was just a part of the sorrow that seemed to follow her. The saddest of all childhoods. Mother. She rarely spoke of it. But the illness and death of one’s mother at a young and crucial age must mark forever the way the world is experienced. A sorrowful place. Where was the solace? My father—yes, in part. Her religion. But who could she really speak to about these matters? Her sister? We were company, she said that more than once. Her brood of children. But how were we company? I think of her otherworldly isolation. And yet it is true she was always utterly present with us. So much so that each of us felt like an only child. How is it possible?

  To write without embellishment. Without concern for the larger shapes. To simply record. And to have that be enough. That I was here. And that this, this most extraordinary and ordinary thing, happened to me once. It seems in this state more possible to do this than ever before. To just be. And write from there. Without grander schemes or plans for the text. Another freedom. To enjoy it as long as it lasts. It won’t last forever of course. Relish it.

  Meanwhile Frida languorously waits. So unlike me to have lost the compulsion to compose at that level. It’s part of the letting go. Even the things that are most pressing or most dear become a little lost—not in a bad way.

  This is the story of two souls in transit: the music of the spheres—

  Provincetown, the dunes: I am walking through drifts and drifts of sand toward the ocean, aware of its presence, surrounded by it, caressed by it, the feel of it, the smell—and yet it is some distance away, still out of reach.

  I offend some of those friends who have neglected to have children, in ways I naively could not have predicted. Who do you think you are? I serve as a painful reminder. Time passes. And all opportunity. Everything is ephemeral, fleeting—over before we know it.

  The ocean in winter. How Ilene and I let it ravage us. Years ago already. Will we have children? we wondered over the riot of surf. Yes. Maybe. We were like schoolgirls together. A little shy. Whispering in the dark, every hope, every fear. Almost every fear.

  I tell her about the baby. She is
more thrilled than anyone, it seems. She has a five-year-old son and is somewhat lonely in it. I will be company—and she for me. It’s possible this child will bring us back together—as was always meant to be.

  8 FEBRUARY, VERMONT STUDIO CENTER

  Wishing in summer for the negative numbers, attracted to the below zero, I agreed to come up here near the Canadian border for a week of teaching. Careful of the ice. I work hard and try to stay focused on the student papers. Also need to complete an essay for Jason. I must say I’m not sure I have the powers of concentration. I’ll just have to let that dictate the way the piece goes. What are my choices? I don’t know why I agree ever to write an essay. I always suffer them—though I’m happy after they are done to have a record of sorts of the person I once was. I’ve gotten a second wind this trimester, which is a lucky thing since there is a lot of work to do up here.

  I resist reading Defiance out loud. Not in front of the one who is still forming. The book feels that visceral, that poisonous to me. The pages burn in my hands. It broke my heart to write. Unlike any of the other books. A harrowing process. I don’t want her to hear my voice spitting out those grim syllables.

  Usually I get a little crazy around the time a book is coming out—but it’s different this time. I am not really so invested in it. It will be out in May and I will be eight months pregnant. This will preclude my traveling to “promote” it and nothing could make me happier. It is an undue burden I usually feel compelled to take on. Sorry, not this time. A great excuse—no airplane will carry me in the eighth month of pregnancy. Quelle dommage! I must say it does now feel like the pregnancy has taken—and that there will actually be a baby. I know there are premature births and every other kind of mishap still to move through—but I’m not worried anymore. And Defiance? It is a tough book. It can take care of itself.

  At what week is the baby viable?

  It presents itself as an angular shape in my mind—the next corner to turn. I try to prepare myself for the next possible thing and then the next, every step of the way. Premature birth.

  Late in the seventh month you are viable, I have found out.

  Steve Moore, my former editor at Dalkey Archive, calls her Baby Defiance.

  Those my age, in serious mid-life crisis mode, their children grown, look at me a bit bewildered. To have gone about this in such a strange fashion. But to have had children young—for me it seemed not unimaginable, but simply not possible. The kind of mother I would have been back then: resentful, depressed, detached, enraged, indifferent.

  “What is known is that she liked and was good at talking to children (there are many witnesses to this), that she often bitterly regretted not having them, and that she never consoled herself with the belief that her books were a substitute or an equivalent. These feelings would surface whenever she was depressed. In her deepest plunges into ‘melancholy’ or a sense of failure, she always uttered the words ‘children’: ‘It’s having no children,’ it’s ‘a desire for children.’”

  —from the Hermione Lee biography of Virginia Woolf

  “I put my life blood into writing, she (Vanessa) had children.”

  To wait—it was not such a calculated risk, considering the options. All along I was willing to forgo it all entirely. It is why I am so good at getting jobs, I think: I am perfectly content not to have the job at all.

  Once, when I was sure I was pregnant and far too young to consider such a thing but dreaded the options, Helen said, We do not have to decide right away, and she took me to a Yankees game—an oddly consoling thing—and held my hand. The father a good friend of ours. She had known about the affair.

  How have we made it through all these years? Mutual respect comes to mind. Flexibility. Devotion.

  Two souls in transit.

  The ability to change everything and at the last minute if necessary. Autumn. A walk on the Poet’s Walk. We are going to have a baby!

  All those years of my youth working those terrible temporary jobs in all those law firms for all those idiotic lawyers and slowly, slowly dying. Those years when all I could do it seemed was weep.

  In the eighth inning, she says, maybe we could have the child.

  Are people from unhappy or broken families constantly trying to remake, retrieve, make whole, complete? Maybe we could have the child, once, she said.

  I felt my early life to be completely smothered by my mother’s children. Though I was never asked to take care of them. Still, there was always so much commotion. I had to go far and live long to want to have a child of my own.

  At the top of the ninth—Helen, I don’t think so.

  My mother—the saddest of childhoods—and her five little ones.

  Virginia Woolf: “I shall make myself face the fact that there is nothing—nothing for any of us. Work, reading, writing, all are disguises; and relationships with people. Yes, even having children would be useless.” —A Writer’s Diary

  A while back when we were in one of our efficient phases, we made an appointment with a fancy lawyer to handle the legal aspects of having a child. She was big deal—had represented Hedda Nussbaum, all kinds of characters. She decided to read The American Woman in the Chinese Hat and told Helen that even though she knew it was fiction she felt concerned about my ability to be a mother. Perhaps, when the time came, the baby might need some representing. Protection. That I already had a very, very dim view of lawyers could not prepare me for her stupidity, or her arrogance.

  Intrigued by every single moment of this—even the frightening parts as they come. There is always some terror. Of course. Loving every aspect of being pregnant is an odd thing. Not used to such simple happiness—not since childhood at any rate. It all comes back. The dark afternoons of music. Ballet lessons three times a week with that marvelous diva Irene Fokine. In the summer I took painting lessons. My brother and I played Scrabble for hours and hours on the dock of my grandparents’ lake house.

  I really do glow. Happily, happily sitting on my nest.

  The baby moving inside. A foot. A fist. An elbow perhaps. A fin.

  Accretion of the days. To attend to every trembling, every motion.

  I am a novelist in part because I love the long haul, my stamina is of the long-distance sort. In the pool I am best after the first fifteen laps. I believe in relationships for life. Things cut off abruptly shock my system badly. Only once did I have to end something in that way. The obsession on both sides over time had grown monstrous. Finally there was no other option. It took years to recover.

  It is a little disconcerting to have those friends who did not have children—those who made that decision, those who had counted me among them, one of the childless—to turn away now, if only slightly.

  Disregarding what one gives up for this. Seeing it as only rosy, and resenting it.

  On the street some women avert their eyes when they see me. I am a reminder of what they have failed to do. I sympathize, I really do. But I, for better and worse, have always been a person who acts on my impulses. Because, for the most part, I am someone incapable of living with regret.

  Action, driven as much by intuition as by reason. I have always been amused by the yuppies, who think they might open some sort of ledger and see if there was enough money yet, enough “quality time.” And a nursery school and college lined up. We’d better get on a waiting list!

  Children cannot be thought through—could not for me at any rate. The logical conclusion would have been no.

  Dear Douglas Culhane. His role in all of this never to be forgotten or underestimated. How he made the desire for the child precise. Brought it to full cognizance. The strange workings of this world. Douglas was wonderful in all ways.

  I might say more but am reluctant to invade his privacy. The particular dangers of keeping a journal that others might see. A suspect project in many ways.

  Also not to forget the Quiet Monsieur, as we called him, standing discreetly in the corner. His favorite color is red. His favorite animal, a dog. He
admires most, fidelity. I am speaking in code a little, because I feel I must. He was all in all a perfect little gentleman.

  Drunk at a dinner party, our eyes mistakenly meet and we forget for a moment that we do not love each other anymore.

  Granted, it has not always been easy.

  Not always such smooth sailing.

  This struggle against ruin. This vote, as Louis says, for the future—this infinitesimal gesture—against the vanishing.

  Once a crimson wreath… I shall carry it the rest of my life.

  Language is a rose and the future is still a rose, opening.

  Unable to hold on to them I watch them age. All acts of retrieval doomed. I remember that late fall afternoon in the woods near the MacDowell Colony where my parents and I walked and walked and grew increasingly lost—those mortal woods.

  14 FEBRUARY

  Last night my back to the utterly black living room and the feeling is—what? That everything is about to be taken away. One of us, or both. Helen making a Valentine’s Day dinner. I sitting by the fire.

  Ah, the old terror returns.

  My idols, my models, the ones I respect most: Woolf, Beckett, Stein—all childless.

  “From that day forth things went from bad to worse, to worse and worse. Not that she neglected me enough, but the way she kept plaguing me with our child, exhibiting her belly and breasts and saying it was due any moment, she could feel it lepping already. If it’s lepping, I said, it’s not mine.”