Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  “I'm already there.”

  “Oh, for God's sake.”

  “I've been in hell since Isabel died.”

  “This isn't about Isabel.”

  “Yes, it is. Yes, it is.”

  He crawls across the floor. He grabs my chin and forces me to look into his face. “Emilia, if you are in hell it is only because you put yourself there. You put all of us there. You are not the first woman to have lost a child. Losing Isabel broke my heart, too, but it is not the end of the world. Life isn't over. We have to keep on living. We lost our baby, Emilia. Not our lives.”

  “I didn't lose our baby.”

  “What?”

  Our faces are inches apart. His hand is on my chin, keeping my eyes locked on his. I can feel his breath on my lips. I can smell the coffee he drank today, the onion from his lunch, the cinnamon gum he chewed.

  “I didn't lose Isabel. I killed her.”

  So I tell him of my real crime, the crime that makes what I have felt or not felt about my father pale by comparison. I take us back to that night, November 17, 2003. I lay in our bed, our child in my arms. She was nursing at last, grunting, noisily sucking. I tell Jack how tired I was, worn out by hours of crying and panicking. My eyelids felt sticky and my head heavy. With the two middle fingers of my left hand I pulled my heavy flesh away from Isabel's tiny nostrils. I had to hold my left elbow high to do this, and my arm ached. The pose was so awkward, so uncomfortable, that it should have kept me awake, it should have kept me with her. But I was so tired. As I slipped into sleep my arm fell to my side. Once I woke, and reminded myself to pull the skin back, to keep her nose clear, to make sure she could breathe. Then I drifted off again, and again my elbow dropped to my side and my fingers loosened their grip. I woke again and listened to the gulping and clicking of her steady feeding. And that's when I did the unforgivable. I was so tired, I stopped taking care. I told myself I could go to sleep, because if she couldn't breathe, she would pull away. She would know to do that. It was a reflex, an animal instinct. I tucked her tightly against me with my right arm and drifted off, holding her head in place, keeping her still, her tiny nose and mouth sealed tightly against my warm, round, milk-laden breast.

  As I tell Jack this story, I watch him creep slowly back and away from me. When I am done Jack stares at me. He is a foot away, more even. The air between us is dead, everything sucked out of it.

  “No,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “You did not smother her. The autopsy report said she died of natural causes. It said she died of SIDS.”

  “It said they found no cause of death. The medical examiner said she stopped breathing. And the reason she stopped breathing, Jack, was because she couldn't breathe. Because my breast was in the way, and she couldn't get any air.”

  “She wasn't crushed. The autopsy report said specifically that she wasn't crushed.”

  “I didn't say that I crushed her. I didn't crush her. I smothered her.”

  Jack sits on his knees, his ink eyes wide and staring and I see that he believes me. And I am surprised. Because I realize now that when I told him, when I made my confession, I was hoping he would save me. Jack is, after all, a litigator. He is an expert in the fine arts of cross-examination, of oral argument, of shaping words and making pictures, of creating a story from a series of facts. He twists and twirls, he convinces. He is a magician. Just as he could cross-examine me about my feelings for my father and confront me with a truth I did not see until he showed it to me, I want him to convince me that I am wrong, that my memory is flawed by grief and sorrow, that I have no way of knowing that Isabel died struggling to pull her face from the moon of my breast.

  But he doesn't say anything. He sits on his knees, stares at me, and believes. And whatever last scrap of hope I might have clung to curls up and blows away.

  He opens his mouth, and closes it again.

  “No,” I say. “It's your apartment, and William's. All his stuff is here. It's ridiculous for you to be the one who leaves.”

  I am impressed by how steady I am, considering that my heart has been ripped from my chest and my bones have all melted. I am not even crying. Yet. I am even able to make a sensible decision about luggage. The rolling suitcase, not the pretty Kate Spade overnight bag, because I can fit more in the larger case. Cell phone charger and tampons, deodorant and extra contact lenses. I am a paragon of practicality. By the time I realize that I have packed no pants—no jeans or skirts or even a dress—I am bent over in the elevator, my fist in my mouth.

  Chapter 26

  There really is no way to overstate the cheerlessness of the Port Authority bus terminal. The urine-stenched grimness of it is so complete, so absolute, that it is almost a parody of itself. Does anywhere else have cafés so depressing, with Formica tables of such putrid colors, with such derelict patrons hunched over such sour coffee recalling and bemoaning such wretched and wasted lives? Even in the middle of the week, the lawyers and secretaries, the bankers and commercial real estate brokers on their way home to Bergenfield and Mahwah seem to assume a brief morose dejection as they cross the threshold into Port Authority. Today, on Sunday, it's unbearable.

  I stand in the main lobby wrinkling my nose against the stink and imagine the scene that awaits me at my mother's house. How often lately have I skulked back to hide under my mother's skirts. Who else will I find there tonight? Who else will await my apology? The thought of coming upon my parents cavorting in some lascivious lap-dance reenactment is stomach-turning. Worse is the thought that they seem to be managing to salvage a relationship, one that should have been irrevocably poisoned by unforgivable betrayal. And my marriage, my beautiful marriage, the marriage for which I was willing to do anything, spend anything, waste anything, destroy anything, is an unsalvageable wreck.

  Dragging my suitcase behind me, I head back out to the street. For no reason other than the inherent drama of self-pity, I decide to walk to Simon's rather than take a cab. He lives in London Terrace, in an apartment I found for him when I finally got sick of having him sleep on my couch in Stuyvesant Town.

  It is almost twenty blocks to London Terrace from Port Authority, and by the time I arrive I am chilled through, but at least I do not look like I have been hysterically crying, like a woman who has left her husband. Still, Simon's doorman does not want to let me up, even though I have a key. I am arguing with him when Simon walks in.

  “Good work, Francisco,” Simon says. “This woman is a menace. God knows what she would have done to my apartment.”

  I say, “Jack and I broke up. And I forgot my pants.” Then I burst into tears.

  Simon swoops down on me, all long limbs and expensive coat. He pulls me into his arms and I bury my head in the wool of his chest, shuddering and weeping, crying as hard as I did in the elevator of my building. I am crying so hard I barely notice that we are walking, crablike, toward the mailboxes and away from the middle of the lobby.

  “Why aren't you wearing any pants?” Simon whispers, once my sobs have subsided.

  “I'm wearing pants, you idiot. I just forgot to pack any others.”

  He hugs me again. “We'll go shopping tomorrow,” he murmurs, as he leads me to the elevator.

  And of course we do, because Simon is my dear, dear friend, and he once again puts me ahead of his work, this time banishing four sexually harassed gay members of the Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 217 to the back of his mind in order to help me riffle through the piles of jeans on the eighth floor of Barneys. I am feeling oddly well rested, because I prophylactically took an extra sleeping pill last night, and another when I found myself awake and panicking at five this morning. I am also stuffed, because Simon and I went out for breakfast. I had pancakes, bacon, and the half of his oatmeal that he did not want to finish. A woman whose marriage has collapsed is supposed to be listless and wan, with dark smudges under her eyes. I have powdered sugar on my chin and more nervous energy than a skittish greyhound moments before a race.

&nbs
p; “Try these,” Simon says, holding up a pair of flared jeans in a dark indigo.

  “They're, like, six feet long.”

  “So you'll get them hemmed.”

  I take them.

  “Those won't work for you,” a young woman says.

  “Excuse me?”

  She puts her hands on her bony hips and leans forward, appraising the size and shape of my ass. Hers is smaller than William's.

  “They'll be too small. And they don't have any stretch. Try the Sevens. They give really nicely, and the pockets are a little higher so they'll make your butt look smaller.”

  Fifteen minutes later I am standing outside the dressing room with two pairs of jeans that fit me perfectly in the hips and rear, although they flap ludicrously around my feet. It feels good to surrender myself to the competent and bossy care of this knowledgeable young jeans-girl. She is brusque but not unpleasant, informing me that with my loose belly I do not want to wear tight jeans.

  “You think they make you look thinner, but they don't. You need to have the waist sit right here at your hip,” she places her hand at my hips. “If you bulge out over the top it just looks nasty. But if it sits right, like this, you look hot.”

  I look in the mirror. It has been a long time since I stared at myself like this. I realize that when Simon and I were first taking pairs of pants off the stacks, I was reaching for my original size, the size that would have fit me before Isabel pulled my body all out of shape. I look different now. I am thicker around the middle, softer. My hips have an extra curve to them, and my belly protrudes where it didn't use to. I still have a waist where I always did, but below it, things seem looser. I wonder if this is a permanent disfigurement, if my body will always reflect her brief tenancy.

  “Can you hem these for her, because I don't know if you've noticed, but they're a tad on the long side,” Simon says.

  “Sure,” our salesgirl says. “I'll have one of the seamstresses come right up. It usually takes a week, but I can put in a rush order and have them for you by Thursday or Friday.”

  Because I cannot wear this same pair of pants for the next week, Simon spends another half hour with me, choosing a long suede skirt, one that, although it is on sale, is far more expensive than I have any reason to allow myself, especially since it has been a very long time since I paid my own credit card bill. As I sign the slip I imagine Jack's face when he opens the bill. Will he wonder how I could be indulging in a shopping spree on the very morning after I have packed my bags and left our home? Perhaps he will decide that I was just trying to comfort myself in some small way. Perhaps he will even be pleased at this evidence of my desperate search for consolation. In that case, I should probably buy a pair of boots to match the skirt.

  I walk Simon to work after we leave Barneys, and then I head back downtown on the subway. Somehow, when my idleness took place in my own home, and could be classified under the caption of “grief,” I did not seem quite so indolent. It was not this embarrassing to be wandering the city in the middle of the day. I think about calling Mindy, but pregnancy lies between us, the proverbial elephant in the room about whose HCG levels we do not speak. I can't face that. Instead of calling her or of going back to Simon's house and watching television, I take the train down to the Village to the little corner bookstore where Simon and I used to go before I moved uptown.

  I choose a Russian novel thick enough to bury myself in its pages. The upside of the loneliness of my life now is that I will no longer need to lie about having read the classics. I find a Modern Library edition of The Secret Garden for William and a Lyle book that I don't think he owns. Then I search out the parenting section.

  My mother's bookshelves groaned with well-thumbed volumes on stepparenting. Every time a new one was published she would rush to buy it, sure that this one would contain the keys to creating a relationship with Allison and Lucy. She read them hungrily, but no book ever told her how to make my sisters love her.

  I have never once bought a book on being a stepmother. I have refused, perversely. Now I pull them out, one after the other. There are so many.

  Step Lightly: Advice for the Stepmother; Step by Stepmotherhood; Stepmotherhood: How not to be wicked; even, humiliatingly, Warm and Wonderful Stepmothers of Famous People.

  I leaf through them one by one, trying to decide which is the best, which will give me the answers I seek. Then, impulsively, I pile them all in my arms.

  The sales clerk asks if I would like to have my purchases wrapped, and for a moment I can't decide. I don't know when I will give William his gifts, and I am afraid that the forced joviality of festive paper will make an occasion where none exists. But they have morphologically accurate dinosaur-themed wrapping paper that I know he will love. I tell the clerk to wrap just the copy of The Secret Garden. Then I head to a nearby café.

  I bring my coffee to a small table, take off my coat, and settle myself in for a comfortable read. The café is remarkably full for a Monday early afternoon. This place is blessedly devoid of the stroller-pushing crowd. Some of the denizens might be students, but most are merely as slothful as I. Don't any of these people have jobs? There are people clicking away on laptops, and newspaper readers, and one or two just sipping their coffee and staring dreamily into space. I reach into my bookstore bag, but instead of pulling out my self-assigned Russian novel, I choose Lovable Lyle to read. It's about a series of hate notes that Lyle receives and is a little grim, until the end where Lyle saves the day. I don't recall this installment in Lyle's saga from my childhood. I'm not sure that my father read me any Lyle books beyond the first one or two. I can remember quite clearly being read to by my father, how he would sit next to me, the book angled toward my bedside lamp. I remember the voices he adopted for different characters in different books. I don't remember when he stopped the bedtime stories, however. At some point I learned to read to myself and then that was that. Even though William is such a precocious reader, Jack still reads to him. They read reference books together, or a chapter of whatever novel William is reading. He is a lucky little boy.

  I put the book back in my bag and take out my Gogol. I am diligently leafing past the introduction when someone says, “Do you mind if I take this chair?”

  I look up. He is my age, I think. Early thirties, with a barely tamed head of tight curls and chestnut-colored skin.

  “Go ahead.”

  He lifts the chair easily with one long-fingered hand and glances down at my book.

  He says, “I had to read that in college. It's really funny. Bleak, but funny.”

  “Were you an English major?”

  He shakes his head. “No. I took a Russian literature class. What about you?”

  “What was my major?” I ask archly, raising my eyebrows. It takes me a moment to realize that I am flirting.

  He laughs. “Sure. And do you want to see my etchings?”

  I wonder for a moment what my future would be like if I made space at my café table for the man with the caramel-sweet eyes. Would I turn into someone else? Would my eyes then be able to skate over the women with the Bugaboo strollers, unmoved, unshattered by their presence because my life would be so full of other things? Would I suddenly stop missing Jack and Isabel and William?

  I glance down at the circle of hammered gold around the fourth finger of my left hand. The gaze of the handsome man holding the chair follows mine.

  “Enjoy your book,” he says.

  I nod, but put the Russian novel back in my bag. Instead I take out the stepmothering guides and pile them in a tall, rickety tower on my café table. My coffee grows cold and sour in its cup as I read. Every book writes about the stepmother's turmoil and stress. Every book describes the stepmother's mistaken expectations. Every book urges me to confront the truth of the complicated nature of the stepfamily's feelings. And I gobble them up. I read voraciously, just like my mother did when I was a child. I realize now that she read not for answers but for company. Those well-thumbed reference tomes were
her solace, not her salvation. These books cannot teach me how to be a better stepmother, but they can give me the tremendous consolation of knowing that I am not alone.

  My favorite book is the unlikely Warm and Wonderful Stepmothers of Famous People. This book is much more fun than one would expect, and worth the gymnastics required to hide its embarrassing title from my coffee-drinking neighbors. I particularly enjoy the story of the wretched little royal tart Elizabeth I, who slept with her pregnant stepmother's husband, when the woman had been so loyal and kind to her, and the story of John James Audubon, the illegitimate child of a sea captain and his mistress, who was raised by an indulgent and long-suffering stepmother. I like these self-abnegating stepmothers, even if they are a bit hyperbolic in their devotion. Self-abnegation is certainly a trait no one could accuse me of. I could use a good role model.

  Chapter 27

  On Thursday, after Simon has gone to work, I clean his immaculate apartment, vacuuming the gray carpet, straightening the gray pillows on the gray couch. For some reason I cannot bring myself to go pick up my jeans, and I wonder if it is because doing so will mean that I need these new clothes, that I have really left home and cannot return. I tell myself that I'm being foolish. If Jack and I were finished, wouldn't he pack my things and send them to me, making shopping for new clothes unnecessary? So new jeans, therefore, rather than symbolizing the permanence of our separation, are actually a sign of the possibility of reunion. Or maybe I don't want to pick them up because they are a size thirty-one waist and I cannot believe I still haven't gotten myself back into a twenty-nine.

  By early afternoon I have cleaned as much of the apartment as I can stand, reread two of the stepmothering guides, skimmed two chapters of my Russian novel, and am starving. The food in Simon's fridge is as gray as his furniture.

  I am halfway down the block to the Greek diner on the corner when I finally realize that today is the first Thursday of March. I stand in the middle of the block, indecisive. I am hungry and I have left my home and my marriage, but I made a promise. Finally, I take out my phone and scroll through the address book until I find Sonia's number. She answers right away, but there is so much noise in the background that I can barely hear her.