“Portia,” said Mark, “I need to tell you… she’s pregnant.”
Portia gaped at him. “Cressida?”
“What? Oh, my God, no. Helen. Helen is pregnant.”
“I know that,” said Portia, oddly proud of herself: an outsider with insider information. Then, in a violent, sickening moment, she understood what he was telling her. There was no whiff of smugness, no pride at all. There was no vestige of protection. He had tolerated their childlessness not only because he was not, in fact, childless himself, but because he had always held open that door—not widely enough for the both of them, but only as far as he could pass through, alone. And the car was… still… running.
Now she was the one who was sick. Her folded arms were pressed tightly against her abdomen, holding herself intact, and her head… it felt as if someone had taken it and shaken and shaken to empty out the blood, like a bottle with some sluggish, stubborn condiment still lurking at the bottom. What was left? She didn’t know whom she was sitting beside. She didn’t even know where she was.
“I can’t tell you,” he said, “how sorry I am. I didn’t plan this. I’m not sure I even wanted it.”
“But you want it now.” She was amazed to hear another voice. It sounded nothing like her own.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
She began to cry. This was a lousy development. It improved nothing. It set her back. For the longest time, she kept crying. To her amazement, he offered only a hand, vaguely patting her thigh, as comfort. After a while, she took hold of it and flung it away.
“You’ve done nothing wrong,” he told her. “I won’t make any trouble for you.”
“Trouble?” she screamed at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You can stay in the house as long as you need to. I mean, we’ll need to talk about everything, of course.”
She stared at him, blurry through her running eyes. She liked him this way, she found: indistinct, nullified. He was nearly handsome, melting into colors. Now, he wasn’t Mark, only this melting thing in the driver’s seat, and anyway, he was about to leave.
“I’ll go now,” he told her with infuriating kindness. “I don’t think I should go with you. I’m sure you agree.”
She didn’t agree to anything. On principle. But she said nothing.
“I just… ,” he faltered. “I can’t miss this, Portia. The first time, I made such a mistake. I can’t do it. I’m sorry I…”
What? she thought wildly. “Misled me? Lied to me? Cheated on me?”
Soberly, maddeningly, he nodded.
But I, she wanted to say, have cheated on you. Not that it was the same thing. Not that it was, remotely, the same thing. The same thing—that was the thing she had actually done and hidden away. If you only knew, she thought cruelly. But she wouldn’t squander it now. She wouldn’t cheapen it by telling him here, in this fetid running car. That was for another time or, more probably, never.
“We’ll talk,” he said. “But now, I think I should go back. I’ll move some things out. We’ll both take some time.”
“Speak for yourself,” Portia said unkindly. “I won’t need much time.”
He let her have this. He was being noble, apparently.
He unfastened his seat belt and opened the car. Chilly air slipped in.
Mark unfolded his long legs and stood on the pavement. He went to the trunk and opened it, removing a small bag, and slammed the trunk shut. An instant later, he opened her door.
“I know you can’t forgive me yet,” he said. “One day, I hope you will. But I have to do the right thing. I have to, Portia.”
“Like you had to fuck her,” she said caustically. “Nothing noble about that.”
He shrugged. He seemed to have tired of the conversation. “We’ll talk when you get back. We’ll be good to each other, I promise. I promise for myself, anyway. What you do is up to you.”
He straightened up. He was so high above her. He blocked the light.
“Tell Susannah I’m sorry,” he said. And he left her there.
When we approached the gate of Dachau, my grandfather stopped suddenly and broke down. He refused to go any farther, even though he and my father, sister and I had come all the way from Seattle to see the concentration camp. We stood looking at him, not sure of how to react. We understood what he was thinking and feeling, but we couldn’t really understand. He had been here before, when he was exactly the age I am now. There were no Princeton applications for him, though he was (and is) a brilliant mathematician, winner of a national award for mathematics (at least, until the Nazis rescinded his prize and gave it to the competition’s fourth highest scorer, and top scoring Aryan). There was no dreaming about his future, and what he might accomplish at university and beyond. There was only the terror of watching his family try and try and fail to get out of the country, first with their property intact, then with just their lives.
CHAPTER TEN
THE KNACK FOR ISOLATION
Don’t wake Caitlin,” Susannah said with some urgency. She was holding the door frame with one hand and pinching shut her heavy bathrobe with the other. She leaned out into the winter night, anxious and fretting, as Portia opened the car door. “Caitlin’s asleep upstairs,” Susannah said.
Portia was not processing very well. Coming down the long drive to the house, she had seen her mother through the living room window, her head with its long gray ponytail tipped forward as she read. She had seen the moment of awareness, the jerking of her mother’s torso, the snapping turn of her neck. Susannah had leapt from the couch at the sound of the car, scurrying into the kitchen and opening the door, frantic not to embrace, it seemed, but to quiet. Now, extracting herself from the car, Portia found herself unable to look at her mother directly but saw instead the house itself, moonlit in the clear, starry night, and the field behind it, and also moonlight on the field, blue and electric bright. Out in the field, prickles of cornstalks and brush came up, spiky through the crust of old snow, and slashes of ice reflected black in that blue light, a landscape from the moon itself, or Jack London. In that same instant, she felt the vastness of the night and her own smallness and inconsequentiality, which was oddly—in the circumstances—comforting. She felt, too, an abrupt, not readily fathomable urge to walk directly into that wild and limitless place, though the wedge of dull light from the kitchen nearly reached the spot where her car had come to rest, and framed her own mother, that ultimate symbol of attachment, implying every comfort there wasn’t in the snowy field. Without warning, a nimble cat darted for freedom past her mother’s legs, and Portia watched it as it took flight around the side of the house and off in the direction of the field. The cat was not known to her. Her mother always seemed to have a new cat, Portia thought.
“Go in,” she heard herself tell Susannah. “You’ll get cold. I’m coming.”
“Sh,” her mother said. “She’s sleeping.” Then, obligingly, she stepped back into the kitchen and closed the door, waiting on the other side and peering through the window.
Portia stood for a moment, feeling the numbing cold against her face. It was punishing cold, insidious cold, the cold that dragged your body across the line. She had always had a fascination with hypothermia, it occurred to her, returning briefly to Jack London and that famous story about how the man fought and fought the cold before slipping beneath its spell. It wasn’t the worst way to die, she thought, looking again at the field. Then, quite deliberately, she went to the trunk and opened it. The suitcase-shaped space where Mark’s bag had been seemed miraculously intact, hours and miles later, as if he had left an intangible placeholder in its position when he extracted his things. It wasn’t a large space. He hadn’t brought much for a ten-day visit. Had he known? she thought, as she had occasionally thought over those hours and miles just past; but now, as then, the thought was accompanied by a blare of sharpest pain. And now, like then, she pushed it roughly away.
The trunk was packed with gifts, food, clothing. Th
ere was the suitcase of folders from the office, too many to get through, probably, but enough for a perpetual excuse to absent herself. She reached for the duffel bag of her clothes and the shopping bag of food—loaves of cranberry bread she’d baked the day before, crates of satsumas, a foil-wrapped plum pudding from Bon Appetit. She had no idea what she was doing and only intermittent memories of the road.
“Where is Mark?” Susannah said when she came into the kitchen. She had lit the stove under her kettle and had the cupboard open, revealing her vast tea collection. With surprise, Portia noted that her mother had a box of Constant Comment in her hands.
“In Princeton,” she heard herself say. “He has… there’s this crisis. With a man named Gordon Sternberg.”
Susannah frowned. “But when is he coming? Is he coming?”
“I’m not sure,” Portia said. “It’s a very volatile situation. He keeps getting calls in the middle of the night and having to drive down to Philadelphia.”
“Philadelphia?”
Again, she was hit by a wave of incongruity. What was she talking about? For an instant, she had to retrace the conversation, frantically rolling up its fragile string. Why on earth was she talking about Gordon Sternberg? Why was she talking about Mark?
Setting down her suitcase and the shopping bag she’d taken in, Portia watched her mother fuss with the tea. She was wondering at herself, at how—in all these hours—she hadn’t once thought about what she’d say to Susannah, how she’d answer the obvious question. What had she done instead? How had she passed the grinding miles and minutes, her hands tight on the steering wheel, hunched stiffly forward and staring bleary-eyed at the road? Surely something had been accomplished, some deep thought or great problem untangled once and for all, but nothing came back, only a fuzziness and weariness.
Had she always intended to lie? She had lied to her mother for years, of course, though usually for far less consequential things: the Ms. subscription, a birthday gift, she had let lapse a decade earlier; the cardiologist she had promised (and failed) to see after an episode of palpitations. Lying was a well-established method of keeping Susannah away, though only one of several in her arsenal of separation: withholding of certain information, avoidance of particular hot-button issues, the expression of commonly held opinions on certain matters they could both get righteously indignant about (religious fanatics, beauty pageants, breast enlargement)—each of these was a useful means of furthering the campaign. But this particular lie had been unexpected, slipping into language without preamble and lingering afterward, like some malodorous thing. She had not intended to lead with a lie. Mark is in Princeton. Not technically an untruth, but not the truth. Mark has left me. Mark is with someone else. Mark is with a woman who is pregnant with the child he never told me he wanted. That, she thought grimly, was the inescapable, stare-you-in-the-face, invasive, pervasive, metastatic, and ultimately fatal truth.
“You didn’t have to wait up for me, Mom.”
“I had no idea when you’d get here.”
“Ah,” said Portia, though she was unsure of the connection.
“You must be tired. You must have left very late.”
Portia considered this. Then, to gather information, she looked at her watch. It was nearly two-thirty in the morning, a fact that took her completely by surprise. The drive from Princeton, after all, lasted about six and a half hours, and she and Mark had left at eleven that morning. For a moment, she tried to assemble the past hours, to shuffle them into order, but they seemed to resist her. There was the walk with Rachel, the place she had stopped in Brattleboro, mainly to use the bathroom, but there was food involved, too, not that she’d eaten it. A chain restaurant with a southwestern theme. (What was happening to Vermont? she had thought, reading the menu of “sizzlin’” things, choosing at random.) There had been some time there, sitting over her “sizzlin’” plate of something, feeling ill. And a margarita, it seemed to her, though that wasn’t like her at all, to drink when she was driving. But what about today was remotely like her? “Like her” was her job, and Mark, and her house on her street, and going for a walk with Rachel and the dog. “Like her” was the semiannual drive across Connecticut and up 91, past Brattleboro and Putney, and the final stretch to Hartland and her mother’s house. She concentrated now on that stretch of road: white moonlight on the highway with the river to her right, dull under a sheen of ice. She did remember driving that road, and the Vermont Welcome Center, and the sick, Blow Upon the Bruise way she had felt passing the sign for Keene, New Hampshire, and the big A-frame house near Rockingham that for years had had an enormous stuffed animal in the window but now did not. She remembered, farther back, passing the exits for Northfield and Deerfield and Springfield in Massachusetts, but strangely couldn’t say in which order they’d come. And, farther back again, to that horrible, elastic time on the street in Hartford, after Mark left, which was when her true grip on the day slipped through her fingers and was irrevocably lost. How long she had spent there, staring at the same Massachusetts plate on the same muddy green Ford Taurus on that miserable street, she had no idea at all.
It was like one of the made-for-TV movies of her youth, she thought grimly, sipping the tea Susannah had handed her. Sybil of the snows, driving their car—was it still “their” car? or had it instantly become her car when he left by the driver’s-side door?—along that straight and narrow road, with one of her capable alternate personalities at the wheel: the girl in the steel bubble, compromised by her lack of immunity, cut off from the world. Portia N., Portrait of a No Longer Teenage Alcoholic, downing a mango margarita with her “sizzlin’” something or other, and then, shamefully, getting behind the wheel of the car. Who knew what damage she might have done?
“I stopped,” she told Susannah. “For dinner. In Brattleboro.”
Her mother frowned. “But I was going to give you dinner.”
“Oh, I know, Mom. And it would have been much better than what I got. But you know how you can get so hungry, suddenly, that it actually becomes distracting? I was famished. I had to eat.”
“Okay,” said her mother.
“The food was awful,” she assured her.
“Would you like something now?”
Portia shook her head. She hadn’t, in fact, eaten much of her dinner and wasn’t hungry now. To be honest, food had become inherently unappealing. Hunger would be something else to fake while she was here. Another burden. Another outright lie.
How long can I keep this up? Portia thought. The ten days of her visit? To the end of the academic year? A calendar year? Could she keep it up forever, burdening mythical Mark, her partner, with grievous workloads and familial crises?
Oh, Mom, Mark had to fill in for the dean of faculty and address the Class of ’75.
Cressida’s graduating from high school, and he wanted to be there.
Can you believe it? He came down with strep! He’s in bed watching every episode of Six Feet Under for the third time.
She could draw Mark forward through an eventful, burgeoning career, pepper his health history with ailments, mine his parallel personal life for conjured experiences. Nothing too dramatic, of course. Nothing too real, like an affair, a pregnancy, a child. Twice a year she could come north to visit, laden with gifts and apologies from him. Susannah never came to Princeton, or hadn’t for five years, at least. And now, with this pregnant teenager and—Portia could hardly bear to think of this—the baby coming, her mother would be thoroughly distracted. Sipping her tea, she tuned in sporadically to Susannah’s monologue, which had pushed off from Portia’s own comment about hunger into wild tales of Caitlin and the food she consumed. Bags of oranges! Half a coconut cake! The girl was struggling with her fast-food addiction, despite Susannah’s own very thorough enumeration of the ecological, economical, and, yes, culinary sins of the entire industry. Susannah had found a McDonald’s wrapper in the car, the incriminating crunch of environmentally indefensible Styrofoam underfoot.
Ho
w long could I keep it going? Portia wondered idly. Six months, certainly. Possibly a year. If her mother remained this distracted, it could go further. It would be like a game, she decided. A bet with herself, the reward linked to the number of years, months, days, she managed to keep her mother in the dark. Bonus points if she found herself making excuses for Mark’s absence at Susannah’s deathbed. I’m so sorry, Mom. A freshman English major cut her wrists over the weekend. The whole campus is in lockdown.…
Here she stopped, stunned by her own callousness, her failure as a daughter, partner. Everything, really. She turned to her mother, really trying to focus now, full of contrition. She saw, as always, an echo of her own form in the shoulders and neck, the same hair, the same set jaw. Her mother’s legs had held up—she supposed that boded well for herself—but the skin of her hands and face, skin that had rejected sunblock as some form of artifice, no better than plastic surgery or any other means of subverting the actual appearance of age, was papery and speckled with brown. Portia had used sunblock for years, ever since the first magazine articles about what it could do. Was this what she had prevented? She noted Susannah’s steel gray ponytail down her back, white wisps of hair escaping around her face, and thought with some shame of the color she had begun to use, only in the last year or so, only when the gray at her temples began to colonize the rest of her head. (“This whole generation!” Susannah complained. “They’ve never seen a real vegetable. They don’t know what a carrot is supposed to taste like! It’s all processed meat and artificial flavors from some lab in New Jersey!”) There were lines—new lines? old lines?—around her mother’s mouth and eyes. Susannah had been for so long a local sage, matriarch to younger women, pillar of female wisdom, that her passage to real age was at once unremarkable and a jolt. But the solid, steel-haired woman across the table, waving her weathered hands over an earthenware mug of herbal tea, had plainly departed middle age. She was old, thought Portia. Pissed and old. And, oddly, looking only forward.
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