“I know.”
“What are you going to do?” she asks, and raises it up again at me. Click click click.
I want to tell her about the clinic, that I’ve got the appointment. I try to heave the words to my mouth, but they won’t come.
“Everyone always says they ‘take pictures’ or ‘get some shots’ or ‘capture images,’ ” I say (although to be fair I have never heard anyone in real life say they are going out to capture some images). “Have you noticed that? The verbs are all about acquisition. But cameras don’t really work like that. Cameras are receptive—they are just holes that let in light. But because men use them more than women, we get different words, words that don’t go with what happens. Imagine if men went about saying, ‘Hey, I’m just going to grab my camera because I want to receive some photos.’ ”
“They’d hang up their cameras,” says Stella. She has let hers fall to her side. Then she grins. “Or, they would think about hanging them up, but the words aren’t as important as the action”—she puts her hand again at the base of the lens and lifts it up with a wicked smile—“and the action’s not as important as the shape. If cameras were vagina shaped, it would be a different story.”
This makes me laugh, but she is still looking at me. She knows what I am doing.
“You must need time,” she says. “Give yourself some time.”
“I think that’s the thing I don’t want,” I say. “It isn’t as if things don’t happen when you take time. It doesn’t all stop while you think.”
“No,” says Stella, raising her camera again. “But the important thing is that you stop while you think.”
“I wouldn’t stop. I would change. I would get attached.”
“That’s the risk. But the other risk is that if you run at it, you will do something that you’ll regret.”
“Gosh, really? I wonder what that feels like.”
“I know, honey. I’m sorry.”
I turn away from her, and from the camera, and fiddle with an odd little wire thing she’s got on a table; it has four tiny cards hanging on it, the four suits. The red diamond is at the front.
“Do you know something?” Stella says suddenly. “You’re actually living. I’m not. This is living, Esme.”
“I’ve just called the clinic to make the appointment,” I say.
There is a silence. Then a click. She has taken a picture of my back.
“I’ve thought about it,” I say to the table, “and it’s the only real choice.”
I look round at her. “I want to take your picture,” I say. “You should see your face.”
“When are you going?” she asks.
“Wednesday. They had a cancellation.”
She says nothing.
“The coffee is burning,” I say.
She leaps to the stove, throwing the camera on a beanbag. “Okay,” she says. “It’s not burning. It’s just done. Wednesday. What does Mitchell say? Is he the father?”
“Is he the father?”
She grins. “You never know—you might have met a decent guy in the last few weeks.”
She does not have a high opinion of Mitchell. He first met her when he came with me to meet a bunch of Columbia people at a bar in August, and said to her—to rile her, to flirt with her?—that she was gay because she hadn’t met the right man yet. She stared straight at him and said, “I don’t like dicks,” and that was the end of a wonderful relationship.
“I haven’t,” I say. “Mitchell—though—everything is over with Mitchell. I was going to tell him; I thought he had a right to know. But when I met him, I didn’t have the chance to tell him before he dumped me. He said that he liked me, but that the sex wasn’t all that great. So I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t see the point except to abase myself.”
Stella opens her hands, to show that everything I am doing is obvious and obviously wrong. “You get pregnant, you are about to tell Mitchell—why are you about to tell him? Because he might be delighted? Because he might put you on his white charger and ride off up Madison Avenue with you? But what he actually does is dump you without knowing about it—and the next thing you do is call the clinic? Stay still for a second, and think about what you want, from this point. Not because of what has happened, but because of how you want the future to look. You have to have time to see it and feel it. You have to stop, and you have to look.”
“I am stopping, and I am looking,” I say.
“Okay. But really stop, really look. We all spend so much time reacting—”
I shrug again. “Of course. Things happen, and we react.”
“Mitchell being an asshole and Mitchell being the father of your baby are two different things. And another different thing is that you are pregnant.”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen. It was one time. I don’t want to change my whole life because of some guy’s—whim.”
“Yes, but that’s what I mean, that’s a reaction to Mitchell. You need to react to the pregnancy.”
“Stella, are you a secret pro-lifer?”
“You are not listening; I am talking about choice. I am talking about choice in the most profound way. Be still. Be quiet. And then decide.”
“I am not sure that there is a choice, or that there are ever choices. Everything that has happened leads up to the next thing. It can look like a choice, but the way we fall is always determined by what went before. So we can’t choose.”
Stella is shaking her head. “Someone says that about photographs—about how the circumstances that lead to the shutter clicking mean that the photograph is a sum of all the events before it. But I don’t believe it—it sounds great, it’s really top-notch philosophical bullshit. But you do have a choice.”
“Yes,” I say.
She nods, and stands for a moment, considering me. “If you want to know, I think the whole business of this, all the guilt that you’re suddenly in the middle of, is, is . . .” She gives me a rueful smile, and then, with her head at a cutesy angle, says, in a singsong voice, “A bourgeois social construct, imposed on us by men and internalized by us in the worst way.”
I am quiet. The thick blue line isn’t a bourgeois social construct.
“Aristotle didn’t have a problem with abortion,” she says.
“Oh, well, good. That’s a comfort,” I say. There’s no point asking how she knows this. Americans have all these classes that mean they just know odd things, so engineers know about William Blake and poets know about analytical geometry. She probably took one on Aristotle and the politics of gender.
“He thought it took time for the soul to get into the body.”
“Well, if he’s right, all the more reason to take the cancellation,” I say. I say “cancellation” on purpose, to brutalize myself.
Stella’s shoulders suddenly go down. She walks to me, and puts her hand on my arm. “I’ll go with you,” she says. “I will.”
I feel hot quick tears come, and try to stop them. “Are you going to bring your camera?” I say.
She looks how I feel. “I’ll restrain myself,” she says.
She strides away back to the counter, and pours the strong black coffee into her round white mugs. As she brings one to me, she says, “This does not happen when you’re a lesbian.”
“It’s definitely a plus in the lesbian column,” I say.
“What does your mother say?” she asks.
The reluctance to tell them is visceral. To inflict such disappointment. One of the lures of traveling down this road is that that telephone call never needs to happen. I watch as the cat settles himself comfortably on a beanbag strewn with underwear. “Earl’s glad you’re back,” I say.
Stella just regards me over her coffee cup.
THE NEXT DAY, after I’ve had breakfast, I flip open my laptop and start to work on my paper. I can’t concentrate. If I have the baby, I won’t be able to concentrate for the next eighteen years.
I keep trying, and manage some workmanlike stuff that doesn
’t require inspiration, and then I check my phone, check my e-mail, go on Facebook. I read other people’s posts, make jaunty comments, flitter away the time, profane the time.
Bryan Gonzales, another art history student, calls me and invites me to a party at Columbia tonight. I say I can’t at such short notice. “Ah, come on, Esme. Bradley Brinkman is coming, and you all go weak at the knees for him.”
I refuse again, tell him I am tired, tell him I will come to the get-together at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Sunday instead. If I am going to do this, then I can at least pay some sort of respect, treat this with all due seriousness.
I lie in the dark. The rain is falling; I can hear the ebb and flow of tires on the wet tarmac, swooshing up dark spray. Through the blinds, blue ambulance lights flash on my ceiling from time to time, and car headlights arc by, ceaselessly repeated. Somewhere near, someone is playing a solo on a trumpet, making it sound more wistful than I thought a trumpet could ever sound, and I hear the notes dying, each one, on the air, like sparks from a fire fading into the dark.
The tiredness is real, but I do not sleep, cannot sleep. For hour after hour I keep vigil with the bunch of cells, the mourner and the executioner.
Sometime in the darkest part of the night, I notice that the trumpet has long been silent. There is nothing to indicate the time, no church clock chiming the hour, no early birdsong as advent to the dawn. I have been lying here the whole night long and it has been different from any other time in my life when I have been still and quiet and alone. I know why. It is because I am not alone.
I have been thinking about a lot of things—about what matters, what seems to matter, what doesn’t matter at all. About God, too. I don’t know if he’s a he, a being with eyes to see us, ears to hear us, tears to weep for us. Or, if he can hear us, whether he can help us. I don’t know—we none of us know—if he is there, or if he was there once, and then got tired and walked away, so that we were left alone. But whether there is a God or not makes no difference to me. I have been doing my own creating, and I don’t believe I have enough of a reason to get tired and walk away. There are many, many reasons, good reasons, to terminate a pregnancy. But that my PhD at Columbia might be a bit trickier now is not one of them. Nor is the intolerable hurt that for this baby’s father there was no hot night for its making.
With the New York dawn chorus of clanking crates from delivery vans, I reach for my phone, call the clinic, and leave a message on their voice mail canceling the appointment. I finally turn my head on the pillow to sleep.
WHEN I TELL Stella, she flings her arms around me and says that keeping the baby is cool, cool, cool. Then she says, “Hey, I’ll be your birth partner if you want. Like a doula or something?”
“What’s that? What would you do?”
She shrugs. “I dunno. I guess I would yell ‘Push’ or ‘Pull’ or something. But really, it’s great. And now, Esme?”
“What?”
“Call your mother.”
I still have no desire at all to tell my parents about the baby. When I was first offered the scholarship to Columbia they were perturbed—in part because of 9/11, in part because it is in New York City and I am their only child. What nameless dangers might await me? They could think of a few with names, but I don’t think pregnancy was one of them. I am too sensible for that to happen.
As New York hasn’t been a target since 2001, I researched the statistics in order to convince them I could come here and not get into trouble. It’s more dangerous to cross the road in London, you’re more likely to choke on a mint than become a victim of al-Qaeda, and so on. My father makes mathematical instruments for a living; if you present the right data, it calms him down. My mother is still nervous, but not because of al-Qaeda. I know that despite their visit, she is still afraid of gangs loitering on the brownstone steps from Sesame Street, who might surround me and take my money or my virtue.
And so I don’t want to tell them yet about the baby, about how soon they are going to be grandparents and how there was, after all, trouble waiting. I need to get used to it myself first. The thought of my mother swooping in, imploring me to come home on the next flight, ready to enclose me in her ordered world—I will phone tomorrow. Or the next day.
In the afternoon, I go to the student welfare center at Columbia. They are surprisingly helpful. They do not seem to judge me as an idiot who doesn’t know how to use birth control. They say that sure, I can stay in that apartment for now, because I won’t be having the baby until the next academic year. And I can put my name down for accommodation for families. A mother and a baby; we will count as a family. It will just cost more, is all. She pushes the accommodation list at me, with the prices.
It will cost a lot more.
I ask if there are any jobs going, provided by the university. No, there are none available right now. The teaching jobs are like stardust; they and all the little extra ones are snapped up by those in the know before the semester starts. I can sign up to be told when new ones come, but they are usually grabbed before they get to the e-mail stage.
I sign up anyway.
I am on a student visa, and I am not supposed to work—except in those little, well-regulated Columbia jobs. But I am going to need a lot of extra money for the baby. More in rent. Nappies, a pushchair, baby milk. Other things that cannot be dreamed of in my philosophy. I do some research online. Nappies—diapers—cost a thousand dollars a year. A pushchair is at least $200. A cot is another $100, minimum. Apparently I need a baby bath, a bouncy seat, a breast pump, a high chair, a changing station, a Diaper Genie, a sterilizer, breast pads, a sheepskin rug. I don’t know what half these things are. A sheepskin rug? Is that for the photographs?
I call a few places about waitressing; it is all tips, no salary, and they want people with experience. And, presumably, people who don’t panic when they have to divide twenty-four by four. I don’t mention that I am pregnant, of course, but that too wouldn’t go down so well. I go over to my window, look out on my beloved Broadway. I have a few friends who might be able to help a little, here and there. But not old friends, and not family. When you need help, extended, selfless help, you need your family, the family I don’t want to call because I can’t bear to ask for my mother’s selfless extended help. I want to do it myself. It is going to be so difficult, financially and in terms of time. Am I being absurdly stubborn about having everything—New York, the PhD, the baby? If I am going to keep it, I might have to go home.
In the next couple of weeks, I realize that that “if” is entirely rhetorical. There is no question at all, anymore, about whether I am going to keep it. Day by day, hour by hour, it becomes more precious to me. If it carries on at this rate, when it is born I will be mad with love.
I am walking down Broadway again. To think about Mitchell is still painful—the image is always of him having particularly lustful sex with some voluptuous beauty—so I am not thinking about him. Much. Except that I look for his face in every face, and when I think that I see him amid the surge of people on the pavement, my blood electrifies with desire and misery, and turns to dishwater again when it is not him. But the hankering will wear off more quickly if I do not indulge it. It wears off for everyone in the end, after all. Except A. E. Housman.
As I walk, I see every color, every form, every fall of light. It is like a Fairfield Porter watercolor, such bright sun and such shadows, and such radiance. I think that it is too beautiful to leave if I can possibly help it.
If I have to leave, it will only be because I don’t have enough money. So I should think of a way to get some. Waitressing is out, teaching via Columbia is out—but in New York, there must be a million ways to make money.
A dog walker with a pack of hounds surging around him walks past. How much per dog per hour? That guy could be on hundreds of dollars a day. But the drawbacks are obvious and manifold.
I try to think of other jobs; managing hedge funds pays well, according to the papers, but I don’t know what a hed
ge fund is. I could think of a fantastic Facebook or phone app that would take the world by storm—except I can’t think of any at all, and I don’t even see why people ever liked Angry Birds. Then I remember that I am only allowed to work in Columbia-sanctioned jobs. I am stuck. I could borrow from my parents, but I hate that idea. I must be able to make something work myself.
On the thought, I reach The Owl. I stand still. It has a lopsided “Help Wanted” sign in the window, a grimy one, written in marker pen. It was not there last time I came past. Signs and wonders.
I push the door open, and step inside. Luke is there, as he was last time, although it is ten A.M. There is music playing. He nods hello.
“You’re here a lot in the mornings,” I say. “I thought you were the night manager.”
“Yeah, I just opened up for George this morning; he had a book call. He’s back, he’s just in the john.”
“Right,” I say. I am embarrassed by the word “john.” Can’t help it. It is a word that makes it into a male toilet.
George reappears, and smiles vaguely at me. He looks at Luke.
“You thinking of pricing those cookbooks?”
“Nope,” says Luke. He is getting up. “I just came to open up for you, George. I’m not staying. If I do, I’ll miss Little House on the Prairie.”
Luke has a light stubble, is wearing a bandana, a red T-shirt, and a pair of Lucky jeans. He does not look at all like he’s going home to watch Little House on the Prairie.
“You’re joking,” I say. He looks surprised.
“I don’t know which episode it is. But I’m assuming Laura will do something wrong, see the error of her ways, and go on to help the whole town of Walnut Grove learn a valuable moral lesson just in time to sing in church on Sunday.”
“Luke,” says George, “this is a shock. Are you trying to tell us something?”
“Yeah. This is my way of outing myself. I’ll see you.”
When he has gone, George says to the ambient air, “Maybe it’s me, but the older I get, the stranger everyone else seems to become.” He notices that I haven’t gone to browse the shelves, and says, “Can I help you with anything?”
The Bookstore Page 6
