“I do see it all the time,” she says, turning back to her machine. “And mostly it still feels like a miracle.”
I smile at her white-coated back. But then I say, “Mostly?”
“Yeah, mostly.”
“You mean . . . that it’s hard when you can see something is wrong? Down’s, or something?”
She makes another measurement. “That is hard. Yeah, that’s hard. But it’s hard as well when they’re thirteen, and didn’t know it was gonna happen, and don’t know who the daddy is, or even that there had to be a daddy for it to happen. And some folks still say ignorance is bliss.”
She hands me paper towels, and switches tone. “You can clean the gel off with this and then get dressed. Everything looks normal, Miss Garland.”
I get in the lift, clutching a little windshield-wipe printout of my baby. There is a couple inside already—a black man with chunky dreadlocks, and a white girl with red hair and freckly skin. She looks to be a few months pregnant. They are holding hands.
I never say anything when I see that someone is pregnant—I am not sure that English people do, in general. Apart from the Victorian squeamishness about pregnancy (Good Lord, something rather sexual might have taken place fairly recently), there is the fear that the woman might just be fat. Or she might be fat and desperate to conceive, in which case you’ve randomly hurt her twice. Here, it is different. Everyone congratulates a pregnant woman. So I congratulate the girl.
She smiles, but looks embarrassed. The man smiles too, and rubs his other hand on her rounded tummy.
“Thanks,” he says, “but we had our baby two days ago.”
“Oh—well, then—more congratulations!” I say. I hope there isn’t another one in there that they’ve not noticed.
“It’s incredible,” he says suddenly, as the doors open onto the ground floor. “We’re going back to her now. We’ve been away from her fifteen minutes for my wife’s checkup, and it’s—crazy, we miss her like crazy.”
They hurry across the sunlit lobby, over to an older black woman who is holding a precious bundle. She hands the baby over to her son.
I walk back to my apartment.
At the deli downstairs, I stop and buy flowers.
“What are these pink berries called?” I ask.
“They are called Pink Berries,” says the Korean guy.
I buy them, and a bunch of yellow tulips.
It is frivolous, to spend money on flowers, but I want to celebrate seeing my baby for the first time. When I am hunting about in the kitchen for suitable jars to put the flowers in, my phone rings.
It is Mitchell. I have heard nothing from him since he walked out of my apartment. It rings again and again—I wonder if I should let it go to voice mail. But I can’t let that happen. I press “answer.”
“How are you?” he says. He doesn’t say he is Mitchell, he doesn’t check I am Esme. The flame flares up in me anew.
“I’m fine.” My first impulse is to tell him I have seen our baby. If the Koreans had spoken English well enough I would have told them. But Mitchell is the kind of person who assigns motive to speech, always. So I keep quiet.
He says he wants to take me to lunch and suggests the MOMA museum restaurant—the Modern. I have never been there and it is supposed to be lovely. I look over at my laptop; it is in hibernation mode. Would it be too strange to celebrate seeing the baby with the father, without telling him that I am celebrating?
I do not ask him why he wants to see me. He might be holding in fine balance whether he does or not; I don’t want to tip him into a rethink.
I say yes, I will meet him at MOMA.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When I arrive he is waiting outside, and looks very handsome. He is wearing one of those expensive suits that have an effortless fluidity to them. Two women going into the museum give him long looks, and their hips start to sway as they walk past him.
As he kisses me he says, “I’d forgotten that you always smell like roses. Or do you just smell like England? Roses and summer lawns.” He ushers me into the restaurant.
Ladies who lunch, in Chanel and pearls, are all around us. Everything has a high-modernist feel: white walls and beautiful angles, sunlight pouring through all the glass. I could almost believe, doing a doctorate on Thiebaud, that I belong amid all this excellence and elegance.
“It’s a great setting for a restaurant,” I say to Mitchell as the waiter brings us bread and water and we unfold the soft white napkins.
“I know,” says Mitchell. “I love that it has such a high ceiling.”
I look up. Air is all that is overhead, for a long way. The air has its own quality of piercing clarity, like Arctic air, with the moneyed voices of the women tinkling up into it. In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.
The waiter comes.
“The portobello mushroom salad with goat’s cheese is good,” says Mitchell. The waiter nods in corroboration.
“It sounds nice, but you have fresh pea soup,” I say, “and I am very partial to pea soup.”
This is not true; I have never had pea soup. But if I mention that I can’t have soft cheese because of the risk to the baby, we might tumble into a fight again. There are still long weeks stretching ahead where it would be legal to terminate. I don’t want another fight about it.
“Two pea soups,” says Mitchell to the waiter.
When we have had the soup and are eating our main courses, Mitchell is very, very nice to me. He lets me talk. I tell him funny stories about the bookshop, and about Stella and the photographs of the lesbian sex dungeon.
He is charming, and constantly refills my glass with San Pellegrino as if it is the best champagne. I keep sipping it out of nervousness, because I know Mitchell has some sort of objective. But he wants me to agree to a termination, and I can’t do that. So what is the point of this?
When the plates have been taken away, and he has ordered fresh figs and Manchego cheese with quince jelly, he takes my hand. It is a gesture that he sometimes makes, a gesture I adore.
“Please—” I say, pulling my hand a little. But this time he has chosen well; I am not going to make a scene here.
“Esme, I have something to say. I want you to think about it in terms of—of what’s best for everybody concerned. Of our happiness. The happiness of all of us, Esme.”
“I can’t do it, Mitchell, I am not going to—”
“I know, I know. It isn’t that.” He is holding my hand and stroking the back of it, his gaze intent upon it.
“I fought against this, Esme, as you must know. I fought like a caged lion. But it’s all been in vain—”
The waiter comes back, with a bowl of fresh figs and the other things. Mitchell waits, his fist knuckling his lips.
“Your figs, sir. And your quince jelly, and the Manchego.”
“Thanks,” says Mitchell. He looks up suddenly, into my eyes. There is a little gasp of delight from one of the women at the next table. I look at her to see what is the matter; she is looking pointedly at the basket of figs. There is a black velvety box nestled in among the fruit.
I stare at the box as if it is a tarantula. By now there is a little hubbub around us. I begin to shake my head, and a ripple of laughter goes around; maidenly modesty, they think, the bashful young girl. Mitchell holds up a presidential hand, to stop them from laughing or me from protesting. It works for both. He takes the box out of the figs and presents it to me. The waiter is still there. I do not look at him, but I feel as if he is smiling. I can feel smiles from all directions.
I open the box. The diamond glints at me. It is not in a normal setting—it is held in a kind of pincer grip in a gap on the ring. It elicits another gasp from my nearest neighbor and her friend.
Until this moment, I never understood why everyone makes so much fuss about diamonds. I used to make Jell-O with my mother, and hold the red cubes up to the light, and think that a chunk of that translucent red was always going to be prettier tha
n the glassiness of a diamond. I still think it. But I wasn’t taking into account all that a diamond means, all the meaning any diamond has already accumulated by the time it is presented like this. There is the shock of pride that somebody wants me this much, and a deeper shock, to think that I could rate myself that way, in pounds and pence, dollars and cents. Because I’m worth it. I am diminished by it. People are exclaiming about the diamond now, muttering, “Harry Winston.” I bow my head over it. For a second or two, nobody can see my face.
Marrying Mitchell, by almost any measure, would be a Very Bad Idea. He is as beautiful and cold and hard as the diamond in his ring. If I were watching this scene play out in a movie or in a book, I would be willing the heroine to say no with all my heart. Yes, he is the father of her child, yes, he is looking earnestly into her eyes, yes, he is, after all, doing the decent thing in proposing to her. But. But. But. His motive. Run away. Run away.
I want to stop him. I want to ask him real questions, and hear real answers. But we are center-stage here. I can’t. Or is it that this is my very dream, and hearing the real answers would wake me up?
“Esme Garland,” says Mitchell, well aware of all the listening ears, “will you do me the signal honor of becoming my wife?”
Our audience emits a collective sigh of happiness and then turns to me, radiating an expectant goodwill.
This audience is a just-off-Fifth-Avenue audience, one that is, moreover, lunching at the MOMA restaurant on a Wednesday. Is the goodwill entirely without nuance? Is there nobody here who came to think about her feminist interpretation of Emil Nolde, nobody here who has just finished a paper on the New Balance of Power in Sexual Politics? Nobody here who can save me?
Obviously, I need to do the saving myself. But just as Mitchell has all those van Leuven ghosts behind him, prompting him to do the respectable thing now that all other avenues are closed, so I have a gathering of English ghosts behind me. The English kind are not quite so sure of themselves as the Dutch pilgrim kind. My English ghosts think it is terrible to make a fuss, terrible to derail such a set piece, terrible to disappoint the ladies who lunch, who will go home to their husbands and call their daughters and say, “Such a delightful thing happened today when I was having lunch with Sibyl in the Modern” . . . I don’t seem to have any of the strain of backup that won Waterloo on the playing fields of Eton.
I am lying. I believe that, but it is not that.
There is fury that he can set me up like this, but I can’t, I simply can’t, bring that out in front of all these people. If I were French, I would perhaps hit him or throw the quince jelly at his head. If I were American I might be able to articulate my anger in a more reasoned way, oblivious to the audience—or say “fuck you” and storm out. That’s tempting—leaving him with his figs and his diamond ring. But I am so dreadfully English. In times of stress I become highly agreeable.
I ought not to be thinking about myself, anyway. I ought to be thinking not about how much Mitchell might love me or not love me, but about the baby. A baby ought to have a stable environment. I am sick of the phrase; it’s been dancing in my head and it was spoken out loud by Mitchell when he wanted me to terminate, and here it is again. Isn’t a loving environment much more important than a stable one? There is virtue in saying yes. Of course there is. He is my baby’s father. I have decided to have the baby; therefore I owe it to the baby to give it the best start in life. Doesn’t that mean I ought to at least try the old route—the two parents who love it, the economic stability—better than stability—prosperity? Not, for the sake of pride, to consign the pair of us to a walk-up studio and babysitters and to the worry about where the next twenty dollars will come from? The things we ought to do are more important than the things we want to do.
I am lying again. I believe that too, but it is not that.
“Esme,” says Mitchell, lifting my chin with his finger. “I want you to know—it isn’t just because of the baby.” (Our audience nearly faints. Not a single forkful of arugula has got any farther than it had two minutes ago.) “It’s because—for the first time in my life, the very first time, I’ve—” He opens his hands like Jesus when he gives the Sermon on the Mount. “I’ve fallen in love.”
The New York chorus responds as they have responded to the rest. Aren’t New Yorkers supposed to be cynical? People are taking out phones to photograph us.
Mitchell takes my hand again. “I was afraid,” he is saying. “I was afraid of loving you, of loving anyone. This is a big day for me.
“When I say I would be honored if you would be my wife, I mean it—from my heart. For you, for me, for the baby, for the sake of all that stuff you are forever babbling about—love and beauty and truth and all—please say yes. Please marry me.”
My eyes are full of tears. One gets very emotional when one’s hormones are swishing around one’s body like slops in a bucket.
“Don’t cry, honey! Just say yes!” An old lady in a black lamb’s-wool coat is nodding earnestly at me from a couple of tables away. After her the deluge.
They say I ought to, because of the baby. That “he’s trying to do the decent thing.” That we’re darling together. That I won’t regret it. That the diamond is from Harry Winston. I stare down at the ring that I do not care about, that I wish were red gelatin. It serves as a prop—I am an actor in this whether I like it or not. I look from the ring up to Mitchell. I want him to love me so much that I can’t work out where my desire ends and truth begins.
I have been so up, so down, so spun around by this mercurial man that I can’t remember what I was like before. I dimly remember a person who liked poems and pictures, a person who danced along in the happiness of paying attention, almost convinced of her freedom. This loving is greater than freedom.
“They will say it’s a shotgun wedding,” I say.
“They will say it’s a whirlwind romance,” he says. Then he gives me an arrested look. “ ‘Will say’? The future tense? Is that a yes?”
I smile. Our observers let out what, on the Upper West Side, would be a whoop.
“Yes?” repeats Mitchell, incredulous, making sure. He starts to laugh.
“Yes,” I say, laughing too, and nodding. “Yes.”
AS MITCHELL IS sliding the ring with erotic deliberation over my finger, the old lady in the black lamb’s-wool coat comes over to us. She has a small diary and a pen with her.
“What are your names?” she says. “I’ll keep a lookout for you in the Metro section.”
Mitchell grins at me. There is a complicity in his eyes now that makes my heart soar. I know I will regret this, I know that worthy heroines in Regency romances never say yes when there is any doubt as to the state of the hero’s heart, but I am made of flesh, not words. I want to be with Mitchell. If I am with him, I can make him see that I am worth loving. Perhaps it is the other way round, and he doesn’t see yet that he is worth loving too. I can make him see that. And if it all goes wrong, I will suffer, but the suffering won’t be for the strangled impulse, the unlit lamp. I will light the lamp and burn myself on the flame.
“This is Miss Esme Garland, and I am Mitchell van Leuven,” he says.
There is a kind of aftershock to this statement, and another whisper ripples round. A van Leuven.
The woman nods, as if she expected as much, and her old bejeweled fingers write it down painstakingly. She shuts the diary with a snap. “Then I guess you really will be in the Metro section.” She looks piercingly at Mitchell. “You did a good thing today.”
“I think so,” says Mitchell, with a well-timed glance of pride at his newly affianced bride, who is still reeling from the actual proposal, let alone the idea of announcements in the New York Times. Mitchell is good at playing to the crowd. When it is this sort of crowd, at any rate.
We accept the smiles and congratulations for a minute or two, and then, the nine-minute wonder over, people resume their own lunches and we are left alone.
“A fig?” says Mitchell, picking
one up. Its plump body is the color of claret, with a flash of pale green at the top and that dusting of powder all over it. I don’t know if that powder is a natural bloom, or if everyone dusts figs with icing sugar as a matter of course, to make them look prettier.
I say yes to the fig, since it does not seem polite in the circumstances to say no. As with figs, so with marriage proposals. Oh, but I want to, I want to. Why does he want to? Mitchell slices it, and adds some of the cheese and quince jelly. He hands me the plate.
“Mitchell,” I say, urgently.
“Not here, Esme,” he says quietly.
“It isn’t that. It’s—please will you order a glass of wine?”
He grimaces before he answers. This habit he has of first making gestures to illuminate what he is about to say ought perhaps to drive me insane, and indeed might, over a lifetime. But now it just increases the tenderness; it is a foible that I know and recognize, that somehow belongs to me.
“But you can’t drink,” he is saying.
“I can have a mouthful. Order a glass of wine—anything you like—and let me have a mouthful. Please please please.”
“No. It will harm—”
“It’s my body.”
“The baby’s ours. Are we really having this argument again? Really?”
“No. But one mouthful. In England, some people even say you can have one small glass a day. I am asking for one mouthful in nine months. Come on. I got engaged today.”
Mitchell holds himself still, tense, and then he relaxes. He signals to the waiter.
“One glass of champagne, please. Your best.”
The waiter smiles, but bends over Mitchell, and mutters to him. Mitchell holds up an understanding hand.
“Yes, of course. Just a second.” He leans over to the ladies at the next table. “Excuse me. I am ordering one glass of champagne for my wife-to-be and me to drink. The waiter says I would have to buy the whole bottle. I’m fine with that, but I’m not fine with it going to waste. Would you oblige us by having the rest?”
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