Accidentally on Purpose

by Mary F. Pols

  That first night, I lit the candle and put my clothes away in the cubbyholes and cupboards over the bed. It was tidy and efficient. Like a boat, I kept telling myself. A land boat. Meanwhile, the cats prowled all 165 square feet of the place, then settled in front of the stove. There was a crack at the bottom, and they seemed fixated on it. I got down on my knees two or three times to see what was entrancing them but couldn’t see anything. I turned to McGee. “Whatever it is, I’m counting on you to catch it,” I said, kissing his gray head. He ignored me, green eyes trained on some treasure I dearly hoped would stay hidden.

  A FEW WEEKS BEFORE, the baby had begun to move. Those little flutters still startled me. He seemed to stir more at night, when I was lying down, as if he were trying to get comfortable too. I ended up wedged in between both cats in the bed; with so few other perching options in the trailer, they’d taken up posts on either side of my legs. They wore indignant expressions all the time now, like passengers on a plane that’s been rerouted or forced to circle over its destination.

  “Hello, baby,” I said on the third evening in our new home. “Are you going to settle down in there?”

  I knew you were supposed to talk to your baby, so he’d know your voice. It’s hard not to feel as though you’re striking up a conversation with a stranger on an elevator, though. Maybe he’d prefer to be left alone so he could get back to sleep. What did he know in there of the uprooting his mother had just done, of this crazy way station we’d arrived at?

  He. I was getting used to it. I wasn’t quite ready to call him Dolan; it seemed presumptuous.

  “I’m sorry I cried when I found out you were a boy,” I said.

  The day before, my friend Karen had asked how I was adjusting to the idea of a son. All along she’d been a strong lobbyist for a boy, probably because she had a very nice teenaged son.

  “Didn’t you ever want a boy?” she’d said. Her tone was wistful, as if she were sad on behalf of the whole sex I was rejecting. “They’re so affectionate, so nice to their mothers. Sean is so sweet to me. And they’re easy.”

  “No, I really didn’t,” I said. “I just wanted a girl.”

  But lying there in the dark with one hand on my belly and the other stroking McGee, I remembered how I used to look at a photograph of a boy with curly dark hair, thinking, Yes please, I’d like one just like that.

  It was an old passport picture, belonging to a man named Michel. I don’t know why he kept that photo taped to his refrigerator door, himself aged five or six, but I’d stare into it hungrily, imagining our little boy looking just like that.

  Michel was from Argentina. I met him when we were both working for the Los Angeles Times in a suburban bureau so far from downtown that the people who worked there clung together for companionship. I’d taken the job not long after graduate school. Michel had been in the States for years, first for college, then working in Silicon Valley as a software engineer. He was starting a new career, and he was sweetly eager about it. When he didn’t know what he was doing, he got flustered and cute, grateful for help. There was something safe and nonthreatening about him, a lack of aggression that made half the office assume he was gay. I thought he might be, too, but I found myself hoping he was just sensitive. I started inviting him to things.

  “Hey, Michel,” I said, taking a slight detour on my way back from the printer, a detour that led me right by his desk. “It’s my birthday next week and I think we’re going to have a margarita party on the beach. If you want to come.”

  “Really?” he said. He had such a nice, open face. A beaky nose. Green eyes. Curly dark hair, cut close to his head. “My birthday is coming up too. When’s yours?”

  “The seventeenth,” I said. “When is yours?”

  This wasn’t an idle question.

  “The twenty-fourth,” he said. “Exactly a week after yours.”

  “Oh,” I said. Oh no. I stood there looking at him. He was still smiling at me, not in an I’m-going-to-hit-on-you way, but with sweet sincerity.

  “That’s my ex-boyfriend’s birthday,” I said. Good Lord. Was I cursed? That was Peter’s birthday. But not just him. “And my other ex-boyfriend, too. Although he was less significant.” I was digging myself deeper. I might as well divulge everything. “And my college boyfriend, the one I was with for almost five years. His birthday is the day after yours.”

  “Wow,” he said, laughing now. “That’s pretty weird.”

  “I think I better uninvite you to my margarita party,” I said. “I think maybe I should never speak to you again. I have some issues. Not to be neurotic. Although I guess that is neurotic.” I was wishing I’d sent my document to the printer in the other corner of the office.

  “What if I bring some really good tequila?” he said. “Would I be welcome then?”

  We were friends for a couple of months before anything happened. I was determined that he was going to have to make the first move, in part because I genuinely feared the birthday hex, but also because I’d just been burned by my most recent boyfriend and I wanted to make sure Michel was both interested and available. One night, after we’d spent the day together hiking up near Santa Barbara, and the evening lying on the floor of his living room, drinking port, I pushed up onto my elbows and said it was time for me to go. He leaned over and kissed me. “You think you can lie there on my floor looking so beautiful and then say you are leaving?” he asked. “I think you should stay.”

  The high tide came rushing in, and I thought this time it might stay. He was a steadying influence, respectful and gentle. He took me rock climbing and I trusted his belay completely. He fed me pap-padums warmed on his gas stove and made me rethink my previous objections to Indian food. I held him when he cried about the breakup of his parents’ long marriage. He played the piano for me and showed me how to end a fight with laughter rather than tears. I found the French erotica under his bed and thumbed through it, wondering at his secret desires, the ones I wanted to understand. If I felt that I was more passionate about the relationship than he was, I dismissed it as being a fluke of personality; I was about the heart and he was about the head, but this struck me as a good combination. I wanted us to be together.

  He’d had plenty of girlfriends. I probed about the last one. Why did they break up?

  “It seems as though you were really into her,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I liked her a lot. But I think she was a little too into my package.”

  “Your package?” I said, puzzled.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You mean this?” I said, reaching over to demonstrate.

  He laughed. I loved the way he snorted when he was taken over by mirth. Peter had never had much of a sense of humor. Peter hadn’t thought I was funny at all.

  “No, no, no,” he said, still laughing, and waving his hands to indicate there was nothing anatomical about this package. “You know, the package of who I was: Jewish, Stanford, rock climber, pianist, software designer.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see. So she was shallow.”

  I was instantly struck with guilt. I liked his package, too. When you read the Vows pages in the New York Times, it always seemed as though couples brought résumés to a relationship. I liked Michel’s. I approved of it. It looked nice next to mine. Diversity, then confluence in journalism. Was there something wrong with that?

  We had talked vaguely of the future. His ambitions were very clear. He wanted to move back to the Bay Area, and get a job covering Silicon Valley for one of the big newspapers. I wanted to get back to the Bay Area too, although the job prospects weren’t as good for me as they were for him. Every newspaper recruiter was hungry for tech writers.

  When he found a job there first and relocated, we tried breaking up. He wasn’t ready for a bigger commitment, and I told him I didn’t think a halfhearted long-distance relationship was worth maintaining. Then I drove up to visit, on the pretense of seeing other friends. We’d just have lunch or dinner or something, I said
, casually. He said I should come see his new apartment. After lunch, he played the piano for me. I stood leaning against the doorjamb, with my head on it, watching his hands.

  “That’s beautiful,” I said. I was trying not to cry.

  He got up, putting the lid down over the keys, and came toward me. He was careful that way, always paying attention to details. Neatness was important to him. Once, when we talked about living together, he’d said he was concerned that I was too messy. But on this day, he wasn’t finding fault. He started kissing me. He undressed me in his living room, going down on his knees in front of me, pulling me down in front of the piano.

  A few weeks later, on another weekend trip, we went to the beach. While we were lying in the warm sand, he told me I’d have to move up to San Francisco if we were going to make anything work. Even an ultimatum sounded good to me. I told him I’d start looking for a new job right away.

  “It’s not as if I don’t want to be back here myself,” I said.

  He nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “I don’t want you to move here just for me.”

  I filed the equivocation away in my head and closed my eyes to enjoy the warmth of the sun. We’d work things out. I just had to get a job.

  Later, when we went back to his apartment, I took a shower to get rid of the sand. Then I grabbed a green towel from the hook on the back of the door. I was wearing it when I stepped into his bedroom.

  “So if I get a job up here, do you think we’ll live together?” I asked. I was combing my hair.

  He looked up at me and put his face in his hands in horror. “Oh no, the towel,” he said.

  “What?” I said. “Is it dirty?”

  “It was just cleaned,” he said.

  “You wanted me to use a dirty one?” I said. I’d gone to college with three smallish striped towels, hand-me-downs from the family linen closet. For years, that was all I had, and I imagined that someday, when I was a real grown-up, I’d have a closet filled with stacks of fluffy towels, dried in a dryer, not hung out on a clothesline to get stiff and hard, the way ours always were at home. At thirty-one, as I was on that day with Michel, I still had the towels my mother had given me, but I also had at least a semblance of a real linen closet. One thing I was never stingy about was towels for guests.

  “It was for my father,” Michel said. “He’s coming this week. I want him to have a fresh towel.”

  I felt stung, and went back into the bathroom to get dressed. I hung up the towel on the back of the door again.

  “When it dries it’s going to be pretty close to fresh,” I told him.

  “No,” he said, clearly annoyed. “I’ll have to go back to the Laundromat tomorrow.”

  The signs of trouble in a relationship can be so small that you feel idiotic recounting them to friends. “It’s not that he isn’t generous,” I had told one friend after that weekend visit. “I think he’s just not that generous toward me. In spirit that is.” An incident involving a clean towel seemed insignificant on its own. But when I thought about the time I’d said to Michel, “Are you going to be okay with me wanting a dog someday?” and he’d responded, “I’d allow a dog if the children wanted one,” the towel started to seem like part of a larger problem.

  A few weeks later I called Michel to tell him I had an interview at a paper in the Bay Area and it looked promising. It would be only a lateral career move for me, but I was willing to do it. Michel reminded me he didn’t want me to move for him. I pressed, and before I knew it, he was telling me he didn’t see a future for us.

  It was the lowest tide. I went into the bathroom and sat down on the floor to cry. In times of deep misery, I always end up crouched in the corner of a bathroom. I think this may be because as children, we were always told by my father, in the midst of whatever tantrum we were throwing, that we should go into the bathroom, wash our faces, and come out smiling. This meant I spent a great deal of time in my formative years gazing at my sobbing self in the mirror, marveling at the infeasibility of that puffy red face ever producing a smile again. Perhaps then, as an adult, I was just reverting. Or maybe the sheer messiness of the tear deluge called for proximity to absorbent materials and drains. Anyway, for nearly two hours that day, I stayed on the cold tile, wondering what I could have done differently, or better, that would have made Michel want to keep me in his life. I went for the interview anyway, got the job, took it, moved myself up to Oakland—choosing my apartment in part because Michel said he liked the breakfast place on my prospective block more than any other brunch spot in the whole Bay Area—and waited for him to change his mind. Once I’d made it easy for him, once he no longer chafed at the obligation, he would come back around, just as he had on the lovely day when he played the piano for me in his apartment. Only he never did. My hope evaporated so slowly that I caught traces of it in myself for years to come, like perfume trapped in the folds of a sweater you rarely wear.

  I wiped the tears off my face. Thinking about Michel had sent me into self-pitying mode. Something stirred outside the trailer. Probably deer, I thought, sitting up to peek out the window. As soon as I lay back down, the baby fluttered again. I rolled onto my side. Instead of talking to him, this time, I tried to just think in his direction. I’m so sorry, little man, I said. It’s awful of me to have wanted the son of one man but to have had such a wretched attitude about the son of another. Whether I approved or disapproved of the man, whether I liked or disliked his package, this little boy would be mine, mine to love.

  AS DAVID BYRNE SAID, “This is not my beautiful life.” Nor was the trailer my beautiful house.

  “So you’ve only been peeing in there, right?” Kir asked. She was bent over, looking at the underside of the trailer.

  My temporary residence had some plumbing issues. It also had some heating issues, involving the gas hookup. The stove was not working either, which might have had something to do with the rat carcass. But the plumbing issue was the most pressing.

  Kir was preparing to unhook a piece of tubing from the trailer. But there were two, and neither was marked. We knew one was the intake and one the outtake, and the distinction would be a critical one.

  “I think so,” I said, standing at a careful distance. It was early morning. Kir had walked down from the house in her busy-mom costume, Adidas slides, yoga pants, and a rain jacket. I have often heard people debating whether Kir looks more like Jackie Kennedy or Julia Roberts. Both comparisons are fair, but hard to hold against her. For one thing, she never acts as though she thinks she looks that good, and for another, she’s charmingly spastic. During graduate school she once spent an entire morning with a pair of old underwear hanging out the leg of the pants she had grabbed from the hamper.

  The wastewater tank was covered in a layer of autumn leaves. Inside it, something very bad seemed to be happening, because there was hideous upheaval when I tried to flush the toilet. Sam, who knew about the inner workings of the Airstream, was in Korea on business.

  The dogs, Whidbey and Goose, were running cheerful circles around the trailer. Their favorite pastime these days was harassing my cats by standing on their hind paws to bark into the trailer’s narrow windows.

  As Kir grabbed one of the valves I thought back to a day when we’d driven over Mt. Tam to Stinson Beach together in her tiny yellow Opel—this was in graduate school, long before kids or minivans—and I’d noticed that as we sped down the side of the mountain she seemed quieter than usual and intensely focused on shifting gears. As we roared up to the stop sign at the bottom, she’d yanked up the emergency brake. I’d given her a quizzical look, and she revealed that the brakes had gone out temporarily. Downshifting had kept her in control. The fact that she could keep this information to herself, remain calm, and pilot us safely down the mountain had instilled in me great confidence that Kir could get me out of most messes.

  “I hope this is the right one,” she said. “I think it is.”

  She carefully disconnected the tube.

  I’d
like to think I wasn’t responsible for everything that came out of that tube, but the alternative is that whatever composed that torrid combination of fluids and solids had been in there for two years. Whatever it was, I watched it flow over Kir’s bare feet with a combination of guilt and a desire to be far far away, throwing up in some very clean toilet bowl in a home with indoor plumbing. I’d been so optimistic and cheery about making this work, and I needed it to be all right, since I had nowhere else to go. But my heart had been sinking and my energy ebbing since I moved in. I was not myself; I was a creature carrying another creature, and I needed some creature comforts.

  Kir quickly swapped the tubes and stopped the flow, holding everything as far away from herself as she possibly could. She looked up at me, grimly.

  “Now you know how much I love you,” she said.

  KIR WAS THE FIRST of my friends in the Bay Area to have children, and thus my first experience with losing a friend to motherhood. Not that she wasn’t still there, and not that I didn’t adore her children. But things had changed. Whereas once we’d spoken on the phone for an hour several times a week, now her answering machine was always on, and she no longer picked up midway through a message. Her priorities had shifted, and I felt rejected and insignificant. And she was just the first friend to go down that path; the rest fell like dominos, until my most active friendships were with my few remaining single friends; and my boss, Karen, whose kids were teenagers; and Liza, of course, who was headed toward being single again.