The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  They laughed at something on the news and she watched them, a visitor now to her own life, unable to comprehend how she would return to this, to takeout containers and television, work clothes and suede couches.

  Adam passed her his iPhone so she could see the list of apartments he wanted them to look at, and she clicked through slideshows of little rooms in deep Brooklyn, recoiled at how quickly her mind could return to its old concerns, how small the apartments were, how crummy compared to Ji Sun’s. She was the greed she was against, she always would be. There was no way to live in the world without being both, but she still believed she could be better. Her eggs smelled sulfurous now, the burned crust of the bagel toxic. Every room she could imagine would be too small, any place where she wasn’t nestled among other people who would walk out of their lives and say it wasn’t right, it could not continue.

  She didn’t want to grow small because everyone said they’d aimed too big. If Banks Are Too Big to Fail, Are People Too Small to Matter? This question was painted on a huge sign in the park, had been made a headline in some British newspapers. She wouldn’t shrink. She shrugged off the snug cocoon of her blanket, placed Adam’s phone face down on the coffee table. She opened her laptop, began to write.

  Chapter 38

  Alice, hunched and hungry, no longer needed to type more than a single letter into her web browser. She typed B and Babyhub.com populated, propelled her to the latest TTC board she’d visited. She typed F and her browser went not just to Facebook, but to backslash Marit Håkansson, the profile page of Kushi’s former girlfriend.

  Marit, to whom Kushi had been briefly engaged, was from an island in Sweden where everyone was six foot something and stunning. Kushi told mordantly funny stories about his visits there, how Vikings would worry whether he’d be okay to go outside in the cold, how they asked if he knew every South Asian person they’d ever met on their travels. The one time he did run into another South Asian man, at a café, they’d actually embraced, just for the relief of it. Now we’ll never be able to convince them we don’t all know one another, Kushi said to his new friend, who laughed still harder and asked, Should we tell them we’re long-lost brothers?

  Marit had gone to the Olympic trials twice for pole vaulting, just missing a spot both times. The second loss contributed to their breakup, as Kushi said her bitterness consumed her. She fixated on the pole vaulter whose spot she considered hers to a degree that Kushi found pretty close to pathological, spending all of what little time they had together, with his resident’s schedule, and her training, cataloguing her teammate’s failings, not just as a pole vaulter, but as a person.

  “And this was from what I could see, and what she told me,” he’d said, widening his eyes. “Who can say what she was up to when I wasn’t around.”

  Who can say, Alice thought, and wondered whether she needed even type F, or if her computer could read her mind, knew she was wondering about Marit, had a feeling. She’d followed Marit obsessively since she had announced her pregnancy two years ago, just as Kushi and Alice had begun trying in earnest to conceive. Alice had watched Marit’s belly grow in the “Bump Updates!!” album that Marit curated, starting at eighteen weeks, even the imperceptible increments in those early weeks a taunt to Alice, who back then still believed she might catch up, become pregnant while Marit still was, have a baby born the same year.

  “They look like twins,” Kushi had said, when Alice showed him the photo set announcing their pregnancy, taken on the porch of a ski lodge. “Egh.”

  “They look like . . . goddesses. Like fertility gods.” The whole portrait had a golden glow to it, the light off her long blond hair, the sparkle of snow in the background.

  “I think they are contractually bound to ski one weekend a month,” Kushi said, and closed Alice’s laptop. “Can you imagine it? Skiing is the worst.” Kushi had a populist’s opposition to any sport that required more gear than athleticism, and when he’d visited with Marit, he’d insisted on cross-country skiing at this same resort to avoid paying for a lift ticket. Alice had marveled at his stubbornness and also sympathized a bit with Marit having to deal with it, back before Marit had gotten pregnant and, uterus full, vacated Alice’s capacity to feel sympathy for her.

  But Alice wondered if Kushi ever thought of what his baby with Marit would look like, imagined his face into her husband’s place when Alice insisted on showing him one of the photos, as she couldn’t help but do maybe once for every twenty times she wanted to.

  This morning, before she could even make out the details of the photo, she knew something was up. Most of Marit’s latest photos were of Livia, her toddler, and sometimes herself. But in this photograph the whole family appeared, Marit holding hands with her husband, and Livia with one chubby hand on her mother’s belly, rounded so slightly it might be mistaken for poor posture, but there was the caption, “We are endlessly excited to share the news that our little family is growing—in a big way. We are 11 Weeks Pregnant with TWINS!”

  Twins! Alice thought if Marit was only pregnant again, and on track to have two under two, she would be aggrieved but not obsessed. She didn’t consider the logistical and sleep-related nightmares, the madness of three very small children, the toll on Marit’s body, bank account, sanity, or marriage, all things that people alluded to or mentioned outright in their comments, populating in a frenzy right before Alice’s eyes. Instead, she thought of Marit’s womb, this overgrown and fecund place, and of her husband’s sperm, absent any mysterious motility issues, how the two of them just coupled and created. There needed to be some verb just for this, for fucking when you felt like it and finding that your bodies had made another baby, still more babies, whoomp, an extra! A spare, Alice thought, as uncharitable as she was now toward all fetuses that weren’t growing in her own uterus.

  At the start of her third year of med school, before her brain saw pregnancy everywhere, Alice had been the first to notice a patient was pregnant. The patient was fifteen, had come in to Urgent Care presenting with persistent stomach pain. Her mother in the room with her, one tentative hand on her daughter’s shoulder, as though she wanted to provide comfort but hadn’t been granted permission.

  The nurse had already drawn blood and said that the patient wanted to be seen with her mother, didn’t mention a pregnancy. Alice had seen the girl in the hall earlier, wearing an oversized Patriots sweatshirt, its pocket stretched around what to Alice looked first like a smuggled football and then, undeniably, a pregnant belly. Later, in her hospital gown and striped socks, the girl rested her hand at the top of the slope, which was more angular than most bumps, but still so clearly a pregnant belly that Alice blurted out, “Have you had a pregnancy test?” before even asking about the date of her last menstrual period.

  “No,” the girl said.

  “She can’t be,” her mother said.

  They both dismissed it so easily, as though the question did not apply. Denial was so powerful; Alice knew. But this far along—before she left, they estimated she was thirty weeks—what did she think when she felt movement inside her body? Alice searched the girl’s face for some sign that she knew, at least suspected, but she found only fear.

  Alice had been startled by her attending’s surprise.

  “Good catch,” she’d said, as though Alice had caught some rare disease. “Cryptic pregnancy. It’s not as uncommon as you might think.” She went back with Alice into the patient’s room, confirmed the pregnancy.

  The patient burst into tears. “I’m just so relieved it’s not a tumor,” she said, wiping her face with the back of her hands.

  Her mother appeared so stricken that Alice worried she might say something about a tumor being easier. A tumor, once removed, wouldn’t go on to stun you with a secret pregnancy before it was old enough to drive.

  “I didn’t—when did you have sex?” the girl’s mother finally said, after a silence so long Alice worried it might swall
ow the room.

  “I only did it once! One time!” She’d sobbed then, and her chubby cheeks, red and wet, made her look even younger, then younger still when she let her mother take her in her arms.

  Alice thought of this girl now, as she tried not to memorize the comments beneath Marit’s post, wondered what had happened to her, to her baby. Had the girl stayed in high school? Was she with the boy who’d gotten her pregnant? Were they all living together with the baby’s grandmother in a triple-decker in Jamaica Plain? Alice imagined briefly the Lifetime movie version of this story, where she tracked this patient down, found that she’d been waiting to give Alice her baby all along. The baby would be a toddler by now, but in the movie playing in her head, the girl hands Alice a newborn, swaddled in soft muslin, gives her a sage nod as if to say, You’ve been a mother all along.

  One time. Alice thought, the first time! To have sex once and become pregnant. No wonder the girl had not been able to believe. How powerful, the mind, to refuse to see what was growing there, to see anything else—a football-shaped tumor! But how weak and worthless that it didn’t work the other way, that the force of will, of desperate wishing, couldn’t make a baby grow where a body was barren, where there were none.

  She wrote CONGRATULATIONS!!! under Marit’s photograph, thought to add something more but couldn’t find any words in her brain that weren’t painful. She closed her laptop gently, hurt by it, and in a strange way afraid of it, what it might show her next, and all that it already knew.

  Chapter 39

  Seven of them crowded together around a table at an Indian restaurant that Lainey loved, gaudy and greasy, forgettable food but indelible décor: a cacophony of rainbow fairy lights, strung on every inch of wall year-round, neon and novelty, blinking rainbow and bleating white, warm but frenzied, blurring together to give the small room a pulsing glow. It felt to Lainey like being in the bright guts of a cartoon, and this, plus the fact that it was BYOB, made it one of her favorite spots to get drunk.

  It was the first time they’d all been together, in person, since Connecticut, and Adam had arranged the dinner to celebrate the publication of Lainey’s Op-Ed in The New York Times, but said in his email that, hey, they might as well raise a glass to his greatest accomplishment, too, which had been marrying Lainey, his warrior bride, activist empress, protestor home from the front lines, her name up in lights now in the old Gray Lady. Reading his email, she’d been embarrassed by how corny he was, and also by how much she loved it. She felt this way again now, as Adam raised his glass, and said, “To Lainey! May she move us all to be better, do more.”

  Alice, Ji Sun, Margaret, Mac, and Kushi all clinked their glasses, cheered, held eye contact with one another in the way Margaret always insisted they do, to stave off bad luck.

  Lainey’s Op-Ed had been given the title “After Occupy Wall Street,” but the whole piece was devoted to illustrating the ways in which Occupy wasn’t over, in which it had only begun, how authorities could kick them out of Zuccotti Park, but couldn’t boot them out of the whole world, there was too much connectivity, their roots electrified by the internet in a way that past activists hadn’t been able to even imagine. The web of lights encircling her made her think of those roots now, and of the friends for whom Occupy wasn’t even over in its outdoor iteration, who would attempt to reoccupy the park again in the new year, and again on the anniversary of the protests, some again even after that. Others would reallocate their activist energies in New York, fight stop-and-frisk, lead SlutWalks, move to new church basements and cook for hundreds after Hurricane Sandy. Some would join political campaigns, go to law school, form intentional-living communities. Some left the country to find themselves and some went back to the jobs they’d walked out of when it felt as though they would never return, that they were on the brink of a whole new paradigm, a notion that felt poignant in its naïveté to those who slid back into their cubicles, wondered within weeks whether their time in tents had been a dream. And some, like Lainey, would pursue this polished version of professional activism, byline gleaming in publications across the globe, often enough that it became ordinary, but never failed to thrill her, face back on the news, expert in this new kind of activism that straddled the internet and the real world, expert on this new kind of human that straddled those two worlds, too.

  “Isn’t it funny to toast to this? I mean, you work there.” Lainey was exhilarated, but wanted to find some way to seem, to be, modest. It was vulgar to think of her involvement in this extraordinary movement as a line on her résumé, to capitalize on her anticapitalist stance! But still, she believed in what she’d written, and had the feeling, the certainty, that she, too, was at the beginning rather than the end of something.

  “It’s not the same, this is your byline, Laine. It’s huge! Look at this freaking glorious illustration of your beautiful face!” He held up the Opinion section of the paper, which he’d been carrying around all day, and Lainey laughed and blushed so deeply that even the maroon riot of light couldn’t disguise her pride.

  “Oh, do that again, hold up the paper!” Margaret said. “I want to get a picture. The light in here is so luscious. Takes ten years off our faces!”

  “Not to get everyone drunk before dinner, but I also wanted to toast to something else.” Adam pulled another bottle of wine out of his messenger bag. “If they ever come back around with the corkscrew. We found a place!”

  Their friends clapped and shouted.

  “Yeah, so cheers to never seeing you Manhattanites again.” Lainey laughed. “Our last supper!”

  “We’ll drink to that,” Kushi said, though his and Alice’s apartment in Fort Greene was near a bookshop, cute restaurants, and a reliable train, while the place Adam and Lainey had found was next to a Subway sandwich shop, and a U-Store-It. Adam was trying to get Lainey excited about commuting by bike, as he did.

  Margaret lifted her phone to take more photographs, and her nails, freshly lacquered, caught the light. Lainey watched as Margaret fondled her new iPhone, an eighth guest at the table. It wore a rubber case, and there was a circle around the Apple icon, just a porthole view at the brand, no other function.

  “There’s a hole in your case,” Lainey said. Drinking wine and champagne at once made her happy and mean, and she was feeling it faster since she’d been sober for three months, save the contact high from so much pot in the park.

  “What? Where?” She followed Lainey’s gaze, turned her phone over. “Oh, ha-ha.”

  “Seriously, what is the point of that. Does it not compromise the structural integrity of the case? Isn’t the whole purpose of a case to keep the phone covered?”

  Margaret turned her phone over and over in her left hand, thumbed the case lightly.

  “I just got it. It’s pretty.”

  The others laughed, but Lainey was stuck now, felt an urge to reach into the latex lip of that hole and tear it off.

  “But why the hole. What is the point of that? Everybody knows it’s an iPhone! Why do we need this additional advertisement? We know by the shape, the sounds it makes—for chrissakes, we can see the icons reflected in your eyeballs.”

  “Are you done?” Margaret asked. “Do you need me to be here for this rant?”

  “It’s not a rant! Does it not bother you? Why would you choose that case?”

  The others piped up now, but Lainey ignored them, heard Mac say, “Girls, girls, no need to fight,” and resisted the urge to kick him under the table.

  “It’s peach! It’s pretty. I like it, gosh. Actually, it was a gift.”

  “Oh, right, for the blog,” Lainey said, dragging blog into a long ugly worm of a word. She rolled her eyes.

  “Why are you being so mean to me? Did you forget how to have a meal at a table?”

  Lainey laughed, both delighted and stung. “Fuck you,” she said it playfully, but no one could tell she’d tried to shift course.

&
nbsp; “Fuck you! You think you’re the first person ever to, like, discover that capitalism harms people. Wow. Thanks for the insight, let me get on Twitter and let some other people know.”

  “Whoa, whoa, what is happening?” Kushi said, arms out like a referee.

  “I need some air,” Lainey said, and grabbed her coat.

  Adam stood, but Ji Sun stopped him. “Let me,” she said.

  Outside, Lainey cried a little, but she wasn’t sad. She felt oddly proud of Margaret for having been mean to her, and frustrated at herself for being so petty. There were Christmas lights on the buildings, too, but they looked anemic now. Leaving the restaurant was the reverse of leaving a matinee, after adjusting to such bright light, she couldn’t believe the sky could be so dark, other lights so impotent. Margaret was right that she’d forgotten how to behave, a raccoon from the forest in for dinner, used to scraps. She didn’t want to fight this idea. She felt feral.

  “I’m such an asshole,” Lainey said, glad to see Ji Sun and not Adam, who would tell her she was wrong.

  “You are,” Ji Sun said, zipping up her leather jacket, the knockoff version of which Lainey wore. She moved close to Lainey, bumped her hip with her own. “Why didn’t you tell me you were moving out?”

  “We’ve been talking about it for a hundred years! I thought you’d be glad to finally be rid of me.”

  “No, but that you found a place. That you were really doing it.” There was always some toehold for Ji Sun, not just in not having to let go of the idea of Adam—of course they wouldn’t be together, even if he and Lainey split—but against this inexorable march toward coupledom, domesticity, an expression of their lives in some version of their final forms, a closing of the door on some possibility that the four would ever live together in the way that they once had. She had believed Lainey, of all of them, might lead the way in some different direction. But here Ji Sun was again, the only one at dinner who hadn’t brought a husband.