He was not a person who called himself a writer but was actually an architect or a pastry chef. He was a writer, who wrote. Reading and writing were his air and water. Every day. For hours. A novelist. A published, award-winning novelist. A self-doubting, slow-working, often frustrated novelist, but a serious artist. Writing was at the core of his existence, and everything else fell into place around that central fact.
Even when he wasn’t writing, he was writing, inventing, trying things out. Once, when I asked him to tell me the story of his name, he reported that instead of Brian his parents almost named him Barrel after a Hungarian relative, a glue maker and war hero, who died by falling, face-first and drunk, into a barrel of glue. He told me this very solemnly, and I was relieved that he had not been named Barrel. It might have changed the course of his life. Would we have met? When I asked his mother about her cousin Barrel who had tragically, ironically, drowned in a barrel, she laughed and laughed. “For such an honest guy,” she said, “Brian is the world’s biggest liar.”
He had his books, his Joe Louis postage stamp, his habits, his broccoli, his blue shirts, his cabal of imaginary friends, his never-ending mental arguments with Noam Chomsky. He had his uninterrupted days and nights at the keyboard. He had solitary writer written all over him. And, as much as he enjoyed being with me, he obviously didn’t want kids or a family. Writing was the sun around which the rest of his life orbited, including me. So how long could this last?
If we went on, if he allowed me into the inner courtyard, then what? I was afraid I’d have the perverse urge to blow things up, disturb and disrupt, the way you want to toss your hat from the top level of the Guggenheim into the tiny reflecting pool below.
*
The first few weeks of my pregnancy, oblivious to my condition, I dashed into every Starbucks I saw. I couldn’t understand this sudden compulsion—I’d never been a coffee person. Not even close. In fact, I’d once presented myself to the NYU medical center with heart palpitations after eating a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans. The doctor asked, “Have you had a lot of coffee today?” I was indignant: “I don’t drink coffee.” Then I remembered, but didn’t confess. Just slunk away in shame, the only woman in New York City who couldn’t hold her caffeine.
I ordered lattes, macchiatos, cappuccinos, any foamed formula with espresso. I was puzzled but compliant, caffeine’s willing handmaiden. The more sophisticated drinks lent me, I hoped, a certain chic. I loved their Italian names, the long vowels. Holding a perfectly frothed macchiato was tantamount, in my book, to wearing a blue cashmere wrap. And then I began to wonder; a little seed of doubt presented itself. Why was I craving coffee? Why was I craving milk? Why was I craving?
I happened to be in California, visiting my family. Our local drugstore was a ten-minute tromp through a wooded park, a trek I’d taken a thousand times for candy, makeup, or magazines. I went straight to the feminine hygiene aisle, a place I was once loath to be seen loitering, and bought four pregnancy kits of various brands, all promising speed and accuracy.
You are supposed to pee on the stick at a certain time of day, under particular conditions. (Reading the directions, I kept hearing the slogan from a radio show I’d liked as a kid, “It’s Science!”) But I couldn’t wait for science. I just pulled out a stick and tried not to pee on my hand. I put the plastic cap back on and waited. One minute, two. A faint line began to appear, just the dimmest purple dash across one display window, and then another line, crossing the first, forming a lavender plus sign. Plus one. Oh God. Oh God’s God.
I ripped open another package and forced myself to pee on that. And another and then the last. They all had dashes and checks or hazy blue lines. I couldn’t believe these little sticks. They were unanimous, unwilling to negotiate.
I found my running shoes, laced them up. I’d walk up the hill. By the time I got back, maybe the pregnancy would have run its course.
Next to my shoes was one of Brian’s, a black Converse sneaker. He’d just spent two weeks with me in California, meeting my family, laughing with my college friends. We’d driven up the coast together, along Highway 1, traveling from LA to Marin County, passing through Big Sur, the most beautiful place on the planet, where we’d pulled the car off the road onto a secluded apron of land above the ocean, just to kiss. We’d spent the whole two weeks in a bubble of our own invention.
I’d taken the fact that he left a sneaker behind as a good omen, his tangible wish to still be here. I picked it up on my way out. I puffed up the hill toward the fire trails, assimilating the news, clutching his sneaker. At the top of the hill was a long narrow ridge lined by giant eucalyptus trees, with an animate presence. Two sentinel rows of stolid, immovable elders who had offered me sanctuary since I was ten. The trees had delicate scythe-shaped leaves and trunks with silvery outer layers that peeled away from a pink undercoat. As a kid, I liked to rub my check against the silky inner bark, or crush the leaves in my palm; the smell cleared my head, straightened my gait. Not now.
What on God’s green earth was I going to do? Or we. Since it takes two people to set a baby in motion, it seemed fair that those same two should have a say in whether or not the baby comes to fruition. But I didn’t have that capacity for democracy. I’d told Brian all along: if I get pregnant, I will have the baby. I was willing to stand in the rain with a dripping placard for the right of women to choose (though I’d never done anything remotely so noble), but I didn’t experience it as a choice. I wanted to be a mother and he was a man I loved. He might opt out, fairly or unfairly, I might hate him for that, fairly or unfairly, but the baby was a foregone conclusion.
As I walked home, the hills soaked up the dusk, turning blue-black. Then, slowly, they lit up, house by house, like a night sky. Each pinprick of light was a family. Was I technically now a family too? I housed a cluster of cells, dividing at a breakneck pace. I was, at the very least, a party of two.
I walked home swinging Brian’s sneaker by its laces. A few feet shy of our driveway, I must have loosened my grip. Brian’s shoe flew up and away from me, in a high arc, and landed in a bramble of blackberry. I forced my arm into the dense thicket; inside the soil was moist and yielding under my fingertips as I traced methodical, concentric circles where the shoe should be. But I found only a velvety scattering of decayed berries and something spherical and slick, maybe a dog toy. I started to push in deeper, then stopped and drew my arm back. I was suddenly afraid of being bitten by a creature whose solitary home I’d invaded.
*
After what felt like hours, the blond doctor arrived back in the room, upbeat, followed by a nurse carrying my baby. She was awake. When I took her into my arms, her eyes moved slowly from my face, to the nurse’s face, back to mine. “Good news,” the doctor said. “She’s out of immediate danger. We’ve avoided the exchange transfusion for now. However, we may still need to transfuse her with red cells. We’re admitting you.”
Which part of this was the good news?