Sometime after midnight, the young mother of a baby boy beside us called home to Mexico. She told her own mother, in Spanish, a language I don’t speak but somehow understood, that she was scared. She suspected her son’s heart lacked confidence.
Beside this boy was an infant girl whose teenage parents had come by earlier in stained sweatshirts and stricken faces. They’d peered at their creation and quickly left. The little name card above the girl’s head remained blank. In her sleep, she held two fingers in the palm of her other hand, already practicing the art of self-comfort. My girl’s name card was also blank. In countries with high infant mortality rates people often delay naming their children. In Nepal it is customary to wait until “Janku,” or first rice, when the baby is about six months old. It had only been two days, but already my family and friends were pushing.
“Just decide,” Suzi said. “This is starting to get weird.”
3
On the final approach to JFK, not yet visibly pregnant, I tried to cry discreetly, so as not to alarm my fellow passengers. I was flying toward Brian, without any assurance that he wanted a future with me or the baby. I wasn’t even sure if he would be at the airport to pick me up. Outside the clouds were puffed into a layered, edible meringue of lilac and indigo. I knew I should be stunned by this much beauty; I should stop crying and say thank you. But I didn’t. Everyone in California, most especially Suzi, told me to stop crying, “You’re flooding the baby with stress hormones.” Sorry, baby.
At JFK, I trudged through the crowd, sticky, pudgy, sick at heart, looking for Brian’s blue shirt. He was there, amid the throngs, a cool spot of color, of calm. I wanted to run to him, but I stood still and waited for him to notice me.
We decided we’d drive straight out to the Hamptons to meet with our chic French therapist, who was at her summer house but willing to see us anyway.
She opened the door before we knocked. “Bon, you found us,” she said in the accent that made everything sound vaguely philosophical. “After such a long drive, you’d like a glass of wine?”
On the one hand, how very European and unuptight of her, red wine for the baby! Or maybe she did not acknowledge the existence of a baby at all, at such an early stage.
In her office she listened to us sum up our positions. Brian wanted to be with me but did not want to be a father. He felt fatherhood wasn’t something that should be forced onto another person. He wasn’t asking me to terminate the pregnancy, but he was clear that he would not, or could not, be the partner I hoped for. As much as I wanted to be with Brian, I was incredibly hurt that he would reject something (someone) he’d tacitly helped create. The therapist sat quietly for a while and then turned to me: “Heather, you are living in an illusion. You must wake up from your dream. Brian does not want what you want.” What I wanted most, at that moment, was to smash one of her tasteful ceramic objets d’art over her sleek French head.
I stood up. “Time to go,” I said. “Time’s up!” I wanted to add, Fuck off and go back to France. This is the land of opportunity! The land of figure-it-out!
Brian and the chic French therapist stared at me. Neither stood. I stayed standing. Finally, Brian wrote a check; maybe I did too? We were splitting everything. We made it out onto her groomed gravel driveway and into the car.
We drove to the ocean, sat together on a log.
“Do you think this is an illusion?” I said.
“I think we’ve both seen what we wanted to,” Brian said, and pulled me down onto his lap.
Between us, inside me, was an apple seed of differentiating cells. It was amazing how someone so small could cause such colossal disruption.
“What should we do?” I said.
“I love you,” he said. “That is as much as I know.”
He began to cry. I had this shock; he felt as abandoned as I did. My choice was making it impossible, from his point of view, for us to continue to be together.
His choice, from my point of view, was the worst choice of all time. I understood his dilemma on a cognitive level, sort of, but on a gut level I just kept thinking, If two people are in love, and one of them is pregnant, show me the problem! Point to it! There is no problem.
We drove back to Manhattan in silence, each of us leaning into our wound. All the way up the West Side Highway, the river ran beside us, an unperturbed ribbon of greenish silver. The tension in the car was so thick I wanted to jump out and swim uptown. In Brian’s neighborhood we found a place and parked. It was dark; I was starving and nauseated. Brian looked haggard, bleary, and generally undone. I felt I could sleep for months, sleep through the whole pregnancy and just wake up to the baby. Maybe that would do it. If Brian could see the baby, he’d want the baby.
“Do you want to come up?” Brian said.
“What do you mean by that?” I said. It was an old joke of ours, answer a question with a question.
“Just come up,” he said.
I went up. We ordered food from our favorite Mexican place, took a shower together, and lay down on his futon, named the General for the way it dominated his tiny studio.
The next day we ate and walked and watched some TV. We did not talk about the baby. We avoided the future. All the while, the cells I housed continued multiplying. They were turning into things, tiny, barely visible things, but things.
For two weeks we walked this high wire. We were happy, almost. We had a present of breakfasts and afternoon strolls and writing in the same room. Every day was a clown act, starring us as clowns.
When we gathered enough courage to talk about the baby, Brian’s answer was always the same: he couldn’t see a way to live life as a father.
“You live it like this,” I said, patting a space between us on the General, “only with a baby next to you. It’s not like you have to become a whole new person. You just scoot over.”
But scooting wasn’t his strong suit. If a fellow diner knocked into his chair on the way to the bathroom, Brian would startle, scowl. Not out of annoyance with his fellow humans, but because his own borders were so porous that space was sacrosanct. I liked to compare him to Rilke, who couldn’t even live with a dog because the dog’s moods, its sorrows and triumphs, affected Rilke too radically. I had found this a charming image of Brian until I remembered how Rilke didn’t live with his wife or raise his children.