It couldn’t be talked away, couldn’t be handled in therapy (which Ned, in any case, would never have gone in for). It was as solid as a dining room table. His coldness toward me I might have tolerated for Lena’s sake, had he been any vague semblance of a father, but his dismissal of her got more and more unbearable. I had the devotional urgency of new mothers and couldn’t help feeling that a baby was a standing debt, a debt to a forming soul.
His lack of paternal feeling was unsurprising, in the end, since he’d never promised anything else. And it was true I’d forced him into parenthood by having Lena instead of getting a D&C as he wanted me to. I’d told myself that when the baby was born he’d come around a bit. I never expected him to be a candidate for Father of the Year, but maybe, I hoped, part of a circle would be described, a slow curve into warmth. Surely a real, living child would thaw his chill. It was what happened, I believed.
Now I’m not sure where I got that belief—maybe from a TV movie. I committed a cardinal error of women, by which I mean an error to which women in particular seem prone: the error of expecting someone else to change toward them, to grow into alignment. I expected love, change, and alignment from Ned, and all these expectations were baseless. The category of children was as alien to him as if he himself had sprung fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. His own dim trailer park childhood had ceased to exist after he emerged from it—in his mind, despite the odds, nearly a perfect man.
It didn’t help that around that time he was nurturing his budding interest in politics. He wasn’t a candidate yet, he wouldn’t be for a while, but he was angling, forging careful alliances. Though he’d never professed religious faith, he started attending church “for the connections.” He gathered new opinions around him like sacks he was hefting—sacks that bulged ominously, misshapen sacks full of hidden, gross things. Tired catchphrases would spring from his conversation in passing: “No handouts for welfare mothers,” say, but also, a fetus was sacred.
It was hard not to take his remarks personally when they concerned, as they often did, categories such as motherhood or women. But at the same time the remarks felt like objects to me—prefabricated items he had purchased quickly in a store, items he was busily stuffing into his shopping cart without close scrutiny.
“BURKE’S BUYING DRINKS for everyone,” said Kay, twisting in her chair to talk to me from the next table. “It’s his birthday. We only have beer or wine, but Don’s serving a pretty good Shiraz.”
I accepted the pour of wine into my glass and raised it; we toasted Burke, Gabe saying something I didn’t catch about rare hothouse flowers (Burke is a horticulturist). There was a rowdy crowd from town that night, some large-bodied, friendly-looking women out celebrating a remission; one of them had a tumor that had responded well to treatment. Everyone drank on Burke’s dime and I embraced once again the sentimental illusions offered by wine—what was wrong with them, after all? I’d clearly been hasty.
“You know what they say about horticulture, right?” Gabe was saying, still on his long-winded toast. “Dorothy put it best: ‘Well, you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.’ ”
I watched Burke laugh and raise his glass; I recalled a half-joke the voice had told. Have you heard the one about the Buddhist fly? It was a lovely iridescent fly, ran the riff, that flew through a room buzzing I am one with the universe, I am one with the universe. The fly felt the descending peace of its enlightenment, the liberating lift of air beneath its gossamer body. How beautiful it was! How beautiful the very air! How blessed was its flight!
The swatter fell.
You were not one with the universe, my friend, said the voice. But now you are.
But Don was serving a good Shiraz. In its flow I decided Lena and I should go see my family, we should sit at the table with them and be thankful for what we had. I recalled our dusty old centerpiece of orange-and-red silk leaves and decrepit Indian corn, which my mother always trots out with an enthusiasm that borders on the poignant.
I HAVEN’T FILED for divorce and custody yet, though I could and probably should—partly because I know it would hurt Ned’s career and therefore anger him, partly because it also presents complications for me, since I removed our child from him without a written agreement.
It took me years to leave, years of deciding and planning—far longer than it had taken me to get married in the first place—and by the time I was ready it was past Lena’s fourth birthday. I should have divorced him before we left, when he had no legal leverage over me. I don’t know why I didn’t—ineptitude. I must still have been spellbound, and I didn’t know how serious his politics would get, I didn’t anticipate a fight. I expected a quiet, long-distance divorce about which he would be indifferent, as he was about me, as long as he got to keep a lot of money.