Chapter Twenty-Five The Opposite of a Scare
Twenty-Five
The Opposite of a Scare
The day after the fight, Paul and I made up. He said that jealousy was just part of an open marriage and something we had to push through. He said I could see David as much as I wanted to and do whatever I wanted as long as he could too, and as long as Paul and I kept making each other the priority.
And so David and I met up at a book conference. Every second I did not have to appear on panels, we spent in bed at the hotel. I cared about nothing else but being close to him. We made out and cried and read to each other and couldn’t stop talking.
The last night, David said after sex, “ That seems like how a life gets created.”
“Why does that make me happy?” I said. “Maybe it’s the idea of trapping you.”
“Oh, I’m already trapped,” he said as he drifted off to sleep. “I’ve been trapped for a long time.”
The next morning, we woke up at dawn to be awake together for an hour before he had to catch a flight back to make it to campus in time to teach his class.
We sat in silence on the couch, and I looked past him at the lights on a factory as we decided, once again, that this was too powerful, and that if we didn’t get it under control it would end my marriage. I thought of Brief Encounter , and how sad the woman is when she gives up the doctor she’s fallen in love with to stay with her husband: “Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this anymore, when I can look back and say quite peacefully and cheerfully how silly I was. No, no, I don’t want that time to come ever. I want to remember every minute, always, always to the end of my days.”
David’s alarm went off again. He got up, got dressed, and started to pull his things together.
“I have to go now,” he said, and as he said it he was staring me in the eye, walking toward me where I sat on the bed, and pulling off his belt.
“You have to go,” I said, and as I said that I was wrapping my arms around him and pulling him onto the bed. After we made love again, I helped him pack quickly, and then he was gone. He texted me later to say that he’d made it to the gate just before they shut the doors. I dreaded going home, where in spite of the joy I had spending time with Nate I also faced mountains of work and endless chores and a husband who I suspected was on OKCupid.
A couple of weeks after the book conference trip, my breasts were oddly sore, and I felt a little nauseous in the morning. I’d had spotting a few days after the trip; I pored over online discussions of “implantation bleeding” as if they were a lost codex. The odds were slim: at my age, getting pregnant naturally had a 3-to-5 percent chance each month. Staying pregnant after that was fifty-fifty. Then the chance of a genetic abnormality was at least one in twenty…Still. It wasn’t impossible .
“Let’s hope you’re not,” Veronica said. “At your age it’s too dangerous. I love your hypothetical miracle child, but I love you more.”
Not me. I loved my fantasy baby more than anything or anyone else. What’s the opposite of a pregnancy scare? A pregnancy thrill? The thought of having a child with David made me feel high. Maybe there was still time. How clear everything would become if that were the case. He and I would have to be together. No one would question it.
I thought of something a woman had once said casually at a dinner party during a discussion of orphans: “They’re usually good-looking.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked her.
“You never heard that? Right, so, kids who go to orphanages are often illegitimate, meaning a lot of them were born out of wedlock to two sexy people who couldn’t keep their hands off each other.”
I imagined lust giving David and me a shockingly beautiful child.
At dinner that week with my parents, who I hadn’t seen for a while, I noticed that my father looked frail. He had red-purple bruises on his arms. I noticed a yellow seed pod in his hair. I plucked it out with the words, “Dad, I’m going to take a flower off your head.” He nodded.
I chatted with them in a friendly way even as I was picturing myself holding a baby on my lap as we ate. I imagined the child sleeping next to me in a car seat and almost levitated.
While I fantasized, my mother complained that my father refused to wear his hearing aids. We talked about the projects I was working on, and I told them I’d become friends with an editor named Helen. My mother said she’d host a dinner for Helen the next time she was around. I said, “No, thanks, when she’s here it will just be me and her. I’m not sharing.”
They did not know that I was in love, or that I was avoiding my glass of wine to prevent hurting a hypothetical miracle child.
We were eating at a restaurant near a college golf course. Outside, the birds chattered, and carts rolled in carrying happy, sweaty men with polo-encased bellies hanging over their shorts, white athletic socks pulled halfway up their calves. When my father went outside to smoke, I watched him through the window as the sun set behind him and the grass glowed red.
My mother was saying something about how well I’d arranged my life.
“It’s not so great right now, actually. My marriage is in rough shape.”
“Oh, did Paul do something?”
“Not him,” I said. “Well, he did before. But this time it was me. I did something. I fell in love with someone else.”
She was quiet for a few seconds as she absorbed this information.
“Is it Helen?” she said.
“No, not Helen.”
“Tom Hanks?”
The next day, as I set off for a walk, a little girl from down the street who I’d spoken to a couple of times saw me and took off running as though we’d been kept apart by evil forces. When she reached me in front of my place, I could see that her flouncy white dress was covered in little red hearts. She raised her arms.
“You want me to pick you up?” I asked her. I’d read somewhere that it’s good to ask kids this so that they know they have agency over their own bodies.
She said yes.
I lifted her into my arms. She snuggled into my neck and stayed that way as I carried her around. Her mother caught up with her and we chatted while I carried her daughter around. My arms grew tired, so I asked her if she wanted to get down and play. She did, so I ran inside and came out with a space suit from Nate’s old costume box, which she put on immediately, and a ball, which she started bouncing.
Was her running to me a sign? I wondered. Am I three weeks pregnant and she’s the only person who can tell? Is there a soul in the bardo who wants me to bring her into the world?
I liked to think about the bardo, a place where souls wait in between death and birth for the right opening to be reborn, to jump back in like life’s a game of Double Dutch. I thought of a Zadie Smith essay I’d read: “Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation?” She quoted Julian Barnes: “It hurts just as much as it’s worth.”
There was something about walking around living with a 3 percent chance of pregnancy—miniscule and yet greater than the zero percent chance I’d had in the years of postvasectomy monogamy—that changed the color of the sky.
A week late according to my tracker app, I looked up “early pregnancy symptoms.” I possessed all of them, including the more out-there indicators, like bluer veins. Beneath my skin ran Crayola-aquamarine rivers. I read the “implantation bleeding” page twelve more times and an article in The Guardian about a woman who had a healthy baby at forty-eight.
The next day I got my period. I bled for two weeks straight.