Chapter 18 1989 #2
Twins, the doctor told her last week. She had gone to the appointment on her own, and she could sense the nurse wondering how she’d got herself into this mess.
“Okay, we’ll go together next week,” says Al.
Thank God. He’s coming for spring break, driving across the country—he says it’s not because of his growing fear of airplanes.
He’ll enjoy the journey, he says. It won’t be a moment too soon.
Al always seems to know what questions to ask at the hospital. What to be concerned about.
“We can ask them the genders.”
“Don’t you want to be surprised?”
“I guess.” Her heart is aching for at least one girl. To bring a woman into this limitless planet. She is struck with a small wave of nausea. Hello there, she thinks familiarly. My awful, wonderful secret.
“I’ve been thinking more about names,” says Al. “How about Lawrence?”
“Of Arabia?”
“No, after my dad.”
“Huh.”
“What?”
“No, it’s just. Surprising, that’s all.”
“It might make my mom happy.”
“Is that the factor?”
“No, it’s just. It would be nice.” Nice for whom? Al always seemed afraid of his father. Afraid of becoming him, afraid of disappointing him. It wasn’t a legacy Susan much wanted to carry on.
“I was thinking more Hollywood. Brigitte, Marlon.”
“Mm. Something from Shakespeare?”
Susan laughs. “That would make your mom happy. Me pretending to be highbrow.”
“What is that supposed to mean.”
The phone hung silent.
“Let’s just stay open. It will come.”
When he hangs up, she pulls off her oversized shirt, holds her hands onto her sore breasts. She’s so tired she could cry.
A knock at the door. Costumes, no doubt, coming to collect the many layers she wore today to hide her belly. Baggy dresses, a shapeless coat. They are miracle workers. She brought them all coffees today and little chocolates from the patisserie near her apartment. It’s the least she could do.
“Just a minute,” she says, but the door opens anyway and there is Mark, taking in the half-naked swell of her, the slow understanding of her betrayal hardening into an unforgiving rock.
Flowers’s office is full of heavy objects, solid glass paperweights, a heavy silver bowl, a photograph of the child that he gets to see every other weekend.
On the wall are framed posters and playbills and letters from fans.
He stands with his back to her, looking out of the small window, occupying the space with a rare grip over time.
They are always rushing here, fielding daily catastrophes minor and major, adapting, abandoning storylines that other soaps are copying, writing people in and out, and changing the wardrobe or the lines.
Stillness is precious—which is to say, expensive. So, you better make good use of it.
“Have you done something new in here, Mark? The wallpaper or something?”
An odd serenity has descended over Susan, an almost giddiness. Whatever happens next, there is no more hiding. She stands, one hand on his long, leather Chesterfield, the site of rare, precious naps and several rumored fucks. She has never been alone in here with him.
“Sit,” Flowers says, and though she would rather not, the tone doesn’t leave much choice. She sits.
“I know you’re upset. I should have talked to you.”
Flowers removes his tinted glasses, wipes them with his pocket square.
She is aware of movement outside the room, the chatter of people packing up for the day, making evening plans, light gossip.
The office is thick with bergamot cologne, with his silence.
Men are always trying to figure out what to do with her, aren’t they?
She can still remember that look on Bourke’s face—was it six years ago now?
What a child she was! How foolish, thinking she had the world to lose.
She had nothing—no credit to her name, no tools more sophisticated than self-sabotage, no respect other than her own.
She had wanted Bourke to give up on her, hadn’t she?
To admit she was too big for him? Like Bridget Bishop, she had been prepared for the very worst.
Well look at you now. Everything to lose. And maybe just enough savvy to save herself. She shifts on the sofa, aware of her stomach, his resentment of it. Think of something, Margie hisses at the back of her mind. I don’t want to die.
“Listen, I know you think this is bad. But I really think there might be an opportunity here. I mean, you always say characters are verbs, right? And Margie, well, she’s due for a bit of reinvention, isn’t she?
If we made a feature of it, we could do all kinds of storylines—I mean, the paternity question alone… ”
The words coming out of her mouth are hasty and harebrained, a true Margie maneuver, but she is willing to do anything (anything) now to keep him from closing the door on her.
Because outside she can hear Orson laughing with someone, his high-pitched cackle reserved for only truly funny and slightly naughty comments, and it’s enough to make her cry.
This is her family. Every day, they show up, prepared to be vulnerable and brave, determined never to let one another down.
They can read you with a single glance, will keep you level with an aspirin or a coffee or a quiet word.
Most of them, she’d trust with her life.
Mark still isn’t looking at her. She knows she’s nothing to him, replaceable as a shoelace. But still, she is talking, almost as though she expects this to be a scene from the show.
MARGIE
Whatever it takes, boss. I’ll do it for free if you’ll just let me come back. We can even use the babies, if we need, for filming. Did I mention it’s twins?
If Rip were writing the scene, Margie would be compelling. Her wheedling would move mountains. Mark would scratch his head and say something like: This just might work. Or maybe, appealing to Margie’s regular currency: You can keep the job if you fuck me.
Would she? Now, in the interest of keeping her options open, when her whole world feels like it’s on the line?
She can feel the coiled springs under the cushions of the couch, the bodies which have surely succumbed here, before, to the desperate need to please.
He is crossing the floor slowly in the direction of his desk, and she is trying to envision whether it could be just another role, because as Susan, she cannot do it.
Her husband is fixed in her mind. But surrendering Margie is not an option.
Mark leans against the desk and looks at her squarely, his eyes running cold over the shape of her.
She looks at him with all of Margie’s desperation and he looks back at her like a used tissue.
“Listen, Susie. I like you. But if you don’t look the part, you don’t have the right to play it. Contractually, we can do what we want.”
What he’s trying to say is no one wants to sleep with a pregnant girl.
“But what I’m saying is—”
“This conversation is over.”
Susan is descending from the sublet and dropping the keys in the mailbox and folding into Al’s arms. She breathes him in, the unfamiliar way he smells after a month without her, and they rock together as people pass around them, a stone in a stream.
“Miss me?” he asks.
She nods into his shoulder. He has driven across the country to get her. He places both hands on her stomach (his stomach) and looks at her with a wide-open face.
“You want to go home?”
She presses her cheek into his cheek, the stubble where a beard won’t grow. She shakes her head against his head, her nose wiping against him. No. She doesn’t want to go anywhere.
With her suitcase in the trunk of the car, they buy tickets to the Los Angeles aquarium. He takes her hand and leads her through the towering tanks.
“The other night,” he says, “they were showing something about the origins of life on PBS.”
“Trust you to watch PBS while I’m away.”
“Hey, they have good stuff on there.”
“Lifelong learner. See, you act so above it all, but I told you, you’d love having a TV.”
“I was never above it all.”
“I’m just teasing. What did it say?” She rests her cheek on his shoulder, the softness of his shirt, the hardness of his muscle underneath. His glasses are reflecting the blue of the water.
“There are these vents in the floor of the ocean where magma hits the seawater. And they think that’s where life began.”
“Huh,” she says. “That makes sense.”
“Does it?”
“Yeah. You’re seawater, and I’m magma.”
He pinches the flesh on her elbow and she wrinkles her nose at him.
They pause to make way for a young mother and her small, beautiful daughter who is babbling, pointing, peering up through thick eyelashes as a shark coasts through the tank.
The mother lifts the child, who places tiny hands against both of their mouths, in a moment where words can hold no meaning.
“Do you think children look at the water and remember the womb?” he asks.
“Maybe.” It always amazes her, how these thoughts float into his mind. “I mean, do you remember it or is it just something you know? Deep inside you, do you know that someone carried you?”
“Probably. It’s why we have to be nice to my mother.”
“I am nice to your mother.”
“I never said you weren’t.”
Al and Susan watch as the shark drifts past, breathing in silent synchronicity. Her heart slows, lost in her own overpowering future, the proximity to danger, the serenity of his arms wrapping around her chest, swaying her back and forth.
“I want our children to be deep-sea divers,” he says. “I want them to identify twenty new species of fish and discover long-forgotten wrecks.”
“I just want them to have everything,” she says, squeezing his hand. “Everything they want.”