Authors: Dorothy Phaire
Bill then continued. “I had my lawyer draw up a legal separation agreement. The papers are inside.” He pointed to the portfolio. “You’ve left me no choice, Renee, if you insist on going forward with this risky pregnancy at our age. I made it clear this is not what I want. I have plans and fatherhood at 52 is not part of them.” She didn’t respond but kept writing the letter to her father, though she heard every word he said. “Renee, I’ve come too close now to getting everything I want to let this setback get in my way. For the first time I’ve got my own flourishing company. Techands already has dozens of clients lined up and a crop of new recruits on the waiting list to be trained.”
“I, I, I. You seem to be using that pronoun a lot lately,” said Renee without looking up at him.
“Listen, Babe, I’m not just thinking of myself. Have you forgotten what all those doctors told you six years ago? They didn’t give you much chance of carrying to term anyway. Why put yourself through that agony again?” Sweat beads formed on his forehead as he spoke. Bill took a gulp of his drink then continued in a begging voice that Renee noticed had lost most of its initial haughtiness. “I’ve got my suitcase downstairs, Sweetheart and I wanna move back home. Just say that you’ll consider giving up this foolish idea. At least think about terminating this pregnancy before it gets too far along.”
Renee threw down her writing pen, snatched up the folder and pulled out the separation agreement. “Where do I sign?” Bill frowned and turned pale. “You mean you’d throw away fourteen years of marriage just like that for something that probably won’t happen anyway? Don’t be so unreasonable, Renee,” said Bill with outstretched arms.
Ignoring Bill, she picked up her pen. Without even reading the separation papers, she scrawled her signature next to the pink ‘Sign Here’ tab. She stuffed the papers back into the legal folder then resumed writing her letter.
“Sweetheart, what are you doing?” he said, and grabbed her hand, forcing the pen to drop to the floor. “Let’s talk and try to compromise.”
Renee pulled her hand away. “What for? I agree with you, Darling,” she said in a calm yet sarcastic tone. She scooted her chair back an inch and folded her arms, giving Bill a smug look. “I’m making it easy for you to continue with your important plans. You’ve obviously given this solution a great deal of thought. You want a divorce and I’m granting it to you, an uncontested, no fault divorce.”
Bill sat his drink down on the edge of the desk, gently. He loosened his tie and knelt down in front of her. He took both her hands in his and held on tightly so she couldn’t wiggle free. “Renee, I don’t want this, Babe. I just want things back the way they were.”
“And if I do what you want, then things will go back the way they were between us?” she asked, looking at him pointedly. Bill released his grasp of her hands and rose stiffly from his knelt position, holding onto the edge of the desk for support. He turned away from her direct gaze as he attempted an answer. “I’m not saying things were great before.” He moved towards the middle of the room, staring at his polished leather shoes while she waited for him to look for the right words to say and for the confused look to leave his face. “It’s just that … Cliff thought it might be better this way … for both of us.”
“Cliff thought!” she yelled, “I don’t give a damn what that weasel thinks. Why is he in our business? Besides, it doesn’t matter anymore, Bill,” she said and turned away from him. “Things can’t be the same between us because I’m not the same. Motherhood is something I will not compromise on any longer.”
Renee picked up the pen that had fallen to the floor. Then, turned to face Bill as she spoke. “For once, I actually agree with you. It’s over between us. If I can get through this morning at the doctor’s office alone and everything else I’ve seen this afternoon, I can survive anything alone. That’s what I’ve been doing anyway throughout most of this marriage, surviving alone.”
“All right, all right. You win,” he sighed and threw up his hands, “I’ll try it your way. I’ll come to your next prenatal appointment.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“No, Babe, I mean it. I really want to. Please let me at least try to change.”
“I said it won’t be necessary, Bill. My doctor told me this morning that I don’t have a viable pregnancy.”
“What … what do you mean?” he asked as he approached her, stopping short upon seeing the palm of her upright hand. She summarized what the doctor had explained earlier that morning. She wanted him to feel as badly as she felt—if that were even possible.
“There is no baby growing in my uterus. I have what’s called a blighted ovum. It’s a condition that sometimes happens in pregnancies. And, this time it has happened to me.” Renee saw that Bill looked stunned.
It took several moments for him to speak. Renee gave him a sidelong glance and watched as his expression switched from bewilderment to remorse. She noticed that a film of sweat had settled over his brow.
Bill picked up the folder with the signed separation papers from the desk and positioned the folder under his arm. He picked up his glass of cognac that he had placed on her desk. “I’ll go make you a cup of green tea with a little honey,” he finally said with a brief nod to himself. “You always used to like green tea. It seemed to make you feel better.” As he headed for the door to leave, he turned back to her and with an inflection in his voice that sounded like hopefulness. “Maybe we can talk later.”
Renee listened to the sound of his heavy footsteps as he slowly descended the spiral staircase to the first floor landing. She hoped he was not going to want to move back home. With her own emotions in shambles and Brenda’s life turned upside down, now was not the time to try to listen to what Bill wanted. It didn’t seem to her like he even knew what he wanted. She struggled to remember what it was that had attracted her to him in the first place. She recalled how funny he used to be in the beginning of their relationship and how he could always seem to make her laugh. Renee knew she had been the serious, more studious type, but dating Bill brought out a fun-loving nature that she didn’t even know existed. And, he was kind and attentive in the beginning. She couldn’t remember when or how it all changed. She was too exhausted to think about that now. She locked her diary and the unfinished letter to her father inside her writing desk and retired to the bedroom to lie down.
Downstairs in the kitchen Bill poured out his unfinished drink in the sink and dumped the signed separation papers in the hidden trash receptacle. He flung off his jacket and threw it across the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Then he snatched off his already loosened tie and laid it on top of his jacket. Scanning the kitchen’s perimeter, he searched for something to make tea in. When he spotted the tea pot conveniently sitting on the back burner, he proceeded to fill up the pot with water. While waiting for the water to boil, he slumped down into a chair and let his head fall into the open palm of his hands. Bill couldn’t help admonishing himself for what had just happened. “You really screwed that one up, Buddy,” he said aloud to himself. “That’s just what you get for listening to Shaw. Now what?” He tapped his fingers on the countertop. No ideas came to mind. He couldn’t prevent Renee’s words from playing back to him in his thoughts. “
It’s over between us.”
No, she couldn’t mean that, he thought, shaking his head. He would give her more time and some space. He figured he’d better go back to his room at the hotel at least for a couple of nights. Let things simmer down, he thought.
“Damn, I shouldn’t have listened to Cliff! I’m such a fool,” he said, and slammed his hand down. Bill realized he didn’t have the panache that his business partner possessed when it came to the art of persuasion. He had seen Shaw step into a room full of people and in less than ten minutes get anybody to agree with him. Bill knew he had really made a mess of things trying to be like someone he wasn’t.
He had always resisted telling Renee the real reason he had never wanted to be a father. He had made that decision years ago. If he hadn’t been so scared of the knife he would have gone and had a vasectomy done years ago, and that would have been the end of it. Though perhaps not he reasoned, since Renee still wanted to adopt a baby when she found out she was having problems carrying a child to term. She had begged him many times to open up to her and talk about what was causing his unnatural fear of fatherhood, but he had always skirted around her questions until he got angry when she veered a little too close to the truth. He knew how much she wanted to be a mother, but that wasn’t enough to make him face his own demons and reveal what had happened to him as a child. One would think that an only child would be loved and cherished growing up, but that was not the case for him. Now, that all the parties involved were long since dead there was no use airing his family’s dirty secrets. His parents had been deceased for ten years now, but he had lost touch with them years before they died in that plane crash.
The whistle of the tea pot startled him out of his thoughts. He jumped up and turned off the burner and slid the screaming teapot to a cold burner where the whistling receded to a soft hissing sound. He grabbed a cup and saucer from the cabinet and filled the cup with boiling water. He knew how Renee liked her green tea. She wanted the tea to steep in hot water for at least 5 minutes before adding honey and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. He sat back down and stared at the cup as he waited for the tea to get good and strong and watched the steam circling the cup’s rim, unable to block the memories that he usually managed to keep buried. Bill gazed at his distorted reflection through the tabletop for a few moments, then closed his eyes. Things that he had never shared with another living soul came back to him.
He had been a pre-menopausal baby, a complete and unwelcome surprise to his middle-aged parents. His mother wrongly assumed she was past her childbearing age and was in her late forties when she conceived. By the time they discovered she was pregnant, it was too late to do anything about it. They were stuck with the burden of an unwanted child, having decided early in their partnership that they would remain childless so they could devote their full attention to scholarship and research. Bill’s parents were well educated and appeared to be normal from all outward signs. They were grant-funded, research doctors and spent all their time in the lab conducting studies at the University of Southern California. When they weren’t writing grants to get more funding for their research they were in the lab working. Neither wanted to practice medicine and deal with patients, nor did they want children to hamper their lifestyle and commitment to science. Both parents were undeclared alcoholics throughout much of their adult lives that made their already short tempers even shorter. Cocktails before, during, and after meals were a staple in the Hayes household.
Bill had no memories of ever feeling loved or wanted in the three bedroom house where he grew up in Corona, California. In addition to razor-sharp, switch beatings and slaps that left hand prints for the smallest offense, such as getting a B on his report card instead of straight A’s, he was regularly ordered to strip naked and stay locked in a dark, closet for hours without food or water. He could never figure out why it didn’t occur to two seemingly intelligent people that they could have simply given him up for adoption. But for all he knew perhaps they had tried to go that route and no one wanted to adopt a black male infant. To any normal adult, let alone a child, that locked closet where they kept him isolated for hours would have seemed as awful as any thirty-day stretch in solitary confinement at San Quentin Prison.
He managed to hide from his teachers and classmates what went on behind the doors of 41 North Collins Lane. As a child, Bill never told anyone what his home life was like or invited friends over because he was too ashamed. He couldn’t remember at what point he had made the conscious decision to never have children. He feared how he might raise them. God forbid if his parents’ anger, impatience, and aversion to children turned out to be a hereditary trait. Bill knew he couldn’t take that chance. He was petrified of being a father because he feared he might repeat the cycle of abuse that his parents had inflicted on him until he turned 18 and joined the Air Force, leaving home for good.
When the executor of his parents’ will informed him that their plane had gone down on the way to a scientific conference in Munich, Bill didn’t register shock or grief. All he remembered feeling was numbness. He quickly sold their house on North Collins Lane and closed that chapter of his life forever, vowing he would never discuss it with anyone. It was ironic when he met and fell in love with Renee, a psychoanalyst who could have helped him deal with those issues. So far he had successfully hidden that part of himself from her, just as he had successfully managed to deceive his teachers and friends throughout his childhood. He didn’t want anyone to know how much he had been hated as a child.
Bill couldn’t reconcile his belief that his genes might be contaminated with a strain of depravity that would only get released if he assumed the role of fatherhood. To save an innocent child from even the remotest possibility of that happening, he would not put an unsuspecting child in danger and have the cycle repeat itself. That was the only way he knew how to rationalize it, even though Renee would never understand and would always think he was being selfish and unreasonable. There was nothing he could do about that. She would never know how much they actually had in common by being raised in dysfunctional households. He knew about Renee’s tyrannical aunt who had raised her, but she would never find out about his hateful parents who had raised him. He figured the best thing to do now was to give her some time to get over her disappointment of not being able to bear a child of her own. Once things got back to normal, he would show her that he could give her the kind of love and attention that she needed. Adopting a baby would not give her that, but he would.
Bill noticed there was no longer steam floating up from the tea. He felt the cup and realized it was lukewarm and the tea looked as black as coffee. Bill got up and poured the ruined tea down the drain. The hissing from the teapot was gone and the water had cooled down as well. He could either start the water boiling again or leave the house, which he figured was probably what Renee would prefer anyway more than she would want a cup of tea. He picked up his jacket and tie from the back of the chair. On his way towards the foyer he glanced up at the top of the staircase then on his way out he picked up his suitcase that stood by the door.