I got used to the little voice in my head, the one from the airport, the one that had floated up to the ceiling and watched me rage at Bruce while mourning quietly that he wasn’t the one. I got used to the voice asking Why? every morning, when I laced up my sneakers and yanked a succession of nondescript shirts over my head… and asking Why? again at night, when I’d play my messages back— ten, fifteen messages from my mother, my sister, from Maxi, and Peter Krushelevansky, from all of my friends— -and then erase each one without ever calling back, until the day I started erasing them without even listening. You’re too sad, the voice would murmur, as I stomped up Walnut Street. Take it easy, said the voice, as I gulped scalding black coffee, cup after cup, for breakfast. Talk to someone, said the voice. Let them help. I ignored it. Who could help me now? What was there left for me but the streets and the hospital, my silent apartment, and my empty bed?
I let the voice mail keep taking my calls. I instructed the post office that I would be out of town for an indefinite period and to please hold my mail. I let my computer gather dust. I stopped checking my e-mail. And on one of my walks I dropped my pager into the Delaware River without missing a single step. The cast came off, and I started going on even longer walks— four hours, six hours, meandering loops through the city’s worst neighborhoods, past crack dealers, hookers of the male and female variety, dead pigeons in gutters, the burned-out skeletons of cars, without seeing any of it, and without being afraid. How could any of this hurt me, after what I’d already lost? When I ran into Samantha on the street, I told her I was too busy to hang out, shifting from foot to foot with my eyes on the horizon so I wouldn’t have to see her worried face. Getting things ready, I explained, waiting to be off again. The baby’s coming home soon.
“Can I see her?” Sam asked.
Instantly, I shook my head. “I’m not ready… I mean, she’s not ready.”
“What do you mean, Cannie?” asked Sam.
“She’s medically fragile,” I said, trying out the term I’d heard over and over in the baby intensive care ward.
“So I’ll stand outside and look at her through the window,” said Sam, looking perplexed. “And then we’ll go have breakfast. Remember breakfast? It used to be one of your favorite meals.”
“I’ve got to go,” I said brusquely, trying to edge my way around her. Samantha didn’t budge.
“Cannie, what is going on with you, really?”
“Nothing,” I said, shoving past her, my feet already moving, my eyes fixed far ahead. “Nothing, nothing, everything is fine.”
NINETEEN
I walked and walked, and it was as if God had fitted me with special glasses, where I could only see the bad things, the sad things, the pain and misery of life in the city, the trash kicked into corners instead of the flowers planted in window boxes. I could see husbands and wives fighting, but not kissing or holding hands. I could see little kids careering through the streets on stolen bicycles, screaming insults and curses, and grown men who sounded like they were breakfasting on their own mucus, leering at women with unashamed, lecherous eyes. I could smell the stink of the city in summer: horse piss and hot tar and the grayish, sick exhaust the buses spewed. The manhole covers leaked steam, the sidewalks belched heat from the subways churning below.
Everywhere I looked, I just saw emptiness, loneliness, buildings with broken windows, shambling addicts with outstretched hands and dead eyes, sorrow and filth and rot.
I thought that time would heal me and that the miles would soothe my pain. I waited for a morning where I woke up and didn’t instantly imagine Bruce and the Pusher dying horrible gruesome deaths… or, worse yet, losing my baby, losing Joy.
I would walk to the hospital at the break of dawn and sometimes before, and walk laps around the parking lot until I felt calm enough to walk inside. I would sit in the cafeteria gulping cup after cup of water, trying to smile and look normal, but inside, my head was spinning furiously, thinking knives? guns? car accident? I would smile and say hello, but really, in my head I was plotting revenge.
I imagined calling the university where Bruce had taught freshman English and telling them how he’d only passed his drug test by ingesting quarts and quarts of warm water spiked with goldenseal that he bought from a 1-800 line in the back pages of High Times. Urine Luck, the stuff was called. I could tell them he was showing up stoned at work— he used to do it, probably he still was doing it, and if they watched him long enough they’d see. I could call his mother, call the police in his town, have him arrested, taken away.
I imagined writing to Moxie, including a picture of Joy in the NICU, growing bigger, growing stronger, but still a pathetic sight, run through with tubes, breathing on a ventilator more often than not, with who knew what horrors strewn in her future— cerebral palsy, learning disabilities, blind, deaf, retarded, a menu of disasters that the doctors hadn’t mentioned. I’d gone online, to sites with names like preemie.com, reading first-person stories from parents whose children had survived, horribly damaged; who’d come home on oxygen or sleep apnea monitors or with holes cut in their throats so they could breathe. I read about kids who grew up with seizure disorders, learning disabilities, who never quite caught up, never quite got right. And I read stories about the babies who died: at birth, in the NICU, at home. “Our Precious Angel,” they’d be headlined. “Our Darling Daughter.”
I wanted to copy these stories and e-mail them to the Pusher, along with a photograph of Joy. I wanted to send her a picture of my daughter— no letter, no words, just Joy’s picture, sent to her house, sent to her school, sent to her boss, to her parents if I could find them, to show them all what she’d done, what she’d been responsible for. I found myself planning walking routes that would bring me by gun shops. I found myself looking in their windows. I didn’t go inside yet, but I knew that was next. And then what?
I didn’t let myself answer the question. I didn’t let myself think beyond the image, the picture that I treasured: Bruce’s face when he opened his door and saw me standing there with a gun in my hand; Bruce’s face when I said, “I’ll show you sorry.”
Then one morning I was burning past a newsstand and I saw the new issue of Moxie, the August issue, even though it was only just July, and so hot that the air shimmered and the streets turned sticky in the sun. I yanked a copy off the rack.
“Miss, you gonna pay for that?”
“No,” I snarled, “I’m going to rob you.” I tossed two bucks and change on the counter and started flipping furiously through the pages, wondering what the headline would be. “My Daughter the Vegetable?” “How to Really, Really Screw Up Your Ex’s Life?”
Instead I saw a single word, big black letters, a somber incongruity in Moxie’s light-hearted, pastel-heavy lineup. “Complications,” it said.
“Pregnant,” says the letter, and I can’t read any more. It’s as if the very word has poleaxed me and left me paralyzed, save for the icy crawling along the back of my neck, the beginning of dread.
“I don’t know an easy way to say this,” she has written, “so I’ll just say it. I am pregnant.”
I remember sixteen years ago standing on the bimah in my synagogue in Short Hills, looking over the crowd of friends and relatives and mouthing those time-honored words, “Today I am a man.” Now, feeling this rush of ice to my stomach, feeling my palms start to sweat, I know the truth: Today, I am a man. For real, this time.
“Not quite,” I said, so loudly that the homeless people loping along the sidewalks stopped and stared. Not hardly. A man. A man would have called me. At least sent a postcard! I turned my attention back to the page.
But I’m not a man. As it turns out, what I am is a coward. I tuck the letter in a notebook, stuff the notebook in a desk drawer, lock the drawer, and accidentally on purpose, lose the key.
They say— they being the great philosophers, or possibly the cast of Seinfeld— that breaking up is like pushing over a Coke machine. You can’t just do it, you have to set the thing in motion, rock it back and forth a few times. For C. and me it wasn’t like that. It was a clean, swift break— a thunderclap. Intense and awful and over in seconds.
Liar, I thought. Oh, you liar. It wasn’t a thunderclap, it wasn’t even a breakup, I just told you I wanted some time!
Then, less than three months later, my father died.
I went back and forth with the telephone in my hand, her number still first on my speed-dial. Call her? Don’t call her? Was she my ex or my friend?
In the end I opted for her friendship. And later, when a houseful of mourners picked over deli trays in my mother’s kitchen, I opted for more
And now, three months later, I am still mourning my father, but I’m feeling as if I’m over C., truly and completely. I know what real sadness is now. I can explore it every night like a kid who’s lost a tooth and can’t stop tonguing the pulpy, wounded, empty space where the tooth once was.
Except now she’s pregnant.
And I don’t know whether she’s set out to trick me or trap me, whether I’m even the father, whether she’s pregnant at all.
“Oh, this is unbelievable,” I announced to Broad Street at large. “This is fucking unbelievable!”
And, the thing is, I’m too chicken to ask.
It’s your choice, I imagine I say with my silence. Your call, your game, your move. I manage to silence the part of me that wonders, that wants to know how she chose: whether she went to the clinic on Locust Street and marched past the protestors with their pictures of bloody dead babies; whether she did it in a doctors’ office, whether she went with a friend, or a new lover, or alone. Or whether she’s marching around her home-town right now with a belly as big as a beachball and books full of baby names.
I don’t ask, or call. I don’t send a check, or a letter, or even a card. I’m done, empty, dried out and cried out. There’s nothing left for her or for a baby if there is one.
When I let myself think about it I get furious at myself (how could I have been so dumb?) and furious at her (how could she have let me?). But I try not to let myself think of it too much. I wake up, work out, go to the office, and go through the motions, try to keep the tip of my tongue away from that hole in my smile. But deep down I know that I can only postpone this so long, that even my cowardice can’t stave off the inevitable. Somewhere in my desk, tucked in a notebook and locked in a drawer, there’s a letter with my name on it.
“You’re late!” the head nurse scolded, and smiled at me to show she didn’t mean it. I had the copy of Moxie curled up like I meant to smack a dog with it. “Here,” I said, handing it off. She barely spared it a glance. “I don’t read this stuff,” she said. “It’s worthless.”
“I agree,” I said, heading toward the nursery.
“There’s someone here to see you,” she said.
I walked to the nursery and sure enough, there was a woman standing at my window, the window in front of Joy’s Isolette. I could see short, impeccably coiffed gray hair, an elegant black pantsuit, a platinum diamond tennis bracelet around one wrist. A light whiff of Allure was in the air, her freshly polished fingernails glittered under the fluorescent lights. The Ever-Tasteful Audrey had put together just the right ensemble for going to visit her son’s illegitimate premature firstborn.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
Audrey gasped and took two giant steps backward. Her face went two shades paler than her Estée Lauder foundation.
“Cannie!” she said, and pressed one hand against her chest. “I… you scared me.”
I stared at her, saying nothing, as her eyes moved over me, unbelieving.
“You’re so thin,” she finally said.
I looked down and observed with not much interest that this was true. All that walking, all that plotting, my only food a snatched bite of bagel or banana and cup after cup of bitter black coffee, because the taste matched the way I felt inside. My refrigerator held bottles of breast milk and nothing else. I couldn’t remember the last time I sat down and ate a meal. I could see the bones in my face, the jut of my hipbones. In pro-file, I was Jessica Rabbit: nonexistent butt, flat belly, improbable bosom, thanks to the milk. If you didn’t get close enough to notice that my hair was dirty and matted, that I had giant black circles under my eyes and that, most likely, I smelled bad, I was an actual babe.
The irony had not been lost on me: After a lifetime of obsession, of calorie counting, Weight Watching, and StairMastering, I’d found a way to shed those unwanted pounds forever! To free myself of flab and cellulite! To get the body I’d always wanted! I should market this, I thought hysterically. The Placenta Abruptio Emergency Hysterectomy Premature and Possibly Brain-Damaged Baby Diet. I’d make a fortune.
Audrey fingered her bracelet nervously. “I guess you’re wondering…,” she began. I said nothing, knowing exactly how hard this was for her. Knowing, and not giving a damn. A part of me wanted to see her twist in the wind like this, to struggle for the words. A part of me wanted her to suffer.
“Bruce says you won’t speak to him.”
“Bruce had a chance to speak to me,” I told her. “I wrote and told him I was pregnant. He never called.”
Her lips trembled. “He never told me,” she whispered, half to herself. “Cannie, he is so sorry about what happened.”
I snorted, so loud I was afraid I’d bother the babies. “Bruce is a day late and a dollar short.”
She bit her lip, twirling the bracelet. “He wants to do the right thing.”
“Which would be what?” I asked. “Having his girlfriend refrain from any more attempts on my baby’s life?”
“He said that was an accident,” she whispered.
I rolled my eyes.
“He wants to do the right thing,” she repeated. “He wants to help out”
“I don’t need money,” I said, deliberately crude, spelling it out. “Not his or yours, either. I sold my screenplay.”
Her face lit up, so glad that we were on a happy subject. “Honey, that’s wonderful!”
I said nothing, hoping she’d fall apart in the face of my silence. But Audrey was braver than I’d given her credit for.