I couldn’t argue with that. For all his quirks and oddities, Theo remained, fundamentally, a very good guy – and one who, I had come to recognize, could cope with my quirks, my permanent sense of doubt. Perhaps one of the greatest surprises in temporal existence is actually finding yourself outside of the uncertainty and struggle that so characterizes most of our time here. It’s a rare interlude – and at least I recognized it as such, and was able, for a while, to keep that nagging voice of inner uncertainty well and truly muzzled.
Even the birth of my daughter didn’t turn into the ‘Götterdämmerung’ that I had always feared. On the contrary, there was something rather textbook about the whole process. On the morning of July 24th I got up to make tea and suddenly felt a telltale stream of liquid cascading down my leg. I didn’t panic or fall into a state of advanced fear. I simply walked back into the bedroom and told Theo: ‘Time to get up – my waters have just broken.’
Though he’d only fallen into bed two hours earlier after an all-night Fritz Lang marathon, he was wide awake and dressed in about sixty seconds. He grabbed a bathrobe for me and the bag that (true to his hyper-organizational needs) he had packed for me a week earlier. We made it across town to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in less than a half-hour. Within sixty minutes I was checked in and wired up and being given an epidural. Four hours later, Emily arrived in the world.
It’s strange being told to push and heave when the entire lower half of your body is numb. It’s strange to glance upwards at the mirror that has been strategically placed in front of your otherwise covered legs and watch as this blooded thing is slowly yanked out of you. But the strangest of all sensations is the moment after you have been freed of the baby – and the baby of you – and you are handed this tiny shriveled creature to hold for the first time . . . and you feel a mixture of unbelievable instant love and desperate fear. The love is overwhelming – because, simply put, this is your child. But the fear is also immense, vast. Fear of not being up to the task. Fear of not being able to make her happy. Fear of letting her down. Fear – quite simply – of not getting it right.
But then the baby starts to cry and you clutch her to you. Amidst the elation and exhaustion of just having been delivered of a child and having entered that brave new world of being a mother, another thought takes hold:
I will try to do my very best for you
.
Happily, Theo didn’t video the birth as he had threatened to do. As I held Emily (we’d chosen this name long before her birth) close to me he crouched down beside us and stroked her head and clutched my hand and whispered to his new daughter: ‘Welcome to life.’
Then he told me again just how much he loved me. And I said how much I loved him.
Only much later did I realize that this was the last time we ever said those words to each other.
Five
S
NAPSHOTS FROM
E
MILY’S
first eighteen months.
Bringing her home from the hospital and me standing watch by her crib all the first night, out of fear that something might happen to her.
Discovering that my daughter’s toothless gums were made of reinforced steel when they snapped down on my nipple.
Emily discovering the pleasures of ice cream for the first time. When I gave her a small spoonful of vanilla at age eight weeks her reaction – after shock at the cold – was a very noticeable smile.
A bout of colic which kept her awake all night for the better part of two weeks and had me in a state of absolute despair, as I walked the floor with her from midnight to dawn every one of those fourteen days, willing her to sleep and failing miserably.
Finally getting back to work after twelve weeks’ maternity leave and having to drop Emily off in a crèche for the first time and expecting her to cry vehemently . . . but my daughter handling the transition with absolute serenity.
Buying Emily a set of classic wooden building blocks, all engraved with letters of the alphabet. ‘Can you make a word?’ I ask her – and she laughs and throws a block across the room.
Emily crawling across the living room for the first time to where I’m grading papers and picking up a book on the floor, holding it upside down and saying her first word:
Mommy
.
Emily picking up a pen and scrawling lines on a blank pad and saying her second word:
Word
.
Emily coming down with a virulent strain of the flu, her temperature rising to 106 degrees, the pediatrician making a middle-of-the-night house call and warning me that she might have to be admitted to hospital if the fever doesn’t break in twenty-four hours, and my daughter wimpering as the fever makes her breathing irregular and she can’t yet articulate in language just how horrible she now feels.
The fever finally breaking and Emily taking more than a week to get back to her normal self and my exhaustion manifesting itself when I nod off in a departmental meeting.
Theo – on one of the few evenings he is at home – actually spending time with his daughter and screening for her the original 1937
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, and giving her a five-minute lecture about the ‘contextual importance’ (yes, he actually used those words) of the film in the history of cinematic animation.
Emily’s first full sentence some weeks later: ‘
Daddy not here
.’
Because Daddy was hardly ever
here
.
That was the prevailing subtext of Emily’s first year and a half: her father’s increased absences. It was a gradual yet noticeable disengagement. Within the first week of Emily returning home – and, like all newborn babies, treating us to ongoing sleep disruption – Theo began to retreat to his apartment, saying that he had no choice but to press on with the writing of his book.
‘Well, you could do that here,’ I said. ‘We did set up a small office for you.’
‘But I’ve got all my research stuff back at the apartment.’
‘All of your research stuff is on the internet. And since we also installed wireless here for you . . .’
‘The vibe isn’t right here for the sort of writing I have to do. And the broken nights are killing me.’
‘Emily only wakes for around a half-hour. And she’s such a wonderful child.’
‘I need my eight hours.’
‘And I don’t?’
‘Of course you do. But you’re not working right now and I am. And if I don’t sleep . . .’
Why did I give in to this argument? Possibly because he was the guy going out to a job every day, while I was still staying at home, on maternity leave. So yes, I didn’t have to be as mentally alert as Theo did right now. Though I mentioned several times that I would like him to spend more time with us, I also didn’t push the issue. I was simply too damn tired to start a fight with him. But I also sensed that – with the tangible arrival of his very tangible daughter – the reality of parenthood had caught him unawares. For all his pre-natal talk about so wanting to play the dad, the very fact that Emily was now omnipresent in our lives had thrown him. Could it be that we say we want something, even if we secretly doubt that we do? As I had been guilty of this same sort of behavioral pattern throughout my life, I couldn’t point an angry finger in Theo’s direction – not just now anyway, as I was hoping that his need to run away was just a temporary phase.
Once Emily began to embrace the idea of nine uninterrupted hours of sleep, Theo did return to the apartment. He even started taking Emily for walks in her stroller, to occasionally bathe and change her, to get down on the floor with her and play with her collection of toys, and generally make her laugh. But there was a concurrent detachment in his relationship with me. It was a subtle yet noticeable one. We still chatted, we still shared meals and kept each other abreast of stuff going on in our respective lives. However, a certain chill had crept into our time together – and whenever I asked Theo if anything was troubling him, he always dodged the issue.
‘There’s no problem,’ he said one evening after he had fallen silent for several minutes over dinner and I had commented that such Pinter-esque pauses were a tad unnerving.
‘In the theater Pinter’s pauses never last more than five beats,’ he countered.
‘Which is why the five minutes we just spent in absolute silence strikes me as worrying.’
‘I’m not worried about anything,’ he said, simultaneously avoiding my gaze.
‘Is something wrong, Theo?’
‘Why would there be anything wrong?’
‘I sense your detachment from this household, from us.’
‘That’s also news to me. I mean, I’m here every night.’
‘But you seem preoccupied.’
‘As do you.’
‘In what way?’
‘Your mind is frequently elsewhere,’ he said.
‘It’s called juggling parenthood with a full-time career.’
‘Which I’m doing as well.’
‘Not as much as me.’
‘Oh, please, we’re not going to play the “Who’s doing more around here” game.’
‘Well, you did leave me completely alone during the first eight weeks of Emily’s life.’
‘That’s not true. I slept elsewhere because we agreed that, as I was the one who was still working—’
‘We didn’t agree that. You simply decided to absent yourself and I was stupid enough to go along with it.’
‘If you were that upset about it, you should have said something at the time.’
Checkmate. He had me on that one. And he damn well knew why I hadn’t brought up his absences at the time – because I was terrified of alienating him, because in my postnatal, sleep-deprived zombie state I had this ever-augmenting fear that he would cut us loose if I pushed him too far. Perhaps that’s what the smile now told me:
We’re not married . . . we don’t own anything together . . . I could walk away any time I wanted to
. . .
The smile moved from the supercilious to the reconciliatory.
‘If there’s a problem between us,’ he said, ‘don’t be shy. Just tell me. I don’t want you to feel there’s any sort of disconnection between us.’
But the disconnection continued to deepen. When I returned to work, I dropped Emily off every morning at the crèche, as Theo was still never getting up before midday. The thing was, she had to be collected every afternoon at three p.m. As the classes I taught fell on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and continued on until four p.m., it had been agreed that Theo would pick her up from the crèche in Cambridge and bring her back to his office at the Harvard Film Archive until I arrived there at five-thirty.
But after three weeks of this schedule he informed me one evening: ‘I can’t do the pick-ups any more.’
‘Why not?’ I said, trying to mask my surprise.
‘It’s just not working out.’
‘In what way is it “not working out”?’
‘She demands a lot – which I’m happy to give, but not during work time.’
‘Define “demands a lot”.’
‘“Demands a lot”, as in “constant attention”, as in “having to feed and change her”, as in “crying and disturbing my co-workers”, as in “not being able to duck away for the ninety minutes she’s at the office”.’
‘Theo, the deal between us was—’
‘I know what the deal
was
. The thing is, deals are there to be renegotiated. I need to renegotiate this one.’
‘Well, it’s not that simple.’
‘It is that simple. You wouldn’t bring her into one of your classes, so why should I bring her into the archive?’
‘Because I’m bringing her to the crèche five mornings a week and picking her up from the crèche two afternoons a week. Because I look after her every evening, as you work until at least nine or ten, as well as most of the weekend. And I’m happy to have all this time with her – because she is such a fantastic kid. So the only thing I ask of you is those ninety minutes you spend with her on the three afternoons when I’m teaching. It’s a pretty good deal, Theo . . .’
‘It’s unworkable. What we need to find is some nice, competent, responsible childminder who’s willing to pick Emily up—’
‘That’s going to cost us at least one hundred and fifty dollars a week.’
‘We can afford that.’
‘You mean,
I
can afford that.’
‘Well, you do earn more than me – and you must still have some money in the bank.’
‘Not that much money.’
‘Well, you did blow all that money on an apartment.’
I stared at him, amazed at that last comment.
‘Did you hear what you just said to me?’ I asked.
He laughed, then walked out the door. He didn’t return for two days, during which time I had no choice but to approach a childcare agency and hire a very nice Colombian woman named Julia to help me out. It was decided between us that she would collect Emily from the crèche and look after her until seven p.m. every evening, during which time she’d also cook and deal with laundry. Julia was thirty-five, married with three kids and living in Jamaica Plain; an American resident for ten years who still hadn’t thoroughly mastered the English language. She was very determined to do everything possible to please me and to get as many hours from me as she could. As she bluntly told me: ‘I need the money.’ And I was happy to give her the extra hours – to hell with the cost – because it freed up the entire afternoon portion of my schedule and allowed me more time to deal with student papers and administrative trivia and also start planning the next book: what I hoped would be a major critical study of Sinclair Lewis.
So we agreed a salary of $350 for twenty hours per week and suddenly I was freed of the hassle of having to race across town to collect Emily right after my afternoon classes. In turn, Theo was completely free of any domestic responsibility whatsoever. As soon as I had hired Julia I called him at his apartment, got the answerphone and left the message: ‘All right, you win, we have a childminder who will deal with all the afternoons. Whether or not you want to return to us is completely up to you.’