“You think he died because I was inadequate. Or was it deliberate, Joe? Tell me if this is how you explain it to yourself. He died because he wasn’t fed enough. I deliberately didn’t feed him enough because he looked too much like Roger and I didn’t want him to be Roger and I didn’t want me to be Roger’s mother because I’ve seen Roger’s mother and I know what she should have done years ago.”
“Shut your fucking mouth, Anna!”
“Is that pretty much it, Joe? Is that how you explain it all to yourself?”
“You’ve got a vicious fucking mouth, Anna. You know that?”
“I’m vicious? Well, what exactly did you mean when you said you did everything you were supposed to do? What the hell does that mean? I didn’t? And what exactly were you supposed to do? What was your obligation in all this? The glory of the up and down, in and out for a few seconds before you fall asleep and then it’s welcome to fatherhood. Like fatherhood was the only thing on your mind before nap time. Then you wake up to me swollen and throwing up for three months and all you can do is flee to the office, as fast as the car will go, leaving the madonna on her knees at the toilet bowl. And at night-time when you get home from the gym or drinks at the office, you throw your jacket on the couch, pour yourself another drink, and start spouting pearls of wisdom like ‘We all do what we have to do’ or some such shit while I’m still throwing up. You’re a fucking animal.”
“A few seconds, is it?”
“What? That’s the only thing you heard, isn’t it? That’s the only thing your heard me say, isn’t it, Joe? What are you doing? What the hell do you think you’re doing? Are you . . . Joe . . . no . . . Are you out of your mind?”
“A few seconds?”
“Get off me!”
“A few seconds, was it, Anna?”
“You’re pathetic. Get off me!”
“We’ll see about that, won’t we? See who lasts . . . a few fucking seconds. I’m up for seconds, darling.”
“It wasn’t a challenge, Joe. I don’t want—”
“Hey, a talent, a class act like you . . . wouldn’t still be here . . . if it was only ever . . . a few seconds.”
I was now on my front unable to move with him on top and inside me.
“Please . . . Joe,” I pleaded but he ignored me and kept going, not passionately, but furiously, like someone trying to beat a record. I closed my eyes, while he went for it, doing what he had to do. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the perfect rhythm of his breathing and his cruelty, and all I could see behind my eyes was the baby, watching us through his small congested eyes, silver blue and wet. Joe stopped for a moment and turned me over. I was so unspeakably tired. He started going down on me with such fanaticism that I couldn’t tell whether it was a demonstration or a punishment.
“Joe . . . Joe. . . ,” I whispered. “What are you doing, Joe? That was our son today.”
He lifted his head. I reached for the bedside light. His face was red and he was crying, such a flood of tears and sobs as might move a stone. Then he buried his face in my breasts. Why couldn’t I hold him or even caress the hair at the base of his head? The baby had had eyes like Roger’s.
8. One night a few months later, Joe and I were at a meeting of a support group for parents who have lost children to SIDS. I looked around the room. There were mostly couples, but there were also a few single people whose relationships had succumbed or were in the process of succumbing to SIDS. Though they each looked, almost to a mourner, like thoroughly decent people, I was desperate to get out of there as soon as possible and never to go back. An unbelievably tragic and random event had beaten them to a pulp and they were looking for solace in this suburban living room where a tall urn of boiling water waited on a card table beside a row of thin white empty cups and saucers, a jar of Nescafé, and some Tupperware holding somebody’s coconut-sprinkled half-baked therapy.
I looked at Joe, who, not getting much out of the grief counseling, had found a friend next to the coconut cookies and was in the process of handing out one of his business cards.
“Private client services,” I heard him say as he stood beside the shaky card table eating a cookie. “Sounds impressive, but stripped of the jargon, my job is to put people in touch with the best mix of growth and security that’s available at a given moment. That’s it in a nutshell. Mmm . . . these are good, aren’t they? But you gotta watch out for the crumbs.”
We had lost our son. I was still having trouble seeing the world as other than surreal, still having trouble sleeping. I wasn’t crying. I was numb. During the occasional shafts of clarity, it became obvious to me that once I’d recovered a little, it would be better, for both our sakes, if we separated. We shared a tragedy that was no one’s fault, but that was not enough to sustain the mistake that was our marriage. We were both still young.
At work, people, especially women, tiptoed around me. They didn’t know how to approach me and so, for the most part, they didn’t, notwithstanding that the firm styled itself “the people people.” “The people people,” which had once described itself as being in the “recruitment” business, then in “personnel,” then “human resources,” was a firm of management consultants specializing in “outsourcing” and “downsizing” counseling. It didn’t take very long before you didn’t hear “the people people” anymore. You got used to it. We were, after all, “the people people.”
I hadn’t been at the firm very long when the slogan was introduced, and on being asked what I thought of it, I was generous with my praise in case it was me they were assessing and not the catchphrase.
There were bigger things in need of my tightrope-walking skills at the time. My immediate superior had developed an unwelcome interest in me. I would feel his hand on the small of my back at inappropriate moments. He would brush past me unnecessarily, his hands lingering everywhere, laugh, and ask whether I’d stay where I was because he had to come back that way.
After a couple of months, I was sufficiently concerned to turn to a woman
slightly senior to me and tell her what was happening. She said I was doing the right thing by ignoring it and that “he tries it on with all the new girls.”
“But I’m not a secretary.”
“No, they don’t have the choices that you have.”
“What choices?”
“You can go along with it—”
“Go along with it? You’re kidding!”
“No. Many do.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“Go along with it, or what?” I asked.
“Ignore it. Ignore it for long enough and he’ll get tired of it and go on to someone else.”
“What if I talked to him, said something to him about it?”
“I wouldn’t do that if you want to stay. It’s pretty good here. The pay is good. You can be happy here.”
“And if I ignore it, he’ll stop sooner or later?”
“Yep.”
“And it’ll still be possible to have a good working relationship with him?”
“I’m still here, aren’t I?”
She was still there when my compassionate leave expired. She was still single, a director now, and afraid of nothing, not even the odor of my personal tragedy. At work she was the only one I could talk to. When months passed and still I hadn’t recovered, I stopped going to support group meetings. Nothing was helping. In desperation I bowed to the urging of my family and Joe, and reluctantly agreed to taking a “recuperative” vacation. Joe had been talking about Fiji. He was between deals.
“Might do us a world of good, recharge our batteries. Might be just what we need,” Joe lobbied.
What we needed was to separate. But it was easier to take the trip to Fiji and separate later than it was to start surreptitiously looking for a place to live. Just thinking about my parents’ response to a separation was enough to get me on a plane to Fiji. And so instead of leaving Joe, I found myself accompanying him to Fiji for a bizarre vacation
in which the hotel staff there treated us like honeymooners, at least initially. After a few days, someone must have noticed that I was going on long walks on my own and Joe was propping up the bar into the small hours of the morning without me and asking around where on the island paradise one could hire pornographic videos. He finally managed to get some with a local or at least tropical flavor for us to watch in the privacy of our hotel suite. He ordered elaborate and colorful cocktails through room service, and when they arrived replete with miniature umbrellas and swizzle sticks, he turned on the video for us to watch together in bed. I cannot imagine what he was thinking, or rather, I cannot imagine how he could think that any amount of gin, swizzle sticks and umbrellas, and the sight of two oiled, hopelessly bored Southeast Asian women pretending to be excited by each other on a television screen could rejuvenate our marriage or anesthetize me to the death of our son. He found it arousing and pleaded with me to “live for the moment.”
Like the baby, the baby lived for a moment, I nearly said to him before telling myself, convincing myself, how much better things would be if I didn’t say anything of the sort. After all, where was the harm in his trying to escape? Who was he hurting? So, we would separate later. He was hurting badly. Let him masturbate. There had been times when with my whole soul I detested him, and there would be again. There had been times when I had been overcome by paroxysms of contempt for him, and there would be again. But suddenly, seeing him there completely naked and unprotected on the bed, I felt a sadness for him. It was pity. In that moment I decided that in the remaining few days I would try to go along with him. There would be time enough for disappointment, policy statements, accusations, and dissolution when we got back home. I would try to please him. I would fake it as much as was necessary. I would ride the waves of his puerile erotic fantasy with him. I would try to think of it as someone might who sleeps with a soldier on the eve of battle, the battle he would be going into when I left him. Where was the harm?
It was right there in me, all over again. We were back home when I realized I was pregnant. Joe opened a bottle of champagne. My mother fell to her knees, cried, and thanked Jesus. I felt as if I’d been hit by a truck.
“I prayed for this, Anna. I actually prayed for this,” my mother told me.
“We all did,” Joe echoed.
I’d made an appointment for a termination. I had taken the telephone directory out of the cupboard, opened it, and made an appointment, but I couldn’t go through with it. The nuns had done my mother and father proud. But it wasn’t just the nuns. Once I had told even Sophie, let alone Joe and my parents, I wasn’t able to go through with it. My mistake, well, my second mistake, had been to tell anyone. I should have gone to the clinic as soon as I was sure, as soon as I’d missed my first period. It wasn’t Sam yet then. It wasn’t my beautiful son then. It wasn’t anyone. But it was the end of any chance I had to start again, completely unencumbered.
One Saturday afternoon during the pregnancy I fell asleep on the bed to dream of a much older woman, a barely recognizable friend of my mother from church, bending over me in the half-light. As she drew circles on my stomach with a finger dipped in what looked like olive oil, she whispered, “Three divinities from the Holy Trinity make one God. These three circles protect the life and development of a new being who will come into the world by the will of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Please grant . . .” I awoke, but the whispering continued.
There really was a strange woman standing in my bedroom muttering about the Trinity. My mother, who was waiting anxiously in the kitchen, had paid her to come. Joe was listening to a football game in another room. He let them in but stayed out of the argument that ensued between my mother and me. Later, Sophie thought it was all very funny.
“She’s worried about you, that’s all,” she said.
“Would you like it?”
“Hell, no! Just laugh it off. Forget about it.”
“But she actually paid that woman.”
“What kind of olive oil was it?”
“Sophie, you’ve got to get them off my back,” I said just as Joe walked in.
“Your sister’s right, Anna. We need to find out what kind of olive oil it was. If she used ours, she’s a thief and it won’t work,” he said, biting into an apple. But at night, standing in his pajamas as he finished brushing his teeth, he looked like an overgrown child, hopeful and trying to be good. I was reading on my side of the bed when he appeared at his side of the bed and said, apropos of nothing, “I’m glad she did it. Why take chances?”
When the baby that is Sam was born, my mother and father, my husband and his mother, and my sister were overjoyed. The truth I have never been permitted to tell a soul is that I was not. Even so, I loved him immediately. And if great joy was absent, relief was not. Relief is what I felt every moment I went in to check on him, every morning when I woke up and he was still alive. It was years before I took for granted that he would be. I never did entirely.
I loved him dearly, but I was not euphoric. I was conscious of how hard it would be to have to wait for my baby to grow old enough for the damage my leaving his father would do to him to be so minimal that I could live with it.
9. Every day I would come home and burst with love and pride on seeing the adorable little boy I fed, clothed, bathed, and read to—the little person I had produced—but still, every day without fail, I knew I had married a mistake. I was trapped in a house, smaller or bigger, depending on the market, but always a house inhabited by cavernous silences. I was forced to sleep beside, launder the clothes of, and be intimate with a crude, fairly simple man who showed few signs of having much of an inner life. The very routine of my circumstances meant that I was unlikely to meet someone new and with whom I could commune, share my problems, someone who cared about me, about others, someone who could think. Certainly I was unlikely to experience any joyful abandon or elation in a future relationship. So, years later, when I thought I might have found it, it was completely unexpected.
I never expected to find myself warm, snug, smiling, tingling, glad to be alive, driving aimlessly at sunrise without anyone in the world knowing where I was. The streets beside me were just waking up. Deliveries were being made—flowers, newspapers, milk. Bakeries were lit and smiling complicitly. Everything was at once familiar and new. I had stayed out all night and I should have felt guilty, though not too guilty. I had been with a man but had not slept with him, much as we had both wanted to. We had barely kissed good-bye, and yet I felt like a million dollars.
I needed to drive around until Joe was at work and the housekeeper had taken Sam to school. I had told Joe that I would be out of town for the firm and would leave my car at the airport. I drove to the other side of town and ordered coffee at a café I had read about in the epicure section of the paper. The café returned the compliment by providing that day’s copy of the paper for its breakfast clientele to stain or steal. But I couldn’t concentrate on reading. I was too alive. I ordered a huge cooked breakfast that I knew, even as I was ordering it, I would not be able to finish. It was more the desire to extend my stay in the café where jazz greeted people meeting other people for breakfast—artists, writers, musicians.
Had Simon been there he would have reminded me that few artists, writers, and musicians can afford to eat breakfast out. Then he would have asked me if I wanted to join him in scouring the malls, supermarkets, and shopping strips of Bentleigh, Croydon, McKinnon, or Box Hill looking for a Proust, Mahler, or Matisse. He would have been right to gently mock my romanticizing of the neobohemian pretensions of the citizens of the left bank of the Yarra. I would have smiled, a little embarrassed, felt a little stupid, and then I would have left him.
But Simon was not there and that morning in that café, life suddenly seemed fecund with possibility. I looked at the posters on the wall and, for at least a moment, took every one of them seriously. I would make it a point to get to more theater, community theater, avant-garde interpretative dance
master-class workshops, all in performance spaces only walking distance from where I sat. Smell that coffee. Thank God people had continued to do things I’d never done. I could still get involved. I wasn’t dead or even old. Another poster advertised a concert for Greenpeace. Maybe I would go. Maybe I would join. Maybe I would join Amnesty. People on this side of the river were definitely friendlier.
I thought that perhaps I might live on this side of the river one day but the thought dissolved before I got to whether it would be alone or with a new man, perhaps the man I had just been with. The arrival of the breakfast—eggs, bacon, tomato, hash browns, and toast—had brought me back to earth a little. While it all looked and smelled just as it needed to in order to delineate the night before from the new day, the size of it reminded me of the reality of my situation. More than money and childlessness, what a woman needs for a second marriage is a pancake-flat stomach. It was the first time in years I had seriously thought of re-entering the market.
I hadn’t been looking. I hadn’t been looking for an affair or even for a way out. I’d gradually resigned myself to a half-life with Joe until Sam was older. How much older? I had no timetable and perhaps I was never really going to leave, but I needed the promise of it in some unspecified future. But then there came a cocktail party, another one associated with Joe’s work that I hadn’t wanted to go to because, if the people there thought well of Joe then they weren’t worth spending time with, and if they didn’t think much of him I wouldn’t want to see that either. This particular cocktail party seemed to mean a lot to Joe.
“Why don’t you wear that red dress? You know the one,” he called from the bathroom.
“No, which one?” I called back, genuinely not knowing.
“You know, the one I like. The red backless one with the . . . with the tits.”
“The tits are mine.”
“What?” he called.
“The tits are mine.”
“Come on, Anna. Don’t get cute. We’ll be late,” he called back impatiently. He was nervous. He kept changing his jacket. I’d been responsible for a complex about his dress sense and now he was unable to ask my opinion.