Only they hadn’t told her about the baby. No, they hadn’t.
When it was all over, she knew she couldn’t do it again. Maybe she was a coward. Maybe she’d been deluding herself, thinking she could handle it like a man. But a man wouldn’t have broken down and cried. A man wouldn’t have thrown up right there in front of the police officers. She remembered the shriek of an electric guitar, the volume turned up and roaring over the parking lot. It had been a hot, humid night in July. A terrible night, and she still saw it sometimes in her worst dreams.
She was assigned to the social desk. Her first assignment there was covering the Civitans Stars and Bars Ball.
She took it.
Laura knew other reporters, men and women who did their jobs well. They crowded around the distraught relatives of plane-crash victims and stuck microphones in their faces. They went to morgues to count bullet holes in bodies, or stood in gloomy forests while the police hunted for pieces of murder victims. She watched them grow old and haggard, searching for some kind of purpose amid the carnage of life, and she’d decided to stay on the social desk.
It was a safe place. And as she got older, Laura realized that safe places were hard to find, and if the money was good as well, then wasn’t that the best a person could do?
She wore a dark blue suit not unlike the outfits worn by the other businesswomen in the restaurant, though hers was maternity-tailored. In the parking lot was her gray BMW. Her husband of eight years was a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch in midtown Atlanta, and together they made over a hundred thousand dollars a year. She used Estée Lauder cosmetics, and she shopped for clothes and accessories in the tony little boutiques of Buckhead. She went to a place where she got manicures and pedicures, and another place where she took steambaths and had massages. She went to ballets, operas, art galleries, and museum parties, and most of the time she went alone.
Doug’s work claimed him. He had a car phone in his Mercedes, and when he was home he was constantly making or receiving calls. That was a camouflage, of course. They both knew it was more than work. They were caring toward each other, like two old friends might be who had faced adversity and fought through it together, but what they had could not be called love.
“So how’s Doug?” Carol asked. She’d known the truth for a long time. It would be hard to hide the truth from someone as sharp-eyed as Carol, and anyway, they both knew many other couples who lived together in a form of financial partnership.
“He’s fine. Working a lot.” Laura took another bite of her gumbo. “I hardly see him except on Sunday mornings. He’s started playing golf on Sunday afternoons.”
“But the baby’s going to change things, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it will.” She shrugged. “He’s excited about the baby, but…I think he’s scared, too.”
“Scared? Of what?”
“Change, I guess. Having someone new in our lives. It’s so strange, Carol.” She placed a hand against her stomach, where the future lived. “Knowing that inside me is a human being who’ll—God willing—be on this earth long after Doug and I are gone. And we’ve got to teach that person how to think and how to live. That kind of responsibility is scary. It’s like…we’ve just been playing at being grown-ups until now. Can you understand that?”
“Sure I can. That’s why I never wanted children. It’s a hell of a job, raising kids. One mistake, and bam! You’ve either got a wimp or a tyrant. Jesus, I don’t know how anybody can raise kids these days.” She downed a hefty drink of chardonnay. “I don’t think I’m the mothering type, anyway. Hell, I can’t even housebreak a puppy.”
That much was certainly true. Carol’s Pomeranian had no respect for Oriental carpets and no fear of a rolled-up newspaper. “I hope I’m a good mother,” Laura said. She felt herself approaching inner shoals. “I really do.”
“You will be. Don’t worry about it. You definitely are the mothering type.”
“Easy for you to say. I’m not so sure.”
“I am. You mother the hell out of me, don’t you?”
“Maybe I do,” Laura agreed, “but that’s because you need somebody to kick you in the tail every now and again.”
“Listen, you’re going to be a fantastic mother. Mother of the year. Hell, mother of the century. You’re going to be up to your nose in Pampers and you’re going to love it. And you watch what happens to Doug when the baby comes, too.”
Here lay the real rocks, on which boats of hope could be broken to pieces. “I’ve thought about that,” Laura said. “I want you to know that I’m not having this baby so Doug and I can stay together. That’s not it at all. Doug has his own life, and what he does makes him happy.” She traced money signs on the misty glass of Perrier. “One night I was at home reading. Doug had gone to New York on business. I was supposed to cover the Ball of Roses the next day. It struck me how alone I was. You were in Bermuda, on vacation. I didn’t want to talk to Sophia, because she doesn’t like to listen. I tried four or five people, but everybody was out somewhere. So I sat there in the house, and do you know what I realized?”
Carol shook her head.
“I don’t have anything,” Laura said, “that’s mine.”
“Oh, right!” Carol scoffed. “You’ve got a three-hundred-thousand-dollar house, a BMW, and a closetful of clothes I’d die to get my hooks into! So what else do you need?”
“A purpose,” Laura answered, and her friend’s wry smile faded.
The waiter brought their lunches. Soon afterward, three women entered the restaurant, one of them pushing a stroller, and they were seated a few tables away from Laura and Carol. Laura watched the mother—a blond-haired woman at least ten years younger than herself, and fresh in the way that youth can only be—look down at her infant and smile like a burst of sunshine. Laura felt her own baby move in her belly, a sudden jab of an elbow or knee, and she thought of what he must look like, cradled in the swollen pink womb, his body feeding from a tube of flesh that united them. It was amazing to her that in the body within her was a brain that would hunger for knowledge. That the baby had lungs, a stomach, veins to carry his blood, reproductive organs, eyes, and eardrums. All this and so much more had been created inside her, had been entrusted to her. A new human being was about to emerge into the earth. A new person, suckled on her fluids. It was a miracle beyond the miraculous, and sometimes Laura couldn’t believe it was really about to happen. But here it was, two weeks until a birth day. She watched the young mother smooth a white blanket around the infant’s face, and then the woman glanced up at her. Their eyes met for a few seconds, and the two women passed a smile of recognition of labors past and yet to be.
“A purpose,” Carol repeated. “If you’d wanted one of those, you could’ve come over and helped me paint my condo.”
“I’m serious. Doug has his purpose: making money, for himself and his clients. He does a good job at it. But what do I have? Don’t say the newspaper, please. I’ve gone about as far as I can go there. I know I’m paid well and I have a cushy job, but—” She paused, trying to put her feelings into words. “That’s something anybody can do. The place won’t fold if I’m not at my desk.” She cut a piece of salmon but left it on her plate. “I want to be needed,” she told Carol. “Needed in a way that no one else can match. Do you understand?”
“I guess so.” She looked a little uncomfortable at this personal revelation.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with money or possessions. Not the house, not the car, not clothes or anything else. It’s having someone who needs you, day and night. That’s what I want. And, thank God, that’s what I’m going to have.”
Carol was attacking her salad. “I still say,” she observed, a shred of crabmeat on her fork, “that a puppy would have been less expensive. And puppies don’t want to shave all their hair off except for a rat-tail hanging down in back, either. They don’t like punk rock and heavy metal, they don’t chase girls, and they won’t get their front teeth knoc
ked out at football practice. Oh, Jesus, Laura!” She reached across the table and gripped Laura’s hand. “Swear you won’t name him Bo or Bubba! I won’t be godmother to a kid who chews tobacco! Swear it, okay?”
“We’ve decided on a name,” Laura said. “David. After my grandfather.”
“David.” Carol repeated it a couple of times. “Not Davy or Dave, right?”
“Right. David.”
“I like that. David Clayborne. President of the Student Government Association, the University of Georgia, nineteen …oh Lord, when would that be?”
“Wrong century. Try twenty ten.”
Carol gasped. “I’ll be ancient!” she said. “Shriveled up and ancient! I’d better get some pictures made so David’ll know how pretty I used to be!”
Laura had to laugh at Carol’s expression of merry terror. “I think you’ve got plenty of time for that.”
They veered away from talking about the forthcoming new arrival, and Carol, who was also a reporter on the Constitution’s social desk, entertained Laura with more tales from the trenches. Then her lunch break was over, and it was time for Carol to get back to work. They said good-bye in front of the restaurant as the valets brought their cars, and then Laura drove home while cold drizzle fell from a gray winter sky. She lived about ten minutes away from Lenox Square, on Moore’s Mill Road off West Paces Ferry. The white brick house was on a small plot of land with pine trees in front. The place wasn’t large, particularly in comparison to the other houses in the area, but it had carried a steep price tag. Doug had said he’d wanted to live close to the city, so when they found the property through the friend of a friend they’d been willing to spend the money. Laura pulled into the two-car garage, opened an umbrella, and walked back out to the mailbox. Inside were a half-dozen letters, the new issue of The Atlantic Monthly, and catalogues from Saks and Barnes and Noble. Laura went back into the garage and pressed the code numbers in on the security system, then she unlocked a door that led into the kitchen. She shed her raincoat and looked through the letters. Electric bill, water bill, a letter whose envelope read MR. AND MRS. CLEYBURN YOU HAVE WON AN ALL-EXPENSES-PAID TRIP TO DISNEY WORLD!, and three more letters that Laura held on to after she’d pushed aside the bills and the desperate come-on for the sale of Florida swampland. She walked through a hallway into the den, where she punched on the answering machine to check her messages.
Beep. “This is Billy Hathaway from Clements Roofing and Gutter Service, returnin’ your call. Missed you, I guess. My number’s 555-2142. Thanks.”
Beep. “Laura, it’s Matt. I just wanted to make sure you got the books. So you’re going to lunch with Carol today, huh? Are you a glutton for punishment? Have you decided to name the kid after me? Talk to you later.”
Beep. Click.
Beep. “Mrs. Clayborne, this is Marie Gellsing from Homeless Aid of Atlanta. I wanted to thank you for your kind contribution and the reporter you sent to give us some publicity. We really need all the help we can get. So thanks again. Good-bye.”
And that was it.
Laura walked over to the tapedeck, pushed in a tape of Chopin piano preludes, and eased herself down in a chair as the first sparkling notes began to play. She opened the first letter, which was from Help for Appalachia. It was a note requesting aid. The second letter was from Fund for Native Americans, and the third was from the Cousteau Society. Doug said she was a sucker for causes, that she was on a national mailing list of organizations that made you think the world would collapse if you didn’t send a check to prop it up. He believed most of the various funds and societies were already rich, and you could tell that because of the quality of their paper and envelopes. Maybe ten percent of contributions get where they’re supposed to go, Doug had told her. The rest, he said, went to accounting fees, salaries, building rents, office equipment, and the like. So why do you keep sending them more money?
Because, Laura had told him, she was doing what she thought was right. Maybe some of the funds she donated to were shams, maybe not. But she wasn’t going to miss the money, and it all came from her newspaper salary.
But there was another reason she gave to charities, and perhaps it was the most important one. Purely and simply, she felt guilty that she had so much in a world where so many suffered. But the hell of it was that she enjoyed her manicures, her steambaths, and her nice clothes; she’d worked hard for them, hadn’t she? She deserved her pleasures, and anyway she’d never used cocaine or bought animal-skin coats and she’d sold her stock in the company that did so much business in South Africa. And had made a lot of profit from the sale, too. But Jesus, she was thirty-six years old! Thirty-six! Didn’t she deserve the fine things she’d worked so hard for?
Deserve, she thought. Who really deserved anything? Did the homeless deserve to shiver in alleys? Did the harp seals deserve to be clubbed and slaughtered? Did the homosexual deserve AIDS, or the wealthy woman deserve a fifteen-thousand-dollar designer dress? Deserve was a dangerous word, Laura thought. It was a word that built barriers, and made wrong seem right.
She put the letters aside, on a small table next to her checkbook.
A package of four books had come in the mail yesterday, sent from Matt Kantner at the Constitution. Laura was supposed to read them and do reviews for the Arts and Leisure section over the next month or so. She’d scanned them yesterday, when she’d been sitting by the fireplace and the rain was coming down outside. There was the new novel by Anthony Burgess, a nonaction book on Central America, a novel about Hollywood called The Address, and a fourth nonaction work that had instantly caught her attention.
Laura picked it up from where it sat beside her chair with a bookmark in it. It was a thin book, only one hundred and seventy-eight pages, and not very well produced. The covers were already warping, the paper was of poor quality, and though the pub date was 1989, the book had a faintly moldy smell. The publisher’s name was Mountaintop Press, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The title was Burn This Book, by Mark Treggs. There was no author’s picture on the back, only an ad for another book about edible mushrooms and wildflowers, also written by Mark Treggs.
Looking through Burn This Book brought back some of the feelings that had surfaced when she was sitting in the Fish Market. Mark Treggs, as recounted in the slim memoir, had been a student at Berkeley in 1964, and had lived in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco during the era of love-ins, long hair, free LSD, happenings, and skirmishes with the police in Peoples’ Park. He wrote wistfully of communes, of crash pads hazed with marijuana fumes, where discussions of Allen Ginsburg poems and Maoist theories mingled into abstract philosophies of God and nature. He talked about draft card burnings, and massive marches against Vietnam. When he described the smell and sting of tear gas, he made Laura’s eyes water and her throat feel raw. He made that time seem romantic and lost, a communion of outlaws battling for the common cause of peace. Seen in hindsight, though, Laura realized there was as much struggle for power between the various factions of unrest as there was between the protesters and the Establishment. In hindsight, that era was not as romantic as it was tragic. Laura thought of it as the last scream of civilization, before the Dark Ages set in.
Mark Treggs talked about Abbie Hoffman, the SDS, Altamont, flower power, the Chicago Seven, Charles Manson and the White Album, the Black Panthers, and the end of the Vietnam War. As the book went on, his writing style became more confused and less pointed, as if he were running out of steam, his voice dwindling as had the voices of the Love Generation. At the midpoint, he called for an organization of the homeless and a rising up against the powers of Big Business and the Pentagon. The symbol of the United States was no longer the American flag, he said, it was a money sign against a field of crosses. He advocated demonstrations against the credit card companies and the TV evangelists; they were partners, Treggs believed, in the stupefaction of America.
Laura closed Burn This Book and laid it aside. Some people probably would heed the title, but the volume was mos
t likely fated to molder in the cubbyhole bookstores run by holdover hippies. She’d never heard of Mountaintop Press before, and from the looks of their production work they were only a small regional outfit with not a whole lot of experience or money. Little chance of the book being picked up by mainstream publishers, either; this sort of thing was definitely out of fashion.
She put her hands to her stomach and felt the heat of life. What would the world be like by the time David reached her age? The ozone layer might be gone by then, and the forests gnawed bare by acid rain. Who knew how much worse the drug wars could get, and what new forms of cocaine the gangs could flood the streets with? It was a hell of a world to bring a child into, and for that she felt guilty, too. She closed her eyes and listened to the soft piano music. Once upon a time, Led Zeppelin had been her favorite band. But the stairway to heaven had broken, and who had time for a whole lotta love? Now all she wanted was harmony and peace, a new beginning: something real that she could cradle in her arms. The sound of amplified guitars reminded her too much of that hot July night, in the apartments near the stadium, when she watched a woman crazy on crack put a gun to a baby’s head and blow the infant’s brains out in a steamy red shower.
Laura drifted amid the piano chords, her hands folded across her belly. The rain was falling harder outside. The gutters that needed repairs would soon be flooding. But in the house it was safe and warm, the security system was on, and for the moment Laura’s world was a sanctuary. Dr. Bonnart’s number was close at hand. When the time came, she’d deliver the baby at St. James Hospital, which was about two miles from the house.
My baby is on the way, she thought.
My baby.
Mine.
Laura rested as the silvery music of another age filled the house and rain began to slam down on the roof.
And at a K-Mart near Six Flags, the clerk behind the counter in the sporting goods department was just selling a boy-sized rifle called a Little Buckaroo to a customer who wore stained overalls and a battered Red Man cap. “I like the looks of that one,” the man in the cap said. “I believe Cory will, too. That’s my boy. Saturday’s his birthday.”