WEEKS AFTER THE SNOWSTORM, its remains still lingered on the shadowy sides of hills. One night, after the first day during which I made none of my usual Jake pilgrimages, I dreamt that I was in the driver’s seat of a beat-up old car. The windows were down and I had a clear-eyed view of a wide horizon all around me. The car was parked at the pinnacle of a steep, rocky mountain. Next to me, riding shotgun, was a little boy. He was wearing sneakers and blue jeans with a ripped knee. He was sitting the way little kids do whenever their legs are too short for a big chair—his feet stuck out straight in front of him, dangling off the edge of the seat. He had storm gray eyes.
The car started to roll backward, down a rutted dirt road on the side of the mountain, picking up speed as it went. I was twisted in the seat, looking out the back window and trying to steer the car as we whipped around switchbacks trailing a cloud of dust, the wind blowing through the open windows. It was very tense and difficult. My heart was beating hard.
I looked at the little boy next to me. “We’re totally out of control,” I said to him.
“I know,” he said, and smiled at me. “Isn’t it great?”
When I woke up from the dream, I knew I was pregnant. The test I got from the drugstore later that week only confirmed it.
Prometheus, who was the cleverest of the Titans, stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. This angered the gods, and in retribution for this theft, Prometheus was chained by Zeus to a lonesome rocky peak in the Caucasus Mountains, where every day a bloodthirsty eagle swooped down and savagely tore out his liver and ate it. Every night, Prometheus’s liver regrew, so he could suffer again tomorrow.
Having taken his revenge on Prometheus, Zeus then turned his attention to the punishment of mankind. Up until that time, there had been no women on the earth. Zeus’s revenge was to give men Pandora, the first woman, the loveliest of maidens, endowed by the gods with every gift of grace and beauty. But the clever Zeus also gave his creation one fault, one single pernicious flaw. He gave her curiosity.
Zeus sent the misbegotten Pandora to earth to be the wife of Epimetheus, Prometheus’s foolish brother. He sent with her a tightly sealed box, which he warned her never to open. He did not tell her what was in the box.
Zeus knew even then that Pandora was destined to engender the misery of humanity through her own action. He also knew that her action was inevitable, arising from her very nature as it was made by the gods. It is in the inherent nature of women, the Greeks say, to be curious, to wonder what if?
The gods—the vindictive, scheming, punishing gods—had not long to wait before Pandora—in the night while Epimetheus slept—opened the box. Out flew all the plagues of humanity—greed and envy and slander, sorrow, mischief of every kind. These plagues buzzed around Pandora’s head like wasps and stinging flies and then flew off to spread themselves throughout the world, causing grief wherever they went. But finally, last of all, from the very bottom of the box, out fluttered hope on tiny delicate wings. The sorrows would be with humanity forever now, but we would also have the fragile, sometimes imperceptible, wing beat of hope.
The story of Pandora tells us, if we brush away all the misogyny, that it is only those people—the Greeks call them women—who dare to embrace every part of themselves, who dare the bad with the good, the forbidden as well as the approved, the sins along with the virtues, who give us the saving grace of hope and who open for us the wild and limitless possibilities of wonder. It is only those flawed and tragically reckless rule breakers who ever find the answers to the question, what if? Maybe even from misbegotten people, millions upon millions of flawed Pandoras, there can come some good. Each of us, children as we are of that first woman, sometimes dares to open a forbidden box, and we must ever after brave the perils and demons that our own natures have brought upon us. But we have also, at the same time, released our own saving grace.
I doubt very much that I am the only person who ever thought about Pandora when deciding to have a baby. What if? we ask ourselves with wonder and awe.
It is lovely to have a secret, and at first I didn’t tell anyone I was going to have a baby—a little boy, I was sure, with gray eyes. The little boy was my secret companion, invisible and silent but magical, riding along everywhere with me, part of me.
The snow had melted and left the black tree trunks naked against the gray sky. Even the crows were silent now, and the hawks sat forlornly on high branches with their shoulders hunched against the empty air. But the little boy inside me was a warm vivid flame, a red glow that throbbed with every heartbeat. I carried him around, sheltered from the sharp winter cold, and he laughed with joy and made me laugh with joy also. We were happy to see the faded winter grasses ripple along the ground in the waves of icy wind. We were happy to see the pointed face of a fox peek at us from the edge of the woods and then disappear again into the shadows. I dreamt of the little boy clapping his hands in delight.
The thing about a secret pregnancy, though, is that eventually you’re going to have to tell. Even if you don’t tell, people are going to know.
I had two problems. Maybe three.
The first problem was how to break the news. The second problem was whom to break the news to. The third problem, which was only maybe a problem, was what to do then.
Maybe the baby was Jake’s. Maybe he was Danny’s. They bookended the snowstorm, the two of them, merging together in my memory along with the snow and the silence and the warmth of strong arms that held me tight in the violet dusk.
Jake was long gone. I hadn’t heard a word from him since he drove off under the gray sky a lifetime ago. Yes, Jake was gone.
But Danny was right across town, pouring drinks at the café, telling jokes and laughing in the warm, coffee-scented air. Danny—who surely loved me as much as he had ever loved anyone.
I went uptown.
Danny was drying glasses behind the bar. The light coming in the big front windows filtered through a scrim of steam so that it diffused in a pearly glow all through the café. It reflected off the chrome cappuccino machine into Danny’s eyes and made them seem especially bright.
“Hey, sugar,” he said to me, smiling. “Where ya been?”
“Nowhere,” I said. “Around. You know. Home. Around. Nowhere. You know.”
Danny laughed. “Well,” he said, “I’m glad we got that cleared up.”
I felt sweaty and sick, like I had guzzled a whole bottle of cheap tequila in two minutes flat. I didn’t know if it was nerves or the side effects of growing a human inside me.
Danny looked hard at me. “Are you okay?”
“Sugar,” I said, “I gotta tell you something that you’re not going to like.”
“Come on out back,” he said, and I went behind the bar and followed him through the kitchen and out the back door into the alleyway. I sat on an empty milk crate and he sat near me, resting on his heels with his back against the brick wall.
He lit a cigarette and looked up at the sky. Then he looked at me, and his eyes smiled. “It can’t be that bad,” he said softly.
So I told him—told him I was going to have a baby and that it might be his baby, but that it might be Jake’s.
We sat quiet for a while, listening to the sounds in the alleyway—the low swish of cars on Juniper Street, the delicate clink of dishes in the kitchen of the café, Pamela’s voice, too indistinct to make out the words, one sharp bark from a hidden dog.
“Scoot over,” Danny said, and I inched a little bit to the edge of the milk crate. He sat down next to me, balancing on the rickety plastic, and put his arm around me. “I’ll marry you,” he said, and there was only the very tiniest pause before he said, “if you want me to.”
I put my head on his shoulder like I used to in the old days when we sat at the corner table in the Cave and I watched him play cards. I tried to imagine us together again—like the old days, only with a little baby now.
But I couldn’t see Danny and me together—I couldn’t bring the images of it to my mind—because all I could see was my little gray-eyed boy. I could see my little boy’s face, watching me, trusting me. He was depending on me.
Farther down the alley, I heard a screen door bang and a woman’s voice call out goodbye. Danny was waiting for me to answer—I could feel him waiting, holding his breath. But I knew then that this little boy wasn’t Danny’s baby or Jake’s baby. I knew then that this little boy was my baby.
“Thank you,” I said to Danny. “I appreciate that. But it turns out that what I need most is just for you to be my friend. Be our friend.”
His relief was palpable.
The bookstore, with Vaslav long gone, was its usual empty self when Rafi showed up the next morning. I was sitting on the sofa sifting through a big pile of childbirth books that Tom had ordered for Rosalita so long ago. The sunshine was pouring in the rippled window glass, and the dust was dancing in the beams of light. Rafi sat down next to me. I could tell by the look on his face that he knew.
“Oh, God,” he said, picking up a copy of Green Babies and looking alarmed. “It’s going to be green?”
I laughed.
“Jake?” he asked, looking serious again.
I shrugged. “Maybe. Does it matter?”
“Probably not—not if it doesn’t matter to you, I guess.”
“It’s not that I don’t care,” I said. “It’s just that I think we’ll be okay without him. We will.”
“We?”
“The two of us.” I smiled. “There’s two of us now. And we’re in it together, for better or worse.”
He reached over and held my hand. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he said.
“I know. I know that. I want to, though.”
“Are you sure?”
“For the first time ever, actually.”
“I’m glad then,” he said. “Do you need anything? Money or . . . anything?”
“Oh, Rafi,” I said. “Right now, right at this minute, I have everything I need.”
He stayed with me all afternoon.
As the freed prisoner slowly sees more and more in his new world, Socrates says that his gaze shifts upward to the sky. At first, it is still too painful for him to look directly at the sky in daytime, with the burning light of the sun piercing his eyes. But at nighttime, he can study the heavens—the moon and the stars.
That is the word Socrates uses—he will study them. In this endeavor, he will not be alone. Humans have looked to the night sky to study the stars and the moon for eons. The sun beats down on us, and we lower our eyes before it. But the moon—how many generations of our ancestors have lingered in the night in order to gaze up at its mysteries, enraptured?
The moon is another world, perched just beyond our fingertips. We can see its mountain ranges and its quiet deserts. We can imagine that perhaps we could make lives there somehow, deep in its tranquil valleys.
The freed prisoner has learned now that there is a world beyond the confines of the cave. And having made the journey to one new world, he looks up into the night sky and sees yet another, floating serenely above him. Perhaps he imagines there must be a tunnel to it somewhere. After all, he has no particular reason to end his journey now.
It is generally better for me to depend on my vices rather than my virtues. My virtues tend to be largely theoretical—I imagine that I might have them if only I were put into the right situation at the right time under the right attendant circumstances, etc. With my vices, on the other hand, I am on sure ground. They are not theoretical at all.
This dependability is not only comforting but also useful. For example, if I want to quit smoking, I increase my chances of success if I quit in the dead of winter—preferably when the forecast calls for freezing rain. It is far too much trouble to go out into the wind and the cold and the wet just to buy cigarettes—or at least my own laziness makes such a venture less likely. I bank on my vice of laziness to be strong enough to overcome any possibility of action. By the time I’ve conquered my sloth (or the weather clears up), I’ve gotten through the worst part of withdrawal. I always tell people who want to quit smoking that they should wait until February. It has worked for me—I have quit smoking lots of times.
Besides being cold and wet, I also hate vomiting. And that proved useful, too, because no sooner did I get good and pregnant than the list of things the smell of which made me vomit increased dramatically. And cigarette smoke was right at the top. I threw out a brand-new pack, washed everything in the house that was at all washable, filled the car ashtray with baking soda, and never looked back.
The downside was that I couldn’t bear to be in the Cave—not only the smell of smoke but also the smell of beer made me wretched. One attempted afternoon visit was all it took. From then on, Rafi and Vera and Pancho visited me at the bookstore instead, where I could sit quietly on the couch eating plain saltine crackers and sipping stomach-soothing ginger tea per Rosalita’s experienced advice. Though welcome, their visits exhausted me so much that I would go to bed at 8 P.M. and sleep for fourteen hours at a stretch. I was quite suddenly leading an alarmingly virtuous life. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to heaven is apparently paved with vomit. This must be yet another reason why virtuous people always look so sad.
“You missed a good band last night,” Rafi said, sitting next to me on the bookstore couch while I slowly ate my crackers and his nephew Jordan lay on the rug looking at the pictures in Hamilton’s Mythology.
“I was asleep,” I said. “Or maybe puking. Probably puking.”
“You would have fit right in with the frat boys.”
“And yet I miss it.”
“I’m becoming quite concerned,” he said.
“About the puking?”
“About the baby.”
“The doctor says I’m puking only a normal amount.”
“Let’s leave the puking aside for a minute.”
“I thought you were concerned about it.”
“I’m concerned about the baby,” he said. “Pancho says that babies can hear things before they’re born—in utero.”
“You’re concerned that the baby will hear me puking? And develop some sort of prenatal guilt complex?”
“Puking takes up a lot of your thought, doesn’t it?”
“Puking takes up a lot of my day.”
“Did I ever tell you that you’re very glamorous?” he asked.
“No.”
“This is why.”
“You can have glamour or you can have babies. You can’t have both,” I said.
“I think we’ve strayed from the topic here,” he said.
“I didn’t realize we had a topic.”
“The topic we have is that Pancho read this article,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And the article said that babies can hear in utero.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not coming into the Cave anymore now.”
“Because of the puking.”
“Leave it,” he said, shaking his finger at me. “There is an important issue here.”
“Which is?”
“I’m worried—Pancho and I are both worried—that your baby is not being properly prenatally exposed to the right kind of music.”
“Dive-bar music?”
“Exactly. Is your baby hearing the blues? Being exposed to Muddy Waters? Does your baby even know who Robert Johnson is? If all it ever hears is the stuff they play in supermarkets and doctors’ offices, it will grow up to be a fan of adult contemporary or Christian rock.”
“Good Lord,” I gasped. “I hadn’t thought about it!”
“The dangers are very real.”
“I see now that I’ve been flirting with disaster,” I smiled.
He sighed. “You have to admit that you do love to flirt. It’s part of your glamour.”
So on rainy days when he wasn’t working, Billy Joe brought his guitar over to my house and played old Delta blues to my belly. On sunny days, Pancho came by and sang all the separate parts of Renaissance madrigals, one by one, carefully explaining to my navel how the pieces were supposed to fit together. He would put his hands on either side of my belly and whisper softly into it long explanations of the historical development of polyphony in Western culture. It was remarkable how much he knew.
Blossom was a loving and generous woman. She would no more have let a person go hungry than she would have kicked a dog. Some days when times were bad, more people left the back door of her restaurant with a free supper in a box than ate out front at the tables. Her children were getting grown now, and even though they still worked in the restaurant, the two oldest boys had wives and homes of their own. Blossom was anxiously waiting for the first grandchild. In the meantime, she lavished attention and homemade applesauce on Bertie. And now she joyously opened her arms and her kitchen to me.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “Sit right here. I’ve got a little piece of catfish fixed so nice just for you. It’ll strengthen you.” Sometimes it was chicken. Sometimes it was beef stew.
“You’re going to be a mama now yourself,” she said one day, looking solemn. “I had better teach you how to make pie.”
I laughed. “It will be a long time before this baby will be old enough to eat pie!”
Blossom looked wistfully at her second-youngest daughter, tall and lovely, taking orders at the next table. “Oh,” she said slowly, “it will be no time at all.”
And so every afternoon for a week, I sat at the big table in the middle of Blossom’s kitchen while she taught me to make pastry and then different fillings. Under her watchful eye, I beat eggs and creamed butter and slowly melted chocolate. Blossom wore the demeanor of a high priestess presiding over a sacred ritual, and I paid close attention to everything she said. My gray-eyed little boy slept peacefully inside me.
“Don’t you worry, baby,” Blossom said to me, even though I had never said anything about how scared I was sometimes. “If you feed them and you love them, everything else will take care of itself.”
By the time I heard from Jake at last, the baby was getting big in my belly and I could feel him moving, like a rustling of butterflies deep inside me. It was just a postcard, postmarked from Nevada:
Hope you are OK—Nashville horrible corporate suit nightmare—Vaslav never saw Vegas, so we are here—Had a good run at the tables—enough to get us to Brazil—leave tonight—Vaslav thinks Rio is the place to be—letter soon—I think of you. xx, Jake
I put the postcard gently between the pages of The Dialogues of Plato, volume two, at the part of Symposium where Aristophanes explains that we all have another half of ourselves out there somewhere, that we are always searching for the part of ourselves that we lost when Zeus split human beings in half as punishment for our ambition. I tucked the postcard between the pages and then closed the book and put it away on the bookshelf.