“Please don’t even joke about deliveries. This obviously cannot happen.”
“Well, obviously not,” Pamela snapped, her voice made tinny by the speakerphone. “Someone has to knock some sense into her. I can’t believe Nathan was such a bloody wet blanket about it, I told him what to say.”
James and Pamela had been speaking every day for the last terrible fortnight, so she was well aware that there had been no change. Gwen had moved beyond the reach of all reason, as if beneath a dome of thick glass through which nothing, no sound, no sense, could penetrate. She had the blank-eyed conviction of the religious zealot, and the zealot’s placid, maddening pity for those who didn’t see the light. She was having the baby, she could do it, she’d been reading about it on the Internet, she had an instinct, a second sense; they just needed to have faith. James found it hard to look at her. How was it possible that one spoiled, angry teenager had wrested control of all their lives?
“Anyway,” Pamela went on, “speaking of deliveries, you delivered our boy back to school. He sounds like a different child; you’d think he was at Disneyland. It’s heartbreaking. My beloved little boy. I’m driving on the freeway in the sunshine and I was feeling such lightness thinking, yes, he’s going to be okay, my baby’s going to be himself again, but now I’m questioning the wisdom of his absence. He should be processing, he’s deeply in denial. It’s dangerous. He should be fighting to prevent it before it’s too late, that’s the key here, isn’t it? You can’t do anything from a place of denial. For God’s sake, he can be home a few weeks and then go back to boarding once it’s dealt with; he’s the only one with any influence; he’s got to tell her as many times as it takes that she’s being a bloody moron. I don’t know what went wrong when they spoke on the Heath, I couldn’t have prepped him any better but when I spoke to him just now he sounded manic and was wittering on about spending his gap year volunteering in a South African clinic. It’s out of sight and utterly totally bizarrely out of mind.”
“Gotcha.”
“That’s what Gwen said. Ha, ha. Anyway, so you see. I did mention that by the time this supposed gap year rolls around he’ll have a six-month-old and won’t be gapping anywhere, but it didn’t seem to register. Total denial.” In the background James could hear the voice of the satellite navigation commanding Pamela to keep left ahead. “But between us, I will say I hated making every word of that speech to him. I don’t want to be Mean Mummy, the voice of doom and responsibility, but I was trying to scare him. Surely she’ll listen to him if he’s insistent enough, if he collapses when they talk face-to-face, then he must e-mail her from school like I’ve instructed. That is, assuming she can read. I’ve written him a draft. I want my baby traveling the world, carefree, with girlfriends in Argentina and Italy and Australia and Japan, learning his heart, expanding his horizons. I always tell him, if you call all your girlfriends ‘Darling’ it will save you the trouble of keeping their names straight. You know something, he’s having that bloody gap year if it kills me, whatever I said to him. If she wants it so much, she can look after it. What was the point of— Wait, what? One second, the road’s— I need to read the signs. The satnav’s saying North-South and the road’s saying East-West. Okay, right. What was I saying? Oh, yes. I wanted him to fly. I did not envisage him trapped in the suburbs with a sulky little teen bride and a bawling bundle. It’s not what I wanted for his soul.”
“I hope you didn’t make teen bride jokes with Nathan. We’ve had enough dumb moves.”
“Are you kidding? I told him I’d disown him for his stupidity. Luckily it hadn’t crossed his mind, he sounded suitably horrified. Why the bloody bollocks is there an exit here? One second. I’m going to call you back, I’ve gone wrong.”
• • •
SOMETHING HAD GONE WRONG for Pamela lately, and not simply with her navigation. Her very identity was in conflict.
Her office at the clinic was a parlor. No hierarchical furniture arrangements, no barriers of desks or intimidating swivel chairs that spoke of diplomas and educational advantages and a disconnection from the common lives of those she sought to help. Instead, soft, womanish furniture—soft sofas, pairs of matching, soft egalitarian armchairs. And in this safe, cushioned space women cried and cried about men. About what had been done to them. About what had been sown in them by men. Biology itself dictated who was taking possession of whom; that was the oldest metaphor, the oldest reality. It was there in the syntax—women were never the subject, only the object, subject to a man. And yet two brains make a sequence of decisions; two bodies unite and two people should face the consequences. With the women in her office Pamela sympathized, and raged, and helped. The men must be made to take equal responsibility. They must.
But—when she thought of Nathan, when she considered her sweet son, his puff-chested naïveté, his ebullience, his grin, she felt that something essential had been stolen from him that he had simply been too innocent to guard. Gwen, predatory and conniving beyond her years, had entrapped him. Some women did, we were not all passive, not all united in benign and supportive sisterhood, after all. Seeking revenge upon her mother, or a means to get her claws irretractably into Nathan (for he was manifestly out of her league, only available because of this accident of circumstance; of this Pamela felt quite certain), or perhaps just wanting a warm, responsive living dolly to cuddle, she had attacked—mugged was the best word—had mugged Pamela’s little boy. It was almost as if— She toyed with the word that had risen spontaneously to the surface. No, all right, she conceded, defensive against herself, it wasn’t quite like that. But something like it. Certainly a violation.
She had not gone wrong. She found her exit and after leaving the slip road redialed James, who answered immediately and said, “Look, maybe he should be around but you can’t imagine how godawful it’s been in the house with Julia and that girl at each other’s throats; I just wanted him out of it. The boy deserves some peace and quiet to study now.”
Pamela whistled through her teeth. Ahead she saw a drive-thru Dunkin’ Donuts and realized with a flash of grateful recognition that a large iced coffee would elevate this journey from tedious to transcendent. She slowed and turned, her mood already transformed. “What a trip. Do you remember when he begged for that Japanese fighting fish? And then he forgot to clean it out and it suffocated. I retract what I said, I actually think it’s a gift that he’s away during the week and he can breathe. Charlie came into his room while we were on the phone and he sounded so happy to be with his friends again. They’re good boys, with all their high fives and weird Masonic handshakes.”
“I asked the other day if he’d told Charlie about the baby and he looked at me like I’d lost my mind and I thought, you know what? Let him have his denial. If we can’t change her mind in the next few weeks, he won’t have much longer to be a kid.”
“Oh, Jamesy,” Pamela breathed, back in the seductive tone she assumed when she felt he was no longer opposing her. He could picture her quite clearly leaning forward, steepling her fingers and offering beyond them the musky darkness of a substantial cleavage, and an outrageous pout of her lips. In fact, she was idling at the mouth of the Dunkin’ Donuts takeout lane, reading the menu with greedy pleasure. “He’d still be a baby. He’d just be a baby with a baby. Which is precisely why you cannot let it happen. We’re depending on you now; all these random people are your bloody responsibility. Please give your son a kick up the arse and get him to fucking deal with it.”