Just go ahead and have it, said the physician’s assistant who stuck me with the needle when I went to get a blood test to confirm what the stick had shown. So many women are dying to have one and can’t. You should listen to luck like that.
The next morning, a Saturday, I woke up with panic pressing down on me. Out of nowhere, I might have said, but that was technically not correct. I wanted to call Karl but I knew I shouldn’t, and then did, four times, but he didn’t pick up. Ocean Beach was too worn and cluttered to solve this problem, so I called around for a rental car to drive north to Point Reyes. I hoped I did not feel moved to run it off the road. I knew I wouldn’t. I wished I could.
On the rocks where the lighthouse stood, I watched the Pacific stretch so far out into the distance it turned into a second sky. The sun shone white across it like a cracked sheet of ice, but none of it could keep me from staring at my phone and hoping for Karl’s name to materialize at the top of the screen. In search of a beach to sit on, I drove back through the cattle farms, bumping slowly along the road, watching the cows watch me, hills on the right and sea cliffs on the left, imagining that the Kia was a lunar roving vehicle and we were on the moon.
I settled myself down among some dunes and tried to listen. I tried. And tried! The life inside me wasn’t luck. She was more like the line of wrack lying down below me on the sand. Long cables of kelp coughed up by the tide, running parallel to the water, studded with trash from the sea and actual trash—tampons and clam shells, seagull feathers and straws. A trail of broken pieces left behind by all my winds and waves. The residue of really loving what I loved. Of getting exactly what I wanted. She wasn’t luck, but I was lucky, because she was the daughter of a man who liked to kiss the freckles on her mother’s shoulders and quote that line from Hopkins: Glory be to God for dappled things. It might have been all she’d ever need to know about him: he was that tender, that imaginative, that whimsical, that earnest, that alive to the music of words. Kissing her mother like that and not his wife: that reckless and selfish. Just like her mother. But if he liked a song he would play it ten times in a row and still not be tired of it, whether it was a song he’d known since 1989, or a song he’d met the other day, which meant he wasn’t just reckless and selfish, he was also loyal and true. Unlike her mother, who had turned her back, many times, and without remorse, on musicians whose songs had ceased to bring her news. Or maybe the only thing to tell her was that he still carried his eight-year-old daughter into the house at night after long car drives, even though his wife said his daughter was too old for that kind of thing, even though he knew that half the time his daughter was only pretending to sleep. He was the miracle. This child was not.
The ocean: wrestling with itself and always coming to the same decision.
Driving back into the city the temptation to call Rose and then Karl again and Rose and then Karl grew so strong I pulled into an overlook just before the beginning of the bridge, got out of the car, walked to the edge of the blacktop, and threw my phone into the ocean. I did not want to need anyone or to need their help so badly. I wanted to get rid of the risk of being disappointed by the people I needed; did not want to risk being humiliated by my need. As the phone sailed through the sky two women standing next to me clapped. Oh, c’est fantastique! said one while the other said Bravo! and on the way home their approval consoled me the way that futile and deeply unoriginal gesture did not. The phone was gone but the losses—all the losses, any losses I’d ever known—remained. They were heavier and more real than the life inside me.
On the table, in the clinic, as the anesthesiologist inserted the tubes into my nose, I started to cry and told myself not to. There was no reason to cry. Why the fuck was I crying? I must have said these things out loud.
Are you okay, sweetheart? said one of the nurses standing next to me.
Sweetheart? I heard myself say. I’m forty-three.
It was harder than I thought it would be to walk out to the waiting room. My abdomen was sore, as if I’d done a hundred sit-ups. I felt sore, too, between my legs, and along my upper thighs, the way I could after long hours of sex. There were cramps. The literature had neglected to mention that my body would howl like a dog trying to tell me someone had gone missing.
Karl drove me home. In the car I felt his worry and called it love. Lina came to stay that night. We sat in my bed talking and she told me her first abortion left her feeling like she’d been hit by a truck, but she bounced right back after the second, and she thought it might have had everything to do with the fact that she loved the first guy and hated the second. The sound of our hair dryers doing a duet over top-volume NPR in the morning brought me more comfort than I would have imagined.
The day after: sitting in an utterly silent classroom as my students wrote, the girls so absorbed by the act of thinking, so unselfconsciously committed to the act of thinking, it was as if I sat in a garden watching flowers in the act of being flowers. Watching them flourish as they would, without objection or interference—that was all the mothering I owed anyone.
The day after that: crying in the bathroom of a Starbucks after school because those flowers were not mine to keep. Because Karl was not mine to keep, and I was so smart I was stupid. Crying for my mother wanting to drive herself off the road in 1973 and for my grandmother drinking to erase herself in 1969.
It took a few weeks before I could walk up or down stairs without halting or effort. By that time it was summer and school had ended. Afraid of what would happen to my mind without work to distract it, I wrote. Every day, furiously, to atone for having let so many things convince me they were more important. Then Karl showed up at my door. I’d told him I didn’t want to talk to him, but his wife had taken off for Tahoe for a month with the children, and he said he was afraid of being alone with his thoughts. I let him stay that night. He came back and stayed another, and then arrived the next with a beat-up blue canvas duffel bag. I didn’t have the strength or will to send him packing. I needed him to show me that he was stupid, too.
You’re not sleeping in my bed, I told him. We can’t play house.
Your belated faith in boundaries is touching, he said. But he slept out on the couch as requested and in the mornings slipped into my bed.
We spent our evenings sitting next to each other on the wooden deck in my yard, drinking and talking and watching June turn into July. Listening to the foghorns on the bridge call to one another across the bay—noises he said his children had given names to and created, their words, origin stories for. Sometimes we talked about his childhood in relation to his children. You don’t mind? he said. I didn’t. We can talk about so many other things. But I didn’t want to. When he talked about his children it made it easier to hang on to the belief that the world contained just as much light as it did darkness. We went back over everything we said and didn’t say to each other in New York. I had a real talent for being a smug prick, he said. You weren’t the only one who noticed. He said: Rose was the instigator and you were the transcriber. He said: Neither role is better than the other. He said: Rose told me that if she and I fucked it wouldn’t change a thing, and it pissed her off how right she turned out to be. And: Nobody did, or has, made me laugh the way you two did. I said: That’s because you left New York. He told me I was the only person who’d ever been able to make him see what the big deal was about Mary Gaitskill. I told him that I hated to break it to him, but he’d never be able to convince me that I needed to give Tom Waits a second chance.
Sometimes those conversations were really just me handing a draft of my life so far over to him, hoping he’d mark Stet! in the margins wherever I’d written Better? I could feel ashamed to be so desperate for his reassurance, all these years later, but I’d just aborted a child he helped make, and it seemed the least he could do.
You can be just as miserable married as you can be alone, he said.
You’ve got to do better than that, I said. Please.
Okay, he said. He laughed. You’re right. He thought. He said: If you’d wanted what everybody else wanted, or convinces themselves that they want, I wouldn’t be sitting here next to you, waiting to hear what you’ll say next.
I took his hand.
Hold on, something else might be coming through. I think it’s Kierkegaard. Do you mind?
Never, I said.
Okay. Here you go: It is in fact through error that the individual is given access to the highest if he courageously desires it.
I said his name. Because I could not say Don’t ever leave me.
What did you want, back then? I said, on another night. In the middle of June. The air, hot and tired from climbing to a high of 103 degrees that day, hung on us like a second set of clothes.
For a long time, it was to leave home and stay gone. That was as far as I was thinking. And then when I got to New York I saw that I really wasn’t ambitious. I was serious, and took things seriously, but I didn’t have a target for that seriousness. I envied you and Rose because you did. Although I could tell that meant you wouldn’t be a very good girlfriend.
You were right about that.
Or, you know, it was a story I was telling myself. Anyway, there came a point where I sensed I was going to have to go back home, and so I was never as wholehearted about New York and anything in it as I should have been.
And then you went back home.
It wasn’t a tragedy.
I didn’t make a very good wife, either.
That’s also not a tragedy. Maybe your ghosts needed you to write an entirely new story.
That’s too easy.
I don’t know. Walk around with it on for a couple of days and see if it keeps feeling flimsy. What would you lose in believing it? Or why don’t you let me believe it for you?
For whatever reason—exhaustion, cumulative and recent—I thought I actually could let him believe it for me, and go on feeling comforted by it even if we never talked again. I knew I should tell him it was time for him to go sleep in his own bed, but I didn’t.
You’re a good friend, I said.
You’re a good friend to me, too. I feel free around you.
Don’t you think that’s just because I’m not your wife?
No, he said. I always felt that way.
What do you want now? I said.
I want to make sure my children are happy enough for as long as possible. Other than that I’m not sure.
He could have said he wanted me, I thought, forgetting completely that I had just decided to let him return to his life. I let the omission hurt, and when I took my hand away from his he must have felt it.
It’s funny. You think I have all the power here.
I’m sorry. Don’t you?
If you want a fight, Charlotte, just say so.
Part of me wanted to push him toward a more definite show of anger, and part of me wanted to play the exemplary mistress who knew her place. The exemplary mistress and her love for her martyrdom won out. Or I really loved him, and that’s what shut me up.
I don’t want that, I said.
Neither do I. You saw my face when I showed up here. Thinking you might never talk to me again did that to me. You did that to me. You think this isn’t costing me anything, but it’s just that I don’t want to waste the hours we have together by torturing you with an account of the debilitating guilt I feel when I’m not with you. I just want to enjoy you.
Is that all you want from me? I couldn’t help it.
No, he said. He started to speak and then stopped. I waited.
I fantasize about going to a supermarket with you, he said, and waited, too. He might have been a little embarrassed. He laughed a little, too. Fully inhabiting the mundane with you.
Well, this must be real, then, I said, and hated myself for going for a joke, when I’d also been longing to idle beside him in some frozen section having nowhere to go but home, together. But I couldn’t trust his confession, because words like that were the first things everybody regretted once the affair was over and they’d beaten a retreat back to their less disruptive selves—and sometimes I didn’t trust him, fearing that if I’d confessed how profligate my own heart was, how greedy for crumbs, it might provoke another I wish you hadn’t told me.
How could you think it was anything else? he said, sounding truly puzzled.
But I did not want a fight. And we were as good as married, in my mind, because he wanted to talk with me and he wanted to fuck me; he wanted to fuck me and he wanted to sleep next to me. Sometimes he wanted to fuck me because of things I said while talking, because of the music in a turn of phrase or the force of an idea, and then I didn’t care what anybody thought, not even myself. All that sweat on our skin and in my sheets must be consecrating something.
Then he’d leave for work and I’d sit down to write and wonder when I’d stop making him larger than life. So what if that’s what I was doing? I typed faster than I had in years, and deleted much less of it than I ever had when I read it back over.
I love you, he said, on the last morning of July. I did not answer but held him tighter.
He was on his way out to his office an hour later when the doorbell rang. I opened it and there stood Elinor, one hand resting on the handle of a scuffed gray plastic rolling suitcase. Hair in a chaotically constructed bun. A huge gray hooded sweatshirt with the name of her father’s university on it. Leggings and sneakers. She looked a little sheepish, a little anxious. A little tired and washed-out. My neighbor’s wind chimes made their sound. She turned around to look, then turned back.
One day I’ll write in advance like a normal person, she said.
I laughed. I told her I was glad to see her, and I was—in fact I was almost overjoyed. She had solved my problem for me: her arrival meant Karl would have to go, and I would be able to avoid, at least for now, having to give the speech in which I freed him to go make sure his children stayed happy.
This is my boyfriend, Karl, I said, after I’d ushered her inside the apartment.
Nice to meet you, he said, sure and direct, extending his hand with a fatherly aplomb, and again I felt the loss of never being able to belong to him in public.
This is Elinor, I told him. She’s a former student.
Hello, she said brightly, and extended her own. So unruffled by the lie she could have been my flesh and blood.