I canceled my session with Eric this morning and went straight to Yvonne’s, a little earlier than usual. I couldn’t wait to get there. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew she wouldn’t be home. I’m starting to think we have some kind of connection. Nothing mystical, just that she must wonder about me, feel some kind of remorse. Wish she could meet me, be my friend.
I can think better at Yvonne’s. There’s no clutter, no clothes humped over chairs, no knocked-down stacks of books on the floor. No art or postcards or photographs—except for that dog, which I have to say I have an urge to throw out. It’s like a blank screen, that place. It helps me to think. And I need to think. There’s so much I need to think about: About the fetus. About Yvonne. I can’t get calm enough at the loft. I can’t even do a headstand in the morning anymore. I keep toppling over. I do them at Yvonne’s. Then I have coffee and a raisin bagel I pick up at the Korean vegetable stand on the way. Sarah taught me how to say good morning in Korean so I’ve struck up a bit of a relationship with the woman at the counter. I told her it’s not good to eat ice cream in the morning. Though maybe it cheers her up. Maybe she’s pregnant, too.
I eat my bagel and coffee in Yvonne’s bedroom, careful to brush the crumbs off the bed. There’s still no sign of Mark. Not even a book he might have suggested. She’s reading another one of those murder mysteries. I was thinking of pulling out a novel—something good. Maybe she’d like Crime and Punishment. I’m in the mood for Dostoevsky and I like the idea of us reading the same book at the same time. I looked for her class notes to see what poems she’s teaching, but she must take all of them to school. In folders. Different colors for each class. She’s so anal I’m sure she’s a Virgo. On Tuesdays the Sunday Times is already thrown out. Mark and I let papers and magazines pile up week after week and it takes months to get around to throwing them out. I keep the Book Reviews around for several months and then go through them tearing out all the stuff I want to save. I know it would be a lot easier to do it week by week, but I never get around to it. I keep saying I will but I don’t. I’m Sagittarius.
Mark and I haven’t brought her up again. She’s like a secret we’ve agreed not to talk about. Last Saturday night when I got home he was frantic. Really upset. He’d been at Sarah’s and when I got to the loft all there was to greet me was a bunch of messages on the answering machine. My mother: “Mark honey, I still haven’t heard from her. I’m sure she’s fine. You know how dramatic she gets sometimes. Call me immediately when you get in.” Sarah: “Mark, you there? I’m worried. Why don’t you come over. I made some pasta. We can worry together.” Mark: “Treas, if you call in or get in please phone me right away. I’m at Sarah’s. I love you.” (He’d also left a note on the kitchen table on top of Blonde on Blonde.) Glenda and David: “Mark. You okay?” (I could tell they were trying very hard not to say anything funny.) “Call us if you need anything.” Eric: “Hello Mark, this is Eric Anderson. I’m sorry, I haven’t heard from her. Call me if there’s anything I can do.” It made me feel good. Immediately. Worried. Right away. All those people worrying about me. I have to say I was a little disappointed there was no message from Yvonne.
I didn’t call Sarah’s. I wanted to see Mark’s expression when he walked in. To see the relief. Remorse. When he finally got home he was stunned to see me there. Maybe he’d been thinking I wouldn’t come back.
“When did you get home? Didn’t you get my messages?”
His first words.
I was revved up after having spent an hour dismantling my altar, throwing out all the religious paraphernalia I’ve accumulated over the years. Miraculous medals and novena tracts. Rosary beads and retablos and bottles of holy water I’ve collected at different shrines. Scapulas and holy cards and miniature statues of the Blessed Virgin. I was doing a little Spiritual Housecleaning. I threw out everything but St. Jude and the St. Lucy devotional candle from Italy. And my grandfather’s statue of the Infant of Prague. Even though the Infant looks like a teenager in furs making a peace sign, I was thinking about the fetus and I’m too superstitious to throw it out. Besides, it’s the only thing I have from my grandfather. I hadn’t meant to take it, but once when Carla and I were using it as Barbie’s husband I accidentally knocked his head off. Though we fixed it well enough with Elmer’s glue and toothpicks, I was too scared to put it back.
“Why didn’t you call?” Mark asked. “Where’ve you been? You look like hell.”
Mark saying “hell” reminded me of God, and I’d sworn not to think about God. I went over and leaned into Mark, put my arms around him.
“I love you,” I said. “I’m so tired. So hungry.”
He made me a bowl of pastina and I drank two glasses of red wine—fuck the fetus. Then I collapsed.
I still haven’t told him anything about those two days. But I’m eating again. And I have an appointment for an ultrasound tomorrow. My pregnancy test came out negative, but Dr. Bradford said my pelvis and vagina show definite signs of pregnancy and with my missed period we have to be sure. I’ve lost nine pounds since the last time I was there. That surprised me.
“You look pathetic,” Mark said last night as I was getting undressed. “Where are your tits?” He nudged me around with his foot, felt my ribs, my behind. “Your ass is disappearing. You’re getting skinny.” Then he pulled me on top of him and kissed me. “My crazy pregnant wife,” he said. “Those hormones are making you a little nuts, you know.”
Well, maybe they are making me crazy, but I don’t look any smaller. I’ve checked myself in all our mirrors—and Yvonne’s. Yvonne’s clothes have begun to hang on me, though. This morning I brought them all back. The black skirt and blouse I wore on my first date with Brian. Everything but the scarf and stockings. I had the skirt and blouse dry-cleaned, but when I got there I balled them up and shoved them in the back of the closet behind the shoeboxes. I like committing secret acts of messiness in her apartment. She needs it. The way babies need to ingest a little dirt to make sure they don’t develop too weak an immune system. I threw one of the cookies back there with them too. Let her get ants.
I went through her lingerie drawer and found a pair of black lace panties. I did my yoga in them. I laid across her bed and ate my bagel and coffee in them. It’s strange to sit in someone else’s apartment in your underwear. Their underwear. I slipped my copy of Blood on the Tracks into the cheap tape player on her nightstand and thought about Brian. I’ve seen him every day since I got back and he’s the only one I’ve told about the retreat house.
“Fuckin’ Jesuits?” he asked. It was a relief to talk to a Catholic and not have to explain.
“You went to the fuckin’ Jesuits?”
I love the way he says the word. Fuckin’. With a sharp f and a kind of a grunt.
“What did they do? Beat you with a stick? Throw you on the floor and make you lick the fuckin’ hosts off the tiles?” Brian had gone to a Jesuit school in Ireland, so he knows all about them.
I laid across Yvonne’s bed thinking of Brian shoving me to the floor. Falling on top of me. Pulling my hair as he pushed up my skirt and came hard inside me. I turned over on my stomach and pressed against the spread. Pushed two fingers up against my clit, wedged a throw pillow between my legs, my head grinding into the rough chenille. Dylan was singing “Tangled Up in Blue.” Brian was holding my breasts, slamming against me, yanking my hips up as his cock moved quickly in and out. Come, goddammit, he was saying. When it occurred to me that Brian would never be this kind of lover, I flipped it around and pictured myself humped over him, shoving my fingers up his ass as he moved down on them and pushed back away from the pain. I’m just going to hurt you a little, I whispered beside his head, holding him, rocking him. Come on, baby. I rolled him back over, mounted him, mouthed down on his cock and sucked. It was the third time I came this morning. Maybe pregnancy makes you horny.
Dylan’s voice was getting weaker and I popped the battery out of Yvonne’s red plastic alarm clock and switched it with the one in the tape player. It reminded me of the first time.
Eric made me pay for my missed sessions. He insisted it wasn’t meant as punishment, that I knew what the rules were and if he’d felt there was a substantial reason I’d missed he’d bend the rules a little.
“Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement,” I said.
“Terry, I can’t force you to talk to me.”
Try, I wanted to say. I liked the idea of him forcing me to talk. Strapping me to the couch and injecting me with truth serum. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of truth serum. That something could make you say things you didn’t want to say, say things you didn’t even know you knew. I don’t even know if there is such a thing.
I was on the couch. Eric thinks it will help me open up. There’s so much I haven’t told him, I get confused just trying to keep track of what I can say. For the longest time I just laid there watching little bits of plaster drift from a crack in the ceiling. What you are saying is that you are thoroughly without integrity. I was thinking about Father Dugan and “The Hound of Heaven.” About Yeats and things falling apart. I felt like I was falling apart.
“Do you want to talk about where you were last weekend?” Eric asked.
I did. I wanted to talk. I wanted to tell Eric everything. Just like I’d wanted to talk to Father Dugan. But I didn’t know where to start.
“I hate Christmas,” I said, just to say something.
He crossed his legs. He was wearing the black shoes. “What do you hate about it?” he asked.
We were like two gears that wouldn’t get in sync.
I rolled over onto my side away from him, my face pressed to the back of the couch. I wonder what he’d do if I started to masturbate right in front of him. Mark’s the only person who’s ever seen me masturbate. He made me show him.
“You touch what?” he asked once, teasing. “Come on, let’s get a little specific.”
I was lying on his couch. It was early on, when we’d first become lovers. I remember Miles Davis in the background. Miles Davis was always in the background. Mark loves Miles Davis.
“Come on, I want to see you do it.”
In some ways it’s the most shocking thing he’s ever asked me to do. By myself. With him watching. It took a couple of hours, quite a lot of red wine, and a little pot before I could even make a gesture.
“You lay on your stomach?” he asked.
“Sometimes on my back.”
“Show me.”
But I couldn’t. Not that time.
“What are you thinking about?” Eric asked.
I started humming Dylan’s “Memphis Blues Again.” I’d been playing Blonde on Blonde incessantly and realized the other day that the line I’ve always heard as to be stuck inside a mobile actually said nothing of the sort. All these years I’ve been hearing it wrong. I was high the first time I heard it. I’d imagined myself hanging in a gray vapor, blowing around on a piece of string, separate and alone, dangling from a wire hanger for all the world to see.
“Terry . . .”
I’d dreamed about it again and again, for a long time. Blowing in a vapor on a mobile. Blowing in the wind.
I rolled onto my back.
“Mobiles,” I said.
“Mobiles?”
“Yes, mobiles.”
Neither of us said anything for a minute.
“The kind you hang over a baby’s crib?” he asked.
I was staring at the ceiling. The peeled patch looked like an enormous breast. I closed my eyes.
Baby. I turned toward him. I started to cry. I started sobbing so hard I couldn’t stop.
Eric looked pleased, as though he’d been waiting for this moment all his life.
“Go ahead,” he said. He leaned forward. “That’s good. Cry all you want to.”
As if I could have stopped.
He pushed the tissues toward me and I thought I’d scream. Everything felt dead. Like I was stuck out in a fog all alone. More alone that I’d ever been. I felt scared to be that alone. There was no one I was sure of. Nothing. Not Mark. Not Eric. Not Brian. I’d seen Brian flirting with one of my other students in class the day before.
Eric leaned toward me, his chin resting on the tips of his fingers. I could feel his eyes going over me, waiting.
I couldn’t breathe. I tried to breathe, but I started choking. I made myself cough harder and more violently but Eric didn’t come over. He wouldn’t touch me.
I wanted to kill him.
“The baby,” I said. “The baby.”
He leaned all the way forward in his chair, those praying hands moving toward me.
“Did you have an ultrasound?”
I had. I’d done everything they said to do. Followed every direction.
“Did you drink your gallon of water?” the technician had asked.
“Good girl,” she said when I answered.
“You told me to,” I said.
It seems I was one of a very small minority that actually paid attention to the directions.
“I’m Catholic,” I said. “Obedient to the bone.” Mark’s words.
The technician laughed. “Madre de Dios,” she said. “Me too.” She had a smile button and a tag that said “María.”
“You think you can show me my soul on that thing?” I teased.
María laughed. She laid me down, pulled up my gown, and placed her hand on my stomach. The clear cream she smeared across my abdomen had a babyish smell. I watched the TV monitor as she flipped on the machine. I tried not to move. I had to pee so badly I was afraid it would start to leak out of me. My stomach puffed up like that made me look pregnant. My belly rounder than I’d ever seen it. I thought of the baby curled up in there. My baby. Mine and Mark’s. How it could be six weeks old by now. How I would take care of it. Bond with it. How it would think I was the most important person in the world. It. Her, maybe. I could find out if it was a boy or a girl if I wanted. Maybe there were two of them. Twins. My cousin Nora had had twins and said how amazing it was to see them both on the screen curled around one another. To know they were hers. Her babies. She saw the little penises form, the babies move and kick and punch against one another. There’s a good chance I would have twins. I know that. A very good chance. I looked at the screen.
“That’s your uterus,” María said. “What do you see?”
The baby looked like a cloud of gas. Bubbles and vapors and a gray blotch hanging in the center. I couldn’t remember what size it was supposed to be by now, but I guessed the gray blotch was it. My baby.
“There’s only one,” I said, relieved.
“None,” she said. “Nada. There’s nothing in there. That’s the water you’re seeing.” They hadn’t told me not to drink carbonated. “And your ovaries.”
“There’s no baby?”
All around me, tacked to the walls, were foggy gray-and-white photos, X-rays of the insides of women. In the glary fluorescent light María’s smile button kept ricocheting this weird grimace.
“No baby.” She leaned toward me. “Are you relieved?” she asked.
I couldn’t stop looking at that button. “I’m not pregnant?”
“You’re not pregnant.”
“Are you sure?”
She started to laugh.
“I’m not pregnant,” I said to Eric. “There’s no baby. No baby. I think I killed it. I think I starved it to death.”
“Terry, there’d have been a dead fetus in there,” Eric said.
That struck me as a rather callous thing to say.
I stared at him.
“Are you disappointed?”
Disappointed.
“Please hold me,” I said.
He didn’t say anything though I heard a change in his breathing. I wonder if he was sitting there thinking of himself as a prism.
“I can’t hold you,” he said, “but I think it’s very important for us to talk about why you want to be held.”
“Why can’t you just hold me?”
“And what is your fantasy about that?”
“Don’t you love me?”
“Who is it you’re talking to?”
I still can’t believe I let that one go by without a good crack.
We just sat there.
“I don’t know,” I said finally, “I don’t know who I’m talking to. I don’t know who you are.”
I got up, wrote him a check, and left. Ten minutes early.
That afternoon he left a message at the loft saying I’d written out the check to myself.