Fury (30 page)

Yet, even as he cups my ears, smoothes my hair, and touches his forehead to mine, nerves are with me too. No confrontation seems bigger than this. Here is a man who makes me look forward to each and every day, and yet, as I pull back and search his tired, contented green eyes, there's still the outside chance that this whole scene can be dashed by just two words:

Words can't express my relief when I see his mouth curl into a bird-in-mouth smile. My Eamon, eyes twinkling, sits upright, squeezes the wind from me, kisses my stammering mouth, and whispers, “Excellent.”

The next morning, Eamon wakes me with a heaping breakfast of coffee, red grapefruit, smoky bacon, tomatoes, and buttery eggs on a hot, crusty roll. We spend the morning in bed with the paper, collaborating on the crossword puzzle, getting stumped on number seven down (“Wake at dawn?”) and laughing when we discover the apropos answer (“morning mourning”).

We discuss if and how it might be feasible to have a baby in Paris, and by the time we reached the bottom of the coffeepot it seems possible, it really does, in spite of the language barrier and all that soft cheese. “The French love babies,” Eamon assures me. Plus, there's always the American Hospital in the 7th arrondissement, and—look right there on the hospital's Web page—all the laboring women in the maternal unit looked pampered, relaxed, happy, and sufficiently anesthetized.

Later that afternoon I walk the eight blocks to Fourteenth Street to confirm my pregnancy with a doctor. Eamon's offered to come along, but, even as I appreciate his support, I think I could benefit from a couple of hours of thinking things through on my own.

I approach Union Square, tucking my chin deeper into the folds of my scarf and butting my head against the wind. I think:
This is no time to be impulsive
. I need to know that I'm acting deliberately and making fully conscious decisions. I don't want to be one of the passive-aggressive mothers I often come across in the pages of Alice Miller: “The humiliated grown daughter, if she has no other means of ridding herself of her burden, will revenge herself upon her own children.” I can't stand to be the kind of woman who unconsciously expects a child to be what her own mother wasn't: a person who will be fully focused on her; who'll acknowledge and accommodate the full gamut of her feelings; who'll love her unconditionally—never deserting or mistreating her—no matter how emotional, demanding, self-interested, or time-consuming she got. It was a parent's job to protect a child and not vice versa.

As I walk through the greenmarket, I'm especially attuned to the families that I pass. I notice the newborn dozing in a linen sling against her mother's chest, the howling imp whose mouth is stained with the chocolate half of a black-and-white cookie, the pudgy tot stumping around the rows of lettuce and leeks and pushing a forlorn doll in a flimsy toy stroller.

No, I need to know with 100 percent certainty that I won't use a kid to work out any unresolved emotions from my childhood. To this end, it seems especially important that I find some balance between aggression and passivity. I don't want my issues to blind me to my child's own emotions, the way, in the past, they've made me stupid to those of Eamon and my sister.

My first trip to the doctor is brief. A nurse and I peer over a hospital-grade pregnancy test, watching a strip of color appear in its plastic window. “See there?” she asks me. “One of them's faint, but there are definitely two lines. Congratulations, looks here like you're going to be a mom.”

On the way home I feel tender and exposed, as if anyone who looks at me can read my mind or see straight into the flurry of my soul. I stop in a pharmacy and fill a prescription for prenatal vitamins and then drop into a dark Lotto shop on the avenue. The clerk there has a pudgy, shaved head that he wears like an army helmet and a face that says he is all business. He eyes me strangely when I buy a twelve-dollar cigar, as if he senses my interest in it is only symbolic.

Back at my apartment building, I hear the
ooh-wee-ooh
s of a sixties girl group from the hallway. As I turn the key in the door, Eamon jumps up from where he's sitting hunched over a cup of cold black coffee.

“How was it?” he asks. “What did they say?”

When the words stick in my throat, I produce the stogie from the pocket of my winter coat and watch his face run from perplexity to joy as it dawns on him what the fusty thing means.

What shows on my face? I am cautiously giddy, but I also feel a strong clutch of panic. Am I good enough for the job? In touch enough with my emotions? I want to be the kind of mother I've read about in the pages of Virginia Satir: someone who expresses her own humanness and acknowledges the humanness in her child. But what if I turn out the opposite? What if, in spite of myself, I end up being the kind of mom who bottles up her feelings because she thinks they undermine her authority and comes out, as Satir says, “looking phony to her children?”

Eamon seems to sense me spinning my wheels. He moves closer and puts his arms around me.

“
Baby, I love you
,” the record says. “
Baby, I love you
.”

In the weeks that follow I begin to think that impending parenthood's wreaking havoc on Eamon's nerves too. He's acting freakishly out of character. To begin with, he spends all day out alone on the city streets, presumably on some mystery mission. He leaves just before noon and returns at nightfall with aching arches, tension headaches, and only hazy descriptions of the places he's been.

“I was just walking around the Upper East Side,” he says, with a terror-stricken look on his face. Or he'll say, “I was in Midtown, when it suddenly occurred to me to take the subway downtown to the Bowery.” As if this ought to clarify everything.

Around the apartment he is nervous and withholding, giggling or making cryptic notes to himself on small scraps of paper. When he's not in a complicated state of distraction, I catch him sneaking glances of great emotion and magnitude. I once awake in the middle of the night to find him watching me with a soft, private smile.

I don't press him to explain. The way I see it, he's obviously working through his own emotions about becoming a dad. Instead, I smooth his brow and assure him that I have his back. “I'm always here if you need me,” I say. “We're a team. There's nothing we can't figure out together.”

It occurs to me that he might be waiting for pregnancy to change me: to turn me into a moody, carping, sugar-craving cliché. One morning over breakfast, he randomly sputters, “I got you some chocolates!” And I watch him produce an outrageously expensive box of Richart bonbons, oblivious to his gift's strange timing.

As it turns out, Eamon isn't unraveling. On the contrary, he's been ring hunting, requesting my father's permission, and otherwise preparing to propose.

It all becomes clear on the night of April 7. We're standing outside the Dias y Flores Community Garden, between Avenues A and B. Although it's the tail end of winter, the lot is still manicured and alive. Looking between the iron bars of the fence, we can almost make out the thoughtful arrangement of dogwoods, the sleeping viburnum, the prized juniper, the dormant rosebushes, and the frozen yew tree.

We're standing on the same piece of sidewalk where two years before we'd had our first kiss. But for as much as the place has significance to us, we've never actually been inside. Eamon has obviously made arrangements to get in with the help of the owner of a nearby herb shop—a man with purple dreadlocks and taut suede pants who is presently rattling the door and frowning, trying every key on his cluttered key chain.

With each failed attempt, Eamon's face clouds with despair.

I take his cold hand in mine and give it a squeeze. “It was a nice thought,” I say. I tell him it's enough just to be there, taking the same nighttime walk we'd taken as spellbound strangers.

It's just after sundown and the neighborhood is loose and lazy, as if it's storing up its energy for later. A piebald cat sniffs and rasps against a row of bruised garbage cans. A swaggering young couple scarfed in matching kaffiyahs slowly walks their bicycles down the sidewalk toward the avenue.

“I have a garden you can use,” the man offers, after he's exhausted every key on his chain. “My place is just over there.” He points to a brick tenement on the opposite side of the street.

Eamon nods mysteriously. We follow the dreaded man across the road, through his graffiti-tagged front door, and down a long, shadowed hallway lit weakly by a quivering fluorescent light.

He opens a door on a studio apartment filled with the sound of running water. Violet bulbs glow in the overhead fixtures. Against one wall, half a dozen bonsai trees are arranged in a way that brings to mind a miniature-scale national forest. The place is wonderful, balmy, outlandish. In a long aquarium a prehistoric-looking lizard sleeps on a blanched piece of driftwood. There's even an indoor waterfall trickling into a basin of speckled Japanese pebbles.

“Garden's out back,” the man tells us before he turns to leave. “Stay as long as you need. When you're done, the door'll lock behind you.” It's an astonishing act of trust and generosity.

When it's just the two of us, Eamon opens the sliding glass door and we step out into dusk's silvery light. The sweet stranger's “garden” is actually a cement patio—a dumping ground for fleeting interests and appliances on the mend. There's an empty clothesline, a dismantled bicycle, broken ceramics, a moldy birdbath, a rusted child's trampoline.

Eamon gives me a soft look and takes my hand. “In case you're still wondering what this is all about, I brought you out here because I've been wanting to ask you . . .” As he crouches down to one knee, I clench my breath. My happiness is irrepressible. My head breaks into ringing. Here's my match, my partner, not just someone to live with but someone I don't want to live without.

The moment—though it hasn't gone according to Eamon's plan—is perfect. Standing in that rusted-out patio, I'm reminded of what I admire about both him and the city where we fell in love. With each, the next adventure is always around the corner (or, more accurately, through a storefront, around a garden, down a long, hidden alley). I think,
As long as I have both Eamon and the city, there will always be strange insights and fresh discoveries. I'll never know where any given day might take me.

Later, it will also occur to me that Eamon found the chink in the armor of my stoicism. Every day he reminds me of the function of human emotion. We wouldn't be (and hadn't been) possible as a couple without admissions of feeling. Our confessions reawakened us to each other. Our outpourings—whether they were smitten or sore—reaffirmed our humanity. It was with Eamon's help that I'd eventually come to see that even arguments can be a celebration of life and an attempt to take in all its sensations.

He barely gets a simple, silver ring out of his pocket before I lilt my
Yes!
I love him. It's as fixed and as certain as any law of physics—as long as we're both here, it will always remain.

We barely have three days to enjoy the thrill of engagement before Eamon has to fly back to Britain to prepare for a tour.

Before he leaves he shares the news of our engagement with his parents, who call to tell me how glad they are that I'm joining their family. I also call mine, who have known the news since Eamon asked my father for his permission. To the story of the proposal, my mom and dad don't respond with much but a stony “if you're happy we're happy” and a marginally offensive speech about the importance of prenuptial agreements.

As for the news that we're expecting, Eamon and I agree to stay true to tradition (and superstition). We're going to wait until the thirteenth week of pregnancy to let that lynx out of the bag.

During our time apart, our schedules turn stressful. Our to-do lists multiply by the day. Eamon is researching French marriage laws and trying to find an obstetrician in Paris. I am (in no particular order): putting my feet into doctors' stirrups; presenting my arm to various blood-work technicians; hiring movers; flying to a Midwestern university to read to an (enthusiastic) audience of (fourteen) college freshman; listening to remedial French language CDs; hunting for an off-price wedding dress; trying to finish the first draft of my anger book; and packing up the contents of our apartment to be placed in a storage unit just off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

I sit on my naked hardwood floor and edit pages of my book atop cardboard boxes labeled LINENS or KITCHENWARE.

I tape French conjugation tables to the bathroom mirror on the off chance that they might permeate my memory whenever I brush my teeth.