Grace Grows (41 page)

Touch me like you need to

Kiss me like you care

Love me like an ocean

Love me everywhere

Singing hey hey one more time

Ain’t no where to draw no line

We’re both one I understand

but its just time to be your man

Its time to be your man

And if you still got room

for another heart

catch me if you can

Or we could do away with running

its just time to be your man

Its time to be your man

I’ve seen it all, see it now

and the answer is a breath away

I went through half a box of tissues.

Then I went grocery shopping and came back and made him his favorite meal. Pot roast. Mashed potatoes. Sugar snap peas. Cheesecake. Well, I bought the cheesecake.

He came in the door excited, having smelled the roast all the way up the stairs. “Oh man, I was hoping that was my supper cooking!”

The smile
. And kisses.

I felt shy, serving him. When I set his plate on the table he took my hand and tried to pull me onto his lap.

“No,” I said. “We’ll crush you.”

“I don’t think so.” He tugged till I sat on him and shifted his legs so that not even my toes were touching the floor. Then he tried to get me to look at him. I set my forehead on his shoulder.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“I listened to the song,” I said into his neck.

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t listen when you sent it,” I continued in a small, muffled voice. “I’m an idiot.”

“As I’ve said before, gigantic brain and dumb as a bucket of hair.”

I rubbed my cheek against his. It was scratchy.

He kissed me, in lots of places. My cheek, my eyelids. Behind my earlobe (shiver). On the knob of my collarbone. Between my breasts.

My breasts. Under my breasts. In the bend of my elbow.

In the palm of my hand.

nesting

We shifted into impending-baby mode. Ty scheduled his life around me, around us. Accelerated childbirth classes. Parenting classes. Weekly doctor visits. The requisite baby shower at the office, with blue crepe streamers and yellow balloons and paper plates adorned with little blue giraffes.

Lakshmi gave me a dozen onesies, a tiny New York Yankees uniform, and a toddler-size lunghi, the traditional wraparound skirt worn by Indian men.

Lavelle gave me a rubber ducky and other tub toys, tiny blue jeans and T-shirts, and a pair of tiny red Converse.

“Hey, look,” Lavelle said. “Between Lakshmi and me, he’s got a full wardrobe.”

We had a relatively new office secretary, a girl from Queens named Jess. She gave me an enormous stuffed dog. Completely impractical for a New York apartment, but she was only nineteen and hadn’t started thinking practically yet.

“I know, it’s huge! I’ll help you carry it home,” she said.

“No worries, my husband is coming to help. I love it!”

Lakshmi made a big blue-and-white-iced chocolate cake in the shape of a baby rattle. I knew she lived all the way up in Inwood.

“How on earth did you get this here?” I asked.

“The subway. In pieces,” she said grimly. “Over the last two days.”

“You assembled it here?” It seemed impossible. Our “kitchen” consisted of a mini-refrigerator with a microwave sitting on top in the corner of the room.

“I iced it on Lavelle’s desk.”

At four o’clock sharp the air in the room changed. I knew before I looked up that Ty was standing just inside the door. People turned around to see who I was waving at, and conversation stopped. Three silent seconds passed. Then everyone snapped out of it and looked at me expectantly. Except Jess—she was still staring at him, open-mouthed.

“Everybody, this is my husband, Ty.”

“Girl, we know who he is.” Mykesha worked down the hall at Actors’ Equity and was even drier than Lakshmi. “You got that song on YouTube.”

Ty smiled and turned on his public personality.

“What’s that song?” Mykesha asked.

He told her.

“That’s it. Lord, if I have to hear that song one more time! My daughter thinks you’re ‘cute.’ ”

“Hey, look at what everyone gave us.” I drew him over to the pile of loot on my desk. He only got a quick look before my colleagues swarmed him. I took the opportunity to slip out to the bathroom. The Bump lived on my bladder, these days.

Jess followed me into the hall.

“Grace!” she said, wide-eyed. “What the fuck?”

“Yes,” I said agreeably. “Yep.”

“That’s Tyler Wilkie!”

“Mm-hmm.” I headed on down the hall. She followed.

“This means . . . you’ve had sex with him!”

I paused at the ladies’ room door, hoping my straining Kegel muscles could hold up for just another half-minute or so.

“Oh my God, I’m sorry! That was so rude.”

“It’s okay.”

“Yeah, you of all people understand, right? Oh my God, wait till I tell Amber! She has a Facebook page all about him! She wanted to kill herself when she read he got married!”

“Well, I’m just going to go in here for a minute. . . .”

“Oh, sorry! Go ahead. Do you want me to wait?”

“No, no. I’ll manage.”

She was already halfway back to the office.

I had so little time left to be utterly selfish. I went to the Cloisters, alone. I didn’t tell Ty.

I sat in the sun on a bench in the Bonnefont Cloister and watched white butterflies skim lavender buds and boats float down the Hudson. It was one of those balmy, blue-sky, gorgeous spring days that could make a questioning person believe in Goodness. In God, or Peg’s Goddess. Like maybe She’s right there with you, in your pocket.

When I felt quiet enough, brave enough, I leaned over and extracted Ed and Boris’s wedding gift,
The Prophet,
from my bag. I opened it and found “On Love.” I skimmed through all the stuff about love threshing and baking you, until I came to the dreaded passage.

But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

I read and reread and let myself meet, head-on, the pain of too much tenderness. I could not pretend I did not understand. And it wounded me. It hurt, as Ty might say, like a motherfucker.

One day—let it be a long, long time from now—one of us would die.

It was the cruelest thing I had ever experienced. What if he died first, and left me here without him? How would I endure it? And in the meantime, how did I accept the idea and go ahead and love, willingly and joyfully?

It seemed like this might be the biggest reason I’d been afraid to love him.

I rubbed my belly, for comfort. The Bump was quiet, just when I could have really used some distracting internal upheaval.

The garden curator, a pretty young woman with dirt on her face, got up from weeding a nearby plant bed and came over. She sat beside me and pulled a small packet of tissues from her pocket and handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said, and blew my nose.

“Can I do anything for you?” she asked gently.

I shook my head. “I wish. Thank you.”

She patted my shoulder and went back to her verbena and Saint-John’s-wort.

I picked up
The Prophet
and read “On Love” again, all of it, slowly. There was a part that seemed kind of helpful.

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of
       love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your
       laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

Okay.

So maybe I’d keep working on being less fearful, even about this, and just go ahead and love.

Because I really wanted to laugh all of my laughter. And I imagined I had a few more tears to shed, too.

You think?

Three days before my due date, the baby still hadn’t dropped. Dr. Goldstein thought I might go another week, which I found unacceptable. I needed to be the only person in my body, and now. I put on my sneakers. The way people stared, you’d think they’d never seen a full-term pregnant lady jogging before. Ty came home from rehearsal and caught me, mid-block.

“Stop!” He scowled. “This can’t be good. Come inside.”

After we ate supper I sat on the bed and watched him put together the crib. He was underneath it, on his back, tightening the hardware. It seemed like a good time to talk about names.

We went over the obvious choices. Ty eliminated Tyler. He felt kind of okay about Graham, his middle name, as a middle name for The Bump. We looked at Daniel or Nathan, for our dads. Grandfathers’ and other relatives’ names. We nixed them all.

I suggested Nicholas.

“Where’d you get that?”

“My favorite actor, Nicholas Desmond.”

Ty made a smirky face.

“What?”

“That skinny English guy in the movie about getting lost in Antarctica?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, that guy.”

“He needs to eat a sandwich and get some sun.”

“He’s a
Sir
. He was knighted by the queen last year.”

“Like I give a crap.”

He always got like this about my movie star crushes. Ridiculous! “Well, what do you think of the name?”

“Too many letters.”

I gave up. I lay down on the bed, exhausted. “Maybe we’ll know the baby’s name when we get a look at him,” I muttered.

“Yeah, let’s wait till we see him.”

On my due date, Ty and I went for dinner at Dan’s.

We ate spaghetti Bolognese that he made for us, and then the two of them spent a couple hours in Dan’s studio, looking at his paintings and talking about art. I hung with them at first and then slipped away for a nap on the sofa.

On the way home in the cab Ty said, “Grace, I think I might like to try painting.”

“Yep,” I said. “Saw that coming.”

After we got home Ty went to the bedroom to work on a song and I cleaned the kitchen and vacuumed the living room. I baked cookies and burned the bottoms. When I was scraping them into the trash can I found a scrap of paper with the words to a song. It was the one he’d started in bed on our wedding night; he played it a lot around the house.

loving late, think I got it right

shooting straight on a cloudy night

I’m on my way

watch which words your saying to me

marching through my civil war

see your eyes and I’m wanting more

I’m on my way

watch which words your saying to me

cause I might believe you

letting go my soul, my fear

feel you whisper in my ear

I’m on my way

what are these words your saying to me

bringing down the barricades

I’m in your arms now I’ve got it made

I’m on my way

what are those words your saying to me

I think I believe you

For the past month or so I had been having painless Braxton Hicks “practice” contractions for a couple of hours every day. That night, they woke me every few hours.