The Bookstore (20 page)

The scan is not until ten thirty, but my paper on the male gaze needs finishing touches. So I work on that until it is time to go.

This scan is to check that everything is in the right place, that everything is as it should be. The letter says I am to drink a pint of water an hour before the scan. I imagine the water is to plump everything up so that they can see the baby more clearly, so I drink as much as I can, in order for it to be more visible. I don’t know what it will be like—New York hospitals might have such sophisticated equipment that it could be like a photograph. But it couldn’t be color, because there isn’t any color in the dark. Our blood isn’t red until we bleed.

I wonder if I have any choice about seeing the baby. It seems intrusive, probing into the dark before birth. And yet, it is important to check everything. They check the thickness of the skin in the neck, apparently, to check its brain is okay. And what if something is wrong? The sudden fear of it curls round
my chest. Do I have a termination then? Where is my moral line?

I can’t think about that and write a decent paper, so I turn my mind away from it, and open my books.

I print out my essay so far, to take with me to the hospital. When you’re pregnant and you’ve drunk this much water, walking is difficult; it is painful even to move. I stalk from the subway stop to the hospital, a cartoon person.

The scanning department has a shiny cash register at the entrance, by way of welcome. If your insurance papers don’t cover everything, they accept credit and cash. I hand my papers over and fill in the forms I am given. Then I turn to face the waiting room. It is, of course, full of couples, holding hands. The hospital could have a special “single mom” time each day, no couples allowed. We could all grin sympathetically at each other. I find a seat, fish my essay out of my bag, and disappear behind it. The overwhelming need to pee means I can’t concentrate on my soon-to-be-lucid prose. It is a form of low-level torture.

When it is my turn, I go with fairy steps into the dark room and lie down. The scan lady rubs my tummy with gel and then puts her scan gun on top. Then she takes it off again, and fits it back in its holder. She says, “Miss Garland, you read the letter about drinking, right?”

“Yes!” I say. Surely I drank enough. “I drank so much! I drank gallons!”

“You sure did. Would you like to go to the bathroom so we can maybe see your baby as well as your bladder?”

Sweet words. She wipes the gel off, I go, I come back, we begin again. This time, there is something evident on the screen. A small Martian. There is a section of it that looks like the suction tube on a vacuum cleaner. She makes measurements between bits of the image, like you can with Google Earth.

“Can you see your baby?” she says.

“Yes!” I say, all eagerness. “Except—if you could maybe point out the head . . .”

“That’s the head. We can see it in profile right now—so you can see the forehead, the nose, the lips—that is the left arm, the left hand. Can you see now?”

“Yes,” I say, because I don’t want to disappoint her.

“All the measurements are fine,” she says, as she clicks and makes notes, clicks and make notes. I stare hard at the arc of light on the black. It makes no sense at all. I can see something flashing.

“What’s that pulsing thing?” I say.

“That pulsing thing? That’s your baby’s heart.”

A heart. A tiny, beating heart.

She looks round at me because I haven’t said anything. I am crying. Why don’t we have a valve of some sort to control crying? It’s like having a little sign over your head that says, “I am not in command of myself.”

In general, I find it difficult to take in the fact that I am going to have a baby, that there is another human being growing inside me. I know it, but I don’t feel it. It insisted on its presence that one crucial night, in order to save itself, but after that I slipped into saying “I’m pregnant” without the words resonating with any grasped reality. But there it is, a heart—a heart belonging to a person, a heart that will race with fear or excitement or joy one day.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Sorry. You must see this all the time, but to me . . .”

“I do see it all the time,” she says, turning back to her machine. “And mostly it still feels like a miracle.”

I smile at her white-coated back. But then I say, “Mostly?”

“Yeah, mostly.”

“You mean . . . that it’s hard when you can see something is wrong? Down’s, or something?”

She makes another measurement. “That is hard. Yeah, that’s hard. But it’s hard as well when they’re thirteen, and didn’t know it was gonna happen, and don’t know who the daddy is, or even that there had to be a daddy for it to happen. And some folks still say ignorance is bliss.”

She hands me paper towels, and switches tone. “You can clean
the gel off with this and then get dressed. Everything looks normal, Miss Garland.”

I get in the lift, clutching a little windshield-wipe printout of my baby. There is a couple inside already—a black man with chunky dreadlocks, and a white girl with red hair and freckly skin. She looks to be a few months pregnant. They are holding hands.

I never say anything when I see that someone is pregnant—I am not sure that English people do, in general. Apart from the Victorian squeamishness about pregnancy (Good Lord, something rather sexual might have taken place fairly recently), there is the fear that the woman might just be fat. Or she might be fat and desperate to conceive, in which case you’ve randomly hurt her twice. Here, it is different. Everyone congratulates a pregnant woman. So I congratulate the girl.

She smiles, but looks embarrassed. The man smiles too, and rubs his other hand on her rounded tummy.

“Thanks,” he says, “but we had our baby two days ago.”

“Oh—well, then—more congratulations!” I say. I hope there isn’t another one in there that they’ve not noticed.

“It’s incredible,” he says suddenly, as the doors open onto the ground floor. “We’re going back to her now. We’ve been away from her fifteen minutes for my wife’s checkup, and it’s—crazy, we miss her like crazy.”

They hurry across the sunlit lobby, over to an older black woman who is holding a precious bundle. She hands the baby over to her son.

I walk back to my apartment.

At the deli downstairs, I stop and buy flowers.

“What are these pink berries called?” I ask.

“They are called Pink Berries,” says the Korean guy.

I buy them, and a bunch of yellow tulips.

It is frivolous, to spend money on flowers, but I want to celebrate seeing my baby for the first time. When I am hunting about in the kitchen for suitable jars to put the flowers in, my phone rings.

It is Mitchell. I have heard nothing from him since he walked out of my apartment. It rings again and again—I wonder if I should let it go to voice mail. But I can’t let that happen. I press “answer.”

“How are you?” he says. He doesn’t say he is Mitchell, he doesn’t check I am Esme. The flame flares up in me anew.

“I’m fine.” My first impulse is to tell him I have seen our baby. If the Koreans had spoken English well enough I would have told them. But Mitchell is the kind of person who assigns motive to speech, always. So I keep quiet.

He says he wants to take me to lunch and suggests the MOMA museum restaurant—the Modern. I have never been there and it is supposed to be lovely. I look over at my laptop; it is in hibernation mode. Would it be too strange to celebrate seeing the baby with the father, without telling him that I am celebrating?

I do not ask him why he wants to see me. He might be holding in fine balance whether he does or not; I don’t want to tip him into a rethink.

I say yes, I will meet him at MOMA.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

W
hen I arrive he is waiting outside, and looks very handsome. He is wearing one of those expensive suits that have an effortless fluidity to them. Two women going into the museum give him long looks, and their hips start to sway as they walk past him.

As he kisses me he says, “I’d forgotten that you always smell like roses. Or do you just smell like England? Roses and summer lawns.” He ushers me into the restaurant.

Ladies who lunch, in Chanel and pearls, are all around us. Everything has a high-modernist feel: white walls and beautiful angles, sunlight pouring through all the glass. I could almost believe, doing a doctorate on Thiebaud, that I belong amid all this excellence and elegance.

“It’s a great setting for a restaurant,” I say to Mitchell as the waiter brings us bread and water and we unfold the soft white napkins.

“I know,” says Mitchell. “I love that it has such a high ceiling.”

I look up. Air is all that is overhead, for a long way. The air has its own quality of piercing clarity, like Arctic air, with the moneyed voices of the women tinkling up into it.
In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.

The waiter comes.

“The portobello mushroom salad with goat’s cheese is good,” says Mitchell. The waiter nods in corroboration.

“It sounds nice, but you have fresh pea soup,” I say, “and I am very partial to pea soup.”

This is not true; I have never had pea soup. But if I mention that I can’t have soft cheese because of the risk to the baby, we might tumble into a fight again. There are still long weeks stretching ahead where it would be legal to terminate. I don’t want another fight about it.

“Two pea soups,” says Mitchell to the waiter.

When we have had the soup and are eating our main courses, Mitchell is very, very nice to me. He lets me talk. I tell him funny stories about the bookshop, and about Stella and the photographs of the lesbian sex dungeon.

He is charming, and constantly refills my glass with San Pellegrino as if it is the best champagne. I keep sipping it out of nervousness, because I know Mitchell has some sort of objective. But he wants me to agree to a termination, and I can’t do that. So what is the point of this?

When the plates have been taken away, and he has ordered fresh figs and Manchego cheese with quince jelly, he takes my hand. It is a gesture that he sometimes makes, a gesture I adore.

“Please—” I say, pulling my hand a little. But this time he has chosen well; I am not going to make a scene here.

“Esme, I have something to say. I want you to think about it in terms of—of what’s best for everybody concerned. Of our happiness. The happiness of
all of us,
Esme.”

“I can’t do it, Mitchell, I am not going to—”

“I know, I know. It isn’t that.” He is holding my hand and stroking the back of it, his gaze intent upon it.

“I fought against this, Esme, as you must know. I fought like a caged lion. But it’s all been in vain—”

The waiter comes back, with a bowl of fresh figs and the other things. Mitchell waits, his fist knuckling his lips.

“Your figs, sir. And your quince jelly, and the Manchego.”

“Thanks,” says Mitchell. He looks up suddenly, into my eyes. There is a little gasp of delight from one of the women at the next table. I look at her to see what is the matter; she is looking pointedly at the basket of figs. There is a black velvety box nestled in among the fruit.

I stare at the box as if it is a tarantula. By now there is a little hubbub around us. I begin to shake my head, and a ripple of laughter goes around; maidenly modesty, they think, the bashful young girl. Mitchell holds up a presidential hand, to stop them from laughing or me from protesting. It works for both. He takes the box out of the figs and presents it to me. The waiter is still there. I do not look at him, but I feel as if he is smiling. I can feel smiles from all directions.

I open the box. The diamond glints at me. It is not in a normal setting—it is held in a kind of pincer grip in a gap on the ring. It elicits another gasp from my nearest neighbor and her friend.

Until this moment, I never understood why everyone makes so much fuss about diamonds. I used to make Jell-O with my mother, and hold the red cubes up to the light, and think that a chunk of that translucent red was always going to be prettier than the glassiness of a diamond. I still think it. But I wasn’t taking into account all that a diamond means, all the meaning any diamond has already accumulated by the time it is presented like this. There is the shock of pride that somebody wants me this much, and a deeper shock, to think that I could rate myself that way, in pounds and pence, dollars and cents.
Because I’m worth it.
I am diminished by it. People are exclaiming about the diamond now, muttering, “Harry Winston.” I bow my head over it. For a second or two, nobody can see my face.