The Seven Year Bitch (22 page)

The phone rang in the kitchen and I got up reluctantly to answer it.

“Is that Izzy?”

“Oh, hi, Deirdre-Agnes,” I said. She'd never called us at the country house before. Instinctively I looked out the window to see if she'd pulled up in our driveway and was calling from her car. “I've been meaning to call you.”

“I need my crib back now!” she said. “My baby is three months old and I can't keep him in the bassinet.”

“Well, something terrible has happened,” I said. “There was a terrible flood in our apartment.”

“A flood?” she said.

“The ceiling in Duncan's room fell in and crushed the crib. Everything was water damaged. It's just terrible! I didn't call you, because we were checking with our insurance company to see if it would cover the cost of the crib, but they don't cover floods.”

“How is that a flood?” she asked.

“Well it was flooding conditions, it was raining. Remember that huge rainstorm last month?”

“No,” Deirdre-Agnes said.

“Well, I'm sorry, we had to throw the whole thing out. Listen, I have to go because I have company.” I thought of Russell sitting on the company's lap.

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, we're having the ceiling repaired and repainted.”

“That's not what I mean. What are you going to do about it?”

“What do you mean?” I asked impatiently.

“To replace my crib!” she said.

“Well, Deidre-Agnes, what would you like me to do to replace your old used crib?”

“I'd like you to send me a check for fifteen hundred dollars so I can buy a comparable one.”

“Fifteen hundred dollars!” I said. “For a used, scratched crib that you gave me. I suggest you go on eBay and buy one for about a hundred dollars, and I'll happily send you the money.”

“A hundred dollars!” she said. “You better give me back my crib.”

“It doesn't ex-ist,” I said. Why had I made up this terrible story? I asked myself. I had never regretted anything more in my entire life. I didn't even want to see the crib again, let alone lay my son down to sleep in it. I had made a terrible mistake and there was nothing I could do about it.

“Well, then we'll see you in court,” she said in her Irish brogue so it sounded like “caaaaaart” and hung up.

I
sat on the couch in the lobby of our building watching Duncan stare in awe at the Christmas tree. Every year before I had a baby, I had resented this tree with its
Sesame Street
and Disney ornaments and its huge Elmo topper. I had grimaced at the super's wife when she appeared each year to assemble and decorate it, apologized for it when I led company past it, noted other buildings' more grown-up holiday offerings, which involved fairy lights and branches of berries and pots of poinsettia and velvetribboned wreaths. But now that Duncan loved this tree, I loved this tree. I even appreciated the building's nod to its Jewish residents: three little plush Hasidic man-dolls standing between a Santa-clad Shrek and Winnie-the-Pooh.

Duncan stood before this tree as if it were a shrine, only looking, never touching, filling me with pride. Other children attacked it while the doormen scowled.

A man I knew from the third floor walked into the building and approached the couch where I was sitting. I couldn't remember his name, but I knew him because he had put Humbert in a Jude Law movie, which was exciting even though Hum ended up on the cutting-room floor, probably because Jude Law had felt threatened by my dog's movie-star good looks and acting skills.

The man was with his son, the same age as Duncan, who walked right up to the tree and manhandled an ornament of a bear character I wasn't familiar with yet, Calamine pink with a rainbow on its stomach. I felt oddly grateful for every character I wasn't familiar with yet, as if it meant I was that much closer to my old self. If I didn't know SpongeBob SquarePants or let the Wiggles into my house, I wasn't completely lost. Similarly, I tried to hold on to my femininity by refusing to learn the names of the different dinosaurs. When I accidentally learned which one was the triceratops one day at the Museum of Natural History it was like unwittingly growing a pair of balls.

“Look, Dad,” the odd little third-floor neighbor-boy said.

“No touching,” Duncan said, like a little museum guard.

The man, whose name I didn't know and never would because now it was about three years too late to ask, sat down next to me on the couch. I was a little surprised because we'd never really talked, just smiled when we passed each other in the lobby. We hadn't even had the usual elevator pleasantries because he usually took the stairs. All I really knew about him was he wasn't married to his son's mother and she'd been in a documentary about giving birth in their apartment. I'd been there the night her labor began and the camera and lighting crews came.

I never understood why people wanted to do anything in their apartments. I didn't even want to eat dinner in my apartment, let alone give birth in it. In fact, if I could afford it, I wouldn't even sleep there. I'd do what Coco Chanel did and leave my apartment every night to check into a nice hotel.

As soon as he sat down next to me I felt he was available.

“Duncan's gotten so big,” he said.

“So's yours,” I said. “He's beautiful.” I always said that no matter how strange-looking a child was.

“It's gone so fast,” he said.

I hated when people said things like “It's gone so fast” because to me it had gone really slowly.

“I know,” I said. “It's amazing.”

The man suddenly stood, reached up to the light fixture hanging low over our heads, and unscrewed the bulb a little, turning it off. “That's a lot better,” he said. The light hadn't bothered me but I was impressed when a man took charge of his environment that way. I wondered what it would be like to live with a man like that. If Russell was annoyed by a lightbulb, he would either live with it for the rest of his life or call Rashid up to fix it. Rashid was up at our apartment so often that once when Duncan had drawn a picture of our family he had included Rashid, a very tall, angular scribble standing between short, round Mommy and Daddy scribbles.

Despite the macho lightbulb incident, the man had always seemed slightly gay to me. Not gay really—I didn't doubt he liked women—but a little effeminate. He smelled good. He was very attractive, I thought, but he seemed like the type of man who might sleep in a nightgown or knit by the fire in his country house. I wasn't at all attracted to him. Not in a romanticcomedy-I'd-really-end-up-with-him-in-the-end way but in a real I-wonder-what-the-woman-who-gave-birth-in-her-apartmentsees-in-him way.

“Working on any good movies?” I said.

“What? Oh, yeah, I have a lot going on,” he said.

I knew from this he meant he was breaking up with his girlfriend.

“I hear ya,” I said, with a funereal nod.

“No, I don't think you understand.”

“Oh, I think I do.”

“Things aren't working out for me and my girlfriend.”

We sat and watched our children in silence for a minute.

“My girlfriend, Natasha, just isn't stable. She goes off on me for no reason. Rages at me. I can't take it anymore. One minute she's screaming at me that I'm not a man, and then she's fine but I'm not fine. We were supposed to go to Miami last week, and the day we were supposed to leave she was yelling at me that I had done something wrong, I had packed wrong, and the next minute she's holding the tickets and saying, ʽOkay, let's go,' and I'm thinking, There's no way I would go with you now.”

“That's awful,” I said, thinking I had done the exact same thing to Russell the last time we had gone to Miami.

“I really can't take it anymore. I took an apartment in Brooklyn.”

I couldn't say anything. Usually when someone told me he was getting a divorce I would say something glib like “That's great,” or “You're lucky,” or “Cheers, darling!” In fact I'd said all three to my cousin just a few weeks before—“That's great, you're lucky, cheers, darling!”—and held up an imaginary glass of champagne. But I couldn't say anything right then because it was suddenly too painful and fresh, as if he were still blood-spattered and holding the scissors he'd used to cut the umbilical cord in his apartment.

As he continued complaining about Natasha he could have been Russell complaining about me. It seemed that despite the fact that I wouldn't want to deliver a baby in my apartment, we were exactly the same wife.

“She sounds awful,” I said. “You did the right thing to leave her.”

“I know,” he said bitterly, standing up. “You worry if you leave, you'll be lonely. But there's nothing lonelier than living with the wrong person. I gave her the apartment and some money.”

“Ah, bailout money,” I said.

“Right, I like that. Bailout money. Still, it's hard to know if I'm doing the right thing.”

“It all depends on your appetite for risk,” I said.

He called to his son, “Come on, Em, let's get you upstairs.”

“You too, Duncan, let's go for a walk.”

When we got to Washington Square Park, I noticed that the fountain was gone. It had been completely ripped out. I had heard they were planning to move it, but I hadn't imagined they would get rid of it altogether and put a new fountain in its place. Now, where my white fountain had been, there was an open grave. A terrible mastectomy had been performed.

“Mommy, move!” Duncan said, pulling me toward the playground.

But I couldn't. I had spent my childhood playing in that fountain and the rest of my life brooding in it. In B School, I had studied at it. When I was pregnant with Duncan, I had walked by that fountain thinking, I'm walking by this fountain pregnant with a son. We had played there together just the month before. But I hadn't taken his picture. I didn't have a single picture of the fountain and now I never would. Panic overtook me. I was going to be forty and I didn't want much. I didn't want a Mercedes or a tattoo or a Cartier watch. My crisis didn't even require an affair. I just wanted my same old fountain in its same old place. They were yanking my past from me and it was too late to protest. There wasn't anything to chain myself to, no wrecking ball to stop; all that was there was dirt, an odd sort of light brown dirt, an espresso color. Maybe New York dirt was different from country dirt. Although this didn't seem like New York. It seemed like Baghdad with the dirt and dirty headless snowmen all around.

For some reason I thought of Shasthi. Was I, I wondered for a moment, no better than the Parks Commission, moving my bulldozer into Shasthi's uterus? If she got pregnant, would it be the right thing? And if she didn't, after going through all of this, would it destroy her?

I went to the chain-link fence blocking off the construction, grasped it and started to rattle it. Duncan grasped it and shook it too with his little hands.

“This is fun, Mommy,” he said.

A
few weeks later, Shasthi took Duncan home with her to the Bronx to spend the night. Russell and I had had a wedding to go to. We drove through the Bronx to pick him up. It had been my first night away from him and I was anxious to get to him. And the wedding we'd gone to hadn't been worth leaving him for.

Shasthi had come the morning before and packed his little things and left with my son in her arms, duffel bag and folding stroller slung over her shoulder. “Here's one more extra shirt for him,” I'd said, handing her the one that had “MOM” on it in a way that was meant to look like a tattoo. Her face had clouded over and I realized she didn't want the shirt that said “MOM” on it. She didn't want a reminder of “MOM.” Maybe for that day she was his mom.

“I just think we should have checked out her apartment first,” I said to Russell, who was always a wreck driving in other boroughs for some reason. Once when we'd been lost in Brooklyn one sunny morning, he'd almost had a nervous breakdown, sweat shooting out of his temples, terrified of our surroundings, while I pointed to the fat old black ladies smiling in their Sunday hats and squat white shoes and the sounds of joyous choir music pouring out of every church.

“It's okay,” he said. “We'll just make sure to see it now, so we know if it's safe for next time. Jesus, we're really in the middle of nowhere,” he said, practically shaking with fear as I watched two young children holding hands and running on the sidewalk while their mothers pushed their empty strollers leisurely behind them. “If it's really bad, crawling with roaches or lead paint flakes everywhere, we won't let it happen again.”

When we pulled up in front of her building, an ugly brown brick monstrosity with small windows, Shasthi was waiting, radiant, with Duncan smiling in her arms, his little legs wrapped around her, koala-style.

I looked at Russell. “Do you mind if I use your bathroom?” I asked Shasthi. I was determined to get upstairs to see where my son had spent the night.

She loaded Duncan into his car seat and he cried when she said good-bye. Then I followed her into her building and up one flight of stairs to her apartment.

When I walked in her door I couldn't believe what I saw. To my right was a small kitchen the same size as mine at home, immaculate of course, with a Poland Spring water cooler that, like ours, dispensed both hot and cold water. In the living room there was a fifty-inch wall-mounted Sony Aquos flat-screen TV between windows lavishly draped in red brocade with tasseled sashes. Along another wall, behind a baroque mahogany table with eight upholstered chairs, was a breakfront with beveled glass doors protecting a full set of china and other treasures, including the ones I had given her from our wedding. In the center of the table was a huge china-flower arrangement, a Capidimonte sort of thing, and in the corner was a Roman-Greco-style statue of a naked woman with swans at her feet. Everywhere, on end tables, were vases of vast china-flower arrangements. I hadn't seen anything so grand since we'd been to the Borghese Gardens in Rome on our honeymoon.