God and Jetfire (22 page)

They didn't pick up. Their answering machine said that I had reached Erik, Paula, Sarah, “and the newest member of the family—
Jonathan
!”

 

EIGHTEEN

I turned to the life I'd chosen. Students returned to school as always in September, a hundred new costumes, a hundred reinventions. We piled into the large auditorium in the architecture building.

“Did anyone see the report in
U.S. News
? We ranked second in the country among design schools and first in interior design! Good going, guys!” Our director shook his tiny fists.

The faculty assembled on the stage, and everyone found seats as the cold vanquished all our steamy memories of summer. Students greeted one another and braced themselves for another year. We sat down and shivered and, if we'd thought ahead, put sweaters over our knees.

I was excited; I couldn't help it. The impulse to reinvent yourself at the start of school was like a natural instinct. Summer was a chance for a set change, and this crowd of students wasn't just coming back tan from the beach; they'd sublet flats and held design internships in fashion-forward cities around the world. They were coming back with professional confidence and clothes you couldn't buy in Ohio.

“This year we're saying goodbye to someone who's been here longer than almost anyone on staff. After twenty years, Professor Collins has announced his retirement. Congratulations, Professor, and we'd like to present you with something to remember us by—”

The director looked to the back of the auditorium and we began to turn our heads, and then there was commotion at the rear doors. One opened, and Jevn came running down the side aisle stairs with a prize of some kind, while everyone laughed and cheered. I watched the scene, stunned. He did not appear to be the father of a baby he'd just given up for adoption.

*   *   *

I was always looking for him, always afraid I'd find him. I'd seen him one other time, right before school started; he was across the street near the little cinema and our favorite restaurant, but he ignored me, grimacing strangely at no one, to tell me that he saw me but that there were no words to say about it. I'd sent e-mails when he was in Colorado, and he responded by assuring me he was thinking often of Jonathan and me. I said I was angry with him, but he said he had never done anything to hurt me and never would. His composure made my anger feral. It seemed as though while I'd been pregnant, speaking to him daily, relying on him at every turn, he had somehow managed, in the midst of it all, to heal, apart. I was left with the loss of him—but then I couldn't distinguish the losses: Jevn, my son, myself.

We were like the number eleven, he had said. Between us there was another, invisible one, made of space and air. I looked for him, hoping our proximity would sharpen the features of the absent third, and the hollows in his cheeks would tell me how to feel about it. When I saw him in the auditorium, I wondered what I could learn about the shape of my son in this vast divide: Jevn, leaping fast down the stairs in front of the whole cheering school, and Jevn, three months ago, lifting me gently off the birth ball for another contraction.

I stared, frozen, toward the stage, one of the many reinvented faces in the crowd, and watched Professor Collins graciously receive his gift.

*   *   *

When the assembly ended, someone grabbed me by the arm. It was a professor who'd taught at the school I attended in Copenhagen. He'd squatted with me on the grass in front of Grundtvigs Kirke, a church with dramatic stepped gables at its westwork, and advised me not to abandon the things I drew until I'd really tested them. He said it was always easier to start over, a new major, a new design, but at some point you have to understand that everything is in the details, the
how
. Not the
what
.

As I turned toward his grasp, I saw he was already holding Jevn in the same kindhearted but merciless old man clutch. He sat us both down on a leather bench in the hallway. He spoke soberly to the floor and under his breath.

“I know it was hard. I know it was, but do you know what I think about how you handled the situation, with finding a family and arranging for the adoption? And keeping track of your schoolwork and supporting each other? And making it possible for that boy to grow up in a stable home and still get to know you both?”

He tilted his face back to look down at us sternly through his glasses, his jaw clenched in a proud professorial underbite.

“A.
Plus.
”

*   *   *

What I should have been doing that September: tracing the delicate fur of my son's cheeks and chin over his pounding heart and down his bulbous belly, to the scar of a belly button at the healing cord. I should have been exploring my child like a new country. And even more than a summer away, that new place would have changed me.

Nina hosted a pizza party for our birth class reunion after everyone's babies were born. Those mothers emerged as if from cocoons, fresh and wise, fed on long days in the new land. They sipped some of their first glasses of wine in months, those who were not breast-feeding. Sparkling cider for those who were. They wore their motherhood as comfortably as their babies as they chatted over them in their frontpacks. Nina had made prizes, and each was awarded, one by one. Karen got the award for the biggest baby, at nine pounds, three ounces. There was an award for the longest labor, thirty-six hours, and the best effort at a natural birth went to Rachel, who had had to deliver by Cesarean. I got the prize for the mom who made a good decision but didn't get to hold her baby every day. It was an empty picture frame.

I should have had no time to think about what being a mother or loving a child looks like. I should have been too busy doing it: nursing, and changing, and burping, and cleaning up. But my motherhood was like a flash of light in the eyes of an animal that disappears in the darkness. I looked for vestiges of it in the pressed-down grass where he lay and branches broken where he'd passed through. And I had nothing to do but wonder what loving him, that unknown hollow, should look like.

*   *   *

I'd moved into the attic of a house shared by design students who came and went, alternating between internships out of the city and school. Fall was approaching, and the early dark and the weight of the sloped ceiling was always pushing me toward the floor; everyone's boxes and bikes surrounded me as though I were occupying the back recesses of someone's memory. I had three roommates, but my interactions with them were limited: waiting outside the bathroom while one of them and her new boyfriend showered together. Fighting over cupboard space. Dirty dishes in the sink. Whose turn to buy toilet paper. My new walk to studio took me along a different side of the park, and, from the sidewalk, a clearing in the trees and a long lowland meadow framed a surreal, distant vignette: the short stone wall that wrapped around the pond where I'd eaten a baked potato in labor.

I turned to the life I'd chosen, and the whole point was now Architecture. Everything I had been through was so that I could realize Architecture. I wanted to see the place, Architecture, that had seemed so worth what it took to get there to everyone who'd given me advice. The thing that had competed with my son for space in my life and won. Maybe I needed my summer's experience so that I could access unknown reserves of creativity: ingenious lines, inspired organizational principles, buildings that admitted light and air and attested to a depth of humanity that all the kids who were just playing around in the mud pies of their fertility could never have conceived. Maybe God would give me creative skill to fill the void, and I would possess Architecture as no mother can possess a son; I would give the world good lines, and we would all understand why it had to happen.

We inhabited a Disney World of Starchitecture; no building looked like another, because our dean had had a mission to fill the campus with buildings designed by signature architects. Built of Styrofoam and Spray-Crete, the architecture building was in rapid decay, an invaluable lesson for architecture students prone to thinking there were ambitions higher than Stay Standing for a building to aspire to. One afternoon, our Environmental Technology class went outside to look for thermal bridges, breaches in the building envelope where outside temperatures entered in, a result of deterioration or a failure of design. My group found a place where the screen skin that secured the Spray-Crete was exposed; it looked like someone had kicked the corner out of frustration.

While we waited for our professor to come see what we'd found, people in my group started talking about their internships. Jennifer was wearing an asymmetrical black T-shirt, its V off-center. She had been in London, working for a firm that designed skyscrapers and transportation centers all over the world. She sighed heavily as she spoke about redlines and construction sets, as though among the things she'd learned about architecture was that you are supposed to sigh about redlines and construction sets.

“Didn't you stay here, in Cincinnati?” Seth turned to me. I wondered if he meant for my internship. Or was he hinting at the bigger experience I'd had, afraid to ask directly? “At the Design Center, I thought I heard?”

I'd come back to school with some amount of confidence, because what I'd done had been so big it seemed it had to be in some way adequate, but I realized then that it wasn't. I had nothing to say about my slow days in the office, waiting for tasks, waiting for the end of day. But I couldn't respond by describing labor and my son's adoption, either. I wasn't a mother, and I wasn't a proper architecture student, either.

“I think you've been away from school for a long time,” Jevn had said months ago when I suggested our classmates were capable of being supportive and understanding. He didn't expect any sympathy from them at all. He certainly hadn't sent an e-mail to his entire class telling them about the birth, as I'd done. I had hoped to maintain control of the story and to ask for sensitivity. Jevn intended only to finish school and to move on.

He stuck close to the wall and avoided my eyes as we passed between studio and seminar, carrying drawings or models or slide reels or lumber. I searched him for scars; if he was still breathing, then I could still breathe; if he was getting work done and moving on, then I should be able to do the same. He would never say hi or stop to talk. One evening, riding my bike down the lawn in the dark, I almost hit him lying in the grass with someone I guessed was his new girlfriend.

It seemed Architecture should welcome me back, given my sacrifice, but as I stepped into my new studio, it felt like an ancient enemy. It was the same as always: a field of drafting tables, a latent tension, students arriving early and claiming their desks. The studio was trapezoidal in plan, and there was a single small window at floor level located in the most acute corner. You had to bend over to see out to the courtyard and across to the old part of the building, where windows were expansive and kindly placed at eye level. Still, someone shoved his desk as far as it would go toward the shard of light, monopolizing the single evidence of a world outside.

I found myself slipping into my headphones. Everyone wore them; they kept you from hearing the frenzied sounds of your studiomates tearing through trace paper on the trail of some inspired design. The music provided momentum; it elevated the beauty of the things you drew and helped keep you going. In studio, the biggest enemy was the blank page. We were coached not to fear it, but to strike fast: draw, draw, draw. Keep moving. Bad lines tell you something that no lines can't. Get the billion bad lines out of your system, so you can get to the good one. You can make something beautiful out of any starting point. It's the
how
, not the what.

I'd done that. I had faced a blank page and cast out a line. I wasn't stalled on the decision anymore. All that mattered was moving forward. I was going to build something out of what I had to work with. But inside my headphones I maintained a foothold in grief; I listened to songs we'd sung to Jonathan and songs we'd sung before him. I had to draw and keep drawing. I couldn't think about the possibility that we had given him up so Jevn alone could arrive at Architecture.

*   *   *

In the first week of the quarter, before studio was in full swing, you could leave school early in the evening. I took advantage of that to go home at sunset one night to call Paula. We talked about when I might come down to visit, and she let me listen to Jonathan's infant grunts. I hung up the phone unable to cry. It felt like my lungs were caving in, and my body couldn't coordinate the process: shake my shoulders, release the tears, think of my son, all simultaneously. I just sat, stunned.

I loved my son so much I let him go, I thought. A lot of the songs I listened to in studio suggested that, that real love doesn't depend on being together; it doesn't demand to be realized in any particular form. Letting go so that the one you love can have everything he needs was the most generous and wholehearted and noble kind of love. What better thing to offer than that best kind of love? But I couldn't figure out what my love should look like, or what it should do. I didn't know my son in the way that makes missing cinematic and colorful. I had no memories to cherish, no stories to relive in his absence. He had no space in my life I could leave exactly the way he left it. My love hung emptily suspended, without a trajectory.

My structures professor's wife called to invite me over for dinner, and I was grateful to get out of my attic room. I'd tagged along with Jevn on other occasions when they invited him over, like the time we'd all gone sledding, and then I borrowed her dry socks and danced in the kitchen with their children. They wanted to hear the whole story. They asked me careful questions with their brows furrowed, not believing I was okay, afraid I was just downplaying things. But by the end, they were relieved.