Love's Illusions: A Novel (29 page)

“So?” Michael said as he came into the apartment, hung up his jacket and gave me a kiss, “how’d it go?”

I nodded, “Yes… you’re kissing a single woman for the
very
first time. It’s done.”

“Good,” he said. He had wanted to come along to court with me, but something about him being there, listening to me testify, seemed wrong – I refused to let him come.

I sighed. “Yeah, I suppose it is good. Ya know it’s strange,” I said looking at him, “I thought I’d feel something… I don’t know what, just
something
, but instead I… Well I feel a little sad, but other than that, I just feel nothing.”

“Sad? You mean you wish you hadn’t done it?”

“Oh God no! Sad is the wrong word, Maybe it’s just that it’s taken so long, it’s like – anticlimactic or something.”

“Maybe,” he agreed. “Are you still going to plan a ‘divorce party’?

“Already have – it’s Friday night, be there or be square,” I said with a snarky grin on my face.

It was 4:52 am according to the digital clock on the night stand when I woke up with cramps. Michael and I had come back to the apartment at 2:00 am after a crazy evening celebrating my divorce, and fending off questions about why I wasn’t drinking – I had fallen asleep almost immediately, exhausted as usual. I laid there for a few minutes wishing the pangs of pain away so I could go back to sleep, but this time they didn’t pass.

I got up and went into the bathroom, thinking maybe that was the problem, but soon found out it wasn’t – I was bleeding.
Oh shit, what the fuck is going on?
I got myself cleaned up and woke Michael… “I think I’m having a miscarriage or something - I have a pain in my stomach, and I’m bleeding… We need to get help.”

He was up like a shot. “What happened? Are you alright?” he demanded.

“I don’t know – I woke up with cramping pains and I’m bleeding, sort of a lot,” I replied.

He was rubbing his hands over his face, and through his hair then turned, and started to get dressed, all before I had time to finish my sentence. “Okay, shit –I’m taking you to the ER,” he blurted out tossing my jeans and a sweater in my direction.

For the second time in about a month, I found myself talking to the same friggin’ doctor at St. Joseph’s… just my luck that I’d get this guy again. He remembered me just as well as I remembered him. “Hello again Mrs. Janowski,” he said rather matter-of-factly, finding my name on some paperwork in his hand, as he entered the curtained off area the nurses had brought Michael and I into to wait. He nodded at Michael then asked, “So what happened?”

Michael answered before I could; telling him the scenario of events for what was now the last hour or so.

“Okay, I need to do an examination and see what’s going on. You’ll have to wait outside Mr. Janowski – it won’t be too long.”

Michael flashed me a look – he didn’t like being called that name, it had only happened once before, but he did
not
like it. I attempted to explain to the doctor that my name was now Moretti again, that I had gotten a divorce three days ago, and that Michael’s name was Nowak. The doctor looked back and forth between us, and then at the nurse, finally just saying, “You need to wait outside sir.”

Leaning down to kiss me, Michael reluctantly left, the nurse assuring him that he could come back as soon as the doctor was done.

Dr. Lintel was quiet throughout most of the exam, mumbling to the nurse, asking me a few basic questions about the pregnancy so far: the pain, when it first started, my activities, if I’d taken any drugs, and if I had had any bleeding before this. When he was done, he moved up to my side as he removed his latex gloves and took my wrist. “Well it looks like this ‘accident’ healed well,” he said. “Do you want Mr. …”

He hesitated and I filled in the blank, “Nowak.”

“Do you want Mr. Nowak to hear what I have to say?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” I answered as I took a deep breath.

“Nurse, will you ask him to come back in please?”

After Michael was back he stated, “I’m sorry, Miss Moretti, but as you suspected, you’ve had a miscarriage. We need to do a D & C to remove any remaining fetal tissue, but after that, you’ll be fine – there should be no reason at all why you shouldn’t be able to have children in the future.”

As he stopped talking. Michael and I looked at each other. Both of us suspected a miscarriage, but hearing it confirmed, seemed to give us enough of a jolt that neither of us spoke. There was no need for words, our eyes said it all. “Do you have any questions? If not, I’ll start making arrangements for the procedure.” Dr. Lintel asked.

“Yes, I have questions,” I said, and started to rattle off the list that was forming in my mind. “First why… do you know why this happened?”

“No, that’s something I can’t tell you. Most likely it’s nothing you did. Sometimes nature knows when something is abnormal and…”

“Abnormal?” I broke in. “What do you mean abnormal?”

“I’m
not
saying there was any kind of abnormality, I’m just saying that
if there was
, then nature sometimes knows, and takes care of it through an early miscarriage. Miscarriages in the first trimester aren’t that unusual. Like I said, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to get pregnant again in the future, but I do suggest you wait at least six months before trying again. You can talk to your obstetrician about all that when you go back for a follow up – we’ll send your records over,” he said looking down at the paperwork in his hand, then back at me. “You didn’t fill in a name here, we need his name.”

“I don’t have one.”

He eyed both of us. “Oh. Well you’ll need to find a doctor to do the follow up, you can’t come to the ER for that.”

“That’s not a problem, I’ll go to Planned Parenthood,” I stated.
I’d rather go to them, at least they’re nice, not like you with your fuckin’ judgmental tone,
I thought glaring at him. I’d ask them the rest of my questions too.

After he and the nurse left, I looked at Michael, and with tightened lips said, “Well, I guess we don’t need to go to New York tomorrow.” The feeling that came over me was much like what I felt three days earlier – I was glad it was over, but still filled with sadness. He sat on the edge of the hospital bed and held me; tears welled up inside me, and I cried, all the time wondering to myself if I’d be crying had I gone through with the abortion.

I cried on and off for another couple weeks. Michael thought I was crying because of the miscarriage, and somehow took it to mean that I would never have been able to go through with the abortion. I knew it wasn’t that – had I actually found myself at that final second before making an irreversible decision… I knew I would have done it – not a doubt in my mind. But somehow, having nature make the decision, losing control of what would and would not happen, threw me for a loop – one I was not prepared for.
No,
I thought,
I needed to be in control of something
– I was crying about my body betraying me even though the end result was exactly what I wanted.
I was also sure my newly divorced status was somehow part of it too but, the miscarriage provided a perfect cover – I could cry with impunity.

Stressed. I decided I was stressed, not depressed. I figured I had a right to be stressed. Shit it was the fall of 1972 –over the last two years I had been married, discovered my husband was gay, divorced, was in a relationship with a wonderfully sexy man who just happened to deal drugs, gotten pregnant, had a miscarriage, and was leading a double life; not to mention being at constant odds with my parents, stoned as much as possible, and trying to get myself through school. Somehow just the word ‘depressed’ seemed melodramatic to me, like something from a soap opera on TV with someone always looking for sympathy or an excuse about why they had screwed up whatever situation they found themselves in during that episode. Yep, I could give myself permission to be stressed, I thought; everyone experienced stress – it was socially acceptable. Stress didn’t mean I was weak or crazy, it meant I sometimes freaked out trying to get through the day. That was okay because it was coming from the outside – something imposed on me, not from somewhere inside me. Stress was external; depression was internal. Somehow stress ‘felt’ better to me – the real me was doing just fine; it was the world around me, causing stress, that fucked things up.

Michael spent the weeks between the miscarriage and roughly Thanksgiving, in mourning. I even caught a couple times when ‘the bad boy’ had tears in the corners of his eyes. He didn’t sleep well, he was irritable, withdrawn, and his libido had waned – some. Of course we were being very careful since I was just getting back on birth control pills, and he hated condoms, but I could tell, he was working his way through his own feelings. All the things Dr. Lintel had told us - that miscarriages in the first trimester were common; it didn’t mean that I had done anything wrong, that there was no way of knowing why it happened – maybe something was wrong with the fetus, maybe not; it was just nature’s way of sorting things out; that just because I miscarried this time it did not mean I would miscarry next time… needed time to settle for both of us.

The doctor had no idea I was planning on aborting when he said all those things, but somehow, Michael, well he was just plain sad. Even though I cried about the betrayal of my body, it was good it happened this way. I knew now that the abortion would have torn the two of us apart in a way that might have been irreparable. When I could get him talking, he admitted he wanted the baby even though he knew that I was right; he was still hoping I’d change my mind – right up to the end. A piece of me loved him more for that, but I also knew I would
not
have been able to make the kind of commitment a child needed. I wasn’t even sure I was capable of making that much of a commitment to him – not yet. I felt scattered, how could someone who found it hard or impossible to get out of bed some days be a mother? We went over and over it, after about a month he came out of his funk, and started acting like his old self again.

The holidays came and went, pretty much duplicating the year before – we spent Thanksgiving with his family, Keith stayed in California. Tom, who had graduated from high school last spring, had taken off on a road trip with some of his friends, but the rest of the neighborhood still got together; I enjoyed it, but not as much as the year before. I kept looking at it as if this was now ‘my future’. Not that I thought I was destined for greatness or anything –I knew that wasn’t the case – but would I ever be as satisfied as these people seemed living out a mediocre life? Imagine me as south side girl – like Mary Beth said, I couldn’t get the image to fit in my mind.

I went back to Weymouth for Christmas. My mother had broken the news of my divorce to the family; no one said a word about it to me so I guess it wasn’t that big a deal after all, and of course, none of them knew anything about the whole pregnancy thing. I had somehow taken on the same persona non grata status as my father again this year – fine with me. I fielded my parents’ questions about The Canteen and Michael with ease, my father asking if he had managed to go back to school, and both of them telling me to say ‘hello’ to him for them when I got back. Most of our conversations revolved around my plans for after graduation in the spring – something I hadn’t even let cross my mind yet. My student teaching was going well and would be complete soon. Somehow, I thought having to focus, having to be up early each morning even if I had worked until 4 am the night before, had helped to get me through the last couple months. I couldn’t just blow it off, not if I wanted to pass at least, and I did want to be done with school. If I’d had nothing special to focus on, I wondered if my crying fits would have lasted longer.

While I was gone, a piece of my brain kept flashing to Michael’s confession about being with someone else last Christmas, but I pushed thoughts of a repeat performance out of my mind – and as Mary Beth and I discussed on the drive east this year, that was before the two of us had any kind of ‘real relationship’. We did have a ‘real relationship’ now. Besides we had been through a lot together since that point. Mary Beth still referred to him as ‘my bad boy’, and often used the word ‘phase’ when referring to him instead of ‘relationship’ … something I chose to ignore.

Day to day life dragged on throughout the spring. Life like this was unrecognizable to me; had I grown so used to being on edge, stressed about one thing or another that I didn’t know how to live without it? Nothing to worry about, nothing to stress about… mundane, routine, and almost sedate… Getting through the drudgery of everyday life was going to be the death of me.

Why didn’t I feel happy? My stressors were in the past. Not only was I going to graduate, in fact, I had managed to impress the hell out of my instructors in the education department – my favorite one, Lana Christakos, even saying I should apply for a graduate assistantship and stay to get my MFA. That was a suggestion I wanted nothing to do with, at least not now, but one that made me think for a split second that I should have attended Goodman School of Drama, the performing arts school that was housed next to SAIC. I must be a fantastic actress if they wanted me to stay. Double life – Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde; didn’t they see how much I had struggled to keep my head in one piece, how many days I wanted no more than to roll over and die, and how completely and utterly bored I was now?

As one humdrum day stacked on top of the next; I revolted against it all.
Why was Michael able to come back from his sadness; why am I just sinking deeper and deeper?
During my short pregnancy I had stopped all drug use and kept it at a lower level when I had to be at Francis Parker early each morning only letting myself get stoned on weekends. Now I was back to taking Valium to sleep, having to increase the amount just to doze off and needing multiple gulps of SoCo if I wanted to stay that way. Shit I was back to all of it, plus some! Michael kept me well supplied. He was getting pulled in more and more with Keith’s growing California network, something I wanted nothing to do with – not even wanting to hear about it. Every time I allowed myself to think about the whole Keith-dealing scheme I freaked out; all I could see was the downside. What if things went bad again and Michael was hurt or got busted? It would be federal charges. It was way too risky – something I could not live with and I knew would only end up pulling Michael away from me. The only way I could deal with those thoughts at all was to get stoned, now how ironic was that?