Keeping Things Whole (20 page)

Intermission. The play was suspended
for fifteen minutes. Kate and I had been suspended for nearly as many weeks.

Will you let me by?…Us?

If you want by, go.

But the crowded theatre wouldn't let either of us by. The half-shocked, half-impressed audience kept us shackled together with small steps in the busy aisle then down a crowded staircase. Strangers in dry clean-only clothes were never more than six inches away, often less. At the doorway, I let Kate pass in front of me. Was she already picking her steps a little more carefully? Walking to shield?

“Are you thirsty?” I asked the back of her head.

“A pee first.”

“There'll be a lineup. If you're thirsty, I should get in line now.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what? Water or Perrier?”

“Perrier. Thanks.”

One of the least heard words in the language was flitting about the crowded lobby.
Abortion
—a bird flown in from the dark outdoors, beating its circuit of panic. Even more frequent, the bright, single syllable
she
.
She
, most of the actors.
She,
my mother
.
Lady She. The women who had, who hadn't, who might have. Normally the A-word is
the
secret. Gloria once told me that women in book clubs often confess to their affairs and/or those of their husbands. Semi-strangers mention miscarriages while eating little sweets off little napkins. Nearly 30 percent of them will have had abortions, but none of them say so. Suddenly I was hearing it all over the lobby. Imagine what Kate was getting in the ladies' room.

I stepped out of line quickly, one movement shy of leaping and ripping my hair out. She'd told Gloria, and I'd been standing in line to buy bottled water. She told her. She told her. She told her. For Kate to have said “I'm pregnant” to Gloria was a cowardly way to deliver her verdict on the pregnancy to me. What, she was going to tell Gloria and still get herself taken care of? Look what Mom had to say about that.

I moved between the bar lineup and the women's room door. This second spat beside the Detroit River would be my call, not hers. When Kate emerged, I stepped forward and pointed to the exit. “Some air.”

Fittingly, we had to pass through smokers to get any privacy outside. The Zug winds were up, so we only stepped from one stink to another.

“You had no right to tell her when we still haven't made our decision.”

“
Our decision? Rights?
I puke enough in the morning. Yes, Antony, I shouldn't have told your mother. And I should have let you know as soon as I decided, but
decide
is a tricky word here. This isn't like booking a trip or choosing a major. As for you, the second thing I know is that I wish I could have this baby with you. A version of you.”

Apart from her, I was incandescent with rage. In front of her, I felt less enraged than irrelevant, and that feeling had been growing for two months. Fatherhood, my feelings—big deal.

“You talk as if humiliating me in there means nothing. The pregnancy—”

“The
baby
, Antony. Our
baby
. Not a pregnancy, a baby.”

“The pregnancy is one thing. Shutting me out and telling Gloria is quite another. Look at what she's doing to us in there.”

She reached for my arm. “I am sorry about that. I had to tell someone, a woman. Safaa's too much of a witness. Melissa—not right either. I thought this would be better than telling my mom. You get pregnant and you need to tell another woman. You just do.”

I shook free of her arm.

“‘Need to tell.' Aren't you the lawyer? You mean
want
to tell.”

That lit her eyes up. “Don't you get it? I'm no longer a law student with great prospects. This is bigger than that, all of that. Your rights. My rights. Neither of them make a fuck of a difference to the little tadpole heart inside me.”

I'd never before seen someone look stronger by crying. Her eyes welled with tears and threatened to unbalance her forehead, but she swung her jaw out to right her skull and stare back at me. “I know what my body wants.”

“So do pedophiles. So do rapists.”

She flashed me an
asshole
look
.
I flashed back:
an asshole who's right
.

“Listen to me. I go to sleep pregnant. I wake up pregnant. My blood is pregnant. Remember Orwell writing about being unable to shoot a man while he takes a shit? That's how I feel. It doesn't matter anymore how the rifle got into my hands. It's there, and some poor fucker's got his pants down.”

“I'm not thinking
how
either. I'm thinking
when
. If we can't be good parents, why be parents at all?”

“
Can't
or
won't
?”

“You tell me. You cannot work seventy hours a week and be a good parent. Period. Choose your moment, darling. Six or seven years from now you could be set and I could retire, get a hobby job. Teach taek. Finish school. Become a green builder. Remember Enron? Most of the pirates stayed on the sinking ship until it took them down with it. But a few got out as rich as princes.”

“Yeah, the stripper guy.”

“The
smart
guy. Just being a parent doesn't make somebody a good parent. Most parents are shoppers and wipers. At best, they round that out with chauffeuring. But you have to want to drive to soccer practice. I don't, and I don't think you do either. Fear of blood on our hands is never going to make you more patient with shrill cartoons and plastic junk everywhere. Parenting may be affectionate or meaningful, but it isn't intellectual. You're the smartest woman I've ever met. This isn't the right time, in your life or mine, for wiping and yelling.”

“That doesn't make it the right time for killing, either. Do I wish I weren't pregnant, that for me a big decision was still whether to buy or lease a car, a Windsor firm or Toronto? Yes. Am I going to kill to get it? No.”

The theatre lights flashed us back to our seats.

“I'm going,” she announced, then did, hailing a curbside taxi. After a few steps she turned back to say, “Tell her I had to pee too often to stay.” No mention of the expensive shoulder sweater she'd leave me to collect from her seat or simply abandon. But she needn't have said anything. Her striding away alone was the highest compliment she could have paid Gloria's
Macbeth
. Mother Kate was beginning to gel, a woman looking after her own or at least armed with the perfect excuse to do what she and she alone wanted to do. Why stick around for the second half of the play? She knew how it would end.

You can guess what Gloria
made of Lady M's “Out damned spot” line. The blood of careerist murder on manicured hands. Convenience blood. Sure, Mom, point taken. But remember that her career was possible after five years of university, not eight, and that she hails from the last generation of lifetime careers and constant employment. Eat the boomers.

I bristled through the second half
.
She did Banquo's ghost as an aborted child come to life. Once again one of the child actors was dressed to mirror, in flagrant miniature, another character. For Glore, Banquo's ghost was unborn. Later, towards the bloody climax, Macduff saying he “was from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd” somehow made him both aborted but also born of a caesarean, a fetus-man with a score to settle. Watching indictment after indictment, piecing together this variation on tragedy's grand message—you reap what you sow—I was forced to admit I was doing more than awaiting my word with Glore. Surely part of me was also sitting there, in public, passive and quiet, to staunch Kate's wound. Cold comfort, though, hearing Macbeth's “I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far” speech as his vote for abortion when the Kate parliament had just voted otherwise.

Wherever Mom was in the theatre, biting her lip in the wings or watching like a hawk from the control booth, she wouldn't have liked the mathematical image I saw so clearly amidst all the hot oranges and cool blues of the stage lights. Alongside the estranged Macbeths I could also see back to an old textbook and its photograph of a Venn diagram set into a commemorative stained-glass window. Watching Mom's play through the stained glass of rage, I saw every relationship as a Venn diagram of bodies and minds moving together or apart, hugging or slugging, admiring then exiting. Two lovers start out with the hope of aligning their planets, shifting their borders, sliding me into you and vice versa. Then, for some, a child, a third circle, a waxing and waning solar system of infants fixated on and imitative of parents they'll eventually hold in contempt before maybe, maybe consenting to the pity visits and guilt calls. Across the water from the theatre, nearly one-third of American children were being raised by single mothers. For everyone in this story born after Peg and Bill, our Venn diagrams with our fathers had the briefest of intersections, a mere genetic download. That single touch then so much work to keep things whole.

Staunching my wound, seething, collecting my thoughts—whatever I was doing in that theatre had a predictable curtain call. By slipping out of my seat as soon as the final (roaring) applause started I was able to avoid the crush of bodies which had slowed us at intermission. Here, finally, spiky rage shot through me. Everyone rising around me seemed so politely refreshed for having watched a fake tragedy with good lighting, to have been momentarily shaken in their nice clothes.

My asking for backstage admission and going down to the green room was a descent into Gloria's lair, but what else to do? If you call the duel, your opponent gets to set the location. Laughter and a whirlwind of smells thickened as I descended worn stairs. The fatty smells of cosmetics, an acrid wave of hairspray, the crowbar of sweat. Rounding a corner, I saw the green room full of the half-undressed cast and the black-garbed crew. They hugged so frequently they created a communal, rotational dance, hug to the left, spin, now hug to the right. As someone in a dressing gown hinged one way then back I saw two seated queens, Gloria and her Lady M, drinking bubbly out of coffee mugs. Just before I reached them, I nearly collided with the child actor who had played Banquo's ghost.

“Arlene,” Gloria said, “this is my son, Antony.”

“An excellent performance,” I told her. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you. I'm sure you've developed an eye.” Turning to Mom, Arlene said, “Well, darling, I really should get this shit off.” She rolled her eyes around to indicate the thick mask of makeup on her face. “Nice to meet you, Antony.”

Gloria glanced behind me. “You're alone down here?”

“Alone now period, looks like. You can imagine how I might like a word.”

“This way.”

Shortly after a play, the stage is one of the few empty spaces available in a theatre. Gloria led me up a series of tiny backstage staircases. Watch your head here, and again here. Props sat ready on a side table in the wings: envelopes, swords, a leather-bound book. Once we hit centre-stage, I could see and sense her rooting her feet to the deck boards and squaring her shoulders. As of opening night, a director's job is finished, and she walked the boards with palpable envy for her actors.

“I thought you should know as soon as possible that with a child coming I'm going to have to consolidate my finances. I can no longer splurge on indulgences like this,” I tapped the painted, plywood backdrop.

“What are you talking about?”

“Don't worry. You seem to have a hit on your hands. I'm sure you'll find another backer.”

“Antony, I understand if you want to talk about the play or the pregnancy, but my show and its sponsors are not your concern.”

“I am your sponsor, Mother.” I smiled. “I am Cronus Holdings. This,” I swept my hand from temporary backdrop to rented seats, “is all
family money
.” In the Williams' lexicon, that meant smuggling money.

“I don't know what you think you're doing,” she sputtered. “I'll phone Gordon Clarke on Monday. If I have to have him show you receipts, I will.”

“Gord already sends me receipts. His company is my company. Cronus Holdings is publicly registered, registered to me. Gordon's just a subcontractor. You could have looked me up in an hour. But of course you didn't. Not when you were busy getting what you wanted.”

“Get out.”

“You played that card long ago. This time you'll hear me out before I leave. Even now, I'll acknowledge your strength. You deserved the money, used it well if not fairly. Yes, you've landed some hits here, made a big point, but it also happens to be all for you. Don't for a second say this play was for Kate. You're always single because other people are too imperfect for you. Again, your choice to make. But that doesn't give you the right to hand out report cards, not to me and certainly not to Kate.”

“Love
is
a report card,” she replied. “No grades, no love.”

“Well then yours needs other criteria than whether or not I'm you. Or Kate should become you. You're more right than you know sending out those little girls to look like Mommy. Vanity and motherhood onstage together at last.”

I did a little half-stroll before continuing, arced about on the thrust of the stage. “We may not speak again, so let me say two more things. I've given Kate more respect than I've ever given anyone, more than I knew I had to give. And yes, in part that means giving her a hard time. I learned this from you,
admiringly
. Respect cannot go untested. And that's precisely why I'm willing, as you so charmingly put it”—I gestured at the set around us—“to dip my hands in blood. Because I know Kate can do better. That you have meddled in this so deeply is un-fucking-thinkable given why you're doing it. You want a grandchild for an audience. Sure, you'll gain a life here, but you're taking one too. Kate's. Here goes her career. And the best years of her brain.”

She stepped towards me, the stun worn off. “You naïve little shit. You don't have any idea what she'll want in a few years.”

“But I know what she'll lose. And so do you. Motherhood fills your arms for a decade. Romantic love can do it for a lifetime.”

She gave me some chin. “You're just disappointed because now she might actually slip off your money leash. You say you love what she can do with her mind, so long as that doesn't mean independence from you. You want her to have a big brain but an empty wallet so she'll cling to yours.”

“You of all people have lost the right to condemn my money.” I turned and tried to make that my exit line.

“I could turn you in,” she said to my back, “make you grow up one way or another.”

I turned to face her again. “We both know you're not about to do that to your grandchild's father.” I stretched my eyes open. In the suddenly still air all we did was stare, both of us knowing whose eyes looked back at her. When her silence became her answer, I walked downstage and climbed into the aisle, passing row after row of empty seats as I left. Halfway to the exit I did the tunneller's worm with my hand then pointed my thumb back at her.
Flood behind
.