Mrs. Kimble (16 page)

P
regnancy affected her in strange ways. Her vision improved. Her hair straightened. She cried easily, something she had never done; nearly every night she dreamed of her mother. As if she were waking from a long sleep, she began to remember her old life, her years as a journalist. How she had lived.

She remembered late nights, bottles of wine, Leonard Cohen on the hi-fi. Traffic. Taxis. Men in suits, strange and thrilling men who watched her as she passed. She remembered crossing the park on cool mornings, her legs alive in dark stockings, walking with a purpose.

At the end of her first trimester, she went back to New York for a visit. “I’ll be fine,” she told her aunt Cookie, who’d taken to phoning her every day. She had no morning sickness; she felt healthier than she had in years. She asked Ken to come along—it seemed like the right thing to do—but he was meeting with developers about the new golf course; after months of negotiations they were close to a deal. “Maybe next time,” she said, hiding her relief.

She booked a room at the Plaza—like a tourist, she thought; but she had nowhere else to stay. For the first time in her life, she had
no relatives in New York. Her parents’ Brooklyn apartment had been sold; her brother had moved to Washington, D.C., where he’d made a career of harassing the government, marching in protests and getting himself thrown in jail. Staying with friends was not an option; she hadn’t told anyone she was coming. She would have felt foolish saying so, but she wanted to observe New York when New York wasn’t looking.

It was easy to do. For a whole day she wandered the streets: her old neighborhood, the newsstand and deli, the bookstore where she’d met Howard Resnick, the young lawyer she might have married. “That’s where Mother used to live,” she told the child inside her. “That’s where she used to work.” Late in the afternoon she walked through midtown: past the
Times
building, the watering holes they’d frequented after hours. The taverns were filled with new faces—still journalists, presumably, but unfamiliar and impossibly young. Among them were women in short skirts, long hair hanging down their backs. Five years ago Joan had been a rarity; in certain establishments she’d turned heads simply by sitting at the bar. Now women were everywhere.

She went into a tavern and ordered tomato juice. It felt good to sit. She hadn’t walked so much in years; in Florida she drove everywhere. Around her women knocked back martinis and short glasses of Scotch; they watched themselves in the mirror over the bar, smoking, preening, laughing. Joan took a cab back to her hotel; in the large tub she soaked her aching legs. The next day she called Morris Brown and invited him to lunch.

“J
OAN,” HE SAID
.

He got to his feet and took her in his arms. Out of habit she
stood on her toes; her husband was very tall. But Morris was short and thickly built; they had always stood eye to eye.

“It’s good to see you,” he said. His neck smelled of shaving soap and something else, something deeply familiar, like a place she’d visited as a child. Stop, she thought. Morris had never seen her cry.

“Thanks for coming,” she said, breaking the embrace.

“Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t miss seeing you for the world.”

They sat. The restaurant was dark and smoky, a reporters’ hang-out; Joan had eaten a hundred lunches here, hamburgers and garlicky pastrami. On Fridays, drinks after work; packs and packs of cigarettes.

“I ordered you a martini,” said Morris.

I’m not drinking,
she could have said.
I’m pregnant.

“Thanks,” she said instead.

“God, Joanie.” He reached across the table for her hand. “God, you look good.”

A flush washed across her chest. Ken complimented her all the time (had at the beginning, anyway; lately not so much), but it never affected her like this. Her scalp tingled; she felt almost faint. She took a sip of her martini; a sip wouldn’t hurt.

“I’m fat,” she said, though she wasn’t. She’d gained eight pounds so far, mainly in her face and chest. Her silicone breast no longer matched the other one; she’d taken to wearing a padded bra, the stuffing removed from one side. She had let her hair grow; Ken preferred it long.

“You’re gorgeous,” said Morris. He offered her a cigarette; she shook her head. “It’s been a long time.”

“It has.” She’d invited him to the wedding knowing he wouldn’t
come, knowing the invitation was a breach that probably offended him, not because he was jealous but because she’d left what they both loved. “How are things?”

That was all it took. There’d been a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington; a bunch of crazy Cuban nationalists, it had first appeared. Then one of the burglars turned out to be the security coordinator for Nixon’s reelection committee.

“This is just the beginning,” said Morris. “There’s more here than meets the eye.” Joan nodded eagerly, devouring it.

“These are crazy days,” he finished. “God, Joanie, you’d be in your element. A muckraker like you.”

Sadness filled her like a sickness. She hadn’t expected this, hadn’t wanted it. She’d only wanted a last look back.

“Anyway.” Morris raised his glass. “To Joan Cohen.”

“Kimble,” said Joan. She regretted it immediately.

“Sorry.” Morris took a long drink. “How’s the husband?”

“He’s fine. He’s—” He’s what? she thought. Selling mansions? Building a golf course? Ken’s business deals bored her beyond words. Morris, she knew, would feel the same way.

“He’s fine,” she repeated.

Morris sat back in his chair. “I can’t believe you’re married.” An awkward silence. “That didn’t come out right.”

“That’s okay.” Joan looked down at her glass; she had finished her martini. “Neither can I.”

“I’m jealous as hell.” Morris drained his Scotch; the waiter came with another. “That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Me, the one who was married all those years. Here I am. Jealous as hell.”

Joan looked around the restaurant, at the pale, keen faces—not a
suntan among them, though some were rosy from the booze. The room was suddenly loud: jazz, urgent voices, laughter; the dull roar of traffic outside. Morris’s eyes followed hers.

“Do you miss it?” he asked.

“No,” said Joan. Tears burned behind her eyes. “I don’t miss it at all.”

Later Morris hailed her a cab. The taxi idled; on the rush-hour sidewalk they clasped each other, annoyed pedestrians stepping around them. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the smell of him, some piece of him she could take back with her.

That night, in the airplane rest room, she began to bleed. When the plane touched down in Miami, she was no longer pregnant.

T
HERE IS
a superstition among Jews about taking the future for granted. Buy blankets and booties for an unborn child, and you risk putting a
kineahora
—a jinx—on the pregnancy. Joan had laughed when her aunt Cookie warned her, but she’d obeyed nonetheless. She hadn’t bought so much as a diaper.

She lost the baby anyway.

The child, had it lived, would have been a girl; the doctor said there was no way to tell, but in her heart Joan was sure. Privately she’d named the baby Ava, after her own mother. Joan imagined her tall, with Ken’s blue eyes, an athletic girl who did not play the violin.

She imagined Harvard for her daughter, not Radcliffe. Ava would have studied physics, philosophy, discrete math; she would have understood the movement of the planets, the invisible workings of the universe, all the things her mother did not.

Ava would have lived a long life. She would have inherited nothing from her mother to prevent this. She would have traveled the world unafraid; perhaps she would have joined the Peace Corps, as Moira Snell had wanted to do. If she’d wanted to, she could have fallen in love. She would have surrendered nothing.

S
ummer came.

Joan lay awake a long time, restless despite the sleeping pills, the Valium for her nerves, the Midol for her menstrual cramps. Since the miscarriage her periods had been agony. “It’ll pass,” her gynecologist had assured her. She was in the early stages of menopause; in another year her cycles would stop altogether.

Rain nicked the windowpanes; the shadow of the date palm darkened her husband’s face. A face, by now, as familiar as her own. They’d celebrated their second anniversary that spring.

Ken stirred; the ceiling fan blew a lock of hair across his forehead. He was always so careful about his hair. She imagined he resembled his father: the blue eyes, the straight nose. His mother would have been small and dark, with a round behind and a broad shelf of bosom. Like Joan’s own mother, the original Ava; like her aunt Cookie. It was the way all Jewish women seemed to end up, the way Joan herself was starting to look. She’d gained weight and didn’t care, eight pounds from her brief pregnancy and ten more besides.

She’d never met any of his family. He’d invited no one to the wedding; his parents were dead, his few boyhood friends scattered all over the big squarish states of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa. Except for Joan he was alone in the world. Or almost. He’d been married before—a youthful mistake, he said, hardly worth mentioning. She’d never asked about his first wedding, if the bride wore white, if she was, in fact, a virgin. He never spoke about past lovers, and Joan didn’t press: she had too many of them herself to be comfortable swapping histories. Yet she’d never married any of hers.

Joan rolled over on her side, kneading the soft flesh between her hipbones. They never spoke of the child who’d died. The way her gynecologist explained it, miscarriage was common in the first trimester—nature’s cruel quality control, a sign that something serious was wrong with the baby. Ava’s death could not have been prevented; Joan’s one martini with Morris Brown was not to blame. She chose to believe otherwise; she held herself responsible. The alternative was to believe evil happened for no reason, that fate was perverse and sadistic and humans powerless against it.

She watched her husband in the dark. They hadn’t made love since she lost the baby; she’d stopped reaching for him and he seemed not to notice. He did not need her. She wondered, briefly, why he didn’t; if his needs were being met elsewhere.

She felt a quickening in her chest, a flash of pain.

J
OAN SAVED
birthday cards, ticket stubs, snapshots taken in photo booths. She’d kept her grade school report cards, her grandfather’s violin, her father’s army discharge papers. Years ago, in New York, she’d rented a storage space for her old yearbooks and
photo albums and pressed corsages, the zippered bags of twenty-year-old dresses, the crates of her mother’s china. Recently these treasures had been shipped to the house in Florida. They filled the attic and the crawl space above the garage, cardboard boxes labeled “Mexico Trip” or “High School” or simply “Mother”.

One morning after Ken left for work, Joan put on a robe and went into his dressing room, a small alcove off the bedroom. She opened the walk-in closet and flipped on the light. His suits hung in neat rows, matching vests and jackets and pants on cedar hangers. Joan fingered a sleeve. Except for a blue seersucker he’d bought on a whim, they were exquisite fabrics: linen and silk, tropical-weight wool in shades of cream or beige. In the seersucker he looked seamy and slightly quaint, like a crooked politician or a door-to-door salesman. “I’m not crazy about the seersucker,” she’d finally told him. He had never worn the suit again. She was surprised that he’d kept it.

On the closet floor sat a neat row of suede bucks and light-colored wing tips, impeccably polished; beside them, an antique spittoon she’d given him for his birthday, to hold his pocket change. His shirts hung along the opposite wall. There was nothing in the closet Joan didn’t recognize. It had all come from Harrison’s Men’s Store, where Ken had an account.

She opened a dresser drawer. Inside were running shorts, carefully folded; in the next drawer, colorful bikini briefs. The other drawers were filled with socks, handkerchiefs, swim trunks; all new, from Burdine’s downtown. She couldn’t have said what she was looking for: a note perhaps, a phone number written on a scrap of paper. But Ken was a prudent man. If he was having an affair, he’d be careful not to leave a trace.

In the bottom drawer she found the ratty jeans and tank tops he’d worn when they first met, folded with the same care as his new silk handkerchiefs. At the bottom of the pile was his Mexican blouse. Joan held it to her cheek, stroked the colorful embroidery. The fabric felt soft and somehow alive, like a person’s skin.

That was all. The old clothes were all he’d retained of his previous life. In forty-four years he hadn’t saved a single letter or photograph, not a shred of evidence that he’d ever gone to school or held a job or kissed a girl, much less married one.

Joan refolded the blouse and laid it carefully in the drawer. She was about to close it when she saw something in the back pocket of a pair of cutoffs. She slid her hand inside. It was a black-and-white photograph of two children sitting on a porch swing. The boy wore short pants and a striped T-shirt; on his lap sat a baby of indeterminate sex. The children were fair-skinned and serious; they squinted into the sun. On the back of the photo, in neat cursive:
Charlie and Josephine, September 1967.
The letters were round and careful, a woman’s hand.

Joan stared at the photograph for a long time, too absorbed to hear the car in the driveway, the front door opening, Ken’s tread on the stair. When she looked up he was standing in the doorway.

“Joan,” he said softly. “What are you doing?” His voice was calm, his face blank. A muscle twitched below his left ear.

What could she say, sitting on the floor with his denim cutoffs in her lap, the dresser drawer hanging open? She stumbled to her feet, wishing she had dressed. He looked rich and powerful in his silk suit. In her old bathrobe she felt at a disadvantage.

She took a deep breath. “I was looking through your clothes.”

He smiled. “Why would you do such a thing?”

The smile reassured her; he wasn’t angry at all.

“Who are Charlie and Josephine?” she asked.

Ken’s face did not change. Seagulls outside; in the distance she could hear the ocean.

“They’re my children,” he said.