Until the Real Thing Comes Along (18 page)

“Well, did you want a snack?” Ethan asks me. “I might want some … oh, I don’t know, what do you recommend, Sandy? Beef jerky?”

“Here’s what I recommend. I recommend you get this car out of the way before I mess up your face a little. Why don’t you do that?”

“Why
don’t
I?” Ethan says. “Well, let’s see. Because you offended my wife?”

Sandy straightens, starts pounding his fists down on top of the car. The warm-up act, I presume.

I cover my ears, find myself midpoint between laughing and screaming. “Let’s
go!”

And thank God, Ethan starts the car, drives away.

“What was
that
?” I say, when we are safely back on the freeway. “What were you
do
ing?”

“I don’t know. Did you like it?”

I start to laugh. “Yes. John
Wayne
!”

“Yeah.” He turns on the radio. The unfamiliar voice of the DJ
starts talking about the Vikings. Ethan and I look at each other and he takes my hand. I stop breathing, stare out the window, start taking in this new place as though it were homework.
My wife!
the back of my brain is thinking. I might send Amber a postcard with a brief message: You were wrong. No offense.

The duplex, located in a small suburb west of Minneapolis, is furnished with a sofa, two chairs, a dinette set, and a bed. Enough to get started. Right across the street is Lake Minnetonka, which looks to me nearly as vast as the ocean I’ve left behind. There is a small balcony, accessible through sliding-glass doors that go across the length of the living room, and Ethan and I stand on it now to discuss things. Inside, the realtor uses his cellular phone to persuade some home owner that the best offers come right away, they shouldn’t hold out much longer than a few weeks for a better offer. Not always true, of course, but as I am temporarily Queen-of-Sheba retired it is no concern of mine.

“Do you want to look at any other places?” Ethan asks. “I really like this one. It’s peaceful. It’ll only take me twenty minutes to get to work.”

I nod. It is peaceful. And beautiful. I imagine myself reading on the balcony in the early afternoons, making dinner in the evening in the small kitchen while I watch the motion of the water. It seems ironic to me that I needed to come to Minnesota to finally have water views.

“I think I could live here,” I say. “Yes. Let’s try it.”

Ethan opens the slider and steps inside, and I feel as though I am in a movie where, with that motion, everything starts.

Just before I follow him inside, a bird lands on the railing. I
turn slowly to look at it. It is black, smudges of deep red on its wings.

I softly call Ethan back out, point, whisper, “What kind of bird is that?”

“It’s a red-winged blackbird.”

I laugh. “No, it is.”

“Oh,” I say. “It seemed too obvious.”

“Well,” he says, “that happens.”

T
wo months later, I am making bagels. I bought a book on bread, and I am trying what I believe to be the hardest thing. This is what happens when you have difficulty finding a job.

I thought I might enjoy not working. It happens not to be true. And unless I want a position manning a deep fryer, there is no work for me out here. The high point of my day thus far is that I have discovered sesame seeds in the bottle look just like sesame seeds on the bun.

After the badly formed bagels have been boiled and are in the oven, I lie on the sofa, close my eyes, think, What’s so
bad
about this? You can listen to music, read a book, learn to sew—you can make a quilt! You get to walk for as long as you want every day; you see the animals that live in the woods, the little children who live in your neighborhood. You’re living with Ethan, he comes back here every night, he sees you every day, he is sharing this pregnancy, isn’t this what you dreamed of?

And then I answer myself. What’s wrong with this is that I don’t know what to do with myself. I haven’t been able to make
friends—no one is home during the day. The novelty of having time to write letters has worn off. I have called everyone, including the Berkenheimers, too often; there is not enough to say. I have paced in the living room at two in the afternoon for what I thought was an endless amount of time; then looked at my watch and found that it was two in the afternoon. I thought that there might be measurable joy in the billowing up of sheets you put on a bed that you share with someone you love. I forgot he needed to love you back in the same way.

I’m not really living with Ethan. He is living with his baby-to-be and its incubator, that’s how it feels. When we were best friends I at least had some part of him that was only mine. Now I’m taking a backseat to my stomach, feeling, in some ways, more alone than ever. I lie beside him in bed at night, feeling warmth coming from his body but not touching him. It’s torture, actually.

I don’t know what I imagined. Did I think that the Midwestern climate would effect in him some deep change of heart and mind? That, free of a lifestyle that made certain demands on him, he would accept another possibility, enter into it fully?

Well, as it happens, yes. One night after we first moved in, remembering that he had called me his wife, I reached for him, gently rubbed his back. I felt him stiffen, and I stopped, pulled away, decided to wait for him to take the initiative. And waited. And waited. For what I know now will never come again. And yet I wait still. “Dear Patty,” an advice columnist who lives in my head writes me daily, “You live with a
gay man
. Hellllooooo!” Ethan kisses my forehead, full of the only kind of love he can give, and my heart folds in on itself, dies.

I thought, too, that my pregnancy would be softly all-consuming, that I would be as in love with growing the baby as Ethan is. And for a time, I was. When Elaine visited shortly after we moved here, she walked into the bathroom and found me naked before the mirror, admiring myself. I blushed, reached for a towel, but she said, “No, let me see.” We both looked at my rounded belly, my full breasts. “It’s beautiful,” she said softly.

I nodded. “You know, when I first started getting a belly I used to get up really slowly. I was afraid if I moved too fast, it would fall away. You know, disappear.”

“No chance of that now,” Elaine said.

“No,” I said. “Not now.” And we stared together again at my finally undeniably six-month-pregnant self.

Well, that was then; this is now. Let Elaine believe I am blissfully happy; let someone keep believing that. The truth is that I do not pay much attention to pictures showing how wonderfully developed my baby now is inside me, how talented, what with his thumb sucking, his somersaulting, his hearing. I pay attention to the fact that I need antacids for heartburn, and that I have suffered the supreme humiliation of asking my doctor if that was a
hemorrhoid
down there or what.

“Oh yes,” he said, his voice rising up from between my legs. “Uh-huh, that’s exactly what it is. Very common, don’t worry.” And he patted my knee, gave me a tight little smile.

“How was work?” I imagined his wife asking him at dinner that night, passing him the mashed potatoes. “Disgusting,” I imagined him answering.

I dressed in anger after the examination that day, my teeth
clenched. And then, putting my hands to my belly, I wept, saying, “Sorry. Sorry.”

The phone rings. “What are you doing?” Ethan asks.

I hate when he does this. Because I’m never doing anything, really. But “Making bagels,” I answer, dutifully.

“You’re kidding!”

“No.”

“I didn’t know you knew how to do that.”

“Ethan? Let’s go out to dinner tonight. And to a movie or something.” Then on to Paris.

“Tomorrow, okay? I have to go out to dinner with a client tonight, that’s why I’m calling.”

“What client?”

“Bob Saunders is his name, I’ve never met him.”

I am silent, twisting the phone cord around my wrist, murdering it. I recall when we were in the grocery store last Saturday, and Ethan passed a handsome man who stared at him and Ethan stared back. Just a little. But enough. The moment had the simultaneous brevity and interminability of an electric shock.

“Patty?”

“Forget it, Ethan. I’ll just go alone to the movie.”

“You can’t wait one day?”

I stare out the window at the lake, blue-green today, just like yesterday, a sailboat off in the distance, free. “Fine,” I say, and hang up. My voice is so flat. My self is so flat. Well, my
in
side self. I feel divorced from my own vitality, my own life spark. I feel as though I could run a hand down between my self and my self, as though some distance exists there between what I used to be and what I
am, no bridge between them. I remember hearing women gaily say, “Oh, when you’re pregnant, your mind just turns to
mush!”
I don’t know what in the hell they were so happy about.

I open the oven door, stare in at my creation.
“You’re
not bagels,” I say. I throw them in the garbage, put Janis Joplin’s “Ball and Chain” on the stereo. I turn it up high, then higher, then hear the neighbor pounding on the wall. I pound back, then turn the stereo down. There, I think. Okay? Okay?

“Now, I’m not going to kid you,” the childbirth instructor tells us. “Labor is uncomfortable.”

She pauses, waits. No one moves.

“But you’ll get through it just fine. Some of you will have to use a little something”—she pauses, ever so slightly—“but
many
of you will need absolutely nothing at all.” She beams.

“That won’t be me, I’m just telling you,” I say to Ethan.

“Shhhh!” He is nearly transfixed, watching the instructor pace before her blackboard, pointing to various disgusting illustrations. “Pay attention, Patty, we’re going to need to remember this.”

I don’t know why he thinks so. I don’t believe my time will ever come. I am not sure a baby is even in me. It’s probably a tumor. Maybe it’s gas. I have heard the rapid heartbeat, and I let Ethan be the one to be thrilled. I have rejected the earnestness of that rhythm. I refuse to believe the promise. I cannot engage.

When I see a newborn wrapped in a blanket and in my arms, maybe then we’ll have something to talk about. I do not look at pregnancy books anymore; instead, I look at books with pictures
of live babies. I see them staring amazed at the sight of light through their fingers; chewing busily on the leg of a doll, their silky eyebrows furrowed in baby concentration. I see them bending one small finger against their mother’s breast, smiling with their whole bodies; I see them pushing Cheerios around on a high-chair tray. I look into their clear, wide eyes; I trace the lines of their hair with my finger. I ignore the Stages of Labor and focus instead on corduroy overalls, striped T-shirts, plastic butterflies trapped in clear balls that are held in the dimpled hands of tiny scientists. Until I have that for myself, until a real live baby is here, I am only enduring a state of body that makes tying shoes a near-Olympian feat. Ethan and Dr. Homer have had little chats about me, I know. I am a bit depressed, says Dr. Homer (who, by the way, has NO taste in clothes). Common thing in pregnancy, and in a move, too. When you combine the two, why …

Ethan and I both have a little crush on the father who sits on the floor beside us in childbirth class. I hear the gentle words of encouragement he offers his sweet-faced wife; and I see the difference between him and Ethan. Ethan may say many of the same things to me, but the source of those words, the impetus behind them—the meaning, ultimately—is achingly different. I know it with my head and my heart and my uterus and my lungs and the marrow in my bones. And I am tired of it. And so I am withdrawing from this pregnancy, which is not full of holiness and miracles. I quit. I just want a four-year-old who is my child, living with just me, thinking I am a yahoo hero and his dad is … okay.

“I want you ALL to practice your
BREATH
ing,” the instructor says. “We’re in tranSItion, now.” She paces before us in her white
coat, her pointer lightly slapping her leg like a riding crop. She has a very flat belly. “On three, all right? One … two … 
three
!”

I want to kill her. I really might kill her.

That night, in bed, Ethan pulls me to him. “What
is
it?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, Ethan, for God’s sake, don’t be so obtuse.”

“Patty, I thought I made it clear, I can’t … I don’t—”

“I know!”

He pushes my hair back from the sides of my head, kisses the top of it. Big brother. “What can I do? What should I do?”

“I think you should move out for a while,” I say. And cannot believe I have said it. Because it is, of course, the opposite of what I want. I want him to live with me
really
, to love me the way a man loves a woman when a man loves women. I am as hopelessly stubborn as the child who stands at the window crying for the moon to live in her toy box, to be brought out at will and held in her hands.

Ethan’s arm loosens about me. I feel his chest rise as he takes in a breath. “You want me to move out? Are you serious?”

“Yes.” I sit up, look at him. “It’s not working at all, Ethan, the way we live.”

He nods slowly.

“I hate it. I’m starting to hate you.”

“Well. Jesus, Patty.”

I shrug. “It’s true.”

“You know, Dr. Homer—”

“Oh, fuck him. I hate him. I can’t believe Dr. Carlson even recommended
him.” Inside me, the baby moves, and, instinctively, I put my hand there. Ethan reaches out to feel too, and I say, “Don’t.”

“Patty. Should we just go back? Do you want to go home?”

“I don’t know! I just want you to move out. I want … myself back. I don’t know why you asked me to do this, Ethan. What did you think? What did you want?”

He sighs deeply. “I wanted … I guess I hoped I’d change, Patty. I know now it was a stupid idea. But I felt a terrible kind of desperation. I just couldn’t … You remember when I was helping to take care of Bob Slater, the one that died right before we moved?”

“Of course. He’s the one that told you the good thing about having AIDS was charging things and knowing he wouldn’t have to pay for them. The one who was so good at
Jeopardy.”