CHAPTER
EIGHT
I turn my head to see the silhouette of Aunt Charlotte, backlit by the hallway globe, as she stands in my doorway. I don’t know how long she has been there, or if she noticed I’ve been staring blankly at the ceiling.
“Feeling better?” She walks into the room and pulls open the blinds. Sunlight floods in, and I wince and cover my eyes.
I told her I had the flu. But Aunt Charlotte understands the intertwining of emotional and physical health—how the former can ensnare the latter, suffocating it like a thick vine. After all, she had taken care not only of me, but of my mother during her episodes.
“A little.” But I make no move to get up.
“Should I be worried?” Her tone navigates the edge between playfulness and sharpness. It is familiar; I remember it from when she’d help my mother out of bed and into the shower. “Just for a little while,” she’d cajole, her arm around my mom’s waist. “I need to change the sheets.”
She would’ve been a wonderful parent, Aunt Charlotte. But she never had children; I suspect all those years of nurturing my mother and me had something to do with why.
“No, I’m going to work.”
“I’ll be in my studio all day. I’ve got a commission for a private portrait. This woman wants a nude of herself to give to her husband to hang over her fireplace.”
“Seriously?” I try to inject energy into my tone as I sit up. Like a throbbing toothache, thoughts of Richard’s fiancée dominate every other aspect of my life.
“I know. I don’t even like the communal dressing area at the Y.”
I muster a smile as she starts to leave the room. But then she bangs her hip against the edge of the dresser by the doorway and releases a little cry.
I leap out of bed, and now it’s me with my arm around Aunt Charlotte’s waist, guiding her toward a chair.
Aunt Charlotte brushes off my arm and my concern. “I’m fine. Old people are clumsy.”
And suddenly, the realization pierces me: She is getting old.
I get her ice for her hip over her protests, then I make us some scrambled eggs, mixing in cheddar cheese and scallions. I wash the dishes and wipe down the counters. And I hug Aunt Charlotte tightly before I leave for work. The thought strikes me again: I have no one in the world but her.
I’m dreading seeing Lucille, but to my surprise, she greets me with concern: “I shouldn’t have encouraged you to come in yesterday.”
I notice Lucille’s eyes linger on my Valentino tote. Richard brought it home for me one night just before he left for a business trip to San Francisco. The leather is slightly worn around the clasp; the bag is four years old. Lucille is the type of woman to observe such details. I see her take it in, then look at my old Nikes and my bare ring finger. Her eyes sharpen. It’s as if she is really seeing me for the first time.
I’d called her after my breakdown on the subway. I can’t remember our entire conversation, but I do remember crying.
“Let me know if you need to leave a bit early,” she says now.
“Thank you.” I drop my head, feeling ashamed.
It is busy today, especially for a Sunday, but not busy enough. I thought coming in to work might distract me, but visions of her crowd my mind. I imagine her hands on her swollen belly. Richard’s hands on her swollen belly. Him reminding her to take vitamins, urging her to get enough sleep, holding her close at night. If she gets pregnant, he’ll probably assemble a crib and perch a teddy bear inside.
Even when I was struggling to become pregnant, a soft, smiling teddy bear waited in the room we’d designated for a baby. Early on, Richard had called it our good-luck charm.
“It’ll happen,” Richard had said, shrugging off my worry.
But after those six months of failed tests, he went to a doctor to have his sperm analyzed. His semen count was normal. “The doctor said I’ve got Michael Phelps swimmers,” he joked, while I tried to smile.
So I set up an appointment with a fertility specialist, and Richard said he’d try to reschedule a meeting to attend.
“You don’t have to.” I’d attempted to keep my voice light. “I can fill you in after.”
“You sure, sweetheart? Maybe if my client leaves early, I can meet you for lunch, as long as you’ll be in the city. I’ll have Diane book a table at Amaranth.”
“Lunch sounds perfect.”
But an hour before the appointment, just as I was stepping onto the train, he called to say he’d come to the doctor’s office. “I put off my client. This is more important.”
I was grateful he couldn’t see my expression.
The fertility specialist would ask me questions. Questions I didn’t want to answer in front of my husband.
As my train sped toward Grand Central Terminal, I stared out the window at the bare trees and graffiti-littered buildings with boarded-up windows. I could lie. Or I could try to get the doctor alone and explain. The truth was not an option.
A sharp pain made me look down. I’d been picking at my cuticles and had torn one below the quick. I put my finger in my mouth, sucking away the blood.
The train screeched into the terminal before I’d come up with a plan, and far too soon a taxi delivered me to an elegant Park Avenue building.
When Richard met me in the lobby, he didn’t seem to notice my agitation. Or maybe he thought I was just anxious about the appointment. I felt as if I were sleepwalking as he pressed the button for the fourteenth floor in the elevator, then stepped back so I could exit first.
Richard’s urologist had referred us to Dr. Hoffman. A graceful slender woman in her mid-fifties, she greeted us with a smile shortly after we’d signed in and led us to her consult room. Under her lab coat I saw a flash of fuchsia. We followed her down the hall, and even though she was wearing three-inch heels, I struggled to match her pace.
Richard and I sat side by side on an upholstered couch facing her uncluttered desk. I twisted my hands in my lap, fidgeting with the slender gold bands on my finger. At first, Dr. Hoffman was hesitant to even indulge our insecurities as she explained that it took many couples more than six months to conceive. “Eighty-five percent of couples are pregnant within a year,” she assured us.
I mustered a smile. “Well, then . . .”
But Richard interjected. “We don’t care about statistics.” He reached for my hand. “We want to get pregnant now.”
I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
Dr. Hoffman nodded. “There’s nothing to prevent you from exploring fertility treatments, but they can be time-consuming and expensive. There are also side effects.”
“Again, with all due respect, these are not issues that concern us,” Richard said. I caught a glimpse of what he must be like at work—commanding, persuasive. Impossible to resist.
Why had I ever thought I could hide something so significant from him?
“Baby, your hands are icy.” Richard rubbed mine between his.
Dr. Hoffman turned her head to look directly at me. Her hair was swept into a fashionably loose twist, and her skin was smooth and unlined. I wished I had worn something more elegant than simple black pants and a cream turtleneck sweater, which I’d just noticed had a small bloodstain by the cuff. I tucked the material under the finger I’d injured and tried to curve my lips upward.
“Okay, then. Let me start by asking Vanessa some questions. Richard, perhaps you’d like to take a seat in the waiting room?”
Richard looked at me. “Sweetheart, would you like me to go?”
I hesitated. I knew what he wanted me to say. He’d taken off work to accompany me. Would it be a bigger betrayal if I asked him to leave and he found out anyway? Maybe Dr. Hoffman would be ethically bound to tell him, or a nurse might glance at my chart and slip up someday.
It was so hard to think.
“Honey?” Richard prompted.
“I’m sorry. Of course, it’s fine if you stay.”
The questions began. Dr. Hoffman’s voice was low and modulated, but each query felt like a bullet: How frequent are your periods? How long do they last? What methods of birth control have you used? My stomach clenched like a fist. I knew where this was heading.
Then Dr. Hoffman asked, “Have you ever been pregnant?”
I stared down at the thick carpet—gray with small pink squares. I started counting the shapes.
I could feel the heat of Richard’s stare. “You’ve never been pregnant,” he said. It was a statement.
I still thought about that time in my life, but the memories had remained locked inside me.
This was so important.
I couldn’t lie, after all.
I looked up at Dr. Hoffman. “I have been pregnant.” My voice sounded squeaky and I cleared my throat. “I was only twenty-one.”
I recognized the “only” as a plea directed at Richard.
“You had an abortion?” I couldn’t read the expression in Richard’s voice.
I looked up at my husband again.
And I knew I couldn’t tell the full truth, either.
“I, ah, I had a miscarriage.” I cleared my throat again and avoided his stare. “I was only a few weeks along.” That part, at least, was true. Six weeks.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Richard leaned back, away from me. Shock flitted across his face, then something else. Anger? Betrayal?
“I wanted to. . . . I just—I guess I couldn’t figure out how.” It was such an inadequate response. I’d been so stupid to hope he’d never find out.
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
“Listen,” Dr. Hoffman interrupted. “These conversations can get emotional. Do you two need a moment?”
Her tone was calm, the thick silver pen she’d been jotting notes with poised in midair, as if this were a normal interlude. But I couldn’t imagine that many other wives had kept the same kind of secrets from their husbands as I had. I knew I’d have to privately tell Dr. Hoffman the full truth at some point.
“No. No. We’re fine. Let’s keep going?” Richard said. He smiled at me, but a few seconds later he crossed his legs and released my hand.
When the questions were finally over, Dr. Hoffman conducted my physical and blood work while Richard sat in the waiting area, thumbing through emails on his BlackBerry. Before she left the room, Dr. Hoffman put a hand on my shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. It felt like a motherly gesture, and my throat convulsed as I tried to hold back tears. I’d hoped Richard and I would still go to lunch, but he said he had postponed the client meeting to one o’clock and he needed to get back to the office. We rode the elevator downstairs in silence along with a few strangers, all of us staring straight ahead.
When we stepped outside, I looked up at Richard. “I’m sorry. I should have . . .”
He’d silenced his phone during our appointment, but now it began to buzz with an incoming call. He checked the number, then kissed me on the cheek. “I need to take this. I’ll see you at home, sweetheart.”
As he walked down the street, I stared at the back of his head and willed him to turn around and give me a smile or a wave. But he just rounded a corner and disappeared.
That wasn’t the first time I’d betrayed Richard, and it wouldn’t be the last. Nor would it be the worst—not even close.
I’d never been the woman he thought he’d married.
During a lull in customers at Saks I duck into the break room for coffee. My stomach has settled but a dull ache lingers between my temples. Lisa, a salesperson from the shoe department, is sitting on the couch, nibbling a sandwich. She is in her twenties, blond and pretty in a wholesome way.
I pull my gaze away.
One of my psychology podcasts featured the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It’s when you become aware of something—the name of an obscure band, say, or a new type of pasta—and it seems to suddenly appear everywhere. Frequency illusion, it’s also called.
Young blond women are surrounding me now.
When I came into work this morning, one was trying on lipstick at the Laura Mercier counter. Another was touching fabrics in the Ralph Lauren section. Lisa raises her sandwich for a bite and I see the ring gleaming on her left hand.
Richard and his fiancée are getting married so quickly. She can’t possibly be pregnant, can she? I wonder again. I feel the familiar hitch in my breath and the cold seep into my body, but I force myself to ward off the panic.
I need to see her today. I need to know for certain.
She lives not too far away from where I stand right now.
Sometimes you can learn a lot about people online—everything from whether they had sour cream on their lunchtime burrito to their upcoming wedding date. Other people are harder to track. But with almost everyone, you can determine a few baseline facts: Their address. Their phone number. Where they work.
You can learn other details by watching.
One night, back when we were still married, I followed Richard to her place and stood outside her apartment. He was carrying a bouquet of white roses and a bottle of wine.
I could have pounded on the door, pushed my way in behind him, screeched at Richard, and demanded he come home.
But I didn’t. I returned to our house, and a few hours later, when Richard arrived, I greeted him with a smile. “I left dinner for you. Should I heat it up?”
They say the wife is always the last to know. But I wasn’t. I just chose to look the other way. I never dreamed it would last.
My regret is an open wound.
Lisa, the pretty young saleswoman, is gathering up her things quickly, even though some of her sandwich is still left. She tosses the remains in the trash, sneaking glances at me. Her forehead is creased.
I have no idea how long I’ve been staring.
I exit the break room, and for the rest of my shift, I greet customers pleasantly. I fetch clothing. I nod and give an opinion when asked about the suitability of dresses and suits.
All the while, I bide my time, knowing I’ll soon be able to satisfy my growing need.
When at last I can leave, I find myself being pulled back to her apartment.
To her.