A petite doctor with a blond bun crossed the room.
“Listen,” she said, nodding in the baby’s direction, “she needs a central line placed into her umbilicus, immediately, for the exchange transfusion.” The doctor projected the air of an overachieving-homecoming-queen-valedictorian-tennis-champ. Probably played Rachmaninoff’s harder pieces for fun and relaxation. “Please sign this release. It’s just a procedure, not surgery. The umbilicus is numb, so she won’t feel a thing.” Beneath her lab coat, visible at the collar and cuffs, was a heavy silk blouse, cream colored. She was too young, too pretty, too sure of herself to be a decent doctor. But she was who we had. I tried to parse what she’d said: just a procedure, not surgery. She wanted to attach a tube to the baby. That much I got.
I wanted to talk to the nice doctor with the soft boyish face and glasses, from Marin General. But he had sent us to her. The blond doctor was waiting for my answer; would I allow her to attach the tube or not? She held out the form and a pen.
Would a plastic part really improve the baby per se?
What would Brian do? I tried to summon some of his steadiness, his ability to lever rationality into crisis. I signed. She exhaled, her shoulders dropped. Astonishing! This woman was as nervous about my judgments and decisions as I was about hers. A nurse scooped up the baby and left the room.
2
Everyone in the world should have the chance to fall in love in a New York City spring, at least once. Spring, in New York, is like a new epoch in history. The sludge recedes; the trees return as green civilizers of the streets. Your beloved finally takes off all those obfuscating layers, and you can see skin. The Josh Ritter song goes something like, “This trip has been done a hundred thousand times before, but this one is mine.”
On a Saturday, three or four months into our courtship, I found myself staring down from Brian’s twenty-sixth-floor window, watching the Upper West Side swish below. I wanted to go to a gallery, a café, Riverside Park, bike riding along the Hudson. I wanted to take the train downtown to Magnolia Bakery for a lemon-frosted cupcake. Anything, just out into the tides of the town. But Brian was at his desk, happy in his misery. Wringing something more out of the imagination by sheer attendance. Showing up. Seeking. Day by day. He had his hands on the keyboard and his eyes closed, tunneling in, burrowing down. This was something he did occasionally, write blind. He was deep in conversation with his unconscious, his imagination, his genie. Whatever the hell it was that wrote his books, he was chatting with it. Just the two of them, tête-à-tête.
He didn’t seem to need a lemon cupcake.
I knew we’d go out later. I watched the sun drop into the river, pressed my cheek against the cool glass, and waited. The world was out there, true, but it was also in here.
When we left, to meet friends for dinner, it was still warm out. The sidewalks felt almost pliable underfoot, willing to bear us in any direction. We linked arms and headed downtown. My sweet hermetic boyfriend, out in the world. Traipsing around. I tucked one hand into his jacket pocket. The payoff for this simple gesture was absurdly inflated. I wanted to see a scan of my brain, to know exactly which synapses electrified, a bright web of lightning, when Brian put his hand in my pocket too.
*
I was not allowed to watch the procedure in which they inserted the tube into the baby, but I heard crying from down the hall. Was it my girl? Impossible to know. Even more impossible to know what she might be feeling, thinking, or understanding about the world—alone in a room of white coats.
My mom brought me a tea; I sipped it, queasy. I wanted the baby back. We should be at home together. I should be in a flannel nightgown, snuggling her, emitting the primary message: you are loved.
When I could no longer stand listening to the cries of a baby who might or might not be mine, I stepped into the pay phone booth in the waiting room. I shut the door. Silence. At last, a small private space in which to feel something.
My mom tapped on the glass of the booth, holding out the tea. “Don’t let it get cold.” I opened the glass door and took the tea, annoyed. If, years from now, my own daughter was in this same situation, I would, undoubtedly, hover. Peddle tea. But it was still annoying. I considered calling Brian. I wanted his support but not enough to make the baby’s illness real by telling him about it. Instead, I dialed my health insurance company. When a representative answered, I told her my name, my group ID number, and said, “My daughter is sick. We’ve been transferred to UC Med.” It was the first time I’d said my daughter.
My voice broke, and the woman paused. “It’ll be OK, dear,” she said. She could be empathizing from Ohio, Singapore, or a block away. She could be anywhere. So how the hell did she know how it would go?
When I returned to the waiting area, I picked up an old issue of the New Yorker. On the cover, beleaguered cartoon figures marched through eddies of gray sludge and snow, huddled beneath a banner that read “Misery Day Parade.” February. I held it up for my mom to see, pointing to the banner of hand-printed letters, Misery Day Parade. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “I know.” And she did know. She was a professional understander, a therapist. The rare kind, with a heart of true compassion. Maybe because she’d suffered so much as a kid, maybe because she was born that way. She never dealt in pity, only empathy. But at the exact moment I needed it most, I didn’t want it.
Every gesture of comfort she offered only underlined the obvious: she was my mom and, therefore, not Brian.
*
I loved, for one, his books. Not just the books he’d written but also the books he read. They were everywhere, on every surface: the lip of the bathroom sink, the windowsill, stacked in unstable towers on the DVD player, in doorways, and, endlessly, on the bed.
He’d climb into bed with his intellectual posse: Chekhov, G. K. Chesterson, George Scialabba, Irving Howe, Raymond Williams, but also Robert B. Parker and Roger Angell. In terms of heroes, he had a take-all-comers approach; he’d once written an essay on his affection for the TV show The Equalizer. Books on antiquated English grammar by patrician midcentury taskmasters, on efficiency in the workplace, labor histories, lurid crime novels—all would flop over the pillows, work their way under our feet. Reading the ideas of others wasn’t just what he did, it was what forged him into who he was, word by word.