Stunned silence. We didn’t fight like this. We fought calm; we fought grown-up. We fought in full, well-punctuated sentences without obscenities.
“Did you hear me?” I said. “You are a PHENOMENAL ASSHOLE. You excel at being one. You have found your calling. Maybe being an asshole and a writer at the same time will be easier than being a writer and a father.”
More silence.
I was in misery. And Brian was in misery. And there was no way for either of us to make the other one less miserable.
On a cellular level it felt like a minor sin, a venal sin, to call the father of your child an asshole.
The fact that I’d never witnessed Brian behaving like an asshole made it even worse. He was, in fact, an anti-asshole. The only man left in America to hold doors, cede the conversational right of way, wish everyone he knew a happy birthday, ask after your aunt. Seriously, he asked after aunts.
In the weeks when we were first dating, he’d occasionally need to adjust our plans so that he could visit Simone, an elderly woman he worked with at Dissent magazine and cared for deeply. When Simone was dying, Brian went to see her in the hospital every afternoon. Not in a showy “Hey, look at my act of charity” way. He didn’t experience it as an act of charity; he just wanted to be there, with Simone, as much as he could be, before she was gone. If he was an asshole, it was only to me. I was in a state of cognitive dissonance so complete I could not speak.
I hung up.
*
I spent my second NICU night in the skinny room adjacent to the nursery, awake, holding my cell phone. I wanted to call Brian. Or rather, I didn’t want to want to call Brian. But, more than that, I wanted to call Brian. It was midnight in California, 3 a.m. in New York. He’d called me shortly after I’d delivered; he knew the baby was a girl, but he didn’t yet know we’d been transferred or why. Brian answered fully awake, as if he’d also been sitting with the phone in his hand for the sixty or seventy hours since we last spoke. I told him about the transfer to UCSF Med Center, the little hose in her torso, the (as yet unused) blood-cleaning machine, the doctors’ inability to understand why her red cells lacked stability, and how she seemed mostly undisturbed by it all.
“She barely weighs five pounds,” I said, “and that includes her central line.”
“Central line?” I could hear the soft pencil scratch as he wrote this down. Brian, in doubt, taking notes. It was what he knew how to do: externalize worry into symbols and syllables. He said, “Will you call again in a few hours? Or can I call you?” I was relieved to hear his fear for the baby but also a little disgusted. He’d be waiting for my call? If I were him, I would get on a plane. But he was him, slow mover, deliberative decider, a man afraid of life beyond the moat.
In the few minutes before sleep overtook me on the plastic couch I tried to assimilate what was happening. I was with my daughter in the Intensive Care Unit for neonates at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. She’d crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in an ambulance. She was small enough to fit into a handbag; how could you fit an entire soul into something smaller than a handbag? I was, for now, a single mom. I was living on cafeteria food, leaking milk through my nursing bra onto my shirts, I couldn’t decide what to name her, Amelia or Grace. I was a disheveled waffler. Misery Day Parade, by all means.
But what leapt to the surface of my consciousness before sleep was her face. Holy infant so tender and mild. Thinking of her, I was sick with worry, alone and lonely for her dad. I was scared. But I also felt an intrinsic happiness. She had made it into the world and—though she might not cure plaguing diseases or quell the rage of nations—the world was a better place for her presence.
*
I went alone to my sonogram and listened to a lush galloping sound, the rush of blood, thrumming and syncopated, that is the human heartbeat. The technician showed me the moonscape of my uterus, where, nestled against the curve, a rambunctious, pixilated alien bobbed. Hello, little alien, welcome to earth.
She asked, “Do you want me to print this out for your husband to see?”
After our fight on the phone, days had floated past without contact. And then one night there was a message from Brian, asking to talk. He was calling from nearby. I called him back, buzzed him up. Walking down the hall, he looked like Brian, only worn and whippet thin. His face, always pale, was pinched and gaunt. Seeing that he’d lost weight, that he couldn’t sustain the rhythms of daily life, satisfied me. At least he was suffering. But he was suffering from a great distance. When he drew closer I started to cry.
Stop, I commanded myself. Have a little dignity, show a little pride, fuck him! But the tears appeared at the same rate as I brushed them away.
“This is not what I want,” he said. “I wish that it were.”
I wanted to kill him, on the spot, not for his decision, which I disbelieved and rejected, but for the formality of his grammar, I wish that it were. Who the fuck did he think he was? The blameless hero of a Henry James novel?
At the same time that I was in a rage at him—and couldn’t express anything toward him except a biting anger—I pitied him. I knew for certain that, in the long run, I would be happy. But for Brian it would never be OK. He could never live happily, having failed to parent his child.
“I don’t want this,” Brian said. “I am not able to give you what you want.”
Sitting between us on the couch was my purse; inside was the sonogram photo of the baby, taken by the technician who thought I had a husband. She’d been delighted by the baby’s energetic swimming; “Such active guy!” she’d said, in a thick eastern European accent.
I put a hand in my purse and felt around for the sonogram. I was waiting for the right moment. This was my trump card. I actually believed the baby looked like Brian. It certainly had a long sloping forehead like his. Maybe that was a signature feature of all fetuses, but I believed the baby looked like Brian because it was Brian’s. If he would only look at the baby, he’d want the baby. Knowing that this was ridiculous and that it reduced me to a form of begging or guerrilla tactics didn’t dampen my determination. The baby he was rejecting was a theoretical baby, a faceless thought-baby, not this wiggler, not an “active guy.”
Brian’s eyes had followed the motion of my hand, reaching into the bag. “Thank you,” he said, “I should take my keys.”
I looked up at him. Keys? What did keys have to do with the sonogram?
Then it sank in. Did he think I would break into his apartment? Light his computer on fire? Toss the latest draft of his novel out the window and watch the pages flutter down twenty-six floors to Amsterdam Avenue?