She notices that he says ‘the father’ instead of ‘my father,’ which relieves her. She does not want him to think of the professor that way.
‘He never knew.’ She blows on her tea. ‘He was a visiting professor at NYU. I was in my first year of graduate school, and that fall, I took his class. We slept together a couple of times before he said he thought we shouldn’t. By the time I realized I was pregnant it was early January, the winter holiday, and he’d flown back to the UK, though I didn’t know that then. I called him over and over – first at the department and then at the number they gave me for his office in Edinburgh. In the beginning I left messages, and then I tried not leaving them. It wasn’t that I was in love with him. I wasn’t, not anymore. But I wanted to give him a chance to raise you, if he wanted to. Finally I understood he didn’t deserve it, and that was when I stopped calling.’
Luke’s face is constricted, his throat ridged with veins. How did she not recognize him? She has imagined it – coming face-to-face with a strange but familiar man in an airport or a grocery store – and thought an animal awareness would rise within her, some sense memory of the nine months they shared a body and the breathtaking, anguished forty-eight hours that followed. She would not have been surprised to hear her pelvis shattered during the birth, but it had not: her experience was utterly normal, the birth so routine a nurse said it boded well for Varya’s second. But Varya knew there would not be a second and so she clutched the tiny human, her biological son, and said goodbye not just to him but to the part of her that had been brave enough to love a man who thought so little of her and carry a child she knew she would not keep.
Luke takes off his shoes and brings his socked feet to the sofa. Then he wraps his arms around them, letting his chin rest on his knees. ‘What was I like?’
‘You had a shiny pelt of black hair, like an otter, or a punk kid. Your eyes were blue, but the nurses said they might turn brown – which, of course, they did.’ Varya kept this in mind when she scanned sidewalks and subway cars and the background faces in other people’s photos, looking for the blue-or brown-eyed child that had been hers. ‘You were sensitive. When you got overstimulated, you shut your eyes and pressed your hands together. We thought you looked like a monk, my mother and I, annoyed and trying very hard to pray.’
‘Black hair.’ Luke smiles. ‘And blue eyes. It’s no wonder you didn’t how who I was.’ Outside the window, it is six o’clock and drizzling, the sky a luminous periwinkle. ‘Did your mom want you to give me up?’
‘God, no. We fought about it. Our family had been through a lot of loss. My father died, very suddenly, when I was in college. And two years before you were born, Simon died of AIDS. She wanted me to keep you.’
Varya had her own apartment by then, a studio near the university, but during the pregnancy, she often slept at 72 Clinton. Sometimes she argued with Gertie past midnight, but she still went to bed in her old top bunk. Ten minutes or two hours later, Gertie joined her, taking the bottom bunk that Daniel used to occupy instead of her own bed down the hall. In the mornings she stood on the bottom rung of the ladder to brush the hair away from Varya’s face and kiss her fatly on the forehead.
‘So why didn’t you?’ asked Luke.
Once, while driving through Wisconsin in the depth of summer – she was en route from a conference in Chicago to a second conference in Madison – Varya stopped to stand knee-high in Devil’s Lake. She was desperate to cool off, but the water was warm, and dozens of tiny minnows began to peck at her ankles and feet. For a moment, she could not move; she stood in the sand, so full of feeling she thought she might burst. Of what feeling, exactly? The unbearable ecstasy of proximity, of symbiotic exchange.
‘I was afraid,’ she says. ‘Of all the things that can go wrong when people are attached to each other.’
Luke pauses. ‘You could have gotten an abortion.’
‘I could have. I made an appointment. But I couldn’t do it.’
‘For religious reasons?’
‘No. I felt –’ But here her voice becomes rough and drops off. She picks up her mug and drinks until her throat relaxes. ‘It’s as though I was trying to compensate – for the fact that I was inward. For the fact that I didn’t engage in life, not fully. I thought – I hoped – you would.’
How had she been able to do it? Because she thought of them: Simon and Saul, Klara and Daniel and Gertie. She thought of them in her second trimester, when she was often disabled by panic, and during her third, when she felt huge as a walrus and peed more than she slept. She thought of them with every push. She held them in her mind so that she could feel nothing else – she loved them and loved them until they disarmed her, made her strong and broke her open, gave her powers she did not normally have.
But she could not sustain it. As she rode home from the hospital with her arms folded over her stomach, she wondered what kind of a person she was to give up a child for no better reason than her own fearfulness. The answer came to her immediately: the kind of person who did not deserve that child. Her body, which had been full to bursting with life, which had burst with life, was now hollow, the way it had been before – the way it had always been. At this she felt sorrow but also relief, and the relief inspired such self-loathing that she knew she was right. She could not bear that kind of life: dangerous, fleshy, full of love so painful it took her breath away.
‘So what’s happened since then?’ asks Luke.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you have another kid? Did you ever get married?’
Varya shakes her head.
He frowns, puzzled. ‘Are you gay?’
‘No. I’ve simply never – not since then, I haven’t –’
She inhales sharply, a soundless hiccup. When Luke grasps her meaning, he startles. ‘You haven’t had a relationship since the professor? You’ve had nothing?’
‘Not nothing. But a relationship? No.’
She prepares herself for his pity. Instead, he looks indignant, as if Varya has deprived herself of something essential.
‘Aren’t you lonely?’
‘Sometimes. Isn’t everyone?’ she says, and smiles.