Acquainted with the Night (19 page)

At last my friend rose and came towards me. I assumed he meant to refill the glasses, and I stood up to help. But he took my arm, sat down in my chair, and gently pulled me down on his lap.

We kissed. It seemed quite easy and natural, though I had known him for years and never thought of him in this way. He was extremely thin. I have never thought of extremely thin men with desire. My feeling was pleasant, mild surprise. He placed his hand on my leg, under my skirt. We stood up.

“Let’s go to the bedroom,” he said.

“No,” said I.

“What’s the matter?”

“I can’t.”

He pulled me closer. “What’s the trouble?” He asked it kindly, as if I might name something specific, like toothache.

“The children,” I said.

“Oh,” and he waved his arm vaguely in the direction of the playroom. I didn’t know what that wave meant, exactly, but it seemed to dispose adequately of his children.

“I just can’t.”

We kissed again. I realized that considering my intentions I should have resisted. I felt no urgency—neither, I think, did he—only a warm limp tenderness, and a strong curiosity to see what would happen, as if I myself had no control over the outcome. It was a very warm, mellow day, and the air, from all his plants, had the rich smell of dank soil. Would he persuade me?

I was about to speak again—I shall never know what I might have said—when one of his children came galloping into the room, shouting and waving a doll with a severed leg that needed fixing.

He displayed great equanimity, this suddenly interesting man.

“Well”—he smiled, releasing me—“it looks as though even the children are against us.”

We parted cordially. I was disappointed and immediately regretted not seizing that opportunity. What I regretted far more, though, was not telling him my reasons. They seemed too intricate to explain in the simplicity of his embrace. Yet no doubt I had left him with mistaken feelings of rejection.

My reasons were quite pragmatic. We—my husband and I—had decided it was time to have a baby. I had purposely had my loop removed, and last month we had devoted my calculated fertile week to fruitless attempts. Now the right week had come round again. We were conscientiously spending the nighttime hours, except for the two evenings he was away discussing juvenile crime, in pleasurable stabs at impregnation.

I couldn’t risk having another man’s child. A de Maupassant story flashed through my mind, in which the mother of three children tortures her husband by telling him that one child is not his, but refusing to say which one. It made me shudder.

However, the de Maupassant story really portrayed the opposite of my situation because my friend and would-be seducer was black. Under normal circumstances this fact would not have hindered me, indeed might have served as a spur. But just now it would never do. Should I become pregnant, the suspense of uncertainty, drawn out over nine months, would kill me. And the alternative, getting rid of the harmless, unidentifiable fetus, was equally intolerable. Of course had I been swept away by passion I would not have been able to calculate so clearly and rapidly, nor to envision the shocked faces, and the rest of my life spent in ambivalence, remorse, and pained maternal love, all of which absurdity flashed before me as they say drowning people relive their past in a brief instant. But I was not swept away.

It was distinctly inappropriate to explain this to a friend who was embracing me, gracious and simply frank about what he wanted, though he had had the same training in complex logistics as I had. Paradoxically, it would have spoiled the moment, which was pleasant, if abortive. As I left him I had a vague sense, not for the first time, that in the dynamic of my feelings, a small but important piece of machinery was missing.

I thought about him a lot in the weeks that followed, wondering what it would have been like, nursing an intense curiosity along with a tame desire. I even thought of calling him to explain, but it would be impossibly awkward to make that ludicrous speech over the phone. And then, Anne might answer. Ten months later, I was delivered of a beautiful baby girl. I lost my mammoth belly and gained a child. She took after her father. Looking back, I thought complacently, I had almost certainly done the correct thing.

When my daughter was four she needed to go to the hospital for a very simple operation to straighten an eye muscle. I trusted the surgeon and had no doubt that he could do a good job on her eye. But I worked myself up into a completely irrational state about losing her under the anesthesia. It seemed to me that such a small body, heavily dosed, would have to put up a tremendous struggle to climb through the layers of blanketing ether back up to consciousness. Like a drowning swimmer. Wouldn’t she be more likely to slip away, from deep to deeper sleep, gone forever?

Even though I consulted three doctors about this—the eye surgeon, our pediatrician, and an anesthesiologist, all of whom told me it was quite the contrary: a young child with a healthy heart runs far less danger under anesthesia than an older person—I couldn’t give up my crazy unscientific terror.

A few days before the operation I got my period, so strongly that I believed I must be hemorrhaging. I imagined all the blood draining from my veins and seeping out between my legs; soon I would be a bloodless, crumpled skin. The gynecologist was unimpressed by the dimensions of the problem as I described it over the telephone. It required, he said, no more than ice packs on the lower abdomen. I should lie in bed with my feet up on pillows.

We lay in bed, my husband and I, watching
The Maltese Falcon
on the
Late Show.
Every twenty minutes or so, during commercials, he would go to the kitchen to freshen my ice pack. Meanwhile, on the screen, the black bird was lost and several lives depended on its recovery. Brigid O’Shaughnessy disappeared and a strange man clutching his heart stumbled into Sam Spade’s office, muttered a few words, and died. I felt a surge in my entrails and began to cry quietly.

“What’s the matter?” my husband asked.

“I’m going to die from loss of blood.”

“Is it still coming?”

I nodded.

“Look and see,” he said.

I did. In fact, the bleeding had abated. I took two aspirins and at the end of the movie went to sleep cautiously, flat on my back with my feet up on pillows.

The operation was a success. Our daughter was composed and unafraid, so successfully had we strained to create an air of nonchalance. The only thing she complained of was the bandage over her eye. I told the doctor this when he came around hours later to check on her.

“That’s all right. We can get rid of that.”

And with a swift, experienced hand he reached out and deftly ripped off the bandage. I closed my eyes, dreading what I might see. When I opened them, the eye looked perfectly normal, except for a large squarish clot of blood floating near the outside corner, which he said would disappear in a few days.

Late one night several years later, I stood in my bedroom getting ready for bed. My husband was already undressed, stretched out full-length in the peculiar cut-down pajama bottoms he likes to sleep in. We were having a serious talk about whether to leave our daughter in the progressive school she attended, which stressed self-discovery and independence but was weak in the three R’s, or to transfer her to a more traditional school which gave a solid background in academic subjects. There was something to be said for both; we each felt equally divided. I was taking my things off slowly, shoes, watch, beads, belt, skirt, panty hose, shirt, when it struck me that he was totally unmoved by the cool, evenly paced strip being performed right before his eyes. He was agreeing with the advantages of early self-knowledge, but questioning whether that emphasis might deter or postpone the development of necessary intellectual rigors—accuracy, thoroughness, and the like. We had to make a decision soon, yet I suddenly wished he would be sidetracked by passion, grab me, and pull me down to him on the bed. I could easily have seduced him from his worthy concerns, but I wished it to happen without words or gestures from me; I wished my bare presence to be irresistible. I put on a nightgown and sat down near him on the bed to weigh the issues.

I felt a wry sense of loss. Something shadowy, perhaps not terribly important in the long run, yet precious, was gone, irrecoverable and uncompensated.

We decided to transfer our daughter to the school that stressed academic subjects, on the grounds that a sense of identity with no external nourishment could grow like a choking weed rather than an unfurling flower.

I have always been a strong swimmer, and felt myself more a creature of water than of land. After my daughter learned to swim I used to take her out in the ocean with me, over her head, past the foam. I taught her how to ride the waves, how to surf in on them, how to dive through them, how to lie down and yield herself to them. At first I would grip her arm tightly when a wave came, and hang on no matter how I was tossed. Later on I let her fend for herself, still right by my side. When I surfaced I would find her immediately: she would always be laughing, her thick hair loose and sodden, her suntanned face glowing with drops of seawater. I was very careful when she went in the water by herself. On my blanket, or standing at the water’s edge, I never took my eyes off her. I had been told the sea was dangerous. To me it was an ancestor, a refuge, a transcendent embrace. But out of duty, I watched.

Once when she was eight, she went floating on a rubber raft, on a beach with no lifeguard. I turned away for an instant, and when I looked back the raft had drifted too far out. She waved, having a marvelous time. I could see from the pattern of the waves that she was headed farther out. My husband and our friends said she would come in on the next wave, but they did not know the underside of the water as I did. I swam out to her, full of strength and power. Is it possible to be confident and terrified at the same time? The confidence and the terror merged, alternated, and contained each other’s images, like those cheap iridescent rings our pediatrician used to give out for good behavior. From one angle you could see a grinning devil, from another a circus clown. If you turned the ring slowly enough you could see them simultaneously, and watch one change into the other.

I caught her and pulled her back to shore, still gleeful on her raft.

She never believed she had been in danger.

One day when she was ten I took her to the beach alone. As soon as we arrived she ran off, leaving me to spread out the blanket and arrange rocks, shoes, and our picnic basket at its corners, against the wind. This done, I looked up to find her running towards me, already soaking wet, gasping and crying. She was so breathless I could hardly understand her words.

“A big wave took me out and I couldn’t get back.”

“What do you mean?”

“I couldn’t get back,” she cried. “It pulled me out. It was like a whirlpool.”

“But you’re okay now. It’s all right now. It couldn’t have been so bad.” I held her, and stroked the dripping hair away from her face.

“I couldn’t get back!” She was so shaken that she didn’t seem to realize she had gotten back. Yet the time had been so brief. I thought she must be exaggerating, as I often did myself.

We were near the water’s edge, with my arms clasped around her. I saw the lifeguards coming towards us, in full force.

“Yes’m,” one said. “She had a scare.”

They were large and bronzed, and all three had golden hair, one crew-cut, one stylishly shaggy, and one with curls. All month I had watched them with benign amusement: big handsome boys with nothing to do, taking turns up on the chair, the off-duty ones playing cards on the sand. Each wore a tight bright-green bathing suit with white stripes down the sides and a conspicuous bulge in the front. They looked like Olympian gods; they chewed gum and tossed Frisbees; they were such blatant symbols of beauty and vigor, with those vivid innocent good-natured faces, that all the older women on the beach smiled involuntarily and knowingly at the sight of them.

“What happened?” I asked.

“It’s a bad ocean today. There’s a sea puss out there.”

“A what?”

“A sea pussy. It sucks you in.”

I have always been unable to keep from grinning foolishly at that kind of metaphor. Even when the electrician gravely refers to the plug and socket as male and female, I must consciously control my face. It seemed terribly inappropriate to grin right now. I tried to disguise my expression as friendly interest, also inappropriate, but less so. I became very aware of my mature, well-tended, ballet-sustained body.

“It caught her,” he went on, “and swept her out. It’s like a little whirlpool, the shape of the waves does it.” He made a V with his hands. “It pulls you, and it’s hard to get back. But she put up a terrific fight. She did it on her own.”

“We were standing at the edge with the ropes,” said another. “We were ready to go in after her. But we like to let them try to get out of it themselves, if they can. It’s better for them, in the long run.”

“She’s a real strong kid,” said the third. “Put up a real good fight.” He glanced at her admiringly.

I thanked them. I was stunned. The sun beat down heavily. My joints were loosening, and I expected that my arms and legs might drop off and melt into pools on the sand.

“A sea pussy? Is that what you call it?” I asked sociably. Perhaps it was a joke.

“Yeah. Traveled all the way from Fire Island. Gonna be a bad day. Bad sea.”

All day long the lifeguards ran into the surf, hauling people out with ropes, one end looped diagonally around their big bronze torsos like banners. Crowds gathered at the edge and listened to the exhausted survivors stammer their tales. Heroic and modest, the lifeguards made up for their summer of idleness. My amusement at them shifted to awe: they retrieved the lost.

Later in the afternoon I took my daughter into the sea once more so that she would not be forever frightened. She was happy in the waves; I was frightened. I had always wanted to die drowning, given that die we must one way or another. For me, going to water would have been a return more than a departure. It would still be the ultimate loss, but it would be a recovery too, perhaps of some state of being that renounces the firm footing and yields to the tug of the current. I could have gone in her place. The sea might have known that and not played tricks with me. I felt betrayed, and lost my trust.