Love and Other Natural Disasters (12 page)

"Fuck you!"

I could see that my anger was only
making him calmer, more confident somehow. He said, "I'm sorry, and I'll
keep saying that for years if that's what it takes."

"It takes honesty. It takes
strength of character. Two things you clearly don't possess. I want you to
leave." I stood up and walked to the door.

He followed me slowly. "No
more minimizing, Eve," he said with a seeming sincerity that made me want
to vomit. "I'm here to accept the consequences of my actions, and to deal
with your anger."

"And what about your anger,
Jon? Where does yours go?"

"I'm not really an angry
person, Eve."

At that, I yanked open the door.
"Oh, bullshit! We're all angry!"

It was the dynamic we'd played out
for years, writ large: He was sane, and I was crazy. He was calm, and I was
angry. I didn't want to live in that ever again. I saw his belief in his own
superiority, even as he pretended to prostrate himself, even when he was the
one who'd had the affair. The
touchless
affair. Was
that bile I was tasting?

"I'm sorry I couldn't say what
you wanted to hear. But I was honest. I'm trying to give you time, but there's
not much time until the baby comes."

I didn't say anything, and finally
he brushed by me and out into the night.

Jonathon and I had been together
only about a year when his father died. I barely knew the man, but I don't
think that would be any different if he were still alive. After all, Jon barely
knew his father and he had a twenty-year head start.

David
Gimbel
was, in a word, remote. When Jon first took me to dinner at his parents' house,
David didn't make an appearance until we'd already finished the salad course.
He didn't apologize, and neither Jon nor Sylvia made any comment. It was a
given that David's work came first. Once at the table, he ate quickly,
efficiently, speaking only when asked a direct question. He seemed completely
oblivious to the social purpose of a shared meal, especially one with his son's
new girlfriend. At the time, I was slightly offended by his refusal to appraise
me (though it was soon apparent that Sylvia was judging me enough for the both
of them). A few years ago, I was reading one of my parenting magazines and came
across an article about autistic children. It detailed their disinterest in
human interaction, their inability to read social cues, and their complete
focus on a narrow range of activities. I gave it to Jon to read, and we agreed
that David had been autistic before his time.

So maybe there was nothing strange
about the fact that Jon didn't cry when he learned his father had died or at
the funeral. David was buried in the Jewish section of a grand, park like
cemetery in Oakland. It was a beautiful spot, surrounded by pine trees and
Grecian-style monuments and panoramic views of the Oakland hills. If ever a
final resting place deserved to be called lush, this was it. During the
funeral, Sylvia alternated between complete composure and helpless sobbing. She
clutched Jon's arm and said, "He's gone—can he really be gone?" Jon
said, simply, "Yes."

I kept watching Jon for changes. I
thought losing a parent was supposed to ripple through your life. But there was
nothing I could detect. A year after the funeral, we returned to the cemetery
for the unveiling, which was when David would get his headstone. Jon actually
joked that morning, "See, for Jews, everything's earned. You've got to be
dead a year before you even get your headstone."

Again, we stood graveside, and
again, I saw little in Jon's face. But when we made love later that day, there
was a different level of intensity, and I was relieved to feel it.

I don't know if my own father is
alive or dead. I've spent exactly one day with him. When I was about Jacob's
age, he took me to a pool hall. I remember that I sat on a bar stool and drank
Shirley Temples and the bartender did card tricks for me, and men called to my
father as he worked the room and took everyone's money, "Hey, is this your
kid?" and my father said with what sounded like pride, "Yeah, she
is." I remember feeling happy. I might have invented the pride part, but I
think the rest of it's accurate. Of course, when my mother heard about the pool
hall, she wasn't too pleased. I don't know if she would have said anything to
my father about it if he'd come back around, but he never did. I guess he
realized I wasn't for him, or he wasn't for me. My mother said later that it
was probably for the best because if he thought a pool hall was the place for a
five-year-old, who knew what he'd do with a twelve-year-old? I still prefer not
to think too deeply about that remark.

I guess my point is, some people
think presence is always better than absence when it comes to parents. I've
never subscribed to that. Sometimes it's better to keep things simple, not to
muddy the waters too much. Maybe that's why I was able to even consider what
some people would call unthinkable: not having Jon in the delivery room.

It was early evening when Charlie
pulled up in his ancient
Datsun
. (Is there any other
kind of
Datsun
, post-millennium?) He'd planned to get
on the road by 7 am, arriving by mid afternoon, but I never really expected
that to happen. Charlie had a way of getting sidetracked. I could hear the
Datsun
from what seemed a half a mile away. It emitted
irregular wheezing/clanging noises, not unlike those produced by a really
unskilled kid practicing a band instrument. Just when you thought you could
predict the next note, it changed. Charlie said the car owed its life to a
welding torch and a prayer; he said it with pride. He was pretty ingenious when
it came to that car. It was hard to get some of the parts, so he'd pioneered
his own modifications. I'd encouraged him to become a mechanic, and he'd tried
for a while, but the boss didn't seem to appreciate Charlie's virtuosity (or
his low threshold for actual work). Charlie's gift was for distraction. He
could distract himself from nearly any focused pursuit (work, relationships),
and then when occasionally he'd start feeling down about the wreckage of his
life (no work, no girlfriend, living with his mother), he was able to distract
himself from even that. He could distract other people with the force of his
personality, which was, I think, the final nail in his coffin at the garage.

I was standing on the doorstep
waving as he leapt from the car. "
Evie
!" he
said with a grin. "You're one good hug away from popping!" With that,
he wrapped his arms around me and lifted me up.

I protested laughingly as he spun
me around. When he finally set me down, I said with a grin of my own,
"Traffic, huh?"

"I could have crawled here
faster," he said, still ear to ear.

"Right." I looked toward
his car. "Do you want to bring your things inside?"

"It's just a bag. There's no
rush. Why don't we take a ride?"

"In your car? I don't think my
neighbors could handle it."

"No, let's take your car and
head into San Francisco. Let's drive the Golden Gate."

"You want to go to
Marin?"

"If that's where the Golden
Gate takes us, then yeah."

I looked at him uncertainly. There
was no real reason why we couldn't go anywhere we wanted. Jacob was doing an
overnight with Jon at Sylvia's house. But somehow it seemed wrong. That wasn't
what adults did. Adults sat down at the kitchen table, drank coffee, talked
about the drive up. An adult guest, upon arrival, "got settled."
Whatever that meant, it usually didn't involve a spontaneous jaunt with a
pregnant lady about to pop.

"Just because you're pregnant
doesn't mean we need to stay in tonight," he said. "It means you
shouldn't eat raw fish, or drink alcohol, or sit in a hot tub. But other than
that, the sky's the limit."

"How do you know about sushi
and hot tubs?"

"I've been reading. If I'm
going to be Jon's understudy, I've got to learn the part, right?"

I hugged him. "You really are
something, you know that?"

When I released him, he said,
"I'm kind of pulling for Jon, though."

"Pulling for him to
what?"

"I don't know, whatever he
needs to do to make things right between you."

"I don't think they'll be right
anytime soon. The best he can hope for is to be in the delivery room. And
that's looking like a long shot."

Charlie squinted at me. "See,
this is just what I was trying to avoid. This is what you've got your
girlfriends for. So you can talk about your feelings. Me, I'm here to help you
forget. It's not going to be easy, what with the ban on alcohol. But I'm going
to do my best."

"Why don't you come inside and
we'll figure out what we want to do?"

He shook his head emphatically,
making his thick, dirty-blond hair bounce. "No way. Bodies at rest stay at
rest. You get me in the house, we sit on the couch, and next thing we know,
we're watching Terms
of Endearment
or some shit. You and me, Eve, we are
going to be bodies in motion tonight. When's the last time you were a body in
motion?"

"I've been doing my pregnancy
yoga tape four times a week." I mimed a downward dog.

He looked toward the sky.
"Suburbs, what have you done to my sister?"

It wasn't an entirely unfounded
question. The way I was reacting to his Golden Gate suggestion, you would have
thought he was proposing we drink a fifth of Jack while joyriding. "So
you're saying we just get in the car and go?" I asked.

"Well, you can put shoes
on." His eyes scanned me. "And a brush never hurt anyone." He laughed
as I pretended to punch him. "I'm just saying, it's a big world out there,
you never know who you're going to meet."

He'd stumbled onto the reason for
my hesitation. I didn't want to venture far from home. Scary things happened
when you didn't even leave, so why tempt fate?

"Eve," he said,
"it's going to be okay. I'm here with you." I immediately burst into
tears. Lately, that's what kindness did to me. You know your life has gone
hideously awry when kindness is like jalapenos in your eye sockets. "Come
in the house," I sobbed.

Charlie was way off. We found
There's
Something About Mary
on cable, and we didn't talk about feelings once.

I'd started to believe that talking
about feelings wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Exhibit A was Jon telling me
he
maybe
felt jealous of our unborn child, and
maybe
was
frightened of being a father (again). Exhibit B was when, later that night, I
tried to tell Tamara how sick I felt about Jon lying to me for over a year and
then lying to me once again, using that Bill and Gina crap, and after five
minutes of concerned nodding, she actually suggested that maybe Jon and I
really were like Bill and Gina. When I didn't go for it, she defended Jon,
saying that he was just desperate to come home and was grasping at straws. She'd
never been married, she had no kids—what the hell did she know about betrayal
on this scale?

I wondered what she would have said
if she'd seen the e-mail Jon wrote to Clayton the next day. I'd never read a
non-Laney e-mail before, but there it was, in the Sent folder, with the subject
heading "The Big Talk."

It was bad. Really bad. I read that
book my therapist suggested, and I thought maybe it would help things, but it
didn't. I went in there all prepared — it was like

when you cram for a test, and you
give what seem like the right answers, only the
grading's
all messed up. It was like whatever I said, she was going to blast me for it. I
took responsibility for what I did, what more does she want? I feel like she's
just pummeling me. And the worst part is, maybe she enjoys it. Maybe she likes
getting to punish me. I don't know what I've done to her all these years for
her to like it so much. I don't know what anyone's done to her.

There it was, in black and white. I
couldn't believe he'd been able to sit in front of me, pretending to understand
the depth of his betrayal and expressing his willingness to pay any reparation,
and then turn around and say those things about me. He thought I could enjoy
this? And that line about what someone had done to me.. .Jon thought I was
damaged to the point of sadism. My husband actually thought that about me. I
was having the baby of a man who believed I was a monster.

That e-mail had been the last
straw. I'd decided I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't be alone in the house.
The possibility existed that I might actually crack up and have a good
old-fashioned nervous breakdown, complete with yowling sobs and smashing
objects. That's when I called Charlie and told him I needed him right away, and
that I might need him in the delivery room, too, with that last part
momentarily fazing the usually
unfazable
Charlie.
"But I don't know how to be anyone's coach," he said. "I didn't
go to any of those classes."

"Oh, don't worry. I've changed
my mind. Nothing's natural anymore. I'm getting the epidural. If I could, I'd
be on one right now."

He hesitated, then asked with great
solemnity, "What can be done so that I never—and I mean never, not for an
instant—see your hoo-ha?"