Love and Other Natural Disasters (7 page)

I asked Tamara for all the gossip
she knew, celebrity and otherwise, and she obliged by keeping up a running stream.
The distraction was incomplete, but it was something. "Which exit is
it?" she asked.

"The next one," I said.
With my luck, Jonathon and Sylvia would be in lawn chairs on the front yard. It
would be a regular family reunion.

Tamara took a right off the
freeway. "You'll have to direct me."

Jonathon's father had been a math
professor at Berkeley, and Jon had grown up in an idyllic neighborhood
'
in
the hills above campus. Tamara and I drove up steep, ; Winding streets, with
houses that ranged from unpretentious Craftsman bungalows to facsimiles of
Italian villas or Spanish farmhouses (Sylvia's was a three-bedroom
i
Tudor). On a clear day (and most days were clear up in
the hills—the fog would roll in below and I imagined ' it was like living in a
castle on a cloud), you could see the Bay Bridge and the more celebrated less
traveled Golden Gate, with San Francisco between them. I knew Jonathon loved it
there, but the vista was wasted on his parents. His father had been obsessed
with work, and his all-consuming interest in the quantifiable rendered views
irrelevant; Sylvia—given that her favorite game is Spot the Flaw—has always
found the appreciation of natural beauty something of a trial. But despite
that, Jon had grown up privileged and happy. He bested me on both counts.

"That's the one." I
pointed to the house. "The Tudor on the left."

"Not bad." Tamara parked
the car and looked around admiringly.

"Sylvia's car isn't
here," I said with relief. "Let's get this over with before she comes
home."

We started unloading onto the curb
as quickly as possible. I realized how silly I looked, a massively pregnant
woman dashing up the path and around the side of the house like a thief in
reverse, clutching a boxed car seat. In spite of myself, after I set the box
down and looked at the view, I couldn't help thinking about a childhood spent
gazing out at what must have seemed the whole world.

This time, we'd had a plan. This
time, my pregnancy hadn't been the result of a broken condom but a
well-Orchestrated series of efforts. This time, Jon and I had known what we
were getting into, and we both wanted
it.
We wanted her.

But when I was twenty-four, before
Laney was a twinkle in Jon's eye, we were living together in a railroad apartment
in San Francisco and my normally clock-Work period was a week late. Jon and I
bought the pregnancy test at night, but it said morning urine was best, so we
decided to wait, "do this thing right," as Jon put it. He wanted to
talk that night about babies and families and options, but I said I couldn't do
it. See, Jon always thought he'd have a family, but I never did. It sounds so
melodramatic—remember, I was twenty-four—but I just never thought I was worthy
of one. I wouldn't have admitted that. I told myself I didn't want a
conventional life, I had too many wild ideas and dreams, but hindSight tells
me what I didn't want to see: I didn't think I was capable, or deserving. Jon
never had that worry. Jon fell asleep with his hand on my stomach, some thing
he'd never done before, a sort of subconscious wish. I stayed awake, except for
one patch of sleep during which I had one of the most vivid dreams of my life.
I was in a meadow—the kind you see in commercials for panty liners or dryer
sheets, the kind that evokes freshness—and I came across her. A little girl
named Lavender, of all things. She was about three, with Jon's brown eyes and
my auburn hair, and she reached out her hand. I took it, and knew we belonged
to each other. I was her mommy, and in the dream, it was all I wanted to be.

I shook Jon awake and said, "I
need to know now. I'm taking the test." It was 4:38 am. That had to count
as morning.

"Okay. Do you want me in the
bathroom with you?" he asked drowsily.

"No. I want to pee
alone."

"That sounds good," he
slurred. He rolled over and immediately fell back asleep.

I read the instructions twice. Not
sure about my aim, I decided to pee in a glass and dip the stick in, rather
than "holding it in my urine stream." My hands were shaking as I
returned from the kitchen bearing a shot glass emblazoned with the word "
Jagermeister
." I could be carrying the baby of a man
who had a
Jagermeister
shot glass.

But what had me shaking was that I
felt I had seen my little girl, and how could I abort her now that I'd seen
her? I'd always expected abortion to be my choice

If faced with the decision, and now
I thought I'd have to choose her.

Two pink lines would mean I was
pregnant. One pink line meant no baby, no choice. I wished for it fervently.

I had a ten-minute wait. After a
few minutes, I squatted next to Jon's side of the bed and said softly,
"The clock's ticking. Seven minutes, and we'll know."

He stirred, opened his eyes, and
caressed the side of my face. I tilted my head into his hand. "I love you,
Eve."

"I know," I said.

He sat up and shook his head almost
violently. I was Still on my knees, and then he was on his knees beside me,
taking my hands in his. "Oh, wait, it's supposed to be one knee," he
said.

"Jon—are you... don't..."
Not like this.

He adjusted. "Maybe you should
sit on the bed. No, I think you should be standing. This doesn't seem quite
right."

"It doesn't seem right because
it's not right."

"I know you never thought
you'd get married, never thought you'd have kids, blah-blah. You've been
telling me for years. But, lady, I want you to be mine. My wife, the mother of
my children, I want you to be all of it."

I shook my head, my eyes tearing.
"I don't think I can."

"That's just crazy talk. I
won't hear of it." He looked Into my eyes and softened his voice.
"I'm asking you to marry me. Whether you're pregnant or not, whether we
decide to have the baby or not, I want you to marry me. My life is with you.”

I was crying. "What if I can't
be a mom? You want kids. What if I never do?" But I knew that was
impossible. I already did. Maybe not now, but someday, I'd want Lavender. I
wouldn't name her some hippie-dipshit name like Lavender, but I wanted her.

"You will."

"What if I don't?"

"Then you don't," he
said. He smiled at me, and brushed at my tears with his fingertips. "Eve,
will you marry me?"

If that night had never happened,
would Jon still have proposed? He'd said kids or not, his life was with me, but
maybe that was just the romance of the moment. What if there had been only one
pink line? He could have back-pedaled, said we were too young, that we needed a
long engagement. Sylvia could have gotten to him; he could have reconsidered.
But with Jacob growing inside me, there was no turning back.

In the forty-eight hours since I'd
found out about Laney, my mind had been awash in alternate history. My life
suddenly seemed like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, with Jon turning the
pages.

I found myself creating timelines:
When he met Laney, had we still been in discussion about having another baby,
or already trying? I remembered how gung ho Jon had always been about having a
second child, but in one conversation, he'd asked if we should try to travel
more first or if I might want to go back to school. I'd assumed he was just
considering from all angles, but now I wondered if his attraction to Laney had
given him pause. Maybe he'd thought I'd be easier to leave if we had only one
child together.

I was flooded by moments from the
past year that I'd given no weight and now they were clues. I could hear snippets
of conversations, see images of him looking distracted, remember times he'd
left the room to take a call. I saw myself kissing him before going to bed as
he sat lit the computer, saying he was just going to finish up one more e-mail.
But there were no lipstick stains on the collar, no sudden changes in grooming
habits. I never smelled Laney on him. Our sex life seemed ordinary. If you
trust your husband and believe in him, if you know that in any long
relationship some days you'll be closer and some days further apart, it just
looks like marriage.

I Jon left me alone on Saturday, as
I'd asked. I called him that night. Much as I wanted him to say something that
would make forgiveness come easily, I couldn't imagine what that would be. It
seemed more likely that I'd catch him in another lie and everything would
become more unforgivable. I decided to focus only on what had to be said.

"Hey," Jon said, his
voice soft and tinged with modulated hope.

"Hi," I said. "We
need to figure out how we're going to handle things with Jacob."

"Oh. Sure." He seemed
slightly disoriented by the absence of niceties; I wondered how that could be.
"How's he doing?"

"He seemed happy after he
talked to you last night. He's under the impression that you'll be back any day
now."

"I'm hoping that's true. A
little time and space and who knows how you'll feel?" When I didn't
answer, he went on. "I just wish you would consider working this out with
me back at home. I'd still go to therapy."

"Let's not go over this again,
okay? I just want to talk about Jacob right now." I took his silence as
agreement. "I want him to understand that you might be gone for a while. I
don't want him asking every day when you're coming back." My voice
faltered a little as I said, "I wouldn't be able to take that."

"What is it you want to tell
him?" he asked with a note of resignation.

"I think you should be the one
to tell him that it might be a while, but that you're going to talk to him
every night, and we'll work out a visitation schedule so he can predict when
he'll see you. You know, give him reassurance. That's better coming from you
than me."

"A visitation schedule. That
sounds formal."

"I'm not talking about
lawyers. I'm just talking about you and me figuring out what days and how much
of the weekend you'll spend with him. Predictability will make this easier on
him. And on us." I paused. "So I was thinking that you could see him
at least two week-nights. You can take him out to dinner, or if you want to
hang out and play with him at the house, I'll go out for a while. And he could
do an overnight with you on the weekend."

"So no family time is what
you're saying. It's just Jacob and me."

"Yes."

"Eve," he said, "I'd
really like to be with both of you."

"That's not possible right
now," I said, fighting to keep
my
voice
neutral despite the imminent threat of tears.

"I just don't see how you're
supposed to warm up to
me
if
you're not willing to be around me."

"You need this time to figure
out why you were with Laney. Maybe you want to be with her. Maybe you just
thought all this time that the right thing was for you
to
be with me and the kids, and I'm not really the one
for
you." The tears had started
in earnest. "I'd never keep you away from your kids, no matter what
happens With us."

"Eve," he said tenderly.
"Please don't keep me away from you. I already know the answer. I want to
be with you."

It was just what I wanted to hear,
and that's why I hung up.

CHAPTER SEVEN

My brother, Charlie, would have
been a witness to the Thanksgiving festivities, but he'd canceled his trip at
the last minute. He said it was because he'd like us to have more alone time,
not so many people around, and since he wasn't working, he could come up any
weekend. My mother let slip that one of his friends was having a party that was
supposed to go all weekend, a "
rager
" that
had the potential to be "historic." I should have been insulted, but
I knew it was just Charlie. Besides, it was better this way: I wouldn't have
wanted him to learn about the affair when Jon was within swinging distance.

Sometimes it was hard to believe I
was only four years older than Charlie. My mother has a story she likes to tell
about how when I learned she was pregnant, I marched around the house for days
shouting, "I'm a big sister now!" and insisted she throw out all my
childish accoutrements. Since she couldn't afford to buy it all again, she just
hid it. But my point had been made. I took big sisterhood seriously.

Even as a kid, I could set limits
and hold them in a way my mother never could. I always knew my mother loved us
a lot, but it seemed like no one had ever told her that it's better to stand
firm and be wrong sometimes than to buckle at the first sign of resistance.
Sometimes when I was a teenager, I would tell my mother she was undermining my
authority with Charlie, and I wasn't kidding. "I said no parties on school
nights!" I would say to her, alter she'd told Charlie he could go
"just this once." He'd come home drunk and puking when he was
fourteen and my mother would just shrug as if to say, "Kids! What are you
going to do?"

My mother barely graduated high
school and she'd always had low-paying jobs, so you would have thought she'd
encourage us to excel in school. But she thought C's were good enough.
"Just graduate," she'd say. "I'll love you no matter what."
It infuriated me. She seemed
to
have
no standards: not for her kids, not for the men she dated, not for herself. It
was a deadly combination, having no bullshit detector and no backbone.

I was bent on going to Berkeley
from the time I was twelve, and while it wasn't too hard to be valedictorian at
our neighborhood school, I spent most of my time studying and reading anything
I could get my hands on while wearing black, listening to punk music, and
dreaming of the days when I'd be understood. Charlie's organizing principle was
fun, and his world was filled with friends, sex, pot, and speed metal. I
believed that nothing worthwhile comes easy or cheap, and sometimes it just
never comes at all, no matter what we do. By turns, I was a nihilist, a
fatalist, a Marxist—but never an optimist. Charlie believed it would all work
out for him in the end, and if it didn't, well, at least he'd loved the ride.
Sometimes he frustrated me; sometimes I envied him; but I loved him ferociously
from the first time I held him, as he lay swaddled in the receiving blanket
that had been mine.

When Charlie called later that
night, I knew he'd been tipped off by my mother. "Hey there,
Evie
," he said. "What's up?"

I had to laugh at his false
casualness. "Oh, not too much. It's just another dull Thanksgiving
weekend."

"You want to talk about
it?" he asked.

I sighed. "I've spent a lot of
time talking. And I don't seem to be getting any closer to forgiving Jon."

"Why should you forgive him?
He cheated on you when you're about to have his kid. The guy's scum."

Sometimes the simplicity of
Charlie's world view was refreshing; I wasn't sure if this was one of those
times. "But that means the father of my kids is scum."

"Our fathers are scum, and we
did all right."

He was using a pretty liberal
interpretation of "all right." I mean, Charlie was twenty-six, living
back at home with my mother because he'd lost yet another job, and seemed to
have no future direction at all. And let's not get started on me. I'd spent
half the day resisting the urge to hack Jon's e-mail. I did resist, but barely.
I wasn't sure I'd be so lucky next time.