Parachutes and Kisses (23 page)

The bedroom door flew open and Josh ran in. “God damn it to hell!” he screamed. “Can't you ever be happy about anything? Can't you ever stop nitpicking and noodling? We wanted this baby, wanted it so badly we've been trying for a year, and now all you can do is say how ambivalent you feel!” He screamed so loudly that even the dogs ran into the guest room to cower under the brass bed.

Isadora trembled, pursed her lips, wanted to strike out at him, or yell, or fight back—but she didn't know how. As the clown of family, the second sister, the conciliator (not the gladiator), she only knew how to dance and sing and backpedal, how to be charming, or how to compress and contain her anger until it glowed like a hot coal in her gut that gave off wisecracks like sparks.

“I want an abortion,” she said, lips thin, arms folded. Totally untrue, it was simply the most hurtful thing she could think of to say.

Josh looked at her, incredulous. Then he fell to his knees, weeping. He put his head in her lap. “Please don't kill our baby,” he cried.

They went to bed, hugging, kissing, and crying. In a flood of tears they made peace, imagining their unformed baby suspended like a helium balloon above their heads. Delicate pink, it hovered in the room before losing the lightness that kept it up and falling to earth as if into the realm of consciousness.

After Josh fell asleep, Isadora lay awake trying to imagine the baby-to-be. She could no more abort it than she could gouge out an eye or cut off a leg, but she had grave doubts about Josh—particularly his random rages, his denial of all ambivalence, yet his quickness to blame her. How to convey a woman's feeling of terror at carrying the baby of a man she feels will betray her? A baby is an unbreakable bond, a bond of flesh, a pulsing umbilicus between a man and a woman. Isadora knew full well that this baby would moor her to Josh as she had never been moored to any of her previous husbands. She wondered at herself for having chosen a mate so capriciously—for his jokes, his smell, and his furry belly. Yet the truth was that most women probably chose their mates just as capriciously. The decision was made in the pheromones, not in the conscious mind. Maybe Nature had a greater scheme, was threading helical strands of DNA according to Her own omniscient plan, was juggling chromosomes according to some divine design. Maybe we were just bearers of the chromosomes, as poets were the bearers of the Voice; maybe we were cups, not the wine itself.
There
was a sobering-intoxicating thought.

Isadora slept. In her dream, she was already nursing her baby. Both breasts were full and ached. The milk (how could she know this, not having yet given birth?) squirted across the room when she squeezed her nipple between two fingers.

But when she looked down at the baby, it was Chekarf who suckled her, not a human infant. In the dream, this seemed quite natural. The little Bichon lay on its back, its vestigial nipples turned heavenward, its shiny black eyes open, its little black mouth sucking away at her pink nipple as if he were the most ordinary and healthy of infants. She felt proud of him, as if he were her child—proud of his excellent sucking, proud of his sweet little wet black olives of eyes. Isadora had often wished to suckle Chekarf when he was a puppy. She had looked at the tiny furry white thing and wanted to give it her breast, even to suck its diminutive penis (with its one yellow drop of urine trembling at the end of that delicate strand of white fur). She loved the dog
that
much; she felt she and it were one flesh. Small, helpless creatures still brought out such responses in her—baby raccoons, skunks, field mice. She and Josh had lived with a family of field mice during their first winter in Connecticut, had lived with them simply because Isadora would not consent to their being poisoned. They tolerated the field mice, even welcomed them until Isadora, finding mouse droppings everywhere—in the silverware drawers, in the dishwasher, in the stove, in the canisters of oatmeal, flour, bran, granola—began to worry about a possible health hazard.

“What would Swami Satchidinanda say?”

“Mouse droppings not verry sannitary,” Josh said, doing his Indian swami accent.

“Butt, Mahster, can we kill any livving thing?” Isadora queried in
her
corresponding Indian accent.

“Better to kill
them
before they kill you,” Josh riposted guruishly. Whereupon he undertook to poison them with a poison whose death he claimed was painless. Isadora doubted that any death was painless, but she looked away. The furry gray bodies of the mice seemed to haunt the corners of her vision after the poisoning. Whenever she walked into the kitchen, she seemed to see little gray blurs scurrying at the edges of her sight.

 

The beginning of Isadora's pregnancy was emotionally shaky—like the beginnings of all pregnancies. But once the little heart was firmly entrenched, once they went to the gynecologist and
heard
it beating, she took on a sureness, a beatitude she never had known before.

The worry lines smoothed out of her face; she smiled always. The mood swings, the depressions she had known all her life evened out and she became serene, well tempered, cheerful. She was suddenly so pretty she marveled at her face in the mirror. Always used to being
told
she was pretty, she had never really believed it before; now, she looked at herself and
saw
the pretti ness—a radiant pink-cheeked blonde, with gray-blue eyes and enough life-force for three women. Could that person really be
me?
she wondered.

She ate and ate and ate and never gained much weight. At full term she had put on only twenty-two pounds. She gorged on ice cream, on milkshakes, on yogurt with fruit. Pregnant in early winter, she lived through her queasy period in January and February (she found she could not bear the smell of certain heavy perfumes she had previously loved, Bal à Versailles and Joy, and could not drink coffee, but other than that, she was fine) but then she bloomed into midpregnancy in the spring. By her thirty-sixth birthday, she was flying around the country promoting a new book—with a smile on her face and billowing silk paisley blouses disguising her belly. She was even lucky that that year's fashion was a return to smocklike dresses with ruffled necks and full sleeves. All seemed right with the world, and she seemed born to bear. Her fear of pregnancy had turned to sheer exuberance; her panic to peace. Never had she known such mindless certainty.

She researched and wrote and wrote, wrote and researched
Tintoretto's Daughter,
even flying to Venice when she needed to see the Scuola di San Rocco again, and smell the canals and
feel
the history in her pores and nostrils.

The summer she came to term was like one long house party. She wrote in her warm, brown-carpeted attic studio, and downstairs it seemed guests were always assembling to meet her when she descended—publishers from overseas, friends from everywhere, family. Her grandfather was ninety-four that year and he came up from time to time to regale Isadora (and her blooming belly) with stories about his childhood in Odessa—almost as if he were trying to communicate with the baby-to-be about his past (and her future). Isadora only hoped that he would live to see this great-grandchild, and he did! He was still mentally sharp that summer—and full of black irony and bitter wit, though his body was more and more a ruin.

As the summer progressed, Isadora grew increasingly sure of herself, and sure of her coming maternity, and Josh grew increasingly nervous. He taped a map of the hospital environs to the inside windshield of the car; he started to be afraid to fuck her for fear of hurting the baby. Isadora often thought that hard as it was for
women
to adjust to the idea of a new person in their lives, it was doubly hard for men because
they
did not have the nine months of physical preparation. By the time the baby was due to be born, it was so much a human being to her, so clear a personality, that she and it did not have to be formally introduced. As her pregnancy wore on, she grew happier and happier; Josh, for his part, often withdrew into a state of anxiety bordering on panic.

By the beginning of August, her belly was huge. She posed in the nude for Josh's camera on the redwood deck outside their bedroom. The pictures show a rosy Rubensian figure with legs far too long and thin to support it—sort of like an artichoke on toothpicks. But the smile on the lady's face is one Isadora has not known the like of since. She looks blissfully unworried. Why on earth was she so happy? Was it just such a blessed relief to be bearing with her belly rather than with her brain? Was it the freedom of having fulfilled some biological mission and now being released to continue with her life? Or was it the joy of discovering that one could create with one's body and with one's brain at the very same time? Shaw may have pronounced it impossible. Nietzsche may have pronounced it impossible. But she was writing better than ever and she was also carrying—she was sure—the world's most astounding baby.

One hot afternoon in August, Isadora was working in the airless crypt of the Beinecke Library at Yale. She was wearing a loose pink cotton dress Josh had bought for her birthday and she was researching one of the things she loved most to research—some detail of sixteenth-century costume, a particular sort of bodice worn by sixteenth-century Venetian ladies. She had that wonderful sense of floating concentration one sometimes gets during research or writing: the world had gone away; nothing remained but herself and the book.

Then, all at once she felt a surprising wetness under her. She stood up and looked over her shoulder to discover that a large circle of moisture had formed on the back of her dress. With no alarm whatsoever, it occurred to her that she must find a public phone to call Josh. As she ascended through the stacks in the elevator, she had an image of herself—her blooming pink belly under the full pink dress, rising up through layers of old books and manuscripts, rising up through the climatically controlled environment, through the windowless white marble crypt that is the Beinecke Library, rising like a balloon whose string a child has let go of, the baby in her belly triumphing over all those dusty books.

She called Josh at home in Rocky Ridge.

“I think I'm leaking amniotic fluid,” she said.

“Come home right away,” he blurted out in a panic. “I'll call the doctor and tell him.”

She drove down the hot, dusty Merritt Parkway as if on a cloud of cherubim, painted by Tiepolo. Never had she been so calm. All the pregnancy fears she had known before becoming pregnant; all the midpregnancy dreams of monsters, of Frankenstein babies, half beast, half human, were banished by the imminent reality. She had known for several months that the baby she carried was a girl, known it because of the amniocentesis she had undergone in her third month, but she had no vision of the baby at all—only that it was a version of her little-girl self.

She drove down her toboggan-run driveway feeling utterly regal. Josh was waiting anxiously by the door of their house, waiting for her to return and bring their baby to him. She got out of the car slowly, walking deliberately (in her flat white sandals) down the flagstone path that led to the door.

“What happened?” Josh asked when she walked in.

She merely turned around and showed him the wet spot on her dress.

“What did the doctor say?” she asked.

“That we should come in right away.”

“First let me pee,” she said-since peeing is to pregnancy as heat is to summer: endemic.

They got back into the Silver Nazi, with the map of the hospital environs taped to the inside of the windshield, and they drove to the doctor's office in Stamford.

In the car, they chattered happily—of Venetian bodices, of names for the baby, of the incumbent miracle—so ordinary, yet also so transcendent. Josh had gone with Isadora to every gynecologist's appointment, from the first hearing of the heartbeat, to the strangely frightening amniocentesis (a needle piercing her belly in the whitest and most vulnerable of places), to the Lamaze classes that were so baffling to both of them—but now they were entering a phase of the process that only she alone could do. She wasn't sure whether she felt exuberant about that or terrified. A little of both. Never had she been quite as proud to be a woman.

It was curious, wasn't it? Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say. For years, she had feared pregnancy and birth, yet now that birth was almost upon her, it seemed like the single most important, the pivotal experience of her life.

At the gynecologist‘s—a sweet Stamford gynecologist who had supplanted the elfin New York doctor who'd diagnosed her pregnancy—Isadora was measured and probed.

“Only two centimeters dilated,” said Steve Lowenstein, her pedantic but gentle ob-gyn man. He was a nice Jewish boy, exactly her age—the sort of boy who'd gone to medical school when she'd gone to graduate school at Columbia. The sort of boy Jewish princesses hope to marry, but then grow hideously bored with at thirty and seek to deceive. He had brown eyes, brown hair, and looked at her with longing. Not sexual longing maybe, but longing for all that was exotic. Her ovaries were not exotic, but her life-style (to use that awful word) was. To Steve Lowenstein, she represented the forbidden female-much-married, sexual, seemingly free. They were about to share, with an intimacy perhaps even greater than the conception of this baby, one of the most astonishing experiences of life.

Steve sent Josh and Isadora home, admonishing them to wait for contractions to begin, then call him back. Since the amniotic sac was punctured, Steve would have to induce labor if it did not begin that day or the next. So Isadora and Josh went home to wait.

It was hot and sunny, a beatific blue-skied August afternoon when Connecticut seems the loveliest place to be in the whole world. They went home to wait and prepare, but how do you prepare for an event that is, by its very nature, utterly unique? Birth is common enough, but it is also absolutely individual. Every birth is different; every baby is different.