If You Lived Here (10 page)
blowing softly against his cheek.
Martin looks down at the picture. “He’s cute,” he says. “Very cute.”
After he’s gone through the pictures, the official forms, and the documents that need filling out and signing, we linger at the kitchen table, the contents of the referral packet spread out in front of us like the map for an adventure he hesitates to go on. Martin idly pages through the adoption agency information manual. I stand above him, digging through the medical document envelope, searching for the page that discloses how the baby tested positive for anemia, but not for hepatitis or HIV.
Our business phone rings and Martin, who’s on call tonight, goes to the counter and answers it. “Marino and Sons.” Then, “Hey, Mill.” It’s Millicent Tweedy, the head nurse at New Hanover’s ICU. “Okay. I’ll be there in a little while.”
“Who?” I ask when he hangs up. It’s a conditioned response after all these years. I find the baby’s medical report and pull it out to give to Martin.
He stands at the counter, one hand on the back of his neck, the other making notes. From behind, his body looks thin and less substantial. He says, “A woman named Myra Kapner. She belongs to the synagogue. Heart attack. I need to let the rabbi know.”
He leaves messages on the office phones for Bennet and Albert, asking them to add this case to tomorrow’s schedule. He calls Rabbi Solomon at home. Tomorrow’s Friday, so we’ll have to hurry to have the burial before their Sabbath starts at dusk.
Even when he’s finished, Martin doesn’t come back to the table. He stands by the telephone, folding and unfolding the piece of paper.
I lay the document in front of his chair at the table, then sit back down across from it. “What?” I want to know.
Martin sighs. I see it in his shoulders. “I know this has to be hard on you.” It’s the kind of thing that someone says when they’re about to make it harder.
“What?”
He turns around and walks back to the table. The look of pain on his face is something I’ve never even seen before. “I don’t have enough love left to give to another person.”
I try to laugh. “Love makes love,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Okay, not love. Worry. What is parenthood besides love and worry?”
I feel like some huge metal crate has crashed into my skull. “Are you telling me something new here?”
His fingers drift across the papers on the table. “I just don’t think I can handle a baby, Shelley,” he says. “I’ve given it a lot of thought.”
“Are you saying you don’t want any kid at all?”
He stares down at his hand. “I know how much this means to you,” he says. “I was really trying, you know.”
“What is
trying?
” I demand, forcing him to look up at me. “What is
trying
about jerking your wife around?”
Martin at this moment looks the way our clients sometimes look if they have lost loved ones in the past few hours. Their eyes are wild, disoriented, jerking here and there as if they might find some better truth up there on the wall, or through that doorway, or in the empty shadows of their hands. Myra Kapner’s family probably look like that as they make their lonely trek from the ICU to the parking garage. It’s one thing to know, intellectually, that someone has died. It’s something else entirely to believe it.
I leave Martin in the kitchen, eyes on the table, searching for what
he’s
lost: our old and comfortable childless life, unchanged and unchanging. My husband has grown brittle. What would I have done, all those weeks ago when I gave up Sonya, if I had known that Martin’s flailing would lead to this? Would I have gotten on that plane and left him here to fend for himself? I walk upstairs and get in bed, curl under the covers and stare out the window into the magnolia I planted the year that I moved in here. In the darkness, the stiff wide leaves stand out against the sky like the hulls of little boats. I imagine I’m underwater, looking up at a whole crowded regatta sailing over my head, swimmers and revelers and sailors with muscles and coppery tans. Do all of us feel this way, that life must be happier for everyone else?
Someone once told me that people reveal everything essential about themselves when you first meet them. The problem, of course, is that you can’t easily distinguish the important details from the insignificant ones. Martin, too, revealed everything, but it’s taken me all these years to figure out which details mattered.
I was a counselor at Camp Merry Acres and Martin’s two boys were my campers. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, the whole camp went to the beach. On those days, Martin would show up around two,
then spend the next couple of hours watching his boys out in the water. At first, I thought he was old (he was thirty-two and I was only twenty), lonely, and goofy looking in his business shirt and shiny shoes. Why would he spend his afternoons at such a hot and aimless occupation? He looked so awkward, shuffling over the dunes, settling himself on what looked like a guest towel. Often, he wore a tattered green baseball cap and used it to fan himself. At other times, he held a section of newspaper over his head, which made him look like a very big camper sitting under a very small tent. Sometimes, in the heat, his glasses would begin to slide down his face and he would take them off and squint down toward the bright water like someone unsure of what he was seeing. He looked uncomfortable but determined to stay. I’d grown tired of the other counselors, so I walked over one day to talk to him.
Abe and Theo were seven and six then. They stood in waist-high water, singing loudly and performing some kind of frenetic dance. The water was calm as a bathtub. Abe stepped out a little deeper and did a neat somersault. Theo held his fingers to his nose, bent over, and pushed his head beneath the surface. He disappeared for a second, then one foot shot straight up from the water and the other came out, kicking sideways. Finally, his head emerged, sputtering. “Not bad,” Martin called out to him. “Give it another shot.”
Theo tried again, with only marginal success.
“You’ve got great kids,” I remarked. I had heard that he was divorced and I felt sorry for him, being a single dad and all. His ex-wife had moved to Florida, so he was pretty much on his own as a parent. His kids were terrific, though, and I thought he should know.
Martin turned toward me. The expression on his face told me he knew already. “Aren’t they?” he asked, not appearing to feel sorry for himself at all. Close up, he looked amused and fairly content. He had skin that was boyishly soft for a dad, and large, coffee-colored eyes that now settled on me. I’d just come back from spending my junior year in Scotland, and one of the things I’d decided over there was that I wouldn’t hate my body anymore. It’s awkward, though, to stand in front of a strange man in nothing but a Speedo. I dug my toes through the hot sand and brought my
hand up to my ear, which served to cover one breast. Abe yelled, “Dad!” and Martin turned his eyes away.
I followed his gaze out to the water and watched the boys. It would have been a good moment to walk away, but I didn’t. I wanted him to look at me again.
Martin leaned back, resting his body on his elbows. His eyes remained on the boys, but he asked, “Which beaches have you been to?”
As a conversation starter, it was kind of weird, but I wanted to answer. I sat down a few feet away from him. For several seconds, the sand stung the backs of my legs, then it eased. I said, “Myrtle Beach, of course. I’ve been to the Outer Banks. Biloxi. Those are the ones in this country. Then, I was in Scotland for my junior year last year. I went to this town called Arbroath. On the coast.”
He looked at me with more interest now. “So, you’re an adventurer,” he said, a touch of admiration in his voice.
“I don’t know about that,” I said, but I was secretly delighted. “Which beach was your favorite?”
I gazed down the slope of golden sand to the water. The beach had the soft curves of a body lying languidly in the sun. “This place is as beautiful as any of them,” I told him. “It’s so wide, and the sand is so fine. I love the colors of the ocean here.”
Out in the water, the boys chased each other in circles, drifting farther from the shore. “Theo. Abe! Come back in toward me,” their father called, his voice casual but slightly urgent. It occurred to me that he had come here to lifeguard and, though I felt the slightest tinge of annoyance—that was my job, wasn’t it?—his nervousness about his kids struck me as sweet. Abe started an awkward crawl back toward the beach. Theo followed with a dog paddle. When they’d reached a safer distance from the shore, he looked at me again. “So, Wrightsville Beach is your favorite?”
He didn’t sound surprised or disparaging, just curious to know. I took a handful of sand and salted my leg. Somehow, talking to this dad about it, my months in Scotland suddenly felt like an adventure. His interest in me made me interested in myself. “I wouldn’t say that,” I told him. “My favorite would be that beach in Scotland. Arbroath.” One weekend, near
the end of my time in Edinburgh, I took the bus to Arbroath and rented a room in a little bed and breakfast on the North Sea. The room didn’t even have a window. A storm came up just after I got there and I spent the afternoon curled up in bed reading
Fat Is a Feminist Issue,
the book that changed my life that year. Later, I ran through the rain and got myself a take-out dinner from the fish and chips shop across the street. For two whole days, I felt shaky with nervousness and intoxicated by the thrill of being alone. Although I’d lived in Scotland for nearly seven months, my junior year abroad had been heavily managed by a team of administra-tors from the States. That weekend marked my first hesitant attempt at solo travel. I’d gotten the idea from Simon, a guy in my Russian literature class who had journeyed through Africa and Europe carrying nothing but his passport, a few hundred British pounds, and a knapsack no bigger than a pillow. Simon and I had endured the most relentless days of March together, lying naked beneath his Indian-print bedspread, smoking pot. With the rhythmic chanting of Sufi music in the background, Simon told me about the hash in Marrakech, the hash in Athens, the hash in Nice. Simon’s stories, combined with the pot, the Sufi music, and his little goa-tee, had made that dorm room feel like the most exotic place I’d ever visited.
By the end of March, when the tips of purple crocuses finally started popping up in the muddy gardens around Charlotte Square, I’d grown sick of Simon. For such a worldly guy, he was surprisingly provincial about sex, and I discovered that my capacity to listen to drug tales could only last a month. I dumped him then, but I couldn’t stop imagining Cairo and Calcutta and Nice. By the time I went to Arbroath, I considered it a trial run for my real adventure. After graduation, I would work and save my money, then I’d go. Anywhere I wanted, for as long as the money held out, with only a knapsack the size of a pillow. This trip would divide my youth from the rest of my life.
Martin took off his hat and fanned himself. His dark, thick hair lay flat against his head and formed little sweaty ringlets around his ears. He didn’t look old at all, actually, for a dad. “Arbroath,” he said, testing the word on his tongue. “Tell me about it.”
I first saw the Arbroath beach the morning after the storm. “It wasn’t beautiful,” I remembered. “It was rocky and narrow and so cold that no one ever swam there. But the ocean looked like something out of a movie. Big, crashing waves. That was water you could drown in.”
His eyes were on his boys and, though I wanted him to look at me, I didn’t doubt that he was listening. He squinted out at the ocean, using the hat to shield his eyes. “You liked that?”
“Well, yeah, I did. I like drama. But there was something else.” I hadn’t told anyone. Whom would I have told? My mother had shown her interest in Scotland by sitting on the couch one evening and paging through my photo album, asking questions like, “Was it great?” and “Did you just love it?” My sister, Lindi, who’d spent her own junior year in Spain, responded to everything I described by saying, “Oh, yeah, that happened to me, too.” After my first week or so back, I’d stopped talking about Scotland altogether.
It’s odd how you can tell things to strangers you’d never think to tell the ones you love. With this dad listening to me, I kept talking. “Between the road and the beach was a concrete seawall covered with graffiti. I felt like I was reading someone’s diary. One spot said, ‘Poor Misty died here. Lord, bless her up in puppy heaven.’ ”
The words sounded so stupid that I stopped, but he had a grin on his face, as if he found Misty interesting, too. I continued. “It was all so intimate. A whole chunk of writing looked like Arabic. Another chunk said, ‘Where’s the jobs? Where’s the jobs?’ And one said, ‘Julia, please forgive me!’ I must have walked for miles, just reading this stuff. It was crazy. I’d taken a four-hour bus ride to get to that beach, and most of the time I was there, I had my back to the ocean.”
Martin said, “There’s a whole story there.” “What?”
“ ‘Julia, please forgive me.’ ”
I nodded, suddenly exhilarated. His curiosity about my life felt almost unbearably alluring.
At that moment, out in the shallows, Theo yelled, “Dad, watch me!” Martin glanced at me, almost as if to make sure I wouldn’t disappear,
and then, returning to his son, his face opened into the most radiant smile. Over all these years, I’ve remembered that smile as a marker of the moment I first began to love him. I believed I had taken in all the most salient facts about him—that he was attractive, curious, interesting, kind, and a devoted father, too. But I failed to focus on a fact that was just as revealing: No other parent had felt it necessary to sit on the beach and keep an eye on their kids. The sense of anxiety he revealed that day has grown over the years, and now it’s breaking him.
