Eleven Hours (7 page)

“It wants out,” says Franckline again. But why must you repeat yourself! cries Lore silently. It, he, she—who are you, tiny destroyer, tiny suffering thing? When the sonographer asked her at twenty weeks did she want to know the sex, she said no. Let the child retain its mystery, she thought, let it be free for a while longer from life rushing in, however well-meaning, with its dreams and plans: a bow in the hair, ballet lessons, a red fire truck. She, he, it. A student she had three years ago, a second grader whose parents were Senegalese, was called Soleil. A dreamy boy who could not distinguish between his “th”s and his “d”s and who drew wonderful pictures of million-windowed buildings poking high into the sky, stick figures in every window: waving, laughing, boxing, dozing. It seemed a beautiful name for a child, boy or girl: the sun that rises to give warmth and light, a ball of burning fire.

When he learned of the baby, Asa left his messages. Lore got rid of the answering machine, deleted his e-mails without reading them. Helen Fox, Asa's mother, whom she'd always liked—formidable Helen, with her white hair and her work editing thick books on sociology and anthropology, who'd once put her veined hand on top of Lore's and said that Lore made Asa happy—Helen sent checks to her at P.S. 30, with notes in her tiny handwriting pleading with Lore to phone her, to be in touch, to say that she was all right. The checks tempted Lore, but they also humiliated her, and she threw them away. She'd wanted to reply, but what could she possibly say? That Helen had been her other mother, the one who survived? The one who taught her things about history and dance, and whom she'd liked to imagine making a grandmother? She had pictured that preoccupied, severe face broken up in fond smiles. Lore was the one who would cause that to happen.

If Asa wants to speak to me, Lore thought, he will find my address and come in person, he will take the dreaded 7 train that Manhattanites hate to take, and he will wait for me. Eventually he appeared. It was late September; he sat on the steps of the three-story building where she now lived. When he stood up he was somehow less imposing than he had been six months before. She would have said he'd lost weight except that in fact he looked bloated. She'd always liked Asa's size, the bulk of him, liked being with a man bigger than herself—taller and broader and even denser, it seemed. His largeness and solidity pinned her more securely to reality, made her feel more
there
. But now he looked hollowed out.

The evening was mild and windy; they watched a man parked near her entrance get into his car and drive away. Asa spoke carefully, evenly—he was greatly agitated. He said that she might not believe him but he'd come around to being happy about the pregnancy; he'd always wanted them to have children. She had been very wrong to keep the news from him. Naturally he would be financially responsible. More important, he would be a father to whatever degree Lore would allow. He would be part of the baby's life. He would ask nothing and give anything—except that he would not give up Julia. He kept his eyes on Lore's belly. Lore, frightened, felt him in fact capable of loving this child he had not chosen. What a temptation, to feel Asa's love, just a little, through that.

“It's not your child, Asa.”

“Yes, it is. It's as much mine as yours.”

“I'm saying it's
not yours
. When you were in San Francisco, I went out one night. I met a guy.”

“Come on, Lore. Where did you meet this guy? What was his name?”

“I don't need to tell you.”

“You're making this up. You met a guy? You, what, went back to his place? I don't believe you.”

“Think what you want.”

They sat in silence.

“There are tests that would tell,” said Asa.

“So get tested,” said Lore. He would never follow through, she was convinced of it. He was here to prove he was not altogether bad, that he could still do a right thing, and maybe he could. But he would bring the scent and touch and vibration of Julia with him, and this Lore could not bear. Julia's hair on his collar, the smell of her grassy perfumes, her laugh.

Asa was weaker than he realized. If she gave him this out, he would never seek to know for sure.

“Where is the pain mostly?” asks Franckline. “In the front or the back?”

Lore startles. The pain? Ah. “The back. All in my back.”

“I can massage there for you. Along the spine, especially, and right above the sacrum. You can direct me.”

“I think we should call Dr. Elspeth-Chang again.”

“Soon. Let's see how quickly the next one comes.”

Lore puts down the cup of ice. Her mouth aches with cold. She watches the clock. Six minutes since the last contraction. Seven.
She needs me more
, Asa said to her, the night that he told her about himself and Julia. He sobbed, saying that he couldn't deceive Lore any longer, it was too wrong, Lore was the best thing that had ever happened to him, but things with Julia went way back, he didn't claim it was healthy or right, just that it was. They were like siblings, like twins, but even more than that. They understood each other, they saw the world through the same eyes. It was as if someone had married them, long, long ago, before they could even know what that meant. He didn't know what to do! He loved Lore! But Julia!

Lore cut him off. How long had he been sleeping with her?

Nearly three years.

Asa said: “We all love each other. I know we can work it out.”

“No,” said Lore. “We don't all love each other.
Work it out
?
” She now saw why he had confessed—not so he could make a choice, but to get her permission not to. He wanted things to go on just as they had, but with Lore knowing and agreeing to it. He wanted Lore's reliability and sanity, the ease of their life together. And he wanted her so that Julia would not leave him again for the fourth or seventh time. Oh, Asa and Julia did go far back. Asa had kissed her behind the piano in kindergarten. They had slept in each other's rooms when they were in grade school. He had dropped her half a block from her apartment one night.
She needs me more
. Julia had bought Lore as a pimp might, made a gift of her to Asa, to them both. How stimulating it must have been, Lore thought, the three of them strolling along Columbus Avenue or sunning at Jones Beach or driving up to Bear Mountain for a hike, how Lore's love for them must have acted like a revivifying draft for their old, tangled romance. How deliciously illicit it must have made their need. And how stupid and arrogant Lore had been, to believe that she could take her pleasure of both of them, yet Asa could remain completely her own. The bliss, for so long, of that self-deception. Julia and Lore spooning atop a pile of coats at a party, dozing, while Asa talked on in the living room. Or Asa would say something that annoyed Julia, and Julia, slender Julia, would tackle him; he'd fake a fall, Lore would pile on. They'd roll and punch at each other like preschoolers, laughing, grabbing hair, baring teeth. Asa's hand on Julia's belly, Julia's fingers grazing his mouth: were these knowing promises of what would be redeemed on another day?

Imagine having spoken of any of this to Diana or Marjorie. Lore would have seen, behind their careful words, how appalled they were: could she really have been so clueless? But it had been exquisite: the touch of her lover, the touch of her friend. Before this her heart and her hands had been devoted to the body of a sick and dying woman, with its bruises and sores and bad smells. She is proud of having cradled and eased her mother until the end. But it had left her so very hungry.

She had colluded, in short, and all Asa was asking was that she continue to collude with eyes open. It struck her that Julia might have urged Asa to make his confession. Perhaps she had been growing bored of their stealth affair and was looking for a new drama. “Do this for me, for us,” she might have said, daring him.

And why not? Wouldn't it be natural, this next step? But Lore recoiled. Not, she realized, because of any great moral objection. She could envision the new arrangement perfectly well. But she was too proud. She was, quite obviously, the variable in the equation. One day Julia would tire again and move to eject her; her X would be replaced by someone else's Y or Z. Asa would protest, perhaps, but then he would agree. Oh, he would agree. But even imagining this injury was not the worst. The worst was to acknowledge how greedy she had been, how like Julia she actually was. One lover had not been enough for her. The only difference between her and Julia was that she wasn't clever enough to have orchestrated the setup; she'd had to be swept into it, led.

“Go to her,” Lore said. She was frightfully calm, except for the urgent need to have Asa leave the apartment, vanish from her sight. She was silently nearly hysterical in her desire to push him out the door. She wished there were more locks to lock: a hundred locks to lock behind him. As soon as she was alone she fell into a deep sleep, and in the morning she went to work as usual, thinking and feeling as little as possible. On her return she set about methodically destroying every memento of their lives together: photos from parties and evenings at home, the crafts-fair art, books Asa or Julia had introduced her to, any clothing bought or worn in their presence, even refrigerator clippings and scribbles on notepads. She left behind the plates and glasses, the kitchen tools. A few of her oldest items of clothing and her toiletries were all she threw into her suitcase. She was leaving with no more than she had brought with her to the city something over four years ago. In between had been a dream so vivid and compelling it had seemed real, but it was no surprise to wake up and find that she was alone again. She knew how to live lightly—she had always lived lightly. Her mother had lived lightly. People like them never accumulated much.

Eleven minutes. The smell of rubbing alcohol, new gauze. Lore looks up. A hallucination of sorts, for nothing has been opened, nothing moved; Franckline is sitting patiently at the computer desk, filling out paperwork.

No, people like them never accumulated much, only culled a little corner of the world to call their own, then moved on when trouble pushed them aside. Greenwich Village, Lockport, Hobbes Corners—more than one house there, but in each Lore's mother bent over the lilies in the stony yard. She sat at the sewing machine, sewing Lore's skirts for school. Two females, doing what females do: getting by. Had Lore missed having a father? friends had sometimes asked. Julia had asked. Lore always said no. As a child she had not been quite sure what fathers were for. Money, one would think. But her friends with fathers at home seemed to live not very differently than she and her mother did. Possibly worse—men tended to spend on hunting and bowling outings, and drink.

When Lore's mother was dying and doped up on morphine, she spoke about being a dancer in New York City. Some sort of troupe that contained girlfriends named Celeste and Patty. Bright-red skirts and castanets. There was no way to know if this had really happened, or if it was a fantasy brought on by the drugs. Her mother spoke slurrily of picking blueberries by a country lake, of finding at a flea market an embroidered blouse threaded with ribbons. “The place was so crowded and dirty,” she said. “But I found what I wanted.”

How naive Lore had been, despite being the daughter of a father no one spoke of, despite the strange, incomplete conversations at her mother's deathbed; how again and again she was caught up short by the discovery that other people had stories they didn't tell, or told stories that weren't entirely true. How mostly you got odd chunks torn from the whole, impossible truly to understand in their damaged form. She glances at Franckline. Who is she, what are her stories, what does she tell and not tell? Once upon a time, Franckline arrived here from another country: there, surely, is at least one story, a story of ambition or love or flight. Is she married? (Lore quickly scans Franckline's hand. Yes.) Does she have children? Are they sweet-tempered, mischievous, shy, gregarious? Where does she live, what objects fill her home? Has she ever been betrayed by someone?

Thirteen minutes.

The girl watches the clock, and Franckline can sense her spirits plummeting. She has lost track of the monitor, and Franckline doesn't remind her. Given the slowdown in the contractions, she wants to hear the steady thumping and be able to read the regular spikes and decelerations on the printout. In the meantime, what to do for Lore? Franckline might see if she could borrow a book from one of the nurses for her, or a magazine. But she is sure that Lore would wave them away. Perhaps if Franckline offered to read to her. A few of the patients like to be read to by friends or family members. Franckline listens in, trying to expand her notion of what her adopted language might be applied to. These are usually poems that Franckline finds obscure but pleasantly rhythmic, or Bible passages that she knows better in French but enjoys hearing transmuted into the chunky mouthfuls that make up English. Last week a woman read to her sister from a novel about Russians at a great formal dance, princesses and dukes and so on. The two of them got into a lively discussion about the attractiveness of two different types of females, the girlish and the womanly. The pregnant woman said most men preferred the girlish. Her sister said they just pretended to, but really wanted the womanly. Then the patient sighed and asked her sister to put the book away and said she just wished the goddamn baby would come.

If—when—Franckline has this baby, she will not have her sister by her side. Gizelle, the only of her siblings she nearly stayed in Ayiti for. And, had she done so, would the ice in her mother's heart have one day melted, would her aunties and cousins again have felt like the very thumbs and fingers of her hands? But she had been too young to understand about time—time seemed then so large and heavy, a boulder that would crush her. She could not stay and be ground under. She had no idea that time could ever move swiftly, as it does now, that people and their feelings might eventually change. Manman died ten years ago. Franckline had not been there, had not even known until weeks later, when Gizelle tracked her down. Gizelle will know when this child is born. There are neighbors with cell phones now; the country is not as far away as it once was.