The World Without You (4 page)

“Or
Playboy
,” said Nathaniel. “Girls of the mental ward.”

It was the summer they discovered bad late-night TV. The cable hadn’t been switched off by the previous tenants, so they would stay up until two in the morning in Nathaniel’s Somerville apartment drinking beer and eating pizza while beneath them on Beacon Street teenagers were playing their boom boxes outside the Star Market. In the morning, they would haul themselves out of bed and into the shower and, with a doughnut in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, they would negotiate the hazards of rush hour, descending into the bowels of the Porter Square station to take the T to work. Clarissa was always saying that the only difference between the patients and the staff was who had the keys. That as much as anything steered her away from psychology—she has taken another path entirely: she does foundation work, doling out money for international relief—because that summer she felt as if she and Nathaniel lived alone on a little island of mental health.

Through July and August, staying up late with their beer and pizza, they would talk about their respective life plans, making sure not to imply that the other was included; it was still early, after all. But it bothered Nathaniel, he later admitted, that Clarissa thought she didn’t want to have children. It cast suspicion on her and made him realize there were things about her he didn’t know.

That first year, they lived in separate apartments in Morningside Heights, a five-minute walk from Nathaniel’s office. But it was Nathaniel who suggested they move to Brooklyn, to one of the child-friendly neighborhoods near Prospect Park. A couple of years later, when marriage came up, Nathaniel wanted to know whether Clarissa would consider having children with him. If she wouldn’t, he wasn’t sure he could marry her.

To hear it put so baldly startled Clarissa. If Nathaniel wanted a mother for his children, he should have chosen someone else; there were plenty of women who’d have been happy to bear his child. It felt crude and utilitarian, not to mention unromantic, as if their relationship had been driven by an ulterior motive she’d only now unearthed. It made her wonder whether she and Nathaniel should be getting married in the first place; for a time it seemed they would have to break up.

But they loved each other, and when Clarissa, despite holding no stock in biological clocks, began to see her friends have children; when she held a friend’s baby and, to her surprise, was overcome by an almost visceral pull; when she turned thirty-one, and thirty-two, and she started to realize that although she wasn’t a kids person, exactly, she wasn’t exactly not a kids person either; when she began to think that if she never had a child she might someday regret it—when she felt all this, and saw how important it was to Nathaniel, she agreed to try.

But a year passed, and another, and they hadn’t begun yet. She was thirty-five, she was thirty-six, she was thirty-seven, and it seemed they were in a holding pattern from which they couldn’t emerge. Then Leo was killed, and she decided they couldn’t wait any longer. Because she’d been planning her life and her brother went off and died, and there was no point, she realized, in planning things.

Something happened when it didn’t work those first few months, and she panicked, realizing she’d waited so long to get pregnant that now she might not be able to. It wasn’t supposed to happen, this savage, seemingly chemical urge to reproduce. Maybe it’s the power of suggestion, living in Brooklyn, home to the world’s greatest population explosion. Whatever the reason, this wish to have a baby has blindsided her, has blindsided Nathaniel too, who has found in the last year that he doesn’t recognize the person he married.

She’s dressed now, folding laundry in the alcove outside their bedroom, while Nathaniel is in the bathroom taking a shower. She removes her cello from its case and seats herself on the ottoman.

“Something to sing by?” Nathaniel calls out.

“I guess.” Though it’s hard to sing to Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B Minor: there are no words. “You can hum to it,” she says, but Nathaniel can’t hear her from beneath the shower water.

When he steps out of the bathroom, she’s still moving the bow across the strings. He taps her lightly with his towel. “I thought you were in a rush to get going.”

“Careful,” she says, poking him. “You don’t want to get water on the strings.”

It’s only in the last year that she has started to play again. For years—for decades, in fact—her cello remained in storage. It fell into desuetude, she likes to say, though really it fell into disrepute. She didn’t so much as want to look at it. It pains her to play—she’s such a pale version of what she once was—but she’s driven to do it nonetheless. Music calms her in a way nothing else does, in a way it never used to when she was playing seriously.

They’ve been hoping to beat the holiday traffic, but now, as they drive through downtown Brooklyn, it seems the traffic has beaten them. On Flatbush Avenue, they’re stalled across the street from an Italian restaurant. “We could stop for a whole meal,” Nathaniel says, “in the time it would take us to get down this block.”

The Brooklyn Bridge is backed up, too. A couple of police officers flank the entrance ramp, one of them checking the trunk of a van.

“It’s only July second,” Clarissa says. “Imagine what it will be like tomorrow and the Fourth.” Green threats, yellow threats, orange threats, red threats: it’s hard for her to remember what means what. Hard, too, to stay on high alert. Watching the police officers search the van, she thinks of Leo, of course, though Leo was in Baghdad when he was killed, not on the Brooklyn Bridge. And heightened security was the last thing on his mind. For as long as she can remember, he preferred heightened insecurity.

“When does Noelle get in?”

“Four?” she says. “Maybe four-thirty?” She rifles through her bag to find her date book.

“I haven’t seen her in …”

“A year.” Noelle flew in for Leo’s funeral, but when it was over she returned to Jerusalem, and she hasn’t been back since. Money is tight for her and Amram. Still, Clarissa thinks, how can she have absented herself for so long? When they spoke in February, Clarissa told Noelle she’d pay for a flight, but Noelle refused; she said she’d fly in for the memorial.

“And Amram,” Nathaniel says.

“Mister Asparagus Pee.” It’s what Clarissa and Lily still call Amram. Amram and Noelle went to high school together, though back then he was known as Arthur. Arthur was the class prankster, overweight and disheveled, well liked in the way that overweight boys can be well liked, whereas a girl as heavy as Arthur would have been ostracized. Arthur was always turning scatology into philosophy. He wove elaborate theories as to why people liked the smell of their own farts; he considered suitable for scientific inquiry the question of why some people’s pee smelled after they ate asparagus while other people’s didn’t. Apparently, it was a matter of having a particular enzyme, but Arthur hypothesized that it wasn’t the pee itself but the ability to smell it that distinguished the two groups. One day, when asparagus was being served at lunch, a bunch of ninth-grade boys could be seen shuttling in and out of the bathroom under Arthur’s supervision to smell each other’s pee.

Now, as they head up the West Side Highway, Nathaniel gives a desultory wave in the direction of his office. Above the branches, Clarissa can make out the tops of the buildings on Riverside Drive. It’s the neighborhood where she spent much of her childhood. Evenings, from her family’s balcony, she used to stare across the Hudson at the Palisades, the amusement park flickering, the Ferris wheel lit up like an enormous necklace.

“Are you ready for the next few days?”

She looks at him forlornly: how could she possibly be?

An airplane streaks across the horizon, drawing something in chalk, but the writing disappears as soon as it’s been printed, lost in the cloud cover and the darkening sky, the hints of impending rain.

“Did you write out your speech?”

She shakes her head.

“You’ll have time when you get there.”

“It might be better just to speak it. Sometimes when you prepare it’s even worse.”

A car backfires. Or maybe it’s fireworks already going off. Even as a girl she was indifferent to fireworks, the boom like a rifle’s recoil, the smear of color across the sky; you’ve seen one firework, she thought then, you’ve seen them all. Now, though, it feels like taunting: all that enforced good cheer. She thinks, the nerve of Leo to die on the Fourth. As Nathaniel drives on, she falls asleep to the hum of the movement, the ticking of the grates beneath their tires. She dreams of Leo. He’s not doing anything—he’s just hovering on the edges—but she has an image of him as a baby, and of her changing him on the table beside his crib. Another image comes to her, a Saturday and it’s raining out, and she’s watching Leo, who’s only ten months old, thinking he’s going to talk someday, that he’s going to have opinions. It seemed inconceivable at the time, and in that inability to conceive lay a sorrow too, that her brother would grow up and eventually leave her. Often now, when she reflects on her newfound maternal impulses, she thinks back to how she felt about Leo, and she realizes these impulses have always been there and they’ve simply been submerged.

She is woken by the sound of a cell phone ringing. She reaches into her bag, but it’s Nathaniel’s phone, not hers.

He pulls over to the side of the road. He’s nodding, nodding, taking in some news.

“Who was that?” she asks when he hangs up.

“The chair of the department,” he says. “It seems I’ve won some award.”

“Nathaniel!” she says. “Congratulations!”

“I guess.”

“What do you mean you
guess
?"

He’s quiet.

“Well? Aren’t you going to tell me what it’s for?”

“Outstanding teacher of the year. I’m supposed to give a final lecture.”

“A
final
lecture?”

“Exactly. I’m forty-four years old, and they’re already packing me off. They’ll hang me like antlers from the wall.”

“Look at you. It’s amazing news, and you turn it into a cause for mourning.”

“I’m just dreading it, that’s all.”

Nathaniel is a professor at Columbia, a behavioral economist turned neuroscientist, possessor of not one but two PhDs. He doesn’t like to talk about this—his PhDs, his success, his work in general. Now, though, the secret is out, because last year he appeared on the cover of the
New York Times Magazine
in an article called “The New Frontier: How Neuroscience Is Reshaping Human Consciousness.” To Nathaniel, this has all been mortifying. The photograph, certainly—he still gets ribbed by his colleagues—but also the phrase “whispers of a future Nobel Prize,” which appeared in the article next to his name. He’s aware of these whispers; he’d just prefer it if the rest of the world weren’t aware of them, too. Clarissa likes to say that his carefully honed reputation for sloth has been ruined. But that’s not what bothers him. He’s simply embarrassed by it all. “It’s the life of an extremely small-time rock star.” Only that, he says, overstates matters. He doubts there’s a rock star small-time enough to rival him.

Now, on the Merritt Parkway, he’s close to the car in front of him, too close, Clarissa thinks, so she tells him this, and he touches his foot to the brake. There’s construction ahead. A car is pulled over at the side of the road, and people stop to rubberneck. From behind them comes the sound of a police siren. “I think I’m about to ovulate,” Clarissa says. She has this idea that there’s an exact moment they’re supposed to have sex, though the window is a good deal larger than that, twenty-four to thirty-six hours, most people say. But within that window, certain times must be better than others.

“We don’t have to do this,” Nathaniel says.

“Do what?”

“Be so precise about things.”

“Precision matters.”

Still, he wonders aloud whether there might not be a better approach. No basal thermometers or home ovulation kits. Just have sex when they want to. It would relieve the pressure from them.

“It would decrease our chances.”

“It’s just that you’re so anxious,” he says.

Anxiety, she knows, can contribute to infertility. Not getting pregnant is making her anxious, which is making her not get pregnant. Maybe if she pretended she didn’t want it so much it would come to her unbidden.

“Worse comes to worse, there’s adoption.”

She knows this, of course, but it stings her to hear it. There are subjects she simply can’t contemplate, as if merely to entertain them will bring them on.

Ahead of them, the traffic moves so slowly it appears not to be moving at all. She thinks of drives to the Berkshires when she was a girl, those weekends when it seemed to her that everything was one long car ride, she and her sisters jostling in the backseat, Leo on their mother’s lap in front, their father behind the wheel singing songs, making up word jumbles and dictionary games, doing whatever he could to distract them.

A mist settles on the car. Nathaniel sprays wiper fluid across the windshield, and for an instant it feels as if they’re driving through a carwash before the view in front of them clears up.

She removes a Kit Kat from the glove compartment, then puts it back. She knows what Nathaniel would say. If you couldn’t eat chocolate the entire French population would have died out by now. But you could say the same thing about wine, and she’s staying away from that.

They cross the Massachusetts border and make a pit stop, and when she returns she says, “I’m ovulating.”

“How do you know?”

“I just took a test.”

“In the middle of Seven-Eleven?”

She explains to Nathaniel what he should already know, that when the test turns positive you’re set to ovulate in twenty-four to thirty-six hours. But at that point you should already be having sex; the best time to start is two days beforehand. “We need to have sex right now.”

“Absolutely,” he says. “We’ll just pull over to the side of the road. We’ll hump unobtrusively on the hood of the car.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”