The day before the clinic I woke early, took half of Jackson to a museum and showed him — I was sure it was a him — my favorite Rauschenberg and stood there twenty minutes so that he would remember. I splurged on fine coffee, sparkling water from France, fresh-squeezed orange juice thick with pulp. The sun was out for the first time in weeks so we headed to a roof garden with a view of the water and I read poems and stories that I hoped would help him to understand what it is I was saving him from. At seven weeks, his lungs and liver and ears and mouth were being formed, and his heart, beating with one chamber, would soon have formed a dividing wall. Since his couldn’t, I swore to form divisions in my own.
The terms they use at the clinic versus the ones they must use with happy couples at the regular doctor’s: I see the pregnancy, said a nurse named Viv, not I see the baby. I asked to see and collapsed into sobs but still not letting her turn the screen away. Using the scratchy paper draped over my naked bottom half to wipe my face. I remembered hearing how abortion clinics in the Midwest are required to show the sonogram, that a significant number of children are born because of this.
Viv asked after my support system, which really meant: and what about the father?
“Oh, he’s been great,” I lied, shocked at myself. “We’re both just real sad we can’t keep it, but our financial situation — you know.”
Viv didn’t believe me, but she nodded, smiled wide and long.
I chose the at-home option, because three to five minutes under anesthesia just didn’t seem like enough suffering. The literature warned that some blood clots could be as big as lemons or oranges, and I couldn’t help but think that fruit seemed a malicious analogy.
The painkillers did not help so much as abbreviate the wincing into smaller, simpler blocks. Despite precautions, the sheets were left stained; I disposed of them the next day and slept on the bare pilled mattress for nearly a month. I didn’t tell anyone and simply stopped going to work, because the thought of nannying someone else’s child seemed as impossible as time travel. The family left increasingly angry, then panicked voice mails. Sometimes I didn’t hear the phone and sometimes I did, in which case I would watch it light up and vibrate with wonder. That the family I had worked for before — all things now categorized as before and after — still existed, still managed to force Brie and apple and candied walnut salads into their children’s mouths before rushing out of their multimillion-dollar home, was hard to believe.
~ ~ ~
Paul forced his way in some six days or two weeks later and found me on the stained mattress watching television about the bottom of the ocean. I offered him something to drink and realized that all I had was long-expired soy milk (Jackson’s) and a bottle of apple juice that had begun to ferment. I held it to the light and tilted it wistfully, watched it unsettle; it made me happy, in a small way, to see something change by my own hand, to observe another form rotting quietly.
When I returned, Paul was sitting on the bed — it felt wrong to see him sitting so casually on the physical space where I’d lost the last of Jackson and me — sorting through the pile of pamphlets and pill bottles I hadn’t bothered to move.
“Jesus, Ida,” he said. “Jesus Jesus Jesus.” He looked down at where he sat, at the deep brown-and-red stain, and adjusted himself so that no part of his body touched it. He saw my face and froze.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just—”
• • •
I don’t know how he managed to reach him, but he must have told Jackson, because shortly after the checks started coming; they bore no personal note, and absurd amounts of money. I called James, who confirmed that their grandfather, an oil-guy Texan they’d met twice who taught his dog to bark at the word “Democrat” and had never gotten along with his son and their father, had finally bit the old bullet and they’d both received enough money to last quite some time.
~ ~ ~
It’s too bad what I did to Paul. It’s also too bad this is the best way I have of expressing it, and funny because I imagine that this is the way Jackson describes the way he treated me, artfully deflecting any blame: “It’s too bad what happened with Ida.” Too bad refers to that which was unavoidable in the wake of something greater or more important. It’s too bad what I did to Paul, though in those months it grew to be a kind of playful diversion, testing the limits of manipulation possible through the arch of my back, the jut of my hipbones, a few words in the right places.
Paul clung even more heavily after the abortion and suggested in small ways how that particular expression of my vulnerability had begun to turn his feelings of friendship slowly into lust. He encouraged my every pathetic triumph and rewarded me with small tokens; whether I actively accepted them didn’t matter. He was pleased when I showered, tousled my wet hair and complimented my scent; he laughed loud and long when I made even the smallest, darkest joke; he praised the small herb garden on the fire escape (that I grew out of guilt for lying to James) and brought expensive fertilizers. It should also be said that he made his presence dependable when there were no small triumphs, when I began to revert to silence and starvation, and I began to rely on it. He was the only one who gave me permission. Instead of suffering alone, I let Paul come over and took pleasure in sending cruel words out of my mouth knowing there would be no consequences. Though I had, in a sense, grown to love them, these things I made, I forced him to watch while I hurled the potted plants off of the balcony and enjoyed his small moans.
He very nearly almost won. Somewhere in between the moments of the small triumphs and the fits, he nudged his way in. He made me smile. He showed up with Thai food and comforts and curiosities: an old cowboy belt buckle that concealed a fine silver lighter, sheets of luxuriously high thread counts, a bathrobe with deep pockets, etchings of various types of octopi.
And so, one night, while he happily supervised my consumption of too much whiskey and slowly placed his fingers on my back, I did not stiffen. And when he began kneading, it seemed, every single disk of my back into a singular and celebrated entity, I was grateful. And when he began to separate not just the muscles of my back but also my legs, I did not stop him. And when I couldn’t hear the sounds of the film we’d been watching over his desperate grunting, I didn’t complain, just kept staring and made up the characters’ words, wrapped my legs around the small of his back halfheartedly, and observed as the two people on the screen exchanged proclamations of love and humor I wanted to understand but couldn’t.
I am ashamed of the extravagant things I said and did in the weeks and months afterward, although I don’t feel I had much choice given the way he grinned after we had sex, how he told me he loved me during. We took a vacation to Mexico that was in all regards perfect besides it being a lie, but he must have known on some level the fallacy of the sparkling lemonade we drank on those beaches, must have suspected the real reason I wanted him only on top with his head buried between my neck and shoulders. I loved Paul and still do, but could only stand it if I was able to memorize the ceiling above us. Our whole relationship, in retrospect, seems an exercise in ceilings; I praised him and lavished him in words of adoration and felt shocked at the levels of devotion he was willing to believe I felt sincerely.