I Will Do Better, page 13
Once Lily’s nails were done, they moved on to choosing Lily’s bedtime pajamas. Lily considered, then decided against a striped shirt. A’s response was measured: she told Lily about working at the Gap, showed how you folded a garment. Lily enthusiastically gave it a shot with the striped shirt. A’s laughter was genuine, matter-of-fact: “Please, who doesn’t get sleeves wrong?”
I took her in, digesting how reassuring, how calming, A was. We all snuggled up in bed, started watching an episode of My Little Pony. Lily shared how much fun it would be in the morning: “I’m going to get up early, come out to say hi to you on the foldout bed.” I watched A’s shoulders tense. She seemed to be looking for a way out. Nonetheless she nodded along. “Explain this ‘alicorn’ deal to me. The unicorn has wings? So that means it flies?”
If my heart did not quite melt, my appreciation had no limits.
But I was still seeing Z. To her credit, she had her own principles and refused to visit me at night, after Lily was asleep. “Nice try there,” she’d say. We made do with nooners, sometimes followed by lunch at a burger joint in Harlem. One afternoon, on a walk with her pug, she admitted she wanted to be a mother. “That’s my dream. A house full of jocks, all making chaos.” I froze. The fuck I want more of them. It wasn’t a thought or a reaction, just a brick wall. In some ways, the wall allowed for clarity, as it affirmed my most selfish instincts. This was how I felt. But did I feel this way about doing more parenting? About kids with Z specifically? Was I perhaps reacting to Z’s late-night phone soliloquies, when she could be charming but also might slip, venting without pause about whoever had disappointed her that day? Had mentioning her desire to be a mother been a simple attempt at sharing something important about herself, and I was overreacting, or was it a bigger signal? I couldn’t figure out whether I saw a future for us, let alone whether it was okay to introduce Z to Lily—to say nothing of what might be the right way to do so.
Still, toward the end of August, I gave in. A brutally hot Sunday afternoon. Lily and I loitered outside the Disney Store in Times Square.
“When’s she going to be here?” Lily asked.
Six feet away from her, on the other side of a plexiglass window, an entire galaxy of wonders awaited. Her eyes were wide. She bit her lip. Her hand was damp with sweat and held on to mine, until I let go of hers, wrote out another text.
“Just a little longer,” I said.
Answers were infrequent. Then came apologies. To her credit, Lily remained the most loyal of soldiers, shifting from one little foot from another, awaiting the order to charge.
One more ping: Z and the driver could not figure out how to find the Disney Store in Times Square.
Reader, we stood on that sidewalk for well past thirty minutes. You try it. Try keeping a four-year-old—even the best of troupers—from entering the Disney store on an August afternoon for more than half an hour.
What was best for Lily? I vacillated, turned silent and inward, unable to explain to either woman that I not only was measuring her, but was contrasting her with another. With friends, though, I could be voluminous, so much so that they zoned me out, nodding weakly. Maybe you shouldn’t be with either of them was a reply that stayed in my brain.
Thirty minutes into a late-night call, I heard A’s eyes rolling. “Sorry? Like I haven’t heard that before.”
Lunch. Z stabbed at her tabouli. “You fade away, then reappear. Everything’s supposed to be all fine.”
A: “I don’t doubt that you’re well-meaning.”
Z: “Now you’re present. Now you’re here.”
A: “You have a lot on your plate. I get it.”
Z: “Am I totally on board for those kamikaze lunch dates? Yes, I am.”
A: “I think I’m understanding up the wazoo.”
Z: “—and I don’t have any problem scheduling around those preordained sitter nights.”
A: “But when I need you?”
Z: “Kind of available.”
A: “Half-available—”
Z: “You get all reluctant.”
A: “You’re just trifling.”
Z: “Which just makes no sense—”
A: “It’s like we take one step forward—”
Z: “Then you scurry back into your hole.”
A: “It pisses me off so much.”
Z: “I can’t rely on you.”
A: “So unreliable—”
Z: “I mean, it’s almost like you’re seeing somebody else.”
A: “But there’s no way. You can’t be that much of a shit.”
“WELL THEN, HOW much do you care for A?” Dr. Roberts wanted to know.
“I don’t know how to answer. We have good times. Other times I …”
“Go on,” he said.
“Believe me, I’m more than aware she’s been thrown into the deep end. I can’t tell you how thankful I am. A hangs in there, treading water—as opposed to, what, dog paddling over to the side of the pool and leaping out and running like hell?”
“Noted.”
“Maybe I’m being hypersensitive. I’m just responding to my own, what, overcompensating? But the connection between her and Lily—in particular, how tense A gets. I see it. And once I see it, I can’t unsee.”
My therapist answered with conviction. By continuing things with A, I was making an implicit promise. The effort she was making may have been of her own free will. However, if I cared about her well-being, I had to be considerate of the emotional commitment that went into her efforts.
One way or the other, I had to be fair to her.
“Fuck me,” I said.
BUT THEN Z and I were at a thing, it doesn’t matter what, just that Terri Jay Cello was babysitting, and I’d given a concrete time for our return.
“What’s she going to do?” Z asked. “Leave your kid home alone?”
She’d used this line more than once. It was a way of trying to extend the evening, trying to keep our thing going.
Tonight it struck me in a bad place.
Not long after Diana had passed, a posting had led me to the poet Diane di Prima’s memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. Di Prima tells the story of a night Allen Ginsberg was having a party: Jack Kerouac and a few other big names were in town. The evening promised to be, as di Prima put it, “one of those nights with lots of important intense talk about writing you don’t remember later.” She got a friend to babysit her young daughter and promised to be home by 11:30 p.m. That night turned out to be everything you’d want from a high-end literary beat party. Kerouac was half-crocked, to the point where he was stretched out on the linoleum. When the clock hit the magic point, di Prima started saying goodbye. Kerouac raised himself onto an elbow and announced, “DI PRIMA, UNLESS YOU FORGET ABOUT YOUR BABYSITTER, YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO BE A WRITER.”
Horrible, right? The defining utterance of an entitled male asshole.
“I considered this carefully, then and later,” di Prima wrote, “and allowed that at least part of me thought he was right. But nevertheless I got up and went home … I’d given my word to my friend, and I would keep it. Maybe I was never going to be a writer, but I had to risk it. That was the risk that was hidden (like a Chinese puzzle) inside the other risk of: can I be a single mom and be a poet?”
Obviously, I didn’t have to choose between writing and parenting. Where di Prima was clawing to enter and exist within a foreign world, the world of male writers, during an era when male writers were, pretty much, everything, my writing may have taken a hit, sure, but while I’d been resentful, I’d also recognized there wasn’t an absolute, either/or situation. No, I was trying to enter a different separate land. In its own way, this might have been an equally hostile place, seeing how a prenatal umbilical connection with my daughter was something I most def did not possess. Most of the time, I had jack squat natural instincts about what to do. I guess in this way, I can claim to have been like di Prima at that party in that I was trying hard, but firmly out of my element.
There’s a good argument that when Z asked, “What’s she going to do?” more than simply trying to keep our evening going, more than wanting to further our bonding, in point of fact Z was fighting for our relationship out on the sidewalk, brawling for the domestic future she wanted with me, doing so in this instance by offering me an out, appealing to that selfish me, the me that wanted to stay longer, to spend time in the world with a beautiful woman.
Was that so selfish?
I gave enough, didn’t I?
I remember screaming at Z on the street in the middle of the night.
“Fuck over someone who does you a favor? Who are you? Fuck your friends, next time, tell me, who’s going to answer the call?”
I GOT HOME late, a few minutes, nothing substantial. The bedroom door was closed, meaning Lily was asleep. The living room was equally subdued: dim lights, Terri Jay Cello on the couch, wrapped in an Indian blanket, near the rattling, blasting air conditioner. Her lower face was lit by the blue glow of her laptop.
She looked up. “Something happened.”
Terri Jay got up and took two steps toward the other side of the window, the orange wooden bookcase modules. She motioned toward the middle shelf.
The red velvet box was open like a clam. Out, next to it: the vase.
“Lily asked me if I wanted to see her mommy,” said Terri.
“Excuse me?” As I asked, I knew I should worry.
“I didn’t realize what was happening,” Terri Jay said. “I thought Lily was going to show me pictures of Diana. But she led me to the box. I started to tell her no. Then I thought about it. I took out the vase. I told her it wasn’t safe for her to touch. But Lily started to get upset. She wanted to see her mommy. She said her mommy was in there.”
All at once: the horror of what I was being told; the sickening sensation of being told it at the end of this of all nights; and, worst of all, the separate and very significant difference between the mother Diana would have been and the realities I was trying to force into being acceptable.
I ran my hand back over my forehead, rubbed my palms into my eyes.
“I’m sorry, Charles. I had the thought, Why shouldn’t she?”
I was going to vomit. Any second.
“I unscrewed the lid,” Terri Jay continued. “I showed her. I did. We talked to Diana. Lily said, ‘Hi, Mommy.’ She and I both said we missed her. Lily told her mother she loved her.”
“That’s intense.”
She shrugged. “It just seemed”—Terri was near tears—“why say no?”
MY MIND WAS not on a razor’s edge that night, but since it wasn’t powering down, either, I followed its directives, and stayed up well past my self-imposed curfew, preparing for yet another awkward, loving conversation that I had to initiate. Stress my love for her, that much was clear. Encourage her to talk to the vase whenever she needed. To put her hands on the vase, if she felt that was necessary. But I also had to be clear: this vase was heavy. It was a bad idea—a very bad idea—to pick up this vase. We wanted to keep this vase here with us. We wanted Mommy all in one place.
The living room was all wall shadows and midnight hues.
I don’t know when or just what possessed me, but soon I headed over to the modules, stood in front of the velvet box, and put my hands on each side of the top of the urn. It’s not like I put a lot of thought into this; at the same time, I was alert to what I was doing. More than alert. It was almost as if these movements had been laid out for me, I was just following along to predetermined dance steps on the floor. However, I don’t want to deny my agency: I was conscious, aware, wanting to see what would happen.
Though I’d just scribbled out notes for tomorrow’s conversation, including remarks about the weight of the urn, still, when I picked up that thing, I was surprised. How heavy it was. How smooth. How well-made. I pressed on its rim, turning until I got that soft metallic release. Then I opened the lid. The edges of the plastic bag were crumpled; it took me a moment to find the opening. I placed my finger. Pressed. The ash was fine; at the same time there was a roughness to it. Softer than gravel, just as dry.
A film coated my fingerprint. I raised it toward my face.
I’ve never admitted this. Never talked about it with anyone. But I opened my mouth.
My wife’s ashes felt chalky on my tongue. They had a bone-dry taste, one that was pointed, unpleasant. Not even distinct—not something I recognized, say. But the taste of something that did not age, that remained outside the rules of time. The ashes tasted rotten. Forbidden. The ashes in my mouth were not meant to be tasted. They were not meant to be swallowed.
LAMPPOST SHADOWS LENGTHENING across the pavement; the rim of sky darkening that much earlier; shorts and tees folded into plastic bins, stored under the bed.
“When is A going to visit again,” Lily asked.
“Why isn’t Z coming over anymore?” Lily wanted to know.
You tell yourself you are the good one. You are the hero of this story. Certainly, you don’t think of yourself as the villain in other stories that are out there.
But those stories are being told.
A late-night phone call. “You’ll never guess where I am,” A said. I knew somewhere in the upper Midwest, supposedly visiting her parents. I asked if she’d been drinking. “You could say that.” She revealed the answer: on her former campus, wandering the halls of her old communications department. A announced each step as if doing a play-by-play. She slurred a bit, meandering, anecdotal, wanting to stay on the phone.
Her sloppiness took me aback. I felt as if some kind of boundary had been crossed, that a familiarity was being assumed—worse, was being taken advantage of. Okay, she was having a hard time being back home, a completely reasonable reaction: Who doesn’t feel it in some way or another? But her neediness put me on alert. I envisioned a door—to drunken forays? to what else?—being opened.
What I thought was: That’s enough for me.
The afternoon Z was performative for a waiter in a manner that wasn’t quite flirting, but still made no sense, a message I could not decipher.
On their own, they don’t stand up. Not as reasons to end a romance.
Not unless you’ve been auditioning those women, constantly thinking about down the road.
Z was irate—with how things ended, and that I had ended them. “Who do you think you’re pulling this on?”
By contrast, A went silent; we simply went our separate ways.
On one particular side of the road, the impact was apparent: Lily kept picking out her outfits, but didn’t show the same engagement, settling quickly for the first or second thing she saw. She sat at her little table and held her crayon and sort of spaced out, occupied in her own world. Her head hung at an odd, unhappy angle. I went to sit with her, joining in her art project. Rather than encouraging me to cut along the lines, Lily got loud and bossy. She waved her arms, knocking over her full glass of water. She started having similar problems spilling drinks, dropping cups. We came up with a saying, “Two hands, no spills.” Still she spilled.
I knew to give her time; she was making a big adjustment. At the same time, these adjustments were already entrenched, recurrent happenings in her life—yet another cool sitter landing that real job, no longer arriving on Wednesday nights. To Lily they hadn’t been sitters, none of them; they’d been friends. And they’d all left her. More female figures who weren’t part of her days anymore.
I couldn’t explain to Lily why this was happening.
“I JUST—I just keep reminding myself of the larger question. The more important question.”
Dr. Roberts took the bait: “And that is?”
“Would Diana have wanted either of these woman raising Lily?”
This was my finishing move, my conversation ender, my official way out. Only Dr. Roberts did not wait to pounce.
“Isn’t that a cop-out?” he asked.
I couldn’t believe what I’d heard, looked at him like he was nuts.
“You were fucking two women. Each of them was invested. Wholly. At points in their lives where this mattered.”
“Well—”
“And though it’s certainly your right to decide neither was the right one for you—”
“For me and Lily,” I said.
Dr. Mark Roberts furrowed his brow. I could tell he was measuring his next step.
“Three weeks ago you were ready to let Lily stay with her grandma indefinitely.”
“Mark.”
“Maybe there’s an argument that recognizing what she means to you is a step forward for you—”
“HEY.”
“Okay. Let’s put aside Lily for a moment.”
“Why are you going so hard on me?” I asked. “Where is this coming from?”
A few seconds straightening his tie, his actions almost acted as a resetting. “I’ve been listening to this for a while now. I don’t have to stay neutral. You up for some tough love? Come on. It’s actually kind of fun.”
I studied him—him and that goading, satisfied grin.
He began: “You never revealed to A or Z that there was someone else, did you?”
My silence acknowledged this truth, yes.
“For your own growth, it’s worth recognizing that whether or not you were in any kind of official or recognized relationship—and I’m talking about with either of these women—you weren’t being fair. You weren’t an honest actor.”
“Recognized,” I said.
“Any claims toward a larger decency, any moral authority, or any sort of a mature perspective, they all go out the window when you are not honest.” He let that sink in, continued. “Oftentimes, not being honest comes from the impulse to not take responsibility—for your actions, for your decisions.”
Making sure I was following, Dr. Roberts sort of rolled his hand, as if guiding me into his next point. “Admittedly, you’ve already got more responsibility with Lily than you know what to do with, which is especially hard, seeing that you’re someone who’s spent a considerable amount of your adult history avoiding responsibility.”
