An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir (15 page)

Even now I feel a scalding, pleasureless relief that I pressed Claudelle to see me that morning. I wish I had pressed her more; I wish I had alarmed her into sending me immediately to the hospital — the one in Bordeaux, or the more terrifying one five minutes away from her office. But in the absence of that, I am relieved that when she said, Come at five, I’d said no. If I’d gone at five, Pudding would have been dead already. I wouldn’t have known when it had happened, and I don’t know how I would have gone forward in the world.

A
year and three days after the morning I checked out of the hospital, Edward and I woke up in our second rented house in Saratoga Springs, an enormous Victorian we’d moved to a month before. The grubby rental house was around the corner. We might have stayed, but the owners decided to put it on the market, and so we ended up a block away, in a place that, it would turn out, had bats. We ate a small breakfast and wondered what the day would be like. We still weren’t people who could say under such circumstances, “By this time tomorrow, we’ll have a baby!”

I got dressed in a pair of stretchy black pants and a stretchy black top and put on lipstick and asked Edward to take my photograph: I hadn’t posed for a single picture for all of this pregnancy. I stood on the porch and smiled. It was a lovely spring day. Then we walked to the hospital.

Nurses are like anyone else when it comes to small talk, and while they went about their work they asked the usual questions. Boy or girl? Have you picked out a name? Are you wearing
lipstick?
To deliver a baby? At one point I had nurses on both arms looking for a likely vein for the IV. “You have very slender veins,” said one, pulling out a failed line.

“Shall we call for Marilyn?” another asked.

No, I thought, I wouldn’t name a baby Marilyn.

The mention of Marilyn, legendarily good at IVs, roused the competitive spirit of the first nurse. “Let me try again,” she said, and moved up my arm. This time when she failed she left behind an enormous amethyst bruise.

“Shall we call for anesthesia?” said the nurse who’d suggested calling for Marilyn, and I thought dreamily,
Anesthesia. That’s a nice name
.

The anesthesiologist came to put in the IV. He thought we looked familiar, and realized he’d seen us the night before at the DMV. That was somehow unnerving.

The nurse started the Pitocin drip. Dr. Knoeller came by.

“What are you thinking for names?” she asked.

We said we weren’t sure.

“Well,” she said, “I have a spare boy’s name, if it’s a boy.”

We stared at her, our hearts full of love, sure that this would be the best boy’s name ever.

“Lance,” she said.

Which immediately struck me as an unfortunate name for the son of a doctor.

Even happy labor stories can be excruciating in their details. The Pitocin drip went in at 9:30 a.m. I was hooked up to a fetal heart rate monitor and a contraction monitor, the same sorts I’d been on twice a week at the practice. After several hours I asked the young nurse, “Am I having any contractions yet?”

“ ’Bout every two to three minutes,” she said. I hadn’t felt a thing.

I was glad that Edward hadn’t been in the room for Pudding’s delivery: now, when I looked up at him from the delivery table it would be new, and when he told me we were almost there it would be new, it would be what I’d expected, and wholly unfamiliar. He opened a book to read to me.
David Copperfield
this time, which begins with a hair-raising birth. “Keep going,” I told him, admiring the great girth of the rest of the account of that baby’s life.

Dr. Knoeller stripped my membranes at 5:00. At 6:00 I asked for an epidural. At 7:36 —

I’m skipping some details: the baby’s heart began to decelerate during contractions. Dr. Knoeller came in to check me and was surprised to see that I was fully dilated. The baby’s heartbeat continued to decelerate during contractions. I became aware of the decelerations, even though I couldn’t feel the contractions: I could hear the beeping monitor. I started to watch the clock on the wall and could see that sometimes the heartbeats were in step with the second hand: sixty beats a minute, good for a grown-up but bad for a baby. My old fetish, the heartbeat. This monitor, threaded up me and onto the baby’s head, had a cold science-fiction beep. It was time to push, but it was hard when the effort came at the same time the heartbeat slowed: I tried to concentrate on my work,
the work,
but I couldn’t with that soundtrack. They put an oxygen mask on me so the baby would get more oxygen. Dr. Knoeller and the nurses told me that I was doing wonderfully, I was almost there. Edward was stroking my forehead and saying the same thing. Maybe they were lying. I suspected that they were. One of the nurses said to Dr. Knoeller — I didn’t hear her, thank God; Edward told me later — that the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. They told me to rest, and the heartbeat sped up. They told me to push and it slowed down again.

Then the heartbeat stopped.

Then my heart broke.

And then — look, we’re at 7:36 again — there was suddenly a toasty warm, hollering, wet baby on my chest, and Edward and I were laughing, and laughing, and laughing. He was actual! An actual baby, pulled from the dream of my body into the shocking wakefulness of earthly life. Maybe he thought the same of us: all that warmth, those dim voices, the love taps, the questions — I thought I’d made you up.

“It’s a little boy!” said Edward.

“Did you see?” said Dr. Knoeller.

“A little boy!” Edward told her.

He was small and skinny, six pounds and change, twenty inches long.

When Dr. Knoeller left she kissed us, and hugged us, and said, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m up for doing this again.”

Even so, we didn’t name him Lance.

In the hospital room, we tried out names. We hadn’t seriously played at this game since before Pudding was born. He looked absolutely unlike a Moses. He looked, in fact, like Edward, fair-haired and big-eyed and worried. “Isn’t he just like his father!” the nurses kept saying admiringly, as though this was a great trick the three of us had pulled off. Oh, he was beautiful, entirely himself.

We discussed Barnaby, Felix, Thomas, and Arthur. “The boy who wasn’t Mabel,” Lib said, when Edward called. We understood that Oscar was out: we were pretty sure that’s what Pudding’s name would have been, had he lived. This baby deserved a name of his own. But what would suit him?

“Barnaby Harvey,” I kept saying, and Edward shook his head.

“I’ve always loved the name Thomas,” he kept saying, and I shook my head.

“August,” he said, reading from the book of baby names I’d bought fifteen years before for fictional characters. “We could call him Augie, or Gus. Gus, I think.”

“Sidney,” I said.

“Maybe. Sidney. Sid. It’s a no-nonsense, tough name, Sid. Your mate down at the pub.”

The Sid I knew best was the husband of the president of my grandmother’s temple sisterhood, a sweet uxorious pharmacist. “Maybe not,” I said.

“Gus, then,” said Edward. “I think Gus.”

That night, when Edward went home to get some sleep, I tried it out. The baby was in his plastic hospital bassinet, swaddled into a neat and uncanny little package. I could see only his head in its mint green cap. “Hello, Gus,” I said. “Hello, Gussie. Hello, Gusling. Hello, Gosling.”

Sometime around 2:00 a.m., it had settled in my mind, and so I told the baby the story of his older brother. I really did: this isn’t literary fancifulness. He was a little, little baby, and I told him the story out loud, not knowing when we might tell him again: I wanted him to know how glad we were to see him, and how sad we were that he’d never know his older brother.

“I think your name is Gus,” I told him, and of course now I can’t imagine why we thought his name could ever be anything else.

L
ater that week, after we’d come home from the hospital, the baby clothes arrived from England. We’d thrown away anything really difficult, or burned it behind Savary. Still, for a while I just stood and looked at open boxes. Then I took out a piece of clothing, a pair of blue striped pull-on pants, and without thinking I brought them to my face and breathed in.

Of course they wouldn’t smell like him. He died in Bordeaux. What sentimental perfume did I think I’d find on them anyhow, what essence of Puddingness?

And yet they did smell of him. That is, they smelled of the sweet milky French baby soap we’d bought in Duras. Savary had a washing machine but not a dryer, and we’d washed everything and then hung it to dry on the lines on the south side of the terrace. Those lines were way over my head — I had to stand on tiptoe and grab them down — and the clothes were very small and sweet as they dried. So the pants and everything in the box
did
smell like Pudding, that is, they smelled of our last optimistic days at the house as we did the last bits of nest feathering before we brought our son home. I’d forgotten the smell (as you do of a lost person), but now here it was, three boxes full.

I found that my heart could take it, and I started to unpack. At first every now and then I’d get a flutter and think,
I remember when I bought this for him,
and then I’d look at the label inside — Baby Gap or Old Navy or Carter’s — and would realize it was a hand-me-down from the little American boy in Cambridge. A few articles of clothing felt very sad to me, items of clothing so charming and peculiar that they’d been part of the story we’d told ourselves, “Our Life with Pudding”: some particularly stylish clothing that my friend Monica had sent to us, the tiny pair of plaid wool knee pants that I’d bought in Bergerac for two euros. We’d often looked at this clothing when I’d been pregnant, and hurriedly packed it up when we’d returned from the hospital. We put away the sweaters that Edward’s mother had made, because they had been made particularly for Pudding. They’re his, and his alone.

But even the most fraught of the other clothing feels fine now. Of course it reminds us of Pudding, but when have we ever forgotten? Indeed, we want to remember him, and it doesn’t feel strange or grim to put Gus into a pair of pants that we’d imagined Pudding wearing. People wear clothing that belonged to their dead all the time: a father’s Irish sweater, a grandfather’s felt hat, a grandmother’s Peter Pan–collared shirt. I can look at those plaid pants and remember, for once, not Pudding’s death, but the pleasure I took in finding them for sale, for so cheap, how funny I thought those plaid pants would look on a little boy.

And now I’m thinking of that Florida lady again, the one who wanted a book about the lighter side of a child’s death, and I know: all she wanted was permission to remember her child with pleasure instead of grief. To remember that he was dead, but to remember him without pain: he’s dead but of course she still loves him, and that love isn’t morbid or bloodstained or unsightly, it doesn’t need to be shoved away.

It isn’t so much to ask.

W
hen I was pregnant with Gus, toward the end especially, there was nothing in my life that was not bittersweet. Every piece of hope was tinged with sadness; every moment of relief was lit on the edges with worry. But now that Gus is Stateside, my love for him is just plain love, just plain sweet. He’s such a beautiful funny thing, entirely himself, innocent of history. “It’s you!” I say to him. “All that time, it was you! Who’d ’a thunk it?”

Of course he doesn’t erase his older brother’s death. He’s a little baby: we’d never ask him to do such a job. Monkeying in the ways of the dead is for reincarnated llamas, or infant queens, not our child. His job is to be Gus. In this he more than pulls his weight.

He has cured me, mostly, of blame and what might have been, all of that fairy-tale bargaining:
what would you do differently
and
what if
. I know my fairy tales. Those bargains are disastrous: you ask for what you want, and then your words get twisted. Terrible things happen. It’s never so easy as a wish. Sometimes I think I’m ready. Whoever shows up, some cerulean fairy, some adenoidal troll, the magic goddamn galoshes, I will have a knife to its neck in a second. I will say: All my children, healthy, normal, nothing else. No? You won’t do it? Then leave me alone.

But generally my door is barred to all bargaining apparitions. Sometimes I look at Gus, and it all feels very familiar. Not
him
. He was a skinny just-born, with cheekbones and an incensed cry: he looked like an old man who’d been outfitted with hands and feet a size too big and he wanted to know to which knucklehead he should address his complaint. Now he is fat and looks like a retired advertising executive. He is gorgeous and inscrutable. I tell you, I’ve never seen his like.

But taking care of him, changing him, nursing him, I felt as though I’d done it before, as though it were true: time did split in half, and in some back alley of the universe I took care of Pudding, when he was a tiny baby, and
this
reminds me of
that.
There’s a strange museum/gift shop/antique store/tourist trap in Schuylerville, New York, the next town over. In front is a reconstruction of colonial Fort George done in wood cutouts — a soldier in stocks, Revolutionary soldiers in profile, all cut with a jigsaw and painted in bright colors. In front is a sign that says:
An exact replica of a figment of my imagination,
and that is what this life feels like some days. It’s a happy life, but someone is missing. It’s a happy life,
and
someone is missing.

It’s a happy life —

— Saratoga Springs, New York
June 2007

Acknowledgments

Henry Dunow, my friend and agent, read the manuscript in its earliest state, and was — as he has been for the nearly twenty years I have known him — so smart and kind I cannot describe it, nor adequately thank him for it.

I also want to thank Paul Lisicky, whose reading made all the difference to me (and whose friendship likewise does); Ann Patchett, of course and as usual; Wendy Owen; and Betsy Lerner.