When, exactly when, I wondered, had this taken place? Had Joseph seen it too? How could I not know myself yet? Was it my appearance that had changed? I wondered. Or me, considering my appearance? There was no way to know, and yet neither possibility should have come as much of a surprise. The truth was, I hardly stopped to consider myself, the state of my physical affairs. For years, I’d stayed busy. Kept going. Kept on. So much fancy footwork involved to keep myself afloat and from thinking too deeply about the marriage I’d damaged, about Baghdad, about loss and change despite loss. And then Joseph, so sick. I couldn’t think about that either. Not for a moment had I allowed myself to wither into sadness. Wouldn’t. It’s impossible to know when sadness ends. It’s a string I feared I’d keep on pulling until I unraveled the carpeting of a million rooms. So I’d told myself—all along I’d told myself—that every negative thought I indulged in nudged me one step closer to a very dangerous ledge from which I would one day slip and fall. Holding things together is what I thought I was doing. Keeping the sadness out. Not falling. And this was done by never analyzing change. Never even considering it. Never looking too hard at my reflection and wondering. But of course, fighting against sadness never kept me from feeling sad. It just moved things around. The ledge, the endless hole below it, bore itself inside of me. The only thing I avoided was the sensation of falling. I couldn’t avoid the gorge. And I was nothing more than the delicate rocks on either side.
I suddenly became conscious that Joseph might be aware of these thoughts, so I said out loud to unworry him, “Not anymore, Joseph. It’s all all right now. We have Lorca. We have her to love.”
N
EW YORK
, 1953–1954
On a particularly warm day in March, Joseph considered rolling down the window in the taxi but then thought better of it, not wanting to upset Victoria. It was just the two of them. Joseph and Victoria, Victoria and Joseph, as it hadn’t been in nine long months. It was the two of them and no baby, just the heavy, leaded absence of it. Of her, Joseph thought. His baby was a she, they’d told him.
They weren’t speaking, the two of them, but Joseph felt they were communicating. He hoped that. He needed it. Victoria sniffled. He coughed back. Victoria scratched her forearm. Joseph crinkled his nose. He kept his right hand beneath his leg, hiding. It was beginning to go numb. He was holding a small washcloth. A nurse had given it to him, thinking Victoria might want it. It was hers. But of course, she wouldn’t. She wanted no part of any of it. She’d even bought new clothes for the occasion and had thrown the old ones in the trash—she went that far. But this washcloth was something. Joseph kept thinking: It had been in the room. It had been there. It had touched his baby. Joseph kept it wound very tightly in his fist as if it were cutting off a valve that might make his eyes burst. He felt like a wall of glass, just smashed though still suspended.
He watched as Victoria put her hands on her knees and tucked her chin to her chest. She was wearing a new dress, baggy and shapeless, beneath a large brown overcoat. Her legs were bare and pale. A pair of men’s socks pooled around her ankles like spilled milk. She pulled them up and then let them slink down again. Then she looked at her belly. Her face loosened. She reminded Joseph of a child who had made a mess. To see her that way made Joseph ache. He wanted to hold her. He missed her. But he knew—he’d gotten used to it—that if he tried, she would retreat from him. So he didn’t try. He tightened his grip on the washcloth. He coughed, ridding himself of the impulse as if it were an irritating fleck of dust.
As they sat there, the two of them in the back seat, Joseph couldn’t help but think that he’d given up long before—and it made him feel awful. Months ago, when he’d convinced himself that enough was enough, and there was nothing else he could do for Victoria, he’d given up. And then, each time Victoria didn’t reach for him in his sleep, when she was furious with him for not abandoning the idea of keeping the baby, he gave up a little more. When she didn’t hold his hand on the street, didn’t smile when she looked at him, didn’t put honey into his tea, so compulsively ignored every aspect of her pregnancy and rejected his having any part in it at all, he kept giving up. He gave up until his sympathy was entirely given away, and he felt he had nothing else to give. That’s when he’d found himself at Dr. Espy’s office, ready to be given to. Ready to take. Now he’d been taking for months, on most weekdays after work. He told Victoria that he’d been given additional duties at the bakery. How strange, he thought to himself, to call it a “duty.”
And now, he felt horrible. He felt sick. He was sorry but couldn’t say so. He wanted to be sure that the affair hadn’t been the final blow to ensure this—this lack of baby. This everything. Maybe if he’d been more loving, if he hadn’t lost hope so quickly, so easily, things wouldn’t have turned out this way. Victoria could have changed her mind. But he couldn’t be sure of anything now. He’d done what he’d done. Everything, he thought to himself, every feeling about the baby from now on would be wrapped up in the fact that he’d found someone else for a while—because of that, and despite it too.
He opened the window, stuck his head all the way out, and gasped for air. The driver honked, and Joseph jumped, nearly broke his neck. Victoria crossed her arms over her chest and shuddered. Joseph almost asked her if she was cold—the words were on the tip of his tongue—but he decided he’d better not do that either. He decided that he wouldn’t tell her. Couldn’t. And if he didn’t tell her about the affair, he had to do something kind, something selfless to make it right. He was afraid of what his voice might convey. He kept his eyes set forward on the traffic, the splashes of red light. It was rush hour. This was going to be an expensive ride. Joseph was making calculations in his mind until he caught a whiff of baby powder, and he was back in the hospital again, where, for just a few moments, he’d been a father.
Joseph wound the washcloth around his hand. He stuffed it hard into his pocket and ripped the seams of his pants. He pushed harder and through. He felt his own leg. He pulled a hair. He pulled another and gave himself the chills. He wondered if he was in shock or panicked or numb or what that sensation was, like he was balancing just above the floor. He wished, impossibly, for the feeling to be relief but knew it wasn’t. Relief meant that something was over. He thought of the baby. He would always think of the baby. It would be on the streets, in the sunset, when he looked down at himself in the shower. Here it was in this very back seat, occupying all the spaces in between. And yet, that was the least of it.
For the rest of his life, he realized, he would have a relationship with something that was what it wasn’t. It was what wasn’t sleeping in his arms. It was what wasn’t being breastfed in a rocker in the middle of a night. It was what wasn’t splashing and grinning and splashing and sneezing in the bathtub. It was what wasn’t in framed photographs squished and happy between himself and Victoria. It was what wasn’t reaching for his hand before crossing the street. It was what wasn’t asking if murder was killing a bug. It was what wasn’t going to school from their stoop in the morning, to school with a lunch box, to school in an ironed uniform, to school at a university with giant evergreen hedges and red bricks and books stacked a mile high, making this father so proud, so very proud, the proudest ever. He wondered how he could ever live with what wasn’t, and harder still, how couldn’t he?
He continued to blame himself. If he hadn’t given up, things might have worked out. If he’d taken her to the Statue of Liberty or Macy’s or he’d saved his money for a horse-drawn carriage ride through Central Park or even for a nice shawl, things might have been different. If he’d kissed her harder, rubbed her feet, helped her to wash her hair and braid it, they might not be here. But he hadn’t done any of those things. After a certain point, gestures like those didn’t even occur to him. He covered his mouth and felt himself choke.
The cab stopped quickly and stalled. The driver cursed and started it up again. Joseph pumped his knee, still trying to undream himself. Victoria let out a little sigh. Then he did too.
“Don’t think of it,” she said. “Think of anything else.”
Often, he’d wondered if this was as hard for Victoria as it was for him. He’d wanted to keep the baby, after all. She hadn’t. But her voice now, the way it teetered, nearly broke, left him feeling reprimanded. Of course it had been hard. Of course it had.
He thought about the space below Victoria’s heart, empty now—and how her heartbeat no longer harmonized with another’s. As if hearing his thoughts, she put her hand, warm and swollen, on his. He looked at her but knew she would never indulge him in big, weepy feelings. Instead, she squeezed his fingers. He fought back tears. He hated his emotions. Sometimes he wanted to wrangle them to the ground like a wild animal. Couldn’t he, just for once, have been the steady one, been strong?
She squeezed again, as if telling him she understood.
In the past few months he’d found himself missing her, even when she was an arm’s length away. Now he looked at her. She was touching him. Still, he missed her. She looked at him. He missed her less.
He squeezed back. He squeezed to feel her, to feel himself, to feel her, to feel her, to feel her.
Upstairs, at the apartment, Victoria paused in the doorway as if searching for something she didn’t want to find. Her hands were clasped in front of her. Joseph eased her coat off her shoulders. When he saw a platter of pignoli cookies (Mrs. Messina must have been here) next to the bowl of crushed almonds with honey and sugar that he’d prepared—an homage to his mother, a healer, who fed the almonds to women who had just given birth, to ward off the evil eye and encourage happiness—he used the coat to cover them. It felt inappropriate. No one would have thought that this was how they’d come home. With less than what they’d left with. Fewer knees. Fewer bottom lips.
“Are you all right?” Victoria asked, swinging around.
He coughed to make light of it, swallowed hard. He shook his head that he was fine. He was fine. He wanted a cookie. Hell, he wanted the whole plate.
Victoria walked to the mattress and dragged her feet, not lifting them but shuffling, as if trying to scuff something off her soles. On the bed, she folded herself onto her side, toward the wall and away from everything. She rested her head on her arm. She kicked off one shoe and then the other. They fell next to each other, organized. He imagined her face—twisted like a street pretzel, crying. But as much as wished he could, he couldn’t go to her. Was it written all over his own face, he wondered, what he’d done? It was only then that he remembered how well she could read him, how she could tell from the lines around his eyes if he was unsatisfied or tired or nostalgic. He relaxed his jaw, trying to erase any hints at all about his feelings, keep them from sneaking out. He held his breath.
Joseph thought of all the ways he’d seen her body lying down in the past months. Long, leaflike, silhouetted this way and that—below the windowsill, on the bench, on the floor, on her elbows, on her back with her belly pointing up like a dune. He couldn’t remember her height beside him now, though he tried.
“We’re going to be all right,” Victoria said. He could hear the smile on her face.
“All right,” he said in a voice he hoped would carry her closer to sleep. He was too exhausted to talk. “All right,” he said again and then once more in his head.
Joseph put on the pot for tea and stood with the safety of the counter between them. She would be asleep before the water boiled. The little washcloth was still in his hand. He opened a drawer they hardly used and pushed it to the back. He went to the table and reached for the plate of cookies. He ate every one of them, without a sound, hardly taking a breath. And then spoonful after faithful spoonful, he finished the bowl of almonds too. If he couldn’t breathe, he thought, he couldn’t cry. And if he couldn’t cry, he couldn’t feel sorry for himself. And if he couldn’t feel sorry for himself, he could perhaps convince himself that there was nothing to be sorry about. If he could convince himself of that, he could convince himself of anything.
And yet, the next day, everything changed.
Joseph thought he knew what to expect. After Victoria’s pregnancy, he would need to nurture her, restore her, because some part, he had to think, would undoubtedly have been lost. And he was prepared to take care of her—feed her yellow vegetables, and the ground almonds with honey. He was ready to be flattered by it, by being needed in that way again. It would be a fresh start. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be something.
Together they could discover the city in the manner he had originally hoped. She might look at him like she had in Baghdad. The first time he’d ever seen her had been years before they’d officially met. They were at the market. She’d dropped her bag and he’d lifted it for her, held it open while she dusted off a persimmon and put it back in.
Now he watched her. She hadn’t moved all night. She’d kept tight to the wall, her back guarded and hard. There was a darkness about her that he hadn’t known before, as if an angry stranger were standing beside her, refusing to disappear. Then she turned around. He took a step back, but she wasn’t angry. She was smiling. Her face was pink and flooded him with a sudden, alarming warmth.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” he answered, breathless.
When Joseph came home that afternoon, the apartment was sparkling. Spotless. The linoleum floor was a lighter shade of gray. The windows were clear, ungreased. Victoria stood in the middle of the room with her sleeves rolled up and her hair rebelling from her face in wild wisps, as though she were a flower in the wind. She had a toothbrush in one fist. She motioned to the countertop. Finally, he thought, finally she was upright, undelicate. It had been so long since he’d seen a flush in her cheeks. He’d forgotten how it made her eyes brighter. Her face was glistening with sweat. But then he remembered, was filled with a sudden rage. Had she forgotten already? What kind of person was she?