The events here took place about 25 years ago.
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My husband hated the beanbag chair I’d bought on a whim. Normally we were in sync about almost everything, but the sloppy bulk of the beanbag chair offended his preference for right angles and rationality. The black vinyl behemoth covered a significant portion of the living room floor and aesthetically overshadowed the much nicer leather couch next to it. It was not utilitarian. It was hard to get into, hard to get out of, a space hog only big enough for one person at a time. You couldn’t even have sex in it, not that we’d tried, but it plainly failed the thought experiment.
I said, Let’s keep it until we need the space for baby stuff, okay?
Patrick [ethnically appropriate pseudonym] rolled his eyes but relented. He couldn’t understand why, but I genuinely adored this absurd piece of sixties flower-power kitsch. I loved dropping down into it and immobilizing myself there, an awkward surrender. In that chair, it was almost impossible to do anything but sit and stare at the walls, like the daydreaming teenager I once was. It was 1998, I was 33 years old, a working professional, all grown up, responsible, paying my bills and quarterly self-employment taxes on time. Newly married and preparing to get pregnant soon. But I wasn’t ready to let go of this emblem of aimless youth.
For his birthday I got Pat a CD, Radiohead’s OK COMPUTER. Its strange, mournful hit single, “Karma Police,” had blanketed the airwaves for months. The album was on many critics’ top-ten lists the previous year. That evening we listened to it together over the chocolate layer cake I’d made. It was an oddly uncomfortable experience that first time: a wall of distorted guitar sounds and spooky electronic noises; weirdly elongated vocal phrases from a whiny singer; no obvious lyrical hooks. You almost couldn’t tell when one track ended and another began. The disc still spinning, we sat across from each other at the cheap laminated kitchen table Patrick had owned since his graduate school days. I watched his face grow distracted. He picked up that morning’s newspaper and started doing the crossword puzzle. A shadow fell across my heart.
Long ago I had abandoned my teenage Broadway diva dreams, as well as my compulsion to buy new music and learn about new bands and go to concerts. I had just started working with a classical piano teacher again for the first time in more than 10 years and was getting curious about jazz, but otherwise, the entire art form played a diminished role in my life compared to how it had shaped and defined me early on. I was a professional writer working from home, crafting freelance journalism and marketing projects, profiling novelists, reading fifty book-length works of fiction a year in a highly intentional way, and just starting out as a columnist for the alt-weekly Baltimore CityPaper. (We had moved from New York to Maryland a few years earlier.)
I was also struggling with an attempted first novel I’d begun seven or eight years earlier. External deadlines had never been a problem; I started assignments early enough and filed clean, well-organized copy on time without stress. But on my own dream project, my grandest, truest ambition, I was neurotic, unfocused, and ineffectual. I really didn’t know what I was doing, or even why, but I also couldn’t stop entirely. I tinkered with sentences and paragraphs but couldn’t get the plot to thicken. Almost every writer of fiction, successful or not, knows exactly what I mean.
The day after Patrick’s birthday, I avoided my albatrossian book and my paid assignments, instead collapsing purposefully into the black beanbag chair to give OK COMPUTER another listen. I absorbed it whole, first track to last, several times in a row. Again the next day. For an entire week, I listened with a level of intention and attention I hadn’t employed in many years. Brooding over the dark lyrics, memorizing each guitar lick and percussion pattern and change of sonic texture. What had seemed a mass of weird, undifferentiated sounds now began to crystallize into distinct choruses and verses, cool syncopations, and compelling polyrhythms. There were enigmas here in the soundscape that I couldn’t unravel—I knew nothing yet about modern digital production methods—and I clung to them the way mystics cling to the non-rational aspects of a religion. Worshipfully I held the multipage, wordless CD liner with my fingertips, trying to parse its strange pencil drawings. Within two days I knew all the lyrics by heart. Thom Yorke’s voice no longer seemed whiny. Instead, it was beautiful: a striking display of male vulnerability piercing through the guitar heroics. I loved his falsetto passages and drawn-out phrases that stretched way beyond normal conversational rhythms. The themes were adolescent prog-rock clichés: alienation, violence, paranoia, disaffection, disillusionment. I was vaguely embarrassed by these earnest ironies but also in love with them.
A contempt for bourgeois family values pulsed through the entire project. One track featured a synthetic robot voice drolly listing the hallmarks of suburban achievement: regular exercise, smiling babies, safe cars, and workplace contentment. I loved this non-song of a song, but what business did I have attaching myself to the bitter, depressed musings of some unkempt British boys? I should have been compiling a baby-brain-enhancing mix tape of Mozart, Beethoven, and Windham Hill to play in the delivery room.
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I liked so many things right away about Pat, his low-key wit and slender Irish-origin face, his no-bullshit New Yorker attitude. We’d been Columbia undergraduates at the same time, class of 1987, he in the engineering school and I in the liberal arts college, although we only met for the first time at a party hosted by a mutual friend six years later. Our first official date was a hike up Breakneck Ridge in Dutchess County. On our way up the steep rock scrambles, I said Is this some kind of a girlfriend test? Will I have to rappel? He and I developed shtick almost instantly. He was very funny but not in the unsettling way of an insecure guy who’s desperate to score laughs. He had an edge, a sharpness befitting the son of a cop, the nephew of firefighters and electricians.
Once when we were basking in our deep and sudden happiness Patrick asked me, Why do you think we get along so well?
I said, Maybe it’s because both our peoples were oppressed by the British.
It was a joke but not entirely. I grew up with more money, but Patrick’s blue-collar roots and my first-generation status were equidistant from the powerful, privileged center of things. Whatever the reason, he and I were inseparable, immediately. There was a whirlwind romance, a few beach and European vacations, and some unspoken yet obvious seriousness of intent. (He’s a keeper! was what all my friends were saying, if only because they’d met the several emotional grifters who’d preceded him.)
Everything seemed easy. We didn’t rush it. Step by step. Low-key wedding, homeownership, then a plan about a baby.
It was now five years since that first mountaintop adventure and I was having belated doubts. We’d have sex without birth control, and half an hour later I’d feel unaccountably compelled to start a conversation this way:
Don’t you think the world is overcrowded enough already? Aren’t we headed for environmental disaster at some point?
Pat, ever the engineer, had already thought it all through. I figure it’s okay if we have just two children, as replacement people for ourselves. A wash, in terms of impact.
Even so, I’d say, maybe one child would be enough.
Put all our eggs in one basket? Nah, I think we should go with the old rule of thumb, an heir and a spare.
I’d tell him to be serious.
P: Okay, look, I just think it’s nice to have siblings. Your sister’s very important to you, right?
S: Yeah, but you barely even see your brothers.
P: It’s still good to know they’re there.
S: Two kids means it’s even more time I’m doing mommy stuff and can’t focus on my goals, though.
P: So you would put your own goals ahead of your child’s happiness?
S: Come on, I’m being realistic! I want children but I don’t want to end up feeling overburdened and resentful.
P: You seem to forget that you will love your children and happily make sacrifices for them. We both will.
S: [silent]
S: [considering]
S: But do we want to contribute more people to this world full of assholes?
P: Yeah, people generally suck, but the exceptions are great, and I see no reason why you and I won’t be able to raise a couple of exceptional people.
I’d take a deep breath in, infected by his natural optimism. Doubts lingered. I’d glance at the New York Times obituary pages, the write-ups of the people who had done important and noteworthy stuff, and my eyes would glaze over to see man, man, man, man, man, oh a woman! man, man, man, man…. (Only as late as 2018 would the Times staff admit in print that they had consistently overlooked females of great accomplishments, due to nothing more than sexist blindness. I didn’t know this back then; I assumed I was seeing a more or less accurate picture of human accomplishment. Silly me.)
S: Patrick, your life is going to change a lot less than mine. Your momentum will not be interrupted like mine will. Can you just admit that?
P: BOTH our lives are going to change dramatically! And your ambitions might change, too!
S: See? You can’t even admit it. You can’t admit I’ll be the one taking the hit. You’re still going to go to work every day, right? You’ll still have an income and a serious job. It has to be you, right? Since you’re the only one earning any real money?
P: Sandy. Listen. As long as you can tolerate a somewhat traditional situation, we’ll be fine. Even if you stop freelancing and just focus on your novel, we can probably afford daycare a couple of days a week so you can write.
SA: [silent]
SA: [considering]
SA: Well, I guess that’s a pretty good deal.
PF: That’s what I’m saying.
SA: I’m being ridiculous.
PF: I didn’t say that.
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Nothing occurred in our first year without birth control. In early 1999, I started tracking my ovulation as my gynecologist urged. Every morning I’d open my eyes, pop a thermometer in my mouth, write the results on graph paper, and look for an elevation in average basal body temperature. Then schedule sex accordingly, every other day for a week.
It became impossible to deny. I was blocked. Technical assistance was needed. This pissed me off. I had wanted it to just happen effortlessly. An improvisation, spontaneous. I did not want another project or ambition like my abandoned singing dreams or stalled novel.
A calendar is the quickest way to kill a libido. The first few times we went through the “system,” I tried to embrace it in a spirit of fun. Hooray for procreation. The month would roll on by. I’d imagine I was late by a day or two; I’d get excited. Then my period would come. Bad cramps and dashed hopes. The black pit at the center of my being would crack open. Shame and despair and catastrophic thoughts.
Patrick had an easier time of it all, although it wasn’t a sex-soaked fantasyland for him, either.
Maybe we should just leave it to chance? I ventured.
We’re not getting any younger. Pat’s face betrayed genuine worry.
I didn’t dare use the actual words resonating in my brain at the moment. It was an old church-lady suggestion—or was it an Alcoholics Anonymous principle? Let go and let God. I was embarrassed to have such Pollyanna language welling up in me. Year by year after the upbringing by Christian zealots and bullies, I’d become staunchly anti-metaphysical, uninterested in questioning or seeking. I no longer sought out the high-class intellectualized musings of a James P. Carse or an Elaine Pagels. Yet I could not shake the deep, visceral intuition, the relentless somatic knowledge, that some things in life should be left to fate.
Gynecologist put me on Clomid, the gateway drug of fertility interventions at that time. I’d take the pill, monitor my temperature, have the required congress, all the while trying to maintain a positive outlook. In my musings, I’d recall the Sally Bowles number from the movie version of CABARET, something I used to sing and play at the living room piano in my teen years when nobody was around: Maybe this time I’ll be lucky.
Four or five days after taking the drug, I’d crash. I’d obsess about missed opportunities. My stalled fiction career, my abandonment of New York City, the books I hadn’t finished reading, the countries I hadn’t visited or lived in while still footloose. I’d muse, bitterly, that I’d be much more accomplished by now if I’d had better parents.
My parents—those fuckers. Did they even deserve to be made grandparents?
NO was the sound surging up from the depths. NO NO NO.
At the same time YES. YES. Patrick, let’s have a house, a family, a life plan, and college savings accounts. A will in case something happens to us and provisions are required for our grieving children. YES, OF COURSE.
I assumed I would rise to the occasion. Pregnancy itself would make me happy and hopeful about the future. We had sex every other day for fourteen days in a row, like training for an Olympic sport. Stamina and joy pretty much disappeared by bootcamp number three. We plugged along, getting undressed by rote, climbing into bed, groping at each other with as much passion as is required to do a load of laundry.
A doctor’s test had confirmed that Patrick was in fine form for procreating. He was possessed of a superabundance of hyperactive little swimmers. Biologically destined to be a father. We dubbed him the Sperminator. Even so, by the middle of the second week, his enthusiasm would flag. We’d go through the motions. And it would all be in vain. Again.
I said to my beloved, I really need to take a one-month break.
His normally measured voice gave way to a desperate yelp.
I don’t want to take a break! We don’t have that kind of time!
I said nothing. Went into my office to cry furiously. Long tendrils of black bubbling self-hatred seeped up out of the ground and grabbed me around the calves. I felt pulled into darkness. What a great marriage we had. What a perfect match. I had apparently been born without the proverbial ticking clock. Patrick had an internal timekeeper as loud as a deafening cathedral bell. He could no longer hear me.
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Music was creeping back into my life.
A vocal composer I liked, whom I’d once seen perform at the Bang on a Can Festival in New York, was teaching an undergraduate a cappella group course at a nearby university. I registered as a noncredit student and spent two semesters learning Gregorian chant and early French church music from him. Toby Twining considered me competent but not truly gifted. He never offered me solos. There were several other individuals with beautiful, relaxed, well-trained voices. One particular young woman could fill the room with her powerful upper register. I heard her complain to Toby about a role she’d won at a local dinner theater, a boon on the resume that offered little pay.
I’m good at what I do, damnit! I deserve to be paid well!
I wasn’t part of the conversation, and I would never have piped up anyway in this context, but I thought:
I’m sure you do, but that’s not how life works. This was when I still retained the common sense of a former economics student. How good you are and how hard you work has nothing to do with the laws of supply and demand, or with all the distortions created by late-stage crony capitalism. Do you think elementary school teachers and home health aides actually get paid what they’re worth?
Toby eventually took us into the university’s recording studio. We worked through our repertoire, passage by passage, to create a CD. It was my first such experience, and I was shocked to hear that I still had a Broadway-ish, pushy sound. It added some heft to the group, but I knew I sounded amateurish. I felt I was getting in my own way, somehow. There was a better, truer, more beautiful sound within me that I did not know how to release.
Or maybe I’d never really been that talented in the first place.
I told Patrick, I wish I had trained as a singer.
He looked at me as if I’d suggested running away to join the circus. Why?
I couldn’t begin to respond. His question seemed both unnecessary and unanswerable.
Instead of a baby, I conceived a crush. Completely inappropriate flirtation with a twenty-something guy who worked at my gym and was a fan of my Baltimore CityPaper column. In my pundit persona, I was positively bursting with pointed anecdotes, political gambits, sociological ventures. I must have seemed very confident to my readers while falling to pieces in private. Hey babe, I’d say to my gym buddy. Hey babe, he’d say back. He played it cool but I could tell he found me impressive and alluring. I just found him…nice. Smart and nicely soft-spoken. And not my husband.
We’d choose side-by-side elliptical trainers, watch the news together, talk about books. (He was big into Jeanette Winterson.) Cable news had begun to include long segments devoted to the ups and downs (or rather, the ups and ups) of Wall Street. This seemed strange and disconcerting. When had the inner workings of high-stakes capitalism become everybody’s business? I supposed many of us were invested in the stock market through employer-based retirement funds, but still, I was befuddled by and worried about this relentless focus on finance as opposed to other types of business or economic news.
On Fox, I saw an interview with a man—a thirty-ish white factory worker—who supported the privatization of Social Security. Why should the government hold my money when I could just put it in the stock market for a guaranteed 20 or 30 percent return?
Hunh? What the fuck was he talking about? And why wasn’t there an actual financial expert after him to explain why such long-term expectations were absurd? Was this the news or a PR piece for Republican legislators always on the hunt for another round of Wall Street deregulation? (I figured out the answer to that soon enough.)
I loved Patrick but I’d made a mistake in thinking I could become a good wife and mother. I’d be better off with a cute young guy who thinks I’m brilliant. Like this one. My idle fantasy of running away with my gym buddy was not deterred by the fact that he was currently living in his parents’ basement.
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Patrick came home one night and said he had to travel for his job in a few weeks. We looked at the calendar. He’d be gone during the next prime baby-making bracket. He started to get upset. Really, really upset. I couldn’t handle his disappointment. I left the room. I was relieved he’d be gone. At least for one month, I wouldn’t feel like the little sex engine that couldn’t. All around me, women were pregnant. Half of my friends back in New York: pregnant. Right there in South Baltimore were girls everywhere, poor white girls, high school graduates or maybe high school dropouts, pushing strollers with one hand that also clutched a cigarette butt, holding their cellphones to their ears with the other hand. I’d pass them on sidewalks, hoping for the child’s sake that this was just a nanny or older sister. Mommy, mommy! the child would call. The mother would yell in response. What is it? What the hell do you want now? One Sunday afternoon, I drove out to the Marley Station Mall, a place almost entirely populated with depressed-seeming, overweight mothers of all races and ethnicities, and their infinite supplies of demanding, whiny children. Welcome to America! Was this my future? My mother had been fat and depressed and resentful my entire childhood. It did not turn out well for her or her progeny.
When Patrick returned from his trip I said, Look, I know you’re feeling anxious and all, but maybe we should take a few months off from the baby thing. The pressure is really getting to me.
What?! No way! I do not want to take a few months off!
We sat together on the couch in silence for a while. I was burning with things to say, but couldn’t speak. I got up to leave the room in a hurry, went upstairs sniffling, and lay down on the bed in the dark with all my clothes on. My imagination started sprinting, dreaming up schemes. This was over. I would leave him. Yes. Pack all my stuff and head out to…a motel, yes, that’s right. Call my little gym friend. Just for moral support, of course. Call my sister and let her know what was happening.
He came upstairs a while later, got undressed, and got into bed. I jumped up and left the room. He followed after me.
Are you avoiding me?
I wanted to scream at him, YES! YES I AM! ISN’T IT OBVIOUS?
Instead, I cried.
When I was finally able to speak, I said: I’m not happy!
Well, yeah, I can see that!
I can’t stand this pressure! I don’t want to do this baby thing anymore! I hate it! I totally hate it!
It’s not a lot of fun for me, either!
I don’t think I want to have children with you, anyway! I think I made a mistake marrying you! This is too fucking hard!
Great. That’s just fucking great. Thanks for letting me know!
Or maybe I do want to have children, but with someone else, someone more like me. Another writer or artist, maybe.
What? What? That makes no sense. Two artists, trying to make a living and raise a family? Your life would be harder, not easier.
That’s not the point! Why do you always think money is the point?
I have no idea where the argument went, how it ended, or how we got to sleep that night. The next day I let the previous night’s escape fantasy evaporate in the clear morning air. I dragged myself out of the depths of unhappiness to get on the phone with story sources and write up a few articles just in time for the deadlines. I was a successful freelance writer. My column was popular and controversial. It generated record-breaking numbers of letters-to-the-editor, both pro and con. Waiters in restaurants recognized my name from my credit card. I received an award from the state journalism society. People admired me. Foolish, foolish people.
And Patrick was living in his own kind of fog. We’d have these horrible eruptions, I’d say these terrible things to him, and then somehow life would go on. Maybe I’d apologize a day or two later. I’d tell him I didn’t really mean all those things I’d said. I did not want to leave him for another writer. I did not regret marrying him. Was that true? Maybe, maybe not. I was no longer able to tell what was real.
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To be continued next Tuesday.
Looking forward to next week. Your writing floors me.
What a story, what a journey. One day perhaps, I'll tell you mine.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to conceive.
"People admired me. Foolish, foolish people."
I was one of them. Still am.