The Forever Marriage (34 page)

“Hey, did you find everything you were looking for?” he asked, returning to his chair but not sitting. “I have a friend I could ask about the Peace Corps for you. She …”

He paused, staring down. Carmen followed his gaze. She had grown sloppy and stood with her left hand resting on the boxy computer top: the heavy white-gold band, sapphires like two deep eyes, and glittering diamond with its million of tiny facets sending off sparks of light in between. By the time she looked back up, however, the man had readjusted. “My name is Brant,” he said almost formally. “You can ask for me if you call.”

Once back at the brownstone, Carmen sat at her own sturdy oak table, again examining the smeary copies. Antarctica would mean four months away, no contact with anyone. It was extreme but feasible. She could drive to the airport in some other city, such as Philadelphia, leave her car at the airport, and board a flight bound for Buenos Aires. She had access to enough cash for the ticket; their wedding had brought in nearly $30,000 from Olive’s and George’s friends, most of which still sat in a joint savings account.

Even if Jobe and his parents succeeded in finding out where she’d flown, there would be no way to guess her final destination. Antarctica was the most remote, unlikely place she could imagine. According to the flyer, once she flew the rest of the way to Ushuaia (“the world’s southernmost city”), she would board a boat owned by an environmental group that she had never heard of. She would be virtually impossible to trace.

Of course, it could be a scam. This could be nothing more than a pipeline to white slavery: young women just out of college shipped off from the bottom of the globe to markets where they would be sold to rich, fat sultans. Then she’d be in the same position, only far worse off—with a brutal owner instead of a meek, pale husband who came home at seven o’clock each night, apologizing for the fact that he’d forgotten about the time, pulling off his long, black socks
and massaging his veiny feet while he asked if she would like to go out to eat.

She weighed the risks again the following morning, sitting with her coffee, wearing only the long T-shirt in which she’d slept. When she stood to get another cup, her breasts grazed the table’s edge. They were suddenly enormous—plump and round and tingling. The current became more intense when her nipples made contact with the hard wood. Carmen was puzzled; she’d been a solid C cup since high school. And though men took notice of her breasts on a near daily basis, she’d never given them much thought. Now, however, they seemed to be growing and alive. It was as if they were trying to tell her something she couldn’t decipher.
Stay
.
Go
. It was impossible to tell.

But it wasn’t until a week later, when she pulled out her calendar to schedule a dentist’s appointment, that Carmen realized how late she was. She’d never been very good about keeping track, but she distinctly remembered the last time her period had come: It was about three weeks before the wedding, she’d gone out tasting cakes with Olive and eaten too much because inside her gut was that sucking, achy feeling that only food could soothe.

“It’s like wine tasting, dear,” Olive said at one point. “You don’t
eat
so much as analyze, just a smidge so you’ll have room for the next.”

“I thought you spit when you tasted wine,” Carmen said, through a hefty bite of white cake with icing of lavender essence.

“That,” said Olive, “is a ghastly practice dreamed up by Californians.”

And this, now, was the phrase that wound through Carmen’s head.
A ghastly practice dreamed up by Californians
. It seemed to have some hidden application to her current state, about which she had no doubt. But she had nothing to do that afternoon, anyway. So after the receptionist had confirmed her appointment time and Jobe’s as well (she was trying to be the kind of wife who would protect her husband’s teeth), Carmen drove to the drugstore and picked up a pregnancy test.

It said to wait until morning, indicating that only the “first day’s catch” of urine contained enough hormone to trigger a result. Carmen
paid no attention. She went into the bathroom immediately and sat on the toilet, catching some pee in a cup, splashing her fingers in the process, dipping the little paper strip in before even washing her hands. It was positive: rudely, brightly so with its two parallel blue stripes.

Carmen threw the strip, box, and urine cup into the trash can out back, so Jobe wouldn’t run across them before she was ready to talk to him. But she ended up blurting out the news anyway, the moment he came home. He was barely in the door, bike-messenger-style briefcase still slung over his shoulder, and he looked bug-eyed and terrified for a moment. They stood on opposite ends of their rented living room, staring at each other in horror. But somewhere inside Carmen there was a tiny, interested voice. Jobe was frightened, too—he wasn’t ready for this. For all she knew, he was off at work every day looking for opportunities to teach in far-off universities and one day he’d simply disappear on a South American flight of his own. It made her braver, this thought.

“Are you upset?” she asked. “Do you want me to look into … ending it?” It struck her then that despite her own horror at discovering she was pregnant, this was the first time the possibility had ever even entered her mind. “If you do, I should probably see someone fast. I’m pretty sure this happened in Italy.”

“Jesus, no!” Jobe came forward three full strides, then stopped. He had cut the distance between them in half and there it stayed. “I don’t want that at all! I’m just …” He stopped midway.

What are you?
Carmen wanted to ask.
Surprised? Scared? Completely fucking blindsided?
But standing in this unfamiliar place that was supposed to be their home, she felt as if she couldn’t. She missed the buffer of Olive and Nate. Or even George, whose absentminded bumbling through a room could somehow bridge the murky pool of space between her and Jobe.

The topic of abortion never came up again. In fact, Carmen made sure. Every time she’d tried to leave Jobe over the past year and a half
something had happened to prevent her, each event more dramatic than the last. She didn’t want to know what would come after this: a crippling accident, maybe. Carmen had never been superstitious before but she remembered her mother’s avoidance of the color yellow, aversion to crows, and perpetual four-touch signing of the cross.

Besides, it was easy enough to carry this baby; pregnancy turned out to be like a playground slide—once you started down it, there was only one natural way off. Carmen ran and biked well into her seventh month. Because she was not quite twenty-two and very healthy, Carmen’s doctor had been completely neutral on the topic of prenatal screening. “Chances of anything going wrong for you are incalculably small,” he’d said. “There’s no need for an amniocentesis unless you want to be 100 percent sure.”

Carmen shivered and signed the waiver saying she declined. She didn’t want anyone sticking a long needle into her bulging middle! It might pop like a balloon.

Privately, she marveled at this baby’s very existence, stemming from one of only two times she and Jobe had made love on their three-week honeymoon. She hadn’t even thought it was the right point in her cycle. And it seemed significant that she should have blossomed into pregnancy immediately after marriage when they were even
less
sexually active than before. Sometimes she wondered if Olive really
did
have some kind of witchy power: She could stand in front of the fireplace inside her big house on the hill, tap her feet and wave her arms, recite incantations, and—poof!—there would be the grandchild she wanted tucked inside Carmen’s womb.

There were a number of more logical explanations, of course: the best being that Carmen had gone off the pill after Rory. She didn’t want to be tempted to stray by the ease of built-in birth control. But she hadn’t mentioned the change to Jobe. Instead, she’d been fitted for a diaphragm, and if he thought it was strange that she excused herself and went to the bathroom for a long time whenever he got amorous, he never said. Likely, it never occurred to him. He would lie back on his pillow and dream about equations, perhaps even forgetting
what he was waiting for. But when she returned, full of sticky, clear spermicidal gel, they would resume awkwardly. Sometimes he would go soft and roll away from her but at least half the times they were able to finish, in some manner of speaking. Then Jobe would fall asleep and Carmen would lie staring at the ceiling and feeling the loss of something she couldn’t name.

Now that she was pregnant, however, she was turned on all the time; even the seat of her bike sometimes rubbed her effectively enough that she rode crazily, weaving in and around traffic while the waves coming from her clitoris built in a series of expanding arcs. It was a comical problem she would have liked to share with someone. But for some reason, she couldn’t even admit to Jobe that she wanted sex. Instead she complained of being hot at night and took off her T-shirt, turning toward him, bumping him with the little rounded belly. He complied more often than before, growing hard silently and turning her—especially once she got into the third trimester—so he could slip into her from behind. Facing away, Carmen was braver. She would pick up one of Jobe’s long hands and place it between her legs, sometimes moving his fingers to the spot he never seemed to find on his own.

During the day, they never mentioned these things. Jobe worked and Carmen filled her days shopping for the baby. She had failed when they first moved in to put together a grown-up home, but things were changing now that she was going to be a mother. There was money in the bank—she thought of it as her Buenos Aires fund, though that seemed a ridiculous fantasy now—so she used it to buy a three-wheeled stroller with shock absorbers, a matching changing table and crib in regal cherry wood, and a glider-rocker for night feedings. Still, the supply of baby-related items was endless. Tiny T-shirts and diaper covers, receiving blankets, socks with built-in rattles, stimulating mobiles, nursing bras.

She bought several sets of stencils as well and began on the nursery wall, outlining Humpty Dumpty, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, various elves. Stepping back one pale late afternoon in
April, she saw that she had accomplished the job perfectly. There were even a few artistic flourishes: on the wolf that peered from around a tree, for instance—she had given him sly, lit-up eyes and erect ears, making him far more menacing than he appeared on the package. Was this good for a baby? She wasn’t certain. But it was, at least, a place where she could see her mark.

If Carmen were in a movie about her own life—she paced now, blowing on a milky cup of coffee—she would drop the grade school arts supplies and bravely begin sketching out something of her own. She could picture herself doing this. But the truth was she’d never been quite good enough. Carmen knew that if she were to put aside the stencils and start on the wall freehand, with a tracing pencil and paints, she would create an embarrassing mess.

It was late. She gathered up her supplies and stacked them on the second level of the changing table. It was time to make dinner, something else she wasn’t terribly good at. Though Jobe did like her mother’s goulash and it was a cool, rainy evening. If she got started immediately, she could be pulling the casserole out of the oven right around the time he got home. She had a doctor’s appointment in the morning, where—while she had her legs spread and he had his large warm hands stuck inside her—the avuncular man would ask what she’d been eating. Better to tell him about this homemade meal than the cheese popcorn and Diet Coke she’d had for lunch.

More important, warm, spicy food would fill the evening and soften the gap between them. The smell of her mother’s cooking made Carmen feel a little less lonely. She hurried downstairs through a clash of gloom and bright silver rain to begin thawing the meat.

Over goulash and salad and dark beer (his alone—Carmen drank milk) Jobe asked, abruptly, how the baby was doing.

“You make it sound like I can just check in with it and say, ‘What’s up, baby?’” Carmen lifted a forkful of noodles to her mouth and closed her eyes as she popped it in. Food had never tasted so good
in her life. “I don’t have some secret pipeline, you know. It’s not like I hear things you don’t.”

This was almost, but not quite, a bald lie. Tomorrow, it would be. On her last visit, the week before, Carmen’s doctor had recommended an ultrasound.

“Nothing to worry about,” he’d said, patting her bare foot in the stirrup. “But you’re eight months along and you’ve only gained fourteen pounds. I think it might be time to check in on your bambino and measure.”

“Could I find out the sex?” Carmen asked. She’d gotten used to talking to this man with her legs spread out, up in the air.

“Depends on the way the baby’s turned.” He rose to wash his hands and she watched. He had wonderful hands, wide and strong, not at all like Jobe’s. “But chances are good.”

She hadn’t told anyone about the ultrasound. Jobe already knew so much compared to her. This was something she planned to keep, this tiny bit of knowledge. From now until the delivery, only Carmen would be able to picture this baby and understand him. Or her. She would be able to think more carefully about names. She could finish the wall painting in the nursery, looking at that wolf from her baby’s point of view.

The next morning, she drank her milk and coffee then three full glasses of water. With her bladder pinching and rippling, she drove to the doctor’s office and waited twenty frustrating minutes to be called.

“You better hurry,” she said when he came in. “Or I’m going to pee all over your examining table.”

“Patience, patience.” He glopped some clear gel onto her hard stomach and smeared it with a blunt instrument that resembled a dildo with a flattened head. “I guess that’s easy for me to say, right?”

There was the sound of a heartbeat, but she’d heard this before during every exam since her fourth month. The machine’s little screen was turned away from Carmen and she craned her head. “Can you tell?” she asked. “What is it, a boy or a girl?”