An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir Page 2

  In my memory the house is gothic, all corridors and abandoned bedrooms. My office was upstairs, off what was described in the inventory as the Second Lounge but really was a space too lumpen to be a hallway and too windowless and eave-cramped to be a room. Getting to my office after dark involved crossing a series of spaces whose light switches were right where I didn’t need them. I almost never went. Instead, I stayed by the fire in the front room. We decided we would be hardy: we left the furnace off to save money and wrote, Cratchit-like, in hats and gloves. The place was full of mice. I could even hear them skittering underneath the tub when I bathed. Sometimes we heard a worse noise: according to Maud, the young Irishwoman hired to look after the property, there was a pine marten living in the eaves. I didn’t even know what a pine marten was, but in my gloves and hat I imagined a raccoonish, foxish Jacob Marley, rattling his chains above our bedroom to make us feel fully Dickensian. I hated that animal, though I never saw it.

  In fact, from where I sit now — New York State, the spring of 2007 — everything about our winter in Savary feels dire: the house dirty, the Anglophone friends we made perpetually and depressingly drunk and broke, the language barrier alienating. A single sentence in French can make me sad. Every now and then I will suddenly think, What was the name of the next village over, the one with the covered market in the middle, what was the name of that restaurant we used to go to, and I find I can’t remember, the information’s gone like a pulled tooth, though my brain will keep poking at the empty spot.

  What a terrible time that all was, I’ll think.

  My memory is a goddamn liar. It can only see France — or at least those seven months in the southwestern countryside — through the calamity. If you’d asked before April 27, 2006, I would have said: This is the happiest time of my life. That’s why I wrote down that sentence in the hospital, This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending. It was very strange to have been so happy so recently, and I felt that if I puzzled it over enough I might be able to find my way back — not to experience it again, of course, but to conjure up the smell on the hem of an article of clothing, to touch in some abstract way something that had innocently, casually touched my happiness, since there would be (he was stillborn) nothing literal for me to touch.

  But now there it is when I wipe the smudge away: happiness. I was two months pregnant when we moved to Savary. We’d spent the nine months before that in Paris. For three years we’d split our time between Iowa, where we taught and earned money, and Europe, where we wrote and spent it: Paris twice, Ireland, Berlin, Denmark. People told me, “I’d love to have your life,” and I would always say, “But then you’d have to accept my standard of living.” We didn’t own a house, a car, not even a sofa. We spent our money on souvenir busts and cheap red wine.

  Savary was one more adventure. Yes, the house was dark, but it was agreeably hilarious. “We’re living in an unwed mothers’ home,” I told my friends. “We have eight bathrooms and two kitchens and a single possible pine marten.” The house was surrounded by farmland and vineyards, cows out some windows and horses out others, and a vast patio off the summer kitchen with a view of Duras, the nearby village, and its medieval hill-set château. The château was an enormous plain castle that looked, in good weather, like the home of seven beautiful princesses and one befuddled king, and in bad weather like the keep of a brooding, evil, terribly attractive beast.

  I loved being pregnant. Whatever hormones had shaken together in my bloodstream, it was an agreeable cocktail. I devoted myself to gestating — I didn’t write much, but that didn’t bother me. Edward cooked and cleaned and tucked me into bed. I rubbed my stomach and loved my husband profoundly. I had the sense that these last months as a twosome were as important as our upcoming months as a threesome: they felt like part of someone’s happy childhood. What fun it would be to tell our kid where his parents had spent his gestation and birth. In the spring, sheep and lambs, cows and calves, studded the hills, and I regarded them. I felt stupidly, sentimentally mammalian.

  After the baby died, I told Edward over and over again that I didn’t want to forget any of it: the happiness was real, as real as the baby himself, and it would be terrible, unforgivable, to forget it. His entire life had turned out to be the forty-one weeks and one day of his gestation, and those days were happy. We couldn’t pretend that they weren’t. It would be like pretending that he himself was a bad thing, something to be regretted, and I didn’t. I would have done the whole thing over again even knowing how it would end.

  (Would I really? It’s a kind of maternal puzzle I can’t get at even now: he isn’t here, and yet how can I even consider wishing him away? I can’t love and regret him both. He isn’t here, but now someone else is, this thrilling splendiferous second baby, and like any mother I can’t imagine taking the smallest step from the historical path that led me here, to this one, to such a one.)

  No matter how I vowed to hold on to the happiness of the pregnancy, it was impossible, such a solitary pastime. When your child dies you cannot talk about how much you loved being pregnant. You have to give up the stories about the funny French gym you went to, where the women kissed hello while on treadmills and the gym owner shook your hand and said, “Ça va? Et le bébé?” You must retire the anecdotes of meeting a pair of Mormons in Bergerac, the comic complaints of how impossible it is for a pregnant person to eat in a French restaurant, your run-ins with French lab workers who refused — pen poised over a cup of your urine, one eyebrow raised skeptically — to believe there was such a thing as a married woman who kept her maiden name. You can’t list all the funny names you and your husband came up with for the kid, laughing in bed, late at night. You will lose nine months of your history along with all the other things you’ve lost.

  I had just stepped over the border from happy pregnancy to grief, but I could still see that better, blither country, could smell the air over my shoulder, could remember my fluency there, the dumb jokes, the gestures, the disappointing cuisine, the rarefied climate. I knew already I could never go back, not then, not for any future pregnancy (should I be so lucky).

  Of course I wanted to remember what it was like! It was all I had.

  Now it’s all miles away. Everything’s muddled together. At some point I imagined a kind of time — I don’t know whether I got this idea from science or science fiction, not being much interested in either — that split into two or more directions when the baby died: on one track he lived and we took him home and somewhere in the universe at this moment we have a one-year-old baby and a newborn and are ignorant, exhausted, cheery (or maybe only the first two); on the other track, the one I accidentally took, he died, and we left France. But time changed backwards, too, and now, no matter what, every single day of my first pregnancy, when I was laughing till I was paralytic at my own jokes about what to name the baby, when I was addressing fond monologues to my stomach as I drove a horrific old Ford Escort through the French countryside, he was already dead, and France was already culpable, and our hearts were already broken.

  If you’d asked me five years ago — let’s say five years ago and seven weeks — where I saw myself, five years and seven weeks in the future, I would not have mentioned a husband, children, living in six different countries. I was thirty-five and had never had a really serious romance. This mostly didn’t bother me. I liked living alone. I even liked going to movies alone and eating in restaurants alone. I would never have called myself single. The word suggests a certain willingness to flirt in bars or take out advertisements for oneself on the Internet: single people are social in the hope that they won’t be single forever. I was a spinster, a woman no one imagined marrying. That suited me. I would be the weird aunt, the oddball friend who bought the great presents and occasionally drank too much and fell asleep on the sofa. Actually, I already was that person.

  Then I went to a party in New York thrown by Barnes and Noble and discovered that the author of that weird illustrated book I’d li
ked so much was not, as I’d concluded from the work and author photo, a midforties, balding, puffy misanthrope, but a cheerful, floppy-haired thirtyish Englishman. A month later, he came to Boston to work on an art project and called me up. We went out every night for a week. On our third date, he said, “I have something to tell you.” It transpired that his name was not, as was printed on his book, Edward Carey, but in fact, as was printed on his passport, Jonathan Edward Carey Harvey. He displayed the passport to prove this. As revelations went, I could live with it, though it was too late for me to call him anything but Edward. At the end of the week, on our fifth date — which happened to be his thirty-second birthday — he asked me very seriously if I wanted children.

  The only other people who’d asked me that question were my similarly aging childless girlfriends. The answer I generally gave was: not abstractly, but if I met someone who really wanted children, and I thought he’d be a good father, and I was relatively sure we’d be married forever or at least for the length of two roughly concurrent childhoods, then yes, I would want children, yes please. I loved family life, adored my parents and my older brother, our decades-old running jokes, our familial obsessions. We went out for long, boozy meals. We took trips together and brought home souvenirs and outlandish stories. The McCracken Family Circus. We even went to the actual circus together, all four of us being actual circus buffs. Yes: I would want children if I met someone with whom I could imagine raising eccentric, friendly, hilarious children who we could bundle off to Europe and museums and circuses no matter how old or young they were. At thirty-five it seemed unlikely I’d meet such a person. That was OK. If life never brought me a husband or children, I wouldn’t miss them. I’d devote myself to good works or bad habits.

  But I could tell that Edward wasn’t asking idly. He has a wide forehead upon which all emotions are legible: sincerity, anxiety, apprehension, skepticism; he has passed it down to our sincere, apprehensive, occasionally skeptical second baby. My answer would make a difference.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think I would.”

  A week after that — it has been five years and seven weeks, Mother, and I no longer feel the need to juggle the ledgers — he moved into my apartment. When people ask where we met, I sometimes say, “I ordered him from Barnes and Noble.”

  I’d lived for nine years in Somerville, Massachusetts: now Edward and I began to move. For four years, we relocated every few months, to Iowa City, Paris, Ireland, Iowa City, Berlin, small-town Denmark, Iowa City, Paris. We chased jobs and fellowships and wine and museums, lived in midwestern sabbatical sublets, a thatched cottage that had sheltered Brecht in the 1930s, next door to hard-partying students, in a German villa made over into housing for American academics. Somewhere in there we got married at the small stone church at the bottom of Edward’s parents’ driveway. The village vicar officiated, backed up by an American rabbi my mother had ordered off the Internet.

  My favorite of our dwellings was our last apartment in Paris, the first home of my first pregnancy. We’d had a list of things we wanted in a place to live: space for two desks, maybe a guest room, maybe a tiny balcony, without a doubt an elevator for certain unsteady relatives. Then we answered an ad in an expat paper. The building was next to the Jewish Museum and around the corner from the Pompidou Centre. We punched the code we’d been given over the phone into the pad by the door, walked five flights of stairs that got narrower and wobblier until we were at the top in a low-ceilinged hallway, rang a bell, and were let into a seventeenth-century high-ceilinged cartoon garret filled with antique furniture. It fulfilled none of our requirements. We loved it immediately. Just then another would be renter showed up, a yellow-clad lawyer from Boston, with wooden skin and leaden hair and the official dreary insinuating underfed brittle aura of a number 2 pencil. We understood that she meant us ill. “We’ll take it,” Edward told the landlady, a tall woman from Amiens who raised mules and taught English to small boys. “Wonderful,” the landlady answered, and the lawyer said in disbelief, “It’s fine for one person. But two?”

  “We’re writers,” I said apologetically. “We’re supposed to live in a garret in Paris.”

  She snorted. “Everyone in Paris is a writer.”

  The kitchen was small and overlooked the dining area; the guest room was a treacherous loft over the living room; the tub was a slipper bath, half-sized but deep, with a step to sit on, the perfect place to read. Above the bed, where I worked, sitting up, was a ceiling of herringbone beams. Through the bedroom window you could see the turrets of the National Archives; through the dining room window, the chimney pots of Paris.

  I was working on a malingering novel, since abandoned (for a while I said, “It died,” but not anymore), and Edward on an enormous one. We’d write in the morning, Edward in the dining room and me propped up in bed, and then I’d persuade him to go out to lunch, where we’d order a carafe of wine, and then we’d wander and spend money and not get back to our books till the next morning.

  After some months of this, my novel collapsed. I panicked: How would I ever write again? How could we afford to keep living in Paris at this rate? To talk me down from the cliff, Edward suggested the country, where life would be beautiful, cheap, and dull, and we’d have no choice but to work. All right, I said. We found three possible properties on the Internet; we drove out to look at them. The first was a millhouse that had been converted into a restaurant and was now being converted back into a house; from the windows we could see the landlord’s apartment, which seemed overly cozy. The second, also a millhouse, had an intermittent rat problem. “Coypou,” the landlady explained, and Edward said, “Oh, coypou,” as though this constituted a particularly prestigious sort of rat problem. The third was Savary. Beryl, the landlady, showed us around. Preposterous! we thought. Who needed four times as many toilets as occupants? But the price was right, and we signed a lease that started in three months, and we went back to Paris.

  Two weeks later, I sent Edward out to negotiate a pregnancy test. All slightly medical transactions in French pharmacies require negotiation with the pharmacist. I took it, disbelieved it, sent him out for another, which agreed with the first.

  We didn’t call my occupant the Baby, which seemed inaccurate, cloying, and too optimistic. We were superstitious. For some complicated, funny-only-to-the-progenitors reason, we settled on the names Pudding and Wen (in case we were having twins, which, as the daughter of a twin, I worried about). Then the first ultrasound showed the single pocket-watch heart, and so it was just Pudding, boy or girl. What’s Pudding doing? How are you, Pudding? The baby ticking away was Pudding all September in Paris, and Pudding when we moved to the countryside in October. And then we had the amnio, and Pudding seemed to suit a little boy, the little boy we were making up day by day — I made him up literally, of course, cell by cell and gram by gram, and Edward and I made him up in conversation and dumb flights of fancy. Pudding! we’d say to my stomach. Pudding, what are you up to? Pudding was Pudding to us and soon enough to all our friends and family: everyone called him that. I couldn’t imagine naming a baby ahead of time, calling a baby by his earth name before he was a citizen of this world. Naming seemed a kind of passport stamp.

  But it was one of the first things we were told, after we found out that he was dead: the baby needed a name. I was sitting outside the first hospital of the day, waiting with Sylvie, the midwife who we’d found to deliver the baby. She was a sinewy woman in her midforties who spoke about ten words of English but was hugely enthusiastic. We’d just heard the bad news. I was more than forty-one weeks pregnant. It was late April and the weather was fine and it was better not to be inside any kind of medical room for the moment. Sylvie was holding my hand. Soon we’d go to a different hospital. This hospital was only for living children. They didn’t do autopsies. We needed an autopsy. Sylvie and I sat across from two teenage boys who were smoking, and more than anything I wanted to ask one for a cigarette but I didn’t.

  The language of
disaster is, handily, the language of the barely fluent. I kept saying to Sylvie, Je ne comprends pas. C’est incroyable. C’est incroyable. Edward was at the far end of the parking lot, calling his parents on our cell phone since we’d come to one of those moments of nothing to do.

  You must find a name, Sylvie said. For the certificate.

  How could we pick a name out of the handful we’d idly considered? How could we do that to him? Oh, I don’t mean to be maudlin, and I do not believe in some lousy afterlife where babies who don’t get to be born are ushered off by a kindly black-and-white angel, a real creepy Boy Scout leader of an angel. I hate that fucking angel, cupping the downy heads of all those unborn babies, almost as much as I hate the phrase “unborn baby” itself, I am trying to disbelieve him so I don’t have to look at him, but he’s lodged in my head. He’s rounding them up, he’s saying, Come here, little souls, it’s not your time yet — tell me your name — what did your parents call you?

  No more talk of angels. I can’t stand the tendency to speak of dead children as such. I do not want him elevated to angel. I do not want him demoted to neverness. He was a person, that’s all.

  Edward came back from the privacy of the far reaches of the parking lot, still holding the cell phone. He wasn’t crying anymore, but he had been. I told him we had to name the baby for legal reasons.

  “We’ll call him Pudding,” he said, in one of those moments that sounds improbably sentimental to me now but at that moment was exactly right. A new name would be only a death name, another way to say that he hadn’t exactly existed before now. How could he suddenly be an Oscar or a Moses? How would he ever find his way, renamed like that? His parents called him Pudding, always. Even now we do. It’s the name on the certificate the city of Bordeaux gave us in early May, certificat d’enfant sans vie, certificate of the birth of a child without life — birth certificate, death certificate, whatever you want to call it. Sometimes it seems too sweet to me, but mostly I just think: that’s who he is, he’s Pudding.