‘Tell me about it,’ I said.
And he did: the hysteria of night feeds and the calm of total sleep; the torture of teething and the joy of watching her grow.
‘It’s fucking agony and it’s fucking magical,’ he said. ‘Is that good for you to hear?’
I wasn’t sure.
Once classes broke, I called my mother. Eamonn answered.
‘She’s had a little spill,’ he said.
He told me about the ‘cold snap’ that had recently hit Dublin. The Council hadn’t enough grit for the roads and was importing it from the Continent. There was snow on O’Connell Street, a drift three inches thick against the walls of the GPO where Eamonn and my mother had gone together to mail their Christmas cards. On the way out, she had slipped on a patch of ice and fallen from his grasp.
‘I had her,’ he said, ‘and then I didn’t.’
She was in the Mater, with a pin in her ankle and a bedside locker stacked with get-well cards. Did I have any news I wanted him to pass along?
‘No,’ I said.
I hung up and called my mother’s mobile. She answered on my fourth attempt.
‘Hello, love,’ she said, her voice groggy.
‘I just spoke to Eamonn,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘we didn’t want to worry you.’
She launched then into a long description of her ward: the nurses who looked too young even to be out of school; the ten-strong Polish family who visited their mother en masse and stayed all day; the old man across the aisle who, she said, ‘has good days and bad. No one ever visits, so I sit with him whenever I can.’
‘Do the doctors let you out of bed?’
‘They worry too much, those boys.’
‘Listen, Mam,’ I said, ‘I have something I need to tell you.’
I did. And as she screamed, I couldn’t help but smile.
‘I wish your father were here,’ she said through tears. ‘He would have been so happy, so proud.’
‘So do I,’ I said.
I started, again, to worry about money, about what I’d do after graduation and how I’d provide for what I’d started to think of as my family. I told my mother that we’d be staying in New York for Christmas, and although she sounded disappointed, she said she understood. I quit buying coffee in the mornings, cancelled my journal subscriptions, took extra shifts tutoring at the Writing Center and sold all my big anthologies to the student union bookstore. When Carol came home and saw the shelves empty she looked as though she might cry, looked too as though she wanted to say something. But instead she removed my glasses and kissed my eyelids.
In the New Year, I compiled dossiers of syllabus samples and student evaluations to bring to the Modern Language Association’s hiring fair. I’d managed to schedule three interviews, while Darren had arranged just one for the sake of testing the waters. We took the Amtrak to DC together and shared a room at the department’s expense. In the mornings, we dressed in thermals and parkas and trudged through the snow to see panels. In the afternoons, I changed into a sports coat and took my number in the huge and echoing interview hall at the Four Points Sheraton.
At my first two sessions, I distilled my research and plotted my timeline for finishing. The interviewers nodded with feigned or tepid interest. But at my third session, I heard myself say that my ‘wife’ was expecting our first child. Professor Dessa Greene — a young, goofy Victorianist from a medium-sized university in western Indiana — brightened and produced on her phone an image of her own son, nineteen weeks old and frog-faced, who at that moment was touring the Lincoln Memorial papoosed at his father’s chest.
‘The thing I like most about our department,’ Dessa said, ‘is that they understand the need to balance your work with your life. We’re a young faculty, and there’ll be a place for your family with us if we hire you.’
I left feeling cautious but hopeful. I called Carol but she didn’t answer. I caught the bus to Georgetown to meet Darren for burgers and beers. His own interview, he told me, had been a disaster.
‘Fucking philistines,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t recognize subtlety of thought if it bit them in the face. This game is rigged, friend-o. We should’ve just got real jobs.’
At the next table, a group of business-school types in blazers and khakis sipped from heavy glasses of Ketel One.
‘Look at these assholes,’ Darren said. ‘They’re the guys who beat the shit out of me in school. So I beat them at school. And I stayed in school forever. And now school is almost over, and it’s back to their rules again.’
I told him about Dessa Greene.
‘The family man,’ he snorted. ‘Christ. The kid’s not even born yet and already you’re leveraging the poor little bastard. Well, good for you. That’s how the game is played. Apparently.’
Carol wouldn’t be persuaded to take things easy. She’d work, she said, for as long as she could bear it to stockpile personal days and extend her maternity leave. I rehearsed what I would say to her should the offer ever come from Indiana, tried to think of anything that might make her want to move.
We enrolled in a birthing class that met three evenings a week in a basement in Cobble Hill. The facilitator, Sarabeth — we were instructed never to use the word ‘teacher’, because ‘this kind of learning comes from within’ — padded barefoot from couple to cross-legged couple, whispering encouragements in a voice well suited to her work but even better to night-time radio. Carol breathed in sync with my count, which often was distracted and arrhythmic. ‘You’ve been a student your whole goddamn life,’ she said as I tugged her to her feet and fetched her shoes. ‘Why is it so hard for you to learn this one easy thing?’
We rented a Zipcar and drove it to a mall in Jersey, Carol gripping the wheel around her belly because I’d never gotten a licence. The mall smelled clean and sweet, like new stationery. We bought a crib and a stars-and-moons mobile to hang above it, a changing table and something called a diaper genie. The disposable or plastic items were bulky and preassembled. The wooden things were packed flat in cardboard boxes. I carried them all to the car and from the car up the stairs to the apartment. We filled what little space there was in the big hall closet and in the drawers beneath the bed.
I packed a box with my binders and took it to my carrel. I felt as though I’d fallen behind. Whenever I wasn’t working, I noticed a chill beneath my arms and in my throat. But then, one morning in late January — with three missed calls from Carol, a whole suite of furniture left to assemble, and a leafless tree branch bobbing to the beat of frozen rain outside my window — I realized that I was finished. I drank a flask of coffee and spent a night cleaning up citations. And the following morning, in a haze, I printed a manuscript copy of the dissertation and left it in my supervisor’s mailbox.
With nothing to work on, I spent long hours alone in the apartment. Letters and baby books began arriving with a Dublin postmark. I spoke more frequently with my mother, who was off her crutches and keen to plan her first visit to New York. I checked the job boards hourly for updates, bought a lock for the toilet seat and covers for the electric sockets. I hit the gym both mornings and evenings, got my mile time down to seven minutes.
For Valentine’s Day, I reserved a table at Carol’s favourite place in Gramercy. But on the night, she said she felt too tired to go out. We ordered a take-out feast from the Japanese place on Court and gorged ourselves on edamame and gyoza and teriyaki. Afterwards, we lay on the couch flicking between romantic comedies. The baby was kicking. Of course, I’d felt it before, had marvelled over it with Carol in the night. But now it was just a nuisance. She dug her shoulder under my ribs. I groaned and reached out to help her.