I fell silent, watching the Roy Rogers slide past, the Cineplex Odeon-Ten Screens, Free Validated Parking-the Chesapeake Bagelry.
Harry, who knows me about as well as I know myself, sensed through my quiet that I was of no mind to have a deep, philosophical discussion about where I was in my life and where I might be heading.
"You want to stop for a beer, maybe something to eat?" he asked.
I did and I didn't. Mostly, I felt like being alone, to start to sort some things out, to prepare for what I thought would be an onslaught in the days ahead. "I'm going to take a pass on this one," I said, and he nodded his understanding.
"I'm around all weekend," he said.
We pulled up to the curb in front of my red brick townhouse in the heart of the East Village of Georgetown. Katherine and I had bought it two years earlier. I was enchanted by the enormous bowfront window with the small panes, and even though we first saw it in the dead of a humid Washington August, I pictured how it would look with a towering, lighted Christmas tree. She was smitten with the condition of the place, which was atrocious, so we could gut it and start anew, creating an interior in our own image-or, I should say, her image, with a few peripheral touches by me like, say, the doorbell.
Harry and I bade farewell, and I ambled up the stairs. This should have been a pleasant homecoming. I was a sudden celebrity, and even under the most trying of circumstances, I had re-proved myself to the newspaper, perhaps unnecessarily so, but in my business it was something that was always good to do. Besides that, I was suddenly on very good terms with the president-terms so good he wanted me to be his next press secretary. And beyond even that, I had days ahead of the terrific story of an assassination attempt a dozen days before a presidential election.
Still, maybe it was the lingering effects of the painkillers the doctors had put in my intravenous tubes. Maybe it was my complete physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion. But as I stepped inside my dark, empty house, I felt a sense of helplessness, of melancholy, and I craved a sleep that I knew I wouldn't get.
More than anything else, I missed Katherine, and thought to myself that this was no time to be alone. In a few days, it would be one year that she had been gone. We had been married three years and, like everyone else, had our ups and downs. We were far from a perfect couple, but for my money, we were more perfect than most. A friend of mine, wrestling with his own decision whether to get married, asked me once how I knew Katherine was the right person and that the marriage was happening at the right time. I said you never really know for sure.
Look at the divorce rate. And I'm too independent to ever say, "I have to have this woman for the rest of my life." What I came to understand, though, was that I couldn't picture my life without her.
So in a defensive gesture, we married, and it was the smartest thing I ever did.
We bought the house and renovated it top to bottom, inside and out. We bought a golden retriever and named him Baker. We had sex in spurts.
There were weeks when we couldn't keep our hands off each other, when we would call each other at work and talk tawdry, as if we were having an affair, then steal off in the late afternoon, feigning meetings, and have sex in the waning sunlight of our second-floor bedroom.
Afterward, exhausted, we would lie in bed, leaning on our elbows, and look silently out into our back garden, breaking the quiet to tell each other of our day. We would slowly dress in the descending dark and walk down the street to our favorite restaurant, La Chaumiere, still smelling of sex, our private secret. Of course, other times we were more physically aloof. One or the other of us was tired, or preoccupied, or just not around, and then we would enjoy our friendship, actually test the limits of our friendship, to eventually wake up one morning and feel the need to have sex. More than anything else, she was my friend, and trite as it is to say, she could make me laugh, knowing exactly which buttons to push at exactly the right times.
Her pregnancy brought on a real potpourri of emotions. She was constantly sick at first, dry-heaving at the very mention of food one moment and starving the next. I, meanwhile, was coming to terms with the thought of fatherhood. For most of my adult life I had taken pride in my dearth of worldly possessions, which were so limited that for years, when it came time to move, I was able to wrap the cord around the alarm clock and pack everything I owned into the back of my hatchback. Initially, the thought of the responsibility petrified me, sometimes making me as sick to my stomach as she was. By the sixth month or so, I had arrived at an inner peace and understood and openly appreciated the length of a woman's pregnancy, this nine-month readjustment period. By then, she was a glowing mother-to-be, all her new weight centered in her stomach. I couldn't wait to greet my newborn into our house, and privately I hoped for a daughter. I had a recurring fantasy of stealing home from work early one day, coming around the corner on foot, and running into my wife, pushing a carriage, Baker padding patiently and proudly beside them. I never actually figured out where that fantasy went from there, or if it even involved sex. I'm not sure if there is such a thing as a sexless fantasy, so perhaps I should reclassify it.
Anyways, it was all for naught. Katherine was due in mid October. By the second, I was a basket case, nervous to the point of being unable to work. So I stayed home that day and played with the dog and puttered around the house. Katherine, meanwhile, continued to make calls to her public relations clients from our upstairs office, sending out faxes and approving advertising strategies as if she didn't have a worry in the world. She did this right up to the time when she came walking out the French doors onto our back patio and announced to me that the time had come to head to Georgetown Hospital. She told me I was making her so nervous, I probably induced the delivery. I was wiping down our wrought iron outdoor furniture. Baker was sprawled on the cool bricks, in a patch of shade.
In the delivery room, as we began to run through all the breathing exercises we had learned in eight weeks of birthing classes, her pain seemed almost unbearable. She pushed and counted, counted and pushed, when suddenly a nurse monitoring her vital signs snapped up a telephone and had the receptionist page our obstetrician. The doctor came rushing in less than two minutes later, took measure of the situation, and told me in no uncertain terms to leave the room and have a seat in the waiting lounge. Worried sick, profoundly confused, I did as I was told, trying to meet my wife's eyes as I left, watching her face, covered in sweat, watch mine as I backed out of the room. She mouthed the words "Don't go." The doctor overrode her, yelling, "Please leave." In the waiting area, I sat staring at my feet for the next two hours.
Dr. Joyce was an attractive, late fiftyish woman with the look of competence you would never think to question and a reputation that placed her among the top obstgyns in the city of Washington. As I sat there, lost in my fears, she came up so quietly I never saw her, took me by the hand, and began walking back toward the delivery room.
For a fleeting moment, all my dreadful thoughts gave way to the sparkling optimism that we were heading back to see my wife and newborn baby. I expected Katherine to be sound asleep, the effect of painkillers taking their toll. And I thought that our baby, boy or girl, would be kicking and screaming in a nearby crib. Already, I thought, I'm going to be pressed into service as a father. But before we arrived at the swinging doors that led into the maternity ward Dr.
Joyce pulled me into a small conference room, bare except for a circular table, a few swivel chairs, and some institutional art-a covered bridge in what looked like Vermont is the one I best remember.