indictment: This was her own fault, not just a failure of the body.
And in fact the nursing never worked, despite the best efforts of three lactation consultants. Claire was underweight, Fiona was bleeding and then her breasts were dangerously infected, and in the end it was in everyone’s best interest to stop trying.
Not that it should have mattered! Whole generations turned out fine on bottles. Fiona hadn’t bought all the La Leche stuff about bonding. But as she lay on the bed with eight-year-old Claire, what she remembered far too clearly was her resignation to the idea that this baby would never be able to take comfort from her—that Fiona had nothing left of herself, that first day or ever since, to give.
And what she remembered now, staring out Richard’s window toward the afternoon sun, was the absurd feeling back then, when Claire was eight, that they’d already missed the boat forever. That the damage had been done sometime in the past, not the present, and they were living in its aftermath. That the best they could hope for was good scarring.
1986
Yale didn’t say anything to Bill about messing up with Debra. He told him Nora had given a few general dates, provided some context, but that she wasn’t great on specifics. “Roman will type it all up for you,” he said. “Including a lot of stories about Ranko Novak!” He felt gross going for the cheap laugh; Ranko had grown on him.
He had a message waiting on his desk from Esmé Sharp, and when he called her it ended up spilling out that he had no place to stay, and so at her insistence, he spent the night at the Marina Towers in the fifty-eighth floor apartment Esmé and Allen let lie empty all winter when they were in Aspen. “Stay as long as you like!” she said. “You can water the jade plant.”
It was far enough from Boystown that he wouldn’t run into Charlie. He did want to see Charlie soon, wanted to yell at him all the things he hadn’t yet yelled, but only when he was prepared. He didn’t want to bump into him at the ATM.
Esmé insisted he could take the master bedroom, but instead he set himself up in the smaller guest room, which had its own half-balcony and featured a shelf of architecture books. In the kitchen was a rack of wine that Esmé said “better be drunk up the next time I check.” In the living room was the best stereo system Yale had ever used, and a shelf of classical CDs and opera and Broadway and Sinatra. Left to his own devices, he’d have been listening to The Smiths, which wouldn’t have helped a thing; and if it turned out he only had a few years to live, shouldn’t he be listening to Beethoven? He could see the river and the Sears Tower from the windows. At night, the city below him turned to constellations of yellow and red.
Back when Charlie had first taken him to the Bistro, right up the street, he’d been fascinated to see the two Marina City towers up close, the way each flower petal projection was really a curved balcony. And now, from the inside, he was terrified by how low the balcony railings were, how easily someone tall might lose balance and pitch over, how easily someone could step up and jump.
He wouldn’t do this, not even if he tested positive. Because the test didn’t mean you’d get sick this year or next year. If he ever went blind, he thought, he might end it then. If he couldn’t get through the day without shitting his pants. He and Charlie had met a guy in a bar that summer who’d sat there telling them about his lover, how this guy had vowed to kill himself when he couldn’t dance. And then when he couldn’t dance he’d changed it to when he couldn’t eat. And when he couldn’t eat, he’d said, “When I can’t talk.”
“He never did it,” the guy said. “He fought for his last breath. And what does that tell you? What does that tell you?” Yale and Charlie hadn’t offered an answer, and neither had he.
* * *
—
The days were ticking by, the odds of a reliable blood test increasing. Good news still wouldn’t be definitive, but bad news might be making an early debut. And then at least he’d know. It was the kind of decision he’d have loved to bounce off