Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

Sadie shrugged. “It was okay. I had kind of a hard labor. Back labor—”

“Me, too!”

“It’s awful, isn’t it?”

Caitlin nodded. “Did you do the epidural?” This seemed to be the second question all new mothers asked her.

“I did.” She wished she hadn’t. But it was all so far in the past now—the vivid reality of Jack trumping the twelve hours in which he’d fought his way out of her body—that she didn’t feel like explaining how it had stopped her labor, so that she’d then had to be given Pitocin, and on and on.

“Me, too,” said Caitlin. “I’d always thought I wanted to give birth at home, in a tub, with a midwife. And then, you know, I was going to do the Birthing Center. But then I thought if I was going to deliver in a hospital, I might as well go the whole medical route. Demerol. Epidural. Whatever they could give me.”

Sadie supposed Caitlin thought natural childbirth part and parcel of the Plot Against Women. Why should we suffer when we don’t have to? It’s not natural, it’s medieval . She’d heard these arguments before, from her mother.

“I kept thinking about Lil,” said Caitlin, “as I was lying there, waiting to push.”

Enough , thought Sadie. “Why?” she asked.

“Well, it just seemed so ironic. I’m in New York Hospital, having a baby, and, like, a year before, Lil was in the exact same place having a miscarriage. It just seemed so unfair. She wanted kids more than anything.” She shook her head in a cinematic gesture of sadness and took a sip of coffee. “This needs cream,” she whispered, and sprung, catlike, from the sofa. “I suppose you know how it turned out,” she said, striving to sound casual, as she strode across the room. “With Tuck. And me.”

Unconsciously, Sadie let loose a deep breath. That’s where all this had been leading. Of course. Who thought about a friend’s miscarriage on the delivery table? No one. Caitlin simply wanted someone with whom she could talk about Tuck. “Cream?” Caitlin asked, holding out a carton of organic half-and-half.

“Sure,” she said, though the coffee was beyond hope.

Caitlin sat back down, sipped loudly, then gave Sadie a serious look. “He was the love of my life,” she said. Oh God , thought Sadie. Why today? “I know you think it was just about sex.” Sadie did not correct this notion. “I think, at first, it may have been purely sexual, for Tuck, at least. But it never was for me. From the minute I met him, I knew .” This was all sounding a bit too Danielle Steel for Sadie’s tastes. Knew what? she wanted to ask, not because she actually cared but because she couldn’t stand Caitlin presuming that she understood what she meant, that Sadie, too, had had some moment, with some man, probably not her husband, when she “knew”; when, in fact, her life—contrary to her adolescent expectations—had been a series of accumulated moments, of knowing bits and pieces at different times and hoping they would add up to some knowledge that would be useful to her, and feeling different conflicting things, and trying to suss out the difference between love and friendship, between trouble and desire, and between love and desire (that was the tricky one, as everyone knew ). She did not believe, most certainly did not believe in the one moment of “I knew.” Moreover, she didn’t—did she?—want to hear about whatever had happened between Caitlin and Tuck.

“It was never going to work, of course. Even if he hadn’t had Lil and I hadn’t had Rob. Tuck’s one of those guys who’s afraid of happiness, you know? Who feels like he can’t be happy, like he doesn’t deserve it, so he always has to do something to wreck it. He always has to fuck things up.” She lit another cigarette from the first and took a loud sip of coffee. “And it didn’t last that long, the sex part. It was just too agonizing , doing that to Lil. He loved her, really, but he loved her intellectually . And he was incredibly protective of her. But he still craved women who were different . Wilder.”

Oh, please , thought Sadie. Wilder . Which meant what, exactly? That she’d cheat on her husband? Watch porn? Take it up the ass? What? That she bought into his overblown ideas of his own coolness? But then this was Caitlin talking, not Tuck. She was speaking, of course, of her overblown ideas of her own coolness.

“Lil probably told you. I know she knew. It was so obvious. When he and Lil would go to parties, he would play this game with her where she’d have to pick out the woman he’d most like to sleep with, other than her , of course. He always said other than her . If she guessed wrong, he’d go and talk to the right woman. If she guessed right, he wouldn’t.”

“ Really ,” said Sadie. Was this true? Lil had never told her anything like this, anything of cruelty on this level, though she’d heard certain things from Emily, things Lil had said in the hospital, but she’d discounted them as exaggerations, as the product of depression and grief. Just as she’d struggled to forget her knowledge of his affair with Caitlin, so that she might forge on with her friendship with Lil. She should have told her. She should have. Their friendship had died anyway. She took a sip of coffee and found herself unable to swallow it.

“It’s not a big deal,” said Caitlin. “He didn’t sleep with them. After me, he decided he couldn’t do that anymore.” Right , thought Sadie. “Sex made him feel too vulnerable.” The sour smell of the coffee was making Sadie slightly ill. She had to get rid of it—immediately—and nearly ran to the little sink beside Caitlin to dump it out.

“Oh, don’t do that!” Caitlin cried. “Meera will do it.”

On cue, the girl’s feet, in their slim, silvery sandals, appeared on the stairs. “Hello,” she called. “We’ve come to see the kittens.”

“Mama, Mama, Mama,” called Jack, appearing behind her. “Cat. Cat. See kitty cat.”

Sadie had forgotten about the kittens. Where were they, exactly? Locked in some special kitten-proof room?

“Hi, sweetie,” she said, pulling Jack into her arms. “Did you have a good lunch?”

“Yes,” he said, wriggling free from her grasp and grabbing Meera’s slender fingers. “Meera.” He gave her a mischievous look, then collapsed into giggles. “ Mee -rah.” In his right hand he held a squat, creamy plastic ring rattle, filched from Ismael.

“So,” Sadie said, clapping her hands together, “let’s see these kittens.”

“All right ,” said Meera, with a smile. “They’re just in here.” She opened a door at the back of the rec room and let them into a small, bright laundry room.

“They were living in the courtyard,” Caitlin explained. “This group of cats. One day, I rounded them up and brought them all over to the animal shelter in Williamsburg.” Oh God , thought Sadie. Those cats had been in the courtyard her whole life. An old man who lived on Bialystoker Place left food out for them. When it got cold, they squeezed into the basement of the Amalgamated through an exhaust pipe and the janitors took care of them.

Meera nodded approvingly. “It’s a no-kill shelter,” she added.

“Yes,” said Caitlin. “I was filling out the paperwork and one of them started making strange noises.”

“She was giving birth,” said Sadie. She’d read enough Little House on the Prairie to know what happens when an animal starts making strange noises.

“Yes,” Caitlin cried. “There were six just like this. All spotted. They were so small, like mice. I wanted to take them home, but the woman at the shelter said they had to stay with their mom for at least two weeks. We brought these two home last week. The rest have been adopted.” She snorted. “Two weeks! Imagine if we let these guys”—she gestured to Jack and, Sadie thought, Meera—“out into the world at two weeks.”