James Siegel - Detour

PABLO’S JOB DESCRIPTION PROVED TO BE A MODEST ONE.

Technically, Galina might’ve been a nurse, but she was really a miracle worker.

Joanna, who still maintained at least a tenuous connection to the Catholic Church of her youth, was ready to nominate her for sainthood.

“Do you see this?” Joanna whispered to him.

Galina had managed to calm Joelle, retrieve the sterilized bottles and nipples, and locate a can opener for the formula, all in less than two minutes. At the moment, she was providing a startling display of ambidexterity, feeding Joelle in the crook of her left arm while arranging an impromptu changing table with her right.

Paul thought she looked pretty much like what a baby nurse should look like—anywhere from her mid-fifties to her mid-seventies, with a gentle face highlighted by pronounced laugh lines and soft gray eyes that seemed to resonate with the patience of, well . . . a saint.

“Can I do that?” Joanna asked her, but she was gently waved away.

“Plenty times to do this when you take your baby home,” Galina said. Her English was excellent. “You watch me now.”

So Joanna did. Paul too, who’d vowed to be the kind of hands-on father that actually pitched in.

Galina finished feeding Joelle, then proceeded to demonstrate her burping technique, which was, of course, perfect. One firm pat on the back and Joelle made a noise that sounded like a bottle of sparkling Evian being opened. Galina gently placed Joelle down on the kitchen-counter-turned-changing-table and relieved her of her soiled diaper, with Paul acting as number one helper.

He was happy to note that the unpleasantness of changing a baby’s diapers was mitigated by the baby in question being yours .

The hotel had placed a small white crib in the corner of their bedroom. Galina put Joelle facedown on the freshly laundered sheets and pulled a pink coverlet up to her neck.

“Um . . .” Joanna looked plainly uncomfortable about something.

“Yes, Mrs. Breidbart?” Galina said.

“Call me Joanna, please.”

“Joanna?”

“Isn’t . . . I thought a baby needs to be put on her back . When she sleeps. So she doesn’t choke or get SIDS.”

“SIDS?” Galina smiled and shook her head. “The stomach is fine,” she said.

“Well, yes, but . . . I read something, there were some studies done five years ago and they said—”

“Stomach is fine, Joanna,” she repeated, and patted her on the shoulder.

Now Joanna didn’t look so happy at being called by her first name.

An uncomfortable silence suddenly permeated the room.

Paul thought that a kind of trespass had been committed, only he wasn’t sure who’d trespassed upon whom. Joanna was Joelle’s mother, true. Galina was her nurse. Her highly experienced and, by all evidence, highly competent nurse. A jury might have a tough time with this one.

Galina broke the silence first.

“If it makes you more comfortable, Joanna,” she said, and reached into the crib, gently turning Joelle over onto her back.

In the battle of wills the other guy had apparently blinked.

SIX

You didn’t say anything,” Joanna said.

Joanna wasn’t sleeping. Paul wasn’t either, but only because she’d just woken him.

Said anything when ? He’d been in the middle of a dream involving a college girlfriend and a torpid tropical beach, and for a moment he was shocked to be on a bed in what was obviously a hotel room.

In Bogotá. Yes.

Consciousness continued to fill in like a Polaroid being furiously waved in the air. He was in a hotel room in Bogotá. With his wife.

And his new baby daughter.

Not with Galina, though. She’d departed for home after allowing them to go downstairs for dinner, where they couldn’t find a single Colombian dish on the menu.

Galina was what Joanna was talking about. He hadn’t said anything when Joanna accused Galina of putting Joelle to sleep the wrong way.

“I thought discretion was the better part of valor,” Paul said.

“I see. I read babies are supposed to sleep on their backs, Paul.”

“Maybe she hadn’t read the same articles.”

“Books.”

“Right, books. She probably hadn’t read those either.”

“You should’ve taken my side.”

Paul considered that one. That maybe he should’ve taken her side. He was tempted to point out that they were novices here, and that all things considered, he was inclined to go with empirical knowledge over self-help books and Mother & Baby magazine. On the other hand, if he agreed with her, he had a reasonable chance of being able to turn over and go back to sleep.

“Yes, sorry,” Paul said. “I should’ve, I guess.”

“You guess ? We’re her parents now. We have to support each other.”

“You mean we didn’t have to support each other before?”

Joanna sighed and rolled away from him. “Forget it.”

It was clear that Joanna didn’t actually mean he should forget it.

“Look,” Paul said. “I didn’t know who was right. Suddenly, this baby is ours. We’re . . . responsible for her. Galina seemed to know what she’s doing. I mean, it’s her job. ”

It occurred to Paul that the process of becoming a circle might involve some growing pains. God knows, they’d had enough of them trying to have a baby.

Take sex, for instance.

You could pretty much mark its decline from the moment they’d decided to start a family.

As Paul remembered it, they’d been lying on a nice four-poster bed in Amagansett, Long Island, sloshed on California cabernet. When Joanna said I don’t have my diaphragm in, he didn’t say okay, I’ll wait, and she didn’t get up and get it.

They’d been married six years. They were thirty-two years old. They were drunk and horny and certifiably in love.

It would turn out to be the last spontaneous moment they’d have involving the act of conception.

When her period came a month later, they immediately decided to have another go at it.

This time there was no California cabernet and no Amagansett surf. The results were pretty much the same.

Her friend came right on schedule. Again. Only it wasn’t a friend anymore, as much as an embarrassing if intimate relation she thought she’d booted out of the house, only to discover sitting back out on her front stoop.

In the Breidbart household, menstrual tension became decidedly post.

They soon began the exhausting roundelay of doctors in search of ever-elusive answers, as sex continued its slow and painful evolution from lovemaking to baby -making.

At one point he’d needed to shoot her with fertility drugs exactly one half hour before they performed sex. And it was a kind of performance—increasingly a command performance, summoned to do his duty at various times of the day and night. These times predicated on all sorts of physical factors, none of which had anything to do with actual lust.

A subtle kind of blame game ensued. When a thorough testing of Paul’s sperm revealed that he had a below-average and barely serviceable sperm count, he’d sensed a slight shift in the air. The word you seemed to enter Joanna’s conversation with greater frequency and with what he perceived as an accusatory intonation.

When a thorough testing of Joanna’s ovaries revealed a slight abnormality that could, in some cases, inhibit proper fertilization, Paul had returned the favor. It was cruel and unforgiving.

It was also impossible to stop.

For both of them.

And it wasn’t just each other who began getting on their nerves. Other people too. Lifelong friends of Joanna’s, for instance, whose only crime was their apparently unlimited aptitude for getting pregnant. Including her best friend, Lisa, with two towheaded toddlers, right across the hall. Complete strangers began bugging them as well. Three seconds into meeting them, they’d invariably ask the k-question. Have any kids? Paul wondered why that wasn’t considered unconscionably rude. Did they go around asking strange couples if they owned a car, or a decent bank account, or an in-ground swimming pool?