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(These are excerpts from an unfinished novel draft from November 2010, working title: Rue & Care. The two narrators, Ruth and Caroline, have been friends on and off since the age of seven, each the daughter of an unstable single mother. They’ve had breakups and rapprochements over the decades; this first excerpt takes place in their early twenties, just as a three-year separation has abruptly ended.)
RUTH
For some couples, having a baby is the thing they do together hoping it will make things better. For us, it was having an abortion.
I took a cab straight to her house; she had the door open even as I got off the elevator, and I was hugging her before either of us knew what was what. I’d wondered if maybe she might have changed her mind between her call and my arrival, that’s what made me take the cab, but no, she was even more grateful than I’d imagined, and when I went towards her with arms open, she clung to me, door slamming behind us, and full-contact cried into me, snot on my hair, drool on my neck, stuttering sobs.
“Rue,” she keened. “Rue…”
I took a full, deep breath of the moment, turned my sensors on full so I could store and relive this, exulted in rapture. To be needed, loved, redeemed, to have her back on my shoulder, my head almost under her arm, hugging me tighter as she sobbed deeper; I didn’t dare imagine in all those three years that this was possible, and yet here it was, happening. Cells bursting like fireworks where her skin pressed mine, atoms inhaled, the chemical change of being twinned again. I was so full, inflated past the point of safety, but full of strength and purpose and joy. This was where I fit in the world, this is what I was created for, to do this.
“Care,” I said softly, trying it out after all this time. It caused her to hook around me even tighter, her arm too heavy on my neck, and I wiggled to afford her more room. “I’m so sorry this is happening. You don’t deserve this. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” I gently pushed her upright by the shoulders, with her already shaking her head okay, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “I’ll kill him,” I offered, not insincerely. “How about that?”
“That would be great.” She flopped back against the arm of the sofa and I sat across from her, our feet and legs together as of yore. I tried to just look at her and not look around the room and catalog all the differences since the last time I was here, though there were a irksome lot of those; recent hardbacked books, all with the cover flap tucked in at about page 25; no picture of us in Puerto Rico, but a picture of her and this guy, with his dreadlocks and his unsmiling squint, a horror. Even in 2D, he was detestable; he looked like a sociopath.
And how was she? The sameish; ten pounds heavier maybe, but that was probably baby weight. The idea of having a living parasite inside my body, consuming me while it grew, was so nauseatingly terrifying to me; I couldn’t imagine how desperate she must be to exorcise this alien intelligence, this unsmiling sociopathic fetus sucking her dry. “So when’s your appointment?” I asked, businesslike, first things first.
“Tomorrow at 8 a.m. Up by Lincoln Center.” She nodded and gulped air, pulling it together, dutifully reporting in so that I could assess the situation and call a plan. “God, thank you so much for coming over, I’m so sorry…” She flopped forward, head in hands, and started crying again. “I can’t believe what a fucking idiot I am.”
“No,” I said, laughing and shaking my head, trying to pry her upright again, squeezing my eyes shut tight for a second so I could wring some more reality out of the moment. She was apologizing. She was castigating herself. I didn’t have to do anything, say anything, and all of the arguments I’d carefully prepared, all of the postures I switched between, depending on the day – bemused , bitchy, flat and affectless – I could now crumple that page into a dodecahedron and toss it to the imaginary cat, because I didn’t need it anymore. “It’s okay,” I said, hugging her as she started on a fresh round of sobbing. “It really is going to be okay.”
I wound up staying the night, sleeping in her old t-shirt — her invite, which I declined twice before accepting, but only so that I could make sure she wanted me enough. I didn’t want to press my luck, I wanted to show her that I was a new me, and that she would never have cause to regret our reunion, because I never would. We made dinner, talked about the guy, “Enzo,” whose given name was Lorenzo but apparently that was too much of a mouthful for a tightlipped rebel like him, a mute donkey with so few feelings that he was going to let her abort the fetus he’d fertilized alone.
I was to understand two competing truths: That he was a genius, a great musician, and a deeply feeling person who’d been the innocent victim of tragic injustices but transformed that pain into art (which was the most laudable thing in life, to take your pain and make little statues with it, or take blurry photos of it, or create a non-narrative video installation that deliberately “invites the viewer to participate in the meaning of the piece,” id est, makes no sense on purpose, a.k.a. making the viewer do your work for you, with it.); also that he was an inconsistent, lying cad whose complete disregard for her feelings and well-being bordered on the pathological. And rather than point out the logical fallacy of her cake-eating/cake-having argument, I listened.
One of the things I heard was the repeated name Amy, a co-worker who she was close with, and yet didn’t call when the chips were down, because otherwise Amy’d be sitting there on the second counter stool watching Caroline wave the dishtowel around for emphasis as the pot on the stove sent up plumes of spaghetti-flavored steam. I want to interrupt her rant against “Enzo,” ask her if she remembers how we both used to open our mouths like snapping turtles whenever one of our mothers opened a Sweet and Low, so we could catch the extra sweetness in the air; it’s so much more relevant than this “and then he” shit, which stretches from the second date of their eight-month relationship up to tonight, when he confirmed that he was not available to take her to her abortion because he had, as he said, “a rehearsal.”
“And I’m like, ‘At eight in the morning, you have a rehearsal? Also, you can’t cancel rehearsal? You can’t be an hour or two late? So I mean nothing to you, and this is not even as important to you as rehearsal, which you blew off ten times when we were first fucking.’”
I am to be impressed by her debate skills, her sticking up for herself and not being walked on like she has by every single man she’s ever dated. “Good, you really nailed him.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t help. What I want is for him to come with me and commit to me, but this is just going to drive him farther away. We’re going to break up over this, I mean, if he doesn’t…I mean, there’s like nothing he could do at this point that would make up for…” She’s realizing this as she’s saying it, and I’m witnessing it, and the alchemy of this exchange is locking it into place for her. She heaves in a sigh and lets out a deep groan, uuuuuuhhhggggg, then stares off into space as though trying to remember something. “What the fuck am I going to do.”
“What do you want to do?” I ask, and she looks at me with alarm and gratitude mixed – how could I ask her that question, and why hadn’t anybody else? “Do you want to keep the appointment tomorrow? Do you want to postpone it a week and think about it?”
“No. No, I can’t…I have to go tomorrow, I’ve already been dreading it for a week, and I can’t take it any longer. I can’t change my mind, I can’t.” She put a hand over her belly, and her face distorted into a cry again. “I’m sorry, I know it makes me a terrible person, but I just can’t…”
“I understand. You’re right. You know best, and you know for sure that you can’t. Period, the end.”
We watched TV. She smoked a joint. I smiled to myself at the smell. Homey, like a hamster cage. This was the best night of my life so far.
She started to fall asleep on the couch, and I woke her up. “Want to go to bed?”
“Come with me,” she said sleepy. “Please?”
“Sure.” I followed her into the bedroom, tucked her in.
“Thank you, thank you so much, Rue. It means so much to me that you’re here. You’re…” And just like a movie, she trailed off.