Lost in the Reflecting Pool Read online

  By morning, the rain ended. The power and phones were restored. We watched the clouds rolling out and clear patches of blue begin to shine through. The tent was up, the flowers in place, the wedding cake delivered; we had the dinner for out-of-town guests as scheduled. By Sunday morning, the day of the wedding, a cool breeze rolled gently through, pushing out any remaining clouds. A crystalline sky, green vistas, fields of corn, and blue ponds shimmered in all directions.

  Our wedding was lovely—elegant in some ways, simple in others. The green-and-white tent stood in a field surrounded by grape arbors and bushes lush with ripe blackberries. The red barns and our hundred-year-old stone farmhouse stood in the background. We wrote the ceremony; we created our own ketubah, the traditional Jewish wedding agreement. I made the wedding canopy. My friend Stan, a jazz saxophonist, flew in from San Francisco to play during the ceremony.

  Winnie, Dizzy, and Ginger, with big red bows around their necks, were delightful participants when, at the end of the party, we let them out of their fenced area to mingle with the guests.

  AFTER a honeymoon in California and much laughter, we returned to our mostly harmonious life. Occasionally, something Charles said or did raised doubt in me, but that was always the case in a relationship—that was what I told myself. Nevertheless, I do remember one incident in particular, shortly after we returned from our honeymoon, in January 1985.

  It was something I didn’t give a lot of conscious thought to at the time, though maybe I should have paid more attention to it. I don’t recall exactly what the conversation with Charles was about. It seems as if it had something to do with my having a “bad day” and Charles’s not liking it. Our house was very tiny, with a narrow, winding stairway. The stairs came out into a small vestibule lined with bookshelves that I used as an office. Up one step, you entered a large space that was both a living space and Charles’s office. He was sitting at his desk. I had just come in and was standing in the doorway.

  “Do you think your mood is any better now than it was this morning?” he asked.

  I stood there, thinking about how critical Charles sounded, how he was not concerned about why I had been feeling “down.” He often had “black moods,” yet he was critical of me. But the very important thought I had, the thought that was indelibly imprinted in my mind, even though it was unconscious then, was, If I am ever really sick, he won’t be able to be there for me.

  Chapter Four

  THE FIELDS THAT GLISTENED WITH SUGAR-LIKE FROST began to turn a dazzling, bright green. The sunshine lingered longer in the sky, and the bees hummed as they moved from flower to flower. Charles and I began to think about finding a place to own, a place that would really belong to us. He still wanted to be in the country, and I wanted to be closer to town. He was anxious to have a place where he could have a home-based office; in fact, he wanted both of us to work from home.

  We started the search for the perfect house, but none of the options that seemed fine to me satisfied him. Although he didn’t articulate what he wanted, I knew he had something particular in mind. I knew he wanted the feeling of total privacy, of being away from everything—his own world; our own world.

  Walking up to our house after work I saw that all of the windows were open and I could hear Charles’s voice from inside.

  “Sounds great. How soon can we see it? Any chance we can get in there tomorrow?” I realized that Charles must be on the phone with Tim, our realtor.

  “This might be the one.” Charles turned to me with a huge grin as he hung up. “It’s a small cottage on four acres surrounded by farmland, with the possibility of buying more land if we want.”

  Ten minutes later, Tim called back and told Charles we could see the house the next morning.

  “I have a premonition. Let’s open a bottle of wine.”

  That night, we made love. Charles was less passive than usual; not only was he the initiator that night, but he was much more attentive to me than he typically was, and he didn’t just turn over and go to sleep afterward.

  In the morning, Tim picked us up and we drove along familiar winding roads, closer to town, passing horse farms where mares and their foals grazed on lush grass. We wound our way up and down the hilly countryside, passing parsley-green fields where bleating lambs frolicked. As soon as we turned off the road, we crossed a small bridge with a rippling creek below and began the quarter-mile drive down the wooded lane. Charles grabbed my hand. At the end of the drive stood a small yellow cottage. Surrounding the property were cornfields bordered by majestic oak trees and rolling hills covered in golden buttercups that danced gently in the breeze. The only other visible building was a partially standing, abandoned house on the crest of a distant hill. From behind that structure, a herd of deer appeared, gingerly walking in a graceful line across the hilltop.

  The two-bedroom cottage had been renovated and updated with a modern kitchen; a living room; a small, glass-enclosed sitting area; a dining room; and a lovely, large deck. There was a sizable fenced-in horse pasture with a run-in shed, and a chicken coop. The family selling the property were willing to leave their seven chickens and their daughter’s beloved rooster, Mr. Doodle-Doo.

  “It’ll be great to have free-range chickens and fresh eggs every day, won’t it, Di?”

  I didn’t yet know how much going and collecting the eggs each day was going to come to mean for me. “Well, I never thought about having chickens, but I love the idea of having horses,” I said, as I opened the gate to the pasture and imagined my childhood wish for a horse of my own.

  Touring the house was next. I looked in the bathroom and saw a shower curtain around the tub. “Oh, Charles, I’m so glad this house has a shower. I love our old claw-foot tub, but I’ve missed having a real shower.”

  As it happened, there wasn’t any shower behind that shower curtain. I should have looked, but, as with so many things in my life, I tended to make assumptions, not thinking that perhaps there was no wizard, or showerhead, behind the curtain.

  The shower was installed immediately upon our move into the house. Then Charles dove headfirst into plans to build an office. He rented a trailer to use as a temporary space, arranged financing, found an architect and a contractor, and within several months, a separate cottage that would become his office—and, later, our office—was built.

  It was exciting, but Charles, in his rush to do all this, gave little thought to the terms of the financing. There wasn’t ever a great deal of discussion or planning about financial issues.

  Despite that, we forged ahead.

  Within six months, I left my position at the hospital and moved my private practice to our home office. I did some teaching at a local university and continued to consult at the hospital. Life was full and we were happy. Our practices were separate, although at that time we did some work for an insurance company that required us to work together on some cases. Sometimes I would see someone who needed to be evaluated for medication, and I would call in Charles for a consultation. I remember one woman in particular whom the insurance company referred to me because she was painfully anxious. Her vulnerability was palpable; her fear and self-loathing seemed to scream for confirmation from the outside world. After a long session, it was clear to me that she projected this image of herself as a victim out into the world every day, in many ways beckoning those who bullied and took advantage of her. She pulled at her hair, causing big bald spots, which increased her self-consciousness. I told her I thought she might consider anxiety medication, in addition to psychotherapy. She agreed, and Charles joined us.

  Charles’s response to this woman’s vulnerability astounded and disturbed me.

  Tearfully, she explained to him, “I can’t stop pulling on my hair. I have these huge bald spots.”

  “Why don’t you just sit on your hands?” he said. Was he trying to be funny? It didn’t sound that way; he seemed to be trying to kick her harder. I know my stomach became upset and that I needed to excuse myself from a portion of the interv
iew. When I returned, Charles was handing her a prescription and then explained to me what medication he had prescribed. She and I met a bit longer to wrap things up, and then I asked, “Should we schedule an appointment for next week?”

  Without making eye contact, in a barely audible voice, she replied, “Oh, yes, of course. Same time?”

  “Sure, that will be fine. I’ll see you then.”

  She did not call to cancel the appointment, but she did not appear, either. I tried to contact her several times but got no response. I remember thinking that I was glad she was healthy enough not to come back—I certainly wouldn’t have—but I have never forgotten her and have always carried some professional guilt about that experience. Back then, I told myself that the way Charles treated this woman was out of character for him. Nevertheless, the aching discomfort I felt about it remained in my chest like a sheathed needle, always ready to pierce my heart.

  Did I speak to Charles about it? I don’t remember, but if I did, I am certain it was in some way that would have been so nonthreatening and noncritical that he might even have missed the point about how inappropriate he had been. I certainly didn’t use the word sadistic—not then.

  We stopped working with the insurance company shortly after that, and our practices became entirely separate. That made it much easier for me to push it all away. Besides, we had other things to focus on. We knew we wanted a family. We had proclaimed that in our wedding vows. It was wonderful waking up each day and going to the chicken coop to collect fresh eggs. It seemed symbolic. Nevertheless, I still wasn’t pregnant.

  Although I had just turned thirty, I was already experiencing symptoms that I knew were due to hormonal changes. I was vomiting often, and, although it wasn’t funny, we laughed about it. I took our shared affinity for laughter as proof of how well Charles and I coped together, how “right” we were for each other.

  I had stopped using birth control about six months before the wedding, and I went to a fertility specialist shortly after we returned from California. I so desperately wanted a family that I was willing to take all of the responsibility for our fertility problems. I also wanted to protect Charles’s sense of adequacy because I knew, even then, that he was shaky. I loved him, and back then it did not seem to matter who was having the problem. Little did I know how invested he was in making the problem all mine.

  Charles and his previous wife had tried to get pregnant without success for a long time. I knew I could get pregnant. I had had four pregnancies during my first, brief marriage, to a man named Bram, right after college. I had easily become pregnant when I wasn’t even trying.

  Carrying a pregnancy to term—that was another story. Pregnancies two, three, and four ended in miscarriage. The first pregnancy ended in abortion in 1973, the year abortion was legalized in the United States; that is the pregnancy I have always believed would have gone to term. My belief, or fantasy, call it what one may, has always been that had I not had that abortion, I would have given birth to a daughter on or around April 4, 1974. Her name would have been Rebecca.

  It was when Bram and I moved back East from San Francisco that our differences became clear. He did not want children, and I always knew I wanted a lot of them. So, “knowing” this, when I became pregnant, we didn’t really talk much about “what to do.” We didn’t actually have a conversation about how to handle this pregnancy. I just went over to the clinic at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where we got our medical services, and they handed me an authorization, gave me the name of a physician, and that was that.

  Bram and I were together another two years. We remained friends when the marriage ended. I regretted the abortion, but, although it was sad, I never regretted the end of the marriage.

  Just before we separated, I told Bram something I had not told him before.

  “You know, I really wanted that baby. . . . I didn’t even know it then.”

  There was a heavy silence, and then he said, “You know, we could have had the baby if only you had said something.”

  WHEN I went to the doctor in the early months of my marriage to Charles and expressed my concerns about getting pregnant, I did so both because of the hormonal changes I was experiencing and because Charles’s interest in sex seemed to be diminishing. I worried there would be no way I could get pregnant when we made love so infrequently, and I looked more and more to the new technologies to give me my family.

  The fertility treatments were long and arduous. Nevertheless, we still laughed a lot, including when Charles had to produce a sperm specimen.

  “Okay. So I have to go down into the bowels of this place to give my donation. They say it’s a real cool place, everything I need. Do you want to wait up here or in the lounge down there?” Charles asked, as we walked out of the doctor’s office.

  “Oh, I’d much rather be closer to the action. I’ll come with you,” I said. I hooked my arm in his, and we made our way down to the hospital basement and wandered the dark, echoing stone hallways until we found the glass doorway to the lounge, where comfortable couches and soft lights welcomed us into what could have been a den of iniquity. I sank down into one of the lush sofas, picked up a magazine, and waited.

  After a while, Charles walked into the waiting area with a big smile on his face, nodded good-bye to the receptionist, and took my arm. After we walked out through the double glass doors, he burst out laughing.

  “What’s so funny? What happened?”

  “Well, it was a good load . . .”

  “Great . . .”

  “But it all landed on the floor. Don’t worry, I used the three-second rule and scooped it all up and put it in the container; it’ll be fine.”

  “As long as you got it all, that’s great—and if I give birth to a cockroach, it’ll be a great story, and it will be all ours.”

  We roared with laughter for days. As it turned out, I did get pregnant that cycle, but I also miscarried. We never knew whether or not it was a cockroach, but we always laughed that we knew the reason for that particular miscarriage.

  We spent three years trying to get pregnant before we considered using in vitro fertilization. My doctor hadn’t believed me when I’d said I was going into early menopause. Had he believed me, and had we done in vitro to start with, it probably wouldn’t have then taken another three years for me to have a full-term pregnancy.

  When I didn’t seem to be responding to the fertility treatments, my doctor recommended an exploratory laparotomy to ensure there was nothing physical preventing conception. I went into surgery with two working fallopian tubes; I came out of surgery with one. For that surgery, I was in the hospital for a week. Charles visited each day. Some days he brought lunch; other days he came in the evening with dinner. After we ate, Charles would say, “Come on, let’s go down to the lobby,” and each day I was there, we’d make our way through the unit, down the elevator, and into the domed entryway of this renowned medical institution.

  We’d walk through the heavy doors to the administration building and there he would be.

  “He’s so big, so powerful,” I would say, as we gazed up at the ten-and-a-half-foot marble statue of Jesus. Standing there together in that space, gazing upward, always brought us a sense of healing and hope.

  “Okay, are you ready?” Charles would ask, and before we walked back through the heavy doors to go up to my room, we’d each rub the statue’s big toe on his right foot. That was for good luck, said hospital lore.

  I had to go back a month later for a second, same-day procedure: removal of any scar tissue that might have resulted from the first surgery. Charles dropped me off at the hospital that Friday morning and went to work.

  Why that didn’t bother me at the time would not become clear until years later. I met the anesthesiologist, who started the IV, and into the operating room I went. I awoke sometime later, still in surgery, on the operating-room table, with a breathing tube in my throat, lights in my eyes, and excruciating chest pains. I couldn’t talk because of the tube, but
I flailed and tried to let them know what was wrong. Someone rubbed my neck, and I heard someone say, “Give her morphine.”

  I awoke in the recovery room many hours later. I was the only patient there. No doctor came to see me. Charles was not there, either. At eleven o’clock at night, an orderly pushed me outside in a wheelchair to the curb, where Charles waited in the car. We drove home; with every movement, I felt the same awful chest pain.

  The nurse from the recovery room called the next day to check on me.

  “I’m having terrible pains in my chest whenever I move,” I told her when she asked how I was doing.

  “Don’t worry. It’s just from the anesthesia. We had to give you a lot of morphine while you were in recovery because of all the pain you were having. It’ll pass,” she casually assured me.

  But it didn’t pass and I was in bed all weekend, still unable to move because I felt as if a sword were being thrust through the wall of my chest over and over.

  Charles seemed concerned enough that before he left for his DC office on Monday morning, he told me he wanted me to call my doctor. It was six in the morning when I phoned, and the doctor sounded as if he’d expected my call.

  “I thought I’d hear from you,” he said.

  I didn’t understand: if he had thought there might be a problem, why hadn’t he called me? Now he told me to come to the hospital as soon as possible.

  “Call your parents so they can take you to the hospital,” Charles said, as he gave me a kiss, grabbed his things, and left for his day in DC. He didn’t wait for a reply.

  My parents were in New York, four hours away, yet he wanted them to come and take care of me? I placed the call, and they arrived quickly and took me to the hospital. I then saw multiple doctors, had X-rays and scans, and was admitted. As it turned out, I had been given too much anesthesia. My small stature and thin frame had not been taken into consideration. My lung had been punctured—they called it a pneumothorax, a hole the size of a dime—and my lungs and chest cavity were filled with bloody guck, called a hemo-pleural effusion. I was in the hospital for ten days and each day had frequent chest taps to drain the fluid; the needles were the longest I had ever seen, though in reality they were more frightening than painful.