Free Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman Page B

without saying. I talk to my mother every day, sometimes a few times a day, more when she is worried about me, as she always is, since Isabel died. I have become my mother's current cause, and I am quite frankly worried about the state of the Bergen County Food Bank and the Glen Rock Neighborhood Association.
    Jack leans over and turns off his light. He creeps his hand tentatively across the bed and rests it on my hip, tracing a line with his pinky finger along the joint where the skin is loose and papery soft from pregnancy.
    I stiffen. “Do you mind if I read?” I say. “I'm not tired yet.”
    â€œNo, not at all.” His disappointment is so obvious that it's almost funny. He looks like a five-year-old who opened a Christmas present hoping for a laser gun and found a book instead.
    Poor Jack. I think he assumed, when he married a woman nearly ten years his junior, that his life would be one long letter to
Penthouse
Forum. And, for more than a year and a half, his nights were bacchanals of the kind of lovemaking that leaves you limp, damp, and sweaty, with stuff in the corners of your mouth and under your fingernails. He probably thought it would last forever. He probably thought he would have to start popping Viagra just to keep up. Instead, it's been two and a half months since I've allowed him to touch me in any way other than the merely affectionate. Two and a half months since the day that Isabel was born.
    I read my book, a novel about young New Yorkers whose lives flame out in a fabulous blaze of restaurants, gallery openings, sadomasochistic clubs, and methamphetamine. This is the only kind of book I can stand to read lately: no babies, not even of the possibility of reproduction. Once I am sure that Jack is asleep I wait a few minutes, my finger marking my place in my book. Then I fold down the corner of the page, settle the book on my nightstand without making a sound, and quietly, so quietly, open the small drawer where I keep the most intimate, secret items of our marriage. Condoms, lubricant, a blue vibrator with a silver ball tip. The tweezers I use to pluck the hairs between Jack's eyebrows and the ones that grow around my nipples. A joint hidden in a box of matches. An envelope of photographs.
    The week before I gave birth, I bought Jack a digital camera. He had been teasing me for months about shooting the birth on video, about how he'd zoom in between my legs just when I was expelling the contents of my colon prior to pushing out the baby's head. I told him I knew these were empty threats—Carolyn got the camcorder in the divorce. She also got the still camera, however, and the only camera I had, a manual-focus Nikon F3, was far too complicated for Jack to figure out. In the end, he didn't even take that many pictures, not as many as I wish he had, not as many as he would have, had he known that photographs would be all we would have left of our baby.
    There are exactly seventeen photographs extant of Isabel Greenleaf Woolf. Jack must have uploaded them before she died and ordered prints from an online photo-delivery service. One day they arrived in the mail and I took them without telling him.
    The first is of her face, purple with effort, eyes closed, cheeks ballooned and dimpled, a smear of vernix over one eye. The rest of her is still inside me. Right after he took this photograph, Jack handed the camera to Felicia and knelt down next to Dr. Brewster. He spread his hands on top of the doctor's, as instructed, and caught Isabel in his outstretched palms. When she felt the cold air and her father's warm touch my daughter let loose a wrenching cry, but as soon as Dr. Brewster toweled her off and put her on my belly, she stopped. Felicia insisted that they allow the baby to nurse for a few minutes before taking her away to be weighed and measured, and Isabel latched on as if she had been nursing all her life, or as if she had been waiting impatiently inside me for the chance to get her