The Resurrection of Joan Ashby - Cherise Wolas

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She would not give The Sympathetic Executioners to Volkmann or to Martin, their thoughts and impressions were irrelevant. She knew how she felt about the book. Intended to further the tremendous trajectory of her literary career, it would not have that effect; she would not be turning it in.

      There was a niggling thought that Joan erased in an instant. The baby inside of her had done nothing wrong, had not leached away something vital in her, had not thinned her out as a writer. For a brief moment, the tumult lifted; that she did not apportion blame to the baby, that she considered the faults of the book all her own, seemed as good a start to motherhood as any.

      In the nursery, she turned on the light, a small chandelier she and Martin found at another weekend yard sale. At night, when it was lit, the teardrop crystals threw magical floating shadows at the walls, dappled the ceiling. The room was now painted a pale yellow, the color of buttercups, a neutral color because Martin did not want to learn ahead of time whether it was a boy or a girl. It had been furnished for weeks. Crib against the far wall, with colorful mobiles hanging above, changing table across the way. A large bookcase against the long wall, already filled with thick books, none meant for children.

      She sat down heavily in the recliner, put her feet up on the ottoman, and opened to where she’d left off the previous afternoon in Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? She had been reading aloud to the baby for months, had already read it Anna Karenina, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, the stories in the Portable Faulkner. She had thrown out all of Hemingway. The words he used to depict his narrow range of characters, his adoration of machismo, felt wrong on her tongue, too salty and hard-bitten, and if the baby was a boy she did not want him to turn out that way, that view of women congealed in his brain. She had replaced Hemingway with Jane Austen.

      Joan hoped the baby would sense from the womb that she was treating it like a whole person, that by initiating it early into a life of books, she might create an embryonic connection between them, smoothing away any jagged edges in advance of their introduction to each other, or at least make the initial introduction smoother than it might otherwise be.

      She still could not imagine holding a baby, her baby, in her arms. When the no-longer Pregnant Six had offered, lifting their babies into the air, ready to hand them over, Joan had demurred, rubbed her nose, and said, “I think I’ve got a touch of a cold.” The bonding she knew she would have to do, it could only occur with her own.

      “Okay, we’re picking up near the top of page 376, in the Penguin Classics edition—

       She gave him her hand, and muttered some word which was inaudible even to him; she gave him her hand, and immediately endeavoured to resume it, but he held it clenched within his own, and she felt that she was his prisoner. He was standing close to her now, and she could not escape from him. She was trembling with fear lest worse might betide her even than this. She had promised to marry him, and now she was covered with dismay as she felt rather than thought how very far she was from loving the man to whom she had given this promise.

       ‘Alice,’ he said, ‘I am a man once again. It is only now that I can tell you what I have suffered during these last few years.’ He still held her hand, but he had not as yet attempted any closer embrace. She knew that she was standing away from him awkwardly, almost showing her repugnance to him; but it was altogether beyond her power to assume an attitude of ordinary ease. ‘Alice,’ he continued, ‘I feel that I am a strong man again, armed to meet the world at all points. Will you not let me thank you for what you have done for me?’

       She must speak to him! Though the doing so should be ever so painful to her, she must say some word to him which should have in it a sound of kindness. After all, it was his undoubted right to come to her, and the footing on which he assumed to stand was simply that which she herself had given to him. It was not his fault if at this moment he inspired her with disgust rather than with love.

      Joan read to the baby until she had finished the chapter called Passion Versus Prudence.

      The day before her water broke, before she knew that day would be remembered that way, Joan trashed The Sympathetic Executioners. She ripped up the pages until her hands were worn out, crumpled up the rest into loose, crinkly balls, stuffed it all into a trash bag, stuffed the trash bag into the garbage can at the side of the house. She would never revisit the work, had no need or desire to keep the book, not even for posterity, not even as proof that she had gone beyond the short-story form for which she was so praised. She would have to start all over again, a new novel from scratch.

      Martin had not noticed when the typing stopped a few weeks before, had not been aware that she’d finished the book, had not noticed when the manuscript was no longer visible on her desk. He was out early in the mornings and home late. Major eye surgeries to perform every day, research that filled up the breaks. She knew he wasn’t aware that he had stopped asking to read the pages in progress, unwittingly giving her space and peace. Of course, it was no longer relevant.

      She could not sleep that night, thinking of the loss of all that excruciating effort that had been so pleasurable. At midnight, when she still hadn’t found a spot in the bed that suited both she and the baby, she gave up. Martin was sleeping deeply, his arms and legs starfished, the way the newborn daughters of the no-longer Pregnant Six sprawled in their cribs. She could not recall ever seeing Martin in such a position. He looked boyish and she felt far away from anything girlish.

      She did not flip on the light switch in the nursery. She walked across the cool wood floor and stood at a window. The sky was black, no moon or stars. She could see nothing outside, and it was as if nothing existed beyond the house in which a despondent, frightened woman was wide-awake and a contented man asleep. She had failed Silas and Abe. She had failed herself. She was not in the place she wanted to be, with a finished first novel that would pre-date the child.

      When she lifted her nose off the cold glass and stepped back from the window, the low hallway light reflected her faint outline, and she locked on her eyes. She tried to catch herself blinking, but couldn’t. She wondered how she would handle it all, how she would be as a mother, when she would again have blocks of time for herself. The baby would keep her from immediately starting something new.

      She looked out into the void, into the invisible distance. She would have to develop the narrative of real life, but already she missed her submergence in those other worlds, within the only narratives that had ever mattered to her, with her very own people, the fallow time worth nothing at all.

       4

      Joan was propped up in the hospital bed, feeding their newborn son. Martin was on the bed with the two of them, his thumb and index a circle around both tiny ankles, above the tiny blue booties. The baby slipped off her breast and Martin took the infant into his arms.

      Childbirth, and seeing the baby for the first time, and feeling his heart beating against hers, the suction between his slimy, steaming skin and her own, which had been mottled and wet, did not miraculously change Joan’s worldview, as the no-longer Pregnant Six said it would. She did not suddenly feel it was her responsibility to solve war, genocide, disease, famine, hunger, low literacy rates, drug overdoses, the overcrowding of prisons. But she felt love, more than she thought she would, even though she was still not prepared, as other new parents seemed to be, to lay down her life for him, or for anyone.

      She did not glow immediately after, but the baby did, not wizened at all, not old-man wrinkled. He did not emerge splotchy and crying. Instead, a light shone from his eyes, which he instantly opened, and when she looked down upon him, his eyes caught hers and did not let go, the two of them staring directly at each other, a kindling of sorts, until he fluttered to sleep.

      And he was beautiful, a beautiful baby with blue eyes that matched her own, and a full head of downy dark-brown hair like Martin’s, curls at the ends, for which she was responsible. He was good, too, rarely crying in these first few days, and when he did, it was as soft as a kitten’s, and lasted for barely a minute. And he ate well. She had heard stories

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