Scarlight

I wanted one too, from the very beginning. I don’t have any scars, I insisted. I don’t have anything to show for it.

December in Paris is wet, cold, and dark. The toilet room was on the other end of the flat, beyond where the heater had dominion. Shivering, I took a pregnancy test and looked out the window onto the shaft, which ferried in the sound of the rain. It was the end of 2019. France was “shut down” in protest against plans to reform the pension system. Flights were grounded, and there was little to no metro service. Given all that came after, that visit feels charmed—yes, even the day we dodged tear gas beside the Centre Pompidou; even the rush hour train we caught at Les Halles and on which we were nearly crushed by a stampede, someone screaming les animaux, and even the nights we waited hours for Ubers, then gave up and walked miles across a rainy, pixie dusted Paris and despite how late it always was and how wet we were, there was the total wonder of crossing the Seine past the Notre Dame again, bereft as it was of its spire of thirteenth-century oak.

Back in the WC, I looked down at the stick. In my life, there have been many instances of this squatting, this waiting, then relief when no positive line appeared. The most traumatic iteration being the first time in the Goldie’s Sports Bar bathroom at fifteen years old. At thirty-three, and ever since the miscarriage the previous June, I had hallucinated positive lines where there were none; I was always nauseous. My womb was a wound, full of missing.

In the cold, dark toilet room, against the soundtrack of the Parisian rain, I saw only a minus sign. I consoled myself, as I had perhaps for too long and too often, with the solace of a drink, of a smoke.

But then . . . yes . . . another blue line. Do you see that? I asked J. Is it real?

*

The light in the desert is so demanding, it just stalks every inch of you as if it needs you to survive, rather than you, it. Out of the bright, hot afternoon into the dark bar, past the hostess, we walked straight into the Goldie’s bathroom. It was the closest place to pee on a stick that wasn’t my parents’ house. We had purchased them together, my best girlfriend and I, at the Walgreens next door.

Not pregnant, she squealed almost immediately from beneath her stall, you?

I was also with her on that ugly morning two weeks before, and she was the one who held my hair back from the toilet afterward. His cheap cologne was still all over me, Aqua di Gio, maybe. She screamed that I was sick, that he had to drive us back home. He told her to call a cab, that he was drunk. She said we didn’t have any money, we were just kids, and he began laughing.

The apartment was hardly furnished. I looked at it as we were leaving because it was all I could take with me. Somewhere in Tempe, it belonged to a twenty-seven-year-old. He and the others were younger—eighteen, maybe twenty. There was a beige leather couch in the living room (or was it white?). The kitchen was bare but for the bottle of Bacardi 151, ashtray still smoky from clove cigarettes. The boys (the men?) were in one of the bedrooms, on a bunk bed, playing video games. I can still see the dumb screen reflected on their faces. There at the end of the hall was the other bedroom, a mattress, the inglorious dishevelment of sheets. Was that where he had taken me?

In the cab, as the sun rose again, again, again, imperiously (why couldn’t it ever rain?), I tried to retrieve what was lost. He had handed me the shot, teased me for gagging, take another, another, . . . and then it was dark . . . still I was sore, sore enough to understand where the wound was. The cab mercifully let us out in exchange for ten dollars.

My girlfriend asked, Do you think you could be pregnant? The day had risen already and it was all over us. We had to sneak in the same way we had snuck out. I clambered over the wall after her. Blood, where was it coming from? My shin, my underwear?

I mean did he use a condom?

I don’t know, I replied. I didn’t know, but of course I knew, the answer was no. Can’t we just forget about it? I wanted to fall asleep and not wake up.

Weeks later at Goldie’s, I opened my eyes and oh mercy, a minus sign. We emerged and the light outside was already more forgiving, dusky and a blue wind had taken up with the palms. The desert is meant to be seen only after dark. We smoked two cigarettes we had stolen from my dad. I probably said, I am so fucking happy, even though it still hurt everywhere.

*

It would hurt for a pretty long time and maybe that’s why I was so mad for L. (Let’s just call him L.) He was the coolest, hurt person ever—abused, artistic, and brutally handsome in his scuffed cowboy boots and ripped fur and I was young, hardly twentysomething, and lost and looking for lost.

It was late in May when we met and I loved the dusk which persisted so long, so blue pouring down through his skylight. We talked Derrida and Deleuze. My first true New York summer. Concerts in the park, cocaine on the toilet lid, the brunches, the openings, Billyburg he called it, God the Manhattan skyline by night. He ordered cabs for us across the entire city. Arecibo, Eastern, Myrtle. The old car services before Uber and Lyft. He had so many friends, a place to go to at every hour. Brooklyn was oh so beautiful, it was full of the most beautiful people. Even after all this time, New York still has his ghost.

I was so fucking in love. And he had this row of beautiful scars all down his arm, cigarette burns he said. And I wanted one too, from the very beginning. I don’t have any scars, I insisted. I don’t have anything to show for it.

I probably said, I am so fucking happy, even though it still hurt everywhere. 

One day you’ll be my age, you’ll be thirty-three, he said, and you’ll probably be a mom (I made a puke face) and maybe even a novelist and you’ll forget all about this raging. Trust me, you don’t want to be like me. But I did.

L. has been dead for seven years. That summer, he left town, came back, told me he was back with his ex. But you’re the love of my life, I moaned. Still, he came in me, said let’s be friends, more than friends. It hurt so much but wasn’t it cool hurt, beautiful hurt? I took the morning after pill. This went on, and didn’t. We have to stop this, he said so many times, but kept calling.

In my South Slope apartment, we were listening to Mozart’s Requiem, looking out on the winter yard, when I said, I want to be yours forever. Maybe I still mean it. Okay, he said. His smile was strange, sad, penitent. He moved his cigarette toward my inner thigh and pressed down into it.

Finally, it was there, finally I could see it.

*

I turned thirty-three on the drive out to Montauk and somewhere along the rainy 495, the Notre Dame caught fire, and a sperm cell of J.’s had swum into one of my eggs. Arriving, it was straight to the lighthouse, and beneath the grey April sky, we watched a seal struggle to find the ocean again. I’d like to stay here forever, this green spit of land, the end, I said to J. His mind was still on the Notre Dame. Hundreds of years, just poof, destroyed. Like so, my Jesus year arrived.

Later, a nearly full moon rose, and we ran along the shore wine drunk. Montauk was empty, it was not its season, but the sea was illuminated. I wanted to walk into it, into the Atlantic. J. pulled me back. What is it about Montauk? Is it just that it lies at the end of the line? One (long) train ride and you’re back, back in New York…

A few weeks later, I was out with a friend in the city, dizzy after two drinks. It couldn’t be; it was. I quit smoking, quit being the lush I had become in my twenties, and remained in my thirties. There was a day during that short-lived pregnancy spent in Central Park, walking, wailing. It was May, and the city trees were graced by the season’s dream of green. Did I really just need a cigarette? Did I really, truly want to be a mother?

Just when I was getting used to the idea, there was blood in the toilet. It started so sheepishly, just a few scarlet drops. How could I have imagined how it would end? Sprawled out on the bathroom tile, after all that vomit, all that shit, yes, and blood. I felt I might go blind from the pain. Later, blurry, bereaved, we drove back to the Atlantic (Rockaway, not Montauk) and by then, the water was warm enough, so I waded into it for a little while.

*

You remember it. How quiet it was in March, April of that year. Every night, I stood by our shutters before closing them, trying to hunt down passersby. I missed the stupid parties, the fucking honking. Instead, I’d watch the stoplights change. Our daughter was the size of a peach, size of a melon, size of a banana, size of a baby. I planned for a home birth because the hospitals were lethal, we were told.

I wore an N95 mask, Cloroxed the groceries, did a funny dance when someone came too close. But everything was too close, this was New York. You remember this. At the same time, I mourned this new world my daughter would inherit. It had all begun so differently. We rang in 2020 to a revel of bells beside a thousand strangers at the Sacre Coeur.

Prospect Park, I was always wandering in it, those woodsy paths past sudden waterfalls, sudden homeless encampments. There I could remove my mask, and yes, pee behind a tree (a near constant need) without fear of catching Covid from a door handle, a faucet. I no longer understand my place in New York without that park. Yes, that park became my beloved. (What’s its magic? The city is so close, you can still hear it, but no, look, it’s the woods, fields of fireflies, uninterrupted sky. An illusion just like Montauk.)

The pandemic felt like it would last forever. Maybe it will, maybe it has. That part of it didn’t. A new city burgeoned out into the streets. I stopped spraying down our groceries. And when I returned for an ultrasound after fourteen weeks unmonitored, our baby was still breech. Unless she turned, I would need a C-Section.

That was 2020, the year of extraordinary ritual. In an attempt to flip my baby, I spent the last month of my pregnancy lying on a tilted ironing board, rotating burning moxa rods around my pinky toes. When the city finally opened the pools in late July, I swam in a packed Kosciuszko (another landmark I hold improbably dear), did handstands and underwater somersaults, and one lady who worked in the locker room told me every day she could sense my baby had flipped, and her colleague always said, no, she was happy how she was. Who wants to see this sad world, eyes open, head first?

You remember it. How quiet it was in March, April of that year. . . . I planned for a home birth because the hospitals were lethal, we were told.

My daughter never turned.

In the operating room, the anesthesiologist had trouble injecting the epidural into my spine. I was shaking. How could my baby come into the world in this room, I wondered? It was all fluorescent. There were no windows. I knew that beyond the thick hospital walls, there was rain. I wanted to hear it.

The assisting doctor to my OB took my hand. Tell us about you. I said that I was a writer (muttering the usual addendum that, you know, I teach too, and do freelance stuff, because who actually makes money writing?) She wanted to know more. I told her about my novel, the forthcoming, that it was about a woman who has dementia, but that the sicker she gets, the more she begins to see. The doctor asked, so, it’s about a medical event? It’s not just that, I stammered. She starts to see this blue world. And these blue lights. She starts to see a more beautiful world. She goes toward it . . . it comes from the ocean . . . She falls into it.

The anesthesia, somehow, was in. They lay me down and then there was J., his face. Beyond us, the blue curtain. On the other side of it, they had cut my body in half at the abdomen, they were setting my bladder and intestines aside. You’ll feel some pushing. Yes, there would be a scar forever and ever.

And then, beyond the blue curtain between this world and the next, they were raising my daughter up out of me.

*

After we finally got the hell out of New York, the dream of where everything would be better, inexplicably moved from Paris to California. Yes, somewhere along that golden coast was our happiness. We talked about leaving the city for so long that—surprise!—it became real. Our cherished apartment was overnight devastatingly empty and then we were leaving the keys on the counter and then we would never ever return. We slow-danced in what was our bedroom. One last time, the January sun poured through the blue glass above the door in the hall. My office, the view of winter trees. Someone took a photograph of us on our stoop. We were bound west, to Arizona with my folks for a pit stop, and then on to the dreamiest coast.

But dreams never end the way you want them to. Usually, you wake up too soon. This essay didn’t end the way I first thought it would either. When I started writing it, I was shockingly pregnant again, a discovery made during a late-night piss on a stick after hanging up with the girlfriend from Goldie’s. Yes, the same one. She was just past six weeks along. It turned out that I was nearly six weeks along too. (The truth, as they say, is always stranger than fiction.)

But she wasn’t ready, just wasn’t ready. (This was in September, and in the background roared the news from Texas.) Hers had a heartbeat. Mine, I’m almost certain, never did.

That phone call occurred around the same time we finally reached the Pacific, which was when the truth got even stranger. It was as I was standing there, on those famous golden cliffs, on that sloping coast which had broken so many hearts—and mine, gazing out at that shimmering blue reverie, that I began to bleed, bleed so suddenly and so abundantly I knew all too well what I was losing. I felt that I might faint, might fall, fall into that brilliant, fatal blue, the glorious, failed dream, the sea, the sea. But here was my daughter, my heart, here she was being passed from J. into my arms.

Look, I whispered, that’s where the world ends.

Oh wow, my baby cried in response to the view. She inflected the words with their original intent of wonder, of awe. Somehow after mamamama, oh wow, were her very first words. And armed with them, she greeted the cats, the television, the moon, my iPhone screen, the Pacific Ocean.

2021 was a difficult year. More difficult than the year before. And so I wonder how it is that my daughter learned the words oh wow first.

Is it possible I express astonishment more often than I know? Is it possible that I am, despite it all, much happier than I realize? Aren’t oh wow the words of a person quite fond of her world?

California is a dream, but for the time being we’re back in the mad city where our story began. It’s been so long since I’ve stared up at the night sky here, but look there’s a star, surprisingly numinous, staring back at me. The star starts to bleed. It’s losing form, it’s staining the sky. Is it a supernova? Starlight, scarlight. Is it crying or am I?

And then I realize a new life, a more beautiful world, is on its way for us. It’s so close, I can almost see it. Oh wow, I say, before I know I’m saying it. Oh wow.