Part II: A Past That Is Also a Future — SIX - The Time Traveler's Wife

Saturday, June 3, 2000 (Clare is 29, Henry is 36)

Clare: I’m sitting at the kitchen table idly flipping through the Chicago Tribune and watching Henry unpack the groceries. The brown paper bags stand evenly lined up on the counter and Henry produces ketchup, chicken, gouda cheese from them like a magician. I keep waiting for the rabbit and the silk scarves. Instead it’s mushrooms, black beans, fettucine, lettuce, a pineapple, skim milk, coffee, radishes, turnips, a rutabaga, oatmeal, butter, cottage cheese, rye bread, mayonnaise, eggs, razors, deodorant, Granny Smith apples, half-and-half, bagels, shrimp, cream cheese, Frosted MiniWheats, marinara sauce, frozen orange juice, carrots, condoms, sweet potatoes...condoms? I get up and walk to the counter, pick up the blue box and shake it at Henry. “What, are you having an affair?”

He looks up at me defiantly as he rummages in the freezer. “No, actually, I had an epiphany. I was standing in the toothpaste aisle when it happened. Want to hear it?”

“No.”

Henry stands up and turns to me. His expression is like a sigh. “Well here it is anyway: we can’t keep trying to have a baby.”

Traitor. “We agreed..”

“...to keep trying. I think five miscarriages is enough. I think we have tried.”

“No. I mean—why not, try again?” I try to keep the pleading out of my voice, to keep the anger that rises up in my throat from spilling into my words.

Henry walks around the counter, stands in front of me, but doesn’t touch me, knows that he can’t touch me. “Clare. The next time you miscarry it’s going to kill you, and I am not going to keep doing something that’s going to end up with you dead. Five pregnancies.. .I know you want to try again, but I can’t. I can’t take it anymore, Clare. I’m sorry.”

I walk out the back door and stand in the sun, by the raspberry bushes. Our children, dead and wrapped in silky gampi tissue paper, cradled in tiny wooden boxes, are in shade now, in the late afternoon, by the roses. I feel the heat of the sun on my skin and shiver for them, deep in the garden, cool on this mild June day. Help, I say in my head, to our future child. He doesn’t know, so I can’t tell him. Come soon.

Friday, June 9, 2000/November 19, 1986 (Henry is 36, Clare is 15)

Henry: It’s 8:45 a.m. on a Friday morning and I’m sitting in the waiting room of a certain Dr. Robert Gonsalez. Clare doesn’t know I’m here. I’ve decided to get a vasectomy.

Dr. Gonsalez’s office is on Sheridan Road, near Diversey, in a posh medical center just up the way from the Lincoln Park Conservatory. This waiting room is decorated in browns and hunter green, lots of paneling and framed prints of Derby winners from the 1880s. Very manly. I feel as though I should be wearing a smoking jacket and clenching a large cigar between my jaws. I need a drink.

The nice woman at Planned Parenthood assured me in her soothing, practiced voice that this would hardly hurt a bit. There are five other guys sitting here with me. I wonder if they’ve got the clap, or maybe their prostates are acting up. Maybe some of them are like me, sitting here waiting to end their careers as potential dads. I feel a certain solidarity with these unknown men, all of us sitting here together in this brown wooden leather room on this gray morning waiting to walk into the examining room and take off our pants. There’s a very old man who sits leaning forward with his hands clasped around his cane, his eyes closed behind thick glasses that magnify his eyelids. He’s probably not here to get snipped. The teenage boy who sits leafing through an ancient copy of Esquire is feigning indifference. I close my eyes and imagine that I am in a bar and the bartender has her back to me now as she mixes a good single-malt Scotch with just a small amount of tepid water. Perhaps it’s an English pub. Yes, that would account for the decor. The man on my left coughs, a deep lung-shaking sort of cough, and when I open my eyes I’m still sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. I sneak a look at the watch of the guy on my right. He’s got one of those immense sports watches that you can use to time sprints or call the mothership. It’s 9:58. My appointment is in two minutes. The doctor seems to be running late, though. The receptionist calls, “Mr. Liston,” and the teenager stands up abruptly and walks through the heavy paneled door into the office. The rest of us look at each other, furtively, as though we are on the subway and someone is trying to sell us Streetwise.

I am rigid with tension and I remind myself that this is a necessary and good thing that I am about to do. I am not a traitor. I am not a traitor. I am saving Clare from horror and pain. She will never know. It will not hurt. Maybe it will hurt a little. Someday I will tell her and she will realize I had to do it. We tried. I have no choice. I am not a traitor. Even if I hurts it will be worth it. I am doing it because I love her. I think of Clare sitting on our bed, covered in blood, weeping, and I feel sick.

“Mr. DeTamble.” I rise, and now I really feel sick. My knees buckle. My head swims, and I’m bent over, retching, I’m on my hands and knees, the ground is cold and covered with the stubble of dead grass. There’s nothing in my stomach, I’m spitting up mucous. It’s cold. I look up. I’m in the clearing, in the Meadow. The trees are bare, the sky is flat clouds with early darkness approaching. I’m alone.

I get up and find the clothes box. Soon I am wearing a Gang of Four T-shirt and a sweater and jeans, heavy socks and black military boots, a black wool overcoat and large baby blue mittens. Something has chewed its way into the box and made a nest. The clothes indicate the mid-eighties. Clare is about fifteen or sixteen. I wonder whether to hang around and wait for her or just go. I don’t know if I can face Clare’s youthful exuberance right now. I turn and walk toward the orchard.

It looks like late November. The Meadow is brown, and makes a rattling noise in the wind. Crows are fighting over windfall apples at the edge of the orchard. Just as I reach them I hear someone panting, running behind me. I turn, and it’s Clare.

“Henry—” she’s out of breath, she sounds like she has a cold. I let her stand, rasping, for a minute. I can’t talk to her. She stands, breathing, her breath steaming in front of her in white clouds, her hair vivid red in the gray and brown, her skin pink and pale.

I turn and walk into the orchard.

“Henry—” Clare follows me, catches my arm. “What? What did I do? Why won’t you talk to me?”

Oh God. “I tried to do something for you, something important, and it didn’t work. I got nervous, and ended up here.”

“What was it?”

“I can’t tell you. I wasn’t even going to tell you about it in the present. You wouldn’t like it.”

“Then why did you want to do it?” Clare shivers in the wind. “It was the only way. I couldn’t get you to listen to me. I thought we could stop fighting if I did it.” I sigh. I will try again, and, if necessary, again.

“Why are we fighting?” Clare is looking up at me, tense and anxious.

Her nose is running.

“Have you got a cold?”

“Yes. What are we fighting about?”

“It all began when the wife of your ambassador slapped the mistress of my prime minister at a soiree being held at the embassy. This affected the tariff on oatmeal, which led to high unemployment and rioting—”

“Henry.”

“Yes?”

“Just once, just once, would you stop making fun of me and tell me something I am asking you?”

“I can’t.”

Without apparent premeditation, Clare slaps me, hard. I step back, surprised, glad.

“Hit me again.”

She is confused, shakes her head. “Please, Clare.”

“No. Why do you want me to hit you? I wanted to hurt you.”

“I want you to hurt me. Please.” I hang my head.

“What is the matter with you?”

“Everything is terrible and I can’t seem to feel it.”

“ What is terrible? What is going on?”

“Don’t ask me.” Clare comes up, very close to me, and takes my hand, one pulls off the ridiculous blue mitten, brings my palm to her mouth, and bites. The pain is excruciating. She stops, and I look at my hand, Blood comes slowly, in tiny drops, around the bite mark. I will probably get blood poisoning, but at the moment I don’t care.

“Tell me.” Her face is inches from mine. I kiss her, very roughly. She is resistant. I release her, and she turns her back on me.

“That wasn’t very nice,” she says in a small voice.

What is wrong with me? Clare, at fifteen, is not the same person who’s been torturing me for months, refusing to give up on having a baby, risking death and despair, turning lovemaking into a battlefield strewn with the corpses of children. I put my hands on her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, Clare, it’s not you. Please.”

She turns. She’s crying, and she’s a mess. Miraculously, there’s a Kleenex in my coat pocket. I dab at her face, and she takes the tissue from me and blows her nose.

“You never kissed me before.” Oh, no. My face must be funny, because Clare laughs. I can’t believe it. What an idiot I am.

“Oh, Clare, Just—forget that, okay? Just erase it. It never happened. Come here. Take two, yes? Clare?”

She tentatively steps toward me. I put my arms around her, look at her. Her eyes are rimmed red, her nose is swollen, and she definitely has a bad cold. I place my hands over her ears and tip her head back, and kiss her, and try to put my heart into hers, for safekeeping, in case I lose it again.

Friday, June 9, 2000 (Clare is 29, Henry is 36)

Clare: Henry has been terribly quiet, distracted, and pensive all evening. All through dinner he seemed to be mentally searching imaginary stacks for a book he’d read in 1942 or something. Plus his right hand is all bandaged up. After dinner he went into the bedroom and lay face down on the bed with his head hanging over the foot of the bed and his feet on my pillow. I went to the studio and scrubbed molds and deckles and drank my coffee, but I wasn’t enjoying myself because I couldn’t figure out what Henry’s problem was. Finally I go back into the house. He is still lying in the same position. In the dark.

I lie down on the floor. My back makes loud cracking sounds as I stretch out.

“Clare?”

“Mmmm?”

“Do you remember the first time I kissed you?”

“Vividly.”

“I’m sorry.” Henry rolls over.

I’m burning up with curiosity. “What were you so upset about? You were trying to do something, and it didn’t work, and you said I wouldn’t like it. What was it?”

“How do you manage to remember all that?”

“I am the original elephant child. Are you going to tell me now?”

“No.”

“If I guess will you tell me if I’m right?”

“Probably not.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am exhausted, and I don’t want to fight tonight.”

I don’t want to fight either. I like lying here on the floor. It’s kind of cold but very solid. “You went to get a vasectomy.”

Henry is silent. He is so silent for so long that I want to put a mirror in front of his mouth to see if he’s breathing. Finally: “How did you know?”

“I didn’t exactly know. I was afraid that might be it. And I saw the note you made for the appointment with the doctor this morning.”

“I burned that note.”

“I saw the impression on the sheet below the one you wrote on.”

Henry groans. “Okay, Sherlock. You got me.” We continue to lie peaceably in the dark.

“Go ahead.”

“What?”

“Get a vasectomy. If you have to.”

Henry rolls over again and looks at me. All I see is his dark head against the dark ceiling. “You’re not yelling at me.”

“No. I can’t do this anymore, either. I give up. You win, we’ll stop trying to have a baby.”

“I wouldn’t exactly describe that as winning. It just seems—necessary.”

“Whatever.”

Henry climbs off the bed and sits on the floor with me. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He kisses me. I imagine the bleak November day in 1986 that Henry has just come from, the wind, the warmth of his body in the cold orchard. Soon, for the first time in many months, we are making love without worrying about the consequences. Henry has caught the cold I had sixteen years ago. Four weeks later, Henry has had his vasectomy and I discover that I am pregnant for the sixth time.