F I D E L I T Y
By: Kate Bredimus
Tags: Short Story, Parenthood, Brooklyn, Fertility

“When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie

That’s amore

When the room seems to spin like you’ve had too much gin

You’re in love

Kids are born, you are worn, he feels scorned

As you hide in the closet

Love must wait, ’til a date, then it’s great

But you’re both still exhausted” Dean Martin (edited)

It’s time to revisit our infertile couple back in Brooklyn, before an outbreak of children tore through their life like the Norovirus.

Their love story begins on a dance floor, as all good ones do. But if we’re going to go back farther to the moment where the couple first crossed paths — and we are — then their love story actually begins the way all Brooklyn ones do, with someone urinating in the street.

The man and the woman initially meet briefly in a mutual friend’s apartment in Williamsburg, where the man and his then-girlfriend have stopped by while the woman is visiting from out of town. Sometime during this weekend the woman ends up going out with the girlfriend and a small group of people, where the girlfriend finishes the night by getting kicked out of a bar, dropping trou and relieving herself in front of the bouncer.

“She seems fun,” the woman thinks to herself, and she thinks this with total sincerity. The woman doesn’t have much of an opinion about the boyfriend other than the fact that he appears to be nice and is wearing very baggy jeans with a safety pin holding the hem on. She assumes he’s into Phish.

By the time the woman moves to Brooklyn, the man’s relationship has fizzled out and the two begin ending up in the same places as part of a large, amorphous social circle that floats through bars and music venues. Within this murky blob of friends, friends-of-friends and random non-friends who latch on for a drink or two and then stumble off to find a gyro, the woman notices the man enough to confirm her suspicion that he is a really nice guy. The man does not notice the woman at all.

This all changes, ladies and gentlemen, on the aforementioned New Year’s Eve, well after the clock had struck midnight and the amorphous friend blob is now lurching on a dance floor. The man is leaning against a wall looking disinterested, and unfortunately for him disinterest is the main thing the woman is attracted to (besides, inexplicably, Greg Kinnear).

“He seems fun,” the woman slurs as the man yawns. She extracts herself from the blob and walks over with the grace and poise of a woman filled to her eyeballs with Andre Spumante. But somewhere in these first precarious steps, through the sway and stumble of the crowd and the thumping beat of house music, Destiny belches and the couple’s fate is sealed.

A week after their kiss, in the glow of a new year filled with promise (and also trash because it is Brooklyn), the couple has their first date in a thundering part of Williamsburg under the JMZ. It is a dark little restaurant called Moto, slightly shaky like the date itself. The conversation (requisite biographies), the food (paninis) and the man’s terrible attire (argyle sweater with camouflage pants) fade into the background as chemistry kicks in, and when the man leans in to kiss her outside the restaurant as a taxi gives him an encouraging honk, the woman feels a small thump in her cynical heart.

From here the relationship takes off quickly, driven mostly by the man’s enthusiastic event planning skills. On their second date, the man wants to introduce the woman to his sister, so after dinner they climb the stairs to the sister’s apartment. She is asleep on the sofa. The man gives her a nudge. “Sister, this is woman,” he says. (He doesn’t really say this.) The sister rolls over and opens her eyes.

“Weird,” she mumbles.

With the sister’s blessing in hand, the woman begins joining the man’s friends for road trips out of the city, happy hours at dive bars and hungover brunches the next day. At one of these brunches, in front of the group, he teases her about the plaid shirt she is wearing, calling her Temple of the Dog. Her heart thumps for the second time.

Still, she is undecided. The more earnest the man becomes, the more doubtful she feels. He is no longer ignoring her — quite the opposite — which throws a wrench in things. Regardless, she is having fun experiencing the city with this funny, clingy man and his ragtag crew. She rolls with it.

The woman turns 30 just five weeks into the relationship, which is bad manners on her part but can’t be helped. This puts the man in the uncomfortable position of planning a party for a sad, aging woman who he met only weeks earlier. If you take anything from this story, let it be that if you are sad and aging and leave it up to a new love interest to plan your birthday, you will end up in a hookah lounge with a bellydancer.

The relationship continues to speed ahead with the man whipping it along and the woman laughing and trying to keep up. There are dinners followed by drinks followed by 3 a.m. pizzas followed by full, wasted days on the sofa. There are shows with the man’s band, shows with other friends in bands, tickets to Fashion Week and soft openings for fancy restaurants. Everyone stays out late until it’s no longer late but early, climbing the stairs to someone’s rooftop to watch the sunrise turn Brooklyn pink. It is here, on one of these rooftops during one of these bleary-eyed sunrises, that the man tells the woman he thinks they should move in together. The woman has never lived with a boyfriend before, but in her fogged brain she thinks it’s worth considering. The man is always at her apartment anyway. His current roommate is a heroin addict, and she takes comfort knowing that there is a fundamental logic to this proposition. The man cannot continue to live where he is living. The other day he had come home to a strange lady doing drugs in his living room, gleefully recounting how she encouraged her child to stab his classmate. Then there is the woman’s own roommate, a dear friend who has been subjected to the horrors of being around two people in a new relationship. Something has to give.

And yet, the woman is uncertain. Hadn’t she been the one who always told friends that it took at least two years to know if you were truly compatible? That the infatuation had to lift, revealing all the hideous warts on the ogre you had been hanging out with. That you had to Shrek the relationship to know if it could stand.

What the woman is learning is that someone else’s optimism can, at times, be more powerful than your own doubt. She holds her breath and jumps.

They move boxes into a basement apartment in Clinton Hill. They get a dog. They domesticate with a furor, and the woman is surprised at how easy it is to do this, and how nice it is to have someone to lean against on the sofa while eating leftover Thai.

By the time New Year’s rolls around again she starts to suspect that this fast-paced, lovestruck man who she has shacked up with is plotting a proposal. The idea terrifies her in an excited kind of way. When he makes dinner reservations at Moto for New Year’s Eve, she tries to sabotage it by asking if he is planning on proposing, and then feels terrible when he cancels the reservation. Instead, a limo arrives at the apartment and delivers her to a crappy pizza parlor in the middle of Chinatown. She is confused. Later the man will remind her that the first time he told her he loved her was at this very spot. It happened around 2 a.m. after a beer-filled St. Patrick’s Day in a raucous East Village sports bar. She doesn’t remember the pizza place, but she does remember that the toilet in the bathroom of the sports bar had been clogged and she had made the mistake of flushing it after she peed, and this had caused the toilet to overflow, showering her rainboots with feces. She remembers the feces, but not the “I love you.”

Now, sitting at the same table, she is presented with a pizza box. The man grins as she opens it. Inside is a pizza, with black olives spelling out “Marry Me.” She laughs. He puts the ring on her finger. Her heart is racing. Everything is moving too fast. She needs time to think it through — the “yes” had popped out of her mouth before she could stop it. It seemed like the polite thing to say. But look at her, and look at him! They are both so happy. The pizzaiolos are so happy, too. They have likely never had a proposal in their establishment, let alone a customer. One of the pizzaiolos comes over to the table and presents them with a calendar. On the cover is an image of two puppies sharing a plate of spaghetti. “You, you!” he says excitedly, jabbing at the calendar, and then at the couple. Everyone laughs some more.

The pizza is never eaten. Instead, they check it with their coats at a fancy French restaurant, and bring it back to their apartment afterwards where it sits on the counter until it is hard and waxy. They announce their engagement to friends and family.

All the while, the woman’s mind is in turmoil. She loves this man, sure, but who knows how she’ll feel six months from now, let alone her whole life. She still has butterflies, but they mostly flutter to life when the man is playing onstage with his band, or when he burns her with an insult. As a couple, they seem to have skipped the heady uncertainty of a young relationship and arrived at a level of comfort alarmingly quick. Though, to be fair, nobody is farting just yet.

And, if we’re being fair, it must also be noted that she has contributed to this expedited process. There is a time on a dance floor where, after drinking 40 gin and tonics, she shouts, “I want a baby in two years!” over the music. The man is taken aback, but comes around to the idea within the duration of the song. Swiftness is his forte.

“OK!” he shouts.

“I want a hot dog!” she shouts back. It is what she had meant to say.

The wedding arrives eight months later. They’re just under the two-year mark and it’s pretty clear the relationship will pass the Shrek test. She loves the man even more, thank God. He’s gotten mad at her enough times to reassure her that he cannot be walked all over. He teases her just the way she likes. She can’t stop herself from hugging and kissing him all the time. Maybe this is true love — all the teasing and hugging. And, if it’s not, there’s always divorce.

But divorce, seriously? They can’t even afford this marriage, let alone the dissolution of it. There is no money for a photographer. Her dress is ordered online for $200, which still feels extravagant. The invitations are a photobooth strip they made copies of at Kinko’s and glued to some blue cardstock. The font is Gill Sans, but the man mistakes it for Helvetica. Men!

On the day of their wedding, they stand on a pier, flanked by the woman’s best friend and the man’s father, the October wind blasting them so badly that her cousin, who is officiating, has to give the woman his blazer because her teeth are chattering too much to speak. They exchange vows, mostly insults sprinkled with affection. Everyone is as happy as pizzaiolis. The couple walks down the aisle to an Arcade Fire song, which is so basic and desperate that the woman still shudders thinking about it.

The reception is 60 paces away in a restaurant. There are sweet potato biscuits with ham and fried green tomatoes. Johnny cakes with BBQ and chipotle slaw. Southern vegetable tempura and grilled shrimp. The woman can’t eat any of it. Her adrenaline is sky-high. Her best friend has plied her with whisky and champagne to no avail. There are so many people to talk to, to catch up with, to make it worth their while to have come. The man’s boss, a millionaire restauranteur, has flown in on a private plane to the peninsula’s only runway, which is more like a dirt road. He must think they are so poor, with their biscuits and homemade invitations. The couple listens and cries to heartfelt speeches by loved ones, then starts the karaoke too soon, forcing sober people to sing. The man’s bandmate somehow gets a hold of a cabbage (or brought it with her?) and convinces the woman to throw it back and forth with her during a song. It is probably 6 p.m. and the reception has gotten very weird. Motown is queued up for the parents and grandparents, then quickly abandoned for hip-hop. The man serenades her with a Justin Timberlake song. They are having fun now and the alcohol is kicking in. She has shed her wedding dress and is wearing a jumpsuit from Beyonce’s House of Dereon that her friends had purchased as a joke for her bachelorette party. They are all dancing onstage in their terrible jumpsuits and it is a shitshow. She will deeply regret these antics for many years to come. For God’s sake, there were grandmothers and millionaires watching!

Then there is the afterparty, crashed by extra high school friends. The man arrives via golf cart. He is very bloody and his suit is torn. He stands on a chair and cheerfully announces to the group that he had jumped off the golf cart while it was still moving. The crowd goes wild and the beer flows. The woman partakes in some wrestling with her friends on the carpet. Pretty soon people who should not be making out are making out. It is time for bed. The couple rides a golf cart back to the house they are staying in. A few more high school pals trickle in uninvited and split a Digiorno pizza with them. The couple, exhausted and possibly slightly concussed, staggers up to their bedroom to discover that the woman’s friends have decorated the bed — not with rose petals and champagne, but with an enormous dildo and a 40-ounce of Colt 45. They laugh and pass out immediately. Soon the sun is shining and it is morning. On this, the first day of their marriage, they wake to someone lying at the foot of their bed, weeping. It is one of the woman’s friends, who is very hungover and just can’t take it anymore. The woman gives the friend some Tylenol and they pack up their presents and head over to the woman’s parents’ house for breakfast. Her mother makes her throw the dildo away.

Dildo-less, they resume their life in Brooklyn, where they would have stayed if the subprime loans hadn’t crashed the economy. The woman loses her job. No one is hiring. She coasts on unemployment for six months before the couple decides they have to bite the bullet and move somewhere where they can afford housing, buy a car and purchase all their groceries at once instead of making 15 weekly trips to a bodega.

They end up back in Richmond, where for five years they choose hot dogs over babies. Instead of growing apart, as the woman had feared, they grow closer. So close that the woman begins to think of the man as an extension of herself. This is not exactly a good thing, as the man will soon learn.

Eventually, after many of their friends and family have dropped off the map into the abyss of parenthood, this foolish couple begins to believe that life may be more interesting when you experience it all over again from a new perspective.

(Insert infertility, triplets, chaos, etc.)

In 2013, newly festooned in babies, they find out that life is more interesting for sure, but not exactly in the way they had imagined. Their version of parenthood is a love story, a comedy, a drama and a horror film all swaddled together. The marriage has been bisected and three other people have been stuffed into the gap. These people need 95% of the couple’s attention, and love and care. They are rapacious, selfish and tireless — but they do look cute in overalls.

Now there is even less room for the couple to be individuals, let alone a couple. They live together like harried servers in the world’s worst restaurant, sliding around each other to grab a paper towel or a cup of milk. They speak in short, clipped sentences. They bicker and argue more often. The woman is especially bad. The little patience she had to begin with is gone, and she takes her frustration out on the man. She snaps at him when he needs her to repeat the thing she just said. (Who has time to speak the same sentence once, let alone twice!) She blows up when she has to ask him to do the same thing over and over (“Mental load!” she shouts.) She heaps tasks onto both of their shoulders and makes decisions without asking, the way you do when you think of a person as an extension of yourself. She’s turned into a bit of an asshole.

But she needs him, and he needs her. They move in separate lanes, intersecting only for a brief kiss or hug to cut the grind. They live on the ashes of their romance. Most of the love and affection they can muster goes into their children. In the small window of quiet after the kids go to bed, they often choose time to themselves over time together. They need this time alone so badly — to read a book or work on a song or surf the internet aimlessly or have a single thought that is their own.

As the years pass, the romance continues to drift just out of reach. There are rare date nights where the cocktails go down quickly and they reach across the table to clasp hands and grin giddily at their freedom. They try to talk about anything other than parenting and fail, because they both need to verbalize their trauma. They badmouth their children until the wine kicks in, and then goodmouth them over dessert. Tipsy and relaxed, they hold hands again and smile at the thought of these wonderful creatures they have made. The sweet one with the sleepy eyes and puffy right cheek who is constant and good-natured, fluent in affection, and whose raspy lisp is so dear to the woman that her eyes fill with tears thinking about it. Then there’s the bashful one with the angelic little face; so sensitive and serious; a precise artist with an intense and fragile heart. And finally, the small, dark-haired one with the theatrical imagination; confident, headstrong and hilarious, with an astounding level of sloppiness that makes him the exact counterpart of his meticulous brother.

They — they! — have created these three funny humans. These three humans who are sucking them dry and keeping them in constant orbit around each other. It feels worth it.

If they could only bottle this glow and take swigs of it when they needed to soften the edges of their fractious world, to lower their blood pressure and voices. But peaceful contentment is a gas, not a liquid, and it melts into the air as they couple pays their check and heads back home.

Before they know it, 10 years of marriage have gone by like lightning. The grandparents arrive one weekend to watch the kids so the couple can celebrate their anniversary in Brooklyn, where it all began. On the drive to the airport, the man asks if he can play the woman a demo he has been working on. She knows about the demo, has watched him at night, sitting at the kitchen table with headphones on, hunched over his Maschine pad, jabbing at buttons. He has snuck off to jab at buttons at her parents’ house, at his parents’ house, at anyone’s parents’ house. It has annoyed her, all the jabbing, because he could have been doing laundry or wiping counters or letting her father eagerly show off his arrowhead collection instead. She wants him to work on his music, just not when there are things to be done. And there are always things to be done.

He tells her the concept of the album is following a relationship through the years, the idea that love is a drug dealer because the first hit is free, but after that you have to work for it.

The first song bursts through the speakers. It’s about them meeting so long ago — the Brooklyn bars, the music, the endless nights melting into morning and the false ideas about what love is and what it should look like.

She listens and she feels something deep inside that had been put to rest wrench free. She is remembering a side to this man that she had forgotten, remembering his passions and complications, his shadow sadness, the sound of him singing and his open, optimistic heart. She is remembering how she stood in the crowd, smiling with pride as he played his songs. Now she is crying, with grief for everything they have lost, with gratitude that they had it to begin with, and with relief that they’re still here, together.

**************

Love is the sway and stumble of the crowd as you make your way to a person on the other side. It’s the world encouraging you, or at least a taxi driver, as you kiss on a busy street corner while trains fly overhead. It’s the decision to take a leap and make a home. To be bold even when you’re uncertain.

It’s the willingness to give up the possibility of ever again experiencing the beginning of a relationship — breathtaking and potent, wild and terrible. To give up the shaky thrill of holding the hand of someone new as you climb a flight of stairs to a rooftop, a pink sunrise and a hopeful heart.

It’s the grueling, unrelenting test of time that makes you realize that the good kind of love may not be able to sustain that shaky thrill, but it offers a surer grip.