London Calling

“I could not get my fill of looking. There should be a song for women to sing at this moment, a prayer. But perhaps there is none; there are no words strong enough to name that moment.” ―Anita Diamant

A love story in two parts. Part one:

Divorced after a disastrous relapse from sobriety marriage, I was finally on my feet professionally, a writer, teaching creative writing at Rutgers. I had been asked to interview for several full-time teaching positions at good colleges. I was sober and had several ideas about my future. I wanted a child and a partner but not necessarily in that order. I wanted to leave the cage-fighting world of Manhattan real estate and relationships and live somewhere normal.

That fall, I gave a lead at an AA meeting where I decided to tell the truth. I admitted to two abortions, to being raped, to the stupid and brief marriage I’d experienced. I talked about failure and success and my difficult, Harvard-educated, narcissistic parents, my critical sister, my dead other sister, and my decision to try and be a single mother. I told a friend of mine that any man who might have considered asking me out would change his mind after hearing my lead. “I sounded like a car crash,” I said, “Drive slowly but get away fast.”

A week later, my sponsor leaned over and said, “Molly, this is Kevin. Kevin, this is Molly.” He had piercing blue eyes and beautiful cheekbones, but I was off the market, so I smiled and ignored him. Afterward, he came up to me.
“I heard your lead last week,” he said.
“Oh my god,” I said. “That’s not good.”
It took him a moment to answer. He was not from New York or my family or jacked up on cocaine. He was from Kansas, so he spoke slower than other people.
“Can we have coffee?”
“Okay,” I said. I’m reading at a club tonight,” I said. “It starts at eleven.”
Kevin smiled. “I’m in bed by ten,” he said. “How about coffee now?”

I had become extremely careful about men in AA and men in general. I had made some terrible choices, sleeping with a famous shoe designer who would later be arrested on tax fraud who seduced me as I was crying over a previous relationship and then sent me home with a pair of shoes. The aforementioned depressed married man, several other men who were recently jailed or married, or one who was so much younger than me he asked me how to open a bank account.

That night at Nell's, I climbed up on the pool table to read my work and hoped he would not come through the door. The dress was see-through; the crowd was trendy and young. I was tired. I was tired of dieting, working hard, and dealing with New York's intensity and competitiveness. I felt ashamed of what I was reading, which was not good, of what I was wearing, which was ridiculous, and of my need for approval from a bunch of wannabe poseur artists. I climbed off the pool table and looked around. Kevin was safely in bed.

We argued about Mother Theresa, the Catholic Church, Mary McCarthy, and I name-dropped literary celebrities. He was a journalist at the Wall Street Journal and asked me lots of questions, which worked because I was self-absorbed. No one had made me feel that interesting in ages. Also, he was very handsome and smart and he wasn’t from New York, which meant he had a shelf life of about twenty-four hours. Ravenous New York women trying to find an unmarried, un-addicted mate surrounded me. “What a shame,” I thought. “I‘m going to have a baby alone and teach creative writing. I’m going to be independent and motherly, and I’m not risking my plan for some Midwestern hack.”

“Where’s Kansas?” I asked. “We lived in England the year they did geography, “I said. “Is it next to Idaho?”
“No,” he said. “Can I have your number?”
“Okay,” I said. “But I’m going to the MLA to get a real teaching job, and then I’m moving and having a baby by myself. Possibly I’ll date when my baby starts kindergarten.”
“We’ll see,” he said.

Two weeks after meeting Kevin, we were in love. He had brought me back to his oddly suburban rental in Brooklyn, and I had spent the night. He told me I was sleep-deprived, which I was, and I found myself sleeping next to him more deeply and sweetly than I’d slept in years. After a night of passion in Brooklyn, it snowed, and he had to go to work, so I stayed cozied up in bed and then did my wash because no one in New York had a washing machine and dryer in their apartment. There was a Post-it on the dryer, which I expected to say something romantic, but it said: “Please clean the lint screen.”

I was invited to read in Florida as a candidate for a tenure-track position. When asked about my literary influences, I drew a complete blank.

“Joyce Carol Oates, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence.” I stopped, realizing I needed another woman. “Oh, Virginia Woolf.” Now, that was a lie. I loved To the Lighthouse, but I couldn’t claim that any part of Woolf’s technique affected me.

I got the job but had to say “no” because we discovered a week later I was pregnant. Turning down my first real job in academia hurt. I loved Kevin, and I wanted to have a baby, but my work history was psychotic. Finally, I was offered something based on my accomplishments as a writer and a writing teacher. After graduating from Rutgers University in 1979 with a history major and English minor, I worked as a childminder in a battered woman’s shelter, a telephone installation foreman, a cocktail waitress/actress, a linen importer’s PR person, an assistant agent, an assistant editor and then finally a published novelist and a creative writing instructor at a college.

When I told the disappointed chair of the English department I was getting married and moving to London to have a baby, I knew I had probably turned down a job I would never find again in my field. It was bittersweet, but I was in love. The description on my British visa said: ‘Trailing Spouse.” All the sacrifices for this marriage seemed to be made by me: my rent-stabilized Manhattan apartment, my life in New York, my job in Florida, and my status as a New York City writer with several published novels. As far as I could tell, Kevin’s main sacrifice was tolerating his in-laws. Kevin met my family over Christmas. Traditionally, we spent Christmas Eve at my sister’s house in Montclair, New Jersey, where she lived in a poorly heated farmhouse with her hyperactive, Italian, photographer husband and two wonderful children.

On the way, my mother drilled Kevin and my father drove while I prepared myself to be belittled and bullied by my sister. However, Kevin’s presence meant she was eager to impress him with her affectionate nature so she embraced us both warmly while her husband forced everyone to pose for a family photograph, most of us wearing heavy sweaters. In that picture, you can read the future. I look dazed; Kevin looks freaked out, my sister looks unhappy and angry, my father looks depressed, and my mother is inscrutable, her camera face a blank smile. We all look cold and hungry.

I was happy, terrified, but happy. I was so in love that I felt sick, and I was already a few days pregnant. Since I was thirty-five, we decided getting pregnant might be a problem, so we didn’t use birth control. It was not a problem, and by the time we told people about our impending marriage, a baby was on its way. When I told the women at my bridal shower about the pregnancy, a woman who sang dark songs in a nightclub said, “I knew it was a shotgun wedding,” but it wasn’t. The pregnancy had nothing to do with the marriage. We were getting married because we were madly in love, moving to London, and planned to have a child together. Luke’s arrival merely changed the chronology slightly.

And then we were married. On February 19, 1993, we became man and wife, and by October 28, we would be parents. We had known one another less than four months, and I had yet to meet any member of Kevin’s family who all came from that mysterious state called Kansas, home to Dorothy and sunflowers and people with odd political views, i.e., Republicans. Oh, they keep winning the Super Bowl. The day dawned sunny, clear, and cold. I had morning sickness mixed with wedding jitters and found myself telling the Israeli cabbie who transported my attendant and me downtown to City Hall the whole story of our wild courtship. “Mazel Tov,” he said, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “It sounds like a movie,”

Kevin, my sister, and a good friend from Princeton were waiting. We stood in front of the judge, who looked like Fred Flintstone, and I giggled throughout the entire ceremony. We were whisked into a car driven by my ex-brother-in-law, the Italian photographer who stopped on the West Side Highway and insisted we stand in front of a mural celebrating Cuban Independence and Fidel Castro to have our official wedding pictures taken. It was freezing and windy, Kevin couldn’t understand a word my Italian ex-brother-in-law was saying and certainly did not appreciate his choice of Cuban Independence which was dear to Andrea’s heart but meant little to either of us.

“He’s a communist,” Kevin remarked as we drove on to our small reception being held in my parent’s apartment in Chelsea. “Did you know that?” I shook my head. “He’s just Italian,” I said. “He gets obsessed.”

I looked out the window and tried to breathe. I had just married a man I barely knew. I would move to London nearly six months pregnant, giving up my apartment, my friends, my writing life, and my teaching job to be the trailing spouse of a soft-spoken blue-eyed man from Kansas. I was used to eccentric relatives, but I wasn’t used to traditional gender roles. My brief first marriage was a reaction to my eldest sister’s tragic death and my return to drinking. We raged at one another until I stopped drinking again and left him. I had dozens of boyfriends and left them all when things became too serious. Or I accused them of leaving me while I went to live in foreign countries and demanded fidelity.

The first indication of our future differences was apparent when Kevin decided to pay off all my debts. For someone as poor as I was, artistically poor, of course, I had managed to stay largely debt-free. After I divorced my first husband in 1984, I was completely broke. I found a job after my divorce, working for Random House as an assistant editor, which paid me $12K a year. This was poverty. Then I was offered a job at Bantam Doubleday Dell at $20K. I was still poor but safe and happy. After two years at my second publishing job, I was fired. I waitressed, collected unemployment, and wrote my first novel. I thought I was writing an endless short story. The idea of becoming a novelist like my dad was not attractive. It seemed to me all the novelists I knew were prone to the darkness I had already witnessed as a drunk. I wanted something different, but there seemed to be no alternative, and when the thing was numbering close to three hundred typewritten pages, I ran into an agent I knew on the street who sold it immediately to Harper and Row for what I considered a fortune. When I tried to give some of the money to charity, my accountant, who was working for nothing, informed me I was too poor to be generous.

Money was never discussed in my family. I had no idea how much either of my parents made. We traveled abroad and lived in amazing places like Paris, London and Dublin, and all of us spent at least part of our high school years in a private school. I was told not to work while I was in college in case it interfered with my studies. Kevin, on the other hand, had worked his entire life, delivering papers for his father throughout high school, working while attending the University of Kansas, and paying his bills from a very early age. He was the child of working-class parents, and I was the child of an academic and an architect. He worried about money constantly, while I assumed an art life would somehow provide.

“Don’t you care how much money I make?” he asked me after we were married.
“Why would I?” I asked, bewildered by his question.
“Because it matters to me,” he said.

It didn’t matter to me. I was impressed by his passion for journalism and his obvious brilliance, but I wasn’t interested in what he was worth. I married him because I was in love and I wanted to be his wife. I married him because of his blue eyes, his intensity, and his intelligence.

I had never been pregnant in Manhattan. I had been married, divorced, drugged, drunk, sober, fired, published, thin, and depressed, but never pregnant. I felt like telling everyone I met. I started with a homeless man who lived on the grate outside my apartment building. I usually gave him a dollar, sometimes more, rarely less. I saw it as a sort of toll.
“I’m having a baby,” I told him the day after I found out.
“You’ll be a good mother,” he said.

I don’t know why I would take the word of a man who had lived on a grate for as long as I knew him, but he seemed like someone who had witnessed a fair amount of parenting, both good and bad. I smiled and people in New York rarely smiled at strangers. I couldn’t help it. I stared at babies and noticed babies and carried strollers up subway steps telling the mothers or fathers, “I’m pregnant,” and getting a mix of reactions, some kind, some indifferent, one or two openly negative. I was thirty-five, madly in love, and having a baby. Life was magical. For once, I didn’t feel fat.

Our honeymoon was scheduled for a month after the wedding so we could both finish work commitments. We were flying to Puerto Rico on the day the blizzard of 1993 hit the entire eastern seaboard. Our flight was still scheduled to leave for San Juan. We found our seats, and the jet rolled a few feet and stopped. The de-icing took long enough for the runway to disappear. We rolled a few more feet and then stopped.

“Folks,” the pilot said. “We’re going back to the terminal. The ice can’t be removed, and nothing’s getting out today. I’ve been advised that JFK is closing. Your luggage will be unloaded. Good luck.”

A pilot wishing you good luck is a bad sign. As soon as we reached the terminal, I had the forethought to tell Kevin to rebook our flight to Puerto Rico for Monday. Then the nightmare commenced. JFK was shutting down around us. Most of the employees had already fled for home, and the taxis were all gone. The only way to get back to Manhattan was by the A train, which you caught at a stop and was only reachable by a shuttle bus. We went outside and were buffeted by the wind and snow. Bus after bus went past the stop at maximum capacity with the other passengers fleeing the blizzard. We were wearing summer clothes and sneakers, coatless and.bare-legged.

Kevin sat in the bus shelter, took out his guitar, and started to play a Simon and Garfunkel song. As the next bus approached, I threw myself onto the road. Although it was very crowded, I spotted enough space for the two of us. “Get out of the way, lady,” the driver said. “The bus is full.” “I’m eight months pregnant,” I screamed. She let us on. The man next to us muttered something. “This reminds me of the fall of Saigon,” he said.

The doors of the A train were frozen so we rode into Manhattan with snow blowing through the open doors,. We got to Columbus Circle before the entire subway system shut down. As Kevin and I dragged ourselves the twelve blocks back to our apartment, I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t thrown myself in front of the bus.

Because I was thirty-five, I was told it was advisable to have an amniocentesis to check for genetic abnormalities and the possibility of Down syndrome. When Kevin and I visited the genetic counselor, I assumed both of us would identify our alcoholic relatives, and that would be about it. Except that Kevin had a cousin, Timmy, and cousin Timmy hit the genetic defect jackpot. Cousin Timmy had things wrong with him, including an inability to turn his head, which I had never heard of. The list of things wrong with Timmy was so lengthy that I started laughing despite my determination to behave like a mature adult. The genetic counselor looked freaked out as Kevin joined me in giggling about Timmy’s many problems. The laughter was inspired by our realization that we barely knew one another. I had no idea that Kevin had a cousin Timmy, I still hadn’t met his parents, his four brothers, or many of his closest friends. “Do you have any questions?” the counselor asked, looking displeased with us both. “Yes,” I said, looking at Kevin. “Is that all?“

We left, laughing hysterically. I was consuming a baby book a week, especially What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Thank god there was no Internet then, or I may have discovered even more terrible things that could occur in pregnancy and found even more things to obsess over. The amnio was horrific, with a gigantic needle going into my stomach and the doctor almost taking a phone call at a crucial moment. I remember feeling sad about the whole procedure. I had already bonded with this baby, and I wanted him to be left in peace. Also, I was terrified they would discover something bad, and I’d be asked to consider abortion. Or the amnio would cause a spontaneous miscarriage. My sister’s sudden death had turned me into someone who expected loss.

photo by Alexandra Kirr

Kevin’s attitude was more journalistic. He looked at the statistics for things like Down syndrome and predicted we would be all right. Again, I felt the difference between us. I was all emotion and gothic horror while he approached life as an objective and accurate recorder of the actual. We flew to London to find a place to live and stayed in the Hampstead Heath cottage belonging to Tony Horowitz and his wife Geraldine Brooks, both writers. We received the news that the baby showed no sign of genetic abnormalities, and I met several of Kevin’s future colleagues. I felt like a wife and a trailing spouse. I had never been married to anyone important before. I liked the fact that I was now married to the London correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, but I didn’t like the fact that what I did no longer seemed to matter.

When we returned to New York, I argued about keeping my apartment and subletting, while Kevin felt it was a dump and not worth the trouble. “But it’s a dump on 69th and Broadway,” I said, “that costs less than $800 a month.”

The issue was dropped when we had shipped our furniture to London, and the superintendent wandered into the empty space where I sat, visibly pregnant, rolling pennies I’d accumulated after five years. “You’re moving out,” he said. I looked at him and considered any number of lies I could produce, such as refinishing floors, new furniture, etc. We both knew I was moving out. I was tired and pregnant and had fought over everything up until that point.

I surrendered. “Yes,” I said.
“There’s no subletting,” he said.
I nodded.
“Good luck with the baby.”
I nodded.

Labor started at four pm on Monday, October 25, 1993, while I was teaching creative writing at City Lit in London, a job I had managed to get despite my being eight months pregnant. “I have to work,” I said to the person who might hire me, trying to look sane but knowing I was a hormonally fucked crazy person who had been pickpocketed twice that week wandering around London thinking about my soon-to-be-born baby, staring into space and consuming numerous portions of banoffee pie.

“Of course you do, darling,” said Tabby, who I called ‘Tubby’ for weeks because I didn’t hear her name properly, and she never corrected me despite the fact she was very thin. “You can’t just sit and stare at your tummy all day long.”

The City Lit offered classes to adult learners, many of whom were on the dole. “You’d better go to the hospital,” my youngest student Tom said, looking panicked. He was a laid-off bricklayer who wrote horror stories about people turning into cement. “No, Love,” Margie said. “It's nothing like the bloody movies. She’s got time.” Margie had been an EMT driver until she was made redundant.

My writing students looked worried. Part of their dole package was free classes, and now their teacher was going to become a mother and abandon them. “I’m coming back,” I said, patting Norman, who had only written about squirrels. “I can bring him to the crèche in a few weeks.” But they all looked a bit sad. No longer only children, they’d have to share me with a baby.

“Well then go and have it then,” Tom said, looking at my heaving stomach as if it were far more horrific than anything he’d ever imagined in one of his stories. “Have it and come back.”

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach