Love and Other Impossible Pursuits Read Free Page A

yelping greetings at the women waiting for them. The women kneel simultaneously, scooping children in their arms. Then it is William's turn to be released. He stands in the doorway of the Red Room, waiting patiently while a triple-scoop chocolate ice-cream cone of a woman hugs a tiny freckled girl to her chest. The nanny's hair is like a replica of her body in miniature, a tower that trembles as she lifts the little girl in her arms. William ducks under his classmate's waggling feet and walks up to me. I lean over and hug him with one awkward arm. He stiffens, then seems to resign himself to my embrace.
    â€œYou're here today?” he says.
    â€œIt's Wednesday.”
    â€œSo it is.”
    What kind of five-year-old says, “So it is?”
    â€œCome on,” I say. “Let's go.” I need to escape the press of small bodies. I can smell them—the sour milky tang of their sweat, the strawberry fragrance of their shampoo. They eddy about my legs in a quicksand of sticky hands and pink cheeks. The sound of miniature rubber-soled sneakers squeaking across the floor is worse than nails on a chalkboard. I trip over a Spider-Man lunch box and kick a pair of aqua Shearling boots across the hall. Their heads are at my waist, and my fingers long to slide through their soft hair, to twirl their ringlets. I remind myself of the note that came home in William's lunch box last month. They all probably have lice.
    â€œWilliam, let's go,” I repeat, my voice louder than I had intended. Two of the mothers look at me, eyebrows raised, mouths twisted into disapproving frowns. “We're running late,” I mutter, shrugging my shoulders, as if this is an explanation, as if this will prevent the phone call to Carolyn. Not just irresponsible. Abusive, too.
    William allows himself to be zipped into his coat. I tie the strings of his hat tightly under his chin.
    â€œWhere are your mittens?”
    He pulls them out of his pockets and I tug them onto his limp hands. His left thumb stays with the rest of his hand, refusing to go where it belongs, and for a few seconds I tried to twist the mitten around and stuff the thumb in correctly. Finally, I just give up.
    â€œAll set,” I say, smiling falsely.
    William gives me a baleful look and sets off toward the elevator. By the time I pick up the booster seat that his mother has left in the broom closet outside the classroom, he is waiting for me, watching the elevator doors close.
    â€œWe missed it,” he says.
    â€œI'll bet you ten bucks there'll be another one.”
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    I
never meant to feel this way about this child. My assumption was that I would love him. I love the father so very much; it seemed inevitable that I would adore the child. I longed for William to love me. Jack finally allowed me to meet William after we had been seeing each other for six months, a few weeks before we moved in together. He might have introduced us earlier, but he had determined, for a while, to leave the decision of timing up to Carolyn, to give her the sense of controlling that, if nothing else. Jack had taken matters into his own hands only when it became clear that, if the choice were left to her, William would live out his life in blissful ignorance of the woman who had come to share his father's bed. That was one of the last conversations between Jack and his ex-wife to which I was not privy, and thus I have no idea what it cost Jack to insist on the Saturday morning that he, William, and I spent at the Central Park Zoo.
    I approached my first meeting with the son with far more trepidation than I had my first date with the father. It was so important, this first moment we would lay eyes on each other. I played it and replayed it in my mind as I rode the subway uptown. It was September, but it felt more like August, muggy and hot, one of those Indian summer days where it's such an oven on the subway platform that the air is hard to