We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [51]
Here I thought that I’d brilliantly disguised my true feelings about motherhood thus far, to the point of dereliction; so much lying in marriage is merely a matter of keeping quiet. I had refrained from throwing that self-evident diagnosis of postnatal depression down on our coffee table like a trophy but had kept this formal accreditation to myself. Meanwhile, I’d brought home loads of editing work but had only got through a few pages; I was eating badly and sleeping badly and showering at most every three days; I saw no one and rarely got out because Kevin’s rages, in public, were not socially acceptable; and daily, I faced a purple churn of insatiable fury while rehearsing to myself with dull incomprehension, I’m supposed to love this.
“If you’re having trouble coping, we don’t lack for resources.” You towered over my couch with your son, like one of those mighty peasant icons of dedication to family and motherland in Soviet murals. “We could hire a girl.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” I mumbled. “I had a conference call with the office. We’re researching demand for an African edition. AFRIWAP. Thought it had a ring.”
“I did not mean,” you stooped, your voice deep and hot in my ear, “that someone else could raise our son while you go python-hunting in the Belgian Congo.”
“Zaire,” I said.
“We’re in this together, Eva.”
“Then why do you always take his side?”
“He’s only seven weeks old! He’s not big enough to have a side!”
I wrenched myself to a stand. You may have mistaken me for tearful, but my eyes were watering of their own accord. When I lumbered into the bathroom, it was less to get the thermometer than to underscore the fact that you had failed to fetch it for me. When I returned with the tube poking from my mouth, was I imagining it, or were your eyes once more rolling toward the ceiling?
I scrutinized the mercury under a lamp. “Here—you read it. Everything’s a bit blurry.”
Absently you held the tube to the light. “Eva, you screwed it up. You must have put it near the bulb or something.” You shook the mercury down, poked the end in my mouth, and left to change Kevin’s diaper.
I shuffled to the changing table and made my offering. You checked the reading and stabbed me with a black glance. “It’s not funny, Eva.”
“What are you talking about?” This time they were tears.
“Heating the thermometer. It’s a shitty joke.”
“I’m not heating the thermometer. I just put the bulb under my tongue—”
“Crap, Eva, it reads practically 104°.”
“Oh.”
You looked at me. You looked at Kevin, for once torn between loyalties. Hastily you scooped him from the table, then bedded him with such perfunctoriness that he forgot his strict theatrical schedule and cranked up his daytime I-hate-the-whole-world shriek. With that manliness I’d always adored, you ignored him.
“I’m so sorry!” In one swoop you lifted me off the floor and swept me back to the couch. “You’re really sick. We’ve got to call Rhinestein, get you to a hospital—”
I was sleepy, fading. But I do remember thinking that it had taken too much. Wondering if I would have a cool cloth on my forehead, ice water and three aspirin at my side, and Dr. Rhinestein on the telephone if the thermometer had read only 101°.
Eva
December 21, 2000
Dear Franklin,
I’m a bit rattled, since the phone just rang and I have no idea how this Jack Marlin person got my unlisted number. He claimed to be a documentary maker from NBC. I suppose the droll working title of his project, “Extracurricular Activities,” sounds authentic enough, and at least he was quick to distance himself from “Anguish at Gladstone High,” that hasty Fox show that Giles informed me was mostly on-camera weeping and prayer services. Still I asked Marlin why he imagined that I would want to participate in one more sensationalist postmortem of the day my life as I understood it came to an end, and he said I might want to tell “my side of the story.”
“What side would that be?” I was on record as assuming the opposition when Kevin