The Elusive Embrace by Daniel Mendelsohn

Author:Daniel Mendelsohn [Mendelsohn, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80987-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

I was mistaken for Nicholas’s father three times on the day he was born, and secretly enjoyed it. This was on a humid morning in August 1995. Rose had told me she was pregnant the previous December, and since then I’d found that I liked it when she asked my advice on a range of subjects: whether to have an amnio, where the baby would be born, what to name it. Rose, who is part Croatian and surprisingly sentimental for a mathematician, was eager to use family names. The girls’ names she’d chosen were all rather pretty; some of the boys’ names were quite odd. (Occasionally, when we were both punchy from hours of discussing names, Rose would jokingly threaten to name the baby after a great-uncle called Melchizedek. I’d roll my eyes and mutter something about how any kid called Melchizedek was bound to end up in therapy before he’d reached kindergarten age; we’d both giggle.) In fact, there wasn’t much question about the name in case the baby was a boy, which I always knew it would be: Rose had always liked “Nicholas.” I agreed with her that it was a strong name, with the proper Slavic pedigree. I liked it for another reason as well, which I didn’t tell her at the time. Nicholas is the name of my former boyfriend’s current lover, of whom I’m very fond, and who is very good-looking. Like many atheists, I have a deep compensatory superstitiousness, and I believe in the power of names.

We’d talked about names in May, while walking on a beach in Maryland that was known to me, but perhaps not to Rose or some other friends who were renting a house together for a long weekend, as a gay resort. A few months later, in August, on the day Nicholas was scheduled to be born by cesarean section, Rose and I woke at a quarter to five, then silently dressed and collected her things, with the exaggerated calm of people who are very nervous. Outside, it was still dark but already muggy, and I drove us the few blocks to the local hospital with the car windows wide open. At that early hour the main entrance is closed, and so you have to check in at the emergency entrance, which seemed a bad omen. The waiting room was totally dark, and we were the only people in it. A nurse came round and gave Rose a sheaf of forms to fill out; on her way back to her desk the nurse patted me on the shoulder and said, with practiced sympathy, “You look like a first-timer.” She walked away before I could reply, and anyway, she was right, in a way. Finally someone took us to a room that had been prepared for Rose. As she changed into her paper-thin hospital gown, I caught a glimpse of her belly, big as a basketball and luminous as a moon above a thin secret crescent of dark hair. Quickly I turned my head away.

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