“And this grand conclusion of yours, it came to you just by studying her house and her garden? Evie, give me a break.”
“I studied her too, Mosh. Of course I did. What do you take me for? Do you think I’d go ahead and put myself through the whole upheaval of a pregnancy on an off chance? This is almost a year gouged out of my life we’re talking about.”
“How do I know what you’re capable of? Never in a million years would I have imagined you coming up with a stunt as loco as this, but here we are considering it.”
“Mosh, you just have to trust me on this. I swear the vibes were there. That house of hers was crying out to be cluttered up with toys and diaper pails. Its order went against nature. She’s only surviving in there, not living. She still wants a baby. I could sense it.”
Moshe considered this spacey Evellian analysis of all the available non-evidence and decided a change of tack was in order. He took a stab in the dark. “It’s your mother, right? You’re trying to outdo her. Make your own selfless contribution to womankind.”
“So what if I am? What’s wrong with that?” Her testiness here indicated that he’d struck a nerve.
“Evie, your mum’s gesture was impersonal in the end, a glorified joyride. Yours couldn’t be any more personal. How do you know you’ll even be able to give the baby up in the end?”
“This baby, when it comes, will have Amélie’s name on it. I would never dream of kidnapping it to keep it for myself.”
“How can you say that? Your entire body will be tangled up in it. It’s not like snipping off a loose thread. You think you can just have a baby so lightly? This is an actual baby we’re talking about, a real flesh and blood baby.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“You don’t sound like you do.”
“I am only having this baby for her. That’s the only reason. For her.”
“Well, what if HER baby is born with something wrong with it?” Moshe started to pace.
“The baby will be fine. I’ll follow every rule, take every test on the books. I won’t stand in front of the microwave or eat unpasteurized brie. Scout’s honour.”
“Evie, quit being flip. It’s not the time. You know as well as I do that things can happen even when parents do everything right. There’re no guarantees.”
“I’m healthy, you’re healthy. The baby will be too. I can’t explain how I know this to be true. I just do.”
The would-be father was making no progress in his program of dissuasion but he still had a bottomless stash of what-ifs to plow his way through. What if you have twins? What if she clues in that the baby is yours? What if she figures out Jean-Gabriel’s hand in all this? What if it turns out she doesn’t want to take the baby when you go to hand it over? What then?
“Amélie will take this baby. I’m telling you. She’ll take it.”
How could he argue against brick wall come-backs like that? What was it with Evie? Was she noble or was she nuts? It was a fine line he supposed. Had history ever made its mind up about Napoleon?
“So how do you know she’s really decent, this Amélie, based on one single meeting? Deep down decent I mean. If she’s anything like the character in the play, I wouldn’t leave a cockroach in her care, let alone a baby.”
“Forget the damn play. Forget it, will you?” For someone bent on selling, Evie’s injunction was overly snappish, but lately even the merest allusion to the Médéry dramatic output was all it took to set her a-sizzle. She caught her flub and tamped herself down in short order.
“Amélie’s a real person, Mosh. I liked her. More than just liked, I respected her. You would too if you’d met her. In all those years since Jean-Gabriel she’s changed, pulled herself up by her bootstraps. So maybe she’s a little buttoned-up, but that’s the worst I can say about her. If you can crack that shell she straps on every morning and take a peek in, you see that she’s kind, she’s good.”
“What does she do for a living? Is it steady?”
“She has a great job. She works at Toronto Dominion. She’s been there for years. But the job won’t matter, right? When I hand over the baby, I’ll hand over all of Jean-Gabriel’s money too. It’ll be like she landed on free parking. She’ll never have to work at the bank another day in her life if she doesn’t want to. She can be a stay-at-home mum and still send little he/she to Harvard when the time comes.”
Here Evie hesitated, and for the first time all evening Moshe could make out the fault line of insecurity she’d tried to powder over in primping for their meeting. “Okay, I will admit to you that I haven’t quite worked out how I’ll actually manage the hand-over without revealing where everything came from, but it’ll come to me. I have plenty of time to come up with a plan. And you’ll be there to help me. If you agree that is.”
This gentle poke towards a quick resolution didn’t have its desired effect. Moshe rolled on with his interrogation like the Energizer bunny. “How will you explain a pregnancy that results in no baby to your family and at work? Huh? What will you tell them? That you’re swelling?”
Evie had never known Moshe to be lippy, but then again she’d never pushed him this far. In fact, here he’d hit on another aspect of the project she’d yet to resolve and she confessed as much. Moshe’s insistent probing was starting to find chinks, but still she was unshakeable.
Their to-ing and fro-ing went on late into the night and play only broke when Moshe went home promising to sleep on it. At least this hitch in her plan Evie could handle. That night she appeared to Moshe in his dreams, more obliging than ever. She did everything he’d ever wanted and then some. By morning Moshe knew he was a goner, that he’d give in to anything Evie proposed in the end. But before he caved ignominiously, he had some banking to attend to.
She worked in one of the glass ’n glam downtown office towers, not some dusky corner branch with a golden age wicket that packed in the crowds. Moshe had a bit of trouble tracking her down at first. She didn’t go by Médéry, of course. It should have occurred to him. In Quebec, women carried their birth name for life by law. A few ladies here and there tacked monsieur’s name onto their own with a hyphen, but it was a rarity in the province to curtsy to hubby in this way. A little web research turned up that Amélie’s surname was Turcotte. This whole name business worked to her advantage, Moshe figured, masking from the prurient public her relationship to the notorious playwright. Furthermore, Turcotte was a garden-variety surname, the Smith or Jones of Quebec, its ubiquity padding her privacy in an extra layer of mattress ticking.
Amélie wasn’t a teller. He’d learned this much on the phone. Her name plate hung on the door of one of the private offices on the mezzanine identifying her as a small business advisor. This Moshe interpreted as a good sign. Clearly the bank trusted her as someone who could grow things. She stood up to shake hands and he took the opportunity to study her. She was dressed corporately. Her desk had softer edges. No way could this be the vixen who had bewitched Jean-Gabriel. Her posture was firmed up with rebar, and her chignon winched her cheeks back so tightly her nose had to pick sides. Moshe tried to envision the two of them as a couple, but even by rolling the calendar back in his mind to photoshop out the toll of the intervening years, it struck him as a miscegenetic pairing, unless of course they’d had some sort of Helga the Hausfrau number going. What was Evie smoking the day she’d met her?
Moshe and Amélie sat down to discuss the proposal he’d fabricated for the occasion and she started right in without any of the usual climatological foreplay. Mme. Turcotte was all business. He was looking to set up his own bakery, he told her, a cover story that was true, in fact, but years in the offing according to the modest passbook he set before her from a rival banking establishment. He was thinking of transferring his allegiance to the TD if she could advise him more soundly than the apathetic counsellor over at the Royal. She took his humble account seriously, and guided h
im through an investment strategy that would, she assured him, see his bakery plan take shape far sooner than he’d expected.
The awning fluttered in the breeze, his name splashed across it in gold against a wine-coloured field. It sheltered the rattan chairs on the terrace out front where his loyal customers watched the world go by sipping their café au laits and crunching on palmiers made with the finest Quebec butter. Local ingredients, nothing but. Moshe had studied the output of the competition. On busman’s holidays around town he’d bought his share of flaccid baguettes and yesterday’s croissants reinflated with a bicycle pump. Not in his boulangerie. Nor would he sell any of the charcuterie or cheeses that polluted the counters of the other bakeries in town. Moshe was against the dilution of the bakery. Breads, cakes, and pastries. Period. Everything baked on site under his personal supervision. He’d take on an apprentice or two every year. Give back to the profession. And he’d stick to just one location. Okay, so maybe off in the future he might expand, but not too soon. He’d seen it happen all too often, a cozy little neighbourhood bakery, puffed up by its own success, expanding itself into mediocrity. He would resist the temptation until the time was ripe.
So impressed was Moshe with Amélie’s monetary acumen that gave the bottom line of his future a nice yeasty lift that he almost lost sight of his primary mission. He tried to snap himself back into gumshoe mode, but he just wasn’t cut out for the investigative life. Why had he even come? What did he think he would find out by actually meeting Amélie face to face? All he’d managed to discover was that she was financially savvy, but dexterity with figures did not a mother make. The appointment was clearly over and Moshe rose to leave, no farther ahead than when he’d arrived. Amélie joined him at the door of her office to see him out. She stood directly in front of him. “Monsieur Benshimol,” she said, looking into his eyes with a warmth that had been invisible from across the Saharan expanse of her executive desk. “Save the first croissant for me, won’t you?”
Chapter 13
EVERY MORNING EVIE TOOK HER TEMPERATURE and studied the distribution of red x’s marked in her bedside calendar but she needn’t have gone to the trouble. When it came to putting a bun in the oven, Moshe was a pro. Here was a case where his expertise afforded him no satisfaction, cutting short an exercise that gave him pleasure beyond any he’d ever known.
Evie figured it would be a slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am kind of operation when she dared to picture the actual event in her mind. How else could it unfold between two friends who had inked their procreative arrangement with a handshake? It would be a business boink, nothing more. She dreaded the arrival of the agreed upon optimal day. It wasn’t that she was inexperienced, but in every previous instance, the route that led her into bed with a new partner was hormonally not contractually paved, loosening up the garters of her inhibitions as nature intended. Now that zero hour was approaching, Evie feared that her mating with Moshe would be like sex between a set of Ken and Barbie corn husk dolls, their pumping so tinder dry the friction risked setting the bedclothes alight. And who could predict how many months of parched repetition it would take until their respective gametes made up their minds to boogie?
Moshe foresaw their rendezvous differently. On the evening of the twenty-third, the date on which she deemed the stars of fecundity in perfect alignment, Evie arrived at his door tied up in so many knots she could barely shuffle her feet to step over the threshold. What precisely it was in this leaning tower of mishugas that accounted for her current tension he couldn’t pinpoint. She gave nothing away. In fact she scarcely spoke, barometer enough of her inner turmoil. Moshe’s heart ached to look down into her face, so bravely unsure, her unaccustomed geisha gaze fixed on the territory of his shoelaces. It was Evie who had choreographed this whole grand scheme. He’d only been Mr. Along-For-the-Ride, but he sensed in her fragile silence that she yearned to cede him the sceptre for this crucial step, and in this his instincts turned out to be correct.
Moshe reached under Evie’s chin and tipped her head upwards. He’d hardly ever touched her before. Not officially anyway. Sure, there had been a few accidental hip-bumps at the stove and innumerable two-cheeked pecks of greeting and farewell, but they barely counted except to stir in him the desire for expanded opportunities. So now that he was licensed, Moshe treated himself to a leisurely tracing of the contour of her jaw, a delicate outline which he had long since committed to memory from across the Shabbos table, the better to reproduce it in his dreams. He lifted his hand to brush away the bangs that were caught in her eyelashes. How often in the past had it taken all his strength to hold himself back from clearing his view of her hazel eyes in just this way? He kissed her forehead gently at the vacated spot, and matched it on the other side. His hands slipped back to entangle themselves in her hair, anchoring him against the future, for he was convinced that any minute Evie’s guardian angel would swoop down from the clouds to grab him by the scruff of the neck, remind him he wasn’t allowed on the bed, and slap him on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. But now that he’d come this far Moshe knew no force could prise him away.
His lips skimmed down to explore the neighbourhood of Evie’s eyelids. Moshe’s tongue trilled back and forth along those pesky long lashes. Their silkiness was such that he forgave them their former trespasses. He let gravity ordain his route and meandered downwards, bestowing kisses on all the hills and valleys of Evie’s face that he’d coveted since first they met, marking time in front of the broken elevators.
Back when the refurbished building opened, the elevators were on the blink more often than they weren’t. For some reason, the nineteenth-century structure resented this retrofit in particular that gutted it like a fish, while accepting with equanimity every other modern incursion the construction crew inflicted upon it. Moshe and Evie found themselves stranded together in the condo lobby. They chatted while they waited patiently, sucked in by the repair in progress sign that they later learned to be a cruel joke. By the time Sir Galahad had carted Evie’s retinue of grocery bags up four flights of stairs for her and stopped in to collect the coffee reward she was offering, he was hooked. Nothing had changed since.
Moshe’s exploration of Evie was different from anything she’d ever experienced before, more on the order of a dégustation. He licked, he tasted, he sniffed her bouquet. He bit lightly on her earlobes as if testing their degree of doneness. He might have been evaluating her for a third Michelin star. That Moshe relished his feast couldn’t have been any clearer to Evie. With the pressure of his parted mouth against her, she felt his urge to swallow her whole.
While he was taken up with savouring the V of her throat, nuzzling its buttery hollow, Evie bestirred herself to wonder just how Moshe might taste. All evening she’d been sleepwalking; her mind stuck in neutral, her body Moshe’s marionette, allowing herself a brief sabbatical from the directorship. It would be left to Moshe to make every last decision tonight, which suited her down to the bone. She’d done altogether too much deciding lately, and the burden of it had depleted her. When was the last night she’d slept all the way through? And as for eating, her stomach had hopped itself up into a state of rebellion that harkened back to its misspent youth; Evie could do no more than pick. Suddenly, though, she found that she was downright ravenous.
Evie commandeered the fingers of Moshe’s left hand and sampled them one by one, extracting their essence. What she’d anticipated was a tangy sourdough, but instead spun sugar melted in her mouth. Evie couldn’t resist a sweet table. She drew Moshe’s t-shirt up over his head and dropped it on the floor. She was eager to gorge unimpeded. Children were starving in China.
Moshe rubbed her belly in lazy circles, marking out the property lines of their project’s future abode. “Do you think it took?” Evie nestled in closer as she asked the question. “Maybe we should have another go. You know. For insurance.” Moshe was a firm believer in extra coverage. At the rental car counter he always shelled out for th
e collision and liability even though his credit card purported to offer the same protection.
Evie’s request made good sense and he complied happily. In fact he continued to comply for the rest of the night and all through the following day. Moshe knew full well that they were meant to be focused, working towards a specific embryonic goal, but even though he’d signed on he wasn’t prepared to play the lapdog. He dared to shake things up now and again with manoeuvres that weren’t strictly speaking reproductive, and Evie embarked on his scenic detours with matching enthusiasm. They’d get there in plenty of time.
“Mosh? You awake?”
“No.”
“I know that trick.”
“Can’t get anything past you.” Evie doled out the pinch he deserved though on his lank frame, it was a challenge coming up with an appreciable wad.
“Tell me…”
“What?”
“Have you been with many women before?” He was silent for a while, but Evie had the feeling he wasn’t using the interval to count up on his fingers and toes.
“No,” he replied eventually. “I wouldn’t say many. A few is more like it.”
“A few. Now that’s an answer I approve of. I wouldn’t want to think that the father of this baby is a love ’em and leave ’em kind of guy. Genes count.”
“Yeah, that’s me all right. A Class-A womanizer.”
“Serious, any of them?” Moshe didn’t look overeager to proceed with this line of questioning but he came clean. “One was, I guess. Serious-ish, you could say.”
“Meaning?”
He expelled a let’s-get-it-over-with breath and compressed the entire relationship into one unadorned sentence calculated to stifle the subject. “Well, if you define it by how long it dragged on, and that we lived together for a little while in there, then yes, I guess it would qualify as serious.”
Evie, the Baby and the Wife Page 14