The Thin Pink Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “Oh, Soph, I had the worst nightmare!”

  And I proceeded to tell her about the hungry baby, the missing breast, the laundry basket and the missing baby.

  “And that’s not even the worst part! The worst part is that, not two hours before, I’d been having the most marvelous dream about a happy family. How could I have such opposite dreams in the same night? Am I going nuts?”

  “No, you’re not going nuts, Jane,” she yawned in my ear. “You’re just pregnant.”

  “I am?”

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, of course I am. What I meant was—” But she didn’t let me finish.

  “All pregnant women have these sorts of dreams.”

  “They do?”

  “Of course they do. It’s all tied up with all of those mixed feelings of anticipation and anxiety that the woman is feeling. Just ask me—I had them all. You name it—the one where I was trapped in a car wash, which represented my fear that the baby would deprive me of my freedom. The one where I ate twelve servings of plum pudding with brandied hard sauce and washed it all down with a fifth of Scotch, which was a manifestation of my frustration at having kept myself to such a puritanically restrictive diet. The one where my baby was born already being a twenty-five-year-old football player, which represented my fear of being able to handle a little baby. I’m telling you, Jane, all pregnant women go through this.”

  “Then why don’t you ever hear them talking about it?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t exactly go around crowing about it, either, if you were having screaming nightmares about being attacked by burglars and wild animals. And, if I were you, I wouldn’t be too eager myself to go around telling people about that one involving the missing breast and the laundry basket.” She yawned again, much more forcefully. “Now, may I go back to sleep, Jane? Somehow, your crisis has managed not to wake up Baby Jack and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “But just one last time, for comfort’s sake—you’re saying that I’m not psychotic and that these kinds of dreams and nightmares are natural?”

  “Yes, Jane,” she said before hanging up on me, “that’s what I’ve been saying. It’s perfectly natural for a pregnant woman to be having these kinds of dreams.”

  Which, I thought as I stared at the phone after I’d replaced the receiver, didn’t explain why I was having them.

  The remainder of Mona Shakespeare’s book had come in and it was every bit as brilliant as the first part had been.

  “Do you mean brilliant in the way that I hate?” Dodo asked. “You know how I can’t stand it when you turn on the television and the man on the street’s overusing the word brilliant to describe everything from a new fish-and-chips shop to the way Tony Blair’s hair blows in the wind. There was a time when brilliant referred to a person or thing being very bright, glittering, striking or distinctive. You wouldn’t say that a new fish-and-chips shop was glittering, would you? Or that the way Tony Blair’s hair blows was very bright?” For someone who spent her life in a literary world, Dodo sometimes had a lot of trouble coming to terms with the elasticity of language, wanting it to be more a science than an art. And when she got worked up about a word, things could get pretty heated. “There was a time when Rachmaninoff—”

  I couldn’t take it anymore. To shut her up, I grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a little shake. “It is Rachmaninoff, Dodo. The bloody Mona Shakespeare is a Rachmaninoff.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. It’s Vespers Mass. It’s the goddamned Prelude in C-Sharp Minor if you want it to be.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, if you can call a biting satire that has more facets than Elizabeth Taylor’s diamonds the same as a piano concerto, if you can call a comic novel that scathingly deals with the plight of the modern childbearing woman in very modern times the same as chamber music…” I was exasperated. “No, of course it’s not the same! But it is brilliant. I only threw in the stuff about the Rachmaninoff because I know how much you like him. They’re really not the same at all, but they are both brilliant.”

  “Brilliant?” Dodo was beginning to soften, a wistful look overcoming her features, a look that was arguably known to editors the world over. “It would be nice, for a change, to publish something that was brilliant.”

  “Oh, yes, Dodo, it is, it really is, and it’s all here this time.” I waved the sheaf of pages in front of her. “It’s everything we’d hoped it would be—the part about Mitch the frustrated walking tour guide…”

  “Ooh. I wanted to read about him.”

  “…and the horny podiatrist…”

  “My mother had a dentist who fancied hers.”

  “…plus, there’s also the gynecologist who loves his job, the pizza delivery guy who wants to be an astronaut, the guy responsible for routing mail at the office where she works, the other guy from where she works—the senior editor—who claims to have such a low sperm count that he sees this as his one big chance even though he and Stacy have always hated each other and the only reason they ever slept together was that they both had too much wassail at the company Christmas party, and, finally, the one who Stacy’s mother actually likes. They’re all here this time and it’s every bit as good as the first three chapters we read.”

  Dodo eagerly grabbed the pages I held out to her. “Oh, Jane, this really is it, isn’t it? The kind of thing we live for?”

  “Yes, I think it is.”

  “Well, if it’s as good as you say…”

  “It—”

  She held up a hand to forestall my indignation. “…and I’m sure that it is, then I think we’ll have to get Ms. Shakespeare to come over here to meet with us. You know, no matter how perfect a novel is, there are always one or two things that need to be tweaked and, anyway, with all the money I envision us making off Ms. Shakespeare’s career, I think Churchill and Stewart can afford to foot the bill for her for a week in London.”

  As Dodo nattered on, I pictured Mona Shakespeare, in her New York apartment, receiving the e-mail that would change her life. I pictured her sitting before her computer, which was set up on a card table next to a wall whose single window either looked out on a brick wall or a flashing neon sign that read G s, Gi ls, Girls, the missing letters a constant source of annoyance and odd inspiration. The apartment—which would be no more than a tiny bed-sit with a postage-stamp-size kitchenette and a bathroom with barely enough space to crouch over the chipped toilet—would be Spartan in its decor. She’d be thrifty with what money she had, but that wouldn’t be why she hadn’t even put any posters on the walls. Rather, it would be because she preferred to let her imagination be whipped by the teeming life below her. I knew, thanks to Don Henley, just how much could change in a New York minute. Of course, Mona’s book was about London minutes, so that blew that theory of asceticism all to hell.

  Okay, so maybe what she had then, no matter how else her apartment was furnished, was the huge display of bookcases I’d always envisioned her having, all crammed full with all sorts of diversions for the committed Anglophile. She’d have her Dickens minutes, her Austen minutes, her Fielding minutes, both Henry and Helen, plus all the authors in between and beyond. The point was, she’d have all this, but she’d still have it in New York City, a place I’d been dying to see ever since I first heard Frank Sinatra sing about it.

  God! Wouldn’t it be just great to live in New York? Or at least to go there for a vacation? Of course, it would take a lot of getting used to. I wasn’t foolish enough to think that it was just like London, only bigger and with bad accents. No, I knew about all the bad architecture, bad taxi drivers, and all of the guns that only a completely free society could provide. I imagined myself there. There would probably be violence everywhere I looked and I’d have to take care not to get caught in one of those drive-by shootings they were always having, but the cheesecake at Lindy’s—boy, was I ready for that!

  Did Mona have a gun? I wonde
red. Was our newest, hottest commodity going to turn out to be a pistol-packing mama?

  “The Rubber Slipper really is brilliant, Jane,” Dodo interrupted my reverie, turning pages happily all the while, “even better than Tony Blair’s hair.”

  When you’ve been around books for a long time, you begin to realize that all writers have one of three problems: either they don’t know how to start a book properly, which is the worst flaw of all because if you can’t hook the readers, then they probably won’t still be around to see how brilliant you are later on; or they suffer from saggy middles; or they don’t know how to end a book properly, which can be devastating in a mystery if, say, the author throws in a murderer out of nowhere, making the reader want to throw the book across the room.

  Having written both the first and final thirds of The Cloth Baby, I was discovering that my problem as a writer was going to be a saggy middle.

  Feeling a little desperate about my self-discovery, as I usually am about any self-discovery, I punched in David’s number on my mobile, toying with the salad I’d been eating at my desk as I waited for him to pick up.

  “Shalom?”

  “I have a saggy middle!” I despaired, not bothering with the niceties of greetings, foreign or otherwise.

  “Could it be the foods you’ve been eating?” he asked.

  “That wasn’t—” I was about to tell him that my own waistline hadn’t been what I’d been referring to at all, that what I’d been referring to was the problems I was experiencing writing the book, when I remembered that this was one crisis David couldn’t help me with. He still didn’t know about the book.

  “That wasn’t what, Jane?”

  “I’m sorry.” I did that head-shaking thing even though he couldn’t see me. “I forgot what I was going to say.”

  “Well, that makes this a good use of your free minutes. Is there anything else? I’m trying to filet a mignon here.”

  “Yes, there is something else.”

  “Which is?”

  “Your reference to the foods I’ve been eating would imply that you do believe I have a saggy middle.”

  “I never said that. I was merely trying to come up with a logical reason for how, if you did have a saggy middle, you got it.”

  “I see.” I put down my salad fork. “I’m tired of this diet.”

  “Which diet is that?”

  “The one I’ve been on.”

  “And how long have you been on this diet?”

  “Hmm—” I consulted the ceiling, considering, “—about twenty years.”

  “You know what I think, Jane?”

  “What?”

  “I think that mobile phones and free minutes in the hands of the wrong people are a very bad thing and should be against the law.”

  “Hey!”

  “I’m going back to my filet now. Call me the next time you have an emergency.”

  My life was going so well in some ways.

  Mona Shakespeare’s book was bound to be a success and I was the one who’d discovered it. This meant that I’d soon have more money, power and respectability in the workplace, three things I’d always coveted before (which would be a good thing for me to fall back on if my own book didn’t turn out to be the tearing success Devil Alice kept whispering in my ear that it would be). Never thinking for one second that they would be mine, I had previously conducted my work life along the lines of: Why bother? The picture of my baby that I now had on my desk—well, the phony sonogram picture—looked great; whenever I was there, everybody commented on it. And I even looked cute in my maternity clothes. Why, then, was I so glum?

  “Why so glum, chum?” asked David.

  The two of us were sitting around the coffee table in his living room, drinking ale, while Christopher weeded out their CD collection.

  “I don’t know,” I whined, aware that I was whining even as I was doing it, but unable to stop myself, my voice carrying the heavy verbal equivalent of dragging feet.

  “Maybe it’s losing Tolkien.”

  Well, of course we all knew that a lot of it was that.

  “Maybe it’s having to pretend all the time at work or maybe it’s the chronic back pain I’ve been experiencing what with the cloth baby and all.”

  I knew this was never going to win me any sympathy or any constructive criticism, save to abandon my scheme; which, as we all knew, was really David’s scheme. Well, sort of. I pressed on.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just… Oc-to-ber.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Christopher, without looking up from his task. “Whole months in autumn containing thirty-one days can be annoying in that way.” He paused. “U2? Is there any reason we need to listen to U2 anymore?”

  David shrugged. “I never said that there was.”

  “Don’t you people ever work?” I asked. “I thought you owned a restaurant or something.”

  “We do,” David acknowledged, taking a long draw from his ale. “But it’s Tuesday and we’re closed. You always visit us on Tuesday.”

  “You visit us on Tuesdays and we all get drunk,” Christopher added.

  “Then you totter back to your place,” began David.

  “But first you have to put on your fake baby and spray your breath with lots of breath spray in case you run into the Marcuses, who still think you’re pregnant,” finished Christopher.

  “Now that you’re a couple,” I asked testily, “can’t I ever see one of you anymore without seeing the other?”

  “So-rry,” Christopher said, finally looking up, “but it is hard for me to disappear when I do live here now.”

  I just glared harder at him until he blinked first.

  “So-rry,” he said again, leaving the room to get another ale.

  Well, I thought, even if he was just leaving the room for a few minutes, the fact that I’d been able to intimidate him at all made me feel as though I was getting my own back.

  “I wasn’t aware that you had lost any of your customary zing,” said David, when I intimated as much to him.

  Perhaps that was what was bothering me, I thought: I’d lost my zing.

  “You really think that you’ve been bested by life in recent months?” he pressed.

  “Mmm…”

  “And you’re sure that this isn’t some paranoid schizophrenic fantasy on your part, starting with the fact that you continually feel as though you are in some sort of verbal competition with Christopher—”

  “Hello, is someone calling me?” came Christopher’s voice from the kitchen.

  “Finish your beer,” I shouted.

  “—which has oddly somehow come to parallel your need to fake a pregnancy?” David finished his question.

  “You mean you haven’t noticed a kinder, gentler Jane in recent months?” I countered.

  “Possibly.” David smiled. “But that’s just the pregnancy talking.”

  Sophie’s assurances that my nightmares were perfectly normal for a pregnant woman had done little to allay my fears that I was fast turning into a full-blown psychotic. True, I believed her when she said that the dreams-nightmares I was experiencing were brought about by unexpressed anxiety concerning my future, but they had turned into nightly occurrences and I was fast becoming concerned for my sanity. Tolkien would have been the perfect sympathetic listener, but he was sadly out of my life for good now, and while I was tempted to discuss my problem with the people at work, I feared that upon hearing in particular about the baby with the pitchfork and tail, they might begin to fear for my sanity as well.

  And so it was that on a brisk autumnal day in October, I found myself wandering down to the spiritually oracular source of all things future in London—the open market at Covent Garden. Wending my way through the tourists, I made my way past all of the palm readers, the purveyors of questionable foodstuffs, the vendors of somewhat legitimate goods and the sidewalk artists.

  But, on that day, I wasn’t looking for silly tea-leaf readers or cheap fashion accessories or another concre
te Mona Lisa; I was looking for the last resort of all twentysomething female Londoners in a pinch: I was looking for an authentic tarot card reader.

  Finding the real deal though wasn’t as easy as one would think.

  I turned my nose up at all of the supposed tarot card readers who displayed other methods of divination, like crystal balls or ancient runes, alongside of their seventy-eight-card decks of the Major and Minor Arcana; the way I figured it, if the practitioner didn’t have perfect faith in the unbelievable, then why should I? Similarly, I bypassed all of those who had patently trumped-up Eastern European accents, figuring that if I was going to hand over my money to a fraud, I’d prefer not to be able to detect the perpetrator until after the fact. When you got right down to it then, me being as picky as I was, there really wasn’t much left to choose from.

  Not much left to choose from turned out to be a pudding-figured dwarf of a woman with a body that was like a couple of margarine tubs stacked one on top of the other. She was of an indeterminately older age, with wirelike coils of gray hair sticking out from under her gaudy head covering, her swirling skirts of different colors doing nothing to enhance her form while her gold chains, bracelets and dangling earrings kept up their own racket. She had a hooked nose, creased skin that looked like she’d been living out in the cancerous elements all her life, and the most astonishingly beautiful sapphire-colored eyes peering out from the deep folds around them. Her most astonishing feature, however, was an impressively sizable wart on the point of her chin, a wart that had a single rather long dark hair growing out of it.

  She gave me a smile that would have scared small children. “Read your fortune, missy?” she oozed at me, with an attempt at a Romanian accent that sounded more like Greek to me and that I deemed to be as fake as her jewelry.

  I couldn’t help myself, couldn’t resist. As if my hand had a mind of its own, I watched as it reached out and tugged on the single hair first before trying to pull off the wart whole. Apparently, my brain had been whispering to my hand something to the effect that the lady before me was another fraud, her wart just a part of an elaborate costume designed to scam the unsuspecting.