Laura & Emma

by Kate Greathead

  Nicholas’s gaze fell to the table and his fork went slack as he considered the question. “I don’t know the t-t-t-timeline because nothing is set in stone yet.” Picking up his knife, he began cutting a baby potato in two. “I’m one of several in-house candidates they’re considering. I th-I think-I thought I mentioned that.”

  “No,” Douglas said, catching the attention of a passing waiter and pointing to his empty scotch glass. “No, you did not mention that.”

  Bibs was looking in the mirror again, but this time she was fixated on Laura’s reflection. The intensity of her stare was unnerving, and Laura cocked her chin so that a curtain of hair obstructed her face. Bibs reached out and tucked the hair behind Laura’s ear. She leaned over and whispered, “Gray hair isn’t always a bad thing—occasionally it can be quite beautiful. But instead of committing to it out of principle, I think you should have a wait-and-see approach, because you never know what shade of gray you’re going to get. It could be a beautiful, silvery shimmer, or it could be that moldy off-white, yellowing lampshade, dog-peed-in-the-snow . . .” She lowered her eyes and gestured with her chin at a woman at another table.

  “I’ll keep an open mind,” Laura whispered back.

  The waiter brought the bill. Douglas placed his American Express card inside the check holder without reviewing the charges.

  “Oh, I almost forgot!” Bibs said with excitement. “Someone broke into the house while we were gone. We’ve been burglarized.” Bibs held out her fingers and frowned in concentration as she recalled the list of missing items. “A box of silver cutlery, two fur coats, a pewter tea set, some first-edition books, and a few other things I can’t remember. The most bizarre items, don’t you think? What would a crook want with a tea set?”

  “To sell it for cash,” Nicholas said. “You should file a police report.”

  “The Henrys are taking care of it,” Douglas spoke up.

  “Shhh!” Bibs gave him a stern look. “I’m not done. You’ll ruin the story.

  “He went to the Henrys next,” Bibs proceeded. “They were out of town and their cleaning woman, that crazy Albanian, she came in and found him just sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast, wearing Mr. Henry’s robe. He’d spent the night in their bedroom. Claimed to be a nephew. The Albanian didn’t buy it. Smart cookie. Picked up a frying pan and chased him out of the house and down the street.”

  “And was he apprehended?” Nicholas asked.

  “He got away.” Bibs grinned. “Lucky man, she might have killed him.”

  “And how are you certain it was the same person?” Nicholas asked.

  “They found two suitcases in the closet of the Henrys’ master bedroom, full of our things.”

  The waiter returned with the bill. Laura twirled a loose cuticle on her thumb until it came off in her fingers. Now that the full scope of her foolishness sank in she felt oddly numb. So long as nobody knew about it, it could be as if it had never happened.

  “So you got everything back?” she asked.

  “It was all in the suitcases,” Douglas confirmed as he signed the receipt.

  “Everything was recovered,” Bibs reiterated. “Except, of course, for Mr. Henry’s slippers and robe.”

  * * *

  IT WAS NO COINCIDENCE THAT all of Laura’s doctors were male. She’d had a few encounters with female doctors over the years, and in each instance they’d attempted to engage her on a personal level, asking questions that went beyond her medical history. They weren’t prying, merely trying to establish a friendly rapport, but that wasn’t what she went to the doctor for. Male doctors, in Laura’s experience, had no trouble with boundaries, and so she was flustered and irritated when Dr. Newman’s response to her current symptoms—dizziness, loss of appetite, fatigue—included questions about her love life.

  No, she was not seeing anyone.

  Yes, of course that meant she was currently celibate.

  How long had it been since her last relationship? Laura recalled her brief courtship with Alan, a British journalist she’d met at Edith’s wedding. About three or four years, she told him. She knew what he was thinking and she resented his pity. She wished she could think of something clever or sassy to say, like Mary Tyler Moore would in this situation.

  Dr. Newman suggested she eat more red meat. It sounded like low iron, but just to rule out anything else, he would like to take a blood test.

  * * *

  SHE WAS AT WORK WHEN Dr. Newman’s office called. Laura’s iron levels were low, but that wasn’t the reason for her symptoms.

  * * *

  MARGARET SUBSCRIBED TO A CERTAIN set of rules and lacked the imagination to consider another perspective. Hers was a black-and-white view of the world, and when filtered through this narrow lens, there was no problem that didn’t present an immediate, logical course of action. Which was what Laura wanted right now: not to make a decision, but to be told what to do.

  But Margaret, who typically reveled in presiding over the private lives of others—who gladly dispensed unsolicited critiques when Laura violated some unspoken social protocol, like wearing espadrilles to Janet’s wedding, bringing her own cloth napkin to restaurants that provided only paper, or pointing out an adorable baby rat poking its head out of a flowerbed on the curb of Madison Avenue—recused herself from weighing in on the matter, telling Laura it was too personal an issue; a decision a woman could only make for herself. Even more unhelpful, she was uncharacteristically philosophical about the ethical dimension of it, saying things like “no one knows, exactly, when life begins.”

  Laura wasn’t looking for comfort, but she was struck by Margaret’s tone, which felt coldly detached and ever so slightly judgmental that Laura would find herself in such a predicament. And then the brusque way she’d ended their call: “We’ll have to continue this, my husband just got home.”

  My husband.

  It was a little early for Trip to arrive home from the office, Laura thought, as she put the phone down.

  Five minutes later the phone rang and it was Margaret. She might have sounded a little curt, she told Laura, and she was sorry if that was the case.

  “Is everything okay?” Laura asked, because Margaret rarely apologized, and her voice sounded a little muffled, like she’d been crying.

  After a moment of silence, Margaret burst into tears.

  “It’s not so easy to get pregnant. Some happily married couples spend months and months trying to conceive, only to be told it’s not in their cards.” Margaret blew her nose. “So for it to happen so easily for you—from a one-night stand with some con man, and you don’t even want it . . .”

  “I’m so sorry, Mags,” Laura said. “I had no idea.”

  * * *

  THE MORNING OF HER PROCEDURE, Laura woke up to discover a bird in her bedroom. A sparrow. The heat had been set too high the night before and she’d slept with the window half open. Now she opened it all the way, but the bird was too agitated to find its way back out.

  Laura waited twenty minutes before calling the super, who didn’t like to be bothered before eight. His wife answered the phone. She always seemed put out. Today she told Laura that Tony was in New Jersey, and when Laura asked when he’d be back, she said, “If he knows what’s best for him, not anytime soon.”

  A little unprofessional, Laura thought, but she was afraid of Italians. “Okay,” she said, “thank you,” and hung up the phone.

  The bird continued to fly around her room in a skittish tizzy. She would need to catch it herself and let it out. Each time it landed on a surface to rest, Laura would gingerly approach, but the bird was terrified of her and would resume flight.

  The routine continued. Soon it was eight-thirty. Then it was eight-forty-five. She thought about calling her ob-gyn’s office to ask them to tell the hospital she might be a little late—but what a ridiculous reason to be late for something like this.

  At ten past nine, Laura lost her temper. “Fuck you,” she cursed at the bird. “I’m just
trying to save your life and you’re going to make me late to my abortion.”

  Speaking these words restored Laura’s calm. She was doing her best; she could only keep trying.

  Another ten or forty minutes passed, Laura lost track, it no longer mattered. She’d resigned herself to the situation. She wasn’t going anywhere until she caught that bird.

  When it finally happened, there was a rush. Time stopped, then rapidly accelerated, before resuming to normal. Mission accomplished, Laura shut the window and looked at the clock; she would be late to her appointment, but if she got a move on, only ten or fifteen minutes.

  The feeling of the bird lingered as she took a taxi across town. For all the trouble it had given her, she was left only with the skin-touch memory of its weightless warmth, the swollen curve of its downy breast, the delicate tremble of its beleaguered heartbeat as she’d carried it to the window.

  As she’d leaned out her window over Lexington, there was a moment after she’d unclasped her fingers before the sparrow had taken off.

  * * *

  FOR NOW MARGARET WAS THE only person, besides her doctors, who knew. Margaret was a good friend. She called Laura at least twice a day, just to check in, make sure that she wasn’t overexerting herself, and had remembered to take her vitamins. Sometimes she would demand to know everything Laura had eaten that day. Occasionally she lit into her for accidentally ingesting something on the list of dangerous foods, such as Brie or prosciutto.

  When Laura quoted Edith as saying she’d lived on Brie while pregnant with Jack, Margaret quoted Janet as saying she’d always wondered if Maxwell’s slightly malformed earlobe was the result of the occasional cocktail she’d allowed herself.

  “When you’re educated about these things,” Margaret said, “and have the means to eat only what’s healthy and safe, I find it hard to fathom why you would take any chances. In fact, I find it completely selfish and unconscionable to do otherwise.”

  Laura took Margaret’s criticism in stride, knowing it was related to her anxiety of not being able to monitor the daily routine of the woman whose child she would be adopting.

  “Seventeen, Caucasian, Staten Island,” Margaret said. “That’s all the agency will tell me.”

  * * *

  LAURA WAS READING THE TIMES when she came across an article with the headline “Mothers Who Don’t Marry.”

  “Even in the era of the ‘supermother,’ ” went the first paragraph, “they stand out from the pack: ostensibly independent women who elect to become mothers out of wedlock, maintaining their careers while raising children in households without fathers or any talk of marriage.”

  The article interviewed over a dozen of these “supermothers.” Several of them had had A.I.D.—artificial insemination by donor.

  * * *

  “A.I.D. FOR SHORT,” LAURA ADDED as her parents and Nicholas absorbed the news.

  “I’ve always wanted to be a mother,” she continued after a puzzled silence, “and as I’m not getting any younger, I decided to make arrangements to do this on my own.”

  Her parents nodded. Nicholas stared into his glass. Their waiter approached—then, intuiting a sensitive conversation, politely retreated.

  “To hell with husbands,” Bibs declared. “I think it’s wonderful. Hip hip hooray!”

  Douglas raised his glass. Nicholas blinked rapidly as he mimicked his father’s gesture—on both their parts, an earnest attempt to convey something along the lines of congratulatory approval.

  “And who is the donor?” Bibs asked.

  “It’s completely anonymous,” Laura told him. “He’s twenty-five, in good health. That’s all they’ll tell me.”

  “But he’s—of European descent?” Nicholas asked.

  “Yes,” Laura said, and then, because it was the first country that came to mind, “Swedish ancestry.”

  “So the baby will be Swedish,” Bibs said with a smile.

  As a child Bibs had had a Swedish nursemaid, Sofia, to whose influence Laura attributed her mother’s lifelong infatuation with the Swedes—the most beautiful people in the world.

  “Half,” Laura said.

  * * *

  “AND SHE DOESN’T WEAR A lick of makeup,” Laura had overheard someone say of her once. The comment pleased her because it was true. Most of the women she knew used only a little makeup, but she wore absolutely none.

  She did, however, get her eyelashes dyed. The results were subtle yet noticeable. Following her appointments, people would often remark that Laura looked especially pretty, and Laura would shake her head when they asked if she’d done something: had she gotten a facial or a haircut—was she wearing makeup? “Eight hours of sleep, maybe,” she’d say with a shrug. It didn’t feel like a deception; the dye only accentuated Laura’s naturally long, thick lashes, which had once caught the attention of a transvestite on the Lexington Avenue subway who had wanted to know where she’d “bought” them.

  The dyeing process required Laura to lie down and close her eyes for twenty-five minutes. If she opened her eyes, the dye could get in and blind her. Because of the danger, New York State had recently outlawed the procedure, but Sufrina, the Russian woman who’d been doing Laura’s eyelashes for over a decade, continued to see clients in the back room of her mother’s psychic parlor on Sixth Avenue.

  After Sufrina applied the dye, she set the egg timer, turned off the light, and left the room. Normally soft classical music played in the background, but not today. As Laura lay there alone in the quiet, she had a disturbing thought: What if the building were to catch on fire? Would she be able to feel her way out to the street with her eyes closed? Doubtful. Could she squint, enough to see a little bit, without the dye getting in? Her choices were blindness or third-degree burns—the consequences of an illegal beauty procedure. It seemed like a modern-day fable.

  The twenty-five minutes passed and there was no fire. Sufrina returned, removed the excess dye, and all was well. Laura was on her way out the door when Sufrina’s mother intercepted her.

  “I see something you should know,” she said, tugging Laura behind a pair of velvet curtains into a purple room that smelled of incense. She pointed to a chair and instructed her to sit. Laura, who had to be back at work for a meeting, reluctantly obeyed.

  “You are with child,” the woman said, taking Laura’s palm in her own.

  Laura wasn’t sure if she was supposed to act surprised by this information, which had clearly been relayed to her by Sufrina, whose eyes, Laura had noticed, had unabashedly appraised her little belly when she’d lain down on the table in the back room.

  “Eleven weeks,” Laura responded.

  “It’s a boy,” the woman said. “You are having a son.”

  Laura smiled, as her instinct had told her the same thing.

  “A boy needs a father.” Sufrina’s mother shook her head grimly. “Father is no good.”

  Laura wasn’t sure how to respond. When the woman’s scrutinizing gaze shifted from her palm to her face, her discomfort became irritation. She had not signed up for this. The incense made her nauseated; she needed to get back to work.

  “You are afraid,” the woman said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  Laura nodded, hoping to move things along.

  “There will be another man,” she pronounced solemnly. “He will be father.”

  * * *

  OF THE CITY’S MANY VISUAL blights—the FDR, the Midtown Tunnel, Penn Station, the interior of Grand Central (to say nothing of the filth, soot, grit, grime, and dog shit that one encountered on a daily basis)—it was the glass-and-steel high-rises that most upset Laura.

  Buildings of this sterile aesthetic had begun springing up in the sixties, but unlike the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, they were utterly devoid of charm and character. That was the point: to forgo stylistic features traditionally associated with New York City architecture to achieve a generic, universal look. “International Style,” it was called. If that was the look of the future,
Laura was glad she wouldn’t be around for it. More than merely mar the skyline, the proliferation of these phallic protrusions obstructed the light, casting the city in an ever-expanding shadow of corporate greed and consumerism.

  Even if people were to come to their senses and resume constructing buildings that were attractive to look at, the damage would be done, Laura thought sadly every time her sights snagged on the World Trade Center, which had now been there for a decade but which she would never get used to. Bibs agreed.

  “A pair of glistening pricks in the sun,” was her description.

  Nicholas had a more favorable opinion of the towers, and was very excited when his investment firm had relocated to the forty-seventh floor of one the previous spring. Proud of his view, Nicholas invited Laura to pay a visit to his office, for the first time, to catch the sunset—you must be curious to see where I spend my days. Laura was touched that Nicholas cared to impress her. She felt bad for him when she arrived and it was drizzling and overcast.

  He was waiting for her as she stepped off the elevator. “Perfect timing,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Four-eighteen. Sunset’s in twenty-six minutes.”

  “Do you think we’ll be able to see it?” Laura asked, following him down the hall. He walked briskly, several paces ahead of her.

  “It’ll clear up,” Nicholas said, opening the door to his office. “Have a seat.” He pointed to a leather armchair parked by the window.

  It had stopped raining, but there was still no trace of the sun.

  Laura sat and Nicholas wheeled his desk chair over so that it was adjacent to hers.

  They quietly waited.

  “I’m sorry—would you like something to drink?” Nicholas asked. “Coffee?”

  “A cup of herbal tea would be nice,” Laura answered.

  Nicholas walked out to the hall. He returned empty-handed.

  “It’s coming,” he said, settling back into his chair.

  “I’m excited,” Laura said. “But if it doesn’t clear up on time, I’ll come back another day.”