Loves Me, Loves Me Not

by Libby Malin

  “Get out!” Gina said, her mouth dropping open. “What’s she going to do?”

  “Keep the baby. There are lots of single mothers, you know.”

  Gina pursed her lips. Clearly, she didn’t think much of that option. “How will she meet someone now?”

  “Single mothers do remarry, you know.” Or marry for the first time, in Wendy’s case. “Hey, don’t say anything to anyone. She doesn’t want it getting back to her employer yet.” Gina has friends who work in ad agencies.

  “No problem.”

  Well, I now know that “no problem” in GinaSpeak means “Hah!” The quisling—she gave up Wendy’s story this very afternoon.

  “Henry’s not married like Sam is,” I point out to my mother. No, not married, just keeping all options open. Much better for me, don’t you think?

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Sam—Wendy’s boyfriend. He’s married.”

  “Oh, my god! I didn’t know. That’s awful. What a schmuck.”

  So at last we find common ground. If Sam only knew how he brings families together while ripping his own apart.

  Wendy, by the way, has completely broken off with the cad. She’s even called Henry about legally keeping the baby away from him.

  What prompted her to take this action was a moment of heart-ripping backsliding on her part. As I predicted, she’d reached for the phone to talk to him one night—the night after the day when she’d heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first time. Yeah, she’d called me and gushed for nearly half an hour about it, but it’s not the same thing as sharing it with the guy who actually helped start the heartbeat. So she’d called Sam and damn him, he came over to see her—probably just so he could see what it was like to make love to a pregnant woman. I’m sure that’s what they did. At least she didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant since she already was.

  What she did need to worry about was getting nicked by his sharp-edged psyche. She could hardly speak when she called to tell me about it later that night, waking Henry up and forcing me out of his bed so I could whisper to her in a corner of “my” room. Poor Wendy assumed once again if Sam wanted to make love to her, he might be softening toward the baby and the divorce.

  But he repeated his dogma: he’d never made any commitments to her, that he certainly couldn’t be expected to leave his wife when Wendy was disregarding his wishes about the baby, and he was a local board member of Zero Population Growth to boot. His parting shot? His wife had finally snagged a job at a university prestigious enough for her many talents—Princeton—so they were going to buy a home together and give up the bicoastal commute. End of story.

  I told Wendy to come on over and she spent the night with Henry and me.

  Devastated as she is, Wendy has a plan she’s been forming for some time. Here it is: She still hasn’t told her parents about the baby; however, she has told them that she wants to take them up on their offer to fund a Grand Tour kind of trip. Surprise, surprise, it will coincide with the point in her pregnancy when she’s showing. After a few months, she’ll return to the States, have the baby, and then make up a story about adopting some friend’s abandoned child after the friend passes away.

  Yeah, it sounds batty, but Wendy can pull it off. Even if her parents figure it out, she knows them well enough to know they will accept the single-parent adoption more than they could ever accept her having a child out of wedlock.

  Wendy mapped this all out for me right before she headed to Connecticut for the Fourth.

  And here, boys and girls, is where my own dilemma comes in. Yes, there is a dilemma here, and not just the “what is Henry really thinking about us?” dilemma. Not just the “how can I get my parents to accept my current status as a live-in girlfriend” kind of dilemma. Not the “how can I stop thinking of what Fred looks like naked” kind of dilemma.

  I take some trifle from my sister and sit looking away from Fred and out onto the newly mown lawn. It’s steamy as a crab pot, and I’m wondering why sitting out in this tropical heat is supposed to make the day fun when any other day this hot and humid Gina and Fred would be serving us in their air-conditioned dining room.

  No, my dilemma is this one: “Should I go to the Riviera with Wendy for a few months?” Wendy has already asked me if I want to go, and I still have my two thou in the bank, so it’s not out of the question.

  And therein lies the rub. Just what is the question? Or the myriad of questions that have yes and no answers?

  Do I want to go with Wendy? Yes.

  Do I want to spend two months on the Riviera? Yes!

  Do I want to leave Henry for two months?

  Uh-oh. Can’t answer that one. Every time I think of leaving Henry, I get this sick feeling in my stomach because the questions I refuse to ask and answer are: Do I think Henry will want me when I return? Will he ask me to stay? Will he send flowers to other babes while I’m gone?

  You fill in the blank.

  I can, however, answer this question: will our relationship be over if he is unfaithful? Hell, yes.

  After Mom and Dad leave, I help Gina clean up while Fred does some obsessive-compulsive thing with the grill, spraying down the racks with oven cleaner and hosing them off on the patio. As I watch the foamy water spill onto the lawn, I think that he won’t need to call the weed-control chemical company this week.

  “Too bad Henry couldn’t come,” Gina says, placing plates in the dishwasher. No paper plates here. Real china. “We’ll have to have you two to dinner soon. We still haven’t done that.”

  “Yeah. Well.” I hand her the platter the chicken and fish were on, and she wipes it down in the sink.

  “Maybe in a couple weeks,” Gina says happily. “I’ll make a standing rib roast and new potatoes.”

  “Henry loves good food.”

  “Well, take some home with you. I’ve got chicken left over. And salad and corn.”

  She makes a little doggie bag for me which I hold on my lap when Fred drives me home. Yup, Fred drives me home since I don’t have a car. It makes me feel like a kid again, but in a bad way. We hardly speak on the way to Henry’s condo, which I’m sure is because we’re still thinking of the naked-Fred incident. Better to pretend we don’t know each other.

  Henry is due back tomorrow so I sit on his front steps watching the fireworks over the harbor with an empty heart, drinking a gin and tonic. Trixie meows up a storm by my feet and I rub her behind the ears, but even she doesn’t make me feel better. Trixie likes it here. She gets to roam around outside and a couple neighbors have taken to her.

  And she likes Henry so much I’m almost jealous. She saunters up to him regularly when he’s home and brushes her tail against his legs. When he gets into bed, she leaps—I am not kidding, she leaps—up next to him and purrs so loudly it sounds like she’s got a couple of screws loose in her head.

  I’m alone. Everyone in his Stepford condo development must be out celebrating. Lots of empty places in the parking lot, and lots of dark windows in the two-story buildings facing the lots.

  I hear the whine and blast and see the red bursts, the white flashes, the blue explosions. In the distance, I hear the muted sounds of patriotic songs. “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which has special meaning around these parts since it’s where it was written.

  The fireworks are photo-flash memories in the night sky when I stand to go in.

  “Come on, Trix. Bedtime,” I say, and she reluctantly follows. Maybe she’s waiting for Henry, but he won’t be home until tomorrow afternoon.

  At a quarter to midnight, I hear the front door open. Heart thudding in my throat, I grab a heavy flashlight and creep into the living room.

  Henry’s there, looking tired.

  “Electricity go out?” he asks when he sees my weapon.

  “Uh, no. You weren’t going to come home until tomorrow.”

  “I wrapped it up, so I thoug
ht I’d head back.” He comes upstairs and grabs me to him. His Hilfiger cologne masks the scent of sweat. Sweat doesn’t smell bad on Henry. It smells manly. After a wet kiss that turns my fear to desire, he looks me in the eye.

  “I think I’m falling in love with you, conchita.”

  chapter 18

  Carolina jasmine: Separation

  The winter before the accident, Rick went on a business trip—some conference in North Carolina. He wasn’t interested that much in the conference itself, he told me, but it would give him a chance to see some of his old law school buddies. Although he was a Princeton grad, he’d gone to law school at Duke, an experience he said he wouldn’t have traded for the world. His law school days were among the happiest in his life. The week he was away was a particularly difficult one for me. A work project tanked when the client decided to pull out, and Gelman blamed me for the mess. And Mrs. Squires had invited me to dinner that week because Rick had just informed her he’d asked me to marry him. I felt abandoned and unsure, and couldn’t wait for his return. It didn’t help calm my nerves that he was difficult to reach while away—not often in his room until late, and impatient to get to conference events when I did talk to him. Of course, I spent all my time on the phone complaining, so who could blame him if he wanted to rush off, right?

  If I have one talent, it is my ability to turn gold into dross.

  After Henry’s quasi-admission of love, do I wrap my arms around him and confess my own undying affection? Do I coyly bat my eyes and say, “Henry, I don’t just think you’re in love with me, I know it.” Do I shed tears of joy and tell him, in a voice dripping with earnest sincerity, just how much it means to me that he made this confession and that I’ve longed to hear him say this and have been thinking a lot about it myself?

  Or do I sneeze, and then say “Me, too?”

  My heart might be bubbling over with happiness, but the guard dogs in front of it snarl and snap and say “Wait a minute, hold it, too fast, too soon, get a grip, you’ve only known him a couple months.” They’re talking dogs. Very precocious. So after I apologize for sneezing at this heady moment, I mumble my ditto and that’s that.

  Yes, I hungered for the L word. I wanted to hear him say it. I even wanted to say it myself. But he wasn’t putting the L word in its proper location—smack in the middle of the L phrase—as in “I L you!” He was just kind of dancing around the edges of it. I wasn’t going to dive in before him. No, sirree, bub. I still had that “fragile” tattoo to think about.

  Later that night, we make love, and while we’re lying together in postcoital bliss on his bed, I turn back into the Little Woman and pull something out of her toolbox—nagging. Nagging always makes men want to say the L phrase, doncha think?

  “I really wish you could have come to Gina’s today. They wondered where you were,” I say.

  “Did you have a good time?” He strokes my arm in the blue light of the room. Is there anything so peaceful as a moonlit room after making love? Which is exactly why I need to shatter it. It’s like a wide pane of perfect glass and a baseball.

  “Not without you. Everyone asked about you.”

  “And you told them I had a business deal.” He inhales sharply. Henry knows where this is going. He’s smart, which is why I like him.

  “I still can’t believe you couldn’t get out of it. It was a holiday.”

  He pulls his arm away. “No, I couldn’t get out of it. And you knew that. The day is over. Why bug me about it now?”

  “Because it was important to me—to have you meet my family.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I told you about the barbecue last week.”

  “You didn’t say it was important.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve invited you to something with my family. You’re a college graduate. You should get it.”

  Putting his hands behind his head, he shakes his head in disgust.

  “Besides, if I’d asked you to change your meeting, would you have done it?” I persist.

  “Maybe.” He grabs his silk bathrobe and sits on the edge of the bed with his hands between his legs.

  “Who was the meeting with, anyway?”

  He tilts his head and glares at me. “Roberta Calvin. I’m handling her divorce.”

  “That’s another thing. All your meetings are with women. Don’t you have any male clients?”

  “A few.”

  “Do you ever have late-night meetings with them?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And you send them flowers?”

  He rolls his eyes and slaps his hand on the bed next to him. “Look, I am trying to build a career here. If that means I have to wine and dine a few ladies, and make them feel good about themselves after their louses of husbands have done them wrong, so be it. It’s no big deal.”

  It is a big deal to me, I want to scream. Rick was a lawyer and he never got clients this way. Who gets clients this way?

  “But you’re leading them on. You’re making them think that you, you…” What is he making them think? That he’s available? I choke on the word. “That you’re living alone.” So there. Take that.

  He exhales sharply. “You’re living in my spare bedroom. And besides, I introduced you to Joanna Wentworth.”

  Well, he might as well have slapped me. Living in his spare bedroom, huh? That’s all I am to him? Some temporary tenant who cooks and cleans while she tries to get on her feet again? Oh, I know, I know—Wendy pointed out that this spare-bedroom thing sends mixed signals. But if I could get a clear signal from Henry, maybe mine would unscramble as well.

  The “I think I’m falling in love with you” doesn’t mean anything compared to the “you’re living in my spare bedroom.”

  Tears sting behind my lids and I blink fast. I storm out of the room—or I hope it’s storming because I haven’t quite mastered that—and I go into the “spare bedroom” and slam the door. If he hears it, I don’t know. The television is already on.

  I punch my pillow and cry myself to sleep. Stupid me. I’m the one who wanted the “tenant” situation. I’m the one who suggested I “earn my keep” by cooking and cleaning. I’m the one who set up this ridiculous 1950s throwback arrangement. Was I taking stupid pills or something? Is this another yet-to-be discovered side effect of those migraine tablets?

  I’m so bummed by this squabble that I actually confide in Gina the next day when I call to thank her again for the barbecue.

  “Well, why didn’t you tell him how much it meant to you, honey?” she asks incredulously.

  “Because I thought he knew.”

  “Men don’t know anything unless we tell them a thousand times.”

  “That’s a dumb excuse.”

  “Not many are like Rick, sweetie. Trust me. Even Fred is not, well, perfect.”

  Maybe one part of his body is, I think.

  “Fred’s pretty thoughtful,” I volunteer. I’m taking up for Fred? Things are bad when I need to do that to make a point about Henry. “He gave you those antique garnet earrings you wanted for Christmas. That was very thoughtful. He knew what you wanted.”

  Gina laughs. “The only reason he knew was because I printed out five photos of the things and left them lying around the house beginning in November. You don’t think Fred would come up with that idea on his own, do you?”

  Pop. Bubble bursting. And here I thought Fred was as meticulous about gift giving as he is about grill cleaning.

  I sigh. “Maybe I’ll have to try that. I’ll be lucky if he remembers my birthday.” My birthday is in two weeks.

  “You better get started. What do you want, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. A job.”

  “Besides that.”

  “Actually, I like those earrings and wouldn’t mind having a pair like them.” What I really want, however, is another kind of jewelry. A friendship ring or a going-steady ring.

  Or an engagement ring.

  Yes, I know. I’m hopeless. I rea
lly just want an engagement ring because I was engaged and I liked it and I don’t like unpredictability. Right? It’s not because I love Henry. I can’t really love Henry. I love Rick. I’m supposed to love Rick.

  Oh, hell. We all know what’s going on here. I can’t love Henry. He might break my heart. And all the king’s men won’t be able to set it right if he does. It’s that simple.

  Gina tells me she’ll help me “train” Henry and she’s in such a good mood that I let her plot and plan.

  This consists of taking five photos of her earrings, giving them to me the next day when she comes by for lunch, and telling me the best places to leave them so Henry will notice them.

  “Leave one in his car!” she says as she’s about to drive off. “Under the visor. It will fall down and hit him when he opens it.”

  I take Gina’s advice and drop these photographic hints throughout the condo. I can’t bring myself to do the visor thing, though. Too obvious. (Like the rest of this, isn’t it?)

  Wendy calls me the day before my birthday to tell me she thinks she’s getting thick around the waist and to ask me if I’ve made up my mind about coming to Europe with her. I tell her I haven’t decided but hope to make a decision soon. I want to see how the birthday goes, but I don’t tell her that.

  The birthday dawns with nothing special happening. No nice card on the kitchen table. No breakfast treat with a loving note tucked in the bakery bag. In fact, the only note Henry leaves me is one saying “Don’t forget to pick up coffee.” We’re out.

  My parents call and both get on to sing “Happy Birthday,” promising to take me out to dinner or shopping, whichever I prefer.

  After I get off the phone, I do some more résumé-sending, and I mope around most of the day. Yeah, I go to the market and get the coffee. I even buy myself a little birthday cake, figuring Henry won’t do it for me.

  I work myself into such a state that I actually break down and call him during the day and sneak into the conversation the fact that I’m looking forward to seeing Gina later in the week because I know she has a special birthday treat planned for me. Am I subtle or what?