by Alix Strauss
She’s dozing on the bed—the Baby Mozart she downloaded onto her iPod playing, the headphones resting on her belly—when Harry walks in and finds her like this. He shakes his head, crosses his arms over his chest, and stares at her. He won’t look at Web sites, won’t walk through Baby Gap, refuses to make lists of things they need to buy, and ignores the congratulatory messages people have left on their answering machine. He won’t tour hospitals, won’t read books, and doesn’t come home until she’s close to sleep.
On Tuesday, six-and-a-half-months pregnant and drained, she finds herself at the Four Seasons. It was Catherine who told her about the decorating job. She’d found out through a friend of hers who works in their corporate office that they might be adding a day care room where guests could leave their children with nannies hired by the hotel or that a Mommy and Me program might be offered. If she can get this job, Harry will be ecstatic. He’ll have to realize that everything—the baby, the job, their life—has come full circle.
She spent the last two weeks lying in bed, her feet slightly elevated, surfing the Web for ideas, making sketches, and putting a price proposal together. Usually these were offerings she spent time doing once she was hired. Once half her decorating fee was received. But this job is different.
Catherine was supposed to come with her today, but canceled last minute saying she was dealing with morning sickness. Ellen knows Harry asked David not to have Catherine encourage her. So she drove in alone, and after dropping off samples and paint chips, floor plans and architectural suggestions at another client’s office, is standing in the hotel’s lobby, waiting for Julia.
In her fantasy, she and the baby are taking a Friday class, held in the very room she has created. Harry, already in the city, meets them after a half day of work, and the three spend the rest of the afternoon and evening together. Too late to drive home, they stay over at the hotel, and this becomes their special time together. Their own tradition.
Ellen spots a stylish woman with a confident gait walking toward her. A pink folder is under her arm.
“Hi. I’m Morgan,” she says approaching, a hand extended. “Welcome.”
“Oh, hi. I thought I was meeting with, um…” for a moment her mind goes blank. “Sorry, it’s that forgetful pregnancy thing everyone is always talking about.”
“That’s okay. Julia’s out sick today.”
“She isn’t coming?”
Ellen watches Morgan’s mouth move, but her thoughts are on rescheduling. She’s talked to Julia a handful of times over the past month, each phone call ending with Ellen stressing how important it is she gets this job.
She forges ahead, overlooking the setback, and follows Morgan through the lobby, past the second restaurant, past the desk clerks, the magazine and gift stands, and as they wait for the elevator, tells her what a fan she is of the hotel.
The elevator comes and the two enter. When Morgan tells her they’re compiling a list of other decorators, Ellen’s heart stops and she flashes to sitting in Dr. Tepler’s office that last time when he told her she wasn’t pregnant. The doors finally open and she’s so happy to get out. To take a large gulp of air. They enter the room, which is filled with a huge oval table and glossy blond wooden chairs. To mask her nervousness she knocks on the wall, pulls out her tape measure, and, finally, shows Morgan her sketches.
“I was thinking bright-colored walls, shelves of educational toys, music instruments, stuffed animals…As you can see, there’s lots of room for Mommy and Me classes or one-on-ones.” She flips to another page, reminds herself to take a breath. To not be such a hard sell. But she can’t help it. “The room could be divided into ages and stages…This section for cribs and naps, this section for a class…” She has to think of something else. She has to make Morgan choose her. The next thing she knows, she’s relaying the story of how her in-laws met, how talented she is, how pleased her past clients have been, how smart it would be to have a pregnant woman creating a baby room. As she speaks, her eyes getting glassy, she feels something flutter inside her causing her to wince.
“Are you okay?”
“I think I just felt her kick.” She freezes, waiting to see if more will come.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Would it be okay to feel? If not, in fact, I can’t even believe I’ve just asked you that.” Morgan cuts herself off. Then starts again. “I’m sorry that was very unprofessional. I just…”
Morgan is one of the few people to ask this. Even Harry hasn’t touched her there yet. Hasn’t tried to make any contact with the baby. “Of course.”
Ellen unbuttons her coat, raises her sweater so Morgan can place her hand right on her skin, which is taut and stretched. The hand feels warm on her belly and Ellen remembers how nice it feels to be touched by someone other than a doctor or herself.
“Do you feel anything?” Her voice comes out eager, childlike.
“I’m not sure.”
She feels Morgan start to pull away, but Ellen puts her hand over Morgan’s, keeps it there for a moment longer as if challenging her to feel something.
“It’s fleeting and only happens for a second or so. But sometimes it comes in pairs.” Ellen is so desperate she tells Morgan about her miscarriages, about Harry and their wedding and that of her in-laws, and her brothers-in-law, and how important the Four Seasons is to her. How crucial this job is. How it’s holding her marriage together. She watches Morgan, whose hand is still pressed to her stomach, listening to her. How Ellen won’t let her go until she sees Morgan’s eyes soften. And when they do, she knows the job is hers.
At home, she adds more items to the baby’s room, a stuffed bear, a diaper dispenser, a mobile. She thinks about how she’ll decorate it. When she and Harry were house hunting, this room was one of the selling points. Not too far away from the master bedroom, and with a view that faced the backyard and drew in the morning sun, they had nodded and smiled at each other, afraid to show their glee to the sellers. Though this room has been decorated and stripped twice, she still loves it. Still feels as though her child will be happy here. And once the baby is born, she’ll stay at home and work from here. Really all she needs to design these corporate offices are floor plans, talks with the client, and a few high-tech computer programs.
Next, she enters the den and puts Harry’s mail on the desk. He didn’t bother to make up the pullout couch where he’s slept during these past weeks. Not because his snoring is keeping her up, and a woman in her condition needs as much rest as possible, but because he doesn’t know what else to do.
She hears the front door open and Harry on the phone. “Hold on a sec,” he tells the caller. “Ellen,” he shouts out. “El?” She remains quiet. “El, you home?” She doesn’t answer, stays frozen in his new bedroom. “I’ll stick it out for the next three months. I’ll either be a proud father and perhaps the worst husband in the world, and she’d have every right to leave me for being such an asshole, or she’ll realize what everyone else knows—that there’s no baby and she needs to get herself some help.”
There’s silence and the other person, who Ellen bets is one of the brothers, is talking. She thinks back to the night when Harry and she made love. After the miscarriages, she became obsessed with trying again. She didn’t want to wait like the women in the chat rooms suggested. She did everything she could think of to seem sexy: lit candles, made meals that were known aphrodisiacs—linguine and mussels in clam sauce, chocolate cake, cherries—bought expensive wine, wore revealing lingerie, even ordered a porn tape. One night they’d come back from dinner with his boss and his wife, who, during dessert had shown them a pile of photos of her children. Frisky and slightly drunk, they’d had sex on the very couch he was now sleeping on.
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t,” Harry continues. “She was so good to me when Mom and Dad died, I don’t know if I can leave her. But I can’t live like this anymore. It’s been three years of crying, of mood swings and depression…”
In one last attempt to show Harry how wrong he is, she quickly takes off her clothing. Tosses her elastic black pants, her white maternity shirt, bra, and underwear and socks onto Harry’s unmade bed.
He enters, face startled when he sees his wife standing naked in front of him, her belly extended and round, her breasts large and full. She begs him to touch her like Morgan did. To feel the baby, his baby, move inside her. She tells him about the Four Seasons and the possible Daddy and Me class. She waits for his face to become illuminated with excitement. But Harry says nothing. Does nothing. She reaches for his hand to place on her stomach and once it’s there, she watches a sadness wash over him.
A few days later Harry’s bags have been packed and wait by the front door to be loaded into his black SUV. His eyes are red and he doesn’t bother to hide the tears that streak his face. Ellen doesn’t try either. Though she’s been told all this emotion isn’t good for the baby, there’s no sense in keeping it inside. Ingested rage and swallowed hurt can’t be good for her. She’s done begging Harry to stay. He’s done begging her to see another therapist. So she lets him leave. Lets him feel the baby inside her when he goes to hug her good-bye. Lets him walk out the door.
He’ll be back, she thinks. When the baby is born he’ll come back.
Seventy days later Ellen is looking at a line of newborns, each wearing a pink or blue cap, each dressed in a tiny white cotton onesie, just as she said she would. Just as her calendar indicated. She is worn and tired but happy. Triumphant. She peers at the row of children behind the glass window and is able to pick her child out instantly. Hers is one of the few not crying. Wendy, who is gurgling, has ten perfect toes and ten just-as-perfect fingers. She is perfect in every single way. Ellen’s stunning long hair is gone. Like the woman in The Gap, it’s now cropped short, shaped pixie style, just like she told the women at Barneys it would be. It’s not as becoming as she’d hoped but certainly more convenient and manageable. She presses her forehead up against the glass and waves while smiling. “Hi baby Wendy. Mommy’s here. Mommy’s right here.” A woman a few years younger than Ellen is standing next to her. She’s dressed in the same gown and robe. Both have hospital bands around their wrists.
“Which is yours?” Ellen asks.
“That one right there,” the woman says, pointing to a red-faced, crying boy whose hat has fallen off. “Sixteen hours, not so bad, I guess. I don’t know, this was my first. You?”
“The little one there, second on the left.”
“Oh, she’s beautiful.”
“Thank you.” Ellen turns to look at the woman and smiles widely. “My first, too. Twenty hours. Worth every moment.”
“Let’s hope so.”
They laugh like old friends.
Ellen’s nurse, a pale, milky-skinned woman with a faint mustache, clears her throat. Dressed in white, she’s been waiting quietly off to the side. “Ellen, we’ve been here enough today. It’s time to go back to your room,” the nurse informs her.
Ellen says good-bye to the new mom, then blows a kiss to her baby.
She and the nurse wait by the elevator. “Isn’t she gorgeous?” Ellen asks.
“Yes,” says the nurse.
“Isn’t she just adorable?”
“Yes,” she answers.
The elevator arrives and the two ride in silence. Both keep their eyes on the light just above the doors to let them know which floor they’re passing. Ellen watches the light move from the fifth floor, maternity, to the seventh, the children’s ward. Eight is oncology. The last light to blink is the eleventh floor, psychiatric. The doors open and another nurse greets her. The first nurse guides Ellen gently out of the elevator by her arm and hands her off to the second nurse, like a child being deposited at school, delivered from one adult to another.
Some type of Muzak is playing softly in the background. It’s familiar, but she can’t place the tune. Can’t think of the title and blames this on the medication. Patients are aimlessly milling about. Some are dressed like Ellen, others are in sweats and T-shirts.
“Did she go down to see the newborns?” the second nurse asks.
“Of course. Been here a month and that’s all she’ll do.”
“Which child did she pick out today?”
“Another girl.”
She looks for Harry and remembers he’s not coming, which is fine. She’ll make it work. She had a life before him, and now that she’s got Wendy, has even more to live for. “When can I take her home?” Ellen asks the pasty-skinned woman who is holding the elevator door open. Her facial expression tells Ellen she’s anxious to go back downstairs.
“Soon, Mrs. Thompson. Very soon.”
This makes Ellen smile as she’s lead into the main room. See, she thinks, everyone was wrong.
Chapter 15
Franny
Suite 2011
They stood outside in a muddled mass, watching. Waiting.
The men were off to the side, securing hotel rooms, calling insurance companies, talking claims and estimating damages. The women, a bit more hysterical, dialed up relatives and friends, relaying the horror over and over. They talked to the people on the phone and to the neighbors standing next to them, sustaining several conversations at once. And the children. They clung to their mothers’ legs, shivering in the cold November air, begging to be hoisted into arms, or were comforted by their nannies. Franny Jamison stood there, too, chilled and coatless, opened mouthed, slightly horrified, slightly titillated. Sure, fires happened in the South, but not like this. She laughed for a moment thinking, Only in New York could a fire be glamorous.
It was like watching a movie on the world’s largest flat screen. Attractive, rugged men dressed in bumblebee fireproof suits scurried around, securing the area, axes in one hand, walkie-talkies in the other. Red and yellow lights swirled, bouncing off of windows and resurfacing onto rubberneckers’ faces. As policemen ran into the building, which was consumed by thick gray clouds of smoke billowing from the lobby and pouring out into the street, neighbors ran out like rats, scampering off in different directions. Some went to get their cars, others fled to nearby friends’ homes. A few took their kids to restaurants or a movie or to Borders bookstore. Others, like Franny, lingered in the dreary early afternoon and observed.
An electrical fire had spread underneath the building, damaging the circuit breakers, eating away at the cement like a cancer, causing several manholes to explode from the pressure. Any appliance on at the time was totaled. TVs and stereos smoldered, computers sizzled from the inside, and bulbs grew Stephen King bright before cracking and bursting. Though the interiors of most apartments were still intact, the building had to be evacuated, the avenue sealed off.
An hour later five neighbors from 210 East Fifty-ninth Street were seated at a table with a window view of their building and drank until it became blurry. Franny was sitting next to Joy, whose husband, Chuck, and three-year-old son were staked out at her aunt’s apartment two blocks away with another couple and their twin daughters. On her other side was Wes, a lawyer who worked for the mayor and lived directly below her in 7E. He was lean and fit with thick blond hair and chiseled good looks. A rugged Ken doll. Manhattan Ken, she had dubbed him. She often caught him coming home from work, briefcase in tow, iPhone attached to his ear. On the weekends, she looked forward to him rolling past her on his blades, his muscular body decked out in black spandex shorts or shiny runner’s outfit, headphones hung around his neck. She’d get all dolled up, as if she were going to a swanky restaurant, and strategize her excuse for being downstairs: no heat, clogged sink, stuck window.
As far as she could tell, Wes had three standard expressions. The left-eye wink, the nod and smile, an
d the half-wave walk-by. On rare occasions he’d stop and chat, ask what she’d been up to, how her day was, if she’d seen any new movies. Across from her was Netta, an artsy elderly woman whose husband, an old army colonel, had died last year, and Randel, a gay gynecologist, who lived with his lover on the fourth floor.
“What a waste,” her doorman once said to her when Randel entered the building and Franny was picking up a package. “Here’s a man with the best job in town and he can’t appreciate a woman’s pussy.”
They ordered another round and toasted the building, then each other. She loved being out with them as they bonded, blended together over this catastrophe.
“I was on the john when a fireman knocked at my door,” Netta admitted sheepishly, her glass still raised in the air. “I barely had time to flush.”
They laughed as a group, their voices melding to create a pleasurable, harmonious sound. Franny turned from Netta to look at Wes, to see if he, too, was appreciating the humor. His face was bright, his eyes seemed extra green against his olive skin. As if someone was taking their photo, she held her face near to his, trying desperately to capture the moment: Wes’s laugh, Netta’s voice, Joy’s strong perfume. To onlookers they must have appeared like this was a weekly gathering.
It was after her third or fourth glass of wine that Wes’s fingers slid like mini snakes over to her thigh. The warmth of his palm seeped through her skirt and she dropped her hand from the tabletop and searched for his until she found it. She smiled to herself, then looked up at him as he stroked her thumb.
“Fire good,” he whispered to her, imitating Frankenstein.
Something moved inside of her, and she suddenly thought herself very lucky.
Nothing like this ever happened in Mississippi. Sure someone’s cousin’s father might get drunk and bring a loaded gun to the nearest bar and threaten to shoot someone’s daddy for doing him wrong, but it usually got smoothed over by treating the already-intoxicated man to another shot of whiskey. Random fights over Elvis often took place, or a crazy relative would be found late at night, walking down the road in nothing but their pajamas. Franny remembered a fight that broke out years ago over a corn crop, but that was pretty much it. Incidents like this were why she came to New York. The idea that something huge could happen at any moment that could change your life instantly was the reason she’d come to live here at twenty-two, fifteen years ago.