That cuckold lives in bliss
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger
But, O, what damned minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet soundly loves!
A group of students from an acting class were doing a reading of Othello for Lainie's Shakespeare class. I don't need an Iago to torment me, she thought, listening to the dialogue. I'm my own Iago. Driving myself crazy the way he does Othello. There is no way that Mitch De Nardo, my husband, is screwing the surrogate, she thought, trying to be rational. But the Iago part of her asked, Really? If that's true, then walk out of this classroom, right now, and drive past Sherman Oaks Park. Didn't Mitch say he was going to take Rosie there to play tonight? Didn't he think you'd be safely in school so he could take Jackie's daughter to visit with her? Why else would he be so eager to do that if he didn't have something going on with Jackie.
No, Iago; I'll see before I doubt, when I doubt, prove;
And on the proof, there is no more but this,
Away at once with love or jealousy.
The actor reading the part of Othello had a giant voice that belied his slight build. It was hard to believe the emotion he could call up, reading from a script and sitting on a folding chair, but everyone in the room seemed to be leaning in toward him, feeling Othello's grief and pain. When it was time for the break, as the rest of the class headed for the Coke machines Lainie walked to her car.
There were two teenage boys shooting baskets, a family sitting at a picnic table eating, and a jogger making his way around the track. The playground was empty. A strong wind blew some sand out of the sandbox and made the swings sway back and forth, as though ghostly riders were pumping them into the sky. "I do not think but Desdemona's honest.'' Sitting in her car, Lainie felt stupid to have let her insanity make her walk out on the last half of her Shakespeare class to rush over here to see if Mitch was with Jackie. If she went home now he would notice she was early and wonder why. But that would be okay. She could tell him she missed the baby and wanted to see her before she went to sleep.
Mitch's car was in the garage and the condominium was still as Lainie made her way quietly up the stairs. When she opened the door to the nursery, what she saw filled her with relief and joy and embarrassment for her own doubts about her beloved Mitch. There he was in the rocking chair, asleep, with the sleeping baby snuggled against him. Sick, I am so sick, so insecure that because of the smell of some perfume anyone might wear and some neighbor's remark, I might have been crazy enough to lash out at my husband with a ridiculous accusation.
Mitch De Nardo, the sweetest, best man in the world, had simply been distracted by problems at work. She would wake him now, and after they put Rosie in a night diaper and down to sleep in her crib, Lainie would somehow get Mitch to come to bed early, where she would make sweet love to him. It had been too long, and their loving would make them close again.
"Mitchie," she said, touching him tenderly.
"Huh?" Mitch looked up at her, realized he'd been put to sleep by his own lullaby, then looked down at the sleeping baby. "Little angelface wore me out tonight."
"What did you two do together?" Lainie asked, taking Rose from him and gently placing her on the changing table.
"Oh, it was great. We took a long ride."
In the evening? During rush hour, they took a ride? "Where?"
"The beach," Mitch said, yawning, standing, and stretching. "Want me to put her night diaper on her?" he asked.
"I can do it," Lainie said.
"Great," he said, not looking at her. "Now that you're here, I'm going to go back to the store. I've got a stack of invoices that I have to look over. The bookkeeper's coming tomorrow, and I'm not ready for her. I want her to do all the store bills and all of our personal stuff too." He patted his pants pocket and found his car keys. "Don't wait up" were his last words, and he was gone.
The next day Lainie took Rose to the zoo with her friend Sharon and Sharon's baby. Rose pointed her tiny finger at the elephant and said, "Elatin." "Yes!" Lainie said, thrilling to the sound of her daughter learning to talk.
"Mine still hasn't said a word," Sharon said.
Lainie pushed the stroller from cage to cage, next to Sharon and her stroller, and she still couldn't shake the heavyhearted feeling she had about whatever it was that was going on with Mitch. She didn't feel close enough to Sharon to tell her what she was going through. In fact, she didn't feel close enough to anybody. Oddly, the only woman with whom she'd ever felt any real intimacy was Jackie. For obvious reasons—the months of insemination attempts, the startling fact which never grew less startling that she was carrying Mitch's baby—but also because Jackie was someone who demanded intimacy, barreled into your life and opened up hers in a warm, unafraid way. She paid attention to your feelings and told you about hers.
Not like the rigid way Lainie had been taught to behave with everyone. If those qualities were hereditary she hoped that Rose would inherit them. Jackie was a good person, Lainie thought, and then she felt foolish about the fears and fantasies she'd been having about Jackie and Mitch.
"I've been going to a gym," Sharon said as they stopped at a food center to get sandwiches for themselves and to give the little girls some finger foods they'd each brought along. "Because I've been feeling as if I'm never going to get back in shape, and Jerry hasn't touched me in months. But you know, it's funny, when I was pregnant, we had sex all the time, so I don't think it's my being fat that's bothering him."
Lainie put some pieces of banana on the little tray attached to the front of Rosie's stroller. This was more than Sharon had ever revealed about her personal life in the past. Usually when they got together they talked about what they were reading in English class, or how having babies at home was getting in the way of their studying.
"My sister said it happened with her husband too. As soon as there was a kid, his whole attitude changed. As if he was saying, 'Now that you're a mother, I can't get hot with you anymore.' " Lainie nodded sympathetically. The thought cheered her. Maybe that was why Mitch wasn't sexy with her these days. And if that's all it was, she could fix that in no time. Get him away for a weekend. Bring some slinky lingerie, drive him wild the way she always used to.
On the way home from the zoo, she and Rosie would stop off at Panache to see Daddy. Lainie would take him aside and tell him they should plan a trip together. Her mother could take Rosie for the two days. The store would survive for forty-eight hours without Mitch, and they would find a hotel somewhere on the ocean and just be sexy for hours and days.
All of the girls who worked in the store oohed and ahhed over Rosie when Lainie walked in carrying her. In her little hand she held the string of a helium balloon from the L.A. zoo.
"She's so big," Carin said. "Can I hold her?" Rosie grinned and went to Carin easily. "Mitch said he had to go to the bank," Carin told Lainie. "He'll be back any minute." Then she took Rosie over to the three-way mirrors to play "see the baby." Lainie told Carin she'd be in the office in the back of the store, and she went in to call her mother at work so that when Mitch got back she'd be armed with baby-sitting dates that were good for her mother's schedule.
The office was pristine. The bookkeeper had obviously finished her work, and in one high pile were the store's current bills, checks attached and ready to stuff and mail, and in another Lainie and Mitch's personal bills with checks attached. Lainie dialed the phone, then shuffled through the mail absently while the phone at Bradford, Freeman rang in her ear.
"Law offices of Bradford, Freeman. How may I direct your call?"
"Mother?"
"Oh, hi, dear. Hold on. I've got three lines ringing all at once. Don't go away."
Gas bill, very high, water bill too, Lainie noticed. Gelson's Market, she had a charge account there. It was an extravagance, but Lainie loved their perfect produce, their great deli, and their sweet-smelling bakery, though this month the bill was exorbitant. Pacific Bell. A long itemized bill
of every toll call. Pages of calls. While she waited, she lifted the check and looked down at the list of calls.
West Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Studio City, her mother's phone number. Another West Los Angeles. Long Beach. Long Beach. Who did they know in Long Beach besides . . . she looked across the page at a phone number that was definitely Jackie's. She looked at the date, then at the calendar. A school night, the call was made from their house at six-forty, just after Lainie walked out the door to go to her class. Her hand moved down the page. Two weeks later, Long Beach. Time, six-forty-one. She would leave and Mitch would call Jackie, to tell her that he and Rosie were on their way to see her, and Rosie, who couldn't talk yet, couldn't tell the secret to Lainie. And that's why Mitch wasn't making love to Lainie. Dear God, it was true.
"Hi, baby!" She turned with a gasp as if she were the one who had been caught, when all she'd been doing was looking at her own telephone bill. Something she'd never bothered to do in the past because Mitch always took care of those things with the bookkeeper. And he knew under normal circumstances she would never look at, let alone scrutinize, a phone bill. She put the phone back in the cradle.
"Mitch," she said, feeling her face shaking and not sure if she was going to be able to ask the next question. If the answer was yes it could pull out the underpinnings of her entire life. She remembered the serious way Barbara Singer told her, "You fought cancer, you can handle this," and it gave her the strength to ask, "Have you been seeing Jackie?" Please God, let him say no, she thought. Let the phone calls he made to her just have been about some legal problem or other, or some unpaid medical bill.
Mitch looked down at the floor and didn't answer.
"You have," Lainie said, wishing she had died, wishing that the cancer had killed her instead of letting her live to stand in this room feeling like an empty, miserable shrew demanding an answer. "And you've taken Rosie with you too, haven't you?" When he finally answered, it was by way of a slight nod.
"Why? How? What could possibly make you do that after all you and I went through to make this work? Mitch, I felt so inadequate for so many years that I agreed to let you have a baby with another woman. But there wasn't one step of the way during all of it when I didn't have to stop myself from begging you to call it off because of how much it hurt. Don't you understand that one of the reasons this awful world is able to go on is because a woman desperately wants to feel the baby of the man she loves inside her body? Not to watch some other woman glory in the feeling of that life. I might as well have watched you make love to her. Did you do that, Mitch? Did you make love to Jackie? You can tell me everything now that it's all out. Her perfume was on your shirt, your telephone calls to her are in black and white on our phone bill. Was it sexier with her because she still has her insides?"
She was screaming at him, her voice rising up to the ceiling, reverberating, she was sure, throughout the whole store so the salesgirls and the customers could hear every word. Finally she was letting out the pain, the rage, the hurt she had felt about all of this for so long. And Mitch didn't try to silence her, just stood in that spot, in the doorway of the office, looking down at his black leather loafers.
"Mama," she heard Rosie's voice call out from somewhere in the store, then she heard Carin's voice say, "Mama's busy now. Why don't we go and try on hats? I'll bet Rosie looks cute in hats. Come on. That's a good girl."
"I didn't touch her," Mitch said. "I mean, maybe a little hug once before we parted, that must be how the perfume got on me, but I took Rosie to see her because she came here one night to the store, just before I was closing up. The girls didn't know who she was, and I nearly fell over when I saw her.
"I thought she didn't know anything about us. I thought it was why we had that special phone and paid for everything in cash. She told me she'd known our last name for years. That she once applied for a job at the old store and met me there. That when we first walked into the lawyer's office that day to meet her, she remembered me, even though I didn't remember her. She also told me that during the pregnancy you dropped our last name once by mistake.
"She sat right down over there and said to me, 'Mitch, this isn't blackmail, it isn't a threat, it's just a truth. That baby came from my body, from my egg, from me, and I need to see her. Need to know her, need to be with her.' She said it wasn't blackmail or anything like that, but that she had to be in Rose's life. Tell Lainie it's okay, she said. She begged me. She said, 'I won't hurt their relationship.'
"I told her she was nuts. Completely crazy to think I would ever go for what she was saying, or that you would. I didn't believe it wasn't blackmail, so I offered her money, lots of money to go away forever, I wasn't even sure where I would get that kind of money, but she didn't want it. She wasn't holding out for more than I was offering. She didn't want money. And all of a sudden I realized while I was sitting there that she wasn't crazy at all about wanting to be with the baby. What was crazy was any of the three of us agreeing to bring a baby into the world under those circumstances. And I take the blame. Because of my colossal ego, I ended up making you go through the tortures of the damned, and then Jackie too, and created a situation that just can't ever work the way we thought it would."
"And without telling me, or asking me, you took Rose to see her."
"I thought if I asked you it would kill you," he said defensively, making Lainie wild with rage that he could think that position was defensible.
"So you lied. Made the baby a party to your lie."
"I knew once Rosie could really talk I couldn't do it anymore. And I had hopes that maybe if Jackie saw her once or twice, maybe she'd understand how tough it was on all of us to do it, and change her mind. Or that somehow I'd be able to tell you and we could work it out. Lainie, I did a bad thing by sneaking around you. But the real bad thing was a few years ago when I didn't say to you, 'Let's keep trying to adopt, instead of giving up because we had one bad experience.' And I should have said to my sister, 'Mind your own damned business, I don't care if the baby's a De Nardo. I want Lainie to be okay about it.' But now it's done. I made a baby with that woman, and I can't pretend it didn't happen, and neither can she and neither can you."
Lainie looked at his face and hated him. "Mitch, I'm going home. I'm taking Rosie with me. Tonight, on my way to school, I'll drop her at my mother's. While I'm gone I want you to go to our place and get everything out of there that you need, because I won't live with you, can't stand what you've put me through, and don't want to be anywhere near you. We can discuss the arrangements of our divorce through lawyers, and also what will happen to Rose."
"Lainie, please—"
"No, Mitch," she said. "The last time you said 'please' to me, I agreed to do what you were asking, and it did damage to a lot of people's lives."
33
BARBARA TOOK A SIP of coffee, looked at the clock, and realized it was time to begin. "I think what we've been seeing here is that many times we find ourselves talking about the same problems all the parents in my groups talk about, separation anxieties, setting limits, sleeping."
"Sleeping? Never heard of it," Judith said. "By the time Jillian was sleeping through the night, I had Jody. I think the last complete night I slept was the night before Jillian was born."
There were a few amens to that as the others settled into their chairs. Every week the members of this group seemed genuinely glad to see one another, to have found a unique level of trust among themselves, and a sense of pride in their differences from the rest of the world. It was a chemistry Barbara always hoped the people in her groups would have, but it didn't always happen.
When the groups clicked, the members continued their relationships long after the year of meetings was over. When they didn't, there was no way she could interest the members in engaging one another. In those cases the entire year could be spent with the parents barely looking at one another, and leaving with relief after the last session.
"The best solution for me and my little ones about sleep ha
s been to take them into my bed at night. I read that book The Family Bed, and figured, why should a little person have to be cold and alone when we can all cuddle together and I can make them feel secure?" Judith said.
"Would you consider taking in a chilly big person?" Rick asked her.
"I should have known you'd turn that into a joke," Judith said, laughing and throwing the cloth diaper she'd been wearing on her shoulder as a drooling pad for the baby at Rick. "And believe me, I can use the laugh. You all know what I've been through with men, and on top of that, I can't seem to find a housekeeper I like. Some days I feel like I'm on complete baby burn-out."
"Want to talk about any of it?" Barbara asked.
"Which is the bigger problem? The men or the housekeeper?" Ruthie asked.
"Good question," Barbara said to Ruthie, then turned to Judith. "Which is the bigger problem. The men or the housekeeper?"
Judith thought for an instant and grinned. "Well, you know how hard it is to get good help." Everyone laughed. The discussion turned to their mutual guilt about working and parenting, and how hard it was to part with the babies every day. All of them except Lainie worked, and she spent several nights a week in school and many of her days studying.
Mitch hadn't been to the last few group sessions and there had always been an excuse from her about his having to be at the store. Today when there was a rare quiet moment in the discussion, she spoke up. "Mitch and I are separated. I asked him to leave after I found out that without discussing it with me, he'd been secretly taking the baby to see the surrogate."
"Oh, my God," Ruthie said.
"What would make him do that?" Shelly asked.
"She came to him and begged him to let her see the baby. He was afraid to tell me, but he believed it was the right thing for her to be with the baby . . . so he agreed."
"I guess there's no denying that she is the baby's mother," Rick said matter-of-factly, and Lainie looked as if someone had kicked her.
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