by Imani King
Natasha Ray didn't call me once over the next couple of weeks. A few times I found myself in the awkward position of having to force myself not to check my messages to see if there were any from her - I knew there wouldn't be. It was Dr. Franco who called me to say the pregnancy test at three weeks was negative. I took the call outside by Three Palms' infinity pool, sitting on the edge of it and dangling my feet in the cool water and when it was over I put the phone down beside me and tried to figure out what it was I was feeling.
It took a little while but when I realized what it was, there was no denying it - it was relief. Given my longing for a child - for family and all of the things that come with it - I was surprised at first that my reaction to Natasha's non-pregnant state was relief. I shouldn't have been surprised. The truth was staring me in the face. When I went to bed later on that night and told Vanessa the news, she leaned over me, cooing and pushing her hand down into my shorts:
"Ooooh, Blake, that sucks. Well, we can try again!"
For the second time in our marriage I denied Vanessa one of her attempts to seduce me, pushing her hand away from my soft dick and rolling over with my back to her. There it was, suddenly - the truth: I wanted a baby - a family - but I did not want to have one with my wife. I tried to push the thought away but it stayed there at the forefront of my mind, refusing in its plain obviousness to go anywhere. I fell asleep hoping the morning would bring some escape from the bind I'd willingly gotten myself into but the dawn didn't bring any new revelations or solutions.
Vanessa, keenly aware of the fact that something had changed, redoubled her efforts in the only way she knew how - by using her sexuality. She spent a few thousand dollars at Agent Provocateur and pranced around the house in a see-through babydoll and a pair of tiny panties but something was dead inside me. I was probably more shocked by it than she was. After a few days of being turned down, a state of affairs I knew for a fact she had never had to deal with in her life, she started lashing out. The problem was, Vanessa wasn't very good at lashing out. Or, I was very good at dealing with spiteful people who are just trying to provoke me. The paparazzi trained me well.
"What the fuck, Blake? Are you gay?"
I was lying outside by the pool, strangely unmoved by the sight of my wife perched on the end of the lounge chair, smiling at me and playing with her little pink nipples. The question made me laugh out loud.
"Yes, Vanessa, that's it. Finally my secret is out."
"Fuck you, Blake. Just...fuck you."
I sat up in the chair and looked her in the eye, wondering if she was willing to have a real conversation with me.
"Do you want to talk, Nessa? I think we should talk. I think we should be honest with each other."
But Vanessa didn't want to talk - not honestly. In fact at the mere mention of it she sprung up and disappeared back into the house, sighing at me the way one would normally sigh at a naughty puppy. I lay back down with a sigh of my own. She was a brick wall.
The next day, Vanessa made a very big mistake. One that would eventually unravel our marriage. I had come home earlier than expected after a two-hour session with my personal trainer and a meeting I couldn't quite face. Lisa called me in my car and berated me for cancelling but I didn't care - somehow it didn't seem important.
"Blake, is something wrong with you?" She asked, openly exasperated.
I answered honestly, aware of the fact that I couldn't lecture Vanessa for refusing to face uncomfortable truths if I wasn't willing to do the same:
"I don't know, Lisa. There might be. I feel terrible. Maybe I should see a psychiatrist?"
On the other end of the phone all I could hear was the sound of Lisa sucking her lips, something she does when she's stressed out.
"Blake, I don't know what to say. Just take the afternoon off, OK? If you're serious about a psychiatrist I'll arrange one, but for now just try and get your head together and call me in the morning, alright?"
I agreed to call her in the morning and arrived home to Lupita bent over the enormous kitchen sink, sweating with the effort it was taking to remove a stain from some pink item of clothing. Seeing her like that caused a sudden rush of disgust inside me.
"Lupita - what's going on?"
She held up the item of clothing, a blouse of some kind, and indicated the stain.
"It won't come out, Senor Charlton. It won't come out and Vanessa is going to be very upset."
"Just throw it away."
Lupita looked up at me properly when I said that, searching my face for some sign I was joking.
"I'm serious, Lupita - just throw it away. Vanessa will never notice it's gone and she can buy ten new ones if she does."
Lupita stayed where she was, unsure about my intentions, so I took the blouse out of her hands and threw it in the garbage under the sink myself. Then I took a few hundred-dollar bills out of my wallet and handed them to her.
"Senor Charlton?"
"It's a tip, Lupita. For being so loyal, for doing such a great job every day and putting up with us. I mean it. Now take the rest of the afternoon off and take your kids to the beach or something, OK?
I could tell from the way she was looking at me that Lupita was fairly certain I'd gone crazy, but she did eventually listen, grabbing her bag and disappearing out the front door in a flurry of thank-yous and grateful smiles.
I sat down heavily and ran my hands over the surface of the kitchen table. That table had cost almost twenty thousand dollars to have custom-made by a wood-worker one of the studio heads had introduced me to. Why did I spend that much money on a table? Because when I bought it, it wasn't a table - it was a ticket. A ticket to the scenes that played out in my own head on a daily basis - friends, family, children, everyone gathered around that table as it groaned under the weight of a home-cooked feast and the whole tableau lit with the glow of familial love and friendship.
And what was sitting right in front of me on that table, the one that had never seen the kind of gatherings I had envisioned for it? Vanessa's medical file. It was thick, because Vanessa is a hypochondriac, and it had Dr. Franco's name and the address of the office on it. Without even thinking, I opened it up and flipped through the papers until I realized it wasn't just her recent records, it went back to before we started seeing Dr. Franco, before the whole surrogacy thing.
I skimmed the pages back to 2012 - it seemed to be a fairly accurate document of Vanessa's recent past - prescriptions for Xanax and Prozac (which she took because it suppressed her appetite, not because she was depressed), inquiries into whether or not her nose job had healed properly, prescriptions for antibiotics whenever she came down with the usual winter colds. I was just about to close it back up and head out to the pool for a dip when it hit me. I opened the folder again and went back to September of the previous year, when we had met. I looked at every single page up until February, when we had been married for almost two months already. There was no mention of a pregnancy. There were repeated prescriptions for her hormonal birth control but nothing else. I was suddenly conscious of the sound of my heartbeat thudding in my head.
In a panic, I flipped forward to the paperwork from Dr. Franco's office. It took a few minutes but I found it, right there in black and white on one of the intake forms:
"No prior pregnancies."
My head swam. I leaned forward and started going through all the papers again. And again. I must have read them through three or four times before it sank in that I wasn't missing anything. Vanessa had never been pregnant. My whole marriage was a lie.
Lightheaded with emotions it was too early to identify, I stumbled into my office and pulled a bottle of scotch out of one of the cabinets, gulping it straight from the bottle and grimacing against the burn of the alcohol in my throat - and the even sharper burn of betrayal searing its way into my heart. Then I took the bottle into the kitchen and sat back down at the table, staring at the medical papers as if they were about to offer up some new insight about what I should do or how I s
hould feel.
I was angry - the kind of angry that makes your limbs heavy and your mind blank. Was I angry because I'd been taken for a fool, just like so many friends I'd witnessed marrying gold-diggers and shallow Hollywood girls who never really loved them? Or was I angry because I was hurt - because Vanessa had never felt any of the things I thought she had?
My wife had, from the very first moment I saw her tucked up in a chair on set with her delicate chin balanced on her knees, brought out my protective side. She had seemed so vulnerable when I first met her - so lost and unprepared for the rigors of Hollywood. Most of the women I met were confident in their own beauty and talent, even when that confidence was misplaced. The truth was, I'd always wanted to protect a woman - to wrap myself around her body and soul and shield her from the ugliness of the world. Had Vanessa sensed it and tailored her behavior towards that side of me? I so desperately wanted her to be the sweet, lost girl I met on that set and not the spoiled, rude princess she had turned into almost as soon as the ink was dry on our marriage certificate.
Sometimes in life, you know things long before you're ready to acknowledge them. I sat at my kitchen table as the light drew in and the shadows darkened and recognized the moment for what it was - the acknowledgement of an ugly truth - and one I think I already knew on some level, even as I refused to face it straight on. The coming days and weeks and months loomed up in front of me like a battlefield full of enemies - because there was no way Vanessa was going to let me go easily - there had been no pre-nuptial agreement and she knew without me she was going to slide back into D-list obscurity and a life of much lesser means than the one she was now living. Barrington would need to be called but not that night - I simply couldn't face it that soon.
The person I really wanted to call was Natasha Ray, who had just, unbeknownst to her, managed to avoid what promised to become an extremely messy situation by not getting pregnant on our first try at surrogacy. I picked up my phone and scrolled down to her number, staring almost transfixed at the glowing digits and willing myself not to call her - no woman wants a phone call from a drunken, morose married man. And even as I fantasized about showing up at her door and pulling her soft body into my arms as she kissed my forehead and told me everything was going to be fine, I knew it wasn't going to happen. So I took another drink and waited for my wife to come home as the stars came out one by one over the dark Pacific.
Vanessa didn't see me when she got in, because it was dark in the house by then and I hadn't turned any lights on. She walked into the kitchen and snapped on the light, shrieking with surprise when she saw me sitting there.
"Blake! Fuck, you scared the shit out of me. What are you doing?"
I watched her face as her eyes darted from my tired, unshaven face to the bottle of whiskey to the stack of papers in front of me. Like a dog on a scent she immediately honed in on the papers, striding over to me and peering down at them.
"Blake? What's going on?"
I could hear the effort it was taking to keep her voice calm - as far as she knew it was possible I'd just come home drunk and managed to sit down right next to her medical file. When I looked up at her, though, and she saw the look on my face, she knew. We stayed like that as the seconds ticked slowly by, both of us waiting for the other person to say something. It was me who spoke first:
"I want you out of here within the week, Vanessa."
Anger flashed briefly over her face but it quickly crumpled into tears as she fell onto her knees beside me, sobbing and wailing.
"Blake! I'm so sorry - I wanted to tell you but I was so scared!"
"Wanted to tell me what, Vanessa?" My voice was icy.
"That I wasn't pregnant - I thought I was, but I wasn't."
I recalled her telling me she was pregnant - she said she'd taken three pregnancy tests and they'd all been positive. Did she really think I would forget that?
"So you wanted to tell me you weren't pregnant. Alright. But why did you tell me you were, Vanessa?"
She didn't have a fast reply to that question so she just stayed where she was, weeping on the floor beside me. Whereas in the past I would have caved immediately, too moved by her tears to keep questioning her, that night I felt nothing. I asked her the question again.
"Why did you tell me you were pregnant?"
Vanessa looked up at me and I noticed her eyes were dry. There's was no mascara streaked down her cheeks, no snot bubbles forming on her upper lip. She was faking it. I pushed my chair back hard and stood up quickly, rage coursing through my veins.
"Holy shit! Holy shit, Vanessa, you're not even really crying! Oh my God, I am such an asshole. I am such a stupid asshole for falling for your bullshit. I meant what I said - I want you out within the week - I'll go stay in a hotel."
She was still looking at me. She gave up on her false tears, though, and said a single word to me:
"No."
I was momentarily stunned into silence. What did she mean, 'no'? It was my house, purchased by my parents years before I was even born and she definitely had to go. She continued before I could say anything, though:
"I've talked to my lawyer about this already, Blake. I don't have to go. This is shared property, you put my name on the deed. I'm not going anywhere."
She spat the last sentence at me, her features twisted into a mask of hatred and contempt as it dawned on me further just what a mistake I'd made marrying her. She'd seen a lawyer. She was expecting this.
"Oh my God..."
It was all I could say. Vanessa could see how completely shocked I was and she twisted the knife:
"You're not as smart as you think you are, Blake. You have no idea how easy it was to fool you. All I had to do was give you that politician's-wife look and cater to that massive ego of yours - it wasn't difficult."
If I had stayed, I would have done something I regretted. A flash of violence curled my hands into fists and at the same time I saw the look on Vanessa's face - almost hopeful. She wanted me to hit her.
"You-" I started, breathing heavily, "You are soulless... you are a fucking mercenary."
And then I left, lurching drunkenly out the front door and straight into the SUV that was always there, waiting. The driver, smoking a cigarette a few feet away, saw me and quickly stubbed it out, getting back into the driver's seat and looking in the rearview mirror at me.
"Sir? Are you alright?"
I met the driver's eyes and told him to take me to a hotel.
Chapter 9: Natasha
I was well into the process of settling into my temporary job at the studio when a blood test at the fertility clinic confirmed I wasn't pregnant. It was odd, to have spent the last few weeks half-convinced that there was a life inside me and then to find out that there wasn't, but I wasn't upset. Dr. Franco warned us it would probably take a few attempts so I was prepared for it to take a few months, if necessary. Rosa called me during my lunch break after I texted her the news, concerned I might be upset.
"Are you OK?"
"Yeah," I replied truthfully, "It's fine - we'll just try again next month, or whenever Dr. Franco thinks is the right time - there are five embryos in total and he's only doing one at a time anyway, to avoid a multiple birth."
Rosa sounded relieved. "Ah, good, OK, I just wanted to make sure you weren't upset about it. Besides, now you can have a few drinks when we go out this weekend."
I could have a few drinks - or maybe just one or two. Dr. Franco had told me to limit drinking to no more than three 'units' a week, just for general health reasons and I had no intention of going against my contract or doctor's orders. A night out did sound perfect, though. My new job was tolerable but it was very much another entry-level position - a lot of work for very little money and not much respect. Looking back I wouldn't say I was depressed - no part of me ever expected to 'make it' so soon after graduating with an English degree - but there was a certain grinding repetitiveness to the work that sometimes gave me the feeling that I was treading water instea
d of swimming upstream.
When Friday evening finally came I was well and truly ready to let my hair down and have some fun with my friends. There was a nice little club in our neighborhood that we went to sometimes - they played good music and the crowd was a solid one, well-dressed and up for a good time but lacking the pretentiousness levels that certain clubs in certain parts of L.A. were known for. I was just putting the final touches on my make-up when my phone rang. It was Blake. I don't know why I picked it up - perhaps it was because I'd managed to get a little perspective on the situation and realize that any minor flirting that had occurred between us had been of the completely harmless fun variety. As soon as I heard his voice, though, I knew something was up, even if he didn't tell me right away what it was.
"Natasha - how are you? Is everything OK?"
He sounded emotional. At first I thought it was because of the pregnancy news. We chatted for a few minutes and Rosa walked into my room, overhearing the conversation because the phone was lying on my dresser and I was just leaning over it to talk while I finished fussing with my unruly hair.
"So - are you guys up to anything tonight?" Blake had heard Rosa come into my room. She looked right at me, one eyebrow cocked with curiosity, when she heard his inquiry.
"Yeah - we're just going to go to this club we like close to here. I'm a little stressed out from work and...everything."
"You're going clubbing? Well why don't you get all your friends and come to Foufonique with me? I'm meeting a few friends of my own, we could all meet up."
Rosa's eyes got big at the mention of Foufonique - the newest, most exclusive club in L.A. at that point, and decidedly the hangout of A-listers and the stupidly rich offspring of the movers and shakers. It's not even the type of place I'd ever particularly wanted to go to but as soon as Blake mentioned it - as soon as it became a possibility - I realized it would be, at the very least, a fascinating evening. Arriving with Blake Charlton would guarantee an immediate pass to the VIP area, too. Rosa was nodding her head at me silently, encouraging me.