I turn my back on the window, on Paris, step to the nightstand, and again pick up the crystal clock. It’s just three. I need to finish the soup, take a bath, and wash my hair.
“How about five?” That should give me plenty of time, plus by then Manu will surely be back and able to watch over Margaret.
“Fine. Good. I have something to tell you too.”
I’m about to ask what when three short beeps tell me he’s hung up.
I’m glad. My first conversation with William in more than four months is over. It wasn’t so terrible. The sky didn’t fall. But I’m not any less freaked out than before, nor have I done much to prepare him for my “big news.”
Meanwhile, my big news is growing, growing, growing, right here in my belly. Whether or not either of her parents is ready, she will burst upon the scene in only sixteen, or seventeen, short weeks.
Seems like a long time.
Seems like no time at all.
fourteen
I do not choose the Café de la Poste as the venue for my meeting with William.
Nor do I select the ever-popular pizza joint. Or the stand-up coffee bar at the bakery with the red-and-white-striped awning. Or any other familiar establishment where people might recognize me.
Instead, I pick a small, darkish, no-name café Margaret and I don’t frequent, on a street we rarely walk down. I wear Margaret’s capacious Burberry and arrive early so that when William comes I can be sitting down, coat flaps arranged to conceal my baby bump. The news of Catherine is not news I want to deliver by accident.
“Merci,” I say to the unsmiling man who delivers my thé au citron. Ordering tea with lemon instead of milk earns greater respect from French waiters, who seem to feel you should add milk to your tea only at breakfast, if ever. At least that’s my impression. Possibly they just don’t like the hassle of bringing the pitcher. Or they believe the proper destiny of milk is to be made into cheese. Either way, today feels like a lemon day.
My hand trembles as I lift the hinged lid of my stainless-steel pot and peek inside. The tea is very black and has a kind of oil slick on the top. I probably should’ve ordered a non-caffeinated tisane instead.
“Hey.”
I let the lid drop. William is standing less than six feet away, wearing a magenta hoodie I have not seen before and carrying a tan plastic grocery bag from Albertsons. He made it right on time. I was wondering if he would, because he hung up on me before we could settle on a spot to meet and I had to text him the address of this café.
“Hi,” I say.
You know that scene in the movie Psycho where the violins go wreek-wreek-wreek while Janet Leigh is being stabbed in the shower? That’s the soundtrack playing in my head right now.
“Hello,” I add, lifting my chin and trying to imitate the rich velvety purr of a Parisienne.
I don’t succeed, but William doesn’t seem to notice. He just stands there and stares, a muscle working in his jaw. Do I look different? Better? Worse? A few days ago, before all this insanity began, I was thinking how great my skin looks now that I’m in my second trimester. In fact, I’ve never had a smoother, clearer complexion in my entire life. Margaret tells me I look radiant. But then Margaret would.
William takes three steps forward. I hold my breath. Then he takes two steps back. I’m wondering what the problem is when it occurs to me he’s registering my new appearance. Since having my hair bobbed, I’ve kept it this way, learning to enhance the look with smoky eye make-up and apricot lip gloss. The cut was Margaret’s idea, but truthfully, I didn’t need much urging. I’ve always yearned for short hair that bounces when I walk. Now I have it.
He squints as if he can’t quite put his finger on what’s different about me, obviously forgetting that he’s seen this new hairdo twice before. The first time was here in Paris when he came in pursuit of me and we had a big fight. The second was in Phoenix when I went in pursuit of him and we had another big fight. You know—the one I thought was the final one.
Finally, he shrugs and slings the Albertsons bag onto the tabletop. “Here. I brought your mail.”
I scooch down in my chair to peek into the bag. “Huh.”
Only William would methodically collect someone’s snail mail, including advertisements, then hand-carry it all the way from Arizona to France. But this is a man who rotates his socks and underwear so they wear evenly, and who tracks our Costco shopping list on an Excel spreadsheet. He even recalculates the transactions on our bank statements every month to make sure the computers did a good job.
And yet, perhaps crazily, I appreciate these qualities, especially that last one. Dad was haphazard with money. Kat didn’t care about it at all. To her, money was never a thing to spend energy worrying about. She always figured it would be there when she needed it. And in the end, she didn’t. It outlasted her.
William shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “You look different.” His voice is low, as if maybe he’s already figured out that French public spaces are quieter than American ones.
“So do you.” I eye his new stubble beard. It’s the first time I’ve seen it up close. Does he have one of those special razors that leaves a fashionable scruff, or does he shave at night so he’ll have a five o’clock shadow by morning? Both seem too intentionally voguish to be like William.
Also unlike William is that when he finally does take a seat, he swings his chair around and straddles it backwards. Not how Granddad, or the military, taught him to sit in a public place. Or any place.
“You subtracted hair.” He smiles crookedly. “I added it.”
Ah. So he does realize what the difference is. I toss my head, for the bounce, and feel lighter. “How are you? How’s Granddad?”
He takes his phone out of his hip pocket and places it face down on the table. “Good. He’s good.”
“Good,” I repeat, idiotically. “So you’re in Paris.”
“Yeah. I came—I came to see you.”
“I’m glad.”
His eyebrows rise. “You are?”
“Yes. I’ve been wondering about you. Worrying even. Did you receive my texts? Emails? Voicemails? I even mailed you a postcard.”
“Vous désirez, monsieur?”
We both jump in our seats. The unsmiling waiter is standing at William’s elbow. Americans like to go on about “rude French waiters,” but the truth is service in Parisian cafés, even seedy no-name cafés like this one, is generally excellent. Within a couple minutes of arriving, you can expect to be approached and asked what “you desire.” Sometimes this question catches me off guard. It’s so vast. So philosophical. I’m not always a hundred percent sure I know what I desire, to be honest. I wish I did.
“A beer,” William says, and I take advantage of the distraction to make sure Margaret’s coat still camouflages my stomach. Hang in there, sweet Catherine. We’ll get through this, together.
We sit in silence as the waiter fills a tall thin glass with amber liquid, carries it over to our table, and places it between us. William grabs it as if he’s dying of thirst and holds it up. “Cheers.”
When he puts his glass down, empty, I say, “Well?”
He licks his lips. For a guy, William has very full, soft lips. I picture them on my lips. “Well what?”
“My texts! Emails. Etcetera. You ignored them.”
He frowns. Looks at the floor. Fiddles with his phone. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”
I hate it when people apologize by saying, “Sorry about that.” It’s not a true apology. People who say it aren’t really sorry. They just want you to overlook whatever they did or didn’t do, and move on as if nothing happened. “No harm, no foul,” William often says. It’s another expression I don’t care for.
But since someone has to be the adult in the room I come straight to the point. “Will, I’ve got something important to tell you.” I speak slowly and clearly. I don’t want to have to repeat myself. That would be unbearable.
Yet, unbearably, he do
esn’t even look at me. Instead he picks up his phone and starts to scroll. I don’t believe he’s doing it to be annoying, per se. I just think he doesn’t know where to put his hands.
“Will?”
He scrolls a bit more before looking up. His normally chocolate brown eyes have turned coal black, and his expression is alert. Yet at the same time I have the sense that a significant portion of his brain is elsewhere. William is here but not here.
Still, William’s brain is often only partially available to me, and I can’t stop now. I don’t want to. William needs to know about Catherine, and Catherine needs William to know about Catherine. I take a deep breath.
“Will. Listen to me. I’m pregnant.”
Wreek-wreek-wreek.
How many times in the history of planet Earth has a woman delivered this exact same news to a man? Billions? Trillions? It’s the oldest headline in the world. Yet, as far as I know, not one of us has ever found a smooth way to go about it.
Even so, I expected more of a reaction. Or at least some reaction.
“Will, did you hear what I said?”
He grips his phone. The muscle in his jaw twitches. His inky eyes flick from my face to my abdomen to my face again. Two, three, four seconds go by, and then he chokes out three words. “Is it mine?”
All I can do is sit and stare. Perhaps this is a valid question. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. But you know what? I am surprised.
“Is it yours?” My voice is too loud. “Are you kidding me?”
His upper lip curls. “I’m only asking.”
“It’s yours, Will. You know it is.”
For a long moment we glare at each other across the table. I think he’s going to argue his point, but when he shrugs, glances at his phone, and returns it to his hip pocket, smirking, I realize he’s playing a game. William doesn’t truly believe I could, or would, be pregnant with someone else’s child. Not so soon after our break-up, which after all was less than six months ago. I’m not that kind of player, and he knows it.
So I take pleasure in watching him watch me as I lean back in my chair, casually flip open Margaret’s coat, and run my hands over the firm swell of my belly, arching my spine to make my stomach look bigger than it really is. His cheeks turn a satisfying shade of purple. I’m glad I took the trouble to put on something attractive—not my favorite long baggy sweater or even the loose red Christian Dior tunic from Hervé, but a stretchy black mini dress that fits snugly over my torso and shows off my developing cleavage. It’s Sophie’s. So is the black, white, and tan Hermès scarf draped around my shoulders. The clothes I’m wearing are sophisticated, flattering, and make me feel stronger and smarter than I probably am.
William leans forward and grips the edge of the table. A flicker of something electric—desire, confusion, anger, excitement—travels the space between us. “How many months?” His voice is hoarse. “When?”
Good. Catherine and I have his full attention now. “Almost twenty-two weeks. And you know the ‘when.’ It was the same night Kat died.”
Oh, that crazy night. After Kat closed her eyes for the last time I drove straight from the hospital to meet William at a downtown Phoenix hotel restaurant. His suggestion. We didn’t talk about what happened. We didn’t talk at all. We ate too much and drank too much and ended up having to get a room where we had sex I barely remember. But now he frowns as if he doesn’t recall the occasion. “April fourth,” I add.
“April fourth.” He frowns. “I didn’t know.”
He’s staring at my stomach when a phone pings. Not my phone. It sounds nearby, close enough to be William’s, but he doesn’t move to take it from his pocket. His hands are still gripping the edge of our table.
“How could you know? You’ve never answered any of my attempts to reach you. To tell you the news. You were shunning me.”
He looks up at me. “Is it a boy?”
I flinch. “A boy? What the hell kind of question is that?” I rewrap the lapels of Margaret’s coat over my belly.
Here I was just getting ready to tell him some fun things about Catherine. How, for example, the first time I saw her image on the ultrasound she looked like she was clapping her tiny hands. How she turns joyful somersaults while I’m walking downstairs or riding the Métro. How certain music—like Margaret’s beloved Chopin—makes her fall right asleep.
He shrugs. “What I mean is—do you know the sex?”
I lace my hands together and place them like a package on the table before me. Even before the ultrasound I knew the child I was carrying would be a girl. I just knew. I’d already decided her name would be Catherine. After Kat, but with the French spelling. I couldn’t help myself, though I’m sure William would never want any child of his to be named after Kat. To put it mildly, they did not get along. Kat rubbed him the wrong way from the start.
“Amy. Please.” He maintains his death grip on the table, his knuckles blotchy.
I sigh. He’ll have to know eventually. He’s Catherine’s father. Always will be. “It’s a girl. A daughter.”
A scowl forms on his face, then clears. “A daughter?” Before I can react, he leaps to his feet, his mouth curving in the beginnings of a grin. His killer grin. “Wow. That is—” He searches for a suitable word. “That is really something.”
The only other time I’ve seen William have so much trouble expressing himself was the first time I told him I was pregnant, before we were married. Together William and I must be insanely fertile. When I think back on it—the speed of our courtship and wedding—it seems like it happened to someone else.
He paces, then returns to sit in a different chair, one closer to mine. In fact, his right knee bumps against my left knee. The coin-sized spot where our bodies touch is warm, almost hot. Physical contact with William has always had this mesmerizing effect on me, and I don’t move away. Maybe I should. But I can’t.
I can’t.
“Ames, are you OK? I mean, how do you feel?”
His eyes have returned to their normal chocolate brown, the same color as Kat’s. And I think I see—yes, slipping out of the outer corner of his right eye, a single tear.
Which would make this the first time I’ve ever seen William cry. It feels momentous. In our few years as a couple I’ve done the weeping for both of us. Even when I had the miscarriage, soon after our hasty wedding, all he did was look grave, and then, days later, inform me in a neutral tone that “one third of first pregnancies end in miscarriage.”
Facts and data. They can serve you, and you can love them, but they’ll offer little love or solace in return. Anyway, information isn’t the same thing as knowledge. I said this to William once, not long after we started dating. He just looked at me.
But I need to keep a clear head so I move my knee away. “I’m fine, everything is fine.”
He notices neither my change of position nor tone, because the nearby phone is pinging again. It has to belong to him.
And it does, because this time his hand goes to his pocket. “Listen.” He doesn’t look at me. “I’m beat. Jetlag is kicking my butt. You look tired too. Why don’t we call it a night?”
“Call it a—?”
“Go home and get some rest,” he interrupts, slapping a ten-euro note on the table. “We can meet again tomorrow morning, when we’re both better able to talk. How about nine?”
Before I can say yes or no or what-the-hell, he leaps to his feet. Smiles his killer smile. “I won’t ask you any more questions now.”
I get up slowly, conscious of the intent way he studies the shape of my body. His fingers flex, as if he’s thinking about reaching out to touch me, and I wonder what it would feel like—the sensation of his hand cupping my belly. No man’s hand has cupped my belly, or cupped any part of me, for quite some time. Since April fourth, specifically.
Instead, he puts his hands to work zipping up his new magenta hoodie. “Should we meet here? Is this a convenient place for you?”
“Um. Sure.” Both t
he time and place would be perfect. The café is nearby, and tomorrow is Saturday. That means no lunchtime deliveries and Manu will be available to watch over Margaret, if need be.
William is already halfway to the exit. “Great. See you then. Take care of yourself.” He reaches for the door and pauses. “Yourselves,” he corrects himself.
Catherine tickles my ribs. My darling girl. “Yeah. I will. You too.”
I’m buttoning my coat when he swings back around and hurries over to me. Before I realize what he’s up to, he grasps me by the shoulders—cupping them—and lightly presses his lips to my forehead. My body flares like a flame. But William has no clue. He turns and leaves the café without looking back.
I sink back into my chair and watch him through the window as he strides down the narrow sidewalk, phone in hand. It’s over. Our first meeting is over. William never asked how I’ve been spending my time in Paris or what I’ve been doing for money. Or where I’ve been living or what my plans are. Or even where I got these great clothes.
He does, however, possess one salient piece of data. He knows my big news.
Me, I only have a plastic grocery bag full of snail mail.
fifteen
When I return to the no-name café the next morning, William is already there.
“Hey,” he says, glancing at my stomach.
“Hey.”
I take a seat. He chose the same table we had last night. Today it’s bathed with sunshine and is clearly, I now see, the best one in the place—not too close to the door, enough out of the traffic path to be private, as far as possible from the noisy electronic game machine in the corner, yet near a window so you have a good view of the street. Choosing your table in a Paris café is an art.
This morning, however, it’s hard to appreciate our primo location. Despite the fact that Sophie slept at Manu’s last night and I got to stay in my own comfortable room, I was so freaked out about William and Margaret and Sophie and what in the world will happen next that I lay awake until well past three. When I did drift off, I slept too deeply and too long, leaving me no time this morning to wash my hair or even slap on lip gloss. My head pounds. My eyes burn. I have a pillow wrinkle embedded into one cheek.
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