The Seven Year Bitch

by Jennifer Belle

  “What’s she saying?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” Charlie said. “Wait, I think she wants to cook for you. You. Want. Cook. For. Izzy. And. Russell? She’s a great cook. She wants to start a Thai catering company here in Woodstock.”

  I always got a kick out of everyone in our little town, including Russell, thinking they lived in Woodstock. We were at least thirty minutes from Woodstock. Maybe it was because if we really were in Woodstock our house would be worth a hell of a lot more. Or maybe it was because our town was called Kripplebush, which didn’t exactly sound auspicious.

  Gra reached into a shopping bag, pulled out a photo album, and laid it out on the kitchen table next to the uninspired ham and Brie, lettuce, and bread I had set out for sandwiches.

  “Is this your family?” I asked.

  “No, it’s food,” Charlie said. On each page was a glossy photo of a different noodle dish.

  “Yum yum,” Gra said, and I cringed.

  “Maybe Gra can teach Izzy to cook,” Russell suggested.

  Maybe Gra could cater Russell’s funeral instead of the Second Avenue Deli.

  “Sure,” Charlie said. “Gra doesn’t mind. She can cook, garden, clean. I’m the luckiest man in the world.”

  He knocked back his drink and then another one.

  “That’s great,” Russell said. “I highly recommend married life.”

  We assembled sandwiches and brought them to the living room to sit in front of the fireplace.

  “So how did you two, uh, meet?” Russell asked.

  “Well I went there to get a wife and she was the last one I got to interview. She was the only one,” Charlie emphasized vigorously, “who insisted on having a chaperone. I had sex with all the others but not with her. It just wasn’t allowed.”

  “Really!” Russell said. “So you two haven’t even . . .”

  “Oh no, we had sex right after, but not when her mother was with us.”

  And what happens when she stops cutting your toenails, I wanted to scream. Or opening Coke bottles and smoking cigarettes with her vagina, or whatever I’d heard about all those girls who did sex shows out there. Then the joke’s on you, I thought. Because you’ll be married.

  “Very good,” Russell said.

  “You know it was my third trip there,” Charlie said. “It was what I promised my sister right before she died.” Charlie’s sister had died in a car crash while he was talking to her on her cell phone. He was complaining about a woman he was trying to date, and she had said, “You’re impossible, Charlie. Why don’t you just go to Thailand to get a wife. It’s the only way you’ll get one to put up with you,” and that was the last thing she had ever said to him.

  “You guys are very sweet to look out for me like this,” Charlie said. “But don’t worry, I’m not being stupid. I’m waiting a few weeks before the wedding. And I can get out of it for like a whole year if I don’t like what I see before she gets her green card. We’re really very much in love. I mean she was a little surprised because I told her we lived in New York and she didn’t know I didn’t mean the city.”

  “Well Izzy and I are very happy for you,” Russell said. “Welcome to Kripplebush.”

  I don’t think I had ever heard anything more depressing.

  Sunday night we drove home to the city. Before going to bed, I brought Thursday’s pizza box out to the garbage room so that Shasthi wouldn’t see it there in the morning, and I startled our neighbor Sherry as she was throwing out a stack of newspapers. Sherry was embarrassed to be caught in the hall in her nightgown, a short white cotton girlie thing covered in green fireflies.

  “I’m throwing out everything I can. There’s one of those giant water bugs in my loft,” Sherry said, her voice filled with the particular guttural rage all New Yorkers felt when this happened to them.

  “Oh no,” I said, my whole body tensing at the thought of it but also flooding with relief that it was in her apartment and not mine, although our apartments were only separated by a wall, a stairwell, and an elevator. I really couldn’t stand water bugs. It was a challenge I hadn’t been faced with yet as a mother. If I saw one, I would normally scream at the top of my lungs and leave the apartment for several days like a prehistoric woman surrendering her cave, but I knew I shouldn’t do that now that I was a mother.

  “I’m tired of having to deal with everything alone,” Sherry said. She was a single mother of a teenage daughter. “I want to get married if for no other reason than this.”

  “That’s the only reason to get married,” I said.

  “How am I going to sleep with that thing in my house?” Sherry said.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t wear that nightgown,” I said, pointing to the fireflies. “Maybe he was attracted to you.” I immediately regretted saying something so stupid when she hadn’t had a date in two years. I had to find a way to help. “Russell will kill it,” I said.

  I got Russell out of bed and he dutifully went into battle, wearing only his boxer shorts and carrying a rolled-up New York Post for a club. Sherry and I stood in the hall waiting. Moments later Russell came out. “I got it,” he said. “I hit it with your scale.”

  When I got into bed with Russell I felt grateful to him. He had barely grumbled, just gotten out of bed and taken care of it like a man. I thought of Sherry sleeping safely next door. I thought of Duncan in his crib and Shasthi somewhere in the Bronx, with pillows under her so her pelvis was tilted upward as I had instructed her to always do after sex for at least an hour.

  I was grateful to be married for this if for no other reason.

  “Thanks for doing that,” I said.

  “It was a really big one.”

  I lay there for a few minutes considering having sex with him, despite the fact that I was so tired and had absolutely no desire to. There wasn’t one cell in my body that wanted to have sex with Russell. It was after midnight and the baby would be up by five. I should at least touch him, I thought, try to do something affectionate. I reached over and gently tugged on a small bunch of his hair.

  “Hmmm, thank you,” he said.

  He seemed satisfied with that, and frankly sex seemed just a little bit pointless. Now that I knew what it was like to make love and get a baby in the end, doing it just for the sake of doing it sometimes didn’t seem worth giving up the sleep for. Russell wanted to use birth control, which seemed almost like a bitter joke, considering all we had been through to have Duncan. It seemed wrong to leave Dr. Heiffowitz’s office with your beautiful baby boy and rush to the store for condoms. Russell said it felt dangerous to have sex unprotected, but to me it felt dangerous not to be unprotected, like we were slapping the face of God.

  “I’m tired,” Russell said.

  “I’m soooo tired.”

  “You have Shasthi coming tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s really great, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, she’s really great. I just wish we could get her pregnant.”

  “Well, we can’t,” Russell said.

  “I think we should get her a cell phone,” I said. I started to get excited thinking of how happy she would be when I presented her with her own cell phone. “It would be good to be able to check up on the baby.”

  “Do you think we can trust her with it?” Russell asked.

  “You’re kidding, right?” I asked, completely exasperated.

  “No, why? I don’t want her calling—where is it?”

  “GUY-ana,” I said like I was talking to the town fool. “We trust her with our baby, I think we can trust her with a cell phone.”

  “She can’t make long-distance calls on the baby,” Russell said.

  Our win-a-shrink was an obese man named Howard Klein who sat in a sagging chair drinking a Snapple with a mobile of winged frogs dancing over his bald head.

  “What made you bid on couples therapy at the auction?” he asked.

  Russell and I sat squeezed together on the too-small love seat facing him.
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br />   I instantly started to cry and as I cried I realized that my tears were not wholeheartedly sad, because Duncan was fine, and as long as Duncan was fine, I was too grateful to be sad. Still the tears poured out of me for no reason.

  “What are those? Frogs?” Russell asked, about the mobile.

  “Russell, did you notice that your wife is crying?”

  “Yes I did.”

  “Do you want to ask her why she’s crying?”

  “Not really,” Russell said.

  “Well, I’d like to know why your wife is crying,” the shrink said. “Izzy, do you want to tell us why you’re crying?”

  “I’m tired,” I said. “I get up with the baby at five while Russell sleeps. He never stops reading. He takes agents and authors to lunch every day.”

  “She’s never believed in my work,” Russell spit out.

  I hated this accusation more than anything. His business lost money every month. We had put thousands and thousands of dollars into it. There were boxes of unwanted books everywhere in our apartment. We couldn’t even sit at the dining-room table anymore.

  “The way I see it,” Howard said, “we each live on our own planet in our own universe. I live in my own world and you have no way of understanding the rules of my world because the rules are completely different from the rules in your worlds.” I knew one rule of his world was you could eat as much dessert as you wanted to. “That’s something I want us to think a lot about. I want you each to start making a list of some things the other can do for you that makes sense in your world. It sounds like one thing Izzy would like, Russell, is for you to wake up at five with the baby, and it sounds like one thing Russell needs in his world is for you, Izzy, to support his work.”

  The only thing I knew was that I could no sooner support Russell’s work than he could wake up at five with the baby.

  “Now,” Howard continued, “besides working on your lists, I’m going to give you a trust exercise to do together.”

  “Great!” Russell said, leaning forward to pay full attention to the assignment.

  “This is something you can choose to do blindfolded or not blindfolded,” Howard said.

  If he thought we were going to take turns falling backward into the other’s waiting arms, he was crazy, because if one of Russell’s authors called on his cell phone I’d be on the floor in two seconds.

  He took a sip from his Snapple. “I want you, Russell, to lead Izzy all around your apartment by her nipples.”

  “What?” I said, trying to think if there was any other word he could have said.

  “Yes,” Howard said. “Pull Izzy around your apartment by her nipples. She has to follow you. You are the leader and she is the follower. Does that seem like something you two could try?”

  I turned to look at Russell, who was just nodding his head like a lunatic.

  “I see,” Russell said. “Well that’s certainly an interesting suggestion. I forgot to ask, why did you put your therapy services up for auction? Do you have a child at the school?”

  “Does it matter to you if I have a child? I happen to have a patient who has a child at the school. I myself am not married and have no children. Izzy, how do you feel about letting Russell lead you by your nipples? You know what, don’t answer me now. This is a good place to stop.”

  “But we’ve only been here twenty minutes,” Russell said.

  “We don’t go by the clock in my practice. I intuitively know when it’s time to stop. Is this time next week good for you?”

  “Yes,” Russell said, and I looked at him in disbelief. He couldn’t even say no to this fat nipple-pervert. I was going to have to be the one to stop this.

  “We’ll have to look at our schedules—you know two worlds, two schedules—and give you a call,” I said and opened the door to his office. As soon as I opened the door someone fell in.

  “Oh, sorry. Howard, do you have a moment?” He was beet red from embarrassment.

  “It’s like a Three Stooges movie,” Russell said.

  I walked quickly down the hall with no one leading me by my nipples.

  For some reason I thought of a man I had met once years before when I was single. He was the kind of man I made sure to stay away from, the kind usually named Roman or Camus, with gorgeous curly manelike hair and a thousand girlfriends all trying to follow him to South America, which he was going to do something like “check out.” This particular man I was thinking of I had met in a club the same night I’d met Russell. We’d talked for a long time and he’d told me he was leaving for Paris the next evening. He was leaving his wife, he said, and I was horrified to even be talking to him. “Why would you throw away a marriage?” I had asked him, and he’d said something like, “There has to be more heat to a fire than that.” I couldn’t remember exactly how he’d put it, but it had to do with heat and fire and passion that had left his marriage and something about it had always stayed in my head after that. I couldn’t remember his name or even what he looked like exactly, but I remembered this man saying something like that to me, his voice filled with a certainty and a longing that I admired but had also detested at the time. I could never walk away from someone like he did. Even if I wanted to, I could never do it.

  There has to be more heat to a fire than that, repeated itself in my head.

  I wished I’d said it in couples therapy. I almost felt like walking back down the hall and into Howard Klein’s office and saying it now.

  “You should come with me to Paris,” the man had said.

  “I’m not going to Paris!” I had guffawed. But a small part of me had thought about it.

  “I think we should give it a try,” Russell said when we were in the elevator. “It’s a trust exercise.” He tried to grab my nipples through my shirt. “For the sake of our marriage.”

  “We don’t even kiss anymore,” I said. “We never kiss.” We didn’t even kiss hello or good-bye, even when Russell came back from a business trip. We didn’t kiss when we had sex.

  “So we’ll kiss,” Russell said.

  But we didn’t kiss, and when we got out on the street, he looked at his BlackBerry and then called a moronic writer whose first name was just the letter “C” and immediately started talking to her. We walked that way for a few blocks and finally I just signaled to him that I was going to go in the other direction, and he put up his hand to wave to me, and I walked away without him.

  11

  A couple of weeks later I was pushing Duncan in a swing in the playground when my cell phone rang. It was the man—Gabe Weinrib—calling to make an appointment for me to work on his portfolio.

  “Is this a bad time, Mizz Brilliant?” he said confidently.

  “Not at all,” I said, all business.

  “So, m’dear, I seem to have won your services.”

  “That does seem to be the case,” I said, thinking this guy sounded like a complete idiot.

  “Can I make an appointment to come by your office this week, or could you be persuaded to let me take you out to dinner? My treat of course.”

  “Um, let me look in my book,” I said. I thought of the last time I had seen my office before riding down in an elevator filled with men in suits.

  I tickled Duncan’s tummy and made him laugh.

  “The problem is I’m supposed to go back to Paris on Friday and I’ll be there for two weeks,” he said.

  “Well, I just don’t have anything available this week. . . .”

  “All right, I was just hoping to lure you out to dinner before I go, just to get the ball rolling, then you could take your time.”

  I suddenly remembered that he knew I was at Richman and might think he could stop by the office to see me. A restaurant would solve the problem of where to do this.

  “Well maybe dinner would be okay. Let’s say tomorrow, but I won’t be coming from work. . . .”

  “How about Jean-Georges then, tomorrow at seven?”

  “Jean-Georges?” I said. It was my favorite restaurant.
Dinner would cost hundreds of dollars.

  “Is that okay with you?” he asked.

  “It’s great,” I said.

  “Thank you, m’dear. Lookin’ forward to it.”

  “You have a record of everything you’re currently holding?” I said sternly. With all the m’dears, he was playing this like it was out of a scene from Oklahoma! and he had bid the highest on my picnic hamper.

  I smiled at the woman pushing her baby in the next swing.

  He laughed. “Yes and I’m happy to put what I’m currently holding in your hands.”

  Men always got filthy when they talked about their money. I was used to it and I was going to make a comment about throwing a pair of rubber gloves into my purse but I thought better of it. Instead I said, “Why don’t you bring along a personal financial statement and a comprehensive listing of assets, liabilities, real estate, investment accounts, bank accounts, business interests, other valuable property, and art if you’re a collector.” God help me, I thought, and got off the phone.

  The next night I considered my wardrobe and finally decided on a blue-and-red pinstripe dress with a little stretch to it. The whole effect was really not so bad. The dress pulled slightly at my stomach, where a year and a half before a baby had been, but when I put on tights and the coat that went with the dress, you couldn’t really tell. I put on mascara because my mother’s shrink said that was all you needed—mascara—and a little lipstick.

  “You look so good!” Shasthi said.

  I shrugged.

  “No, really. I’ve never seen you like this.” She hadn’t known me when I used to dress up for work every day.

  Duncan walked to me with his confident stride and touched my knee. “Woman,” he said. “Woman.”

  “He notices too! He’s never seen you in panty hose.”

  I put on a pair of high-heeled black boots I hadn’t worn since before the layoff. “You should dress like this all the time,” she said. “You look like Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Whoa, you look great,” Russell said, looking up from his desk. “Where are you going?”