That night Russell went to a business dinner and Duncan and I ordered room service. Duncan sat in a dresser drawer watching Bambi on pay-per-view.
My phone rang. “So you’re here,” he said.
“Yes, are you?”
“Yes, m’dear. I’m in Bo-ca.” He said it the way he said everything, in this sort of seventies swinging-single way.
“Okay,” I said, sounding like Shasthi.
“Shall I pick you up tomorrow at your hotel? We could go to the beach?”
“Actually I promised I’d take Duncan to Parrot Jungle,” I said. I didn’t know why I had said that. I had absolutely no desire to go to Parrot Jungle but it had just nervously come out of my mouth. It was the only thing I could think of to get out of going to the beach with him.
“That sounds like fun,” he said. “Parrot Jungle it is. My treat.” The man had two hundred million dollars. He had to stop saying “my treat” all the time, for Christ’s sake. Some things went without saying.
“Okay,” I said.
“Shall we say eleven?”
“Sure,” I said. He must really like me, I thought. I sat down on the hotel bed and smoothed my hair like a fifties housewife. If I’d had an apron I’d have smoothed that too. “Let’s meet there, though. We have our cell phones, we’ll find each other.”
“Oh, okay,” he said, knowingly.
“Oh, okay, what?” I said.
“Just okay,” he said.
“No really, what?” I said, like a fifties housewife talking to a seventies swinger, like Lucy had somehow lost Ricky and somehow wandered aboard the Love Boat.
“Great,” he said. “So I’ll see you around the entrance at eleven.”
I got off the phone completely bewildered.
Everywhere you looked at Parrot Jungle there were birds walking around eating garbage. There were parrots to pet and tortoises to photograph and a tiger named Champa, which Duncan got a huge kick out of because that was also the name of one of the other nannies in the playground, a friend of Shasthi’s. There was every kind of preening, colorful male species.
The only thing there wasn’t was Gabe.
Finally, when Duncan passed out in his stroller after ice cream, I called him.
“Sorry, m’dear. I got held up in Bo-ca.”
“Oh, no problem,” I squawked. “We were coming here anyway.”
“I would have liked to have met your son. Next time I’ll bring my son and we’ll all go.”
“What? You didn’t tell me you had a son!”
“Didn’t I? That’s strange. He lives in France with his mother and her yoga instructor boyfriend who I support.”
“Why do you support him?” I asked.
“Because he lives with my son and my son’s mother and I want my son to be totally comfortable in every way. His name is Mathieu and he’s eight. His mother is a French model who I had a short fling with. And now it’s worked out very well. I spend half the time in New York and half the time in Paris with him and I couldn’t be happier. But back then, when she told me she was pregnant, I thought it was the end for me. I begged her to get an abortion. I offered her millions of dollars. I threatened her, I said I would demand a paternity test, give her nothing. But she wouldn’t even consider an abortion. So I have a son. And it’s the best thing in the world. And I have you to thank for it, m’dear.”
“What am I to thank for?” I asked.
“I met the mother of my son the day I landed in Paris, the day after I met you at Don Hill’s. If you had come with me I wouldn’t have met her. I wouldn’t have Mathieu. You might not have Duncan. I’d love to have another baby one day, this time with a wife who I actually live with in the same country. Do you want to have more children?”
All the mothers in Duncan’s toddler class were constantly asking each other if they were going to have another baby. It was so personal, so private, yet it was the first thing out of everyone’s mouth and considered totally acceptable.
“Russell—my husband—and I aren’t getting along that well,” I said, which I seemed to be saying to men left and right lately. I didn’t even know why I was talking to him at all. I had sat down on a bench without realizing it and tucked my legs under me. I felt like he was there watching me, but I couldn’t see him. I felt like I was in a confessional.
“I’m sorry,” he said. I didn’t know what he meant by that. Why was he sorry, exactly?
I had come all the way to Florida for this, I thought. I had made a fool of myself, getting stood up by this man, almost exposing my son to him, risking my entire marriage, and he was sorry I wasn’t getting along with Russell? I vowed right there and then to devote myself completely to Duncan. And to spend the entire next day on the beach with him looking at shells. His little tank top that Shasthi had gotten him that said “I’m the Boss” was covered in ice cream.
I felt duped but I had no one to blame but myself.
“You know,” Gabe Weinrib said, “you have so many of the qualities I’m looking for in a woman.”
“Like what?” I asked, wondering how to get off the phone.
“You’re smart, and funny, and beautiful, and a wonderful mother . . .”
“I thought you liked models and redheads with great little bodies.”
“I see you’ve been paying attention. But actually I like brunettes. Let me put it this way, you have so many of the qualities I’m looking for in a woman I’d want to settle down with.”
“What do you mean ʽso many’ of the qualities? What qualities don’t I have?” I asked.
“Well, you’re married,” he said.
“I should go,” I said. “I have to take Duncan to the monkeys.”
I got off the phone and stared at Duncan, wishing that he would wake up so I wouldn’t feel so alone, and when he did I prayed he would go back to sleep because I had no idea how to pretend to be having a good time.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you to the gift shop. My treat.”
He looked sleepily up at me as if asking who the hell else’s treat it would be. He chose a stuffed Champa the tiger. On our way back to the hotel in the car service, he threw it out the window.
When we got back to the hotel I was tired. Russell was waiting for us in the room.
“Let’s go to the beach,” he said.
“You go,” I said. “I’m going to lie down for a little while.”
A few hours later I woke up to find Russell staring down at me.
“You’re taking a nap,” he said.
“So?” I said.
“So you haven’t taken a nap since you were pregnant with Duncan.”
“It’s just a nap,” I said. He just stood there continuing to stare at me, suspiciously. “I’m not pregnant, if that’s what you’re thinking. Dr. Heiffowitz said I can’t get pregnant.” My period was late. I thought of the unopened box of Tampax I’d thrown in my bag. After my last date with Gabe Weinrib I’d wanted to be prepared.
The next morning, driving back to the airport, Russell pulled the rental car over in front of a Walgreens and Duncan and I waited while he came back with a pregnancy test kit.
“You’re being silly,” I said.
“Do the test now,” he said when we got to the airport.
“Let’s wait till we get home.”
“Test now,” he said.
I waited on line in the ladies room with Duncan by my side because as a mother I was never allowed to pee alone. We locked ourselves into a stall. “Don’t touch anything,” I said.
I unzipped my jeans and sat on the toilet. I removed the pregnancy test from its wrapper.
“What’s that?” Duncan asked.
“It’s something for mommies,” I said.
I heard a woman on line laugh. “It’s hard to have boys,” she said.
“Is that a toy for me?” Duncan asked.
“You can have this part,” I said, giving him the wrapper and the plastic cap that went over the stick’s tip.
�
�Mommy’s making a poopie!” Duncan announced loudly.
I heard a couple of women laugh.
“No, honey, I’m not,” I said, and before I’d even finished peeing, the stick said pregnant.
In the morning I got Dr. Heiffowitz on the phone.
“Doctor?” I said, after I was sure he knew which Brilliant I was. “I took a pregnancy test and it said I was pregnant. That’s how messed up my body must be, how wrong my levels are, how out of whack I am. Maybe it’s early menopause. I’m forty. I mean I know I can’t be pregnant. So, what do you think?”
“I think you’re pregnant,” he said.
“But you said that would be impossible!” I practically screamed, like I was a teenage girl and Dr. Heiffowitz was my teenage boyfriend, not the most eminent reproductive endocrinologist in the world.
“I would never say that,” he said. “I’ve seen sixty-five-year-old women get pregnant, women who had been in menopause for years, women with nonexistent levels, much worse than yours, women whose bodies were ravaged with cancer, women with just a sliver of one ovary left in them. So you see, I would never say such a thing.”
Before I could say one more “But you said that” he had handed me over to Scottie.
The miscarriage I’d had before I’d gotten pregnant with Duncan and before I’d met Dr. Lichter was called a blighted ovum, which meant that the pregnancy had never really existed. There was nothing in the egg. Even though I had taken a home pregnancy test, several of them actually, and had had the pregnancy confirmed by an ob-gyn, been prescribed prenatal vitamins, stopped drinking alcohol and taking hot showers, vomited and fought exhaustion, and told every person I came in contact with for nine and a half long weeks that I was pregnant, they had the nerve to tell me that I hadn’t really been. There was no heartbeat. It hadn’t ever been real.
I had lain on the table staring at the sonogram screen, waiting to hear the heartbeat.
“That’s funny,” the doctor said, shoving the wand around a little more aggressively.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“I don’t hear anything.”
Even though I had to have a D&C to remove the egg, I had never really been pregnant.
And once, when I was eight months pregnant with Duncan, I prayed for a miscarriage. Russell’s parents were visiting us at the country house. To make his mother happy we went to a crafts fair, which was not so much crafts as crap. Still his mother looked at everything—refrigerator magnets, Post-it notepads with flip-flops and suns wearing sunglasses on them, crappy clothes from India that you could buy at any street fair in Manhattan, and every manner of tote bag.
Watching his mother buying a sweatshirt for herself with Noah’s Ark on it and the words “TWO BY TWO” puff-painted under it made my head feel like it was going to blow off my body. Her husband, my future son’s grandfather, was nattering by her side. I welled up with bile. I was sick. I weaved behind them through aisle after aisle—his mother had now put on the sweatshirt, leaving the collar of her shirt peeking out over the collar of the sweatshirt—and I had to sit down on a chair made out of rope for a few minutes with my head down between my legs. What have I done? I wanted to yell out to the fertility gods I had once prayed to. What is inside of me? Please God, I begged, rid me of this . . . thing . . . inside me. I did not want to propagate whatever genes were in those people and now in me. I did not want to bring forth into the world another Trent boy child.
A security guard approached me and asked if I would like to be escorted to the first-aid tent, but I’d refused. I doubted they would give me an abortion in first aid between the face-painting booth and the guy selling the flamingo lawn ornaments.
From the backseat of the car, as we’d driven back to our house with Russell’s father in the passenger seat next to Russell happily chirping questions at me about phantom bonds and Russell’s mother chirping next to me about how everyone was meant to be a couple, I told Russell I felt sick.
“Two by two’s pretty much how God intended it,” his mother said.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” I said urgently.
“Well that’s pregnancy for you,” his mother said.
Pain was shooting up my neck into my ears. I’d had one or two bouts of morning sickness in the very beginning but nothing like this.
“Russell pull over,” I said.
“Okay, give me a minute,” he said.
“Ugh,” his mother said. “Did I ever tell you about the two times when I was pregnant with Russell that I got so sick?”
“No,” I gasped.
“Well, have you ever smelled the smell of old mop? Once I was in a supermarket and I turned a corner and I suddenly smelled that smell of really old, dirty, moldy mop . . .”
“Ooooooohhhh,” I moaned.
“And I kept asking myself, ‘What is that?’ and I realized they must have mopped the floors with an old smelly mop, and well, I just lost my lunch right there in the produce aisle. And the second time . . .”
“No,” I said.
“Oh yes. I was in the kitchen in the Cape Cod house, and I thought to myself, Well, it’s time to make dinner, and I took a whole chicken out of the fridge, and I said to myself, ‘You know, this just doesn’t smell right.’ You know that smell of rotting chicken, long after it’s turned?”
“Russell, pull over!” I begged.
He swerved to the side of the road, and, with his mother rubbing my back in irritating little circles, I vomited and vomited out of the open car door, right in someone’s driveway. I lay in bed for the rest of their stay with cold wet washcloths on my forehead, praying for death. God had punished me for thinking those thoughts about my baby.
When I got off the phone with Dr. Heiffowitz I was too stunned even to call Russell. I was pregnant! I was going to have another baby. I filled Humbert’s water bowl but I forgot to put it on the floor for him. He didn’t have any water for the whole day.
Shasthi came home with Duncan.
“Izzy, may I speak to you about something?” She handed me a pregnancy test stick in a ziplock sandwich bag.
“What’s this?” I said. I’d taken a few more tests before calling Dr. Heiffowitz and I must have accidentally left one on the side of the tub for her to find.
“It’s a pregnancy test,” she said.
“So you know,” I said. “I’m pregnant.”
“You’re pregnant?”
“Isn’t that why you’re showing me my pregnancy test?” I asked.
“No. I’m showing you mine. I’m pregnant. I did this over by Champa today.”
“We’re pregnant!” I said, and we both started jumping up and down. Duncan joined in.
“Why are you both so happy?” Duncan asked.
“Because we love you so much,” I said.
32
As soon as I found out I was pregnant, instantly, it seemed, I got huge. This second pregnancy was nothing like the first. Everything was happening so fast I didn’t have the luxury of sleeping enough or eating properly or dreaming about the baby inside of me. If it hadn’t been for my enormous size and the fact that there was no possible position to sleep in, I would have forgotten I was pregnant altogether.
“Why am I so much bigger this time?” I asked the nurse.
“You’re three years older,” she said.
At the end of that summer, in the country, Russell got stung by a wasp. He had taken Duncan down to the stream and I had stayed up at the house. Even from inside the house, I heard the terrible, bloodcurdling screams. This was it, I thought to myself. Russell had been attacked by a bear. Wearing just my Crocs and my beige Old Navy maternity panties, I waddled as fast as I could down the hill, overgrown with tall ferns, to protect Duncan. The howls of pain continued and there was cursing, “Shit, fuck, shit, fuck.” I was gripped with panic, thinking that it might not have been Russell, that it might have been Duncan who’d been hurt. I stood frozen for a second, wondering if I should go back to the house to call 911 or continu
e on to find them.
“Duncan, Duncan,” I repeated over and over as I tore through the woods toward Russell’s cries of anguish.
Then I saw them. Russell was doing a crazy dance like Rumplestiltskin, and Duncan was trying to calm him by trying to rub his back. Russell’s skinny limbs were flying everywhere.
“Duncan,” I yelled.
He ran to me. “Daddy said a fucket word!” Duncan called all bad words “fucket words,” including words like stupid.
“What happened?”
“Daddy got sting-ed,” Duncan said. “Hey, why are you naked!”
I took his hand and approached the insane little dancing man.
“I got stung by a wasp,” Russell cried. “Ooooooooh ooooooh.” He showed me his calf with its small red patch.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Duncan, Daddy’s going to be all right. Is this how you want your son to see you?” was how I began it. I was shaking in my Crocs. “You are teaching him that it’s okay to be hysterical!” I screamed.
“It’s okay, Mommy,” Duncan said.
“No, Duncan. It is not okay. This is not how you should act if you get hurt. You have to be brave. Men are supposed to be brave. And mommies have to be brave too.”
“It really hurts,” Russell said.
“It doesn’t hurt that much,” I said.
“It does.”
“Well, why don’t you stay down here and cry and Duncan and I will head back up to the house. When you come up I’ll give you some Advil and an ice pack.” I took Duncan’s hand and we started back through the mud toward the house, the naked pregnant mother and the toddler.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Russell stuttered, limping behind us. “You’re right, I’ll try to be brave next time.”
My rage was more poisonous than a thousand wasp stings.
“Ow, shit. It just really hurts. It’s . . .” He gasped for air. “A lot of pain.”
“You don’t know pain,” I yelled. “You’re complaining to a pregnant woman that you’re in pain?” I continued the long uphill march to the house, uncomfortable being naked, even though that was why we had bought the house. “If you had to feel what I feel for one minute, you would drop dead.” I was huffing and puffing from the exertion.
The Seven Year Bitch Page 20