“Look,” he said.
By the door, the swag bags, black and shiny with Chanel printed on them, were being set out. He walked over and grabbed one—despite the dirty look he received from the girl who had thought I was calling her brilliant—and brought it back to me. I pulled out a deluxe sample of Chanel Precision, the very product I was supposed to be using for wrinkles.
He opened the jar and I slathered some on my feet.
“You have pretty feet,” he said. “When my wife was pregnant all she wanted me to do was massage her feet. The only thing that would get her to quit complaining was a foot rub. You want help with that?”
“No thanks,” I said.
“When are you due?” He asked the question like “How long are you in for?”
I quickly tried the boots again and they slid right on. I thanked him profusely and rushed back to Gabe’s table.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
“I looked everywhere for you. I was afraid you had slipped out without paying for your vasectomy.”
We ate our meals and laughed. His friends were nice.
“This is who I would marry if I had to marry someone,” Gabe announced, putting his arm around me.
“Why don’t you?” a man across the table asked.
“She’s pregnant with another man’s child,” he said.
“And I have a two-year-old,” I said, which I liked to say as much as possible in case people wondered why I wasn’t just a little bit thinner.
A woman standing at the microphone said the silent auction had ended and we should go to the back to pay for our prizes.
I stood up.
“Please allow me,” Gabe said. “It’s my treat.”
“What? No! I can’t let you pay for Russell’s vasectomy.”
“It would be my pleasure,” he said. “Paying for a noble cause at a noble cause.”
I tried to stop him but he walked off.
“Well,” the woman sitting next to me said. “Gabe Weinrib finally falls in love and it’s with a married, pregnant woman.”
“I’ll take you home in a cab,” Gabe said when we’d gotten our coats and gift bags. I couldn’t wait to give Shasthi the little gift bag of Chanel.
“Are you going uptown?” one of the other women who had been at our table asked.
There was an awkward pause.
“I’m going to take Izzy home in a cab,” he said.
“No, that’s okay. I live pretty close. I used to work right here and I’d walk home.” I didn’t know why I was rambling like that.
He hailed a cab. “Are you sure?” he asked as the other woman slid in.
“Oh,” I stuttered. “Did you want to come up to my place?” I had no idea why I was saying this, except that I had worked so hard cleaning up. But it would be crazy. What would Sherry’s daughter think, for one thing? The doormen? Duncan, if he, God forbid, woke up? There were sonogram pictures on my fridge. I was pregnant.
“No,” he said. “It’s late. Another time.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding hysterically. I felt like a desperate fool. I thought of myself scrubbing the toilet, changing the sheets, throwing out newspapers. Why had I done all this? I wondered.
“Oh, I almost forgot, here’s your vasectomy, and I bid on a little something else for you too. A small memento of this evening.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and handed me a Renee Lewis jewelry box with the earrings inside splayed out on black velvet. They were dangling mismatched gemstones, a ruby and a diamond and an emerald and an amethyst.
“Oh!” I was completely shocked. “I can’t.”
“You’re worried about what Russell will think?”
“No, I . . .”
“Just tell him there was a raffle. They’ll look good with that dress. You of all people know I can afford it.”
“Right,” I laughed. He could. “Thank you. They’re beautiful.”
I put one on and then the other, unsure of how they didn’t end up in the murky gutter. The cool gold on my earlobes reminded me how much I had loved to be kissed there.
“So things must be pretty good between you,” he said.
“No,” I said, surprising myself. “I didn’t think I could get pregnant.” I shouldn’t be saying this, I thought. I shouldn’t be explaining myself.
“You must love him,” he said.
I must, I thought. Or I must have at one time. I felt drunk even though I hadn’t had so much as a drop of wine. I must have loved him at our wedding. Taking the dancing lessons, choosing my ring. I must have loved him when I was pregnant with Duncan. I had wanted a baby so badly. I had loved him that winter weekend so long ago in the country when we stayed alone in Marlon’s house—our first weekend away together. I’d lain upstairs in bed listening to beautiful piano music coming from the living room, then I’d floated downstairs thinking, If he can play the piano like that, then he really is a genius. I imagined the talent our future children would one day display. But the piano bench stood vacant, Marlon’s hideous floral piano cover still in place like a giant tea cozy. It hadn’t been him playing the piano, it had been the radio.
Without warning, I burst into tears. I choked back sob after sob. No matter how hard I tried not to, my tears kept coming. They betrayed me. And I betrayed Russell. No sexual act would have been more of a betrayal than those tears.
Gabe said something to the woman in the cab and she sped off without him.
He walked me home and we stood in front of my building.
“You sure you don’t want to come up?” I said. What was wrong with me! “I have to walk my dog while the sitter’s still there.”
“I’d walk him with you, but I have a pretty early day tomorrow.” I cringed in my earrings. “Thanks for the offer though. Well, thank you for coming, m’dear. And I’ll call you to check how you’re feeling. Take care of yourself.”
“Yes,” I said and walked into my building.
Standing in my lobby, I opened my clutch and looked at the time on my cell phone. It was only ten thirty. I ran back out onto the street and hailed a cab and made it to the New York Health and Racquet Club just in time. I handed my ID card to the girl behind the desk.
“Gym’s closing in ten minutes,” she said.
“I’ll just be a minute.” I walked past her into the locker room and, hands trembling, turned the knob to the right, then the left, then the right again. 19-21-23. The happiest years of my life. I took off my earrings, put them back in their leather case, along with the gift certificate for the vasectomy, and placed them in the back of my locker.
Trying to get a cab home, I stepped onto a subway grate, and a gust of wind blew my halter dress all the way up. It fluttered up around my waist, leaving my bare thighs and panties and big round stomach exposed. I shrieked and struggled to hold it down around me, just like a pregnant Marilyn Monroe.
Part Three
Run from Your Life
33
One day, when I was pregnant with Duncan, after I’d cajoled and cajoled, begging to know if it was a boy or a girl, Dr. Lichter had said, “I see a wee-wee.”
“You mean . . .”
“It’s a boy,” Dr. Lichter said.
My whole life, I’d thought I would be the mother of a boy. I’d had a recurring dream since childhood that I was taking care of a small black boy.
I had a soft spot for boys. I loved them.
But now, with a wee-wee inside me, I thought there must be a terrible mistake.
I didn’t know anything about dinosaurs. I knew about ballet and tea parties with the tea set I had saved from my childhood to give to my daughter and dolls. I knew about the Nancy Drews I had saved from my childhood to one day give to my daughter and Eloise at the Plaza and in Paris and in Moscow and at Christmastime, all saved from my childhood to one day give to my future daughter.
Cars, trucks, bulldozers, sports, pirates, Lego, boats, and trains—I would have absolutely nothing to talk about with this kid. I wasn’t interested in anyt
hing he was interested in.
I wept on the table, naked from the waist down.
Dr. Lichter was unable to console me.
I called my mother from the cab home, crying. I couldn’t even speak.
“What is it?” she said.
“There’s a wee-wee in me,” I said. “And now I’ll never ever have anyone to have lunch with when I’m old.”
My mother was silent because she knew it was true. I knew she wanted to say that she would have lunch with me but then she knew I would have to point out that she couldn’t have lunch with me because she would be dead, so we both just silently, futilely, searched for a solution.
When I got home and told Russell, he was elated. He took it as some sort of personal victory. He had won and I had lost.
“You don’t know anything about dinosaurs either,” I said. And forget about sports. That was the one good thing about Russell: He didn’t watch sports.
“Like hell I don’t,” he said.
“Name one thing.”
“There are herbivores like the brachiosaurus and the brontosaurus, and carnivores like the Tyrannosaurus rex, otherwise known as T. rex. Dinosaurs became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period. The stegosaurus, or old plate-back, as he was known by his friends, was an herbivore who lived in the Jurassic period. And I’ll be sure to tell him about the pterodactyl who could fly.” Russell spread out his arms and flapped them like a pterodactyl, running all around the room. “Forget it, you’re outnumbered.”
Even Humbert was a boy.
But no one was more disappointed than Russell’s parents.
“Oh well,” his mother said. “I wouldn’t have been happy without a girl. We had two children, a boy and a girl, to replace ourselves.”
Oh God, I thought, what a concept.
“But if Leslie had been a boy, I would have kept trying until I got a girl. I would have died trying! Maybe the doctor was wrong,” was his mother’s brilliant idea. “Ya never know—it just might come out a girl!”
But Dr. Lichter wasn’t wrong, and one day, in the middle of a spirited sword fight with Duncan, I had an amazing realization. I loved sword fighting! And I loved talking like a pirate. Arrrrrgh, matey! Batten down the hatches, scalawag! I loved making Duncan walk the plank, and I loved when he made me walk the plank. And I loved sharks. Their crooked terrifying teeth and hideous nostrils and dorsal fins. And I loved roaring and screaming and running and discussing which was scarier, a fox or a wolf, or a witch or a dragon.
I walked to the boys’ side of the Kidini clothing sale filled with excitement, proudly examining little plaid flannel shirts and tiny down jackets with the stoic determination of the mother of a boy. Pajamas that made him look like a little Hugh Hefner and striped socks just like his father’s.
I loved when he wrapped his arms around me and mashed his hard skull into mine and said, “I love you, Isolde Pearl Brilliant.”
Since Dr. Lichter had bailed out on me, I had no choice but to choose a new ob-gyn. Dr. Sitbon was nothing like Dr. Lichter. He was French and young, no more than forty, and for nine and a half long months no matter how many times I asked him to call me Izzy, he called me madame.
It seemed absurd that I would wait for him, half naked on his table, pregnancy hormones coursing through my body, imagining him fucking me from behind against the dangerous wastes bin, and then he would enter and say, “Bonjour, madame.”
The fact that I hadn’t exactly had a bikini wax and had an enormous pregnant stomach and sometimes a rashy complexion didn’t stop me from thinking that we really would fuck, long and hard, leaving all those other women to languish in the waiting room with their water bottles and swollen ankles and brochures for cord blood cell banks and doulas.
“You still haven’t heard anything about Dr. Lichter?” I would ask in my disappointment with his professionalism.
“Ah, you still miss your Dr. Lichter. I am not good enough for you?”
Prove you’re good enough, I thought, thrusting my huge stomach at him even more seductively.
“You’re good,” I said. But he never spent more than five minutes with me. We never had long philosophical discussions about what it meant to be a mother.
“What’s that?” I asked, during one appointment, pointing to the Cartier ring that had suddenly appeared on his wedding finger.
“I got married two weeks ago,” he said.
“Congratulations!” I said, my heart plunging. It was getting harder and harder to fantasize about him. Dr. Lichter had a tired old labor-and-delivery nurse for a wife, so riding him on the tiny round stool at the foot of the examining table was always a likely possibility. But Dr. Sitbon was a newlywed, just back from a honeymoon. “Where did you go?” I asked.
“China.”
I hated people who took adventurous honeymoons. “Did you marry a nurse?” I asked.
“No, a doctor,” he said.
“Are you going to have children?”
“I hope.”
I had seen him once walking with a beautiful woman doctor up the circular driveway, talking heatedly in their respective lab coats, and I had burned with jealousy at the time.
“Ah, what is zis?” he said.
“The sex?” I asked.
“Oui, yes. Do you want to know?”
“Tell me,” I said. “Do you see a wee-wee?”
“A what?”
“A wee-wee. That’s what Dr. Lichter said.”
“Ah yes, your precious Dr. Lichter. No, I do not see a wee-wee.”
My heart soared with happiness. It was a girl. I was having a girl.
“However, I do see a penis!”
“Maybe you’re wrong,” I said, sounding like Russell’s mother.
He circled something invisible with his finger on the sonogram screen. “I’m not wrong, madame,” he said. “Do you see that?”
“No.”
“Well I’m afraid it’s undeniable.”
I tried to smile.
“Not what you were hoping for?” he asked.
I couldn’t speak.
“My mother had two boys,” he said. “I was her second son.”
I let out an uncontrollable sob. And once that happened I couldn’t stop crying.
“And then she tried one more time and had a girl. So it all could have a happy ending.”
Crying, I told him that I loved boys, that I’d always dreamed about a little black boy, that I loved having a son. That I loved pirates and sharks and dinosaurs. Either way, I thought, I would probably have had some disappointment, mourned the one I wasn’t having and would never have.
“Well the baby looks wonderful,” Dr. Sitbon said. “He’s totally healthy and perfect in there. It looks like he’s having a very good time. So, are you okay?”
I was crying hysterically on the table.
“Aye, matey,” I said.
“Aye, matey,” he said back in his French accent. He held out his hand, which meant I was supposed to use it to hoist my enormous body up to a sitting position and also that my appointment was over.
“Thank you, ye old scalawag,” I said.
“A pleasure as always, madame,” he said and walked out the door.
Going home in the cab I called my mother, sobbing.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“There’s another wee-wee in me.”
“It’s okay,” she said sadly. “It’s great. A brother. A brother for Duncan!”
“But I’ll never know now what it’s like to have a daughter. No one will ever take care of me.”
“But remember what my shrink said when you were pregnant with Duncan. She said she was jealous that you’d have all that boy-love. You’ll have all that boy-love again.”
“I don’t live my life by what your shrink says, in case that comes as a surprise to you,” I said, already starting to feel soothed.
We went on like that for the rest of the ride until I was pretty much all cried out.
“ I’m having a
boy,” I told Shasthi when I got home.
“I’m having a girl,” she said.
Then we both headed into the kitchen at the same time and bumped into each other because the kitchen was too small for our big stomachs.
That night I had dinner at Craft with Joy. “I’m only staying here for one night,” she said. “I have to get back to the shamba.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Things are just better with Chili when I’m there,” she said. “It turned out his wife wasn’t fat. She was pregnant. She gave birth to his daughter four months ago. But it’s all fine,” she said happily. “He was afraid to tell me because he thought I would leave him. I forgave him and he gave me a donkey which is apparently a very big deal and he sent both his wives away in disgrace.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said. “Both wives? I thought he just had one wife.”
“He had another one in Mombasa, but he’s done with that.” She seemed thrilled. “I’m so happy, Izzy,” she said. “You should leave Russell and move to Kenya with me.”
“I can’t leave Russell,” I said. “In two days I’m having a birthday party for Duncan and then, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m having a baby. It’s a boy,” I added.
“Oh, Izzy, that’s great,” she said. “I love being the mother of boys. I can’t believe Duncan’s already three.”
We ordered and I ate the entire roll the waiter placed on my plate with his tongs, and then I ate another. Even Joy couldn’t stop me from eating bread when I was pregnant.
“I just hope you’re not going to do the whole breast-feeding thing again?” she said. “Really, don’t come visit me until you’re done with all that.”
I laughed. “I’ll wait for you to come here.”
“There’s nothing here for me anymore,” she said. “With the exception of having my children, leaving Harry was the single best thing I have ever done. I mean, marriage is so distasteful really. Tell me, what is your definition of marriage?”
“Having good seats at the theater,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
The Seven Year Bitch Page 22