Aunt Marvelle is right. It’s time I told my feelings to William.
And just like that my joy nosedives.
I overplayed my hand by coming out here uninvited. So what if I did a good job with Jolie? I stepped over that vague but distinct line of noncommittal friendship. Until today, I was simply William’s ladyfriend. We were each the person in the other person’s private life. The attachment was companionable, simple, easy.
Until today, I had not made it obvious.
I’m in love.
I wince as the weight of my cup hurts my hand.
I love William so much that I’m willing to picks fights in the Maternity waiting room in the name of somebody he loves.
It’s so easy to mess up easy.
William’s hug lifts me off the floor, baby and all. The kiss is the kind that in the middle of it I think I can’t bear for it to end. Only, this time, there has to be retreat. For one thing, I’ve entered my seventh month. And even I feel funny about sex with an unmarried man under my aunt’s roof. Besides, I seem to vaguely recall an earlier resolution to cool off this hot time.
William is over the moon. I sit and listen as he elaborates about the perfection of his newborn grandson, how brave his daughter was, and how happy and relieved he is.
“The obstetrician says Will is small but well formed, and scored nine on his Apgar. He’ll grow quickly. I’ll bet he walks early.”
“He’s only a few hours old and you’re ready to buy him shoes. Can he just lie there and coo for a few days?”
William laughs. “He can to anything he wants. He’s perfect, Lu. Perfect.” With him, there’s no impossible expectation baggage that usually accompanies that word. This is the ten-toes, ten-fingers garden-variety kind of miracle.
“Now, about you.” He stretches his arm along the back of the sofa and smiles at me in a way that makes me want to slide into him. “I don’t have the words to thank you for what you did for Jolie. You should have stayed to see Will.”
“A good fairy knows when to make an exit.”
“You made one hell of an impression on Jon, too!”
I gasp. “How do you know about that?”
“It was pretty obvious something had happened when he walked in with a handprint blazing on his face.”
I flex my still-swollen hand and feel again the thrill of my reckless act. I hope he remembers it the next time a woman smiles provocatively at him. “What did Jolie say?”
“Not a word. But you know how it looked. Then Jon started explaining how a pregnant woman in the waiting room attacked him. It was so pathetic that I was ready to put both hands around his neck and squeeze, until Jolie started to laugh. That’s when it occurred to me that he’d described you. I went out to look for you. Why did you leave?”
“Righteous retribution doesn’t work if the messenger hangs around.”
William wags his head. “He’s going to have that mark for at least twenty-four hours.”
“Sometimes you have to communicate with people on the level they understand best. Even so, I was tactful. If Jon were my son-in-law, I’ve have used my knee.”
“Remind me to never get on your bad side.” William reaches for me again. “Right now I want all your good sides showing.”
I find myself kissing him back, but we finally pause with mutual understanding that now is not the time for more. When I’m tucked under the protection of his arm he says, “I’ll be a wonderful grandfather, don’t you think?”
“I think William is the luckiest kid in the world.”
“I make a pretty good Dad, too.” His expression changes in a way that lets me know he’s thinking now about me and only about me.
Antsy about that, I turn out of his arms and reach for my cocoa. “So then, how did Jon behave when he saw his son?”
“He looked stunned and stupefied, as if he didn’t know Jolie was pregnant.”
“Some men can’t make the leap until it’s a done deal.”
“I hope you’re right. There he was when I left, cuddled up with Jolie and Will as if nothing had ever happened between them.”
I arch my back, straining to relieve tension in tired muscles. “I’m glad, for all three of them.”
William grunts. “We’ll see. Just before I left, I pulled him aside and told him if he planned to stay with Jolie and the baby in the hospital, then he better be prepared to take on that responsibility for good. He’s a father. It’s time he acted like a man.”
“And he said?”
“He said if Jolie can forgive him, I ought to.” William starts a slow rubbing of my back, low down where I need it most. “Looks like my life and my house are my own again.”
It’s too good. I move a little away, as though I’ve had enough of his magic massage. “I hope you’ll enjoy your well-deserved solitude.”
“I don’t have to be alone to be happy.” As his arms slide around my belly from behind, I feel every inch of me respond. It’s not sexual, exactly. It’s more intimate, as if I know I’m being touched by something fundamentally good and right. The urge to merge is more amoeba-like, cell into cell, asexual mating. That’s probably bad biology, but I swear it feels as if our skins dissolve a little one into the other each time we touch.
He leans close to press his lips against my ear. “I’m thinking it’s a good time for us to get a few things straight.”
“William, it’s not really—”
“Lu, marry me.”
Whoa! Wait a minute! He skipped steps two, three, and four; mutual declarations of love, living together perhaps, at least one breakup and reconciliation. One of us has to be practical. But I have to leave his persuasive embrace before I can think even halfway straight. I stand and move a few feet away. “William, that’s just euphoria talking.”
“Okay.” He grins at me and stands up. “Maybe I’m jumping ahead. But we know where this is going. I love you, Lu.”
“Me, too.” I can’t help smiling. “I love you.” But as he advances I hold up a hand to fend him off. “But that’s beside the point.”
“That is the point.” He smiles so tenderly I want to smack him. “We’re good together. We’ve known it from that first night in May.”
“That was just sex. Very good—okay, incredible sex. And it’s all been good ever since.” I wish he would stop grinning as if he’d like to prove to me again right now. “But that’s just sex, William.”
“I like you even when you don’t sleep with me.”
Because I can’t think of a good defense for that, I begin to pace. “You’re forgetting I have a weird life. I’m doing a tell-all in a magazine. And I have Dwarves.”
“They’ll back off once they see I’m in charge of the Care for Lu department.”
“What about our families? Dallas and Davin haven’t completely accepted the divorce. Now there’s a new family member on the way. If I announce I’m remarrying, they may just revoke my mother license.”
“They’re adults. Eventually they will accept that you’re entitled to a life, like any other person. After what you did for her, Jolie already thinks of you as family.”
He’s so reasonable. I pace harder, hoping active leg muscles will squeeze the blood back up into my brain instead of letting it seep down into more treacherous regions. “I’ve been divorced less than a year. What makes you think I want to marry again?”
He spread his arms. “Maybe it’s the way you look at me. Or the way you back up against me in bed in the middle of the night and then pat my thigh when you find me. Or the way you smile in your dreams.”
“How do you know I do that?”
“I watch you sometimes.” He reaches out to hold me in place. “I feel like an ass telling you that. But I don’t know how to be careful around you. With you it’s as if I’ve woken up from a bad dream that’s consumed a lot of my life.”
“Maybe what you feel is just rebound.” The blood is going both to my head and loins so fast that I feel woozy. “We’ve both had a couple of toug
h years. We could simply be having a mutual gratitude affair. And then in a few months, we’ll look at each other and go yeech!”
“Never going to happen.” He touches me “that way” again, placing his finger on that spot just below my breastbone just like he did that first night. “There’s nothing to keep us from being very happy together, Lu.”
Just as I’m about to say You’re absolutely right! Screw the world! Sweet Tum sneezes, or hiccups. And I remember the best reason of all for not giving in.
“I’m having another man’s child.”
“Yes, I noticed.” He looks down at my belly and says, “I’ll adopt your child.”
I wrest free of his hands. “See, that’s what I mean. You don’t even know what you’re saying.” I fold my arms atop my bulge and say, “You’ve been surrounded by pregnant women for months. No wonder you think you’re in love. It’s a reaction to all that maternal nesting, hormonal fallout. You’ve got estrogen poisoning.”
He laughs. “And you just stopped making sense.”
“Aha!” I’m grabbing at straws and I don’t even know why. “One of the things I like best about being divorced is that at the end of the day, I can be totally irrational without apology under my own roof.”
At last he looks a bit doubtful. “Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to discuss this tonight. It’s just that you came out here without me even asking to help my daughter through the most difficult day of her life. Then, slapping Jon around—” I watch him try to make sense of it all, but he just ends up smiling again. “I thought we had something that didn’t need rules or schedules or logic or any of that crap that makes life miserable.”
I want to fly into his arms and sob that I love him so much it makes me stupid, and how I don’t want to be irrational all alone. That I pat his thigh in the middle of the night because then I know he’s solidly there, not just a wish in my head. That I need him desperately, and will probably die lonely, unloved and pathetic if he’s not with me.
But I’m scared.
I know from hard experience how even with the best intentions the day-to-day slog through modern life can pervert feelings. I’m scared of becoming another mistake that we will have to live with. The new Lu is too new. She’s gelatin. If I’m not careful she will melt away.
My anxiety crystallizes into one complete thought. “What if you are the one I chose just because you were there at the time?”
For a moment he looks stunned. And I know this is a thought he’s not had before, but one he’s too smart not to consider now that it’s on the table.
But he doesn’t ask. He just rubs his forehead as though he’s wearier than dirt. “I guess I got carried away with the moment. I should go. You need to be in bed.” He kisses my cheek quickly. “Good night, Lu.”
I hope he didn’t see me tearing up before he walked out because I’m in overflow as the door slams. Too tired and miserable to take it all to the privacy of my bed, I sit on Aunt Marvelle’s sofa and sob out loud like a six-year-old.
What kind of woman throws away a declaration of love from the right man? A deranged pregnant one.
But I’m so very tired of being there, and being what other people need. I’m good at it. I’m just tired.
After a few minutes I hear footsteps, and look up to see Aunt Marvelle crossing the room to the front door.
“I’m not saying a thing about that. Not one thing. But I could.” She flips the dead bolt and turns back the way she came.
42
“That’s right. A spa vacation. I came in for a checkup yesterday and requested a physician’s permission slip to fly! I needed it today. T-o-d-a-y. Can’t you people get anything right?” I slam down the phone.
I’m cranky. Ask anyone who’s had to deal with me this past week. Even Tai backed off lobbying for the “nude” photo shoot Curran had the audacity to mention to her. Since his artsy pictures of me started appearing in Five-O, he’s had some overtures from other magazine and photography agencies. His boat has been launched. Now he wants more, of me, just when I’m feeling the need to hide away from the world.
When he arrived just now for our formal weekly photo session, I wouldn’t let him in.
He did a really good job of making me feel his pain. It’s one of those drizzly early-fall days with an icicle feel in the wind. Yet there he was, in a cotton shirt that flapped about his rangy body like a flag. “Come on, Lu! Let me in.”
I twitched the living room curtain aside and beckoned him closer with a curled finger. When he was practically nose to glass, I said, “Curran, dearest? Go to hell!”
I hear knocking again. I’m sure he went to enlist aid from Cy.
Sure enough, when I stop practicing a drum-line rhythm with my pencil on the tabletop and concede I will have to answer the onslaught at my door, I see the silhouettes of two men in the glass.
I smile as I hear them fiddling with my lock. Ever-vigilant Cy doesn’t know everything. His key no longer fits. I had the locks changed after they accosted William.
“You, old man!” I shout from ten feet away, “Go home! You, young man! Get lost!”
“It’s the eighth month,” I hear Cy tell Curran. “Mothers-to-be start getting testy about this time.”
Testy is scarcely the word. I’m furious! With myself, with my world, with—oh, joy, my hair! The reflection in the hall mirror is of a robed woman who slept hard, and didn’t brush afterward.
“The pregnant woman’s on strike!” I shout as I move nearer the door, my cow booties mooing with every step. Hey, when you go to seed, I say go all the way.
“Step away from the door. There are no more gal-pal, buddy-buddy, social-escort services available on these premises. I free you! Flee! Find women your own ages to harass!”
Curran puts both hands to the glass and tries to peer in. “Lu, don’t be trippin’. You’re messing with a brother’s future.”
“This is my world, squirrel! You’re just trying to get a nut.” I’m not certain I got that expression quite right, but I like the way it sounds.
“She’s gone all diva on us. Think like she’s sick or sumthin’?” Curran asks in a worried tone. “Maybe we should drop a dime on that doc.”
I press my nose to the glass opposite his. “Stop annoying this demented diva, and drop that dime on a female who wears hip-huggers and a navel ring. Faint heart never won fairly weird maid. Get thee gone, forsooth, the soother the better!”
Cy raps on the glass, as if I’m not already paying attention. “Lu, this is Cy. Open the door. Otherwise, I’ll have to take action, for your own good.”
He means he’ll call Aunt Marvelle or Dallas, or worse, William.
“You leave the newlyweds alone. Have you no decency? And Aunt Marvelle has a cold. Call Dr. Templeton, and I will put the house on the market. I’m going away, far away, where there’s sun and sand. And I swear, if you don’t both scrambola this instant, I’m never coming back.”
“She must have got Tai to okay the spa deal,” Curran says to his co-irritant.
“So, maybe we should back off?” Cy answers.
“Yes. Be a mensch, Cy, and back off. Take—” I hear my phone.
I shuffle back to the kitchen to pick up, checking the caller ID. It’s Tai. This call I want.
“It’s a lock, Lu. Your reservation at the resort is set. Ten days of absolute decadence in the desert. A courier is running the plane tickets over. Enjoy!”
“Thank you. Oh, and don’t bother to contact me. I won’t respond!”
I sit back and prop my feet on a chair. My ankles aren’t what they used to be. If I don’t watch it they balloon by noon. But I’m too pleased by Tai’s news to stay in Cruella DeVil mode. Tomorrow I’m going where no one knows me, and better still will expect nothing of me.
43
Resort means hope, to have a chance, where to turn for help, where to seek refuge, the ultimate means of relief. I’ve resorted to the desert, and it becomes me.
Every woman I know has done the occas
ional spa day at a mall store. This is altogether different. I’m nine days into a sustained body-and-soul experience meant to alter one’s view of life. I’ve been strategically slathered, steeped and basted, and generally made to feel my flesh is my best friend.
This spa even offers a specialized regimen for safely pampering the expectant mother and child. In addition to being loofahed, waxed and buffed, I’ve lain supine on a massage table built for the body of a mother-to-be while an expert in such matters has massaged me into a spreadable-on-toast state of relaxation.
Sweet Tum loves it, too. I’m certain she will be born a total Epicurean. Yes, it’s a girl. I had a dream the third night here. Sweet Tum is a she.
More than that, I know that she and I will be our own happy family unit.
It was simple. All I needed was a time in a place to think only my thoughts. Even a thing as miraculous as love can be an intruder at certain times in one’s life.
In the middle of the night after I ran William off, it dawned on me that I’ve been thinking of myself as the consummate adult, coping and moving forward in my life. What I’ve really been doing is walking on eggs, trying to maintain a version of the status quo. You know you’re in trouble when you need Latin to describe your life.
From the moment Jacob disconnected, I tried to address the feelings and concerns of everyone even remotely connected to me. “It’s okay. It’s all right. We’re fine.” By now, I’ve probably said this to pieces of furniture and my car.
First there were Davin and Dallas to coddle through the divorce. Then Jacob’s need “to be sure,” followed by his desire not to be a father again. Let’s not forget Tai and her expectations. And then, of course, there’s Curran, Cy and even William. Within the past fortnight, I’ve married off a daughter, and talked someone else’s child through birth. Who haven’t I tried to please in the name of good human being?
Me.
A New Lu Page 29