Good in Bed

by Jennifer Weiner

  She rose quickly to her feet. “Where?” she asked. “For what?”

  I laughed, and heard the tears inside of it, and wondered if she could hear them, too. “I need to buy myself a wedding ring.”

  SEVENTEEN

  The receptionist at my father’s office didn’t seem at all perturbed at the long pause before I told her why I was calling.

  I had a scar, I finally explained, and I wanted Dr. Shapiro to have a look at it. I gave Maxi’s cell phone number as my own and gave Lois Lane as my name, and the receptionist didn’t sound the least bit curious. She just gave me a ten A.M. appointment for Friday and warned me that the traffic could be brutal.

  So on Friday morning I started out early. My hair was freshly trimmed (Garth had obliged, even though it had only been four weeks, not six). And on my left hand I wore not only the plain gold band I’d imagined but a diamond of such breathtaking enormity, such improbable size, that I could barely keep my eyes on the road.

  Maxi had brought it home from the set, promising that no one would miss it, and that it would be just the thing to announce to my father in general and the world at large that I’d arrived.

  “But let me ask you,” she began that morning, over buttermilk waffles and peach and ginger tea. “Why do you want your father to think you’re married?”

  I stood up and opened the curtains, looking out at the water. “I don’t know, really. I don’t even know if I’ll wear the rings when I go see him.”

  “You must have thought about it,” said Maxi. “You think about everything.”

  I looked at the rings on my fingers. “I guess it’s that he said nobody would ever love me, that nobody would ever want me. And I feel like if I see him, and I’m pregnant and I’m not married… it’ll be like he was right.”

  Maxi looked at me as if this were the saddest thing she’d ever heard. “But you know that’s not true, right?” she asked. “You know how many people love you.”

  I drew a shaky breath. “Oh, sure,” I said. “It’s just… with this… it’s hard to be reasonable.” I looked at her. “It’s family, you know? Who was ever reasonable about family? I just… I want to know why he did what he did. I want to at least be able to ask the question.”

  “He might not have answers,” Maxi told me. “Or, if he does, they might not be the ones you want to hear.”

  “I just want to hear something,” I said raggedly. “I just feel like… I mean, you only get two parents, and my mom’s…” I gave a vague, general wave of my hand to indicate lesbianism and an inappropriate life partner. My finger flashed in the sunlight. “I just feel like I have to try.”

  The nurse who led me into the cubicle had breasts as symmetrical and rounded as twin halved cantaloupes. She handed me a plush terrycloth robe and a clipboard full of forms to fill out. “Doctor will be with you shortly,” she said, clicking on a high-powered light and shining it on my face, where I’d invented a scar. “Huh,” she said, scrutinizing the scar. “That hardly looks like anything.”

  “It’s deep, though,” I said. “I can see it in pictures. It shows up there.”

  She nodded as if this made perfect sense to her and backed out of the room.

  I sat on a beige armchair, making up lies to put on the forms and wishing that I had a scar – some physical sign to show the world – to show him – what I’d been through, and what I’d survived. Twenty minutes later, there was a brisk knock at the door, and my father walked in.

  “So what brings you here today, Ms. Lane?” he asked, his eyes on my chart. I sat quietly, saying nothing. After a moment, he looked up. There was an irritated expression on his face, a stop-wasting-my-time look that I recognized from my childhood. He stared at me for a minute with nothing registering on his face but more annoyance. Then he saw.

  “Cannie?”

  I nodded. “Hello.”

  “My God, what…” My father, a man with an insult for every occasion, was for once gratifyingly speechless. “What are you doing here?”

  “I made an appointment,” I said.

  He winced, took off his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose – another pose I’d remembered well. It usually presaged a temper tantrum, anger of some sort.

  “You just disappeared,” I said. He started shaking his head and opened his mouth, but I wasn’t about to let him start without saying my piece. “None of us knew where you were. How could you do that? How could you just walk out on all of us like that?” He said nothing… just stared at me – through me – as if I were any hysterical patient, shrieking that her thighs still felt lumpy or her left nipple was higher than her right one. “Don’t you care about us? Don’t you have a heart? Or is that a stupid question to ask someone who sucks cellulite out of thighs for a living?”

  My father glared at me. “You don’t need to be condescending.”

  “No, what I needed was a father,” I said. I hadn’t realized how angry, how furious at him I was until I’d seen him, standing there in his crisp white doctor’s coat, his manicured fingernails, his tan, and his heavy gold watch.

  He sighed, as if the conversation bored him; as if I bored him, too. “Why are you here?”

  “I didn’t come here looking for you, if that’s what you’re asking. A friend of mine had an appointment, and I came with her. I saw your picture,” I continued. “Not very smart, you know? For someone trying to stay undercover”

  “I’m not trying to stay undercover,” he said irascibly. “That’s nonsense. Did your mother tell you that?”

  “Then how come none of us know where you are?”

  “You wouldn’t have cared if you did,” he muttered, picking up the clipboard he’d come in with.

  I was so flabbergasted, he actually had his hand on the doorknob before I could think of what to say. “Are you crazy? Of course we would have cared. You’re our father”

  He put his glasses back on. I could see his eyes behind them, a weak, watery brown. “And you’re all grown up now. All of you are.”

  “You think just because we’re older it doesn’t matter what you did to us? You think needing your parents in your life is something you outgrow, like training wheels or a high chair?”

  He raised himself up to his full five feet, eight and a half inches, and gathered the cloak of authority, of Doctor-ness, around him as palpably as if he’d been pulling on a heavy winter coat. “I think,” he said, speaking slowly and precisely, “that lots of people are disappointed by the lives that they wind up with.”

  “And that’s what you want to be to us? A disappointment?”

  He sighed. “I can’t help you, Cannie. I don’t know what you want, but I can tell you this – I’ve got nothing to give you. Any of you.”

  “We don’t want your money”

  He looked at me almost kindly. “I’m not talking about money.”

  “Why?” I asked him. My voice was cracking. “Why have kids and leave them? That’s the part I don’t understand. What did we do…” I gulped. “What did any of us do that was so awful that you never wanted to see us again?” I knew, even as I was saying the words, even as I was thinking them, that it was ridiculous. I knew that no child could be that bad, that wrong, that ugly, could be anything to cause a parent to leave. I knew that it was no fault of ours. We weren’t to blame, I thought to myself. I could let it go; I could set the burden down, I could be free.

  Except, of course, that knowing something in your head is different than feeling it in your heart. And I knew at that moment that Maxi had been right. Whatever my father could say, whatever answer he could provide, whatever excuse he could muster, it wouldn’t be right. And it wouldn’t ever be enough.

  I stared at him. I waited for him to ask me something, to ask what had become of me: Where did I live, and what did I do, and whom had I decided to spend my life with? Instead he looked at me again, shook his head once, and turned toward the door.

  “Hey!” I said.

  He turned to look at me, and my throat close
d up. What did I want to tell him? Nothing. I wanted him to ask me things: how are you, who are you, what’s happened to you, who have you become. I stared at him, and he said nothing – just walked away.

  I couldn’t help myself. I reached for him, for some sign, for something, as he was walking out the door. I felt my fingertips graze the back of that crisp white coat. He never stopped walking. He never even slowed down.

  When I came back, I put the rings in their little velvet box. I washed the makeup off my face and the gel out of my hair. Then I called Samantha.

  “You won’t believe it,” I began.

  “Probably not,” she said. “So tell me.”

  And I did. “He didn’t ask me a single question,” I told her at the end. “He didn’t want to know what I was doing out here, or what I was doing with my life. I don’t even think he noticed I was pregnant. He just didn’t care.”

  Samantha sighed. “That’s awful. I can’t even imagine how you must feel.”

  “I feel…” I said. I looked out at the water, then up at the sky. “I feel like I’m ready to come home.”

  Maxi nodded when I told her, sadly, but didn’t ask me to stay.

  “You’re done with the screenplay?” she asked.

  “I’ve been done for a few days,” I told her. She surveyed the bed, where I’d laid my things out – my clothes and books, the teddy bear I’d bought for the baby one afternoon in Santa Monica.

  “I wish we could have done more,” she said with a sigh.

  “We did plenty,” I said, and hugged her. “And we’ll talk… and e-mail… and you’ll visit when the baby comes”

  Maxi’s eyes lit up. “Aunt Maxi,” she proclaimed. “You’ll have to have it call me Aunt Maxi. And I’m going to spoil it rotten!”

  I smiled to myself, imagining Maxi treating little Max or Abby like a two-legged Nifkin, dressing the baby in outfits she’d picked out to match her own. “You’re going to be a fabulous aunt,” I said.

  She insisted on driving me to the airport, helping me check my luggage, waiting with me at the gate even though everyone from the flight attendants on down were staring at her like she was the rarest exhibit in the zoo.

  “This is going to wind up on Inside Edition,” I warned her, giggling and crying a little bit as we hugged each other for the eighteenth time. Maxi kissed my cheek, then bent down and gave my belly a little wave.

  “You’ve got your ticket?” she asked me.

  I nodded.

  “Got milk money?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, smiling, knowing how true it was.

  “Then you’re good to go,” she said.

  I nodded, and sniffled, and hugged her tight. “You’re a wonderful friend,” I told her. “You’re the greatest.”

  “Be careful,” she replied. “Travel safe. Call me as soon as you get there.”

  I nodded, saying nothing, because I didn’t trust myself to speak, and turned away from her, toward the walkway, the plane, and home.

  First class was more crowded this time than it had been on my way out. A guy about my age and exactly my height, with curly blond hair and bright blue eyes, took the seat next to me as I was struggling to get the seat belt (much tighter this time) around myself. We nodded politely at each other. Then he pulled out a sheaf of important-looking legal documents with “Confidential” stamped all over them, and I pulled out my Entertainment Weekly. He shot a sidelong glance at my reading matter and sighed.

  “Jealous?” I asked. He smiled, nodded, and pulled a roll of candy from his pocket.

  “Would you like a Mento?” he asked.

  “Is that really the singular?” I replied, taking one. He gazed at the roll of Mentos, then looked at me and shrugged. “You know,” he said, “that’s a good question.”

  I reclined the seat. He was kind of cute, I mused, and clearly had a good job, or at least the paperwork to make it look like he had a good job. That was what I needed – just a regular guy with a good job, a guy who lived in Philadelphia and read books and adored me. I snuck another look at Mr. Mento and contemplated giving him my card… and then I pulled myself up short, hearing my mother’s voice and Samantha’s voice converging in my head in one loud, desperate shriek: Are you crazy?

  Maybe in another lifetime, I decided, pulling the blanket up under my chin. But this one would work out okay. Maybe my father was never going to be my father again, maybe my mother would stay yoked to the Dread Lesbian Tanya forever. Maybe my sister would always be unstable, and maybe my brother would never learn how to smile. But I could still find good in the world. I could still find beauty. And someday, I told myself, before I fell asleep, maybe I’d even find someone else to love. “Love,” I whispered to the baby. And then I closed my eyes.

  If you wish for something hard enough, the fairy tales teach us, you can get it in the end. But it’s hardly ever the way you thought it would be, and the endings aren’t always happy ones. For months, I had been wishing for Bruce, dreaming of Bruce, conjuring a memory of his face and holding it in front of me as I fell asleep, even when I tried not to. In the end, it was almost like I’d wished him into being, that I’d dreamed so hard and so often that he couldn’t help but appear before me.

  It happened just the way Samantha had said it would. “You’ll see him again,” she’d told me that morning months ago when I told her that I was expecting. “I’ve seen enough soap operas to guarantee it.”

  I got off the plane, yawning to clear my clogged-up ears, and there, in the waiting area directly across from me, beneath a sign that read “Tampa/St. Pete’s” was Bruce. I felt my heart lift, thinking that he’d come for me, that, somehow, he’d come for me, until I saw that he was with some girl I’d never seen before. Short, pale, her hair in a pageboy. Light blue jeans, a pale yellow Oxford shirt tucked in. Nondescript, fade-into-the-woodwork clothes, medium features and a medium frame. Nothing remarkable about her at all except for her thick unruly eyebrows. My replacement, I presumed.

  I froze in place, paralyzed by the horrible coincidence, the outrageous misfortune of this. But if it was going to happen, this would be the place – the giant, soulless Newark International Airport, where travelers from New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia converged in search of transatlantic flights and/or cheap domestic airfare.

  For about five seconds I stood stock-still and prayed that they wouldn’t see me. I tried to edge off to the side of the lounge, to skirt the entire area, thinking that there had to be some way to duck onto the escalator, grab my bags, and escape. But then Bruce’s eyes locked on mine, and I knew it was too late.

  He bent down, whispering something to the girl, who turned her head away before I could get a good look. Then he crossed the concourse, walking right toward me, wearing a red T-shirt that I’d snuggled up against a hundred times and blue shorts that I remembered seeing him put on, and pull off, just as often. I sent up a quick prayer of thanks for Garth’s haircut, for my tan, for my diamond earrings, and endured a sudden spasm of misery that I wasn’t still wearing that grand and gaudy diamond ring. It was completely superficial, I knew, but I hoped I looked good. As good as somebody seven and a half months pregnant could look after a six-hour plane trip, at least.

  And then Bruce was right in front of me, looking pale and solemn.

  “Hey, Cannie,” he said. His eyes fell to my midsection as if it were magnetized. “So you…”

  “That’s right,” I said coolly. “I’m pregnant.” I stood up straight and tightened my grip on Nifkin’s case. Nifkin, of course, had smelled Bruce and was in the midst of trying to leap out and greet him. I could hear his tail thumping as he whined.

  Bruce raised his eyes to the computerized board over the doorway I’d just passed through. “You’re coming from L.A.?” he asked, showing that his reading abilities had not diminished during our time apart.

  I gave another curt nod, hoping he couldn’t tell how badly my knees were shaking. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Vacatio
n,” he said. “We’re going to Florida for the weekend.”

  We, I thought bitterly, staring at him. He looked just the same. A little thinner, maybe, with a few more strands of gray in his ponytail, but still, same old Bruce, right down to his smell, to his smile, and the half-laced doodled-on basketball sneakers. “How nice for you,” I said.

  Bruce didn’t take the bait. “So were you in L.A. for work?”

  “I had some meetings on the coast,” I said. I have always wanted to say that to someone.

  “The Examiner sent you to California?” he asked.

  “No, I had meetings about my screenplay,” I said.

  “You sold your screenplay?” He seemed genuinely happy for me. “Cannie, that’s great!”

  I said nothing, glaring at him. Of all the things I needed from him – love, support, money, the bare acknowledgment that I existed, that our baby existed, and that any of it mattered to him, his congratulations felt exceedingly paltry.

  “I… I’m sorry,” he finally managed. And with that I was furious. How rotten of him, I thought, showing up at an airport to take Little Miss Pageboy on vacation, mouthing his pathetic apology, as if it could undo the months of silence, the worry I’d gone through, the anguish of missing him and figuring out how to provide for a baby on my own. And I was furious, too, for his complacency. He didn’t care – not about me, not about the baby. He’d never called, never asked, never cared. Just left me – left us – all alone. Who did this remind me of?

  I knew, at that moment, that my anger wasn’t really for him. It was for my father, of course, the Original Abandoner, the author of all of my insecurities and fears. But my father was three thousand miles away from me, with his back eternally turned. If I could only step back and look at it clearly, I’d see that Bruce was just some guy, like a thousand other guys, right down to the pot and the ponytail and the half-intended slipshod lazy life, right down to the dissertation he’d never finish, the bookshelves he’d never build, and the bathtub he’d never clean. Guys like Bruce were as common as white cotton socks sold in six-packs at the Wal-Mart, if not as clean, and all I’d have to do to acquire another one would be to show up at a Phish concert and smile.