Bundle of Joy? (14 page)

“Well, you’re doing a great job.”

“And this is her second job,” Ben said.

He kissed her cheek, and I felt like they saw only each other.

“She teaches third graders all day,” he added.

“Wow!” I said. “That’s a lot of time on your feet.”

She and Ben smiled at us and each other, and I had a feeling Ben knew how to give her a good foot massage.

“It’s their first time here,” Rebecca said to Ben. “You know what that means.”

“Dessert is on the house,” Ben said, smiling.

“I suggest his chocolate cake,” Rebecca said, and winked at me.

I left the restaurant full of food and a good feeling. I felt like I’d stepped into one of those perfume ads where everyone rolls around and seems to be in love. I coveted the way Ben and Rebecca looked at each other. I had all but given up on finding that. It hadn’t bothered me that I might spend my life alone. I had accepted that. I enjoyed being by myself. I wasn’t full of surprises. But with Paul’s solid arm around me as we walked up Hudson Street it seemed like my life was changing.

“What’s on your mind?” Paul asked.

“Just the meal,” I lied (sort of).

“It was good.” He squeezed my shoulder. “You know, I’ve been thinking about that kiss you gave me the night of the Great Blackout.”

I laughed at the way he said that, like he was a newscaster. I wasn’t sure what to say. Should I say I liked it too? Should I blame it on the booze? Should I say that that was what had made the blackout so great?

But before I could say anything, he stopped at the Don’t Walk sign on 14th Street and he kissed me. I’ve been kissed now by four different men, but I felt
that
kiss in the back of my knees.

He stopped kissing me to put his hands in my hair and pull my face close to him and kiss my temple. I could only squeeze his forearms. I felt drunker than I had a few minutes ago. I felt wonderful, but a little sick. Then I did something I never did: I invited him back to my place.

Of all the nights for Armando and Kelly to decide to bond it had to be that night. Armando should have been working, and Kelly? Didn’t Kelly have a night shoot? But there they were sitting in the living room watching an
ER
repeat. Kelly’s mouth hung open, and Armando stood and kind of sized Paul up, which I found endearing. Paul was unfazed by our audience.

“You remember Paul,” I heard myself say in a shaky voice. And then all strung together I finished with “PaulthisisKellyandArmando. Can I get you a beer?”

“That would be great.”

I went into the kitchen, my heart now beating in my stomach; only one of my armpits was sweating. I took two bottles out of the fridge. Kelly was in the kitchen with me almost immediately. Another reason to have roommates: silent, delirious jumping-for-joy in unison.

“Do you want us to go somewhere?” she asked in a hoarse whisper. She was holding on to me, kind of bouncing.

Nothing like this had ever happened to me before.

“I don’t know. No, no. Just stay.”

“Okay,” she said quickly. “Just be cool.”

We went back into the living room where Armando and Paul were watching a music video. I handed Paul his beer. He thanked me and moved over on the love seat that Kelly had vacated, so that I could sit next to him. I did. Immediately he started running his hands through my hair. It was so casual. No one else seemed as surprised by it as I was. Armando offered me some wine and I accepted.

“Hey, Voula,” Paul said when he had finished his beer. “Can I see your office?”

“Sure,” I said, standing up a little too quickly. I glanced at Kelly, who had her lips pursed, trying not to smile. I knew if I looked at her for too long I would give something away.

In my office, Paul examined the still-dark burned walls. He put his hands against the surface and shook his head.

“You’re here under better circumstances, this time,” I said.

“It could be a lot worse, you know. I mean, of course, you’re all okay—but it could be much worse. How’s Armando’s room?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been in there since it happened,” I said. Then I smiled. “But it must be okay, because other people have.”

“And your room?”

“Oh, no one goes in there.”

He laughed. “I meant, was there any damage?”

“No, no damage.” I shook my head. And then, because I couldn’t help myself and I felt this force pulling me toward him, toward the inevitable, I said, “Do you want to see it?”

“I’m not sure I’m that kind of boy.”

“Oh, okay, never mind.” I felt like suddenly I’d turned into Ally McBeal. It was so not me. Could I get a do-over?

“No, I’m teasing. Of course I want to see it.”

He took my hand and led me into my room. He closed the door behind us. He stood looking around. I had pictures from Georgia O’Keeffe and a silver Greek cross. Did I seem too sexual? Or too religious? I cared so much about what he thought. Why were my walls this odd off-white color?

“I like your room,” he said. “It’s very you.”

He smiled at me. He pushed my hair behind my ear. I wanted so badly for him to kiss me, but he just kept looking at me. It was almost more than I could take.

“You’re very pretty, Voula. You’re very a lot of things.”

I laughed and covered my face.

He took my hand away. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No,” I said. “I just never do this. I don’t know what to do. I never had a boyfriend. Not that you are. I just don’t know this stuff.”

I was confessing. I wanted him to know he was dealing with an amateur.

“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to,” he said.

I nodded. For some inexplicable reason, I trusted him.

And I didn’t do anything.

He did everything. He sat me on the bed and he touched me, just touched me until I relaxed. He kept looking at me. I don’t think he said anything; he just looked at me whenever he did something else, to make sure I was okay. I had this feeling that he would stop as soon as I said I wanted him to. But I didn’t want him to.

He kept his white T-shirt on and his boxers. I kept my socks on, and he pulled my crocheted blanket around me to keep me warm.

I had listened to Jamie and her friends talk about all kinds
of experiences they’d had, with men they loved or men they wanted or men who were so bad they were good. I never got it. I could never really relate. There was the time with Warren, but that was more about him than me. With Paul it was about me. Someone must have trained him on how to make a girl feel good. I wasn’t jealous. I would just like to shake her hand.

He rocked my world.

I
was splashing water on my face in the bathroom of the studio that Maureen had insisted I get to at ten a.m. She wanted to show it to me without the other broker. I wondered what she thought as she waited outside for me on the oversize couch she had declared “too big for the space.”

My body was revolting. I couldn’t blame my body. It didn’t know how to handle too much positive emotion. It was used to pain. There were butterflies in my stomach and my jaw felt wired shut.

Paul and I had eaten soy yogurt and toast that morning. Well, he ate. I just pushed the yogurt around because I didn’t think my stomach could take food. I was certain it was me and not the food at Esme’s Eatery. I was certain I might never relax again. My world was evolving in so many ways.

Even in the morning, Paul hadn’t stopped being sweet. I think it would have been a little bit easier in a way if he had been distant. I was becoming too happy. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Something bad had to happen soon. I thought about calling my mother just to get some perspective on how gloomy the world could be.

But even the bathroom was cheerful. The tile around the ceiling was trimmed with bright blue V’s. The bathtub was one of those old-fashioned claw-foot tubs that I only saw in places that were too expensive. There was even a painted blue magazine bin facing me as I sat on the toilet. I imagined stuffing the bin with all of the magazines I wrote for.

“Dear, is everything okay?” Maureen called.

“Yes, just a minute.”

I opened up the door and looked at Maureen, who was on the phone lining up appointments with other clients. I had a chance to assess the place.

The kitchen wasn’t enclosed—you literally opened the door into it. The bathroom was perfect. There were three steps up to an area that would be big enough for my bed and dresser. I could even curtain it off if I wanted to. The living area was decent-sized. There would be room for my desk and file cabinets. I might even be able to squeeze a small eating table into the area. I opened the closet. There was only one, but it was big enough.

I studied the sheet Maureen had given me with the floor plan and financials. There was a storage unit in the basement with the laundry. There was also a roof deck. Outdoor space was a huge plus!

Maureen finished her calls so that she could talk me through the apartment.

“Now, the kitchen is small, but it does have a dishwasher.”

I hadn’t even noticed that.

“Also, Voula, this place is going to get great light. It’s south facing.”

Facing south jacked prices up several thousand dollars.

“It’s move-in condition.”

Maureen knew my aversion to “vision.”

I looked at the financial sheet again. It was actually in my price range.

“There’s no doorman,” I said.

“But there is a live-in super. Besides, I thought you were willing to move away from the doorman thing.”

“I am.” I was. I recognized a sparkle in Maureen’s shrewd eye, which I took to be a reflection of what she was seeing in mine. “Show me the roof deck.”

The roof deck was at best double the size of the bathroom. There were two green chaise longues up there and a tiny hibachi. The area was surrounded by a low plaster wall and next to it was a room that looked like it had some utilitarian purpose.

We were eight floors above West 13th Street. I looked down onto the street and if I crooked my head in a quasi-uncomfortable position I could see the Hudson River. A river view? It was unbelievable. It was bliss. I knew there had to be a catch somewhere. I felt faint.

“Do you think they’ll really accept 199? Or is that just a ploy to get it bought?”

“To be safe, you might want to bid a little higher,” Maureen said.

“Do you think I could use the bathroom again?”

“That depends,” Maureen said, grinning. “Are you going to make an offer?”

“Offer 190,” I said. “And give me the keys. I need to sit on that big couch.”

Three days later, I was watching Jamie get ready for the lunch that Alice was having at Alice’s Chelsea Mercantile apartment. I had never been there, but talk about real estate boon.

“I feel fat and ugly!” Jamie screamed, throwing off the third shirt she had tried on.

Jamie had gained seventeen pounds in fifteen weeks. She wasn’t happy with any of her clothes or her swollen ankles. I was wondering when would be a good time to pop in some info about my date. Jamie pointed to a giant ankle and shrieked. I had to ask myself again why anyone would choose that life.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to her breasts as she changed shirts again. This shirt needed to be worn with a different bra.

“What?”

“Your nipples—they’re…” Jamie had had enviably nice breasts her whole life. She had had high Bs with nice nipples and no signs of sag. Her boobs were definitely larger now, but the nipples were dark.

“I know. It happens, I don’t know why. According to Raj—” she pointed down “—other things have gotten darker too. I can’t bring myself to look.”

I
couldn’t bring myself to ask for clarification, even though I needed it. I decided to let it pass, and consult my pregnancy book later. I changed the subject.

“Are we going to walk?” I asked.

“I don’t think I can.”

“Subway?”

“Voula, I think I need a cab. Sorry.”

Unless it was after midnight, I considered it blasphemous to take a cab any less than twenty blocks, but Jamie’s belly looked rounder than I had ever seen it. Her whole body was full: she didn’t really look pregnant, just sort of swollen. I agreed to bend my cab rules.

As we sat in traffic up 8th Avenue, I blurted out the details of my date with Paul and that I was waiting to hear if my offer was countered. The weekend was messing with the way things were supposed to flow. For some reason no one could make a real estate decision on Sunday. As expected, Jamie didn’t say anything about my real estate adventure.

“Wait! You had sex this week? And you didn’t tell me?”

I wished she would lower her voice. I didn’t want the cabbie to think I was a slut.

“Well, we barely talked.”

“But what about yesterday?” She sounded so hurt.

I refrained from pointing out that yesterday I had listened to two thirty-minute diatribes from her. The first about the change in her hair texture, the second about how difficult it was for her to sleep. That conversation was divided into two parts—first, how often she peed, and second, how uncomfortable she was sleeping on her side since she usually slept on her back. What I said was “It just didn’t come up.”

“This is big, Voula,” she said.

As if I hadn’t thought about this.

“I know,” I said. I held up my hand. “I’m almost going to have to start counting on the other one.”

Jamie giggled and so did I.

“I’ve run out of everything,” Jamie said, looking down to her swollen toes. “I stopped counting at sixty-three.”

“Jeez,” I said, wondering what the cabbie was thinking now. Still, it felt better to have told her. It made that night seem like it had really happened.

“Was it great? I mean, had you forgotten how to schtoop?” She elbowed me and winked.

“Is pregnancy turning you into Jackie Mason?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. So, details. Namely, when are you going to see him again?”

“His schedule is so effed up. He signed up for all this overtime before our first date and couldn’t get out of it. His job is awesome unless there’s a fire. He basically just eats and works out.”

“Sounds like your job,” she said. “But without the working out.”

“Shut up! Anyway, he is just so sweet. Can you believe I’m saying ‘sweet’? But he is. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.” Now that I’d started talking about him, I didn’t want to stop. I avoided Kelly’s questions with sly grins just because I wasn’t sure I wanted her to see the full extent of my neuroses. Now that I could tell Jamie about it, the topics seemed endless.

“Don’t talk yourself out of it, Voul. Just go with it. Give what you get. Don’t Dan-the-Man him.”

“What?”

“You know—don’t act like you don’t care.”

“Do you really think I messed up the Dan the Man situation in some way? Do you really think I should have worn my heart on my sleeve for that one?”

“You can just pull up right here on the left,” Jamie said to the cabbie. She looked at me. “No, and don’t get pissy. I’m saying play it cool. Just not
too
cool. Not you cool.”

“Me cool? As in frigid?”

“Don’t be silly,” Jamie said as she took a wobbly step out of the cab in her heels. “Just don’t act like every guy is out to get something. Some of them are quite nice.”

“I know that,” I said. “I also know from a lot of your experiences that some of them are dicks.”

“Right, but this guy doesn’t have to be. It sounds like you think you can trust him. So trust him.”

Alice’s doorman ushered us in with a friendly wave. In the elevator, Jamie gave a deep sigh.

“So first, sex—how was it? What I wouldn’t give to kiss and touch someone again for the first time. It’s so amazing when it’s really right. You just kind of drink him in for hours and hours.”

Jamie closed her eyes as if reviewing all of the sixty-three-plus “first times” she had had. I knew then (if there was ever any doubt) that I would never be the kind of sexual person that Jamie was. I wasn’t ever going to drink anyone in. But while her eyes were closed I took a look at her swollen body. For the second time in our lives, she was envious of something I was doing. It was all so hard to believe.

Alice had married well. All of the primping and exercise, the extravagant amount of money spent on clothes, had landed her a very busy, very important, very handsome—and extremely boring—investment banker. They bought a two-bedroom apartment in Chelsea Mercantile at the beginning, before Whole Foods even got there. Even though Alice said they had gotten it for a song, I was sure they paid one and half million for it. And it wasn’t even south facing.

Alice had just had a baby three weeks earlier. This brunch was an excuse for us to ogle little Lucinda. Alice had a full-time nanny and planned to work part time. She was always kind to me. She didn’t have to include me in her plans, but she made an effort. I liked her. I just thought she was the kind of person who didn’t want you to keep up with them, that she liked to have people around who would stare at her in wonder. She was the kind of person who would happen to mention that she
made her own wedding veil, that her pie crusts were from scratch and that she was next in line for a promotion at work.

She told Jamie how great she looked and let slip in her sweet-as-pie way that she had gained only fourteen pounds during her entire pregnancy. She said this in the context of how quickly the weight would come off. Already, according to her dull husband, Peter, she had lost ten.

I made my way into the kitchen to fix a drink. I checked out the silver appliances (an easy extra three grand and in a place like this, probably five) and took note of the food spread. I was certain that instead of rolling each individual wrap, Alice had just called down to Whole Foods. That was a sign to me that something was wrong.

I gathered with the rest of the women in the jumbo living room with fifteen-foot ceilings. Jamie was telling everyone about my recent bid and a select few about my recent exploits. I was embarrassed, but also kind of pleased. For once I had something to report other than just talking about articles I knew that no one was going to read. But it didn’t last. Alice pursed her lips, asked me a question about Paul and then preceded to regale the group with stories of her labor and casually mention that the luxurious throws on the couch were knit by her between contractions.

The baby had been napping when we arrived, but after we polished off the light dill dip and samosas, we heard a cry.

“I’ll get her,” Peter said, and dashed into the depths of the massive apartment.

I was certain that if I were to look into the baby’s room I would find a space bigger than apartments that were in my price range. His exit gave Alice the ideal opportunity to mention how “fabulous” a parent Peter was.

“The other day he said he wished he could lactate so he could relieve me of the nighttime feeding. Isn’t that the most romantic thing you ever heard?”

I tried not to wince.

“I think I’m more scared of the breastfeeding than the actual delivery,” Jamie said.

“It’s really a piece of cake,” Alice said, matter-of-factly. “I know some women have problems, but Lucinda latched on right away. They say it’s because I didn’t have any drugs.”

“I think I’m probably going to have to take something,” Jamie said, her voice lower than usual.

Peter came back into the living room carrying Lucinda, who was decked out in a furry pink jumper.

I felt the appropriate thing to do was follow the crowd and begin cooing at the baby. Immediately everyone was clamoring for a chance to hold the baby. I was fine to pass on it. The thing looked far too tiny to be in my arms. I could be clumsy and I wasn’t going to risk dropping Alice’s pride and joy. However, I alternated between telling Alice how beautiful Lucinda was with waving at the baby, as if it could even see me with its scrunched-up eyes.

I noticed that Jamie didn’t ask to hold the baby until Alice’s sister, Jen, offered it to her. Only then did Jamie take Lucinda, tentatively, and smile down at her.

“Just watch the head,” Alice said.

Jamie immediately adjusted her arms, and I felt bad that she had been corrected. “You’re a natural,” I said, trying to make her feel better.

Alice’s mother-in-law arrived and immediately reached to take the baby out of Jamie’s arms. “I’m going to have to kidnap my grandchild,” the woman said.

I looked away when Jamie passed the baby to her. I feared she was going to drop it. I was relieved when Alice took her back to her crib where the baby would be safe from all of these cooing women.

“She’s ridiculous,” Alice whispered to the rest of us. “She pulls the baby away from anyone.”

“First grandchild syndrome,” one of Alice’s co-workers muttered. She spoke from experience, as she had two kids of her own. She looked at Jamie. “You should really think about natural childbirth. It isn’t as bad as you think.”