Sleeping Tigers (16 page)

“What?” he asked.

“Not fair. You’re wearing boxers. And in San Francisco that pretty much passes for clothing.”

“Yeah, but I’m also wearing socks. That definitely gives you the fashion edge. How attractive is a man in underwear and socks?” David perched on the edge of the tub again, his hairy knees bumping against my own smooth ones.

I giggled. “Why keep them on, then?”

“Didn’t want to give you the wrong idea. I’m not easy, you know. I’m a highly trained professional. Tell me about your niece.”

Paris’s coughing had stopped, and her hoarse breathing had settled into a slight rattle deep in her chest. She was asleep. I shifted her weight to one arm and took David’s glasses off with my free hand. “If I’m going to bare my soul as well as my legs, I want to see your eyes.” I laid the glasses on the edge of the sink.

David blinked at me. Beneath his mop of curls, his dark eyes were sleepy and long-lashed, warm.

He’s beautiful, I thought, and started telling David everything.

“You slept with David?” Karin shrieked.

I held the phone away from my ear until she’d calmed down. “Yeah, but that’s it,” I said then. “We slept together. As in sawing logs. Triple Z’s.”

It was late morning, and Paris was asleep again after getting up briefly to eat a bowl of oatmeal. I was sitting on the floor of my bathroom, my new home away from home, the phone cradled against my ear while I folded laundry. Lots of laundry. Thank God baby clothes were small enough to wash in the sink. Paris went through more costume changes than Lady Gaga.

Karin was still laughing. “Are you positive we’re talking about the same guy? You actually had a one-night stand with David Goldstein?”

“It wasn’t a one-night stand in the biblical sense. We just happened to fall asleep together…”

“…in the same bed…”

“…in the same bed, yes, but for only three hours, and with a baby in the same room. That hardly counts as a one-night stand.” I sighed. “He’s amazing, Karin. Heroic and kind. And he has beautiful eyes.”

“Oh boy. You must be punchy from lack of sleep. David’s a great doctor and a nice guy, but within an hour of being in his company, most people want to give away their dirty money and join the Peace Corps.”

“I think he’s sexy,” I insisted, then held the phone away from my ear again while Karin howled in disbelief. When she’d finished, I added, “Anyway, I’m glad that I had his number. Thank you for that. Paris probably would have been okay, but it sure felt like an emergency.”

I smiled, staring down at the tiny cotton t-shirt in my hands. The baby had fallen asleep on my shoulder after finishing her orange popsicle, and David helped me sponge the worst of the syrupy mess off my legs and her face before we transferred her to the bed. Then the two of us sat at my kitchen counter, and I told him the whole Cam story while we ate cheese sandwiches and drank what was left of a bottle of tequila. David had started to leave, but I convinced him to stay with me after we both realized he had to be in the clinic in just three hours. Besides, I felt safer with him there, in case Paris had a relapse.

Spooning on my bed, David behind me with an arm about my waist, we had fallen into a deep, comforting sleep. When the alarm on David’s watch went off, he had dressed and stroked my hair as he whispered goodbye. Almost as good as an orgasm, that caress. But Karin would only laugh if I told her that.

“I just don’t get it,” she was saying now. “I thought you were done with nice guys and ready to just have some fun.”

“I guess I lied.”

She sighed. “Okay, go ahead and pursue things with David. For all I know, the man could be a smoking volcano in the sack. When are you seeing him again?”

“Today. I’m taking Paris into the clinic for her shots. Pretty romantic, huh? Then I’m going to Berkeley to find Cam.”

Karin offered to take the baby while I went to Berkeley. “Babies almost always run a fever after those shots.”

“Think you can cope?”

She snorted. “Don’t forget that I’m a trained professional.”

“Just promise that you won’t make Paris wear leather pants and high-heeled boots to the playground.”

It was a couple of miles to the clinic, but I put Paris in the stroller rather than try strapping her into the car seat. As we walked, the neighborhoods got progressively less chic until we were in a part of San Francisco you never saw in the movies. The buildings were crooked multistory tenements in washed out colors. Men stood around cars shipwrecked on cement blocks. Women chased small children through dusty yards or sat on the front steps of buildings, their haunches broad and shiny in rayon dresses. Broken glass sparkled like the sea.

Paris clung to my neck in the dreary cement building that housed the clinic. I was the only non-Hispanic woman in the waiting room. I was also the only woman with a single child.

One woman, her legs as solid as tree trunks beneath her stained pink cotton dress, had brought along four. When she sat down on one of the orange plastic chairs, the children fought for space on her lap. The woman brought a box of doughnut holes out of her enormous cloth bag and handed them around. The children’s faces puffed like hamsters hoarding seeds, their mouths soon sticky white rings.

I waited for an hour before a male nurse called my name. By then, the waiting room had taken on the companionable, chaotic atmosphere of a ferry crossing choppy water, one where nervous passengers make the best of a bad trip. Two of the mothers offered Paris graham crackers and handfuls of cereal; of course I hadn’t thought to bring snacks.

The nurse, a dark-skinned man with a gold stud in his nose and black hair slicked back from his high forehead, wore a name tag that read “Enrique.” He wrestled with Paris to get her to lie on a baby scale. The scale looked too much like a car seat for Paris; she thrashed about as if she were being stuck with pins.

“She’s a real little wildcat,” Nurse Enrique pronounced, and helped me pin her down on the table so that he could measure her height. Then he left the room, saying the doctor would be right in.

Finally, David appeared. He was dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing when he left my apartment, but he’d thrown on a white lab coat. He greeted me with a nod and played with Paris, moving her limbs around like a doll’s and encouraging her to crawl on the table. Then he had me sit the baby on my lap while he examined the curve of her spine.

Why didn’t he look at me, I wondered, or make conversation? I didn’t get it. David was even more reticent here than he’d been at Karin’s party. Was he embarrassed about sleeping with me? Was he involved with someone else, and didn’t know how to bring up the subject? Or was he just being professional? I wondered how to put him at ease.

Nurse Enrique returned and threw a loving arm around David’s shoulders. “You gonna come play with us tonight, Doc?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” David said.

Enrique giggled. “Watch this guy,
guapa
. Doc’s got himself some fast hands. And rhythm! Ooh la la.”

I felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. David couldn’t be gay, could he?

“Is your nurse a close friend?” I asked David casually, once Enrique left us alone again.

“Very,” David said, then glanced at his watch and got down to business. Paris was thin, but we couldn’t determine where her weight fell on the growth curve, he told me, since we had no actual birth date or previous medical history. But there was good news, too: her heart, lungs, muscle tone and reflexes all seemed normal.

“We’ll start catching her up on immunizations today, and we’ll keep an eye on her weight gain over the next few weeks,” he explained. “We want to make sure that her failure to thrive has been the result of poor nutrition and nothing more.”

“Thank you,” I said. Hearing the phrase “failure to thrive” made me feel sick with anxiety.

On top of that, I now felt confused about David. Was sleeping with me last night just another good deed for him? A California sort of welcome? A favor for Karin? And how was it possible that I had once again fallen for a guy who found me as desirable as plywood?

David flashed a smile, softening his professional cool. “Hey, want to join us tonight? A bunch of us are going to play at a club called Aunt Mary’s. It’s near your house. Can you get a sitter?”

“You want me to go with you?” I asked. “I thought you were going with Enrique.”

David studied me over his glasses, drawing his bushy eyebrows together in a slight frown. “Sure, Enrique will be there, too, but so will a lot of other people. You know where Mary’s is? Near the Bart station on 24
^th
?”

Right in my neighborhood, but definitely not right up my alley. I didn’t really think David was gay. But I couldn’t imagine myself competing for David’s attention among a group of swinging singles as hip as Enrique, me in my khaki pants with a baby on my lap. “Sounds fun, but I can’t,” I said. “I’m going to Berkeley to talk things over with my brother.”

“You sure?”

Did David look disappointed? No way to know. I reached out to shake his hand. “I’m sure. Maybe I’ll go out with you and your friends another time,” I said. “Thank you for everything.”

David patted my arm awkwardly. “Okay. We’ll be there until pretty late if you change your mind. Enrique will come in to give Paris her shots in just a minute. Good luck with Cam.”

Paris was running a slight fever after her vaccinations, so I took Karin up on her offer to watch the baby while I drove to Berkeley that afternoon. I should have been relieved to be driving without a screaming banshee in the back seat, but instead I felt bereft, as if part of me were missing.

I reminded myself that I was looking for Cam not just for my sake, but for Paris’s, too. Even so, by the time I crossed the Bay Bridge and saw how the fog was wrapping itself around San Francisco like a moist towel, I had to fight the urge to turn the car around. I was exhausted on top of everything else; who knew that babies were this tiring?

It was easy to find the outdoor food vendors near the main campus gate on Telegraph. There were salad carts and fruit carts, hot dog stands and fruit smoothie trucks, pretzel vendors and one enormous stand that specialized in Chinese food. Among this cornucopia of student cuisine, I spotted The Falafel Man truck.

Cam wasn’t there. A tiny brunette, maybe twenty years old, stood alone in the cart. The tattoos on her neck and arms were so vivid that at first I thought she was wearing a long-sleeved shirt beneath her halter top.