Angels (24 page)

“Welcome to Hollywood.”

A ring on the doorbell had us making inquiring faces at each other. Emily nearly broke her neck skidding across the floor, spurred on by visions of Mort Russell standing on her doorstep holding a your-worries-are-over check.

But it wasn't Mort Russell, it was Luis. Up to now, they'd existed for me only as a blur of interchangeable facial hair, but at last night's party, they'd come into separate focus. There were indeed only three of them. Ethan: big, meaty, and shaven-headed. Curtis: blondy, balding, plumpish, with the least impressive goatee of the lot. It was wispy and flyaway, as though he'd been crawling under a bed and gotten a load of fluff stuck to his chin. I found something slightly odd about him, but that might just have been because Ethan had told me that in high school Curtis had been voted pupil

“most likely to go postal in a public place with an automatic weapon.”

And, standing in front of me, Luis. Neat, pretty—and polite!

He'd come to thank us for the party and to invite us over for dinner sometime. He claimed to be an excellent cook, as a result, apparently, of his Colombian heritage. “Come by whenever,” he invited.

“Sure.” Emily brusquely ushered him out the door.

“Don't you want to?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes at me. “Oh, come on!”

Muttering something about being thirty-three and not fifteen, she grabbed the phone and spent several unbroken hours on it, hopping from call waiting to call waiting, dis ANGELS / 187

cussing the pitch, having the same conversation again and again, speculating and, in effect, saying nothing.

I could have gone to the beach or reverse shopping—I'd decided to return the embroidered denim skirt because when I tried it on at home, it made my knees look funny—but instead I listlessly watched a telly evangelist, weighed down by the return of my earlier, regret-filled mood. I thought about Garv. He'd had a lot of good points. But then again, plenty of bad points. They ping-ponged around so much in my head that in the end I grabbed one of Emily's yellow pads and wrote them all down.

List of Good things About Garv

1.

Understanding exchange rates and the plots of thrillers.

2.

Having a lovely, tiny bottom. It was really gorgeous, especially in jeans.

3.

Thinking I am the most beautiful woman on the planet.

(Though he probably doesn't anymore.) 4.

Seeing the good in everyone. (Except for my family.) 5.

Doing his own ironing.

6.

Taking me to jazz concerts and such like, to further my cultural education.

List of Bad things About Garv

1.

Taking me to jazz concerts and such like, to further my cultural education.

2.

Loving soccer and being proud of me because he thinks I understand the offsides rule. (I don't.) 3.

The electric blanket business, obviously.

4.

And the way he was about my hair.

5.

Not talking to me about Things. I know all men refuse to talk about Things and shrug, “Ah sure, we're grand,” when a nine-year marriage is falling apart, but it still distressed me.

6.

Sleeping with other women.

188 / MARIAN KEYES

But my childish list of facts had no impact on my gloom. I was a mess and my life was a mess. And my future was a mess. And my past was
definitely
a mess. Realizing that the day was shaping up to be a write-off, I took a towel out to the backyard, laid down on a lounge chair, and within seconds was mercifully asleep.

I awoke choking on a jet of water—the sprinklers had started—and came back inside to find Emily still on the phone. She was getting directions from someone. “Oh, I know it. The block where all the plastic surgeons are? Right.”

She hung up. “Coming out for dinner tonight?”

“Who'll be there?” I tried to sound casual.

“Lara, Nadia, Justin, Desiree, you, and me.”

No Troy?

“He's got to work,” she said kindly, sensing my unasked question.

“He's meeting some producer guy. And you know what Troy is like about his work.”

I didn't, but anyway. I was disappointed—and still no word from Mort Russell. Although, while I'd been asleep, Helen had phoned.

I was touched by her concern. Until I discovered there wasn't any.

All she'd done was try to discuss sexy surfers with Emily. “And she wouldn't believe me when I said I didn't know any!”

As we drove through the dazzling evening to Beverly Hills, we came upon a little commotion in a mini-mall. Two boys were being arrested. They had their hands on the roof of the black-and-white and one officer was frisking them, while another swung handcuffs, ready for use. I'd never before seen someone being arrested. It gave me a little living-on-the-edge thrill, of which I was immediately ashamed.

The restaurant was mostly outdoors, the tables beneath a pretty green-and-white-striped awning, separated from the street by a white trellis. Nadia and Lara were already waiting at our street-side table. As Emily and I wove through the tables to get to them, I felt there was something slightly odd

ANGELS / 189

about the place, but I couldn't put my finger on it until Justin arrived, Desiree trotting by his side.

“Thanks a lot, guys.” Thin-lipped and high-pitched, Justin chided Lara and Nadia. “You invite me to a dyke restaurant. I could get lynched.”

And then I realized what was so strange: the clientele were all women. Justin was, literally, the only man. Suddenly the open staring, the two winks, and the one wide smile I'd received all made sense. And I was beset with anxiety; had I been wrong to wink back?

Giddily, Nadia fessed up that coming here had been her idea. “I love this place. Isn't it the greatest?”

“The greatest,” Justin muttered, mortified. “Let's eat.” As he perused the menu, every now and again he flashed an “I'm just an expendable fat guy, you have nothing to fear from me” look about the place, but couldn't relax.

We ordered, everyone except me asking for things that weren't on the menu or for the menu description to be customized. Then, just as I was about to tuck into my dinner, my fork froze in my hand as I saw something that didn't fit with the rest of the world.

A woman, her entire head and face swaddled in bandages, was being led along the sidewalk by a young great-haired babe. As they got closer, we could hear the girl murmuring tenderly, “Okay, Mom, there's a step coming up. Two more steps, then down again. Okay, here's the car.”

They stopped at a four-wheel drive parked only a few yards from our table. In silence we watched the woman stand, blind and passive, waiting for the car door to be opened.

“What happened to her?” I muttered queasily. “She looks like a burn victim.”

Instantly I was fixed with indulgent smiles all around. Even Desiree's liquid eyes looked kindly and amused.

“Plastic surgery,” Lara said, sotto voce. “Looks like she got her whole head lifted.”

190 / MARIAN KEYES

“Take it easy, Mom.” Gently the woman was being guided into the passenger seat, but she didn't lower her head enough and managed to bump her face on the door frame. A little squawk escaped the mouth slit and a spontaneous flinch of “Ew” rippled through the entire restaurant. Everyone had stopped eating.

Then the woman was in. As her daughter scooted around to the driver's side, she sat in her four-wheel drive looking like Return of the Mummy. I had to be careful about slamming plastic surgery, what with Lara's fake jugs, but what
must
that face be like under those bandages? A raw steak? I couldn't help wincing. “It looks barbaric.”

“Hey!” Lara playfully shook my arm. “Don't faint on us. She's happy. She'll spend a couple of days in bed, then she'll have a launch party for her new face.”

“What about her daughter?” I don't really know what I meant by that. I just thought it must be terrible for her to see her mother in such a state.

“Don't worry about her!” Nadia comforted. “She'll be okay soon.

At Beverly Hills High, they get nose jobs for their sixteenth-birthday present!”

“Um…”

“I got a nose job,” Nadia announced proudly. “Not just for me, but so my kid will be born with, like, a totally great nose.”

A paralyzed silence descended. Desiree actually got down off her seat and trotted away. Lara smiled at me, but she looked a little sick.

“What? WHAT?” Nadia had picked up on the atmosphere and was looking from one of us to the next. “What'd I say?”

Then, “Oh, I get it. It's because I'm gay. You think gay women can't have children. Well, get over yourselves.”

THERE WAS SOMETHING
I'd forgotten to put on my list of bad things about Garv. Now, what was it? Putting empty orange juice cartons back in the fridge? Pronouncing “certainly” as “certintly”?

No, it wasn't either of those, it was, 7. Wanting to have children when I was afraid of it.

Claire had been bang on the money when she'd remarked that the rabbits were almost as much trouble as children. Of
course
Garv's fondness for Hoppy and Rider was something to do with wanting children. Even an amateur psychologist who'd failed all his amateur psychologist's exams could have figured that one out.

And I sort of knew it myself, even if I did my very best
not
to know.

Before Garv and I got married, we'd discussed the subject and decided that, while we both wanted children, we also wanted a few years on our own first. That suited me fine because at twenty-four I felt too young to be a mother. (Even though I knew other twenty-four-year-olds had lots of kids; the only explanation I could come up with was that I was immature.) The thing was—and I'd have been the first to admit it—that I thought the whole process of having a baby was terrifying. And I wasn't the only one. Most of my friends were of 192 / MARIAN KEYES

the same mind and we spent many happy hours perplexed by the notion of natural childbirth. Occasionally a horror story was produced about some girl—a distant cousin, someone they worked with, no one too like
us
, if you know what I mean—who'd recently had a baby without pain relief. Or stories of nice, normal women who'd had epidurals lined up for months, but who got to the hospital too late and had to have an eight-and-a-half-pound baby without so much as a baby aspirin to take the edge off the agony.

Such conversations usually came to an abrupt conclusion by someone begging, “Stop! I'm going to black out!” But the ink was barely dry on my marriage certificate when both Garv's and my parents mounted a round-the-clock Pregnancy Watch. Unpasteurized cheeses were whipped away from in front of me. If I so much as belched (not that I ever dared to in front of his mum and dad), it generated a Mexican wave of pleased, knowing eyebrow raises.

When I ate a bad mussel and spent two wretched days lying on the bathroom floor, they were practically knitting bootees. Their expectations made me feel panicky—and resentful. Just because I'd never stepped out of line before didn't mean that, just to please them, I was going to start dropping babies as if I were shelling peas.

“They can't help it,” Garv said. “It's just because we're the first one in each family to get spliced. Humor them.”

“Will it all be okay?” I asked anxiously, bothered by visions of my in-laws holding me down and forcibly impregnating me with a turkey baster.

“It'll all be okay,” he reassured.

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

“
Everything
everything?” (You know the way you can get, sometimes.)

“Everything everything.”

And I believed him. Broodiness, I was sure, was one of those things that belonged Some Time in My Future. A change that automatically occurred with the passage of time, like all of a sudden wanting to sit down in pubs when stand ANGELS / 193

ing up, being good-naturedly pushed and shoved had been fine—indeed,
enjoyable
—for years. I'd watched it happen to other people; I saw no reason why it wouldn't happen to me.

We hadn't been married long when we moved to Chicago and suddenly I was studying at night and we were both working very long hours, trying to get a toehold on our respective career ladders.

Having children would have been out of the question; we'd barely have had the time or the energy to conceive the poor creature, never mind take care of it.

Then, astonishing news came from London: Claire was pregnant.

On the one hand, it was a blessing because my mother would have her longed-for grandchild and the pressure would be off me. But on the other hand, I felt peculiarly usurped. It was Claire's job to reduce my parents to hand-wringing despair; it was my job to please them. All of a sudden, she's puking day and night and cutting my most-well-behaved-daughter's legs out from under me.

And Claire had been one of the greatest party animals of our time, so what had prompted the decision to have a baby? I asked her, hoping she'd confide that James, her husband, had said it was a good tax break. (That's the kind of man James was.) But the hardest fact she could come up with was that it “just felt right.” This I liked the sound of: if it “just felt right” for a wild woman like Claire, the time would definitely come when it would “just feel right” for me.

A few days before Claire's due date, I happened to be in London for a couple of days on business. It had been months since I'd seen her, what with me living in Chicago, and when she collected me from the tube station I barely recognized her. She was enormous, easily the most pregnant person I'd ever seen—and she was proud, excited, and madly eager to involve me in the whole process. The minute we got back to the flat, she ordered gleefully, “Look at me, I'm HUGE!” Then she whipped up her sweatshirt and gave me a full frontal.

On the one hand, I was delighted for her happiness, but on the other, as I looked at her gigantic, blue-veined belly, I 194 / MARIAN KEYES

felt a little squeamish at the thought that there was a human being in there. But what made me even more squeamish was that it had to get out, through an orifice it was clearly far, far too big for.