Good in Bed (35 page)

“If it were up to me,” he'd written, “I would hold E's hand forever. She has the most wonderful hands, tiny and slender and soft, so different from my own.”

Or from mine, I'd thought sadly, staring at my own thick-fingered hands with their ragged nails and picked-over cuticles.

If it were up to me, I'd kiss her on every street corner and hug her in front of live studio audiences. I don't need seasonal excuses, or random bits of greenery dangling from the ceiling as incentive. She's completely adorable, and I'm not shy about showing it.

It makes me unusual, I know. Lots of men would rather hold your shopping bags, your backpack, possibly even your purse, than hold your hand in public. They're okay kissing their mothers and sisters—years of conditioning have worn down their resistance—but they're not so great about kissing you when their friends can see. How to get your man over his hump? Don't stop trying. Brush his fingertips with yours while sharing popcorn at a movie, and hold his hand as you walk out the door. Kiss him playfully at first, and hope he'll reciprocate with more passion, eventually. Try tucking that mistletoe in your brassiere, or, better yet, that lacy garter belt you've never worn.…

Lacy garter belts. Oh, that hurt. I remembered how, for my birthday and for Valentine's Day, Bruce would show up with boxes full of plus-size lingerie. I refused to wear it. I told him I was shy. In truth, the stuff made me feel stupid. Regular-sized women are ashamed of their butts and bellies. How could I feel good about pouring myself into the teddies and thongs he'd somehow procured? It felt like a bad joke, like a mean trick, like a
Candid Camera
stunt, where as soon as I showed that I was dumb or gullible enough to think I'd look good in this stuff, Allen Funt and his crew would pop out of the closet, bright lights flashing and wide-angle lenses at the ready. No matter how Bruce tried to reassure me (“I wouldn't have bought it for you if I didn't want to see you wear it!”), I just couldn't bring myself to even try.

I shut the magazine. I paid for my things, shoved them in my pocket, and trudged home. Even though I knew he'd written his December article months before he'd gotten my letter—if he'd gotten it at all—it still felt like a slap in my face.

Because I had no party plans (not to mention no one to kiss), I volunteered to work on New Year's Eve. I got out at 11:30, came home, bundled Nifkin in the little fleece sweatshirt he despised (in my heart, I was sure he thought it made him look silly … and in my heart, I had to admit he was right), and packed myself into my winter coat. I stuck a bottle of nonalcoholic grape juice into my pocket, and we walked down to Penn's Landing and sat on the pier, watching the fireworks go off, as drunken teenagers and South Philly denizens screamed and groped and kissed each other all around us. It was 1999.

Then I went home and did something I probably should have done much earlier. I got a big cardboard box and started packing away all the things I had around that Bruce had given me, or the things that reminded me of him.

In went the half-melted globe candle that we'd lit together in Vermont, and in whose flickering sweetly scented light we'd made love. In went all of the letters he'd sent me, each folded neatly into its envelope. In went all the lingerie he'd bought me that I'd never worn, and the vibrator and the edible body oils and the pink fur-lined handcuffs, which were probably things I shouldn't have lying around anyhow, what with a baby on the way. In went a hand-painted glass bead necklace his mother had given me for my last birthday, and the leather bag from the birthday before that. After some deliberation I decided to hang on to the portable phone, which had managed to lose its association with Bruce … after all, hewasn't calling. And I kept the CDs from Ani DiFranco and Mary Chapin Carpenter, Liz Phair and Susan Werner. That was my music, not his.

I bundled it all up, taped the box, and walked it down to my storage area in the basement, thinking I could maybe sell some of the nicer stuff if it came to that, but for now, it would be out of sight, and maybe that would be enough. Or, at least, a start. Then I came back upstairs and cracked open my new journal, a beautiful book with a marbled paper cover and thick lined pages. “1999,” I wrote, as Nifkin hopped up and sat on the arm of the couch beside me, looking over my words with what I hoped was approval. “For my baby, whom I already love very much.”

* * *

It rained through most of January and snowed almost constantly through February, turning everything white for about ten minutes, until the belching city busses and the guys hawking snot on the streets turned it gray again. I tried not to look at the red foil hearts in drugstore windows. I tried to avoid
Moxie
's red-on-pink Valentine's Day issue to which Bruce, the cover informed me, had contributed a piece entitled “Make Him Wanna Holler: 10 Sizzling New Sex Tricks for the Erotic Adventuress.” One ill-fated day I'd flipped to his column while waiting in line at the convenience store, and had been assaulted with a full-page picture of Bruce wearing lipstick-red silk boxer shorts and an expression of abject bliss as he lolled on bed with a woman I sincerely hoped was a
Moxie
model as opposed to the mysterious E. I'd thrust the magazine back into the rack as if I'd been burned, and decided, after in-person consultations with Samantha (“Just let it go, Cannie”) and e-mailed debate with Maxi (“I could have him killed, if you like”), that the best thing to do would be to just ignore it and be grateful that February was a short month.

Time passed. I developed a new and interesting set of stretch marks and started craving the imported Stilton cheese that they sold at Chef's Market on South Street for $16 a pound. A few times, I came close to slipping a wedge in my coat pocket and slinking out of the store, but I never did. Too embarrassing, I reasoned, having to explain my cheese habit to whoever would have to come and bail me out after my inevitable arrest.

I actually felt pretty good, which was how most of the relentlessly upbeat pregnancy books I'd read described the second trimester. “You'll feel radiant and alive, full of energy!” read one, beneath a picture of a radiant and alive-looking pregnant woman walking through a field of wildflowers, hand in hand with her devoted-looking spouse. It wasn't that great, what with the occasional overwhelming sleepiness, and my breasts aching so badly some days that I had fantasies of their falling off and rolling away, and the night I ate an entire jar of mango chutney while watching a rerun of
Total Request Live
on MTV. Occasionally—well, maybe more than occasionally—I'd feel so sorry
for myself that I'd cry. All of my books had pictures of pregnant ladies with their husbands (or, in the more progressive ones, partners)—someone to rub cocoa butter on your belly and fetch you ice cream and pickles, to cheer you up and urge you on and help you pick out a name. I had nobody, I would mope, conveniently ignoring Samantha and Lucy and my mother's twice-a-night phone calls and weekly sleepovers. Nobody to dispatch to the convenience store in the middle of the night, nobody who'd stay up late debating the relative merits of Alice and Abigail, nobody to tell me not to be scared of the pain and not to be scared of the future and tell me that everything would be fine.

And it felt like things were getting more complicated instead of less. For one thing, people at work were starting to notice. Nobody'd come right out and asked me yet, but I was getting the occasional stare, or hearing the occasional hushed silence when I came into the ladies' room or the cafeteria.

One afternoon Gabby cornered me by my desk. She'd been gunning for me since the fall, when my forty-inch Sunday feature on Maxi ran on the front of the Entertainment section, much to the delight of my editors. They were thrilled that we were the only East Coast paper to have secured an interview with Maxi, and even more thrilled that we had the only story in which she spoke so candidly about her life, her goals, and her failed romances. I got a nice little bonus, plus a glowing note from the editor in chief, which I kept prominently posted on my cubicle wall.

All of this was good for me, but it meant that Gabby was in an increasingly foul mood—especially since I'd gotten the nod to write about the Grammys, while she'd been consigned to prewriting Andy Rooney's obituary, lest his health take a turn for the worse.

“Are you gaining weight?” she demanded.

I tried to turn the question around, the way
Redbook
's latest “10 Tips for Handling Difficult People” advised, aware that people's ears had pricked up. “What an unusual question,” I said through numb lips. “Why are you interested?”

Gabby just stared at me, refusing to bite. “You look different,” she said.

“So what I'm hearing you say,” I began, per
Redbook
's instructions, “is that it's important to you that I always look the same?”

She gave me a long, angry stare, then huffed off. That suited me fine. I hadn't decided what to tell people, or when to tell them, and for the time being I was wearing oversize shirts and leggings and hoping they'd chalk my weight gain (six pounds in the first trimester, another four since Thanksgiving) up to holiday overindulgence.

And it was true that I was eating well. I had brunch every weekend with my mother, and dinner once or twice a week with my friends, who seemed to be operating on some kind of top-secret schedule. Every night, somebody would call and offer to come over for coffee or meet for a bagel in the morning. Every day at work, Andy would ask if I wanted to share leftovers from whichever fabulous place he'd dined at the night before, or Betsy would take me to the tiny, excellent Vietnamese luncheonette two blocks over. It was as if they were afraid to leave me alone. And I didn't even care that I was their sympathy case or their project. I sucked it all up, trying to distract myself from missing Bruce and obsessing over the things I didn't have (security, stability, a father for my unborn child, maternity clothes that didn't make me look like a small ski slope). I went to work and to see Dr. Patel, and made arrangements for all of the classes and courses a new mother-to-be could want: Breast Feeding Basics, Infant CPR, Parenting 101.

My mother put the word out, and her friends all emptied their attics and their daughters' attics. By February, I had a changing table and a Diaper Genie, a crib and a car seat and a stroller that looked more luxurious (and more complicated) than my little car. I had boxes full of footie pajamas and little knitted caps, drooled-upon copies of
Pat the Bunny
and
Goodnight Moon
, and silver rattles with teeth marks. I had bottles and nipples and a nipple sterilizer. Josh gave me a $50 gift certificate to eBaby. Lucy gave me a packet of hand-drawn coupons agreeing to babysit once a week when the baby came (“as long as I don't have to change number two diapers!”).

I gradually turned my second bedroom from a study into a nursery. I took the time I used to devote to the composition of screenplays
and short stories and query letters to
GQ
and
The New Yorker
—to bettering myself, basically—and started a series of do-it-yourself home improvement projects. And, regretfully, I started spending money. I bought a sea-green rug that went nicely with the Lemonade Stand walls, and a Beatrix Potter calendar. I trash-picked a scarred rocking chair, had the seat recaned, and spray-painted it white. I started filling the bookshelf with every children's book I could scrounge from the book editor, plus books from home, and books I bought secondhand. Every night, I read to my belly … just to get into the habit, plus, because I'd read somewhere that babies are sensitive to the sound of their mother's voices.

And every night, I'd dance. I'd pull the forever-dusty metal blinds down, light a few candles, kick off my shoes, crank up the music, and move. It wasn't always a happy dance. Sometimes I'd blast early Ani DiFranco and think about Bruce in spite of myself as Ani roared out “You were never very kind, and you let me way down every time …” But I'd try to dance happily, for the baby's sake, if not my own.

Was I lonely? Like crazy. Living without Bruce, and without the possibility of his eventual return, of even ever seeing him again, and knowing that he'd totally rejected me and our baby, felt like trying to live without oxygen. Some days I'd get angry and be furious at him for letting me stay with him so long … or for not coming back when I wanted him to. But I'd try to put the anger in a box, the way I'd put away his gifts, and keep moving forward.

Sometimes I couldn't help but wonder whether it was only pride that was keeping us apart, and whether it wouldn't be smarter for me to call him, or better yet, go see him, and just beg until he took me back. I wondered if maybe, despite everything he'd said, he did still love me. I'd wonder if he ever had. I'd try to make myself stop thinking these things, but my mind would churn and churn, until I'd have to get up and do something. I polished my silverware, child-proofed the cabinets, cleaned my closets. My apartment, for the first time ever, was neat, even beautiful. Too bad my head was such a mess.

“The thing that every single woman has to remember,” said Samantha as we walked along Kelly Drive on a brisk, breezy early morning in April, “is that if he wants to talk to you, he'll call. You just have to keep repeating that. ‘If he wants to talk to me, he'll call.'”

“I know,” I said mournfully, resting my hands on the ledge of my belly, which I could do since I had officially started showing the week before. Being pregnant was strange, but it did have a few benefits. Instead of having people—okay, men—look at me with disinterest and/or scorn because I was a Larger Woman, people looked at me with kindness, now that I was visibly pregnant. It was a nice change. It even made me feel a little bit better about my own appearance—at least for a few minutes every now and then.