Magnolia Wednesdays (4 page)

The biscotti turned to lead in her stomach. Dr. Sorenson, her internist, actually her only regular doctor, was not a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy. She went to his office once a year for her annual well-woman checkup, which included her annual Pap and general physical, and on the rare occasions when an infection or some other small malady presented itself.

What could the hospital have found that would compel him to see her so quickly? Was it some kind of tumor? A cancer?

Just as rage had taken her in its grip earlier, now panic consumed her. She chastised herself for being so ridiculous. And silently apologized to Sara for all the times she’d poked fun at her secretary for doing this very thing. Other than the recent bullet in her butt, she had always been healthy. The fact that she’d been riding such an emotional rollercoaster lately did
not
mean there was something seriously wrong with her; there was just no reason to travel down that mental road.

Vivien pressed redial and waited anxiously for someone to answer. After she gave her name she said, “I had a message to call to schedule an appointment for
today
with Dr. Sorenson.” She expected the woman to laugh at her, but the woman said, “Yes, I have a note to fit you in. Can you be here at two thirty?”

Since Vivien no longer had a job, getting there at two thirty was not a problem. But everything else about this was. “Did the note say why he wanted to see me?” she asked.

“No.”

“Is there someone I might talk to who could give me some idea why he wants to see me?”

“No.”

Vivien was too busy trying not to hyperventilate to take the receptionist’s one-word responses personally. This was New York; abrupt was a way of life.

“Look, all I’m saying is it’s pretty unusual to be seen so quickly. Maybe you could help me find out whether it’s something serious or not. So I can be prepared. Because frankly, one more shock could send me right over the edge. Work with me a little here. What do you think I should do?”

There was a pause, presumably while the woman searched for a sufficient one-word answer. Finally she said, “I’m going to go out on a limb on this one. But I think you should show up at two thirty like the doctor asked you to. So that he can tell you whether you need to be worrying or not.” Then there was dial tone.

In New York, abrupt might be a way of life, but sarcasm was the national pastime.

And so it was that Vivien Armstrong Gray clutched her box of stuff to her chest and boarded the 57 bus to the Iris Cantor Women’s Health Center, where at 2:42 P.M. Dr. Peter Sorenson blew what remained of the world as she knew it the rest of the way out of the water.

4

I
’M WHAT?” VIVIEN asked, certain she’d misheard. “You’re pregnant.”

“No, I’m not.” She shook her head from side to side, adamant.

“Well, according to the hCG levels in your blood you are.” Dr. Sorenson shrugged, equally certain there was no arguing with science. “I’ve scheduled you for an ultrasound next door so we can confirm how far along you are. There are several really great ob-gyns practicing here at the center. I’ll be glad to refer you to one of them.”

“But I can’t be pregnant.”

He looked at her face, which she knew was crumpled in horror and disbelief and the vain attempt to hold back tears. “Ah, so I guess those aren’t tears of joy.”

He handed her a tissue, which she used to try to staunch the flow. “I am way too old to have a baby.”

“Apparently not,” he pointed out not unkindly.

“And I’m not married.”

“Not really a requirement,” he said.

“And as of today I don’t even have a job.” The tears started again. “And I’m a complete emotional train wreck.”

He smiled. “That part will go away in about twenty years.”

Vivien sniffed and blotted some more. “I don’t even particularly
like
children.” God, she sounded so pathetic she could hardly stand it.

“Look,” he said gently. “I can see this is a shock. Let’s just take it one step at a time, okay? You’ll go have the ultrasound, see if it confirms how far along your blood levels indicate, and then you’ll know what your options are.”

Numb and weary, she stood and followed a nurse to the ultrasound department where they confirmed that she was somewhere between eight and nine weeks pregnant. An embryo the size of an orange seed was inside her womb.

On her fortieth birthday last year someone had given her a card that read, “Cheer up. You could be this old and pregnant, too!”

And now, apparently, she was.

FOR THE NEXT week Vivien barely left her apartment except to pick up the odd cracker item or buy a lottery ticket at Fairway Grocery; in her current state of mind, winning millions of dollars seemed more likely than producing real income.

Alone in her hidey-hole, seeking every ounce of comfort it offered, she grappled with what to do. She was barely pregnant, the embryo so tiny she could barely imagine it as more than the seed it resembled. And yet this tiny, seed-shaped thing would alter the course of her life forever, whatever she decided to do.

Intellectually, politically, she had always believed in a woman’s right to choose. Had argued vehemently that those who disapproved of abortion and birth control should be forced to adopt all the unwanted and abused children in the world, every last one of them, before they tried to force others to bear children they might not be equipped to care for physically or emotionally.

She still believed a woman should have the right to govern her own body, to choose whether or not to become a mother. But in the wee-est hours of the morning as she stared out her living room window watching the sun steal up behind the buildings to fill the cracks and spaces of the city with light, she also knew that she couldn’t give up anything that she and Stone had created together. Even if she were unemployed and alone.

So she made an appointment with her new ob-gyn, a smart, no-nonsense woman named Myra Grable, who gave her a prescription for prenatal vitamins, suggested she buy a copy of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, explained the added risks that came with a pregnancy at her age, and promised that the nausea and exhaustion would pass.

But Dr. Grable didn’t tell Vivien how to tell Stone he was going to be a father. Or where she might find the energy to go out and look for a new job. Or how she was going to go back on camera, assuming she could even find a job like the one she’d left, while her body swelled and she remained unmarried. Hollywood celebrities seemed to do these things with impunity, but Vivien didn’t know any television journalists who’d reported during unmarried pregnancies. So far she looked the same as always. But what would happen when her body began to change?

“Why did you quit? It’s so much easier to find another job when you’ve already got one.” Stone and pretty much every member of her family asked her that question in the following weeks, but it was almost impossible to answer. Because how could she describe the torrent of emotions that had propelled her to that scene with Dan when she wasn’t ready to admit that the torrent was hormone-induced? That she was pregnant. And completely freaked out about it.

Her family would disapprove. And Stone? Stone, whom she had affectionately nicknamed Rolling Stone because of his love of rock ’n’ roll and the joy with which he raced from story to story and war to war. He’d told her more than once that he loved her. It was possible he might marry her, might well offer to do “the right thing.” But she wasn’t even sure she believed in marriage anymore. She didn’t understand how in the world her parents had stayed married for so long. And at forty-one, most of her friends’ first marriages were already over. Did she want to marry someone to whom she was first and foremost a responsibility? It was the one thing that might make her feel even more pathetic than she already did.

Finally, when her cozy hidey-hole began to feel too small and her wallowing had produced no answers, she was forced to concede that no one was going to call and offer her a job. So she got up early on that Wednesday morning, took a shower, got dressed, and spent the day at the kitchen table first making a list of who to approach, then working the phone to set up appointments.

By early afternoon she wanted to crawl back into her cocoon on the couch. She’d only been granted three face-to-face interviews because “people were cutting back.” “There was so much wrong out there that investigative pieces just didn’t break through the public malaise as they once had.” And though no one came out and said so, because she was forty-one and the first thing that sprang to mind when she said her name was no longer “inside scoop,” but “bullet in butt.”

Still Vivien dressed carefully for the first interview. Her clothes were already snugger in the waist and bust, but even she wouldn’t have known she was pregnant if she hadn’t been forced to know. When she walked into CIN’s rival, CCN, she felt cautiously optimistic because, after all, who in New York had more experience at investigative reporting than she did?

But when she was seated in the news director’s office, the first question wasn’t “When can you start?” but “What were you thinking when that first shot whizzed by?”

At the second interview she was asked whether she was relieved to have been shot in a place so well padded. And he wasn’t referring to the parking garage. At the third, there weren’t even any questions. Just a twenty-something HR person who knew nothing about her and didn’t seem to want to. Vivien slogged home through the late-afternoon traffic and told herself something would turn up. And for a while she thought maybe something really would.

Friends and colleagues gave her leads on openings they’d heard about. But when she followed up she was inevitably deemed overqualified for the positions, and Vivi, who hadn’t yet won the lottery and was growing increasingly desperate, had too much pride to beg.

Her closest friends took her out to eat and commiserate over the arrival of Regina Matthews, who was already appearing in brief bits on the air as they prepared the audience for the woman who would take over Vivien’s spot. “She’ll never be you,” a former colleague told Vivi over lunch at a nearby deli. “But she does have great lips.”

Stone chided her for giving up so easily. She was great at what she did and she had one of the best demo reels in the business.

“All they’re thinking about when they see me is whether I have a scar on my butt,” she replied. “Or why they should hire me when CIN felt they needed somebody younger.”

“You’ll find something. And when I get back, we’re going to take a vacation somewhere,” he said. “Somewhere fun where nobody’s shooting anybody else.”

It sounded heavenly to Vivien, except that there was no telling when he might actually get back, and by the time he did she’d be noticeably pregnant or, possibly, a mother.

Yet she couldn’t bring herself to tell him about the baby. Some small part of her was not only in shock and delusional but seemed to think that if she didn’t mention her pregnancy, it would simply go away. In these earliest months when the chance of a miscarriage was highest, she told herself there was no need for a discussion that might end up moot. And so she kept the news to herself even though she knew that the longer she waited the harder it would be to tell him if she had to. And the harder it became to talk normally as if everything, other than her lack of employment, was just fine.

BY THE TIME she completed her first trimester, September had given way to October and Vivien could no longer pretend that her condition was temporary or that she was somehow going to find a position in New York even half as good as the one she’d left. In fact, she had begun to doubt she could find anything that came anywhere close to resembling journalism as she knew it.

She’d already talked to everyone who’d agreed to see her and a few who hadn’t, and had been reduced to answering newspaper and online ads like some rookie fresh out of journalism school. Today’s interview was with the editor of a weekly publication that might best be described as
USA Today
meets
People
magazine with a heavy dose of the
National Enquirer
.

Vivi studied John Harcourt surreptitiously as she took a seat in his cramped, windowless office. He might have been twelve, thirteen at the most. Which meant Vivien could have already been at CIN a full two years before he was born.

He was not, as it turned out, familiar with her work, but he thought that her name sounded somewhat familiar.

Despite an almost irresistible urge to stand up and walk out, this time Vivien listened to the little voice that reminded her of how that had worked out the last time and instead ran through the highlights of her career. As she did so she told herself that if she couldn’t get this appallingly low-paying job at the
Weekly Encounter
, she deserved to be unemployed.

“Honestly,” he said. “The column we’re looking to start doesn’t really sound like your kind of thing at all.” He was shaking his head, clearly getting ready to blow her off.

“Oh, I’ve covered all kinds of things,” she assured him. “I enjoy investigative journalism, and I’ve worked in the broadcast field for a long time. But I’m a writer/reporter first and foremost. I started in print and I can cover anything and make it interesting.”

“I’m sure you could.” His expression said,
not
. “But I seriously doubt you’d want to . . .”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of what I’d want to do.” She leaned forward, her words coming from between clenched teeth.

“He’s already afraid of you,” the little voice cautioned. “If you scare him too badly, he won’t hire you to get coffee.”

Vivien knew the voice was right. But just as her emotions had pushed her beyond control with Dan, her desperation was shoving at her now. She needed a job and she needed it right away. And given the fact that she was unmarried and pregnant, print would be a better choice for her now anyway. People didn’t really care about the personality behind a byline. There were no celebrity journalists on a publication like the
Weekly Encounter
.