Some Girls: My Life in a Harem (26 page)

Years later, I would remember that night. I would remember how New York had sparkled outside the wall of windows. How the whole city had seemed to breathe to the rhythm of the dance beat that throbbed through the club, which only hours before had been an elegant restaurant. How I had remembered sitting at that same restaurant with my parents when I was a little girl. We had gone for dinner there after the ballet one night. Maybe it had been
Swan Lake
.

And I would remember that while the other people in the elevator had begun to get agro and fight with each other, Andy and I had sat down in the midst of it and talked about Bruckner. As I watched the towers fall almost ten years later, I thought of the night I got stuck in the elevator of the World Trade Center. I thought of the night I met Andy.

 

The next night, Andy invited me over to the Tomandandy studio—an überhip SoHo loft still under renovation. I stepped out of a cab and navigated the cobblestones in my heels. His studio took up the entire floor of an old building on the corner of Spring and Greene.

When the elevator doors opened, the starved vegans from the other night reappeared, smoking and leaning on the window ledges along the corridor. The lights were out for some reason, something about replacing the wiring. The hipsters in the hallway were lit only by the street-lights outside and by the glowing cigarette cherries next to their faces. I walked past them to a cavernous room that reeked of fresh paint. Piled in the center of the room was a disjointed city of computer and music equipment that remained lit due to the presence of a noisy generator. Snarled piles of cords were everywhere.

In the corner of the room, washed in the blue of a computer screen, was Andy. He turned to me and smiled his wolf smile, his upper canines so crowded and pointy that it looked like he had a whole second set of teeth growing above the first ones. I knew that I was looking at a piece of my future.

As I moved around the darkened loft that night, drifting from one cluster of bored New Yorkers to another, I noticed a trend. I fell into conversation with a Brooklyn filmmaker and his Norwegian-model import girlfriend. The filmmaker said Andy was his best friend. I met a club promoter who said the same thing. So did a Unix programmer and so did practically everyone else I talked to. I would later discover that people often said Andy was their best friend when he barely knew their name, because Andy was the world’s greatest listener. He inspired an easy intimacy that compelled strangers at bars to tell him their secrets and often spawned rivalries for his attention. The people around Andy were close with him but antagonistic toward each other.

Andy and I snuck away from the party and went for a walk. We made out in a TriBeCa alley under a cupola of scaffolding. I recognized that Andy was a rare find. He was in need of a de-geeking makeover, but that was an easy fix. After a few more dates, I wedged myself into his life, becoming a regular installation at the studio and a source of untold drama between Andy and his business partner, Tom. I fit seamlessly into the pattern of everyone loving Andy and hating each other.

I was in love, real love with a real boyfriend. I thought about Robin often, but didn’t miss him at all. When the date on my ticket came around again, I didn’t show up at the airport. I didn’t call Ari to cancel. I threw the ticket in the trash and walked forward into my new life as if the old one had never existed.

 

Andy was infinitely fascinating and made lots of money and pretty much did whatever I said, which made him the perfect boyfriend in my eyes. Within a month we had moved in together. My realtor cousin found us an apartment on the corner of Mott and Houston. It might have been the ugliest apartment building in all of New York, one of those brick boxes with cheap brass fixtures and polished granite lobbies. Our building was the kind of eyesore that was the precursor to the glass-block monstrosities now blanketing downtown, encroaching farther and farther east toward the river until soon the whole Lower East Side will be a mass of cheaply built condos with the Gap or Jamba Juice in their bottom-floor retail spaces.

But apartment hunting in New York was a horror that I didn’t feel like facing; I was characteristically impatient and took the first thing that came along. Our apartment was a one-bedroom comprising two minuscule white boxes, with an Easy-Bake-size kitchen along the wall of the living room.

I packed up and moved my entire room at Penny’s in about five hours. I gave Andy a makeover and a home and he paid our rent and gave me someone to love. We got a python. I bought us a bed, a dresser, and a couch at a cheap furniture store on Sixth Avenue. My parents came into the city to have lunch with me on weekends and my mother constantly restocked our freezer with lasagna and chicken soup. I reheated her food for our dinners and called it cooking. We were practically all grown up.

It was my fantasy in many ways, having this normal life but still being complete freaks. An arty hooker (or a hooker-y artist, depending on the day) and a genius computer hacker, taking over the world by day while enjoying quiet nights at home watching classic films and eating Chunky Monkey. On odd nights, when the stars aligned, this is what our life looked like. But truthfully, I spent many of those nights alone. Andy was a workaholic and was almost never home. I told myself that it was ideal because I was a girl who needed her space. Andy wasn’t the only one with a career. I had my own career to think about.

I went on auditions and went back to working at the Wooster Group a few hours a week. I filled notebooks with my scribbles of script ideas. Most afternoons I walked to Andy’s studio, sat on the long orange custom-made leather couch, and ate sushi while I watched Andy work, composing music on his elaborate computer console. He was so talented, so unassuming, so fucking smart. I envied him. He didn’t have to audition for anyone or fuck anyone or pretend to be something he wasn’t or kiss anyone’s ass or beg for a role, a job, a chance. He just had to be Andy. That’s what you get from the world for being exceptional. The rest of us have to work harder. If I were just me, just Jill, I’d be nowhere.

 

Andy and I never used birth control. My little hysterical pregnancy in Brunei aside, I didn’t really think I could get pregnant. As a result of starving myself in high school, I didn’t get my period for a year straight. And I had never been regular after that. I thought I had turned my own insides to stone.

So it wasn’t my lack of a period that alerted me to something being wrong; I just knew. But I peed on the stick and it came up negative. I peed on sticks again and again and my doctor insisted the sticks didn’t lie. When I finally demanded a blood test, I was almost three months pregnant. Andy was strangely unfazed when I showed up at his work with the news of a pregnancy. He consoled me with a brief hug before going back to work, leaving me frozen in front of the orange elevator doors with the receptionist staring at me.

She and I must have had warring astrological signs or something, because our interactions were always bristly. She was the one who screened my calls when Andy didn’t want to be disturbed. He denied it, but I knew it was true. I stuffed any display of weakness or emotion and planned to have my feelings when I got somewhere private. But when I got home, I couldn’t find the feelings I’d put aside for later. That’s the danger of pretending. You can forget what you were pretending not to be in the first place.

 

Andy assumed that I’d have an abortion, because there was no other option in his universe. When he came home later that night, he started talking details, like when he would have to take off work to take me to the clinic and whether he’d have to take a whole day or a half day. I made him a BLT and served it to him on our crappy sleeper couch. I had picked out the couch while trying to be thrifty, and it was terrible. It was made of black canvas and was tilted and lumpy, and the cushions were always sliding out. We had to put them back in place ten times a day. That albatross of a couch dominated the living room. It was an indictment of me, a visual reminder that I couldn’t do anything right. I wasn’t even woman enough to pick out a good couch.

“I’m not sure I want to get rid of it,” I said.

Andy generally complied with my wishes without protest. It was a good trick he had. He made people feel like they were in control, but actually he was getting them to take care of everything for him. Sure, I could decorate the place any way I wanted, but the catch was I had to do it all myself. That way when things went wrong, like with the couch, it was never Andy’s fault.

In this instance, however, I saw a side of Andy that I hadn’t before. He was quietly decided and direct. It seemed that he was capable of having an opinion after all. He may have had opinions all along and just hadn’t been letting on.

“If you want to have a baby,” he said, “you’ll be doing it alone.”

In high school, I had bussed down to Washington to march with pro-choice advocacy groups. When the militant antichoice organization Operation Rescue attacked New York in force during the Democratic National Convention, I volunteered with the National Abortion Rights Action League doing clinic defense. We gathered at various clinics at six a.m., locked our arms, and protected the entering women from screeching picketers with gory, unforgivable signs. I had rarely felt such a clear sense of being a participant in the fight of right against wrong. We were right; they were wrong.

I didn’t really tell Andy or anyone else how badly I wanted to keep the baby, how my heart twisted in protest against the decision my head had made. I was nineteen and my boyfriend didn’t want a baby. I would rather have chewed tacks than asked my parents for help. My friends were career-minded artists. My choice was spelled out.

I hung out in Penny’s kitchen, my old kitchen, and drank tea.

“It’s a loss,” she said. She’d had an abortion a few years before. “I don’t regret it, but it still haunts me.”

“Nineteen years ago my birth mother had this same conversation with her best friend. She came up with a different solution.”

“She was a different girl in a different time. This is your life, not hers.”

But I thought about my birth mother probably more than I ever had as I made my decision. And in my thoughts she wasn’t a long-limbed ballerina in a spotlight; she was a girl like me, imperfect and feeling totally screwed. I wondered if, like me, some part of her had believed that her boyfriend was going to turn around and tell her that she wasn’t alone. His eyes would have the tilt, the gleam of a man who had changed his mind. He would offer her a family, a little bohemian tribe. And she would offer him one right back. And her life would change in dazzling and unexpected ways.

When I had thought I was pregnant in Brunei, the choice to keep the baby against all odds had seemed so simple, so noble. Maybe deep down I’d known all along that I never was pregnant.

I thought of my adoptive mother newly married and vacuuming the brown rug in her New Jersey apartment as again a month came and went without anything taking root inside her, her insides slippery and hollow and out of her control. I thought of her ticking off each interminable minute of each month until doctors became lawyers and creating a family became a project of proportions neither she nor my father had ever dreamed of.

But then there was the baby, the perfect and whole baby in her arms, wrapped in a pink blanket and sleeping through the flight from Chicago to New York, breathing in and out and smelling like sweet, powdery newness. My mother’s life changed in dazzling and unexpected ways. And for a moment, she was happy.

It was the end of summer, the beginning of September—usually my favorite month in New York.

But this was what savvy girls did, postfeminist girls, girls with futures, right? They tried hard not to get knocked up in the first place, but if the unfortunate accident happened they grimly proceeded to Planned Parenthood and exercised the choice their mothers had fought so hard to guarantee them. They did it and maybe went to some therapy. They did it and acknowledged the scar tissue, but they did it.

A baby was an unthinkable encumbrance. Having a baby at nineteen was something only girls in urban projects and Midwestern trailers did, girls who knew that it was unlikely that their future would differ from their mother’s life anyway. But my mother had raised me to believe that without question my life would differ from hers.

My body, my choice,
I had shouted on the steps of the United States Capitol building. And so it was. It was my choice alone and it was alone that I sat, in an office on the second floor of a building somewhere in Midtown.

 

I waited in a cold hallway, wearing a gown and paper slippers, craning my neck to watch
Batman
on the television. The women who waited with me talked to each other with the candor that women have, the ease we often share at nail salons, at the gym, in doctor’s offices. The woman across from me was Latina, with green eyes and cocoa skin. She was wide around the belly but had slim and shapely legs crossed at the knee and covered with goose bumps. She told her neighbor that she had three kids already and had been on the pill when she got pregnant.

“Ninety-nine percent effective my ass,” she snorted.

Every plastic bucket of a seat was filled. My arms brushed the arms of the women on either side of me. I spoke to no one.

Andy’s genes, I thought. Andy’s wonderful, brilliant, musical genes. I recognized that I was on the precipice of something irreversible, far more so than any choice I’d made before that. A piece of me was turning cold, dying. Maybe it was the piece that believed so strongly in my own rightness, in my own goodness, in the fact that I would do better than my mother, my mothers, that I’d outshine them both by immeasurable wattage. I’d outrun them both by a thousand miles.

Instead I shuffled down the hallway, no better than they. Worse. Worse.