The Real Liddy James (9 page)

At this moment, the waiter materialized and launched into a description of the specials in a French accent that sounded like he had learned it at drama school.

“I'm just having one course. Dover sole,” said Sebastian quickly.

“Really?” said Liddy, who was starving as well as inebriated. “I thought the calamari special sounded good.” She ordered it as a main.

Sebastian did not ask for the wine list.

“And a glass of the house red,” he said.

“Make that a bottle,” said Liddy defiantly.

There was a long pause. Liddy was aware that the date was not going well. Sebastian was tapping his knife against his fork in an extremely irritating manner. Because of starvation and inebriation, when she looked at his face it moved in and out of focus, but, even fuzzy, she could tell he was bored. She attempted to get the evening back on track.

“My boyfriend and I are on a break,” she announced somewhat primly. Then she hiccupped.

Sebastian put the knife down. “Let me guess,” he said meaningfully. “He doesn't know if he wants to marry you, right?”

Liddy said yes, then thought she sounded pathetic. “I don't know if I like him anymore,” she added. “He's older than me.”

“Five years either way is the max age difference, if you ask me. It's unnatural to want to go to bed with Granddad. Or Baby, if you look at it the other way round.”

“Peter's forty-three. He's not
Granddad
. He's mature.”

“Really?” said Sebastian in the withering tone she had heard earlier in the day. “Then why doesn't he know what he wants?”

The waiter delivered their food. Liddy took her first mouthful before her plate was on the table.

“What does he do?”

“He's an academic.”

Sebastian rolled his eyes. “Of course. Don't marry him.”

“Why?”

“You and I, we work fifteen hours most days. In your case,
that's partly because the professor doesn't, but what'll happen when you have kids? How will you ever get off the treadmill?”

“I'm not going to give up work when I have kids.”

“Why not?” said Sebastian. “I hear that raising a family can make a person very happy,” and Liddy actually groaned, and put her head in both hands, and had a vision of a different life, a life of privilege and comfort, a life that several of her contemporaries were starting to choose (which she had previously dismissed as acts of desperation but now saw could be love). These women married men, often inferior to them in qualifications or career prospects, who were devoted husbands and gave them good-looking children and shared years with them that were as full and busy as they wanted them to be, before embarking on late-blooming second careers, frequently in nonprofit organizations.

Liddy gripped her hands tight around her face and she felt a silent scream. “I can't,” she whispered. “Is that what you'd want your wife to do?”

She went back to eating.

“I'm not a marrying man,” Sebastian announced, “but if I were, I'd be a provider. I would not like my children brought up by some nanny while my workaholic wife ran round with a briefcase in one hand and a baby bottle in the other!”

Liddy spluttered, sending fragments of calamari over the tablecloth. “You are a . . .
Neanderthal . . .”
she said, coughing.

Sebastian wiped his cutlery with his napkin. “Yeah. Right. You know the problem with women like you? You have some . . .
thing
about all this going on in your head, but, guess what, Ms. Murphy, it's okay to let someone take care of you.”

As that someone was clearly never going to be Sebastian Stackallan, Liddy knew that “sex for fun” was most definitely off the menu. But still she found it difficult not to take it personally.

It took them precisely seven minutes to eat their food in silence, split the bill, and head out of the restaurant. Sebastian made some attempt at chivalrously waving down a cab, but when she asked him if he wanted to share it, he refused before she had finished speaking. She clambered into the backseat, but the heel of her right Louboutin caught in a grate and came off her foot just as Sebastian slammed the door firmly and banged on the cab window. The driver roared off and Liddy did not ask him to turn back. She looked down at her naked foot and sighed.
Oh, Cinderella
, she thought,
you've got a lot to answer for
. The appalling vista of endless unsatisfactory evenings like this opened up before her, and she decided to keep the remaining shoe on a prominent shelf in her apartment as a reminder that she must wait for the One. In the meantime, she would forget everything about the experience (the art of forgetting was something Liddy had found easy to master), forswear all men for a while, especially handsome princes, and if anyone mentioned Sebastian Stackallan she would say she was immune to his Celtic charms because of their shared DNA.

The cab pulled up on Third Avenue and she got out, barefoot, and began to weave her way unsteadily along the sidewalk. She was already dreading tomorrow's hangover, which would not even be leavened by the memory of a night of gymnastic sexual excess.
“Liddy!”
called a voice ahead of her, and she saw Peter sitting on her steps. He rose to his feet and pulled a small box out of his pocket and she knew what was going to happen next, so
she stopped, and her first instinct was to shout
no
, but then she looked at the solitary shoe in her hand.

“I can't live without you,” he said, so to stop him begging she said yes before any question had been asked, but she did not move toward him until she had put some conditions in place. They would get married before the end of the year, somewhere exotic, on their own, they would have a baby, and they would buy a place in Brooklyn, for she had noticed that was what her friends who had babies often did.

“Yes, yes, I like Brooklyn,” he said. Then she threw the shoe in the trash. Years later, she would remember that Peter had never actually asked her to marry him and expressed more enthusiasm for Brooklyn than the baby, and she would regret that she had not exploited her advantage by defining a minimum number of offspring. But that day, she let him into the apartment, ran him a bath, and ripped up her repeat prescription for the pill. Only then did she open the small box and see the exquisite belle epoque ring with a sapphire cluster setting he had chosen with his mother the previous weekend; it was perfect, and she allowed him to kiss her perfectly too.

In late September, Liddy and Peter flew to a resort in the Florida Keys, where they got married on a beach of white sand with two witnesses they lured from the bar of the hotel. Peter was tanned, and in his mirror aviator shades looked so like Robert Redford in
The Way We Were
that Liddy's enthusiasm for making a baby quadrupled, and when the hotel manager announced that a hurricane was on its way and offered them a bus ride to the safety of Miami, they elected to stay on the island and helped the
staff board up the windows and chop down the coconuts, which the storm could turn into deadly missiles. As darkness fell, they drank three rum punches each and snuggled into their cottage as the wind howled around them, bending the palm trees into horseshoe shapes.

That night the hurricane blew away all Liddy's lingering doubts and she decided that (a) no one would ever know her better than Peter James, and (b) all the evidence pointed to him being the love of her life. She would take his name, protect and provide for him (and the baby that was coming), and they would make their own little kingdom of three and live in it happily ever after.

Liddy had expected that motherhood would change her, but she had no idea of the joy that Matty would bring. The moment she held him in her arms, red-faced and screaming his way into life, she was overwhelmed by the sense that this was the only human being she would willingly die for. She directed her youthful constitution and indefatigable commitment to the project of his nurturing, and refused to be separated from him as much as was humanly possible for an ambitious associate in a top New York legal firm.

Unsurprisingly, Marisa Seldon proved an enlightened employer, giving generous maternity benefits and two-tier pay grades to allow flexible hours for the working parents. There was even a small nursery set up in an unused basement room and sometimes Liddy brought Matty into her office, where she sat her
son on her lap. He would grab the curly phone cord in his chubby fists as she barked instructions at rival firms—to Peter's horror, Matty's first sentence was
“I don't think so!”
When he started school, Liddy tailored her hours to suit.

Their sleep and travel were the two casualties of their new life and Peter missed these things, and sometimes sighed meaningfully when he tripped over one of Matty's toys, even though it was Liddy who did the night feeds and early-morning risings. Peter missed Liddy, too, and felt that the conversation between them had come to an abrupt full stop. But as Liddy never complained if he stayed late at work, or had dinner alone with his parents, or went to see a new play with his students or his colleague Rose Donato, whom Liddy liked, although she was clearly a bit of a sad case, he never told her. Which rather proved his point.

Liddy had turned the destruction of her sleep pattern to her advantage (she bought a running machine to work out between 5:30 and 6:15 most mornings), and found that the constraints on her time actually increased her efficiency in the office. She accepted that she would never read Proust, and spent her Sunday hours lying on the beanbags in Amagansett watching “Bob the Builder,” Matty draped across her like a hot-water bottle, allowing her mind to drift. She would often surface from the theme music with an unexpected solution to a thorny problem (sometimes writing entire briefs on Monday mornings), and although Marisa worried about her workload, Liddy did not.

Being a mother made Liddy a better, tougher professional and a better, softer person because she learned to distinguish between
the two. There were moments, often by Matty's crib as he slept, when she experienced an intense sense of gratitude to the universe, or even God, that she had managed the elusive balance of work and home life that her female colleagues aspired to. Even she had noticed that this was a frequent topic of conversation, particularly late at holiday parties, among slightly drunk women who bombarded her with questions. She knew better than to attempt any reply other than
Peter helps all the time
(false), and
I only have one child
(true), but, secretly, she rejoiced in the superiority of her marriage. The love between her and Peter was special, different, invincible—

—until Matty turned five, and the desire for a second child overwhelmed her.

At first, Liddy was annoyed with herself. No one had to tell her this would turn her life upside down, so, ever practical, she kept quiet and embarked on some aversion therapy. First she volunteered with Matty's school and spent a day shepherding screaming children around a farm in Connecticut, where one student had a dramatic allergic reaction to a donkey and another threw up all over her. Then she packed up Matty's baby clothes and brought them to her legal secretary, who was on maternity leave. But as she ran back up three flights of stairs to retrieve a pair of tiny blue knitted booties and afterward sat slumped in tears on a filthy trash can in Hell's Kitchen, she knew it was not a temporary whim. So when that December she was in the little garden behind the house with Matty, dusting snow off the fig tree, and he said he wanted a puppy or a brother, she made her
mind up. She told Peter that what she wanted for Christmas was for them to have another baby. She smiled as she said this, and cuddled her arms around his waist. He said nothing and withdrew from her embrace.

That weekend, when Peter bought Matty an enormous stuffed dalmatian toy and Liddy an enormous bunch of white lilies, she brought up the subject again. Peter was unsettled; over the years he had come to expect that his needs always trumped hers. She had noticed that a small muscle in the right side of his face twitched in irritation whenever she became truthful and vulnerable, and it did so now. She continued to plead, because she believed that on the big issues he would support her even if he could not do it gladly.

But again he said no, not twice but three times, adding, “I don't want another child, Liddy. I love you and I love the beautiful, healthy boy I have. I'm nearly fifty years old. I've got a book to write. I'm done with the diapers and no sleep.”

“It's not just about what we want. It would be good for Matty to have a sibling.”

Peter shook his head. “
Really?
This is
totally
about you. You think you would have been less lonely with a brother or sister, but you're wrong, Liddy. I never talk to my brother because he's deranged—”

“I have a vision of a family, two kids, maybe a dog, walking in the park.”

“We are a family! And how on earth could you look after a dog?”