The Solomon Sisters Wise Up (7 page)

Oh, and I could expect my brain to go on hiatus.

“Ready?” Griffen asked, startling me out of my thoughts.

“As I’ll—”

Ever be, I’d been about to say. But I realized Griffen wasn’t talking about the pregnancy. He was talking about resuming walking.

We turned the corner of Eighty-fourth Street and walked down to First Avenue, something of a hike from Lexington Avenue when you weren’t saying a word.

Again Griffen was almost hit by a baby stroller.

There were a lot of baby strollers in my neighborhood. I’d never really noticed them before, except to want them out of my way. Now I wanted to peer in every single carriage and ask the mother questions.

Griffen stopped in front of my apartment building. The last time he
stopped
in front of my building was our first date.

“Do you know what you want to do?” he asked.

I wondered what he was thinking.
Get rid of it. Say you want to get rid of it!
I imagined him silently chanting.

Was he foaming at the mouth to tell me he’d pay all expenses?

“My doctor said I’m due on May fifteenth.”

He looked positively ill. Really. Like he was about to throw up on the street.

“That’ll make the baby a Taurus,” I rambled on. “My mom was a Taurus, and it’s definitely not true that Taureans—or is Tauri?—are stubborn, so…”

I trailed off as he stared down at the street. Now he looked as if he wanted to cry. “Are you really going to do this?” he asked, desperation in his voice. “I can’t believe you’re going to do this.” He covered his face with his hands, then shoved them in his pockets, then dropped down rather dramatically on the bottom step of the brownstone next door to my building. “Are you really going to do this?” he asked again.

I nodded.

He sucked in a breath. A deep, ragged breath. “So you’re going to do this. You’re really going to do this.”

Just remember the daze you were in when you found out you were pregnant,
I reminded myself.
That’s how he feels now. Be very kind.

“I am going to have this baby, Griffen,” I said. I laid a hand on his shoulder. He flinched, and I pulled it away. “I know it’s an incredible shock. I don’t know what else to say myself, other than that I’m pregnant and I’m having the baby.”

He let out a whoosh of breath and dropped his head between his knees. “I need some time to digest this. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll call you,” he added, and then he shot up and walked away. Fast.

I imagined him stopping just around the corner on Second Avenue, hyperventilating into his doggie bag.

I’ll call you. I’ll call you. I’ll call you.

A month ago, I’d gotten Astrid’s gold star raised eyebrow and a “Write it up” when I suggested “What He Really Means When He Says He’ll Call” as an article. I’d boldly stopped twenty-five guys on the street, from hot to very not, from early twenties to early forties, stuck a microphone in front of their mouths and asked the age-old question.

According to my own survey, the odds that a guy would call when he said he would were slightly less than fifty percent.

I considered those odds promising for my current situation.

Then again, I hadn’t exactly given the men hypothetical situations to mull over, such as:
“Uh, a chick you’ve been seeing for a couple months tells you she’s pregnant, and you say you need some time to digest it and that you’ll call. Will you?”

Tape recorder in hand, I’d asked: “At the end of the evening, you tell your date you’ll call. Will you?”

Mark, 30: “If I like her, yeah. If not, no.”

Me: “Then why say you’ll call?”

Mark: “Sometimes I say it just to get away from the girl, you know?”

Me: “From the
woman,
you mean.”

Mark (rolls eyes ): “I wouldn’t call you if you said something like that on a date.”

Me: “Good.”

Jim, 34: “You just say it. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like when someone says, ‘How are you?’ It’s like a rhetorical question. They don’t really expect an answer.”

Me: “But isn’t the woman expecting a call?”

Jim: Blank stare.

John, 29: “If I say I’ll call, then I’ll call. Guys who don’t give nice guys like me a bad rap.”

George, 21: “I’d definitely call
you.
I like older women. Seeing anyone?”

Me: Big smile and a proud “Yes, I am.”

Paul, 37: “I call exactly three days later. You don’t want her to think you’re too into her. Women like a man with an edge.”

Robert, 28: “I don’t even realize I’m saying it.” (In other words, what Jim said.)

Griffen (yes,
that
Griffen), 32: “I mean I’ll call.”

Me (smiling ): “But
when
will you call? Tomorrow? In three days? Two weeks? When you’re bored? If you want sex?”

Griffen (smiles back and taps my nose with his finger ): “When did I call you after our first date?”

Me: “The next day at work. You said you had a great time and asked me out again for the weekend.”

Him: “I’m a stand-up guy, huh? You’re pretty lucky.”

Me (kissing his neck ): “Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes.”

And then we had sex. Great sex.

That flirtatious little conversation over chocolate fondue and strawberries, a few glasses of white wine and a lot of sexual innuendos was one month ago. I was pregnant then.

I’d been pregnant for just about our entire relationship.

But it wasn’t the fondue or the wine or the sexual innuendos.

I was pregnant because of a large iced mocha.

And because my air conditioner had conked out yet again.

And, indirectly, because of my Don’t-You-Dare-Do-It sister, Ally.

Two months ago, on a hot, humid late August morning, the kind that wakes you up with its stickiness, I’d decided to spend the sunlight hours at the very air-conditioned DT*UT, a coffee lounge around the corner from my apartment. I took a cold shower, threw on a tank top, jeans and my flip-flops that annoyed even me with their clickety-clackety on the sidewalk, twirled my hair up into a messy bun, grabbed a bunch of competitive women’s magazines and a pad of paper and headed out. I planned to write a “What the Competition Is Doing and What
Wow Woman
Should Be Doing” memo to Astrid, since it was my month to report on the competition. After the stifling heat of my apartment and the sauna outside, the cool air in the coffee lounge was almost too cold, and I ran back home for a meshy cardigan.

I was standing at the condiments counter with a large iced mocha into which I was stirring an extra packet of Sweet’N Low, when someone backed into me.

The cutest guy I’d seen in a long, long time.

“I am so sorry,” he said, grabbing a wad of tissues and handing them to me, his expression full of apology. He grabbed another wad of tissues. “I hope your sweater isn’t ruined. It’s nice.”

I beamed. Was there a stain on my sweater? Was I standing in a coffee bar? I had no clue. I felt as though I’d been transported to dreamland. That was how instant the chemistry felt. To me, anyway.

I looked down at myself. My new pale pink Banana Republic cardigan, the one Ally had bought me because she’d been offended by the ratty black one I’d shown up in for lunch a couple of weeks ago, was soaked with a combination of espresso, milk, chocolate syrup and whipped cream.

From the breasts down.

He was looking at the stain. At my chest?

“Here,” he said, reaching into his back pocket. He pulled out his wallet and handed me a card. “Call me when you get the bill for the dry cleaning. I’ll pay for it. That sweater looks expensive.”

“It’s really no problem,” I said. “Easily could have been the other way around.”

He smiled. And a tingle shot up both my legs.

Thick, silky blond hair. Real blond. Baby blond. But brown eyes. Pale brown. And long, boy eyelashes. One dimple, in his left cheek. He was tall and lanky, with delicious shoulders, and dressed guy Gap-y in army green cargo pants and a white T-shirt and sneakers.

I realized I was staring and hoped I wasn’t salivating. “You could—”

“I’m really sorry again,” he interrupted, “but I’m so late. I have to go.” He pointed to the card he’d given me. “Call me when you get the bill and I’ll send you the money. I’m good for it.”

And before I could say another word, he was out the door with his take-out cup of iced coffee.

I looked at his card. Griffen Maxwell. Producer at Fox News.

I whipped out my cell phone and woke up Lisa.

“Don’t wait for the dry cleaning!” she shouted. “Call him tonight! He sounds gorgeous!”

“But—”

“No buts,” Sabrina insisted when I called for her opinion. “You like the guy, call him. Why do you think he gave you his card in the first place? He was in a rush, didn’t have time to get your number, so he whipped out his card.”

For once, Lisa and Sabrina were in agreement.

“Talk about cute meet,” Lisa said. “You can write it up for a
Wow
How-We-Met sidebar!”

“Don’t you dare call him!” Ally advised later that day when she called to ask if I’d gotten our father’s engagement announcement with the Wedding Fest event time card. (Yes, I had. I’d shaken my head and flung it across my room with a
Yeah, right.
)

“Sar, if he was interested, he wouldn’t have run out of the coffee shop like that,” Ally said. “He would have asked you your name and gotten your number. When a man is sexually attracted to a woman, nothing keeps him from sniffing out a date. Men are always throwing around their cards, especially if they’re proud of their jobs. Don’t call a guy who isn’t interested.”

Can you spell KILLJOY?

“Do what you want,” Ally said when I complained that she was always raining on my parade. “But trust me—he’ll say okay to getting together because he figures it’s easy sex, and suddenly you’re nuts about a guy who never liked you to begin with.”

How did you respond to that? Did you simply hang up in your sister’s ear or did you tell her off first?

I opted for a “Whatever, Ally,” the response that always tended to annoy her the most, then I did the opposite of what she’d suggested. A little habit of mine.

That night, I picked up the telephone and put it back down five times. Finally, I picked it up and forced it against my ear and dialed. “Hi, Griffen, this is Sarah. We met at DT*UT this morning?”

“Sarah?” he repeated.

I waited a second for my face and stained breasts to register.

Silence.

Panicking and thinking that perhaps I should have listened to Ally was another habit of mine.

How many women had he met at DT*UT that morning?

“You spilled my coffee on me?” I reminded him.

Moment of silence. “Ah, that’s right,” he said. “Of course. The woman in the pretty sweater. So what do I owe you?”

Not the pretty
woman
in the pretty sweater. Just the pretty sweater.

Shut up and talk, Sarah!

“Um, well, my sweater’s still at the cleaners,” I said. “They’ll definitely be able to get the stain out.”

“Great,” he said.

Silence.

Shit.

“It’ll be ready tomorrow, though,” I rushed on, “so I thought maybe we could meet at DT*UT, and you could buy me a cup of coffee to make it up to me.” Flirt, flirt. Coy, coy.

Silence.

Shit.

“Or whatever,” I said, disappointment and Ally’s words of unfair wisdom filling my stomach.

“Tomorrow’s no good for me,” he said. “Thursday’s okay, though, for a quick cup of coffee. Around seven?”

Smile. Big smile.

Ha! Ally had been wrong, wrong, wrong. If he wasn’t interested, he wouldn’t have made the date. He would have told me to call him when I’d paid the bill. Okay, granted—a “quick cup of coffee” wasn’t exactly dinner. It wasn’t even really meeting for coffee. But it was a start.

And so on Thursday night, I spent an hour dressing for a quick cup of coffee (sexy-casual, which was much more difficult than my standard business-casual or casual-casual).

He didn’t even recognize me. Hadn’t remembered me at all. But then we’d sat and started talking about our work—both our jobs were entertainment-focused—and then movies, and it turned out we were both huge Woody Allen fans and huge Chris Rock fans and huge Yankees fans and huge fans of Indian food, and twenty minutes later we were having Indian food in a narrow red restaurant with thousands of Christmas lights way down in the East Village, sharing Taj Mahal beer and chicken tikka and salmon tandoori. And two hours later, as we walked uptown, on the lookout for a taxi, we’d passed by Veniero’s, the famous bakery, and I’d commented on the cupcakes.

And then he’d called the next day and asked me out for Saturday night.

It was one heck of a date. We had chicken enchiladas, margaritas, saw a Jennifer Lopez movie, and then went back to my apartment and made a baby.

“I’ll call you?”
Sabrina said, slamming her palm on our little round table at Starbucks. “That’s what he said to the news that you’re pregnant—and then he just
walked away?
”

Hurried away was more like it.

While Sabrina muttered the word
dick
and Lisa shook her head, I stared out the window, counting baby strollers. In the two minutes we’d been sitting down with our coffees, my already dog-eared
But I Don’t Know How To Be Pregnant!
next to my Linzer torte, which I’d craved a second ago and now couldn’t imagine eating, I’d counted eight. Wait a minute—I spoke too soon. Make that nine.

Yesterday, before I’d gone to meet Griffen for the big tell-him-the-news birthday dinner, Lisa and Sabrina and I had arranged to meet this morning at the Starbucks around the corner from my apartment. The plan was for me to sleep on Griffen’s reaction so that regardless of whether he got down on one knee or went screaming out of the restaurant, I could come to my own conclusions before anyone else’s opinions got thrown into the mix.

Here were my conclusions: I’d expected Griffen to call last night even before he got home. I envisioned him in Central Park, shivering in his denim jacket by the Boat House, staring at the water and pondering deeply. I thought he’d call me on his cell, suggest we meet for a drink to talk things through. But he didn’t. And he didn’t call an hour later, or two hours later. Or three hours later. At four in the morning, I finally fell asleep with the telephone on my pillow.