The Thin Pink Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “Yes, I do,” I said. And then, trying to be encouraging, I added, “I guess sometimes it just takes time.”

  “But I haven’t got all that much time,” Dodo objected, “at least not for having babies, since I just seem to keep getting…older.”

  This time, it was me covering her hand with mine, not knowing anymore what to say.

  “Well,” she brightened, “at least I have your baby to look forward to.”

  “Elrond, Jane. Galadriel, Jane.”

  Apparently, in addition to the home they still kept in Barcelona, Tolkien’s successful parents also had a lovely estate just outside London as well.

  When they were out of the room, I leaned over and whisper hissed to Tolkien, “But I thought they went by Ron and Claire now.”

  “Oh, they do,” he said. “But if your parents had named you Tolkien, you’d go on teasing them at every opportunity life presented you with, too. Anyway—” he shrugged as we watched them reenter the mahogany study, bearing a tea trolley laden with teacups and triangular sandwiches “—they expect it from me. Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “What were you saying, my boy?” Elrond-Ron patted combed-back white hair that needed no patting.

  “I was saying how lovely things have been around here since you and Mother decided to stop being hippies and start making money instead.”

  “Yes,” agreed Galadriel-Claire, who seemed just as interested as her husband in adjusting hair that didn’t need adjusting, in her case a believable henna chignon. “Although I notice you haven’t caught the money-making bug yet.”

  “Yes, well,” Tolkien said, “I suppose one of us has to remain an antiestablishment holdout.”

  “Yes,” said Elrond-Ron, “but you’re a copper.”

  “I don’t know,” I defended, taking Tolkien’s hand in both of mine and smiling at him. “Maybe he’s just one of those antiestablishment coppers everyone’s always hoping to find.”

  “They have those, dear?” Galadriel-Claire queried, shocked.

  “I’m certain they didn’t have those when we were hippies,” said Elrond-Ron.

  “Yes, well,” I said, “I guess things have improved since then, haven’t they?”

  Galadriel-Claire, perhaps thinking that one of the greatest improvements entailed having manicured toenails rather than filthy ones, gave a hearty laugh. “Yes, they really have.”

  “Tolkien says you’re in publishing,” said Elrond-Ron.

  “That’s right.”

  “A lot of money to be had in that, is there?” I thought about the contract I had with Alice. “Yes, there can be.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, Tolkien.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying, you and Mother have become even more money-oriented since the last time you were in town. Don’t you ever miss your—um, how to say this—ideals?”

  Elrond-Ron waved a hand. “Ideals. They’re a fine thing to have, but then the world keeps changing, often in ways you can do nothing about and, well, bonds become a safe place to be.”

  Galadriel-Claire leaned forward with enthusiasm. “The way we see it, we’ll make lots of money now and enjoy it. Then, when we die, we’ll leave everything to our favorite charities.” She looked straight at Tolkien, a frown of dismay furrowing her prettily tweezed brow. “You won’t mind, will you, darling, if we leave everything to charity rather than to you?”

  “God, no,” he said, and clearly meant it.

  “How about you, Jane?” Elrond-Ron focused his gaze on me. “Will you mind—” he gestured at the moneyed life around him “—if Tolkien’s parents leave everything to charity?”

  “God, no,” I echoed Tolkien.

  Elrond-Ron looked at Tolkien with approval. “God, I love this girl,” he said, taking out a cigar and using the end of the cigar to indicate me before lighting it.

  “Me, too,” said Galadriel-Claire, taking the cigar from his fingers and drawing on it.

  “Anyway,” I shrugged, “why should I mind?”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Will I do what?”

  “Will you marry me, Jane? I know that we’ve only been dating for a short while, but I feel as though I know you better than any other woman I’ve ever been with in my life.”

  Obviously, those other women couldn’t have been very open. “If I convince you that you’re insane,” I responded, “would that induce you to shelve this crazy idea for a while?”

  “No. Even if you do think it’s crazy, I don’t care. I’ve always thought it was foolish for people to waste what time they have on this planet on foolishness—there’s little enough time as it is. I suppose that sometimes people waste time because they’re confused, but I’ve always thought that, once a person knows what they want, they should make their intentions known at the first opportunity. What I want is you, Jane.”

  So here it was, the moment I’d waited for all my life, it seemed: someone that I wanted, who wanted me just as badly and was willing to say so.

  “What’s it going to be, Jane? If you tell me no, that it’s too soon, I’ll know that what it really means is that you’ll never be ready. Because I don’t think it’s possible for me to feel this way without you feeling the same way back. And if you can feel the same way back, and still say no…”

  I was torn.

  If I married him, I’d have to give up my baby, tell everyone that something had gone drastically wrong. I thought about the little extras at work, the nice way that Sophie and my mother had treated me of late—not like a criminal who was trying to purloin someone else’s joy, but as a worthy woman in my own right—and even of the impending shower, still some weeks down the line. And it wasn’t just all of that, merely all the selfish things; it was that, somehow, over these several months, I’d grown attached to this insane project of mine as I’d never been attached to anything in my life.

  And then there was the book I was writing, of course. How could I give up on that dream now, when I was so close to realizing it?

  Devil Alice’s words now came back to taunt me, singsonging in my head: “Well, you did always say you wished you were a paid storyteller,” she’d pointed out.

  And then there came my mother’s voice, with her ever unoriginal maternal wisdom: “Be careful what you ask for.”

  To which my own voice in my head, my own voice that was now thoroughly annoyed with Devil Alice and my mother’s voice, responded, “Blah—blah—blah.”

  Then the startling thought occurred to me: I could give all of that up—the familial attention, the perks at work, the within-my-grasp success of the book—if it meant that I could have Tolkien in exchange. It was that simple.

  Right on the heels of that startling revelation, however, was the thudding realization that it wasn’t that simple. To draw back from my plan now would mean that I would have to come clean, and I wasn’t yet ready to do that. After all, I could hardly get people to believe that it had all been a hysterical pregnancy, not this late in the game, and certainly not since I’d been brilliant enough early on to name Dr. Shelton as my obstetrician—even if I’d had the foresight to fire him since—brilliant Dr. Shelton who could surely be depended upon to detect if a woman were really pregnant or just merely crazy.

  And here was the biggest thing: it was the “something had gone drastically wrong” part that was really the chief problem. For, if I wasn’t willing to yet admit to lying all this time, and no one would ever believe it had all been some misunderstanding, then the only alternative would be to tell people that I had lost the baby; not lost it in a “can’t quite remember where I put it” sort of way, but lost it as in “the baby died.”

  I just couldn’t bring myself to do that, and not merely because of all the pain it would cause to people like Dodo, people who had invested care, concern and, yes, even love into my pregnancy. No, it wasn’t merely that. It was that it would be wrong, wrong for the same reasons that I’d felt uncomfortable earlier whe
n I’d accepted sympathy from Stan from Accounting after telling him I needed an amnio because of the threat of Down’s syndrome.

  There was my weird hairsplitting morality kicking in again: it was perfectly okay for me to accept unearned attention for a positive thing, a pregnancy that wasn’t real; but it was wrong for me to accept it for something that was a true tragedy to too many people.

  I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Tolkien, the man of my dreams, would have to go. There just wasn’t any other way around it.

  Besides, it probably wasn’t such a bad outcome after all, I would tell myself later, after he had gone and after I had cried. If I were to marry Tolkien Donald and if my mother were then to talk him into going back to his original name, Donald John, which she would probably do, and if I then were to adopt his last name, I would become Jane John which, when you say it fast, sounds sort of like what you might wind up with if you were to ask a Chinese person to imitate a ding-dong-ing doorbell. Anyway, that was the way I rationalized it to myself.

  Too bad that I loved him.

  Originally, I’d had a financial motive for continuing with my scheme; now, there was a lopsided moral one. Did it really matter which motivation was stronger?

  True, I still didn’t know how I was going to get out of this mess when the nine months were up; but then, I’d never known that, had I? All I could do was what I’d always done, really: cross my fingers and leap into the unknown.

  Lately, in part perhaps to sublimate my feelings over losing Tolkien, I’d been overcome by a nearly uncontrollable urge to tidy up my surroundings, engaging in a syndrome of behaviors that I’d read was not uncommon in women during their second trimester, particularly the latter part.

  It’s part of the whole nesting thing and, apparently, the body’s pretty good at knowing how long it’ll be up for such exertions. It’s as if there’s a clock inside that knows that in just a few short weeks, things’ll have progressed into the third trimester, when the body begins to become unwieldy and symptoms can mirror the first in terms of fatigue.

  I found myself in precleaning mode then on, of all things, an early Saturday morning in late September. I had my hair babushkaed, I’d found an old shirt of Trevor’s that I’d initially worn when we’d painted the apartment salmon pink together, and I was sipping coffee while looking at the selection of paint chips I’d picked up at the store. It may have taken me nearly three months to realize it, but it’d suddenly occurred to me that I no longer needed to be surrounded by a color I’d come to abhor. I was determined to redo every room in the apartment and equally determined that this time I’d paint each room a different color. This way, if I suddenly developed a hatred for one of the colors I’d committed the walls to—something difficult to change, like red or navy or black, for instance—there’d always be other rooms that I could escape to. Of course, not being either an idiot or a twelve-year-old Eminem devotee, I’d put aside red, navy and black in favor of the more decoratively pliant shades of peach (close to salmon but not nauseating in small doses), leaf green and mauve.

  Having put off for as long as possible what I’d have liked to put off forever—I could tell this when I started to swallow actual dregs of coffee, a sure sign that procrastination has gone on far too long—I realized that if I wanted to beautify my nest by painting, I should really engage in the nesting act that involved more obsessive cleaning of it as well. Good God! Sometimes this pregnancy stuff seemed as much of an act of penance as saying Hail Marys for masturbation.

  I decided to begin in the bedroom. Even if it wasn’t one of the public rooms where my few visitors could appreciate my alterations, it was the room that was the first thing I saw in the morning and the last upon retiring at night. I began with the easy stuff: the bed making, the putting of week-old discards into the clothing hamper, the hour-long pause to flip through a magazine that I’d bought and then forgotten about.

  Well, there was no need to take this nesting thing too far too quickly; after all, it wasn’t like I had anything but myself to put in the nest.

  From linens, dirty socks and “How to Keep Your Man From Leaving” (too late!), I made the natural and inevitable progression to the most hated job of all, dusting, which would be followed in as short an order as I could make it by vacuuming. Of course, if I was going to be painting the room mauve soon—the kitchen was going to be peach, the living-dining area leaf green, while the bathroom was going to remain pristine white for those occasions, now rare, when I drank too much and could only deal with the cleanest of slates—I had better do a more thorough than usual job of it. Instead of just taking the feather duster, then, and waving it in the general direction of my knickknack-strewn dresser, I supposed I’d actually have to make contact with the furniture. As a matter of fact, if I wanted my paint job to come out looking as good as possible, and I did, then I really should move the furniture away from the walls and dust the baseboards as well. That way no unsightly dust would bubble up the paint job, marring the smooth effect I’d hope to achieve. And, besides, I’d only have to move the furniture to the center of the room when I painted anyway.

  The dresser turned out to be not much of a problem and the cabinet that discreetly housed the TV still less so. The bed, however, when I got to it—the heavy queen-size sleigh bed—made me wish that I’d been less ambitious about the amount of space I’d felt was required by Trevor’s and my energetic lovemaking. Really, I thought, straining as I alternately tried the tugging and shoving approaches, if I’d known I was going to one day be required to move it myself, I’d have settled for oral sex on a tatami mat.

  “Ugh!” I grunted, making a sound not unlike those that Trevor had once made in that very bed, as I finally succeeded in forcing the back legs of the bed over the ridge of the Turkey carpet, an area piece that didn’t come quite to the wall and which had caused the bulk of the moving problem.

  I collapsed against the space of wall closest to where the bed had been, exhausted. As I rested my elbows on my bent knees, formerly neat hair now coming out of my babushka at all angles, the thought occurred to me that life would be a whole lot easier if one could just push everyone out of the nest early, say early enough to obviate the need of making a nest in the first place. Of course, the inevitable next thought was to think that it was silly of me to have had that last thought when, after all, and as I increasingly had to keep reminding myself, there wasn’t anyone destined for this nest but me. I never got the chance to fully think that thought through, however. Instead, my eyes, ignoring the dust Harveys that had grown up behind the bed, had alighted upon a slim file folder which the humidity of the damp air was keeping smashed up against the wall where, presumably, the bed had previously kept it. The folder was situated behind the side of the bed where Trevor had slept for two years.

  This was odd, I thought, crawling over to it. In his zest to get away from me as quickly as possible, he’d obviously, unwittingly, left a part of himself behind. I wondered what it was. I flipped open the folder, began studying papers.

  By the time I was finished, I had a whole new picture of the Trevor Rhys-Davies I’d thought I’d known so well. Gone was the picture of him as a paragon of virtue, at sharp counterpoint to what he had clearly described as my own devious machinations. Here to stay was a picture of him being, if not quite another Nick Leeson, then at least the kind of stockbroker who wasn’t averse to using insider information to feather his own nest. No wonder he was able to afford such an astonishing array of suspenders.

  It all came down to a company called Thames Waterways. And, if my eyes were not deceiving me, what I was holding in my hands was the kind of information that Trevor’s employer, not to mention the Inland Revenue, would dearly love to have; the first, because no one likes to be made a fool of by a subordinate at work (Constance immediately sprang to mind); the latter, because they would probably appreciate the opportunity to collect all of the back taxes he owed on the funds he’d illegally acquired. If they wanted to put the screws to hi
m, they could fine him and send him to jail.

  What in the world had come over Trevor? What could have possibly possessed him to take up such a risky scheme? He’d never shown any inclination to want for more than what his job provided him. Was it the true parsimonious colors of the fifty percent of his nature that was Welsh shining through, the Rhys part finally rearing its head? Was it an aberration, a one-time thing, or were there secret files elsewhere in his life, with other Thames Waterways tucked away in them? You’d think that the generous salary he was paid would be enough to keep anyone happy. It may not have been princely, but it was enough for Knightsbridge and that was plenty. Still, you did always hear that enough was never enough for anybody and maybe, being around all of those inviting numbers every day, the temptation had finally proven too great.

  Oh, well, I thought, rising stiffly from the floor and going to put the folder underneath the socks in my bottom drawer. The Inland Revenue might be very interested in all of this, but I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to tell them. After all, Trevor had thus far kept my secret for me and so it wouldn’t be fair of me to turn him over to the thumbscrew boys at Inland Revenue and the Crown Prosecution. Okay, so maybe he’d only kept it because he’d been sent out of the country by the home office, but still…

  Besides, I thought, returning to the chore of dusting the baseboards, I had more important things to do. I still had a whole flat to paint.

  Ye gads! (I’ve never said that before in my life; I certainly hope it’s spelled right.) My fetus was now a whopping thirteen inches long—my, how it had grown!—and weighed about one-and-three-quarter pounds, so less than the combined weight of two “I’m very depressed”-size bags of M&Ms. The fetus had thin skin, like its mother, and the skin was shiny as well and had no underlying fat. It had little finger and toe prints which were visible. (Sigh!) The eyelids were beginning to part and the eyes to open. If born now, it would need intensive care in order to survive, but survival was possible.