The Thin Pink Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  God. After all that had happened, he still loved me.

  I’ve always known that I’m not the most lovable woman in the world—maybe that’s been a big part of my problems, that knowledge—and there’s certainly no explaining why fools do fall in love with who they fall in love with, but for whatever reason, this stupendously, monumentally wonderful man had chosen to love me and hadn’t yet been able to teach himself to stop. I had to bite my lip to keep from crying, to keep from speaking the truth.

  When the time came to pay for my tea, I refused to let Tolkien do it, despite his comments about my needing to save money where I could these days. Instead, I proudly paid my own 17 pounds and 50p, wished him luck with his pasha, and waddled out of the Ritz as quickly as my bulk would allow before I did in fact burst into tears.

  You expect a gay wedding to be different somehow, but it never is.

  Save for the fact that the impromptu nuptials of David and Christopher took place in the middle of Meat! Meat!! MEAT!!!, and that I was the tuxedoed best man in a room filled overwhelmingly with gay men, it was just like any other wedding really; the only other difference being that, given the degree of openness and generosity of spirit they each brought to the union, it seemed more likely that they would attain a happily-ever-after.

  As their relationship had progressed over the last several months, and as David grew more and more sure of Christopher, I had begun to have second thoughts. I’d begun to tell myself that I didn’t think that Christopher was the one. How could he be, when merely being around him made me feel so unaccountably testy?

  But then I began to account for it and the pieces finally began to fall into place in what passes for my tiny little mind.

  Watching David and Christopher exchange their vows, surrounded as I was by scores of the most beautiful men in London, I recognized my feelings toward Christopher as being a smallness of character, as being the nakedly jealous thing that they were. I’d blown my own chance with Tolkien and here my best friend was facing his great chance at happiness, while all I could do was stand as living proof that maybe Gore Vidal was right: that all I could see in my best friend’s success was the chance for me to die a little death.

  “Well, to hell with that,” I said fiercely, not intending to speak the words aloud, certainly not right smack in the middle of David and Christopher’s exchange of vows, but doing so nonetheless.

  “What do you mean, Jane?” David turned to me, concern etched on his face. “Why are you objecting to the minister inviting everyone to stick around for wine and pastries, and filet mignon of course, after the ceremony?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said with a sob, hurling myself into his arms. “I just meant that I do love you and I truly want you to be happy always. Always.”

  He patted my hair, not dismissively, but lovingly, a caress like a benediction. “I do know that, Jane.”

  “And,” I sniveled, “I do know that it was never really your scheme about the…well, you know. I do know that it was all my fault.”

  “Yes, Jane.” He smiled. “I did know that, too.”

  “Ahem,” coughed the minister. “May I…?”

  As he pronounced them a couple—so I guess maybe there was another small difference between this and other weddings I’d been to—I beamed my approval on the proceedings, hoping it didn’t look forced.

  At the reception afterward, my best friend was generous enough to steal some moments away from his own beloved to minister to my needs. As we stood in a quiet corner, sipping expensive champagne—okay, so maybe I was guzzling mine—he spoke:

  “You know, Jane, I do have some sense of what you must be going through today.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. You must be looking at Christopher and me, at our nuptial happiness together, and recognizing that you could have had the very same thing with Tolkien, if only you’d been willing to give up your plan to remain falsely pregnant for nine months so that your family and the girls at work would be nicer to you.”

  “Well,” I said, “I did want to experience that whole ‘rosy world’ thing.”

  I could see he was exasperated with me. “‘Rosy world, rosy world’—for nine months now, you’ve been going on and on to me about this ‘rosy world’ thing. There is no ‘rosy world,’ Jane! There’s life. There’s life and then there’s make-believe. Take your pick.”

  That was when I finally came clean with him. I told him the whole truth about my book deal with Devil Alice.

  “So you see,” I finished up, speaking in an overly excited, French grapes-induced rush, “I couldn’t very well walk away from all that, now, could I? Not when my book is destined to be an ultragalactic bestseller and—”

  “An ultragalactic bestseller? Is there even such a thing as an ultragalactic?”

  Odd, but instead of the sympathy I thought I’d see on his face, he looked angry with me.

  “You gave up a chance at true love for an ultragalactic bestseller?”

  “It didn’t seem to bother you any,” I defended, “when I gave up true love so that my family and the girls at work would be nicer to me.”

  “Did I ever say it didn’t bother me?” He shook his head. “Besides, giving up true love for those reasons is perhaps insane, but insane is okay as a defense. But for mercenary reasons? For an ultragalactic bestseller?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Do you have any idea how rare true love is? No, clearly you don’t. True love is what human beings live for, Jane, and it’s rare, very rare, ultragalactically rare. Most people wind up settling in their relationships—settling for someone just to have a companion, settling with someone who isn’t totally abusive either physically or emotionally, settling—or else they convince themselves that they have love when what they really have is something somehow less. But you had a chance, Jane, a real chance to live rare, and you gave it up. And for what?”

  I started to tell him about my other reasons, about how I hadn’t been willing to admit my lies yet, about how I couldn’t bring myself to hurt Dodo et al. by inventing a grim end to the pregnancy. But David waved me off.

  “I don’t care what your reasons or what your other reasons were.” Then he grabbed me, firm yet gentle hands cradling either side of my face. “Promise me something, Jane.”

  I nodded.

  “Promise me that…if you can’t bring yourself to do it right now, then promise me that one day, even if it’s years from now, you’ll go after Tolkien. You’ll tell him everything you did, everything you really felt in your heart for him, and let him decide what happens next.”

  What choice did I have? It was his wedding day. You can’t deny someone what they ask for on their wedding day, certainly not when that someone is the best friend you’ll ever have.

  “I promise.” I spoke fiercely, but my eyes must have started to water, because David reached for a handkerchief and wiped them for me.

  “Please don’t be sad, Jane.”

  “I’m not sad,” I said, and I wasn’t, not at that moment. “I’m just so happy. My very best friend has managed to find himself that rare true love and he’s even smart enough to do something about it.”

  And as I waved them off on their honeymoon several hours later, the bouquet I’d caught in hand, I endeavored to maintain that smile of pure joy at their good fortune in having found one another. Perhaps those psychological theories are right—that if you let a smile be your umbrella, you begin feeling happier on the inside as well or some such rot—because I felt my spirits lifting, at least momentarily.

  I finally felt ready to take responsibility for another being, but who? After all, Tolkien was out of the picture and David no longer needed me as he once had.

  My purpose when I originally went to the Ritz had been to get over my disappointment at not being able to go to New York. My falsely hearty devil-may-care attitude at David’s wedding had been meant to help me get over the experience of seeing Tolkien at the Ritz. Now I needed something to get me over my
best friend’s happy wedding.

  I’ll never know where my stamina came from that day; I’d never been one for walking long distances, certainly not when there was a cab or a tube station handy. Then, too, it was the kind of gunmetal gray, insidiously damp, November in London, a can-never-get-quite-warm-enough sort of day that makes a person begin to understand what Guy Fawkes was on about, it being the kind of weather that could provoke any sane person into starting a rebellion. Still, I pulled my coat more tightly around myself, turned the collar up and continued placing one booted foot in front of the other. Before long—well, actually, it probably took me a fairly long time to get there from Piccadilly—I found myself in front of Royal Hospital, not quite knowing how I’d gotten there, as though I’d been conveyed there on a moving belt rather than by my own two feet.

  For some odd reason, the hospital seemed to me to be a far more interesting place than any of the shops in the neighborhood. Oh, well, I thought to myself, feeling a bit like Alice in Wonderland as I struggled to pull open the heavy door, I’m here; might as well go in and have a look around.

  The last time I’d been in any kind of medical facility was when I’d tried to get the women at that clinic to sell me their sonogram photos. This time, however, with my badge of honor entering the room a beat or two ahead of me, my reception was far warmer.

  “Can I help you?” asked the nurse at the information desk, her smile telling me that, given my condition, there was nothing I could ask that could be too great a burden.

  “The nursery?” I asked, tentatively at first, then, more definite, “The nursery. I wondered if you might direct me to the nursery, please.”

  “And the name of the baby you’re here to see?” she asked, cueing up the appropriate screen on her computer.

  Good God, I thought. Name? I had to come up with a name? “Smith,” I blurted out after a long moment’s thought. Well, they had to have one of those, didn’t they?

  In fact, they had two. “Would that be Robert or Julia?”

  “Oh, Julia,” I said. “Definitely Julia.”

  “Just go straight down the hall here and take the lift up to seven, then take a right and soon you’ll see the window.”

  “Thank you.”

  I set off to follow her directions, half of me wanting to hurry toward my destination, the other half reluctantly dragging its feet as though once I got there, there would be no turning back, as if were I to stop now, I’d be able to halt some kind of unstoppable train from being set in motion.

  The floor on seven gleamed with high polish as I made my way toward the window to the nursery. I stepped up to the glass, still both attracted and repelled at the same time.

  “You won’t hurt them, by standing there, you know,” commented a passing nurse. “You can move closer.”

  I turned toward the sound of her voice, nervous half smile at the ready, but she was already bustling down the corridor.

  I took that one step closer.

  My heavens, they were odd really, weren’t they, babies? The way they scrunched up their little faces and you never could tell if they were fixing to cry or squeezing out gas or maybe they were even already thinking complex thoughts in their own prelanguage sort of way. I mean, who knew?

  I thought for sure that the caps they’d be wearing to keep their little heads warm would be in shades of pale pink and blue, like on the television, but it wasn’t like that; they all had the same cream-colored caps and I found myself squinting at the names at the end of each bassinet to see if I could find Baby Julia Smith.

  There she was! And she was a good-looking baby all right, not the best in the bunch maybe but by no means as off-putting as that chronic face scruncher down the row from her. The chronic face scruncher they could keep. After all, I might be ready to snap out of my W. C. Fields phase, ready to start thinking of these tiny life forms as something more than mere poop machines, but I wasn’t about to become one of those silly creatures either, the ones who coo at miniature clothing and think that anyone under the age of six should be granted the benefit of an angel.

  Still, if given the chance, I suppose I might have cooed at Baby Julia, touched my finger to her cheek just to see if it really was that soft.

  Weird: no one I knew was even looking and yet I felt something stir, something that was downright uterine, as I looked at these babies.

  Suddenly, they didn’t seem so much like alien beings anymore.

  They were hope.

  It wasn’t so much what they looked like, and I really, really, certainly, definitely was not going to become one of those gaga people who claim that they’re all cute, but looking at them was like viewing a small sea of individual potentials. They were possibilities, that’s what they were. I guess I wasn’t the first person ever to have the thought, but I wasn’t romanticizing things: I knew that they wouldn’t all grow up to be Saint Augustines; I knew that one might be a Jack the Ripper. But that was the beauty in looking at them, knowing that they were each still a blank slate and that what they were to become had yet to happen.

  Oddly enough, and tough as it was to tear myself away, I left the nursery feeling better than I had all day. I still felt saddened, more like wistful, I guess, that in losing Tolkien, I’d somehow let my own best chance of the kind of happiness I’d seen there float out the door. But I was gladdened, too, and that made up more than half the measure of what I was feeling, gladdened at the notion of the sheer numbers of potentialities there were out there on any given day, loose in the world.

  My baby was now statistically eighteen inches long and weighed five pounds, just like a sack of flour. Its brain was growing a lot. It could see and hear. (Can you imagine what it would be like if I really did have a baby in there, one that could see and hear all of the crazy things its mother was up to? I’d probably wind up with the first case ever of a fetus suing its mother for divorce on my hands.) Most of its systems were well developed, but it was possible that its lungs were still immature. Should the baby be born now, there was an excellent chance of its survival.

  Still, from where I was sitting, having come as far as I had with the thing, I figured I might as well carry it the whole term if at all possible.

  The Ninth Month

  As I moved inexorably toward the inevitable culmination of what I had so blithely begun nearly nine months before, I now found myself in a state that I imagined was not unlike schizophrenia. I seesawed between extreme stages of enervating fatigue and manic energy, feeling more excited and, at the same time, more apprehensive than ever before. I was having an increasing amount of difficulty sleeping and, when I did sleep, my dreams were so oddly blissful that they terrified me. I was impatient, restless for it all to be over with, and feeling severely put-upon by the impatiently expressed desire on the part of others to just see me get it over with. Mostly, however, I was simply relieved myself to be nearly at the end.

  The final preparations were now being made for the birth, which could safely take place at any time. The lungs were mature. Another two inches and two and a half pounds had been added to the baby’s length and weight. The average statistics on babies showed that they were approximately twenty inches long and seven and a half pounds in weight, at birth. Of course, since I was petite and since I had been so sensible about not gaining too much weight during my pregnancy, hopefully my baby would be slightly smaller and therefore more easy to bear, although I don’t suppose I’d want it to be too small; like Thumbelina, say. The fetus might seem less active at this point but, like a calm before a storm, it was simply that, being possibly engaged in the pelvis, it was more confined at the moment.

  The storm itself could really come at any time now.

  I was shopping the grocery store in the basement of the Marks & Spencer closest to my flat when the domino effect of my unwieldy nine-month belly pushing into the edge of my shopping cart propelled the cart into the bum of the tall man in front of me who’d bent over to study the tinned foods. Since I’d noted from studying pregn
ancy magazines and the women I’d encountered in my life that when a woman grew near to term she suddenly seemed to have a surge in size, taking on that overripe look of a balloon puffed up to near popping point, I’d used my rudimentary sewing skills to sew extra padding into the back of my cloth baby in an effort to ensure authenticity. Apparently, though, I’d taken things too far, as evidenced by the fact that I had turned into the walking embodiment of one of America’s SUV-driving soccer moms: I never seemed to have any awareness of how much space I was taking up, my condition gave me blind spots, and I was always bumping into the unsuspecting, wreaking havoc in other people’s existences like a mad Bobo doll gone out of control. The angry face of the man I’d just rear-ended, as he turned to confront me, would have confirmed this fact in case I’d been too obtuse to have sensed it already.

  “You stupid cow…” he began, before lurching backward as though I’d tried to bump him again. Then he saw who the stupid cow was. “My God!” shouted Trevor. “Jane!”

  “My God! Trevor!” I lurched backward as well, in my case causing irreparable damage to a display of creamed corn. “What are you doing back in town so soon? I thought you were going to be doing some sort of stock thing in Asia somewhere for the next several months.”

  “I thought so, too, but home office called me back. Seems they need me more here than there.” He couldn’t seem to tear his horrified eyes away from my bulging belly. “My God! Look at you! I can’t believe you’ve taken this scheme so far! I was sure that after I’d left you’d come to your senses, perhaps tell your family and friends that it’d just been a big mistake, like one of those phantom pregnancies that you hear about every now and then. I certainly never dreamed that even you’d go all the way with such a thing.”