Crossing the Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  I promised her a car and a month in Costa del Sol when she was old enough, but it was still no go. I even tried yelling, “Come on, Em! Roll, baby, roll!”

  Finally, in despair, I phoned David.

  “I’m working, Jane,” he said, the background noise of a cleaver striking a butcher’s block confirming his words.

  I could picture him there, phone wedged in the crook between ear and shoulder as he eviscerated cattle.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “It’s Emma.”

  The striking sounds stopped.

  “What’s wrong with Emma?” he asked, concern evident.

  “She won’t…she won’t…”

  “She won’t what, Jane?”

  “She won’t roll over!”

  “And she needs to do this because…?”

  “Because the book says she should be doing it by now! It’s the last day of her fifth month! If she doesn’t do it by midnight, I’ll need to call in a doctor!”

  “Of course you won’t need to do that.”

  “I won’t?”

  “No. Throw that stupid book away.”

  “But I can’t do that! And, anyway, why would I do that?”

  “Because these books don’t know anything. My mother raised five boys—five boys, Jane—in Israel. Do you think she sat there with her nose in some book, saying, ‘Oh, no! Benjamin hasn’t picked up a raisin yet!’?”

  Damn! I knew I should never have told him about the raisins.

  “You have a brother named Benjamin?” I asked, trying to deflect.

  “You know I do, Jane. There’s Benjamin, Jacob, Seth, Moshe and me.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “And my mother didn’t have any trouble raising us without any books telling her what to expect and we still all know how to cut up a cow.”

  “You’re an amazing clan.”

  “Do us both a favor, Jane?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Call Tolkien right now instead.”

  Cleaver strike and click!

  Although it was sort of rude on David’s part to hang up, he did have a good idea: I phoned Tolkien at the Yard.

  Initially, the conversation went exactly as the beginning of my conversation with David had done, save that he didn’t tell me right off the bat that he was working and I don’t think he was cutting up a cow. Where the script parted company was when we got to the part where I screeched “The book says she should be doing it by now!” to which he replied, “It will be fine, Jane.”

  “It will?” I already felt inexplicably calmer by just a smidgen; not calm, never that, but at least I’d got my smidgen.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “You know, I was a late roller.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Oh, yes. Made my mother frantic.”

  “I didn’t think your mother ever got frantic.”

  “Oh, yes,” he soothed once more, “she got frantic over this.”

  With each “Oh, yes” he murmured, I felt myself calming by yet another smidgen.

  “See, the way I figure it, new little people can only concentrate their energies on just so much at a time…”

  As his voice went on, not really a drone but it was soothing, I gazed down at Emma, still happily lying on her stomach, in her blue overalls, watching Kick.

  “…I mean there’s so much bombarding their heads at once…”

  Emma smiled at Kick.

  “…Emma just has such strong verbal skills—”

  “She does?”

  “Oh, yes. You can tell she’s going to be a huge talker. So, since she’s so busy working on being the next Disraeli…”

  From her belly, Emma tried to reach for Kick as he zipped by. It was kind of a facedown lunge if such a thing makes sense.

  “…the fact that the physical might lag just a teensy bit behind…”

  She was on her back!

  One second, Emma was on her stomach doing her beetle routine and the next she was on her back!

  I put my hand to my mouth; I felt that awed.

  “…is really no surprise—”

  “She did it!” I screamed in his ear.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Emma—she just rolled over!”

  “Right while we were talking?”

  “Yes.” I scooped her up, hugged her to me. “Good girl, Em.” Then I flopped down on the sofa, my elation turning to enervation. God, that book was killing me. What was I ever going to do when we got to crawling?

  But Tolkien was talking to me again.

  “She really did it,” he asked, “right while we were talking?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  “We make a great team,” he said.

  Emma was progressing nicely. She could keep her head level with her body when pulled to a sitting position, would work to get a toy out of reach (she loved the fuzzy bunny), could pass a cube or other object from one hand to the other, would look for a dropped object, could rake a raisin and pick it up in her fist (amazing how much a part of my life raisins now were), and—yes, yes, YES—she could roll over…(one way).

  She could also babble to beat the band, combining vowels and consonants.

  When she combined her M’s and her A’s in particular, babbling “ma-ma-ma-ma,” my heart overflowed.

  June, the sixth month

  I’d figured out the perfect thing for Christopher to do to get back on track. David was working and I’d brought Emma upstairs for a little friendly visit.

  “You want me to design a kiddie playground?”

  “Not just any playground,” I said. I produced some snaps I’d taken of the playground near Mary Jr.’s, with just this purpose in mind. “This is where my friends and I take the babies. Look at the condition of it.”

  He looked, reluctantly, but he looked.

  “Can you see anything you could improve upon?” I asked, hopefully.

  “Well,” he said, “the first thing I’d do is get someone in there to cut that grass.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it is a bit too Amazon at present.”

  “And next, I don’t know, I suppose I’d get rid of everything that’s there already and just start fresh.”

  “Yes!” I said, excited. “That’s exactly what I was thinking too! Why bother doing just a little bit, like adding benches and tables for the mothers with babies to sit at, while leaving the old rusty equipment there?”

  “There’d be no reason to bother at all,” he agreed. “But who’d pay for it? I can’t imagine the area residents have any extra money to chip in. If they did, they wouldn’t be living there in the first place.”

  “True, but I’m sure there must be some kind of city council I can appeal to. David always does say I’m a force majeure. I’ll just apply some majeure force to the appropriate parties. I’m sure they’ll see things my way.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  I thought of the tidy sum of money that I still had in the bank from the sale of The Cloth Baby.

  I shrugged. “Something will come up. David always says—”

  The first time I’d mentioned David’s name, I thought I’d seen Christopher stiffen, but now that stiffening was so pronounced, it stopped me in my verbal tracks.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “This whole thing—” he flicked at the pictures “—this somehow has to do with him, doesn’t it?”

  I was startled. I’d never before heard Christopher speak of David with anything other than love and respect. Come to that, I’d never heard anyone speak of David with anything other than love and respect, and that included my mother; well, except for my ex-fiancé, Trevor, but Trevor’s opinion on such things never counted; even when he’d been my fiancé, they hadn’t counted.

  David had told me there were problems…

  “Well,” I said, trying to be as delicate as possible, “he did mention that you no longer seemed happy working at the restaurant…”

  “Of course I’m not happy!”
he nearly shouted, but then I could visibly see him make an effort to rein in his emotions.

  “Of course I’m not happy,” he said again in a quiet, a sadder tone. “Oh, it’s fine, helping someone you love build their dream. But David’s dream is a success now.”

  And it was true. Ever since Kevin Spacey had stopped off there after a night at the Old Vic, although I do believe he ordered the fish, Meat! Meat!! MEAT!!! had become the official dining playground for the young acting set.

  “He doesn’t really need me there anymore,” said Christopher. “And, truth be told, I no longer want to be there.”

  “Of course you don’t,” I said.

  “You’re agreeing with me?”

  “What’s so strange about that?”

  “Only the fact that you’ve never agreed with me about anything before, including whether The Piano was a good movie or not.”

  “That’s just because you’re always wrong whenever we disagree. The Piano was a great movie.”

  “Oh, please! Do I have to remind you again about Sam Neill’s hair?”

  “No, thank you. And you’re still wrong.”

  “Oh, I don’t think—”

  “And there’s something else you’re wrong about. There is one other thing we agree on, outside of the fact that you shouldn’t go on working for David.”

  “There is? What?”

  “We both love David.”

  He looked at me.

  “Yes,” he finally said, softly, “we both love David.”

  “Which means that in order to save your relationship, we need to get you out of a situation that is only serving to build up resentment in you, and back into doing something you love.”

  “You’re right, Jane.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d just heard those three words, from him, but I wasn’t about to let on by showing my shock, lest we get derailed again.

  “It’s time,” he said, “that I got back to working on my own dream.”

  “Exactly.”

  He looked at the snaps of the decrepit playground again.

  “But a kiddie playground?” he bemoaned. “It’s not exactly like working on the Louvre, is it?”

  “No.” I smiled. “But it could be.”

  Today it was Minerva from Publicity’s turn to be grilled by Stephen Triplecorn.

  Thank God, Dodo was still determined to do her Witness Protection Act—or maybe that should read Jane Protection Act—because at least I’d have someone in there to look out for me.

  It wasn’t so much that I suspected Minerva from Publicity of having it in for me—not in the way that Louise did or Stan from Accounting, for that matter (Stan having reverted to his former out-from-under-a-rock type hard on the heels of his helping me hack into Stephen Triplecorn’s computer) with the one exception being that on-the-side chat we’d had at my place after the last party. It was more that Minerva was the kind of person I thought of as being too much her own person, making her, in essence, like me; in other words, she was what some might term A Loose Cannon. Having no discernible side in anything, who knew which side she might come down on? One thing was certain: she would speak her mind.

  What did I know about Minerva that might weigh in the balance? For, certainly, those harlequin glasses meant nothing, save that she had as peculiar a taste as Constance but in another direction. I knew that she had no overt prejudices. I knew that, for whatever Minerva-like reason, she’d turned down nearly every request I’d ever made to get more publicity for any of my authors. I knew she knew that I’d faked a pregnancy for nine months. As I say, who knew which way she might go?

  According to Dodo, who told me afterwards, Minerva came down on the side of decency and common sense.

  “Great,” I said, “but what the hell does that mean?”

  Dodo did a little swivelly thing in her chair because, apparently, she could hardly contain her glee. “It means that I took care of everything.”

  “What did you take care of?” I said with growing exasperation.

  She leaned forward, going straight from Pleased With Myself mode into Girl Detectives Conferring Together mode.

  “Minerva said,” she whispered across the table, even though there was no one but we two in the room, “that you were the most inventive employee the company had.”

  I leaned towards her, playing along.

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “It wasn’t,” Dodo said. Then she looked over each shoulder, as though someone might yet overhear. “It wasn’t so bad until she started making a list of your inventions.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-oh is right. Minerva recalled for Stephen Triplecorn the time you’d, er, falsified an author’s previous sell-through in hopes of justifying more publicity money for his new book.”

  “But I was only making the world the way it should be! Talking in Your Coffin was a book that should have had a greater sell-through, and the sequel—”

  “I know that, Jane,” she soothed, “but that’s really not the issue right now. May I go on?”

  I nodded.

  “Then Minerva recalled for Stephen Triplecorn the time you invented a Royal Ascot Week in July that you claimed to be invited to, when what you really wanted to do was take the week off to go to Provence with Trevor, who’d received the trip as a work bonus, but you were out of your own holiday time and felt compelled to invent the ruse.”

  “But it was Provence, Dodo!”

  “And we are British, Jane. Don’t you think we could be depended upon to know that Royal Ascot Week is always in June?”

  “I just thought that you’d all be so royalty-besotted that you’d be happy to let me go.”

  “You could have just told the truth at the time, Jane.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, right. You and the world keep on telling me that.”

  “But that really is all past history that no longer matters, because then Minerva said…and I quote, ‘And then there was the time Jane invented a tilted uterus,’ end quote.”

  “Oh no!”

  I knew exactly what she was referring to. During my baby charade, in order to get Minerva to feel sympathy for me, hoping she’d throw some extra publicity Colin Smythe’s way, I’d invented a tilted uterus. Naturally, my invented female-plumbing problems had earned me squat.

  “Oh, yes,” said Dodo.

  “So what happened next?”

  “Well, I realized I needed to call in the heavy artillery then, didn’t I? So, I did this.”

  And here she leaned forward even farther, so that a glimpse of cleavage showed through the opening of her cream silk blouse.

  She really was an impressive woman.

  I shook my head, tore my gaze away.

  “But I don’t understand. Why would your breasts stop Minerva?”

  “I didn’t do it for Minerva,” she said, exasperated. “I did it for Stephen Triplecorn!”

  “Oh. I see. And what effect did those, um, that have on him?”

  “He turned red, of course, like you’re doing now, and went into a coughing fit.”

  I wasn’t surprised.

  Then I wondered: Did Dodo realize she’d just set women back about twenty years? Even if she had a clue, apparently she didn’t care. Maybe she just figured that her looks had so often worked against her—making people resent her or think she was dim—that it just made things honors-even if she exploited those looks to good advantage.

  “Then I told him to go out to the outer office and ask Hilda for a glass of water. Well, I figured that would keep him away for at least five minutes, since Hilda was bound to pounce all over him for treating her as though her job description required she wait hand and foot on every single person who’d ever lived.

  “While he was gone,” continued Dodo, “I struck a deal with Minerva.”

  “A deal?”

  “Yes. I promised her that, for a term of one year, I would personally see to it that she only had to work on promoting authors who were clearly
promotable.”

  “And that worked?”

  “Of course it did. Minerva loves her job, always has, provided it’s worth doing. You should have seen her eyes light up. I could see visions of Garcia Marquez plums dancing in her head.”

  “But we’ll never have Garcia Marquez, or anyone like him, come to that.”

  Dodo shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. You should have seen how happy just the fantasy made her. Besides, she has been a smidgen more content since you found Mona Shakespeare for us. And while Mona is no Garcia Marquez—”

  “So then what happened?”

  “So then Stephen came back and Minerva told him that, despite some of your past inventions, she believed you to be a force for good in the world. And then she left. See? I told you,” she said, putting her feet up and crossing them on her desk, which, coming from her and despite the skirt, was not unladylike at all. “Minerva finally came down on the side of decency and common sense.”

  “So what will you do when Minerva expects you to deliver Garcia Marquezes?”

  Dodo’s legs came down again and for the first time she looked puzzled.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said, frowning. But then she brightened, leaning back again, hands clasped behind her head as she swiveled. “I know. I’ll give her more Colin Smythe.”

  I was on hold for Simon Smock and it appeared they were going to keep me holding forever.

  Since our luncheon, I’d received my copy of the manuscript everyone in the city was so hot for. Title: Unknown. Author: Anonymous. Well, I thought, at least they knew how many words were in the damn thing: 120,000, which seemed like an awful lot of sex to me. But then, what did I know? It had been way too long since I’d had any.