Crossing the Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  Ring!

  “Constance again,” Tolkien said, running his fingers through his hair.

  “Yes, Constance?”

  I have to admit, I felt distinctly strange talking to Constance, even over the phone, with my bra off.

  “I was thinking…maybe steak for dinner?”

  “For you or for Emma?”

  “Oh, certainly not for me. I’m a vegetarian—you know that.”

  “Well, Emma can’t have steak either.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “Because, Constance, she’s…a…ba…by.”

  “Ah.” Then: “And babies can’t eat steak? But I would have thought the protein—”

  “No, Constance. There are some baby food jars in the cupboard. She likes the lasagna best.”

  I heard the cupboard door open, heard Constance crack open a jar, heard her sniff.

  “It smells awful! Like dirty socks.”

  “Well, you don’t have to eat it. Emma does, and she likes it.”

  “Well, all right. Bye now!”

  Tongue between my breasts.

  At least I was getting closer to where I wanted to be.

  Ring!

  This time, I just answered it myself.

  “Yes, Constance?”

  “I was getting ready to give Em her bath. Do you think she’d like it if I washed her hair in beer?”

  “No!”

  “My mother used to—”

  “No.”

  “I hate to say it,” Tolkien said when I rang off, “but at this rate, I’m going to forget what we’re supposed to be doing here. Do you know what’s on TV?”

  “Stop that,” I said, throwing the remote across the room. “I’ll remind you.” I proceeded to get serious about my interrogation.

  I was warming up to the good part, the part where I’d make Tolkien scream for mercy…

  Ring!

  “What. Is. It. Now. Constance.”

  “You don’t have to get so huffy,” she said, sounding truly wounded. “I’m just trying to do a good job.”

  “Yes, I do realize that,” I sighed. “What is it?”

  “Well, there’s this really great horror flick on tonight,” she said. I could hear her excitement get the better of her. “It’s about a monster and, oh, I don’t know, a city that needs to be eaten or something. Anyway, in order to prepare Em for the cruelties of the real world—”

  “No!”

  “But you don’t think—”

  “No, you don’t think.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Emma likes that blasted purple dinosaur. Or those four Aussie boys who won’t stop singing. Her videos are in the cabinet under the TV. If you must watch something while she’s still awake, watch one of those with her.”

  I heard the sound of the cabinet opening and Constance rooting around.

  “Do you mean this?” she asked, as if I could see the box.

  “I can’t see the box you’re holding, Constance.”

  “It must be the Aussie one you mentioned. I don’t know if this one is such a good idea. These guys all look so…excitable.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair, making the exasperated man’s favorite gesture. Damn, but now I could see why guys did that.

  “Constance.”

  “I mean, the guy in the purple shirt—”

  “Constance.”

  “But if you really think she’ll like this kind of thing—”

  “Constance!”

  “Yes?”

  “Do me a favor. On second thought, make that two favors. First, put Emma on.”

  “But I don’t think she’s really ready for conversation yet—”

  “Just. Put. Her. On.”

  “Ga!”

  “Hey, Em, how’s it going?”

  “Ga!”

  “Are you enjoying yourself with Auntie Constance?”

  “Ga!!!”

  “That’s just great. Mummy loves you, Em. Can you put Auntie Constance back on the phone again?”

  “Hello?” said Constance.

  “Apparently, Em’s having a great time with you.”

  “I’m so relieved to hear that,” she said, and she did sound relieved. Then: “You could tell that from…how?”

  “By the way she said ‘ga.’ She wouldn’t have said it like that if she were miserable.”

  “Oh no? What’d she be doing?”

  “She’d be crying, Constance. That’s what babies do when they’re unhappy.”

  “Well, she must be happy then, because she hasn’t cried since I’ve been here.”

  “That’s great.”

  “You said there was a second favor?”

  “I did, and here it is…Don’t use the microwave or the stove or anything else that might blow up, don’t bathe Emma in juice or beer, don’t watch horror shows or porn with her, and don’t, I repeat, don’t call here again unless it’s an emergency!”

  “There are an awful lot of don’ts in there, which inclines me to point out that you’re asking for—one, two, three, four, five don’ts—five favors rather than one.”

  “Just. Do. It. Constance. Just do the don’ts.”

  “Now is that really grammatically sound?”

  I know it was rude but, rather than answering that last, I merely hung up. I knew that if I went on marginally obeying the laws of polite conversation, I’d probably never get to have sex again.

  And, oddly enough, that last exchange appeared to do the trick, for there were no more peeps out of the Constance quarter for the duration.

  This meant, in effect, that, once I woke Tolkien up, I got to play interrogating Scotland Yard detective with him—my finest hour being when I got him to go looking for the missing Crown Jewels with his tongue. Then he got to play the interrogating Scotland Yard detective, which he was extremely good at, I suppose because he was one, but he’d liked the Crown Jewels hunt so much the first time that he wanted to do it again, which was fine by me. Then we had great looking-each-other-in-the-eyes sex, ate whatever we could find to eat that wasn’t moldy and passed out.

  I woke as the dawn was breaking.

  Oh, it was nothing so romantic as wanting to make love again with my lover as the sun rose over sleepy London; it was that I was used to Em waking me then. She may not have been my natural-born child, but she clearly had the key to my biological clock.

  I punched Tolkien awake.

  “We need to go see Em.”

  “Can’t we sleep some more?”

  “No. She’ll be up now.”

  “Can we at least have sex again?”

  “No,” I said, throwing his pants at him. “I miss her.”

  When we got back to my place, I put the key in the lock, turned the knob, pushed open the door, only to hear…snoring.

  I looked at Tolkien and whispered, “My word, but Constance is loud for a little woman.”

  But when we got farther into the room, we realized that the hibernating-bear sounds weren’t coming from Constance, who was asleep in the chair. They were coming from the open mouth of Stan from Accounting, asleep sitting up on the couch, Emma sleeping on his chest.

  The door clicking shut must have wakened him, because Stan blinked alert. Seeing me, he rose, and handed me the still sleeping Emma.

  “What are you doing here?” I hiss-whispered.

  “The little raving loony,” he said, indicating Constance with a nod of his head as he put on his rumpled suit jacket, “went into a little raving loony panic, and her Uncle Stan was the only person she knew who was home.”

  “What was she panicked about?”

  “I dunno. The Aussie guys in that video you had her watch? Whoever knows with Constance.”

  “Well,” I said, “thanks for helping out.”

  “Oh, no problem.” He gave sleeping Emma a light chuck under the chin. “She really is a cute little bugger. But next time, don’t even bother with Constance. Just call your Uncle Stan. All those sisters, you know. I may not look it w
hen I’ve got my calculator out, but I know babies.”

  A few days later, Tolkien, David, Christopher and I were all sitting on the floor of my flat, sharing some shrimp pizza—David doesn’t bother with kosher—while Emma napped in her cot in the corner, fuzzy bunny held tight. The get-together was ostensibly to celebrate Tolkien and I buying a new carpet for the living room together—progress towards us finally, at last, completely living together!—which was a nice off-white Berber with garnet and emerald colored threads woven into the nap. In reality, the get-together was because I wanted to talk to them about Mother and Vic.

  Ever since that night in Tarquin’s, I’d been trying to sort out my feelings.

  Vic had certainly been nice enough. She’d been downright deferential to me, as though I were somehow my mother’s parent, a force to be reckoned with. Given how low a regard I knew my mother to hold me in, this was almost laughable.

  And Vic was very pretty. She was tall and had that lanky I-could-have-once-been-a-model body, but without the anorexic face. Her face, on the contrary, was warm, with chestnut hair framing brown eyes and a sunny complexion, the lines of which she didn’t bother trying to conceal with makeup. In fact, the confidence with which she wore her looks transformed features that might just have been pretty into an overall impression that was somehow stunning.

  Maybe it was the perfect smile, the warm laugh.

  And she was a sharp dresser, on that occasion having worn a white linen shirt and pants, which I knew would have instantly become a wrinkled mess on me were I to try to wear such a thing, with a matching tan jacket over her shoulders. She even had on somewhat high-heeled strappy sandals, which I would have killed for and which proved she wasn’t bothered by her height.

  “She sounds like a real beast,” said David with dramatic sarcasm. “I can understand why you would despise her.”

  “I never said I despised her,” I protested. “I simply said that I didn’t know how I felt about her.”

  Christopher took another slice from the box. “Maybe you just don’t like gay people.”

  “That’s not helpful.” I glared at him. Then I really thought about it for a second.

  “Oh God,” I groaned. “Do you think that could be it? Do you think it’s possible that, here, all along, while I’ve been thinking that I’m some open-minded person, I’m really just another self-righteous git who doesn’t know what she’s talking about?”

  “Well, sometimes you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tolkien said gently.

  “Like when?” I was outraged.

  “Like all that stuff with Emma about the Babinski reflex and then trying to get her to roll over on some kind of timetable—”

  “The book said—”

  “I really don’t think anti-gay or anti-lesbian sentiment is your problem,” David cut in.

  “It’s not?”

  “No, it’s not. I think you are simply, perhaps even understandably, ambivalent about seeing your mother with someone other than your father.”

  “But he’s been dead a long time.” I was surprised at how blunt I sounded, as if the length of how long he’d been gone should somehow make my feelings about him less.

  “So what?” said Tolkien. “You’ve certainly told me before that you always felt he was your only champion in the family.”

  “In a way,” put in Christopher, “your late father has somehow been the full-body equivalent of a phantom limb. You can’t see him anymore, but he is felt by you quite often and that feeling somehow affects everything else.”

  I was intrigued and appalled at the same time. “What a bunch of amateur psychoanalysts you three are!”

  “Perhaps, but we make a weird kind of sense.” Tolkien shrugged.

  “About as much sense as the Weird Sisters in Macbeth,” I muttered.

  “Exactly!” David said. “And they knew what they were talking about too! What do you want for your mother?” he asked me.

  “What do I want for her?” I’d certainly never given that any thought before. “What a bizarre question.”

  “Well, think about it,” he pressed as, in an effort to delay confronting whatever it was he wanted me to confront, I excused myself to the kitchen to search for dessert options.

  I returned in a moment, offering the open canister around.

  “Raisin, anybody?” I popped one into my mouth.

  “No, I don’t want a raisin!” David said. “And since when do you eat raisins?”

  “I dunno,” I said, popping another one. “It must be the Emma Factor.”

  “We were talking about your mother, Jane. Do you want her to be happy or do you want her to be miserable?”

  I thought about my long history with my mother, all of which somehow involved each of us trying to make the other miserable, not through any hugely overt acts but rather through small annoyances. While this behavior might not have passed for normal in everyone else’s families, for us it defined the dysfunctional way in which we functioned. But did I want outsiders or even life its own self making my mother miserable?

  No, I realized with a shock, I didn’t.

  “Oh my gosh,” I said tentatively, feeling slightly awed. “I think I want my mother to be happy.”

  Then I remembered something David had told me the previous November, on the occasion of his wedding to Christopher. He’d said that true love is what human beings live for and that it was rare, very rare.

  I looked around me—at Emma sleeping, at David and Christopher loving each other, at Tolkien just being himself—and it occurred to me that not only was David right, but moreover: love is love wherever one finds it and because of its rareness should never be turned away from.

  “There is one thing I’d like to know,” Tolkien said.

  “Hmm…” I was still caught up in my musings on love.

  “You said before that it was Sophie who first told you about your mother having an affair. Does she know who Vic really is?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Then I shrugged. “I doubt it. Whoever tells Sophie anything if they can help it?”

  “The author has received your revision notes,” said Simon over the phone, as I pictured him sitting there in what were undoubtedly plush offices, this man who had put the flame in buoyant. I’d sent the revisions to the author through him, since I had as yet to receive a name or address for Anonymous.

  Uh-oh, I thought. Anyone who was as much a hands-on control freak as Anonymous—the woman even insisted on designing her own cover, for Christ’s sake!—would undoubtedly fight me tooth and nail on every editorial suggestion. Hell, she’d probably insist we print it in some impossible typeface.

  “And?” I asked, trying to keep my tone brightly Dodo-ish.

  “And she thinks you’re brilliant.”

  “She does?”

  “Yes. She thinks you’re right that the dream sequence slows things down and that Ipanema isn’t as sympathetic as she should be. Of course, there are a few minor details she disagrees with…”

  We spent the next half hour going over the minor details, me surreptitiously munching on my salad, hoping all the while he couldn’t hear me. He’d caught me just starting to eat when he’d phoned and I was too hungry to stop. Relative happiness with the universe having returned my appetite to me, I’d recently discovered that if I didn’t eat when the hunger pains started, I got downright mean.

  The minor details went well, with him winning some points but also agreeing to ask Anonymous again about others. And they really were just minor details, the kind of niggling things editors need to point out so that the writer will at least stop and think a moment before saying, “Oh, it’s fine the way it is.” The big things—making Ipanema, who I truly detested, a bit nicer; editing out the entire boring dream sequence—were things I won hands down.

  “So,” said Simon, “I’ll just get back to my client with these further notes…”

  “That’s great,” I said, unable to keep a tetchy note out of my voice. “I can
’t wait to hear what Anonymous has to say.”

  “It’s really bothering you, not knowing who the author is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, well…”

  “Fine, I’ll tell you.”

  “Rurry???” I was so shocked that I couldn’t stop myself from speaking around the huge wedge of tomato that was already in my mouth.

  “Uh, rurry,” he said. “Do you remember that trilogy of novels about the Welsh au pair with the shoe-buying problem?”

  “Omigod!” I said. “You mean the author of Slit is Gayla Gladstone?”

  Gayla Gladstone was a supremely successful novelist whose books were very popular with women in the 18-34 demographic. She was also stunningly blond, given to wearing only white and gold and fur—which got her into a lot of trouble with certain groups—and she was very good at getting herself on television.

  “I’m really not that crazy about the fur,” I said.

  He sighed. “I have tried talking to her about it. Many times.”

  So now I finally had a name for Anonymous. But wait a minute! Simon had said that she didn’t want to publish any more books under the name of Gayla Gladstone.

  “Why would she want to stop using the name of Gayla Gladstone?” I asked. “It’s practically a household word. It has great recognition.”

  “My client says that her previous publisher strong-armed her into using it. They said her real name would present a problem in marketing her work, that no one would ever take her seriously. But now she feels that she’s famous enough that her fans will forgive her anything. You know how these celebrities are—John Mellencamp, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince…once they achieve a certain level of fame, that which they rejected as a career expedient becomes desirable again.”

  “Well,” I objected, “that’s not really true of Prince. I mean, he wasn’t originally called that by his parents, was he? Anyway, doesn’t he just go by a symbol now?”

  “Who the hell knows anymore.”

  I was becoming fairly certain that I did not want to know the answer to the question I now had to ask.

  “Simon, what’s Gayla Gladstone’s real name, the one she insists on using now?”