I'm So Happy for You

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  “That could be nice,” said Wendy, whose toes were finally beginning to thaw.

  Daphne directed Wendy into a newly Sheetrocked area to the right of the dining room, where four or five Central American men were busy unloading what appeared to be a large wood-paneled refrigerator. “Hi, you guys!” Daphne lifted her hand at the men, who smiled and laughed, seeming to find the sight of her and Wendy amusing, before returning to the business of refrigerator installation. So far, only the island had been installed: a glossy white barge with elongated silver pulls and a white marble top. “So, here’s the beginnings of the kitchen!” Daphne said, turning back to Wendy.

  “Very sleek,” said Wendy, hating herself for recognizing the designer (likely Poggenpohl, she decided). She ran her hand across the top of the island. It felt cold and smooth.

  “To be honest, I was kind of reluctant at first to have the island put in,” said Daphne, “just because it looks so modern compared to the rest of the house. But our architect said we needed more storage. I mean, that’s kind of the problem with these old town houses. They’re so long and narrow that there really isn’t room for a dining room and a full kitchen on the same floor. Anyway”—she shrugged—“I guess it’s nice to have somewhere you can grab a bite without having to sit all the way down at the table. You know?”

  “Right,” said Wendy, who didn’t see how sitting down at a table in a room that looked like the one at whose periphery she stood constituted any kind of effort.

  “Also, I love these drawers. They’re so quiet.” Daphne pulled out the drawer closest to her right hand, then pushed it back in, an operation that was indeed silent and seamless. “Meanwhile, as you can see, the fridge has arrived. It’s supposed to go over there.” She pointed at the far corner. “And the stove will go in the middle there, next to the sink”—again, she pointed at an indistinct place on the opposite wall—“if it ever arrives.” She laughed warily. “Our architect ordered it from Italy. Don’t ask me why. And don’t even get me started on the cabinets. They were supposed to be here, like, a month ago. Whatever.” Daphne shook her head as she led Wendy back toward the main staircase. “Anyway, I want to show you the upstairs. We’re ‘staging,’ so we’re already living up there. Which is great, except we don’t have a kitchen right now. Which kind of sucks.”

  “I’m sure,” said Wendy.

  Just outside the parlor door, in view of the stairs, Daphne came to a sudden halt and indicated that Wendy should do the same. “I’m sorry,” she said, teeth gritted apologetically as she grabbed hold of Wendy’s wrist with one hand and removed her slippers with the other. “Do you mind terribly taking your socks off before we go upstairs? It’s just that, with all the construction dust and everything—”

  “It’s fine!” Wendy cut her off, taken aback not so much by Daphne’s request as by the half-guilty, half-panicked look on Daphne’s face. It was a look that suggested to Wendy that Daphne thought Wendy belonged to such an inferior social caste that the concept of tracking renovation detritus between floors of a brownstone was sure to be alien to her. Without further comment, she pulled off her socks and stuffed them into her empty boots. But inside, she simmered.

  Shame and anger turned to covetousness, however, as Wendy’s still-tender toes sank into the plush carpeting that lined the stairs. The feeling only grew more intense after she followed Daphne into the master bedroom, which had its own carved marble fireplace and had already been outfitted with a mahogany sleigh bed. For the picture before her was not just one of bricks and beams, or even marble and mahogany, but of a refuge—less from the noise and chaos “out there” as from the noise and chaos inside her own head that made her see both sides of every argument and wonder what she really believed and who she therefore was. Rationally, Wendy knew that a home was defined by its people, not its furnishings. Yet a part of her wanted to believe that if the sleigh beds were in place, the happy family would follow. (And that a higher thread count meant a hotter sex life.) Marcia used to say that marriages were “hard work.” But Wendy had always suspected that there was a shortcut—that money (if only she and Adam had money!) would do some of the backbreaking labor for them.

  At the same time, Wendy could neither understand nor justify her longing for the particular luxury that Daphne’s house promised to deliver. Once, Wendy had prided herself on living simply. When had the basics ceased to be enough? And when had refrigerators and toilets, utilitarian by definition, become shiny objects to covet and pine for? (And was “using the facilities” really that much more pleasurable on a tankless, sensor-activated TOTO Neorest with an integrated Washlet seat featuring warm-water washing, automatic air dryer, and deodorizer—versus a plain old American Standard?)

  “Are you sure you don’t want these?”

  Wendy had become so lost in her own thoughts that the sound of Daphne’s voice startled her. Daphne was dangling a pair of woolen socks in her face. “That’s okay,” said Wendy, preferring in that moment to be a martyr to the cause of her own middle-classdom.

  “Are you sure?” asked Daphne.

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “Anyway, as I was saying, any time you ever want to stay here, please just let me know,” Daphne went on. “I mean, it’s embarrassing how much space we have! Right now we have two guest rooms on the third floor. I mean, at some point in the future, one of those might turn into a kid’s room.” Wendy could feel her blood pressure rising. “But for now, I swear, we could literally house a whole family up there!”

  Why don’t you? Wendy thought, knowing full well that were she to own a brownstone, she’d be unlikely to invite a homeless family to live in the top floor of it, either. That didn’t mean she was above guilting others for failing to do so. And wasn’t it Wendy’s right under the circumstances to make Daphne feel just the tiniest bit bad about her good fortune? “Wow, you’re lucky,” she said faux-wistfully. “We can’t even afford an apartment with a real second bedroom anymore.”

  “You should go work at a glossy magazine or something!” Daphne blurted out, her eyes flashing as if she’d just had a brainstorm. “Like at Condé Nast or Hearst or something. I’m sure they’d hire you in a minute. And they pay really well.”

  Maybe there was nothing offensive about Daphne’s words in and of themselves. Yet in the context of her “mansion tour,” Wendy found the suggestion inexcusable. She thought of the time when she and Daphne were in their twenties and trying on clothes in the dressing room of a Lower Broadway boutique. Wendy had been complaining about how she hated her knees. “Well, what about trying a skirt that falls below the knee?” Daphne had suggested. As if the idea had never occurred to Wendy. (As if that were the advice she’d been seeking.) What Daphne never seemed to understand was that Wendy liked to complain. Just as she wanted Daphne to listen and, where possible, commiserate, then refute her contentions with generic words of praise. So often, Daphne’s advice sounded patronizing or, worse, downright insulting. “I could,” Wendy finally answered in the most righteous tone of voice she could summon. “It’s just that—I guess I care more about what’s happening in the world than about the shopping habits of rich people. Which is basically what all those magazines are about. You know?”

  If Daphne experienced the line as a personal dig, she didn’t let on. “Well, that’s your right,” she said, shrugging. “Meanwhile, what’s happening with Adam? Is he planning on going back to work soon?”

  Wendy could feel her face growing warm. “He’s still working on his screenplay,” she answered quickly.

  “Oh—that’s cool!” said Daphne, nodding. But Wendy could tell that she didn’t think it was cool at all.

  Wendy didn’t think it was cool, either. But in that moment, her frustration with Adam’s employment situation seemed like her own private business. It hadn’t always been that way. Once, Wendy had told Daphne everything. Ever since she and Jonathan had become an item, however, Wendy had found herself increasingly protective of both her husband and their marriage.<
br />
  Wendy treated herself to a car service home. As she entered her apartment, the shabbiness of the living room was suddenly explained to her both by its lack of crown molding and by its low ceiling—so low that it seemed in danger of caving in. Or maybe it was Adam, seated in the middle of it, wearing an old Mets cap and watching the Cartoon Network, who seemed to be bringing the walls down around him. “How was Daphne’s manse?” he asked. “Appropriately luxurious?”

  No doubt he’d spent the afternoon smoking pot, Wendy thought. She sniffed twice in rapid succession. “It smells funny in here,” she said, even though it didn’t.

  “What are you talking about?” Adam snapped back, clearly offended.

  “Nothing. Sorry,” said Wendy, guilty. It was Saturday, the “day of rest,” she reminded herself. He wasn’t hurting anyone by sitting there. She hadn’t wanted to marry a corporate lawyer. Nor was it Adam’s fault that Daphne had been insensitive to their real estate situation.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

  “Oh, right. Daphne’s house. It was like Versailles in there,” Wendy told him.

  “I can’t believe you bothered going all the way there in this snow.”

  “It’s just snow.”

  “Maura called.”

  “Thanks.”

  Wendy went into the bedroom to call her back. But even with the door closed, she couldn’t overcome the sensation that the place wasn’t big enough to accommodate the two of them. “Will you meet me for lunch?” she asked Maura. “Please?”

  “Wendy—there are four feet of snow out there!” Maura protested.

  “I’ll come to you.”

  “I don’t eat lunch.”

  “You can have water.”

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  “I’m begging you. Please?! I really need to vent.”

  “It’s not my fault you quit therapy.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “That’s different. Gloria told me I was finished.”

  Wendy paused before venturing, “I have to admit, I’ve never believed you.”

  There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Finally, Maura spoke: “Okay, so I lied.”

  “I knew it!” cried Wendy.

  “She always wanted to talk about why I hadn’t finished my dissertation. It got annoying after a while.”

  “Now you have to come meet me. It’s your punishment.”

  “I’m working on my dissertation.”

  “Another bald lie.”

  After much sighing, Maura agreed to meet Wendy at a diner on Fourth Avenue that was near her rental studio. Maura hadn’t won the real estate lottery, either. Nor was she particularly close to Daphne. All of which made Wendy think that Maura would be the ideal listener to her griping.

  “So, I went to see Daphne’s house this morning,” Wendy began over scrambled eggs. “And it was totally insane. Seriously, it looked like a museum in there. But no, she was all upset because the cabinets hadn’t arrived yet from Italy.” She rolled her eyes. “Then she started bragging about how they have so much space upstairs they could house two extra families. I had to fight off the impulse to tell her she should. And then, when I said, ‘You’re lucky you can afford eleven extra bedrooms; we can’t even afford two,’ she suggested I leave my job and go to work at Lucky or something, writing captions about pants.” Wendy tutted. “Like it’s NEVER occurred to me that I might get paid better at a glossy magazine! So I said, ‘Sorry, I’m not interested,’ and she said, ‘Well, what about Adam? Is he going back to work?’ Like it’s any of her damn business!” Wendy shook her head. “I’m sorry. I love Daphne. I always will. But her narcissism has really gotten out of control—basically, ever since she hooked up with Jonathan. It’s like she can’t see that other people don’t all have the same financial profile as her.” No sooner had Wendy concluded her monologue, however, than she felt mean and petty for having spoken so critically about her best friend.

  Nor did Maura’s response, surprising to Wendy in its temperateness, make her feel any better about the vitriol she’d just spewed. “That sounds aggravating, I agree,” Maura said, sucking on the slice of lemon that had come with her tea.

  “But, you know, the guy’s rich. And the Uberoffs aren’t exactly hurting for cash, either. I’m sure they helped, too. And, I mean—come on—it was never like Daphne pretended she was some big bohemian or something. I guess my point is, if I had dough like that, I’d probably buy a town house in Cobble fucking Hill, too. I’d probably order my kitchen cabinets from Italy, too. I mean, wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess,” Wendy was forced to admit.

  On Monday, Wendy left work early to go see Dr. Kung in her York Avenue office. She might as well have shown up an hour late. To fill the time as she waited for her name to be called, she read a brochure about pelvic floor disorder. (And did the pelvis have a ceiling, too? Wendy wondered. And, if so, how high was it? And was the floor parquet?) Finally, a nurse called her name and escorted her into Dr. Kung’s inner chambers. It was another twenty minutes before Dr. Kung herself appeared—in four-inch-high red pumps and a white lab coat unbuttoned to reveal steep cleavage. “Nice to see you—Wendy,” she said, reading off her clipboard. “You know, we have the same name.”

  “I know, it’s funny,” said Wendy, who didn’t actually find it all that funny.

  “Is your name short for anything?”

  “Well, technically, Wendell. But no one calls me that. Just my mother.”

  “My name is short for Wenhui,” offered Dr. Kung.

  “Really,” said Wendy, anxious to get on with it. In the past few years, all of her doctors had gotten strangely chatty. Wendy suspected they’d all attended the same workshop that stressed the importance of “people skills” in winning the trust of their patients.

  “So, I understand you feel something hard in your pelvis?” asked Dr. Kung.

  “Well, not exactly,” conceded a now cringing Wendy. (Who knew that receptionists wrote down patients’ complaints?) “I mean, I think it went away. But I can’t get pregnant. And it’s been twelve months. To be honest, that’s kind of why I’m here.”

  Dr. Kung’s scowl was unmistakable. It was clear she thought Wendy was wasting her time. “How often do you and your partner have sex?” she asked.

  “Well, during the week I’m ovulating, at least three times every month,” Wendy told her. It was a slight exaggeration, but still.

  “What about the rest of the month?”

  “What does it matter if I’m not ovulating then?”

  “How do you know you’re not ovulating?”

  “Well, I take my temperature every morning. And I use those ovulation-predictor kits from the pharmacy.”

  “You think you know when you’re ovulating,” said Dr. Kung, in what struck Wendy as an unnecessarily superior voice. “But nobody knows for sure unless she comes in here every day of the month and gets an ultrasound.”

  “Well, I’m not saying I know the exact hour,” said Wendy.

  “And you’re thirty-four?”

  “I turned thirty-five at the end of last year.”

  “And how long is your cycle?”

  “Usually around twenty-six days. Sometimes a few days shorter.”

  Dr. Kung scribbled something on her clipboard. Then she cleared her throat and said, “You have your period, what? Four, five days?”

  “Something like that,” said Wendy.

  “As soon as your period is over, have sex every day until the fifteenth day of your cycle. Maybe even the sixteenth day, just to be sure. You’ll be pregnant in three months.”

  “But I’ve been trying for twelve cycles!” cried Wendy, on the verge of tears again. She hadn’t lied about having a hard mass in her pelvis only to be told that she wasn’t having enough sex with her husband! She felt as if Dr. Kung wasn’t taking her problem seriously. At the same time, she suspected that Dr. Kung was right. Only, Wendy didn’t see what she could do to rect
ify the situation. She and Adam were too many years into marriage for the orgiastic marathon that Dr. Kung seemed to be advocating. Or was that just an excuse for the waning of passion between them (and Adam’s obvious ambivalence about having kids)? “But what if there’s something wrong with me?” she asked. “Or even with my husband?”

  Dr. Kung sighed wearily. “You want his sperm tested?”

  “Yes, please,” said Wendy.

  “Fine. You want your tubes tested also? It’s a painful procedure.”

  “Yes, please,” Wendy said again. She was already in agony, she figured; what was a little more of the same?

  Dr. Kung was writing the second of two referrals, when she paused, glanced up at Wendy, and said, “Do you want some more advice?”

  “Sure,” said Wendy.

  “Buy some nice underwear.”

  Had Dr. Kung spied Wendy’s decomposing Hanes Her Ways on the companion chair in the corner? The thought was so excruciating that as Wendy exited the woman’s office, she knew she’d be changing gynecologists yet again.

  That evening, over carrots Vichy (James Beard, p. 207) and broiled ham steaks (Ibid., p. 121), Wendy told Adam about her visit to Dr. Kung’s office, albeit in a slightly revisionist form. “So I saw Dr. Kung this morning,” she began in a faux-breezy tone, “and she said there was probably nothing wrong and we probably just weren’t having enough sex during the second week of my cycle. But just to be sure, as a first step, she said you should get your sperm tested.”

  “You want me to jerk off into a test tube?” Adam narrowed his eyes in amusement and—it seemed to Wendy—irritation, all in one.

  “Paper cup,” she said, wincing. “I mean, since it’s easy to check—”

  “Easy for you to say!”

  “I just mean, it’s not like it’s painful or something—unlike the tube test that she wants me to get, which is supposed to be really unpleasant.”