Babyland

by Holly Chamberlin

I wondered, Had anyone ever pinned down Jack Coltrane, even for a little while? Yes. Leslie Curtin had done something of the kind, I was sure of it. Female intuition. Womanly instinct. Jack’s former girlfriend had made some big mistakes.

  Maybe Jack couldn’t be pinned down. Maybe it would be unfair of anyone to try.

  Anyway, that’s not really what I wanted, to pin Jack down.

  The bartender nodded toward my empty wineglass. “Another?”

  “Sure,” I said. “And I’ll take a menu, please.”

  I glanced once again out the window but Jack was long gone. So, Anna, I asked myself, What is it you do want with Jack?

  80

  With Friends Like These

  “Your hair! You got it colored. It looks fabulous.” Kristen was sitting at the table, the first to arrive at Boucle that Friday evening. She beamed. “You really think so? I just felt like I needed a change, something to perk up my look. You know, I’ve been wearing my hair the same way since B.J. was born.”

  I sat across from her and beamed back. “Really, it looks great. What does Brian say?”

  “He likes it.”

  Confirmation: Every one of my girlfriends was in love.

  “This place is nice, isn’t it?” I said, apropos of nothing. “The food is very good.”

  Kristen glanced around the main dining area. “Well,” she drawled, “it’s not The Cheesecake Factory.”

  “Alexandra refuses to eat there,” I explained. “Something about it being mobbed with commoners.”

  “Alexandra doesn’t know what she’s missing. How are you, Anna?”

  “I’m okay,” I told her. “Some days are worse than others. Some days are better.”

  “Have you talked to Ross?”

  “Not since last week. We’ve pretty much finished apportioning everything we owned in common. There’s really not much reason to talk, I guess.”

  How strange that is, I realized. One minute we’re engaged and expecting a baby. The next minute we’re apart and have nothing to say to each other.

  “I suppose I could call him,” I said, musingly. “Just to see if he’s all right.”

  “Do you really want to know?” Kristen asked and I wondered, If Ross told me he was unhappy, what would I say? What would I be obliged to do?

  “Well, I don’t want him to be miserable,” I said. “But the truth is I don’t really need to know how he’s doing. That sounds so horrible, doesn’t it? Ross and I were planning to spend our lives together and now I don’t even miss him.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be,” Kristen said, with that all-too-familiar air of wisdom everyone seemed to have adopted since the breakup. “It’s all for the best. You and Ross just weren’t in the cards. The relationship was ill-fated. Ross and Rachel, yes; Ross and Anna, no.”

  “I guess it wasn’t,” I said.

  The waiter came by, and I ordered a glass of wine. Kristen, I noticed, was suddenly very interested in her napkin.

  “Stop fiddling,” I said, “and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Kristen put her napkin on her lap and laughed. “It’s nothing, really. Just something I was thinking about. Something concerning you and Ross.”

  “Oh. Okay. What?”

  Kristen waved her hand dismissively. “Forget I said anything, really.”

  I wondered, What could she possibly have to say about Ross and me that hadn’t already been said? “Come on, Kristen, tell me.”

  “Well ... okay. It’s just that it occurred to me last week that maybe Ross is, you know.”

  I laughed. Kristen can be so charmingly maddening. “No,” I said, “I don’t know. Ross could be what? A spy?”

  “No!” And then her eyes widened and she leaned in. “Is he a spy? That might explain some—”

  “No, Kristen, Ross is not a spy. And if he were a spy, would I tell you he was a spy? Would I even know he was a spy?”

  “Oh. You’re right.” Kristen folded her hands on the table. “Okay, Anna. I’ll just say it. It occurred to me that maybe Ross is gay.”

  It was the very last thing I expected Kristen to say. The very last thing I expected anyone to say.

  “What!” I cried. “Why? Because he’s thin and well groomed?”

  “Well, there is that. But—Oh, I’m sorry, Anna. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s stupid.”

  Yes, it is stupid, I thought angrily. And you’re stupid. But of course I said nothing.

  “Anna?” Kristen grabbed my hand across the table. “Are you all right?”

  I smiled gamely and withdrew my hand. “Fine. I’m fine.”

  But I wasn’t fine at all. Kristen was a lawyer. Okay, an out-of-practice lawyer, but someone good at putting evidence together to build a case. Why would she think Ross might be gay unless she had some real clue?

  “You didn’t hear anything, did you?” My words came out in a hiss. “Any rumors?”

  “Oh, God, no! Of course not.”

  “Because I assure you that Ross is not gay. I’ll admit he doesn’t have a huge sexual drive. Pretty much none after I got pregnant. But—”

  I stopped. But what? It had occurred to me before: Maybe Ross had met someone else, another woman, someone far sexier than me. Someone far less inhibited. And her lack of inhibition had enticed Ross to shed his own inhibitions ...

  “I know about the loss of sex drive,” Kristen reminded me gently. “You told us, right before Michaela made a play for him.”

  Which, I remembered with a shock, had repulsed Ross, but maybe not for the reason he had claimed. Maybe Ross was sickened not as much by Michaela’s unseemly advance but by Michaela herself. Michaela, the epitome of sultry female sexuality.

  Frantically, I tried to remember if Ross had ever exhibited any behavior that could be called gay. But what did that mean, anyway? Did he swish around the apartment in a pink chiffon robe? Of course not. And neither did most gay men! Anna, I scolded, how prejudicial! What horribly stereotyped thinking! You’ve been watching far too many sitcoms.

  “Um, let’s order.” Kristen smiled too brightly at me. “Okay?”

  I nodded and reached for my menu. The words were meaningless. All I could think about was Ross and his interesting sexuality.

  A giant portabella mushroom studded with crabmeat and cheddar. Crab cakes. Scallops wrapped in bacon with a maple glaze. Who cared? I’d lost my appetite. All that mattered at the moment was the answer to the following question: Had Ross ever had sex with a man? Bravely, I reminded myself that in some cultures it wasn’t at all unusual for an otherwise heterosexual man to have a youthful affair with another man. Right? So what if Ross had had an affair in college? So what? How did that affect me, his former fiancée, today?

  Sexually transmitted disease. HIV. It was all over the news. Bisexual men routinely brought home all sorts of nastiness to their unsuspecting wives and girlfriends.

  I gripped the menu more tightly. I felt slightly dizzy. Calm down, Anna, I told myself. Ross is the most cautious person you know. He’s obsessively clean. He’s ultraconcerned about his health. The last thing Ross would ever do is have dangerous sex.

  Unless, of course, he were very young and very drunk and maybe very in love.

  “Anna? Anna!”

  I dropped the menu to the table. Kristen was staring at me, eyes wide.

  “Are you okay? You look terrible!”

  “No, I’m not at all okay. Please, Kristen, tell me why you thought Ross might be gay!”

  Kristen fiddled with her napkin. She realigned her knife and fork. She took a sip of water. And then, she said, “Well, I was watching Jerry Springer the other afternoon and—”

  “A talk show! You’re basing your judgment of Ross on something some piece of trash said on Jerry Springer!”

  “She wasn’t a piece of trash,” Kristen said hastily. “She was a sexologist.”

  I groaned. “Oh, that makes it all better!”

  “Anyway,” Kristen went on, “she was talking about lack of sex driv
e in heterosexual men, and one of the other guests told her story, which was that her husband stopped having sex with her, and eventually she found out it was because he realized he was gay.”

  “I’m still processing the fact that you, a Phi Beta Kappa, watch Jerry Springer. And that you admit it.”

  Kristen politely ignored my scorn. “Anyway, it got me thinking about Ross.”

  “Ross and I didn’t break up because of a bad sex life,” I reminded her. “He didn’t find me repulsive. I didn’t find used condoms in his car or receipts from cheap motels in his pants pockets.”

  “I know that.” Kristen glanced around for eavesdroppers. “Anyway,” she went on, her voice a bit lower, “I should clarify. I don’t mean ‘gay’ as in Ross actually, you know, does anything about it. I mean gay as in maybe he’s in denial. Like maybe he’s never come out of the closet.”

  “Oh.” I was stunned. “Is that supposed to make me feel better? Ross wasn’t actually cheating on me with a man. It’s just that every time we made love he imagined he was in bed with, I don’t know, some guy with a big black mustache and an even bigger—I can’t even say it!”

  Kristen’s face grew very red, and she reached for her water. As she took gulp after gulp, I wondered, Why hadn’t Ross gotten married long ago? With his looks, charm, and money he could have had his pick of the single women in Boston. It wasn’t as if he’d been wildly playing the field all those years. Boston is a small town. I knew all there was to know about Ross’s romantic past.

  At least about his romantic past with women.

  Kristen lowered her empty glass and waved. I turned to see Alexandra making her way toward us.

  “Oh, look, Alexandra is here!” Kristen said brightly. “Has it only been twelve minutes?”

  “You’re not off the hook,” I told her.

  Alexandra arrived and by way of greeting said, “This day is sucking.”

  “Well, mine isn’t any better,” I said, before she was fully in her seat. “Get this. Kristen thinks Ross might be gay. In denial, but gay nonetheless.”

  Alexandra sat and shrugged. “I can see how she might think that. Ross’s affect is oddly sexless. Like maybe he’s hiding something.”

  “That’s it, exactly!” Kristen said excitedly. “I just didn’t know how to put what I felt into words. He’s so handsome and well dressed and all, and he’s in perfect shape, but he’s not at all sexy. What I mean,” she added hastily, “is that I don’t find Ross sexy. But I’m happily married. So I don’t count. Now, Michaela is single and she made a pass at Ross so maybe I’m totally wrong and that sexologist was just crazy and—”

  Alexandra put a finger to Kristen’s lips. “Haven’t you learned that backpeddling just intensifies the insult?”

  “I’m going to have a heart attack,” I stated with false brightness. “I’m serious. If I think Ross is sexy, and if Ross really is gay but just can’t admit it, what does that say about me? What does that say about me as a woman? Am I an emotional freak? A psychological disaster?”

  “We’re dropping this subject right now,” Alexandra said sternly. “Come on, Anna, Kristen’s right. What does she know about sexual affect? She’s been married to the same guy for years.”

  “Hey! I—”

  But Alexandra cut her off. “And me, well, why would you want to listen to my opinion? I’m just a loud mouth. Now, come on. Let’s order. I’m starved.”

  One more sharp-edged piece to the miserable puzzle that was my life. Why, I thought, can’t people keep their suspicions to themselves? What good does it do me now to wonder if Ross is a gay man lodged in the back of a deep, deep closet? Now, in addition to questioning my ability to sustain a long-term relationship, I could doubt my sexual appeal. I could obsess about my own worth as a woman!

  I wondered, What if the only reason I’d found Ross physically attractive was because my own sexuality was so repressed I could only handle being with a closeted gay man. One whose libido—at least the libido he could reveal to me—was lukewarm at best.

  And to further complicate everything, there I was, falling in love with Jack—or maybe I’d been in love with him the whole time, how would an idiot like me know?—a man who didn’t seem to care a bit for me in the romantic sense.

  Life wasn’t looking very bright. Numbly I ordered, and while Kristen and Alexandra chatted about something or other, I wondered, Was my romantic life effectively over? Had I become a classic urban single-woman failure, unable to tell gay men from straight, unable to sustain a long-term relationship, unable to have a baby the old-fashioned way?

  I wondered, When was the last time a man had shown any romantic interest in me? I thought back to the months before I’d met Ross and came up with nothing. Was it true I’d been experiencing a dating dry spell when Ross came along?

  And here I was, almost thirty-eight years old. Almost forty. Would anyone, I wondered, ever find me attractive again? Maybe I’d lost the glow of youth, that was inevitable, but had I also lost the more mature appeal that was supposed to come after?

  I was brought back to the moment when our meals arrived. “Fresh ground pepper, ma’am?” asked the smooth-cheeked waiter.

  Ma’am. It was official. I was not only a grown-up. I was old. I was an old woman with no fiancé and no baby and no—

  “Ma’am?”

  Kristen eyed me with concern. Alexandra frowned.

  “Yes, thank you,” I told the waiter. I flashed him what used to be a winning smile. I thought of how pepper had been bothering my digestion of late. “But not too much please.”

  81

  Slam

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote, “In spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” Unfortunately, so does a woman’s.

  The next morning around eleven I decided quite out of the blue to stop by Jack’s studio to see if he wanted to grab a cup of coffee. Why not? Two colleagues sharing a brief break in their busy work schedules. What could be more normal?

  No excuses. No hand delivering what could have been e-mailed, no books to loan or articles to share. Just an invitation to share a cup of coffee.

  The door to the loft was unlocked. I knocked lightly as I pushed it open. “Hi, Jack,” I said. “I—”

  And then I saw that the person sitting at Jack’s desk, the person using his precious computer, was not Jack at all.

  The person turned and gave me a calm but suspicious look. She had slim shoulders and a delicate neck and a short choppy haircut that perfectly topped a perfect, pixie-like face. She was no older than twenty-five.

  “Yes?” the pixie said.

  I stood frozen for a moment, one hand still on the doorknob behind me.

  “Oh,” I finally said. “I’m sorry. I came to see Jack ...”

  “He left early.” The pixie offered no further information. She didn’t offer to take a message. She was not Jack’s employee.

  I wanted to say something, but what? I didn’t have the nerve to ask the girl if she knew where he was. Or with whom.

  Her wide blue eyes narrowed just a bit. “Do you need something?” she asked.

  “No, no,” I said, backing out through the door. “I’m fine. Thanks. Bye.”

  The pixie turned back to the computer screen, and I closed the door behind me. I didn’t dare linger; what if Jack came back and found me there? I raced down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. The sunny sky seemed to mock me. Without breaking my pace I headed for my office.

  The image of that petite pretty thing haunted me all the way. Was this Jack’s latest girlfriend? Was Jack at her place now, waiting for her to come home so they could spend the lunch hour having hot and steamy sex?

  I reached my office just as the tears came. What had I been thinking, assuming Jack would be in his studio, assuming he would want to spend time with me? The stark reality was that Jack did have a life and I was only a tiny, insignificant part of it.

  82

  Ladies’ Night In

  “How can a c
ookie be healthy?” Kristen peered dubiously at the plate of homemade no-fat cookies Tracy had just placed on the table.

  Alexandra grimaced. “Don’t tell us. I don’t want to know when I’m eating fern spores and acorn shavings.”

  “Just try one,” Tracy said. “Aren’t you supposed to be the adventurous one here?”

  The Chinese food arrived before Alexandra could reply.

  “What more does a girl need?” Kristen said as we unpacked the three large white bags. “Look at all this scrumptious food. Brian’s not big on Asian cuisine. I don’t remember the last time I had dim sum! Let’s go to Chinatown some Sunday morning, okay?”

  “A day at a world-class spa,” Alexandra said suddenly. “That’s what else a girl needs. No, make that a week, but not at one of those places that serves a lettuce leaf and a boiled brussels sprout for dinner. A place that serves croissants for breakfast, truffle omelettes for lunch, and bouillabaise for dinner.”

  “Speaking of things French,” Tracy said, “a girl could use a month-long trip to Paris, with all expenses paid by a wealthy benefactor she never has to meet, let alone sleep with.”

  Alexandra laughed. “Now that is a fantasy beyond the realm of ordinary fantasy. No sex in return for a fabulous meal of coq au vin, foie gras, and Grand Marnier souffle?”

  “What about you, Kristen?” I asked. “You must think a girl needs something beyond sesame noodles and beer.”

  Kristen considered. “Can I say a wonderful husband and kids she adores?”

  Suddenly, everyone’s eyes were on me.

  “You can say anything you want,” I said, but I wasn’t able to stop tears from springing to my eyes.

  Kristen grasped my hands in hers. “Can I also say that even more than sesame noodles and beer a girl needs her girlfriends?”

  “Ugh, this is so disgustingly maudlin and we haven’t even begun to drink! Quick, hand me the corkscrew.”

  “What about you, Anna?” Tracy asked, tossing the corkscrew to Alexandra.

  “Stick to fantasy,” Alexandra advised, handing me a glass of chilled Pinot Grigio.

  I shrugged. “I think a girl needs all of it. Chinese food, girlfriends, a spa, and a trip to Paris. And when she comes home, a wonderful husband and maybe even adoring children waiting breathlessly for her at the airport.”