Mitch, still dressed, removed the pearls from the mannequin and placed them around Lainie's neck, and kissed her and teased her, wrapping the cold hard shiny beads around each nipple, then squeezing the circle of beads tightly around the nipple until it hurt, then letting the pearls fall their full length to the middle of Lainie's thighs. And as he teased her mouth with his tongue, he pushed his fingers and the pearls up into her, inside her vagina. The unusual sensation made her hotter as Mitch moved them against the tender walls inside her, then slowly pulled them out, and in again, fingers and pearls pushing into her, and out.
After a while he shoved the length of pearls as deeply inside her as he could, and gradually extracted them. Then he put Lainie's hands behind her back and tied her wrists together gently with the pearls as he fell to his knees. And while he reached up and his fingers manipulated her hard nipples, his tongue danced expertly against her aching swollen clitoris, and he moved his hands around to grab her buttocks and forcibly pull her closer to his face, now working her with his entire mouth, pushing it against her fiercely. And when the ache that filled her made her afraid that her knees would give, and when the heat inside her was so intense she was sure she was about to let go, to cry out, he stopped for an instant, slid out of his own clothes, pulled her down onto the floor. After he undid the pearls from around her wrists he said huskily, "Tomorrow, whoever buys these pays a thousand bucks extra."
"Mitch . . . " Lainie was too hot for conversation, and she slid to the floor with Mitch, who mounted her, and with a practiced move of his hips and thighs, his penis found the warm welcoming place inside her as she lifted her hips up, then dropped them with Mitch moving in her, and then again and again. She was loving him, loving the feeling of the way his moves controlled the heat of their union, and then she felt him harder and hotter as her own orgasm blasted through her just seconds before Mitch moaned, then writhed in the throes of his. And when the dreamlike heat of their passion fell away and they found themselves on the carpet of the new store, wet and trembling and out of breath, they laughed at themselves. Lainie decided it was time to tell him the good news.
"I went to a new doctor," she said, kissing his face gently. "I heard about him from a woman in my modern novel class. He's an endocrinologist who treats diabetics all the time, and he said if I keep tight control and monitor myself and do all the right testing, I can have a normal pregnancy and a normal baby."
Mitch sat up and took her face in his hands, looked long at her with full eyes. "Is that right? Lainie, that's amazing. Why didn't you tell me you were going?"
"I didn't want to unless I knew the answer would be what we wanted to hear. I saw the doctor a few weeks ago, one day when you were meeting with the contractor, but I wanted to wait to tell you when you weren't too preoccupied."
He held her pretty hand and kissed it again and again, then he asked, "So when do we . . ."
"Start?" Lainie smiled and he nodded.
"According to my calendar," she told him, "we just did."
15
BUT THE NIGHT OF SEX AND PEARLS didn't work. "It takes a long time and a lot of prayer for it to happen," Lainie told Mitch.
"Maybe I should have used rosary beads," he teased her. The new store opened to enthusiastic business, more than they'd imagined, and there was no time to take a sexy stress-free vacation, so the following month when Lainie was ovulating they borrowed a friend's boat in the marina, took a champagne picnic with them, and in the beautiful master cabin the boat rocked along with the rhythm of their ardent lovemaking. But two weeks later they discovered that hadn't worked either. Nor did the night at the Bel-Air Hotel, or the cottage they took for a night at the San Ysidro ranch in Santa Barbara.
For the next year and a half they tried all the fertility tricks Lainie heard about from friends and salesgirls in the store; and of course Mitch's sisters threw their two cents in. Lainie was doing all of it, drinking an herb tea from the health-food store called Female Blend, and standing on her head after they had sex to give the sperm an easier journey.
Most of her trips in the new BMW were to the doctor's office. She agreed to do everything he suggested, like having a test where he scraped the inside of her uterus to determine whether or not she'd been ovulating, and rushing to the doctor's office immediately post-intercourse so that he could check the motility of the sperm, while she felt gooey, uncomfortable, and embarrassed. The sperm were fine, the doctor reported.
She had five unsuccessful intrauterine inseminations, in case the vaginal mucus had been interfering with the chemical balance of the sperm. But no luck. She also tried everything she read about in various magazine articles, like having acupuncture on her lower abdomen to "open blocked chakras that might be preventing nature's positive flow."
One day at Panache Lainie was talking to one of the salesgirls from the shoe department, whose name was Karen, only she now spelled it Carin, since her astrologer told her that if she changed the spelling of her name it would change her life. Carin knew of a psychic who had helped two of her friends get pregnant. Lainie laughed.
"This I have to hear," she said. Lainie had listened to Carin's stories in the past about her various brushes with numerologists, tarot-card readers, channelers, and crystal healers. "Are we in Southern California or what?" she said laughing when Carin wrote the number of the psychic for her on the back of a Panache receipt.
The psychic's name was Katya, and she lived in a little white stucco house in the hills above the Sunset Strip. The tiny rooms that Lainie passed as she followed the babushka'd Katya were all painted in dark colors and reeked of the incense burning in holders Lainie recognized as the kind they used to sell at Pier One in the sixties. This is a joke, she thought, following Katya in to the farthest room in the house, and I hate that I'm so desperate. But she sat on a sofa across from the one where Katya sat. The thick odor of the incense was beginning to nauseate her.
"You have cash?" Katya asked her.
"Yes."
"Put it before me."
"How much?" God, I hope I have enough, she thought. Mitch would laugh really hard when she told him this part and then ask her, "You mean she wouldn't take American Express?"
"Fifty dollars."
She opened her wallet, and as she leaned over to place it on the table Katya spoke.
"You cannot have a baby."
The sound of those words unsettled her. When she called to make the appointment she hadn't mentioned a word about why she was coming in. Carin. Carin must have told her friend about Lainie's problem, and the friend told Katya so she could look magical when Lainie got there.
"That's right," Lainie said.
"There are many children in your family, some sisters have children, but none for you yet."
Lainie nodded. Clearly Carin had passed everything on. This is dumb. I'm paying fifty dollars for her to tell me what one of my employee's friends told her.
Katya had her eyes closed now. "You were afraid for so long because of your disease; now it may be too late. But we can try."
Lainie was surprised. She had kept the subject of her diabetes quiet at the store and didn't think any of the girls knew about it. But maybe Carin knew, and told her friend who told the psychic.
"How do you know about my disease?"
Katya opened her eyes now and looked long at Lainie. "I'm a psychic, dear girl," she told her. This was impossible. There was no such thing.
"Do as I tell you and you will be pregnant."
Lainie listened.
"Just before you and your husband are together again to procreate, put a Bible under your bed. Next to it, in a box, put a dead fish."
"A fish?" It didn't matter how this crazy person knew about her diabetes. This was so silly she couldn't keep a straight face anymore. "What kind of a fish?"
"Any kind."
"And then?"
"And then you will conceive."
Lainie laughed out loud, all the way to her gynecologist's office. There was one more t
est he wanted to perform before he put her on Clomid next month, a fertility drug he said was guaranteed to work, and maybe even bring the blessing of a multiple birth. She didn't mention the Bible and the fish to him.
After he examined her, he looked worried.
"Mrs. De Nardo," he said, "let's hold off on the Clomid. I may want to put you in the hospital for a few days to do some exploratory surgery. There's not a horrible rush. I mean, we can wait until next month after you ovulate and see if you conceive this time, but if we don't start seeing results soon, I'd like to get a closer look."
Lainie never told Mitch anything about that conversation. A week later, on the day she was supposed to be ovulating, she went to a Christian bookstore and bought a Bible. Then she went to Phil's Fish and Poultry and bought a small salmon, which she brought home and put in the Stuart Weitzman box that had held her silver evening shoes, giggling to herself. "I can't believe I'm doing this."
That night when Mitch moved close to her, she said to herself, Somehow that woman knew about my diabetes, so maybe she knows about babies. Come on, fish! Do your stuff.
Even sex to make babies, which was supposed to be too calculated to be sexy, was steamy with Mitch. He spent hours nuzzling, nibbling, and licking at all the spots on her body he knew so well, and that night when they rose to fevered orgasm together, he said, "Come on, baby. Come on, my baby," before he collapsed in a final sigh on top of her and whispered, "You're my whole life, Laine," and fell into a deep sleep.
The next morning after Mitch left for work, Lainie, who would have forgotten if she hadn't dropped an earring that rolled to the floor and just under the bed, removed the Bible and put it in a drawer and took the fish out of the shoe box and put it down the garbage disposal.
She didn't have to be in the store until noon, so she ran a tub, and slid in. She always put the morning newspaper next to the tub on the floor, then leaned over the side to turn the pages. But now, before she started to read, she knew something was wrong. A searing cramp squeezed through her lower abdomen, and then another pain, and when she looked at the water it was bright red. She was hemorrhaging. All alone in the house, she was losing big gobs of blood. Slowly she lifted herself out of the tub, and as her own blood, diluted with bathwater, dripped down her legs, she managed to get herself into the bedroom to call Mitch. He was there in just the time it took for her to dry off, wrap herself in a robe, and prop up her feet.
"You're okay, baby, you're okay," he repeated to her over and over as he gently carried her to the car, then rushed her to the hospital.
Lainie's mother, Margaret Dunn, left work to come to the hospital to be near her daughter for the surgery. She was a bony, gray-haired woman who didn't talk much, and didn't expect anyone to do anything for her. Mitch included her in all the conversations with the doctors, took her to a silent lunch in the hospital cafeteria while they waited for Lainie to come out of surgery, and took turns with her tiptoeing into the recovery room to see if Lainie was awake yet. She had three ominous-looking intravenous tubes attached to her.
When she finally opened her eyes, it was Mitch's face she saw looking down at her, and she already knew by the expression he was wearing, the one that she teased him about by calling it "tough dago," what had happened.
"Mitchie," she asked, "I can't have a baby, can I?"
Mitch didn't speak, only shook his head sadly.
After they brought Lainie home, Margaret Dunn took two weeks from her job at the law office in Beverly Hills to sit by her daughter's bed every day. She walked Lainie to the bathroom, answered the telephone, straightened up the house, and served home-cooked meals on a tray. Friends from Panache came to visit with cards and gifts and cookies, and Sharon, a girl Lainie had befriended in an English class at Northridge, came with Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. All three sisters-in-law came at one time, filling the bedroom of Lainie and Mitch's condo with the overwhelming combination of their assorted perfumes, Joy, Tea Roses, and Opium.
The friends were understanding and kind. They offered sympathy for the loss of hope of ever having a baby. The sisters looked funereal, which was obviously the way they felt. Even the flowers they brought, white lilies, looked like the kind people brought when someone died. And they sat on the bed and spoke in solemn whispers.
When her strength came back, Lainie began a regimen of chemotherapy twice a week. Mitch would drive her to the hospital and wait, drive her home and sit outside the bathroom door while she was sick, then help her gently into bed where she would nap, while he went back to work at Panache. Her hair was falling out in large chunks, her skin was sallow, and she had no appetite at all. She still went to the store as often as she could. She had enough energy to do some work, but she felt sensitive about her appearance when she saw the pitying expressions on people's faces when they looked at her.
One day she stopped at Sherman Oaks Park, sat in her car in the parking lot near the playground, and watched the toddlers in the sandbox and the bigger children on the play equipment and wished she were dead. When the months of chemotherapy ended, the doctors scheduled a surgery during which they planned to take a tissue sample from each organ to determine if the cancer was gone.
"Mitch," Lainie said the night before the second surgery. She was naked against his naked back. "If they find any more cancer, I'm not going to go for chemo again. I'm going to elect to die."
The surgery found nothing. Mitch sent her a giant basket of flowers. He also sent a dozen helium balloons which floated to the ceiling in her hospital room, and he held her too tight, and she laughed when he climbed into the hospital bed next to her and said, "God couldn't take you away from me so soon. I'm too nice a guy."
The business was running like a top and Lainie's strength was returning, her hair was growing back, and her everyday life was normal again. Slowly and gently Mitch brought their sex life back to normal too. Loving her, it seemed, with a greater tenderness than ever.
On Mitch's thirty-fifth birthday, Lainie threw a party for him right in the store, with valet parking, a dance floor, a disc jockey, and a caterer. She invited Mitch's sisters and their husbands, all the employees of Panache and their spouses, a whole group of her friends from school, and the guys Mitch grew up with in the Valley. There was Dave Andrews, who owned a mattress company, and Frankie De Lio, who owned a chain of liquor stores, and Larry Weber, who was a successful lawyer.
When the disc jockey played Kenny Rogers singing "Lady," Mitch took Lainie onto the dance floor as if they were a couple of teenagers at a school dance, and some of the girls from the store let out a cheer when he pulled her close to him and they danced.
"You have come into my life and made me whole . . .," Kenny Rogers sang.
"Larry Weber told me he has a client whose sixteen-year-old-daughter is very pregnant," she thought she heard him say into her hair, and she wondered why he was telling her that. "I mean as in so pregnant she's giving birth any minute."
Lainie looked into his face now to try to see where this was leading. "So?" she asked.
"So she's a kid and her parents didn't want her to have an abortion, and for a while the girl's mother was going to keep the baby and raise it as if it was hers, only now they decided that wouldn't be good for the girl, so they need to find a home for it fast."
"Look at that cute couple," Carin said as she and her boyfriend danced past Lainie and Mitch. For a few minutes Lainie didn't know what to say as they moved to the music, pressed tightly together, then she stopped dancing and stood in the middle of the dimly lit room and looked at him.
"You mean just like that. In a couple of days? Somebody drops off a baby?"
"I know. It sounds nuts, doesn't it? But maybe it's fate. Larry being here and asking me casually why we don't have kids, and me telling him all the stuff we've been through . . . "
Lainie looked away. A peal of laughter erupted from Mitch's sisters who were standing in a cluster with their husbands.
"I mean, maybe we're the ones who
are destined to take the baby from this poor little girl."
Lainie had always thought Mitch was against adoption because an adopted baby wouldn't have the De Nardo genes. But here he was asking to take in some stranger's baby within hours. He was getting desperate.
"What do you think?"
"I don't know. I mean, it's so fast. We don't even have anything for it."
"What does it need? It could sleep in our bed. I can go to any drugstore and get diapers and formula now if I have to." He looked and sounded like a kid begging for a puppy. Next he would probably swear he'd be responsible for feeding it and changing it.
"I'll help with it. Hell, we can afford to get a full-time nurse."
"I'm so lost in your love . . .," Kenny Rogers sang.
The next few days were about visits to the lawyer and signing papers in Larry Weber's Valley office, then running to the Juvenile shop to look at baby furniture. They bought a changing table, a crib, and a musical swing.
"Can't you just order them," Margaret Dunn asked, "and not have them delivered until after the baby is born?"
Mitch laughed at his mother-in-law's superstitions, and told the Juvenile shop to deliver everything that night. It would give him time to run home and get the third bedroom cleaned up and ready for the arrival of the baby.
The next morning Larry Weber called just as they unlocked the front door to open the store for the day to tell them that the girl was in labor.
"We're ready for her," Mitch said, smiling.
"It's a boy," Larry Weber said just before they went home for the day, and Mitch grabbed Lainie and twirled her around. "We're talking Joey De Nardo. We're going to have a boy." That night Lainie brought a picnic dinner into the baby's room, spread out a blanket, and they ate sitting on the floor, talking about how it would feel to have a little one in that very room any day now. They drank a lot of Santa Margharetta Pino Grigio with dinner, and when the phone rang at eleven o'clock they were in bed, both a little drunk, making love.
The Stork Club Page 14
