I was afraid my voice might betray me, so I said nothing.
“Whatever happened, I don’t care,” he began, his voice breaking. “It doesn’t change a thing for me. Do you hear me, Julie?” He was in love with me. I was sure of that. I could almost hear his love for me pouring over the telephone line. And I didn’t want to lose him if it turned out the experience at Opal Weekend had meant nothing to Manny. “We’re having a fraternity party next weekend at the house,” he said, and hesitated. “Will you—go with me?” Before Opal Weekend he had been so sure of me. Now he couldn’t be certain of anything where I was concerned.
I impulsively accepted his invitation, thinking I couldn’t assume anything with Manny. He had known about the party and he hadn’t asked me. In fact, he already had another date lined up. When had that happened? I hated myself for being so possessive and feeling so betrayed. Maybe sleeping with someone didn’t give me any rights. Maybe I was reading too much into the weekend. All the signs pointed to that.
Chapter Twelve:
Most Likely to Conceive
Miami
For someone supposedly so perceptive, I completely missed the signs. When I missed my first period, I attributed it to nerves. Mackie assured me that a menstrual cycle could be delayed because of a shock or traumatic experience. And I was beginning to think of Opal Weekend as the biggest shock my system had ever withstood, at least a 6.0 on the Richter scale. I worried myself sick about whether Manny’s feelings for me were genuine. Or whether he had any feelings for me at all.
Mackie kept a close eye on me because I was beginning to show serious signs of disintegration and distress.
“God, Mackie. I couldn’t be pregnant, could I?”
“It’s a real possibility,” Mackie had to admit.
“After only one time?”
“That’s all it takes.”
“But I don’t have any of the signs,” I protested. Almost as soon as the words came out of my mouth, so did the remains of my breakfast. I barely made it to the toilet in time.
Mackie dampened a washcloth and wiped my face.
“Let’s wait,” I said. “For another sign.”
“Don’t put your head in the sand,” Mackie said.
I sat down on the bed and cried. “What have I done?”
“Just followed your heart,” Mackie was instantly contrite and suddenly sympathetic. “Remember, it takes two. Manny’s just as responsible.”
“We still don’t even know if it’s true,” I reasoned.
It was my first day back at Goldsmith’s during winter break. The moment I arrived, I suddenly felt queasy. Running to the bathroom. I vomited again. Either I was coming down with something or the pressure was taking its toll.
Something was clearly wrong, I thought, as I glanced at my desk calendar. I ruffled through the pages, staring at the calendar for something that I couldn’t or wouldn’t fathom. Finally, I checked the dates. Normally, I was as regular as clockwork. I knew I was fooling myself if I thought it was simple stress. I had missed my second period, and I was on the verge of hysteria.
How could this have happened? I panicked. I knew exactly how it had happened. I wasn’t on the Pill and Manny didn’t use any protection when we were together. He said he thought it cramped his style, and he told me he would feel “closer” to me if he didn’t wear a condom. Typical Latin macho male.
I avoided Manny for the next few weeks. I couldn’t possibly face him after I had confirmed my worst suspicions.
“My mother will freak out,” I cried to Mackie.
“And let’s not forget about your father,” Mackie pointed out. “If you weren’t Jewish, he’d stick you in a convent. If he doesn’t kill you, he’ll never let you leave the house again, and then he’ll go after Manny with one of his handguns or the bow and arrow.”
It hardly seemed fair. For years I had resisted considerable pressure to sleep with Manny Gellar, who I truly believed was the love of my life. And the first time I had, he’d gotten me pregnant.
The situation shouldn’t have surprised me. The evidence was right there in our high school yearbook next to the picture of Manny and me, labeled, “Most Likely to Succeed.” It should have read “Most Likely to Conceive.”
My mother would be disappointed in me, of course, but she would be more disappointed if she knew the identity of the father. In her wildest imaginings, Sylvia never would have suspected Manny. My parents and Manny’s parents hoped that one day Manny and I would end up together. But not this way.
In the beginning, I protected the identity of my baby’s father as staunchly as a journalist protecting a source. All the coaxing or screaming in the world wasn’t going to make me betray Manny. In the end, I was so scared and alone I finally did confide in my mother, but only if she promised to keep the pregnancy a secret from my father and especially from Manny and Elena.
At first, my mother insisted that I tell Manny about the pregnancy. She and Mackie were both convinced he would do the right thing and marry me, that he would accept the responsibility. I think my mother was secretly excited about the baby. But I didn’t want him to marry me because he felt responsible. I was unsure of Manny’s feelings for me and didn’t want to force him into such a big commitment while we were still both in college.
“I just can’t tell him,” I pleaded with my mother. “He doesn’t think of me in that way.”
“And exactly what way was he thinking of you when he slept with you and got you pregnant?” Sylvia asked, her anger almost palpable.
Then there was Matt. How was I ever going to tell him?
That’s when my mother came up with the idea of sending me to Italy. She assumed total control of the situation. Locating a one-year study abroad program through the university, she enrolled me immediately.
Arrangements were made for me to visit one of my mother’s good friends in England before I arrived in Florence, purportedly on a jewelry-buying trip to Europe. Ostensibly I would be living in the heart of Italy for the purpose of studying Italian and art history. But I knew my mother was sending me to Europe for one reason and one reason only. To explore the possibility of removing all traces of Manny Gellar from my life forever and to recover from the mess he had made of it.
But Sylvia Goldsmith hadn’t sent her weak-willed, sexually active daughter out of the country to repeat her mistakes. This time my mother made sure I was armed with protection. She secured a prescription for the Pill with strict instructions to begin taking them as soon as I had “The Procedure.”
“My mother refers to it as ‘The Procedure,’ ” I lamented to Mackie about the first alternative. “Zip, zap, and it’s over. It sounds so cold and heartless. She can’t come with me now because if she leaves the shop at Christmas my father will get suspicious. Mackie, I wish you were coming with me. I don’t think I can handle this alone. I’m not sure I can go through with it. I know it’s impossible, but I wish there was some way I could have this baby.”
Chapter Thirteen:
The Great Escape
Florence, Italy, by way of London
When I arrived in England, close family friend and business associate Richard Westphalen and his dark, handsome partner, Franklin Ingersoll Constable, affectionately known as “FIC,” pampered and fussed over me in their London flat.
I had been hearing about Richard and FIC for years. My parents told tales of the terrific times the four of them had had in the Greek Isles, cruising the Mediterranean—to Athens, Santorini, Rhodes, and Kusadasi, through the Dardanelles Strait, and into Istanbul.
Richard and FIC afforded me the same courtesy as my parents did the lovers, asking no questions, making no judgments. To the rest of the world I would be seen as weak for giving in to temptation. The outside world would unjustly brand me, just like they branded Richard and FIC. But I was learning that life didn’t always fit into some neat little package defined by the world’s current standard of morality.
They lavished so much attention on me and took
such fine care of their houseguest that I fairly smothered. But it was just what I needed. I was nurturing a new life inside me. But I feared that my spirit would never soar again.
London was a dreary, cold, wet place, draped in fog, and the atmosphere matched my melancholy mood. My pregnancy was as shrouded in secrecy as the city was shrouded in mist, which I thought was fitting. If I was miserable, it was only fair that everyone else should be too.
For the first two weeks, I refused to leave the flat. I lay still as a stone, weighed down by quilts and profound guilt over what I was proposing to do. I kept my hand on my stomach in a move to protect my baby—from myself. I wrestled with my decision over and over again in my head. Was I doing the wrong thing? How would I feel when I no longer had the baby? The procedure was irreversible. Once it was done, there was no going back. If I had told Manny about the baby, would things have been any different? Would he love me and protect me like I so desperately wanted him to?
Then I wept and couldn’t be comforted. I spent most of the time on an emotional tightrope, my feelings alternating between disbelief that I was even contemplating taking the life of my unborn child and misplaced anger at Manny, although he never even knew about the pregnancy. I was angry with myself and angry with my mother, although her reasons for not keeping the baby seemed to make sense. I was too young, I wanted to finish college, and I wasn’t ready to raise a baby by myself. But she had seemed as upset as I was about the whole prospect.
The bottom line was I had a hole in my heart that was eating away at me like battery acid, and I was convinced that if I went ahead with the procedure, I would never recover from the loss. In the end, I agreed to visit the clinic for a discussion.
“I’ll make the appointment,” Richard said. “I’ll take you, and I’ll be there every step of the way.” I turned away so he couldn’t see the hurt in my eyes. I was numb and could barely function. I was living a nightmare.
When the time came, Richard was very sweet and supportive. My most vivid memory was in the clinic waiting room. I remembered letting out a primal scream that came from the depths of my soul. I looked at Richard and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” he said, puzzled, never letting go of my hand.
“For screaming,” I answered. I looked around the waiting room. No one had lifted a head from their magazines or their own contemplations. In reality, I hadn’t made a sound.
Suddenly, I felt as if I were suffocating. All the memories I had tried to dam up, of Manny and the night we had spent together, came flooding back. How could something so beautiful be so wrong? I didn’t see how I could sever this precious connection with the love of my life. I had to get out of there. Breaking free from Richard’s grip, I bolted from the chair and escaped from the waiting room. Richard followed close behind.
“I can’t do this,” I said flatly.
“I understand. Let’s go home, then.” Solicitously, he bundled me up in my coat, and we walked out of the sterile room from hell. I never told my mother, and I never looked back.
Richard and FIC personally escorted me to Florence to join the school group. Most of the students had flown in to the town of Pisa from New York and taken a bus to Firenze, some thirty miles away.
My school group was staying at the Hotel Palermo on the Via della Scala, a few blocks from the train station, near the Church of Santa Maria Novella, right in the middle of the Red Light District and across the street from the police headquarters—the Carabinieri.
On the evening of our arrival, everyone was ushered into the hotel and settled down in the dining room in front of big platefuls of spaghetti. I finished my plate of pasta and got up to go to my room.
“Signorina, no, that is only the primo course,” said our primo waiter Lucca. I soon learned, many meals and many pounds later, that in Italy pasta came before everything, and it came often and in large portions. All tortellini, all the time.
My new roommate Dana was beautiful, with a pale complexion, the face of a Botticelli angel, and luxurious, thick black hair that covered her like rich mink. She resembled a young Sophia Loren, with luscious curves in all the right places. I couldn’t believe my luck when I discovered that Dana could speak Italian. We soon became fast friends. Which was lucky for her, because most of the students were hesitant to approach the porcelain-faced beauty that everyone on the program referred to as the Italian Ice Queen.
As we unpacked on that first day, I stared through the window. I had arrived a day earlier and picked out a large corner room—the best in the hotel. With windows on three sides, the third-floor room came with spectacular views of the city at sunset. I marveled at the cathedrals, the cupolas, and the architectural treasures of Florence. Pigeons fluttered overhead, lending the city character. The hotel surrounded an outdoor piazza, with a lovely garden in the center, under a beautiful arched, plate-glass ceiling.
One of our bedroom windows faced the Arno River, which bisected the city. Even with the windows closed I could hear church bells pealing the hour as Dana and I hung up our dresses in the closet and laid out the rest of our clothes in the drawers of the heavy wooden armoires we had each selected.
Another window overlooked a narrow cobblestone alley and the peeling, ochre-colored side of the building next door. Clothes hung out on a line to dry and couples intermittently streamed through, like ants, hurrying in and out on their way to and from their destinations. Tourists busily scurried about on quests to discover the treasures of the “Birthplace of the Renaissance,” while fashionable Florentines strolled arm in arm on their way to dinners at charming trattorias. Gypsy women with babies were everywhere begging for coins, garbed in their multi-colored finery, trying to trap unsuspecting tourists and spouting life-curdling curses when they came up empty-handed.
Exhausted, I threw open all the shutters of my room and looked out on an ocean of cascading red tile rooftops for as far as I could see. I imagined the palazzos out in the country, the stucco buildings on the other side of the Arno, the Oltrarno or south bank. Florence was perfectly situated between the seaside, the countryside hills, and the Apennines mountain range that crossed Italy.
“Great choice of accommodations, roomie,” Dana called out from the black-and-white-tiled bathroom. “There’s even a bidet here.” I had seen bidets on buying trips to Europe with my mother but wasn’t sure exactly what they were used for. However, I was reluctant to admit that to the sophisticated Dana.
“We can use these for our hand-washables,” Dana pronounced in her typical take-charge fashion. Dana literally took charge of me, which was fortunate for me because Dana seemed to know her way around every situation.
She finally coaxed me out of my doldrums with promises of shopping. I could hardly wait for daylight to begin exploring the quaint silversmith and goldsmith shops and jewelry stores that lined the Ponte Vecchio where the Old Bridge stretched across the Arno River.
I sat at the open window at twilight, facing the courtyard opposite a window at the far end of the garden plaza. Still dazed, groggy, and half asleep, I could see the moon rising, full and beautiful, over the terracotta rooftops. The night was warm, but it offered a gentle breeze, and I was happy to be here in such a new and exciting place. Tonight, Manny Gellar seemed a million miles away.
Noise coming from the room across the courtyard caught my attention. A crowd of students had gathered, and a party was in progress. The students were tasting true freedom in a city tantalizingly far from home. I was about to close the curtain when a tall, skinny, pasty-faced boy—I vaguely recognized him from the dining room the first night—sailed through the window opposite me. As I gaped in horror and tried to call out Dana’s name, he glided in slow motion right past me and down through the plate glass ceiling. He landed with an unceremonious thud in the garden below, the glass shattering into a million shards. It was a picture I couldn’t get out of my mind.
The next time I saw Todd Singleton, he was bandaged from head to toe, a mummy tucked away in the America
n Hospital, where no one spoke English and where he remained for the duration of the program. People soon forgot what Todd used to look like under those bandages. For me, Todd would always be frozen in time, billowing through space at the Hotel Palermo. In fact, I almost wished I could trade places with Todd Singleton and stay safely cocooned until it was time to go home. Right now, though, I couldn’t imagine facing home.
Manny’s letters started coming two weeks after I arrived in Florence, and they kept coming in a steady flow. When the first one was delivered, my initial instinct was to throw it away, but I fought the urge and opened it.
Dear Jewels,
I miss you very much and I spend a lot of time thinking about us. Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving? Were you upset about what happened in Jacksonville Beach? I don’t want you to be scared by any of the things I said or did, and if you would rather me not mention that night, please tell me and we can have a carefree, no-obligation relationship. The only hassle is that I care for you and I don’t think I can stand being without you for a whole year. Please write as soon as possible and let me know how you’re feeling. I’m looking forward to seeing you again more than anything else.
Love Always, Manny
I burst into tears. Why was he sounding so sweet like this now, when we were an ocean apart? Why couldn’t he admit his feelings before? Why had he asked Nita to that final fraternity weekend? Was anything he said in the letter real? How would I ever be able to tell? When the next letter came, I placed it in a pocket of my hanging shoebag, unopened. By the time I left Florence, there was no room for my shoes.
It drove Dana crazy.
“Roomie, if you don’t open those letters, I will.”
But I was adamant. “I can’t. I don’t want to know what’s in them. It’s too painful.”
To this day I have no idea what the rest of the letters said. I doubt reading them would have made any difference. Before I left Florence, I stuffed the unopened letters behind the armoire in the hotel room.
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