Once in a Lifetime

by Harper Bliss

  “Amy has children.” Another fact I already knew. It’s supposed to reassure me, but it doesn’t. I can’t stop thinking about all the possible complications. But I also know I need to start somewhere. A woman hand-picked by my best friend can’t be that bad a starting point.

  “Fine. Set it up.”

  Muriel takes a deep breath, as if she’s just been bequeathed with the most important task of her life. “I won’t let you down, Jodie. I promise.”

  * * *

  Much to Muriel’s delight, Amy and I click. I’ve gotten laid several times, and it has certainly taken an edge off, but when I say ‘harder’ to Amy she can’t interpret it in the same way that Leigh used to. Instead, she narrows her eyes and looks at me with a tad too much disbelief displayed on her face. She tries, I know that, just as I know that it’s not really a matter of trying.

  But I’m not the same woman that I was with Leigh. My relationship with Amy is based on entirely different pillars than supreme and, at times, shocking satisfaction in the bedroom. Amy has two teenagers who are around Troy’s age. Two boys. When we’re all together I sometimes look at Rosie’s crib in fright, what with so much unbridled youth running around the house. Troy is fiercely protective of Rosie, and sometimes it feels a bit like an us-versus-them situation, but then I’m reminded of the solace and comfort I’ve found with Amy, and more than anything, the deep understanding of each other’s lives that we share.

  I don’t question Amy when she cancels a date because one of the boys is unwell. I don’t wake her up for a bout of uninterrupted sex on the rare Sunday morning when we can both sleep in and have either her house or my apartment to ourselves. I don’t have to ask her what her week will look like because my week looks about the same.

  “I knew you needed more than to get laid, Jodie,” Muriel tends to say. “That was just my hook, you see?”

  It’s only over brunch to celebrate our one-year anniversary, when the conversation turns to moving in together, that I experience the first major doubts. Being with Amy is the complete opposite of being with Leigh. Amy and I never had the urgency of desire I had with Leigh, but the sexual component of our affair has gone from taking a back-seat to a tired, almost reluctant show we put on every few weeks just because it’s part of the relationship deal. We’ve never sizzled in the bedroom, but a spark now and then would be welcome.

  Amy has a big house in Park Slope—an inheritance from her late father’s side of the family. One that would fit me, Troy, and Rosie easily, but just the notion of leaving my apartment and my neighborhood makes me queasy—not a pleasant sensation when having brunch.

  “Think about it, Jodie.” Amy has a million freckles on her face and a huge mane of red curly hair. “Rosie could have her own room.” Rosie’s room at the moment is a glorified broom closet, and the fact of the matter is that on my salary I can’t afford to leave my rent-controlled apartment. As far as persuasive arguments go, Amy has come out with the big one from the start.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Don’t sound so enthusiastic.” Amy’s eyes dim. Sweet, sweet Amy.

  “It’s only been a year, though.” What if it doesn’t work out, I add in my head, and I will have lost my apartment.

  “Yes, but what a year it has been.” Amy reminds me of the reason why we’re drinking champagne today. She raises her glass. “I love you, Jodie.”

  Amy didn’t have any issues with the fact that her boys are practically grown and I brought an infant into the mix. The way she is with Rosie, treating her like one of her own, warms me to my very core. In front of me sits a woman with the same desires as mine. The sort of woman I wanted all along. Someone to share my life with—the kind of life I always dreamed of. So what’s stopping me? I drink from my glass, which I still hold in toast position.

  “Okay.” I nod, more to convince myself than her. “Let’s do it.” In the back of my brain, I can’t help but conjure up possible scenarios to keep my apartment. As though a little part of me already knows this relationship—shacked up or not—can never last.

  Amy beams me a smile. She is gorgeous. I should have taken Muriel up on her offer to matchmake much earlier. Even Gerald likes her. Most of the time, Troy loves that he’s gotten two stepbrothers out of this. Sometimes, though, he just wants to be alone. He grew up an only child for the longest time. “Let’s have another.” She points at the near-empty bottle in the ice bucket. “Make this a proper celebration.”

  We planned this day like it would be a wild one. Luxurious brunching followed by luxurious fucking. The boys have been carted off to their dads and Rosie is with Muriel. But I know exactly how this will end. Stomachs too bloated from too much food and booze. Libidos remaining dormant because, in my case, what’s the point, really? I’m not sure how Amy feels about our lack of fireworks in the bedroom. Maybe I should ask her. She’s sufficiently tipsy to give me a straight answer.

  “Are you sure?” I lean over the table. “We could also get out of here semi-sober and, you know, go home.”

  “Our home.” She quirks up her eyebrows suggestively and extends her arm over the table. “I’m so happy.”

  “Me too, babe.” I grab her hand. “So, what do you say?”

  She glares at me for a minute with glazed-over eyes. Amy is no fool, of course. Not even with a good amount of alcohol in her blood. But, suddenly, I feel we need to have this conversation now. If we don’t, there will always be something more important keeping us from having it. This is our day alone.

  “I say that you look like a woman who has something on her mind.” Amy’s voice sounds skittish.

  I look at our intertwined fingers instead of at her face. My cheeks grow hot already. Leigh and I never had to have these sorts of discussions. It was all so effortless and easy. Then again, Leigh proved allergic to my wish for another child, so what is more important to me? Amy, who wants to lead the life that I want? Or someone like Leigh, who thrills me in the bedroom but can’t stick around for the hard stuff? The stuff life is actually made up of. Ideally, I’d find a combination of both in one person, but that’s proven to be impossible—as though the two lifestyles are mutually exclusive. Except for me, I think.

  What I really want to say is, “I want us to go home and fuck,” but I can’t use that line on Amy. It’s not who we are.

  “Sweetie?” Amy urges. I’ve probably been silent for too long. “Are you okay?” Sometimes, without her being able to help it—and I know this because this happens to me as well—she uses her baby-addressing voice with me. It makes me feel like the most unsexy creature that ever walked the earth.

  “I’m fine.” I straighten my spine and wave her off. “It’s nothing.” My liquid courage evaporates. What am I doing anyway? I should thank my stars for having Amy in my life. Or, as Muriel puts it, shower my best friend with eternal displays of gratitude. Normally, I would discuss the lack of bedroom action with Muriel, but she introduced me to Amy, and it seems ungrateful. The fact is I don’t have anyone to talk to about this. Perhaps if Leigh had stayed in New York and we’d found some way to become friends. Perhaps we could have discussed this sort of thing. Or would it have led us somewhere dangerous? Either way, there’s no point in contemplating this. Leigh Sterling is long gone, and probably rocking another woman’s world on the other coast.

  Then Amy surprises me. “Come on. We’re getting out of here.” She signals the waiter for the check. Has she been reading my mind?

  “Tell me what you couldn’t say at the restaurant,” she asks when we’re in the cab. The Brooklyn Bridge looms in the distance. I don’t even particularly like Brooklyn with all its hipsters and gentrification, I think for the umpteenth time.

  I pull her toward me until her ear is close enough to my mouth. “I want us to fuck,” I whisper. I put my hand on her upper thigh and dig my fingers in hard. The thing about making demands like this is that it doesn’t really suit me. It makes me sound like someone I’m decidedly not.

  “Then that’
s what we’ll do,” Amy replies, but there’s a sort of resignation in her voice I find hard to bear. Like it’s a chore that needs to be ticked off a list. “Let’s just behave for a little while longer for the cabbie’s sake.” She glances at the front seat nervously and puts her hand on mine, detaching my fingertips from her jeans.

  The rest of the ride passes in a tense silence. While Amy searches her purse for her keys I look over the facade of the house, all three floors of it. There’s a basement playroom for the boys, and a woman comes in twice a week to clean it. Rosie could have a well-lit space of her own with room for all her toys, and a desk when she gets older, and real privacy. Maybe I have to do this for my children.

  So, I remain silent when we go inside, dump our overcoats and bags in a specially designed closet, and fall onto the sofa, both of us lazy and heavy-limbed. Amy flicks on the TV and there’s an episode of Law & Order: SVU on and we both love that show, so we watch it and the day passes quietly. Almost politely.

  When we go to bed, I’m painfully aware that we have the house to ourselves, like a ticking clock reminding me that it’s now or never. Come tomorrow, Rosie will be back, and the boys will arrive in the evening, and our attention will be divided among them, with only a fraction left to spend on ourselves and each other. Then Monday will roll around, and along with it the frenzy of a working week, during which we usually fall into bed completely exhausted at ten.

  I’m more put off by my own ambivalence than anything else. I’m fully aware that our lack of a sex life is as much down to me as it is to her. Perhaps even more. Sometimes, when I want to instigate lovemaking, I stop myself because I know I won’t get out of it what I really want—hands tied to the bed and five fingers inside. What aggravates me most is that, before Leigh, this more gentle lovemaking would have been more than plenty. Happiness would have been a given. If only Leigh hadn’t looked into my soul and given me what I truly wanted.

  “Good night, babe,” I say to Amy. I kiss her on the cheek and there’s a brief moment during which the chaste kisses we exchange may turn into a full-blown French kissing session, but the moment passes, as do so many, and a few seconds later the lights are off and we’ve both turned on our side.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Tell me about your ex,” Karen says. We’ve gone for a walk in Dolores Park and it feels right, for the first time since I arrived in San Francisco, to hold another woman’s hand in mine. For the first time, the presence of other couples around us isn’t a brutal reminder of how lonely my life has become since I moved here.

  “Which one?” We both know it’s a lame joke. I’ve only ever talked about Jodie.

  She leans her weight onto me. “Come on.”

  Karen has turned out to be quite the foul-mouthed little spitfire in the bedroom, always asking for more, making demands, because she knows what the consequences will be.

  “She wanted another child, I didn’t.” It’s how I usually sum it up. It has proven very effective to shut down conversations I don’t want to have.

  The first time Jodie left me alone with Troy, I was a nervous wreck.

  “Can you pick him up from school and watch him for a few hours, please?” she’d asked over the phone. “I really would like to escort this kid to his new foster parents. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Sure,” I’d said, like it was a logical sequence of events. I guess it was. Jodie and I had been dating for a few months. I’d gone to pick up Troy with her from school and Gerald’s house a few times. I knew the drill, so to speak. That didn’t mean I had confidence in my own abilities to babysit a seven-year-old. Was I supposed to hold his hand when we walked down the street? Pour him a glass of milk when we arrived at Jodie’s? I didn’t even have a key.

  But Troy, perhaps because he was a child of divorced parents, displayed a great deal of independence—he didn’t need me to walk him home from school at all, or so it seemed. Nevertheless, we walked side-by-side, and I queried him about what he’d learned that day. I could just about manage second-grade math with my numbers-challenged brain so I tested him with some sums as we headed to Jodie’s place. He solved all of them in no time.

  When we reached Jodie’s building he produced a key and let us in. Once upstairs, he poured his own milk and started playing with an early-model cell phone Gerald had given him.

  “I’m texting my dad,” he said. “I would text Mom as well, but she doesn’t have a cell phone.”

  I didn’t even have a cell phone back then, but I quickly added it to my list of objects to acquire as soon as I quit my ADA job and found a law firm to join. If Gerald had one, I wanted one too.

  “Can you show me?” I asked, and took a few steps in his direction.

  “Sure. Look.” The screen was tiny and so were the buttons he pushed, but it seemed easy with his agile child’s fingers. “I’m texting Jake. He’s had one for ages.”

  I’d heard Jake’s name mentioned in conversations between Troy and Jodie. The pupils at the private school Gerald paid for all had cell phones.

  I watched Troy’s little fingers push the keys in quick tempo until he stopped to show me what he’d typed, before pressing a button with a green telephone on it to send.

  “It’s so cool,” Troy said.

  The D.A.’s office had only acquired its first personal computer a few years earlier. It was only a matter of time before Gerald bought one for Troy—perhaps he’d already done so and Troy had one in his giant room at his father’s house, despite Jodie’s opposition. She’d only agreed to the cell phone because it made her feel safer to know that Troy could reach her and Gerald at all times. Jodie and I had only been dating a few months and I stayed well out of her and Gerald’s parental disagreements. Troy already had two parents, and I doubted he needed a third.

  After that first time, I started picking up Troy from school at least once a week—saving Jodie quite a bit in babysitter fees. Some days, I would have work to finish and I’d sit at Jodie’s dining table while he continued building something elaborate in Lego. Other days, I’d join him on the floor, my long legs often an obstacle, and the hours until Jodie arrived home would pass as if they were minutes.

  But, throughout the time we spent together, I was always aware that I was not an extra parent to Troy. He already had a mother and a father. As we grew closer, I saw myself as more of an aunt-like figure in his life. I didn’t need to be anything else to him.

  When Jodie started talking about having another child, it unsettled me because this boy or girl would be ours. There would be no Gerald living around the corner. No other name on the birth certificate. I would be a mother—a thought that scared me so much it cost me everything.

  “I just don’t have it in my DNA, Jodie,” I said to her. “The maternal gene does not exist within me.”

  “That’s so not true,” she said. “What about Troy? You are so great with him.”

  “It’s not the same.” I never knew how to explain it adequately to Jodie without hurting her feelings.

  “Why not?” she insisted. “What would be so different?”

  “Everything.” There wasn’t a thing between us that wouldn’t change if Jodie had another child—and that’s how I always saw it: Jodie having another child as opposed to the two of us as a couple going through all the steps to conceive of one.

  “Only in the most exhilarating way,” Jodie said.

  “I’ve just joined a top firm, Jodie. I can’t just hop out of the office and pick someone up from daycare or school anymore.” Did she really think that I’d paid my dues at the D.A.’s office, working for a pittance for years, to throw all that hard work away and dedicate my life to another human being for the next eighteen years?

  “As I can tell you from experience, working a full-time job and being a mother are not mutually exclusive. I can call millions of additional witnesses to the stand if needed. Yes, life will change. Things will be crazy for a while, but there’s no unwritten law of the universe that says you can’t hav
e both, Leigh.”

  How was I supposed to tell this woman I loved so deeply that I didn’t want both? That before I met her, the thought of becoming a mother had barely crossed my mind? That her, me, and Troy was more than enough for me. That I was so selfish as to sometimes curse Gerald when he asked if we could take Troy for a night during his week. That Jodie co-parenting a son was about as much as I could take, no matter how much I cared for him?

  I never did tell her these things. Not until it was too late.

  “You don’t want to talk about her?” Karen caresses my hand with her thumb.

  “There’s not much to say.” I could probably fill a thousand pages detailing my sentiments regarding Jodie—how meeting her changed my life—but I’m not the sharing kind. And it feels as if my wounds have only just begun to heal.

  “It’s not good to keep it all inside.”

  “Why do you want to know?” If Karen is going to go all shrink-like on me, I need to go on the defense.

  “Because… I feel as if I’m competing with a ghost from your past.”

  “It’s not a competition.” I unlace my fingers from hers and wrap an arm around her shoulders instead.

  “It sure does feel like one at times,” Karen says.

  Karen and I have only been seeing each other a few weeks. What is she expecting? “Really?”

  “You’re so guarded, Leigh. I’m just trying to find a way in.” She puts her head on my shoulder. “I like you, that’s all.”

  “That’s all, huh?” I stop walking and face her, cracking a smile. “I like you too.” I pull her close for a kiss, and while I shut my eyes, inwardly I scream. Look at me kissing another woman in the park. I can do this. I’m over Jodie Whitehouse.

  But when I kiss Karen it’s not the same as when I kissed Jodie. Karen knows too much. She has too much knowledge on how to push my buttons and, even more so, she doesn’t need me the way Jodie did.

  Jodie and I used to take Troy for walks in Central Park. It was our go-to Sunday afternoon activity on the weekends he was with us. We’d just sit on a bench in silence and watch him play and it’s that simple sort of happiness that has eluded me completely since we broke up. As if my life no longer has room for tiny pleasures like that.