“It’s not a dead horse to me,” I said.
“But it is to me,” he returned quickly.
We had a silent stand-off for a few moments. “Look, I was very young. I didn’t want to get tied down when you were going to be in Philly and I would be in L.A. I was twenty-two years old. I was a different person than I am now.”
“How?”
“I’m older and wiser, Malone. I don’t know. What do you want me to say? I’m sure you’re the one, okay?!”
“Well, what if you change your mind. Would you tell me? Or would you just disappear from my life again?”
“This is the real deal, babe. I’m never going to leave you,” he assured me.
“Okay then, the last woman you dated. Did you end it, or did she?”
“I did,” he said.
“How did you break it off?” I asked.
“I don’t know, we just did,” he said, annoyed.
“Well, how? Did you take her to a restaurant and give her the ‘it’s been great’ speech. Did you send her an e-mail? How did you break up with her?”
God forbid he should ask me the same question.
“I don’t remember, let me check my diary. We just ended it, that’s all,” he grew more impatient.
“Aloud?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did you even tell her it was over, or did you just let her figure it out on her own?”
“Who fucking cares about how I broke up with Sandreen? It’s you and me now. I’m sure if you talked to her today, she’d say I handled it fine.”
Sandreen the belly dancer? The one Kyara said he was more serious about than the others?
My tea was finally cool enough to sip. I unwrapped my knee from an ace bandage and noticed that the swelling created a distinctly cave woman look. There was a nail file on the nightstand by the bed, so I scooted over and decided I would not let up on the issue until all ten of my fingernails were smoothly filed. This would help me resist the temptation to give in when Matt urged me to change the topic.
“Why did you break up with Sandreen anyway, Matt?”
“Why do you care about that? It has nothing to do with you and me,” he said. “Malone, I gotta tell you, I hate this kind of shit.”
“Matt, I’m just curious about you, that’s all. It’s not that unusual for a woman to want to know about her fiancé’s last girlfriend. It’s not some big scandal you’re trying to hide from me, is it?”
He laughed. “Just the opposite. It just got stale with Sandreen. After a few months we were in a rut, and it just wasn’t fun anymore.”
“You were in a rut with a belly dancer?!” I blurted without thinking.
“Belly dancer? Who told you she’s a belly dancer?” Matt laughed.
Thank God that half-wit Kyara got it wrong. Sandreen was not a belly dancer at all. She was an assistant in a biotech lab. She was an exterminator. She stood on an assembly line stamping “Made in the USA” stickers on the bottoms of wicker baskets.
“She’s a stripper,” he said.
A stripper?! He got bored with a stripper?! I am an accountant, for Christ’s sake.
“Anyway, Sandreen is nothing next to you, Malone,” he told me as I sat in my bed wearing flannel pajamas and sipping herbal tea. “Every time I see you, it’s like, I can’t think of the word for it.”
Try!
“It’s like, I feel really, you know,” he groped.
I don’t know! Find a word.
“Awesome,” he said
Awesome?
“Matt, you know, we’ve only been together a total of two weeks since we’ve been back together,” I said. “Do you ever get nervous that life will get mundane with me too once we’re married?”
“Nope,” he said. “How could it? Everything about you excites me.”
There are older couples who are still madly in love with each other. Maybe Matt and I would be one of them. We did have the advantage of marrying later in life. At best, Matt and I would have sixty years together. I could still be awesome at ninety-six. Why did I have to be so cynical and think that the way Matt felt about Sandreen was the way he’d one day feel about me? Sandreen was not me. People have one soul mate. I was Matt’s. Sandreen got stale because she was not the right one for Matt, so screw her. However they ended their relationship had nothing to do with ours. I was sure I’d already given their breakup more thought than she had. Surely she was over it by now and happily dancing naked on someone else’s lap.
“So that’s it, Matt?” I asked. “That’s all there was to our breakup? You were young and went out to explore the world, and got distracted by all of the other new and exciting experiences life had to offer a twenty-two-year-old?”
“Basically.”
“No band of Italian reform school escapees?” I asked.
“I wish,” he laughed.
“And you didn’t call me back because you were a young and foolish gutless wimp?” I asked.
Matt laughed. “I guess you could say that.”
“But that’s not how you handle things now, you say. Right?”
“Right.”
“You communicate directly now. Right?”
“Yes. Very directly,” he said.
“Okay.” I sighed to let him know I had concluded this line of questioning. “When should we get married?”
“Gee Malone, you’re a real romantic,” he laughed. “Grab your calendar and let’s pick a date.”
Matt and I settled on the last Sunday in June, which also happened to be my birthday. At first, I wasn’t crazy about the idea because it seemed as if his marrying me were a birthday gift for me. Like he resigned with a droning, “Okay, since it’s your birthday, I’ll marry you.” Then of course, I could always count on the combo birthday-anniversary gifts. Finally I agreed to it when Matt said that getting married on my birthday signified the beginning of our new life. I liked that. Corny as hell, but I liked it.
“Okay, and we’ve decided on Ann Arbor for the wedding, right?” I asked.
“Check.”
“Okay, here’s the big one,” I treaded lightly. “Your coast or mine?”
“I guess I could be happy in New York,” he shrugged.
I dropped the phone and shouted with joy. After a few seconds I picked the phone up, breathless. “Matt, you’re going to be so happy here, you’ll see. I promise you’re going to look back at this decision as the best one you ever made. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
“There’s a price for this, Malone,” he said. “You need to stop second-guessing me now, and just accept the fact that I’m crazy about you. No more rehashing old shit, okay?”
“Deal,” I rushed. “Deal, deal, deal!” I sang. “Matt, you are the love of my life. Do you know that?”
“Yeah, Malone, I do. And you’re the love of mine. Do you know that?”
“Yes, yes I do. No doubt about it. I love you, you love me.”
Speaking the lyrics to the grating Barney song reminded me of the one last issue we had to settle. To breed or not to breed. “Um, Matt. Do you really want kids?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” he answered. “Who doesn’t want kids?”
“Parents,” I quipped.
He was silent. After a moment’s pause, Matt asked, “You don’t want kids?”
“Well, it’s not that I don’t want them. I just don’t, I can’t see how we’d, I feel like it’s, you know? No, I don’t want them.”
“Not even one?” Matt asked.
“I just never saw myself with a child,” I said.
“I never saw myself without at least one,” Matt replied.
We both sighed. Matt said, “I compromised on the New York thing, I think you should give a little here. One kid. Deal?”
“No,” I said softly. “I don’t have the patience for motherhood, and I’m not going to have a child as a compromise. Don’t you think a child deserves a mother who wants to be a mother?”
“I don’t
know,” Matt said. “Lots of women are on the fence at first and they really grow to love the kid. I think you’d warm up to motherhood once you had the baby.”
I couldn’t believe I was even considering this for a moment. I closed my eyes and pictured a newborn wrapped in a blanket, sleeping in my arms as I fed him a bottle and rocked together in our chair.
Yuck!
I jarred myself out of this forced-fantasy with the realization that the little mole rat would soon shoot shit out of his four-day-old ass and I’d be the one left to clean it up. Then he’d get older and start waddling around the house getting fingerprints all over the walls. My conversations with him would be about shapes and colors. Later I could look forward to engaging topics like letters and numbers. I’d talk to other women about diaper rash and teething. Soon I’d find myself at birthday parties and playgrounds. And by the time two years went by, my old life, my old self would spiral down the drain like the blood in the shower scene of Psycho.
“I’ve got to tell you, Matt, I don’t really like kids that much. I like Sophie’s little ones enough, but I only see them once or twice a month. I can tell you right now, I wouldn’t find them all that cute if I had to see them every day.”
Matt and I decided we could wait to resolve this issue. We had already covered so much ground that night, I was willing to give it a rest. Surely I could avoid the topic again until I hit menopause, when I’d toss my secret pills out the window and say, “Shucks, honey, we sure did give it our best, but my old eggs and your decrepit sperm just couldn’t get it together.”
Or maybe I’d give the idea some more thought. “Kids,” I said aloud, trying to bolster myself against my natural revulsion to the sound of the word. “Kids,” I said again. “One kid,” I said before taking my final sip of tea. “One kid.”
Is one too many.
“One child could be lovely,” I tried to convince myself.
Just like one bullet could be lovely.
“One child.”
Refrain.
“One child.”
Maybe.
Chapter 33
I called Sophie and asked if she wanted to spend Saturday together. As luck would have it, that weekend was the first truly spring-like weather New York had seen all season. When I looked out the window, I saw people wearing short-sleeved t-shirts and tying sweaters around their waists. One eager woman donned a straw hat with pink flowers around the rim, and Chad was riding his bicycle down Prince Street ringing his silver bell for no reason whatsoever. A few weeks early, spring was in the air.
Anyone who has spent a single March in New York knows to take advantage of the outdoor weather while it lasts. One day last March, it was so hot that Reilly and I actually sunbathed on our roof. Three days later, it snowed.
“I want to take the kids to the park today,” Sophie suggested. “Would you be okay with that, Pru?”
“Of course, I love kids,” I assured her.
I was finally ready to leave my crutches at home and limp around the city. I took a taxi to Washington Square Park where I’d meet Sophie, Oscar and Devy at the playground near the arch. Sophie waved from the edge of the sandbox until I saw her, dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt with a gangster-girl red headband. The kids sat filling and emptying a rainbow of plastic pails with sand. They were building a beach, Devy told me.
A child in the playground called to his mother to push him higher in the swing. When she refused, the three-year-old began crying uncontrollably. He jumped out of the swing and threw himself on the playground floor. His face was scrunched up and red like a newborn’s, and he gasped between each dramatic sob. His arms and legs began kicking the ground as he cried louder and more out of control. “Please Mommy, please push me higher,” he cried before swallowing deep and guttural breaths. Watching him made me feel like I was going to throw up, and I couldn’t hold back my own tears.
“What’s wrong with you?” Sophie asked.
“I don’t know,” I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. “Sophie, I have no idea. I just feel sorry for that kid. I mean, look how much he wants that swing ride.”
“So push him on the swing,” she laughed. “Do you want to call Child Protective Services and report the mom for not pushing the kid high enough? Come on, honey. Sit down and tell me what’s going on.”
“I have no idea, Sophie,” I continued crying, terrified I might not be able to stop.
* * *
That evening Sophie and I went to Jennifer and Adrian’s engagement party at his apartment on Riverside Drive, where the two planned to live after their September wedding. “Have you met Adrian yet?” I asked Sophie on the taxi drive uptown.
She nodded. “Love Adrian. He’s so attentive, you just can’t help feeling a little jealous,” Sophie told me. “Jennifer told me he was the first guy she’s ever met who fights fair. I wouldn’t even know what to do with a level-headed guy like that, would you?”
I shuddered. “Sounds boring.”
“Boring?!” Sophie laughed. “You must meet Adrian. I won’t say another word except that Jennifer has met her match with this one. Hey, speaking of, how was your visit with Matt?”
The moment of truth. Or revision. “Not great. Not terrible, but we didn’t get a lot of time together, and of course my accident put a damper on things, but I do have some good news. Matt’s agreed to move to New York after we get married.”
“That is good news, Prudence. When’s the big day, anyway?”
“Fourteen weeks from tomorrow,” I said. “At the sweetest little chapel in Ann Arbor, then we’re having the reception at the same restaurant we ate dinner at when Matt took me to his fraternity formal. You’ve never been to Ann Arbor, have you?”
“What would ever bring me to a college town in Michigan?”
“Anyway, it’s just beautiful in June. It’s right before the weather starts getting humid. A thousand trees are fully bloomed. God, I can’t think of a more romantic setting for us to marry. You’re coming, of course.”
“Of course.”
When we pulled up to Adrian’s apartment, a doorman in a long coat and an old- fashioned hat approached the taxi door and opened it for us. The building was a six-story brick structure with a hunter green awning that matched the doorman’s uniform. “Are you here for the Fields party?” he asked when he saw the gifts in our arms.
We nodded.
“Mr. Fields is on five,” he told us. “Follow the corridor until you reach the elevator, ladies.”
Adrian’s apartment looked like a sitting room at the United Nations, with Victorian love seats, eastern European crystal stemware resting on marble-top tables and a small vase in the corner that looked as if it were from the Ming Dynasty. Silk screens with Egyptian themes lined the hallway walls, and the candleholder sitting on Adrian’s white grand piano was a Greek-style octopus. A dwarf sat at the piano playing tunes from classic films, as an inside joke for all who knew about Jennifer’s scheme to win Adrian’s affection.
Adrian was an exquisitely handsome black man with about a centimeter of brown hair and sharp bone structure. He was a tall man with a broad chest that was even more pronounced by his thick ivory Shetland wool sweater. Adrian was talking to a woman with a red head wrap when he saw Sophie and me and lifted his glass as if to tell us he’d be there in a moment.
“You must be the famous Prudence Malone,” he said in a deep rich voice that could fill a room with music just by saying hello. “Sophie,” he said, leaning in to kiss her. “You look lovely as always.”
He just said “lovely” and it sounded manly, exotic and brutal at the same time. This man is the African God of Yum.
“Adrian, I’ve heard so many wonderful things about you,” I said, extending my hand.
Lame. I have zero yum factor.
“My Jennifer always tells me what dear friends she has in you two,” Adrian returned.
“My” Jennifer. “My” Jennifer. I would change my name to Jennifer right now just to pretend this man wa
s talking about me.
“I’d like to spend some time talking with you, Prudence. You will be staying for the after-party, won’t you? Adrian asked.
After-party? What after-party?
Sophie answered, “Of course we’re staying, Adrian. Go greet your other guests. Prudence and I will be around the rest of the evening.”
“What after-party?” I asked Sophie. “Jennifer never mentioned anything to me about an after-party.”
“Well, of course you’re invited to the after-party, Prudence,” Sophie smiled. “Don’t be ridiculous. If you’re not invited, who is? We all are, silly. Chad and Daniel are coming just for the after-party. Since when do you need a formal invitation, Prudence? We’re best friends. It’s a given that we’re invited. Don’t start sobbing on me again, okay?”
Jennifer rushed over to us apologizing for taking a few minutes to get to us. “Everyone wants to talk to the bride-to-be, and you can’t very well just brush them off.”
“It must be hell for you to be the center of attention like this,” I laughed.
“Treacherous. And all these gifts, torture.”
Sophie raised her finger to ask a question that just occurred to her. “You’re not going to wear a boring old wedding dress, are you? I mean, people are expecting —”
The music stopped as Adrian tapped his empty wine glass with a shrimp cocktail fork.
He’s got good crystal.
“Can I have your attention for just a moment please?” Adrian asked.
I’m quite sure you have everyone’s attention with that voice of God.
“I’d like to make a toast to my Jennifer. Many people wondered why we got engaged so soon after we met. And I’m sure some of you had your own theories.” The group of thirty guests laughed at the implication. “There’s a very good reason I asked Jennifer to be my wife right away. By our third date, I was completely and totally addicted to this woman’s charm, her wit, her insights and observations, the way she looks at the world and how she says exactly what’s on her mind. Every day I’m with Jennifer, she reminds me of all of the beauty — and the drama — that life has to offer, and just by being herself, she reminds me of so many things I’d forgotten to appreciate. With Jennifer I am a wide-eyed child, I am a reborn man and I am a fool in love. So, I’m hooked and there’s no rehabilitation that I want, or that could ever break this wonderful habit I’ve formed — loving you, Jennifer,” he said, raising his glass to her.
The Wife of Reilly Page 26
