With Friends Like These

by Sally Koslow

  I’d walked out of Jules’ kitchen dumb with amazement. I’d known her for years and never once detected the faintest pining for motherhood. For an actress, she’d done an appalling job of concealing her disinterest in Henry and Dash. Nor did she seem to be burdened by the proverbial biological clock most childless women hear clanging even in their sleep. I’d have taken Jules for a woman who, on discovering she was pregnant, would have slipped in an abortion between the dry cleaner and the tailor.

  Was she frozen because she’d mixed up her decision about the baby with whether she should raise the child with Arthur, which would mean having him in her life forever? To that I said if anyone was up to the job of being a single mom, it’d be Jules. Why hadn’t I told her that? I’d already called her twice and she hadn’t called me back. If her hesitation was because she needed a friend to hold her hand while she took the next steps, I would be that person. I hoped I’d gotten that message across.

  “Mommy, Mommy, I’m cold,” Henry said. He shivered dramatically and stretched tall, having grown, I swear, since the previous day.

  I wrapped him in his hooded towel that looked like a bear and breathed in his fresh, buttery smell. “Let’s get dry and put on pajamas, then we’ll do dessert and a book.”

  “Can I wear my Superman PJs?”

  If Daddy has washed them, you can. “We’ll see.” I followed Henry into his bedroom nook. The pajamas were freshly laundered, neatly folded in his drawer, smirking in my direction. I handed them to Henry, who started to dress himself.

  “Meet you in two minutes, mister,” I said. “You pick the book.” I returned to the kitchen, poured applesauce into Henry’s chipped but beloved blue bowl, and placed it and a spoon next to a small glass of milk and two oatmeal raisin cookies—one for Henry, one for me. Tom had baked the day before, ratcheting up the fiber by substituting whole-wheat flour for white. The result was less revolting than I’d expected. Super-Mensch won the bonus round.

  Henry trotted into the room in his fuzzy slippers, hoisted himself onto the chair, and handed me Guess How Much I Love You? “You start, okay?” he said. He shoveled in applesauce while I read. When we got to our favorite part, he lip-synched, “Little Nutbrown Hare and Big Nutbrown Hare discover that love is not an easy thing to measure.” This was where we improvised. “I love you a hundred hugs,” he said, and grinned, his widely spaced pearly teeth on display.

  “I love you two hundred hugs and a ginormous smooch,” I said, planting one on his belly. Mean Maxine stuck her fingers down her throat; she could go to hell for thinking less of me because I was drippy sweet with my son. We finished the book and progressed to tooth brushing, and then Henry’s bed, a cot he would soon outgrow. As we cuddled, I heard the front door open, and in twenty seconds Tom stepped to the bed to kiss Henry goodnight. He walked away without acknowledging me. I began to tell Henry an installment of Talia by the Sea, the spellbinding rip-off of The Little Mermaid. Today our three-year-old heroine and her sidekick, Sammy the Seahorse, befriended Stewart the Starfish. They all lived in a shtetl under the Santa Monica pier.

  “Tell me again the name of my school for when I’m big,” Henry said when my storytelling ended.

  He was stalling. I said, “Jackson Collegiate—maybe,” and nothing more, except goodnight. The minute the school’s name popped out, I regretted it, and wished the public school was known by more than a number. It sounded like a place where imaginations went to die.

  I didn’t want all of us to be disappointed if Jackson didn’t select Henry for a jumbo scholarship, but that wasn’t all. As the weeks passed, I’d begun to think of this school as a dybbuk in a navy blue blazer. The tension between Tom and me had begun to go off the charts when we set out on the path to that school. A place where I was convinced that we’d never feel comfortable with its Chloes and Xanders, parents who wouldn’t wince when their Dashes and Dylans hit them up for a two-thousand-dollar cello on top of ice skates, tennis rackets, and new sneakers every other month. That night, I decided, we would chew this through and spit it out.

  “Hey,” I said. Henry was tucked in and I finally was able to sit on the couch and open The New Yorker. In an austerity move, we’d canceled our other subscriptions and bought the Times only on Sunday.

  “Hey,” Tom said, looking up from our computer. It occurred to me that I should stand behind him and massage his neck. We hadn’t touched in two weeks. Like a crippled woman throwing off her crutches to hobble to the faith healer, I slowly propelled myself across the room and placed my hands on the knotted muscles of Tom’s broad back. He flinched. I stopped. You’ve got to do better than that, Mean Maxine said. Gently I started to knead.

  “Your hands are cold,” he said.

  “They’ll warm up,” I said, and continued. I hoped he would speak first. He said nothing, and then words sputtered from both of us.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, although I hadn’t decided exactly what the apology covered.

  “It’s the secrets that get me,” Tom said.

  His admission trumped mine. I am a klutz of a liar, even when I haven’t been drinking wine, which puts my brain on seven-second delay. When I came home the night before, I might have predicted that Tom would ask for a belly dance demonstration. A more cunning wife would have hummed an Arabic tune, grabbed a scarf, and shimmied across the room. Instead, I stood as stiffly as a camel in the desert sun and outed myself as a person with something to hide. One bad lie begot another. I should have told Tom two days earlier that I’d scheduled an interview with the man I’d hoped would be offering me a job. If my parents had known how I’d acted, they’d have started by calling me foolish, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have wanted to hear the rest.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “But I’m not really all that mysterious.” I was aiming for self-deprecating; I landed on sarcastic.

  He swiveled toward me. We were no longer touching. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “in so many ways.”

  This was when I should have murmured, “You’re wrong—I’m not disappointed at all.” But since I was, I gracelessly continued with the small speech I’d rehearsed. “I was thinking that we should forget about the private school, the extra costs, no matter what. Henry should go straight into public pre-K. It would be a load off.”

  “Always worrying about money,” he snarled.

  The Tom I knew never snarled. Perhaps his behavior was because I said things like, “I worry about it because you don’t.”

  This made him glare. “I doubt the answer to anything is to deprive Henry of the best possible education.”

  “I hardly think public school in this neighborhood is deprivation.”

  Tom stood. “I’m not trying to be a hardass about this,” he said. “I’ll think about what you say, but I’d rather not talk now.” That was something. “Anything else?”

  I felt as though I were in a conference with an academic adviser. I probably shouldn’t have leaped to item number two on my agenda, but I couldn’t help myself. “That guy I was having coffee with in California?”

  “Oh, yes,” Tom said with his own scum of sarcasm. “I do vaguely recall.”

  “He offered me a job.”

  “Good for you. I suppose it pays exceedingly well?”

  “It would.” I reported the salary, more than twice what he earned.

  “Congratulations,” Tom said, and scrunched his face. “But I’m confused. If you have this offer, why do you want to can the idea of Jackson Collegiate, or not at least play it out and see if Henry gets a scholarship?”

  “Because I’m thinking of turning down the job.”

  “Why in fuck’s name would you do that? The two of you got along so famously.”

  All those weeks I’d been waiting to hear from Winters, and now that I had his offer, it felt coated in schmutz. I couldn’t tell Tom, I don’t trust myself around him, because that was the smaller piece of it. Mean Maxine woke the dead with the bigger half of the answer. “Because it’s rea
lly Chloe’s job. I went on the interview under false pretenses.”

  When I finished, all Tom said was, “How could you?” He shook his head. I crashed into his disappointment and disgust as if it were an iceberg. Again, he slept on the couch. I didn’t sleep at all.

  Chapter 37

  Jules

  When Arthur got out of the taxi carrying flowers, I thought I’d have an acute myocardial infarction. I tried to overlook that they were gaudy red carnations and gold mums pumped up with baby’s breath, my least favorite floral filler even under normal circumstances. They appeared to have been coordinated with his jacket, which was as plaid as a bagpiper player’s.

  “For you,” he said as I opened the front door. He handed me the bouquet. In his other hand he clutched a drugstore shopping bag. As he bent for an embrace, I looked down. Arthur was still devoted to his cowboy boots. He seemed to be breathing heavily, the evidence hanging in the frosty air. Perhaps he was as nervous as I was.

  “You must be freezing,” I said. He stepped inside and handed his coat to me, revealing a fine-gauge cashmere V-neck in a flattering shade almost exactly like Benjamin Moore Purple Rain. I’d given it to him after I’d noticed that every sweater in his wardrobe was acrylic.

  “You’re looking well, Jules,” he said. His voice lacked his usual glee. I liked regular Artie better than this dour stand-in.

  “I’m a little pregnant, not stricken with TB,” I said, eyeing the bag he’d set down on the floor. “What’s all this?”

  “For you.” Cereal on sale? Mouthwash? I pulled out a large Whitman’s Sampler in the familiar yellow cross-stitched box. “The two-pounder,” he added.

  Nonna’s favorite. “You shouldn’t have.” He seemed glad he had; the corners of his mouth twitched into a smile. “We’ll crack it open later. Thanks—I’ll put these in water, and then lunch.”

  I’d thrown together tuna salad and deviled eggs and defrosted a ciabatta from my favorite Italian bakery. I couldn’t predict the conversation, but I knew my life had expanded beyond the sunny lane of small talk. I seated Arthur across from me, to be on the lookout for signs of lying—excessive blinking or absent eye contact, perhaps. “What’s on your mind?” I asked, hoping we could get right to it. I had, after all, an appointment this afternoon that I did not want to miss.

  Arthur filled his plate and sampled the tuna and eggs. “I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said, holding his fork aloft. He wasn’t wearing the pinky ring whose twin I’d left on the table at Picholine. I delicately salted an egg and brought it to my mouth, willing him to continue. “I want to be a stand-up guy here. What is it you’d like me to do?”

  Jules’ Rule: Let your opposition make the first offer, to state their terms, financial or otherwise. “What is it you’d like to do?”

  “Clear the air.”

  “Clear away,” I said. “Ask me anything.”

  “The first thing … I’ve been wondering …” He rotated his shoulders like a novice prosecutor warming up before a judge. “Let me rephrase. I really hope you’ll tell me … is, well … whether this pregnancy is something you’d been hoping for and, ah, planning, all these years.”

  I wanted to cut his head off with the machete of truth. Did Arthur M. Weiner, with his inclination for stinginess and love handles, see himself as a stud service I’d utilized under false pretenses to conceive a child? Did he think I was the kind of woman who’d been longing for said child since her first period? I stood up and started wagging my finger in his face.

  “If I’d wanted to become pregnant—which, I assure you, I did not—I would have tried to have a baby years ago with … Never mind. Or I’d have conceived a designer specimen with the services of a turkey baster and a painstakingly selected sperm bank deposit,” I shouted. Why dog-paddle in the shoals of the gene pool? I’d have chosen a donor who was green-eyed, multilingual, an Olympic swimmer, a Nobel Prize winner, a chess champ, and an excellent salsa dancer, endowed not only with a fine set of the masculine basics but an elegant nose and sensuous lips, deeply in love with opera, poetry, and contemporary photography. “I assure you, I would have done this when I was twenty-nine, not thirty-nine.” I caught the double take. “Okay, forty-three. This event isn’t a feathery little tremor. It’s a nine-point-five disaster. Who the fuck planted this idea in your head? That flabby-assed neighbor? What’s her name?”

  “Jennifer.”

  “Puttana.” I was speaking so quickly I’d started to cough. To Arthur’s credit, he offered to Heimlich me, which I declined in favor of a back wallop.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said. He cast his eyes toward the heavens. “Jesus, I certainly didn’t come all the way up here to upset you. Can we please have a do-over?” I drained my water glass, gobbled a hunk of ciabatta, and waited. “As I tried to express in the restaurant the last time we saw each other,” he said, “you’re like nobody else. You’re the only woman I want next to me in bed—or anywhere. The way you cook and kiss and do it. Even the way you make tuna …”

  My secret ingredient is dill, and I add mayo spoonful by spoonful, judiciously monitoring the ratio of tuna to mayo. Plus it’s got to be Hellmann’s. With a shudder, I briefly recalled the case of the Miracle Whip, an unsolved mystery for these past ten years. Some call it salad dressing; I call it spackle. Talia wouldn’t have snuck the economy-size jar into our apartment, and Chloe bought only what I put on our list. My money has always been on Quincy, daughter of Minnesota. I believe Miracle Whip is the state condiment.

  “Go on,” I said. I wasn’t surprised that my mind had wandered—Arthur and I had covered this ground before.

  “As far as the two of us go, well, we’re a pair,” he said. “It’s like we were raised in the same playpen.” I rested my chin on my hands and waited for him to continue. “But now, because of the … baby … there’s more to think about. In fact, all I’ve been doing is thinking….” He trailed off, and I’d be damned if I’d help him. “Anyway,” he concluded as he tapped his foot madly, “where I’m going with this is, you would make an incredible mother.”

  I was fairly incredible at executing any number of tasks, but this was a compliment I had a hard time believing. “I guess I should thank you,” I said nonetheless.

  “You’re welcome,” Arthur said, “but I’m not done. One of the things I like—I mean, love—about you is that you’ve never busted my chops about wanting to have a kid. Every other woman has started in with the baby talk by the fourth date.”

  “I knew I was perfect.”

  “But the thing is, I’m not,” he responded, somber and sedate. “I’d make a rotten father.”

  You do crosswords in ink, compute baseball averages in your head, and know the lyrics to every Roy Orbison song. You have a fine baritone—I hear it in the shower. You’re gainfully employed. You don’t have a time share at the track. You’d be ten times the pop my old man was. Maybe I am motherly after all, I thought, the way my instincts jumped to Arthur’s defense.

  “I’ve never even let myself get a dog, no matter how much I love them,” he lamented. Wherever we stroll, Arthur stops to scratch the head of every passing canine. If the creature is a puppy, he practically sticks his tongue in its mouth while he rubs the ecstatic animal’s belly. Quite the show. “A child is such a commitment.” Oh, really? “I’d like to spend my life with you—I don’t want to lose you—but I don’t know about the fatherhood part.” He sighed and put his head down on his forearms.

  Feeling no obligation to offer consolation, I grabbed the plates and headed into the kitchen.

  Arthur got up wearily. Without talking, I started loading the dishwasher as he brought in the glasses and empty serving dishes. The tuna bowl was scraped clean. The kid inside me would have to go straight from the hospital to the Duke Weight Loss Center.

  “Do you want me to make you coffee?” I asked. In my fury I’d already wiped down the counters and sterilized the sponge for four minutes via the microwave’s highest power setting.

/>   “That would be swell,” he said as he came up behind me and circled my waist with his arms, pressing against me. His hands moved up to my tender breasts and lingered until I winced. They traveled to my neck. Softly he held aside my hair and murmured, “Jules, Jules, Jules, you always smell so damn good.”

  I removed myself from the embrace and stomped to the freezer, where I kept the coffee beans. How many cups to brew? Who’d ever thought the answer to that question could reveal my position on a moral dilemma? I decided to go with one and a half. As I prepared the beans, the kitchen filled with the seductive aroma of Costa Rican dark roast. I started the coffee and turned around. Arthur had left the kitchen.

  When I walked into the other room, carrying one mug of coffee, he was sitting on the couch. The Whitman’s Sampler was on the coffee table, its wrapping removed. Only Arthur, I thought, would have started in on it himself. “Want some?” he asked.

  I’d never been a woman to say no to a bon-bon. I walked to the table, hoping that if he’d eaten a piece or two, it was the peanut clusters that make you wish you had a dental hygienist on retainer. I lifted the top of the box. One piece of candy was missing. In its place, dead center, south of a dark chocolate buttercream, north of a truffle, west of a nougat dipped in milk chocolate, and east of a white chocolate patty adorned with a pink doodad, sat an honest-to-God piece of jewelry. I was eyeball to eyeball with an oval amethyst the size of my thumbnail set horizontally in matte gold, cabochon style. It was a ring, perfectly purple.

  “Chloe helped me pick it out,” Arthur said, galvanized with glee. I gave him a skeptical look, which encouraged him to continue. “She took me to this hole-in-the-wall on Forty-seventh Street.”

  “But she never shops in places where she doesn’t pay at least retail.” I’ve never grasped the concept or the math, but being overcharged apparently makes Chloe feel as if she’s getting more for her money.

  “The jeweler is Morty Rabinowitz. His wife is my friend June—she goes by Rittenhouse professionally. She’s the one who sent Chloe on a job interview, thanks to me.” Arthur was beaming. “Here, Mommy, put it on,” he said, lifting the bauble from its frilly paper wrapping.