The Big Love (18 page)

“There is?”

“There is,” said Henry. “And while this might be a technicality, there was nothing officially defined to break up.”

“So, what, you were just telling me that so I wouldn’t wait around for the next thirty years, hoping for you to show up on my doorstep and have sex with me again?”

“Jumping every time your phone rings.”

“With my legs perpetually shaved.”

“Yes,” said Henry. He smiled at me. “I was trying to spare you that.”

“That was very kind of you,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“And I take back everything I said.”

“You didn’t say anything,” said Henry.

“I take back everything I said about you in my head,” I said. “During my hating you period.”

I walked over to the bookshelf and began to go through the books. I could feel Henry’s eyes on me.

“When I was in sixth grade, I used to go to the roller rink every Saturday afternoon,” I said. “One day, I noticed that this really cute boy kept staring at me. He would skate past me, and stare at me, and then skate past me again, and stare at me some more, and I was getting more and more excited each time it happened. Then finally, he skated right up to me and he fell in step beside me and he said”—and here I paused, as I always do when I recount this particular anecdote—“‘Are you a boy or a girl?’”

Henry laughed. “That did not happen.”

“It did. And then, when my mom came to pick me up, I started crying, and I told her what happened, and do you know what she told me?”

He shook his head no.

“She said, ‘He just said that because your skates are black.’ We didn’t have much money, and I had hand-me-down skates from my cousin, and they happened to be black.”

“That’s a good mother,” said Henry.

“Yes.”

“And that’s a good story.”

“I know it is,” I said. “But I’m telling it to you for a reason, and the reason is, I’m hereby officially putting you in that category.”

“What category?”

“The skate-by guy.”

I put the last few books into the box and told Henry I was leaving. He got up off the couch and put the box of my stuff under his arm and carried it into the hallway.

“Do you know what’s going to happen to you, Henry?” I said.

“What?”

I looked up at him. “You’re going to end up with a woman who can handle this sort of thing.”

I pulled an old publicity photo of Woody Allen off the wall and switched off the light. When we got downstairs, I took my box from Henry and thanked him for carrying it. We stood together in front of the building. The
Philadelphia Times
banner flapped lazily in the breeze.

Henry caught my gaze and then quite pointedly didn’t look away. I never know how to handle that move—the meaningful stare—and this time was no different. I started smiling, and then Henry started smiling, and then I started to laugh. I couldn’t help myself. I looked down at the sidewalk.

“I’d like to ask you one last question,” I said.

“This is the last question?” said Henry.

“Well, I’m going to my house, and you’re going to your house, and I’m not working for you anymore, so yes, it’s the last question. And I’d like you to be completely honest, even if you think it might hurt my feelings.”

“Fire away.”

I tried to think of the best way to put it. “What kind of sex would you say we were having, back when we were having it?”

“What do you mean?” said Henry.

“I mean, good, bad, average. What kind of sex was it?”

Henry looked up at the sky, like he was searching the clouds for the right word.

“Outstanding,” said Henry.

“I thought so,” I said.

I hailed a cab and headed home.

I sat in the cab with the box of my stuff on the seat next to me. I felt good. Henry had turned out to be a pleasant diversion. Like a tantalizing confection you eat someplace foreign you know you’ll never return to. Certain people come into your life, and you can’t hold on to them; you simply take what they have to offer and try to give them something in return. Maybe this is growth, I thought. Not clinging so hard to things. Even my job. I could feel myself letting go of that, too, which was good, since I didn’t have it any longer. I would find another job. And now Tom was home and everything was falling back into place. I gazed out the window. I smiled a smug smile.
Outstanding.

I glanced down at the box beside me. My desk calendar was on top, fluttering in the wind streaming in from the driver’s open window. How long had it been since the dinner party? I wondered. I reached over and flipped back through the pages. Just over three weeks. I was amazed. It felt like two years had gone by. I started slowly turning the pages, running the events of the past weeks through my mind. My brain flashed on a pornographic moment with Henry. I blushed, and closed my eyes.

Then I opened them. I blinked hard. I grabbed my calendar and started flipping back through the pages. Back to the dinner party. I flipped further back. Finally I saw it, in the lower right-hand corner of one of the pages.

A small x.

I looked at the date on the page with the x. I counted weeks on fingers. Five fingers. Five weeks!

A wave of nausea came over me, and I felt clammy and panicky and terrified. I grabbed the armrest to steady myself. Take a breath, I commanded myself. This doesn’t mean anything. This could be nothing. I kept trying to calm myself with a rational inner dialog, but down below there was another voice, a much more authoritative one, which was telling me in no uncertain terms that I was pregnant.

“Hey lady,” said the cabdriver.

I looked up. The taxi was in front of my building. Tom was upstairs, I knew, watching a golf tournament on TV. Completely oblivious. Like nothing at all monumental was going on inside my womb.

“Um, there’s a second stop. Nothing’s happening at this stop. I just wanted to drive by,” I couldn’t stop babbling. “I thought someone might, but now it turns out they’re not . . .”

“Whatever,” said the cabbie, and I gave him the new address.

I sat back and started furiously flipping through the calendar, trying to remember things I hadn’t thought about since eighth grade health class. Like when ovulation took place. Was it twelve days after your last period stopped? Or did you count based on when your last period
started?
Sixteen days or so? I realized I had no idea. After that, how many days was the egg in play? Three, maybe? Five? I started to sweat. I pictured my insides as a big cesspool filled with sperm that had managed to bypass the various defenses employed against them, sperm lurking around for days, weeks even, making their own ecosystem, my womb a giant snow globe of foreign genetic material, a single unsuspecting egg floating down like a balloon in a stadium filled with confetti. I tried to remember exactly when I’d had sex. I folded down the corners of various pages.
Four times on two separate occasions.
Should a second time that took place after midnight count for the following day? I wondered. Because that’s a lot of folded pages. I sat there, staring at my dog-eared calendar, as a truly horrifying realization started to sink in.

I didn’t know whose baby it was.

I didn’t know whose baby it was!
It could have been Tom’s, or it could have been Henry’s! It was probably Henry’s, but it might have been Tom’s! And they didn’t even look alike! Tom had blond hair and Henry had brown! I started to hyperventilate. I tried to remember what Tom had said about our children’s eyes. Something about how he knew what color they would be. Well, Tom had blue eyes and Henry’s were brown! I was doomed!

The taxi turned onto Cordelia’s street and pulled up in front of her building. I thrust a crumpled twenty over the front seat, and while I was waiting for my change, I folded my arms across my chest and discreetly pressed my forearms against my breasts. Which were tender. Tender!

“Here you go,” said the cabdriver. He handed me my change.

I headed into Cordelia’s apartment building. I nodded to Enrique the doorman, and he waved me on through. I got into the elevator and pressed the button for the eleventh floor.

I stood alone inside the elevator. Shame settled over me like a mantle. When had I turned into a whore? I asked myself. What had happened? Where had I gone wrong? How had I come to the conclusion that any of this was acceptable behavior? I was living with a man I wasn’t married to, and I’d slept with a guy I’d known for less than a week, on our first date. Which wasn’t even really a date, come to think of it. The man had asked me to dinner in a stairwell. We’d split the check. I might as well have put an ad in the back of our paper and asked him to leave the cash on top of the dresser on his way out. I watched the numbers of the floors light up, one by one, and my eyes filled with tears. Well, Alison, I said to myself, you are reaping what you sowed. You sowed sluttish behavior, and now you are going to reap an unwanted child whose paternity is in no way certain.

The elevator doors opened. I walked down the long, poorly lit hallway and rang Cordelia’s doorbell.

“What’s wrong?” Cordelia said when she saw my face.

“I’m pregnant,” I said, and I burst into tears.

Cordelia nodded her head calmly and let me in. I flung my coat over a chair and threw myself face-down onto her couch.

“I’m going to kill myself,” I said.

“You took a test?” she said flatly.

“You know how Bonnie says every time she gets pregnant, she knows?” I said. “Well, I
know.
”

Cordelia walked into her kitchenette and pulled a bottle of Absolut out of the freezer. She poured us each a big drink.

“Drink,” she said.

I sat up and shook my head no. “The baby,” I said.

Cordelia rolled her eyes at me.

“What?” I said.

“Do you know how many times we’ve had this conversation, Alison?”

“More than once.”

“Many, many times more than once.”

“And I’m never pregnant,” I said.

“And you’re
never
pregnant.”

“Never.”

“You’re never pregnant. You work yourself up and you get hysterical and you never once have gotten pregnant.”

This was the truth.

Now, without getting too explicit about my inner workings, this whole thing with me has always been a rather inexact science. I do not run like clockwork. I run in a manner designed to create the maximum number of niggling suspicions and false alarms and full-blown pregnancy scares. And perhaps you think that a normal person with a history like mine would exercise some caution when leaping to the kind of conclusions I leapt to in the back seat of the cab. Perhaps a normal person would. Not me. There is never a doubt in my mind. I’m always one hundred percent convinced. Now that I’m giving the matter some thought, it occurs to me that the whole system functions as my own personal penance for having sex. For while I have, on a conscious level, quite rationally decided that having sex with an individual to whom you are not married is okay so long as neither party is married to or otherwise entangled with anybody else, my subconscious is down there going
not so fast.
And so it starts lobbing up fears. And diligence of application of various prophylactic measures does not do anything to mitigate them. I trace this back to a girl in my youth group who got pregnant in high school and maintains—
to this day
—that she never actually, technically, entirely, had sex. So even multiple lines of defense mean nothing to my psyche.

“I know we’ve been through this before,” I said, “but this time is different.”

“Different how?”

“Because I don’t know who the father is,” I said, and I burst into tears again.

Cordelia put her hands on her hips. “Who are the candidates?”

“What do you mean who are the candidates?” I shrieked. “You know the candidates! Tom and Henry!”

There was a long pause.

“And they don’t even look alike!” I said.

Cordelia cocked her head at me.

“They have different-colored eyes!” I said.

“That’s your plan?”

“I don’t have a plan!”

“Well, I do,” said Cordelia. “Put your coat on.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the drugstore.”

I shook my head vigorously. “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t take it.”

“
I
can’t take it,” said Cordelia. “And I refuse to do this for one minute longer than absolutely necessary.”

Cordelia and I took the elevator down and walked around the corner to the CVS. I plunked down the nineteen dollars for a test, the good one—nineteen dollars I could ill afford, now that I was unemployed. I trudged back to Cordelia’s clutching the brown paper bag in a sweaty fist.

There is no need for me to draw this part out. I followed the directions on the box, I sat on the toilet for what seemed like an eternity with my eyes screwed closed, and then I opened them. Relief poured over me. There is no better feeling than this one. In fact, it strikes me that the only plus to this pregnancy hypochondria is that this feeling—the feeling of
not
being pregnant when you don’t want to be—is so sublime. For a while, all of your regular problems seem so small and manageable in light of this new impossibly huge one, and then, with the simple act of peeing on a stick, the impossibly huge problem disappears.

“You know,” Cordelia said to me, “we really have passed into the realm of behavior that ought to be evaluated by a mental health professional.”

I nodded.

“This is not normal,” she said.

I nodded again.

“Next time you think you are pregnant, remind yourself that you’ve never once gotten pregnant. You’ve been having sex for years, and you’ve never gotten pregnant. Not once.”

She gave me a long hug.

“Cordelia?” I said into her neck.

“Yes?”

I pulled out of the hug and searched her face. “Do you think maybe I
can’t
get pregnant?”

She hit me.

And I headed home.

I have two theories about why it was that I took Tom back. No, I just thought of another one—so that makes three. Three theories. The first is that Tom leaving me for Kate Pearce was a blow to my narcissism, and his return fed into my ideas of my own incomparable self-worth. Janis Finkle was the first person to use the term
narcissist
in connection with me. She just casually lobbed it into one of our sessions, like it was something we had both acknowledged long ago, like it was a fact that had been written down in my file right next to the names of my siblings and the town I grew up in and my recurring dream about the boating accident. After our session, I went straight to Barnes & Noble and sat down on the mottled green carpet in the psychology section with the DSM-III open on my lap. I flipped to Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I read through the diagnostic criteria. I definitely had three of the indicators, and quite possibly four, while you needed five to be considered a clinical case. Which was cutting things a little close as far as I was concerned. When I saw Janis the next week, I really grilled her on the subject, to such an extent that I undoubtedly appeared to be obsessed with my own narcissism, like a snake that had developed a taste for its own tail. Anyhow, I don’t believe I’m a primary narcissist—I am capable of acknowledging other people’s feelings and seeing things from points of view other than my own—but I do have narcissistic tendencies, and when Tom told me he couldn’t live without me, the narcissistic part of me perked right up. Of course he couldn’t! Poor fellow! So. That’s one. The second theory is a little more on the nose. Perhaps you have put together the following: that my father left when I was five, and—as I am on the record as having two fathers—he did not come back. So Tom’s return was a reenactment of the central fantasy of my childhood, and on some level I was unable to resist it.