Читать книгу Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me - Karen Karbo - Страница 11

2.

FOR A WOMAN, THE TRUE ADVANTAGE OF MARRIAGE IS not having regular sex, but having an on-site partner with whom to debrief. In this day and age anyone can get laid; try finding someone who’ll listen to dish at midnight. Before Lyle discovered Realm of the Elf, he was just such a man.

I was eager to get home after Thanksgiving dinner. Wait until Lyle heard about Ward Baron and The Last Living Valkyrie. Lyle does a great improvisational chromosomal analysis, wherein he imagines both the best baby and the worst baby two people could possibly produce. Of the offspring of a software mogul and a runway model he might say: What if the baby gets his height and her math skills! His lips and hips and her sense of the absurd! We entertained ourselves for hours with this when Stella was gestating, and haven’t laughed so hard since. Then she was born, and was completely herself, and made fools of us both.

I managed to successfully transfer a sleeping Stella from her car seat to her crib without waking her, then tromped down to the basement stairs to Lyle’s Lair. A previous owner had had a Space Odyssey decor in mind: The basement walls and unfinished ceiling were spray-painted silver. Lyle had his computer set up against one of the silver walls, on a big square of old dog-brown shag. Next to the computer was a futon, one that has been passed from soon-to-be-married friend to soon-to-be-married friend, until it wound up in Lyle’s Lair. Itchy Sister, our thirteen-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback, sleeps on the futon, where she snores and silently, endlessly farts. On top of the computer Lyle always burns an aromatherapy candle, Seduction, to combat the odor.

“You won’t believe this one,” I said to the back of Lyle’s head. “Mary Rose and Ward are an item. Not just an item, but an expectant item.”

I am an expert on the back of my husband’s head. Like a character in an experimental play, I talk to it all the time. Lyle’s hair is cut by an envious, straight-haired stylist to emphasize his cherubic curls. His best ones—shiny, self-assured—are just to the right of the crown. To the left, they can’t decide if they want to be curls or waves. There are four gray hairs, and a black mole on the back of his neck I will one day have to pester him to have checked, if our marriage survives his passion for Realm of the Elf.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“We can talk about this later,” I said, and started to walk away.

“I’m listening. I’m always listening to you. Uh-oh, now I’m really not feeling well.” He sat forward, attacked the keyboard. Mozart on a particularly frenzied day.

“Do you have a headache? Have you eaten anything?”

“I just got my arm cut off.”

I stared over his shoulder, feigning interest. Realm of the Elf was one of those online role-playing games where you create the persona of some magical Hobbit-like creature, then go around getting mortally wounded in imaginary sword fights and finding precious gems in the virtual bushes. I will never understand the appeal of this or any other text-file computer game. White letters scrolling up a black screen, a cyber ticker tape.

I read, “A marauding troll has just malevolently and with vim chopped off your arm! Your hand is being eaten by deadly acid. Otherwise your soul is full of life. He takes a misshapen trunk from your dove gray pack. Your neck wounds look better.”

“And people say screenplays are poorly written.” I wanted to say, I’m worried about you! Can’t you be into bondage or something more normally deviant?

He said nothing. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. “I’m just … about” Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

“I don’t know how you can read this stuff hour after hour.”

I sighed, went over and petted Itchy Sister behind an ear. Her black lips turn up at the corners when she gets some attention, even in her sleep.

“Mary Rose and Ward are going to have a baby!” I told the back of his head.

“Let me just see if I can find someone to get my arm on, and I’ll be right with you. There’s a healer in the next village who owes me a favor.”

I went upstairs to check on Stella, then went to bed.

A WEEK AFTER Thanksgiving, when I arrived at Mary Rose’s house with Stella to watch the Knicks versus the Blazers, Mary Rose wasn’t home. Like many people in our city, Mary Rose and I never missed a basketball game. Our city endured drippy falls, drenched winters, drizzly springs, and no major professional sports teams save basketball, which made for a civic fanaticism rivaling that of the rampaging hordes who follow soccer in Europe. Mary Rose and I pitched in for a special cable package—not cheap—that broadcasted all home games that weren’t carried on network television. When a game was carried only on radio, we huddled around Mary Rose’s boom box, set in the middle of her coffee table, like would-be war widows listening for news from the front. Mary Rose would undercook a frozen pizza. Sometimes I brought an aluminum tray of take-out nachos.

Mary Rose lived in a bile-green bungalow that had been converted into a triplex, in a part of the city where the streets were lined with old Victorians groaning on tiny lots. It was the homeliest house on the block, but Mary Rose had a deal with the landlord. Mr. D’Addio gave her a break in the rent in exchange for her mowing the lawn and keeping the sidewalk free of the smashed plums that fell from the three ornamental trees that grew on the parking strip. The plums, while beautiful, were a nuisance. They stained the pavement a bloody maroon, as well as attracted a ferocious species of wasp that could sting you through your shoe.

I stood in the entryway of the triplex, talking to apricot haired Mrs. Wanamaker, who lived in the unit downstairs. The entryway smelled of wet dog and the perfume inserts of magazines. Mrs. Wanamaker was fascinated to hear about Stella’s affection for avocados and taking off her own diaper. She also admired Stella’s black-and-red Blazer jump suit. The true mates of this world are not husbands and wives, but lonely old women and exhausted young mothers.

Mary Rose bounded up the front steps, apologized for being late. First, there was Mrs. Marsh, wanting all her dahlia bulbs dug up for the winter, then Hotlips Pizza lost her order.

“Pepperoni double cheese,” she said, flying the cardboard box over my head as she jogged past me up the stairs. So much energy for someone newly pregnant, I thought.

I dragged myself upstairs behind her, Stella’s car seat banging against my shins, the strap of her diaper bag cutting into my shoulder. My knees ached. Once inside, I dropped the bag—twice as heavy as the Perfect Wonderment herself—stuffed to the gills with powders, ointments and sunscreens, Q-Tips and mittens, a change of clothes, rattles and teething toys, books for several different age levels (in the event she started to read while away from home and proved to be a genius), and a half-dozen empty plastic bottles, designed in Denmark according to some enlightened Scandinavian feeding principle, lint stuck to the milk-encrusted nipple.

“If I have one piece of advice for the woman looking to get pregnant, it’s train for a decathlon,” I said. “It’s amazing to me how everyone always wants to help a pregnant woman, when the baby is all nice and tucked away in utero, but then once the kid is born, and your life as a schlepper begins in earnest, no one thinks to lend you a hand.”

“Was I supposed to help you?” said Mary Rose. “I didn’t know I was supposed to help you. You always seem like you’ve got everything under control.” Mary Rose set the pizza in the middle of the coffee table, then glanced around the living room to make sure there was nothing Stella could get into. Stella wasn’t crawling yet. She sat where you put her. Nevertheless, Mary Rose was under the impression that a baby, once freed from the confines of the womb, was biologically programmed to seek disaster, compelled to stick her fingers into sockets, choke on a dusty bead found beneath the couch.

Even if this were true, a baby would be completely safe at Mary Rose’s. The only time Ward had ever ventured upstairs, according to Mary Rose, he’d said that if Mowers and Rakers didn’t work out, Mary Rose could always get a job doing interior design for a monastery. The living room was tiny, the walls toffee-colored with three windows on one side. Opposite the windows were two doors, one that gave off onto the front hallway, the other to the back hallway that led to the kitchen and the huge bathroom which, due to the architectural gymnastics involved in the conversion from charming house to funky triplex, was bigger than the living room. There was nothing on the walls.

Acquisitive Ward, he of the Arts and Crafts-style living room set, collection of vintage neon beer signs, and three complete sets of Fiesta Ware, jokingly (or maybe not, Ward had a way of saying things that were more hurtful than funny, then trying to pass the insult off as a joke when you got annoyed) said her spare quarters were an affectation.

“He accused me of being self-consciously minimalist,” said Mary Rose. “I told him it was called “the less you had, the less you had to clean.” I’m not a minimalist, I’m practical.” Like everyone newly in love, she reported this humdrum exchange with pride and astonishment, as if to say, See how we know each other? See how we tease each other? Already, it’s come to that.

I felt a prick of irritation. Before I could trace it to its roots I said, “Practical, unless you count having a baby with a man you hardly know.” That sounded meaner than I meant it to. I backpedaled. “I mean, not that knowing the man you have your baby with makes any difference. Actually, maybe knowing the father is worse. Then you don’t have any excuse for perpetuating his genes.” I was starting to go off. I laughed too loud, startling Stella.

Mary Rose retrieved her backpack from where it hung on the hall-closet doorknob, then fished around inside. “Look at this.”

It was a handout given her by Dr. Vertamini, her OB/GYN. A list of symptoms that signal impending miscarriage: pain or burning on urination; vaginal spotting or bleeding; leaking or gushing fluid from vagina; uterine contractions; severe nausea; severe vomiting; abdominal pain; dizziness or light-headedness; severe headache; swelling of face, eyes, fingers, or toes; blurred eyesight; reduced fetal movement; absence of fetal movement for twenty-four hours (from the twenty-eighth week of pregnancy on).

“What do you think it means by pain, exactly?” asked Mary Rose.

“Are you experiencing any pain?”

“No. I figured it has to do with malpractice laws or something. Dr. Vertamini probably gives one of these to everyone, don’t you think? She just didn’t print it up for me.”

“Oh, no, I think she printed it up just for you.”

“So I shouldn’t worry, is what you’re saying.” Mary Rose manufactured a smile. Her teeth looked like bathroom tile installed by a perfectionist.

“Get used to worrying is more like it. You’ll get past the first trimester, then there’s the second, then the third, then the birth. No sooner is the baby born then you start worrying about can she hear all right? Is she retarded? And this new thing I read in the paper. Children who don’t go to day care have a higher rate of leukemia. Children who do go to day care wind up sociopaths. It’s a prison sentence of worry. No parole.”

Mary Rose dropped the handout on the table, dragged a slice of pizza from the box, pinching off swags of cheese with her long, nail-bitten fingers. I got the feeling she didn’t like my answer. Or maybe just my sermonizing. I do have a tendency to go on a bit. But she knows this about me, so why did she bother asking?

“What was all that business at Thanksgiving with Dicky?” she asked abruptly. “I asked Ward, and he just rolled his eyes.”

“Poor old Dicky. It would kill him that you didn’t know all about it.”

I was happy to get off the subject of motherhood and told Mary Rose probably more than she wanted to know about poor Jennifer Allen, whom Dicky had fallen in love with when he was at U.S.C. They became acquainted because they were both from our city, had gone to rival private high schools. She had a head of sunny curls that compensated for all of her shortcomings. Jennifer and Dicky loved each other in the dedicated, impractical way of the well-off. He bought her a yellow Vespa for her birthday. She convinced her parents to allow Dicky to accompany them on their annual two-week Christmas pilgrimage to St. Croix.

After two terms at school, Jennifer got sick. Or it was presumed she was sick. She began falling asleep in class. She was pale as a mushroom. It was all those weekend ski trips to Mammoth, those late nights with Dicky, the midterms, beer bongs, glee clubs. It was the anemia typical of the earnest, nutritionally ignorant vegan whose idea of saving the planet involves subsisting on a diet of Coke Classic and Cool Ranch Doritos. All Jennifer Allen really needed was a vacation from being a nineteen-year-old college student with no worries, but because all this collegiate carrying-on is presumed to be a normal upper-middle-class child’s birthright, nobody thought anything of it.

When Jennifer came home for the summer, her mother took her to one of our city’s most well-respected specialists, where she was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of cancer: leukemic reticuloendotheliosis, also known as hairy cell leukemia. It had already invaded her marrow, spleen, and blood.

The shock felt by Dicky Baron and Jennifer Allen almost stopped their young hearts there and then. Who had ever heard of such a thing? Hairy cell leukemia. How could something so ridiculous-sounding be fatal? If she chose to accept treatment, there would be useless operations, followed by a round of expensive, nausea-producing chemotherapy that would not, in the end, postpone a death both painful and tedious. In the meantime, it would spell the end of the sunny curls. It would mean a life of valiant hat wearing.

Jennifer wept. There was not much hope. There was, however, the romance of dying while you were still young and pretty, featuring the interesting delusion that you can somehow experience the benefits of death without actually ceasing to exist. One day, while Dicky and Jennifer were alone in the house, Dicky found Big Hank’s .45 semi-automatic while he was going through Father’s bedside table, looking for something interesting to pinch. Dicky and Jennifer believed it was fate.

Dicky gave the gun to Jennifer, clicking off the safety and turning his back, as if she were a stranger about to get undressed.

Dicky’s comment, when he was arraigned on charges of manslaughter, was, “I thought there would be more noise and less blood.” The detective in charge of the investigation wore rubbers over his tasseled loafers and was glad of it. Even the ceiling needed to be repainted.

In Romeo’s Dagger, the first of the three movies I’ve managed to get off the ground, I insisted that Jennifer shoot herself off screen. We have all seen enough, I said. We have proved to ourselves and the world that the American people are unflinching. All has been told; all has been shown. I made an impassioned plea to the studio for the power of restraint. When that didn’t work, I cited the shower sequence in the original Psycho. I got my way. Now that I have Stella, I am relieved on behalf of Jennifer Allen’s mother.

Dicky maintained throughout the trial that if he and Jennifer had done anything wrong, it was in telling her parents. If Jennifer had been less conscientious, she never would have complained to her mother, and no doctors would have been involved. No medical clerks would have been involved, medical clerks who make clerical errors.

For Jennifer Allen, his Jennifer Allen, did not have hairy cell leukemia. Her chart had been confused with that of another Jennifer Allen by Corrine Clingenpeel, a medical receptionist trying to hold down two jobs, raise her young son, and get through nursing school. It was a single-mother mistake, as the papers were fond of reporting, the mistake of a woman overwhelmed. For this Jennifer Allen, Dicky’s Jennifer Allen, was the healthiest person on which an autopsy had ever been performed in the state, according to our city’s chief coroner.

It made the national news, and the nation was duly outraged. An investigation into hospital filing systems was opened up. Briefly, the blame was laid at the smelly feet of a cadre of sixteen-year-old computer hackers. For several weeks the nightly news ran stories about people who had gone in for knee surgery and had their gall bladders removed instead. Dicky (“looking not unlike the young Nick Nolte”—Associated Press) wept on all three networks, plus CNN. He was tried, acquitted, and signed by William Morris.

I’d been rattling around the film industry for six years when Audra brought me the rights to Dicky’s side of the story. In Hollywood there are always several sides for sale. I was in the art department on a feature at the time. For twelve hours a day I moved furniture on, off, and around the set. The movie was set in Victorian times and all the highboys, chiffonniers, and sideboards were made of solid oak and cherry. I wore a kidney belt and a look of perpetual self-pity. I liked movies. If I liked moving furniture I would have gotten a job with Bekins. At this time Dicky’s case came to trial, and an article about Jennifer Allen’s death appeared as a Newsweek cover story.

When Jennifer Allen’s parents changed their phone number, the better to discourage all interest in their daughter’s unfortunate death, Audra was besieged. For several weeks it seemed everyone who had ever entertained the notion of producing a movie wanted to buy the rights to Dicky’s version of events.

But Audra Baron comes from a long line of implacable Vermont dairy farmers on one side and crafty Polish petit bourgeois politicians on the other. She also was a devotee of Entertainment Tonight. In other words, she was not impressed with their urgings and entreaties, with the videotapes they overnight expressed to her as samples of their work, the trouble, time, and money they took to fly up and visit her in person.

She trusted none of them and called me, bi-weekly becoming daily becoming hourly, to make sure she was doing the right thing. I do not remember exactly how it happened, but suddenly Audra began referring people to me. “Talk to my niece Brooke. She is handling the rights.” That my only credentials for pulling off this task were my stint in the art department as a beast of burden seemed not to bother Audra. I was better than a stranger, although I practically was one. She insisted I call her Aunt.

It was a time in Hollywood when the edgy, Italian-suited, business-school-educated studio clone was on the way out, and no one knew what was on the way in. All anyone could be sure of was that the creative elite had stopped washing their hair. A-list directors began showing up for meetings looking like earnest philosophy majors. They wore sweaters with holes in the elbows and smelled.

I didn’t know any of this. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know enough to call myself a producer. I returned all my phone calls at the first opportunity, ate lunch at home—peanut butter and jelly on whole-wheat toast with half an apple. I was on time for my meetings, wore job-interview clothes, and never offered anything I couldn’t deliver. I didn’t negotiate. I said: “I’ve got the story of Jennifer Allen’s death, from the point of view of her boyfriend. Take it or leave it.”

If they left it I went somewhere else, in my 1979 Datsun with no car phone. When I took the project elsewhere, I presumed I was really taking it elsewhere, unaware this was a negotiating tactic. When the studio I had left called back and offered more money, more control, I said: “No. I’m sorry. I’m already talking to someone else. Thank you anyway.”

No one had ever heard of such a thing. No one knew what to make of me. I was so middle-class, so resolutely un-shrewd, un-feisty, un-iconoclastic, un-all-those-other-adjectives used to describe brash up-and-comers that I was perceived as being shrewd, feisty, and iconoclastic.

For a few weeks, everyone wanted to have a meeting with me just so they could tell their friends and associates how I never once said Romeo’s Dagger was a cross between this box office smash and that critically acclaimed success; how I drank Dr. Pepper and ate club sandwiches and seemed not to be watching my weight. My brand-new agent Melissa Lee Rottock performed the necessary arm-twisting and obscenity-slinging, and together we were able to get a deal set before people got bored with my style of doing business, which was no style at all.

“In Dicky’s defense, I have to say that it was a pretty heady time. For all of us. But then, you know, we made the movie and moved on. But he’s never gotten over not being famous anymore. I think he even goes to a support group of other people who were also famous for something or other. There’s that Olympic athlete who got shot in the groin during a domestic squabble, and a chicken rancher who landed a 747 when the pilot had a stroke. On the set, we joked—it was cruel, I have to admit—that Dicky was already planning his next career move. Trying to figure out a way to deliver a set of quintuplets in the middle of a hurricane or unwittingly discover the gene for obesity.”

“Also, of course, in the middle of a hurricane,” said Mary Rose. “Preferably the worst one in a hundred years.”

“Now you’ve got it.”

Mary Rose got up and turned on the tube; the game was a minute into the first quarter. We sat together in the dark on Mary Rose’s sleeper sofa, a Goodwill reject of nubby brown polyester fabric whose seat yawned open, jaw like, when no one was sitting on it. Stella dozed in my lap. The furnace kicked on. Outside there was the occasional roar of sudden rain.

We watched while Ajax Green, the star of our team, missed both of his free throws.

“One guy starts missing, then they all start missing,” I said.

“They don’t want one guy to feel like a loser all alone, so they all join in,” said Mary Rose.

“Here’s my prescription for the off-season: group therapy in the morning, free-throw practice in the afternoon.”

“The other reason they don’t make their free throws is because it’s a free throw. They don’t feel like they deserve anything that’s free. They only feel happy overcoming a ten-point deficit with seven seconds left to play. They only feel happy if their situation is completely impossible,” said Mary Rose. “There’s Derik Crawshaw though. He seems relatively well-adjusted.”

“Yeah, but he’s new.”

We could go on like this all night, and often did. We thought we might be transverbalists: women who enjoyed not cross-dressing, but cross-talking, talking like men.

By the end of the first quarter Stella was awake and fussing, the Blazers were down by four, and Ward Baron had decided to stop by.

Stopping by was not something Mary Rose generally approved of. People who knew Mary Rose did not drop by. Whenever I waxed nostalgic about college, during which time I shared a huge old house with five other people, all of whom had issued open invitations for everyone they knew to crash whenever they wanted to, Mary Rose’s pupils dilated with anxiety. Needless to say with Ward, it was a different story altogether. At least a first.

Ward and I had an odd relationship. He reminded me of Lyle: lanky, with unkempt brown curls and a deep voice that cracked with emotion at will, the compulsion to tell dumb jokes. When we were teenagers the Barons came to California to stay for a month with us in our rented beach house at Corona del Mar. Ward and I were on the verge of getting one of those cousin things going that are a familiar staple of nineteenth-century English literature, but we were both shy, and I was neither large enough nor hardy enough for his tastes. He fell for a five-foot-eleven sailing instructor instead.

So there were murky feelings swirling around our relationship even before Romeo’s Dagger. Ward wanted me to hire him to direct. He thought, perhaps rightly so, that his mother had given me my break, so I should give him his. As savvy as Ward imagines himself to be, he thought what all people who are not in the movie business think: that a producer is like the immigrant owner of a Vietnamese restaurant who has a job for every family member who wants one. In truth, the most powerful person involved in the production is the star, in this case the cuddly cute comedian R—,who (in his first serious role) played Dicky Baron, and got to pad the crew with as many family members, chefs, and favorite kung fu instructors as he wanted. Likewise, cuddly cute R—had his pick of the litter, director-wise. But Ward was persistent. He thought, as men typically do, that I could be softened up, worn down, stone-washed, whatever. First, he tried to appeal to my cousinly instincts, sending me pictures of Audra and Big Hank vacationing in Milan along with a copy of his director’s reel. When that didn’t work, he came to L. A. and took me to dinner at the beach, hoping the salt air and overcooked swordfish would rekindle our romance manqué of twenty years earlier.

When that didn’t work out, he resorted to good-natured bullying.

“You don’t know how many people would sell—well, maybe not their souls, but their houses in Montana”—to work with me. Who’s executive producing this thing, anyway?” he said.

“I am,” I said. It was a lie, but he was getting on my nerves. “Anyway, I’ve showed your reel to R— and he thinks you’re too slick.”

“You mean stylized,” he said.

“I mean facile,” I said.

“Perfect, then, for your movie,” he said.

“Hiya, baby,” he said now, to Mary Rose. Ward moved closer to kiss her cheek, then made a last-minute detour and swooped down to plant a peck on her brown wool sweater in the region of her belly button. He wore one of those enormous black leather jackets that crackled with every breath. “Oh, and hello to you too, Mary Rose.”

Ward scooted Mary Rose over, and the four of us sat squashed on the couch, like people on a lifeboat. Ward gently placed a Styrofoam take-out carton on Mary Rose’s lap. “I remember you liked these.”

Mary Rose clapped her hands over her heart and sighed, “Oh.” Ward’s hair curled over his collar. She reached up, almost shyly, and combed it with her fingers. He closed his eyes, let his head drop back into the palm of her hand. I watched this out of the corner of my eye—it was really very sweet—when suddenly Mary Rose yanked her hand out from under Ward’s head, which snapped forward like that of a crash test dummy. The Styrofoam container slid to the floor and popped open.

“Oh, come on!” yelled Mary Rose. She gestured at the TV. “Where I come from, getting your mouth guard knocked halfway across the floor is a foul.”

“Baby, franchise players never foul,” said Ward.

“What are you talking about, sweetheart? Pippen’s got two,” said Mary Rose. “Everyone else has four. Guys coming in off the bench get called for tucking in their shirts.”

“My point exactly, sweetie.”

Then Mary Rose spied the container on the floor, inside the square white clam was a handful of pale brown cookies. She leaned forward, peered closer. “What are those?”

“Peanut-butter cookies. Left over from the shoot. I remembered they were your favorite.”

Mary Rose cupped one long hand over the other, continued to peer down at the cookies as if they were some poisonous animal devouring its prey, interesting to watch but lethal to touch. “Not my favorite.”

“Since when? Is this some kind of pregnancy food thing?” Ward looked at me and rolled his eyes.

“She’s allergic to peanuts,” I said.

“You are? You never told me that. Why didn’t you ever tell me that? I would never have brought these, if …” He leaned over and snapped the Styrofoam case shut, as if the mere sight of them might cause Mary Rose to go into anaphylactic shock. “I must be thinking of the ex-wife.”

“You have an ex-wife?”

Ward was silent. He popped the container open again, then snapped it shut. Open, shut, open, shut. “How can you tell your husband is dead? The sex is the same, but you get the remote.”

“You never told me you have an ex-wife.”

“You never told me you were allergic to peanuts.”

We all turned our attention to a free-throw shot. We watched, rapt, as the ball twirled around the rim. Lynne Baron! I’d forgotten about her. She and Ward were just separated when he and I had our acrimonious overcooked swordfish dinner. She did something in the movies. I remember, because he told me she was getting out of the film business and into training Seeing Eye dogs. “She wanted to get out of the blind leading the blind and into Labrador retrievers leading the blind,” he’d said. Then I remembered: She’d been a Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie model who threw in the thong to become a food designer. She was well-known in food-design circles. She did for a plate of deep-fried Cajun jumbo shrimp what the makeup artist, hair stylist, and wardrobe consultant did for the actress eating it.

I must confess, I then did something very unfriendlike. I gloated. This, Mary Rose, this is why you don’t get pregnant with someone you’ve just met. If you want a joint project, build a gazebo, learn to swing dance, but don’t, don’t have a baby. I felt wise, suddenly, instead of like the judgmental curmudgeon I knew myself to be.

When Ward excused himself to use the bathroom, I told Mary Rose, “Ask to talk to him outside. Don’t let him get away with this. You deserve some answers. You deserve them now. Don’t give him a chance to put together a good story. That’s what men do, you know, say nothing until they have a chance to put together a story.”

“I know,” said Mary Rose. “I know about men.”

“Well, clearly you don’t,” I said, “or not about this one, anyway.”

Mary Rose zapped me with a glare that could cause radiation burns, but when Ward came back, she asked to speak with him outside. A deck ran along the front of the house and could be reached only through Mary Rose’s bedroom, a cramped space with no insulation, big enough only for a double bed and the upended orange crate that served as a nightstand.

The rain had let up. Mary Rose sat in one of the rickety white plastic patio chairs, put her feet up on one of her window boxes. A huge parsley plant colonized one of the boxes. The other was a wasteland of twine-colored petunias that had long ago gone to seed. She left the door open. I hit the mute button on the remote, so I could hear everything.

Ward stood. “I should have told you about Lynne. I should have, but this all happened so fast and I never think of her. She never crosses my mind. You’re the only woman who crosses me.”

“Crosses your mind, you mean. So how long were you married?”

“Long enough to know it wasn’t going to work.”

“And that would be …”

“Fifteen months.”

“But who’s counting, huh?”

“You have to make it difficult on me, don’t you? I said I was sorry. I am sorry. I’m a schmuck, I admit it. I have an ex-wife, all right? But we were over long before I met you.”

“How long?”

“Over a year.”

“What happened? To the marriage, I mean.”

“I wanted kids, she didn’t. We argued. She had an affair. We grew apart.”

“Wow, that just about covers all the bases, doesn’t it?”

“I love you, Mary Rose. I love our baby. My mother and father, we all love this baby.”

I suspect it may have been the inclusion of Audra and Big Hank in this love fest, but something made Mary Rose say something odd and, even to my ears, ambiguous. “There is no baby, Ward.”

Later, when she was telling me her version of events, she said that what she meant was, “I saw our baby in the ultrasound, and it’s not a baby, but a tiny, pulsing bean with seashell ears and a gentle Martian face.” What she meant was, It’s not a baby per se. It’s a He-bean (she was already certain the bean was a boy).

Ward wet his lips. “You got an abortion?”

Mary Rose said nothing. She leaned forward and tugged out one of the dead petunias.

“You should have told me. I know it’s your body and all that bullshit, but I am the father. There’s half of me in there. It’s not just you.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me you were married before?”

“This will kill my parents. I hope you know that.” Suddenly, he picked up one of the patio chairs and chucked it off the deck. It bounced down the front walk, coming to rest on the sidewalk, beneath the ornamental plums. “They were really looking forward to our having this baby.”

“I understand, Ward. There’s just one thing. We’re not having this baby. I am.”

“You said you got an abortion,” said Ward.

“You did,” said Mary Rose. “I meant that it’s still technically a fetus, not even that. An embryo, really. It’s far from being a baby yet, is what I meant. You jumped to conclusions.”

Ward looked over the railing as though suddenly interested in the fate of the eight-dollar patio chair. “Let’s just forget this and start the evening over, can we?”

She let him kiss her. I watched though the doorway.

I’m not convinced that Mary Rose wanted to forget about any of it. I think what she really wanted at that moment was to call a time-out. She wanted the gestation of the He-bean to freeze so that she could think things over. But in making the choice to have the child, Mary Rose had sacrificed time-outs forever. Next to gravity, bearing a child is the modern world’s last unalterable fact. Marriages are easily dissolved, morality readily ignored, laws circumvented; an operation can be had to give a boy a vagina or a girl a penis. A fetus cares not whether its mother and father have argued; it cares not that you have lost your job, that the economy has collapsed, that you have been stricken with the flu. On it comes.

I’m guessing, but I imagine it was the knowledge that on or about June 12, Mary Rose would be having Ward’s baby, or so she thought, that urged Mary Rose to give Ward the benefit of the doubt. Lynne or no Lynne.

Either that, or she was a fool. Strike that. Who am I to talk?