Good in Bed (37 page)

When he offered to help me carry things upstairs, I wasn't about to turn him down, even though I was thinking, as I toted diapers up to the third floor, what my place would look like to him. He probably lived in the suburbs, in one of those grand old houses on the Main Line with, like, sixteen bedrooms and a stream running through the front yard, not to mention kitchens that did not boast Harvest Gold appliances, circa 1978. At least my place was relatively neat, I told myself. I opened the door, and Nifkin catapulted himself into the hall, hurtling into the air. Dr. K. laughed.

“Hey, Nif,” he said, as Nifkin sniffed the rawhide bone through three plastic bags and went into a seizure of joy. I dumped my bags on the couch and hurried to the bathroom as Nifkin tried to burrow into the bag. “Make yourself comfortable!” I yelled.

When I emerged, he was standing in the second bedroom, where
I'd been trying to piece together a crib from one of my mother's friends. The crib had come to me unassembled, without directions, and possibly missing important pieces.

“This doesn't look right,” he murmured. “Mind if I give it a go?”

“Sure,” I said, startled and pleased. “If you actually get it together, I'll owe you big-time.”

He smiled at me. “You don't owe me anything,” he said. “I had fun today.”

Before I could think of what to make of that, the telephone rang. I excused myself, grabbed the portable, and flopped gracelessly onto the bed.

“Cannie!” bellowed a familiar British accent. “Where've you been?”

“Shopping,” I said. Well, this was a surprise, too. Maxi and I had been corresponding through e-mail and the occasional telephone call at work. She talked about her travails on the set of
PlugIn
, the futuristic sci-fi thriller in which she was costarring with a hot young actor who required not one, not two, but three full-time “sobriety managers” to keep him in line, and e-mailed me investment tips and articles about how I should set up a fund for the baby. I'd write her back, talking about work, mostly, and my friends … and my plans, such as they were. She didn't ask many questions about the impending arrival—good manners, maybe, I thought.

“I have news,” she said. “Big. Huge. The hugest. Your screenplay,” she began breathlessly. I swallowed hard. Of all the things we'd talked about in the months since our meeting in New York, my screenplay hadn't come up once. I'd assumed that Maxi had forgotten about it, hadn't read it, or had read it and decided that it was so terrible it would be better for our friendship if she never spoke of it again.

“I loved it,” she said. “The character of Josie is such a perfect heroine. She's smart, and stubborn, and funny, and sad, and I would be honored to play her.”

“Sure,” I said, still not understanding what was happening. “Start eating.”

“I fell in love with the part,” Maxi continued, ignoring me, her words tumbling over each other, faster and faster. “And you know I've
got this deal with this studio, Intermission …I showed the script to my agent. She showed it to them. They loved it, too … especially the idea of me as Josie. And so, with your permission …Intermission would like to buy your screenplay, for me to star in. Of course, you'd be involved the whole way through …I think that both of us should be able to sign off on any changes to the script, and, of course, on major casting decisions, not to mention who's going to be the director …”

But I wasn't listening. I lay back on the bed, my heart suddenly feeling fierce and strange and enormously excited. Making my movie, I thought, a huge smile spreading over my face. Oh, my God, it's finally happening, somebody's going to make my movie! I'm a writer now, I've really made it, maybe I'll be rich!

And that's when I felt it. Like a wave cresting inside of me. Like I myself was in the ocean, being gently tumbled, over and over, by a wave. I dropped the phone and put both hands on my belly, and then came a gentle, almost inquisitive series of tap, tap, taps. Moving. My baby was moving.

“You're here,” I whispered. “You're really here?”

“Cannie?” said Maxi. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine!” I said, and started laughing. “I'm perfect.”

I'd never had any luck with Hollywood. To me, the movie industry was like a guy you lusted after from across the high school cafeteria—so good-looking, so perfect, that you just knew he'd never notice you, and that if you asked him to sign your yearbook at graduation, he'd stare at you blankly and grope for your name.

It was an unrequited love affair, but I'd never stopped trying. Every few months I'd importune agents with query letters asking if they were interested in my screenplay. I'd wind up with nothing to show for my troubles but a fistful of preprinted rejection postcards (“Dear aspiring writer,” they'd begin) or occasionally a semipersonal letter advising me that they were no longer handling unsolicited material, unknown writers, novice writers, unproduced writers, or whatever they were using as the derogatory term du jour.

Once, the year before I met Bruce, an agent did meet with me. The thing I remember most about our appointment was that during the entire ten minutes or so he granted me, he never once said my name or removed his sunglasses.

“I read your screenplay,” he said, pushing it across the table toward me with his fingertips, as if it was too distasteful to risk full palm contact. “It was sweet.”

“Sweet's not good?” I asked—the obvious conclusion one would draw from the expression on his face.

“Sweet is fine, for children's books, or TGI Fridays on ABC. For movies, well … we'd prefer it if your heroine blew something up.” He tapped his pen across the title page.
Starstruck
, it read. Except he'd doodled little fangs coming out of the
S
's, so they looked like snakes. “Also, I've got to tell you, there's only one fat actress in Hollywood. …”

“That's not true!” I exploded, abandoning my strategy of smiling politely and keeping quiet, not sure what I was more offended by—his use of the term “fat actress,” or the notion that there was only one of them.

“One bankable fat actress,” he amended. “And really, the reason is, nobody wants to see movies about fat people. Movies are about escape!”

Well. “So … what do I do now?” I asked.

He shook his head, already pushing himself back from the table, already reaching for his cell phone and his valet parking stub. “I just can't see getting involved with this project,” he had told me. “I'm sorry.” Another Los Angeles lie.

“We're anthropologists,” I murmured to Nifkin, and to the baby, as we flew over what might have been Nebraska. I hadn't brought any of my baby books with me, but I figured, if I couldn't read, I could at least explain. “So just think of it as an adventure. And we'll be home before you know it. Back in Philadelphia, where we're appreciated.”

We—me, and Nifkin, and my belly, which had gotten to the point where I pretty much regarded it as a separate thing—were in first class. Actually, as best I could tell, we were first class. Maxi'd sent a limo to my apartment, which had whisked me the nine miles to the airport, where a block of four seats had been reserved in my name and nobody so much as batted an eyelash at the presence of a small and terrified rat terrier in a green plastic carrying case. We were currently airborne, at our cruising altitude of 30,000 feet, and I had my feet up on a pillow, a blanket spread over my legs, a chilled glass of Evian with a twist of lime in my hand, and a glossy assortment of fresh magazines
fanned out on the seat beside me, beneath which Nifkin reposed.
Cosmo, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Mirabella, Moxie
. The brand-new April issue of
Moxie.

I picked it up, hearing my heart start thumping, feeling the sick feeling in the pit of my belly, and the familiar cold sweat at the back of my neck.

I put it down. Why should I upset myself? I was happy, I was successful, I was flying to Hollywood first class to collect a bigger paycheck than he'd ever see in his life, not to mention the mandatory hobnobbing with superstars.

I picked it up. Put it down. Picked it up again.

“Shit,” I muttered, to no one in particular, and flipped to “Good in Bed.”

“The Things She Left Behind,” I read.

“I don't love her anymore,” the article began.

When I wake up in the morning, she isn't the first thing that I think of—whether she's here, and when I'll see her, and when I can hold her again. I wake up and think about work, my new girlfriend, or, more likely, my family, and my mother, and how she'll manage in the wake of my father's recent death.

I can hear our song on the radio and not instantly punch up another station. I can see her byline and not feel like someone large and angry is stomping on top of my heart. I can go to the Tick Tock diner, where we used to go for late-night omelets and fries, where we'd sit side by side in a booth and grin dopey grins at each other. I can sit in that same booth without remembering how she'd start off sitting across from me and then, halfway through, get up and plop herself down beside me. “I'm just being sociable,” she'd say, every time. “I'm paying you a visit. Hello, neighbor!” she'd say, and kiss me, and kiss me until the waitress with the blond bouffant and the coffeepot in each hand would stop and shake her head.

I have reclaimed the Tick Tock. Once it was our place, now
it's my place again. It's right on my way home from work, and I like the spinach and feta omelet, and I can even order it sometimes without remembering how she'd bare her teeth at me in the parking lot, demanding to know whether she had spinach stuck between them.

It's the little things that get me, every time.

Last night I was sweeping—my new girlfriend was coming over, and I wanted things to look nice—and I found a single kibble of dog food, wedged in a crack between the tiles.

I returned the obvious stuff, of course, the clothes and the jewelry, and I tossed out the rest. Her letters are boxed up in my closet, her picture's banished to the basement. But how do you guard against a single kibble's worth of her dog's Purina Small Bites that's somehow survived, undetected, for months, only to surface in your dustpan and send you reeling? How do people survive this?

Everyone has history, my girlfriend says, trying to soothe me. Everyone has baggage, everyone carries parts of their past around. She's a kindergarten teacher, a student of sociology, a professional empath; she knows the right things to say. But it makes me furious to find C.'s cherry ChapStick in my glove box, a single blue mitten in the pocket of my winter coat. Furious, too, over the things I can't find: my tie-dyed tank top and the Cheesasaurus Rex T-shirt I got for sending in three box tops from Kraft macaroni and cheese, because I know she's got them and I'll never get them back.

I think that when relationships end, there should be Thing Amnesty Day. Not right away, when you're both still raw and broken and aching and probably prone to ill-advised sex, but down the road, when you can still be civil, but before you've completed the process of turning your former beloved into just a memory.

Turning your former beloved into a memory, I thought sadly. So that's what he's doing. Except … well, turning a former lover into a
memory is one thing, but turning a child into a minor distraction, into something you can't even be bothered with … well, that was something else. Something infuriating. Ill-advised sex, indeed! What about the consequences of his little slipup!

But for now, I hired a cleaning crew for my apartment. The floors, I told them, showing them the kibble I'd found, muttering dire predictions about bugs and mice and other assorted vermin. But really, I am haunted by memories.

I don't love her anymore. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.

Oof. I leaned back in the plush, double-wide leather-clad reclining seat and closed my eyes, feeling the most potent and horrible mixture of sadness and fury—and sudden, overwhelming hope—that for a minute I thought I'd throw up. He'd written this three months ago. That was how long magazines took to print things. Had he seen my letter? Did he know I was pregnant? And what was he feeling now?

“He still misses me,” I murmured, with my hand on my belly. So did that mean there was hope? I thought for a minute that maybe I'd mail him his Cheesasaurus Rex T-shirt, as a sign … as a peace offering. Then I remembered that the last thing I'd mailed him was news that I was having his baby, and he hadn't even bothered to pick up the phone and ask me how I was.

“He doesn't love me anymore,” I reminded myself. And I wondered how E. felt, reading this …E. the kindergarten teacher with her sweet talk of baggage and her small, soft hands. Did she wonder why he wrote about me, after all this time? Did she wonder why he still cared?
Did
he care, or was that just my wishful thinking? And if I called, what would he say?

I turned restlessly in my seat, flipping the pillow, then scrunching it against the window and leaning against it. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, the captain was announcing our descent into beautiful Los Angeles, where the sun was shining and the winds were from the southwest and where it was a perfect 80 degrees.

* * *

I got off the plane with my pockets full of little gifts the flight girls had pressed upon me, packets of Mint Milanos and foil-wrapped chocolates and complimentary eye masks and washcloths and socks. I had Nifkin's carrier in one hand, my bag in the other. In the bag was a week's worth of underwear, my Pregnancy Packable kit, minus the long skirt and tunic, which I was wearing, and a few fistfuls of assorted hygiene products that I'd thrust in at the last minute. A nightgown, some sneakers, my telephone book, my journal, and a dog-eared copy of
Your Healthy Baby.