Love Monkey (6 page)

“How big?” I say. He tells me. And that's it. Those are the only questions I can think to ask about the situation. But I hear more. Details I don't want to know. Real horror-movie stuff, bodies splitting open, gushing fluids, eight and three-quarter hours of screaming agony. Childbirth sounds a lot like
Alien
. I'm invited to meet the kid today at lunchtime, though Mike will be at work.

That my friends are having kids makes me even more of a kid. With all the man-jam I've sent spiraling down my shower drain, I could start a sperm bank. A sperm Switzerland. Isn't this a bit childish of me? Shouldn't I be using those sperm for something? Shouldn't I have someone other than myself to worry about by this point in my life?

Not that I blame anyone but me. The reasons my last five relationships ended:

1. I acted like an asshole.
   
2. I acted like an asshole.
   
3. My UK work visa ran out and I had to move back to New York.
   
4. I acted like an asshole.
   
5. She acted like an asshole, but only after I tormented her for six months.
   

I miss them all, of course. Take last summer's girl, Maggie Kelly. Met her at someone's birthday party. She was adorable. Smart. Fun. Self-confident. Loved to laugh, eat, drink, screw. We went out to her mother's house on Memorial Day weekend. Dad wasn't there, having moved in with his new mistress in the city a couple of months prior. Looked like Mom was going to have to sell the house. It was a beautiful one. Immaculate maintenance, double-hung windows, extreme gardening, the works. Her kids were grown, she didn't have
a job or any job skills. She was getting old and life was turning out to be a major bummer. She made us soup and we chatted for a while. I was on my best behavior, trying to be cheery. I nodded a lot. Complimented her cooking. Complimented her daughter. Asked about her garden. Didn't mention dad's mistress. In short, I scored the max. I was ideal.

Couple weeks later Maggie is giving me the rundown on her family's troubles.

“My sister didn't get that understudy part,” she says.

Her big sister, Stephanie. Actress. Her claim to fame: she once auditioned for
The View
. She didn't get it. Scuttlebutt was that they were “going ethnic.” She's cute, but not actress cute, and she's thirty-five. It would be rude of me to point out that no woman ever started suddenly getting prettier at that point.

“That's too bad,” I say. “What's she doing now?”

“She's looking for a waitressing job,” she says. “She's talking to a sushi place.”

“How's your mom?” I say.

“Dad's being such a jerk,” she says. “She's going to have to hire a lawyer.”

I wait for a polite moment to get to the point.

“What did she say about me?”

“She said you seemed
sad
.”

Sad.
From a woman whose life was falling apart. Those three letters ricocheted around my brain for weeks. “Depressed” implies it's not your fault: those pesky chemical imbalances. “Sad” means,
Buddy, you're just not trying
. And after a while I made Maggie sad too.

Before Maggie there was my Besty. Besty who loved cats. Besty who got me interested in Audrey Hepburn movies. Besty who was so quick and lively and lovely and serene that I had to break up with her.

We'd make up fairy tales after sex.

“Tell me a story!” This from somewhere in the $139 futon that was my bed for three years.

“Once there was a fair princess named Besty,” I began.

“Only fair?”

“Once there was a slightly above-average princess named Besty,” I said. “Ow. And she was heralded throughout the land for her ability to fell evil beasts by poking them in the most sensitive part of their tummies.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

“Her only boyfriend was a gecko lizard named Tom,” I said. “Tom met her in the amphibian singles bar.”

“Because she was used to dating guys who were basically reptiles.”

“Exactly. And Tom the gecko told Besty, ‘If you do tequila shots with me and give me a kiss, you will see a magical change come over me and also you will get a commemorative Jose Cuervo T-shirt.' ”

“And did she?”

“She had a few shots to steel herself for the challenge.”

“Did she kiss him?”

“She looked at him. She saw that he was a kind, quirky, friendly, harmless creature, and then she decided. She closed her eyes. She leaned over. And she asked the bartender for some more tequila.”

“And then did she kiss him?”

“After enough liquor to knock down Robert Downey Jr., she finally puckered up.”

“Did he turn into a handsome prince?”

“No, he turned into a gila monster. But she did get the T-shirt.”

She moved even closer. We braided our arms and legs together.

“Hey,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothin'.”

“Oh.”

A minute passed expectantly.

“Hey,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothin'.”

Uh-oh. Paging Mr. Sandman. Carry me away.

“Hey,” she said.

“Yeah?”

Pause.

“I love you,” she said.

Something twanged deep down within me and for a few seconds I forgot to breathe. I carefully considered the situation, ran through the options, weighed some choice responses, and then did what I always do when confronting difficult choices. Nothing. Good thing I wasn't Sophie in
Sophie's Choice
. Which kid should I save from Auschwitz? Mmm, let me see about that. Uh, yeah, I'll just weigh the pros and cons for a while, this one's health against that one's intelligence, this one's lovely personality against that one's essential courage. Oh, time's up? So you're taking them both? Whew, that's a relief.

Tick, tick, tick. I wanted to say something. But I didn't.

So I hugged her and kissed her for a while. Thinking, Maybe she'll forget about this awkward little moment?

With the next girlfriend, I won't be sad or weird or distant. I'll give her everything she wants and more. An emotional AmEx card. No preset intimacy limit.

But first I have to go celebrate a baby not my own.

Mike went back to work today, but Karin's still at New York Hospital. The thing is two days old; it looks like a rough draft of a human being. I am expected to say how cute it is, but I resolve to stay noncommittal on these things. Must keep my options open.

“Is it the cutest baby ever?”

These are the first words out of Karin's mouth. Her whole face is
shiny, as if someone went over it with a belt sander and a coat of Turtle Wax. In the last two months of her pregnancy, she grew scarily large. She was getting worried too. You could tell. I said nothing, but privately I wondered if she was going to deliver a VW.

A grin is oozing all over Karin's face. Even her hair is smiling.

“Isn't she?” she prompts.

“I don't know. I'll just stroll over to the nursery and do some comparison shopping.”

But I don't say that.

“Of course,” I say.

“Great baby,” I say.

“Good job. Uh, giving birth. And all,” I say.

I'd always heard that parents undergo this weird brain rewiring that makes it impossible for them to think their baby is not the darlingest diaper filler that ever lived. I keep waiting for evidence to the contrary, but there is none. I have a lot of smart friends, investment bankers and doctors and so forth. Theoretically, they're smart enough to have figured out that just about half of all babies are below average. Yet to date I have never heard one new duh-duh or maw-maw say: “Don't you think our baby isn't as cute as most? Frankly, I'm disappointed with the outcome. Then again, look who I married.”

I ask no questions about bodily functions, except, tentatively, “So, um, how was the, uh, labor, uh, thingy?” It seems impolite not to give her an opportunity to chat about what is, after all, the most memorable experience of her life, though it is completely without interest to me. It's the only question I ask on the subject. There is a reason:
I don't want to know
. Yet somehow in the next twenty minutes, just by being polite and nodding my uh-huhs, I will discover:

1. Karin had to have doctors cut a huge hole horizontally across her abdomen.
   
2. They then had to make another huge slice, this time vertically, in her womb.
   
3. She is currently being held together with
   staples
   .
   
4. She has not farted since the delivery, which apparently is a bad thing.
   
5. The baby's sole source of nourishment for the time being is whatever it sucks out of Karin's breasts.
   

“Do you want to hold the baby?” she says.

No. Why do women always ask this? Do they not realize that the feeling
they
get from holding
their
baby (i.e., unsurpassed joy, love, and pride at not having given the kid spina bifida or anything) is different from the feeling
I
get when holding
someone else's
baby (i.e., nothing). I like Electric Light Orchestra (still) but I never make anyone else listen to them.

“Yes,” I say.

I'm holding the baby. I'm supporting its head and thinking that it's about the size of a loaf of bread. No wonder they say, “She's got a bun in the oven.” Karin goes to the bathroom (is she just passing gas?), and when she's gone I surreptitiously feel around the kid's head looking for the soft spot. It feels pretty hard to me, though. I thought their heads were supposed to be like week-old bananas. Yet another letdown.

“What are you doing?” Karin is back. She has caught me groping madly around her newborn's skull.

“Uh, just, I don't know.”
Change the subject. Punt!
“She's just so, uh, cuddly!”

“Talk to the baby!” she commands. “It's good for them!”

I picture the kid in eighteen years, getting the thin envelope from Stanford. Maybe even from SUNY Binghamton. Because I didn't develop her brain enough during the four minutes I spent silently with her when she was three days old.

“Uh,” I say. “Hello, baby. You're really…small, there. How was the birth? Nice baby. Good to see you. Hope you're feeling well.”

I make my apologies (“Stressed at work,” I murmur, and what do you know! First time I've ever used this excuse on an infant) and make good my escape. I have to walk by Sloan-Kettering, the cancer hospital across the street. There's a homeless woman. Well, not homeless, exactly; she appears to be a permanent resident of a cement overhang, an alcove tenant. She's just lying there completely prone, facing the building. Her pants are pulled down so as to expose her mottled, bleu-cheesy haunches: kiss my ass, world. It must suck to be living outside a cancer hospital. Then again, better to be outside it than inside. On the street a woman walks by. She is missing her left arm. These are people who truly have cause to be miserable, and are they?

Well, yes, they certainly appear to be. I, on the other hand, have absolutely no reason whatsoever to be miserable. Yet I am. Which in turn makes me even more miserable. Plus now the misery comes with a little garnish of guilt too.

A
fter work I get home feeling fat (I think I'm starting to get cellulite—in my
chin
) and throw away everything bearing the evil names of Keebler and Hostess, not to mention that slut Little Debbie. I'm thinking about tomorrow. Julia's thing is tomorrow. She knows I want to go. I've hinted at it. (Example of my hinting: “Hey, can I go to your thing on the fourteenth?”) But she hasn't mentioned it this week. Maybe she'll call. Probably she won't.

It's a Friday night, so I celebrate by turning on the baseball game. And a CD. Plus I open a window. I need noise to drown out the sound of my Julia thoughts. I am reminded of her, on occasion: every time the phone rings, every time the e-mail at work doinks, every time I hear a song she likes, every time I find myself sitting in front of the TV watching a movie we've talked about, and pretty much every other moment of every day.

As for the apartment, well. Normally it has a lived-in look. At the
moment it has a died-in look. Some cleaning up is definitely in order. Luckily, it's a small place. Spraying everything in sight with foamy toxins and wiping them off again doesn't take as long as I'd feared. The lemony scent begins to waft, only somewhat gaggingly, through the apartment.

The phone. It's 8:55.

I flop sideways in my big leather armchair, slinging my legs over an arm. My stack of black plastic shines dustlessly. I issue a tentative hello. I hate it when I answer the phone with a big friendly voice and it's a telemarketer. Makes me feel so used.

“It's me,” says the voice that I most, and least, want to hear.

Shit. It's Friday. She's caught me at home with nothing to do.

“How's it going?” I say.

“It's going okay…” she says. Many of her remarks end with ellipses. Julia is a big believer in words unspoken. Every conversation with her is like an Easter-egg hunt. Well, a Satanic Easter-egg hunt, in which you search wanly for an egg and find a rainbow-striped grenade.

“What are you up to?” I say, as I always do.

“Nothin',” she says, as she always does. “What are you up to?”

Now I run through the options silently.

1. The truth: I have been cleaning in a way that would startle and delight my mother. In fact, if my mother were here right now, we would have something to talk about for the first time since 1984.
   
2. A really weak, unprepared lie.
   

“Just, having some friends for dinner,” I say. Yeah, Dinty Moore, Uncle Ben, and Sara Lee.

I inhale, preparing for follow-up questions.

“I was just wondering,” she says, backing into the point as always.
And when she backs up, I'm always the guy standing behind the truck, looking the other way. Beep! Beep! Beep! “What are your plans for tomorrow?”

I exhale. Tomorrow is her thing. Her dance recital. She and the rest of her dance class, most of them little girls, are putting on an amateur performance at a junior high school in South Norwalk tomorrow night. Julia is going to perform in two of the pieces and she is so beautiful when she's just sitting around that I would give my left nut to see her dance. Well, I may need my left nut. My spleen, though. My pancreas. Any of the B-list organs.

But she's going to tell me: Please don't come.

She's going to tell me: Duane is going to be there. (And he's taller than you.)

She's going to tell me: Can't you see it's all over?

She's going to tell me: Quit hanging around me.

“I'd kind of like to see your dances,” I say, exploratively.

“Are you sure?” she says.

“I think it might be fun,” I say.

“But it's going to be so lame!” she protests.

“I don't believe that,” I say. “I think it'll be lovely.” Did I just say “lovely”? This girl gets me to say words like lovely.

“You're going to get all the way up here and think, ‘I wasted a perfectly good Saturday afternoon.' ”

There is no such thing as a perfect Saturday afternoon unless it involves her.

“I've got nothing better to do,” I lie. I've already declined a christening and a wedding for this. Of course, I couldn't tell friends I've known for years that I was missing these once-in-a-lifetime events on the off chance that a girl I like might let me watch her dance in a linoleum-and-concrete auditorium. So I told everyone I couldn't go because my mother has an ovarian cyst. (Lesson one when lying: effort counts. Be so specific that you couldn't possibly be lying. Lesson
two: choose a lie thesis that people don't want to discuss at great length.)

We discuss train schedules, rendezvous points. The trains back to the city don't run all night, so she tells me to bring an overnight bag. I can stay at her parents' place in a pinch.

“I'm kind of excited you're coming,” she says.

Hmmmm.

“By the way,” she adds. “Duane might be there…”

“Oh yes?” I say.

“Is that okay?” she says.

I chase the question with a grunt. Then I put down the phone and sit there listening to the evening's symphony of car alarms on West Eighty-third.