The Seven Year Bitch (14 page)

“Here's a sweater for Duncan.”

“He doesn't need a sweater.”

“What do you mean he doesn't need a sweater? It's cold outside.”

“I don't want him to get too hot.”

“It's seventeen degrees.”

“No, it's forty-two degrees.”

“Okay, you win. It's forty-two degrees. Put the sweater on him.”

“It's not that cold.”

“Yes it is.”

“I was out. You haven't been out.”

“It's freezing, Russell.”

“It's March. I think you're insane.”

“I know it's March. But it's cold. It's raining.”

“That's what his coat's for. He's going to be wearing a coat.”

“Of course he's going to be wearing a coat!”

“So he doesn't need a sweater.”

“Is it that you're just too lazy to put the goddamn sweater on him? It's not that hard, you pull it over his head.”

“You're really hurting him by doing this in front of him.”

“You're hurting him by taking him out in zero-degree weather without a sweater.”

“Fine. I'll put it on him.”

“Good. Jesus. Moron.”

We fought about the mail piling up on the dining table, the clutter, the house filling up with books, and authors, always these terrible authors.

“What's this?” he asked, holding the large envelope from Dr. Heiffowitz's office.

“Probably nothing,” I said, taking the envelope into the bathroom with me.

 

 

When she came in
the morning, I waited for Russell to leave the house to deal with a problem with our car, and we sat down on the couch together and went through the questions. My heart was pounding the way it had when I had filled out my own.

“Now. What was the first day of your last period?” I said in a casual, upbeat tone as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be discussing.

“Were you a DES baby? Have you ever had a hysterosalpingogram? Traveled to another country? Been implanted with an IUD?”

I explained each question to Shasthi like a police detective reading her her rights.

Now
this
was how to interview a nanny, I thought. Instead of
Do you have references?
it should be
Have you ever been diagnosed with endometriosis?
And instead of
Can you occasionally stay late if my husband and I have dinner plans or theater tickets?
it should be
Has your period ever been late or absent altogether?

“Number of births, number of abortions, number of miscarriages?” I read out loud.

I was about to write down
none
when Shasthi said, “I've had two abortions.”

“Okay,” I said, making my voice normal. “You did!”

“When I was in Guyana I had a boyfriend for many years named Jay. I got pregnant with him two times.”

“Two times!”

“My family is enemies with Jay's family so they said I had to choose. They told me if I continued with him no one in my family would ever speak to me again.”

“So you didn't marry him?” I asked.

“No. I married the man my family had in mind for me. My family is very important to me, you know.”

No, I didn't know. This was a tragic story with a terrible ending. It was like Romeo and Juliet without the happy relief of poison.

“Do you ever think of Jay?” I asked, thinking of Gabe Weinrib fucking some woman on the plane to Paris.

“Yes. He is married now.”

“So the problem could be your husband's sperm,” I said, bitterly. “If you were able to get pregnant twice before.” If she had married Jay she would have many children by now. I was happy to pay for Shasthi's doctor's bills but I wasn't sure I was willing to pay the price for her husband's bad sperm. We both seemed taken aback by the force of my hypothesis.

“No. My husband has two big children in Guyana.”

I felt crushed. She lived with this man in the Bronx somewhere, his mother in the apartment upstairs, and the strange thing was she didn't seem at all unhappy. The whole family gathered to watch cricket matches from her country thanks to some cable sports package she had ordered. I had to almost admire the ability to enjoy something as stupid as cricket when she was forty and childless.

I tried to imagine her apartment, immaculately neat, the kitchen smelling of a fragrant, spicy fish stew. All the things I had sent home with her in shopping bags—unused wedding presents, and birthday presents, a fifty-dollar candle from Barneys.

I wondered if I was committing some kind of on-the-job sexual harassment, forcing her to divulge her personal abortion stories like that. I tossed the questionnaire onto a pile of papers, trying to seem casual.

“Well anyway we got this taken care of so we can just send it in and then decide what we want to do next.”

I went to get the baby from his crib and was alarmed for a moment, seeing some kind of mark on his forehead between his eyes.

But it was just one of her sequins floating there like a bindi. I still hadn't fixed the vacuum and her sequins were everywhere but I liked that they were there. They were a little off-putting in their quantity but cheerful, like the ladybugs that appeared in my apartment each July.

 

 

When I came home
that evening, Russell said, “Notice anything new?” I couldn't see anything new, just a big pile of four seasons' worth of shoes tossed by the front door.

“Poland Spring came with our new water cooler!” Someone in the kitchen burped loudly, and when I looked over I saw it was the water cooler itself, as if it were trying to make its presence known. It was like having a third-grade boy in the kitchen.

Russell presented me with a glass of perfectly chilled water. I had to admit it was delicious. I gulped it down and drank another.

“Now we can gossip by it,” he said. He made me walk over to it with him and stand in front of it. “You'll never guess what I heard about the new woman in 3E . . .” he began. It was the first time someone other than Duncan had made me laugh in a long time.

That night we lay in bed talking about the water cooler. “It's saving us money,” he said. “I mean we were spending
at least
four dollars a day on water. Probably more. Now it's
less
than a dollar a day.”

“And it looks better than I thought it would. I'm already used to it,” I said.

“And I already feel we're healthier. I drank water tonight instead of beer.”

“I drank more water tonight than I would usually drink in a week.”

“And it's great to have the hot-water part too. Tomorrow I can make you tea. I might even have tea too, instead of coffee. I'm really so glad we did it. So, so glad.”

“I'm really glad we did it too.”

I hadn't heard us this excited about anything in a long time. Not since our conversations about Duncan when he was first born. In fact, I couldn't help but wonder if we were more excited about the water cooler than we'd been about Duncan. What had our life become, I wondered, if we needed something like Poland Spring to bring us together?

“You feeling frisky?” he asked.

Despite those words, I agreed to make love to him to celebrate our new addition as long as he promised to be very, very quick because I was so tired, which he did. He plastered on a condom from my underwear drawer. “You have to take off your nightgown,” he said.

“Why?” I complained.

“I want to see you.”

“You've seen me.”

“I want to see you again.”

“I'm too tired. If I take it off it will be inside out and I'll have to find it and then turn it right side in and put it on again in three minutes.”

“Not three minutes,” Russell said.

“You said you'd be quick.”

We argued about it for a while, and in the end I agreed to hike the nightgown all the way up around my neck in a big bunch like an Elizabethan collar. He climbed on top of me, and I helped guide him into me like an air traffic controller with one hand while holding our dog by the collar with the other. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had sex without holding on to my dog's collar and usually reassuring him and even kissing him the whole time. We'd thrown out his crate when Duncan was born to make room for a glider and we couldn't lock him out of our room because the doorknob was broken and we'd be the ones locked in with no way to get out.

Even with my holding him as hard as I could, he broke free, licked Russell's ass, and finally mounted him until I got him in my grasp again.

“I love you,” Russell said.

By way of afterglow he brought me a wad of toilet paper and something new: a glass of water.

“What do you think Shasthi is going to think of the water cooler?” Russell asked.

“I was just thinking how excited I am to show it to her tomorrow,” I said.

“I think she's really going to love it.”

And then I was too tired to speak.

The next morning when Shasthi came we showed her the Poland Spring water cooler.

“Isn't it great?” I said.

“Yes, it's so much better. I have one at home,” she said.

Russell and I looked at each other in shock. She'd heard us complaining about wasting money on water and she hadn't mentioned anything. Why hadn't she spoken up about it? I wondered. She'd left our apartment night after night with its refrigerator full and countertops covered with a small fortune of half-empty bottles of water and she'd smugly returned home to her state-of-the-art water cooler. Maybe I was wrong to help her get pregnant and think about doing things like getting her a cell phone when she wasn't concerned about me whatsoever.

Or maybe she just didn't think it was her place to say anything. I hated the thought of her thinking something like that but maybe it was true. Or maybe what she thought we wasted money on was so vast a list, the water was just a drop in the bucket so to speak. When I was pregnant our doorman had once said to me, “Can I ask you a question? Why do you live here? You could live in a whole house in Westchester for the money you spend for your place.”

“I could own a whole village in Africa,” I had said, stupidly.

“But Westchester is just a few stops on the train,” he had said.

Every time I paid my maintenance, I thought of that conversation.

“Well we love it,” Russell said, still praising the water cooler.

I wondered if Shasthi and her husband had made love when they'd gotten theirs.

T
his is it,” Russell said, stopping in front of an old door in a cast-iron loft building. We were buzzed in and walked up the three steep flights of stairs to our new shrink's office. I always hated the way Russell walked up stairs, with his body bent completely over. The man had no core strength whatsoever.

Corinne, the new shrink who had been recommended by my mother's shrink, was standing at her door watching us. She had limp curly hair the color of cream of tomato soup and seemed to be wearing some kind of baggy pajamas.

“Take off your shoes,” she said.

Russell and I were both wearing two different socks.

We followed her through the vast loft to the living room area and she directed us to sit on a lumpy old couch that was covered with a blanket. Questionable upholstery was one of my biggest fears for some reason. I never went to those cafés with strange assorted chairs and couches everywhere. I wasn't one of those people who was phobic about germs, but the idea of sinking into a couch that ten thousand other New Yorkers had sunk into before me didn't appeal to me at all.

I sat on one end of the couch and Russell sat as far away from me as he could while still being on the same couch.

Corinne sat facing us in an armchair covered in a mid-century print, its white stuffing leaking from every seam. Behind her was a ladder that led to a sleeping loft with a neatly made platform bed.

“Do you live here?” Russell asked, although we both knew the answer.

“I do,” she said. “I had an office, and I started to ask myself why I was paying all that rent.”

So we wouldn't have to see you in your pajamas with your cat on your lap, I wanted to tell her.

I waited for her to ask if it bothered us that she worked out of her apartment but the question didn't come.

“What brings you to therapy today?” she asked instead.

Russell gave some long-winded answer that included use of the word
dovetail
. “Your schedule seemed to dovetail quite nicely with our needs at that moment. . . .” I looked at the beautiful worn kilim on the floor with its vibrant blue center and almost ugly brown border. I couldn't take my eyes off it. The blue was made more beautiful by the brown. If I had a rug like that my life would be better, I thought.

Everywhere in the loft were interesting antiques, run-down and shabby but pleasing. Lamps, armoires, divans, desks. On the surfaces were all things I suddenly felt I needed—just the claw feet from a claw-foot tub or a green glass bud vase. She had a good eye, I thought, something I envied in certain people. If I'd had all those things they'd look like junk and I'd end up taking them all out to the garbage room.

The walls were hung with framed disturbed-looking children's art where diplomas might have been. There wasn't even a single book.

I heard Russell say the word
dovetail
for the second time. I could go my whole lifetime without saying the word
dovetail
and Russell couldn't go a whole conversation without it.