The Stork Club (34 page)

"Boy, are you in for a rude awakening," she said, pouring some into her own glass too. "Babies grow up and walk all over you. And if they're yours, as you already know they have the ability to break your heart worse than any woman ever could. I can absolutely guarantee you that within a matter of years, that kid will be on the take from you worse than any gold-digging woman you've ever imagined, and you know what? You'll give it all to him gladly. Charlie always did with our kids," she said with love but without any sentimentality. "He was a pushover beyond description."

"Look at those two," Rick said, grinning at the game Mayer was playing with David, making piles of sand that the baby kicked down, after which Mayer moaned in mock dismay, which made the baby erupt with laughter. Patty watched Rick watching them.

"Mayer and his girlfriend are very serious," she said. "It's hard to believe that soon I could be a grandmother and you're the daddy of a little baby."

Rick smiled. "I remember Doreen's mother saying something like that to me when I met her. She's my age and she has seven grandchildren and couldn't figure out why I'd want to do this. To start being a parent at this ripe old age."

"Oh, I understand why. It's already changed you immeasurably."

"Nah. I'm still a fat old lech."

"But a mellower old lech. And not so fat anymore. In fact, you're starting to look pretty damned sexy."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Rick said, smiling and looking at his best friend's widow across the table, then taking her hand. Her tan face was lined from the years of too much sun at the beach. But her green eyes were still as bright as when she was the young secretary in a producer's office at Columbia Pictures where a dashing Charlie Fall came to have a meeting with her boss. And while he waited for the producer to get off a phone call, in the ultimate flirtatious move Charlie proposed to her.

"So how's by you these days?" Rick asked her gently. "Are you surviving okay without him?"

"Oh sure," she said. "I'm okay. My kids hang around a lot, my mother flies in from Seattle every few months." And then she opened her eyes wide and tried to hold back a funny grin that was forming around the corners of her mouth when she said, "I'm even being courted by various swains these days."

For some inexplicable reason, though he couldn't think of why, the idea of Patty's dating made him feel affronted, and Rick blurted out his first thought, "But the problem is, who could ever live up to Charlie Fall right?"

The green eyes flashed, and Patty took her hand out
from under his. "Nobody has to, Ricky," she said quietly. "That's not the criterion. Not that I have to explain this, but I loved Charlie completely for twenty-seven years, and somebody else will be somebody else. I'm not so stuck with some concept of how my relationship with a man has to be, I'm not hanging on to some unrealistic archetype that no human being can ever live up to."

"You mean like certain other people you could mention and that's why they've never married?"

"If the shoe fits, honey . . ." she said, smiling. "Listen, you know as well as I do that Charlie Fall had his faults, believe me, and so will my next husband."

"Husband? You're already that serious about somebody?"

"No, but I want to be. Unlike you, I'm crazy about intimacy. I love having the same person in bed next to me every night and every morning. Having somebody boss me around who gets pissed at me for bossing him around. I like a guy who does the
New York Times
crossword puzzle over my shoulder, and gets the references to sports and geography but leaves the song titles and names of playwrights to me."

"Sounds awful."

"Go to hell."

"I'm sure I will, because I still like a high-volume turnover of pieces of ass I've barely spoken to mainly because they can barely speak. I long for naked lust with exotic strangers in dubious locations, and particularly love waking to find black lace underwear and bondage equipment hanging from my chandelier
and
my appendages." Patty's outraged laughter made him go on. "I like to start my day uncertain if during the foreplay of the night before, I played the part of the shepherd who buggered the sheep or the sheep itself. That said . . . want to marry me?"

Patty let out a sound that was somewhere between a scream and a giggle. "I think we're a match made in heaven," she said. The sun was big and orange and very low in the sky and the two of them watched as Mayer put David on his shoulders and ran into the surf, then pranced through the waves to the beach, kicking water everywhere, making the baby scream with delight.

"Patty," Rick said to her though he continued to look down at the boys on the beach, "I know I idealized my late mother enough to make Oedipus look aloof. But I'm sure you know that in the more recent years, you've always been the standard against which I've measured every woman in my life. You're smart and funny. You made a family for Charlie and those boys that I've always envied and admired and coveted. You're going to find somebody one day soon, and he's going to be the luckiest man that ever lived. And I'm here to tell you that if he doesn't worship the ground where you walk every day, you call me and I'll kill him. Promise?''

Patty reached over and took his hand back. "I promise."

The phone rang and Patty reached for the portable receiver on the wicker table next to her.

"Hello? Yes, Andrea, he's here. I'll put him on." Patty gave Rick the handset.

"Secretarial assistant to moi?" Rick said into it.

"Mister R., listen. I've got Doreen Cobb on the other line."

"Doreen? How great! My God, it'll be great to talk to her. Can you patch her through?"

"She sounds kind of depressed," Andrea said. "She knows that today was the adoption."

"Put her through," Rick said. There were a few clicks and then Rick heard Doreen's sad little voice on the other end of the line say "Hello?"

"Hello, Doreen," Rick said, wishing he knew how to make the day of David's adoption easier for her.

"I'm sorry to bother you, I mean, I know I'm not supposed to but . . . it's just that I . . ."

"You're not bothering me. I'm really glad to hear your voice. How's Bea?"

"Bea's okay," she said, and he could hear muffled sounds on the other end of the line that he knew were her pained sobs.

"Doreen, can I do anything?" he asked gently.

"Oh, no," she said. "I knew today was David's special day . . . and I just wanted to hear about how it went."

Rick listened to more sniffling and sobs, and tried to think of something he could say. "It went great and he's a tiger. He's walking, he's talking up a storm. In fact I can see him right now from where I'm sitting. He's right at the place where the sand meets the surf, mushing his fat little feet into the wet sand and screeching at the top of his lungs every time the waves come."

"Oh good!" Doreen said, sounding sincerely cheered by the report.

"Oh and by the way, I've become part of a parenting group." He knew she would think that was funny. "All of us are parents who got their babies in unusual ways.''

"Ahh, that's so sweet," she said. "I'll bet it's fun for you."

"And one of the ideas the group leader had was for me to make a scrapbook for David, photos of his families, extended families and birth families. So I've been thinking about calling you, to ask if you'd send me some pictures of you."

"Oh, God," she said laughing. "There's never been a good one yet."

"And some of Bea, and of your sisters and brothers and their kids so David can see his cousins."

"Oh fun!" she said. The news that she was still included in David's life seemed to lift her spirits. "I'll start putting them together today. I know Bea has one of the whole family at a picnic table and . . . what? I'm on long distance!" Someone had come into the room on her end of the line.

"I have to go now," Doreen said abruptly, and without a good-bye, she hung up. Rick continued to hold the receiver as if he thought she might come back on the line, but then there was a dial tone. Disappointed, he put the phone back on the table.

"Not that it's any of my business," Patty said, "but this is where the system falls apart a little for me. I mean, how do you separate out your responsibility to this girl from your gratitude? Please don't think I'm being cold about all of this. I know how much the baby means to your life, Ricky, but I don't get it. She chooses you to be the one to take her baby. To me that part is good, I guess, because she feels as if she has some control over it all. Knows that the flesh of her flesh is with someone she deems okay. But isn't the theory that, barring Christmas cards and an occasional photograph, you make a clean break after the baby's handed off?"

"That's the theory," Rick said. "But it only works on paper. Something happens. It happened to me, anyway. Maybe because she lived in my house, maybe because she's so unique, but I care and will always care about her well-being. And now, at least when she's falling apart from the pain of the rest of her life, she can call me and still get some joy from knowing her baby is thriving. Not that I'm some great expert, but I don't understand how the other ways of doing this can work. A woman pretending she never had a baby? A
mother not looking at the calendar on the day she gave birth and wondering where the baby is?"

"You realize if she'd put David with another family, they might have been less sympathetic about her needs. A family with a mother who felt threatened by the intrusion."

"Yes I do. But she picked me, and her mother let her pick me. And maybe that was why. Because they both knew instinctively that I would never deny them a relationship with this baby. Or with me, even if the day ever comes, and you and I both know it won't, when I marry."

"Do you have any idea who the father is?" she asked. Mayer was walking up the beach with David toddling along next to him babbling away.

"As far as I know," Rick said, "when it comes to paternal influences, this kid is stuck with just little old me."

"God save us all," Patty said, flashing a smile as David climbed onto Rick's lap, salty and sandy. Rick stood him on his feet and peeled the soggy bathing suit off. "I'll take him inside and wash him," he said. And just as the bathing suit got past his thighs, David peed all over Rick.

"Well that's
his
comment on the situation," Rick said.

"Maybe your daddy better go in and take a shower
with
you," Patty suggested to David, who clapped his hands with glee at the idea.

A few days later the photographs from Doreen came in the mail. David's only interest in them was throwing them all around the room or biting on them, but Rick shuffled through them all. He smiled as he looked at the one of Doreen and her mother, remembering the life-changing day he met them at the airport.

He always viewed everything with his director's eye,
even these photos of Doreen and her sisters. Cheryl, the prettiest one, who unlike Doreen seemed to have confidence in her appearance. Susan smiled with her mouth but her weary eyes and body English were a giveaway of an unhappy young woman.

There were a million stories in the photo of the whole family, children and spouses included, at what appeared to be a picnic in a pretty-looking park. The poses people took, where they placed themselves in the shot, the expressions on their faces were all so telling. One more time he went through the whole pile of photos, and stopped for a long time at the one of the assembled family at the picnic, because now he saw something in it that made him afraid. Could it be? But then he dismissed the thought as his overactive imagination and put the pictures away.

29

S
OMETIMES after work Judith would pick up her two little girls who had been at home with the housekeeper all day and take them to the park. While she went through the ordeal of lifting the wiggling baby out of the infant car seat and gentling her fat little resisting body into the Snugli, then putting the stroller together while an impatient Jillian whined, she wondered if maybe her position on men and relationships was too tough.

"Every couple has their deal," her friend Jerralyn told her one day at lunch, "usually unspoken, and as long as each of them keeps the deal they're in good shape. He provides clothes and trips, she sticks around, he cheats, she ignores it. She flirts, he thinks it's cute. The partner you end up with is the one who offers a deal you can live with and vice versa."

Judith didn't ask Jerralyn what the deal was she had with her husband, Tom, just said, "I guess I haven't
met a man yet with a deal I like." But the idea of making a deal, unspoken or otherwise, was abhorrent to her. This evening she held baby Jody on her shoulder and pushed Jillian in the swing when a little toddler boy lurched into the play-equipment area, screaming, "Daddeeee! Daddeeee!" Jillian moved back and forth, little fists holding tight to the chains of the enclosed baby swing, and watched the little boy with fascination. Then, liking the sound of his chant, she took it up as her own.

"Daddeeee! Daddeeee!" she cried, her elfin voice echoing through the park. Each time she called out, the sound went right through Judith, who felt anguished that there might never be anyone to answer the cry. There must be a good man out there somewhere, she thought as a gray dusk fell around her. A sudden chill in the air made her wrap both girls in her own sweater and hold them close to her chest as she headed for the car. I'll find him, she decided. I'll tell Jerralyn, who's always trying to fix me up with one of Tom's friends or some guy she met on a ski trip, to go for it. To say that despite all of my refusals in the past, I've had a change of heart and I'm ready to take a shot.

The first man on Jerralyn's list was in the computer business, so wonderful looking he could be on the cover of
GQ
. This was the fellow Jerralyn and Tom had met on the ski trip. He talked a lot about his physical condition and eating habits, and when they got down to the details of Judith's life he seemed fascinated with the story of how she came to have her daughters.

"That is so great," he said over coffee. "You are a real original." But she knew it was all over with him when she finished the story and he said, "Well . . . it sounds to me like an extrapolation of masturbation."