Younger (13 page)

“I got my period,” she said.

“Oh, God,” I said, feeling devastated for her. She had been sure that the insemination had taken. “I'm so sorry.”

“I guess now it's especially good those adoption people are coming so soon, huh?” She wiped an incipient tear from the corner of her eye.

“Yes,” I said. “It's great you have the other option under way.”

And then I thought of the thing I'd wanted to say before, the thing I'd bitten back because Maggie had been so adamant about not wanting to change anything about the loft to impress the adoption agency. I'd never be able to live with myself if I thought my living there was the reason Maggie didn't become a mother.

“You know, it might be better if I wasn't here when the adoption people came,” I said gently. “I could pack my stuff up in the tent, find somewhere else to stay for a few days. I mean, it looking like someone else lives here might complicate things for you.”

Maggie stared at me. “But that would be lying,” she said finally.

“Not lying,” I reminded her. “Don't ask, don't tell.”

She gazed at me another minute. “I'm not going to do that,” she said finally. “In fact, I'm going to make a point of telling them you live here. You're my best friend. You're a mom. What could be bad about that?”

I could think of a hundred possibilities, but before I got the chance to begin enumerating them, Maggie stepped back into the bathroom and slammed the door.

I
offered to stay home that night with Maggie, but she shooed me away, saying she could certainly weather getting her period by herself, and besides, she wanted to be alone with her duck heart. While I would have been happy to spend the evening comforting Maggie, I was also dying to see Josh again.

We'd been out a few times during the week, but tonight, he was cooking me dinner. I expected maybe bratwurst and frozen fries, or a hearty pot of chili—the kind of thing Gary used to make on the rare occasions when he cooked. And since, after all my shopping, I hadn't gotten around to actually making anything too elaborate for Josh last time, he didn't have a very high standard to live up to.

So I was surprised and impressed to find a gourmet meal in progress when I arrived at Josh's place. Vegetables and exotic herbs were spread across the kitchen's stainless steel countertops, and something that smelled wonderful was bubbling on the stove.

“I didn't know you knew how to cook,” I said, kissing the corner of his mouth. He'd obviously been tasting his efforts; the preview was delicious.

“I don't,” he said. “I called my mom, like, ten times today.”

His mom. I forgot about people having moms—I mean, people I was having sex with. I could only hope that she was older than me.

“So what are we having?” I asked.

“Some salad thing. Let's see, shrimp with garlic and vegetables. And this kind of mushroom risotto—that's my mom's specialty.”

That was one of my specialties, too.

“How about a cocktail?” I said.

“I got something better,” he said, holding his fingers to his lips and making a sucking sound. “A little…”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and my confusion must have showed on my face.

“I got us a couple of blunts,” he said. “You know, spliffs.”

And when I still looked baffled: “Pot.”

“Ooooh,” I said, the light dawning. “I don't think so.”

I had smoked pot, of course. Round about the last time I'd gone on a date—twenty-five years ago.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “If nothing else, it'll make my food taste better.”

This really made me nervous. I had pleasant memories of my few experiences with marijuana, but I'd spent so many years warning Diana of its dangers that I'd begun to believe them myself. It can damage your lungs. It can muddle your thinking. And it can lead to harder drugs. By the end of the evening, I might find myself down under the Williamsburg Bridge, selling my body for a hit of crack.

But what really scared me was what I might say to Josh under the influence. My dim memories of smoking include lots of outrageous statements and wild laughter. Who knew what I might confess, with all my inhibitions dismantled?

I was about to suggest that I mix us a nice martini instead, when Josh lit up the joint. He took a really deep drag and held it out to me.

Maybe more than I was afraid of becoming a crack ho, I was afraid of Josh seeing me as uncool. I accepted the joint and took a light puff, trying not to inhale. Josh, in turn, poured me a glass of white wine, and I sat on a stool near the kitchen counter sipping the wine while he stirred his risotto and we passed the joint back and forth, companionably quiet.

Then Josh suggested we put on some music and said there were some things he wanted to play for me to update my taste from Marvin Gaye.

I looked skeptical. “Not like the rock they were playing in that club that night,” I said. “Because if it's that—”

“It's not that,” he said. “Do you like rap?”

“Uhhhh, I don't think so.” An Everest of pot was not going to make me that cool.

“But if you like Marvin,” he said, “and Aretha, I really think you'll like this.”

He put on something then that was a little bit rap and a lot more soul. “I'm going down…,” a woman sang, and I thought, Sister, I know just what you mean.

We made love. Maybe, I thought, if Gary and I had smoked pot, our sex life might have been better. But then I thought, naaaaaah.

Josh's playfulness was what enchanted me more than anything, so that I felt like a child, not merely a young woman. In the middle of kissing, of touching, of the most intense passion, he'd say something that made me laugh so hard we'd have to stop whatever we were doing so I could lie back and chortle, a more intense release than any orgasm. The only thing we seemed to do more than touch each other was to laugh.

The risotto burned, so we decided to ditch the plans for an elaborate sit-down dinner and eat in bed. Josh set down the pot holding the shrimp and the salad bowl directly on the sheets, handed me a fork, and suggested we dig in. It was delicious, the best dinner I'd ever eaten, it seemed. For dessert, instead of making the sundaes he'd planned, we fed each other ice cream and caramel sauce directly from the containers, and then squirted whipped cream into each other's mouths.

“Let's play a game,” he said, after we were finished eating.

“All right.” I stretched. “How about Scrabble?”

He looked at me as if I'd suggested we play a little croquet, right there on the bed.

“I had something electronic in mind,” he said. “Do you know Doom?”

Oh, I knew Doom all right.

“Not really.”

“Final Fantasy?”

“Nope.”

“I know. I'll just teach you the game I've been working on. My own design.”

“I'd like that,” I said. “But I've never really played video games.”

I don't think he really understood what I meant by never, because he handed me the controls, gave me a brief tutorial, then seemed to think I'd know what to do. But my pathetic little guy kept getting instantly annihilated by the alien space guns, incapable of making even the feeblest attempt to get out of the way.

“I know you don't have any brothers,” Josh said, “but didn't you have guys as friends? Boyfriends, maybe, who tried to teach you to play?”

“No,” I said, attempting and failing yet again to get the little man to jump over the rock. “I never even tried to play one of these.”

Josh shook his head and took the controller back. “You press X with your left hand and Right Arrow with your right, like this,” he said. The little man leaped handily into the air, only to encounter another rock.

“Okay,” I said, taking the controller back. “I get it now.”

The little guy slammed head-on into the rock, and the game evaporated him completely.

“That's it!” Josh cried, snatching the controller from me. “You're banned!”

Laughing, I grabbed for it.

“Oh, no,” he said, holding it beyond my reach. When I lunged for it, he slid it across the floor and then clamped his hands over my wrists, wrestling me back onto the floor. I jerked my knee upward—a Krav Maga move—and managed to startle him onto his side, but he quickly recovered and rolled me over again onto my back, straddling me, breathing hard.

“What have you been doing all these years?” he said.

It sounded like teasing, but I could feel my guard go up. I wanted to tell Josh the truth. And I'd decided that when I couldn't, I'd try not to say anything at all.

“You know,” I said, my voice light and teasing.

“No, I don't,” he said seriously. “I know you went to Mount Holyoke. I know you spent some time traveling. But I don't know how much time, or where you went, or what you did. And if you're twenty-nine now, that leaves a lot of years unaccounted for.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Well, how did you get your name, anyway? Alice sounds so…old.”

“I was named after my grandmother,” I said, relieved that he'd asked a question that allowed me to both reveal something about myself and answer honestly. “She was Italian—Alicea.”

“Alicea. That's pretty. Maybe I'll call you that. Or Ali. You seem more like an Ali.”

I made a face, remembering the horrible restaurant guy. “I really prefer Alice.”

“What did you do for work before you got this publishing job?” Josh asked. He put down his game controller, his face suddenly serious.

“I didn't really work,” I told him. “I tried to write a bit, but it didn't go anywhere.”

“So what did you do?” he asked. “How did you support yourself?”

“I didn't support myself. I got money from my…family.”

“From your mother.”

“My mother paid for college,” I said truthfully. “But then I had other family money.” Namely, Gary's money.

“I'd like to meet your family,” he said.

I laughed, until I realized he meant it.

“But I told you. My father died when I was a child, and my mother died last summer. I'm pretty much on my own now.”

“What about Maggie?” he said. “You always say that Maggie is like your family. Why can't I meet her?”

Maggie had actually expressed curiosity about meeting Josh, too, but I was afraid such a get-together would raise more issues than it would settle, with Josh wondering how I had gotten to be friends with someone “so old,” and Maggie getting way too much material for the boy-toy jokes she already teased me with.

“I just don't think it's a good idea,” I said.

“Are you ashamed of me?” Josh asked.

Ashamed?
How could he imagine such a thing? I wanted to show him off to everyone I'd ever met in my entire life. In theory, of course.

“Of course not,” I assured him.

I stood up and walked across the room to the refrigerator, suddenly in need of a beer. Maybe, too, the sight of my naked body would serve to distract him.

“Why all these questions?”

“My parents were asking me,” he said. I could hear him pull in a shaky breath. “They want to meet you.”

“No!” I squealed, clutching the cold beer to my heart.

“Jesus, what's the problem? They're coming into the city, and they want to take me out to dinner, and they wondered whether you might like to come along. No big deal.”

“Good,” I said. “I'm glad it's no big deal. Because I don't want to go.”

“Why not? My parents are very nice people.”

I was sure they were. He'd already told me they lived in Fairfield, Connecticut, that his father worked as a lawyer for the state and his mom had become a nursery school teacher once Josh and his sister were in high school. They had an old house—a lot like my house in Homewood, I'd bet—and his mother loved to garden. I'm certain she and I would have a lot in common, much more than Josh had ever bargained on.

“Listen,” I told him. “I really like you. I want to be with you. But I thought the deal here was neither of us was interested in a commitment. You're moving to Tokyo, Josh. From the very beginning, we knew this was a temporary thing.”

“But why do you have to put all these limits on it? Even sometimes when we're just talking, it's like you have a limit on how much you'll tell me—like you're afraid you might give away too much.”

There he was, the person I had been afraid of all along, the Harvard MBA lurking inside the gamer. “When I met you, you talked about how you didn't want to get married,” I reminded him. “How you didn't want to get serious about anything or anybody. That's the only reason I wanted to go out with you in the first place.”

Josh looked at me as if he were seeing me for the very first time. “That was the only reason?”

I took his hand, softening. “No, of course not. Of course that wasn't the only reason. I like you a lot, Josh.”

If last week I felt twenty-eight or twenty-nine, tonight I felt fourteen.

He breathed out through his nose and seemed vulnerable as a little boy—not, I must note, a real turn-on for me. But I had reduced him to this state.

“But it's
because
I like you so much that I want to be sure we're in agreement about how far this relationship is going to go,” I tried to explain. “I don't want a big committed relationship right now. I need to be free to put my energy into my job, to put myself first. I haven't done that for a long time.”

Josh looked at me curiously. “Why not?”

I shook my head as if to clear that statement from our collective memory. “This is about you too, Josh,” I reminded him. “You made this huge change in your life, went through all this pain to break commitments you'd made, so you would be free to go to Tokyo and study gaming. That's got to be your priority.”

“But I feel like I'm falling in lo—”

“Stop!” I screamed. “Don't say that.”

“Why not? Why can't I say it? It's what I feel.”

“Because it scares me,” I told him. The truth.