Crossing the Line Read online

  “Oh, no,” she shook her head. “I’m sorry, Jane, but it’s just not in the budget. Dexter Schlager,” she went on, referring to our hairless Editor-in-Chief, “was pretty adamant. He said that he hadn’t expected to take on a new editor’s salary this year, but that he had—yours. And please don’t think he’s sorry for a minute. He thinks it’s great that we’ll have a ‘writing editor in residence,’ as he put it, on staff. But as for springing for a second unexpected salary for a new assistant editor—”

  Knock, knock.

  “Yes?” invited Dodo.

  The door swung open, apparently pushed by a sullenly nasty toe, and there stood Louise, slouched with arms crossed against the doorway, in all her surly glory.

  “Jane,” announced Dodo, trying to strike a bright tone but failing miserably, “meet your new assistant!”

  While waiting for Stephen Triplecorn to arrive for his first visit in regards to doing a Home Study, I did some quick research on foundlings, foster care and, my ultimate did-not-dare-to-dream-yet goal, adoption. I learned that fifty-six abandoned babies were discovered here a year, according to Home Office figures; that it was highly irregular for a black baby to be placed in a white home—which really bothered me and not just because of my situation with Emma—but that at least my unmarried status wasn’t a mark against me; and that adoption, if it were even possible, would take years.

  As I opened the door on Stephen Triplecorn, I saw that he was still favoring tight trousers, which he wore with a short-sleeved striped shirt and tie, and no jacket.

  “I know people get excited at the prospect of spring coming,” I said, “but you do realize that it’s bloody freezing out today.”

  Wrong, wrong, wrong, Jane. I wanted to hit myself in the head with my own fist. Do not, DO NOT alienate the man who holds your life—Emma’s life—in his hands.

  “Would you like some tea?” I asked sweetly.

  “No, thanks,” he said. “Tea’s too warm. That’s why I favor the short sleeves when I can get away with it—too hot-blooded for my own good.”

  “I see. So where shall we…?”

  “Actually, I’d like to talk to your neighbors first. You did tell me you’d tell them to be expecting my visit.”

  “Right.”

  An hour later, he was back, clipboard in hand.

  “How did it go?” I asked, anxiously.

  “Well,” he said, “the two gay guys upstairs vouched for you completely. But we expected that, didn’t we? After all, the Israeli one is your best friend, correct?”

  “Yes, but that’s never stopped him from speaking the truth about me before.”

  “Yes, well…They also said they watch the baby for you frequently while you’re at work. Is that true?”

  I prepared to get defensive. “Is there a problem with that?”

  “No.” He shook his head mildly. “No problem at all. As a matter of fact, they both seem saner than you do.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Welcome.” He chewed on his pen, did a squinting thing at me. “Now, the Marcuses downstairs…Do they drink?”

  I was surprised. “Why do you ask?”

  “Not sure, but they both seemed somewhat dotty. They said you used to be a bit noisy sometimes, before the baby, but much less so since, and that they were surprised at the color of the baby, said they thought for sure your baby’s father was white.”

  “Oh.”

  “Now, why do you think they’d say that?”

  I wince-smiled. “Because they drink?”

  He nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. At any rate, the important thing is, at least so far, that everyone says the same thing…Emma appears to be happy in your care.”

  He looked over to her, as if to confirm this, and Emma obliged him with a smile.

  And Emma was a happy baby, an extraordinarily happy baby. All you had to do was look at her to see that. Sure, she did her share of crying every day—like when she woke hungry or when she wanted to be changed or got frustrated or when she just wanted to be held—and sometimes that crying could get to me, but she was so much happier the vast majority of the time than most babies I knew about. She was a joy. She gave it. She was it.

  “Yup,” said Stephen Triplecorn. “There’s no denying that’s one happy kid.”

  I started to smile.

  “But that doesn’t mean you’re in the clear,” he added.

  I wanted to tell him to stuff a sock in it. But, unable to avoid a glance at the bulging crotch of his trousers, it looked like he already had.

  I’d been meeting with the playgroup at Mary Jr.’s house for a few weeks now. We did try for every week, but with everyone’s busy lives, we weren’t always all able to make it. Sometimes, like now, there was only one other woman—in this instance, Charmaine—there with us.

  With fewer people, the conversation tended to be more personal.

  “Excuse me for not remembering,” asked Charmaine, “but how is it again that you and Mary know each other?”

  “You remember,” answered Mary Jr., “she came to Mum’s funeral.”

  “Oh, right,” said Charmaine. “She used to clean your office or something—was that it?”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling vaguely embarrassed at maintaining this lie about a woman I’d never met, or had only met in her coffin.

  “Where was that again?” asked Mary Jr.

  Before I had Emma, I would have found it odd, her forgetting a piece of my own personal trivia that was so essential to my identity. But since? I knew now that if you put a half dozen women plus babies together in a room, they were a lot more likely to discuss feeding concerns and sleeping habits as opposed to the fate of the euro or Middle East relations. And that’s not condescension talking, by the way; for in that room, I realized that, in a sense we were doing the most essential work that allowed the rest of the world to spin blithely on.

  “Churchill & Stewart,” I answered.

  Mary Jr. was puzzled.

  “Huh,” she said. “I don’t remember Mum ever mentioning that place.” But then her brow eased as she observed Martha doing yet another spectacular-baby thing, and she shrugged. “No matter. It’s not like cleaning offices is the most exciting thing in the world. I suspect Mum must have done a lot of places she didn’t bother to mention.”

  “Hey!” I exclaimed, hoping to deflect the subject. “Did you see what Martha just did with her feet?”

  Mary Jr. glowed with pride. “Yeah, she’s pretty brilliant, that one.”

  We were eight around my table.

  We were a tight fit, I’ll grant you, but we were eight.

  With David and Christopher, who I’d always expected to vouch for me anyway, and the drunken Marcuses out of the way, I realized that it would only be a matter of time before Stephen Triplecorn—The Man With The Big Package—would be calling on my family and co-workers. Admittedly, the wheels of Social Services seemed to take forever to grind—believe me, I wasn’t complaining!—but I needed to plan ahead. So, in the hopes of enlisting their aid, or at the very least persuading them not to say “Oh, Jane Taylor? Right. The pathological liar with the fake pregnancy,” I called them all together for another party. Not wanting to take any chances, I had David do the cooking, so what we wound up with was a nice big salad of field greens, something bruschetta-y and a game animal nobody recognized, plus chocolate for dessert, which somehow made it all okay.

  Once dessert was over, though…

  “What are you up to, Jane?” my mother asked.

  I’d already tried to corner my mother several times, hoping to get to the bottom of Sophie’s “Mother is having an affair” assertion. But every time I’d tried to do so, she’d been practicing that safety-in-numbers thing, actually talking to others in such a way that it would have been socially awkward for me to grill her.

  “‘Up to?’” I asked.

  “You didn’t call us all here to feed us well,” said sister Soph.

  “Are you going to read a will
?” asked Constance, gleefully. “I always wanted to be at a will-reading in a drawing room.”

  “This isn’t a drawing room,” Stan from Accounting pointed out.

  “Nobody died,” said Louise, through gritted teeth.

  “Are we completely sure of that?” Dodo asked mildly.

  “Of course we’re sure of that!” I said. “Nobody died! Why would you even think such a thing?”

  “You have to forgive Dodo her anything-is-possible stance,” said Stan, “because with you, anything is possible.”

  I don’t know why, but I actually suspected Stan meant that as a compliment. What was going on with him?

  “He’s right,” agreed Minerva from Publicity. “You’re just like that Corinthians verse.”

  “You mean the one they use at weddings? Isn’t that about love, faith and hope?” Louise sneered.

  “That’s the one,” said Minerva. “Do you have any more of this chocolate?”

  “But Jane is nothing like that Corinthians verse!” Louise objected.

  “If you like,” conceded Minerva, “I’d still like some more chocolate, please.”

  I cut her some.

  “There really isn’t a dead body in this anywhere, if you must know,” I said.

  “We must.” Louise was adamant.

  “Well, there isn’t,” I said. “What there is…”

  “Yes, Jane?” Constance leaned forward.

  “Spit it out, Jane!” said my sweet mother.

  I spoke the words in a rush. “Stephen Triplecorn, the Social Services person who’s handling my case, is going to want to interview all of you to check my references.”

  “You already know what I think about you keeping Emma,” sniffed my mother.

  It never failed to amaze me. I had yet to come across a black person who expressed the belief that I had no right to keep Emma and yet my own mother still insisted on being dead-set against.

  “This isn’t about the social aspect of the case,” I said, “or what your views are on cross-cultural placement. It’s about whether or not I’m a fit mother for Emma.”

  Louise spewed wine across the table.

  “You want us to vouch for you?” she laughed.

  It did get better from there, but please believe me when I say: not by much.

  Later on, as everyone was leaving, Stan from Accounting stopped for a moment.

  “I’m just curious, Jane,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Nearly a year ago, you began your fake-pregnancy scam.”

  “Eleven months,” I corrected.

  “Fine. Eleven months. But that’s hardly the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “It just seems to me, that anyone who would go to such great lengths to fake a pregnancy, must have had real ambivalence about having a real child. So, what I want to know is: What changed? What’s changed in the last eleven months?”

  His question surprised me.

  “Why,” I said, “I found Emma.”

  “And that’s it?” he asked.

  I thought about it; it seemed so important to him.

  “Yes,” I said, finally. “I was never ready before I found her. But I am now.”

  As my mother used to like to say, every year of my growing up, “Yes, even Jane’s got to have a birthday. Might as well do something to mark the day.”

  I couldn’t agree with her more. The only problem was, my day was here and there was no one for me to mark it with.

  David was working; Christopher was off doing one of those ex-architect type of things he’d begun doing lately, Frisbee golf or something, (not that he and I would ever do anything alone together anyway); my mother, ever since I’d moved out of her house, had failed to mark the day; my sister, likewise; and I’d worked from home all afternoon, so it wasn’t even like I could have an absolute-minimum workplace birthday with cloying cake and a five-minute break.

  “Oh, well.” I held Emma in my arms as I sat on the couch, legs tucked under me with Kick the Cat nuzzling against my bent knees. “Mummy is thirty today. It’s easy to remember. It’s March 30th and Mummy is thirty. You’d think someone might remember that, wouldn’t you? No? I guess not. It’s all still gibberish to you anyway, right? How about we go out for some cake and milk, just me and you? You can have the milk—”

  Knock, knock.

  The three of us made our way to the door.

  It was Tolkien, looking a little the worse for the rain that was pelting against the windows.

  Since my impromptu visit to Scotland Yard, I hadn’t seen him once. Sure, we’d talked on the phone for at least a few minutes every day—he liked to keep on top of how things were going with Emma—but having made my first aggressive move, I’d decided to hang back and wait for him to make the second. That second move had been long coming, I’d started to believe it would never come, but now, apparently—I hoped!—it had arrived.

  “You never ask ‘Who’s there,’ do you?” he asked.

  “Emma and I like being surprised,” I said, holding the door open. “Besides, the Marcuses wouldn’t let anyone pass without giving them the evil eye first.”

  He looked around, as though he might be expecting someone other than we three: Emma, the cat and me.

  “Were you meeting someone here?” I asked, sarcastic perhaps, but that’s me.

  “No.” He reddened. “It’s just that before I knocked, I thought I heard voices.”

  Now it was my turn to redden. “Oh. That.”

  I explained how the baby-care book recommended talking to your child as much as possible, that language acquisition was easier for children who heard it a lot—I mean, duh—and that early language acquisition helped children feel less frustrated with the world.

  “So I talk to her nearly all the time,” I said. “Most of the time, I feel like the greatest moron who ever lived, you know, sitting here talking about the light fixtures or how to boil an egg or Chaucer to a baby who can’t answer back. But the book does say it’s good for her…”

  He was staring at me.

  “What?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing. Something. Who knows what I was thinking? At any rate, I brought you these.”

  And here, he produced a bouquet of flowers.

  They were nothing you’d call grand, having in fact wilted somewhat in the rain, not the proverbial dozen roses or anything exotic or out of season; it was just a small bunch of wild-flowers in need of a vase.

  “What’s—?”

  “For your birthday,” he answered my not-wholly-formed question.

  “But how did you know?”

  “Don’t you remember, when we were dating? We had those conversations that people always have early on in a relationship, you know, where people exchange favorite colors and foods and Beatles…”

  “…and flowers and birth dates,” I finished for him.

  “Exactly,” he said, as Emma and I went to find a vase. “As a matter of fact, I did remember your favorite flowers are peonies, but when I looked, they said they were out of season.” Now he really looked embarrassed. “At any rate, I rang your office, thinking you’d be there, but that new receptionist—Helga?”

  “Hilda,” I corrected.

  “Nasty thing, isn’t she? Anyway, she said today was one of your work-at-home days, so here I am.”

  “With flowers.”

  “Yes, well…”

  He actually shuffled his feet.

  “Do you want to sit down?” I asked. “I could get you something to drink. Emma and I were just going out for milk and cake, but we can all go.”

  “Oh, no,” he waved his hand. “I can’t intrude on that.”

  “But you wouldn’t be—”

  “You and Emma are doing just great, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “I can see that.” He smiled, a smile that was equal parts sad and happy. “I’m glad, Jane. Emma deserves to be happy and you seem
to be doing a good job with her.”

  “Well, thanks, but I still don’t see why you can’t come with us.”

  “I need to get going now,” he said abruptly. Then he kissed me on the top of my head, just the briefest brush of air and warmth that I wished I could capture somehow like a firefly under glass.

  “Take care of her,” he said to me. Then, “Take care of your mum, Em.”

  He kissed each of us on the cheek, quickly, and left.

  Emma could now lift her head like a trouper, could follow an “object in arc” in whatever ways the book said she should or might, and could make a razzing sound.

  Who would have ever thought that I’d experience so much joy from a tiny little person giving me a raspberry?

  April, the fourth month

  Louise was blocking me at every turn.

  That day when Louise had virtually kicked open Dodo’s door, and Dodo announced her as my new assistant, I’d nearly fallen off my chair. What could Dodo have been thinking of? Louise hated me!

  After Louise had slunk off, Dodo had explained:

  “The way Dexter Schlager figured it, one of the editors would have to share their assistant with you, since he wasn’t about to spring for a new one. It was either her or Constance, and, well, Jane, surely, you must understand, I can’t start sharing an assistant at this stage in my career.”

  So Dodo had persuaded Dexter to make Louise’s boss share her.

  “And who knows, Jane?” Dodo tried to put a bright face on it. “Maybe you’ll do so many brilliant things, right out of the gate, that Dexter will find it worthwhile to get you your very own assistant.”

  Not bloody Rupert Murdoch likely, I thought.

  “You do realize, don’t you,” I’d pointed out, “that Louise will despise working under me? That she’ll thwart me at every turn?”

  “Oh, surely, it won’t be that bad.”

  But it was.

  And who could blame Louise, really? Certainly not me, not when I stopped to give it any thought.

  Never known for either self-awareness or great reserves of empathy, I still managed to put myself in Louise’s knockoff Manolo Blahniks: What if she, previously on the same stratum as I once was when I started at Churchill & Stewart, were suddenly to successfully leapfrog from assistant to assistant editorship to full editorship and the company turned around and appointed me her assistant?