The Thin Pink Line Read online

  It was a good thing that I was the only one in the room who knew I was occupying the moral low ground here, for I had neglected to tell my best friend David about my discussion with Alice and the book I was writing in the early hours of the morning.

  Why? you may well ask.

  Because while it was perfectly acceptable for me to have my best friend think that I would do such an insane thing because I’m, well, insane, it would be quite another for him to learn that there was now a profit motive involved. What can I say in my defense? I have a weird morality and I didn’t want David, who had always loved me in spite of my worst self, to think ill of me.

  Determined to be unreasonable to the bitter end, figuring that what they didn’t know about my own omissions wouldn’t hurt me, I rolled over onto my stomach and glanced sullenly at David over the top of a pillow. “And when were you going to tell me about all of this?”

  “When I was a success?” he asked more than answered.

  “Well,” Christopher put in helpfully, “at least you got the better of your mother for one brief shining moment today.”

  Oh my God. OhmyGod. OmigodomigodoMYGOD!

  It was Tolkien, on the phone, calling me at last!

  Oh, I thought frantically, if only I could place him on hold for a moment and put in an emergency call to David. Surely he’d know the right things to say.

  But I couldn’t do that. I mean, I knew that I couldn’t do that. That would be insane. What I had to do was, I had to still the wild beating of my heart just long enough to hear him say—

  “—pick you up at eight on Saturday night, then?”

  “Yes,” I just barely managed to reply.

  “Glad to hear that you can talk.” I was sure I heard him smile through the phone. “This is the first thing you’ve said since you said ‘hello.’”

  I closed my eyes with the sheer joy of it, holding the phone tight against my ear. “Yes.”

  “Okay,” he said, “that’s great then. You can talk and we have a date.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  From the thrill of triumph with Mother to the agonizing pain of defeat with Sophie: with her baby’s due date just around the corner, yes, dear reader, it was time once again to be showered to death. What with all of the wedding-baby showers of friends, acquaintances and near strangers that I’d been to in the last few years—a fate that I am certain is shared by all other UUs of my age—there were times when I felt as though I’d been a well-wisher at the happy events of every woman in the European Union.

  I suppose that, as her only sister, I should have been more instrumental in planning Sophie’s first baby shower. But I’d been rather busy lately, hadn’t I? Anyway, the upshot was that I’d forgotten all about it and so the arrival in my mail slot of an invitation to her shower had come as a bit of a shock. Oh, I’m sure she must have told me about it at some point, probably rather frequently, but whoever listens to Sophie if they can help it?

  I did know that, unlike with bridal showers, baby showers were rarely a surprise. True, if you made a bridal shower a surprise and the bride happened to be a fairly big drinker, you then ran the risk of her not showing up for whatever fake event you’d told her you’d planned on the given day. But if you tried to make a baby shower a surprise, you ran the added risk, not just of the honoree not showing up, but that when she did so, she’d be so shocked and overwhelmed by the outpouring of emotion that she’d go into premature labor and then whoever’d thrown the party would have the burden of a baby spending the first few months of its life in an incubator on their conscience.

  All of which made me glad that I wasn’t the one who was hostessing Sophie’s shower. The problem was the person who was.

  “No, Mother, for the last time. I’d love to be able to help you transform the living room into a faux nursery for Saturday, but as I’ve already said I think a few thousand times, we’re rather swamped here at work these days. You know, even though it’s still summer, the fall lists will be coming out soon and then it will be Christmas….”

  “She is your sister, Jane.”

  “Yes. I’m sure you’ve mentioned that a few times. In spite of that, though, I’m sorry. I’ll just have to be a guest this time.” Which was good because then I’d just have to phony smile at everyone when I first met them and not through the entire day as a co-hostess might. “Anyway, I thought that Sophie’d made a lot of new friends during those parentcraft classes that she and Tony have been taking. Can’t you put the touch on one of them to help you hang silicone bottle nipples as decorations?”

  “Well, I suppose…”

  The day of Sophie’s shower finally dawned, one of those airless days you get sometimes. As I walked up the path, I reflected that my personal forecast read: “should be anywhere else but here.”

  The living room had been transformed into a nightmare of baby cuteness, too awful to live through again via my own powers of description. Suffice it to say that, since Sophie and Tony had been adamant about not learning the sex of the baby ahead of time, there was every yellow, blue and pink permutation of baby-themed items on display, not to mention the bunting and balloons. When I tried to go into the kitchen, just off the living room, to see what kind of food and beverages would be on offer for the afternoon—some wine, maybe?—I was struck in the face by a low-flying decoration that had been attached to the ceiling: a yellow cloth nappy with “Welcome Loved Baby” stitched in alternating letters of pink and blue across the place where the baby’s bottom would one day be. I was beginning to feel that I’d stumbled into a Hieronymus Bosch painting in which H.B. himself had stumbled onto the wrong color palette.

  “Are you sure you should be drinking wine, Jane? I thought that pregnant women these days didn’t.”

  “Oh. That?” I laughed nervously at Mother’s words, pointing to the wineglass on the counter as if someone else might have put it there. In reality, having not seen any wine bottles set out along with the inevitable fruit punch and slimline cola, I’d fished in the back of the upper shelf of her fridge until I came up with what I’d known I’d find there: an industrial-size bottle of cheap Italian red. “Oh, I just put that out in case some of your other guests might want a glass but were too shy to ask. You know, I’m sure that not everybody you’ve invited today can all be pregnant.”

  “Actually…”

  But I was saved by the doorbell, telling my mother to get it as my hands were completely tied up—couldn’t she see?—with the task of finding a place in the fridge for that huge jug. While she was gone ushering guests in I took the opportunity to down the entire contents of the large glass of wine. It was going to be a long afternoon and, if I wasn’t fortified well, I’d die.

  Research, I reminded myself.

  Sucking down the last of the dregs, I reflected on how I might best utilize what would undoubtedly be an awful day. I’d knocked off the first third of the book, which represented the first trimester of pregnancy, effortlessly. This annoying shower business, I decided, would find its place in the last third somewhere. As for the middle of the book? That I’d write last. Middles of books, as everyone knew, were always the most tedious. It was beginnings and endings that were fun. So, in a way, I was here on business. Bloody hell, if I were already a published author, I could probably deduct my present to Sophie as a business expense.

  Research.

  “Jane, this is one of Sophie’s new best friends, Peg. They met in parentcraft class. Peg’s offered to help me co-hostess the festivities today.”

  The woman before me would have been scary even if she wasn’t pregnant but, with a belly bulging under her bow-tied maternity blouse that looked like it was set to go off at any second, she looked like a battleship with its very own individualistic destroyer missile.

  “You must be the sister,” Peg said, shifting the very large and prettily wrapped package she was carrying onto one hip so that she could offer me her hand in a stiff shake. “I’ve heard of you.”

&nbs
p; From the skeptical look on her face, apparently none of it was good.

  “Charmed,” I replied.

  “Oh!” my mother cried, remembering her hostess manners. “I should have taken that big package from you right away. Is it heavy? Here, let me show you where the table is that I’ve set up to lay out the presents. Oh, and you come too, Jane. I’m sure you’ll want to see it as well. Since you just came straight to the kitchen when you got here, you didn’t get a chance to put your present for Sophie down, either.”

  When we got to the present table—more pink, more yellow, more blue—Peg put her present down and both women turned to look at me: me, who was clearly carrying nothing larger and nothing more than a fashionable handbag, barely bigger than a cigarette case. I opened it up and pulled out the folded-over sheet of paper. They looked at me like I was daft.

  “It’s a gift certificate,” I explained.

  “For your sister?” they both asked as one.

  “Well, it’s not just any gift certificate,” I explained. “It’s to one of those super-duper mother-baby shops. You know the places? Mother Mayhem, Diaper Dream, one of those.” I looked at the gift certificate to see what it said. “Oops.” I laughed a hollow laugh. “It’s called Mother and Baby. Now how could I forget something as simple as that?”

  “Do you know you have a red stain on your blouse?” Peg asked. “It looks oddly like cheap Italian wine.”

  From there, the day only worked its way firmly toward worse.

  I wound up getting as drunk as repeated trips to the kitchen when no one else was there would allow. This meant that I focused my alcoholic efforts on the period of time when my mother had seen to it that everyone else had overfull plates, finally sitting down for ten minutes to eat herself, and the period of time when everyone was firmly focused on Sophie unwrapping her presents, as though spare disposable diapers and bottom wipes were the most fascinating things in the world. This further meant, having downed two glasses in rapid succession on each of the two occasions I had escaped to the kitchen, that the shower passed like an alternately blissful and hellish blur with Sophie’s friends impressing me as no more than a massive amoebalike blob of pregnancy as they seemed to move in a group, the presents streaming by my consciousness with me looking a little bit silly when I screamed when a giant stuffed purple animal—I think people said his name was Barney something—got too close. Other than that, nothing much bothered me until my mother accused me hissingly, in the kitchen, of being drunk.

  “Am not,” I hiccupped.

  “Are so,” she said, adding, “and you pregnant.”

  “Am not,” I maintained.

  “Oh, yeah? Then what’s that red stain doing on your shirt?”

  “I told you before—I poured a couple of glasses in case there were any unpregnant guests who wanted any.”

  “Before the stain was the size of a spot. Now it looks more like Australia.”

  “Well, I didn’t try to turn it into a whole continent. I was merely trying to remove the stain that was already there.”

  “Well,” my mother pointed out, “you didn’t do a very good job.”

  And so it went.

  Not long after being accused of being a drunken pregnant woman, I pleaded hormonal fatigue to explain away the wooziness, congratulated Sophie on helping to make the world a more overly populated place, and hailed a taxi, worried that I was too drunk to take the tube and might somehow get myself into trouble.

  Of course, had I been in usual top form that day, I might have thought to point out to dear old preachy Mum that family legend had it that she’d spent both of her own pregnancies bombed to the gills. Or, alternatively, I might have pointed out that she herself was not exactly a font of maternal sentiment, having repeatedly heard her recall her decision to have a second child so quickly after the first as: “Jane? Oh, yes. Well, we didn’t think it would be good for Sophie to be an only child. You know how people so often get a second cat so that the first won’t be lonely? Well, that’s why we had Jane. Jane was our second cat.” As it was, the opportunity had eluded me.

  The last thing I would ever want, I thought to myself as I bounced along in the back seat of a shiny black cab, would be to become like any of those women I had just been with.

  Whom I couldn’t remember very well at all.

  For our first formal date, Tolkien took me to a private club where they had a retro band competition going on and they had this foursome of mop tops on stage who were seriously into their Beatles thing. Yawn. As if any Englishman ever needed to hear “Hey Jude” just one more time. On the plus side though, since it was a private club and one had to be accompanied by a member to get in, and since no one I knew would be caught dead there, the chances of my running into anyone who knew me as five-months-pregnant Jane were zippo. On the downside, I did have to listen to what was probably one of the worst renditions ever of “Yesterday.” Yes, we all know that it’s the world’s all-time favorite song, but it really is a lot like the whole “Stairway to Heaven” thing: once you’ve heard the same song eighty million times, it’s kind of tough to feel the same sentimental charge (unless of course one keeps on smoking dope heavily well into one’s later years). I mean, come on, it’s like having a multiple orgasm that’s gone on one too many times; after a while, it gets to be like, “Uh, honey? Do you think we might go out for some chips now?” Back on the plus side, however, when the band did a fairly credible version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and Tolkien shyly asked if he could hold mine, something that used to be just a little bit too hard in me began to melt and I found myself grinning widely.

  Naturally, given my extraordinary situation—I certainly didn’t want him to think that I was pregnant, while I definitely didn’t want anyone else to suspect that I was not—I had to take extra precautions about everything. Take him picking me up, for instance.

  Tolkien, being the gentleman that he was, had insisted upon picking me up at my place, despite my protestations that it was completely unnecessary and that I could easily get anywhere on my own steam to meet him at any time he’d like.

  “Besides,” he’d said, “you can never begin a relationship from a place of trust if you start out by always meeting at neutral locations. I’ve got to see your place and you’ve got to see mine. Otherwise, how will each of us ever know that the other isn’t leading some kind of double life?”

  “Oh? Forgive me for saying this, but isn’t that a little extreme? After all, how can we begin a relationship from a place of trust when we begin it from a place of mistrust?”

  “I suppose I should make a confession up front. I’m an undercover cop for Scotland Yard. Remember that mustache on the first night we met? I’d been working a case earlier.”

  Good God! Scotland Yard, C.I.D.! If I’d had any sense, I would have pulled out right there, before running the risk of being caught out by a real professional.

  But I didn’t have any sense. Or at least apparently not where Tolkien Donald was concerned. I agreed to see him again, and I even agreed to let him pick me up.

  Of course that in itself required its own peculiar machinations.

  Ever since I’d moved to Knightsbridge, I’d been cursed with the kind of nosy neighbors that I’d previously thought existed solely within the realm of television. In my case, the Marcuses had always seemed to have their hands right in Trevor’s and my soup, even though they lived on the floor below. So naturally, when Trevor and I had broken up, they’d been right there with their front-and-center seats, on hand to hear whatever they could with their water glasses peeled to the walls but most notably the word baby getting bandied about like a neon-green Spalding at Wimbledon. Now that they thought I was pregnant, it was important to maintain that fiction, particularly in case either my mother or Sophie should stop by and get snared in a conversation with them. This meant that they needed to see me in the same loose-flowing nondescript outfits that I’d been wearing to work in order to maintain the illusion that some growing might be go
ing on beneath my clothes. This also meant that when Tolkien came to pick me up, in July, over the funky and tight-fitting outfit I’d selected (I was going for sexy but not trampish and was sure I’d succeeded), I’d donned a long shantung-silk dark coat of the tentish variety that I’d found in a secondhand shop, the kind of coat formerly worn by politicians’ wives in the fifties who’d wanted to downplay their pregnant conditions by admitting to no body shape at all.

  “You won’t be too hot in that?” Tolkien’d asked, his brow furrowed in concern as I locked the door behind me.

  “Not at all,” I’d responded, passing the Marcuses’ open door as we’d crossed the second-floor landing on our way down. I gave Mr. and Mrs. Marcus a friendly smile while mouthing the words “just a friend,” all the while thinking, “you silly old cows. If not for you, I wouldn’t be sweltering in this ugly thing.”

  “Really, Tolkien,” I’d assured him, “I’m fine. It’s just that, in the summer, I find that some places turn on the air-conditioning so high that I need to wear something warm until I’ve had the chance to acclimate my body temperature. I’m sure that once we get to where we’re going, and I’ve taken my usual minute, I’ll be ready to shed this thing in no time at all.”

  Oddly enough, considering his C.I.D. experience, he didn’t appear to take my oddness for anything more suspicious than the unabashed display of oddness that it was.

  Of course the elderly Marcuses—her with her floral aprons over housedresses and he with his suspenders that served no business-world purpose whatsoever—were also the reason that I, later on that same evening, having decided that I liked the Beatles again just fine if they gave me an excuse to hold any part at all of Tolkien, when he asked if I wanted to go back to my place, was forced to reply, chirpily, “Oh, can’t we just go to yours?”

  The way I figured it, with me being pregnant, I couldn’t very well let the neighbors start thinking I was some kind of tramp, now, could I?