The Thin Pink Line Read online

  Tolkien looked embarrassed for the first time since I’d met him. “But your place looked so comfortable, Jane, while mine is, well, so bachelory.”

  “Now, now,” I wagged my finger coyly, “weren’t you the one saying earlier that you’d show me yours if I showed you mine?”

  And so he did.

  It turned out that by “bachelory,” what Tolkien had really meant was lacking in personality. Oh, sure, there were tables and chairs and assorted other furniture, as well as the prerequisite male perfect sound system and trillion-strong collection of tapes and CDs. But there was nothing meaningful on the walls and, except for the testosterone temple to music, everything had a transient feel as if it could poof up in smoke in a minute and the owner wouldn’t mind.

  “Well,” he said, pouring me a glass of wine, after I’d as politely as possible commented on the neuter decor, “a person never knows when he might have to up and move.”

  “Oh.” That explained everything. “Your job must have you moving about frequently, all that undercover work and stuff.”

  “No, not really. So long as I have effective disguises, it’s not really essential for me to move from safe house to safe house.”

  “Well, then, did you just move here recently?”

  “No. Been here about two years.”

  “Ah.”

  “See, the way I figure it, sometimes a person goes through periods in his or her life when they just know that they’re in transit, like one of those caterpillar things on the way to something better.” He looked at me meaningfully then. “The way I figure it, the last couple of years of my life have just been a holding pattern.”

  In the event, it didn’t matter that all of Tolkien’s furniture, even that in his bedroom, was no more than utilitarian. In the event, all that mattered was that he treated me to the kind of orgasm that made my toes curl, my eyes snapping open with both disbelief and belief, and that I was able to be there to see the same thing happen for him.

  God knows, it wasn’t going to be easy, keeping my pregnant and nonpregnant worlds running well and simultaneously, but I was newly determined to try.

  “Gee, your baby doesn’t move very much, does he? Are you sure he’s okay in there?”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Stan from Accounting had snuck up on me noiselessly while I’d been going over the quarterly sales figures on the latest Colin Smythe. He’d put his arms around me from behind, determinedly rubbing my abdomen.

  “I’m checking for early fetal movement,” he said, still rubbing.

  Oh, the things we pregnant women had to endure. “Well, my baby’s the silent, refined type.”

  “But I thought all you skinny bitches had babies that you could feel moving real early.”

  “How would you know a thing like that?”

  “Because my sister’s a skinny bitch and her baby started moving right before the end of month four, just like clockwork.”

  “I can’t believe they allow members of your family to breed, Stan. There ought to be a law.” Damn! When I’d read about early fetal movement in the pregnancy books, I’d known that this was going to be one of those niggling little picayune details that was going to rear up and bite me on the arse; I just hadn’t imagined it doing so in such a tactilely odious way. “And cut that out!” I said, finally batting his rubbing hands away. “Go find some numbers to crunch or something.”

  In spite of how much Stan from Accounting annoyed me, I knew that he kind of had something there. In the absence of the more typical evidence of a fetal presence, like kicks that others could feel, it would be nice if I had something tangible to offer. Hoping to get some bright ideas, I phoned Dodo and told her I wouldn’t be in to work that morning, claiming a nosebleed that just wouldn’t quit, graphically adding a thoroughly ruined white silk blouse for good measure. Then, instead of going into the office, I hightailed it over to a prenatal clinic I’d noticed one day. I figured it was as good a place as any to go trawling for ideas.

  Okay, so maybe I was on some kind of blind scavenger hunt in which I had no idea what I was scavenging for, because, truthfully, I wasn’t even sure what I expected or hoped to find. All I knew was that Stan from Accounting might one day demand proof of my baby’s existence and a prenatal clinic seemed like the right spot to learn what—other than big, fat bellies—other women used as proof that there was legitimate life growing within.

  “Can I help you?” asked the nurse behind the glass partition as I entered the crowded waiting room. At Sophie’s baby shower I’d absorbed the lesson that, while two might still be considered company, one pregnant lady often constituted a crowd.

  “Oh no,” I said, looking around in hopes of spotting a vacant seat.

  “You’re not here to see a doctor?”

  “God, no.”

  Ah! Found one!

  “Then you’re here for…?” She left the question open-ended, I suspect in hopes that I would finish it up. When I failed to do so, however, she must have figured the entire conversation was now up to her. “To pick someone else up perhaps?”

  I stabbed the air with my forefinger. “That’s it exactly.”

  I began riffling through the remaining magazines on the cheap wooden table—God! Why did Reese Witherspoon have to be on everything this month?—until I remembered that I was supposed to be there doing my research, not reading magazines for free.

  “Hello,” I said brightly to the very pregnant lady sitting right next to me. “Been coming here long, have you?”

  She tried not to look at me as though I were the oddest creature on earth. “Er, well, I have been coming here for as long as I’ve been pregnant.”

  “Ah. I see.” Not very forthcoming, was she? I could see that I was going to have to work hard at this one. “Do you find that—being far along as you obviously are—that people ever expect you to offer them some kind of surefire proof that you’re really carrying a baby in there and that it’s not just some kind of a hoax you’ve cooked up?”

  Without bothering to answer me, she struggled out of her chair and over to the nurses’ station, demanding to see the doctor right away.

  Oh, well, I thought to myself as I watched the bewildered nurse allow her to pass through, there were still plenty of other pregos out here for me to question.

  I leaned across the cheap wooden table in order to whisper to the moderately pregnant woman who was just on the other side. “How about you? If other people can’t feel your baby kick, do they just accuse you of making it up?”

  Another one who wouldn’t answer the simplest of questions. Rather than engaging in the fun of talking to me, she too went up to the nurse, saying she was ready to pee in the cup now and that when she was done, she’d gladly freeze her butt off in whatever cold room wasn’t being used at present.

  After she’d also passed through, the nurse addressed me, a suspicious expression on her face. “Excuse me, who did you say you were here to pick up?”

  “Umm…Julie?”

  She shook her head.

  “Sharon?”

  She shook it again.

  “Marianne? Siobhan? Lily?”

  She began to rise from her chair, all starch and authority.

  “Well, who have you got on your appointment list there?” I asked, getting desperate. “I’m sure it must be one of them.”

  “You’re going to have to leave,” she said, forcing me to my feet as she gripped me under the arm and marched me toward the door. “You obviously have no business being here and you’re disturbing the other patients.”

  “But it’s a free country.”

  “Actually, it’s a constitutional monarchy, which is not necessarily synonymous.” Then she slammed the door in my face.

  I sat on the edge of the curb, trying to keep my feet out of the way of passing traffic as it whizzed on by. Well, that hadn’t done any good. I’d wasted the morning with a bunch of pregos and I still didn’t have the answer to the question of wh
at proof I had to offer suspicious minds like Stan’s from Accounting.

  I was just beginning to debate the idea of hunting down some Greek food, when the very pregnant lady, the first one I’d spoken to while still inside, exited the clinic door. She was holding some papers in her hand that she was excitedly looking at as she moved down the street.

  Hopping to my feet, I brushed off the bottom of my shorts and hurried to catch her up. “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, God, it’s you again,” she accused, pressing the pages to her breast.

  “Please don’t run off,” I begged. “You looked so happy when you came out of there.” I indicated the clinic door. “I wouldn’t want to do anything to change that, and I can assure you that I’m absolutely harmless. I only wanted to ask someone, someone who would obviously know the answers to a few innocent questions about pregnancy.”

  She still looked skeptical.

  “Look,” I pointed, “there’s a bobby right there on the corner. If I upset you too much, you can always have him arrest me.”

  She folded her arms. “So what did you want to know?”

  “Well, mostly, what I want to know is what you offer people as proof that you’re really pregnant? I mean, I’m content to take you at your word, but say if other people couldn’t feel your baby kick, even though you told them it did, do you have anything you could show them that would make them sit back and say, ‘Ah, there really is a life growing in there’?”

  When I’d posed the question, I worried that she might call the bobby but, oddly enough, her expression softened into a smile.

  “Well, today I’ve got these, haven’t I?” She showed me the pages she’d been clutching, peering over my shoulder as I studied them. They were blurry black-and-white photos with swirly shapes on them that were kind of like the Milky Way but rounder.

  “What are these?” I asked.

  “Why, they’re my baby.”

  “These?”

  “I had an ultrasound done today. These are the sonogram pictures. This is my baby’s head,” she pointed, “and this is his bottom.”

  I didn’t tell her, because I thought it might be rude, but her baby’s head and bottom looked exactly the same to me.

  She must have read my expression because she shrugged, unconcerned. “Well, that’s what the technician said anyway.”

  “You’re kind of late in your pregnancy to be having one of these, aren’t you?”

  “Not necessarily. They can do them from the fifth week right on through.”

  “Nothing’s wrong, I hope.”

  “Oh, no.” She looked slightly embarrassed. “It’s silly, really. But, well, the first time they did an ultrasound, the genital organs weren’t distinguishable yet and, well, I did so want to decorate the baby’s nursery before he came. It is a he, by the way, you can tell by that thing over there. Anyway, I figured that by having another ultrasound done in my seventh month—” God! I’d thought she was nearly done! Good thing I hadn’t said anything “—they could tell with reasonable certainty, even though it’s never hundred percent.”

  “They’re really great pictures,” I lied. “You can really see a lot in them.” My mind, however, was turning toward other things. “Now, say a person was only supposed to be in her fourth month of pregnancy. If that person had a sonogram, would it look similar to yours?”

  “Well, for starters, no two are alike, I wouldn’t imagine. Then, too, I’m not an expert, but I would think that someone who’d had some experience with these things might be able to detect a difference.”

  Rats! Stan from Accounting had relatives who bred like rabbits, apparently. If he’d been reading this lady’s sonogram instead of that idiot of a technician they had in the clinic, she’d probably have been able to do up the nursery in little toy boats and blue, blue, blue months ago. In other words, Stan would probably be able to tell that these sonogram pictures showed a pregnancy that was far more advanced than mine was supposed to be at this point.

  I felt dejected. “I guess then that it wouldn’t matter how much I offered you to sell me your sonogram pictures. They wouldn’t do me any good anyway.”

  “You were going to try to offer me money so that you could have these pictures of my baby?”

  Glumly, I nodded.

  She snatched the pages back out of my hand. “You’re a sick, sick woman,” she hissed and, before I even knew what I was about, she was off, moving down the street as quickly as her varicose-veined legs would allow.

  Great! Now what was I going to do?

  For the remainder of the day I—there’s no other word for it—stalked women as they came out of the clinic. Still worried about Stan from Accounting’s baby sophistication, I made sure to only target women who looked like their own pregnancies were within range of where mine was supposed to be at this stage. I know it wasn’t particularly the nice thing to do but I just thought that if I could only get my hands on one of those pictures, I’d be made at work.

  But, no matter how much money I offered those women—and I was willing to pay a lot—none of them were willing to part with those precious pictures of theirs. God! What was wrong with them? You’d think I was trying to buy their actual babies or something instead of some silly pictures. They could keep the babies, as far as I was concerned; pictures were much less fuss.

  Yes—yes—yes, I know what that sounds like. And, believe me, I’m not sooo insensitive that it’s beyond me to understand why these women might want to retain this early evidence of life growing within. But I didn’t want to think about that right then. After all, they were going to eventually get babies to replace those pictures, while I, on the other hand, needed those pictures.

  Still, by the end of the day I felt somewhat haggard. I knew I was lucky that none of them had tried to have me arrested, particularly since I had that same uneasy feeling I’d always had at university whenever I’d been in the process of purchasing illegal drugs. I envisioned myself stealing some pictures, possibly going through the clinic’s trash after they’d closed for the day or whipping them out of the hands of some unsuspecting prego before sprinting off down the street, hoping the bobby wouldn’t catch me before I managed to hail a cab, but I knew that wasn’t on.

  So there I was, in the middle of London, hot, tired, and I hadn’t even gotten to have my Greek lunch. I was no closer to having tangible proof of my pregnancy and I now had a whole slew of pregos mad at me. Life as a writer-researcher pretty much well sucked.

  At the end of the month, Dodo invited me to come with her for a long country weekend. It was curious how she’d come by the loan of the estate, which happened to be Duck’s End, Colin Smythe’s place. He’d offered it to her in a fit of gratitude over her ingenious saving of the American version of Surf the Wind. Somehow, she’d gotten another bestselling author to write a scathing letter to the New York Times concerning their reviewer’s scathing review of Colins book and the Times, in a most democratic fashion, had duly printed it.

  Apparently, reviewers, contrary to their own inflated self-beliefs, don’t matter very much. Oh, sure, books have to be reviewed, if only to have an alternative to advertising, but it just doesn’t matter very much what gets said. “Attention must be paid,” said Willie Loman, referring to something else entirely, and he was right but that was as far as it went.

  If we were going to be weekending at Colins place, then he was going to be weekending in the South of France, but before leaving for the airport, he’d been kind enough to take us on a little tour of the estate’s more notable features.

  The country estate proved to be everything one could want from such a place, even if it did have that unfortunate name. There were all kinds of lovely stone and brick-colored roofing on the outside that made it look more like it should be on a hillside on the outskirts of Florence than thirty miles outside of London. On the inside, the halls had Middle Eastern runners rather than carpets, a great hall with a fireplace that stretched up half of one barn-size wall, and there was even a gen
uine suit of armor, an unusually small one that Colin said was rumored to have belonged to Rizzio, the little Italian who had hung out with Mary Queen of Scots, that association leading to his untimely demise at the hands of her jealous husband’s men.

  Of course, when I, who have always been fascinated by the life of Mary, expressed undue interest in this detail, Colin quickly conceded that it might just as easily have belonged to a dwarfish distant cousin of a distant cousin of Henry VIII. He hastily added that he’d acquired the estate itself for a song from an MP who’d had to step down from his post and then rapidly sell his home in both disgrace and financial disarray following the disclosure that not only had he been caught out in the usual acts of buggery and/or marital infidelity, but that he’d compounded his crimes against the Crown with further acts of misuse of public funds, expense account fraud, acceptance of campaign monies from known criminals and just plain all-around bad judgment.

  “I hate to have my fortune grow on top of someone else’s misfortune—” Colin shrugged “—but sometimes circumstances can’t be helped and, anyway, he did need the cash from the sale fairly quickly if he wanted to escape out of the country in time to avoid that awful prosecution.”

  He led us out onto the terraced back patio where, much to my delight, there was an Olympic-size swimming pool with water the color of sapphires. The midsummer temperatures had recently soared to all-time highs in London and, even with all of that cool stone, the house itself had been like an airless oven. Of course, I couldn’t risk swimming alone in front of Dodo, lest she notice by my unswollen belly that there was nothing procreative going on, but I might be able to sneak dips in when she was off showering or reading some of the manuscripts she’d been obsessive enough to lug along or even if she retired early at night. And if I could manage to steal a moment of luxury for myself, how nice it would be to take a dip in this sparkling pool of refreshment, surrounded by cool tile which was in turn surrounded by lushly colored flowering bushes that were at peak bloom. How nice it would be were it not for the added presence of the bikini-clad duo who were lounging in lounge chairs at water’s edge.