The Thin Pink Line Read online

  When I’d first entered, I’d dismissively taken the hanging item to be a fanny pack left by some tourist rushing off to catch a bus, but now I saw that it wasn’t that at all. True, the tastefully navy-blue item had adjustable straps to go around the waist, but instead of having a pouch for carrying money and passport and hotel keys, there was a perfectly rounded half-moon of some firm yet soft padded material attached to the straps. What was this? I wondered. But as I removed it from the hook and studied it more closely, it didn’t take me long to figure it out.

  My God! It was a pretend baby! This bundle of cloth must be what women who were like me—in other words, skinny women, only in their cases skinny women who had good reason to expect not to be so for long—put on themselves when they wanted to try on clothing in Maternity departments before their bodies had caught up with their need to shop. What fun!

  I lost no time in unzipping the back of the ball gown just enough to squeeze the belly enhancer in, adjusting the straps around my waist. Then I rezipped the back. Hey! This was sensational, I thought, studying myself once again from all sides. Now I looked like Napoleon’s Josephine, only instead of having my protruding belly be the result of an Empire waist, it looked as though it was because I’d been slack about entering into my period of confinement. My God! With this thing on, I really did look pregnant and, oddly enough, it wasn’t the off-putting sight I’d imagined it would be. Rather, it looked kind of, well, cool.

  As I stared at myself, I wondered what it would be like if this weren’t just a pretend baby, if it were in fact the real thing. Would I suddenly feel differently about the future? Would I ever be able to live up to whatever expectations he or she might have of me?

  I was still positively entranced by my own reflection when it occurred to me that I’d been in that stall for a long time. Shrugging off my momentary bout with sentimentality, it further occurred to me that soon the salesgirl would begin wondering if I was trying to steal the ball gown by forcing it into my hat. I began reluctantly removing the gown, thinking all the while.

  Well, I really didn’t need the ball gown for anything, and I was sure I’d never wear the overalls no matter how trendy, but this cloth baby…now, this was something I could use. If I had one of these, why, I could instantly begin showing at work. I’d have to suffer no more snide remarks from Stan from Accounting and I’d be able to begin shopping for maternity clothes to my heart’s content. Only I certainly wouldn’t do it here, I thought, gasping as I caught a glimpse of the price tag on the ball gown, not unless I wanted to take on a second job.

  But where could I go to purchase one of these handy cloth babies, I wondered, putting my own clothes back on. I studied the navy-blue item I wanted so desperately, searching for a manufacturer’s name and address, but found nothing. Blast!

  Then a thought occurred to me: a perfectly wonderful, wonderfully awful thought. What if I were to just, oh, take this little baby home with me? Would Harrods be any the wiser if I were to slip it under my jacket and rebutton it—ugh! that was tight!—like so? After all, the salesgirl very well knew that I’d only brought the two garments in the dressing stall with me, so even if she noticed that I was bulging a little bit more than when I’d come in, she’d just attribute it to the eyestrain brought on by viewing an endless stream of women in varying stages of pregnancy day after day; she’d assume I must have been bigger before, with the ill taste to wear a pink suit that was too small for my condition, and that she’d simply failed to notice. Surely, even if she did notice a size discrepancy, provided I handed both security-tagged garments over to her in person, she’d be too well mannered to say anything. And since no one would ever security-tag something that was just a dressing-stall prop, I’d be able to sail right on out of the store without setting off any alarms.

  I’d just hand her the garments—like I was doing right now—holding my pillbox hat and bag over my bulging belly. I’d just smile—again like I was doing right now—and thank her for her time, assure her that I’d be back just as soon as I was further along in my pregnancy for something other than looking and trying, and—

  Snagged!

  “Excuse me, madam,” she said, smiling oh-so-politely as she took me firmly by the elbow, “but if you’d just come with me…”

  She got another girl to cover the department for her and then waltzed me down to Security. It had never been my ambition in life to find out what the interior of Harrods Security looked like, but who could guess at the turns one’s life would take?

  And who could have guessed that anything within the walls of Harrods could ever look so utilitarian, I thought, squirming in my metal chair as the jacketed guard with the walkie-talkie paced before me, being both good cop and bad cop all at once since there was only one of him. He looked intelligent enough to be doing just about anything else for a living and when he spoke, his Scottish accent was all Sean Connery with its brushy sh sounds for every s. I almost felt sorry for him. I mean, I could tell that he would have liked nothing better than to reach inside my overstuffed pink jacket and yank out whatever it was I had hiding there, but he couldn’t very well do that, now, could he? He had to wait for his female counterpart so that she would handle my body if need be, and she was on her break.

  “You know,” he said, exasperated, “you’d make it a lot easier on everybody concerned if you’d just hand over whatever you’ve got concealed under there.”

  Suddenly, tired myself, I could see the wisdom in what he was saying. After all, by not handing it over now, all I was really doing was delaying the inevitable.

  I reached up under the back of my jacket, undoing the strap. “Oh, here,” I said, exasperated as well, slamming the cloth baby down on his metal desk and folding my arms across my once-again flat front. “Do with me what you will.”

  “What the hell’s that thing?” he asked, picking it up and studying it as I had done earlier.

  “What does it look like? It’s a cloth baby,” I said, not really sure that this was the technical term for it. “You keep them in the dressing stalls of the Maternity department here. They’re for women to use when they’re trying on clothes early on in their pregnancy and want to know what the clothes will look like when they fill them out.”

  “Jesus Christ! Now I’ve seen everything!” He looked at me like I was some kind of an idiot. “Why the hell didn’t you just ask for one? If we keep them as a courtesy to our customers, then it’s probably the equivalent of something like a paper shopping bag with our logo on it. God knows why anyone would want to take one of these home with them, but I’m sure if you’d asked Sally nicely,” he went on, referring to my Amerasian friend, “she’d probably’ve gladly let you take it. Chances are, some clothing manufacturer sends them to the store for free as part of a promotional gimmick.”

  He tossed the cloth baby back and I caught it, clutching it to me. “Here,” he said, “take it, if you want it so badly, only—” and here he disappeared into a storage room off to the side, emerging with a legitimate bag“—at least put it in here.”

  I hastily obeyed.

  “Now, then. Off with you. And don’t come back here for a while. Just because I didn’t catch you stealing anything worth stealing, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to want to see your face on my security camera any time soon.”

  He didn’t have to tell me and my baby to go twice.

  “It’s all your fault,” I said to David, not long after I’d arrived home from the Harrods debacle and he popped down with Christopher for a visit.

  “My fault? Just because you take it into your insane head to commit petty theft in the house that Fayed built, how can you possibly say that it’s my fault?”

  Of course, it wasn’t his fault, not completely, not since I’d made a pact with that devil Alice to write a book that would make me rich and famous. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a pact in the strictly Hawthorne sense, since there was in fact a very concrete, nonsupernatural contract, a copy of which was tucked away in my filing cab
inet. But it certainly felt like a pact.

  Yes, I was still keeping that teeny tiny little secret from my best friend. Not given much to self-examination over the emotional motives for why I do what I do, I would have been hard-pressed to explain why I was still keeping it from him. Was it really for the reason I was always telling myself it was, that I preferred he think I kept up the charade because I was insane as opposed to finance-conscious? Or did it have something to do with the fact that what he had with Christopher appeared to be real, and that while what I had with Tolkien was stupendous, the fact that I couldn’t tell him everything about me kept the relationship from feeling real? Therefore, it sometimes felt as though the book was the only real thing I could call my own…if that makes any sense at all…which it doesn’t necessarily, not even to me. But there are times when my life has made almost no sense at all, and I suppose that this was just one of them. I just knew—instinctively, perhaps—that while David thought no less of me now, he would think less of me if he knew about the contract.

  Anyway, while I was (pretty) sure that it was the only secret I’d ever kept from David, I wasn’t ready to fess up, which meant that I still had to plow ahead with saying unreasonable things to him like:

  “Well, if it weren’t for you and your harebrained scheme—”

  “What harebrained scheme?”

  “You know, the one you came up with two months ago, the one whereby I fake being pregnant—”

  “That was my harebrained scheme?”

  “You two can’t possibly still be arguing about this, can you?” yawned Christopher, picking up a magazine from the coffee table, flopping down on the sofa, putting his long legs up on the table while leaning back and…

  “Yeow!”

  “What the hell was that?” Christopher cried, jumping forward as the white-and-gray puffball that he’d nearly sat on went whizzing past.

  “Kick the Cat,” I said, racing after him.

  “I’m not going to kick your cat,” Christopher yelled after me with some asperity. “You know, Jane, you really are a sick, sick woman.”

  Why were people always saying that to me?

  “I wasn’t telling you to kick my cat,” I said, returning to the living room with the kitten now in my arms. He’d burrowed underneath the bed in my bedroom, but I’d managed to coax him out. “I was merely telling you his name—Kick the Cat.”

  “You got a cat, Jane?” asked David.

  “Of course. I love cats.”

  “But you hated Punch the Cat.”

  “Well, that was different. Punch the Cat was a cat who deserved to be hated. Kick the Cat, on the other hand,” I said, nuzzling the kitten’s nose with my own, “is a pussy with balls.”

  “Oh, dear God,” said David, “now I’ve heard everything.”

  The next morning found me sitting at my desk with my new cloth baby in place, situated beneath the loose clothing I’d picked up at a discount shop on my way home the day before, following my near arrest at Harrods. As I sorted through the manuscripts Constance’d dumped on my desk on Dodo’s behalf, I thought I looked pretty smart in my new jumper with its Baby Roo sign, downturned arrow, and pouch. Still, looking darned cute and pregnant at the same time wasn’t enough of a positive to mitigate the negative of having to wade through novel proposals that began, “With the cold war at an end, Russian spy Vassily Andropov is having trouble adjusting…” Derivative. Yawn. Or “When some silver spoons are found missing at Windsor Castle, the Queen’s favorite Welsh corgi, Toto, who also has the power of speech, helps Elizabeth II solve…” Libelous. Yawn. Or, from a desperate American unable to achieve publication Stateside, “On a plantation in the Deep South, around the time that the Civil War breaks out…” I’ll send that rejection letter out tomorrow, Scarlett. Yawn.

  And then of course there were the gadzillions upon gadzillions of coming-of-age stories that kept streaming in like so many lemmings headed for the cliffs; I mean, didn’t any of these people realize that everyone who mattered had come of age by now? Who cared that they had childhoods that needed getting over? Sometimes I just wanted to shout: Just get over it, for chrissakes!

  Good God. Wasn’t there anything new being written under the writing sun anymore? And why was Dodo, my new best girlfriend Dodo, still dumping her manuscripts on me when she knew that I was suffering from…now, what was that new symptomatic complaint I’d come up with for the fifth month? I quickly consulted What to Expect. Ah, yes. Lower abdominal achiness brought about from the stretching of the ligaments that support the uterus. I had to find a way to remember that better somehow. Perhaps a mnemonic might help?

  Anyway, didn’t Dodo realize that I had my own unsolicited manuscripts to contend with? After all, people without talent did write to me directly sometimes. These were usually the sorts who felt they could improve on their chances by setting their sights a little lower. Having gone to one of the public reference libraries in order to scrutinize The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, published by A and B Black, so that they could swallow every possible detail of how to approach publishers, the hopefuls had consulted the lists of agents and editors. Seeing that Dodo, aka Lana Lane, was Editor for Churchill & Stewart, they would have similarly noted my name as Assistant Editor. Deducing that everyone and his brother would be writing to Dodo in the hopes of getting her to buy their book, the lower-sights setters would make the further deduction that I, being merely an Assistant, would be still looking to make a name for myself, that I would be eager to discover the next Martin Amis, and that I would have a lot less for them to compete with in terms of what was on my plate since everyone and his brother was not writing to me.

  Hah! The idiots should see my desk! That, coupled with the fact that, unlike Dodo, I did not have a me to palm work off on, meant that they had even less chance when they wrote directly to me than when their manuscripts were channeled to me through Dodo. True, sometimes publishing gold could be mined from the slush pile, but still…

  I was just wondering whether an offer to Constance of a free lunch in exchange for her taking a half-dozen of the hated manuscripts off my hands would work, when the free-association thought occurred to me to go online for a little electronic entertainment. It was always fun seeing what e-mail had come in overnight: reactions from Alice to the bits and pieces I was regularly sending her from the manuscript that I had tentatively titled The Cloth Baby; tales of horror stories at author appearances as told by acquaintances at other publishing houses; panicky missives from Colin Smythe, who was now riding the superhighway with everyone else; solicitations for sex photos.

  I tapped in my password, Odette, the more-exotic-than-Jane name that I’d secretly wished had been mine all through my youth. I waited to connect, which always seemed to take too long, just like fast-food restaurants never seeming to be fast enough—I mean, you actually had to wait some—and then I was in.

  There was that satisfying little yellow envelope, the one that popped into my computer’s iconic mailbox as it intoned the three most current orgasm-producing words in the English language: “You’ve got mail.” In my eagerness to get at it, I put my hands under the desk and pulled in order to propel my swivel chair closer, only to be stopped when the expanded belly that was my cloth baby bounced me back off the wood. Well, that was going to take some getting used to. Not willing to make the same mistake twice, I pulled myself closer to the screen more gently.

  Now, then. Who was writing to me today?

  When I double-clicked my mouse on the yellow letter, I saw that there were four new messages.

  No, I wasn’t interested in “Titsillating (sic) Teens.” And they could keep “Boffo Boys in the Buff” as well. I hit the delete button twice. The third item was a vacation offer to Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Now this intrigued me.

  Just the other day, I’d e-mailed an acquaintance at Bloomsbury about a movie adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando that I’d rented on videotape. Was it possible that the Mouse had somehow seen what wa
s in the contents of that letter? After all, another time, having e-mailed my Bloomsbury acquaintance about Norman Mailer under the slug line “The Naked and the Dead,” I’d received a solicitation from a firm advertising one-night courses in necrophilia.

  I punched the delete button on the Mouse as well.

  Let’s see. Even though these things only worked with the number three in fairy tales, would the fourth letter be the charm?

  The sender appeared as [email protected] and the slug line read, “S.O.S.!!!”

  Hmm. Well, now. This was curious. AOL stood for America Online, but I didn’t know any Shakespeares in the U.S., either m or otherwise. As for the S.O.S., I’d heard sometime back that, given the advances that technology had made, the old system of Morse code was going to finally be retired, all of the knowledge concerning those dots and dashes just becoming another thing of the past. Not long after I’d heard that, however, another item had appeared on the news concerning a group of people who’d somehow managed to get themselves locked in a church. For a while there, it’d looked as though they were going to be stuck there for the night and miss their seven o’clock dinner reservation, when one member of the locked-in group, who happened to know Morse code, went up into the bell tower and rang out the ancient naval distress signal. It might not have saved the Titanic, but in this instance, a passerby recognized the call, summoned help and the entire group was able to sit down to dinner on time. In light of this, some thought that maybe people shouldn’t be so hasty to dispense with the old ways. Of course, there were others who thought that everyone should just carry a cell phone in case of disaster—no one locked in the church had one—and then there were the Americans who thought that everyone should carry a gun as well.

  But back to [email protected] who, apparently, had not heard that S.O.S. was going out of business and still believed that someone would hear if he or she just shouted loud enough:

  Dear Ms. Taylor,