The Thin Pink Line Read online

  Help!

  I am a thirty-six-year-old novelist who has just written a brilliant first novel—my seventh—but no one here will buy it. (Please don’t hit the delete button; I know that EVERY writer says their book is brilliant, but mine really is.) It’s a satire, and every editor-agent here says the same thing: that it’s pee-your-pants-funny AND intelligent, but that they can’t take it on or represent it because—get this—Americans don’t like funny books. I in turn told them, “But what about Nick Hornby? What about Helen Fielding?” To which they said, “Oh. Those. Well, those writers only sold in America because they were Brits.” This is where you come in. The way I figure it, at this point I could either impersonate an English author—(which just seemed too hard) or approach an English publisher (you). Anyway, in a nutshell, my novel takes the whole prototypical single-girl Britcom thing and kicks it up a notch to the next level. This time around, she’s not just looking for a steady date or maybe someone to settle down with; this time, she wants to have a baby. Anyway, I hope you’ll agree to at least look at it, because I really am desperate and would hate to have to start selling my late mother’s antiques.

  Yours in hope and desperation,

  Mona Shakespeare

  New York, NY

  P.S.: I don’t know why all the agents and editors think that Americans don’t like to laugh. I mean, I know that we haven’t realized yet that sex is funny or that fucking is funny while saying fuck isn’t, but I like to laugh whenever I can and I think I’m still an American. Oh well. M.

  PPS.: Please don’t get offended that I use British, English, Brits and English persons interchangeably. We Colonists can be slow and no one over here’s been able to figure it out yet. And please don’t get me started on Scottish, Scotch and Scots. M.

  Good God! The woman was a loon! Still, there were some good things about her query letter, like the fact that she addressed me with respect, that her last name was the same as my all-time favorite author, and that she wanted to make people laugh. And I certainly could relate to desperation. Plus, she said her book was about an English girl who wanted to have a baby. I figured I should at least look at the thing; for all I knew, it might be competition for The Cloth Baby, although it was hard to feature that there could be another human being out there in the universe who was faking a pregnancy for nine months so that they could write a bestseller about someone who was faking a pregnancy for nine months. Figuring to make Mona Shakespeare’s day, I tapped out my reply:

  Dear Ms. Shakespeare,

  Please send complete manuscript to the address which follows. I make no promises, but looking at anything has never completely killed me.

  And it wouldn’t. There, I thought, hitting the send button. It was nice to make someone else’s day for a change. And it might prove instructive to get a peek at Mona Shakespeare’s manuscript.

  I can’t wait to see you again, the card attached to the flowers said.

  Okay, so maybe it was a corny cliché, flowers with the old I can’t wait to see you again card attached, but no man I’d ever been with had sent me flowers at work before, much less remembered that my favorite flowers were peonies—giant, pink, slightly-out-of-season, who-knew-where-the-hell-he’d-got-them peonies. If my life was doomed to be a cliché, I’d just as soon it be the flowers-at-work cliché as opposed to the trying-to-trap-man-by-becoming-pregnant cliché that it had formerly been. In a nutshell, I was of a mindset to be charmed by romantic clichés.

  I buried my nose in the bouquet and inhaled.

  “Who sent you those?” Louise did a double take as she passed my open door.

  “Nobody,” I said, trying to palm the card before she could read it.

  Louise stood before my desk, arms crossed. “You’re embarrassed,” she observed with obvious delight. “C’mon, who sent them? Was it Trevor, trying to get back in your good graces?”

  “God, no!”

  “Then who?” Before I could stop her, she snatched the card from my hand and read what it said, mouthing the words with a puzzled frown: “Can’t wait to see you again.”

  Good thing Tolkien hadn’t signed it, I thought. I don’t know why, but it would have felt unseemly, wearing a Baby Roo jumper while receiving flowers from the man I wanted to have sex with again so badly. I figured that Tolkien hadn’t signed his name, assuming that I would know from whom the flowers came, there being a) no unnamed stalkers in my life and b) no other men I was sleeping with that I might mistake as the sender. Either way, the man was an optimist and I decided there and then that I liked optimism in a man.

  I was also relieved that he hadn’t signed it, because I had no desire to have my pregnant and unpregnant worlds collide, and females get so nosy whenever there’s a new man on the scene.

  “Who then?” Louise pressed. “If not Trevor, then who sent you these flowers?”

  “Um…er…um…”

  “Yes?”

  “It was David!” I finally answered her. His was the only name I could think of given that I needed the name of a person who might conceivably send me flowers.

  “David?”

  “Yes, David. You know—my friend, David. You’ve met him with me before here and there.”

  “True, he’s the gorgeous one. But isn’t he gay?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why would he send you flowers at work with a note attached that reads—” she studied the card once more “‘—Can’t wait to see you again’?”

  “Oh. That.” I pooh-poohed her with my hand.

  “Yes.” She still looked suspicious. “That.”

  “That’s just David being a good friend. He knows how low I’ve felt lately, being pregnant with no man on the horizon and all. This is just his way of cheering me up. He’s trying to make me feel as though there’s still a high level of masculine interest in me, even if it is gay interest.”

  “God,” she said, eyeing me with mild hostility as she dropped the card in my trash.

  “What?”

  “You are so much more lucky than you deserve.”

  I waited until she was safely out of sight before retrieving the card from the trash and reading it one more time: Can’t wait to see you again.

  Louise was right, I thought, holding the card tight in my hand. I was much more lucky than I deserved.

  I slammed my door, so as to receive no more surprise intruders, and punched in the familiar number on my mobile.

  “David!” I whispered a shout when he answered.

  “Yes, Jane. I know who I am. Is there anything urgent?”

  “Tolkien sent me flowers!” My whispered shout was even more gleeful this time.

  “That’s wonderful, Jane. Do you realize, by the way, that I am working here sometimes?”

  I had decided to have an amniocentesis.

  Oh, not the kind involving a long, hollow needle getting inserted into the uterus by first going through the abdominal wall. Good God, no, certainly nothing as painful as that.

  No, what I was going to do was have what I thought of as a more figurative procedure. True, I wasn’t over age thirty-five, the single most common reason why amnios are ever performed. Then, too, there were no tubal defects or chromosomal abnormalities that I could point to in either Trevor’s or my backgrounds and I didn’t think I’d be able to convince people that both of us were carriers of autosomal recessive inherited disorders such as Tay-Sachs disease or sickle-cell anemia. I’d decided then that Madame Zora was going to recommend that I have one done because, according to her, it had become necessary to assess the maturity of the fetus’s lungs and, despite her most feverish extrasensory efforts, the tarot cards weren’t saying. Anyway, since amnios were typically performed between the sixteenth and eighteenth week, my timing couldn’t have been more perfect.

  I had realized that in my case, because I hadn’t been able to get any mothers to give or sell me the pictures from their sonograms and because I’d then told everyone at the office that Madame Zora was staunchly against e
xpectant mothers seeing the pictures from their sonograms, I’d need to have some other kind of diagnostic test to determine the sex. I hadn’t bothered to explain why Madame Zora took this singular view, not really having to since everyone thought she was barmy anyway. The bottom line was that by having an amnio now, not only would I know my baby’s sex in advance, but I could actually pick it. How many people could do that? (Well, soon, probably loads; but I was definitely a baby step ahead of my time.)

  I’d decided that I would have a girl. Girl babies were easier to care for and besides, later on, what with the absent Trevor factor, I wouldn’t have to worry about people lecturing me about the need to find a husband, since they might claim that a boy should have a father figure if at all possible. Of course, I still had the problem of where I was going to find an infant when the nine months were up and I was forced to deliver, rather than admit that I had been lying to everyone all along, but I could worry about that later. Who knew? Maybe Alice was right: maybe once I was rich and famous, no one would care about how I’d deceived them. Funny, but I’d originally started out on this weird journey by believing I was pregnant, then I’d tried to get pregnant so that Trevor and I could have a baby together and so that I could experience that “rosy world” thing, then I’d wanted to continue pretending to be pregnant because life seemed so much nicer that way, then I’d met Tolkien (which had absolutely nothing to do with pregnancy at all, save that it was preferable that I not be), then Alice had offered me a contract to write a book about a woman who impersonates being pregnant for nine months, and now…and now…

  God, my life was just one confusing mess. Who knew where it all might end?

  “It was me,” were the first words out of Tolkien’s mouth when I answered the phone.

  “Yes, I did know that,” I replied, certain I was responding correctly.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Well, you are an optimist, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  Now that I was officially showing, there were a lot of perks that came along with my expandable abdomen: like being allowed, nay encouraged, to take extra breaks at work and to palm off any authors that I didn’t feel up to dealing with onto anyone else in the office who wasn’t already occupied; like my mother actually being nicer to me than to Sophie because, even though Sophie’s baby had just been born something like a minute ago, Mother now knew that that baby was healthy. With my baby still in transit, as it were, she couldn’t be too careful and so poor old Soph was left sucking hind tit.

  But showing had its decided downside, too; witness all the unsolicited advice I was getting on a pretty much hourly basis. My mother and Sophie? Well, we already know about that. Even laid up in hospital following a forty-six-hour labor, Sophie’d had the presence of mind to ring me so that she could point out just one last time, shouting down the line, “And whatever you do, Jane, don’t let anyone talk you into an epidural!” As if I would be foolish enough to ever have a painful birth. As if.

  Then there were the ladies in the supermarket, neighbors I’d never spoken one word to before, the ticket taker at the Cineplex, and even the postal worker who made deliveries to our office building. (Him: “My sister says that eating sweets when you’re pregnant instead of eating proper organic whole foods is like playing Russian roulette with your unborn child’s metabolism.” Me—throwing the rest of my Smarties packet into the trash bin: “Just leave the fucking packages, why don’t you?”)

  Finally—or most recently, I should say—there was Stan from Accounting who, at the monthly meeting, looked pointedly at my breasts before pointing out, “I hope you’re planning to breast-feed. You do realize, don’t you, that if you don’t you will be depriving your child of what is literally his genetic right?”

  This from a man who, not five minutes before, had been telling us that once we’d edited all of our books down to the point where we didn’t think there was one more word that we could spare, if we would just then shave off another ten pages, the company would be saving hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.

  I looked at this man who would have gleefully shorn 350 pages off of each of Tolstoy’s books—I’d often heard Stan say that no modern novel had any business running any longer than 223 pages—and said quite eloquently, “Stuff it, Stan.”

  “Oh, come on, now. There’s nothing to be getting all hot and bothered about. After all, you are among friends here. We accept the fact that your hormones are raging at an elephant-stampede level now, but still, someone’s got to tell you that breast-feeding your son—”

  Notice how Stan was the only person in my acquaintance who was convinced I was having a boy? Specifically, that the being who would be sucking on my breasts would undoubtedly be a boy?

  “How are you so sure that I’m having a boy?”

  “Well, you are carrying the baby low—”

  Something else to worry about. Perhaps my padding was in danger of falling down around my hips. “Yes, I know. But what if I were to tell you that the amnio said it’s going to be a girl?”

  “You had an amnio? You who are so determined not to have your baby come into the world, and I quote—” and here he did a disturbingly credible imitation of me “‘—via the historical roughness of the testosterone-centered medical establishment,’ unquote, you had a risk-taking amnio?”

  “Yes,” I said, chin high, making the whole thing up as I went along, forgetting all about my party line concerning Madame Zora, fetal lungs and inconclusive tarot readings. “I had a cousin who delivered a Down’s syndrome baby. It doesn’t do to take any chances under those circumstances.”

  Stan reddened. “I’m sorry to hear about your cousin’s baby, Jane.”

  I forgave him much more quickly than I normally would have done, possibly due to that niggling guilt feeling that was gnawing on my gut. I didn’t mind accepting sympathy that wasn’t really due me for a pregnancy that wasn’t real, not when it came in the form of longer lunch hours and a cushioned stool under my desk; but blithely accepting sympathy on behalf of a nonexistent medical condition, when that medical condition was a very serious thing to all of those affected and the people who loved them, well, that was just too much even for me.

  “It’s okay, Stan,” I said. “You couldn’t have possibly known.” I recovered my old self fairly quickly, however. “And my baby is definitely a girl.”

  Well? Why couldn’t I have whatever baby I wanted if I was the one calling the shots? Hell, I might have twins yet. Or better still, if the Yanks kept topping themselves, having litters of more than seven or eight where really just one would do for most people, why couldn’t I break some kind of record here? All it would take probably would be enough foam rubber padding. Besides, once the nine months were up and no baby to show for it, I’d probably have to hightail it out of town anyway. Why not go for broke?

  Nah. Too much bother having a multiple.

  “Anyway,” Stan said, no longer red, having gotten over his embarrassment as quickly as I’d gotten over my guilt, “I’ve never before seen a pregnant woman whose breasts didn’t enlarge any. Usually a pregnant woman’s breasts grow larger. And swollen. And tender.” How the fuck did Stan know these things? Surely his sisters weren’t talking to him about that. “Are you sure you’re getting enough calcium and taking your prenatal vitamins? After all, you don’t want to starve the little bugger, even if it is a girl.”

  I looked down at my breasts which were still, distressingly, the same 34B they’d been since I was twelve. Oh God, I groaned inwardly, another thing I’d overlooked. Before too much longer went by, I’d definitely have to find something reliable to stuff a bigger bra size with, something that wouldn’t float away on its own if I were to be accidentally pushed into the Thames.

  “Thanks for pointing out my possible calcium deficiency, Stan,” I said with a saccharine smile. “Now, in the meantime, stuff it.”

  “Ahem.” This rather unoriginal sound came from Dexter Schlag
er, the hair-disadvantaged Editor-in-Chief of Churchill & Stewart, who was seated all the way at the other end of the table and who always touched his egglike dome as though there might be something there other than smooth skin. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, but if we’ve devoted a sufficient amount of time to Taylor’s breasts, perhaps we can return to the matter of cutting ten pages each from every book on next spring’s lineup….”

  I know I already cited Stan as being the “finally” as far as unsolicited advice went, but actually there was one last straw yet to come, this camel’s backbreaker coming from Rock, the purple-mohawked punk from Wavy Do who, despite her own perfectly dreadful looks and poor choice for a name change, was one of London’s best kept secrets being the kind of par excellence colorist who could make Rod Stewart’s hair color look natural.

  After Stan’d managed to turn our monthly into a meeting that would go down in the annals of Churchill & Stewart as “The Breast Meeting,” I’d taken a detour to the Ladies’ on my way back to my desk, there to see if my normal-size breasts really did look radically disproportional to the beginnings of a swollen belly I’d allowed myself to acquire.

  Yep, I saw in the mirror, turning sideways, that rat bastard Stan was right: I didn’t look a thing like that sweet lady with the sensible flat shoes and the feeding-ready breasts on the cover of What to Expect. I’d have to begin remedying this situation, and fast, with a little judicious stuffing—perhaps a mere padded bra would do the trick? After all, what was needed here was comforting-looking breasts, rather than the intimidation style that nature had blessed me with—but I also couldn’t do it too fast or Stan might get suspicious, say if I went up three cup sizes over a single weekend.

  In fact, it was while I was reviewing the many options available to me for nonsurgical breast enhancement, scrutinizing my appearance in great detail, that I first noticed how desperately in need of a touch-up was the true medium-brown hair color that was at the root of my greatly improved shade of raven. A few weeks back, I’d worried that the snobbiest of Harrods shoppers would critically notice my dye line, but then I’d quickly forgotten all about it, what with the near arrest and all. Now I realized that it had gotten out of hand. It occurred to me that I had been so busy of late, what with the baby and all, that I’d let longer than the usual five-week interim pass since my last appointment with Rock.