The Thin Pink Line Read online

  Naturally, I tried all the advice concerning backaches that I found in the pregnancy guides, at least the advice that didn’t seem completely asinine to me. Keeping my weight gain within the recommended parameters was easy since I still weighed competitively less than any other pregnant lady in her sixth month. I gave up wearing high heels and flat heels in favor of the doctor-recommended two-inch heels necessary for keeping the body properly aligned. I never lifted anything abruptly, always bending at the knees rather than at the waist and lifting with my arms and legs rather than with my back. I carried grocery bags balanced one on each side, milkmaid fashion, rather than in one big bag at the front. I tried not to stand for long periods and, if I absolutely had to, kept one foot on a short stool with the knee bent to prevent strain on my lower back. Since my job did require a fair amount of sitting, I learned to “sit smart,” using a chair that afforded adequate support and refraining from crossing my legs, no matter how deep the desire to show off the fact that, two-thirds of the way into my pregnancy, my gams still looked great; I also kept my feet elevated on the little stool hidden under my desk and never sat more than an hour without getting up to stretch. I purchased a firmer mattress, used a heating pad at night that would have been forbidden to me if I were really pregnant, and tried to learn how to relax.

  And my back still hurt.

  “Here, goddammit,” Dodo groused, dragging two rolled-up exercise mats into my office and unrolling them on the floor in front of my desk. She heaved the guest chairs farther out of the way.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Down,” she instructed, already having lain down on one of the mats herself. She was flat on her back, arms straight at her side, knees bent with feet flat on the floor and a comfortable distance apart.

  “But what are we doing?” I tried again, lying down on the mat next to hers and imitating her form.

  “Oh, shit,” she said, getting up quickly and nearly yanking me to my feet. “I nearly forgot. You’re past your fourth month and shouldn’t lie on your back. Here, stand beside me over here with your back against the wall. Now, exhale as you press the small of your back against the wall. Then inhale and relax your spine.”

  She made me do this twenty-five times before she told me we were doing something called the pelvic tilt.

  “But why are we doing this?” I pressed. “Why, when we both have a ton of work to do?”

  “Because obviously that stupid Madame Zenobia of yours didn’t bother showing you how to do the exercises that will help alleviate the pain in your back—and help alleviate the pain that the rest of us are beginning to feel at hearing you continually whinge about the pain in your back.”

  “Well. If I’d known you felt—”

  “No time for that now. We’ve got to do twenty-five repetitions of the dromedary droop before I go to my three o’clock meeting.”

  “The dromedary what?”

  But there was no time for that either, apparently. Before I even knew what I was about, my well-heeled and elegant boss had dropped down on all fours on her exercise mat, indicating with an impatiently equine toss of her head that I should do the same. “Come on, Jane.”

  “But isn’t a dromedary a camel?” I asked as I obeyed her, but she ignored me, barking out orders that evinced a heretofore unseen military side to her personality.

  “Keep your back in a naturally relaxed position! Don’t let that spine sag! Head straight, neck aligned with spine! Now, hump your back, tighten your abdomen and buttocks, allow your head to drop all the way down! Slowly release your back! Raise your head to the original position! Aaannnddd REPEAT!”

  Dodo’d been in such a hurry to get me on an antibackache program when she’d first stormed my office that she’d clean forgotten to close my door behind her. And so it was that, somewhere between the fourteenth and fifteenth dromedary droop, with our buttocks in the air and our backs humped, we heard the most odious sound imaginable, causing us to snap our heads toward its source as one, as if we were two puppets dancing to the rhythm of a single puppeteer.

  “Well, that’s a sight I’d’ve paid good money to see,” oozed Stan from Accounting as he slouched in my doorway. “But, then, why pay for the camel, when you can watch it hump for free?”

  “Get out!” we shouted.

  Once Stan was no longer darkening my doorway, I collapsed on my side, oddly tired after the mild exertions.

  “Gosh, I’m tired,” I breathed. “Can we stop now?”

  “Well, we haven’t finished yet but, ohhh,” she relented, “all right. However—” she held up a cautionary finger “—I will be back tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. I intend to have the rest of your pregnancy be backache-free whether you like it or not. Now, here—” she extended her hand, “let me give you a hand up.”

  I gratefully accepted her offer, grabbing on tightly. But as I rose, something in my new unbalanced state caused the forward momentum to carry me too far and, once I was up, I just kept going until I bumped smack into Dodo, the cloth baby bouncing me back off of her.

  “Oh my God!” she cried, wonder filling her eyes. “I just felt the baby kick!”

  “That’s not possible,” I replied hurriedly, honestly, not thinking.

  “Why, whatever do you mean?”

  Now I was forced to backpedal. “Oh, it’s just that, well,” and here I affectionately rubbed my belly, “she’s not much of a soccer player, that’s all. Some babies aren’t, you know, and this one’s one of those. Hardly ever does the kicking thing and, when it does, it’s usually only me that can feel it on the inside, never anyone else on the outside.”

  “But how strange! I know what I just felt, Jane, and it was definitely a kick.”

  “Don’t you have that meeting to go to?”

  But she was already on me, one hand rubbing my belly to see if she could get it to do it again.

  As I sighed, I realized that I might as well submit. She was going to do it anyway, so I might as well sit back and try not to hate it. Still, like any real pregnant woman at my stage of the game, there was a part of me that sometimes grew tired of this pregnancy. Really. Pregnancy, pregnancy, pregnancy:

  Couldn’t anyone ever think of anything else?

  Tolkien idly stroked the back of my arm, as I lay curled up naked beside him, my two-toned hair against his gorgeous chest. It was a constant revelation, the notion that despite the same body parts and the same basic actions being involved every time, that sex with the right person could be a source of continual amazement as new facets of the other person were discovered with each encounter, each touch.

  “Mmm,” I purred.

  “Mmm,” he echoed.

  “I love being here with you like this,” I purred some more, for once not frightened that if I told a man what I was really feeling, I’d scare him off.

  “Me, too,” he said, and I knew he meant it. Then he pulled back a bit, lifting his cheek from where it had been resting against the top of my head, and looking down at me. “And do you know what else I’d love?”

  I looked up. “Mmm…what?”

  “To meet your family.”

  I was immediately startled back out of purr mode. “What?”

  “Your family, Jane, I’d like to meet them.” He smiled. “You know, it is the normal thing that people usually do when they meet each other and wind up feeling as we do.”

  “I guess I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “You seem hesitant.”

  “Yes, well, if you knew my mother and sister, you’d be hesitant about wanting to meet them.”

  “Is it that you’re embarrassed by them? If so, I can certainly understand about familial embarrassments. Believe me, having had parents who refashioned themselves Elrond and Galadriel and having been renamed Tolkien myself, I can safely say that I do know how bad it can be.”

  “Oh—” I smiled ruefully “—it can be worse.”

  “You know, the few times they’ve come up in conversation,
you’ve alluded to the fact that your relationships with your mother and Sophie are somehow lacking. Don’t you think they’d be happy for your happiness? Even Elrond and Galadriel, weird as they can be, are always happy whenever I’m happy.”

  I thought seriously about what he was asking me: would Mother and Sophie be happy for my happiness? I shook my head. I didn’t know. And that was perhaps the saddest part of all, that I couldn’t say with any degree of certainty that my own family would be happy for me.

  “I don’t know.” I smiled a little sadly. “I don’t know how they’d be.”

  Not to mention, a voice in my head kept reminding me, that this was no time to have my pregnant and my nonpregnant worlds collide.

  “How about the people you work with then?” he suggested.

  “No,” I said, thinking of that worlds-colliding problem again. “They’re not much fun, either.”

  “Oh.” He looked so dejected.

  “Hey!” I brightened. “I know!”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. There are some people I’d like you to meet.”

  To claim that I’m no different than anybody else might present a bit of a credibility stretch, I know, but there is at least one thing I have in common with the rest of the world: having found myself to be hopelessly in love, and having found that feeling to be returned in kind, I wanted to shout that fact to the world. The only problem was that in my case, my current life was built on such a mountain of mendacity that there was almost no one I could share the good news with.

  If I were living a different kind of life, if I were a member of a different kind of family, I would have brought Tolkien home to meet everyone in an instant. As it was, I made do with the one person who knew more truths about my life than anyone else and the man that he loved. In other words, I took Tolkien home to meet…

  “Tolkien, this is David. David, Tolkien. Oh, and that man over there is David’s Christopher.”

  In honor of the occasion, David had offered the use of their apartment, figuring that he’d be more comfortable cooking in his own kitchen than in mine, and figuring further that it would be good to have the floor that I lived on function as a buffering zone between where we were and where the nosy Marcuses were two floors below.

  I suppose that when I’d told Tolkien that we were going on a double date with my best friend, I might have mentioned that my best friend was a gay Israeli ex-fighter pilot and that his date would naturally be his male lover, but I hadn’t done that, figuring it wouldn’t matter to Tolkien. And it didn’t. What mattered most to Tolkien was that I obviously held David in a higher regard than anyone else that I knew; the rest of David’s CV was just so many details.

  “David’s great,” Tolkien enthused, leaning across the table to whisper his enthusiastic pronouncement to me while Christopher helped Tolkien replace the appetizers with entrées.

  “What do you like best about him?” I asked, curious. I wasn’t used to a boyfriend loving my best friend, Trevor having hated him, and I really did want to know.

  “Well—” he thought about it, then rolled his eyes, shrugging, “—he can cook.”

  “Yes, he is marvelous that way.”

  “Oh, and there’s also the small fact that he absolutely adores you.”

  I beamed, I was that happy.

  After dinner, after a dessert that made me glad I was at least smart enough to know that men always prefer a woman who will share dessert with them than one who claims to be keeping to her diet even on an important occasion like this, I left Tolkien to help Christopher stare at the CD collection, while I went off to the kitchen to corner David, using the pretext that I needed more wine.

  “Well,” I asked, feeling a bit breathless in the midst of my anxiousness to hear the verdict, “what do you think?”

  “You really want to know, Jane?”

  I was feeling a bit cautious, but: “Yes.”

  “You really want to know what I think of your Tolkien?”

  Now I was impatient. “Yes!”

  The sleeves of his white oxford shirt were rolled to the elbows, revealing black hair on strong arms that he crossed as he leaned against the closed refrigerator door.

  “What I think is…”

  “Yes?”

  “What I think is that if I had not already found the love of my life, and you were not my best friend, I’d go for him myself.”

  “But he’s not gay,” I objected.

  He smiled, shrugged. “Details.”

  “Really?” I squealed, trying to contain myself and failing miserably. What I really felt like doing was jumping up and down like the girls in the office did, but I’d tried that enthusiastic-schoolgirls-on-a-trampoline routine with David once before and his lack of enthusiasm for it had proved disappointing. “You really like Tolkien that much?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “But why,” I asked, all seriousness again now, “why do you like him so much?”

  “Because he is so—um, how can I put this delicately so as not to offend?—” and here he smiled devilishly “—because he is sooo not Trevor.”

  Dodo had Mona Shakespeare’s bookcases.

  No, I don’t mean that she stole them, or anything else criminal like that. Dodo isn’t me, after all.

  No, what I mean is that the bookcases I always envisioned in Mona’s New York flat—crammed with the works of every important dead writer and every living writer who might be important once they were dead or who were currently important for one pop culture reason or another—existed in reality, and they existed in grand style in the flat of Dodo, my boss, who had invited me to see where she lived for the very first time since I’d worked with her.

  I perched anxiously on the edge of her moss velvet couch, trying not to let my fake baby frontage over-topple me onto the ecru chenille carpeted floor as I waited for her to bring drinks in.

  Drinks were brought in on a small round tray that looked to be solid silver.

  “Are you really sure you just want water?” she asked, depositing a crystal glass in front of me.

  “Yes, that’s fine,” I said, watching covetously as she removed a tall expensive-looking bottle of red from the tray and a large goblet.

  She poured herself a shimmering glass and then seated herself on the other side of the coffee table, positioning herself in what used to be safely called “Indian-style” but what people now preferred to call “tailor-sitting,” which I did not, because there really are no more tailors in the world, save on Savile Row, except for me, who spelled my name different and didn’t like to sit like that anyway. So there.

  First glass.

  “I’ve always wished we were closer, Jane, which is why I invited you here this evening.”

  Enquiringly: “Mmm?”

  “Since you’ve had this baby thing going on, I’ve felt that I was closer to you than to anyone else at the office.”

  Reflectively: “Mmm.”

  “You see, I’ve never had many—and during some dry periods in my life, not any—girlfriends.”

  Empathetically: “Mmm.”

  “And I never had a sister.”

  Wistfully: “Mmm.”

  Second glass.

  “Do you know how hard it is to meet men when you have the kind of high-level job that I have?”

  Trying for sympathy, but missing entirely: “Mmm.”

  “Or to have meaningful relationships with anybody when one’s good looks get in the way?”

  Again missing the sympathy thing: “Mmm.”

  Third glass.

  “Why are people so threatened by me?”

  This was a question requiring more than an “mmm” answer. “Mmm, I don’t know.”

  Dodo set her glass down fast, nearly cracking the delicate crystal. “You mean that you’re not?”

  I examined my mind, since she seemed to be looking for deep thought here. “No,” I shook my head slowly, “quite honestly, I’m not.”

  “Why ever not?”

 
; I thought some more, about the smashing good looks and the top-of-her-game career she had that I did not. And then I thought about how otherwise empty her life was, if for gal-pal talk like this she had to resort to, well, me. But I couldn’t very well say, “Because your life seems so empty to me,” now, could I? So, instead, I said, “I don’t know. I guess I’m just too big of a person to be bothered by petty jealousies and envy.”

  Yes, I know: it was a good thing I wasn’t the one drinking the wine, because otherwise I’d have had to choke on it.

  But, apparently, Dodo didn’t detect anything false in what I’d said. Reaching out, she impulsively squeezed one of my just-your-basic hands in one of her exquisite ones. “Yes, I know, Jane, you are a big person.”

  “Well, there’s no call for making pregnant-woman jokes.”

  “No, I mean it. And you’re wise too.”

  Okay, now this was where I became certain that she was dead drunk and that if she remembered this conversation at all in the morning, she’d remember it cringingly.

  I inched the bottle far enough down the table that it was out of any convenient reach, but she was already too far gone.

  “Tell me, honestly, Jane, what do you think?”

  “About…?”

  “About women and careers and romance and babies—do you think it’s possible to have it all?”

  I thought about the career we’d both chosen, publishing, and how what with the quantity of egos constantly pinging through the publishing stratum—authors, agents, editors, all of whom had smashing big egos—it was a wonder that at the end of the day any of us had anything left over for anything. But, yes, in answer to Dodo’s question, I did believe that a woman could have success at both career and romance—not necessarily easy, but she could—the only really sadly discouraging thing being that in Dodo’s specific case, she seemed to want it all so desperately and yet it eluded her.