The Thin Pink Line Read online

  Great. By the time my period was finally over, I would probably end up having to do naked back handsprings to seduce the father of my child so that there would be a child.

  I had decided to make Dodo my new best girlfriend.

  It had been the process of elimination really. Now that I was going to be pregnant, I needed to have a best girlfriend at work, a gal pal to confide in and complain to, and Dodo presented all kinds of advantages in that area. For starters, Dodo was older, if only by about a half decade or more, but older meant that she could be called upon to do maternal for me if I needed it. Then, too, she had no sisters and was hated by almost every woman at the office because she was so unconscionably beautiful. (Of course, I was hated by almost every woman in the office too, given that they saw me as a minor appendage of Dodo, like a middle finger or something, but this was okay with me since—sour grapes here? you might well ask—they weren’t the kind of people I wanted to engage in chitchat with around the water cooler about television programs anyway.) If I could co-opt Dodo, I could have all the appearances of having a normal pregnancy—i.e., having a girlfriend to share the experience with—while keeping the other females in the office at bay.

  It was really amazing to me sometimes how much planning and sheer energy went into being a dishonest person.

  Anyway, up until that point, I had been a paragon of restraint. Sure, I’d wanted to blab my good news to the world once I’d drawn that first pink line, but I knew from experience that prospective mothers did not behave in such a devil-may-care fashion. I knew that they traditionally played the coy game, that they tried to wait ten to twelve weeks before talking about it, so as to have safely hurdled the time most likely for their fetus to become part of a sad statistic.

  As I say, I was a paragon of restraint. By the sixth week, absolutely determined that this was one baby I was not going to lose, I began to tell people, caution be damned.

  Dodo was so surprisingly, touchingly happy for me that she swore to stop addressing me as Taylor on the spot. On top of that, since it was a Friday afternoon, and since Fridays were the accepted day for all the full editors to leave work early and stop off at the local pub for drinks and a rehash of the week, Dodo, who was only included because she had more successful authors than anyone else, impulsively said, “Oh, why don’t you come with us today, Jane? I’d love to help you celebrate!”

  No sooner were the words out of her mouth than I was reaching for my bag. Yes! Me and the full editors, out for a friendly pint or two, maybe a slimline and gin. The next thing I’d know, I’d finally be one of THEM.

  No sooner had my hand grasped my bag, however, than I heard Dodo’s breathy exhalation of disappointment. “Oh, how stupid of me, Jane,” she said, literally hitting herself on the side of the head, “of course you can’t go out for drinks with us. You’re expecting!”

  I let the strap on my bag slide down over the back of my seat again. So much for celebrations. Apparently, there were going to be problems with this pregnancy that I hadn’t anticipated yet.

  Dodo gave me that disappointed “Bad luck, old girl” look again while readjusting the strap on her own bag and squeezed my shoulder. Then her face brightened considerably. “Tell you what. Next week, you and I’ll have lunch, just the two of us. We can have salads and yogurt and—oh!—everything else that’s good for the baby. How does that sound?”

  It sounded a treat.

  I still wasn’t pregnant. I really was going to have to do something about that.

  On the way home from work I picked up a couple of steaks and two bottles of pricey red. Not much for meat myself, I’d often remarked in the past that, unless a man is a vegetarian, it’s amazing how chewing on meat that’s still pink in the center can put an otherwise civilized man in mind of ravishing the nearest breathing body that has even a smidgen of estrogen coursing through its veins. True, the night I’d initially told Trevor that I thought I was pregnant, he’d begged off having sex by using meat making him tired as an excuse, but I’d known it had just been that: an excuse. Red meat usually makes men horny as hell. (David claims that for gay people this theory only works with filet mignon, but then of course it’s just testosterone on both sides all the way.) As for the matching bottles of wine, these were also for Trevor, since, as Dodo had pointed out to me—rats!—I wasn’t supposed to be drinking anymore. Just to enhance the pretense that this was a real meal and not a base seduction, I tossed in some frozen potato thingies that I could zap in the micro and a few mangy garden veggies to toss in a bowl. Dessert? I wasn’t planning on us needing any.

  Yes, I know that my life had become a cliché: Girl Tries to Get Pregnant to Snare Man. But, honestly, at this point, what choice did I have? And, anyway, how many times do I have to keep pointing out that he thought I was pregnant already? So it wasn’t as though it was some kind of black-and-white case of entrapment.

  “My, that’s a rather large glass of wine you’ve poured for me,” Trevor pointed out.

  In my overeagerness, I’d used the biggest goblet I could find as opposed to something more delicately suitable. Okay, truth time: I used a brandy balloon.

  He took a sip. “Mmm, it’s good though. Aren’t you going to have some?”

  I made a vague gesture in the general direction of where I thought my womb might be, but his head was already bent over his plate.

  “Mmm, these potato thingies are top-drawer. What did you say you call them?”

  “Potato Toss.” The potatoes looked so not tossed, what with their tiny squared-off shapes and their fried casings, that I felt moved to embellish, “It’s a recipe I got from David.”

  “Oh.” He frowned at his potatoes. “Him. I always have trouble figuring out what you see in him.”

  “Well, he is my best friend. So there is that.”

  This really wasn’t going as I had planned. I topped off Trevor’s brandy balloon. “How’s the steak?” I asked brightly, poking a fork against my own steak that I hadn’t taken a bite of yet. “Is it, er, pink enough in the center for you?”

  “Mmm. Perfect.”

  “Would you like mine as well?”

  “Hmm…what?” Trevor raised his eyes from the evening Times. Okay, so maybe he was squeezing in a bit of reading smack-dab in the middle of my big seduction scene, but it was just the headlines. I was sure of it.

  “My steak. I asked you if you’d like mine as well.”

  “But don’t you want it yourself?”

  “Oh, that,” I poohed. “No. I only made two because I thought you might be really hungry after a hard day at work. And, anyway,” I couldn’t resist one last embellishment, “I don’t think that a lot of red meat is such a good thing for the baby.”

  “Oh. The baby.” His eyes returned to Tony Blair’s recent credibility problems.

  I poured out the last of the first bottle into his glass and cracked open the second.

  In any event, it turned out that the best laid plans of assistant editors named Jane Taylor were about as effective as those put out by mice and men.

  “I’m not really sh-sh-shure that thish-sh-sh ish-sh-sh sh-sh-shuch a good idea tonight, Janey.”

  “Course it is. You just need to loosen up a bit.” I loosened his tie for him, hoping that might help.

  “Too loosh-sh-sh. Too loosh-sh-sh. I think that’sh-sh-sh the problem—I’m too loosh-sh-sh!”

  And he was right of course.

  I tried pulling it…

  “I don’t believe it’sh-sh-sh meant to sh-sh-shtretch that far, Janey.”

  …and pushing it.

  “Wrong direcsh-sh-sh-way. But it feelsh-sh-sh good!”

  I watched as it dangled uselessly over me….

  “Not working.”

  …and sat over it.

  “That’sh-sh-sh a sh-sh-sh-shtrong maybe.”

  In the event, it wasn’t much of a sexual experience as sexual experiences go, but I was pretty sure that something happened on that last go-round.

  True, I mu
sed as I listened to Trevor’s snores, Shakespeare had been proven right yet again regarding the correlative nature of wine and performance, but all I needed was for there to have been just one strong swimmer on my side. Just one strong swimmer and then I would have what I wanted. Then my dreams would all come true.

  It was one of those perfect London days that every tourist secretly prays for. Oh, I don’t mean the odd day in August when the sky is just as perfectly blue as a robin’s egg and the temperature makes people walk around the city as though it were San Diego. No, I mean the kind of day in May where the rain comes down so relentlessly that, if not for the barely visible modern conveniences glimpsed through the fog, you’d swear you’d just been dropped into the middle of one of those old Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, the ones with all of the historical and literary inaccuracies. The kind of day that is so atmospherically awful that it enables every tourist to later return home from their vacation and say, “Yup. It really is just as damp there as they say. And the people really don’t know how to cook—can’t get a decent steak to save your life.”

  So it was one of those perfectly miasmic London days and I had been looking for Dodo, hoping to suss her out on what to do about the latest Colin Smythe emergency, only to find her huddling outside beneath the arch of the cement building which housed our offices, only partially successful in her attempts to keep both herself and her extra-long cigarette wholly dry.

  This insanity had all started about six months ago, when an American businessman from Seattle had flown in at zero hour on his white horse in order to save our company from being swallowed up by a bigger company, a pattern of acquisition that had become the norm in publishing in the past decade or so. In fact, some dire souls predicted that one day, there would just be five companies left; and that the day after that, there would just be one. Anyway, the man from Seattle’s name was Steve Johnson. It was rumored that his mother had enjoyed a wartime affair with the original Churchill of Churchill & Stewart, and that it was sentiment over this, plus the fact that he believed Mr. Churchill to be his real father, that had caused him to invest such a large sum of capital into the then shaky company. The only stipulation that had accompanied Mr. Johnson’s largesse—well, aside from the insistence that we make him a full member of the board whose vote would always count twice to everyone else’s once—was that we declare our offices to be wholly smokus non grata. This dictum from a man who did eat the London meat, and enjoy it, as well as the Stilton cheese and any pastries he could get his hands on during the entire time he was here; well, at least he wouldn’t have to worry about contracting lung cancer while he was in the midst of having his full-blown coronary. This dictum from a man who hadn’t set foot in the country since we’d waved him off at Heathrow at the end of that one week he’d spent here six months ago. This dictum that all of us still followed religiously, despite the fact that there was no sign of Mr. Johnson’s imminent return, because who knew when he might suddenly fly in again on his white charger.

  So now we knew what Dodo, who would have still been a chain-smoker were it not for Steve Johnson’s position, was doing outside. As for me, now that I’d found her and was ready to talk Smythe, I extracted a Silk Cut from the packet in my purse, placed it in my mouth, rooted around in my purse for my lighter, and…

  “You’re pregnant, Jane! You’re not going to smoke that, are you?” Dodo asked, her own cigarette dangling a long ash that was so damp that it threatened to make the whole thing go out. Not bothering to wait for a reply, she reached out and yanked the cigarette from my mouth, grinding it beneath her heel.

  I gave her my patented combination horrified-askance look and said, “Course not! Don’t be daft. I just pull one out now and again and hold it, unlit, as a metaphoric eternal flame of all that I am willing to sacrifice for the health of my unborn child.” Ugh! Where did I get this crap?

  Actually, I got it from the bloody Yanks mostly. It wasn’t enough that they beat our arses in one war and then, worse injury, saved our arses in another; now they had to export all of the worst of their godforsaken grasp of culture and social mores “across the pond.” This meant that no one anywhere was allowed to enjoy smoking or drinking anymore, that expectant mothers spent nine months suspended in the purgatory of waiting to be accused by any Tom, Dick or waiter who thought that what they were doing to their unborn babies must be against some kind of law and that if it wasn’t, it should be. These being always the same people who believed that, following a smokeless and alcohol-free pregnancy, it was perfectly okay to have one’s offspring raised by strangers, never mind if the well-nourished former fetuses one day grew up to kill their own classmates. And, as for Walt Disney, well, you couldn’t swing a dead cat anywhere within the borders of the European Union without hitting Mickey bloody Mouse square in his eternally grinning face. Phew! Still, due to the ever watchful eye of the Pregnancy Nutrition Police, I was probably going to have to abandon the diet of twelve smoothies a day that I’d been strictly adhering to for the past few months.

  I watched Dodo suck on a rain-spattered Benson & Hedges and thought about how good it looked.

  “Doesn’t Trevor worry when he sees you walking around with an unlit cigarette dangling out of the corner of your mouth?” Dodo pressed. “I mean, that you might start up again?”

  I thought about it for a moment. Actually, the cigarette Trevor was used to seeing me with was always lit, and no, actually, he never said a word. Oddly enough, so long as I said that the doctor reported everything was going okay, he didn’t ride me at all about what I was doing with my body.

  “No,” I said virtuously, going all Joan of Arc. “He knows I’d never do anything to hurt our child.”

  Blast. Now I was going to have to give up public smoking too.

  Well, I supposed, I’d have to give it up in private as well soon, anyway, once I was really pregnant.

  “Was there something you came out here to talk to me about, Jane?” Dodo prompted, lighting a fresh cigarette off of the end of the other. “Surely you didn’t come out here in this damp, and risk giving the fetus a cold, only to keep me company.”

  Actually, I came out here to have a bloody cigarette, you stupid twit, was what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t very well say it now, not with Dodo being my new best girlfriend and me being pregnant and all.

  “Oh,” I sighed. “I just wanted to talk to you about the Smythe situation. But it can wait.” I smiled tightly, patting my flat belly. “Mustn’t let the fetus get wet.”

  Then I went back inside.

  To cheer myself up, I manufactured a tilted uterus, culled from What to Expect, and tossed that into my sympathy-garnering bargain.

  “A tilted what?” asked Minerva from Publicity.

  Legend had it that Minerva had been with the company for so long that when the original Mr. Churchill had put his key in the door for the very first time, she’d already been there waiting for him. Since she was always the last one left in the office each night, it reinforced the image that she was merely this being who existed only in the Publicity department. Minerva had an honest-to-God beehive hairdo that was spun out of a yellow-red color that was improbable on a woman of her years and wore harlequin glasses that had a safety chain and an abundance of rhinestones on the corners.

  I had been trying to get her to do some damage control on the Colin Smythe “reckon” situation, perhaps send out copies of all of the favorable prepublication reviews he’d received from other magazines (i.e., British ones) that hadn’t had any trouble understanding what he’d meant by peppering his text with so many “reckons” that to American readers the book was like a bowl of chili with too much chili in it.

  As a ploy to enlist Minerva’s sympathies, no sooner had I mentioned Colin Smythe’s dilemma than I began rubbing my own lower back and wincing—but not too much—as though bravely covering up a pain, only mentioning the tilted uterus as though I were reluctant to do so after she asked me if I were having some k
ind of nervous attack.

  “A tilted what?”

  I explained to her how, statistically, one in five women had the top of the uterus tilted toward the back rather than the front.

  “It’s really not that big of a deal,” I went on bravely. “They say that in most cases, it should right itself by the end of the first trimester.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” she prompted.

  “Well, in those rare cases, it becomes stuck in the pelvis, puts pressure on the bladder something fierce, and sometimes, they have to insert a catheter to drain the urine and push the uterus back into its proper position.”

  “Ouch,” said Minerva, but her “ouch” somehow lacked sympathy. “Well,” she said, turning back to the stack of press releases she needed to get out, “let me know if it comes to that. As you say, though, it’ll probably tilt itself back into place before your first trimester’s up. Good luck. In the meantime, no on the Smythe. It’s just not in the budget.”

  Perhaps one can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar but, apparently, a tilted uterus simply wasn’t worth squat.

  Shitshitshitshitshit! Still not pregnant!

  I exited the bathroom in David’s flat, tossed the useless at-home pregnancy test kit into the trash bin under his kitchen sink and helped myself to the extra-large bottle of vinegary Australian in his fridge.

  We’d mutually concluded long ago that there was no point in wasting the good stuff on depression. We were only going to wind up pissed anyway, so why punish ourselves by throwing a lot of money into the bargain? On the other hand, it was worth paying the price of a hangover that a lot of cheap wine always bought a person, if only so that we’d have the reminder in the morning of why not to become alcoholics.

  “Shitshitshitshitshit!”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you really think, Jane?”