The Thin Pink Line Read online

  Constance lined up beside Louise, although the effect was somewhat lost since her breasts were, well, nowhere near as competitive. “Yes, do, Jane.”

  “Could you excuse me for just a tick?” I winced a smile. “I promised one of our more neurotic authors that I’d call her back promptly at—” I hurriedly consulted my watch “—now, and I’m worried she’ll put rocks in a burlap sack, rope it around her waist and walk into the Thames to die if I don’t call on time.” I winced another smile. “You know the type.” I backed toward my office. “Really. I promise. Won’t be a tick.”

  Safe in my office, the door closed, I picked up my mobile and punched in the number for David’s mobile. No point in risking the use of the office phone, I figured, since who knew what kind of record the company kept of calls. Besides, I thought as I waited impatiently for David to pick up, I did have all of those fucking free minutes to use up.

  “Shalom?” he said.

  “Do you always answer like that for everyone,” I asked, “or do you just reserve it for when you see my number flashing on your caller I.D.?”

  “It’s just something I do for you, Jane. I know how much you like getting the full ethnic treatment.”

  “Thanks so much for always thinking about me, but I haven’t got time for that right now. Are you busy?”

  “I can’t believe you just asked me that.”

  “How come?”

  “Because you never have before.”

  “Oh.” I shrugged, even though I knew he couldn’t see me. “It must have been an aberration. But, really, are you—busy?”

  “Well, I am working here on attaining my lifelong dream—”

  “Oh. That. Well, that can certainly keep—” I lowered my voice to a hissing whisper “—because I need your help.”

  “For what?”

  “Dodo and the girls are pressuring me to name an obstetrician.”

  “So?” He was whispering too now. “You’re resourceful. Just make a name up.”

  “I can’t just make a name up.”

  “Why not? You’ve made up an entire pregnancy so far. How hard can it be to pick a vaguely medical-sounding doctor’s name out of a hat?”

  “Yes, but what if they bother to check? These women are very nosy.” I paused. “And why are you whispering too?”

  “I’m just trying to be companionable,” he whispered again. “Seriously, though, Jane, I really do need to go now. There are some decisions about the restaurant that only I can make.”

  “Oh, fine,” I said, exasperated. “If you really need to get back to your own blasted lifelong dream…”

  “Yes, I really do, Jane. But I have every confidence that you’ll think of a solution—however insane it may turn out to be—all on your own.”

  Click.

  How rude. I hate it when people click off without saying goodbye first.

  Oh, well.

  I straightened my skirt and steeled myself to go back into the breach.

  “I’m back,” I announced.

  “Yes,” said Louise, “we can see that. Author still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t floating at the bottom of the Thames?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Then can we go on?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What I meant to say earlier was not that I hadn’t picked an obstetrician out yet. What I meant to say was that Doctor…Doctor…Doctor…”

  “Yes, Jane?” From Louise again. “Doctor who, Jane?”

  All of a sudden a name came to me and, before I’d thought to think through the consequences, it came flying out of my mouth. “Dr. Shelton is to be my obstetrician and—”

  The man I had just named was a very famous obstetrician whom I’d named simply because he was the only one whose name I knew. The problem was, since he’d just successfully attended to one of the lesser Royals in a troublesome pregnancy that had garnered lots of media attention (From the Globe: “Will Princess Veronique’s Baby Be Born with Two Heads?”), everyone else knew his name, too. And all of the ones in the office who knew it were suddenly clouding around me like flies.

  “My God, Jane,” gushed Louise, as if I’d just been anointed by God or made a dame.

  “Why didn’t you say anything before?” asked Constance, her adoring eyes making it clear that I was her new heroine of the moment, at least until she started hating me for having good fortune that was wholly undeserved.

  “Well…” I lowered my eyes in modesty. “Anyway,” I went on quickly so as not to overdo, “what I was starting to say before was that it isn’t that I’ve not seen an obstetrician yet. It’s merely that Dr. Shelton and I haven’t finalized our plan of action, should this pregnancy turn out to be as problematic as, well, Princess Veronique’s.”

  “Maybe you should sit down,” suggested Louise.

  “I’ll get you a footstool for under your desk,” said Constance.

  “You know,” said Dodo, tapping her lower lip with a finger once I’d been thus enthroned. “You know,” said Dodo, the woman who wasn’t supposed to know “nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies, Miss Scarlett.” She stopped tapping her lower lip to point her finger at me. “I had a friend over at Random House who knew someone who had a baby once, and this person she knew also used Dr. Shelton as an obstetrician. Anyway, just the other day, after all of this stuff about Princess Niquie came out? Well, she told me that her friend said that this Dr. Shelton, whom everyone’s treating as though he were the second coming of obstetricians or something, was perfectly beastly to her friend. Said that right from the start, from the very first pound she put on, he berated her up and down for letting herself become, and these are supposed to be his words, ‘a fat cow.’ Said he told her that the optimum weight gain charts had been put on earth for a reason and that if she couldn’t play by the rules, she shouldn’t be allowed to procreate. Can you believe it?”

  I thought about my own gym-hardened stomach. Here was a part of pregnancy that I could definitely excel at. I was hoping to win the award for Least Pregnant-Looking Lady that anybody’d ever seen, leaving all the others behind in the pickles-and-ice-cream dust.

  “No, actually,” I said, “I have a tough time believing that of sweet old Dr. Shelton. He’s been very kind to me. More like a grandfather really than anything else, save for the fact of course that he makes me put my feet up in stirrups whenever I see him. No, Dodo, I’m sorry to say that it’s my guess that your friend’s friend was having one of those bulimic pregnancies you hear so much about now.”

  “I haven’t heard of them at all, never mind hearing so much about them,” puzzled Dodo.

  “No?” I yawned. “Oh, well, it must be that I keep seeing it mentioned in those pregnancy magazines I read now. Maybe it’s not a matter of public domain yet. At any rate—” and here I couldn’t resist the urge to pat my rockhard abdomen “—Dr. Shelton says that in all his years of practice, he’s never seen an expectant mother do so well at not gaining too much weight. He says that some people take pregnancy as a license to eat and begin ballooning up from the minute their urine makes that pink line on the wand. He says they should send me on the talk-show circuit or something as an inspiration to others.”

  I could tell that this last really rankled Louise and Constance. I knew that, were these normal times, they’d never let me get away with what they surely saw as pomposity. But these were no longer normal times. These were pregnant times and this had given both of them pregnant pause, for, after all, if Dr. Shelton said a thing was so…

  I accepted everybody’s extra attention that day but, for once, kept a clear eye on the future, at least as far as Dr. Shelton was concerned. After all, I couldn’t very well have him be my obstetrician of record when I was surrounded by people who knew people who knew him, people who might, in that tell-two-friends-about-it way that life seemed to go, create a situation in which the truth was revealed concerning the fact that he had no clue as to who I was. I would bide my time, spin out the Dr. Shelton fantasy
for a few more weeks so as not to make everyone suspicious by making a too abrupt change. Then, when the time was right, I would make a change, claim it was a matter of personal philosophy. Although I hadn’t read the chapters on selecting someone to deliver the baby in What to Expect thoroughly, because I hadn’t really seen the need yet, I did vaguely recall there being options other than the traditional “man who specializes in making woman lie flat on table with feet in stirrups while telling her to push.” I knew that some people used a family doctor and I knew that some people used a midwife. Perhaps this last was the answer to my dilemma.

  Time would tell. At any rate, for now, my feet were comfier than they’d been in years.

  “You do realize, Jane, that even were you to get pregnant now, by the time you actually gave birth, it would appear to the world as though you had undergone an eleven-month gestation period? That might be difficult to explain, unless of course you elect to pass Trevor off as being part pachyderm.”

  The speaker of course was David. The place was the Serpentine in Hyde Park, where David was keeping our little rower afloat, while I lay on my back, eyes closed. The time was smack in the middle of an indescribably beautiful crystal blue marble of a Sunday afternoon.

  But all of that was irrelevant now since my best friend, the heartless bastard, had just burst my bubble.

  “What do you mean?” I scrambled to an upright position, reaching up just in time to save my straw hat from sailing into the lake.

  “Just do the math. Even disadvantaged as you are, without my military training, you should be able to handle simple addition and subtraction.”

  I did as he instructed, all the while marveling at how calmly he was able to keep rowing as my fantasy world collapsed. Then I double-checked it, this time reversing the process by going from left to right on my fingers.

  “Actually, you’re wrong,” I pointed out, as if it mattered. “Actually, given the date I originally told people I conceived and given how far into what is supposed to be my third month I’ve gone, if I did conceive now, by the time I delivered people would naturally assume that I had been pregnant for twelve to thirteen months.”

  “Perhaps the math skills of the Israeli military are not what they once were.” David shrugged it off and went on placidly rowing.

  “Could you stop rowing, please? I’m in crisis here!”

  But he didn’t stop. “You’ve been in crisis ever since I first met you, Jane. The only difference is that this time you are much more flagrantly so.”

  “But what am I going to do? I’ve told everybody that I know that I’m pregnant. Trevor, my mother, Sophie, the girls at work—they all think I’ve got a baby coming sometime around the end of the year. What am I going to do when the calendar flips over and I don’t have a baby to show for it?” All of a sudden, a horrible thought occurred to me. “Never mind six months from now, what am I going to do when it’s time for me to start showing and I’m not showing?”

  There it was again, that shrug. “So, you’ll tell everybody that you made a mistake.”

  “A mistake?” I shrieked so loudly that it caused the eavesdropping American in the rowboat closest to ours, the one with the ultrafaded T-shirt with Arkansans for Impeachment printed on it, to let his oar get hopelessly away from him. “Serves you right, you self-righteous git,” I muttered.

  “What was that, Jane?” David asked.

  “Never mind. What I really meant to say was,” and here I shrieked again, “a mistake? Are you out of your can’t-add-worth-shit Israeli military mind? I can’t tell everybody that I made a mistake! What am I going to do, say, ‘Oh, uh, oops, excuse me, I thought I was pregnant for the last three months, but, dur, er, I guess I’m not?’ You don’t think that too many of them might try and have me locked away if I do that, do you?”

  “There is really no need to be quite so sarcastic, Jane. No, of course you are not going to do whatever that insane thing is that you just described. What you’re going to do is you’re going to tell everyone the truth. Of course that is what you’ll do. You have no other choice.”

  I thought about the idea of coming clean with Trevor. But how can you come clean with someone who’s never around? Each week, he was home less and less. True, we lived together. True, on paper at least, we were having a baby together. But, lately, he’d not been around to discuss, well, anything. Lately, he’d been little more than a slightly warm body in bed, and on some nights not even that. Besides…

  “You’re starkers! I can’t tell everyone the truth!”

  “Tell me, what other choice do you have?”

  The words that David had spoken to me in his apartment some weeks ago had been percolating in my mind ever since: If I could be pregnant without really being pregnant, would I?

  True, I didn’t think about it in his garbled-English sort of way, but there was a kernel of something in what he’d said, an essence that had been haunting me ever since he’d said it.

  “Maybe you were right,” I said now, realizing that the decision had been made in my subconscious long ago, although of course there was no way for him to know what I was referring to as yet.

  “You mean about your baby being thought to be eleven months old when you finally get around to having it?”

  “No, of course not. Your math skills still suck.” I waved him off, idly thinking that he really did look like Michelangelo’s David with his T-shirt off like that, save that there was no marble and he already needed a shave. “No, what I meant was that maybe you were right a few weeks ago when you said that I wanted to be pregnant without really being pregnant.”

  “Jane.” He finally stopped his rowing. “What’s going on in that little head of yours?”

  “Think about it,” I said, suddenly all excitement about my prospects for the future.

  And that was when what had started out as “a plan” three months ago, what had evolved into “the plan” in the months since, finally crystallized as “The Plan.”

  “Think about it. Everyone is expecting me to be pregnant for the next several months. I’ve wanted to be pregnant more so that I could experience what everyone else seems to be experiencing than because I’ve given any thought to actually having or raising a real-live baby. There’s nothing in the slightest bit warm or fuzzy about me, nothing maternal—perhaps Dodo could do maternal, but I certainly couldn’t—so there’s no reason to think that if there were a real baby involved that I’d be any sort of good mother—”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “—or that Trevor would be a good father.”

  “Well, we do know that.”

  “So, it’s probably just as well that Trevor and I aren’t expecting a baby together, because he never seems too terribly keen on the idea anyway. But Trevor has already asked me to marry him, so now we have this whole wedding to plan.”

  “Which you could always cancel.”

  “But I don’t want to stop being pregnant!” I let the other shoe drop on him. Still, he was my best friend and a part of me couldn’t help but think that he of all people had known what was coming all along. “Wouldn’t it be great if I could go on having this experience, even though there would be no baby at the end of the line? I’ve already got three months under my belt. Wouldn’t it be great if I could finish out the whole term, if I could impersonate being pregnant for the whole nine months?”

  “Now you’re the one who’s barking mad!” His idiomatic English was doing that leaps-and-bounds thing again. “This you cannot do, Jane. This is too much insanity even for you.”

  “No, it’s not. Besides, you always said you were my best friend. Won’t you stand by me now in my hour of need?”

  He picked up the oars and began rowing again. “This really is too much,” he reiterated, but then he smiled. “So, what are you going to tell everyone when the nine months are up?”

  “Constipated?” asked Constance, placing a couple of what looked suspiciously like unsolicited manuscripts onto my desk. Damn Dodo for alw
ays dumping things that were addressed to her onto me.

  “Ex-cuse me?”

  “I just saw that really big frown on your face when you were staring off into space there, and I began wondering if you were trying to maybe solve the riddle of the Sphinx or if you were maybe constipated.”

  I was tempted to throw the dwarf with the weird violet-red eyes out of my office but then thought better of it; for all I knew, there might be something here that I could use.

  “Why do you say that, Constance?” Actually, I’d been thinking about what to order for lunch.

  “Well, see, I saw this show they did on Beeb 4… Oh, maybe I should just start with Cindy Crawford.”

  “Cindy Crawford?”

  “Yeah. The American model.”

  “I know who Cindy Crawford is, Constance. What I don’t know is what she has to do with constipation.”

  “Well, you know how she’s had two kids and everything? Well, although she was better with her second, I really didn’t think she handled her first pregnancy in a way that was very positive for womankind.”

  I knew I was going to regret helping her out with one of her digressions but, like the hypnotized Mina Harker letting Count Dracula in, I found myself powerless to resist. “Oh? And what did Cindy do to womankind this time?”