“Is he your first? Husband?”
“Only. And last.”
Henry fingered the stem of his glass. She was more bitter, tonight, than the last time they’d talked. “I understand,” he said, though he didn’t, not really; nor did he know if he should have accepted her slightly desperate invitation this evening.
Last Saturday, when he’d met her at a friend’s dinner party, she’d been astonishingly direct about the wreck of her marriage. “We still love each other,” she’d confided to him over stuffed lobster and long-grain rice. “But he can’t handle the baby.”
Henry had been flattered by the apparent ease she felt with him (she didn’t open up to just anyone at the dinner, he’d noticed). And he’d felt moved by her beauty in spite of her swollen belly.
Or — the thought disturbed him still — because of it.
Always before, he’d been drawn to slender, boyish figures. He promised himself he wasn’t going to stumble over the first woman he saw now, at his first outing in weeks. For God’s sake, he hadn’t been that lonely since Meg.
As they’d eaten dinner, to protect what he’d convinced himself was his brutally Meg-bashed heart, he had tried to find Kate ugly. Mentally, he had listed hateful words: bulbous, eggplant, behemoth. But no matter how meanly he’d barbed his thoughts, she looked gorgeous. He’d felt a surging sexual urge in her direction.
She’d gone on about her unexpected pregnancy, her financial pressures, Ben’s ambivalence about the baby, and his decision to leave. Henry had lost himself in her long, starry earrings, her slender nose, her light-brown eyes. Her sweater had kept sliding up on the boldly curving mound of her abdomen. It was the best thing he’d seen in months.
By dinner’s end, charmed by her candor, shocked by his ratcheting pulse (he had felt physically winded), Henry had given her his numbers, home and work — a clumsy moment — and told her to get in touch with him if he could help her in any way.
Then, this morning, she’d called him at the office. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said.
“No, no.” He’d just traded eight quarters for a vending-machine sandwich, turkey with mayo. He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, as though she could see him. “How are you?”
“A little queasy today. I’m kind of embarrassed — ”
“What is it?” Henry said.
“Ben’s being a first-class shit. I need help lifting boxes.”
“I’m off at five.” He had to meet with a couple of clients and go through last year’s tax returns with them. “Can I bring you anything? Food? Medicine?” Did pregnant women take medicine?
“I’ve got some spaghetti if you’d like to stay for dinner,” she said. “Bring a jar of sauce, the Paul Newman stuff? Tastes like motor oil — I’m afraid everything tastes vaguely automotive to me these days — but I like Paulie’s eyes.”
She refilled his glass.
“I see Beauty and the Beast is playing down the street,” Henry said.
“Oh, I love that movie.”
“Would you like to go see it? Maybe tomorrow?”
“I don’t think so. Too romantic.”
“Nothing wrong with a little romance, right?” He sounded nerdy to himself.
“Except it’s a lie,” Kate said. “I mean, who ever thought I’d end up raising a kid by myself?”
Henry felt brave now. The wine. Her startling honesty. “Did you ever consider not having it?”
“No. That’s not a problem for me, you know, I’ve got no religious qualms about it, but … I always wanted a child,” Kate said. She was going to cry, Henry saw. “The truth is, I didn’t think Ben would really leave.”
He didn’t know what to say. He held her hand. “It’s okay. Listen, why don’t you let me cook the spaghetti? You sit still.”
“Oh, the spaghetti. I forgot.”
Idiot, Henry chided himself. Now she probably figured he only cared about his stomach.
“That’s nice,” she said.
He’d been stroking the back of her hand.
“You know, the worst part about pregnancy …” Kate squeezed her thighs with her hands. “It’s what it does to your conception of yourself. As a woman, I mean. I look in the mirror and think, what a bloated, ugly — ”
“No,” Henry said.
She turned to him. “Do you think I’m —?”
He placed his palm on her belly. “I think you’re exquisite,” he said.
The tears came now. She tried to laugh. “I’m being vain — ”
“Shhh.”
Neither of them made the spaghetti. Henry finished his wine and left (he’d forgotten Paul Newman anyway). “Are you sure you can drive?” Kate had said.
Something seemed to have solidified between them, but they were shaken by the suddenness, and felt a need — they both knew it without speaking — to step back and think. She had made him promise to call.
Weaving home in his car, a little drunk, he wondered what he’d fallen into. Rebound, he thought. This poor, lovely woman’s ricocheting all over the city.
And what about him? Maybe he was needier than he’d dreamed.
A baby? A little girl?
A pair of university students — female, male — went jogging past a pizza parlor in the rain. Henry watched them in the neon bath of a Pepsi sign. I’d like a small deep-dish, extra cheese, with pepperoni and X-Y chromosomes, please.
At home he made himself a bologna-and-pickle sandwich and caught the tail end of a Tracy-Hepburn movie on TV Affectionate repartee, romantic wit — bullshit, he thought, in Kate’s weary voice. Still, he enjoyed the couple onscreen.
He looked around. His apartment seemed especially barren tonight, though in fact the chairs had taken over. Meg had kept only the green recliner. Somehow, Kate’s half-empty place had felt more welcoming and whole than his well-stocked kitchen and den.
The pink envelopes in which he mailed his rent checks (supplied annually, in packets of twelve, by the investment firm that owned his building) sat on the counter next to his cutting board and knives. The Hot Pink of Authority, of single people living in generic rooms all over this quarreling, splitting city. He stuffed the envelopes into a drawer.
The smell of Kate’s hair came back to him. Coconut. Sea breeze. Sweetness and … Jesus, too much wine, he thought. He sat to stop his spinning head. The chair was hard. “Damn it,” he said aloud, hoping to nudge his mind off Kate, “that green recliner was mine!” Meg had kept the best piece and cast off the no-goods. In the shock of their separation, he’d agreed.
“Time to renegotiate,” he spurred himself.
He remembered, then, that today — tonight — was his birthday. Twenty-eight. In his two years with Meg, she’d always remembered to plan a celebration.
He toasted Katharine Hepburn. “Happy birthday,” he told the snowy screen.
That night he dreamed pregnant dreams: rising dough, hot-air balloons, great windy dirigibles.
His first girlfriend, Markie Barnes, was a dentist’s daughter. They were sophomores in high school together. The night she told him he’d be the luckiest boy in the world tonight, she also said, “I’ve got, you know, medicine to keep it safe.”
He didn’t know what she meant. Had she smuggled a pain-killing drug out of her father’s office? Would they need relief? Later, he misunderstood her again and thought she’d called the sticky stuff “homicidal jelly.”
He’d slept with two women in college, Natalie Sparks and Lisa Baines, neither of whom really loved him — they’d made that persistently clear — but each time, with each woman, the sex had been without pain. They both loved movies, especially the old Hollywood romances — Lubitsch, The Thin Man series — that played at the repertory theater near the Rice campus. Each Friday night it was cheeseburgers or pizza, kisses in black-and-white, then blind groping in the stale mess of a dorm room: textbooks, Glamour magazines — or at Henry’s place, his roommate’s exotic beer bottle collection.