“Why are you building that plane?” Jillian asked, trying to keep her voice light and casual.
Spencer laughed. “What? What are you talking about, Jillian? I don’t get it.”
“That plane… that terrible plane that you and Jackson and McLaren are so proud of… Why do you have to build it? Why does it have to exist at all?”
Spencer shrugged. “It’s a contract, Jilly. And I didn’t add as much as Jackson said I did…They have a bunch of real smart engineers over there. They’re behind most of it,”
The first notes of Follow the Fleet began to flow from the VCR, but neither of them were paying attention.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Spencer. “You’re worried about what kind of world we’ll be bringing the twins into. I think about it, too, believe me…
They settled down to watch the movie. “Don’t worry,” he said reassuringly. “We won’t let anything happen to them. Will we? I know you won’t and you know I won’t. Follow the Fleet played on the television, but it played to no conscious audience. Both Jillian and Spencer had fallen asleep, entwined in each other’s arms.
Jillian dreamed. A dream so real that even in her sleep she hated it. Those familiar words.
“I’m going to rotate the panel forty-eight degrees. You got me, Alex?”
“That’s good to go. I’ll need the 9c spanner as soon as…Spencer? You feel that?”
“Alex? Jesus. Alex? What the—”
Jillian awoke with a start, waking Spencer at the same time. Follow the Fleet was still on the television set.
Spencer pulled Jillian into an embrace. “Must have dozed off,” he said.
“Were you dreaming?” Jillian asked.
said Spencer, “just sleeping.”
“You weren’t dreaming?” Jillian pressed. “No, Jillian. I wasn’t dreaming,” he said. Jillian looked into his eyes. They were not loving, but black and cold.
“Were you?” Spencer asked.
Jillian looked down at the coffee table where Sherman Reese’s video cassette had been before they fell asleep. The tape was gone. Jillian felt her stomach lurch.
“Were you?” Spencer repeated.
Jillian looked over at the radio and closed her eyes. “No,” she said. “No dreams for me.”
18
There were any number of restaurants on Madison Avenue that catered to the rich women who constituted the New York corps known as “The Ladies who Lunch.” Shelley McLaren was known at all of them, but she favored one of them above all others. She was sure to get the best table no matter how late she called for a reservation, she was always welcome to order “off the menu”—asking for things not listed on the menu, that is—and for these privileges she was mercilessly overcharged, but because she was one of the few who had a house charge at the restaurant she had no idea how much money she actually paid for her microscopic lunches or how astronomically she tipped.
Not that she would have cared all that much, but like all rich people she did not like being taken advantage of. Nevertheless, when Jillian Armacost called with a special request, Shelley had insisted that she treat to lunch at “her” place at Madison and Seventy-seventh. Jillian was on time and shown to the table immediately. Shelley walked through the door fewer than three minutes later, but it took her a full thirty minutes to make it to the table.
Finally she plunked herself down in front of Jillian. “Sorry about that,” she said. “One knows so many people in places like this and you have to chitchat with all of them or the next thing you know they won’t support your charity and your tickets to the Costume Institute Reception at the Metropolitan suddenly go to some woman from Minneapolis that you’ve never heard of…”
“I never knew lunch could be so complicated,.” said Jillian. “What if you just stayed home and had a sandwich?”
“Social death,” said Shelly McLaren. She popped open her Judith Lieber purse and worked around in there for a moment. “Lunch may be complicated,” she said as she searched. “But strangely enough the most complicated things can be surprisingly simple.” She pulled a brown plastic vial filled with prescription pills from her purse and showed them to Jillian, passing them quickly across the table as a waiter glided up to them, smiling unctuously.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. McLaren,” he said. “It is so nice to see you again.”
“Two glasses of muscadet, Charlie,” Shelly ordered. “Two of those nice salads and leave us alone.”
“Very good, ma’am.” Charlie withdrew quickly. Shelley leaned forward and smiled at Jillian. Jillian was fingering the pill bottle under the table. “Now, about these things,” said Shelley. “My caterer gets them from someone in the French Caribbean. Martinique, I think. The French are so advanced in this sort of thing, don’t you think? RU486 was supposed to have been legal here years‘ ago, but it will never happen…
The waiter named Charlie returned with the wine and Shelley clammed up as he placed the glasses in front of Them. They waited a couple of seconds before speaking again.
“Are they safe?” Jillian asked.
“Yes,” Shelley replied. “But there’s really something you should know before you—” She was silent again as the salads were delivered and Charlie withdrew.
“What should I know?” Jillian asked. This was not a meeting she had relished, but she has thought about it hard and long and now she was determined to go through with it.
“With these things, Jillian,” said Shelley, “all sales are final. You take them and you’ll abort. You have to ask yourself, do you want to go through with this?”
Jillian nodded. “Yes. Absolutely. ”
“Okay,” said Shelley. “Take both pills when you get home. Then go lie down for a while. Then there will be quite a bit of vile cramping, then once you start spotting it goes pretty fast.” Shelley took a slug of her wine. “Believe me, if I can get through it, anyone can. ”
“You?” said Jillian.
Shelley had to stop herself from rolling her eyes. “Jillian, we all have. It’s like there’s a secret club. There’s ‘the Pill’ and then, just in case, there’s ‘the Pills.’ ”
“And Spencer won’t know?”
Shelley picked up her wine glass again and waved off an imaginary Spencer. “If he’s anything like the rest of them… he’ll think it was a miscarriage and fly down to Van Cleefs to buy you a bracelet. If he feels really bad he’d go to Harry Winston’s.” Shelley extended her wrist and rattled a thick diamond bracelet on her wrist.
“Unless he’s looking for it,” Shelley continued, “there will be no way to tell. And why should he be looking for it?”
Neither of them had touched their salads and Jillian had not had her wine, but Shelley signaled for the check. Charlie brought it and Shelley signed it. The she looked over at Jillian who appeared to be on the verge of tears.
Shelley put her hand on Jillian’s. “Don’t beat yourself up about this, sweetheart,” she said. “It’s not as if any of this means anything, you know. It’s all nonsense…” Jillian stood in the bright white of the bathroom connected to her bedroom and looked at the bottle of pills. Very slowly she unscrewed the top and shook the contents into her hand. The two tablets were very thick and dusty. They would be difficult to force down her dry throat. She ran the water in the sink and filled a glass with it—she was about to put the pills in her mouth when she began to hear her own heart beating, getting louder and louder until she could hear nothing else. But then there came another sound… a much faster thump. Two more heartbeats. The heart beats of the twin fetuses, pounding away so fast as if telegraphing a message to their mother, begging not to be killed.