The Seven Year Bitch Read online

  “Richman Gold’s Private Client Groups handles your annual portfolio rebalancing,” I said, doing a quick calculation for the second time. Thirty mil in real estate, eighty mil in safe bonds, one hundred mil in a well-diversified portfolio plus a mil in a checking account. “So you didn’t need my services.”

  “I know,” he said. “I just thought it would be fun. I remember that night I met you, I asked you how much I should invest in a hedge fund and you said, ‘It depends on your appetite for risk.’ I think of that line all the time. ʽIt depends on your appetite for risk.’”

  He looked like he was enjoying himself.

  I sectioned the scallop with my fork and popped a portion of it in my mouth to sustain myself.

  “And I see your appetite was big,” I said, looking at the hedge funds. “Wait a minute, you’re Arrowsender, LLC?”

  When I was considering having my fund buy stock in an IPO, I’d noticed that a huge portion of the privately held stock in the IPO company was held by one investor with a ridiculous name—Arrowsender. When the company went public, all of the private stock was bought out by the investors. He had made a killing.

  “So we don’t really have any business to do together,” I said, almost disappointed.

  “Well that’s good because you probably don’t sleep with your clients.”

  “I’m married,” I said. “I don’t sleep with anybody.”

  “Happily?” he asked.

  I couldn’t wait to tell my mother about this so she could tell her shrink. If it were possible for a person to kick herself under the table, I would have. We sat there for hours, laughing and joking, and I couldn’t remember having so much fun. I knew in the morning I would have to play hooky from Duncan’s Baby Time class. After tonight, I didn’t think I could eat strange sandwiches with Gerde and hear her German small-town theories about proper fashions for babies. At the end of the night he rejected his chef’s tray of desserts. “The chef knows what I like,” he told the waiter.

  Then Jean-Georges himself came out of the kitchen with a pineapple and a knife and carved it for us, and a waiter followed with a silver boat of whipped cream.

  “Is this an anniversary?” the great chef asked.

  “This is only the second time we’ve met,” Gabe said.

  “Oh, I thought for sure this was your wife,” he said.

  “ How was your big date?” Russell asked when I walked in the door.

  “I got my period and had to put a diaper in my tights.”

  “Your period,” he said. “I think that’s my cue to get a vasectomy.”

  When Russell had to have a procedure to test his fatty liver, he’d clutched on to me all the way up to Mount Sinai and I’d had to promise him the whole time he wouldn’t die. And that was just his liver. I didn’t think there was much threat in him volunteering for an operation on his penis.

  I went into our room and lay down on our bed, still in my clothes and diaper. Russell followed after me.

  “Did you have fun?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Does that mean you want to go back to work?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  On my way to Aquacise at the gym, I called Dr. Heiffowitz’s office and spoke to his assistant, a woman named Scottie. It was my thirty-ninth birthday and I had that revved-up, birthday, time-is-of-the-essence feeling. “I have a quick question,” I said. “My nanny . . . sitter . . . can’t get pregnant. But she doesn’t have any money and she’s here in this country illegally, so I was wondering if . . .”

  “Well, I don’t know what we can do if she’s here illegally. Has she filled out a patient questionnaire?”

  “No, not yet,” I said. I felt like a complete idiot. It was a mistake to tell Scottie her status, which when I thought about it had nothing to do with it really. Dr. Heiffowitz was a fertility endocrinologist, not an immigration attorney. It must, I thought, be possible to get pregnant without a Social Security number, people probably did it all the time.

  “I’d like to make an appointment for her,” I said. “Send the patient questionnaire to my address.”

  Dr. Heiffowitz was such a genius, they might as well send the baby in the envelope along with the patient questionnaire, because it was practically a guarantee he could get you one.

  Walking along Washington Square North, I tried not to notice the changes that were being made to the park. Big signs from the Parks Commission had been placed on the ugly wire fence now lining the perimeter, explaining the plans for the beautification of Washington Square Park. One-hundred-year-old trees and burial grounds were being dug up. Someone had tied balloons to the fence and drawn sad faces on them.

  A sad face painted on a balloon is the last thing you expect to see on your birthday.

  The cobblestones were all gone. A trench had been dug around the park exposing layers of earth that no New Yorker wanted to know about.

  I saw the old ladies selling their wares.

  “Do you have any hats?” I asked.

  “Doris, do we have any hats?”

  “Hold on, Marilyn.” Doris went into the senior center and came out with a tiny orange baby hat with a green stem, made to look like a pumpkin.

  “I meant for a man,” I said. “Like a skullcap.”

  “You mean one of those African-looking things? My rabbi wears one of those instead of a yarmulke. He’s very young. Unmarried,” Doris said.

  “We’ll have it for you next week,” Marilyn pushed in. “Custom made. I can have one of my girls do it right away. Any particular colors?”

  The one I’d spilled wine on was black and orange and red. I told them what it should look like.

  “Your husband is a lucky man.”

  “It’s not for my husband,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “Just a friend,” I said.

  “No judgments,” Marilyn said, crossing her knitting needles in front of her. “My girls just knit. We don’t ask any questions. We don’t judge our customers. We’re all mothers here. Between the three of us we’ve done everything under the sun.”

  The third old lady, Gert, just sat on the steps staring off into space. It was hard to imagine she’d done much of anything under the sun at all.

  “We’re all divorced,” Doris said. “Marriage did not agree with me. It was fine until the children came and then I had to harp on him for everything. Just to get him to come home. I called it ʽThe Making of the Shrew.’ It was horrible.”

  “You were already a shrew,” Marilyn said. “You’re still a shrew. The question is which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

  Doris laughed. “The answer happens to be, the chicken and the egg. I was a spring chicken, and then became a mother, before I was a shrew, believe me. When we were first married, my husband had a harmless crush on another woman in our beach club. She always wore the same purple bathing suit, and she would hang it on a hook to dry after she rinsed it when she came in from swimming. My husband was always bringing her up, saying what nice legs she had and tush, and why couldn’t I have a bathing suit like that one. So one day I grabbed it off that hook and I put it on, and I flaunted myself all over the beach right where everyone could see me, and it was the funniest thing. We would always play tricks on each other and have fun. We had a spark. Then, for the children’s sake, I had to nag and pester him all the time. He wasn’t a bad father and he wasn’t a bad husband, but he was a bad father and husband if that makes any sense. He couldn’t handle it, both together. I had to do everything—the school, the doctor’s appointments, the vet, and the house payments. He turned me into a nag and a pest.”

  “Maybe if you’d had a nice ʽfriend’ things would have been different,” Marilyn said.

  All three women looked at me.

  “So what about something for you?” Marilyn said. “A nice scarf? I made these here, but I don’t want you to think you have to buy one of mine, because all my girls do wonderful work. I just happen to like this one.” Sh
e held up a purple eyelash number, reminiscent of the purple bathing suit in Doris’s story.

  “Did you make that one?” I asked.

  “I did, but that’s not why I’m recommending it. I just happen to like it.”

  “Well it is my birthday,” I said, taking a twenty out of my coat pocket. I hadn’t bought myself anything since I’d been laid off and it felt good to do it.

  I spent my thirty-ninth birthday sitting in the dining room of the senior center drinking lemon tea and eating lemon pound cake. Then I attended a special seniors’ Weight Watchers meeting on the second floor. Why not, I thought. Thirty-nine was forty and forty was fifty.

  At home I changed for our dinner reservation. But Russell wouldn’t get off the phone. He talked and talked and talked and talked. It was an emergency. A review in the New York Times of a book by one of his authors had begun “In this terrible novel . . .” He talked and soothed and strategized. From the other room I heard him say, “It’s my wife’s birthday,” and then he laughed. “I know, I’m in trouble.”

  Our babysitter sat on the couch reading a book.

  “It’s a ten o’clock reservation,” I screamed. “Ten o’clock. Not six or seven or eight but ten. You can’t even get off the phone at ten o’clock on my birthday.”

  What had become of me? I wondered.

  12

  Everything caused a fight. Everything was a negotiation. Something as simple as dressing Duncan in a sweater turned into a full production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Blood was always dripping from my chops.

  “Here’s a sweater for Duncan.”

  “He doesn’t need a sweater.”

  “What do you mean he doesn’t need a sweater? It’s cold outside.”

  “I don’t want him to get too hot.”

  “It’s seventeen degrees.”

  “No, it’s forty-two degrees.”

  “Okay, you win. It’s forty-two degrees. Put the sweater on him.”

  “It’s not that cold.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “I was out. You haven’t been out.”

  “It’s freezing, Russell.”

  “It’s March. I think you’re insane.”

  “I know it’s March. But it’s cold. It’s raining.”

  “That’s what his coat’s for. He’s going to be wearing a coat.”

  “Of course he’s going to be wearing a coat!”

  “So he doesn’t need a sweater.”

  “Is it that you’re just too lazy to put the goddamn sweater on him? It’s not that hard, you pull it over his head.”

  “You’re really hurting him by doing this in front of him.”

  “You’re hurting him by taking him out in zero-degree weather without a sweater.”

  “Fine. I’ll put it on him.”

  “Good. Jesus. Moron.”

  We fought about the mail piling up on the dining table, the clutter, the house filling up with books, and authors, always these terrible authors.

  “What’s this?” he asked, holding the large envelope from Dr. Heiffowitz’s office.

  “Probably nothing,” I said, taking the envelope into the bathroom with me.

  When she came in the morning, I waited for Russell to leave the house to deal with a problem with our car, and we sat down on the couch together and went through the questions. My heart was pounding the way it had when I had filled out my own.

  “Now. What was the first day of your last period?” I said in a casual, upbeat tone as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be discussing.

  “Were you a DES baby? Have you ever had a hysterosalpingogram? Traveled to another country? Been implanted with an IUD?”

  I explained each question to Shasthi like a police detective reading her her rights.

  Now this was how to interview a nanny, I thought. Instead of Do you have references? it should be Have you ever been diagnosed with endometriosis? And instead of Can you occasionally stay late if my husband and I have dinner plans or theater tickets? it should be Has your period ever been late or absent altogether?

  “Number of births, number of abortions, number of miscarriages?” I read out loud.

  I was about to write down none when Shasthi said, “I’ve had two abortions.”

  “Okay,” I said, making my voice normal. “You did!”

  “When I was in Guyana I had a boyfriend for many years named Jay. I got pregnant with him two times.”

  “Two times!”

  “My family is enemies with Jay’s family so they said I had to choose. They told me if I continued with him no one in my family would ever speak to me again.”

  “So you didn’t marry him?” I asked.

  “No. I married the man my family had in mind for me. My family is very important to me, you know.”

  No, I didn’t know. This was a tragic story with a terrible ending. It was like Romeo and Juliet without the happy relief of poison.

  “Do you ever think of Jay?” I asked, thinking of Gabe Weinrib fucking some woman on the plane to Paris.

  “Yes. He is married now.”

  “So the problem could be your husband’s sperm,” I said, bitterly. “If you were able to get pregnant twice before.” If she had married Jay she would have many children by now. I was happy to pay for Shasthi’s doctor’s bills but I wasn’t sure I was willing to pay the price for her husband’s bad sperm. We both seemed taken aback by the force of my hypothesis.

  “No. My husband has two big children in Guyana.”

  I felt crushed. She lived with this man in the Bronx somewhere, his mother in the apartment upstairs, and the strange thing was she didn’t seem at all unhappy. The whole family gathered to watch cricket matches from her country thanks to some cable sports package she had ordered. I had to almost admire the ability to enjoy something as stupid as cricket when she was forty and childless.

  I tried to imagine her apartment, immaculately neat, the kitchen smelling of a fragrant, spicy fish stew. All the things I had sent home with her in shopping bags—unused wedding presents, and birthday presents, a fifty-dollar candle from Barneys.

  I wondered if I was committing some kind of on-the-job sexual harassment, forcing her to divulge her personal abortion stories like that. I tossed the questionnaire onto a pile of papers, trying to seem casual.

  “Well anyway we got this taken care of so we can just send it in and then decide what we want to do next.”

  I went to get the baby from his crib and was alarmed for a moment, seeing some kind of mark on his forehead between his eyes.

  But it was just one of her sequins floating there like a bindi. I still hadn’t fixed the vacuum and her sequins were everywhere but I liked that they were there. They were a little off-putting in their quantity but cheerful, like the ladybugs that appeared in my apartment each July.

  When I came home that evening, Russell said, “Notice anything new?” I couldn’t see anything new, just a big pile of four seasons’ worth of shoes tossed by the front door.

  “Poland Spring came with our new water cooler!” Someone in the kitchen burped loudly, and when I looked over I saw it was the water cooler itself, as if it were trying to make its presence known. It was like having a third-grade boy in the kitchen.

  Russell presented me with a glass of perfectly chilled water. I had to admit it was delicious. I gulped it down and drank another.

  “Now we can gossip by it,” he said. He made me walk over to it with him and stand in front of it. “You’ll never guess what I heard about the new woman in 3E . . .” he began. It was the first time someone other than Duncan had made me laugh in a long time.

  That night we lay in bed talking about the water cooler. “It’s saving us money,” he said. “I mean we were spending at least four dollars a day on water. Probably more. Now it’s less than a dollar a day.”

  “And it looks better than I thought it would. I’m already used to it,” I said.

  “And I already feel we’re healthier. I drank water
tonight instead of beer.”

  “I drank more water tonight than I would usually drink in a week.”

  “And it’s great to have the hot-water part too. Tomorrow I can make you tea. I might even have tea too, instead of coffee. I’m really so glad we did it. So, so glad.”

  “I’m really glad we did it too.”

  I hadn’t heard us this excited about anything in a long time. Not since our conversations about Duncan when he was first born. In fact, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were more excited about the water cooler than we’d been about Duncan. What had our life become, I wondered, if we needed something like Poland Spring to bring us together?

  “You feeling frisky?” he asked.

  Despite those words, I agreed to make love to him to celebrate our new addition as long as he promised to be very, very quick because I was so tired, which he did. He plastered on a condom from my underwear drawer. “You have to take off your nightgown,” he said.

  “Why?” I complained.

  “I want to see you.”

  “You’ve seen me.”

  “I want to see you again.”

  “I’m too tired. If I take it off it will be inside out and I’ll have to find it and then turn it right side in and put it on again in three minutes.”

  “Not three minutes,” Russell said.

  “You said you’d be quick.”

  We argued about it for a while, and in the end I agreed to hike the nightgown all the way up around my neck in a big bunch like an Elizabethan collar. He climbed on top of me, and I helped guide him into me like an air traffic controller with one hand while holding our dog by the collar with the other. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had sex without holding on to my dog’s collar and usually reassuring him and even kissing him the whole time. We’d thrown out his crate when Duncan was born to make room for a glider and we couldn’t lock him out of our room because the doorknob was broken and we’d be the ones locked in with no way to get out.

  Even with my holding him as hard as I could, he broke free, licked Russell’s ass, and finally mounted him until I got him in my grasp again.