“I’m sorry,” he said. “If I could take it back…” His voice broke.
“You need to get tested for STDs. And AIDS,” she said. He stared at her sullenly for a minute then shook his head. Ayinde thought once more of her mother. Lolo had hated Richard from the first time she’d heard his name. “Sportin’ Life,” she’d called him, after the drug pusher in
Porgy and Bess. How is Sportin’ Life?
she’d ask when she called.
You don’t marry a man like that,
Lolo instructed her daughter, as if Ayinde had asked for her advice.
No, not at all! You have your fun with him, baby girl. Get your picture in the papers. Then find yourself a man to marry.
I love him,
Ayinde told her mother. Lolo shrugged and went back to the painstaking application of her false eyelashes, the ones she wore every day, even when she was only going down to the lobby, where there was no audience except for the bored doorman to watch her pick up her mail.
Then it’s your funeral,
she’d said.
Ayinde narrowed her eyes and stared at Richard.
The whole world will be laughing at us,
she thought, and that thought slammed her back into her body, into this room, into the here and the now of what her husband had done.
Laughing at me. Laughing at Julian.
She lifted her chin even higher. “Get out,” she said.
“They’ll want to talk to you,” Richard said. “About what we’re going to do next.”
“Get out,” she said again, in a voice she barely recognized as her own. He got up with his shoulders hunched, slumping out of the room, and she was left by herself with Julian in her arms. She tucked her nose against his neck, breathing in his scent—milk, warmth, his sweet breath. Priscilla Prewitt had a chapter on divorce.
Marriage on the rocks? Keep your eyes on the prize. Remember what really matters. Remember who comes first. Study after study—as well as good ol’ common sense—tell us what we know in our hearts. Babies do better with mommy and daddy both under the same roof.
Ayinde squeezed her eyes shut, knowing that even though she’d told them to leave, there were still people in her house. If she listened closely enough, she would be able to hear all of them—the cook, the maids, the publicist, the business manager, the trainer, the masseuse, the gardener, the landscaper, the delivery men, assistants, interns, and secretaries—wandering in and out of her house just like Richard had wandered in and out of their marriage. She wondered whether everyone knew what had happened. She wondered whether Richard had ever brought women home when she was visiting her parents in New York or when she was out for the afternoon. She wondered whether the maid had smoothed the sheets and the cook had whipped up breakfast for two.
She slumped onto a love seat and groped for her cell phone. And then she called her friends and told them to meet her in the guest house and please not to listen to the radio as they drove.
Richard hadn’t really left, Ayinde realized. He’d just locked himself in the guest room. Ayinde walked past the door half a dozen times, gathering sloppy armloads of her clothes and Julian’s, carrying them down the stairs, past the kitchen where the cook and Clara kept their heads down, ostentatiously not looking at her, past the dining room where the coach and the lawyers and Christina Crossley sat, out the door, and into the guest-house bedroom. Then she stood in the driveway with her baby in her arms and waited.
Kelly’s car pulled into the driveway first. “What happened?” she asked through the window. Her cheeks were pale. Her hair hung in wet tendrils against them, and she smelled like Ivory soap. “Are you all right?”
“I want to wait until Becky’s here,” Ayinde said.
Kelly nodded and got out of the car, and Lia got out of the passenger’s seat. “I was helping with Oliver,” Lia said. “I hope you don’t mind…Here,” she said, stretching out her arms. Ayinde looked down and saw that she was holding Julian as if he were a sack of flour, one arm wrapped haphazardly around his midsection. One of his socks had gone missing. And he was crying.
How long had he been crying?
she wondered, as she handed him over to Lia, who settled him against her shoulder.
“Shh, shh,” she whispered. Julian hooked his thumb into his mouth, and his wails tapered off, as Becky’s little Honda pulled up her driveway.
Ayinde led them into the guest house, which, per Richard’s instructions, had been turned into an upscale clubhouse, all heavy leather furniture, wide-screen television set, a fully stocked bar at the back of the living room above which Richard’s trophies stood on specially built glass shelves.
Everything but the NO GIRLS ALLOWED sign,
Ayinde thought. She should have gotten a sign like that. She should have stapled it to her husband’s crotch.
Her friends sat in a row on the couch with their babies and her own in their laps. Then there was no more time to stall.
“Richard,” Ayinde said. Her voice wobbled. “He went to Phoenix for business. He met…there was…” She realized she had no idea of how to say it. “A woman in Phoenix is saying she’s having his baby.” There. Simple and to the point.
The three of them stared at her. “Oh, I don’t believe it,” Kelly finally said. “Richard wouldn’t do that.”
“How do you know?” Ayinde asked harshly. Kelly dropped her eyes. “He did do it,” Ayinde said. “He told me he did. And I trusted him.” Then Ayinde bent over at the waist, clutching herself, breathless from the sudden pain that ripped through her belly. It was like being torn open. It hurt a hundred times worse than even labor had.
Becky’s arms were warm around her. She helped Ayinde straighten up and led her to the couch. “Has he done this before?”
Perfume,
Ayinde’s mind whispered again. “I don’t know,” she said.
Oh, really?
she heard Lolo ask, in her arch, mocking way.
You don’t know, or you don’t want to know?
“Does it matter?” She could see snippets of the Gospel According to Priscilla Prewitt floating in front of her eyes.
Remember what really matters…the most important job in the world…mommy and daddy together under the same roof.
“I can’t leave him. Not with a baby. I won’t.”
“So what are you going to do?” Becky asked.
Ayinde could guess at what came next. When she’d worked as a reporter, she’d covered a dozen scandals like it, read about a hundred more. She’d be trotted out like a show pony to stand by her man. She’d be photographed gazing at him with a Nancy Reagan look of idiot adoration on her face. Her job would be to hold his hand. The world’s job would be to laugh at her. She’d be a punch line, a cautionary fable, a bad joke. And over what? Some groupie, some cheerleader, as disposable as one of those wax paper cups full of sports drink the players gulped and discarded during games? Some starfucker who’d hurried back to her girlfriends in triumph, bearing a trinket Richard had tossed her—an autographed cap, a T-shirt, a baby? She bent over, gasping, as the pain tore through her again.
Becky’s voice was as kind as Ayinde had always wished her own mother’s voice would be. “Maybe you should talk to Richard.”
Julian started his stuttering
eh, eh, eh
that meant a full-blown cry would start soon. “Shh, honey,” Lia whispered, rocking him against her chest, the brim of her baseball cap shadowing his face.
Ayinde felt her body moving without her volition, felt her hands smooth her hair and her feet start walking.
The guest-room door was closed but not locked. The doorknob slid under Ayinde’s hand. Richard was lying in bed in the dark, dressed right down to his shoes, with his arms pressed tightly at his sides.
Corpse pose,
she thought. In yoga they call that corpse pose. She opened her mouth but found that she had nothing to say to her husband; nothing at all.
“Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, babies,” Kelly sang, enthusiastically and slightly off-key. Her ponytail bobbed as she pushed Oliver along the sidewalk. Kelly and Becky and Ayinde and I had met for coffee after the music class the three of them attended, and from what I could gather, the “Good-bye” song was how every class concluded. “Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, mommies…”
“Oh, God, please stop that,” Becky begged. “I’m never going to get it out of my head. It’s worse than Rick Astley.”
“All those girls named Emma,” Ayinde murmured, “and not one Ayinde in the bunch.” Her smile curved her lips but didn’t touch her eyes. I wondered how music class was going for her since the Richard Towne miniscandal had erupted. I wondered if the other mothers stared or if they’d tried not to. That had been the worst part, I thought. When I had Caleb, there was a little park I used to go to, a few other mothers I’d developed a nodding acquaintance with. The one time I’d been back to the park afterward, I could feel the effort coming off of them like heat rising off the pavement in July as they tried not to stare and murmured the same handful of platitudes I just bet Ayinde was currently enduring:
We’re so sorry
and
What a shame
and
Time heals all wounds.
I fell into step with them—three mommies, three babies, and which of these things is not like the other? But they didn’t seem discomfited by my being there, either. Maybe that was because we were all still feeling so strange around Ayinde.
“I love Julian’s sweater,” I told her. Her face brightened a bit.
“Thank you.” The sweater was navy blue with red trim and felt barnyard animals cavorting on the front. Julian wore it with blue jeans, matching knit cap, and miniature Nikes. I was pretty certain that his outfit had cost more than any of the clothes I’d finally broken down and bought for myself. Nothing fancy, just basic jeans and khakis and T-shirts to supplement the jeans and sweatshirts I’d salvaged from my old high school wardrobe and my mother’s blue coat, which I couldn’t seem to let go.
“So listen,” Kelly began. “Oliver only woke up twice last night. One and four-thirty.” She looked at us hopefully. The skin underneath her eyes looked bruised and fragile. “That almost counts as sleeping through the night, doesn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” Becky said. “Hang in there.” We walked, and I tried not to feel out of place without a stroller. Kelly, of course, had the hot, high-priced Bugaboo, as seen in
In Style
and on
Sex and the City.
Ayinde had effortlessly trumped her with a Silver Cross pram her mother had brought back from London. And Becky had Ava strapped into a secondhand Snap ’n Go that she told us she’d bought at a tag sale. When Kelly had asked whether it was up to the current safety standards, Becky had stared at her blandly and said, “More or less,” before she’d started to laugh.
We worked in pairs to carry the strollers into Becky’s hallway. Her house was warm, and it smelled like sage and cornbread and pumpkin pie.
“Are you having Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked.
“Nope. Mimi is. She called and invited us over for Thanksgiving dinner and then asked us to bring…” She paused. “Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Would that I were. But I can’t complain. At least she’s gone.” She rolled her eyes. “Did I tell you she got seventeen parking tickets while she was in residence? She shoved them all under the door on her way back to Merion.” She made a face. “And guess who wound up paying them?”
“I thought she was rich,” Kelly said.
“I think that’s how the rich stay rich,” Becky said. “They get the less fortunate to pay their parking tickets.” Becky set Ava on the blanket on the kitchen floor, between Julian and Oliver. “Want to play?” she asked. “Lia and I have invented a new game.”
I reached into a drawer, pulled out a fistful of yarmulkes, and pressed one into Kelly’s hand. “Try to throw it on Oliver’s head.”
Kelly was sitting in Becky’s rocking chair with an afghan wrapped around her shoulders and her eyes half shut. She wrinkled her nose, looking down at the yarmulke she had pinched between two fingers. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not disrespectful?”
“It’s a yarmulke, not the blood of the Redeemer,” Becky said.
I watched Kelly turning the skullcap over in her hands, running a fingertip along the words
ANDREW AND REBECCA
embossed in gold thread, thinking that she was the most cheerful person I’d ever met in my life. Every time I’d seen her she was fine! Great! Terrific! Of course, once you got her talking, you’d learn that Oliver still wasn’t sleeping more than three or four hours at a stretch and that she was working every day, plus running off to parties two or three nights a week after the baby was in bed. I wondered how Kelly would handle a crisis, and then I smiled, imagining the phone call.
Hi, it’s Kelly! My leg’s caught in a bear trap! Can you come help me? No? Well, that’s fine! It’s kind of a cute accessory!
“The babies don’t mind,” Becky said. To prove it, she took a yarmulke of her own, aimed carefully, and tossed it onto Ava’s head. “And seriously, how else are they going to entertain us?”
Kelly pressed her lips together. “I just don’t think we should be throwing religious objects at our babies’ heads.”
“Christina Crossley wears a cross,” Ayinde said from the corner of the kitchen, where she was thumbing halfheartedly through a copy of
Saveur.
“It sounds like a nursery rhyme, doesn’t it?”
We sat for a minute, Becky and I standing in the corner of the kitchen where the babies lay on a quilt; Kelly in the rocking chair with her eyes half shut.
“Is she…very religious?” I finally asked.
“Don’t know,” Ayinde said, setting the magazine down. “Could be. She booked us on
60 Minutes
for next week, so maybe she does have an in with God. Or a deal with the devil. Either way, Richard and I get twelve minutes of prime time to hold hands and make goo-goo eyes at each other. Want to hear my statement?” Without waiting for an answer, she pulled a sheet of paper from her diaper bag, straightened her shoulders, and began to read. “I ask for the public to respect our privacy and our son’s privacy as my husband and I work through this very difficult time.” She refolded the sheet of paper and gave us a big, glossy smile as she straddled one of Becky’s barstools. “So, what do you think? Do you give it five stars and two thumbs up? Does it have a good beat? Can you dance to it?”
“Oh, Ayinde,” Kelly said softly. I looked away. I was thinking about my own husband, how during the short months of our marriage, when I’d been huge and miserable most of the time, he’d never been anything less than sweet and solicitous. I don’t think he’d ever even looked at another woman, and he was surrounded by beautiful ones every day.
“Do you want to do it?” Becky asked, then looked abashed and quickly busied herself with the coffee pot. Ayinde put the statement back into her diaper bag.
“I don’t want Richard’s life to be ruined,” she said with her back to her friends. “Because that means Julian’s life is going to be ruined. Or not ruined but tainted. Forever.” She put her hands in her pockets. “Other than that, I don’t know.” She blew out a frustrated breath, sending her braids dancing against her cheeks. “The logistics are insane. Christina Crossley took three hours yesterday videoconferencing with some image expert in Dallas, deciding on my outfit for the taping. In case you were wondering, I’m wearing a slate-gray Donna Karan suit, which says I’m serious, and a long-sleeved powder-pink shirt underneath, which says I have a heart.”
“You could’ve just borrowed my
I’M WITH STUPID
T-shirt,” Becky said, earning a wan smile.
“The statement’s very good!” Kelly said, perky as ever, even though she looked as though she wanted to pull the afghan over her head and sleep for several days. “It’s very effective. Very succinct.” She peeked over the edge of the afghan. “Can I have some coffee?”
“The girl was on
Dateline,
” Ayinde said. None of us said anything. We already knew. The girl—Tiffany Something, a onetime spirit dancer for the expansion team out there—had been on
Dateline
and Ricki and Montel and on the cover of several magazines, always with her belly front and center and headlines that were some variation of the words
LOVE CHILD
. There was, it seemed, an endless appetite for the seamy details of what the tabloids called her
NIGHT OF PASSION
with
SEXY SIXER
Richard Towne, who had been above reproach for so long as the NBA’s shining example of a family man. And because the tabloids had already run everyone’s name and picture, the so-called legitimate newspapers felt completely justified in doing the same thing. The
Philadelphia Examiner
had even snapped a picture of Ayinde with Julian in a sling on her chest walking through the park. Becky and Kelly had been furious, but Ayinde had just given a weary shrug and said that the concept of the sins of the fathers not being visited on the sons hadn’t made it to Philadelphia quite yet.
“It’s worse that she’s white,” Ayinde said. She started flipping through
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
“Because now there’s not only the cheating thing, but there’s the pissed-off sistas, too. The ones who take it personally every time a black man looks at a white woman.”
“How did they feel when he married you?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m black enough for them,” she said with a slanting smile. “They were fine with Richard being married to me. But now…” She shook her head. “The team’s already talking about hiring extra security to get him in and out of the arenas. Some women at Madison Square Garden were throwing condoms at him.” She closed the book and slid it back onto the shelf. “I wish I’d thought to throw a few condoms at him. Back when it would have made a difference.”
She walked to the center of the kitchen where the babies were lined up and tossed her yarmulke at Julian. It hit his shoulder and fell off. “Five points,” she said and sat back down.
Kelly’s eyes widened. “You’re playing for points?”
“For cash, actually,” said Becky. “First one to a hundred points gets ten bucks. It’s twenty points if you get it on his head and it stays there; ten points if you get it on his head but it falls off; five points for other body parts. Oh, and you win automatically if the baby’s first words are Shabbat Shalom.”
“Well, all right,” Kelly said. She turned her yarmulke over in her hands, then looked over her shoulder as if she was expecting to see Jesus Himself there, wagging a finger in remonstration. She cocked her elbow back and let the beanie fly. It landed on Oliver’s head and slipped forward. “Oh, no!” she cried, rushing to remove it. “It’s getting all drooly!”
“Not to worry. I’ve got about five hundred more,” Becky said. “Mimi overordered.” She rolled her eyes. “We went to her house for brunch yesterday. Ava pulled off her hairpiece.”
“Mimi wears a hairpiece?” I asked. I hadn’t ever seen Mimi, but Becky had told me enough about her that I had a pretty good mental picture…to which I’d now be adding a wig.
“Yeah. It was news to me, too,” Becky said. “She suffers from thinning hair, which has to do with her estrogen levels. She told me all about it later. Allllll about it.”
“At least she calls. At least she babysits,” said Ayinde. We looked at each other again. Ayinde’s mother, the very glamorous Lolo Mbezi, had only made the two-hour trip from New York City to Philadelphia once, and Richard’s mother had stopped by once, on her way to Atlantic City, with a gift-wrapped tricycle in the back of the Escalade Richard had bought her. She’d gotten sulky when Ayinde had explained that Julian couldn’t hold his head up by himself, let alone sit on a tricycle.
“Has your mother called you since…” Kelly folded her yarmulke into halves, then quarters. “Has she called you lately?”
“She calls,” Ayinde said. “She says she wants to be supportive. She hasn’t said, ‘I told you so’ yet, but I know she’s got to be thinking it. And, to tell you the truth, I think she’s happy about it.”
“Why would you think that?” Becky asked.
“She’s gotten all this work since…well, since. All the newspapers are running that stupid picture we took and the one of her from the 1970s.”
I knew the picture she was talking about. It featured a Studio 54–era Lolo in profile, wearing a dashiki, gold armbands, and about eighteen inches of Afro.
Ayinde sighed and wrapped her long fingers around a mug of coffee. “I wish I could stay here.”
“In town?” asked Becky.
“No. In your kitchen.” She looked around at the red walls, the battered dining-room table, the shelves full of thumbed-through, sauce-stained cookbooks, the crimson-and-blue quilt where the babies were resting.
“I want to stay, too,” Kelly said, pushing off with her toes on the floor, rocking back and forth. She kept folding her yarmulke into eighths, then sixteenths, as if she was hoping it would disappear. With her chin down and her hair in its ponytail, she looked about twelve years old.
“What’s your problem?” asked Becky.
“My husband,” she said. “My husband is my problem.”
“Wait, wait, don’t tell me,” said Ayinde. “He’s been having an affair with a twenty-year-old?”
Kelly smoothed her ponytail over and over. “He got laid off.” She got to her feet, grabbed Oliver under his armpits, and lifted him to her shoulder. “I know I told you that he was just investigating other opportunities and that he was on paternity leave, but he wasn’t. He got laid off, and he hasn’t been investigating anything except daytime television.” Her lips quivered. She pressed them together hard.
“When did this happen?” Becky asked.
“In June. Six weeks before Oliver was born,” Kelly said. She planted kisses on Oliver’s pudgy cheeks while we did the math.
“Are you all right financially?” Ayinde finally asked.
Kelly gave a short laugh. “We are now that I’ve gone back to work. I mean, he keeps saying we should use our savings—he was in a dot-com start-up right out of graduate school, and he actually was one of the three people our age to make it out before the bubble burst—but I don’t want to touch it; it’s our nest egg. So I’m paying the bills.” She was rocking back and forth, patting Oliver’s overall-clad bottom, looking as if she was going to collapse under the chubby baby’s weight. “I didn’t want to go back to work. I always thought that I’d take a year off and stay home with the baby, only now…” She rocked back and forth faster. “I feel like I don’t have a choice. And…” Her cheeks were flushing. “I like working. That’s the bad part.”