She, Myself & I (11 page)

“Thank you. Now, Paige. Let me get this straight. Are you pregnant?”

“No,” I admitted. “At least, I don’t think so.”

“Good,” my mother said, looking relieved. In fact, insultingly so.

“Why would it be such a bad thing if I were pregnant?” I asked her.

“I just don’t think that would be the best thing for you right now. Do you?” she asked. “You’re not married or even in a relationship, you work long hours, you’ve gone through a difficult last couple of years.”

“Yes, but . . . ,” I started, and then I frowned, biting my lip. “Maybe that’s what I need. Marriage didn’t work out for me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I can’t have a baby. I could always go to a sperm bank.”

“Good Lord,” my mother said weakly. She picked up her glass of wine and downed it in one long gulp.

“But you don’t like babies,” Sophie said, eyeing me critically.

“Of course I do! Why would you think that?” I asked.

“You just never seemed to have any interest in kids. Even when you were married, I just assumed that you’d be too caught up in your career to have a family,” Sophie said.

“Plenty of women balance a career and kids,” I said.

Sophie shrugged. “I know, it’s just a big sacrifice.” She looked around my apartment at the white sofas, and the glass coffee table with the hard sharp corners, and the bar against the wall that had wineglasses hanging from the underside of the cabinet, and I knew what she was thinking: this wasn’t a kid-friendly place.

“It’s not like I’m going to have a baby right this second,” I said irritably.

“Thank God for small favors,” my mother said. “Mickey, would you pour me another glass of wine?”

“Even if I did get pregnant right away, there would be nine months to get ready. I could sell this place and buy a house. And maybe I could cut my hours back at work, or work out of the house part of the time,” I mused.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sophie said, rolling her eyes. She struggled to get up off the couch. “Just a few weeks ago you were saying that you were never going to date again. And now you’re all of a sudden going to have a baby? On a whim? Having a baby isn’t something that you just casually decide to do, and it isn’t something that’s going to be a Band-Aid for everything else that’s going wrong in your life.”

“It’s not just a whim,” I said, choking on my anger. How dare Sophie, she who had everything—the doting husband, the baby on the way, the knack of being the center of attention at every single social gathering she’d ever been to—tell me that I can’t have a child? “As a matter of fact, I was pregnant once already. And then I miscarried, and then my marriage turned to shit, but before that, before I knew about Scott, all I wanted was to get pregnant. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I had . . .”

My voice trailed off, and I clapped my hand over my mouth. Salty tears stung at my eyes and spilled over onto my cheeks. Sophie, Mickey, and Mom were all staring at me.

“Oh, Paige,” Mom said, and she leaned over and put her hand on my leg. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell us before?”

“If you had, maybe Scott wouldn’t have left you?” Sophie asked, finishing the thought that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to complete.

“No. I mean, yes, I wonder what would have happened. I’m not saying I think a baby would have saved our marriage. There was that one rather large problem that he wasn’t attracted to me, or anyone of my gender,” I said. “But I wish I’d been able to have that baby or that I’d gotten pregnant again. I want a family.”

“But you’ve said you don’t want to get married, or even date again,” Sophie said carefully. We’d suddenly swapped roles: I was emoting, she was analyzing.

“I don’t know what I want,” I said miserably.

Chapter Twelve

“What do you think you should do?” Elise asked.

“Don’t do that. Don’t get all shrinky on me,” I groaned.

God, I hated therapy. It always seemed so self-indulgent to me, wasted money and wasted time. I’d first seen Elise several years ago, when Scott and I had been married for about six months and I’d been struggling with a low-grade depression that I couldn’t seem to shake. One year and a grossly large amount of money later, we’d discussed everything from the competitive nature of my relationship with Sophie to the many issues stemming from my parents’ acrimonious divorce to the distance I sometimes felt from my new husband, and I was no closer to uncovering what had been bothering me. So I stopped going.

But now that I was wading through this postdivorce swamp, I for once decided to take my mother’s advice and called Elise for an appointment. I figured that now more than ever I probably needed a neutral opinion on how to proceed. Should I call Zack? I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him, but the idea of getting further involved with him terrified me. What if he, too, was gay, and I was somehow doomed to a life of dating and marrying closeted men? And was it really so crazy to consider having a baby on my own? Or were my baby pangs the result of loneliness and grief?

“Okay, here’s my non-shrinky answer for you: you’re really screwed up,” Elise said, peering at me through her thick, tortoiseshell-framed glasses.

“What? You’re not supposed to say that,” I protested. “You’re supposed to be supportive and kind.”

“Whenever I try to be supportive and kind, you accuse me of being shrinky,” Elise pointed out. Accurately.

“True, but I don’t think you should go around telling your clients that they’re screwed up. At least give me some hope.”

Elise looked at me thoughtfully. But then, Elise did everything thoughtfully. She probably peed thoughtfully and went through thoughtful labor with her children. She even looked like a therapist, with her tasteful brown pageboy haircut and her gently rounded face.

“I didn’t say you’re
irredeemably
screwed up. If you wanted to, you could overcome it,” she offered.

“With another year of therapy spent discussing why my mother always felt she had to befriend my friends?” I asked, and crossed my arms.

“No, that’s not what I was going to say. But I’m not going to tell you if you’re just going to sit there and be sarcastic,” she said.

“You can’t do that! I’m paying you for this!”

“Paige, you are not the craziest client I’ve ever had, but I think you might be the most stubborn. Which is not necessarily better,” Elise sighed.

I bit my lip. I was a little intrigued. “Okay, I won’t be sarcastic. Tell me how I can unscrew myself, ha-ha.”

Elise shook her head, obviously not appreciating my shrink humor. “Okay, here it is: stop being so fucking closed off.”

Fucking? I’d never heard Elise swear before. It was like hearing your parents curse for the first time—it was both titillating and disillusioning, and not at all what you expect to come out of the mouth of someone wearing a long flowered skirt and matching pink sweater set.

“Fucking?” I repeated.

“Yes. Fucking. I’m not denying that you’ve had a tough time, and I can understand how having to cope with the loss of your pregnancy, the loss of your marriage, and finding out that your partner was not the man you thought he was would be overwhelming. And it does take time to get over those kinds of traumatic events, absolutely. But you’re not trying to heal. You’re just closing yourself off and making stupid declarations about how you’re never going to risk getting involved in another relationship again,” she said.

“Are you just going to mock me, or is there some advice coming my way?” I asked.

“Here’s the advice: trust yourself. Yes, Scott deceived you, and yes, I can see how it would make you question yourself. But as a closeted gay man, Scott had a lot of practice getting by with his sexuality undetected. And maybe he didn’t even consciously know that he was gay. I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought his attraction to other men was just an impulse he could control, and that living life as a straight man was just a matter of discipline. But in the end, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get to the point where you can accept that there is nothing flawed or wrong with you because you didn’t know the truth,” she said.

“You make it sound so easy. But you can’t guarantee that the next guy won’t be seriously screwed up in some way, or the one after him, or the one after
him
. What am I supposed to do, just leave myself open to getting kicked in the teeth over and over again?” I asked.

“No, I’m definitely not saying it’s easy. You trusted someone you loved, and he deceived you, and it’s only natural that it’s going to be harder for you the next time around. But you’re taking it to an extreme. You’re not just saying, ‘I want to take some time off of dating so that I can heal, but I fully plan to get out there again.’ Instead, you’re deciding that you don’t want to get close to anyone ever again, because you don’t want to add any complications to your life. And I think that’s why you’re suddenly so eager to have a baby on your own. You’re craving the intimacy of a loving relationship, but you’re too frightened to put your heart on the line, and a baby will love you unconditionally. And to answer your earlier question, no, I don’t think that right now is the best time to make that decision. I’m not saying that you should never consider it, or even that doing it on your own is an objectively bad idea. And I’m certainly not saying that being single is a bad thing. But you shouldn’t make those kinds of decisions because you’re afraid of the alternative, afraid of opening yourself up to the possibility that there is someone out there for you.”

“Like Zack, you mean.”

“I don’t know,” Elise said, and she shrugged again.

Considering I had gone to her for some solid, orderly advice, all of this shrugging was not comforting.

“He could be the right one for you, or maybe he’s not. You hardly know him, other than to discover that your first impression of him wasn’t accurate and that he might have more to offer than you first thought,” Elise continued.

“So . . . you think I should call him,” I surmised.

“It’s up to you whether or not you choose to see him again,” she said. “I can’t decide that for you. Whatever you decide to do, though, just make sure you’re not letting your fear control you.”

“Huh,” I said. “I guess I can see that.”

Elise’s eyebrows arched.

“What? I’m open to personal growth. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Always an important first step,” Elise said.

“That’s right. And as long as I’m here, I do have one other tiny issue I wanted to talk about,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“The Home Shopping Network. Is it a bad sign if someone—not necessarily me—shops there? A lot?”

Chapter Thirteen

“Hello.” “Hi. Zack. It’s Paige,” I said. I turned my chair around and stared out my office window at the back of the capitol building. It was a grand building that mimicked the architecture and style of the United States Capitol. I’d always thought it looked out of place in Austin, like the poser girl everyone knows in college—usually a drama major—who shows up at keg parties in her prom dress.

“Hi,” Zack said in what might have been a cool tone of voice. I couldn’t be sure—I’d called him on his cell phone, and the line had that tinny quality that took all the nuance out of a person’s voice.

“We went out last month,” I clarified.

“I know who you are,” Zack said. This time I knew I wasn’t imagining the curt tone—he was miffed.

“I’m sorry I didn’t return your call before this,” I began.

“Calls,” Zack said.

“What?”

“Calls. I called you more than once. I left several messages for you, both at your office and at home,” Zack said.

“Right. Calls. It’s just . . . well, things were kind of hectic here at work, and then I had Soph’s baby shower, and I, well, just sort of lost track of time,” I finished lamely.

Zack didn’t say anything.

This wasn’t going as well as I’d hoped it might.

“So I was wondering . . . uh . . . would you like to have dinner with me? Maybe tonight, or if you already have plans, later in the week?” I said. I rested the palm of my hand against my forehead and waited.

Zack still didn’t say anything.

“Hello?” I asked.