With Friends Like These: A Novel (20 page)

“Let’s have a look.” Sheila bent her head low for a pussy peek, wiggled a speculum, and thumped my belly from the outside. “Your uterus is slightly enlarged.”

What part of me wasn’t?

“But we can’t rely on those drugstore tests—we’ll need to do your blood,” she announced. “I’ll send in my nurse. After she’s finished, you and I will talk.”

One prick later, we were in Sheila’s office, chatting about another. “Are you still dating Ted?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair, girlfriend style. Ted and I had once had a double-date with the Drs. Frumkes.

I realized Ted’s handsome, scheming face had become a blur. Were his eyes green or was that just the color I’d turned when I found out he was cheating? “Ted’s history. I have a different man in my life now.”

“You always do. Would this be the lucky father, assuming positive results?”

“He would. But let’s leave lucky out of it.”

She cast a taut, perfectly made-up eye in my direction. “Please tell me he’s not married.”

“He’s single, perhaps terminally.”

“Hmmm.” Sheila’s tone said,
Do go on
.

“It wouldn’t matter who the father of this mythical baby is,” I said in a voice loud enough to be heard out on Park Avenue. “We both know I am completely unqualified to be anyone’s mother. I’m too old, too selfish, too bossy, and if I didn’t want a child at twenty-three or thirty-three, why would I want one now?”

To my horror, Dr. Sheila Frumkes took my hand. “Allow me to speak as both your friend and physician. Let’s wait for the blood works, and in the meantime, I urge you to not jump to conclusions. The far side of forty is when a lot of my patients find that their attitude shifts. I’ve been practicing a long time”—to celebrate her fiftieth birthday last year she got a two-carat diamond belly-button stud to show off her abs—“and in my experience, many women who never thought they would want children turn out to be beyond delighted at a surprise pregnancy, and even more
who predicted failure as a parent become outstanding mothers. It’s one of the most mysterious, rewarding aspects of my work.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sheila could save the rhetoric for one of the skinny thirty-eight-year-olds crowding her waiting room, women who felt if they didn’t reproduce they were as incomplete as a bra with one cup. I’m not one of those females who need kids to give themselves purpose and importance and stretch marks to bitch about—and which, in truth, they wear like medals.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I lied. “I respect your opinion”—which was, after all, gratis. “When should I call for the results?”

“Tomorrow or the next day, depending on how asleep at the wheel the lab techs are. Now, you’ll have to excuse me—I need to break the word to the couple in the next room that it’s triplets. They’ve had two miscarriages.” Discretion is not Sheila’s finest attribute. “Don’t be surprised if you hear screaming.”

Triplets should have put things in perspective. But they didn’t. One baby was still like one atom bomb or one sex-change operation. It would mutate everything in my life to a shape I couldn’t grasp, and I wasn’t even thinking specifically—
quelle horreur
—about my body. To start, I supposed I had to consider Arthur.

My ability to fantasize is well honed, so much so that if I can’t envision someone in an imaginary role, it’s a sign that I don’t want to see them in that capacity. Arthur as a dad. Arthur as a partner. Arthur as a husband. Arthur and me as parents. One by one, I pictured … nothing.

I decided to add to Jules’ Rules:
If pregnant, keep the news to yourself until you’re sure you care what the father thinks
. The truth was, just as I couldn’t conjure up Arthur in any version of commitment, I also couldn’t guess his response to having knocked me up. He was fifty. Did he want a child? Did he want me? Would he be appalled or relieved if I decided to …

I couldn’t complete the thought. Wasn’t today already an all-you-can-eat buffet of surprises? A tear trickled down my cheek. Fucking hormones. I grabbed a tissue out of the box on Sheila’s desk and dabbed
away mascara. A nurse strolled into the office with a chart in her hands, so I got up and walked to the bathroom to collect my thoughts and properly wash my face. On the way, I heard the shriek of joy or shock Sheila had predicted. Whoop-de-do.

I closed the door and admired the décor. The bathroom was limestone with fresh calla lilies, a basket of linen towels, and a shelf discreetly labeled for urine specimens. There were six in a row, each vial like precious eau de parfum.

I walked closer. In the golden lineup was a small glass of pee plainly labeled
Q. Blue
.

Holy Jesus.

I sat down on the closed toilet seat. Quincy: triplets. This was too huge to absorb alone. I needed to share this with someone. Despite the prohibition against using cell phones, I pulled mine out.

Arthur answered on the first ring.

  
Chloe

“May I refresh that drink?”

“Please!” I’d gulped down my first frosty mojito as if it were limeade. I didn’t dare ask the server if the blonde with the dark roots in the next cabana was Maizie May or some other star famous mostly for being famous. Around her were a group of pedicured people in flip-flops, and my eyes ricocheted between them and the evenly tanned women frolicking in the turquoise water. They, too, were playing spot-a-celebrity, and few of them were discreet about it, or anything else. But the abundant chests and Brazil-nut-sized diamond studs were all part of the grand Beverly Hills Hotel experience. I was loving it! I felt deliciously inconspicuous, even in a fuchsia one-piece, one more tropical blossom in the garden where I waited for the ghosts of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard to drift past, hand in hand.

This was my first time in Los Angeles, my first time accompanying Xander on a business trip, my first time away from Dash, whom Jamyang was looking after, and soon, quite possibly, my first time relaxing, if I dare call it that, with Charlene “Cha-Cha” Denton, the wife of Xander’s boss.

Charlene is only six years older than I am, but next to her I feel like a rookie. She’s one of those women with such lavish charm that she might have acquired it not through breeding or observation but via a transplant. She speaks vaguely of roots “out west,” where she and Edgar own a vast Montana ranch and raise emus and grass-fed bison, but a
Vanity Fair
profile suggested that Edgar had met Charlene when she’d waited on him at a cigar bar after she’d escaped from her parents’ pig farm near Turtle Lake, Minnesota, not far from where Quincy grew up.

Xander and I had arrived yesterday evening. He had business in L.A. doing whatever it is that hedge fund managers do—I stopped requesting specifics years ago. His schedule was crammed. Mine wasn’t.

Under normal circumstances, I would have liked to have visited Talia’s parents in Santa Monica. Talia had alerted her mother that I was coming to town, and I arrived to a message inviting me for a walk on the beach followed by tea, which Talia says her mother serves in glasses, even when it’s hot. The prospect sounded lovely. I adore Mira Fisher. Yet this morning I’d lied to the Fishers’ answering machine, saying I needed to go to an appointment with Xander. I was too furious at Talia to risk spending even a minute with her mother.

After breakfast at the Polo Lounge, I strolled on Rodeo Drive, a disappointing stretch with the same Gucci, Armani, and Prada I’m too intimidated to enter on Madison Avenue. My window shopping took all of twenty minutes. I bought nothing and returned to the hotel.

At that point an adventuresome woman would have asked the concierge to call her a taxi to go to, say, the Getty Museum. Not me. I bought Jamyang some ridiculously priced caviar eye essence in the hotel’s spa, left a message for Charlene inviting her to join me, and headed for the pool, where I’d been sitting for more than an hour, half hoping she wouldn’t show up. I would happily wait to see her that night, when Xander and I had a dinner scheduled with the Dentons for eight. But Xander had referred to my private time to be spent with Charlene as “sealing the deal.” Edgar had graduated from Jackson Collegiate, and both of the school’s new red clay tennis courts were named for him. Xander felt it
would be brash to ask directly for his boss’s help in getting Dash admitted to Jackson. It had to be “spontaneous,” and impressing Mrs. Edgar Denton mattered most. It was she who directed Edgar’s personal foundation, she whose approval needed to be wooed and won.

And there she was, suddenly, all six feet one inch of her.
Vanity Fair
had compared Charlene to a crane ready to topple, but today she looked as confidently upright as ever. Her sharply angled face was softened by the shadows from a flying-saucer-sized white hat of the sort I’d seen only in photographs of British ladies attending Ascot. She waved as she swanned in my direction, and even that gesture reminded me of royalty, which in certain East Coast circles Charlene was.

“Chloe, darling,” she said in her well-modulated voice, as if there were no other person on earth she’d looked forward to camping out with on a steamy California day. She kissed each of my cheeks. “Your suit is precious.”

I knew better than to mistake Charlene’s comment for a compliment. When she deftly removed her gauzy white caftan, Charlene herself was wearing a shiny black bikini. Her sandals, with their slender, silvery straps, made mine look like hand-me-downs from Mother Teresa. Next to her I felt like a stump covered by a rashy fungus, but I was determined—thank you, lovely, calming cocktails—not to have one of my paranoia attacks. Today I was in service to my child’s future!

“Thanks,” I said. “When did you and Edgar arrive?” Charlene and Edgar own a jet.

“We left Mexico a few hours ago,” she said. “We blinked and were landing in Burbank.”

I blinked, too, and the blonde in the next cabana walked in our direction, lurching into my chaise. She scowled, as if her accident were my fault, then giggled loudly, unself-consciously, drunkenly.

At close range there was no doubt: the woman was Maizie! Did I dare out myself as knowing Quincy? “Excuse me,” I said, “but I believe my close friend Quincy Blue is working on a project with you?” My statement came out like a question. The sun was in my eyes, which made it hard to
see Maizie’s reaction, but I believe she took a slow, dismissive scan of me and turned toward Charlene, who ran away with the conversation. “Why, Miss May,” she said, leaning forward. “‘Lonesome Trucker’ is at the top of my playlist. I’m a truly devoted fan.”

Charlene Denton liked Maizie May? I did know, this time courtesy of
The New Yorker
, that in order to prep for whatever encounter might be required to extend and solidify her power, Charlene reportedly reads every column in every magazine, newspaper, and major online source; apparently her daily feed includes
Billboard
. “You must—you absolutely must—join my dear friend Chloe Keaton and me for lunch,” she insisted.

I expected Maizie to blow off Charlene as the lamest sort of perimenopausal groupie. Instead she said, “Costume Institute gala, the mermaid in blue fins and the sequined headdress?”

“Good Lord, you noticed me in that crowd?” Charlene managed to make “good Lord” sound clever and original.

After that event, photos of both Maizie and Charlene had been splashed all over the Sunday
Times
Style section. I’d heard rumors that Edgar was one of Maizie’s backers, and Charlene, of course, had been on the steering committee. I imagined that she had to be flattered by Maizie taking note of her latitude and longitude in the social firmament, though she acted cool. Not snotty cool, friendly cool. “Cha-Cha Denton,” she said, extending her slim hand with its substantial, but not grossly large, marquise diamond.

She’d never asked me to call her Cha-Cha.

“Maizie,” the singer said, giving Charlene’s hand a quick shake. “You and your friend have gotta join my group.” She glanced at her watch. To my eye, its iridescent face and chunky metal band suggested Chinatown, but it might be platinum. “We’ll be at the banquette against the wall. Two sharp.” She walked away without ever having looked at me again.