Good in Bed

I nodded again, turned the handle, and hustled out the door.

I made bargains with God the whole way home, the same way I’d invented letters to the Celine Dion fan, poor Mr. Deiffinger, the least of my concerns now. Dear God, if you make me not pregnant I’ll volunteer at the pet shelter and the AIDS hospice and I’ll never write anything nasty about anyone again. I’ll be a better person. I’ll do everything right, I’ll go to synagogue and not just on high holy days, I won’t be so mean and critical, I’ll be nice to Gabby, only please, please, please, don’t let this be happening to me.

I bought two tests at the drugstore on South Street, white cardboard boxes with beaming mothers-to-be on the front, and peed all over my hand doing the first one, I was shaking so hard. By then I was so convinced of the worst that I didn’t need the plus sign on the EPT wand to tell me what Dr. Krushelevansky already had.

“I’m pregnant,” I said to the mirror, and mimed a smile, like the woman on the box.

“Pregnant,” I informed Nifkin later that night, as he bounded all over me and licked my face at Samantha’s house, where I’d stashed him while I was at work. Samantha had two dogs of her own, plus a big, fenced-in yard and a pet door, so the dogs could go in and out as they pleased. Nifkin wasn’t crazy about her dogs, Daisy and Mandy – I suspected that he much preferred the company of people to other pets – but he was a big fan of the premium lamb and rice kibble that Samantha served, and so, on balance, seemed happy to hang out at Sam’s house.

“What did you say?” Samantha called from the kitchen.

“I’m pregnant,” I called back.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I yelled. Nifkin sat on my lap, looking gravely into my eyes.

“You heard me, right?” I whispered. Nifkin licked my nose and curled into my lap.

Samantha came into the living room, wiping her hands. “You were saying?”

“I said, I’m going home for Thanksgiving.”

“Lesbian turkey again?” Samantha wrinkled her nose. “Didn’t you tell me that I was under strict instructions to slap you if you ever mentioned spending another holiday with Tanya again?”

“I’m tired,” I told her. “I’m tired and I want to go home.”

She sat down beside me. “What’s going on, really?”

And I wanted so badly to tell her then, to just turn to her and spill it all out, to tell her, help me, and tell me what to do. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I needed time to think, to know my own mind before the chorus started. I knew the advice she’d give me. It would be the same thing I’d tell her if she were in the same situation: young, single with a great career, knocked up by a guy who wasn’t returning her phone calls. It was a no-brainer, a $500 afternoon in the doctor’s office, a few days of cramps and crying, end of story.

But before I went for the obvious, I wanted some time, even just a few days. I wanted to go home, even if home had long since gone from a happy refuge to something closer to a Sapphic commune.

It wasn’t hard. I called Betsy, who told me to take as much time as I needed. “You’ve got three weeks of vacation, five days you never took from last year, and comp time from New York,” she said, in a message on my machine at home. “Have a happy Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you next week.”

I e-mailed Maxi. “Something has come up… unfortunately, not the thing I might have hoped for,” I wrote. “Bruce is dating a kindergarten teacher. I am brokenhearted and going home to eat dried turkey and let my mother feel sorry for me.”

“Good luck, then,” she’d written back immediately, even though it had to be three in the morning there. “And never mind the teacher. She’s his transition object. They never last. Call or write when you’re home… I’ll be in the States again in the spring.”

I cancelled my haircut, postponed a few telephone interviews, arranged for my neighbors to pick up my papers and my mail. I didn’t call Bruce. If I decided not to stay pregnant, there’d be no reason for him to know. At this stage in our non-relationship, I couldn’t very well imagine him sitting beside me in a clinic tenderly holding my hand. If I did stay pregnant… well, I’d burn that bridge when I came to it, I thought.

I hitched my bicycle rack and mountain bike to the back of my little blue Honda, put Nifkin in his traveling case, and tossed my bag in the trunk. Ready or not, I was going home.

PART THREE. I Go Swimming

TEN

The summer between my junior and senior years at Princeton, I had an interns hip at the Village Vanguard, the oldest and most attitudinous of the alternative newsweeklies in the country.

It was a wretched three months. For one thing, it was the hottest summer in years. Manhattan was boiling. Every morning I’d start sweating the instant I exited the shower, keep sweating through the subway ride downtown, and basically continue sweating the whole day.

I worked for a horrible woman named Kiki. Six feet tall and skeletally ski

Initially, Kiki confounded me. The hipster garb made sense, and the bad attitude was par for the Vanguard course, but I couldn’t figure out when she was getting any work done. She showed up late, left early, and took two-hour lunches in between, and seemed to spend most of her time in the office on the phone with a cadre of interchangeable-sounding friends. The mosaic nameplate on the white picket fence she’d ironically erected around her cubicle read “associate editor.” And while she associated plenty, I’d never seen her edit.

She was, however, the master of delegating unpleasant chores. “I’m thinking about women and murder,” she’d a

This was 1991. The back issues of the Vanguard weren’t stored online, or even on microfilm, but in huge, dusty, falling-apart, oversized binders that each weighed at least twenty pounds. These binders were housed along the hallway that linked the offices of columnists to the feeding pen of metal chairs and cigarette-scarred desks that served as workspace for the Vanguard’s lesser luminaries. I spent my days hauling the binders off the shelves, lugging them over first to my desk, then to the copying machine, all the while trying to avoid the gin breath and wandering hands of the nation’s preeminent gun rights activist, whose office was right next to the shelves, and whose favorite summer hobby seemed to be accidentally on purpose brushing against the sides of my breasts when my arms were loaded down with binders.

It was miserable. After two weeks I gave up on the subway and started taking the bus. Even though it made the ride twice as long and just as hot, it kept me out of the sweltering, fetid pit that the 116th Street subway stop had become. One afternoon in early August, I was sitting on the M140, minding my own business and sweating as usual, when, just as the bus lurched past Billy’s Topless, I heard a very small, perfectly calm voice that sounded as if it was coming from the precise base of my skull.

“I know where you’re going,” said the voice. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood straight up. I got goosebumps, and was suddenly freezing cold, and I was completely convinced that what I was hearing was… not human. A voice from the spirit world, I might have said that summer, laughing it off with my friends. But really, I thought it was the voice of God.