Dating Big Bird (10 page)

“Well, now she’s pregnant.”

“By that cheeseball.”

“What cheeseball?”

“That cheeseball husband of hers, that guy who’s always outside reporting on something for MSNBC,” I said before adding gratuitously: “The guy who wears the wig.”

“He wears a wig?”

“Please,” I said, as if everyone scrutinized the minutiae of people’s features as much as I did. “His hair never moves. It never changes. ‘Neither wind nor rain nor sleet nor snow …’ ” I let the sentence trail off unfinished. Then I gave the magazine back to Amy. “I can’t handle this.”

She flipped through it, trying to find the page she was looking for. “She’s keeping a monthly diary. About what it’s like to be pregnant. All the different stages; all the different emotions—everything.” She turned the magazine around so I could read it now, too. “See? It’s called ‘Nine Months.’ ”

I read the first few sentences of the article. “This is repulsive.”

“I know.”

“ ‘No one can prepare you for the feeling you get when the stick turns blue. For me, it was a whirlwind of emotion: fear and joy and panic and selfishness and selflessness all fighting each other yet complementing each other like multiple personalities. And that was just in the first few seconds.’ ”

I poked Amy in the upper arm as if she were to blame for this waking nightmare.

“Did you read this whole thing?”

She nodded.

I read on: “ ‘If becoming pregnant in the safe womb of marriage was frightening, single motherhood must be completely terrifying.… It felt suddenly as if I were living inside another woman’s body, though when I stared at my naked belly in the mirror that first night, I saw no discernible difference.’ ”

“God, I
hate
that word.
Belly
. And I can’t talk about this anymore.” Suddenly the incessant honking and cacophony of car alarms and police sirens and taxi doors slamming and people yelling felt unbearable; an assault I felt unprepared for and too vulnerable to withstand at that moment.

We turned onto Seventy-sixth Street and headed toward Amy’s apartment. She had a corner two-bedroom on the seventeenth floor of a dark brick prewar building at the far side of West End Avenue. Her view faced north and east, and if you bent your head way back, you could see her windows from the street. But inside, later, looking out from those windows—looking up and down the sidewalks that threaded as far as the eye could see and thinking about what the future held and might not hold for me—it all looked so different than it had from down below; the way things always did from the outside looking in.

A few weeks later it became clear to anyone else who hadn’t noticed that Karen was pregnant.

The proofs of the
Vogue
shoot for the February issue had just come in, and Renee and Annette and I were standing around Karen’s desk admiring how great they looked. Simon had just brought in another case of water for Karen, which we’d helped ourselves to as if it were champagne—and just as we’d taken our first sips, Karen stopped swiveling in her chair.

Karen was always ill at ease in celebratory situations, so at first it seemed like this might just be one more time she was going to vacuum the joy out of the room. But when she put her hand to her mouth and bent forward and seemed to burp into the plastic lining of her wastebasket, we all looked at each other in horror.

Karen Lipps had barfed!

“Party’s over,” Karen said as she rushed past us to the ladies’ room.

Even if Simon hadn’t passed around a memo from Karen
the next morning tersely announcing her news, the rest of the office would have eventually figured it out, since she never seemed to get sick with anything—cold, flu, sore throat, food poisoning—and also since shortly thereafter the press had started noticing her weight, too.

Like the
New York Post
, which ran a mean little item on “Page Six” a few weeks later about how she’d been spotted tucking into a bowl of fettuccini with porcini mushrooms and cream sauce—reporting it with the requisite boldfaced subhead: “Karen ‘Tipps’ the Scales at Orso.”

And then there was
The New York Observer
, which had simply started referring to her as “Moby Lipps” and “Karen Hipps.”

“She’ll probably fire me since I was the one who made her change her name to something that rhymes with all these fat words,” I told Malcolm.

It was the Friday night after Karen’s latest horrifying P.R. episode, and I was sitting at his kitchen table watching him cook us dinner. He had just transferred the saucepan on the front burner to the back burner so he could make room for another pot. This accomplished, he pulled a bag of mushrooms from the refrigerator and retrieved a large fennel bulb from a brown paper bag on the counter. This had become a familiar scene. Malcolm must have cooked me a hundred dinners and chopped a thousand vegetables in that kitchen in the time we’d been seeing each other.

I remembered the first night he’d made dinner over a year ago, when he’d asked me, as he was preparing the first of many elaborate salads, whether I liked fennel.

“Yes,” I said.

“I love it,” he said sardonically, his face and mouth spreading into a huge wry smile that made him look either strikingly handsome or criminally insane. I walked around to the counter where he was standing near the sink, slicing and
peeling a vegetable I’d never really given much thought to before that moment. He cut a stalk in two and put a piece into his mouth and the other piece into my hand—a gesture I interpreted as being touchingly old-fashioned. Another man might have presumed to put it into my mouth, but not Malcolm. He seemed incapable of taking anything—and everything—for granted the way other people did. We chewed and crunched for a while, and then he smiled, and then I smiled, and then he cut another stalk in half, and we ate that, too.

Malcolm’s apartment was a big, old, rambling set of rooms in one of those big, old, rambling Upper West Side apartment buildings where the elevator doors echo when they open and close and the hallways always smell of other people’s cooking. He had lived there since the late 1970s, and the rooms still held what was left of those years when he had a family—walls and walls of books, all the furniture, and a few large abstract paintings. His wife, Jean, a social worker, had left behind almost everything, he told me, since she didn’t think she could bear even the faintest traces of memory.

But he’d stayed on here, held on, hunkered down, as if hanging on to life itself—an instinct for survival so blind and so absolute, it had stunned him ever since.

“I don’t know how I survived or why I wanted to,” he’d said later that night, the first time I’d ever slept there.

“It’s the life force,” I said quietly, not knowing how else to explain the inexplicable will and strength needed to climb out of a hole so black and so deep.

“The life force,” he repeated. “Is that what it is?”

His eyes bored into mine, and then he held me so tight, I thought my ribs might break.

I remember asking him that night why it was, besides the Prozac, that we didn’t make love. What it was that made him so afraid.

“I don’t think I could handle any more loss” was all he’d say when we’d talk about his past and how it was affecting us now. I came to understand that this was his way of not saying what he feared most—becoming attached to someone again:

You can’t lose what you don’t have
.

And so he wouldn’t have me.

Not like that, anyway.

Although he had me in other ways I thought were just as—or almost as—attachment producing:

Cooking for me.

Sleeping with me.

Marathon conversations that lasted, most weekends when we drove out to his house in Sag Harbor, well into the morning. Politics, history, fiction, food, movies we’d seen together—whatever the topic, he had an opinion on it and a desire to discuss it.

Like tonight’s topic: Karen.

He hated Karen because of everything I’d told him. Plus he hated people like her on principle. Watching him move around the kitchen from stove to oven to cutting board, I could detect a glimmer of
Schadenfreude
in his eyes.

“What?” I asked.

“She’s a pig,” he replied.

“Hey, enough with the fat jokes. I’m already sick to my stomach.”

“I don’t mean pig in the sense of size or weight. I mean pig in the sense of how she behaves: pig as a person. She’s always hated fat people, and now she’s fat. She treats people like shit, and now she’s getting treated like shit. What goes around comes around. Don’t feel sorry for her. She doesn’t deserve it.”

He was right, and usually when he was right, when he defended me, when he made me feel like I wasn’t crazy for
feeling spent and empty after a stressful thankless week at work, I usually felt better. But for some reason that night was an exception. I was too weary—weary of all the mean-spiritedness, of all the nastiness, of all the obsessive emphasis on looks and weight and appearance that were endemic to the fashion business.

I sipped my water silently and wished Malcolm would stop his fucking chopping and stirring and cooking and put his arms around me, or grab me, or push me up against the wall and kiss me so hard it took my breath away. But that would never happen, I knew.

I could sit in that chair for hours and hours and hours the way I had so many times during the year we’d been seeing each other, and neither of us would do anything of the sort. We would eat dinner and move into the living room afterward and talk until it got very late and we were exhausted, and then we would finally go to sleep together. Most times, that was enough. Or better than nothing. That’s what I would tell myself those nights in the dark when I lay awake next to Malcolm.

But sometimes it wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t better than nothing. Sometimes being with him made me feel lonelier than being alone.

I got up to set the table, taking the dishes out of the cabinets, then the silverware out of the drawer, and then the glasses out of the dish drainer. We moved in parallel orbits around each other the way we always did when we were in his place, or my place, or when we went out for breakfast or dinner or to see a movie. We were together but separate. There were times when I would feel one of those compass points more acutely than the other, as I did that night, when all I could feel was the separation.

It seemed like our situation would have been so easy to remedy. So easy to break the force field that kept us apart by
simply walking through it—a kiss when I stepped into his apartment or he into mine instead of just a nod or a half smile, as if the other had been there all along; an embrace before we left each other in the morning; or a thousand other simple gestures through which two people communicate affection and feeling and intimacy without speaking.

But we did not do those things—did not touch or embrace or kiss unless we were in bed, and even then our physical vocabulary was limited, truncated, as if there were a line we could come upon but not cross. And though I often wanted to, I rarely pushed the limits of our tacit understanding; did not often challenge the official verbal language of our relationship with sexual language. I was afraid that I would, once again, come up against his silence and rejection. It was simply too difficult to feel the panic rising through his muscles, to accept the impulses and instincts that I believed still existed in his mouth and his hands and his body shutting down and short-circuiting, until my touch or embrace or kiss had been neutralized, contained.

Had there been no physical attraction between us, had our relationship been clearly a platonic one, things between us would have been easier; the boundaries of our interaction would have been more defined; desire and possibility would have been removed from the equation resulting in a friendship—no more, no less.

Sometimes when we were together I would try to suppress my feelings—try not to want what I might never get from him—and yet those synapses kept firing. During the split seconds when desire and need and longing converged, I was led, despite my conditioning and my misgivings, to try again.

I put my glass down and crossed the kitchen floor to where he was standing, his back to me, facing the sink. Over the sound of the water running, it seemed he was unaware of
me there, so close. I stopped, not sure if I should retreat, and for that instant I felt the familiar confusion and paralysis set in, as if, like a stroke victim, I no longer remembered how to execute the simplest movements that had always been so automatic. And just when I thought I might lose my nerve completely, I willed myself to move forward and slip my hands under his arms and around his waist and lean my forehead against his back.

He reached to shut the water faucets off, and then his hands, wet from washing the potatoes, covered my hands. Our fingers locked, and I closed my eyes.

A minute or so passed before he loosened his grip and turned around. My eyes welled up with tears, and I tugged at the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. His arms stayed around me, and his hands rested just above the small of my back, and I could feel his chin against my forehead. I knew my disappointment about this part of our relationship tore him up and shamed him, and I wished again that there could have been a way for me to communicate desire without disappointment.