Live a Little (44 page)

“I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”

“I said I have something to confess, too. I bought a few of Raquel’s works anonymously, so that people would start taking her seriously and the galleries would know they’d made the right decision to show her work.” I feel my face burn. I can’t tell if it’s from affection for Phil or consternation that I wasn’t the bona fide popular genius I thought I was.

I think it’s the affection.

“We’re in over our heads financially,” he explains. “That’s one of the things we always argue about.” He squeezes my hand again. “It was just to jump-start things. I only bought two.”

“Oh, Philly.” I don’t know what to say.

From out in the audience, a voice booms. “I knew there was bovine growth hormone in the school milk, but I let ’em put it in anyway, ’cause it was cheaper. I’m Eliot Abramson of Abramson Integrated Foods, Raquel’s stepfather.
Proud
stepfather, I should say. I agree with Taylor. Nobody’s perfect. Anyway, I’m sorry.” Eliot sits down, banging his bony ass on the upright flip chair in the process. His “goddammit” reverberates through the room. I don’t think this family will ever grace the
Living with Lauren!
studio again, if Laurie can help it.

Ma stands and peers down her glasses. “I’m Minna Louise Schultz Abramson, Rachel and Lauren’s mother,” she says in her Bea Arthur rasp. “I’m so proud of both my girls. You carry them inside you all those months, you give them the milk from your breasts”—
oh, Ma, for God’s sake
— “you’d lie down on train tracks for them, and still, you have to let them fly free, let them make their own mistakes. It’s a mother’s curse . . . What did I want to say? Oh yes: I’ve always told everyone I met my second husband in the doctor’s waiting room—that’s Kolodnick, over at Stanford, by the way, the man’s a wonderful doctor, and he’s single, and he’s a
mensch,
ladies!—but anyway, actually, we had an affair years ago, when my first husband—God bless him—Stuart was still alive. It was just the one time, mind you, but I’ve always felt guilty about it. El and I agreed it was a bad idea to break up our families, but when we met again by chance all those years later, we knew it was fate.” She grabs Eliot by the T-shirt. They kiss passionately, two shriveled little Jews in matching black stretch pants. The crowd goes wild. I try to remember if I have a panty liner on under Phil’s tightie whities, because I think incontinence is only a giggle away.

Laurie’s eyes are closed. For a moment I’m scared
she’s
the one having heart failure. She’s always been the normal one in our family, and thus the one with the lowest tolerance for Clan Abramaschultz’s shenanigans. For perhaps the first time ever, I see what Ma was talking about when she characterized Laurie as more vulnerable than I; with more conventional success to lose, she’s always been a little less free to make mistakes. Suddenly, I feel the weight of all that implies for Laurie—along with a surge of gratitude for what was doubtless a lot of heated explaining and convincing on the front end of this deal.

As I’m reaching out to steady my sister, she waves me away and speaks. “Since this seems to be confession day, I’d like to get something off my chest that’s been bothering me for years. Everyone: I’m infertile.” She glances quickly at the crowd. “That’s no secret. I’ve even done shows about it. But it’s my infertility—and my inability to cope with it—that led me to do something terrible to someone I care about very much. Something I’ve always regretted.”

Laurie stands up as if offering herself to her fans as sacrifice. “My secret is, I was so jealous of Raquel’s ability to have beautiful children that I once intercepted a letter to her from a foundation informing her that she’d won a grant to serve as a resident visual artist.”

“Not the Headlands Center for the Arts?” I’d always had a strange, inexplicable feeling of loss about that one, but the lack of a formal response—even to reject me—had so damaged my confidence that I’d never again applied to another program.

Laurie nods gravely.

“I won that?” I know it’s ridiculous, but instead of being furious or sick with betrayal, I feel gratified to have beat out such grand competition for the prized residency. A memory of myself plucking out the smiling newsprint eyes of the winning Stinson Beach snack-bar painter—she of the Scotch habit and laundry list of food allergies from Ross Trimble’s dinner party—floods my brain. I am suddenly quite happy.

“It was lying there on the counter when you brought the mail in one day,” Laurie explains, sounding miserable. “You went to the bathroom. I read it and stuffed it in the bottom of the recycling.” She sniffles softly. “Please, will you forgive me?”

I put my arm around her. “Given that I might or might not have had sex with your husband, I’d say we’re even.”

Epilogue

(One Year Later)

Have you ever wondered what you’d do if they told you that you weren’t dying? Not like, someday you’re not going to die. Imminently. As in today.

I used to think about it periodically. Lately, though, I’ve been too busy. Between the book tour to promote
Sick of It: How Opting Out Can Help You Opt into Success
and my latest show at the LACMA and private commissions and taping new episodes of
Living with Lauren & Raquel!
, I don’t have time to watch
Desperate Housewives
on TiVo, let alone brood about big life questions that really don’t matter much to me anymore. Also, in spite of the fact that
not
dying certainly qualifies as the less morbid side of death, it’s still a relatively gloomy topic, and I’m trying to keep things light and positive for the baby.

Baby?

Yes, baby. What, you thought I was done with all that procreation stuff just because I’m forty-four and counting and my kids not only have drivers’ licenses but five tickets between them?

You thought wrong.

I’ll admit it: Being knocked up at this age is a whole different ball of hemorrhoids. If someone had told me beforehand that the indigestion, swollen ankles, bleeding gums, and pesky zits I endured in my twenties would revisit me in my forties, I’d have run screaming for the nearest empty nest. I’ve even had restless leg syndrome, if you can believe it. Restless legs! Afflicting me, an avowed believer in death by exercise. The nerve!

I can’t complain, though. After all, it
was
my decision. I guess the temptation of having Ren’s baby never really fled the coop completely.

What,
you say,
Ren’s
— gasp!—
baby?

Get your mind out of the gutter, will you? Of course I’m having Ren’s baby. What, you think Phil and I want to go through the corrosive, sanity-eating, soul-stealing fog that is parenting an infant? Fuck no. Excuse me, what I mean to say is,
FUCK NO.

I’ll tell you something in complete confidence: The day I give birth to my and Philly’s child and allow the little Morgoth to annihilate the piss-elegant San Francisco condo we moved into last year is the day I rejoin the Peninsula JCC and ask Rochelle Schitzfelder to be my natural-labor coach.

Since I know you’re
dying
for the dirt, here’s the deal: Meet Raquel Rose, surrogate mom.

Yep, that’s it. Surrogate. Before we got deeply into it, when I was still freaking out at the idea and envisioning myself in vomit-stained caftans, I looked it up:
taking the place of somebody or something else.

After pondering things for a while, I realized how off the mark that definition is. Okay, not off the mark, exactly, but incomplete. A lie by omission. Because one thing I know for sure is that I could
never
replace Laurie in much of anything. Lend her my uterus, yes. Substitute for her? No. What they should have said is:
taking the place of somebody or something in a matter of little cosmic importance that they are unable to address themselves.

I’ll never forget the day it happened. Well, not
happened
— that rollicking adventure occurred on a paper-coated table with me on my back, my legs in stirrups, and an embryologist poking around my cervix while a Muzak version of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” chimed in the background— but was
conceived.

Ouch.

It was the strangest thing: One minute I was standing in front of the magazine rack at Walgreens, sneaking a peek at an article on celebrity baby nurseries, the next I was speeding down the freeway to Laurie and Ren’s.

I was so excited I left my keys in the convertible MINI Cooper—I traded in the Sienna when we moved to the city— and ran up the walkway to my sister’s Atherton Tudor. It was Sunday evening; I knew my sister and brother-in-law would be home, she knitting or grinding herbs into neatly labeled jars, he reading medical journals or shining his golf shoes.

“Laurie!” I called as I rapped the door. “Ren!”

Laurie answered. “I didn’t know you were coming, Quel. Is everything all right?”

“It’s perfect.” I sat down at the kitchen table. The surface was so polished, I could see Ren’s worry lines when he entered from the living room to see what was going on.

“I’m going to have your baby,” I said.

“What?”

“We’re going to do one of those IVF thingies where they make a baby out of Ren’s sperm and your eggs and plant it in me. I may be old, but my insides still work. And the baby would be all yours—”

“Embryo,” Ren cut in. He had his arm around Laurie’s shoulders. He often does. When I think of all the years I spent imagining the glorious good fortune that arm around me might confer, I am really impatient to get on with things.

“Whatever. Just . . . I’ll do it. Ren, you said it yourself to me once, that it would have been a good idea if only I hadn’t had chemo. Well, I haven’t had it, and God willing, I won’t have it. I’m healthy, I’ve had my kids, I won’t want to raise the baby or anything. I’ll do it. Say yes before I change my mind, goddammit!”

Ren and Laurie regarded each other with that expressive shorthand long-married people use when they need to achieve consensus in a hurry and without speaking because other (rude) people are in the room. They didn’t exchange a word.

“Yes,” Laurie said simply.

“Raquel . . .” Ren seemed at a loss for words. “Thank you.”

I didn’t want them to be too grateful or think I wanted them to grovel, so I shifted their attention to the one potential obstacle to this endeavor.

“Now who’s going to tell Phil?” I said.

Ah, the memories.

Phil took it like a true mensch. He takes a lot of stuff better than I thought he—or any man—could. That doesn’t mean he’s a saint. Far from it. The thing with Philip Atticus Rose is, he doesn’t play fair—he lets his opponents get overconfident. Just when you think you’re home free,
whammo!
, he hits you with the big one. Frankly, I admire his cruelty. Plus, if I
were
married to a saint, it would probably last about as long as my relationship with Duke Dunne, and that’s not counting the ride on the motorcycle.

It took exactly forty-two days after we got back together on
Living with Lauren!
for Phil to ask about Duke Dunne. I know this because I marked it off on a wall calendar. I know it’s weird, but nobody ever accused me of being normal, right?

We were sitting in the hot tub at his apartment complex in Redwood City—or Redwood Shitty, as we had taken to calling it when the windows started leaking and black mold overtook the grout. The hot tub was the one plus that the mostly singles-y nest of units had going for it, as long as we snagged it early, before the nightly contingent of swaybacked divorcées and horny Pakistani engineers dropped beneath the beige foam.

Phil filled my plastic water bottle with cheap pinot grigio and stretched out, his back against a jet. “Did you sleep with that piece of shit Dunne?” he said.

I sighed and trotted out the only answer I could reasonably give the man I adored more than any other. “Yeah.”

He nodded. “I thought so. You seemed different.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes I wish I hadn’t. Does that help?”

Phil flicked away a froth of suds. “Yeah, it does, actually. Do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“If I ask you for specifics sometime, don’t tell me.”

“Okay.”

“Especially if I’m impotent or something.”

“Like that’s going to happen, stud.” We laughed. I could tell he wanted to kiss me, but then our neighbor Atiq Somethingorother walked through the gate, skinny legs brown and shivering, and asked whether we minded if he joined us. We said no, and Phil’s long toes with their rough, untended nails scratched my calf underwater, just the way I like it.

Phil never asked about Duke again. I choose to take it as a sign of great affection.

Will passenger Raquel Rose please report to the podium?

The disembodied voice repeats itself several times while I waddle my way to the gate. This is good news: Maybe Philly and I will be able to sit together on the way to Waikiki after all.

I introduce myself to the woman at the gate, a well-groomed Filipina with ash-blond highlights and airline-approved ruby lips.

She frowns. “But
that’s
Raquel Rose.” She points at somebody a few feet away, a petite woman with a brown bob and two young children weaving around her legs. “She showed me her driver’s license. She was waiting for an upgrade, so I put her in business.”