Then Came You (22 page)

“My father is living a lie,” I began. “His wife isn’t what she says she is, and he deserves to know that.”

“And you’re sure he doesn’t know?”

I nodded, because I was positive that if my father had any idea who India really was, he would never have married her. Almost positive. If he had some kind of ridiculous knight-on-a-white-horse fantasy . . . but then I dismissed it. There was no way my father could have known what I knew about India and married her anyhow, let alone agreed to have a child with her.

“More pros?” he asked.

“Maybe if he knew the truth, they’d get divorced. Or the marriage would be annulled,” I said, thinking out loud. “Maybe my mother would come to her senses.” I said it—
putting it out there,
as Vanessa, who was a big fan of putting things out there, used to say—even though I knew it was unlikely.

“Is your mom still in the city?” Darren asked.

I shook my head. “She’s . . .” This was painful to admit, but Darren was basically a stranger, a stranger who’d been on my payroll, which meant that he was obligated to keep my secrets. Besides, it wasn’t as if we had friends in common. There was no one he could gossip to who’d be interested. “She’s in New Mexico. In an ashram.”

“An ashram?” he repeated. “Whoa. Did she read
Eat, Pray, Love
?”

“She said she wanted to live authentically.” The last word came out more scornfully than I’d intended. I looked around to see who might have heard, but the other people in the park seemed focused on their food, or on one another.

Darren raised his eyebrows. “You don’t approve?”

I shrugged, feeling foolish, nibbling at a lettuce leaf to buy time. “She sends me pictures of herself in the sweat lodge.”

“Good times.” He grinned. “My mom sends me articles she clips from the newspaper. Like, actually cuts them out with scissors. Recipes, mostly. Those Mark Bittman ones, with six ingredients. You think your dad still loves her?
Your
mother, not mine.”

“I do,” I said automatically. My parents never fought, never even disagreed until my mother took up with the Baba. Then I thought of my father and India, beaming at me as they’d told me their “wonderful news,” the way he’d tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. I couldn’t remember him ever looking at my mother like that, or touching her so tenderly. My parents had been equals—at least at first. When they’d met, at the University of Michigan, my mother was the one who came from a wealthier, more established family, and she was a year ahead of him in school. Her parents had gone to college; my father’s parents had not. India was different—younger, smaller, more fragile, more in need of a wealthy man’s patronage. Maybe that was what he found appealing.

“And the stepmother?” Darren asked. “What’s she doing that’s so bad?”

“Beg pardon?”

“I mean, did she turn your bedroom into a sex dungeon?”

I smiled—it was a funny thought—and shook my head.

“Steal your boyfriend?” Darren continued. “Run over your dog?”

“She hasn’t done anything to me,” I admitted. I wiped my fingers on a paper napkin. “And I don’t have a dog.”

“Somehow,” said Darren, “that does not surprise me.” He’d finished the first milkshake. He lifted the second one, tilted
it toward me, and started drinking almost before I’d finished shaking my head. “Do you think she makes your dad happy?”

“I think,” I said, “that if she does, it’s a happiness that’s illusory and transient.”

He frowned. “Jesus, where’d you go to school?”

“Vassar. And it won’t last,” I said. “A person like that, she’ll get bored. She’ll leave him.”

“And take all his money?” Darren’s voice was innocent enough, but he knew—he had to—that India couldn’t leave with more than a few million of my father’s dollars. Unless this folly they were embarking on came to pass. Unless they had a baby.

“It’s not that,” I said. I was reluctant to say what I really thought, but, again, I reminded myself that Darren was an employee, that he’d keep my confidences. “I’m worried that she’ll hurt him. That she’ll break his heart.”

There it was, out in the open. “Is that what happened with your mother?” Darren asked.

I nodded again. He pointed to the uneaten half of my bun. “Are you going to finish that?”

“Yes,” I said, “I am.”

He shrugged, sucked fruitlessly at the milkshake cup, then asked, “There’s no chance she really loves him?”

I started ripping my lettuce into shreds, feeling Darren’s eyes on me, his careful regard. It felt good, I acknowledged, to have a boy look at me like that. “I’m not sure,” I answered, wondering in what universe I was qualified to answer questions about love. I’d never really had a boyfriend. Crushes, yes, dates, yes, kissing and fondling on dormitory beds, somewhat. I’d lost my virginity the week before college ended with a boy who I was pretty sure was gay, not because I loved him, or even particularly liked him, but because I couldn’t bear the thought of receiving my diploma before I’d had sex. I knew that I was a throwback. I knew that
I would have been more comfortable in an era of corsets and clear expectations, of good manners and muted voices, where men didn’t hawk phlegm on the street and undress you with their eyes and use
fuck
and
shit
like
yes
and
please.

“I don’t know how much I know about love.”

Darren started to sing. “I know . . . something about love. Gotta want it bad.” His voice was surprisingly tuneful.

“Are you in a band?”

“I was in a girl group, actually. I sang the high parts.” He shook his head sadly. “Then Curtis started up with Deena, and Effie took it hard.” He hummed a few bars of “And I Am Telling You.”

“That must have been difficult.”

He shrugged. “It’s why I have chosen the stable and well-paying life of a professional investigator, instead of pursuing my passion for doo-wop.”

I folded the remnants of my lunch into the paper sack and wiped my hands again. Darren said, “You know, my folks split up, too. It turned out to be the best thing for them. FYI.” He held out his hand for my trash, tossed it, then came back and picked up his pad and his pen. “If you tell him, what good comes of it?”

“Well, then he’d know. Then he could make an informed decision.”

He scratched the side of his nose. “But he’s already married her. That’s a decision, right?”

“Not an irrevocable one. Marriages can be annulled...”

He shook his head. “That’s mostly for soap operas. In the real world, actually, it’s a lot harder than you’d think.”

“He could get a divorce.”

“True.”

“He could sue her for fraud. He could say she’s misrepresented herself.” Of course, I knew that such a lawsuit would
place him even more in danger of being mocked on the Internet than a mere annulment or a simple divorce would have.

“Also true.” He pulled off his ridiculous glasses, massaged the bridge of his nose, then rested his head on the back of the bench, and closed his eyes.

I glared at him. “Are you going to sleep?”

“I am not. I’m enjoying the day. This weather’s great. I grew up in Miami. It never cools off down there.” He stretched his arms up over his head. When they came down, one of them landed around my shoulders. I pulled away, startled . . . then shrugged and settled back against him. He was strange, but funny and interesting. I’d known a lot of guys, but not many of them were interesting, and not many of those were interested in me.

“They’re having a baby,” I blurted. “With a surrogate.”

He opened his eyes and pulled his hands back. “Now that,” he said, “would change things.”

“I know that.” My voice was sharp. “Don’t you think I know that? My father’s fifty-seven. Do you think he’s got any business having a baby? He’ll be seventy-five years old when the kid graduates from high school. Almost eighty when it’s done with college.”

“And eighty-two when it gets its master’s degree.”

“It’s wrong. It’s unnatural.”

“It’s technology,” he said, shrugging. “Remember that woman who had eight kids at once?”

I shuddered and said nothing. Darren sat up, put his glasses back on, and flipped to a fresh page of his legal pad.

“Pros? Cons?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell him that a baby would mean that our family was irrevocably, irretrievably broken, that there’d be no going back to the way we were. I remembered the smallest things, every happy detail. In the Hamptons, after dinner, my
father would pile us into the car for a trip to Carvel.
Bring me a small dish of Thinny-Thin,
my mother would instruct from the daybed on the screened-in porch, where she spent much of the summer curled up with the tabloid magazines she’d never permit herself in the city.
No, wait, just regular vanilla. With a little hot fudge. And maybe some whipped cream. And nuts. Actually, vanilla-chocolate swirl. And see if they’ll throw on some cookie crunchies. I love those cookie crunchies. Tell them it’s for me.

If Darren thought his own parents’ divorce had turned out to be a good thing, there was no way he’d understand how I felt, how badly I missed my parents as a couple, the five of us together, my parents, my brothers, and me.

I looked at my watch and brushed my hands along my skirt to remove any bits of food or lint or pollen. Darren was watching me so closely that I wondered if I had ketchup or mustard on my face, or if my slip was showing. (How Vanessa had howled when I’d unpacked my slips! “You wear these?” she’d asked, pinching one between her thumb and index finger and holding it away from her body like it was going to attack her.)

“You want to get together some time for dinner?”

“Sure,” I said, thinking that maybe this was the one good thing that could come out of all this mess. I liked him. It was a nice surprise.

After work, instead of going home, I took the subway to my father’s office down on Wall Street, taking the elevator up to the thirty-second floor, where he and his assistants worked in glass-walled rooms that had floor-to-ceiling views of the Hudson River. When I was little the office had been smaller, and he’d just had one assistant, who kept a stash of caramel squares in her desk drawer and let me bang on an unplugged keyboard while I waited for my dad. I hadn’t been to his office in years, maybe not since high school, when I’d ridden the elevator flush
with triumph, clutching my college acceptance letters. Now my dad’s assistants had assistants . . . but he didn’t keep me waiting for nearly as long as my mother had before waving me into his office.

“To what do I owe the privilege?” he asked.

He looked good, better than I’d seen him in years, his skin flushed, his hair recently cut and neatly combed. I thought he’d lost a few pounds—since the scare with his artery, he’d been trying to stick to a low-fat diet. He was on new medication for his cholesterol, plus a bunch of vitamins that India had researched. The last time I’d been over there’d been turkey meat-loaf and oven-roasted vegetables instead of the usual roast beef and mashed potatoes, but he’d been a good sport about it, and India had smiled proudly when he’d asked for fat-free yogurt for dessert.
She’s good for him,
the voice in my head said, and I told it to be quiet. Just because she could make a turkey meatloaf—or, more likely, tell the chef to make one—didn’t mean she wasn’t going to hurt him, or that she had his best interests at heart.

I took a seat opposite my father’s desk and opened my mouth to tell him:
Don’t have a baby with this woman . . .
or maybe just to remind him of the good times we’d had. Dim sum brunches in Chinatown, dinners at Daniel to celebrate each of our high school graduations, heading to the Hamptons on Friday afternoons, the five of us in a helicopter, smiling with anticipation, feeling that swooping sensation in our bellies as the city fell away beneath us.

“Bettina,” he said. “What’s up?” As he sat there looking at me, eyes crinkled at the corners, I noticed a new picture among the familiar shots of the five of us, over the years—Trey with braces, holding a striped bass he’d hooked in Montauk; Tommy with his first guitar; me at my debut, in a white lacy dress that seemed, in retrospect, specially cut to display my bony clavicles, dancing with my father. The new picture sat in a silver frame
right next to his oversize computer monitor, and my heart sank when I saw it: him and India, under a canopy of lilies and roses, saying their vows.

“What’s up, hon?”

I couldn’t deny it. He looked happy... happy in a way I hadn’t seen him looking since my mother had left . . . and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be the one to tell him that his happiness was based on a lie, or to force him to trade what I wanted—my family, back the way it had been—for what he had. It was over. The odds of a reunion had been slim to begin with, and now, with Satya burbling her coffee-cup wisdom from her ashram and India determined to have a baby, they’d dwindled to none.

“Bettina?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, and tried to smile. “I was in the neighborhood having lunch with a friend, and I haven’t been up here in forever. I thought I’d just say hi.”

T
he morning I met my surrogate for lunch, I’d woken up in an empty bed. Marcus’s pillow was smooth, the covers untouched. The curtains were open, Central Park visible through the windows, the trees pale green with new leaves. Shimmery early-morning sunlight dappled the walls it had taken me three months to have painted just the right shade of coral: not too orange, not too pink. I wondered if he’d fallen asleep in his office, or the living room, and tapped out a text asking him. Then I got out of bed, pulled on my sports bra, my tank top, my two-hundred-dollar yoga pants and three-hundred-dollar sneakers and went to meet my trainer in the lobby.