“What do you mean?” Maura says, aghast.
“You know forgetting to take my pill. To sort of move the process along.” She makes an investment-banker hand gesture.
Maura’s eyes widen. “You have got to be shitting me.”
Jess looks pleased with herself. I can tell she is mostly kidding, but not entirely. Of course, beyond the obvious unethical nature of such a dirty trick, this whole topic strikes a chord with me as I think of how I would have felt if Ben had, say, replaced my birth control pills with placebos. The word unconscionable comes to mind. So I say, “What if Ben had pulled something like that with me? Punched tiny holes in our condoms, so to speak?”
Jess says, “That’s totally different.”
“Not really,” I say.
“Sure it is. It’s your body. You should have ultimate say.”
“Well, it’s his sperm,” Maura says. I can tell she’s imagining what she would do if Scott had an illegitimate child on the side. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, that’s for sure.
Daphne, on the other hand, looks suspiciously conspiratorial. Anything for a baby. I am pretty sure that she would steal a bit of seed if she had to.
I call her on it. “You think it’s okay, Daph. Don’t you?”
“No,” she says unconvincingly. “Well it depends I guess.”
“Depends on what ?” Maura says.
“On why she’s doing it,” Daphne says, turning to Jess. “Would you be doing it to get Trey to leave his wife? Or would you be doing it to have a baby?”
“Look, Daph, motherhood ain’t so noble that it overrides basic morality,” Maura says.
Daphne kicks me under the table, as if the argument brewing at the table is subtle, something that I could somehow miss. She gives me a “do something” look.
“C’mon, guys,” I say. “Enough. We gotta stick together.”
“That’s my point, Claudia,” Maura says. ” Women should stick together.”
” Friends should stick together,” Jess says. “I don’t know Trey’s wife from Adam. Eve. Whatever. I owe her nothing.”
“I’ll remind you of that someday,” Maura says, her voice shaking a little. “When you’re married to a man who once looked into your eyes and promised to forsake all others. I’ll remind you of that after you’ve just had his baby and you have postpartum depression and feel as fat as a cow and you are pumping milk into little plastic containers in the middle of the night while he’s running around with some twenty-two-year-old named Lisette. I’ll remind you of that.”
“Wait a second,” Daphne says. “You didn’t breast-feed.”
I give her a look that says it’s probably not the right moment to play the role of superior-earth-mother-to-be.
“I nursed Zoe for three weeks!” Maura says. “And then I had to quit because of mastitis. Remember?”
Daphne shakes her head.
“Well, I did And besides , Daph, talk about missing the point.”
“God. Well. Excuse me for living,” Daphne says.
I give Daphne a sympathetic look, knowing that she would kill for a raging case of mastitis right about now. Remarkably, I also think she’d settle for a philandering husband if it meant she could be a mother.
A few minutes later, with a lot of cajoling on my part and the ordering of another bottle of wine, the storm has passed and we are on to safer topics. But as I listen to the three women I love most, I can’t help but think how crazy it is that we all want something that we can’t seem to have. Something that someone else at the table has in spades. I want my husband back, hold the baby. Daphne wants the baby, these days never mind her husband. Maura wants her husband to stop straying. Jess wants someone else’s husband to stray a little more.
I consider what we did to get to this place. Whether any of us is entirely blameless for our predicament. Should Daphne have tried sooner to have a baby? If she knew that she wanted a child more than anything else, should she and Tony have tried to conceive in their twenties, rather than saving their money to buy a house? Should Jess use her head and follow her heart a little less? Should she only date available, unmarried men, for reasons of morality and practicality? Should Maura have seen the signs in Scott earlier? Should she have married a nicer guy, someone more like Niles? And what about me? Should I have just sucked it up and had a baby to keep the only man I’ve ever truly loved?
Things certainly aren’t the way you imagine them when you’re a kid and dreaming big dreams about what your life as a grown-up will look like. Even with a mother like mine, even with my untraditional wishes, even with all the books I’ve read about all the people with lives screwed up in one way or another, I still could have sworn things would be so much neater and easier than they’re turning out to be.
* * *