I cast Richard an apologetic look as I finish dressing. “I’m really sorry, but I gotta go.”
“Everything okay?” he asks, swinging his legs over the side of his bed and pulling on his boxers.
“A crisis of the heart,” I tell him.
“I’m not familiar,” he says.
Must be nice , I think.
He walks me to the door and kisses me good-bye.
I pause for a second as I think of something appropriate to say. I settle on, “Thanks for tonight.”
It sounds a little formal, so I smile and add, “I enjoyed it.”
“Anytime,” he says. “And I mean that.”
Jess is a mess when I return to her place. She is sitting cross-legged in the corner of her room and there are at least a dozen cigarette butts in one of her white saucers on the floor beside her. She quit smoking a few years ago, but picks the habit back up whenever she’s in the middle of a stressful deal or an emotional crisis. She looks fragile, vulnerable. To see her now, you’d never guess that she can buy and sell companies worth billions of dollars.
I hug her and say that I’m sorry. That I know how badly she wanted things to work out with Trey. I refrain from calling him a lying bastard. For now.
She says, “I really believed in him,” and then starts to cry. It’s heartbreaking to watch. Another reason not to have a child. The thought of watching your child suffer feels unbearable. Still, as I listen to Jess romanticize her relationship with Trey, I can’t help feeling the way I do when friends lose pets and grieve as if a person died. Yes, it’s sad, but it’s not that sad, I always think. I know you loved Flash, but he was a basset hound, for God’s sake, not your son. But maybe that’s because I never had a dog growing up (my mother is allergic to them). I feel sort of the same way about Trey. I’ve never been with a married man, but I want to say to Jess, “Yes, you liked him, and you loved having sex with him. But how could you love him ? He is married to another woman. With children. He is emotionally unavailable to you. He is a fraud. You were never, even at your peak romantic moment, really together. So you haven’t really lost anything.”
I might say all of this at some point, but now is not the time. I just let her cry. I remember that she did the same for me. Not that Ben and Trey should ever be compared.
“I know you couldn’t possibly understand this,” Jess says after a long silent stretch. “But I thought he was going to be the father of my children. I’ve invested two years in him. Two years. I feel too old to start looking again.”
“You’re not too old,” I say. “That’s ludicrous.”
“I’m almost thirty-five ,” she says. “I’m running out of time. I’m running out of eggs.”
“You have plenty of good eggs left,” I say. I am trying hard to be a supportive friend, but I can’t help fixating on the other part of her statement. The part about me not understanding. I don’t want to make her angst about me, as my mother does whenever someone else is experiencing trauma, but I can’t help asking, “Why do you think I can’t understand this?”
Jess and I never argue, so she has no experience in detecting the edge in my voice now. She has no way of knowing how annoyed I am. How much I am regretting calling her back at all. I could still be at Richard’s. I wish I were. Almost. Actually, I’m not sure about that, in some ways it was nice to get the natural out. Much easier than deciding for myself whether I should spend the night.
But what I do know is that a man like Trey should not have the power to infiltrate my romantic life. It’s bad enough that he has impacted my best friend’s.
I look at Jess, waiting for an answer. She lights another cigarette as she says, “Because you don’t want kids.”
Right , I think to myself. And I guess that means that I also have no imagination, no empathy, no feelings. I can’t possibly fathom how another woman feels when I don’t want to be a mother myself. After all, what kind of a woman doesn’t want to be a mother?
* * *
fifteen
The next day Daphne calls me from the waiting room of her fertility clinic. I’m about to go into our weekly editorial meeting, and I want to take the time to either review my notes or say good morning to Richard or both. I called him back last night, after my conversation with Jess, but I still feel strange about leaving so quickly after we slept together for the first time. I tell Daphne that I can’t talk and will call her back after my meeting.
“But it’s nine-twelve,” she says.
“Yeah. So?”
“So your meeting doesn’t start at nine-fifteen, does it?”
I know precisely where she’s going with her line of questioning, but I still fall into her trap and say, “No. It starts at nine-thirty.”