“I know every mother says stuff like that, but in my case, it’s true. Do you know what I went through to get her?”
He sort of shrugs, but I’m talking again before he has a moment to respond. “Fertility drugs up the yin-yang.” Suddenly, it feels good to be yelling over the music. “You stop your life for it. They say you have to be in for a blood draw at ten-o-six at night? You go at ten-o-six at night. They say you need to have an ultrasound before seven in the morning? You go. They say you need a special drug and that you need to take it before the pharmacy opens in the morning? You go across the state line to Indiana, where the pharmacy opens an hour earlier, on eastern time, and you put everything else on hold if you have to. You shell out three hundred dollars per dose. You just do it. And there’s no guarantee it’ll work.”
He’s chewing on his lip, looking at me as if I’ve lost my mind.
Maybe I have. “And then, all these women, all around you, they have no trouble getting pregnant on their own, and they rub it in your face, as if there’s obviously something wrong with you, as if you’re not good enough, and they’re having children with your husband, with a married man, but you’re the one not worthy.”
Finally I shut up and draw another few sips of mojito up my straw.
“Well, she’s gorgeous. Whatever you went through to have her, it’s worth it.”
“She’s challenging sometimes.”
“There are worse things than a headstrong daughter. That bullheadedness will come in handy when it really counts, you know? She’s not going to be taking any shit from any man, I promise you.”
She’s so unlike me, I realize. “I don’t know where she gets it. I’ve been a doormat. All the things happening right under my nose . . .”
“Maybe you’re trusting.” He pats my hand twice, then quickly withdraws and places his hand back on his sweating pint glass, where it belongs. “It’s not a bad thing to be trusting. The trouble comes when someone takes advantage of that trust. Shame on them. Not us.”
Us?
“That’s right.” I cover my mouth, but it’s too late to suck back in all the words I’d spewed, which sounded, in hindsight, as if they applied to Christian, as well as me. “Your wife.”
“Ex-wife.”
“I’m sorry. Here I am, going on and on about being a doormat. I didn’t mean you were a doormat, too. I wouldn’t say something like that. You . . . you’re obviously so much more together than—”
“And I know what you mean about all these women having babies—even if they shouldn’t. My ex . . . she had someone else’s kid, and I thought it was mine. Can you imagine? I’m there for the midnight ice-cream cravings, rubbing her belly as it grew, there in the delivery room, there for two a.m. feedings, then one day, a DNA test takes it all away from me.”
“Oh God.”
He takes a healthy gulp of the Frogman, draining the last bit from the glass, then exhales a long, drawn-out sigh. “Yeah, nothing like being a father for sixty-five days, and then suddenly, it’s all over.”
Our pitcher arrives, but I don’t acknowledge the server when he tells me our fritters will be up shortly. I can’t stop looking at the rugged man across the table. Can’t stop imagining his falling in love with a baby, counting his toes and fingers, waiting to be called Daddy. Can’t stop imagining him falling to pieces when he realizes it was all an illusion.
“Marriage? Over. Fatherhood? Over. Life as I knew it?”
“Over,” I say with him.
He meets my glance. “Fuck it. Life deals you shitty cards sometimes. What are you gonna do? Fold? Naw, you gotta play, right? No matter what.”
“Absolutely.” I think of my mother, folding with a handful of pills. Checking out. But she didn’t stop there. After I found her in time and they pumped the poison out of her stomach, she only slashed back harder the next time—at her jugular.
She left me to scrape myself up off the floor. I’d played. I’m playing now, too. I reach for the pitcher of mojito and the spare glass the waiter brought with it. I top off mine and fill the second. The red lights from the stage reflect off the glasses and the liquid in them, like stained glass windows. “To being dealt better hands.” I raise my glass.
He raises his. “To lessons learned with the cards we hold.”
“To hard lessons learned.”
We clink.
We drink.
Claudette was right. This behavior—the cheating, the lying—is inexcusable. And if I’d learned of it before Micah flew his proverbial plane into the great beyond, I wouldn’t have been half as forgiving as Claudette was of Brad after Misty Morningside.
Who am I kidding? I love him. I couldn’t have left him. Despite the evidence of his betrayal, despite the fact that he’s gone now, I love him still.
I hear the memory of Micah’s whisper in my ear: I love you, too, Nicki-girl.
I feel the beat of his cha-cha in time with the music from the stage: rock, step, cha . . . cha . . . cha. The cha-chas never at the right tempo but rather at one beat per cha. Wrong. So wrong. But so Micah.
“Dance?”
“What?”
Christian is on his feet, palm up in invitation. “You’re practically dancing in your chair already.”
Am I? “Mojito effect.”
“It’s good. I like it.” He juts his chin toward the dance floor. “Put it to good use.”
“I couldn’t possibly—”
“You’re already doing it! That is, if you want to call whatever it is you’re doing dancing.”
“I’ll have you know, I can hold my own out there.”
“Looks like you want to prove it.”
“You’re on.” I take another long, cold sip of mojito. And then I take my neighbor’s hand.
I hold my frame, follow his lead.
And soon we’re spinning and cha-chaing through the crowd on the dance floor.
It’s effortless. Fun.
And he’s a good dancer.
This is what it was supposed to be like, taking classes with Micah. But he never caught on.
Rock, step, cha-cha-cha.
Rock, turn, cha-cha-cha.
Chris smells of pale ale and some cologne that carries a hint of evergreen. His strong arms guide me around the dance floor, and for the first time since Micah left to give some mysterious executive from a fictitious company a ride to New York, I feel as if someone might catch me if I fall.
Images flash in my mind: Christian’s feeding Papa Hemingway, his bringing Elizabella a frozen treat at Fogarty’s, his mashing squash for Thanksgiving dinner, his lugging over a ladder at a moment’s notice.
He turns me into the cuddle step. Rock, step, cha-cha out of the cuddle.
Memories of day-to-day life with Micah interject: his scooping ice cream, his rubbing my pregnant belly, his piercing into my body on that last night . . .
And suddenly, everything is hazy and sweaty.
The music throbs in my veins.
Rock, step, cha-cha-cha.
And I’m feeling it again, as if it’s actually happening. Sex with Micah. Deep, passionate, as if he were making love as much with his mind as with his body.
I allow my eyes to close, to sink into the feeling. To picture him as I want to remember him forever: between my thighs, connected to me on a thousand levels.
A shiver runs up my spine.
I lean into him, finesse a kiss onto his lips, which part slightly.
His tongue brushes mine.
Frogman.
I gasp.
I imagine Micah on the edge of the dance floor, watching it all. Shame cloaks me in red—heat in my cheeks, heat on my neck, heat in my pants.
But I’m still kissing him.
Christian.
Not Micah.
My neighbor backs off before I do, a stunned, maybe stupefied look on his face, as if he’s not sure that what just happened really happened.
Did it?
The fingers on his left hand are still linked with those on my right, but slowly we part as he heads off the dance floor.
At the last second before he drops my hand, he curls his fingers around mine, and he gives my hand a tug: a subtle invitation to follow him.
Chapter 42