The Hazards of Hunting While Heartbroken (32 page)

“That’s it? The whole we-need-to-talk is about a twenty-four hour change in travel plans? Seriously?”

“Well, yeah. I figured the holiday weekend is important to you.”

“Of course it is, but I’m not a complete psycho. I work for a crazy lady, remember? I know better than anyone that work things come up, sometimes on weekends. You’re so busy and important,” I say, more playfully. “You can’t help it.” I lean over to kiss him.

“So you’re not mad?”

“About Thanksgiving, no. Honestly. I was actually starting to worry about what we’d do down there, trapped indoors with my family, if we got unlucky and it rained all weekend.” I pause for a second, and the little voice in my head cautions me to let the other thing slide. I ignore her insistent pleas.

“But if we’re being honest here, I am a little peeved about your whole ‘we need to talk’ thing. Don’t you know those four little words strike fear in the hearts of women everywhere?”

He laughs. “I guess you’re right. I didn’t give it a second thought. I’m a guy, remember? I had something I needed to talk about with you, so I said so. But, if you’ll allow me the opportunity, I’d like to redeem myself with four other little words.”

I think I feel the world start spinning slightly faster as Oscar leans over, cups my face in his hands, and says, “I love you, Zoë.”

Angela phones me during the late morning, when I’m between meetings. I step into an empty conference room to take her call, and I have to bite my tongue, literally, to keep from sharing this most startling and wonderful development in my life. I mean, I’d worked myself into a lather thinking he was going to break up with me, and instead he says the magic words and cements our status. I need to put a stop to all the worrying and self-doubt. Oscar and I are going to live happily ever after. I told Brendan when we were engaged that I’d never change my name, but I’m starting to think that Zoë Clark-Thornton
does
have a nice ring to it.

Angela cuts right to the chase and her leaden tone goes a long way towards yanking my head out of the clouds. “I went to the doctor to confirm it. Of course their test came back positive.”

“I’m sorry.” I stop short of asking if she’s thought about what she’s going to do. It seems better to let her talk.

“You haven’t heard the worst part of my morning. They said I should have an exam. I can’t imagine what they expected to see in there, but I guess it’s standard protocol. So my regular doctor is out, taking her first vacation in two years or some such nonsense. The nurse says her partner could squeeze me in, so I say, okay, because I can’t really take another morning off work this week.”

She stops for air and keeps explaining. “So I go in the room, and get half naked and sit on the table with the horrible paper drape over me and the doctor knocks. I’m not sure why, but I suppose I was expecting a woman.”

“I don’t like going to a guy, either.”

“Well, maybe some old, gray-haired professorial-looking guy would be alright, in a pinch and everything, but this guy was gorgeous. He had sparkling green bedroom eyes, dimples when he smiled, and there was something so manly about him. He reeked of sex appeal. So I shook his hand and took a deep breath and went to lie back, but then bolted right back up and said, ‘No way. You’re way too cute. I can’t do this.’”

“You did not!” Despite the seriousness of my friend’s predicament, I’m laughing out loud. Had I been in her place, I might have
wanted
to do the same thing, but I probably wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to do so.

“I did, and he looked at me for a minute, then asked if I was serious, and I said yes, and please find me another doctor. So then he got a little red-faced, but he said okay—I mean he has to listen to the patient, right?—and I waited there, half naked and freezing, while he went to find me someone else.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. So of course these places book up months in advance. Eventually they found this female nurse practitioner with poor skin tone and cold hands to check me out. I caught her staring at my ring finger. Judgmental bitch. So anyway, everything looks normal down there and I left with a prescription for both prenatal vitamins and an informational leaflet about the abortion pill, which, if I decide to go that way, I need to take at the doctor’s office sometime within the next month.”

“Which way are you leaning?” I try to ask as gently as possible.

“I haven’t decided. Neither route seems all that tempting. What do you think?”

“I think listen to your gut.”

“What if your gut was telling you everything happens for a reason, but on the other hand, you were thinking, it’s just not the right time? What then?”

“I don’t know.”

Angela exhales loudly into the phone. “That’s the problem. Neither do I. For the first time in my life, I’m truly confused about what I want.”

When I get home at eight, Kevin’s nowhere to be found, but Angela’s waiting on the sidewalk outside my building, bundled in a black cashmere coat, without any of her usual flamboyant accessories. She looks lost and somehow small and timid, adorned only with modest pearl earrings.

“Why didn’t you use your key?” The temperature is dropping fast. My mother will be despairing over the first hard frost, which will kill most of her garden. She calls me the morning after every year, as if the mass murder by Mother Nature of her eggplants, raspberries and carrots is somehow surprising. Every fall I tell her she should avoid the carnage by leaving for Florida a month earlier.

“I didn’t feel like going home to get it.”

Once upstairs, I instinctively reach for a bottle of wine, but then catch myself and put the kettle on the stove instead. Angela chatters nervously about her uneventful work day until it screeches. I pour us two cups of tea and we settle around my little table, which would seat four in a pinch, assuming I cleared a month’s worth of junk mail off it.

She wraps her hands around her mug, stares into her Darjeeling and says, “So I’ve officially gone off the deep end.”

“I doubt that.”

“That’s because you haven’t heard how I spent most of this afternoon. You know how I’m still struggling with whether to tell Claudio about the baby?”

I nod.

Angela exhales and swipes at her abhorred new bangs. “Today I consulted the stars. I Googled our astrological compatibility.” When I don’t register a big reaction to this revelation, she says, “It turns out two Scorpios can be a
great
thing, so that would weigh in favor of telling him. One of the sites I checked even used the words ‘sublime’ and ‘legendary love affairs.’” Her eyes widen as she tells me this.

“Okay, I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but that can’t possibly be true of all Scorpio couples.”

“It’s not. One site said that when it doesn’t work out, it’s usually because the couple spends too much time planning and not enough time doing. Clearly not an issue in our case. Whatever you think about all of it, you can’t say I planned this.” She pats her non-existent belly.

I’ve got nothing against recreational chart consultation, but it seems to me like an odd methodology for reaching such a major decision. “I know you’re upset, but let me play Devil’s Advocate for a minute. How do you know these astrologers don’t gush about how wonderful every possible combination of signs can be?”

“Because I checked. I went through and read the pages for me and at least six of my exes. More than once. And it was freakishly spot on.” She stares back into her tea and her hated bangs flop forward into her eyes again.

I reach across the table and put my hand on hers. “You’re leaning towards having the baby, then?”

She nods, but can’t seem to form the word yes. She’s obviously fighting back tears. “Five years ago, it would have been a no-brainer for me to have an abortion. I wasn’t anywhere near mature enough to have a baby, and I was just starting out in my career. And while I don’t think this timing is fantastic, there’s an insistent little voice in my head that says maybe this is my chance. I know so many women at work who can’t seem to meet the right guy, but whose biological clocks have taken over their lives. And then we have my cousins. They have met the right guys, but they’re too old or whatever, and the system’s just not working right for them. And then, there’s something that seems nice about being a mommy at a relatively young age. Not that I gave that much thought until yesterday or so, but it’s just one more small thing. So if I decide I’m having it, I obviously should let Claudio know sooner rather than later, so that he can figure out whether he wants to be involved.”

“I suppose that’s right.”

“But I’m scared of losing him. I’m terrified that once I drop this bombshell, he’ll either disappear back to Italy, or have a tantrum and demand I get rid of it.”

“He can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. It’s your decision. If Claudio wants to check out and you decide to go it alone, you know you have a phenomenal support network. And who knows? He might surprise you.”

Although business at Broadwick & Associates maintains a frenetic pace during the fall months, a day or two before Thanksgiving the phones always fall silent. Carol goes through her usual holiday tradition, namely hyperventilating over the slowdown, which while predictable to every other person in the legal industry, always throws her completely off her game. She’s one of those self made successes who, whenever she closes her eyes, pictures herself ninety days from the street. The upside is that her paranoia keeps her motivated.

Carol has earmarked the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to go through her daughter’s college applications with me. When I asked if Janice ought to be present for the meeting, Carol looked at me like I’d been recently lobotomized, then snapped that
her
Janice had much more pressing obligations.

Oscar told me last night when I was nearly hyper-ventilating about this meeting, that the most stressful thing about working in advertising is showing new clients a potential campaign for their product. The client can torpedo weeks and weeks’ worth of work with a single frown. Or the client might like the concept, but not the details, such as price, market reach or a thousand other variables. Oscar says when he goes into one of those meetings, he has to be prepared to tell the client how much it will cost to run their detergent ad during the evening news in two dozen different media markets. Not only that, he has to be able to project the number of viewers in each city and anticipate their reaction. Which can mean tweaking the presentation slightly for each audience. Which is sort of what I’ve done with Janice’s applications, on a smaller scale, of course.

Laid out before me on our largest conference table are materials ready to mail to Wellesley, Duke and each of the Ivies, except Yale, which went out for early decision. Carol has blocked four full hours for this meeting. I can only presume she wants to pick apart every minute detail. Fortunately, I’m properly fortified with extra coffee.

My boss charges into the conference room like a storm trooper and immediately assaults the blinds. They come crashing down so no nosy colleagues can see us from the corridor. I steal a glance and note that her make-up looks good today. Lucky break. Carol flings herself into the chair at the dominant end of the table. “Let’s see what you’ve done.”

At my fingertips, I have detailed talking points about why I answered each question the way I did. I also kept records, complete with postmark dates, of when each of Janice’s transcripts and letters of recommendation went out to every school. I am as ready as possible to deflect her inevitable barrage of questions. And not that Carol cares, but I’d forgotten how exhausting it was to apply to college. The materials laid out before us easily represent more than a hundred hours of work.

Carol leafs through the Harvard application with what strikes me as remarkable calm and detachment. “I like you, Zoë,” she says, without looking up from the essay she’s skimming. “You remind me of myself as a young woman.”

People talk about falling out of their chairs with shock, and I’ve always thought that’s a stupid hyperbole, but I actually catch myself grabbing the arm rests. I have no idea what I’m supposed to say. Probably thank you would be the most appropriate response, but I’m too scared to form words. If Carol sees herself in me, then is it possible I could end up as unhinged as her?

She turns the page and keeps talking. “I was young, smart and high energy, but directionless, and my first husband swooped down from his corner office and swept me off my feet. He was charming, refined, and worldly—all the things I wanted to be but couldn’t quite afford. He was seven years older than me, devastatingly sexy, and it seemed like he had everything all figured out. I lost myself in the heady days of a new relationship, and stopped thinking. He was older and wiser. Before I knew what was happening, I’d lost my sense of self. My life revolved around him, my dearest friends went on the back burner. I started skipping out of my entry-level job at a PR firm early every night, because it seemed so inconsequential compared to Reid’s work. That was his name. Reid Chatham.”