The Stork Club (18 page)

"You are absolutely—"

"The most adorable generous man on Earth?" Mitch asked, getting out of the driver's seat and coming around to open Lainie's door.

"Yes," she said, allowing herself to be led into the showroom to pick up her new car.

Two weeks later as the last of the cleaning crew wheeled the industrial vacuum cleaner out to his truck and hollered good night to them, Mitch turned out all of the lights in the new store and took Lainie in his arms. "This must be the way a Broadway producer feels just before opening night," he said. Lainie put her arms around his neck and plunged her fingers into his thick black hair. Mitch pulled her tight against him and looked
into her pretty eyes. "I hope that guy with the big vacuum got this rug really clean," he said, his eyes dancing sexily.

"And why is that?" Lainie knew what his answer would be.

"Because the minute his truck pulls away, you and I are going to be rolling around on it." Even in his exhausted state, after weeks of attending carefully to every detail of the new store, he wanted to have her right there on the floor of the store. The big room was eerily lit by the streetlights and traffic lights from outside. Mitch was hard and kissing her with an urgency.

Lainie was turned on and buoyant with the good news she'd been saving to tell him. So cheered by it that any inhibitions about the windows all around fell away, as her blouse now did with Mitch's help. Then her bra, then he unbuttoned her skirt at the waist, letting it fall, and gently removed her panties, slid them down her thighs to her ankles, and in seconds she was naked in the wide expanse of room surrounded by the stark white faceless mannequins, some of them dressed in elegant evening clothes, the one next to her bare except for a very long string of pearls.

Mitch, still dressed, removed the pearls from the mannequin and placed them around Lainie's neck, and kissed her and teased her, wrapping the cold hard shiny beads around each nipple, then squeezing the circle of beads tightly around the nipple until it hurt, then letting the pearls fall their full length to the middle of Lainie's thighs. And as he teased her mouth with his tongue, he pushed his fingers and the pearls up into her, inside her vagina. The unusual sensation made her hotter as Mitch moved them against the tender walls inside her, then slowly pulled them out, and in again, fingers and pearls pushing into her, and out.

After a while he shoved the length of pearls as deeply inside her as he could, and gradually extracted them. Then he put Lainie's hands behind her back and tied her wrists together gently with the pearls as he fell to his knees. And while he reached up and his fingers manipulated her hard nipples, his tongue danced expertly against her aching swollen clitoris, and he moved his hands around to grab her buttocks and forcibly pull her closer to his face, now working her with his entire mouth, pushing it against her fiercely. And when the ache that filled her made her afraid that her knees would give, and when the heat inside her was so intense she was sure she was about to let go, to cry out, he stopped for an instant, slid out of his own clothes, pulled her down onto the floor. After he undid the pearls from around her wrists he said huskily, "Tomorrow, whoever buys these pays a thousand bucks extra."

"Mitch . . . " Lainie was too hot for conversation, and she slid to the floor with Mitch, who mounted her, and with a practiced move of his hips and thighs, his penis found the warm welcoming place inside her as she lifted her hips up, then dropped them with Mitch moving in her, and then again and again. She was loving him, loving the feeling of the way his moves controlled the heat of their union, and then she felt him harder and hotter as her own orgasm blasted through her just seconds before Mitch moaned, then writhed in the throes of his. And when the dreamlike heat of their passion fell away and they found themselves on the carpet of the new store, wet and trembling and out of breath, they laughed at themselves. Lainie decided it was time to tell him the good news.

"I went to a new doctor," she said, kissing his face gently. "I heard about him from a woman in my modern novel class. He's an endocrinologist who treats diabetics
all the time, and he said if I keep tight control and monitor myself and do all the right testing, I can have a normal pregnancy and a normal baby."

Mitch sat up and took her face in his hands, looked long at her with full eyes. "Is that right? Lainie, that's amazing. Why didn't you tell me you were going?"

"I didn't want to unless I knew the answer would be what we wanted to hear. I saw the doctor a few weeks ago, one day when you were meeting with the contractor, but I wanted to wait to tell you when you weren't too preoccupied."

He held her pretty hand and kissed it again and again, then he asked, "So when do we . . ."

"Start?" Lainie smiled and he nodded.

"According to my calendar," she told him, "we just did."

15

B
UT THE NIGHT OF SEX AND PEARLS didn't work. "It takes a long time and a lot of prayer for it to happen," Lainie told Mitch.

"Maybe I should have used rosary beads," he teased her. The new store opened to enthusiastic business, more than they'd imagined, and there was no time to take a sexy stress-free vacation, so the following month when Lainie was ovulating they borrowed a friend's boat in the marina, took a champagne picnic with them, and in the beautiful master cabin the boat rocked along with the rhythm of their ardent lovemaking. But two weeks later they discovered that hadn't worked either. Nor did the night at the Bel-Air Hotel, or the cottage they took for a night at the San Ysidro ranch in Santa Barbara.

For the next year and a half they tried all the fertility tricks Lainie heard about from friends and salesgirls in the store; and of course Mitch's sisters threw their two
cents in. Lainie was doing all of it, drinking an herb tea from the health-food store called Female Blend, and standing on her head after they had sex to give the sperm an easier journey.

Most of her trips in the new BMW were to the doctor's office. She agreed to do everything he suggested, like having a test where he scraped the inside of her uterus to determine whether or not she'd been ovulating, and rushing to the doctor's office immediately post-intercourse so that he could check the motility of the sperm, while she felt gooey, uncomfortable, and embarrassed. The sperm were fine, the doctor reported.

She had five unsuccessful intrauterine inseminations, in case the vaginal mucus had been interfering with the chemical balance of the sperm. But no luck. She also tried everything she read about in various magazine articles, like having acupuncture on her lower abdomen to "open blocked chakras that might be preventing nature's positive flow."

One day at Panache Lainie was talking to one of the salesgirls from the shoe department, whose name was Karen, only she now spelled it Carin, since her astrologer told her that if she changed the spelling of her name it would change her life. Carin knew of a psychic who had helped two of her friends get pregnant. Lainie laughed.

"This I have to hear," she said. Lainie had listened to Carin's stories in the past about her various brushes with numerologists, tarot-card readers, channelers, and crystal healers. "Are we in Southern California or what?" she said laughing when Carin wrote the number of the psychic for her on the back of a Panache receipt.

The psychic's name was Katya, and she lived in a little white stucco house in the hills above the Sunset Strip. The tiny rooms that Lainie passed as she followed
the babushka'd Katya were all painted in dark colors and reeked of the incense burning in holders Lainie recognized as the kind they used to sell at Pier One in the sixties. This is a joke, she thought, following Katya in to the farthest room in the house, and I hate that I'm so desperate. But she sat on a sofa across from the one where Katya sat. The thick odor of the incense was beginning to nauseate her.

"You have cash?" Katya asked her.

"Yes."

"Put it before me."

"How much?" God, I hope I have enough, she thought. Mitch would laugh really hard when she told him this part and then ask her, "You mean she wouldn't take American Express?"

"Fifty dollars."

She opened her wallet, and as she leaned over to place it on the table Katya spoke.

"You cannot have a baby."

The sound of those words unsettled her. When she called to make the appointment she hadn't mentioned a word about why she was coming in. Carin. Carin must have told her friend about Lainie's problem, and the friend told Katya so she could look magical when Lainie got there.

"That's right," Lainie said.

"There are many children in your family, some sisters have children, but none for you yet."

Lainie nodded. Clearly Carin had passed everything on. This is dumb. I'm paying fifty dollars for her to tell me what one of my employee's friends told her.

Katya had her eyes closed now. "You were afraid for so long because of your disease; now it may be too late. But we can try."

Lainie was surprised. She had kept the subject of her
diabetes quiet at the store and didn't think any of the girls knew about it. But maybe Carin knew, and told her friend who told the psychic.

"How do you know about my disease?"

Katya opened her eyes now and looked long at Lainie. "I'm a psychic, dear girl," she told her. This was impossible. There was no such thing.

"Do as I tell you and you will be pregnant."

Lainie listened.

"Just before you and your husband are together again to procreate, put a Bible under your bed. Next to it, in a box, put a dead fish."

"A fish?" It didn't matter how this crazy person knew about her diabetes. This was so silly she couldn't keep a straight face anymore. "What kind of a fish?"

"Any kind."

"And then?"

"And then you will conceive."

Lainie laughed out loud, all the way to her gynecologist's office. There was one more test he wanted to perform before he put her on Clomid next month, a fertility drug he said was guaranteed to work, and maybe even bring the blessing of a multiple birth. She didn't mention the Bible and the fish to him.

After he examined her, he looked worried.

"Mrs. De Nardo," he said, "let's hold off on the Clomid. I may want to put you in the hospital for a few days to do some exploratory surgery. There's not a horrible rush. I mean, we can wait until next month after you ovulate and see if you conceive this time, but if we don't start seeing results soon, I'd like to get a closer look."

Lainie never told Mitch anything about that conversation. A week later, on the day she was supposed to be ovulating, she went to a Christian bookstore and bought a Bible. Then she went to Phil's Fish and Poultry and
bought a small salmon, which she brought home and put in the Stuart Weitzman box that had held her silver evening shoes, giggling to herself. "I can't believe I'm doing this."

That night when Mitch moved close to her, she said to herself, Somehow that woman knew about my diabetes, so maybe she knows about babies. Come on, fish! Do your stuff.

Even sex to make babies, which was supposed to be too calculated to be sexy, was steamy with Mitch. He spent hours nuzzling, nibbling, and licking at all the spots on her body he knew so well, and that night when they rose to fevered orgasm together, he said, "Come on, baby. Come on, my baby," before he collapsed in a final sigh on top of her and whispered, "You're my whole life, Laine," and fell into a deep sleep.

The next morning after Mitch left for work, Lainie, who would have forgotten if she hadn't dropped an earring that rolled to the floor and just under the bed, removed the Bible and put it in a drawer and took the fish out of the shoe box and put it down the garbage disposal.

She didn't have to be in the store until noon, so she ran a tub, and slid in. She always put the morning newspaper next to the tub on the floor, then leaned over the side to turn the pages. But now, before she started to read, she knew something was wrong. A searing cramp squeezed through her lower abdomen, and then another pain, and when she looked at the water it was bright red. She was hemorrhaging. All alone in the house, she was losing big gobs of blood. Slowly she lifted herself out of the tub, and as her own blood, diluted with bathwater, dripped down her legs, she managed to get herself into the bedroom to call Mitch. He was there in just the time it took for her to dry off, wrap herself in a robe, and prop up her feet.

"You're okay, baby, you're okay," he repeated to her over and over as he gently carried her to the car, then rushed her to the hospital.

Lainie's mother, Margaret Dunn, left work to come to the hospital to be near her daughter for the surgery. She was a bony, gray-haired woman who didn't talk much, and didn't expect anyone to do anything for her. Mitch included her in all the conversations with the doctors, took her to a silent lunch in the hospital cafeteria while they waited for Lainie to come out of surgery, and took turns with her tiptoeing into the recovery room to see if Lainie was awake yet. She had three ominous-looking intravenous tubes attached to her.

When she finally opened her eyes, it was Mitch's face she saw looking down at her, and she already knew by the expression he was wearing, the one that she teased him about by calling it "tough dago," what had happened.

"Mitchie," she asked, "I can't have a baby, can I?"

Mitch didn't speak, only shook his head sadly.

After they brought Lainie home, Margaret Dunn took two weeks from her job at the law office in Beverly Hills to sit by her daughter's bed every day. She walked Lainie to the bathroom, answered the telephone, straightened up the house, and served home-cooked meals on a tray. Friends from Panache came to visit with cards and gifts and cookies, and Sharon, a girl Lainie had befriended in an English class at Northridge, came with
Gift from the Sea
by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. All three sisters-in-law came at one time, filling the bedroom of Lainie and Mitch's condo with the overwhelming combination of their assorted perfumes, Joy, Tea Roses, and Opium.