What Was I Thinking? (30 page)

Chapter Fourteen

What Was I Thinking?

I was watching
Surf Cops,
all alone in my apartment living room, with an ice-cold
Diet Coke in my hand and a big bowl of microwaved popcorn with butter in my
lap. I had to be alone, because that was the only way I would be caught dead
watching that silly show, and I didn’t ever want anyone to know I added a
couple tablespoons of melted butter to my low-fat popcorn. Embarrassing!

And the soda! Shame on me, but I just loved the
bitter taste, the rasp of the bubbles in my throat, the jolt of caffeine, the
ice-cold…

Whap! Something banged behind me, and I snapped
upright. The Diet Coke disappeared, the sounds of explosion were gone, and I
was waking up on scratchy linen sheets. The smell of hot butter was all that
was left of my beautiful dream, and I was in an over-bright, hot bedroom, with
a disdainful housemaid plunking a tray of tea, buttered toast, boiled eggs, and
fruit down on the dresser and markedly
not
apologizing for slamming the door when she came in.

My One True Love was somewhere at the other end
of the big, hot house, and I was stranded with a resentful servant and no hope
of a Diet Coke—ever—let alone the fistful of Advil I’d sell my soul for. And if
I kept scrunching my eyes shut, trying to go back to sleep, the bright, morning
light streaming in the second-storey window was just going to make my headache
worse.

What was I thinking? As reality settled in, I
returned to the same question I now started every day with—
what
was I thinking when I agreed to follow Egbert Roland back to
1904 St. Louis?

Well, I was definitely thinking that Egbert was
my One True Love. No, that wasn’t right—I was thinking that
Bert
was my One True Love, which is a
lot more plausible. I didn’t know he was
EGGGbert
until it was too late.

And I was thinking true love was worth
anything. Sigh! I snapped out of
that
somewhere
between finding out that handsome, smart, lovable Bert was stuffy,
narrow-minded Egbert, and realizing that tampons wouldn’t be invented for
years.

But at least I needed one again, so I could
quit worrying about being pregnant. The three weeks since our one and only
night of sex had finally dragged to a close, and my period had turned up right
on schedule a few hours before. I felt like crap, but I felt like relieved
crap, and that was a start.

It was probably the touchiness that I always
had during the first day or two of the period that made me notice how cranky
Daisy was about bringing in my breakfast tray. My future mother-in-law had
arranged that my breakfast was to be brought to my room every morning and it
hadn’t occurred to me that the staff
who
did the
bringing might not be happy about accommodating my wish to sleep later than the
rest of the household.

I sighed, thanked Daisy for my breakfast, and
told her I didn’t need anything else. She left with another bang. Little by
little, I was learning to live here and I would just have to figure this out.
It was
exactly
like coping with
touchy secretaries in my own time. Not that all secretaries were touchy. Let’s
not go
there.
But, the point was,
Daisy here, and Lindsey in the office a hundred years hence, were both
theoretically below me in the pecking order, but they could make my life hell
if I didn’t get along with them. But, merely caving in to them wouldn’t appease
them nearly enough to be worth sacrificing my own preferences and position—such
as it was.

I knew Daisy had buttered my toast just to be
passive aggressive. She knew quite well that I preferred my toast dry. But
today, with the fat-cravings of period, day one, I was more than happy to have
butter, so I dismissed her motives from my mind.

Now then, on with life.
I was darned glad not to be
pregnant, I was feeling a little better from my month-old exercise regimen of
yoga and calisthenics every morning and a long walk every afternoon, and the cosmetics
business was showing promise. Augusta, Mrs. Horner, Sarah, and I tried out
recipes daily, and we had selected three with which to start our product line.

So, what could I fix next? I was still engaged
to Bert, which was
not
good, since we
were still barely speaking. I had no hope that we could still love each other,
or even recapture friendship. We were still having an engagement party, now
less than two weeks off. That was a horrible knot. A coil, as a romantic
heroine would say.

It made a knot in my stomach, which reminded me
of my monthly pain, the constipation that was the natural result of the
cuisine, and the fact that I had willingly abandoned the world of painkillers,
heating pads, air conditioning, and fresh, raw vegetables.

What was I
thinking
? What the
hell
was I
thinking? What was I
thinking?

I abandoned my breakfast to take a cold sponge
bath and freshen up as well as I could. When I was dressed, tightly laced into
my stays, and desperately missing my Levi’s, I went back to my mental list of
things to fix.

1.
                          
Find a way to call a truce with
the staff, especially Daisy, without letting go of anything that was really
important to me.

2.
                          
Change my diet enough to calm my
gastrointestinal system. Breakfast was a good start, but lunch and supper had to
be fixed, too.

3.
                          
Start making a living.

4.
                          
Figure out what to do about
Bert…

Oh, God! What could I do about Bert? We really
shouldn’t get married, but if not, what was I here for? And if not, where would
I live? It was bad enough imposing on my future mother-in-law as a long-term
guest, but if Bert and I officially broke it off, I couldn’t stay here—but a
single lady couldn’t live on her own in this godforsaken past.

And—what about disease?
I’d tried to put it out of my
mind over the past weeks, but the fear kept coming back to haunt me. We had had
unprotected sex, penicillin hadn’t been invented, and Bert had been with
prostitutes in his past.
Lovely.

Well, I would just tackle the problem straight
on. I would ask Bert if he were infected, and if he said not, I’d ask how one
knew for certain in these godforsaken times.

It was Saturday, so my betrothed would not have
left for his office yet. He usually worked in his third-floor study on a
Saturday morning, and only went downtown in the afternoon if his partners
needed him. I would find him and settle this.

I went upstairs and knocked on his door. He
opened it and the look on his face was all that I expected. Pity about how we
used to love one another.

“Addie, I’ve told you before that it’s
inappropriate for you to visit me here.”

“Yes, and I’ve told you before what you can do
with your ideas about what’s appropriate. We have some confidential issues to
discuss, and I thought you would prefer to do so privately. However, I can
certainly ask your mother if she would chaperone if that’s what you want.”

“What on earth could we possibly have to
discuss that could be called confidential?” he asked, without moving an inch.

“Well,” I said, not feeling at all friendly,
“there’s the small issue of the sexual intercourse we shared three weeks ago. I
thought we might discuss the results of that.”

He pinched his lips into a tight line. “That’s
what I suggested the following morning, but you refused.”

“No, you suggested being terribly ashamed and
rushing the wedding. Now, do you want to know whether you’re a father in the
privacy of your study, or shall we discuss it in the hall? I expect Daisy’s
stock would go up considerably if she had gossip that interesting to pass on at
the next market day.”

“Come in.” His lips were even thinner. I
wouldn’t have believed it possible.

“Sit down.”

I sat.

“I cannot imagine why you are here. We are
already betrothed and I have offered to hasten the wedding to diminish any
scandal. Simply tell Mother the date you wish the ceremony to be changed to,
and we will do it. At least you haven’t left it any later.”

Why had I ever thought I loved this jerk? I was
right in the first place, the day he showed me his basement lab. He was a
natural for World of Warcraft.

“Bert, I don’t want to get married. I’m not
pregnant. I thought you might be relieved to know that.”

“Relieved? Why? Obviously, we’ll start a family
right away, and as—”

“Bert, for the love of God, would you stop your
noise long enough to have a sensible conversation?” Oops. Tact was no longer an
option. All this time in the Etiquette World theme
park,
and I still wasn’t a natural.

He looked very offended, but at least he
stopped talking.

“Bert, I’m not going to marry you. I don’t love
you, you don’t love me, and this whole thing was a mistake from the start.” He
started to speak, but I glared, and he sat back.

“You can speak when I’ve finished, but I’m not
going to listen to you bossing me around before we’ve discussed what I came
for.”

“And just what is that?”
Pissy.
Great.

“I came to notify you that I am not expecting
your child, which is the sort of thing men from my world appreciate knowing
about. I also came to ask you about your disease status, since we had
unprotected sex.”

“My disease status?”

“Yes. As you so delicately pointed out when you
were calling me names on the morning after, a person can pick up diseases from
having sex with the wrong person. And since you
admit
to having been with prostitutes and other wild women—”

“Like you,” he interjected.

I refused to be distracted. I already knew he
had no sense of proportion about sex. Talk about a madonna/whore hang-up!
“Since you have acknowledged having intercourse with the sort of women who are
quite likely to be diseased, I am, naturally, concerned about my own risk of having
caught something from you. Would you please get down from your high horse long
enough to tell me whether you are aware of having, or having been exposed to,
any sexually transmitted diseases?”

Whew! I’d gotten it out. He sat looking at me
with dislike, not speaking.

“Well?” I said.

“Why is the onus on me? You’ve admitted you are
not pure—without any shame, I might add. Why should I not be concerned that I
caught something from you?”

I rolled my eyes at that “without any shame”
bit, but he had a point, or at least, he could legitimately think he had, since
he clearly had no understanding of normal sex.
“Fair enough.
I told you that I had had other sex partners—”

He snorted. I ignored him.

“—and you have a right to ask. However, the
night with you
was
the first and only time I had
unprotected sex. I have never been exposed to any STD, and therefore did not
communicate anything to you. What about you? I gather using condoms was not the
custom for you.”

He turned bright red. Oh, lord, if I survived
this conversation…

He sighed deeply, turned even redder, but
answered. “Using…those things is not the custom now, but as you pointed out, I
lived in your world for three years. I am ashamed to say that, while there, I
became enamored of a girl of easy virtue…”

Don’t laugh, don’t laugh, don’t laugh, I told
myself, biting my lip and avoiding his eye.

“And she insisted that I see a doctor to
confirm my ‘disease status’ as you put it. It was most disagreeable, and
involved
very
undignified procedures, but the doctor
did inform me that I was in perfect health, with no infections, however
transmitted. The, um, young
lady,
always insisted that
I use those condo-things, so I am confident that I caught nothing from her.” He
stared at me defiantly, daring me to be shocked.

“What about other partners?”

He looked at me.
“Other
partners?”

“Did you have other sexual partners after her,
either in my time or yours? Is there any possibility that you contracted a
disease after your modern medical examination?” I bit out the words very
carefully. Neither of us was having any fun, but I wanted to be absolutely
sure. No point in going through all of this to wind up with a misunderstanding
because I wasn’t specific enough.

“No.
No one between Tiffany
and you.
The night with you was my first time without a condo-thing
since 1901.”

Well then. “That’s good news. Thank you for
telling me. I realize this has been a difficult conversation for you, and I do
regret the necessity.” I stood to go.