“So you slept with him?” Rachel asked in a loud, strange voice. Her cheeks flushed pink—a sure sign that she was angry—but I plowed on, divulging full details, telling her how our affair had begun, how we tried to stop but couldn’t overcome the crazy pull toward each other. Then I took a deep breath and told her that I was pregnant with Marcus’s baby and that we planned on getting married. I braced myself for a few tears, but Rachel remained composed. She asked a few questions, which I answered honestly. Then I thanked her for not hating me, feeling incredibly relieved that despite the upheaval in my life, I still had my anchor, my best friend.
“Yeah… I don’t hate you,” Rachel said, sweeping a strand of hair behind her ear.
“I hope Dex takes it as well. At least as far as Marcus goes. He’s going to hate him for a while. But Dex is rational. Nobody did this on purpose to hurt him. It just happened.”
And then, just as I was about to ask her if she would still be my maid of honor when I married Marcus, my whole world collapsed around me. I knew that nothing would ever be the same again, nor had things ever been as I thought they were. That was the moment I saw Dexter’s watch on my best friend’s nightstand. An unmistakable vintage Rolex.
“Why is Dexter’s watch on your nightstand?” I asked, silently praying that she would offer a logical and benign explanation.
But instead, she shrugged and stammered that she didn’t know. Then she said that it was actually her watch, that she had one just like his. Which was not plausible because I had searched for months to find that watch and then bought a new crocodile band for it, making it a true original. Besides, even had it been a predictable, spanking-new Rolex Oyster Perpetual, her voice was shaking, her face even paler than usual. Rachel can do many things well, but lying isn’t one of them. So I knew. I knew that my best friend in the world had committed an unspeakable act of betrayal.
The rest unfolded in slow motion. I could practically hear the sound effects that accompanied The Bionic Woman, one of my favorite shows. One of our favorite shows—I had watched every episode with Rachel. I stood up, grabbed the watch from her nightstand, flipped it over, and read the inscription aloud. “All my love, Darcy.” My words felt thick and heavy in my throat as I remembered the day I had his watch engraved. I had called Rachel on my cell and asked her about the wording. “All my love” had been her suggestion.
I stared at her, waiting, but she still said nothing. Just stared at me with those big, brown eyes, her always ungroomed brows furrowed above them.
“What the fuck?” I said evenly. Then I screamed the question again as I realized that Dex was likely lurking in the apartment, hiding somewhere. I shoved past her into the bathroom, whipping open the shower curtain. Nothing. I darted forward to check the closet.
“Darcy, don’t,” she said, blocking the door with her back.
“Move!” I screamed. “I know he’s in there!”
So she moved and I opened the door. And sure enough, there he was, crouched in the corner in his striped navy boxers. Another gift from me.
“You liar!” I shouted at him, feeling myself begin to hyperventilate. I was accustomed to drama. I thrived on drama. But not this kind. Not the kind of drama that I didn’t control from the outset.
Dex stood and dressed calmly, putting one foot and then the other into his jeans, zipping defiantly. There wasn’t a trace of guilt on his face. It was as if I had only accused him of stealing the covers or eating my Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream.
“You lied to me!” I shouted again, louder this time.
“You have got to be kidding me,” he said, his voice low. “Fuck you, Darcy.”
In all my years with Dex, he had never said this to me. Those were my words of last resort. Not his.
I tried again. “You said there was nobody else in the picture! And you’re fucking my best friend!” I shouted, unsure of whom to confront first. Overwhelmed by the double betrayal.
I wanted him to say, yes, this looks bad, but there had been no fornicating. Yet no denial came my way. Instead he said, “Isn’t that a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, Darce? You and Marcus, huh? Having a baby? I guess congratulations are in order.”
I had nothing to say to that, so I just turned the tables right back on him and said, “I knew it all along.”
This was a total lie. I never in a million years could have foreseen this moment. The shock was too much to bear. But that’s the thing about the sucker punch; the sucker element hurts worse than the punch. They had socked it to me, but I wasn’t going to be their fool too.
“I hate you both. I always will,” I said, realizing that my words sounded weak and juvenile, like the time when I was five years old and told my father that I loved the devil more than I loved him. I wanted to shock and horrify, but he had only chuckled at my creative put-down. Dex, too, seemed merely amused by my proclamation, which enraged me to the brink of tears. I told myself that I had to escape Rachel’s apartment before I started bawling. On my way to the door, I heard Dex say, “Oh, Darcy?”
I turned to face him again. “What?” I spat out, praying that he was going to say it was all a joke, a big mix-up. Maybe they were going to laugh and ask how I could think such a thing. Maybe we’d even share a group hug.
But all he said was, “May I have my watch back, please?”
I swallowed hard and then hurled the watch at him, aiming for his face. Instead it hit a wall, skittered across her hardwood floor, and stopped just short of Dexter’s bare feet. My eyes lifted from the watch to Rachel’s face. “And you,” I said to her. “I never want to see you again. You are dead to me.”
Copyright © 2006 by Emily Giffin
Baby Proof
It was subtle at first, as changes in relationships typically are, so it is hard to pinpoint the genesis. But, looking back, I think it all began when Ben and I went on a ski trip with Annie and Ray, the couple who had set us up on our first date. I had known Annie since our bingeing college days, so I noticed right away that she was sticking with Perrier. At first she claimed to be on antibiotics for a sinus infection, but the whole antibiotic excuse had never slowed her in the past so I dragged the truth out of her. She was eight weeks pregnant.
“Was it planned?” I blurted out, thinking surely it had been an accident. Annie adored her career as a documentary filmmaker and had a million different causes on the side. She had never expressed an interest in having children, and I couldn’t fathom her making time for motherhood.
Annie and Ray clasped hands and nodded in unison.
“But I thought you didn’t want kids,” I said.
“We didn’t want kids right away,” Annie said. “But we feel ready now. Although I guess you're never completely ready!” She laughed in a highpitched, schoolgirlish way, her cheeks flushing pink.
“Hmm,” I said.
Ben kicked me under the table and said, “Well, congratulations, guys! This is awesome news.” Then he shot me a stern look and said, “Isn’t that wonderful news, Claudia?”
“Yes. Wonderful,” I said, but I couldn’t help feeling betrayed. Ben and I were going to lose our favorite traveling companions, our only close friends who were as unfettered as we were by babies and all their endless accoutrements.
We finished dinner, our conversation dominated by talk of children and Westchester real estate.
Later, when Ben and I were alone in our room, he chastised me for being so transparently unsupportive. “You could have at least pretended to be happy for them,” he said. “Instead of grilling them about birth control.”
“I was just so shocked,” I said. “Did you have any idea?”
Ben shook his head and with a fleeting expression of envy said, “No. But I think it’s great.”
“Don’t tell me you want them now, too?” I asked him, mostly joking.
Ben answered quickly, but his words registered flat and false. “Of course not,” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Over the next few m
onths, things only got more troubling. Ben became all too interested in the progress of Annie’s pregnancy. He admired the ultrasound photos, even taping one to our refrigerator. I told him that we were not a “tape things to the refrigerator” kind of family.
“Jeez, Claudia. Lighten up,” Ben said, appearing agitated as he pulled down the murky black-and-white image and slapped it into a drawer. “You really should be happier for them. They’re our best friends, for chrissake.”
A short time after that, right before Annie and Ray had their baby, Ben and I planned a last-minute weekend getaway to the resort where we had been married. It was early January when the abrupt disappearance of Christmas decorations and tourists always makes Manhattan seem so naked and bleak, and Ben said he couldn’t wait until early March for our tentatively planned trip to Belize. I remember tossing some shorts and a new red bikini into my leather duffel and remarking how nice it was to have spontaneity in our relationship, the freedom to fly off at a moment’s notice.
Ben said, “Yes. There are some wonderful things about our life together.”
This sentence struck me as melancholy—even ominous—but I didn’t press him on it. I didn’t even pressure him to talk when he was uncharacteristically taciturn on our flight down to the Caribbean.
I didn’t really worry until later that night when we were settling into our room, unpacking our clothes and toiletries. I momentarily stopped to inspect the view of the sea outside our room, and as I turned back toward my suitcase, I caught a glimpse of Ben in the mirror. His mouth was curled into a remorseful frown. I panicked, remembering what my sister, Maura, once said about men who cheat. She is an expert on the topic as her husband, Scott, had been unfaithful with at least two women she knew of. “Look out if they’re really mean or really nice. Like if they start giving you flowers and jewelry for no reason,” she had said. “Or taking you away on a romantic getaway. It’s the guilt. They’re trying to make up for something.” I tried to calm down, telling myself that I was being paranoid. Ben and I always took spontaneous trips together;
We never needed a reason.
Still, I wanted to dispel the lingering images of Ben pressed against a sweaty bohemian lover, so I sat on the bed, kicked off my flip-flops, and said, “Ben. Talk to me. What’s on your mind?” He swallowed hard and sat next to me. The bed bounced slightly under his weight and the motion made me feel even more nervous. “I don’t know how to say this,” Ben said, his voice cracking. “So I’ll just come out with it.”
I nodded, feeling queasy. “Go ahead.”
“I think I might want kids after all.”
I felt a rush of relief and even laughed out loud. “You scared me.” I laughed again, louder, and then opened a Red Stripe from the minibar.
“I’m serious, Claudia.”
“Where is all of this coming from? Annie and Ray?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. It’s just…it’s just this feeling I have,” Ben said, making a fist over his heart.
At least he hasn’t cheated on me, I thought. A betrayal of that magnitude could never be erased or forgotten. His fleeting wish for a child would surely go away. But as Ben continued to spout off his list of reasons why a baby might be a good thing—stuff about showing children the world, doing things better than our parents had done—my relief gave way to something else. It was a sense of losing control. A sense that something was slipping away.
I tried to stay calm as I delivered a rather eloquent speech. I told him that all of that parenthood stuff wasn’t who we were. I said that our relationship was built upon our unique twoness, the concept that three or more is a crowd. I pointed out that we couldn’t have taken this last-minute trip. We’d be anchored to home all the time.
“But we’d have other things,” Ben said. “And what if we really are missing out on something great? I’ve never heard a single person say they regret having a child.”
“Would they admit it if they did?” I said.
“Maybe not,” Ben said. “But the point is, I don’t think they ever would.”
“I totally disagree…I mean, why are there boarding schools? The mere existence of boarding schools proves something, right?” I asked. I was partly kidding about the boarding schools, but Ben didn’t laugh.
I sighed and then decided to change the subject altogether, focus on having fun. Show Ben what we’d be missing with children.
“Let’s get changed and go to dinner,” I said, turning up “One Love” on our portable CD player and thinking that there’s nothing like a little Bob Marley to put you in a childfree, unencumbered state of mind.
But despite my best efforts to have a good time, the rest of our weekend passed with an increasing tension. Things felt forced between us, and Ben’s mood went from quiet to lugubrious. On our third and final night on the island, we took a cab to Asolare, a restaurant with incredible views of Cruz Bay. We ate in virtual silence, commenting only on the sunset and our perfectly prepared lobster tail. Just as our waitress brought us our coffee and sorbet, I looked at Ben and said, “You know what? We had a deal.”
As soon as the words came out, I knew how utterly ridiculous I sounded. Marriage is never a done deal. Not even when you have children together, although that certainly helps your case. And the irony of that seemed overwhelmingly sad.
Ben tugged on his earlobe and said, “I want to be a father.”
“Fine. Fine,” I said. “But do you want a baby more than you want to be my husband?”
He reached out and put one hand over mine. “I want both,” he said as he squeezed my fingers.
“Well. You can’t have both,” I said, trying to keep the angry edge out of my voice.
I waited for him to say that of course he’d always pick me. That it was the only thing in the world he was really sure of. “So? Which is it?” I said.
It wasn’t supposed to be a test, but it suddenly felt like one. Ben stared down at his cappuccino for a long time. Then he moved his hand from mine and slowly stirred three cubes of sugar into his mug.
When he finally looked up at me, there was guilt and grief in his gray-green eyes, and I knew I had my answer.
Copyright © 2006 by Emily Giffin. All rights reserved.
Love the One You’re With
It happened exactly one hundred days after I married Andy, almost to the minute of our half-past-three-o’clock ceremony. I know this fact not so much because I was an overeager newlywed keen on observing trivial relationship landmarks, but because I have a mild case of OCD that compels me to keep track of things. Typically, I count insignificant things, like the steps from my apartment to the nearest subway (341 in comfortable shoes, a dozen more in heels); the comically high occurrence of the phrase “amazing connection” in any given episode of The Bachelor (always in the double digits); the guys I’ve kissed in my thirty-three years (nine). Or, as it was on that rainy, cold afternoon in January, the number of days I had been married before I saw him smack-dab in the middle of the crosswalk of Eleventh and Broadway.
From the outside, say if you were a cabdriver watching frantic jaywalkers scramble to cross the street in the final seconds before the light changed, it was only a mundane, urban snapshot: two seeming strangers, with little in common but their flimsy black umbrellas, passing in an intersection, making fleeting eye contact, and exchanging stiff but not unfriendly hellos before moving on their way.
But inside was a very different story. Inside, I was reeling, churning, breathless as I made it onto the safety of the curb and into a virtually empty diner near Union Square. Like seeing a ghost, I thought, one of those expressions I’ve heard a thousand times but never fully registered until that moment. I closed my umbrella and unzipped my coat, my heart still pounding. As I watched a waitress wipe down a table with hard, expert strokes, I wondered why I was so startled by the encounter when there was something that seemed utterly inevitable about the moment. Not in any grand, destined sense; just in the quiet, stubborn way that unfinished business has of
imposing its will on the unwilling.
After what seemed like a long time, the waitress noticed me standing behind the Please Wait to Be Seated sign and said, “Oh. I didn’t see you there. Should’ve taken that sign down after the lunch crowd. Go ahead and sit anywhere.”
Her expression struck me as so oddly empathetic that I wondered if she were a moonlighting clairvoyant, and actually considered confiding in her. Instead, I slid into a red vinyl booth in the back corner of the restaurant and vowed never to speak of it. To share my feelings with a friend would constitute an act of disloyalty to my husband. To tell my older and very cynical sister, Suzanne, might unleash a storm of caustic remarks about marriage and monogamy. To write of it in my journal would elevate its importance, something I was determined not to do. And to tell Andy would be some combination of stupid, self-destructive, and hurtful. I was bothered by the lie of omission, a black mark on our fledgling marriage, but decided it was for the best.
“What can I get you?” the waitress, whose name tag read Annie, asked me. She had curly red hair and a smattering of freckles, and I thought, The sun will come out tomorrow.
I only wanted a coffee, but as a former waitress, remembered how deflating it was when people only ordered a beverage, even in a lull between meals, so I asked for a coffee and a poppy seed bagel with cream cheese.
“Sure thing,” she said, giving me a pleasant nod.
I smiled and thanked her. Then, as she turned toward the kitchen, I exhaled and closed my eyes, focusing on one thing: how much I loved Andy. I loved everything about him, including the things that would have exasperated most girls. I found it endearing the way he had trouble remembering people’s names (he routinely called my former boss Fred, instead of Frank) or the lyrics to even the most iconic songs (“Billie Jean is not my mother”). And I only shook my head and smiled when he gave the same bum in Bryant Park a dollar a day for nearly a year—a bum who was likely a Range Rover–driving con artist. I loved Andy’s confidence and compassion. I loved his sunny personality that matched his boy-next-door, blond, blue-eyed good looks. I felt lucky to be with a man who, after six long years with me, still did the half-stand upon my return from the ladies’ room and drew sloppy, asymmetrical hearts in the condensation of our bathroom mirror. Andy loved me, and I’m not ashamed to say that this topped my reasons of why we were together, of why I loved him back.