I put my face in my hands and sobbed harder. Then, suddenly, I had an idea. It was an awful, low thing to do, but I decided that I had no choice. I stopped crying, cast him a sideways glance, and said, “The baby is yours.”
Dex was unfazed. “Darcy. Don’t even start with that Montel Williams DNA-testing crap. That baby is not mine, and we both know it. I heard what you told Rachel. I know when we last had sex.”
“The pregnancy is further along than I thought. It’s yours. Why do you think Marcus and I broke up?”
“Darcy,” Dex said, raising his voice. “Do not do this.”
“Dex. The baby is yours. My doctor did an ultrasound to confirm the fetus’s age. It happened earlier than I thought. It’s yours,” I said, shocking even myself with the disgraceful tactic. I told myself that I would come clean later. I just needed to buy some time with Dex. I could get him back if I just had time to work my magic. He wouldn’t be able to resist me as Marcus had. After all, Marcus was impossible, weird about commitment. But Dex had been mine forever. There had to be some lingering feelings.
“If you’re lying about this, it is unforgivable.” His voice was almost shaking, and his eyes were wide. “I want the truth. Now.”
I sucked in my breath, exhaled slowly, and maintained eye contact while I lied again. “It’s yours,” I said, feeling ashamed.
“You know I’m going to want proof.”
I licked my lips, stayed calm. “Yes. Absolutely. I want you to take a blood test. You’ll see that it’s yours.”
“Darcy.”
“What?”
Dex put his head in his hands and then ran them through his thick, dark hair. “Darcy…Even if it is mine, I want you to understand that this baby won’t change a thing between us. Not a thing. You got that?”
“What does that mean exactly?” I asked, even though it was pretty clear what he was driving at. After all, Marcus had just made the same point to me the night before. I had the concept down.
“We’re over. Finished. It’s never going to happen again with you and me. Baby or no baby. I’m with Rachel now.”
I stared at him, feeling outrage well up inside of me. It was all so unbelievable! So utterly inconceivable! How could he be with Rachel? I stood and paced over to the window, trying to catch my breath.
“So tell me the truth right now. Is it mine?” he asked.
I turned and looked at him. He wasn’t going to fold. You come to know a person well in seven years—and I knew that once Dex made up his mind, there was absolutely nothing that I could say to change it. His jaw was clenched. There was no opening for me. Besides, as brazen as I could be, I knew I could never actually go through with a ploy like this one, even as a temporary measure. It was just too awful, and I only felt worse for having tried it.
“Fine,” I said, throwing up my hands. “It’s Marcus’s baby. Are you happy?”
“Actually yes, Darcy. I am happy. No, ecstatic is more the word.” He stood and pointed angrily at me. “And the fact that you could lie about such a thing confirms to me—”
“I’m sorry,” I said before he could finish his sentence. I was crying again. “I know it was really low…I just don’t know what to do. Everything is falling apart for me. And—and—you’re with Rachel. You took her on our honeymoon! How could you take her on our honeymoon? How could you do that?”
Dex said nothing.
“You did, didn’t you? You went to Hawaii with her?”
“The tickets were nonrefundable, Darcy. Even the hotel was already paid for,” he said, looking guilty.
“How could you do that? How? And then I see you two in Crate and Barrel, shopping for couches. That’s how I knew about Hawaii. You were all tan. Shopping for couches…All tan and happy and buying couches.” I was babbling now, a total mess. “Are you moving in together?”
“Not yet…”
“Not yet?” I said. “So you are eventually? Are you serious?”
“Darcy, please. Stop this. Rachel and I didn’t do this to hurt you. Just like you didn’t get pregnant to hurt me. Right?” he asked in his “please be reasonable” tone.
I looked out the window again at a pile of trash on the curb. Then I returned my gaze to Dex. “Please be with me again,” I said softly. “Please. Give me another chance. We had seven good years together. Things were good. We’ll forgive each other and move on.” I walked back over to him and tried to hug him. He stiffened and recoiled like a puppy resisting the grasp of an overzealous child.
“Dex? Please?”
“No, Darcy. We don’t belong together. We aren’t right for each other.”
“Do you love her?” I asked under my breath, truly expecting him to say no or that he didn’t know or that he wouldn’t answer the question.
But instead he said, “Yes. I love her.” I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t saying it to be mean; he was saying it out of a sense of loyalty to her. It was that committed, resolute look of his. It was Dex being a good person, being true to his new girlfriend. I marveled at how fast old loyalties, ones that took years to build, could be ripped apart and replaced. I knew I had lost him, but I felt desperate to recruit a small piece of his heart back to me. Make him feel even a sliver of what he used to feel for me. “More than you ever loved me?” I asked, looking for one small scrap.
“Don’t do this, Darcy.”
“I need to know, Dex. I really need to know the answer to that,” I said, thinking that he couldn’t possibly love her more in a few weeks than he had loved me when he had proposed after years together. It just wasn’t possible.
“Why do you need to know, Darce?”
“I just do. Tell me.”
He stared down at the coffee table for a long minute in that dazed way of his where he doesn’t blink. Then he looked around the apartment, his eyes resting on an oil painting of a dilapidated, pillared house surrounded by terraced fields and a solitary oak. We had purchased the painting together in New Orleans right at the beginning of our relationship. We had spent nearly eight hundred dollars on it, which seemed like a huge sum of money at the time, as Dex was in law school and I had just begun to work. It was our first big purchase as a couple—an implicit acknowledgment of our commitment to each other. Sort of like buying a dog together. I remember standing in that gallery, admiring our painting, as Dex told me that he loved the way the early evening shadows fell across the front porch. I remember him saying that dusk was his favorite time of day. I remember we grinned at each other as the clerk bubble-wrapped our painting. Then we returned to the hotel, where we made love and ordered a banana split from the room service menu. Had he forgotten all of that?
I guess I had forgotten such moments when my affair began with Marcus. But I remembered every such occasion now. Regret surged through me. What I would have given to have a big ol’ redo, take back everything with Marcus. I looked at Dex and asked the question again. “Do you love her more than you ever loved me?”
I waited.
Then he nodded and said so softly that it was nearly a whisper, “Yes. I do. I’m really sorry, Darcy.”
I stared at him incredulously, trying to process what he was saying, how it could be possible that he could love Rachel so much. She wasn’t that pretty. She wasn’t that fun. What did she have that I didn’t have besides a few measly IQ points?
Dex spoke again. “I can tell you’re in a bad place right now, Darcy. Part of me would like to help you, but it just won’t work. I can’t be that person for you. You have friends and family you need to turn to…. I really have to go now.” His voice was distant, his gaze detached. In a few seconds, he would walk out, hail a cab, and cross the park to see Rachel. She would greet him at her door, her brown eyes sympathetic, probing for details about our meeting. I could hear her asking, “How did it go?” and stroking Dexter’s hair as he told her everything. How I had lied about the baby, then begged, then cried. She would feel both pity and disdain for me.
“Fine. Get out. I don’t want to
talk to you or her ever again,” I said, realizing that I had said pretty much the same thing in Rachel’s apartment. This time, my words had a watered-down, weak effect.
Dex bit his lower lip. “Please be well,” he said, gathering up his briefcase and the shoebox of junk he didn’t want any more than he wanted me. Then he stood and walked out of his old apartment, leaving me for good.
Sixteen
It was incomprehensible. In my entire lifetime—throughout high school, college, and my twenties—I had never been dissed by a guy. Not dumped. Not stood up. Not even slighted. And there I was—a two-time loser all in a week’s time. I was completely alone, didn’t even have a prospect in sight.
I also didn’t have Rachel, my steadfast source of comfort when other things, unrelated to romance, had unraveled in my life. Nor did I have my own mother—whom I refused to call back and hear some variation of “I told you so.” That left Claire, who came to my apartment after I had called in sick to work for three straight days. I was surprised that it took her so long to rush to my aid, but I guess she had no way of suspecting my depth of despair. Up to that point in my life, my definition of down-and-out was a bad case of PMS.
“What has gotten into you?” Claire asked, glancing around my messier-than-usual apartment. “I’ve been so worried about you. Why haven’t you returned any of my calls?”
“Marcus dumped me,” I said mournfully. I had sunk too low to try to put a triumphant spin on the facts.
She raised the blinds in my living room. “Marcus broke up with you?” she asked, appropriately shocked.
I sniffed and nodded.
“That’s ridiculous! Has he taken a look in the mirror? What was he thinking?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He just doesn’t want to be with me.”
“Well, the whole world’s gone mad. First Dex and Rachel and now this! I mean—come on! This is nuts. I just don’t get it. It’s like an episode of The Twilight Zone.”
I felt a tear roll down my cheek.
Claire rushed over to give me a hug and a “buck up, little camper” smile. Then she said briskly, “Well, it’s a blessing in disguise. Marcus was so bush league. You’re better off without him. And Rachel and Dex are dullsville.” She headed for my kitchen, holding up a plastic bag filled with all the fixings for margaritas. “And believe me, this whole situation is nothing that a few drinks won’t cure…Besides, I have a much finer man all cued up for you.”
I blew my nose and looked at her hopefully. “Who?”
“You remember Josh Levine?”
I shook my head.
“Well, I have two words for you. Hot and loaded,” she said, rubbing her thumb against her fingers. “His nose is rather large, but not offensively so. Your daughter might need a minor nose job, but that’s the only issue,” she said brightly. She rolled up her sleeves and set about rinsing my dishes covered with day-old Kraft macaroni and cheese residue. “You briefly met him at that house in the Hamptons with the eighteen-person hot tub? Remember? He’s friends with Eric Kiefer and that whole crowd?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, conjuring a well-dressed, thirty-something banker with wavy brown hair and big, square teeth. “Doesn’t he have a girlfriend who is a model or actress or something?”
“He did have a girlfriend. Amanda something or other. And yes, she’s a model…but the low-rent catalog kind. I think she wore some pleated cords in Chadwick’s of Boston or something. But Josh dumped her two days ago.” Claire looked up smugly. “How’s that for hot off the presses?”
Claire loved being the first to get a scoop.
“Why’d they break up?” I asked. “Did Josh catch his best friend hiding in Amanda’s closet?”
Claire chuckled. “No. Word is she was just too dumb for him. She is as vapid as they come. Get a load of this one…I heard that she actually thought paparazzi was the last name of one particular Italian photographer. Apparently she said something like, ‘Who is this Paparazzi guy and why didn’t they arrest him years ago after he killed Princess Diana?’”
I laughed for the first time in weeks.
“So anyway, Josh is a-vail-a-ble,” Claire sang and spun around ballerina-style.
I became momentarily suspicious. “Why don’t you want him?”
“You know my uptight Episcopalian parents would never let me go down the Jewish-guy road or I would have claimed him for myself…. But you better act fast because the girls in this city are ready to pounce.”
“Yeah. Don’t let Jocelyn catch wind of this,” I said.
Jocelyn Silver worked with Claire and me, and although I liked her in small doses, she was a total alpha female, way too competitive for me ever to trust. She also bore a strong resemblance to Uma Thurman, and if I had to watch her pretend to be annoyed when one more stranger approached her to ask if she was Uma, I was going to puke. Which, incidentally, was what Jocelyn did after every meal.
“No kidding…I haven’t mentioned anything about the breakup to her. Even if I did, Josh would totally go for you over her.”
I smiled with false modesty.
She continued, “So how about this? I’ll make sure Josh comes to our club opening next week—the one Jocelyn’s going to miss for her cousin’s wedding…” She winked at me. “So stop this sniveling over Marcus. I mean, Christ, what was the deal there anyway? He could be fun, but he’s certainly not worthy of macaroni-and-cheese-level grief.”
“You’re right,” I said. I could feel myself cheering up as I thought of how Jewish men were supposed make great husbands. “Josh sounds divine. I’m sure I could convince him to have a Christmas tree, don’t you think?”
“You can convince anyone to do anything,” Claire said.
I beamed. That theory had been proven wrong a few times in recent days, but surely I was going to get back on track with my charmed life.
“And I had another thought on my way over…” Claire smiled mysteriously, poised to reveal another terrific surprise.
“What’s that?”
“Well,” she said as she uncorked the bottle of Patrón, our favorite brand of tequila. “What do you say we move in together again? My lease is up, and you have a spare bedroom. We could save a ton on rent and have a blast together. What do you say?”
“That’s a fantastic idea,” I said, remembering fondly our roomie days before I had moved in with Dex. Claire and I had shared the same shoe size, the same taste in music, and the same love of fruity mixed drinks that we consumed in quantity as we primped for our big nights out. Besides, it would be great to have her around when the baby arrived. I was sure she wouldn’t mind getting up occasionally for nighttime feedings. I watched as she sliced a lime and hung perfect twists on our glasses. She had a nice touch when it came to entertaining, another perk of living with her. “Let’s do it!”
“Excellent!” she squealed. “My lease expires next month.”
“There’s just one thing I should tell you,” I said as she crossed the living room over to my couch, drinks in hand.
“What’s that?”
I swallowed, reassuring myself that although Claire could be snobbish and judgmental, she had only demonstrated a sense of absolute loyalty to me over the years. I had to believe that she would be there for me in my hour of need. So as she handed me a temptingly perfect margarita on the rocks, salt lined evenly along the rim of the glass (an engagement present from Dexter’s Aunt Suzy), I blurted out my big secret. “I’m pregnant with Marcus’s baby.” Then I took one tiny sip of my drink, inhaling the sweet smell of tequila, licking the salt from my lips.
“Get outta here,” she said, her crystal drop earrings swinging as she plopped down next to me and curled her legs up under her ample bottom. “Oh—we didn’t do a toast. Here’s to being roomies again!”
She clearly thought I was joking. I clinked my glass against hers, took another tiny sip, and said, “No. It’s true. I am pregnant. So I probably shouldn’t drink this. Although a few more sips couldn’t hurt. It’s not
that strong, is it?”
She looked at me sideways and said, “You’re kidding, right?”
I shook my head.
“Darcy!” She froze, a fearful smile plastered on her face.
“I’m not joking.”
“Swear.”
“I swear.”
It went on like that for some time before I could convince her that I wasn’t putting her on, that I was, indeed, pregnant with the child of a man whom she had deemed woefully inadequate. As she listened to me ramble about my morning sickness, my due date, the problems with my mother, she gulped her margarita—which was highly unusual for Claire. She had finishing-school manners even when wasted. She never forgot to cross her legs on a bar stool or keep her elbows off a table, and she never gulped. But at that moment, she was rattled.
“So what do you think?” I asked her.
She took another swallow, then coughed and sputtered, “Whoa! Excuse me! I think it went down the wrong pipe.”
I waited for her to say something more, but she only stared back at me with a plastered smile, as if she were no longer quite sure who it was she was having a drink with. I guess I expected her to be surprised, but I wanted the giddy brand of surprised, not the freaked-out version. I reassured myself that I had just caught her off guard. She needed a minute to digest the news. In the meantime, I gave a short, noble speech about how I never once considered having an abortion or giving the baby up for adoption. In truth, I had given some consideration to both options in the past forty-eight hours, but something made me stay on track. I’d like to say it was strength of character and good morals, but it also had a lot to do with stubborn pride.
“Congratulations. That’s fantastic news,” Claire finally said, in the tinny, insincere voice of a game show host informing the losing contestant that they weren’t going to walk away completely empty-handed, but rather with a gift certificate for Omaha Steaks. “I know you’ll do a great job with this…And I will be here for you to help in any way I can.”
I could tell she added the last sentence as an afterthought, its generality smacking of obligation rather than any earnest desire to be involved in my baby’s life. Or even mine, for that matter.