Yet by the time Annie brought my bagel, I was back in that intersection, my heart thudding again. I suddenly knew that in spite of how happy I was to be spending my life with Andy, I wouldn’t soon forget that moment, that tightness in my throat as I saw his face again. Even though I desperately wanted to forget it. Especially because I wanted to.
I sheepishly glanced at my reflection in the mirrored wall beside my booth. I had no business worrying about my appearance, and even less business feeling triumphant upon the discovery that I was, against all odds on an afternoon of running errands in the rain, having an extraordinarily good hair day. I also had a rosy glow, but I told myself that it was only the cold that had flushed my cheeks. Nothing else.
And that’s when my cell phone rang and I heard his voice. A voice I hadn’t heard in eight years and sixteen days.
“Was that really you?” he asked me. His voice was even deeper than I remembered, but otherwise it was like stepping back in time. Like finishing a conversation only hours old.
“Yes,” I said.
“So,” he said. “You still have the same cell number.”
Then, after a considerable silence, one I stubbornly refused to fill, he added, “I guess some things don’t change.”
“Yes,” I said again.
Because as much as I didn’t want to admit it, he was sure right about that.
Copyright © 2008 by Emily Giffin. All rights reserved.
Something Blue
I was born beautiful. A C-section baby, I started life out right by avoiding the misshapen head and battle scars that come with being forced through a birth canal. Instead I emerged with a dainty nose, bow-shaped lips and distinctive eyebrows. I had just the right amount of fuzz covering my crown in exactly the right places, promising a fine crop of hair and an exceptional hairline.
Sure enough, my hair grew in thick and silky, the color of coffee beans. Every morning I would sit cooperatively while my mother wrapped my hair around fat, hot rollers or twisted it into intricate braids. When I went to nursery school, the other little girls—many with unsightly bowl cuts—clamored to put their mat near mine during naptime, their fingers darting over to touch my ponytail. They happily shared their Play-Doh or surrendered their turn on the slide. Anything to be my friend. It was then that I discovered there is a pecking order in life, and appearances play a role in that hierarchy. In other words, I understood at the tender age of three that with beauty come perks and power.
This lesson was only reinforced as I grew older and continued my reign as the prettiest girl in increasingly larger pools of competition. The cream of the crop in junior high and then high school. But unlike the characters in my favorite John Hughes films, my popularity and beauty never made me mean. I ruled as a benevolent dictator, playing watchdog over other popular girls who tried to abuse their power. I defied cliques, remaining true to my brainy best friend, Rachel. I was popular enough to make my own rules.
Of course, I had my moments of uncertainty. I remember one such occasion in the sixth grade when Rachel and I were playing “psychiatrist,” one of our favorite games. I’d usually play the role of patient, saying things like, “I am so scared of spiders, Doctor, that I can’t leave my house all summer long.”
“Well,” Rachel would respond, pushing her glasses up on the bridge of her nose and scribbling notes on a tablet, “I recommend that you watch Charlotte’s Web…. Or move to Siberia, where there are no spiders. And take these.” She’d hand me two Flintstones vitamins and nod encouragingly.
That was the way it usually went. But on this particular afternoon, Rachel suggested that instead of being a pretend patient, I should be myself, come up with a problem of my own. So I thought of how my little brother, Jeremy, hogged the dinner conversation every night, spouting off original knock-knock jokes and obscure animal kingdom facts. I confided that my parents seemed to favor Jeremy—or at least they listened to him more than they listened to me.
Rachel cleared her throat, thought for a second, and then shared some theory about how little boys are encouraged to be smart and funny while little girls are praised for being cute. She called this a “dangerous trap” for girls and said it can lead to “empty women.”
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked her, wondering exactly what she meant by “empty.”
“Nowhere. It’s just what I think,” Rachel said, proving that she was in no danger of falling into the pretty-little-girl trap. In fact, her theory applied perfectly to us. I was the beautiful one with average grades, Rachel was the smart one with average looks. I suddenly felt a surge of envy, wishing that I, too, were full of big ideas and important words.
But I quickly assessed the haphazard wave in Rachel’s mousy brown hair and reassured myself that I had been dealt a good hand. I couldn’t find countries like Pakistan or Peru on a map or convert fractions into percentages, but my beauty was going to catapult me into a world of Jaguars and big houses and dinners with three forks to the left of my bone-china plate. All I had to do was marry well, as my mother had. She was no genius and hadn’t finished more than three semesters at a community college, but her pretty face, petite frame, and impeccable taste had won over my smart father, a dentist, and now she had the good life. I thought her life was an excellent blueprint for my own.
So I cruised through my teenage years and entered Indiana University with a “just get by” mentality. I pledged the best sorority, dated the hottest guys, and was featured in the Hoosier Dream Girls calendar four years straight. After graduating with a 2.9, I followed Rachel, who was still my best friend, to New York City, where she was attending law school. While she slogged it out in the library and then went to work for a big firm, I continued my pursuit of glamour and good times, quickly learning that the finer things were even finer in Manhattan. I discovered the city’s hippest clubs, best restaurants, and most eligible men. And I still had the best hair in town.
Throughout our twenties, as Rachel and I continued along our different paths, she would often pose the judgmental question, “Aren’t you worried about karma?” (Incidentally, she first mentioned karma in junior high after I had cheated on a math test. I remember trying to decipher the word’s meaning using the song “Karma Chameleon,” which, of course, didn’t work). Later, I understood her point—that hard work, honesty, and integrity always paid off in the end—while skating by on your looks was somehow an offense. And like that day playing psychiatrist, I occasionally worried that she was right.
But I told myself that I didn’t have to be a nose-to-the-grindstone, soup-kitchen volunteer to have good karma. I might not have followed a traditional route to success, but I had earned my glamorous PR job, my fabulous crowd of friends, and my amazing fiancé, Dex Thaler. I deserved my apartment with a terrace on Central Park West and the substantial, colorless diamond on my left hand.
That was back in the days when I thought I had it all figured out. I just didn’t understand why people, particularly Rachel, insisted on making things so much more difficult than they had to be. She may have followed all the rules, but there she was, single and thirty, pulling all-nighters at a law firm she despised. Meanwhile, I was the happy one, just as I had been throughout our whole childhood. I remember trying to coach her, telling her to inject a little fun into her glum, disciplined life. I would say things like, “For starters, you should give your bland shoes to Goodwill and buy a few pairs of Blahniks. You’ll feel better, for sure.”
I know now how shallow that sounds. I realize that I made everything about appearances. But at the time, I honestly didn’t think I was hurting anyone, not even myself. I didn’t think much at all, in fact. Yes, I was gorgeous and lucky in love, but I truly believed that I was also a decent person who deserved her good fortune. And I saw no reason why the rest of my life should be any less charmed than my first three decades.
Then, something happened that made me question everything I thought I knew about the world: Rachel, my plain, do-gooding maid of honor with frizzy h
air the color of wheat germ, swooped in and stole my fiancé.
Copyright © 2005 by Emily Giffin. All rights reserved.
Something Borrowed
Dex hails me a cab, but as it pulls over he says, “How about one more bar? One more drink?”
“Fine,” I say. “Why not?”
We both get in and he tells the cabbie to just drive, that he has to think about where next. We end up in Alphabet City at a bar on Seventh and Avenue B, aptly named 7B.
It is not an upbeat scene—7B is dingy and smoke-filled. I like it anyway—it’s not sleek and it’s not a dive striving to be cool because it’s not sleek.
Dex points to a booth. “Have a seat. I’ll be right with you.” Then he turns around. “What can I get you?”
I tell him whatever he’s having, and sit and wait for him in the booth. I watch him say something to a girl at the bar wearing army-green cargo pants and a tank top that says “Fallen Angel.” She smiles and shakes her head. “Omaha” is playing in the background. It is one of those songs that seems melancholy and cheerful at the same time.
A moment later Dex slides in across from me, pushing a beer my way. “Newcastle,” he says. Then he smiles, crinkly lines appearing around his eyes. “You like?”
I nod and smile.
From the corner of my eye, I see Fallen Angel turn on her bar stool and survey Dex, absorbing his chiseled features, wavy hair, full lips. Darcy complained once that Dex garners more stares and double takes than she does. Yet, unlike his female counterpart, Dex seems not to notice the attention. Fallen Angel now casts her eyes my way, likely wondering what Dex is doing with someone so average. I hope that she thinks we’re a couple. Tonight nobody has to know that I am only a member of the wedding party.
Dex and I talk about our jobs and our Hamptons share that begins in another week and a lot of things. But Darcy does not come up and neither does their September wedding.
After we finish our beers we move over to the jukebox, fill it with dollar bills, searching for good songs. I push the code for “Thunder Road” twice because it is my favorite song. I tell him this.
“Yeah. Springsteen’s at the top of my list, too. Ever seen him in concert?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Twice. Born in the U.S.A. and Tunnel of Love.”
I almost tell him that I went with Darcy in high school, dragged her along even though she much preferred groups like Poison and Bon Jovi. But I don’t bring this up. Because then he will remember to go home to her and I don’t want to be alone in my dwindling moments of twenty-somethingness. Obviously I’d rather be with a boyfriend, but Dex is better than nothing.
It is last call at 7B. We get a couple more beers and return to our booth. Sometime later we are in a cab again, going north on First Avenue. “Two stops,” Dex tells our cabbie, because we live on opposite sides of Central Park. Dex is holding Darcy’s Chanel purse, which looks small and out of place in his large hands. I glance at the silver dial of his Rolex, a gift from Darcy. It is just shy of four o’clock.
We sit silently for a stretch of ten or fifteen blocks, both of us looking out of our respective side windows, until the cab hits a pothole and I find myself lurched into the middle of the backseat, my leg grazing his. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Dex is kissing me. Or maybe I kiss him. Somehow we are kissing. My mind goes blank as I listen to the soft sound of our lips meeting again and again. At some point, Dex taps on the Plexiglas partition and tells the driver, between kisses, that it will just be one stop after all.
We arrive on the corner of Seventy-third and Third, near my apartment. Dex hands the driver a twenty and does not wait for change. We spill out of the taxi, kissing more on the sidewalk and then in front of Josh, my doorman. We kiss the whole way up in the elevator. I am pressed against the elevator wall, my hands on the back of his head. I am surprised by how soft his hair is.
I fumble with my key, turning it the wrong way in the lock as Dex keeps his arms around my waist, his lips on my neck and the side of my face. Finally the door is open, and we are kissing in the middle of my studio, standing upright, leaning on nothing but each other. We stumble over to my made bed, complete with tight hospital corners.
“Are you drunk?” His voice is a whisper in the dark.
“No,” I say. Because you always say no when you’re drunk. And even though I am, I have a lucid instant where I consider clearly what was missing in my twenties and what I wish to find in my thirties. It strikes me that, in a sense, I can have both on this momentous birthday night. Dex can be my secret, my last chance for a dark twenty-something chapter, and he can also be a prelude of sorts—a promise of someone like him to come. Darcy is in my mind, but she is being pushed to the back, overwhelmed by a force stronger than our friendship and my own conscience. Dex moves over me. My eyes are closed, then open, then closed again.
And then, somehow, I am having sex with my best friend’s fiancé.
Copyright © 2004 by Emily Giffin. All rights reserved.
Also by Emily Giffin
Something Borrowed
Something Blue
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my family and friends for their love and support over the past year. I am especially grateful to Mary Ann Elgin, Sarah Giffin, and Nancy LeCroy Mohler, who, as always, were there from the very beginning of this story with their invaluable input. I couldn’t ask for a better mother, sister, and friend.
Abiding appreciation to my exceptional editor, Jennifer Enderlin, and to everyone at St. Martin’s Press, including Kim Cardascia, Sally Richardson, Matthew Shear, George Witte, Jeff Capshew, Andy Lecount, Tom Siino, Gina Wynn, Brian Heller, Christine Jaeger, Jeff Cope, Jeff Willmann, Rob Renzler, Matt Baldacci, Carrie Hamilton-Jones, Nancy Trypuc, Anne Marie Tallberg, Josh Zacharias, John Murphy, Dori Weintraub, Tommy Semosh, Jenn Taber, Christina Ripo, Harriet Seltzer, Christina Harcar, Kerry Nordling, Mike Storrings, Elizabeth Catalano, Kelly Too, and Nicole Liebowitz. Thanks also to Kari Atwell and the good people at H. B. Fenn.
Special thanks to Lisa Reed, Julie Portera, Allyson Wenig Jacoutot, Jennifer New, Eric Kiefer, Brian Spainhour, Selina Cicogna, and Stephen Lee for their friendship and generous contributions to this manuscript. Iowe so much to Stephany Evans, a fine agent and an even finer friend. And I am so lucky to have Carrie Minton, the best assistant anywhere.
A warm thank-you to all the gracious book clubs and bookstores I visited, and to readers everywhere who came to my signings or took the time to send me such kind and inspiring e-mails.
And finally, I thank my husband, Buddy Blaha, and our sons, Edward and George, for giving all of this meaning.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BABY PROOF. Copyright © 2006 by Emily Giffin. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Giffin, Emily.
Baby proof / Emily Giffin.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-0463-6
1. Couples—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS607.I28 B33 2006
813'.6—dc22
2006040531
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