Time of My Life Read online

  As my due date slowly, slowly crept up, my ankles ballooned, and my heartburn flared, and Henry’s pace grew no less leisurely. He bought me gift certificates for massages and remembered to tote home flowers on occasion and even withstood an all-afternoon trip to Pea in the Pod, but still, these were the plugs to fill in the wider gap, and it was hard not to admit, though I pushed my smile up as far as it could go and rubbed my belly with gusto, that this gap had a larger crevasse that snaked its way through us.

  When my water broke in the kitchen as I prepared homemade lasagna (Gourmet!), Henry was in a car to the airport. I was one week early and had assured him that no, no chance would I deliver while he was on his one-day trip to Chicago. I’d read about it, after all; first-time moms are likely to go late.

  Contractions followed like tidal waves, so I frantically phoned him, desperate to reach him before he literally jetted off, and then I called a cab, which arrived twelve minutes and three contraction cycles later and reeked like fading curry and Old Spice. And this is how I ended up admitting myself into the labor and delivery ward at Westchester Medical Center.

  Henry burst through the door ten minutes later, frantic and sweaty, and when I saw him, apologetic and also full of hope, I forgot the gap and the crevasses and the changes that had nudged their way into our marriage that we’d been unable to adapt to. If I’d ever recognized them at all. Instead, I concentrated on my breathing, and Henry counted with me, and later, held up my legs and screamed with me. And after eleven hours of excruciating labor, Katie made her way into our world.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Gene and I are splitting buttered bagels in celebration of both of our promotions—he’s now my official assistant—on Monday morning when reception buzzes my line, informing me of a delivery that’s been deposited at the front desk.

  “I’ll grab it,” Gene says, licking his fingers and springing to.

  “You’re not my errand boy,” I say. But just as I stand, Josie swings into my office with a look that says “stick around,” so Gene heads off to retrieve it.

  “Well, I know it’s your first day in your new position, but we’ve already run into a snag,” she says, then tosses a pile of headshots on my desk, which land on top of softened packaged pats of butter that I normally deny myself but made an exception for in light of the celebration. “Coke’s not happy with our choice of the kid model for the ‘zizz’ print ads.” She plops into the chair, still warm from Gene, and squeezes the bridge of her nose. “As if this is just what I need right now.”

  “You okay?” I ask, because clearly, this doesn’t seem like the sort of monumental crisis that Josie seems to think that it might be.

  “Fine.” She waves her hands. “Look, I’ve run through all of those headshots and none of them really stands out to me, so can you take a flip through and see if you can find the next big star?”

  She said this with a foreign, unfamiliar sarcasm. Whether or not we were creating high art, Josie was the first to believe that what we did mattered. That the hours we spent holed up in our airless offices changed commerce and the marketplace, and that leaving our clients satisfied was as important as any job in any industry.

  “No problem,” I answer, perplexed. “How hard can it be to find a cute kid?”

  “Harder than you think,” she says. “I was here all weekend digging through piles of headshots and faxing them to Bart, but none of them worked for him.”

  “To Bart?” I say.

  “It’s nothing,” she reiterates with a finality that seems either true or depressing, and I don’t pursue it to find out. “The shoot is in two days, which means that we have to find someone they agree to, get the kid fitted, get test shots done, get him the script . . .” She sighs. “Anyway, can you just take a look and see if any of them jumps out at you?”

  “Yeah, of course,” I say.

  “Good,” she answers with no enthusiasm and turns to leave.

  Shaking my head, I scoot my chair close to my desk and begin sifting through the pile of photos. Though the children are varied in skin color and hairstyle, in height and in weight, they all possess a similar look: that of frozen smiles and trying-too-hard eyes and plasticky expressions that do little to swoon me, and more important, would do little to swoon the consumer. I flip through the stack again, and it’s not hard to see why Bart was unimpressed.

  Just as I’m doubling back to rethink an adorable, if cookie-cutter, Afroed six-year-old, Gene waddles through my door, weighed down by a ballooning vase of flowers, big enough that it might be fair to compare the bouquet to a tree. A minitree, perhaps.

  “Move some crap on your desk,” he cries frantically. “Quickly, before I drop this load!”

  I shove some old mail onto the floor, and he lurches forward, aiming for the now-empty spot and landing the vase with a thud. The stems shudder with reverb.

  “Wow, someone adores you!” Gene says, stepping back to observe the floral jungle.

  I grab the card that abuts an orange tiger lily and run my finger under the seal of the envelope.

  Jill—

  I am so proud of your promotion and am sorry that I’ve been so distracted of late.

  Dinner tonight at “our place”?

  I love you,

  Jack

  My face expands into an unweighted smile, and I shake my head in wonder.

  I’d left two messages on Jack’s phone after I returned home from my interlude with Henry at Starbucks. In the first, I told him about my promotion, and in the second, alarmed by the fact that I couldn’t dislodge Henry from my head, I told him how much I missed him, how much I loved him, and how I wish that he’d come home that night, rather than taking the early train in the morning, even though the sun had long since tucked itself beneath the horizon and my eyelids drooped with fatigue and I knew that there was little chance of him doing so.

  I fell into a listless sleep an hour later and woke at midnight to no messages. But now, there was this. And on a Monday, too! I knew that Monday mornings were Jack’s busiest, clogged with editorial meetings and copy deadlines and delinquent excuses from his freelance writers, so when this mass of floral obscenity landed on my desk in the midst of all of this, well, it felt like something. Not everything, but something to be sure, and for me, so desperate to rid Henry from my system, to expel him like rotting waste, it certainly felt like enough.

  “So I take it the boyfriend problems have been resolved,” Gene asks, nearly blinded by the glare from my beaming grin.

  “You can take that correctly,” I say, bending over to smell the literal roses.

  “Well, that’s good news,” he says. “Because I didn’t want to say it back then, but I can say it now. Ex-boyfriends are always trouble.”

  “Not always,” I answer. “Just most of the time.”

  “Always,” he says firmly. “Always since the beginning of time. Don’t go thinking otherwise.”

  “I wasn’t,” I say, as Gene heads out the door with a perfunctory glance. Until I realize that I was thinking that exactly, but that indeed ex-boyfriends are always trouble, and a wave of gratefulness passes over me, as I recognize how closely I’d been tiptoeing to throwing it all away. And now, with Jack present and accounted for, how I wouldn’t have to think of Henry again. Trouble he was, and trouble he would be no longer.

  “CONSIDER YOUR CRISIS solved,” I say, walking into Josie’s office.

  She holds up a finger and mouths “hang on,” while pressing the phone into her ear, so I busy myself perusing her bookcases, which are sunken down with shiny plaques of industry awards and dozens of books on marketing, branding, and consumerism.

  Josie’s isn’t quite a corner office but more of a junior suite. She was the most recent partner, and this was the only space they had left. Unlike my own office, which resembles the shambles of undetermined wreckages, Josie’s is angular, tidy, and virtually spotless. I run my hand over her pine shelving and wonder if she stays late, just to make sure that everything is
in its place as it should be, rather than heading home to her kids. But then I remember my own life, my own old life, where my house was the embodiment of perfection, as if starched linens and bursting, bright flower beds somehow symbolized a robust soul, and it creeps over me that Josie and I might share more than just a knack for advertising.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, setting the phone back in its cradle. “Art.” She shakes her head, and I’m unsure if she’s referring to a problem with the art for the Coke campaign or to her husband. She runs her hands over her face and smooths her fingers over her eyebrows and exhales. “He’s been offered a full-time position in San Jose.”

  “Oh . . . that’s great” is all I can think to say, though she doesn’t seem to hear me.

  “So what? So what now?” she says, and I realize that, in fact, she hasn’t heard me. “Am I supposed to resign from this fucking job so that Art can be the full-time art director of the San Jose fucking Opera? Are you kidding me?”

  “I . . .”

  “No, seriously, I mean, do I sound like a horrible wife? That my husband has finally gotten a permanent job, after, I don’t know, two goddamn decades, and I’m not even happy about it?”

  “I don’t know, Josie,” I say softly. “But I’m pretty sure that doesn’t make you a horrible wife.”

  “I don’t know, either,” she sighs. “I’ve sacrificed so much for my family, and now, after years of working my ass off so my kids wouldn’t have to worry or so that we could send them to college without scraping by, he lands this, and it’s like, ‘Well, thank you very much, I appreciate you putting in your time, but now I can handle it, so pack up and move to San Jose!’ ” Her voice singsongs. “San fucking Jose!”

  I think of Henry and my pangs of isolation—how he whisked me off to the suburbs without much of a second thought to what I might be leaving behind, how he prodded me to reacquaint myself with my mother without considering the reasons why I just fucking couldn’t—and it’s easy to understand Josie’s crest of resentment.

  “But enough about my problems,” Jo says, with a wave of her hand. “Which crisis is it that you say you’ve solved?”

  “You have more than one?” I ask.

  “Isn’t that obvious?” She ekes out a smile.

  “Well, I’ve resolved the Coke print crisis: I found your kid. Bart signed off on it, and we’re good to go.”

  When I mention Bart, Josie’s eyes pop almost intangibly, but just noticeably enough that I wonder if she’ll pursue it. She doesn’t.

  “Thank God,” she exhales, and slashes a Sharpie through an item on her list on her desk calendar. I used to make those lists, I think. Grocery lists. To-do lists. Katie lists. Best-damn-mother-of-the-year lists.

  An hour prior, after filtering through the pile of plasticized-looking children, an e-mail popped into my inbox from Jack, confirming our date for the evening. And then I remembered that I already had the perfect child model: Allie. So I called Leigh, who seemed less than exuberant about whoring her daughter out for one of the nation’s largest junk food and soda manufacturers, but who also made the mistake of having the conversation while she picked Allie up from school, and thus was cornered into doing it by a six-year-old.

  “I wanna be in magazines!!!!!!” I heard her scream from the backseat of their Volvo wagon. Leigh sighed and asked if we could push the shoot until the afternoon, so Allie wouldn’t miss school. I e-mailed Bart a snapshot of Allie from her birthday party, dressed in a prairie skirt and olive-green graphic tee, and then, just like that, it was done.

  “God, you’re a miracle worker,” Josie says, when I explain the sequence of events.

  I think of how far I’ve come, of how I’ve ended up back here half a decade after I’d done all of this before.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I say, standing to leave.

  She grins a sad grin, and then, just as I’m turning out of her office, I look back, and watch any last-minute traces of joy drain from her face entirely.

  “OUR PLACE,” as Jack referred to it in his note, was a cramped falafel dive on 114th Street and Broadway. The linoleum tables were covered with cheap paper place mats, and the aluminum chairs grated on the parquet floors when you slid them back to sit. Sitar music cooed out of the speakers that were perched near two corners of the ceiling. The air hung with the unmistakable scents of hummus and fried cooking oil, and every time that I stepped inside, pulling back the squeaky glass door, I thought of our first date.

  If I’d been paying more attention on that evening, I realized later, far too much later when I was already sucked into heady love with him, I could have seen some of the signs. Signs that he wasn’t going to be my savior or that he wouldn’t be the flawless romantic writer whom I somehow imagined him to be on that initial date. The way that he talked about his meandering ambitions, of how he never really knew what he wanted out of life. Such joie de vivre! I thought, with euphoria. The way that his mother called him as he walked me home, and it didn’t occur to either one of us that he shouldn’t take the call. Such a loving son! I thought, my heart swelling at the very notion. And then I invited him inside, and we tore into each other in the way that you can do when you’re first tugged toward someone and the curiosity is only outmatched by the boundless passion, and from then on, I stopped asking questions. At least until we were too far gone for answers, anyway.

  Tonight, Jack is here before me, and I spot him at a cramped table tucked into the back corner. Still, even though it has been months since I came back, I am surprised, awed even, when I see him. He looks up from the pita chips he’s been reaching into and finds his way to me, then smiles, his eyes crinkling like a paper fan, when he sees me.

  “Oh my God, I’m so proud of you,” he says, pulling me close, then holding me by the shoulders from afar, the way that a grandparent might his teenage grandchild who has gone through an unprecedented growth spurt. “I mean, seriously! Jill! It’s amazing!”

  I demur and pick up a menu, even though I order the same thing every time I’m here: the chicken gyro platter—and I do exactly that when the goateed waiter who looked like he might be perhaps getting his MFA in poetry while busing tables at night, ambles over and says, “So what’s your pleasure?”

  Halfway through dinner, Jack reaches around into his messenger bag and pulls out two envelopes.

  “For you,” he says, sliding one across the table.

  With a furrowed brow, I engineer it around my plate, then flip it open.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize that you really intended to do this!” I say. I eye my plane ticket to Miami, which is tucked on top of Jack’s handwritten list of suggested activities: Jet Skiing, South Beach, new restaurant openings.

  “Of course,” he answers and reaches over to weave his fingers into mine. “I’ve planned out every detail of the trip—all you have to do is pack and show up at the airport on time.”

  “You did this all this weekend?” I cock my head. “I thought you were taking care of your mom.” I pause, unsure of whether I should be amazed at what Jack can actually pull off when he aspires to it or upset that he wasn’t aspiring to something greater. “And writing.”

  Indeed, I’d envisioned him either hovered above her sickbed or crouched over his laptop through all waking hours. Not sweet-talking airline representatives into upgrades to business class or booking nearly impossible reservations at celeb-packed Asian-fusion joints.

  “The writing’s going a little slower than I expected.” He shrugs.

  “What’s the problem? Maybe I can help.” I nudge some tab-bouleh around a green pepper and swoop my fork in to grab it.

  “There isn’t a problem,” he says. “It’s just, you know, my mom is a distraction, and I wanted to be sure that I gave her my full attention.”

  With a mouthful, I nod my head in what I hope is support—even though I suspect that, mother or not, Jack might always find an excuse for the writing to go a little slower than expected.

  “Anyway,” he c
ontinues. “This isn’t about my writing. This is about Miami!”

  “Are you sure,” I ask, “that you wouldn’t rather spend that time at that writers’ workshop we talked about? So that you hit the Thanksgiving goal you were aiming for?”

  “Jillian! Seriously. You’re killing me here.”

  “I’m just trying to be helpful,” I say. But I don’t add, because when we split seven years ago, you ruefully and regretfully told me that you’d orphaned your manuscript to spend more time with me, and that had you not devoted so much effort to what was now a torpedoed relationship, you might now have finally fulfilled your dream. And that I spat back that you never had any intention of fulfilling said dream because it was nothing more than a mirage, a mythical goal that you and your mother conjured up like an illusory end zone, that you had no intention of ever running toward. And that you crumbled in—I’m not sure what—rage, defeat, true pain—when I said such hateful things. Such that part of me always wondered if maybe you were right: that I hadn’t been encouraging enough, nurturing enough, though I’d been plenty of both, and that when you slipped into the living room late at night to bang out a few pages, and I’d call you back, needy and hating to sleep alone, maybe I unconsciously didn’t want you to get away from me, to take off on a new trajectory and potentially leave me behind. I’d been through that enough already.

  “I know,” Jack says kindly. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll write when I write.” He raises his glass. “To Miami.”

  “To Miami,” I echo, clinking my chardonnay against his.

  I look down, and it’s only then that I notice the date on the ticket. October 3. Three weeks away. The mere glance at it sends a jolt through my core, as if my chi were getting tangled all over again. This, after all, was the date that I was supposed to tearfully trudge into an East Village bar, order a cosmo to nurse my bruises after Jack and I were nearly ready to dissolve ourselves from each other, and then sidle up on a bar stool next to the man who would heal me. The man who would turn out to be my future. Henry.