The Other Half Page 2

  “Do what?”

  “I can’t go back to the hospital. I can’t take the noise, the smell. The fucking Jell-O.”

  I told myself I wasn’t going to cry, but of all the things that makes my eyes sting it’s gelatin. It was on every tray for every meal – “like some post-war recipe book where they make celery flavored Jell-O with tuna mayonnaise in it.” It got to be a dare, looking up the most disgusting retro recipes while going through chemo. It toughens your stomach, she said. If you don’t puke at mustard Jell-O garnished with broccoli then there is nothing in the world that can make you vomit.

  I wipe my eyes quickly. “I know,” I start to say. “But—”

  “—no,” she says, and squeezes my hand. “Listen to me, sweet boy. I would literally rather die than go back to the hospital.”

  “They can make you comfortable there.”

  She gives a raspy laugh. “Settle down, Cecil,” she says. “I’m full of morphine. I couldn’t be more comfortable if I tried.”

  For a second I think she’s lost her mind. I’m about to ask who the hell is Cecil when it hits me. A history lesson. Becky telling me about Elizabeth the First and how – when the old lady realized her time was up – she refused to lie down on a bed, because she knew the next bed she laid down on would be her deathbed. Instead she’d stood up. Just stood there for hours as if she could wait out the shadow she felt settling over her, and when her minister Robert Cecil came to tell her that she must go to bed, she’d been like, “Must is not a word for princes,” and kept right on standing, until her legs gave out and she eventually died lying on a pile of cushions on the floor.

  “When did this happen?” I say, thinking again of those ugly dark bruises. “How long have you been lying here?”

  “Oh, not long.”

  It’s bullshit, but I know better than to argue. “Hang tight,” I say, and get up from the floor. “Gonna go see what the professionals say, okay?”

  She groans, but I can’t just leave her there. I go over to the tall, blond paramedic standing by the bookshelf.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I know she’s being difficult, but she’s really been through it. Three rounds of chemo, three rounds of radiation. You can understand why she doesn’t want to go back to the hospital.”

  He nods. “Sure. I understand, but can you make her understand that she’s dead if she stays there?”

  I lower my voice. “Dude, she’s dead anyway. It got in the lymph glands and spread to her bones.”

  “Right,” he says. “We can’t force treatment on her, but she won’t even tell us how long she’s been lying on the floor. She’s dehydrated…”

  “Jody…”

  I turn back to her. She beckons me over and I kneel again. “What’s up?”

  “Tell them I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Sorry? Sorry for what?”

  “For calling them out like this. I shouldn’t have bothered them.”

  She should have. She must have been in agony. “If you didn’t want them here…” I say, confused.

  She shakes her head. “It’s one thing to say you’re ready, Jody. Being ready – now that’s a whole different ballgame.”

  My eyes sting. “Becky, it’s okay to be scared.”

  “I’m not scared,” she says. She scrunches her eyes shut, blinking away tears. “It’s the dying part that hurts. That’s the part I want to be done with.”

  “What can I do?” I know I can’t do anything, but I have to ask.

  She reaches for me. “Hold my hand, Jody. Just hold my hand.”

  2

  Chris

  The new intern is strangely hot.

  He has red hair, and I’m a sucker for redheads. Sebastian had teased me about it just that morning. “You gonna get some strange while I’m away?” he said, sprawled on his belly in the middle of our bed. “Hit up Ron Weasley or whatever his name is?”

  “His name is Jake,” I said, although at the time I wasn’t sure. Jake, Josh, Justin. “And no, I’m not going to cheat on you. Why would you want me to?”

  “I don’t, but I know what you’re like about that firecrotch action.” Then he rolled over. No firecrotch action here. No nothing. He was waxed, plucked, exfoliated and ready for the runway.

  “I can’t help it. They’re exotic to me.”

  “I’m blond,” he said, pulling me onto the bed. “Technically I should be even more exotic to you.”

  I said something about how he was more erotic than exotic right now and he said ‘stop talking’, and then it all got…unexpected. Morning sex hadn’t been his style in years, not since the first fevered flush of romance when we hadn’t been able to keep our hands off one another, night or day, private or public. These days our lives are consumed with favors, boutonnières and trying to find a catering budget that allow us to feed the five thousand in style while somehow also allowing us to afford something better than dog food for the first years of our married lives. So much so that when he yanked down my sweatpants, straddled me and fucked me into the clouds that morning I was almost surprised, like I’d completely forgotten that the whole point of us was that we loved one another.

  But instead of making me happy the revelation had upset me in some indefinable way, so I rode the subway this morning with my nerves jangled in a way they should never have been after a performance like that. Sex that good should have left me smoothed over and relaxed, but all the way to work the memory of his moans had only made me more nervous, so now I’m sitting in a meeting – across from that hot little white intern from London – and wondering what the hell is wrong with me.

  Wedding nerves. Right? Right.

  “…it’s going to feel like pandering, so yeah – I don’t think we want to go with that particular strategy. Chris? Chris?”

  “Sorry, yeah,” I say, with barely half an ear on the conversation. “Totally. If you try to please everyone you’re more likely to wind up pissing people off, so yeah – what she said. Go with the Young Adult market and push it hard.”

  “And hope the desperate housewives come along for the ride,” says Amy. “Exactly.”

  “The Twilight effect,” says Jake.

  “Is that what we’re calling it?”

  “We can if you like.”

  “I like,” says Amy, closing her laptop. “Let’s do it.”

  Jake smiles across the table at me. He really is extremely cute, with that flop of red hair and that accent, but what in the world is wrong with me? Why am I checking out ‘cute’ when I have ‘drop dead gorgeous’ at home? And less than four hours ago I had drop dead gorgeous writhing around on my dick and telling me that he loved me.

  All the same, I corner Jake on the way out of the meeting. I have an uncomfortable feeling that I’ve been staring vacantly at him while my mind was elsewhere, and on reflection I figure it would be better if I talked to him rather than not. “How are you settling in?” I ask.

  “Great, thanks. It’s just…”

  “Just what? Anything I can help you with?”

  “No. It’s nothing,” he says, pushing his chair back into place. “It’s just a bit strange sometimes. Hearing all this boardroom speak from people who claim to love words. Leveraging. Targeting. Impactful.” He gives a small shudder.

  “Yeah. They don’t sit pretty on the tongue, do they?” I say, and immediately regret it when I remind myself of Sebastian sitting pretty on my tongue, sighing as he rocked his hips, both hands on the headboard. Nothing like popping a boner in front of the new intern to make you look like a sane and well-adjusted individual.

  Jake picks up his pile of paperbacks. One is conspicuous as the kind of work of actual literature you seldom see in the offices of a publishing firm – Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. “Good book,” I say. “How are you finding it?”

  “Not bad. I’m told it’s entry level Joyce for those of us who don’t have the balls to attempt Ulysses yet.” He gives me a guilty little smile. “I’m afraid I bailed at the first ag
enbite of inwit the last time I tried.”

  “You’ll get it. The important thing with Ulysses is to do it because you want to and to take your time. I didn’t finish reading it all the way through until I was thirty.” God. Thirty. How old is he, anyway? Twenty-five, tops. We walk out to the elevators. “Definitely read Portrait Of The Artist first, though. You’ll get a much better feel for Daedalus.”

  “That was my thinking, too,” says Jake. “Are you going down?”

  “No, I should…um…I’ve got some more stuff to do up here.”

  I’m having a really hard time dragging my thoughts out of the gutter today. Did Sebastian plant that seed in my dirty little mind on purpose? And if so, why? Is he getting cold feet? Or is it some messed up turnabout is fair play thing? Or maybe he wants to get into polyamory and my life is about to become one of those long, trainwrecky r/relationships posts about how we thought it would be a really great idea to ‘open up our marriage’ but plunged headlong into so much drama and heartache that we were now sleeping in separate rooms and locked into a custody battle over the pug.

  No. Would never happen. We’d never get a pug, for a start. Sebastian says they have way too many medical issues, including some stuff with anal glands that I would be a whole lot happier not knowing about.

  It’s nothing. I’m being neurotic. Maybe he just wanted to have sex with me before he had to go off to Milan for a week.

  Milan, where he’ll be surrounded by models as beautiful and willowy and waxed as he is. Guys who are walking delivery systems for abs and cheekbones. Not like me, who has recently stress-eaten myself ten pounds heavier and almost bust out of my wedding tux the last time we had a fitting. He’d been nice about it, of course, and said it didn’t matter and he loved me just the same, but he couldn’t quite hide the disappointment in his eyes. We’re going to all this trouble, that look said. All this expense. And you can’t keep your ass out of the nearest Wendy’s.

  I go back to my office and return to the latest book we're attempting to fire to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It’s pretty formulaic. Ninety pound white girl – with physically or emotionally absent parents – falls in love with vampire/werewolf/angel/ghost/insert supernatural creature of choice here. And/or goes to magical boarding school or competes in something a little bit like the Hunger Games/Triwizard Tournament but just different enough to avoid major copyright issues. Then conflict arises because she’s also possibly in love with a different supernatural creature of choice from the main one who is currently smoldering in her general direction and there it is. Rinse and repeat.

  There’s a message from my sister on my phone. I pounce on it, because there aren’t as many these days, and their subject matter has changed dramatically from our twenties. We used to text one another hangover cures, but no chance of that now that we’re officially grown-ups, dragged into reluctant millennial maturity.

  — help, says the text. i need a proof check because i am a goddamn cow.

  I frown at the screen for a long moment, then remembered that she’s still – on top of everything else – attempting to write that book about weaponized femininity or whatever it was. The cow part is a little more baffling.

  — cow? I text.

  She bloops back at me almost immediately. moo.

  Ah. lol got milk?

  — i’m a one woman dairy. was gonna check the proofs this afternoon but she’s working on a growth spurt or something. won’t stop feeding.

  I text back. you’re in luck. seb’s on his way to milan. can come by after work.

  — you’re a lifesaver. thank you.

  Sebastian calls after lunch. “Hey,” he says. “How’s Ron Weasley?”

  “Oh, you know. Ginger. English. He’s reading James Joyce.”

  “Good for him. Someone has to.” We don’t talk about books at home. Sebastian is working his way through the newest Dan Brown: he likes the short chapters. “Listen, I’m just on my way out, and I wanted to say goodbye.”

  “Okay,” I say, and wonder once again why he’s calling me. We’ve known for weeks that he’d be leaving this afternoon, and that my schedule meant there would be no mushy airport farewell. “Call me when you land.”

  “I will.”

  I hesitate, but I figure I might as well ask, otherwise I’ll be turning it over and over in my head while he’s incommunicado, halfway over the Atlantic. “Honey, are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Why would I not be?”

  “I don’t know. You just seem a little…” Clingy? God, no. Don’t say that. “Intense, I guess.”

  I hear his breath down the phone. Not a sigh. Just a sort of muted exhalation that I know means – among other things – Chris, you’re being ridiculous. “I’ll miss you,” he says. “Is that such a crime?”

  He’s right. I’m being ridiculous. “No, of course not,” I say. “And I loved your farewell tour this morning.” All morning he kept coming back to me in hot flashes of memory, in hitches of breath and the slide of flesh in flesh. “I don’t know what got into you.”

  His laugh is low and sexy. “You did, remember?”

  Oh, I remember. I’ll probably remember in detail tonight, alone with his Instagram and a bottle of hand lotion. “I love you,” I say, and I mean it.

  “I love you, too.” He sighs. “God, I wish I didn’t have to go.”

  “Oh, I know,” I say, thinking wistfully of La Scala, the Palazzo Sforza and saffrony, sinfully buttery risotto alla Milanese. “Milan is such a shithole. A cultural wasteland with disgusting food.”

  “The worst,” he says, laughing. “Okay, I’ll text you when I get there.”

  “Yeah. Have a safe trip. How do you say that in Italian?”

  “Fai buon viaggio.”

  “Yeah. That.” I love his lazy, high fashion Italian, usually drawled down the phone to his cousin, who gets first looks at the new collections. “I’ll miss you.”

  And I mean it. I do. He’s been so sweet lately, so uncritically loving and attentive. I resolve to stop worrying and take it in the spirit it was undoubtedly meant.

  I get off early, brave the horror of the subway and schlep over to my sister’s place in Williamsburg. I hear the baby screaming halfway up the stairs. “Oh, thank God,” she says, halfway through zipping up a hoodie as she opens the door. “An adult.”

  Before Artemis arrived Jo’s apartment had been hipster heaven, with its one brick wall, caterpillar green couch and all those shelves of books written by clever postmodernists, many of whom she actually knew well enough to swap cocktail recipes and ARCs. Then she’d decided to hit up a sperm bank before she turned thirty-five – a watershed, according to her gynecologist – and now the place is a mess of diaper bags and bassinets, her bicycle shunted to the side to make way for the stroller. My niece is only three months old, but already she seems to need as much equipment as a mid-level rock band.

  “Yes, okay,” says Jo, picking the one spare spot on the couch. She scoops up the baby, unzips her hoodie and whips out a breast.

  “Oh my God,” I say, turning away.

  “Jesus, Chris – it’s just a tit.”

  “It’s my sister’s tit,” I say, making a big production of clearing baby wipes and clothes from an old wingback armchair.

  “For God’s sake. You’ve seen me naked. One time we were naked roommates for a whole nine months.”

  “Yeah, but that was different. You were a fetus. You looked like a toad.”

  “So did you.” I sit down and tried to figure out where to put my eyes. Thankfully Artemis’s head is obscuring the worst of the boobage. She’s quiet now, sucking contentedly, her tiny brown fist beating gently at the air above Jo’s breast, reminding me of the way a kitten kneads while feeding.

  “Deal with it,” says Jo. “That’s what happens when you have a baby. You wind up with no shame whatsoever. Seriously – I may as well have invited a bunch of strangers to stare up my twat for the entire pregnancy. Some days the only reason
to wear underpants at all was the sporadic incontinence.”

  I let out a quiet scream, making her laugh.

  “You try sneezing with several pounds of human sitting on your bladder,” she says. “It’s like playing Russian roulette, but with pee.” Artemis snuffles and Jo jiggles her breast, performing some kind of complicated adjustment between mouth and boob. “And there’s a Donald Trump joke in there somewhere, but I’m too fucking sleep deprived to make it.”

  “Why are you telling me these terrible things?” I say, reaching for the galley copy on the coffee table. It says something about our current relationship that I don’t even know what she’s working on these days. Something hardcore and doctoral sounding about weaponized femininity as a symptom of end stage capitalism. She’s always been the smart one.

  “Because you’re a man,” she says. “And you might go from one end of your life to the other without knowing a thing about them. A whole world of knowledge, totally unexplored. Imagine that.”

  “I’m trying very hard not to.”

  She laughs and snuggles the baby. “I thought you wanted one of these?”

  “I do, but I’m not likely to push one out any time soon, am I? Medically the odds are against it.”

  “You know what I mean,” says Jo. “If you get a surrogate you’re gonna have to be supportive, and she’s gonna want to talk about what she’s going through. Which is a lot. Babies wreck your shit. Teeth, bones, hair, tits, pussy, asshole—”

  “—okay. Getting the picture. Thank you.”

  “And once you have a baby you’ll hear it from all the moms, because that’s what happens. You’ll have to deal with other moms telling you about their episiotomies, and they will tell you, because of that no shame thing that kicks in after you’ve pooped in front of your friends and family in the delivery room. You’re going to have to take it like a man, Chris, because God knows Sebastian won’t.”

  “He might,” I say, setting down the sheaf of papers.

  “He won’t. He has a panic attack if he finds a head of broccoli rotting in the fridge. How’s he going to cope with a category five baby shit hurricane?”