Fashionably Late. Olivia Goldsmith

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СКАЧАТЬ herself. Dr Goldman had already cost what? Six or seven thousand? And this was how it ended. She winced. Money couldn’t cushion this blow, except to give you a glove-leather Barcelona chair to sit in while you tried not to lose your composure and your lunch right there, all over the Axminster carpet.

      She felt like a completely different woman than the one who had been on the stage at the Waldorf only fifteen hours before. What had all of that meant? No memory of glory could lessen this pain.

      She knew that she couldn’t tell her mother. Not either fact: that a baby was out of the question or that she wanted to search for her own natural mother. As always, Belle’s feelings came first. Belle was the punch line of that old mother-daughter joke: when the mother finds her daughter dead on the floor, a suicide, she cries out, ‘How could she do this to me?’ Oh yes, Belle would make a pity party out of this one. Belle only wanted to hear about Oakley Awards. She was comfortable around achievement, not failure.

      Worse yet, Belle had been urging Karen and Jeffrey to have children for more years than Karen liked to remember. It would be awful now to have to admit that Belle was right. We should have tried to have a baby sooner, Karen thought. But I’ve been so wrapped up in my career. Carving out a place in the fashion world had been no day at the beach. And then, once I got a foot in the door, how could I not follow through? When my stuff really took off, with all the work, the success, and the travel, there just hadn’t been time. Babies, I figured, could always come later.

      Except now they never would. Karen felt a stab of pain somewhere around her nonfunctioning female parts. Guilt? Phantom ovulation? She reminded herself that the doctor today had said that her infertility was not wholly age-related. ‘It’s quite possible that you’d never have been able to bear a child, although your condition is aggravated by age.’ Perhaps my guilt at waiting so long to try to conceive is misplaced, she told herself, and tried to believe it.

      Not that her mother would ever believe that. Her mother would be more than eager to tell her not only that it was all her own fault but also that Belle had warned her. Belle wasn’t always right, but she was right often enough and vocal enough about it so that she seemed unassailable. Belle was a smart mother, but not a comforting one. Karen felt tears rise in her eyes, although she never cried. Instead, she took a steadying deep breath and blinked. At her age she was experienced enough to know that very few people had anything close to a good relationship with their parents, but at this moment she longed for a bosom she could weep on without constraint, blame, or guilt. No wonder men came to women for comfort: the lure of the breast was powerful. Yet Karen would never go to Belle for solace. Maybe it was no accident that Belle was so flat-chested. No lure there, Karen thought. Well, if men go to women for comfort, where do women go?

      To their girlfriends. Karen had three: Lisa, her sister; Defina; and Carl, who was not anatomically female but could certainly pass for one in almost every other way. But Defina was still celebrating last night; Carl, though always ready to listen, was all the way over in Brooklyn; while at this moment Lisa was out on Long Island with Belle, waiting for Karen’s arrival. Karen sighed. Her stomach still felt as if it were about to heave. There would be no comfort until she got home to Jeffrey late tonight. And maybe not then. Because while he always reassured her on other issues, this was one he was too intimately involved in to be counted on. Their shared baby-making odyssey had tried his patience to the breaking point and put more of a strain on their marriage than she’d like to admit.

      ‘Mrs Kahn?’ there was a question in the nurse’s voice, and Karen knew she’d have to act as if the room wasn’t spinning around her. But could she get up from the damn chair without blowing chunks across the glossy magazines on the coffee table? Maybe it would pass for morning sickness. More like mourning sickness, Karen realized. The woman sitting beside her, the only one not appearing frightened, the one who was very obviously pregnant, turned her blonde head and raised her almost transparent eyebrows. She was reading the style section of the New York Times, which carried a long report on the Oakley Award. Yes, she was putting it together, Karen could see. Yes, I am Karen Kahn. That Mrs Kahn. Great, Karen thought. Now she’d get to read about this visit in tomorrow’s Liz Smith column. She could just picture the item: ‘What top Seventh Avenue designer was seen at New York’s chicest infertility clinic?’

      She looked back at the pregnant woman beside her. There ought to be a law that infertility clinics sent their success stories elsewhere instead of flaunting them in front of us, the barren ones, Karen thought. There also ought to be a law that famous people, or even semi-famous ones, could not be stared at when they were in moments of extreme pain. Karen sighed. Yeah, and while she was at it, why not pass a law against childhood leukemia and racial cleansing? This was the downside of celebrity, Karen. Live with it.

      Get up, she told herself. Don’t puke, don’t trip, and don’t give this albino breeding bitch a chance to ask if you can get maternity clothes for her at wholesale. Somehow Karen’s knees found the strength to propel her upward and she crossed the room in three long strides. Karen was a big girl, tall, with long legs, and – despite constant dieting attempts – she was far from thin. That was why she knew how to design clothes that minimized thighs and camouflaged waistlines. Now, she clutched her layered cashmere sweaters and matching shawl around her as if they were armor.

      ‘Yes?’ she asked the nurse who gave her a professionally bright smile as if it didn’t matter that this was the worst day of Karen’s life. The best night, followed by the worst day. Twenty-four rocky hours. ‘That will be seven hundred and forty-three dollars,’ the woman said pleasantly, without shame. Karen unzipped her De Vecchi bag and pulled out her checkbook. She fumbled for her Mont Blanc but couldn’t find it. The nurse, still smiling brightly, slipped her a Bic. Karen noticed her own hands were shaking. She tried to write out ‘7’ on the amount line and it looked more like a snake that had been mashed on the roadway than a number. It was hopeless. She tore the check out and into two pieces, threw the cheap pen on the desk, and chucked the pigskin checkbook back into her bag.

      ‘Bill me,’ she said, and her anger gave her enough energy to make it through the door to the elevator and down into the lobby of the building. How could they make you pay to get this news? Her lip trembled, but she wouldn’t cry. She never cried. She walked out of the building and onto Park Avenue. The awning over the door was flapping in the wind and a fine rain had begun to spray everything the brown-gray color, like wet wood smoke, that painted New York on its bad rainy afternoons.

      Perfect, she thought. I’ll never get a cab to Penn Station in this. I should have taken a limo, just like Jeffrey had suggested. But Karen hated to keep the driver waiting. It wasn’t that she was cheap – it was simply an embarrassment to her. The idea of a bus or, worse yet, the subway, made her so dizzy she thought she might fall onto the wet concrete. New York is unlivable, she thought, and every place else is worse. I should have gotten the limo and taken it. Not just to here and the station, but all the way to Long Island. What the hell is wrong with me? I can’t give myself a break. Karen Kahn, woman of the people. That’s my father’s influence. Karen felt a wave of self-pity wash over here, and with it all her reserve of strength was gone. ‘Please,’ she said aloud. ‘Please.’

      And her prayer was answered. A taxi pulled up to the canopy and two men stepped out, leaving it vacant for her. She got into it gratefully and took a deep breath. ‘Penn Station,’ she told the driver, who was dressed in the native garb of some Third World country that she would not be able to identify on a map. He nodded and she hoped he had a clue how to find their destination.

      She leaned back into the impossibly uncomfortable seat. What an irony it was that her one prayer had been for a taxi. Just my luck, she thought. Major unanswered wishes in my life and that’s the one I make when the Wish Fairy is feeling generous. Too bad I hadn’t wished for a baby.

      She glanced at her wristwatch, a chunky antique gold man’s Rolex – the only thing that made her big wrist look small. СКАЧАТЬ