Baby proof

twenty-two

On the flight back to New York that night all I can do is ponder my relationship with Richard. I decide that giving a girl a ring when you're not in a serious relationship is sort of like giving a guy a blow job when you have no real feelings for him. It makes everything feel a little bit cheap. It cheapens the giver and the recipient. I don't want to feel this way about Richard's ring (or my blow jobs). I want to be enlightened and modern and independent and sexually liberated. I tell myself that Richard and I feel the same about each other. Nobody is using anyone-or perhaps we are both using each other equally. There is no deceit, no false pretenses. Richard is a grown man with plenty of experience, and he can decide for himself how he wants to spend his money. And I can decide for myself who I want to be intimate with. But despite my masterful rationalizing, the relationship just doesn't feel right to me anymore. Every time I look down at my new ring, I feel queasy.

By the time we land in New York and take a radio car back to the city, my mood has rubbed off on Richard, and our conversations have become noticeably strained. He has already asked me twice if something is wrong-which is far from our typical light dynamic. I tell him no both times because you can't very well tell someone who is not serious about you that you are not serious about him but that you feel somehow unsettled anyway. It's like calling an ex-boyfriend and announcing that you're over him. Or telling a boss who just fired you that you had wanted to quit for weeks. It's just… weird.

Besides, the last thing I want to appear is ungrateful. I am grateful. I loved our trip as much as you can possibly love a trip when you don't love the person you're with. When we pull up to Jess's apartment, I kiss Richard and thank him one final time.

He says, "I'm going to miss you tonight."

"I'll miss you, too," I say.

It is the first lie I've ever told him.

I only miss one person right about now, and his name isn't Richard.

"Well?" Jess says when I open the door. She is wearing an oversized man's undershirt and a pair of Daisy Dukes from our college days. The hem is unraveling in long strands. "How was it?"

"It was incredible," I say. "The place is breathtaking… and you packed perfectly. The lacy underwear came in handy…"

"But?" she says. A best friend can always sense a but coming.

"But I don't think I want to keep seeing Richard."

Jess's eyes widen and she says, "Why not? What happened?"

"I don't know," I say. "I really don't know. It was all great and fine, and then he gave me this." I hold up my ring.

She grabs my hand, identifying the gems as a pink tourmaline flanked by two peridots. Then she admits to giving Richard my ring size, but insists that he picked it out himself. She had no input. Then she says, "Wait. I don't get it. Do you not like it or what?"

"I like it," I say.

"So what's the problem?"

"I don't know… The relationship-just makes me feel… unmoored."

"Unmoored? What the hell does that mean? You read too many books."

I didn't expect Jess to understand, but I try to make her anyway. I say that Richard just feels like killing time, and killing time doesn't feel good when you're thirty-five.

"Shit," she says, wincing. "I forgot today was the actual day. I have your card somewhere-and another small gift… Happy birthday. How's it feel?"

"Not so great," I say.

"Why not?" she says.

"I feel old."

"So what? You don't want kids."

I think of the last time she told me that my age was irrelevant simply because I didn't want children. This time I say something. "I know I don't want kids… But that doesn't mean I don't want anything."

Jess looks hurt when she says, "You have me."

"I know I do, Jess," I say. "And I love you to death… But you know friends aren't the same thing."

She doesn't try to dispute this. Instead she says, "Well, you have Richard, too."

"Richard's not enough, either," I say. "I want more. I want what I had with Ben."

Jess inhales as though she is about to impart some wisdom I am pretty sure she does not possess. Then she stops and just says, "Don't we all, my friend?… Don't we all?"

Later that night, my cell phone rings and awakens me from a fairly sound sleep. I answer with a disoriented hello.

"I expected voice mail."

It is a man's voice-and at first I think it is Richard, and then register that it is Ben.

I sit up and snap to attention. No part of me expected a call from Ben, on my birthday or otherwise. I say his name, which feels intimate because I am in bed, in the dark. I look at the clock. It is only nine.

He says, "Happy thirty-five."

"Thank you," I say. My heart is racing, and I am smiling. No, I am full-on grinning. Ben has just made me happier than any ring-or any other person-could ever make me.

"How was your day?" he asks.

"It was fine," I say. And then bravely add, "Better now."

"So," he says. "What did you do?"

I hesitate and then say, "Not too much."

I feel guilty for lying to him (Lake Como could never be construed as "not too much"). And I feel guilty because I went to Lake Como without him. I tell myself that I don't owe him the truth, and I am allowed to go anywhere with anyone I choose. But I still feel guilty.

"Annie says your boyfriend took you somewhere?" Ben says, and I can suddenly tell that he's been drinking. The boldness of the question gives something away, but beyond that, his speech is slightly slurred, all the words running together. And just as I am very good at guessing what time it is in the morning by the light coming through the window, I can pretty much guess that Ben's had five beers, six tops. What I can't tell, however, is whether he drank them alone or with Tucker.

"Oh, she did, did she?" I say, wondering whether Annie thought she was helping me out-or whether she was sabotaging me-when she passed this information along. Then I consider saying that Richard is not my boyfriend, but I'm not so sure I want Ben to have this information. It depends on whether he's with someone, which of course, I don't know. Apparently Annie's gossip only flows in one direction. Regardless of her intent, I feel on the verge of writing her off.

"So where'd you go with ol' Richard?" Ben says. "And I do mean old."

"Are you drunk?" I deflect. I do not want to tell him where I was.

"Maybe," he says. "I had to celebrate my ex-wife's birthday, after all."

"With Tucker?" I say, proving that, unlike Ben, I don't need five or six beers to ask immature, incendiary questions.

Ben says, "That depends on where you went with Richard?"

"Well, you either were with her on my birthday, or you weren't," I say.

"I was, in fact," he says.

"Fantastic," I say, marveling at how one person can take me from happy to agitated in seconds. In fact, I am suddenly angry enough to consider revising my stance on Richard. Maybe I'll have sex with him a few more times. In any event, I am going to wear my ring tomorrow to work.

Ben says nothing, so I say, "How did you and your girl celebrate my big day?"

"That's for me and Tucker to know," Ben says. "Just like, apparently, it's for you and old Richard to know the secret spot of your special celebration."

The "me and Tucker" is a knife in my chest. The pain is so sharp, in fact, that I blurt out, "Richard took me to Lake Como. The Villa d'Este to be exact. It was magnificent."

I hear a click and realize my drunk ex-husband just hung up on me, beating me to it by seconds.

The next morning I roll into work, turn on my computer, and promptly Google Tucker Janssen, complete with two ss. She is all I've thought about since about four a.m., first in the form of a disturbingly graphic dream, and then in my wide-awake, paranoid, and thoroughly pissed-off state. I am dismayed when I get six hits, but not nearly as upset as I am when I click on the first listing and pull up her grinning mug and an article in her hometown (Naperville, Illinois-I knew she was Midwestern) newspaper. The caption reads: HOMETOWN GIRL TURNED HARVARD MED STUDENT SAVES DYING MAN. The article is four years old-which means she's no longer a medical student. She's a full-fledged, practicing doctor. I scan the article and read her quote: "I've actually known CPR since junior high, so I didn't really apply any new skills. But the incident did lead to my decision to practice emergency medicine."

My heart drops as I grab the phone and hit my speed-dial button for Jess at work.

She answers on speaker phone with a jovial hello.

"Take me off speaker," I say with the urgency I feel.

I hear a rustle of her picking up the phone and then, "What's going on?"

"She's a doctor, Jess."

"What?" Jess says.

"I re-Googled her. She's an ER doctor."

"Tucker?" Jess says.

"Yes," I say, blinking back tears.

I hear Jess clicking away on her keyboard. Then she says, "Where are you seeing this?"

"Put two ss in Janssen," I say. "Like your sperm donor, Ian."

I hear more clicking and then, "Ohhh. Yeah. Here it is… Yeah, this is pretty unfortunate…"

I wait for something more, some pep talk about how being an editor is just as noble as practicing emergency medicine. She might be saving lives, but I'm enriching healthy lives.

Jess comes up with something else. Something better. "This doesn't prove jack. It doesn't prove they're dating. And it certainly doesn't prove that she's any good in bed."

"I need to know, Jess," I say, thinking of my conversation with Ben last night. "I need to know what's going on there."

"Okay," Jess says. "Did you try Googling their names together? In a joint search? It always pulls up married or engaged couples."

"Jesus! You think they could be engaged?"

"No. Calm down. I'm just saying… hold on… gimme a sec here to run this thing…" There is more clicking, then silence. Then I hear Jess whisper, "Well, fuck me."

"What?" I say. "What did you get?"

"I got a hit," she says.

"With Benjamin or Ben?" I say.

"Ben," she says. "You're not going to like it."

My hands shake as I type Ben Davenport in quotes next to Tucker Janssen, two ss. Sure enough, I get a hit, too. The Chicago marathon results. Their time is the same: 3:42:55. Impressive, especially for a woman. So she's a doctor and an athlete. But by far the worst part about this discovery is that their time is the same. Which means that they held hands across the finish line, something Ben always told me we would do together. So now I have a complete picture: I know they trained together, flew to Chicago together, visited her family in her apple-pie hometown together, gutted out a marathon together, and finished together, hand in hand. This is vastly more significant than the Villa d'Este. Jess knows it too, which I gauge by her uncharacteristic silence. It takes an awful lot to defeat Jess, especially when it comes to my honor. But she is defeated now.

"And to think," I say. "This is just what we can pull up on Google."

"Yeah," Jess says sadly. "We'd better not run another search with the word baby, huh?"