The Solomon Sisters Wise Up Read online

I’d been right about C, except for the movie part, but Griffen had also gotten me a present.

  Maybe Lisa was right. Maybe he was more committed to the relationship than I thought.

  Tell him, I ordered myself. Tell him right now.

  I opened my mouth, but slid in a forkful of steak.

  I opened my mouth again, but the waiter came over, granting me a twelve-second reprieve. And while Griffen ordered another bottle of Pellegrino, I stared at his Roman nose and hoped the baby inherited it.

  My stomach churned. How would he react? Unlike Ally, I didn’t think Griffen would run screaming out of the restaurant, never to be seen or heard from again. I also didn’t think he’d drop down on one knee and offer me the ring of my choice in Tiffany’s (I rented Sweet Home Alabama a few nights ago).

  I had no idea what he’d say. I knew only that as he sat across from me, I had visions of the two of us in the nursery of our Upper West Side brownstone or Upper East Side two-bedroom prewar high-rise on the twenty-something floor, deciding on a Where the Wild Things Are or Peter Pan mural and registering for essential items like musical mobiles and bouncy seats.

  Tell him! Tell him!

  “I’m dying to know what’s in that bag,” I said.

  Chicken shit.

  With that sex-inducing smile, Griffen slid the red bag across the table.

  Inside all that passionate red and silver puffing was a thick paperback biography of Theodore Roosevelt, which was right up there with The History of Western Civilization.

  “Griffen, are you seeing anyone else?” I blurted out.

  We both froze, his fork in midair, midway to his mouth, my mind in midthought. I hadn’t meant to ask that question; it was way too loaded for what I really had to blurt out tonight.

  He took the bite of herb-encrusted salmon. “Uh-oh, you don’t like the book,” he said, coy smile on those lips. “I should have gotten you the scarf. I knew it.”

  A scarf would have been better. A biography of Eleanor Roosevelt would have been better.

  Damn. Damn. Damn. There was no denying that Griffen Maxwell wasn’t in love with me. You knew when a guy really liked you and when he just liked you and liked having sex with you. You knew. From date one, I’d figured Griffen was somewhere in between. But I still thought there was potential. After all, as article after Wow article said, you weren’t supposed to have expectations. You were supposed to have fun while leading your busy life!

  “He’ll never marry you,” Ally had said two minutes into our phone conversation last night. “Signs, Sarah,” she said. “You have to pay attention to the signs. A guy in love doesn’t leave your apartment at three in the morning. A guy in love doesn’t play racquetball on Sunday mornings when he should be having lox and bagels and the Times in bed with you. It’s like that Fleetwood Mac song says—if he doesn’t love you now, he’ll never love you again.”

  I told her I thought that was the most depressing thing I’d ever heard, that we had been dating for only two months.

  “Duh!” and “Stop living in a fucking fairy tale already” were among just a few of her responses. “The guy doesn’t even sleep over, Sarah. He’s not going to pass out cigars when you tell him you’re pregnant.”

  I wasn’t sure why Ally, who married her smarmy husband right out of law school at age twenty-three, thought she knew anything about men or dating. That expertise had been bestowed on my half sister, Zoe, who at twenty-six somehow managed to make a very good living as a relationship guru by critiquing people’s dates. I would have hired Zoe myself during my early dates with Griffen, but she lived in L.A. and we weren’t exactly close on sisterly terms.

  Griffen was flipping through my birthday present. “I think you’ll really like the book,” he said. “Teddy Roosevelt’s one of my heroes. The station’s doing a segment on him next week. I’ll set up your VCR to tape it.”

  Before the pink line, a statement like that would have gotten me very excited. I would have read into it, extrapolating: 1) I want to see you again. 2) I want to be inside your apartment. 3) I want to do things for you. 4) I want to share my work with you. 5) This relationship is definitely going somewhere.

  Now, though, all I heard was exactly what he said.

  I took a sip of my Pellegrino and wondered if he’d still come over to tape it for me after running screaming out of the restaurant. “Great! Thanks,” I told him.

  “So you do like the present,” he said. “Whew! It’s not easy buying a birthday present for someone you haven’t been seeing that long.”

  Bad sign number two.

  He then rushed into a monologue about Teddy Roosevelt and the turn of the last century. As he talked on and on about old New York and corruption and poverty and the Lower East Side, I realized that he knew I wanted an answer to The Question and that he was hoping I’d either back down or be bored to death.

  “Um, Griffen?”

  He paused, busying himself with the saltshaker, sipping his champagne, slicing, dabbing.

  “I was serious back there,” I said. “I really need to know if you’re dating anyone else.”

  “Sarah…” He smiled a bit tightly and suddenly took both my hands across the table. “You know what I really need to know? If you’re finished with your dinner so that I can propose a toast.” He didn’t wait or even take a breath. He raised his champagne glass. “To you, on your twenty-ninth birthday.”

  The words so that I can propose echoed in my head. So that I can propose. So that I can propose. Propose. Propose. Propose.

  I didn’t lift my glass. He eyed me, then took a sip of his champagne.

  “Griffen?”

  Blank stare. Slight tinge of annoyance on his face.

  “Sa-rah…”

  I could feel my cheeks turning red. “Look, Griffen, we’ve been seeing each other for two months, and I’d like to know where we stand. It’s not so out of line for me to ask.”

  Screw how loaded the question was, given what I had to tell him. I wanted to know. I had to know.

  He sighed. “Okay. You’re right. It’s not out of line at all.”

  I waited.

  He took another sip of champagne, then leaned across the table, took both my hands again and smiled. “Sarah, I really like you and we have a good time together. How about if we leave it at that for now and just enjoy ourselves?”

  Why did guys always say that? Why? It meant Yes, I am seeing other people, or Not necessarily, but I want to reserve the right because I don’t really feel that way about you, even though I like you fine and enjoy your company.

  Tears pricked the backs of my eyes, and I blinked them back hard.

  He squinted across the table at me in the candlelight. “Oh shit, are you crying?” He sat back.

  “I just want to know if we’re headed anywhere,” I said, my voice squeaking.

  Groan of frustration. “Honestly, Sarah, I don’t know. I like you a lot. I really enjoy your company. That’s what I know.”

  A small sob escaped me.

  He took a deep breath. “Okay. For starters, I think you’re taking this a lot more seriously than I am. I’m not really looking for anything serious right now. If you want the truth, that’s it.”

  That’s when the tears came, fast and furious.

  And that was also when I heard the faint beginning of someone singing “Happy Birthday To You.” The song got louder, closer. I looked up to find our waiter finishing, “Happy birthday, dear Sarah, Happy birthday to you,” and setting down a cupcake with a tiny lit candle in the center.

  “Make a wish!” Griffen said. He smiled and was looking at me with the expression of a guy who was under the impression that a thoughtful gesture would allow us to kiss and make up—or at least get me to shut up. I was tempted to conk him over the head with the bottle of Pellegrino. Was he a jerk or just clueless? “It’s chocolate with white icing,” he added. “I remembered when we passed Veniero’s on our first date, you looked at all the desserts in the window and said that with al
l the amazing treats to choose from, your favorite was still a plain old chocolate cupcake with white icing.”

  He couldn’t be a jerk. Jerks didn’t remember things like that. Or say things like that. Right?

  He stared at me for a second, clearly waiting for a smile or a You’re right, we’re enjoying ourselves! Let’s just have a good time! When I hung my head so low that I almost got frosting on my chin, he said, “Look, Sarah, I feel like I should just come right out and say what’s on my mind.”

  I’m in love with you, Sarah. I’m in love with you. I’m in love with you.

  He cleared his throat. “I really like you, but I don’t want to lead you on. Maybe we should just be friends.”

  What, and be a single mother? I thought numbly, per that old joke.

  But it wasn’t a joke.

  I was only supposed to be pregnant. That was enough to contend with. For the past week, I’d been slowly accepting that word as applicable to myself. I am pregnant. I am a pregnant woman. I take prenatal vitamins and don’t drink coffee or alcoholic beverages. If I have a cold or a sore throat, I brave it out. I am a pregnant person.

  The concept of single motherhood hadn’t really registered on my radar.

  I stared down at my cupcake and cried. The man and woman at the table to our right were glancing at me.

  “Sarah,” Griffen said through gritted teeth, “why don’t you have some champagne? It’ll help you calm down.”

  “I can’t have any champagne,” I muttered.

  “Have some,” he said as though I hadn’t spoken, his eyes darting around in embarrassment. “You’ll feel better, trust me.”

  “I can’t have any alcohol, you asshole! I’m pregnant!”

  Griffen didn’t signal the waiter and ask for the check and go running out of the restaurant, the way my sister thought he might.

  He just sat there, looking as though someone had just kicked him very hard in the stomach.

  “Congratulations, honey,” the elderly woman at the next table whispered to me.

  2

  Ally

  It was a good thing I didn’t know until three o’clock this morning that Sarah was pregnant, or I would have ended up driving back into the city last night to drag Andrew away from his shareholders’ dinner meeting and into the bathroom of the Palm steakhouse for a quickie against the sink.

  I was ovulating.

  And my sister, my younger sister, was pregnant.

  I was ovulating, my younger sister was pregnant, and where was my husband? He was working late, meeting clients early, researching something online, going for a jog. He was anywhere but in bed with me.

  And as my eggs were at this very moment aging in unbearable bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Cross Island Expressway—I slammed down on the horn with a honnnnnk!—I had to concede that my marriage wasn’t what it used to be.

  “Whose is?” my friend Kristina had said earlier this afternoon during lunch-hour Botox injections in a small spa near our midtown law offices. “It stops being about sex after the second year.”

  I would have shaken my head, but a woman in a white lab coat was aiming a needle at the “angry spot” between my eyes. “Andrew and I had good sex for longer than two years,” I countered. “We still have decent sex. Well, sometimes.”

  Kristina snort-laughed. “Yeah, because you’re having it once a month, Ally. Of course it’s good. And trust me, if you two weren’t trying to get pregnant, you’d have sex once every three months.”

  I didn’t know about that. Andrew and I had been trying in earnest to have a baby for only the past five years. We’d been married eleven. That left six years. Take away the first two, and that left four years in between of good, more-than-once-every-month sex.

  “Anyway, Kris, what man would willingly go without sex for three months?”

  She sat up and looked at me as if I’d just sprung down from Planet Naive. “No man would. It’s called a little harmless nookie on the side.”

  I sat up and looked at her as if she’d just sprung down from Planet Are You Kidding Me? “Since when is ‘nooky on the side’ little or harmless?” I asked, grabbing a mirror and admiring the newly plump bridge of my nose. “Wait a minute—are you saying you know that Jack is cheating on you and you don’t care?”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I don’t care to know for sure. We have a good, solid marriage, we love our little Ben, we have history. That’s what I care about.”

  Kristina had been married for two years. Two. She’d given her longtime boyfriend (of seven years) an ultimatum three times over the course of six months, and the third time had been the charm.

  She got pregnant on her honeymoon.

  We freshened our lipsticks and fluffed our hair in the large, round mirror on the wall. “Trust me, Kris, if Andrew were even thinking about cheating on me, I’d know it. We’ve been married for eleven years, and we dated for two years before that. I know the man.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “There’s another category, then. Husbands like Andrew in their late thirties, early forties, who don’t need it like they used to. Sex is available every night, right there in their own bed, but they’re too tired, like us. We all work twelve-hour days, commute three hours round trip, spend our lunch hours getting Botox and facials or running a few miles at the track at the gym. Who has time or energy for sex? Married couples want to come home, eat dinner, read a chapter or two in a book, watch a little TV and kiss their spouse good-night. Lights out. A little dull, but comfortable. You get through the seven-year-itch, your marriage is stronger for it. And then one day you realize you’re your parents.”

  How romantic. And that didn’t describe my parents’ marriage. The seven-year-itch hadn’t destroyed my parents’ marriage—another woman had.

  But it did describe my own marriage.

  Which was why I was reading an asinine book called How To Spice Up Your Marriage by the equally asinine and ridiculously popular married marriage therapists, Doctor Joan and Doctor Jake. I was on chapter four, which was about the importance of oral sex in bringing back the sparks. Ladies, when was the last time you performed oral sex on your husband? Doctor Jake asked in his section of the chapter. Hit the video stores and rent the classic Deep Throat. That’s all the education you need, ladies!

  Idiot.

  Dr. Joan had then chastised her husband and colleague in her section (that was their schtick), then gave step-by-step instructions on how to give a proper blow job. And you’ve gotta swallow, girls!

  Sexual intercourse didn’t always interest Andrew. But if I put my mouth anywhere near the region of his penis, he began to pant. And then I’d get what I wanted. Sperm inside me. And, sorry, Dr. Jake and Dr. Joan, but I wasn’t referring to my throat. I needed the sperm to fertilize my eggs—not to make me gag and run to the bathroom.

  Honkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!

  “Move, goddammit!” I screamed at the traffic.

  Calm down. Calm down. Calm down. Remember what the gynecologist said. Stress is not good for making a baby.

  Still, I didn’t have time for rush-hour traffic. My eggs didn’t have time for rush-hour traffic.

  It was five-thirty, and I wanted to be home by six-thirty to have a good hour to prepare for Andrew, who, according to his snotty little priss of a secretary, would be stopping home for a half hour or so at seven-thirty before a tennis match with a client at the club.

  I had thirty minutes of Andrew Sharp’s precious time. All I needed was thirty seconds.

  For those precious thirty seconds, for my surging luteinizing hormone, I’d gone shopping. I’d left work at five o’clock, the earliest in the history of my law career (and that was after taking the two-hour lunch with Kristina for Botox) so I could nip up to Victoria’s Secret. I eyed the pink shopping bag on the passenger seat of my car. I could have written the chapter on sex accessories in How To Spice Up Your Marriage. Inside that bag was a short, sheer, lacy, low-cut red teddy, matching thong an
d a grocery bag containing a can of fat-free Cool Whip. I had enough slutty nighties, edible underwear, Kama Sutra body oil and paraphernalia from Come Again, an “adult toy store,” to interest my husband in the process of making a thousand babies.

  I only wanted one.

  “You’re going to be thirty-five next month, Ally,” my gynecologist had said at my last checkup. “You can get pregnant through your early forties. Can. Maybe. But the odds are very slim. Your best time to conceive was when you were twenty-seven. Your eggs aren’t what they used to be. Off the record, Al, either get pregnant now, or start putting yourself on adoption waiting lists.”

  For the past five years, my doctor had assured me there was absolutely nothing wrong with me, and Andrew’s doctor had assured him his sperm count was just fine.

  “All you have to do to get pregnant,” my gynecologist had said, “is make love with your husband. Have lots of sex, regularly. Oh, and decrease your level of stress. Your blood pressure is at the high range of normal.”

  Decrease my level of stress. Okay, Doc.

  What was making my blood pressure rise to the high range of normal? How about the sixty-hour work week, the quota of two hundred and fifty billable hours a month, and the five male idiots I had to work with at my law firm? If it weren’t for Kristina and a female associate and a favorite paralegal, I’d have quit Funwell, Funwell and Logsworth a long time ago—eleven years ago.

  And how about the very fancy envelope that arrived in my mailbox two weeks ago, alerting me to the fact that my father and his girlfriend were engaged? (Had my father called to tell me the news himself? Of course not.) Also included was a little card inviting me to participate in “Archweller-Solomon Wedding Fest,” the wedding-planning extravaganza to which my father and Wife No. 3-to-be were subjecting their immediate family. Invited were the three Solomon daughters, the fiancée’s toddler (oh, she’d be a big help) and the fiancée’s mother. The invitation included days and times (starting late October and continuing through after New Year’s) for visiting venues, caterers, florists, harpists, photographers, dress boutiques, et cetera, conveniently after work hours and on weekends so that the Solomon sisters and their patriarch, all of whom actually worked for a living (except for Zoe—sorry, half sis, but I wouldn’t call being the “Dating Diva of L.A.” a job) could attend all or some events.