“I mean facile,” I said.
“Perfect, then, for your movie,” he said.
“Hiya, baby,” he said now, to Mary Rose. Ward moved closer to kiss her cheek, then made a last-minute detour and swooped down to plant a peck on her brown wool sweater in the region of her belly button. He wore one of those enormous black leather jackets that crackled with every breath. “Oh, and hello to you too, Mary Rose.”
Ward scooted Mary Rose over, and the four of us sat squashed on the couch, like people on a lifeboat. Ward gently placed a Styrofoam take-out carton on Mary Rose’s lap. “I remember you liked these.”
Mary Rose clapped her hands over her heart and sighed, “Oh.” Ward’s hair curled over his collar. She reached up, almost shyly, and combed it with her fingers. He closed his eyes, let his head drop back into the palm of her hand. I watched this out of the corner of my eye—it was really very sweet—when suddenly Mary Rose yanked her hand out from under Ward’s head, which snapped forward like that of a crash test dummy. The Styrofoam container slid to the floor and popped open.
“Oh, come on!” yelled Mary Rose. She gestured at the TV. “Where I come from, getting your mouth guard knocked halfway across the floor is a foul.”
“Baby, franchise players never foul,” said Ward.
“What are you talking about, sweetheart? Pippen’s got two,” said Mary Rose. “Everyone else has four. Guys coming in off the bench get called for tucking in their shirts.”
“My point exactly, sweetie.”
Then Mary Rose spied the container on the floor, inside the square white clam was a handful of pale brown cookies. She leaned forward, peered closer. “What are those?”
“Peanut-butter cookies. Left over from the shoot. I remembered they were your favorite.”
Mary Rose cupped one long hand over the other, continued to peer down at the cookies as if they were some poisonous animal devouring its prey, interesting to watch but lethal to touch. “Not my favorite.”
“Since when? Is this some kind of pregnancy food thing?” Ward looked at me and rolled his eyes.
“She’s allergic to peanuts,” I said.
“You are? You never told me that. Why didn’t you ever tell me that? I would never have brought these, if …” He leaned over and snapped the Styrofoam case shut, as if the mere sight of them might cause Mary Rose to go into anaphylactic shock. “I must be thinking of the ex-wife.”
“You have an ex-wife?”
Ward was silent. He popped the container open again, then snapped it shut. Open, shut, open, shut. “How can you tell your husband is dead? The sex is the same, but you get the remote.”
“You never told me you have an ex-wife.”
“You never told me you were allergic to peanuts.”
We all turned our attention to a free-throw shot. We watched, rapt, as the ball twirled around the rim. Lynne Baron! I’d forgotten about her. She and Ward were just separated when he and I had our acrimonious overcooked swordfish dinner. She did something in the movies. I remember, because he told me she was getting out of the film business and into training Seeing Eye dogs. “She wanted to get out of the blind leading the blind and into Labrador retrievers leading the blind,” he’d said. Then I remembered: She’d been a Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie model who threw in the thong to become a food designer. She was well-known in food-design circles. She did for a plate of deep-fried Cajun jumbo shrimp what the makeup artist, hair stylist, and wardrobe consultant did for the actress eating it.
I must confess, I then did something very unfriendlike. I gloated. This, Mary Rose, this is why you don’t get pregnant with someone you’ve just met. If you want a joint project, build a gazebo, learn to swing dance, but don’t, don’t have a baby. I felt wise, suddenly, instead of like the judgmental curmudgeon I knew myself to be.
When Ward excused himself to use the bathroom, I told Mary Rose, “Ask to talk to him outside. Don’t let him get away with this. You deserve some answers. You deserve them now. Don’t give him a chance to put together a good story. That’s what men do, you know, say nothing until they have a chance to put together a story.”
“I know,” said Mary Rose. “I know about men.”
“Well, clearly you don’t,” I said, “or not about this one, anyway.”
Mary Rose zapped me with a glare that could cause radiation burns, but when Ward came back, she asked to speak with him outside. A deck ran along the front of the house and could be reached only through Mary Rose’s bedroom, a cramped space with no insulation, big enough only for a double bed and the upended orange crate that served as a nightstand.
The rain had let up. Mary Rose sat in one of the rickety white plastic patio chairs, put her feet up on one of her window boxes. A huge parsley plant colonized one of the boxes. The other was a wasteland of twine-colored petunias that had long ago gone to seed. She left the door open. I hit the mute button on the remote, so I could hear everything.
Ward stood. “I should have told you about Lynne. I should have, but this all happened so fast and I never think of her. She never crosses my mind. You’re the only woman who crosses me.”
“Crosses your mind, you mean. So how long were you married?”
“Long enough to know it wasn’t going to work.”
“And that would be …”
“Fifteen months.”
“But who’s counting, huh?”
“You have to make it difficult on me, don’t you? I said I was sorry. I am sorry. I’m a schmuck, I admit it. I have an ex-wife, all right? But we were over long before I met you.”
“How long?”
“Over a year.”
“What happened? To the marriage, I mean.”
“I wanted kids, she didn’t. We argued. She had an affair. We grew apart.”
“Wow, that just about covers all the bases, doesn’t it?”
“I love you, Mary Rose. I love our baby. My mother and father, we all love this baby.”
I suspect it may have been the inclusion of Audra and Big Hank in this love fest, but something made Mary Rose say something odd and, even to my ears, ambiguous. “There is no baby, Ward.”
Later, when she was telling me her version of events, she said that what she meant was, “I saw our baby in the ultrasound, and it’s not a baby, but a tiny, pulsing bean with seashell ears and a gentle Martian face.” What she meant was, It’s not a baby per se. It’s a He-bean (she was already certain the bean was a boy).
Ward wet his lips. “You got an abortion?”
Mary Rose said nothing. She leaned forward and tugged out one of the dead petunias.
“You
