Alarmed, I immediately sat up.
“No, no, no—don’t move,” he said, squinting down at me as if about to perform surgery.
With a sigh, I swung away from him, slid off the bed.
“Where are you going?” he demanded.
“To get it out,” I replied, heading for the bathroom.
A sudden calm descended over me, probably because Ethan was panicking so much, I didn’t feel the need. But once I was in the bathroom alone, I was scared. I sat down on the side of the tub and, a bit frantically I’ll admit, investigated. I was relieved, momentarily, when I fished out the errant bit of latex. And horrified when, upon closer examination, I discovered the damning tear.
I leaned back against the tiled wall, the “what ifs” whirling through my mind. And I discovered, with something resembling surprise, that my chief reason for alarm—the possibility that Ethan and I—that is, the idea of a baby—was not so…alarming. I was thirty-four years old. I was a Senior Product Manager for Roxanne Dubrow cosmetics and made damn good money. I had a somewhat posh one bedroom on the Upper West Side. If I wasn’t ready now…
Okay, so it wasn’t perfect timing. I was about to start work on Roxanne Dubrow’s next big campaign, which I was hoping would lead to bigger things for my career. And then there was Ethan. Things were going just fine between us, but a baby? I tried to imagine Ethan, with his pinstripe suits and wire-rimmed glasses, cuddling a child. At first, the image was a bit peculiar. All I could come up with was the look of disgust on Ethan’s face as the imaginary child upended its breakfast on his Italian silk tie. But then I mentally put Ethan in a T-shirt and jeans, set him in a lush suburban backyard tossing a ball to a tow-headed little boy and, suddenly, a warmth swept through me, taking me by surprise. I could do this. If I had to.
In this quasi-calm state I returned to the bedroom. Ethan sat up on the bed, looking at me with anticipation. Though he was still naked, he had put his glasses on, and I felt a sudden urge to laugh. What was it about a naked man in glasses that looked so surreal? I wondered as I flopped down on the bed beside him, a kind of gleefulness swimming inside me. Then I looked up at Ethan’s handsome, well-chiseled face, studied his usually cool gray eyes and saw the panic still frozen there.
“Well?” he said, staring down at me.
Oh, right. The condom. I remembered the issue at hand. The issue that up until ten minutes ago might have caused me the same kind of terror I saw in Ethan’s eyes.
“I found it,” I said, gazing up at his usually adorable face and suddenly realizing how very much like a hamster he looked when he was nervous, all pursed mouth and squinty eyes. I rolled over, burying my face in the pillow to hide the smile that threatened to tug at my lips. After all, I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t worried. I was—in a fashion.
I gathered myself together. Then confessed. “It was…torn.”
“Torn?”
I turned to look at him over my shoulder. “Down the middle.” Then I shrugged, as if to say, These things happen.
I felt him lift off the bed, heard him pad out of the bedroom, then across the living room. Knew when he had reached the bathroom with all the damning evidence in the faux marble wastebasket I kept there. “Oh, God,” he said again.
I was surprised at how quickly the hurt stabbed at me. I knew we hadn’t planned this. It wasn’t something we discussed while sharing moonlit walks and cozy little dinners at all the best restaurants New York had to offer. Yet, I never expected Ethan to react as if I’d just passed him a venereal disease. Just what, exactly, was so horrifying about the idea of us having a child?
By the time he came back to the bedroom and stood before me in all his bespectacled naked glory, I was angry.
“What do we do?” he said.
“Do?”
“Maybe you should…rinse or something.”
“Or something,” I replied, my voice thick with sarcasm.
“Hey, isn’t there that pill? What’s it called again? It’s just for emergencies like this,” he began, his face filled with a frantic hope. “Yes—the morning-after pill. How do we get our hands on something like that?”
The hamster suddenly morphed into a rat. I wondered what I had ever found so incredibly handsome about Ethan Lederman the Third, as he called himself whenever he got pompous after a few martinis.
Then his face changed, as if he remembered something. That something quickly became apparent when he kneeled next to me on the bed. “I’m sorry, Gracie, I didn’t mean…it’s not that I didn’t want…that is… We can’t have a baby together. I can’t. It’s just not part of the plan….”
But it was too late. The wall had risen up, thick and unyielding. And I did the only thing a self-respecting woman could do.
I threw him out.
“You broke up with him?” Lori said, gawking at me from her desk just outside my office.
“Not exactly broke up,” I replied. I instantly regretted sharing this bit of news with my admin, who had inquired about my Saturday night date with Ethan the moment I walked into the office. With a shrug that I hoped made my indifference obvious, I had blithely replied, “He’s history.”
Now I realized that I had opened myself up to a conversation I didn’t want to have. Trying to deflect Lori away from the subject that had caused her perky little features to go slack with shock, I placed the bag I carried on her desk. “Guess what I brought us?” I said, pulling out one of the two giant muffins I’d bought. “Your favorite—chocolate banana chip,” I continued, setting it before her.
“Thanks,” she mumbled, barely acknowledging the muffin, which I had spontaneously decided to pick up this morning. Things at work were so hectic lately, I’d decided we could use a treat. The powers-that-be at Roxanne Dubrow, the family-owned cosmetic line we all slaved for, had been calling meetings two and three times a month, all in the name of a new product line and—hopefully—higher profit margins. Though my boss, Claudia Stewart, was under the most pressure, as she was supposed to come up with the next Big Idea, Lori often took the brunt of the workload, as Claudia and I had been sharing her ever since Jeannie, Claudia’s own assistant, had gone on maternity leave. I sometimes felt guilty. After all, Lori was twenty-three years old and made a third of what I made—and probably a quarter of what Claudia made.
“So what happened?” Lori asked, jumping up and going to the coffee machine to make a pot.
I sighed, dropping my pocketbook onto an empty chair and sliding off the light jacket I wore as a concession to the surprisingly cool September morning before I headed for the hall closet to hang it up. What could I tell her? That I realized Ethan was a selfish bastard who cared nothing about anyone but himself? That there was a possibly—albeit a remote one—that I was carrying this cretin’s child? That the very idea of sharing anything grander than body fluids had nearly caused dear Ethan to lose the filet mignon he’d dropped a wad of cash on at dinner all over the Italian loafers he’d parked under my bed?
She was too young for the truth. It would only disillusion her. And since I firmly believed a woman needed some illusions in order to have any
