Some weeks later, Tara goes to Jenni’s baby shower. It’s a girl, apparently. Yippee.
The shower is at the Colony Club, Jenni’s fancy Upper East Side cult, so naturally I sit it out in favor of driving Uber. I tell stories to my riders about how one time someone tipped me four hundred dollars and the next day they won the lottery, seventeen million. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, of course, but you can’t deny the workings of karma. There’s as much truth in the story as there is in mainstream media, and people guzzle that down without an ounce of critical thinking, so there’s no moral dilemma as I see it.
A few days after, Jenni calls me up to ask if I’ve decided whether I want to be the godmother. The baby is due in just a couple weeks so she needs to know.
It’s ridiculous but also flattering that she still wants me as godmother, especially after I boycotted the baby shower. I’d assumed she would’ve changed her mind by now, or that Peter would’ve talked her out of it.
“Look, Jenni, I really don’t think I’m the right person for the job,” I tell her over the phone. “With me as godmother, she’ll be a teen mom in juvie.”
Jenni isn’t dissuaded. “I know you’re up for it,” she says, with a level of conviction I haven’t earned. “But if you don’t want to, I’m not going to force you. We can ask Peter’s sister instead.”
“Why not Tara or Hal?” I suggest. “They’d jump at the chance, I’m sure.”
Jenni pauses, like she’s trying to figure out how to phrase it. “I just think, for a godmother, we want someone who’s a bit more spiritually connected. Tara and Hal aren’t really.”
“And I am?”
“In your own way,” Jenni says, leaving me more confused than ever. It’s like her time away from Bushwick has made her forget everything I do, everything I am.
“Your pregnancy hormones must really be acting up,” I say. “I don’t have an ounce of religion in my bones.”
“I’m not talking about religion in a dogmatic sense,” Jenni clarifies, though it only makes things murkier, like the bottom of a lake shrouded by weeds and algae. “I’m talking about a relationship with the divine.”
“I’m the only divine entity that I believe in,” I say. “And I don’t think that kind of self-centered worship counts on the godmother application form.”
“Mm-hmm,” Jenni says vaguely, almost like she knows something I don’t. It’s galling, but I can’t yell at a woman who’s nine months pregnant, so I just decline again, say she should ask Peter’s sister and leave it at that.
A couple weeks later, sometime deep into the snow of February, the old group text lights up with the news that Jenni’s going into labor. I’m not inclined to go to the hospital but Tara talks me into it, so we meet up with Hal in the waiting room of Mount Sinai on the Upper East Side.
Tara brings a bouquet of balloons, Hal has a stack of politically themed children’s books, and I’ve got a pack of gender-neutral onesies. I even paid more for the organic cotton; the nylon blendwasn’t cutting it. A nurse leads us into the room. Jenni is there on the bed, the little sack in her arms. Peter is at her side, massaging her shoulders as they both stare at the baby, all wrapped up in cloth, except for the head that’s covered in dark peach fuzz.
Jenni smiles, starts crying when she sees us and introduces us to their daughter. Juniper is the name, very over-the-top. They call her June, a bit better. “My summer in the winter,” Jenni says, reduced to tears again, though even I’ve got to admit it feels like an addition, not a subtraction.
I know it’s off-limits, so maybe that’s why I think of Chris and what kind of dad he’ll be.
Doting on Olivia, giving her back rubs and foot rubs, going grocery shopping to meet all her cravings.
“Well, I’ve got to run now,” I announce to everyone, suddenly oppressed by the mugginess of the room, the humidity of all the affection. “I’m late for my shift at Kora’s.”
Everyone can hear my lie, but I don’t care. I just need to get out of there. It’s all too tender, too pure. The love of it all, the loss of it all, all drilling into my temples like a migraine.
Chapter 31
Something shifts in me after Jenni gives birth.
I, too, want to have something to show from my thirty-one years of looping around the sun. Not a baby, no way, but the compulsion takes over to sell a script once and for all. Time to sell out, write a formulaic little rom-com, and sell it to the highest bidder. Then I’ll use the cash to take a trip somewhere where it’s summer all the time, or maybe winter would be better. The cold sharpens the senses, emboldens the life force so much more than the heat, which only ends up lulling you into a droopy sleep.
After that first success, I’ll have the credibility, the freedom, to pursue more creative, less commercial writing endeavors down the line. And I’ll have a pot of money and an inbox full of fan mail by that point, the feeling that the world is waiting to see what I do next. Not that I want the lobotomy wine-mom rom-com crowd to be my fans, but I’ll take them for starters, then leave them in the dust when the more intellectual crowd catches on to my genius. How’s that?
I shut myself in my room for a couple days for a writing lockdown, leaving only for very important things like bathroom breaks, ice cream breaks, smoking breaks, Netflix breaks. By the time the solitary retreat is over, I still only have scraps of a draft. It’s an enemies-to-lovers story between a Greek innkeeper and a demanding American tourist, set on the bluffs of Santorini. I can see wherethe whole story is going by the time I’m on the third page—never a good sign. Inevitably it means I can’t bring myself to finish it because it’s too obvious. Anyone could fill in the blanks; why make me do the grunt work?
“It seems I’m allergic to fluff,” I tell Tara, unlocking my door and rejoining her in the world of the living. She’s on the couch, moping too, fresh from her latest callback rejection. “I physically can’t write something bad, even if it’s commercial.”
Tara builds me up, says she applauds my artistic integrity. “It’s a rare thing these days. All the scripts I read for auditions are built on clichés, even the dramas,” she says. “Could feed a whole country with all the corn in those lines.”
“Exactly.” I try not to wonder where I’d be without Tara still at my side. “It’s a fucked-up industry, one big house of cards.”
There’s a lurking fear, though, that I’m the one who’s fucked up. That my mind is jumping and sticking in all the wrong spots. I just keep thinking about Chris and the way he felt on New Year’s. It was a type of touch that cut through the numbness. So safe, too, in a way I didn’t even know I could experience.
