Then Came You

Vanessa, who was a big fan of putting things out there, used to say — even though I knew it was unlikely.

“Is your mom still in the city?” Darren asked.

I shook my head. “She’s. .” This was painful to admit, but Darren was basically a stranger, a stranger who’d been on my payroll, which meant that he was obligated to keep my secrets. Besides, it wasn’t as if we had friends in common. There was no one he could gossip to who’d be interested. “She’s in New Mexico. In an ashram.”

“An ashram?” he repeated. “Whoa. Did she read Eat, Pray, Love?”

“She said she wanted to live authentically.” The last word came out more scornfully than I’d intended. I looked around to see who might have heard, but the other people in the park seemed focused on their food, or on one another.

Darren raised his eyebrows. “You don’t approve?”

I shrugged, feeling foolish, nibbling at a lettuce leaf to buy time. “She sends me pictures of herself in the sweat lodge.”

“Good times.” He grinned. “My mom sends me articles she clips from the newspaper. Like, actually cuts them out with scissors. Recipes, mostly. Those Mark Bittman ones, with six ingredients. You think your dad still loves her? Your mother, not mine.”

“I do,” I said automatically. My parents never fought, never even disagreed until my mother took up with the Baba. Then I thought of my father and India, beaming at me as they’d told me their “wonderful news,” the way he’d tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. I couldn’t remember him ever looking at my mother like that, or touching her so tenderly. My parents had been equals — at least at first. When they’d met, at the University of Michigan, my mother was the one who came from a wealthier, more established family, and she was a year ahead of him in school. Her parents had gone to college; my father’s parents had not. India was different — younger, smaller, more fragile, more in need of a wealthy man’s patronage. Maybe that was what he found appealing.

“And the stepmother?” Darren asked. “What’s she doing that’s so bad?”

“Beg pardon?”

“I mean, did she turn your bedroom into a sex dungeon?”

I smiled — it was a funny thought — and shook my head.

“Steal your boyfriend?” Darren continued. “Run over your dog?”

“She hasn’t done anything to me,” I admitted. I wiped my fingers on a paper napkin. “And I don’t have a dog.”

“Somehow,” said Darren, “that does not surprise me.” He’d finished the first milkshake. He lifted the second one, tilted it toward me, and started drinking almost before I’d finished shaking my head. “Do you think she makes your dad happy?”

“I think,” I said, “that if she does, it’s a happiness that’s illusory and transient.”

He frowned. “Jesus, where’d you go to school?”

“Vassar. And it won’t last,” I said. “A person like that, she’ll get bored. She’ll leave him.”

“And take all his money?” Darren’s voice was innocent enough, but he knew — he had to — that India couldn’t leave with more than a few million of my father’s dollars. Unless this folly they were embarking on came to pass. Unless they had a baby.

“It’s not that,” I said. I was reluctant to say what I really thought, but, again, I reminded myself that Darren was an employee, that he’d keep my confidences. “I’m worried that she’ll hurt him. That she’ll break his heart.”

There it was, out in the open. “Is that what happened with your mother?” Darren asked.

I nodded again. He pointed to the uneaten half of my bun. “Are you going to finish that?”

“Yes,” I said, “I am.”

He shrugged, sucked fruitlessly at the milkshake cup, then asked, “There’s no chance she really loves him?”

I started ripping my lettuce into shreds, feeling Darren’s eyes on me, his careful regard. It felt good, I acknowledged, to have a boy look at me like that. “I’m not sure,” I answered, wondering in what universe I was qualified to answer questions about love. I’d never really had a boyfriend. Crushes, yes, dates, yes, kissing and fondling on dormitory beds, somewhat. I’d lost my virginity the week before college ended with a boy who I was pretty sure was gay, not because I loved him, or even particularly liked him, but because I couldn’t bear the thought of receiving my diploma before I’d had sex. I knew that I was a throwback. I knew that I would have been more comfortable in an era of corsets and clear expectations, of good manners and muted voices, where men didn’t hawk phlegm on the street and undress you with their eyes and use fuck and shit like yes and please.

“I don’t know how much I know about love.”

Darren started to sing. “I know. . something about love. Gotta want it bad.” His voice was surprisingly tuneful.

“Are you in a band?”

“I was in a girl group, actually. I sang the high parts.” He shook his head sadly. “Then Curtis started up with Deena, and Effie took it hard.” He hummed a few bars of “And I Am Telling You.”

“That must have been difficult.”

He shrugged. “It’s why I have chosen the stable and well-paying life of a professional investigator, instead of pursuing my passion for doo-wop.”

I folded the remnants of my lunch into the paper sack and wiped my hands again. Darren said, “You know, my folks split up, too. It turned out to be the best thing for them. FYI.” He held out his hand for my trash, tossed it, then came back and picked up his pad and his pen. “If you tell him, what good comes of it?”

“Well, then he’d know. Then he could make an informed decision.”

He scratched the side of his nose. “But he’s already married her. That’s a decision, right?”

“Not an irrevocable one. Marriages can be annulled…”

He shook his head. “That’s mostly for soap operas. In the real world, actually, it’s a lot harder than you’d think.”

“He could get a divorce.”

“True.”

“He could sue her for fraud. He could say she’s misrepresented herself.” Of course, I knew that such a lawsuit would place him even more in danger of being mocked on the Internet than a mere annulment or a simple divorce would have.

“Also true.” He pulled off his ridiculous glasses, massaged the bridge of his nose, then rested his head on the back of the bench, and closed his eyes.

I glared at him. “Are you going to sleep?”

“I am not. I’m enjoying the day. This weather’s great. I grew up in Miami. It never cools off down there.” He stretched his arms up over his head. When they came down, one of them landed around my shoulders. I pulled away, startled. . then shrugged and settled back against him. He was strange, but funny and interesting. I’d known a lot of guys, but not many of them were interesting, and not many of those were interested in me.

“They’re having a baby,” I blurted. “With a surrogate.”

He opened his eyes and pulled his hands back. “Now that,” he said, “would change things.”

“I know that.” My voice was sharp. “Don’t you think I know that? My father’s fifty-seven. Do you think he’s got any business having a baby? He’ll be seventy-five years old when the kid graduates from high school. Almost eighty when it’s done with college.”

“And eighty-two when it gets its master’s degree.”

“It’s wrong. It’s unnatural.”

“It’s technology,” he said, shrugging. “Remember that woman who had eight kids at once?”

I shuddered and said nothing. Darren sat up, put his glasses back on, and flipped to a fresh page of his legal pad.

“Pros? Cons?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell him that a baby would mean that our family was irrevocably, irretrievably broken, that there’d be no going back to the way we were. I remembered the smallest things, every happy detail. In the Hamptons, after dinner, my father would pile us into the car for a trip to Carvel. Bring me a small dish of Thinny-Thin, my mother would instruct from the daybed on the screened-in porch, where she