Lost and Wanted(62)

“Thank you!” Jack said, his face exploding into a natural smile. He was suddenly his best self, bubbly and polite, and let Charlie show him how to do a wheelie.

Charlie had taken a cab to our house, and so I drove to the restaurant. On the way Charlie said: “I knew I would only have a few minutes with him, so I wanted him to like me right away.”

I didn’t take that as anything more than a comment on our hectic holiday schedules at the time.



* * *



—

When Jack was in preschool and Pema was still with us, I would go out at night once a week. Sometimes these were work events, and other times just dinner with a few colleagues. I also socialized with the mothers I knew through Jack, especially Vicky and Eunice, and every few months I saw my old friend from Harvard, Elaine, now a professor of medical anthropology at Tufts. When I go out with any of these people, I know what the conversation is going to comprise. With Vicky and Eunice, I talk about the children; with other scientists, I gossip about MIT. With Elaine, who doesn’t have children, I often have the most interesting conversations: about feminism and work, about politics and whatever each of us happens to be reading.

    As Charlie and I drove to the restaurant, listening to the same station we’d often put on in college—they seemed to have given up on attracting new listeners, and were still playing the same R.E.M., U2, and Prince albums we loved back then—I thought about what was different from those other friendships. It was a level of intimacy that I’d never reached with another woman, not back then or once we became adults. I think that with most of our friends we choose how much of ourselves to reveal, and with a very select few it feels as if there is no choice.

We sat at a table against the wall, Charlie insisting that I take the banquette. We talked about the children for a while, eating some sort of special miso soup with mushrooms. Charlie told me a funny story about Simmi, who had asked Charlie innocently whether people had to “do sex” to have a baby. I made the joke I always make, that it’s actually a lot easier to explain IUI birth with a C-section than it is a natural conception and birth.

Charlie laughed. “Does Jack ask about his donor?”

“A few months ago—he just came home from school and asked why he didn’t have a dad.”

“Oh god,” Charlie said.

“Right. I started in on my whole spiel—I’d rehearsed it in my head a million times. At the end I asked him if he had any questions, and he said: ‘Dylan’s dad got him a light saber that really lights up.’?”

Charlie laughed. “That’s what dads are for. You can borrow Terrence anytime you need someone to buy Jack plastic weapons.”

“How’s it going, with his work and everything?”

Charlie shook her head disbelievingly. “It’s amazing. I didn’t think it would work—I didn’t say it at the time, but I didn’t really think Ray could pull it off. Then some of the pro surfers started buying the boards. They were actually in the L.A. Times style magazine last month, and now the store is going crazy. Online orders, too. Terrence does the online stuff, which used to be great, because he was home so much.”

“But not anymore?”

    We were sitting next to a large, tropical fish tank, presumably decorative, where fish we were not going to eat swam around: goldfish with swollen eyes, darting neon tetras, and an angry-looking lionfish, lurking against the multicolored pebbles at the bottom.

“Things are really hard with us right now. He almost didn’t come to Boston.”

Hearing about other people’s troubles with their spouses sometimes made me glad to be single; other times it just made me think I’d never meet anyone.

“How come?”

“It’s hard on him, me being sick. I decided I’m not doing staffing this year—that means competing for jobs on different shows. I had a flare at the end of the summer, and it was pretty bad. I’m a supervising producer now—that’s basically two levels from the top. The idea is that I’m going to stay home and create my own show.”

“The Manhattan Project show?”

Charlie nodded. “It’s changed a little, though. I think I’m going to focus more on the workers in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There were black nurses in the hospital, black laborers at the labs and the test sites. Did you know they segregated the female workers in a kind of barracks? I mean, you’d expect them to be racially segregated—but the women were even separated from the men, even the married ones. There was a curfew and guards outside the gate.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I feel like it’s a kind of Buffalo Soldier story, but with women. And science.”

“I’d love to watch that.”

“Thanks. Unfortunately, you’re not anyone’s target audience. And even if I can write it and sell it—that’s a big if—I don’t know if I have it in me, being in the office or on set in the way it would take to make it happen.”

“You look great,” I told her.

“People always say that,” Charlie said. “I mean, thank you, but that’s one of the things with lupus. You can’t always see it, so it’s hard for people to understand how bad it is.”

Charlie had ordered us some dumplings that arrived steaming in a basket. We were drinking sake from purposefully mismatched green-and-purple shot glasses.