Jennifer Weiner - Good in Bed

We stood for a minute, and something passed between us, some small easing of the tension. I could feel the blisters on both feet, and how my cheeks felt tight and painful with sunburn. I could feel the cool thin cotton of his T-shirt on my back, and how nice it was, and my belly full of good food, and how nice that was. And I could feel my breasts, which ached dully.

“Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have a breast pump in here?” I asked. My first attempt at a joke since I’d woken up in the hospital.

He shook his head. “Would ice help?” he asked. I nodded, and sat back down on the couch, where he brought me ice wrapped in a towel. I turned my back to him and tucked the ice under my shirt.

“How’s Nifkin?” he asked again.

I shut my eyes. “With my mom,” I muttered. “I sent him to stay with her for a while.”

“Well, don’t let him stay away too long. He’ll forget his tricks.” He took a sip of his tea. “I was going to teach him how to speak, if we’d had a little more time together.”

I nodded. My eyelids were feeling heavy again.

“Maybe some other time,” he said. He kept his eyes politely averted as I shifted the ice around. “I’d like to see Nifkin again,” he said. He paused and cleared his throat. “I’d like to see you, too, Cannie.”

I looked at him. “Why?” A rude question, I knew, but I felt like I was past the point of good manners… of any manners, really. “Why me?” “Because I care about you.” “Why?” I asked again.

“Because you’re…” He let the last word hang there. When I looked at him he was waving his hands in the air, like he was trying to sculpt phrases out of the air. “You’re special.”

I shook my head.

“You are.”

Special, I thought. I didn’t feel special. I felt ridiculous, really. I felt like a spectacle of a woman, a sob story, a freak. How must I look, really? I imagined myself on the street that night, my shoe falling apart, sweaty and filthy, my breasts leaking. They should take a picture, put my poster up in every junior high school, staple it in bookstores next to the Harlequin novels and the self-help books about find-ing your soulmate, your life partner, your one true love. I could be a warning; I could turn girls away from my fate.

I must have dozed off then, because when I came awake with a start, with my cheek against the blanket and the towel full of ice melting in my lap, he was sitting right across from me.

He’d taken his glasses off, and his eyes were gentle.

“Here,” he said. He had something in his arms, cradled like a baby. Pillows. Blankets. “I made up the guest bedroom for you.”

I walked there in a daze, aching from exhaustion. The sheets were cool and crisp, the pillows like an embrace. I let him draw back the covers, help me onto the bed, tuck them up over me, smooth the blanket over my shoulders. His face seemed so much softer without his glasses, in the dark.

He sat on the edge of the bed. “Will you tell me why you’re so angry?” he asked.

I was so tired, and my tongue felt heavy and slow in my mouth. It was like being drugged, or hypnotized; like dreaming underwater. Or maybe I would have told anyone, if I’d let anyone get close enough to ask. “I’m mad at Bruce. I’m mad that his girlfriend pushed me, and I’m mad that he doesn’t love me. I’m mad at my father, I guess.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I saw him… in California” I paused to yawn, to fight the words out. “He didn’t want to know me.” I passed my hands over my belly, or where my belly had been. “The baby…,” I said. My eyelids felt freighted, so heavy I could barely keep them open. “He didn’t want to know.”

He brushed the back of his hand against my cheek, and I leaned into his touch like a cat, unthinking. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “You’ve had a lot of sadness in your life.”

I breathed in, then out, pondering the truth of this. “That’s not exactly a news flash,” I said.

He smiled. “I just wanted you to know,” he said, “I wanted to see you, so I could tell you…”

I stared at him, wide-eyed in the dark.

“You don’t have to do everything alone,” he said. “There are people who care about you. You just have to let them help.”

I sat up then. The sheets and blankets fell around my waist. “No,” I told him, “that’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

I shook my head, once, impatiently. “Do you know what love is?”

He considered the question. “I think I heard a song about it once.”

“Love,” I said, “is the rug they pull out from under you. Love is Lucy always lifting the football at the last second so that Charlie Brown falls on his ass. Love is something that every time you believe in it, it goes away. Love is for suckers, and I’m not going to be a sucker ever again.” When I closed my eyes I could see myself as I was, months ago, lying on the bathroom floor, highlights in my hair and makeup on my face, the expensive shoes and fancy clothes and diamond earrings that couldn’t keep me safe, couldn’t keep the wolf from my door.

“I want a house with hardwood floors,” I said, “and I don’t want anyone else to come inside.”

He was touching my hair, saying something. “Cannie,” he repeated.

I opened my eyes.

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

I stared at him in the dark. “How else could it be?” I asked, quite reasonably.

He leaned forward and kissed me.

He kissed me, and at first I was too shocked to do anything, too shocked to move, too shocked to do anything but sit there, perfectly still, as his lips touched mine.

He pulled his head back. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I leaned toward him. “Hardwood floors,” I whispered, and I realized I was teasing him, and that I was smiling, and it had been so long since I had smiled.

“I will give you whatever I can,” he said, looking at me in a way that made it clear that he was, somehow, oh miracle of miracles, taking this all seriously. And then he kissed me again, pulled the sheets up to my chin, pressed his warm hand on top of my head, and walked out of the room.

I listened as the door closed and as he settled his long body onto the couch. I listened until he’d clicked the lights off and his breathing became deep and regular. I listened, holding the blankets tight around me, holding that feeling of being safe, of being tucked in and taken care of, around me. And I thought clearly then, for the first time since Joy had been born. I decided, right there in that strange bed in the dark, that I could go on being scared forever, that I could keep walking, that I could carry my rage around, hot and heavy in my chest forever. But maybe there was another way. You have everything you need, my mother had told me. And maybe all I needed was the courage to admit that what I needed was someone to lean on. And then I could do it – could be a good daughter, and a good mother. Maybe I could even be happy. Maybe I could.

I slipped out of bed. The floor was cool on my bare feet. I moved stealthily through the darkness, out of the room, easing the door shut behind me. I went to him there on the couch, where he’d fallen asleep with a book falling from his fingers. I sat on the floor beside him and leaned so close that my lips practically touched his forehead. Then I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and jumped into the water. “Help,” I whispered.

His eyes opened instantly, as if he hadn’t been sleeping, but waiting, and he reached out one hand and cupped my cheek.

“Help,” I said again, as if I were a baby, as if this was a word I’d just learned and could not stop repeating. “Help me. Help.”

Two weeks later Joy came home. She was eight weeks old, and she’d topped seven pounds and was finally breathing on her own. “You’ll be fine,” the nurses told me. Except I decided that I wasn’t ready to be by myself yet. I was still too hurt inside, still too sad.