“Your stripes?”
“Army talk,” I said.
She took a sip of champagne and then turned back to the coffee table. She spread some of the vile, oily black eggs on a cracker and offered it to me with a sweet smile. “Sevruga?”
PART TWO
22
We found out Kate was pregnant two weeks later. She’d gone back to the IVF clinic with greater dread than usual to start going through the whole gruesome process all over again, the shots and the thermometers and the cold stirrups and the high hopes that would probably be dashed. They gave her the usual blood work, all this stuff I never quite understood about levels of some hormone that told the docs when her next ovulation would be. But I didn’t have to understand it. I just did what they told me to do, went in when they told me to and did my heroic duty. The next day Dr. DiMarco called Kate to tell her that an interesting complication had arisen, and there might not be a need for an IVF cycle after all. He seemed a little miffed, Kate told me. We’d gotten pregnant the old-fashioned way. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
I had a secret theory, which I’d never tell Kate. I think she got pregnant because things had started to break my way. Call me crazy, but you know how some parents try for years to have a baby, then as soon as they adopt, boom, they get pregnant? Their biological roadblock gets blown away just by the decision to adopt. The relief, maybe. There are studies, too, about how men who feel good about themselves tend to be more fertile. At least I think I read something about this.
Then again, it’s possible that she got pregnant just because we’d finally had real sex, after months of my doing it into a plastic cup in a lab.
Whatever the reason, we were both elated. Kate insisted that we couldn’t tell anyone until we heard the heartbeat, around seven or eight weeks. Only then would she tell her father-her mother had died long before I met Kate-and her sister and all her friends. Both my parents were dead-smokers, the two of them, so they went early-and I didn’t have any brothers or sisters to tell anyway.
I’d always had lots of friends, but you get married, and you start going out only with other married people, and the guys aren’t allowed to go out without their wives unless they’re wearing an electronic ankle bracelet, and then they have kids, and after a while you don’t have so many pals. There were some friends from college I still stayed in touch with. A couple of my frat brothers. But I wasn’t going to tell anyone until we heard the heartbeat.
Telling people wasn’t the main thing to me anyway. What was important was that I was in love with the most beautiful woman in the world, and we were having a baby, and I was starting to feel really positive about my work. It was all good.
At the twelve-week point, I started telling the guys at work. Gordy could not have been less interested. He had four kids and avoided them as much possible. He liked to brag about how little he saw his family. It was a macho thing to him.
Festino shook my hand and even momentarily forgot about the Purell. “Congratulations on the death of your sex life, Tigger,” he said.
“Not totally dead yet,” I said.
“Yeah, well, just wait. Babies themselves are the best form of birth control. You’ll see.”
“If you say so.”
“Oh, yeah. My wife and I do it doggie-style. I sit up and beg, and she rolls over and plays dead.”
I pantomimed a Borscht Belt rimshot in the air. “Thank you, you’re a wonderful audience, I’m here all week,” I said. “Try the veal chop, it’s great.”
“Wait till you’ve got the Barney song stuck in your head,” Festino said. “Earworm from hell. Or till the only TV show you’re allowed to watch anymore is The Wiggles. And when you go out to dinner, it’s Chuck E. Cheese’s at five o’clock. So when are you going to do an amnio?”
“Amnio?”
“You know, that test for birth defects.”
“Boy, you do look on the dark side, don’t you?” I said. “Kate’s not close to thirty-five.”
“It’s like what doctors always say. Prepare for the worst and all that.”
It seemed like a kind of personal question, but mostly I was surprised that Festino cared. “It’s ‘Hope for the best and prepare for the worst,’” I said. “You left out the first part.”
“I was just cutting to the chase,” Festino said.
The pregnancy was the biggest thing to happen to us in the first couple of months after my promotion, but it wasn’t the only big thing. We moved out of the little house in Belmont and into a town house in Cambridge. We still couldn’t swing one of those houses on Brattle Street she’d been fantasizing about, but we bought a beautiful Victorian on Hilliard Street, just off Brattle, that had been renovated a few years ago by a Harvard professor who’d just been lured away to Princeton. There were things we wanted to change-the carpet on the steep stairs to the second floor was badly frayed, for instance-but we figured we’d get around to it sometime.
We probably underpriced the Belmont house, since Kate couldn’t wait to move to Cambridge. It sold within two days of our putting it on the market. So we were in our new house within two months. I hadn’t seen her happier in years, and that made me happy.
In the driveway-no garages in this fancy part of Cambridge, believe it or not-sat our two brand-new cars. I’d traded in my totally rebuilt Acura for a new Mercedes SLK 55 AMG Roadster, and Kate reluctantly traded in her tired old Nissan Maxima for a Lexus SUV hybrid, only because it was, she said, far more fuel-efficient and less polluting. My Mercedes just looked sweet.
It was all happening fast-maybe too fast.
Just about every morning I worked out with Kurt now, at his gym or at Harvard Stadium or running along the Charles River. Kurt had become my personal trainer. He told me I had to lose the paunch, had to become lean and mean, and once I started feeling better about myself physically, everything would follow.
He was right, of course. I dropped ten pounds in a couple of weeks, and after a couple of months I was down thirty pounds. I had to buy new clothes, which Kate was delighted about. She saw it as an opportunity to upgrade my wardrobe, get me out of those Men’s Warehouse suits and into some suits from Louis of Boston in confusing European sizes with unpronounceable names of Italian designers inside.
Kurt had strong feelings about how I ate-i.e., I was poisoning myself-and he had me eating high-protein and low-fat and only “good” carbs. Lots of fish and vegetables and stuff. I cut way back on the eggplant parmesan subs and the olive loaf sandwiches at lunch. I stopped visiting my stoner friend Graham, cut out the weed entirely, because Kurt had convinced me that it was a vile habit, that I needed to keep all my faculties sharp. Sound mind, sound body, all that.
He insisted I take the stairs at work at least once a week instead of the elevator. Twenty floors? I squawked. You’re out of your mind! One morning I tried it, and I had to change my shirt as soon as I got to my office. But after a while climbing (or descending) twenty flights wasn’t all that brutal. When you have an elevator phobia, you’ll put up with a lot of pain to avoid being trapped in the vertical coffin.
Kate was thrilled about my Extreme Makeover. She was determined to eat healthy throughout her pregnancy, and now I was along for the ride. She’d never met this guy Kurt, but she liked what he was doing for me.
She didn’t know the half, of course.
In my new, bigger office, I put up all these framed, military-themed, corporate motivational posters. One was a photo of a sniper in camouflage fatigues and camo face paint lying on the ground aiming his weapon at us. It said, in big letters, BRAVERY, and then: “It takes an extraordinary person to face danger and maintain composure.” Another one showed some guys on a tank and the words, “AUTHORITY: It is the strongest who prevail.” I had FORTITUDE and PATIENCE too. Hokey? Sure. But just looking at them got me pumped.