Fashionably Late Read Online Free PDF Page A

reminded herself that the doctor today had said that her infertility was not wholly age-related. “It’s quite possible that you’d never have been able to bear a child, although your condition is aggravated by age.” Perhaps my guilt at waiting so long to try to conceive is misplaced, she told herself, and tried to believe it.
    Not that her mother would ever believe that. Her mother would be more than eager to tell her not only that it was all her own fault but also that Belle had warned her. Belle wasn’t always right, but she was right often enough and vocal enough about it so that she seemed unassailable.
    Belle was a smart mother, but not a comforting one. Karen felt tears rise in her eyes, although she never cried. Instead, she took a steadying deep breath and blinked. At her age she was experienced enough to know that very few people had anything close to a good relationship with their parents, but at this moment she longed for a bosom she could weep on without constraint, blame, or guilt. No wonder men came to women for comfort: the lure of the breast was powerful.
    Yet Karen would never go to Belle for solace. Maybe it was no accident that Belle was so flat-chested. No lure there, Karen thought. Well, if men go to women for comfort, where do women go?
    To their girlfriends. Karen had three: Lisa, her sister, Defina, and Carl who was not anatomically female but could certainly pass for one in almost every other way. But Defina was still celebrating last night, Carl, though always ready to listen, was all the way over in Brooklyn, while at this moment Lisa was out on Long Island with Belle, waiting for Karen’s arrival. Karen sighed. Her stomach still felt as if it were about to heave. There would be no comfort until she got home to Jeffrey late tonight. And maybe not then. Because while he always reassured her on other issues, this was one he was too intimately involved in to be counted on. Their shared baby-making odyssey had tried his patience to the breaking point and put more of a strain on their marriage than she’d like to admit.
    “Mrs. Kahn?” there was a question in the nurse’s voice, and Karen knew she’d have to act as if the room wasn’t spinning around her. But could she get up from the damn chair without blowing chunks across the glossy magazines on the coffee table? Maybe it would pass for morning sickness.
    More like mourning sickness, Karen realized. The woman sitting beside her, the only one not appearing frightened, the one who was very obviously pregnant turned her blonde head and raised her almost transparent eyebrows. She was reading the style section of the New York Times, which carried a long report on the Oakley Award. Yes, she was putting it together, Karen could see. Yes, I am Karen Kahn. That Mrs. Kahn. Great, Karen thought.
    Now she’d get to read about this visit in tomorrow’s Liz Smith column.
    She could just picture the item: “What top Seventh Avenue designer was seen at New York’s chicest infertility clinic?”
    She looked back at the pregnant woman beside her. There ought to be a law that infertility clinics sent their success stories elsewhere instead of flaunting them in front of us, the barren ones, Karen thought. There also ought to be a law that famous people, or even semi-famous ones, could not be stared at when they were in moments of extreme pain. Karen sighed. Yeah, and while she was at it, why not pass a law against childhood leukemia and racial cleansing? This was the downside of celebrity, Karen. Live with it.
    Get up, she told herself. Don’t puke, don’t trip, and don’t give this albino breeding bitch a chance to ask if you can get maternity clothes for her at wholesale. Somehow Karen’s knees found the strength to propel her upward and she crossed the room in three long strides.
    Karen was a big girl, tall, with long legs, andţdespite constant dieting attemptsţshe was far from thin. That was why she knew how to design clothes that minimized