Fashionably Late Read Online Free PDF Page B

some ways, Belle was born to teach.
    Maybe that was her problem as a mother, Karen thought. Belle only had the two of us to work on. It got too concentrated, too intense. She should have spread it around among a class of thirty children every year. It certainly would have taken some of the pressure off Karen and her younger sister, Lisa. But if Belle had worked, would Lisa have been conceived at all?
    Karen stopped herself. There I go, blaming my job for my infertility.
    Karen reminded herself again that the doctor had said the problem was not entirely age-based, that it was probably congenital. How had he put it? That “it was aggravated by age.” Well, she was aggravated, all right. Karen couldn’t put the idea out of her mind that if only she and Jeffrey had tried earlier, if they had put just a little of their effort into reproduction instead of into the business, that they might have succeeded. She was famousţinfamous reallyţfor never taking “no” for an answer. “If you don’t take no, you’ve got to get a yes,” she often told her staff. But she’d have to take a “no” on this.
    Of course, they could try to go the petri dish route. But Karen knew that Jeffrey would be opposed, and she was herself. After all, with all the unwanted babies, all the hungry and homeless in the world, how could she justify spending thousands just to try to perpetuate her genes.
    Somehow, it didn’t work for her. Not that there were any guarantees, any way.
    If only I’d tried earlier, Karen thought. If only I’d …
    That’s crazy, she told herself. That’s the backlash of guilt women feel if they can’t do everything perfectly. Look at Connie Chung. Is she busy hating herself this afternoon? You’ll drive yourself meshuggah with this, so stop it.
    The taxi jerked to a halt behind a bus that was belching black smoke and also had one of those annoying John Weitz ads staring at her. The cab was still three long blocks from Penn Station and they were the three cross-town blocks of Thirty-Third Street that would be hell on a rainy Friday. Fuck it, Karen murmured to herself, and leaned forward, putting her face close to the hole in the bullet-proof plexiglass partition that separated her from the driver. “How much to drive to Long Island?” she asked.
    “JFK?” he questioned with a voice that rose in a hopeful Pakistani-like lilt.
    “No. Rockville Centre. On Long Island. Only a little further than JFK,” she lied. But she was desperate. Still, she wondered if she had enough cash. One of the perks of success: Karen hadn’t been in a bank in years.
    Her secretary got her cash, but Karen perennially ran short of it.
    She’d made a habit of tucking folded hundreddollar bills into the zipper compartments of all her purses. Emergency money. She opened this one and, sure enough, there was the hundred. She took it out, unfolded the crisp creases, and showed it to the driver, slipping part of it into the little scoop for the fare. He eyed it hungrily and turned off the meter.
    “How we go?” he asked. The accent didn’t really sound Pakistani. And that odd bolero jacket he was wearing was interesting. If it was done in a faille…. Anyway, he wasn’t Pakistani. Maybe Afghan. They drove camels, not Buicks, didn’t they?
    “Through the midtown tunnel, then the L.I.E. Not too far,” she lied again. Well, it would probably take less time to get to Rockville Centre than it would to get across Manhattan. And she just might, with luck (and if they beat the traffic even by only a few minutes), make it to Belle’s house in time for dinner.
    To her relief, the driver agreed. Karen directed him to turn east instead of west and leaned back on the thinly cushioned plastic seat, clutching her hands over her perpetually empty womb. It will be okay, she told herself. Jeffrey will understand. He won’t be too disappointed and we can start to talk about adoption. We may be a little old for the Spence-Chapin agency’s standards but