Chapter 9
Dominique told Bill all about it when he spent the night with her when she got back. He
was still swamped at the office but happy to see her, and he laughed when she described
the scene to him, walking in on them with Clément in his impeccable pajamas, serving
her mother breakfast on a silver tray.
“Thank God they had their clothes on. They seem very romantic and very amorous,”
she said admiringly.
“It sounds very French,” Bill said, and they had a wonderful night together.
Dominique had settled back into their usual routine, which she readily admitted to
herself now wasn’t enough, just as her mother had said. Marie-Aurélie had loved a
married man for twelve years, so she knew what she was talking about. And they had
lived together. Dominique didn’t even have that comfort. All she had was two nights a
week, if she was lucky. Or less, if he was busy. But it was the best they could do. He
kissed her tenderly before he left for work in the morning. And she knew she’d have to
wait a week to spend another night with him. It seemed like a long time to wait.
* * *
Dominique told the girls about Marie-Aurélie’s romance too. Felicity was startled to
hear that her grandmother had rekindled an old flame, but her mother assured her that he
was a lovely man and they were happy, and Violet thought it was wonderful.
“She’s my role model in life. Bonne Mamie really knows how to live. Is he
handsome?”
“Very, even at eighty-six.” Dominique smiled. “They look beautiful together. They
seem very romantic. I wonder if they’ll get married,” Dominique said vaguely, and
Violet looked distressed.
“I hope not. That would ruin everything.” She put her hands up as she said it and her
mother and sister stared at her. Felicity was looking at her hand in horror.
“What is that?” she asked, staring at Violet’s new ring. They hadn’t seen her since
she got back from St. Barth.
“It’s my MVP ring,” Violet said proudly, flashing it at them with a grin.
“It looks like a gold golf ball, or a Christmas ornament,” Felicity said with distaste,
and Dominique stared at it and laughed. It was so Violet to wear something like it.
“It’s an exact replica of a World Series ring.” Jamie had had it adjusted to her size
when they got home, so she was no longer wearing the Band-Aids with it.
“And why are you wearing it?” Felicity asked her. “It looks like you could use it as
a weapon if someone attacks you.”
“Don’t be such a snob,” Violet scolded her. “It’s actually my promise-to-never-getmarried ring.
A going-steady ring with no risk of marriage,” she explained. “It’s like a
non-engagement ring.” It was the complete opposite of Felicity’s discreet little sapphire
ring with the tiny diamond side stones. Violet’s ring was loud, showy, crazy, unusual,
and there was nothing subtle about it, and it was huge on her small hand.
“I really love it,” Dominique commented. It was such a big statement and so perfect
for Violet. It wasn’t even vulgar. It was outrageous, which was better.
“And Jamie gave it to you?” Felicity persisted.
Violet nodded happily. “I love it.”
“And you’re going to wear it?”
She nodded again. “Just like you wear yours, except sometimes I notice you don’t
wear it,” she dug at her sister. “I wear mine every day.”
“You could knock an eye out with that thing,” Felicity commented, “or a tooth if you
bump yourself with it,” she confirmed.
“It’s a statement ring,” Violet said proudly. “I love it.”
“It certainly is a statement. So what exactly is the statement other than you’re both a
little nuts?” Felicity asked her.
“The statement is that we love each other and promise never to get married. Unlike
your seemingly discreet ring, which is fraught with danger,” she said, and their mother
grinned, listening to the exchange.
“You’re each entitled to your own views about marriage. It seems to be a very broad
subject in this family,” Dominique commented dryly.
Felicity still looked strained the moment the subject of marriage came up, although
all the wedding plans were going forward without a hitch so far. Felicity didn’t like
talking about it, which still worried Dominique. Taylor and his parents had really
pushed Felicity into a June date that she wasn’t ready for. She focused on her art show
in order to distract herself. She was much more excited about that than a fancy wedding
at the Metropolitan Museum that she never wanted.
* * *
Dominique called her mother frequently to see how she was feeling. The ankle still hurt,
but less, and she could put a little weight on it now. She had to wear the cast until the
end of February, and a boot after that. And she talked about Clément as though he were a
permanent fixture, and had always been there. Most of all, she sounded happy. There
wasn’t that lonely edge in her voice anymore, that of a woman who had been unloved by
a man for too long and believed that her life as a woman was over. She had come back
to the land of the living with him, and they were busy doing things they both enjoyed.
When he needed peace to work he went to his studio in Normandy, but he never stayed
there for too long now. He didn’t want to miss a minute with her. They lived every day
as though it were their last, which was the lesson time had taught them. They had both
lost partners they loved earlier than they expected to. Now they didn’t want to deprive
themselves of a minute of joy.
They were walking in the Tuileries Gardens after a show they had just seen in the
Louvre, and Clément said he wanted to go to the Uffizi in Florence with her, the Prado
in Madrid, and some of the great museums of Europe. The Victoria and Albert Museum
in London was one of their favorites too. They had similar taste in art.
“I have a question to ask you,” he said to her quietly then. He had no idea how she
would respond but he knew it was a question he had to ask, for his own peace of mind.
If she said no, he would accept it. But he wouldn’t let her go this time. He was never
going to let her go again.
“Marie-Aurélie,” he said solemnly in a low voice so passersby wouldn’t hear, “will
you marry me? I would get down on one knee, but I might have difficulty getting up,
which would be embarrassing,” he said, and she laughed. “It would be a great honor if
you said yes this time. But I love you even if you say no.” They had stopped walking
and he was looking into her eyes, and she smiled. She kissed him on the lips and her
smile widened after she did.
“It would be my great honor and privilege to be your wife, Clément. I just needed
some time to get used to the idea. I’m ready now.” He didn’t remind her that it had taken
her forty years to get ready. He thought she was well worth the wait.
“I’m ready too,” he said, put his arms around her, and held her, as people walked
past them and smiled. They were a sweet older couple who looked happy together. She
tucked her hand into the crook of his arm then and they continued walking. “I was
thinking July might be nice. I’ve always liked the idea of getting married in the south of
France, the light is so beautiful,” he said.
“Wherever you like,” she said, smiling.
“I’ll find the perfect place,” he promised. “Do you want your family with us?” he
asked her. He had none. He was alone in the world now, but not for much longer with
Marie-Aurélie and her family in his life.
“Of course,” she said about her family. “They would love to be there, if they’re not
busy.” She was thinking of Tommy, and how far he’d have to come. But the others were
less encumbered, and New York was closer to France than L.A.
“We could honeymoon in Italy if that appeals to you. I don’t travel much anymore,
but Italy is easy, and the food is so good, and maybe the Hotel du Cap in the south of
France for a day or two. Leave it to me and I’ll arrange it.” Marie-Aurélie loved the
way Clément took care of things. He was always surprising her with new restaurants, or
favorite places she had forgotten, and new adventures. It made life fun every day.
They called Dominique that night and told her, and she was delighted for them. She
promised to tell the children, and Clément promised to give her the exact date when he
arranged things, but he said it would be in July, a month after Felicity’s wedding. They
had a summer of happy celebrations in store, and Clément and Marie-Aurélie were like
any young couple planning their wedding.
“I’ve never been married before,” she said dreamily, as they walked home to the
Left Bank. They liked walking together. “I think I’ll get married in white. But that’s all
I’m going to tell you about it,” she said with a mysterious smile.
She called Dominique again the next day and she promised to design something
perfect for her, that would be appropriate in the south of France. She couldn’t wait to do
it for her mother, she was happy for her. Marie-Aurélie sounded like any young bride,
excited to be marrying the man she loved.
Dominique sent her some sketches a few days later, and there was one that her
mother loved. It was the one Dominique hoped she would pick. She wanted to wear a
big hat with it with a veil attached, but not a standard bridal veil, and Dominique
thought it would look beautiful, and she would put a thin cloud of tulle over the hat just
to add a little magic to her face. Her mother loved the idea and couldn’t wait for the
first fitting. Dominique said she would bring the dress to Paris for her to try on.
* * *
By the end of March, all the big and small details for Felicity’s wedding were perfectly
on track. Dominique went down a checklist with one of her assistants weekly.
Everything was on time. There had been no major problems so far, but Dominique knew
that could change in the blink of an eye. Weddings were unpredictable and sometimes
hard to control.
She called Felicity and reported the details to her.
“Great, Mom, and I only have three more paintings I want to finish to complete the
show.” It was all she wanted to talk about. “Everything’s on track for that too.”
“Your wedding is going to be here before you know it,” Dominique said, and
Felicity felt a roller coaster in the pit of her stomach. She hadn’t made her peace with it
yet and it was coming closer. She had picked the invitations at Cartier. They were
sober, classic, and elegant, and were going out on the twentieth of April. Once people
were invited it would be that much more real and there would be no turning back. Three
hundred and fifty people were being invited to the wedding and most of them would
come, particularly to a glamorous venue like the Metropolitan Museum. Now and then,
Felicity felt a flurry of excitement, and the rest of the time, terror. Taylor had been nicer
to her recently, which made it easier to remember why she loved him and wanted to
marry him. She had no specific doubts about him, her only objection was that it felt too
soon, and she felt too young and not ready to be a wife. His parents were boring but they
weren’t bad people. Their worst flaw was that they were stingy, and hated spending
money. His father talked constantly about getting enough “bang for their buck.” They
were getting a lot of bang out of Dominique’s bucks and none of their own. It was going
to be a dazzling, impressive wedding. There would be an enormous, beautiful tent in the
back garden of the Met for dinner, and another tent for dancing. On a balmy June night,
nothing could be more romantic. The band had been hired, the caterer chosen, the
flowers ordered, and there would be huge crystal chandeliers in the tents, and flower
garlands on the tent poles. The flowers were going to be especially beautiful. Felicity
hadn’t told Taylor the details. She wanted to surprise him, and knowing her mother’s
taste, Taylor was sure it would be spectacular. There were going to be giant urns of
flowers on tall columns. A place had been set aside for the ceremony with a flower arch
over them. The minister Dominique had found had agreed to do the religious ceremony
at the Met, which required dispensation from the bishop, and permission from the
museum, and Dominique had obtained that too. They were being married by an
Episcopal minister since they were both Episcopalian.
The much simpler event to organize was the rehearsal dinner, at Phillip Whitfield’s
club, with a minimum of flowers on each table, their least expensive menu, and cheap
wine he had gotten a great deal on. The rehearsal dinner was about how little the
Whitfields could spend and get away with, and Dominique was spending a fortune on
the wedding. The expenses had multiplied exponentially, which she had expected.
Felicity felt guilty about it and had wanted it to be so much simpler. Taylor and his
family felt no guilt at all. They knew that Dominique Dupont Walker was good for it, so
why not spend liberally.
In March, as the wedding approached, Felicity had rolling waves of nausea, which
she knew was due to stress. She was tense about her gallery show, and panicked about
the wedding and all that it implied. She would be an adult now forever, a wife, and one
day she would be a mother, which was even more terrifying. She had begun to suspect
an ulcer when the nausea never stopped, even worried that she might have stomach
cancer, and read about it online. It sounded like she did, and if she was dying, there was
no point having a wedding. She didn’t confide in anyone that she thought she might have
cancer. She wondered if she would live long enough for her show, and she went to their
family doctor and confessed her suspicions. He was worried for her and ordered a
battery of tests, including an MRI and a PET scan last on the list. She seemed healthy
enough to him on examination. Her color was good, her weight was low but in the
normal range. A simple blood test showed she wasn’t anemic, and he asked her if she
could be pregnant. She said she couldn’t since she was on the pill.
“Have you ever missed a pill, or been pregnant?”
“I’ve missed a pill once in a while, but I’ve never gotten pregnant. When I miss one,
I take two the next day. It works like a charm.” She smiled confidently at him.
“Some of my patients have had charming babies as a result of that method,” he
warned her. “Have you missed a pill lately?”
“Not that I remember. I know I’m not pregnant, I haven’t gained any weight. I have
no symptoms. I’m stressed out of my mind, I have an important gallery show of my work
in eight weeks, and I’m getting married in ten. I’m freaked out about both. According to
the internet, it’s either stress or stomach cancer.”
“Let’s run a quick test to be sure before we do all the other tests,” he said blandly,
and handed her a pregnancy test and directed her to the bathroom. She was gone a long
time, which concerned him, and her eyes were red and full of tears when she returned
with the test stick.
“It’s wrong. I know it is. It’s a false positive. These tests are unreliable.” She
choked on a sob and sat down across from him.
“When you missed a pill, which you don’t remember recently, did you and your
fiancé use a condom?”
She shook her head and the tears spilled down her cheeks. “I can’t have a baby. I
don’t want one. I’m not even ready to be married, let alone be a mother. My fiancé
wanted to get engaged, but I told him I’m not ready to have children for at least another
five years.” She choked on a sob and he handed her a tissue.
“We need to do a sonogram on you, Felicity, to check for a heartbeat and see how far
the pregnancy has advanced, and then you can make some decisions. I’m sorry. I know
this can be shocking news, at the wrong time.” She nodded and continued crying, and a
nurse led her to the sonogram lab. She hopped on the table and the technician applied
gel to her abdomen, and the machine hummed to life as the tech ran the metal wand
around in the gel, and the image leapt onto the screen. There was a blob in the
machine’s field of vision that looked suspiciously like a baby, waving an arm. Felicity
could see the head and the body and a hand. And there was a rapid pounding sound like
a machine or a metronome, steady, strong, and regular.
“We’ve got a nice strong heartbeat,” the tech said, as Felicity choked on a sob. The
tech entered something into the computer, which then showed that she was ten weeks
pregnant, and her due date was in October. With a rapid calculation of her own, she was
going to be four and a half months pregnant at her wedding. She felt a wave of nausea
wash over her as she lay there, blinded by tears. This couldn’t be happening to her, but
it was.
She went back to the doctor’s office after the sonogram, looking devastated.
“I’m sorry, Felicity, I know that’s not good news. But at least it’s a healthy baby, if
you decide to keep it. Why don’t you and your fiancé talk it over, and let me know what
you decide. You don’t have a lot of time to make the decision,” he said gently. “I can
refer you to someone who would handle the procedure.” Despite the changes in the laws
elsewhere, she could still get an abortion in New York.
Felicity thanked him and walked out of his office in a daze. A baby. It was the worst
news she could imagine. She’d been braced for cancer, not a baby. It meant the end of
her art career as she knew it, with a baby hanging on her all day. How was she
supposed to paint? Taylor had already told her a million times that when they had
children, he expected her to take care of them herself, as his mother had. According to
Taylor, real women took care of their own children, they didn’t have nannies. She
wanted to tell her mother, but she didn’t dare. Violet wouldn’t understand and would
tell her she was an idiot for not being more careful. She had to tell Taylor, but he wasn’t
ready for a baby either. She had nowhere to turn and felt desperate. She could get an
abortion without telling him, but what if he found out one day and hated her for it? That
didn’t seem fair to him, but she wanted to deal with it quickly. It had shaken her to see
that it already looked like a baby. She would be killing their child if she had an
abortion.
She cried all the way to her apartment in an Uber, and she sat paralyzed all day,
unable to think or paint. She waited for Taylor to come home and she didn’t know what
to tell him. She didn’t know if he’d be happy or mad. All she knew was that this was
way more than she had bargained for. She threw up twice before he came home. Taylor
was in good spirits when he arrived. He had stopped off for drinks with friends from
work, to celebrate the closing of a deal he’d been working on. Felicity was sitting on
the couch waiting for him, and he slipped a hand into her sweater and held her breast,
and then grabbed both of them and squeezed hard. Too hard. She wasn’t in the mood to
play, and even less to play rough, which he liked sometimes, and she liked a lot less.
He’d only been doing that since they’d been engaged, as though her body was his now
and he could do anything with it he wanted. She had told him several times that he was
too rough, but most of the time he ignored what she said, which worried her.
“I’ve been waiting to come home to these babies all day,” he said. He buried his
face in her breasts and laughed, and then bit her nipples. Not too hard, but hard enough.
It only hurt a little. But she had bigger problems on her mind. “What are you looking so
sour about?” he asked, when he saw her face. He hadn’t looked at it before.
“I’m upset, I’m not sour.” He looked bored at the thought and lay back against the
couch with his legs wide apart. She knew what he wanted. Not tonight. “I got some bad
news today,” she said, fighting back tears, and he looked serious for a moment.
“Are you sick?” She hesitated for a minute. She couldn’t avoid telling him. She
wanted to deal with it quickly.
“I’m pregnant,” she said in a low voice, and he stared at her as though he didn’t
understand.
“You are?” She nodded. His face was a blank page she couldn’t read. “Well, that
was a dumb thing to do now, before the wedding.”
“I didn’t do it by myself,” she reminded him. “We did it. And it’s very dumb.”
“Will it show at the wedding?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. It might. I’ll be four and a half months pregnant by then. I
want an abortion. Now. Soon. Right away. We’re not ready for a child. I barely feel
ready for marriage, let alone a baby. In October. And you’re not ready either,” she said
bluntly.
“So you want to kill our child?” he asked, rage etching itself on his face. She tried
not to remember the little form with the waving hand on the sonogram screen. She
couldn’t let herself think of that. “I thought you were on the pill,” he said angrily. She
wasn’t sure if he was angry about the pregnancy or the abortion she wanted.
“I am on the pill, but I may have forgotten one. It happens sometimes.”
“If you look pregnant at the wedding, my parents will kill me,” he said, looking
scared. “They’ll think you’re a slut.” It was interesting that he expected them to blame
her, and not the two of them.
“The baby is yours, it’s ours. And I don’t want to look pregnant at the wedding
either. I want an abortion,” she repeated. He clearly wasn’t getting that she meant it. “I
want to do it right away, as soon as I can.” He poured himself a drink and paced around
the room, and came back to look at her.
“I won’t let you do it. It’s my baby, you can’t kill it.”
“It will kill my art career. It will kill our life, and our marriage. We’ll be trapped
with a baby we don’t want. It’s not fair to the baby either. Five years from now, it will
be different.”
“Fuck your art career. If you forgot to take a pill, this is your fault, so you can give
up your damn career and stay home and take care of it.” It sounded like a prison
sentence to Felicity. He wasn’t thrilled either, and he wasn’t sympathetic. But he was
absolutely definite about the abortion. “If you kill the baby, I’ll kill you,” he said, and
looked as though he meant it. She couldn’t even break the engagement now if she
decided not to marry him. She was pregnant, and trapped. He walked right up to her
then and slapped her hard across the face. “That’s for wanting an abortion. You’re
having the baby, and it better not show at the wedding.” And with that, he slammed out
of the apartment and left, and Felicity sat on the couch, touching her stinging cheek. He
had hit her hard, and there was a thin trickle of blood running down from her nose into
her mouth. It was the worst day of her life, and she wanted to die.
Chapter 10
When Taylor came home that night, he was a different person fro