Joy Moore Eight Years Ago
Joy Moore
EXCERPT FROM UNTITLED JOINT MEMOIR WITH BENNY ABBOTT
Eight Years Ago
Xander and I honeymooned in Costa Rica. For three weeks, we held hands on beaches, soaked in hot springs, and sipped wine at the base of active volcanoes.
We bird-watched in the cloud forest. Hiked in the rainforest. We got caught in thunderstorms, and splashed through waterfalls, and ate gallo pinto until our stomachs burst. It was perfect, and we were perfect, and I never wanted to leave.
Back in Los Angeles, we tried to keep the magic flowing. We laced arms walking down the street. Lounged in bed long after it was time to get up. We danced in the kitchen, kissed in the laundry room, and revisited the details of our wedding ad nauseam.
But gradually, eventually, our lives took on their usual rhythm. Grocery shopping, bills, emails, doctor visits. We cleaned our house and folded our clothes. I filled my days with graphic design, and Xander read scripts. Everything returned to the way it was before our wedding.
Until, one day, Xander came home waving around a sheaf of papers.
“I found it. This is it.” His cheeks were pink, blond hair in disarray. “This is the script.”
“That’s great, honey,” I said without enthusiasm.
“I think perhaps you didn’t hear me correctly.” He waited for me to look up. “This is going to change our lives.”
“No, I did. It’s great.” I forced a grin.
My computer had been glitching all day, and I was going to miss my deadline.
I was frustrated, and stressed, and this wasn’t the first time he’d said this.
I didn’t have the wherewithal to feign excitement for yet another life-changing script that probably wouldn’t change our lives. “I’m so happy for you.”
I wasn’t convincing enough. He visibly deflated. And so I withheld my sigh, saved my project, put my computer to sleep, and faced him. “Tell me more.”
It was a paranormal romance. “Like Ghost, only the Demi Moore character is pregnant. So imagine the pottery scene, only Demi Moore is giving birth.”
“Wow, that’s…” I searched for the right word. “… intense.”
Xander gave me a play-by-play of the entire script. I could’ve read it faster, but that was beside the point. Xander was beaming. By the time he was finished, I was, at the very least, happy that he was happy.
Wrapping my arms around his waist, I said, “What happens now?”
“Now…” He looked down at me with his deep blue eyes, smiled his perfectly imperfect smile, and said in his mellifluous voice, “We have a baby.”
I laughed. “You’re talking figuratively, right? The ghost’s baby?”
“No.” He bent down to kiss my forehead. My nose. My cheek. His lips tickled their way down to my collarbone.
“You’re not saying what I think you’re saying,” I whispered.
He kissed my neck. “What if I am?”
The room felt hot. My heart fluttered so rapidly it made me cough. “But we just got married.”
“So?”
“So, we don’t have the money.”
He grazed my jawline with his mouth. “Yet.”
“We also don’t have room.”
He kissed the groove in my upper lip. “Yet.”
“But.” I pulled back a little and pressed a hand to his chest. He was acting like the film had already won an Oscar, but I knew how these things went.
He would shop the script around, get a celeb or two attached, and then spend the next few months, probably years, seeking funding.
He had a revolving door of scripts in all stages of preproduction, none of which had made us any money yet.
To diversify his portfolio, he’d begun making small equity investments in various brick-and-mortar businesses he’d met through local investor groups.
Breweries, donut bars, cannabis-growing operations, that kind of thing.
I didn’t want to be kept abreast of the nitty-gritty details, but whenever I asked how all that was going, generally speaking, he smiled and reminded me he was playing the long game.
Which meant that, for the time being, my income was keeping us afloat.
Which was fine. I was down for the long game.
What was marriage if not a long game? Only, children were a different kind of long game.
“Can’t we wait until those things aren’t a yet? ”
“We can.” He drew the words out so slowly it felt like he was shouting what remained unspoken. Didn’t I want a baby?
I didn’t remind him that we’d already discussed this.
That I was worried about what it would do to my health.
I knew other women with severe sleep disorders who’d struggled mightily through pregnancy and early motherhood.
Was it possible? Yes. In the same way many things were possible for me: With planning.
With time. And probably with help, which we couldn’t yet afford. “Can we discuss this later?”
“Later” came the following night while on a double date with Benny and Luna.
We’d attended a gallery opening in a warehouse on La Brea for an artist who fashioned sculptures from construction debris and used food wrappers.
Drinking cheap wine out of plastic cups, we wandered around the hot room trying to find meaning in heaps of trash.
“Pretty sure this one’s an airplane.” Benny pointed to a mound of rebar and Butterfinger wrappers in the middle of the polished concrete floor.
“Because…?” I saw nothing suggesting airplane.
“Just thought it might spark a discussion.”
“In that case, I have a topic for us,” Xander said.
“How unfair it is that some people are born with extraordinary talent like this while the rest of us are doomed to mediocrity?” Benny said.
Luna elbowed him. “Speak for yourself.”
Xander smiled. “Babies.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Benny’s head angled back, eyes darting between me and Xander. “Is there anything you want to tell us?”
“No. Yes. No.” I tried to laugh. “Xander wants a baby.”
“Now?” Benny asked. “Like, soon?”
“No,” I said as Xander said, “Maybe?”
“Well, that’s…” Luna fixed me with such a penetrating stare I swear she could see straight into my soul. “Do you want a baby?”
At the time, I couldn’t yet answer that question, and Luna knew it. Perhaps to save me from saying something stupid, she added, “I certainly don’t.”
Benny whipped around. “What?”
“What what?”
“Never?”
Luna’s head angled to the side. “I take it you do.”
“Well, I mean.” He shrugged, clearly befuddled. “Not now.”
“Then how do you know you’ll want one later?”
“How do you know you won’t?”
She raised a defiant eyebrow. “Are you suggesting I don’t know myself well enough to make an educated decision about this?”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
Xander laughed so loudly everyone in a twenty-foot radius turned to stare. It defused the tension such that Benny returned his attention to me. “What about your sleep disorder?”
“I’ll take nights,” Xander said. He must have heard himself, because he quickly added, with another laugh, “And when that fails, we’ll hire a night nurse.”
The whole idea sounded impossible, but Xander wouldn’t let it drop.
After a few months, it began to feel inevitable.
We’d be walking to a restaurant, having a perfectly adult conversation, when a stroller would pass by, and all at once he’d be making faces and raspberries at the confused child, and I’d be left standing next to the new mother with my still-flat belly, apologizing for interrupting their walk. He was absolutely obsessed.
I can hear you all cooing as I write this.
I can also predict your next thought: Wait. They don’t have a baby.
I divulge a lot of personal information on the podcast. For better or worse, you know all about my childhood crushes, my food obsessions, my mental health misadventures, even the toenail fungus I’ve been fighting since episode 157.
I’ve talked without thinking so many times I occasionally worry my filter is broken.
But the one topic I’ve shared nothing about is babies.
People speculate. I can’t blame them. I speculate too.
If a person is of a certain age and without progeny, you find yourself wondering why.
It doesn’t matter if they’re happy, or lonely, or married, or divorced, or neurodivergent, or neurotypical, or psychopathic, or telepathic, or rich, or struggling to make ends meet, or none of the above, or some of the above.
You wonder. You wonder why they’re of that certain age without progeny.
I am of that certain age. And I did get pregnant.