Page 5 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

Chapter Two

Mark had two kids, a four-year-old named Lizzie and a seven-year-old named Max, but he hardly ever spoke of them. He certainly didn’t talk about his wife. All he wanted to talk about was poetry and writing and books. He would take me to Barnes & Noble: “Have you ever read Jack Gilbert? No? Okay, you must, it’s a must,” adding more and more books to the stack. Then he would take me out to dinner. It did not occur to me at the time to wonder how he was affording all of this on a junior college professor’s salary.

He loved seafood. He was always ordering us things that filled me with mild dread, charred octopus or mussels that looked for all the world like the clitoris of a corpse stuffed inside a shell, and I would choke these things down with the same worried expression as a dog who’s been given a carrot. Then he would tell me about a weird dream he had where he was a young girl in Meiji Japan.

They slept together only five times, and then, after the fifth time, Mark explained that the sex was making him feel extremely guilty about his wife and that they should stop. They were in Margo’s apartment, still naked in her queen-sized bed, when he said this.

“I want to keep seeing you, though,” he said.

“Why?” she asked. Really she was still marveling over how he’d thought sleeping with her would make him feel toward his wife, if not guilty.

“Well, because I care about you. Please don’t cut it off if we aren’t screwing.”

She tilted her head. It hadn’t occurred to her that she could cut it off; this whole affair had seemed to be kind of his thing. She’d been letting him drive. But the idea of hanging out with this middle-aged man without the sex—like, just having an older, dorky friend?

“Okay,” she said, “let me get this straight. So you still want to go out to dinner?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And emails?”

“Of course we can email, the emails are, like, the most important part, we can email for the rest of our lives.”

It seemed obvious to her that they would not.

“But wouldn’t your wife mind the love poetry more than the sex? Like, if I were someone’s wife, and they slept with someone, I could get over it. It’s the love stuff that would get to me. Like, you shouldn’t be telling me you love me.”

“But I do love you.”

Margo didn’t know what to say. She had a blister on her thumb from grabbing a hot plate at work. Her fault for leaving it there too long, but she’d been triple sat by the new hostess. She kept pressing on the blister and feeling the tightness of the water beneath the skin. She was on the verge of failing French also. She should be studying.

“I’m not willing to lie about the fact that I love you. If I can’t be that honest with myself, then I’m finished.”

“I’m gonna go pee,” she said. “Do you want a glass of water?”

“Yes, please,” he said, the covers up to his chin. Then he said in a little old-woman voice, “I’m so thirsty, Margo.” He did this a lot, pretend to be an old woman.

“All right, Granny,” she said, pulling on some fresh underwear and stumbling out into the hall.

She figured that most likely he did not mean it, the stopping having sex. That really he would play a game where he said he wasn’t going to sleep with her, then he’d give in and sleep with her and vocalize his guilt and swear not to do it anymore, and so on. That turned out not to be the case. Mark never slept with her again. And he continued to take her out to fancy dinners and write her love poetry and not feel troubled at all. It was incredibly annoying. She was pretty sure she could wear him down eventually, though.

That was the somewhat stable situation in which Margo discovered she was pregnant. She hadn’t even realized she was late. One night when she was working, she kept throwing up a little Taco Bell in her mouth and swallowing it, and Tracy, her favorite coworker, was like, “Maybe you’re pregnant!” But it seemed so much more probable that her body was rebelling against the Taco Bell.

Yet her body kept rebelling, against cheesecake after her shift, then against yogurt the next morning. She drank a blue Gatorade, cold dark blood of the gods, and puked it right back up. This went on for a full forty-eight hours before she gave in and bought a pregnancy test. They had not used condoms. He had always pulled out. He was married, and he said that was how he and his wife did it, and they’d never had any mistakes! She felt incredibly stupid. For believing him, for having the affair with him, for having a uterus.

The first thing she did was call her mom, and she wasn’t even able to get the words out, she was just sobbing.

“Are you pregnant?” her mom asked.

“Yeah,” she yell-cried.

“Damn it!”

“I’m sorry,” Margo said. “I’m so sorry.”

And then her mother took her out for donuts.

Margo ate them, and they stayed down.

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