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GUCCI GUCCI COO by Sue Margolis
On Sale: May 30, 2006
Trade Paperback
384 pages
ISBN: 9780385338998
The acclaimed author of ORIGINAL CYN finds fertile ground for her
wicked wit in this ferociously funny new novel about babies, sex,
celebrity...and daring to date a gynecologist.
Ruby (still single at thirty-two) Silverman has made a name for herself at Les Sprogs, her exclusive baby boutique where trust-fund mothers swaddle their infants in the hottest designer wear. But all those bumps and babes can't prepare Ruby for the bombshell her fifty-year-old mother drops on her: Ruby's about to get...a baby brother or sister!
When Ruby recovers from the shock of her mother's pregnancy, she can't help but question her own baby-making future. Is catering to celebrity moms and cooing over her friends' kids all she has to look forward to? Sam Epstien would passionately disagree. He's the gorgeous Jewish gynecologist who has set his amorous sights on her. Soon they're seriously involved, and life seems to be looking up for Ruby. Until she stumbles upon a shady baby-brokering business that could erupt into a major scandal, derail her career, and maybe even force her to toss the supposedly perfect man out with the bathwater.
SUE MARGOLIS was a radio reporter for fifteen years before becoming
a novelist. She is the author of ORIGINAL CYN, BREAKFAST AT STEPHANIE'S,
APOCALIPSTICK, SPIN CYCLE, and NEUROTICA. She lives in England.
Ruby knows her celebrities, and not only from the gossip mags she devours. She has met many professionally since she runs Les Sprogs, the classy Notting Hill maternity and baby shop. Ruby enjoys her work and her life, but her artist mother is gently pushing for Ruby to find a new man. When her parents invite her over for "a talk" Ruby expects to hear more of the same. Instead, she's appalled to learn that her mum is pregnant. Ruby, aged 32, will become a big sister for the first time. Shouldn't she be the one settling down and having babies? She can't help feeling unsettled and jealous.
Ruby signs on at St. Luke's Hospital to speak to expectant mothers about what they need to buy for their newborns. She marvels to the manager of the prenatal department that the many celebrities giving birth at St. Luke's are amazingly thin, both before and after delivering. The manager acts oddly anxious, hurriedly saying she can't discuss her patients.
When Ruby leaves her meeting with the manager, she literally runs into Sam, an attractive American gynecologist. Ruby had actually met Sam previously when he overheard her on the phone discussing a visit with her own gyno in which her doctor discovered a postage stamp in a very, uh, unexpected place. Sam is hot, but the fact that he is a gynecologist gives Ruby pause.
Meanwhile, Ruby is surrounded with infants and yearnings for infants. Her co-worker Chanel is struggling to get pregnant, while Ruby's best friend Fi is a bundle of exhaustion from sleepless nights with her newborn. Pregnant movie star Claudia Planchette arrives at Les Sprogs to try on maternity swimsuits. Ruby accidentally glimpses the unclothed Claudia through a crack in the dressing room curtains --- and can't believe her eyes. The supposedly expectant star is wearing a bodysuit with a fake six-months-pregnant belly. But why? It makes no sense, and eventually Ruby persuades herself that Claudia must have been wearing a maternity girdle.
While at the hospital giving her layette talk to wealthy expectant mothers, Ruby learns they are dieting in hopes of remaining as thin as the much-publicized movie star moms. This is a sickening turn of events and Ruby is horrified at the thought of mothers denying their unborn babies (as well as themselves) nourishment because of vanity.
Ruby and Sam's paths cross again when she attends Fi's infant son's ritual circumcision. When, under the influence of a mixture of painkillers and champagne, she nearly passes out, Sam attends to her. Yet another inauspicious meeting, to say the least, especially after Ruby chatters drunkenly, saying things she can only eternally regret. Sam is undeterred, however, and the two are magnetically drawn together into the beginning of a blissful relationship.
In the midst of her joy with Sam, Ruby confronts mysteries. What are the calls Sam receives that so obviously trouble him, but that he refuses to discuss? What's the hinted-at story with his brother? What bizarre happenings surround the celebrity mothers at St. Luke's? Is Sam truly the person she believes he is?
GUCCI GUCCI COO is part mystery and part romance, laden with hysterically funny scenes and characters readers will believe they've been friends with for years. Sue Margolis juggles and weaves several storylines, employing unforeseen twists in the tale culminating in an unforgettable climax --- which all makes for perfect escape reading on a lazy summer's afternoon.
--- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon (terryms2001@yahoo.com)
 Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
Chapter
1
Ruby Silverman shuffled down the gynecologist's table and maneuvered
her feet into the stirrups. As she gazed steadfastly at the ceiling
andlistened for the tart snap of the doctor's rubber gloves, she tried
to take her mind off what was happening by returning to the game she
had been playing in her head-seeing how many words she could find
in speculum.
So far she had six-cup, mule, plum, clue, lumps and slump. Her seventh,
eulum, wasn't a real word, of course, but she'd decided to allow it,
since it sounded to her like some obscure body part prone to enlargement
or inflammation.
"Any tenderness here?" the doctor asked crisply, pressing down on
one side of her abdomen. He had yet to reach the internal part of
the examination, but it could be no more than seconds away.
"No. Nothing."
Pus! That made seven.
The doctor, whose name she'd forgotten, although she knew it was hyphenated,
was the archetypal English hospital consultant: late fifties, unkempt
eyebrows in urgent need of a trim, expensive but conservative gray
suit, ditto the tie, precious little by way of bedside manner.
Usually Ruby placed great value in a doctor's bedside manner, but
on this occasion, the lack of it didn't bother her. In fact she saw
it as a bonus. The idea of a nonboyfriend man-even one who was a gynecologist-having
access to all areas of her body was bad enough; one who was overly
charming-or, God forbid, young and good-looking- would have had her
making a bolt for the door.
Because of her reservations about male gynecologists, the doctor she
usually saw for her annual nether region checkup was a woman. Dr.
Jane Anderson was a fortysomething, easy-to-talk-to, mothering soul
with untameable hair and a comforting lack of fashion sense. Ruby
wouldn't go so far as to say she enjoyed their encounters, but she
always felt reasonably comfortable with Dr. Jane. Today, though, she
was off sick and Dr. Double Barrel was filling in for her.
"Periods regular?" It was more of a command than a question.
"Yes."
"Urination?"
"Fine."
"Bowels moving?"
She thought about trying to lighten the atmosphere by replying: "Yes,
to East Grinstead actually." She decided against it, as Double Barrel
didn't appear to be overendowed in the humor department. Instead she
just nodded.
"Any STDs in the last year?"
"What? No. Absolutely not."
As Double Barrel carried on prodding and pushing, Ruby abandoned her
speculum word game for a minute to consider how odd it was that despite
St. Luke's being the trendiest, most progressive private maternity
hospital and well-woman clinic in London, its male doctors-or at least
this one-were as distant and aloof as in any ordinary hospital. She
couldn't imagine chatting away to DB the way she did to Dr. Jane.
On the other hand, maybe male gynecologists kept their distance on
purpose because they were aware that affability might be misinterpreted.
Whether Double Barrel was the exception or the rule, his manner wasn't
stopping women flocking to St. Luke's in Holland Park for all their
ob-gyn needs. Since it opened five years ago, it was forever being
extolled in the broadsheets and upmarket glossies as the "Bentley
of birth centers." The upshot was that the number of patients on the
hospital's books was growing almost daily.
The maternity unit in particular was hugely popular. Women who wanted
natural childbirth instead of being pumped with drugs, along with
those who preferred to wander-obstetrically speaking-even farther
off the beaten track by opting for the £10,000 birthing pool, doula
and champagne breakfast package, were falling over themselves to get
into St. Luke's. Because the competition for rooms was so fierce,
most women picked up the phone to the admissions department the moment
the pregnancy testing stick registered positive.
The way Ruby saw it, St. Luke's patients fell into three categories.
First there was the megarich Kabbalah and crystals brigade-the ditzy,
enlightenment-seeking British celebs and Hollywood stars living in
London who hired shamans (along with the doulas) to be present at
the birth and ate their placentas-although Ruby secretly believed
they hired the shamans to eat the placentas.
Then there were the middle-class, organic-vegetable consuming, Guardian-reading
women who liked the idea of St. Luke's being a center of medical excellence
as well as progressive. At the same time, though, they felt that paying
for medical treatment severely compromised their leftwing principles.
They got over this by going to St. Luke's and then writing long, guilt-ridden,
but ultimately selfjustifying articles in The Guardian.
Finally, there were the ordinary women who didn't have much money
to spare, but saved what they could and went without holidays so that
they could have their babies at St. Luke's. These were the women who
had decided they'd had it up to here with public hospitals and clinics
where they were forced to sit for hours on end in grubby green waiting
rooms, TV blaring in the corner, carrying a wire supermarket basket
containing their underwear, only to be seen by some disinterested
junior doctor who barely looked up from his notes and addressed them
as if their IQ were lower than their dress size.
Because her parents had struggled financially when she was growing
up, Ruby liked to think of herself as "one of the people" and therefore
part of the last group, but these days-even though she wasn't remotely
obsessive about reading the Guardian or buying organic food-she knew
that she had more in common with the second.
RUBY HAD ONLY agreed to see Dr. Double Barrel after the receptionist
explained that Dr. Jane was off with a serious virus and she wasn't
sure when she would be back. Since Ruby's checkup was already overdue
because of her summer holiday, she decided to try and overcome her
hangup about male gynecologists and take the appointment with DB.
Maybe she was wrong about them and they got no more pleasure looking
up a vagina than a car mechanic did looking down into an engine through
the cylinder head.
Since Double Barrel was seeing Dr. Jane's patients as well as his
own, he was running late and Ruby had been forced to wait over an
hour.
In that time she'd drunk three cups of strong black coffee, which
had made her feel even more jittery. It had also made her want to
pee every twenty minutes. When she went to the loo the last time,
there was no paper left and she'd had to go rooting around in her
bag for tissue.
She also read Hello! magazine. Twice. Like many intelligent women
she tried to convince herself that her interest in celebrity gossip
was strictly ironic. The truth was she devoured it. Seeing who was
pregnant, who had lost or gained weight, cellulite or wrinkles, or
who had turned up to a film premiere done up not even like the dog's
dinner, but worse-as the dog's doggy bag-nourished her the way chocolate
did before her period. A candid snap of Kate's orange peel thighs,
a shot of Gwyneth's eye bags-even if it was a trick of the light-could
set her up for a whole week. Ruby's fascination with celebrities,
however, extended beyond mere curiosity. She had a professional interest.
One of the reasons she was especially curious about who had just got
pregnant or had a baby was because like St. Luke's, much of Ruby's
clientele was made up of celebrity mothers. Ruby ran and part-owned
Les Sprogs, the exclusive mother and baby shop in Notting Hill. British
and American stars, along with all the trust-fund mummies, came for
the designer maternity and baby wear (Ruby had just taken delivery
of her first consignment of Baby Gucci, which was flying off the shelves),
the old-fashioned Silver Cross Balmoral prams at nearly £1,000 a pop,
the all-terrain buggies and the cute sterling-silver egg containers
for "my first curl."
As she flicked through Hello!, she came across a small piece about
the Hollywood actress Claudia Planchette. The headline read: "Claudia
Expecting Special Christmas Delivery." The article was accompanied
by one of those snatched paparazzi-style shots-clearly reproduced
from one of the tabloids-of her striding away briskly from St. Luke's
prenatal department, her head down, her nauseatingly neat bump encased
in tight Lycra. So, Ruby thought, unlike the first time she gave birth,
Claudia wasn't going back to L.A. That meant Les Sprogs could be about
to acquire yet another wealthy, high-profile customer.
Ruby had always possessed a head for business. Nobody in her family
knew where it came from. It certainly wasn't her parents. Her mother,
Ronnie-short for Rhona-was a well-regarded artist. Once a year she
would have an exhibition at a trendy gallery in the East End. She
might sell three or four paintings and make a few thousand pounds.
Sometimes she sold none.
Ruby's dad, Phil, was a freelance commercial artist. He and Ronnie
had met at art school, during Ronnie's first term. Phil was four years
older and in his final year. It was an odd coupling, Ruby always thought-the
hippie-dippy fine art student and the commercial artist. Ronnie always
explained it by saying it had been lust at first sight. It was only
as the relationship developed that they realized how they complemented
and completed each other. She was the young, contemplative idealist,
while he was more grounded and practical.
A few months after they met, Ronnie discovered she was pregnant. There
was no question for either of them of not keeping the baby. Instead
they got married in a civil ceremony, to which only Ronnie's sister,
Sylvia, and a handful of their friends from art school were invited.
After Ruby arrived, Ronnie dropped out of art school to become a full-time
mother. The three of them lived in a tiny rented flat in Balham, where
the only bedroom served as sleeping quarters, nursery and study. It
was here that Phil designed artwork for soap powder boxes and cereal
packs.
Thirty years on, he was still doing it. He had always been reasonably
successful and in demand, but it wasn't until the last ten years or
so that he'd hit the Kellogg's, Nestlˇ, Procter & Gamble league. Until
then, the companies that employed him were very much at the lower
end of the market. His creations were strictly Happy Shopper. He must
have done their custard creams and dishcloth packets for twenty years.
Throughout her childhood, her parents lived from one Spar or Happy
Shopper check to the next. What made it worse was that because of
the feast-or-famine nature of their lives, they could never afford
to set money aside for taxes. The upshot was that her parents were
constantly in debt as one cash flow crisis segued into the next.
Although Ruby was always aware that her dad worried incessantly about
money, her mother never seemed that bothered. At heart Ronnie was
a bit of an art school hippie who insisted it was vital to keep one's
eye on the "big picture"-the demolition of the rain forests, the destruction
of the ozone layer, globalization-rather than worry about a few late
payments to the Inland Revenue.
As an armchair Buddhist-that is to say she read books on the subject,
but never went so far as to join a group-she also believed that "the
universe" would provide. Every time the bank threatened to withdraw
their overdraft, she used to "chant for a check." Occasionally the
universe provided. More often than not, it didn't. When it didn't,
Ronnie would phone her gallery owner buddies and beg some wall space.
Ruby remembered one occasion when she was about fifteen when her parents'
sole source of credit was their Ikea store card. For a month the only
sustenance to be found in the deep freeze was Swedish meatballs, Johanssen's
Delight and vodka.
Ruby only became aware of her parents' impoverished, boho existence
when she was about ten or eleven. Until then she thought everybody
came from homes where the wooden floors were splattered in oil paint,
the sofas were beaten up and broken beds were propped up on piles
of telephone directories. Slowly it began to dawn on her that most
of her friends came from homes with carpets and that when you went
into the kitchen, it didn't smell of turpentine because there were
paintbrushes soaking in the sink alongside piles of dishes. Nor were
there charcoal marks on all the paintwork and half-finished canvasses
propped up on nearly every wall.
None of her friends had mothers with wild red hair who only ever wore
workmen's dungarees covered in paint. They certainly didn't have mothers
who picked them up from school in a fluorescent orange VW camper covered
in Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament stickers and then sang along-very
loudly and very badly-to Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" all the
way home.
Most teenagers are embarrassed by their parents and some might say
that Ruby had more reason to be embarrassed by hers than most. But
her friends really liked Ronnie and Phil and enjoyed coming to the
house. The whole disheveled hippie thing appealed to the kind of kids
who were scolded for getting a speck on the cream linen sofa. Since
her friends seemed to think her mum and dad were the coolest in the
neighborhood, Ruby saw no need to rebel-at least not in the conventional
way.
She didn't shout much or have tantrums. What she did was develop a
passion at high school for business studies. Her dad's state of constant
distress over money left its mark, and after the Ikea card incident,
she was determined that she would never experience the financial insecurities
she'd known growing up.
Even during her university vacations she was busy building her first
business. Although she lacked her parents' artistic talent, she had
inherited some of their creativity. She had an eye for jewelry and
bric-a-brac, which she started buying and selling at antiques fairs.
Her profits built slowly but steadily. After university-having discovered
that it was the ethnicky pieces that attracted people most-she rented
a large Transit van, which she and her then boyfriend, Dan, drove
to Marrakesh and loaded up with Moroccan lamps, bowls, rugs, candleholders,
jewelry and embroidered kaftans. When she got back she took a stall
at Camden Market and shifted the lot in a few weeks. The business
took off and pretty soon she was going on solo buying trips to Morocco
while Dan minded the stall.
Then she and Dan broke up. He'd wanted to get married and although
she loved him she felt that at twenty-two they were too young. Soon
after the split, all the trendy interiors shops started getting into
the Moroccan thing and prices at the local markets rocketed. She battled
on for a few months, but eventually she was priced out.
Then by pure chance, the week before she was due to give up the stall,
she found herself sitting in the dentist's waiting room, flicking
through an old National Geographic. A picture of Guatemalan peasant
children caught her eye, although it wasn't so much the children-beautiful
as they were-that struck her. It was the clothes they were wearing:
the glorious multicolored jackets, skirts and dresses. The brilliant
pinks, oranges and greens clashed and yet worked spectacularly at
the same time.
Two days later she was on a plane. A week after that she found a small
village clothes-manufacturing cooperative and figured she could offer
the workers double what the profit-hungry U.S. importers paid them
and still have a decent income.
As the business took off, Ruby realized that once again she had found
a gap in the market-albeit in children's fashion rather than in interiors.
On top of that she was doing her bit for fair trade.
Trendy, slightly whole-grain young couples in strange vegetarian shoes
and rainbow sweaters couldn't get enough of the Guatemalan outfits-particularly
the baby romper suits, which Ruby had specially commissioned because
she thought the fabrics looked just as stunning on newborns as they
did on older children. As well as clothes, Ruby sold glass dream catchers
and embroidered bags, which she had adapted so that they came with
compartments for baby bottles, nappies and packets of wipes.
She wasn't sure why, but selling baby wear gave her enormous pleasure.
Ever since she used to babysit for neighbors' children when she was
at school she knew she loved kids, but there was more to it than that.
She suspected it had something to do with all the excitement, the
sense of hope and new beginnings, that surrounded pregnancy and childbirth.
Ruby had always longed for a baby brother or sister, but despite desperately
wanting more children, Ronnie had only managed to produce Ruby. After
a year or so of trying for a second child, the doctors discovered
she had seriously blocked fallopian tubes, which couldn't be cleared
by surgery. It was long before the days when IVF was commonplace,
so Ronnie was sent home and told to be grateful to have conceived
one "little miracle." Ronnie's sister, Sylvia, who was four years
older, suffered from the same condition, but for her there would never
be a miracle and she remained childless.
As a child, Ruby was a precociously reflective little soul. Not only
did she feel sad for herself that she had no brothers or sisters,
but she also felt sad for her mother. These days she couldn't help
wondering if there was something about working at Les Sprogs, where
she was constantly surrounded by pregnant women and babies, that filled
an emotional gap and reminded her of life's possibilities.
Thanks to Dr. Jane those possibilities were even more real. A couple
of years ago-urged by Ronnie-Ruby had undergone a series of scans
and tests, only to be told by a gleeful Dr. Jane that she had most
definitely not inherited her mother and Aunty Sylvia's dodgy fallopian
tubes. When the baby and children's wear started to take off, even
more good fortune came her way. Stella, one of her mother's cousins-married
to a filthy rich art dealer-heard about Ruby's market stall on the
family grapevine. She happened to be looking for a new venture to
add to her business portfolio and offered to put up 90 percent of
the money to open a mother and baby shop. She made it clear that her
interest was purely financial and that she wanted no part in the day-to-day
running of the business. That would be Ruby's responsibility.
Of course Ruby leaped at the offer and she and Stella had several
meetings to discuss setting up the business. Stella was an elegant,
rather haughty woman with a spectacularly taut face and a child substitute
in the form of a yappy pooch named Blanche. Their first meeting took
place over coffee at The Sanderson. The moment Stella spotted Ruby,
she rose to her oyster suede heels, her wide mouth a barely upturned
crimson gash. As Ruby shook her hand she was aware of Stella's chilly
gray eyes giving her the Sloane Street once-over.
Ruby explained how she wanted to make the shop egalitarian with an
ethnic twist-sort of Mothercare meets Body Shop. Ronnie had warned
her daughter that Stella's experience of ethnic didn't extend beyond
the best table at La Gavroche and that she balked at words like egalitarian
in the same way that she balked when Harvey Nicks had the audacity
to run out of demitasse sugar sticks. Ruby chose to ignore her mother
and remained convinced until the moment she met Stella that she would
be as thrilled by her vision as she was.
Of course it wasn't to be. Ruby's vision left Stella distinctly underwhelmed.
She dismissed it with a languid wave of her exquisitely manicured
hand and explained that she had something far more grand in mind.
She then outlined her own idea, which was to fill the shop with Flanders
lace christening robes and monstrously expensive dry-cleanonly baby
clothes. She was convinced that trying to compete with a national
mass-market corporation like Mothercare was ridiculous and that the
only way they could make a go of the business was to go small and
exclusive.
By the end of that first meeting, Ruby had decided there would be
no point pursuing a business relationship with Stella. They had a
completely different image in mind for the business. On top of that,
Stella was a snob and the kind of person who would want her own way
all the time. The whole thing would end up a disaster.
But as the days went by, Ruby couldn't quite bring herself to phone
Stella and tell her she didn't want to go into partnership with her.
The truth was that although she had a bit of capital, she didn't have
enough to take a lease on a shop, decorate it and fill it with stock.
When she contacted her bank they agreed to lend her only a fraction
of what she required because she didn't have five years' worth of
accounts. (Ruby had only got around to taking on an accountant and
keeping proper sets of accounts in the last two or three years.)
It also occurred to her that Stella's plan for the business did make
financial sense. As for the woman's none too appealing personality,
Ruby decided that the way to handle her was to avoid conflict, go
along with her and to slowly introduce her own ideas. It was a case
of compromise or carry on with the market stall. In the end Ruby decided
to compromise.
The new business struggled for a few months. Mainly through snobbery
and habit, women tended to stay loyal to the old established Chelsea
and Kensington mother and baby shops. But gradually things picked
up and since by now Stella and her husband had moved to New York where
Stella was busy with other business projects, Ruby felt confident
enough to introduce a few dream catchers here and there and the odd
Peruvian hat with the long flaps at the sides, as well as the Guatemalan
dresses and romper suits. They walked off the shelves.
The day before Stella's twice-yearly visits from across the pond,
all ethnic items were secreted away in the stockroom. From time to
time, Ruby considered telling her about her experiment and how successful
it had been, but she knew this would mean having to face a huge amount
of flak. Even if Stella could see that the ethnic merchandise was
making the company money, it wouldn't stop her getting livid with
Ruby for going behind her back and demanding they be removed. She
would insist that Ruby was alienating the rich and stylish Les Sprogs
clientele and encouraging instead the namby-pamby-friends-of-the-ozonelayer
brigade. She would go on to argue no doubt, that since the latter
didn't possess anything like the wealth of the typical Les Sprogs
customers, the business would be in the hands of the receiver within
six months. Ruby, loath to jeopardize her relationship with Stella,
saw no need to rock the boat.
"BEFORE I TAKE a smear, I'm just going to examine you internally,"
Dr. Double Barrel said. His voice was pretty matter-of-fact, but as
she turned to look at him, she couldn't help noticing he had managed
to raise the corners of his mouth. She was on the verge of making
a nervous joke about her cervix with a smile, but thought better of
it.
"OK," she replied. She was staring at the ceiling again, playing her
word game. There it was. Finally. The snap of the rubber glove. She
felt his fingers inside her. Even though he'd warned her of what he
was about to do, the suddenness made her flinch. "Ceps," she blurted.
"Sorry?" Double Barrel said vaguely. His mind was clearly on what
he was feeling rather than what he was hearing.
"What did you say?"
God, how did she go about explaining her speculum word search and
that ceps was her latest discovery?
"Ceps," she repeated. "So, er, do you like ceps, doctor?"
Double Barrel's head shot up from between her legs.
His face had turned pink. "Do I like sex? Look, maybe I should call
in a nurse to chaperone."
"No, no," Ruby cried out, the color on her face now matching his.
"I said 'cèpes.' They're mushrooms. They're my favorite. I
was just wondering if you liked them, that's all."
His frown caused the doctor's bushy eyebrows to knit. Judging by his
expression he was clearly wondering if she was quite all there.
"Not really. No," he said.
As she watched his head disappear again, she gave a faint, nervous
laugh and mumbled something about them not being to everybody's taste.
"So, er . . ." she began, desperate to engage him in conversation
since she couldn't think of any more speculum words, ". . . what do
you do when you're not being a doctor?"
"I like to play a bit of squash," he said.
She had no idea what to say next, since she knew nothing about squash.
"So, are you any good?" she ventured.
"I get by. I was much better when I was younger."
She winced again as she felt the pressure of his fingers pushing and
turning inside her.
"So you like to keep your hand in," she said. No sooner had the words
left her lips than her hand flew to her mouth. Fabulous. On top of
the c¸pes faux pas, she was now suggesting to the male gynecologist,
who was at this very moment examining her cervix, that he liked to
keep his "hand in."
"No, er, that came out wrong. What I meant to say was . . ." But DB
didn't appear to have noticed her blunder. He simply continued his
excavation. "Umm, that's most odd," he muttered after a few seconds.
"What's odd?" She was starting to feel edgy. "Is there something wrong?"
"Hmm, this is certainly a first," Double Barrel continued.
His tone was curious rather than panicky, which Ruby found a relief.
Then again, doctors never panicked. At least not British ones. American
doctors were all: "OK, we have to get you into the OR stat or you're
gonna die." British ones took a much more gung-ho line, believing
that bravado gave hope and lessened the blow. Consequently, they would
regard you over their pince-nez, and employ a string of cricketing
analogies to indicate that things were looking less than hunky-dory.
As she waited to hear DB announce that from an interuterine perspective
she was up against a rather sticky wicket, she turned to look at him.
It took a few seconds for her eyes to focus on the tweezers he was
holding and what was contained between them. The horror of what she
could see being displayed in front of her, combined with all the caffeine
she'd consumed in the waiting room, was causing her pulse to skyrocket.
Her heart seemed to be beating out a tachycardic Morse code that said,
"Get me out of here. Please, just get me out of here."
She let out a feeble "Oh dear" as her mind spun back to her last visit
to the waiting room loo. She remembered the empty loo roll and how
she'd had to use tissue from her bag. Clearly there had been something
stuck to the tissue. That something had come off on her and must have
somehow worked its way up inside her.
Double Barrel regarded the tweezers and raised a bushy eyebrow. "Extraordinary
place to find a postage stamp," he said.
Excerpted from GUCCI GUCCI COO by Sue Margolis Copyright © 2006 by
Sue Margolis. Excerpted by permission of Delta, a division of Random
House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced
or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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