I suppose I would have been happier hearing my bride say she was pregnant if my girl friend hadn’t phoned that same day with similar news.
Former girl friend, that is-what kind of heel do you take me for?
“This is Elizabeth,” the voice on the phone had said. The voice was soft, low, husky, vaguely refined.
It was early on a Thursday evening, six days prior to that vacant lot in Leimert Park.
I was in the living room of our bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and my wife was sitting on the sofa next to me. The bungalow, a modest affair with a marble fireplace and French doors looking out on a private patio, was outfitted in plush furnishings that matched the peachy-pink walls and pink-and-green floral carpeting. My wife’s dainty yet curvaceous frame was outfitted in a dark green bolero slacks suit with a white top; her open-toe-sandaled feet were on the Queen Anne coffee table, ankles crossed.
“Who?” I asked the phone. The voice had been familiar but I didn’t immediately place it.
“You know-Beth. Beth Short.”
“Oh!” I glanced at my wife, who glanced back at me, pausing as she leafed through the latest Silver Screen magazine, in that chilling “Who is that, dear?” manner known by all men who’ve received a phone call from a woman while their wife is in the room.
“I take it you remember me,” said the sultry voice on the phone.
“Yes. Of course.”
And here is why looking at my wife reminded me of who the girl on the phone was: they looked alike.
The girl on the phone had lustrous brown hair so dark it almost appeared black; so did Peggy. The girl on the phone was not quite as petite as Peggy, but they had similarly creamy pale skin, slender shapely figures, and big beautiful eyes (Beth’s were blue-green, Peggy’s were Elizabeth Taylor violet). Both of them had fabulous smiles, slightly chubby chipmunk cheeks, with movie-star features reminiscent of screen songbird Deanna Durbin. And both liked to wear white flowers in their dark hair.
I had known the former Peggy Hogan-my bride of almost a month-since 1938; but we had gotten serious in the summer of ’45, and soon were more or less engaged; then by the end of the next summer, we had broken it off. Rather, Peggy had broken it off, and gone gallivanting to Las Vegas to work for a friend of mine. Soon she and that “friend” were romantically inclined, which is to say reclined, so for about three and a half months-roughly the fall of ’46-I had been a spurned, rather bitter lover.
And like so many a man enraged with the woman who cast him aside, I had promptly gotten myself involved with another woman whose striking physical resemblance to my lost love would allow me to bask in equal parts joy and misery.
But my affair with Beth-and you will get the details of that, in time… patience-had been brief, and I had not given the little waitress with the movie-star looks a single thought since our final night together, back in Chicago, last November.
Because in December, when Peggy’s affair came to an abrupt and rather unpleasant end, she ran back into my arms and I gratefully accepted the gesture. We were married a day later, in one of those shabby little Las Vegas wedding chapels, and spent several days thereafter frantically fucking, desperately reassuring each other that we were desperately in love with each other (as opposed to just plain desperate), never discussing, never mentioning the fact that she was mine on the colossal rebound.
“You’re surprised to hear from me,” the girl on the phone said.
“Yes,” I said, master of understatement that I am. “I didn’t think it was widely known I was in L.A., and the last time I saw you-”
“Was in Chicago. But, Nathan-you knew I was a California girl. Remember, we talked about you opening an office here? You were going out in December. Remember?”
I remembered. I only wished she hadn’t.
“Listen,” the girl on the phone said, “I’m… I’m in trouble.”
“What kind?” I asked, sitting up. “Kind you need a private detective for?”
“No… you know. I’m in trouble.”
“Trouble?” I asked numbly, knowing.
“Nathan, I’m two months late.”
Not private detective trouble, then; private dick trouble.
“I see… and it’s, uh, it’s…” I glanced at my wife, who was still paging through the movie magazine, pausing intermittently to frown curiously at me.
“It’s yours, Nathan,” the girl on the phone said. Beth said. Her low-pitched voice managed to seem worldly and youthful at the same time.
I swallowed, smiling and shrugging at my wife, saying into the phone, “Forgive me, but… there’s no doubt of that?”
“I haven’t been with anybody but you.” Dreadful certainty in the voice. “Not for over a month before we were together, and not at all since.”
Fighting dizziness, I said, “Frankly, I don’t, uh, remember even… being with you.”
Other than those incredible blow jobs. Yes, I am a classy guy.
“Oh, Nathan, please, please don’t tell me…” The husky voice caught, a sob trapped in her throat. “… don’t tell me you were too drunk… too drunk to remember…”
What I did remember was that I had indeed been drunk that last night with her. Yes, sir, class act all the way.
“This is a bad time,” I said.
Now Peggy was looking at me, really frowning.
“We have to talk,” Beth’s voice said.
“Can’t this wait till business hours? I can be in my office at the Bradbury Building tomorrow morning.”
“I know about your office,” Beth said. “How do you think I found you? Your friend Mr. Rubinski gave me your number.”
My friend Mr. Rubinski and I would have to have a little talk.
“I just need your help,” she said, “you know, to… get rid of it.”
So she wanted money. What a shock.
“It must be something, staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Beth’s voice was saying, the sob gone now, replaced with a sort of purr. “I always dreamed of staying there.”
“Yeah, it’s a swell place,” I said. Swell place to be staying when somebody was sizing you up for a shakedown.
Peggy said, “Who is that?”
I covered the mouthpiece, whispered, “A client.”
Peggy smirked irritably and returned to her movie magazine.
Into the phone, I said, “Where can I reach you?”
The response had an edge in it: “I want to talk now.”
“How about in an hour?
“… All right. I’m at the Biltmore-Fifth and-”
“I know where the Biltmore is.”
“Why don’t you come down here, Nathan, and meet me in the lobby?”
“That’s impossible. I’ll call you back.”
“I’m in a pay phone.”
“Well give me the number.”
She did; I scribbled it down on a pad by the phone on the end table.
“I’ll be waiting, Nathan,” Beth said. “Let it ring a long time-I’ll be sitting in the lobby, listening for your call. Don’t disappoint me.”
The click in my ear was a relief-a momentary one. I felt sick to my stomach, head whirling. Pretty much the symptoms of morning sickness, but then this was evening, and I was a man. Sort of.
“Do these people have to bother you at home?” Peggy asked.
She looked lovely tonight-as she had on every day of our marriage, thus far-her dark hair up, a fetching pile of raven curls, her cute nose trailed with freckles, her wide full lips lushly lipsticked. No flower in her hair tonight; we’d have to settle for the cut flowers in crystal vases spotted about our cozy honeymoon shack.
“I mean,” Peggy continued, movie magazine in her lap now, “you’re not even really working any cases in this town, are you? Isn’t that Fred’s job?”
“I thought you liked it out here.”
“I do. You know how I feel about that.”
I knew well. We’d been here over three weeks, and Peggy had made it clear she liked Los Angeles, specifically Hollywood. I had made it clear I did not: to me Hollywood was one big movie set, a world of cheap fancy facades, especially the people.
I should have known I was in trouble the moment Peggy got a load of the Beverly Hills Hotel, with its pink-and-green stucco Mission-style-meets-Art-Moderne buildings strewn about grounds swarming with flowering shrubbery and colorful gardens. Staying at that hotel-a pastel, palm-flung make-believe land whose airy lobby was garnished with stunning floral arrangements and luxurious plants and overstuffed furniture for patrons with overstuffed wallets-was like living inside a movie, a sensation reinforced by having the likes of Cary Grant, Hedy Lamarr, Jimmy Stewart and Rosalind Russell sitting at the table next to you, in the hotel’s main dining room or its Polo Lounge.
Back in the late ’30s, when I met Peggy Hogan, she’d been studying at Sawyer Secretarial College, earning money on the side as an artist’s model, posing for Brown and Bigelow’s Chicago-based calendar artists. The business schooling was at her family’s insistence, as her ambition had been to become an actress. She had lived in Tower Town-at that time, the Chicago equivalent of Greenwich Village-and had some minor success in the Little Theater scene.
By the time she and I got together, though, Peggy had abandoned her show business aspirations and used her considerable business skills-she was particularly adept at accounting-to help support her family, after her father’s second and fatal stroke. She was one of seven kids, and her only brother, Johnny, had been killed in the war.
That burden was off her back now, however, because her uncle James Ragen-a client of mine-had died last August and left Peggy’s mother a tidy sum. Jim Ragen had been the head of Continental Press, a racing wire service used by bookies nationwide, and he had died-despite my best efforts to prevent it-at the hands of “rival business interests.”
Close to her uncle and looking up to him, Peggy had been around that kind of people all her life-underworld figures, I mean (she even at one time dated a Capone bodyguard)-and had an unfortunate propensity toward fancying the “glamorous” world of bigtime gangsters.
I guess my reputation for having mob ties myself-really exaggerated-maybe lent me a little of that same shady allure, from Peggy’s point of view. So maybe I shouldn’t have complained about her yen for the likes of her late uncle, and Capone bodyguards, and did I mention the friend of mine she’d run off to Las Vegas with was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel?
All of which is to say, Peggy had been around, yet at the same time was naive about certain things. She could be impressed by the phony glitz of Ben Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel, the aura of excitement, danger and affluence that emanated from bigtime gamblers and gangsters, surrounded as they were by fawning sycophants and beautiful women in jewels and fur.
And of course, by his own crafty design, Ben Siegel’s Las Vegas was the bastard brother to Tinsel Town; so I suppose it should have been no surprise to me that honeymooning in Hollywood would stir certain dormant leanings and longings within my bride.
Not right away, though. The first week of our honeymoon in the Southland (as Southern California liked to call itself) had been blissfully uneventful-really your typical honeymoon, three parts sightseeing, one part fucking. Maybe two parts fucking.
On a delightfully sunny day, we prowled the foot trails of Elysian Park, up and down arroyo-gouged hills, through a snarl of creepers, wild roses, blue gum eucalyptus, slouching pepper trees and twisted oaks; from Point Grand View, the city and mountains lay stretched before us, as if the world was ours for the taking. The view at night at Griffith Park planetarium (within and without) widened those possibilities to the universe, though the next morning we settled for a rowboat ride on the shady, landscaped waters of Westlake Park, ogled the oozing bubbling bog of the La Brea Tar Pits in the afternoon and, that night, took in the colored lanterns and the festive music from cafes of brick-paved, shop-strewn Olvera Street.
But the sights that most thrilled Peggy were the movie palaces of Hollywood Boulevard, the ridiculous pagoda of Grauman’s Chinese-where we compared footprints with the stars (my feet were bigger than Gable’s, hers smaller than Lombard’s) and took in Till the Clouds Roll By — and the Egyptian, where we caught The Shocking Miss Pilgrim and coerced a passerby to snap our picture in front of the ancient god standing guard in the forecourt.
To me the perfect symbol of this phony burg was that shabby HOLLYWOODLAND sign on Mount Lee, a deteriorating remnant of a failed real estate deal, letters thirty feet wide and fifty feet tall studded with burned-out lightbulbs, a decaying relic whose chief function over the years had been to provide a platform for the suicide dives of failed starlets. Still, the looming letters from a distance, if you squinted, looked impressive. They certainly impressed Peggy, who was cross with me when I suggested that maybe someday somebody would have the good sense to tear the goddamn thing down.
“You have no romance,” Peggy said.
We had just made love on the bungalow’s Axminster broadloom carpet in the glow of the marble fireplace.
Nuzzling her neck, I said, “If that’s what you think, you haven’t been paying attention.”
“That’s not what I mean… Can we talk?”
I had not been married long enough to recognize the three deadliest words in the English language, known by husbands everywhere.
“Aren’t we?” I asked innocently. “Talking?”
Now she nuzzled my neck. “I just wanted to ask you something.”
“Ask me something?” I ran a hand along the smooth side of her, following the sensuous sweep down to her waist and up the swell of her swell hip. “Sure. Ask me anything.”
“Could we stay longer?”
“Where? California? Why?”
The violet eyes were wide and seemingly guileless. “Never mind why. Could we?”
I leaned on an elbow, watching the flames of the fireplace lick her, burnishing her supple curves. “Well, not at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I think we can squeeze a month, maybe a month and a half out of ’em. You got any idea what these bungalows go for, a night?”
“I know that. I just thought maybe we could rent a little place.”
“… You don’t mean you’d like me to work out of the L.A. office? Peggy, you can’t be serious…”
She was studying me, affectionately, a hand fiddling with my hair. “Why don’t we throw something on and go to the lounge?”
Polo Lounge, she meant.
Soon we were sharing one of the private booths overlooking the garden patio, the trees of which were festooned with twinkling lights. This was a week night, around eleven, and the place wasn’t all that busy. The only celebrity couple was Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, who-like us-were married and seemed deeply, hopelessly in love.
Peggy-in a pink pantsuit with shoulder pads that would have done Joan Crawford proud-sipped her stinger, cherry-lipsticked lips kissing the red plastic straw, and I worked on my rum cooler, wondering what was on her mind.
Finally, she said, “Being out here has got me thinking.”
“About?”
“Giving it another try.”
“Giving what another try?”
“Acting!”
The word was like a blow to the pit of my stomach, and I probably sounded winded, echoing, “Acting?”
“You knew that was always my dream.”
“I thought we’d kinda thrown in together on a mutual dream, Peg-the white-cottage-white-picket-fence variety?”
“Nate, you don’t expect me to be just another drab little housewife, do you?”
Now I felt a black cloud settling over my head, like that shrimpy guy in L’il Abner, the one trouble followed.
Trying to be gentle, I said, “Baby, don’t be fooled by this mink-lined hellhole.”
The violet eyes glittered, looking as lovely-and as hard-as precious gems. “I know it’s a tough town. I know sooner or later I have to check out of the Beverly Hills Hotel and back into reality. But I have talent, Nate-you remember how good I was, in Winterset, at the Playhouse? Don’t you see? This could be my last chance to make something of myself.”
And here I thought she’d made something of herself becoming Mrs. Nathan Heller.
“Baby,” I said, “thousands of pretty young things flock out here to knock Lana Turner off the screen, and the only roles they get, on or off the screen, are as waitresses, salesgirls, and car hops.”
Her eyes tightened. “Are you saying I’m too old?”
“No! Hell, no, baby-”
Her whole face seemed to harden. “That I can’t compete, just because I’m almost thirty?”
I felt like a kid who’d peeked in the oven at cookies baking and got his face scorched.
“You’re the most beautiful woman in this town,” I told her, grasping her hand. And it wasn’t a lie. First of all, she was my bride and we were on our honeymoon and I loved her; and second of all, the former Peggy Hogan was a knockout. But knockouts approaching thirty were, in fact, long in the tooth for this sleazy trash heap of a town.
“I think it’s an advantage, not being some naive little beauty contest winner,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as me. “Let those little tramps try to sleep their way to the top. I have something they’ll never have.”
“Talent,” I said, nodding, going along with her.
“Well of course talent, but I was talking about connections. Your connections. My late uncle’s connections. Ben’s connections.”
It was the first time Ben Siegel had been referred to since we’d tied the knot.
“Ben’s connections,” I echoed numbly.
She shrugged a single shoulder, as if the bombshell she’d just dropped was the tiniest firecracker. “Ben owes us. He owes you and he owes me. He has more Hollywood friends than Hedda Hopper.”
“I’d rather not bring Ben back into our lives, in any fashion. Okay?”
She raised her hands in gentle surrender. “All right, bad suggestion-but your partner Fred has a black book filled with movie colony bigwigs. Isn’t that why you threw in with him-the movie studios and stars he works for, and with? It would be easy for him to line up some interviews, some auditions for me.”
“You’ve really been thinking about this, haven’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, I have.”
“And I’d just move out here, and what? Let Lou Sapperstein run the Chicago office?”
“Sure, and you can fly back and forth some. We could maintain two residences. We can afford it.”
I knew when Peg got up a full head of steam like this, there was no stopping her-and, frankly, I didn’t see the harm. She did have a little talent-a little-and, yes, she had the looks. She was pretty with a nice shape, and with all the Technicolor pictures they were making these days, those violet eyes would show up nice.
But the reality was, she didn’t stand a chance, even with a little string-pulling. At twenty-nine, she really was too old for this town, to be starting out, anyway. So I didn’t see the harm. Let her try, let her get her hopes dashed, and let her come running back into my arms in tears.
The second agent she tried out for signed her. I chewed Fred out, asking what the hell he thought he was doing, had he twisted this guy’s arm or what?
Fred-a small, compactly muscular, nattily dressed man in his forties with sharp dark eyes, a rumpled face, and a shiny bald head-sat behind his desk in the Bradbury Building and shrugged elaborately. “Who’d a thunk it? I didn’t ask for any favors, except to let Peg read for him. I said she was my partner’s wife and would he please humor her. He said sure, and now this!”
I was pacing. “Humor her is right. She goes out on audition at Fox tomorrow!”
“Having an agent is nothing.”
“Nothing! There’s ten thousand beautiful babes out there that would screw you silly for an in with an agent!”
“Maybe in the future I should keep that in mind.” Fred sat forward, patted the air reassuringly. “Listen, Nate, don’t worry. Roles are not that easy to come by. You think she’s gonna get the first part she reads for? No way in hell!”
Fred was right. She got the second part she read for, a bit as a waitress in a Bob Hope picture at Paramount.
She was thrilled, giddy with it, and I did my best not to be a rat, and seem happy for her.
Anyway, Peggy taking this flier at the movies didn’t bother me as much as the notion of relocating to Los Angeles; and Fred Rubinski wasn’t crazy about it, either, because he was used to running his own office. Taking me on as a partner had been predicated on my ass staying in Chicago.
“I don’t know what to do about it,” I said to him, in a booth at Sherry’s, the swanky restaurant he owned a piece of on Sunset. “I could divide my time between Chicago and here, maybe three weeks back there and one in L.A.”
“That might work,” Fred said, lighting up a cigar, pushing a plate of cheesecake crumbs aside. I was still working on my dessert, a rum and Coke.
“Trouble is,” I said, “knowing how susceptible Peggy is to this show biz baloney, I’m afraid Errol Flynn or Robert Taylor or somebody would be in her pants before I got off the plane in Chicago.”
“Nice, you got such faith in your bride.”
“Listen, I love Peggy and I think she loves me, but I got no illusions about this marriage. I got her on the boomerang and I have my work cut out, holding on to her without her flying into somebody’s else’s arms.”
“Siegel?”
“No. But somebody rich and slick and handsome.”
Fred’s rumpled face formed a lopsided smile. “Well, Nate, you may not be rich, but you’re workin’ on it, and lots of people think you’re slick, maybe too slick-and more than your share of ladies have found you handsome enough, over the years.”
“Yeah, but I’m not a movie star. Listen, Fred, if I stay out here, it’s still your office-just make me your chief investigator.”
“Jesus, Nate, you’re the president of the company!”
“That’s all right. Even back home I spend my time working cases… I just use my clout to pick and choose.”
Fred contemplated awhile, then shrugged and said, “Might work out at that. We can play this publicity angle better with the Examiner, if that comes to pass, with you doing a ‘private eye to the stars’ number. We could get nice ink out of that.”
“Maybe.”
So I had told Peggy that night, in our bungalow, that I had decided to stay in L.A. We’d rent a house and I’d work out of Fred’s office, and she could take a real stab at a career in movies.
She melted into my arms. “Oh, Nate, you’re wonderful… I love you so much…”
“Why don’t you try to think of a way to properly thank me, then?”
I cupped her small perfect behind and drew her close.
“Oh, yes, darling…” Her fingers were fiddling in my hair. “… but one thing…”
“Yeah?”
“I think we should start… you know, using something.”
“Huh?”
“I’m going to get pregnant if we don’t start using some precautions.”
Over the first weeks of our marriage, we had certainly thrown caution to the wind, with no thought of anything but good old-fashioned honeymooners’ lust. Possibly in the back of my mind had been the thought of making some little Hellers-I was older than Peg, after all, pushing forty, a returning vet seeking that idyllic postwar world, and settling down had been part of the process.
But that night I used a Sheik, like old times, and soon she was using a diaphragm. We still made love like honeymooners-well, maybe dropping back to twice or even once a day-and Peggy was constantly affectionate, grateful for the sacrifice I was making for her, and her career.
On the evening I received the phone call from Beth Short, I had noticed a certain moodiness on Peggy’s part-almost a sullenness, though she hadn’t been unpleasant or anything.
After I cradled the phone-already starting to work on the story that would allow me to slip away to a pay phone where I could call Beth back and start dealing with this mess-Peggy tossed her movie magazine on the coffee table beside red-painted toes peeking through her sandals, and said those three words again.
Not “I love you”-the three deadly ones.
“Can we talk?”
“Well, sure, honey.”
“We haven’t had dinner, you know.”
Somehow it was an accusation.
“I thought we’d just go over to the Polo Lounge,” I said. “Or maybe order room service.”
“Let’s go out.” Abruptly, she stood, smoothing her bolero slacks outfit. “I need to go out.”
So I took her to La Rue, a chic joint on the Strip owned by Billy Wilkerson, publisher of The Hollywood Reporter. Unlike the nearby Ciro’s and the Trocadero, La Rue was chiefly a restaurant, not a nightclub, and the mood was relaxed-no blaring big band, just a piano playing Cole Porter. The only celebrities I spotted were Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles, sharing one of the striped booths; weren’t they divorced? Hayworth looked angry and Welles, heavy-lidded, seemed half in the bag. I knew Welles, having met him in Chicago years before, but he didn’t recognize me, or anyway acknowledge me. I got over it. We moved along to our own cozy striped booth, where we ate, conversing little. Peg had lobster newberg, which she barely touched, and I had a lamb chop, just picking at the thing.
We were both preoccupied-I was thinking about that phone call to the Biltmore I was supposed to make, Beth’s hour deadline having nearly elapsed; and Peggy had as yet to elaborate on those three little words: “Can we talk?”
Finally, after our plates had been cleared and the crumbs brushed from the linen tablecloth and we’d both declined dessert and ordered coffee, I asked, “How did the audition go this morning?”
“It wasn’t an audition,” she said.
“I thought it was an audition.”
“It wasn’t. It was a doctor’s appointment.”
“Doctor’s… are you all right?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
I scooched around beside her in the booth, slipped an arm around her. “Peg, what’s wrong?”
“I was late.”
“Late?”
“You know… late?”
I couldn’t be hearing this.
“And I’m never late,” she went on, her tone as light as a Noel Coward play, and as ominous as an obituary, “so I made a doctor’s appointment… just to be safe, you know? I’m pregnant, all right.”
“Well,” I said thickly, “that’s… that’s wonderful.”
“Wonderful?” The violet eyes glared at me: are you insane? “You can’t be serious. This couldn’t come at a worse time.”
She didn’t know how right she was, but I said, “It’s a great time-we’re newlyweds and we’re going to be parents. That’s great. It’s the American dream.”
“It’s a nightmare. It doesn’t fit in with our plans at all!”
“Our plans?”
“Nate, I’m going to be in a movie next week. I have an agent. My dreams are all coming true.”
“Don’t you have any dreams that involve me, and starting a family?”
She sighed impatiently, glancing away. “Of course I do… just not right now.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I think we should… consider… you know.”
“Consider what?”
“Must I say it?”
“… Getting rid of it?”
Now her manner turned businesslike. “Surely, with your connections, you know people that could… take care of this.”
My connections again.
“Peggy,” I said, scooching away a little, pawing the air, “no more discussion. You’re having this baby. We’re having this baby.”
She huffed, she puffed, she blew my house down: “I should have known you’d take that selfish attitude.”
Whatever happened to the good old days, when you knocked up a woman, she tried to talk you into getting married, and you tried to talk her into having an abortion instead?
“You’re my wife,” I said, “and I love you, and you’re going to be the mother of my… of our… child.”
“You’re impossible,” she said, and she began to cry, and when I tried to comfort her, she slapped at me and rushed off to the powder room. Other patrons glared at me, wondering what terrible thing I’d done to this poor girl.
I took the opportunity to use the pay phone to try the number at the Biltmore. I let it ring and ring and ring.
Finally a male voice answered. “This is a pay phone.”
“I know. Is there a pretty girl sitting there, waiting in the lobby? Dark hair, almost black? Real dish?”
“Yeah, I seen her, she was hangin’ around awhile. She blew, though.”
“Thanks.”
Shrugging, I hung up; what the hell-what had been her damn rush, anyway? Beth Short knew where to find me.
So I leaned against the wall outside the ladies’ powder room, nodding to Bogart and Bacall as they strolled by, heading to the bar; Bogart nodded back and Bacall bestowed a smile. Nice couple. Glad somebody was happily married.
Well, at least I could be sure of something: I might be one fertile son of a bitch, but none of the women in my life wanted to have my kid.