The Club

by Jane Heller

  “Nope,” one of them said and grabbed them.

  God, they’re not kidding, I realized. Leeza is some piece of work. She fires her most successful editors—women who actually make money for the company—and she’s worried about a bunch of number two pencils!

  “I guess I won’t even try to take those with me,” I said, pointing to the file cabinet in the corner. I had hoped to pack up a few important files—files that might help me get another job.

  The guard smiled. “Not a chance.”

  I smiled back. It was either smile or slit my wrists.

  “Well, that about does it,” I said, surveying my office for the last time. I swallowed the giant lump in my throat as I took a long, hard look around the room in which I’d spent so many wonderful hours. Suddenly, I spotted the needlepoint sign on my wall and scurried over to take it down.

  “Sorry, Miss Mills,” one of the guards said as he tried to stop me. “That’s a no-no.”

  I spun around to face him. “Get out of my way,” I said, steel-eyed. “The sign on the wall is mine.”

  I pulled the sign off the wall and placed it gently in a carton.

  They could take my job but they couldn’t take my sign, which Hunt had given me on our first wedding anniversary. He’d asked his secretary, a whiz at needlepoint, to make it for me. It read: Love means never having to say you’re hungry—not when you’re married to a cookbook editor!

  Corny, maybe. But it was Hunt’s stab at humor, and since he wasn’t exactly the most humorous guy on the planet, it meant a lot to me.

  I gathered my belongings, wished the security guards a nice life, and went home.

  Chapter Two

  “Belford. Next stop,” boomed the conductor.

  I checked my watch. How weird is this? I thought. It’s 11:38 on a Friday morning, and while everybody I know is at work, I’m taking the Metro North train home. Talk about depressing.

  I’d never taken the train home in the middle of the day, except once, two years before, when I’d gotten a terrible head cold. I was running a fever and could barely talk, but even then, I hadn’t wanted to leave the office. I loved my job at Charlton House that much.

  Stop torturing yourself, I thought. You got fired. Deal with it. Take the weekend off and start hustling for another job on Monday.

  I peered out the window and watched the Connecticut landscape go by. Greenwich. Stamford. Noroton Heights. Darien. Every town looked as forlorn as I felt, what with its bare trees, brown grass, and gray sky. Nobody should have to lose their job in March, I thought, not when the Northeast is about as welcoming as an unemployment office.

  “Belford. Next stop,” the conductor boomed again.

  He didn’t have to boom; I was the only one on the train.

  I regarded the conductor for the first time during the sixty-five-minute ride. He was pretty cute, I realized. Medium height, stocky, red handlebar mustache, wire-rimmed glasses. Not my type, but then “my type” had, of late, come to mean “any type.” I’m ashamed to admit this, but in the past year I’d found myself lusting after all sorts of men in a way I hadn’t since college. I never acted on the lusting (adultery sounded wildly romantic but in the end required far too much calculation), but it worried me all the same. First I had sexual fantasies about Mark, Charlton House’s director of sales. Then I had sexual fantasies about Richard, the author of How to Find Resonance in Risottos. Then I had sexual fantasies about Chuck, the man who came to adjust the air-conditioning duct in my office. What was going on? I asked myself. Why was I acting like a Dirty Old Woman? Was it the fact that I was about to turn forty and going through a “passage?” Was it my hormones? Or was it that my marriage was stale?

  Stale as week-old zucchini bread, that’s what it was. I had to face facts: Hunt and I had been growing apart. After seven years of marriage, we had reached that inevitable fork in the road where we were either going to rediscover those lovable little traits that had attracted us to each other in the first place or get a divorce.

  The thought of divorce made me cringe. I had no interest in throwing myself back into the singles’ scene. For one thing, I’d be yet another middle-aged divorcée in a market glutted with middle-aged divorcées. For another, men were so…so…confused these days. They were either confused about their sexuality or confused about their attitudes toward success or confused about whether it was okay to cry. They were even confused about how much aftershave lotion they should wear, which was why there was an inordinate amount of Drakkar Noir floating around. God, it was a jungle out there.

  But the thought of reviving the passion of my marriage…well, it wasn’t impossible. I still loved Hunt and I felt sure he still loved me. The question was, How do people rekindle that first spark, that wonderful giddy feeling when everything the other person does is miraculous?

  You enter into a bizarre sort of bargain when you fall in love: if your beloved watches football games on television, you watch football games on television; if your beloved eats Indian food, you eat Indian food; if your beloved spends New Year’s Eve with his old Army buddies, you spend New Year’s Eve with his old Army buddies. And then the novelty of the relationship wears off, and you never do any of these things again.

  Of course, in Hunt’s case, it wasn’t football, Indian food, or even New Year’s Eves with Army buddies that tried my patience; it was Kimberley, Hunt’s ten-year-old daughter from his first marriage to a sometime actress named Bree. When he was a mere twenty-two, Hunt had met Bree through a friend he no longer speaks to. Bree was blond and long-necked, just like her idol Meryl Streep, but the comparison ended there. Thanks to a very limited range and a tinny, thoroughly irritating voice, she couldn’t get a part in a movie no matter how many producers and directors she slept with. Currently, Bree spent her time reading Variety, collecting alimony payments from Hunt and badmouthing me to her daughter.

  Her daughter. I sighed when I thought of Kimberley, the child I wanted so desperately to love. When I got engaged to Hunt, I was a fledgling cookbook editor at Charlton House, all naive and dewy-eyed about life. I thought it was incredibly worldly of me to involve myself with a man who had an ex-wife and a young daughter.

  “I’ll be a stepmother!” I told my mother excitedly when I called to announce my wedding plans. I had visions of being Superwoman, running home from the office, whipping up nutritionally correct dinners for my little family, helping my stepdaughter with her homework and tucking her tenderly into bed.

  “You’ll be a doormat,” my mother said, never one to mince words. “You’ll beat your brains in trying to win her affection and she’ll shit on you. Both of them will.”

  “Both of them? You mean Kimberley and her mother?” I asked.

  “No, no,” she clucked. “The mother won’t shit on you. She’ll just poison the little girl against you.”

  “How comforting,” I said.

  “I meant Hunt. The minute you open your mouth to discipline his daughter, he’ll take her side and you’ll be the odd one out.”

  “Oh, Mom,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like Hunt. He’d never take Kimberley’s side against me.”

  My mother knew what she was talking about, I realized later. When I married Hunt and inherited his daughter, I found that every time I told the kid to clean up her room, turn the radio down, or take her feet off the kitchen table, Hunt would get that pathetic, guilt-trip look and tell me to back off.

  “She’s only a child,” he’d say. “She doesn’t know any better.”

  “How’s she going to know any better if nobody tells her?” I’d say.

  The situation only got worse as Kimberley got older. When a little kid misbehaves, you giggle and say goo-goo and chalk it up to the fact that little kids don’t know right from wrong. But when a big kid misbehaves, you say, “That kid’s a pain in the ass.” There’s nothing cute or cuddly about a big kid who misbehaves, especially when the big kid’s misbehaving comes between you and your husband.

  I missed the
way Hunt and I used to be, before I saw how Kimberley manipulated Hunt, before I watched him cave in to his ex-wife every time she needed money or said she did, before we allowed our marriage to go stale. I longed for the days when just the thought of him would get my heart racing. But my heart hadn’t been doing any racing lately—at least not for him. My heart only raced when I thought of Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner and railroad conductors with red handlebar mustaches.

  As for Hunt, I knew what got his heart racing—his country club. Sure, we were having problems before he joined The Oaks. But since then, he’d become a person I hardly recognized. Yes, he wanted to make partner at F&F, and yes, there were influential and important business types at The Oaks. But did my nice, normal husband have to metamorphose into a back-slapping, approval-seeking, pink-and-green-plaid-panted golf nut? I had heard The Oaks had an exquisite, eighteen-hole course. Golf Digest called it the most challenging, “visually eventful” course in Connecticut. But after joining the club, Hunt became positively bewitched by golf. He was so bewitched by the game that he often taped tournaments on our VCR and watched them before he went to sleep. He was so bewitched by the game that he often wore neckties with little white golf balls on them. He was so bewitched by the game that he often chose golf over sex, the result being that the only head and shaft that saw regular action belonged to his putter, not his pecker. In other words, our sex life, once so rich and rewarding, had slowed to a crawl. “A guy only has so much energy,” Hunt explained.

  “Belford station,” boomed the conductor.

  Shit. I didn’t want to get off the train in the worst way. I wanted to stay in my seat in the nice big choo choo and think and daydream and never have to face the fact that my job was gone and my marriage was stale.

  “Bel-fooord,” the conductor said again.

  “I’m going, I’m going,” I muttered as I gathered my belongings and stepped off the train onto the empty platform.

  I suddenly wished I’d called Hunt at his office to tell him what had happened. I should have asked him to meet me at Grand Central and take me home. But there was always the chance he’d say, “Sorry, Judy. Got a big pork bellies meeting this afternoon.” Better not to be rejected, I decided. I’d been rejected enough for one day.

  When the taxi pulled up in front of my house, the driver looked at me in his rearview mirror and said, “Nice house.”

  I thanked him, paid him, and walked up the flagstone steps to my nice house—my nice house that, without my pay check, would be a stretch for us to afford.

  The house was a bona fide antique colonial circa 1810, known around town as The Ichobod Townsend House for some crazy old bastard who shot a band of marauding Indians right on the front lawn and became a local hero. Consequently, the house was one of Belford’s prized pieces of real estate, according to the realtor who sold it to us without mentioning that the place was full of squirrels—squirrels who were so comfy up in the attic that they didn’t want to leave no matter what we did. Since we were as environmentally correct as a modern couple could be, we wouldn’t let our exterminator poison the little rodents. Instead, we decided to share the house with them: they got the attic and we got the rest of the place.

  I put my key in the door and let myself in. “I’m home,” I said to no one in particular.

  We had bought the house six years ago, in the second year of our marriage. It was Hunt who’d suggested we move out of the city. “We need more space,” he’d said. “Besides, it’ll be fun riding in on the train together.”

  Commuting together into Manhattan from our antique house in Connecticut with its wooden ducks, patchwork quilts, and American flags sounded just ducky to me, only it turned out to be something we rarely did: Hunt liked to take the seven o’clock express train with all the other guys from F&F; I preferred the 8:02. So much for togetherness.

  The woman who owned the house before us had done a good deal of renovation, albeit some of it nonsensical. I mean, would you install an elevator in a cozy, 1810 colonial? Apparently, she’d taken a fall on the rickety old stairs and put the elevator in so she could travel more easily between the house’s three floors. On our first night in our new home, Hunt and I made love in the elevator. It was exciting, but not so exciting that we ever did it again. Mostly, we used the elevator as a kind of mechanical hamper—a handy gadget for transporting our dirty clothes from the bedroom on the second floor to the laundry room in the basement.

  I dropped my things on the kitchen counter and heaved a deep sigh. What should I do now? I asked myself. It was only noon. There was a whole day staring me in the face.

  I was dying to call somebody, to tell somebody I’d been fired, to “share my pain,” as they say on “Oprah.” But who? All my friends in publishing would be at lunch, eating “spa food,” sipping mineral water, and chewing on the latest, juiciest gossip.

  I considered calling my mother, but she and my father wouldn’t be home. Ever since they’d retired to Boca Raton, where they bought a four-bedroom “Mediterranean-style” house in a country club community called Point O’ Palms, they had led an incredibly active lifestyle. Their country club wasn’t a country club in the same way that The Oaks was a country club—i.e., there was no trick to getting into their country club; all you had to do was open your checkbook—but it had tennis courts, two golf courses, and a marina, and my parents felt at home there the way I never would at The Oaks.

  I considered calling Hunt’s mother, but she and I didn’t get along any better than Kimberley and I did. She was cold and distant and painfully monosyllabic. A real chore to be around. She’d just sit there, smug in the knowledge that chatty types like me would rush in and fill the dead air. And her husband wasn’t a gabber either. Spending an evening with them was about as much fun as watching an icicle melt.

  I considered calling someone I knew from Belford, but I didn’t know anyone from Belford except our plumber, our exterminator, and the teller at our bank’s drive-in window, none of whom were the stuff of bosom buddies. A rural yet sophisticated town in affluent Chesterfield County, Belford wasn’t the friendliest town in the world unless you had kids—kids who lived with you full time.

  rI considered calling Kimberley, but she was at Nightingale-Bamford School, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where the girls wore starched uniforms and spent summers at their families’ châteaux in the south of France and were fonder of their au pairs than they were of their parents. Three years ago, Bree had insisted on sending Kimberley there, despite the ridiculous tuition, and Hunt, ever passive when it came to his ex-wife and daughter, had paid the bill. I remember how we fought over it. I called him a wimp and he called me a nag; I told him to wise up and he told me to butt out; then I stormed into the kitchen and he went off to play golf. As I said, I missed the way Hunt and I used to be.

  Hunt came home at seven-thirty. I could tell he was in a good mood because he kissed me on the lips when he saw me. That’s one of the first things to go in a marriage, you know: kissing on the lips—slow, meaningful kissing on the lips. Oh, you still hug and cuddle and even have sexual intercourse every now and then, but you stop kissing each other on the lips once you’ve been married a few years—unless, of course, one of you is drunk.

  “How was your day, Jude?” he asked as he hung his coat in the foyer closet and ran his fingers through his wavy blond hair. His natural blond hair. Hunt was a pure-bred WASP—a blond-haired, blue-eyed, small-nosed Episcopalian. Hunter Dean Price III was his full name. He was long-legged and long-waisted and had only recently started to grow a paunch. He had the look and the manner of a man who’d grown up with money, even though he hadn’t. What he’d grown up with was a father who had failed at every business he’d ever gotten involved in; a father who felt like such a failure that he was determined his son would succeed where he had not. Indeed, I often wondered whether Hunter Dean Price II wanted that partnership for Hunt at F&F even more than Hunt himself; whether Hunt’s relentless campaigning and networking and sucking up
had more to do with old Dad than with his own personal satisfaction.

  “You really want to know how my day was?” I asked him.

  “You bet,” he said. “How about a drink first?”

  I nodded.

  I followed Hunt to the wet bar in the library, a warm, dark green room off the kitchen. He poured me a glass of Pouilly Fuissé and made himself a Tanqueray gin and tonic, a libation known affectionately around the house as a T ’n’ T. I sat on the loveseat; Hunt sat at the leather-top desk.

  “Something happen today?” he asked.

  I took a deep breath. “You could say that,” I said and started to cry. I had promised myself I wouldn’t, but I was overcome with feelings of sadness and loss. Having to tell Hunt what Leeza had done to me only made it seem more real, more horrible.

  Hunt got up from his chair and sat beside me on the loveseat. “Judy? What is it?” he asked.

  “I was fired,” I said and started sobbing on his shoulder.

  “Fired?” said Hunt as he pulled me off him. I couldn’t tell if he was upset by my news or afraid I’d soil his suit.

  “Leeza Grummond said Charlton House is taking the high road,” I said. “From now on they’re going to publish ‘literature.’” I rolled my eyes. “No more cookbooks. No more romance novels either.”

  “Arlene Handlebaum was fired too?” Hunt asked.

  I nodded.

  Hunt was speechless and expressionless. He just sat there, pulling on his left earlobe and working his jaw muscles, the way he always did when he was upset.

  “They’re giving me a whopping three months’ severance,” I went on. “Big sports, huh?”

  He continued not to speak.

  “Hunt?” I said. “What are you thinking?”

  He cleared his throat. “I’m thinking that I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” he said, “and I’m thinking what a raw deal you got.” He paused. “I understand that they’ve got to trim the fat. All the big companies are cutting back. But letting you and Arlene go is pure stupidity. You two are terrific editors.”