by Sally Koslow
I kicked off my sandals as he slipped off his shirt and pants. He had a long torso and, even though he was thin, small love handles that only seemed to make him more real and, thus, more appealing. As I closed my eyes, the patch of dark hair on his chest made me think once again of the Bermuda Triangle. Was I getting lost or being found?
Fourteen
MAYBE, BABY
olly, I’ve been thinking it over,” Barry said. We’d decided to start with cocktails at the Four Seasons and follow with dinner at Tao. “But first …” He signaled for a server. “Two martinis, please,” he said. “Grey Goose.”
For a woman whose idea of drinking used to center on scouting wine stores for the most ironically labeled under-$15 pinot grigio, I was relieved that courage was on its way in a stemmed glass. Had Barry actually picked that night to say he didn’t think things were working out? It was, after all, our first anniversary.
On a scale of 1 to 10, I gave our wedded life a 5. Straight down the middle, Jack and Jill Doe average. I’d recently read on a tarot card website that only 8 percent of married couples believe their partner is a true soul mate. I’m no math whiz, as my SATs verified, but factoring in today’s divorce rates, this means that it’s the rare bride who connects with a groom who instinctively puts his hand there and stars in the X-rated fantasies that top her playlist.
Barry and I seemed on par with every other married couple we knew. In our three sessions of required premarital counseling, the rabbi singled out sex and money as the sinkholes that swallow most relationships. As far as I could see, we had no terminal problem with either. In fact, since we didn’t go in for smarmy public displays of affection, I thought we could definitely expect a longer shelf life than the husband and wife with whom we socialized who practically copulated on the table every time they invited us to dinner. In their shiny condo with its gleaming bamboo floor, I always suspected we’d been summoned to bear witness to their libido as much as to the panoramic city view from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the thirty-third floor.
While I busily categorized myself as garden-variety married, someone might wonder if I conveniently overlooked what had happened with Luke six weeks earlier. Not exactly. After that business trip, I shelved my memory of l’affaire Luc in the contemporary women’s fiction aisle of my brain. Our fling, I told myself, was meaningless and it was over. I told no one, not even Brie.
Maybe I was wise beyond my years and understood that every union is like a mixed-breed puppy adopted from a shelter: you have no idea how it will turn out until it grows up. That night, in a hotel lounge, Barry was looking as if he had a lot of sleek Labrador retriever in him, with maybe some Tibetan terrier and giant schnauzer. No pit bull in sight. He was wearing all black—well-tailored jacket, fine cotton shirt, lizard belt, jeans—and, fortunately, the effect was more European art snob than Johnny Cash. His nose kept him from being pretty-boy handsome, but with his wavy black hair and dark brown eyes fringed by lashes that rightly should have belonged to me, the overall effect of Dr. Barry Marx was striking. His bravado finished the package.
“To us,” he said, raising his glass.
“Us,” I echoed as we clinked. “You and me.”
“First, I want you to have this,” he said, handing me a Bergdorf’s bag, always a promising receptacle, especially if small. I carefully opened the box, where a velvet pouch revealed a sterling silver cuff incandescent with quartz stones big as pistachios. Had I been auditioning for the part of goomar, the bracelet would have been a fine accessory. My first thought, however, was that Kitty had selected it.
“Wow,” was all I could say. “This is really unexpected.” I’d been hoping for a gift, of course, and had done my best to hint about a two-foot shell-encrusted obelisk I’d been ogling in a dusty Village antique shop. But what I imagined would add considerable panache to our coffee table, perhaps Barry saw as competitively phallic. I admired the bracelet, tried to glisten with appreciation, and castigated myself for being ungrateful. Chances were Barry was going to hate the blue enameled cuff links I’d bought for him. Now that I thought about it, I wasn’t even sure he liked French-cuffed shirts.
“You deserve it, baby,” he said, slipping the present on my wrist. Was he trying to see his reflection in its luster? “And speaking of babies,” he added, “it’s time, Molly.”
In a screenplay, the look on Barry’s face would read “long, meaningful gaze.” For me, it’d be “sheer, frozen panic.”
Some couples chew over the baby question endlessly before they even get engaged. These must be the same people who organize their shoes in transparent boxes, rush their annotated tax prep to an accountant by January 31, and get around to ordering their wedding album. There are also men and women who understand exactly where they stand on parenthood, even if they’ve only discussed it with their shrinks, as well as husbands and wives who haven’t figured out the answer but welcome bright-eyed, bushy-tailed dialogue on the subject. Barry and I fit into none of these categories.
“I’m not sure I feel adult enough to be anyone’s mother,” I admitted.
“Oh, c’mon,” he said. “You’ll be a great mommy.” His tone was jocular.
In our family, it was Lucy who’d majored in kids—bossing younger children in the neighborhood, working every summer as a camp counselor, teaching nursery school. She loved every child, and they returned the affection.
“Whenever anyone asked me to babysit, I always pleaded term paper,” I said. “I’m not maternal.”
Barry let loose such a loud, incredulous “Ha!” that people at the next table turned to see if someone required the Heimlich maneuver. “Molly, listen. It’s an open secret that most parents only appreciate their own flesh and blood and think other people’s kids are sniveling rugrats.”
“That’s a penetrating observation, Barry,” I said, fairly sure he might be right. But what if I didn’t like my own child? What if my child didn’t like me?
The previous year, I’d volunteered as a reading tutor. My first-grade charge insisted on Hairy Scary Spiders. I can still hear his creepy falsetto lip-synching: “My net catches an insect. I kill it with a simple bite. I crash and grind the insect’s body with my steel jaws and pulverize it into juice. Dinner is served.” An innocent bug in a tarantula’s net. I was feeling that way at the moment.
“But I don’t know how to be a mom.” What if I couldn’t understand or slept through my baby’s ear-piercing patois? Got revolted by spit-up? I especially didn’t want to think about the effect of forty-five extra pounds on my stomach, which wasn’t concave even now, or how a nine-pound infant was going to pop out of my nether regions. “May I have another martini, please?” I asked the server.
“Molly, you’re being ridiculous—do you think my mother knew how to be a mother?” The answer to that question did not bolster Barry’s argument. He gamely switched tactics. “You’ll be like your mother,” he said.
“I could never be as good a mother as my mother,” I snapped back. Who could? Claire Divine is warm and patient. I am the definition of impatience, and although I could be kind enough to deserving parties, Barry liked to point out that people often took me for aloof. When I suggested that these hypersensitive types were sadly unable to discern shyness in a grown woman, I saw his skepticism.
As I finished my second drink, overcome by insecurities I never knew I had, I began to feel claustrophobic, despite the bar’s towering ceiling. I was pleased when Barry called for the tab and we moved on. As we entered Tao, a sixteen-foot-tall Buddha gazed down on us. I implored him to tell me what to do, but all Buddha-boy seemed to say was, Order the Peking duck for two. We did, and switched to our usual dinner talk, Barry’s tales from the operating room, which kept us going through a calorie blitz called a Zen Parfait. I passed on the giant fortune cookie. What fortune had in store for me I would gladly wait to discover.
“How about a Chai Kiss?” Barry said, looking at the menu of after-dinner drinks.
“How about home
to Jane Street?” I said. In the taxi, I closed my eyes and leaned against Barry’s well-muscled body. With the help of a good romp in bed, perhaps I could talk my husband into postponing baby making for a few years—maybe a decade—and during that time grow up and figure out what I wanted.
At our apartment, still blurry from all I’d had to drink, I slipped into a blue silk teddy. Barry pulled me toward him tightly. He was in the locked and loaded position. “Happy anniversary, sweetheart,” he whispered hotly into my ear. “Molly Divine Marx, you will be a wonderful mother.”
I looked at him, sleepily and skeptically.
“I don’t know very much,” he said, “but I know that.”
There was something about the way he said those words that felt utterly tender and authentic. I deeply wanted to believe him, to live up to them, to feel sure about this step that for most women isn’t even a choice. “Really?” I asked, a prayer as much as a question. In that moment, I felt that marrying Barry Marx was the smartest and best move I had ever made.
As he blew out the candle I kept by the bed, and the scent of lily of the valley filled our small room, he said, “Let’s make a baby, baby.”
Months later, we did.
Fifteen
PIECE OF WORK
etective Hicks stretches his long legs and scans the room. Sitting on a black leather Eames chair, he might be taken for another sleek minimalist object in Brie and Isadora’s loft. “Ms. Lawson, was that reading of yours at Mrs. Marx’s funeral by Elizabeth Barrett Browning?” he asks, as if he honestly cares about Victorian poetry.
“Emily Dickinson,” Brie says. She’s wearing her Jessica Rabbit-goes-to-court suit, bought to scare the nuts off opposing counsel. It has a tight jacket, strategically unbuttoned to show a peek of cleavage. The pencil skirt, which hugs her butt, ends just below her knees. Her hair is pulled back into a severe chignon. Isadora sits beside her on the couch, a wrinkle that I’ve never noticed etching a delicate valley between her slightly hooded hazel eyes.
“I knew it was one of those depressed women,” the detective says, helping himself to chocolate biscotti that Isadora has set out on a square white china plate. “Now, I gather from Mrs. Marx’s funeral that you two were close,” he says. “Can you tell me a little about the … relationship?” The question is directed to Brie, but he glances toward Isadora as he drops a crumb, which disappears into the thick charcoal rug. Isadora’s wrinkle deepens as she sees the biscotti bit vanish, but Brie looks straight at Hicks.
“Molly and I were randomly assigned as freshman roommates,” she says. “It was one of those fortunate matches. We hit it off and became inseparable. The next year we got an apartment together and kept it until we graduated.”
“Can you elaborate?” Hicks’ eyes wear an amused expression, in which Brie is reading a taunting, sub rosa suggestion. Which is his intention, to tick her off. Don’t fall for it. I beam this message with the futile hope that Brie can hear it.
“We did what college friends do,” she says. “Study, shop, party.”
In reverse order, as I recall.
“Anything else?” he asks.
“Sure,” Brie says, “eat pizza, gain ten pounds, diet, meet guys, root for the home team, take vacations in skimpy bikinis, and try not to think about what we’d do when we grew up. Should I go on?” As she reels off this list, the speed of her speech picks up, as does the pitch of her voice. I am surprised that Brie is allowing frustration to show. Don’t they teach keeping cool in law school?
“Ms. Vega, would you mind if I had a few moments alone with Ms. Lawson, please?” asks Hicks. Isadora stands and smooths away nonexistent creases on her sleeveless black dress, in which she manages to appear as dignified as a head of state despite the fact that it clings to her tiny waist and curvy hips. Isadora possesses the kind of beauty that generally requires a passport. We were the same height, but she looks a head taller than I ever felt. On the middle finger of her right hand, a ring featuring a large, lemony stone—I have no idea if it’s a rare diamond or a hunk of glass—reflects the afternoon light.
“As you wish,” she says, and walks into the bedroom and closes the door. Hicks and I both know that through the wall Isadora can hear much of what’s said.
“So, Ms. Lawson, what’s that phrase people use nowadays? Friends with benefits? Did that apply to you and Mrs. Marx?” I’m getting the feeling that he is going out of his way to offend.
Brie scowls ever so slightly. “No, Molly and I were always friends,” she says. “No ‘benefits.’” She signals quotation marks with her fingers, her manicure a flawless taupe.
Hicks says … nothing.
“In those days I had boyfriends,” she adds, although he hasn’t asked.
“Thank you for the clarification, Ms. Lawson,” he says. “Now, let’s see. How would you describe the state of Mrs. Marx’s marriage?”
Brie shifts from left to right and back again. “You never really know what’s going on in another relationship.”
It sounds reasonable to me, but all Hicks says is, “Ms. Lawson, the question, please?”
“They weren’t exactly one of those couples with a joint mission statement tucked away in a drawer, but in their own way Barry and Molly were devoted and well matched. He was very caught up with work, has a difficult mother, and could be a flirt, but I always thought Molly took it all in stride. He’s a loving, doting daddy, and I know that meant a lot to her. She and Annabel were his home port. His heart. She knew that.”
Tell me something I don’t know, Hicks thinks. Did Barry kill his wife? Was she cheating on him? Was he cheating on her and did he want Molly out of the picture? Did this lawyer lady do it, or maybe the jealous señorita in the next room?
“Barry criticized Molly, but I always read it as affectionate teasing, and assumed Molly did, too,” Brie added. “He’d never hurt Molly, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Because he loved her?” Hicks asks.
“Well, that,” Brie says, “yes, of course—that’s a given—and …” Brie hesitates.
“Go on,” Hicks say.
“Because I imagine that any kind of brutality would effectively terminate his career.” She makes an odd noise. It’s her nervous laugh, a dry, low gurgle.
“How so?”
“Detective, women are pretty damn scared to go under the knife-can you imagine using a cosmetic surgeon rumored to be a butcher?” A goddamn butcher is what Brie thinks.
“Interesting,” Hicks says. He gets up from the Eames chair and moves to the far end of the low burnt orange sofa across from its twin, where Brie is sitting. From this spot, the view of her legs is even better. “And Mrs. Marx—did she love her husband?” he says, picking up a book, a biography of Maxwell Perkins, which he absentmindedly pages through and puts down while he waits for Brie’s answer. “Didn’t that guy always wear a hat to work? Maybe I should start that.”
“Without a doubt, yes,” Brie shoots back, and I’m not sure if she means the hat or is answering Hicks’ question. “Barry could get to her, but he was also her flotation device.” Where in the hell did I come up with that term? Brie is asking herself. And why is she so sure about this? I wonder.
“Her what?” the detective asks. Now he’s interested.
“I always thought Molly pretended her marriage was worse than it was. Some sort of self-deprecating shtick.”
But Brie has it wrong. I think she wanted my marriage to be better than I presented it. Brie was the kind of friend sure enough about herself that she didn’t need my happiness to be less so she could convince herself that hers was more.
“Can you elaborate?” Hicks asks.
I wish I could, Brie thinks. I wish I had evidence. “Just a sense I had.”
Did Brie take me for a big, empty complainer?
“Tell us about the last time you saw Mrs. Marx,” Hicks says.
“It was a bike ride. Remember when we had that string of sixty-degree days in February?”
Global warming. I wonder if I’ll be around to see how that plays out.
Hicks removes a black leather notebook from his jacket pocket and scribbles in it. “You mention that the husband’s family was … what was your word, ‘difficult’?”
“Molly got along with them fine,” she says, although she knows that Kitty only tolerated me, sometimes politely. “The same with her parents and sister.”
“The sister,” Hicks says. “What’s up with her?”
“Excuse me?” Brie asks.
“At the service … you don’t think she was a little intense?”
“It was her twin sister’s funeral,” Brie says, icy. “How was she supposed to act?”
“Okay,” he says. “Sorry if I’m outta line. But what about the sisters? Were they close?”
“Do you have a brother or sister, Detective?” Brie asks. “You know how it goes. Sometimes you love them, and sometimes you wish your mother had drowned them at birth.” As soon as the words fly out of her mouth, Brie regrets them. “The thing with Molly and Lucy is they knew how to press each other’s buttons, but they were very tight.” They loved each other, Brie thinks. Lucy worshipped Molly. Molly was in awe of Lucy.
“Were you and Lucy tight, too?” he asks.
Brie pauses. She always found Lucy smug and provincial, probably because she knew Lucy found her smug and pretentious. “Mutually respectful,” she says.
Hicks chuckles ever so slightly.
Isadora walks out of the bedroom carrying a large handbag. I can’t take my eyes off it—black leather embossed with swirling flowers, possibly even a canary. She walks to Brie, puts her arm around her shoulder, and grazes her lips with a kiss.
