The Late, Lamented Molly Marx

by Sally Koslow

  I also know that if Lucy realized I was thinking all of the above, she’d say, Molly, you are such a goddamn dope. Which takes me to my real bottom line: the incident makes me furious. It was and is a phenomenal time and energy suck, utterly unfair to my parents and to Annabel, who is now denied the company of her only aunt. It has only deepened the rift between the Divine and Marx clans, making it almost impossible for my parents to have even the simplest conversation with their only grandchild, not to mention resurrect the social life they have put on hiatus. Mostly, it’s been a diversion that makes me worry that Hicks will go off on some tangent that moves him away from figuring out why despite the fact that I know from observation that he’s working 24/7, more or less, on the Molly Marx case.

  But simmering at a slow boil—where will that get me? In the Duration we call people who do that Hornets. They buzz around, full of righteous indignation, and even other Hornets avoid them as if they have stinky feet. I’ve been talking about Lucy to Bob, my Dr. Solomon.

  “Focus on the good memories,” he said yesterday, as he always does, when we took our evening constitutional. This is his one-size-fits-all wisdom to calm the brain and soothe the soul, his downward-facing dog of celestial advice.

  I thought it was a pile of caca. “How do you find a good memory when your anger’s a riptide?” I asked.

  “You’re angry about a lot of things,” he said. “You’ll have plenty of time to sort it out. Tease out a warm memory with your sister and focus on it.”

  “Thank you, Angel of Death,” I said. He hates when I call him that.

  “Molly,” he said, “do it. Dig deep. Find a happy Lucy thought.”

  For days, it was like looking for my pulse, and then I remembered. It was two years ago. For our thirty-third birthday my parents had been wildly generous and blew us to a week’s stay at a posh Mexican fitness resort. They thought the adventure would help us bond.

  For six days, we roomed together in a stucco hacienda that looked to be on loan from a miniature golf course. We rose at dawn, when the air was dewy and cool, and hiked the wildflower-covered hills, Lucy apace with the leader and I, naturally, at the tail end. After a breakfast fit for two longshoremen, we sampled every class. Lucy’s favorite was Pilates, where she fell in love with a giant widget modeled after a medieval rack. In the afternoon, we played tennis. She won match after match, but I didn’t mind, hypnotized as I became by the thwank-thwank-thwank of balls hitting the rusty-red clay court, the quintessential warm-weather percussion.

  As each afternoon wound down, we treated ourselves to hot stone massages or had sturdy little Mexican ladies wrap our fried muscles in seaweed. Toxins banished, we napped in hammocks, spent the evenings enthusiastically beading bracelets we knew we’d never wear, and snoozed through lectures like What Does a Woman Really Need? Magnesium! By nine-thirty, we collapsed without even opening the beach books we’d lugged on the plane.

  Somewhere between kick-boxing and Aerobics with Soul, the pampering and the meditating, we became confidantes. “I got dumped again,” Lucy said on our last night. We’d turned off the light and the fragrance of jasmine and honeysuckle blew gently through opened shutters.

  “Who was he?” I asked. I was aware she’d been seeing someone, but she hadn’t mentioned a name and I knew that if I played Meet the Press, I’d be decapitated.

  “You can call him dickhead.”

  “What happened?”

  “Married.”

  “I thought you were too smart for that.” She didn’t say a word for a few minutes following that remark, and I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep, until she started speaking in a soft, unfamiliar voice.

  “At first it was just hot, dirty sex and I got off on being part of a covert operation—when we’d finally get to see each other, we’d rip each other’s clothes off. We’d meet at my place and every few months go away for the weekend. Remember my trip to South Beach?”

  I did: the Delano Hotel, stone crabs, mojitos, underwater music, poolside bungalows. Lucy described it so vividly I thought I’d been there myself. “That was three years ago.”

  She sighed. “I’d see other guys, but gradually I let myself get totally into this sonofabitch, waiting by the phone, telling lies to my friends, acting unglued if he cancelled at the last minute, which usually he did.” She sat up in bed and wrapped her arms around her strong, tanned legs. “Christ, it’s humiliating to tell you all this.”

  “Don’t stop now.”

  “He kept saying he was going to leave his wife and move in with me. Can you believe I, Lucy Divine, bought that sack of shit?”

  I was holding my breath. “What happened?”

  “So two weeks ago, Jessica—she’s another teacher—was at the hospital visiting her cousin who had a baby. And guess who was there looking through the glass into the nursery?”

  “No!”

  “She recognized his face from a picture she’d seen on my desk.”

  I heard Lucy sniffle. It was too dark to check for tears.

  “Jessica took me aside the next day, saying she’d been up all night debating whether to tell me. I drove straight to the hospital.” She paused. “David and his wife had had a boy. Looked just like him.”

  My stomach turned over. “Oh, I’m so, so sorry, Luce,” I said. “What a jerk—”

  “Molly, shut up,” she snapped, back to the real Lucy. “I don’t need your pity. Got that?”

  In the shadows, I stared at my sister, whom I realized I hardly knew and might never know. “Fuck you, Moosey. I won’t shut up,” I said, and threw a pillow at her head. “You let yourself care for someone. What’s so bad about that? If you did it over, do you honestly think you’d do anything differently? The heart wants what the heart wants.”

  “Who are you, Woody Allen?”

  “I love you, that’s all,” I said. I don’t think I’d ever told her that.

  Lucy said nothing. Then I heard her voice, muted and fuzzy, a Xerox of a Xerox. “I always feel judged by you, Mrs. Marx with the perfect life.”

  “Perfect life?” I said incredulously, in a raspy squeak. I decided not to react to “judged” because she was right—I had judged her for more than thirty years.

  “The darling toddler, the successful husband, the perfect part-time job, the huge apartment, the blond hair, the size six hips.”

  Of course she saw it that way. “I’ll grant you Annabel, but Barry …”

  “Trouble in paradise?” she said. Too quickly.

  I’d walked into a Lucy ambush. I didn’t want to betray Barry, but the sisterly thing would be to share. “Barry is a great dad, but sometimes he barely notices I’m around, and when he does, it’s to criticize. He questions every decision I make. That is, when he hasn’t ruled unilaterally and I get to decide on something.”

  “What did you expect? Do you actually believe all those drunken speeches grooms make at weddings about how flipped-out in love they are and how their wife is their ideal woman, an angel on earth?” I believe she followed this question with a snort.

  “I think he sees other women,” I said.

  She had the decency to wait a moment before saying, “We all think that.”

  Mom and Dad, too? “But Lucy, there’s more.” I hesitated. “The thing is, there’s this other guy.” I didn’t give one detail, certainly not Luke’s name. “I never meant for it to happen.” Even I realized I was speaking every cheater’s native language, cliché. “But for a long time now, I’ve been meeting him at his apartment.” I left out Nantucket, Amsterdam, Santa Fe, Yellowstone, and the Mall of America.

  “You have a lover?”

  “I guess you could call him that.”

  She laughed. “For midwesterners, we are a fucked-up pair.”

  I thought that was a fitting note on which to end the conversation. I didn’t want to tell Lucy more; the details would, like an oil spill, pollute my real life. But as I had almost given in to sleep she said, “Molly, I think you should stop this thing with
the other guy. The heart may want what the heart wants, but you could get hurt.” She had flipped off the glib Lucy and become someone reflective and wise. “Like me.” She sat on the side of her bed and tapped me on the shoulder. “I say this because I love you.” The two of us started to cry—noisy, gulping sobs—and neither of us fell asleep for a good hour.

  We slept late and missed not only the hike that morning but the van to the San Diego airport. And this, I told Bob, was the happiest memory I would ever have of my sister.

  Twenty-six

  LOVE ACTUALLY

  re you and the ladies off to the land of very important paintings?” Luke asked.

  Today I had planned to visit galleries with Brie and Isadora, as they were on the prowl for something large and sublime to hang on their naked living room wall and Brie wanted my advice. She’d called early this morning, however, to say that she needed to work. I couldn’t picture an afternoon alone with Isadora, a woman as relaxing as gridlock, so Saturday loomed like an unlined page.

  Barry was off to San Francisco, attending a pep rally for plastic surgeons. He’d spent weeks prepping—cruising Gucci for a suit that said wildly hip yet Park Avenue, the location of his office. He’d gotten his hair cut exactly ten days before, so it wouldn’t look too freshly pruned. Barry wanted to be prime-time polished, ready to expound on his much-heralded weekend butt lift. (“A cheeky booty with zero squats!” Vogue had gushed.) He’d hesitated before accepting the speaking invitation, weighing glory against reality. Did he really want to share secrets with the rest of the profession? I believed the tiebreaker was a patient who’d offered to help him rehearse, numerous times, and curiously, always at night. I also believed she was an actress valued less for her talent than for her juicy body parts, many of which have been rehabbed by Dr. Marx.

  “Brie cancelled,” I said to Luke. “Something about a settlement meeting. How goes the drive to New Hampshire?” He was visiting his brother this weekend. I checked my watch. Eleven o’clock. “You must be in Massachusetts by now.”

  “The trip’s not happening,” he said. “My nephew is celebrating his fourth birthday with strep.”

  While I let the news wash over me, I said, “Poor kid,” with what I hoped was appropriate concern. Maybe Luke and I could see each other. It had been twenty-two days. Clarification. We’d seen each other—at meetings, for coffee, and once for lunch at Le Pain Quotidien—but we hadn’t been together in the way I’d grown to adore, more and more, for the past year or so. For the last three weeks, Luke had hosted Irish cousins who were enjoying Manhattan so much it appeared as if they were going to sleep on his couches until their green cards came through. On the second week of the Danny-and-Seamus show, Luke splurged on the St. Regis, a Manhattan convenience I recently learned that you can rent for an afternoon, not unlike a carpet shampooer. We wouldn’t be returning there soon, though. Not only did the room cost as much as a small painting, but on the way out I spied one of Kitty’s Girls, who may have been on a mission similar to my own. I vowed that never again, unless I was in the vicinity of a grizzly bear, would I cower terrified behind a tree, indoors or out. Hotels were out.

  A few hours earlier, Annabel had been spirited away by Kitty, who wouldn’t be returning her until bedtime. They’d never spent a whole day alone together, and like many first dates, theirs began awkwardly when the name of the restaurant was revealed: Annabel had counted on Dunkin’ Donuts, not Fred’s at Barneys. But my daughter regained composure when she learned that her grandmother was also taking her to see the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park. As to the rest of the schedule, Kitty was sketchy, although I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d cram in an etiquette seminar for three-year-olds.

  I’d already accomplished that day’s first order of business, finding piles of Barry’s credit card receipts and cell phone bills, which I intended to scrutinize later for evidence of philandering. Just then I was taking a break. I’d crawled back into bed, a W along with me, and had finished reading a passionate diatribe, “The Fatted Calf: When You Can’t Fit into the Season’s Boots,” being thankful for a problem I didn’t have, when Luke called.

  “What are you doing right now?”

  “I’m in bed.” I did my best to purr.

  “Really? What are you wearing?”

  I looked at my XL T-shirt, left over from a breast cancer race-walk, hanging over saggy cotton boxers. “Not a thing. How about you?”

  “Weekend grunge. I had coffee in Little Italy and I’m heading toward Chinatown.”

  “What do you say to dim sum?” I said, feeling an energy surge. “Meet at Golden Bridge in an hour?”

  “I say I prefer your buns to theirs.”

  “Don’t tell me the blarney brothers finally left?” Either way, I could scurry downtown in less than hour. “Did New York run out of beer?”

  “No such luck—they’re sleeping off last night,” Luke said. “I was thinking of a certain elite uptown address on Central Park West.”

  Oh, really? I had gotten used to Luke’s place. I had, in fact, gotten very used to Luke’s place, where I knew the woodsy scent of his sandalwood soap, exactly how he folded and hung his thick gray towels, and where he kept his herbal tea, which I’d brew and take back into bed with us in tall pottery mugs, the steam curling my hair and warming my hands. Every time I stole an hour out of a workday to visit him, I’d play pretend, the R-rated edition. This was all too easy to do at Luke’s, where there was no evidence of a husband and child or, for that matter, another woman. We’d simply love and laugh, love and talk, love and snap the occasional photograph, after which I’d grab his digital camera and delete the naked evidence. When the tea grew cold, it was a private mental signal to gather my things, kiss him goodbye, and shut the door on this erotic compartment in my lascivious little mind and return to what I used to refer to as normal life.

  The home I shared with my family was, however, a vault within a vault, strictly off-limits. I’d never invited Luke here and didn’t intend to start. I looked around. Barry’s dry cleaning hung on the back of the bedroom door, ready to be divided by genus and species. The potentially incriminating stacks of receipts and phone bills that I’d set aside lay in a heap, awaiting review. On my dresser, in its simple sterling silver frame, Barry peered from our wedding photo. His dark brown eyes drilled into me.

  “Molly, are you there?” Luke said. “I’d hate to think I’m boring you.”

  “Just musing,” I said lightly.

  “I worry when a woman muses. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “And that would be?” I always liked when he’d recite the daily specials.

  “Us. That bed you’re in must be awfully lonely. And as I recall, the good doctor is in California and Annabel’s gone for the day.”

  His voice was a challenge as much as a conscience-numbing anesthetic. I felt my resolve float away, revealing an emotion I could not name. Excitement? Happiness? Some sicko attraction to danger? I also briefly considered the state of my apartment, which would require a good twenty minutes of preening. Then there was the fact that I could use a shower, a shampoo, and, I dimly noted, a psychiatrist. But I said, “Be here in forty-five minutes.”

  “I’ll pick up lunch,” he said, almost like a considerate husband.

  I was snipping the stems off apricot roses bought in a sprint to the corner deli when the doorman rang. “Alfred Stieglitz is here to see you,” he said.

  “Please send him up.”

  Luke filled my doorway. The smile on his face—bashful with a raunchy glint—replaced my anxiety with an intimacy certified by a cool, coffee-flavored kiss, the kind that requires no breathing. He’d barely piled his jacket and scarf by the door when I led him around the corner to the living room and pulled him down into a wide chair, avoiding the one where I snuggled and read with Annabel.

  Normally, I liked to memorize every caress Luke offered, all the better to replay later when I biked or walked or showered. My rule was that
I fantasized about him only when I was alone, but I’d already broken one rule that day and was on to demolishing a second commandment—number seven of God’s top ten being long gone—as we moved to the rug and got down to basics.

  Today, however, I couldn’t enjoy myself. I kept glancing at the grandfather clock, half expecting to see Barry’s face staring back at me. Exactly seventeen minutes later, I looked at Luke with relief. We could get dressed now.

  “The bathroom is down the hall,” I whispered as I pointed in the direction of Annabel’s chaste, sunny chamber with its flotilla of rubber ducks and bubble bath marketed to calm overtired, cranky children. When he disappeared, I ran into my own bathroom, stuffed my hair under a shower cap, and blasted the shower water as hot as it ran.

  I was happily wielding my loofah until my skin turned pink when over the rush of water, I heard a noise. The bathroom door, which I’d been careful to close securely behind me, flew open. I shrieked so loudly that the intruder let out a primal scream as well. The glass surrounding the shower was steamed—I couldn’t see who’d entered. I did my Psycho bit again at an eardrum-shattering decibel.

  “Calm down,” Luke said as he slipped in beside me. “Jesus, Molly, everything’s okay, it’s okay.” He held me to his chest as he deftly adjusted the water to a temperature below a rolling boil. “Are you trying to give yourself third-degree burns?”

  Sort of, I thought.

  “And what’s that on your head?” Luke pulled off my protective purple plastic, gently pushed me under the nozzle, and started massaging shampoo onto my scalp. He ran his sudsy hands gently down my breasts, circling each nipple, and continued further south. I closed my eyes and tried to swim in the pleasure, but the clank of my colliding worlds was all I could feel. When the phone rang, dimly, in the bedroom, I was grateful.