by Lynda Curnyn
This got an eyebrow raise. “Pourquoi, darling? Do tell.”
“I discovered what a self-absorbed jerk he was.”
This got a laugh. “Oh, Grace, don’t tell me it took you—how long have you been with him, six months?—to figure that out?”
“Yeah, well. I must be getting soft in my old age,” I replied.
She studied me for a moment, then a savage smile creased her well-lined lips. “Alas for Ethan. Another hapless victim of Grace’s axe.”
“Stop that,” I replied, worried that she might be right. I quickly did a mental checklist of my most recent dating history. Before Ethan there was Drew, who was as utterly eligible as Ethan had appeared to be, but just as emotionally unavailable, I had discovered. Like Ethan, Drew had only lasted six months. In fact, six months might be my record since Kevin, my college boyfriend, whom I’d kept around for a solid two years before giving him the boot. I had been pretty brutal back then, too, I thought, cringing at the memory of how I had dropped every T-shirt, cassette tape and pair of boxer shorts Kevin had ever left at my place in the hall outside his dorm room, just moments before graduation. The truth was, I had an intuition for when I thought a guy would break up with me, and I never, ever let a man get the better of me. The only time that had happened was with my high school boyfriend, who had thrown me over for a cheerleader in a vain effort to win more votes for homecoming king. Still, he hadn’t gotten away without enduring a few cutting barbs from me in front of the entire football team. Because even at the tender age of sixteen, I had a knack for laying a man low.
“It’s not like he didn’t deserve it,” I muttered now, then realized there was no way in hell I could reveal to Claudia the cause of my breakup with Ethan. Because even though, statistically speaking, there was only a minute chance that last night’s incident could have resulted in pregnancy, I didn’t want to give my boss any food for thought. Losing her assistant to baby fever was hard enough. Having her Senior Product Manager go on maternity leave during Roxanne Dubrow’s next major marketing campaign would be nothing less than betrayal in Claudia’s eyes.
Fortunately, she had her own beef against Ethan. “He used too many hair products. What was with that Brylcreem look he sported to dinner that night?” she said, referring to one of the few times I had put my sharp-tongued boss and my well-groomed boyfriend in the same room together.
“I think he was going for Antonio Banderas in The Mask of Zorro.”
“He looked more like Pee Wee Herman on his latest adventure.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “He had more facial moisturizers in his medicine cabinet than we carry in our winter product line.”
“There is nothing worse than a man with more beauty products than a woman.”
“Nothing,” I agreed, laughing harder, until Claudia’s office was echoing with the sound of our mutual glee.
Until I remembered that there was one thing worse than a man addicted to skin care. And that was no man.
“I’m never going to have sex again,” I said with a sigh.
“Please. As if a blond bombshell like you has ever had to worry about that,” she said.
She was right, I realized as I stood to leave her office a short while later. With a glance in the mirror on my way out the door, I felt my courage return. There I was, Grace Noonan, blond, busty and single for about the sixth time in as many years. Was it because a five-foot-nine-inch blonde with a 38-C chest and legs up to her eyebrows could afford to be choosy? Or was it because I couldn’t afford not to be?
I got my answer when I found myself in the foyer outside Claudia’s office once more, watching in horror as Lori struggled to swipe away the tears that were gushing from her eyes.
Alarmed, I rushed forward, crouching beside the chair where she sat, her thin arms folded against her narrow frame. “Lori, honey, what’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m s-so s-sorry, Grace,” she sputtered. “I just thought, you know, that some people were meant to be together.” She burst into a fresh avalanche of tears that I found, frankly, bewildering. But not one to turn away a fellow female in distress, I took her hand in mine.
“Lori, honey, it’s okay. Things with Ethan and me…were kind of going nowhere anyway,” I began tentatively, “We’re both…very different. There was no way it would have worked.”
Lori snuffled, then raised her gaze to me. “I thought…I thought he was the…one,” she said, and then, as if the very thought that Ethan Lederman the Third wasn’t Prince Charming destroyed her, she released a fresh torrent of tears.
Though I was surprised at this sudden display of emotion over a man who couldn’t even remember my admin’s name, although she had fielded enough of his daily phone calls to me, I wrapped my arms around her.
And as I rubbed a comforting hand over her back, I wondered if maybe I had jumped the gun with Ethan. After all, I never did let a man get the best of me in the whole breakup scenario, which often left me alone on more Saturday nights than I cared to count. But as I listened to Lori babble into my now-tear-stained silk blouse about true love and soul mates, I began to suspect her lamentations might not be about me and Ethan. She lifted her head, gazed at me with reddened eyes and said, “I know it’s only been a year and a half, but I really thought he was the one….”
Now I was positive this watery display had nothing to do with me and Ethan. After all, we had only been dating six months.
“What’s going on with you and Dennis?” I asked, honing in on her.
“Oh, Gracie, he’s applied to graduate school. In…in London! I know it’s something he’s wanted, like, forever, but I thought—well, I just don’t know what’s going to happen to us!”
As I pulled Lori back into my embrace for a soothing hug, I felt a depth of yearning I had not known for a long time. For the kind of love that could break hearts. For the courage to even seek it.
2
“There aren’t any hard women, just soft men.”
—Raquel Welch
Though I have mastered the art of the breakup, the aftermath always kills me. I’m not talking about regret. I’m not the kind of woman to cry over a man. I do just fine with these things. It’s everyone else I can’t deal with.
Like my friend Angela.
“Gracie, what the hell happened this time?” she said when she caught me on the phone, which I had been avoiding. I never call friends in the post-breakup period. Too much explaining when there really isn’t much to explain. Besides, I hate it when women overanalyze relationships. And though I love Angie dearly—have ever since I dated her older brother during our shared term at Marine Park Junior High in Brooklyn—she suffers from this particularly female malady.
I gave her the snapshot version.
“Asshole,” she said, succinctly summing up Ethan. At least I could count on Angela to agree with me, once given the facts. She wouldn’t have me accept anything less than worship from a man, now that she had settled in with her own worshipful partner, her roommate and best friend-turned-lover, Justin. Of course, she wasn’t about to let a little thing like one of my umpteen breakups slide, either. “I’m coming over.”
“No!” I replied, then realizing my abrupt rejection of her brand of girlfriend comfort had probably hurt her feelings, I hedged. “I mean, I’m tired. I have a big day at work tomorrow….” The last thing I wanted was to be soothed and coddled. I was fine, really. In fact, I felt almost…relieved. I was back to my natural state. Alone.
Knowing I wouldn’t be able to hang up the phone without agreeing to a least an hour of the sympathetic cooing and all-out Ethan-blasting on my behalf, I finally made plans to meet her for drinks that Thursday.
Then, because there was one other person to whom I felt some obligation to at least give the larger details of my life to, I called my mother.
As usual, I was not afforded the luxury of speaking with her alone, because as soon as she heard my voice, she beckoned my father to the phone. “Thomas, sweetheart, pick up
the extension. Gracie’s on the phone!”
My parents had retired and moved to their dream house just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, four years ago, and though I was happy for them, I hadn’t had a private conversation with my mother since. Maybe it was because her naturally frugal nature demanded that a long-distance call involve more than two speakers, but she seemed to treat my every phone call as some wondrous event she couldn’t resist sharing with my father. Or maybe it was just that she shared everything with my father. He was, as she would often tell me over a glass of wine that would inevitably turn her dreamy-eyed and nostalgic, the love of her life.
“Grace?” my father’s deep baritone boomed over the line, a voice that up until his retirement had filled the awestruck college students who had frequented his seminars with reverence.
“Hi, Dad,” I replied, a reluctant smile edging the corners of my mouth. It wasn’t that I didn’t love talking to my father. It was just that breakups resulting from sexual mishaps weren’t the kind of thing I felt I could confide in him.
So I described our demise as a couple as a desire for a “clean break.” “We didn’t really have the same goals,” I said, realizing that this was probably true. I mean, I did want to have a baby. Always imagined I would—someday. But I hadn’t realized the extent of my desire until the other night. Funny how something like a little broken latex can bring so much…clarity.
“Better you realize that now, Grace, rather than later,” my mother said, turning my recent relationship disaster into a triumph, as was her nature. Though she had been happily married to one man since the age of twenty-five, my mother seemed to have a different prescription for happiness for me. “Besides, you have your career to focus on now,” she said, as she’d been saying ever since I had landed the Senior Product Manager position at Roxanne Dubrow three years ago. In her mind, I was the single career woman she never was. My mother had studied the cello since she was nine and dreamed of joining the symphony. But she had given up that dream shortly after her marriage to my father, settling instead for a life as a music teacher in the public schools. She hadn’t, however, given up her belief that a woman’s first duty was to herself and her goals. She never failed to tell me how proud she was of me for staying true to mine. “If the girls at Hewlett High could see you now,” she always said, referring to my rebellious youth and somewhat colorful reputation. If my yearbook had allowed for those colorful attributions of yesteryear, mine would have read, “Girl most likely to single-handedly destroy her life.”
Yet now I was a shining beacon of success. Sophisticated. Cosmopolitan. Successful.
Even my father gave one of his familiar murmurs of assent—it was the only thing that reminded me he was still on the line—whenever my mother went off on how exalted my position at Roxanne Dubrow was, how magnificent my life.
I suppose it was pretty magnificent, I thought, once I hung up the phone and glanced around my apartment. At least from a real-estate point of view.
I live in a doorman building on the Upper West Side. That’s code for mega rent, though mine wasn’t up to current astronomical rates since I had snagged this apartment almost six years ago.
Six years. I had been twenty-eight at the time, and had just landed my first job managing my own product. Granted it was for a pharmaceutical company—not as glamorous a position as my current one—but I was jubilant. I finally had a salary fat enough to leave behind my third floor walk-up in the nowhereland of Kip’s Bay. I even had an assistant, though I barely knew what to do with her back then. I was moving toward my thirties still buoyant with the belief that I was entering the best part of a woman’s life, sexually, emotionally, financially. By thirty-five, I’d been told once by a college professor whom I admired, a woman usually has everything she wants.
I looked around my living room, decorated in soft whites. It was the kind of space I had always dreamed of having: lush, romantic, inviting. I thought about the fact that just this past summer, at our annual company summer outing at the Southampton Yacht Club, Dianne had told me that she thought I had “vision”—the kind of vision, she implied, that upper management at Roxanne Dubrow appreciated.
Yes, I did have a lot going for me, I thought. Then my eye fell upon two ticket stubs that had been left on the coffee table from the opera Ethan and I had attended the other night….
My stomach clenched, and I ran my hand soothingly over what Ethan had once referred to as my Botticelli belly—like the goddesses depicted by the old masters, I was a bit more rounded about the hips and breasts than today’s waif standard. Yes, Ethan had always liked my body. Just as I had liked his. And it had been enough, I supposed.
Until last Saturday night.
What had I expected of him, really? I wondered, finally rousing myself from the sofa and grabbing the ticket stubs to toss before I hit the bathroom for my nightly cleansing and moisturizing ritual.
I had expected nothing.
And that was exactly what I got.
“Morning Mist,” Claudia said when I stepped into her office the next day and found her gazing at a tiny glass jar with branding I recognized to be that of Olga Parks, our main competitor in the older woman’s market.
“Morning to you, too,” I said, wondering at the gleam in her eye.
Claudia shook her head, picking up the glass vial in one hand and holding it before me. “Have you seen this yet?” she demanded.
I glanced at the bottle, hearing the reprimand in her voice. One of my jobs was to keep an eye on the competition, and clearly Claudia thought I had been remiss in this area.
I decided to set her straight. “Olga Parks. Spring line. Two years ago.” I remembered the product well, as I myself had been seeking something to restore the dewy look that seemed to disappear just after my thirtieth birthday. At $65 for two ounces, Morning Mist hadn’t promised to restore moisture—that was the job of the $85 moisturizer it had been paired with. Morning Mist had more of a cosmetic purpose; sprayed on my face, it added a sheen that suggested I had run a mini-marathon during a ninety-degree NYC day. That was a little too much dewiness for me, and I had mentioned that in my report to Claudia, also two years ago.
But my manager had already moved beyond ire to fascination. “Why didn’t we latch on to this concept? It’s pure genius!” she said, spraying the back of her hand and studying the resultant sheen. “Look!” she said, holding out her hand to me, as if the evidence were clear. “When was the last time you saw that kind of glow on your skin?”
“At the gym. It looks like sweat, Claudia. Besides, aren’t we supposed to be focusing now on products for women who are still suffering from excess oils?”
I saw a shudder roll through her, as if the very idea of catering to our younger counterparts disturbed her. “Speaking of which, where is our slick little admin this morning? It’s ten o’clock and she has yet to make an appearance. I need her to run off some sales figures for me.”
I knew from the soft-spoken voice mail waiting for me on the phone this morning that Lori had been feeling a bit under the weather and was going to try to be in by noon. Though I detected in her somewhat despondent message that whatever ailed her was probably more emotional than physical, I covered for her. “She has a touch of a stomach virus. She said she’ll be in by noon.”
“Girls today,” Claudia said with disgust. “Bunch of wimps.” She shook her head. “They’ll never be what we once were, will they, Grace?”
And we’ll never be what they are now, I thought. Ever again.
Not wanting to dwell on that, I decided to steer Claudia back to the purpose of our meeting, which was to debrief me on the corporate agenda that had been hashed out in the Swiss Alps. “I’m ready for the debrief if you are,” I said, eyeing Claudia as she gazed with a mixture of fondness and disgust at the pretty little jar.
“Right,” she said, a look of resignation descending over her aristocratic features. “Well, first I should tell you it wasn’t so much a brainstorming as a corporate screw
over. They didn’t invite us up there to come up with the new vision for Roxanne Dubrow, but to cram their new mandate down our throats. I guess Dianne figured her distasteful little plan would go down easier with a little sparkling water and pâté.”
“Don’t tell me Burkeston finally got the go-ahead from Dianne on that product line she’s been testing forever?” Winona Burkeston, Director of Research, was a bit of a maverick. Though she was close to fifty herself, she had been pushing to get a youth line at the company’s forefront for years.
“What, are you living in a cave, Grace? Burkeston’s gone. Has been for what—two months now? They called it a resignation, but I think she was forced out. Dianne sent down the memo herself. Surely you must have—” Claudia frowned. “Maybe I didn’t pass it on to you.” She shrugged, as if the fact that she repeatedly forgot to pass on vital corporate info really wasn’t an issue. “Anyway, she’s been replaced. By a pretty little Brit named Courtney Manchester, who looks like she’s all of sixteen herself and fresh from London with some fancy degree and a pair of tits I’d swear were silicone if I hadn’t caught sight of them in the steam room.” Her eyes narrowed. “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if those perky tits helped push her agenda through. You know how Michael is when it comes to a fresh piece of ass.”
That sent an unexpected stab of heat through me. And why shouldn’t it? Because Michael Dubrow, the baby of the Dubrow clan and only son, had once claimed me as his piece of ass, for a brief, passionate period in my early history at Roxanne Dubrow. But just as quickly as we got caught up in the perilously romantic idea of our being together despite the company-wide stir an affair between the Dubrow heir and the new—well, I was new at the time—Senior Product Manager would create, we were weighted down by those same facts. Well, Michael was, anyway.
“C’mon, Grace, you can’t be serious,” he had said when, during a romantic weekend rendezvous in the Hamptons, I had speculated on the future. “You and I are friends,” he declared, his only acknowledgment of the deeper intimacy I thought we shared indicated by the way he squeezed my hands in his. “Besides we work together. Think of what people might say….”
