by Liza Bennett
“You know who you sound like, Lark, with your talk of freethinking and self-exploration?” Meg said. “Just like Mom.”
“And nothing could be worse than that, could it?” Ethan had asked, turning to her. Meg was usually suspicious of the probing look common to certain therapists and EST devotees. Ethan’s unwavering gaze held some of that unnerving quality—intimate, demanding, and altogether too knowing.
“I don’t believe I was addressing you.”
“I know—but you were trying to intimidate Lark, and I don’t like that. Besides, this isn’t about Lark, is it? It’s about me. You don’t trust me.”
“You’re ten years older than my sister. You’re married. You have a stepchild to care for. You’re an assistant professor who makes what? Thirty thousand a year?”
“Lord, if only!” Ethan laughed. “Tell me where they’ll pay me that kind of money. But no, you’re perfectly right. I’d distrust me, too, if I couldn’t see into my heart and know—absolutely—that there is no better person in this world for Lark than me.”
“Fine. Then I suggest you file for divorce immediately.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Why? I’m sorry, but if you love my sister, you’ll get a divorce and marry her. I think that’s pretty simple.”
“You don’t know the full story.”
“Please—this is ridiculous. Lark, can’t you see you’re being taken for a ride?”
“No, I don’t see that. I feel that I’ve found the other half of my soul.”
“Oh, for heavens’ sake!” Meg threw down her napkin and pushed her chair back. “Do whatever the hell you want. Give me a call when he breaks your heart.”
3
It was hard to remember those early days very clearly—back when Ethan first emerged as a major player in Lark’s and Meg’s lives, and when Meg disapproved of him so vehemently. Of course, even then she knew that a big part of her problem with Ethan was that he had come between the two sisters. Until Lark met Ethan, Meg was the one Lark sought first, loved most, and clung to in times of need. When Ethan arrived, Meg experienced what every mom naturally feels when her daughter leaves home: the sharp, sad pain of separation. And also, like a stereotypical dad, Meg examined her little girl’s selection of a mate and found him wanting.
Tall, broad as a linebacker, and with the flowing locks of an unrepentant hippie, Ethan generated a slightly out-of-control virility. A don’t-give-a-damn charm that sprang generously from his Irish genes and that he had carefully groomed into a highly individualized charisma. When Lark met him he was thirty-five and already as much his own creation as the blown-glass sculptures he’d long believed would make him famous.
Ethan was an Artist—an artist with a capital A. And if there was any one thing that irritated Meg most about Ethan, it was the arrogant self-absorption of that temperament. The other thing, the overly obvious sexual electricity that Ethan gave off, bothered Meg less over time. The constant undercurrent of Ethan’s masculinity eventually faded into so much background noise.
Slowly and with obvious determination, Ethan won Meg over. Two years after Lark and Ethan first met, he obtained a divorce from his first wife. The complications Ethan had tried to explain to Meg in Bennington were very real: Ethan’s ex, Mimi, was an alcoholic with a young daughter Ethan had adopted. The courts ruled that the girl was to stay with her mother. According to Lark, Ethan was torn about leaving Lucinda, a difficult seven-year-old at the time of the divorce, in the hands of her unstable mother. But Meg’s concerns were for Lark, so when the divorce came through, she paid little attention to Lark and Ethan’s long discussions about how to get custody of Lucinda.
That sort of talk died down soon enough when Lark found out that she was pregnant herself. The marriage ceremony was quickly moved up three months. They’d hoped to hold it outdoors in June at the farm they’d just bought in the small upstate New York town of Red River, but opted instead for a chilly indoor affair at Red River’s First Congregational Church. Meg remembered being impressed by how many people attended—how many friends Ethan and Lark had already made in a town they’d so recently adopted.
At that point Meg could count on one hand the people she considered her real friends in Manhattan. She may have wanted a wider social life, but she just didn’t have time for it. The same year Ethan and Lark married, Meg was promoted to account supervisor—the youngest woman to receive that title in the history of the agency. It was an honor that brought with it fourteen-hour workdays and almost weekly trips to Chicago.
Meg was somewhere over Illinois heading to the Windy City the morning Lark gave birth to her first daughter. The parents named her Brook Megan McGowan in honor, they told Meg, of the two people who meant the most to them in the world: Ethan’s mother and Lark’s sister. With Brook’s birth, one of the last layers of concern Meg felt about Ethan melted away. Now it was not so much a question of Meg allowing Ethan into her life as Ethan welcoming her into his and Lark’s growing family. And he did, with open arms.
It probably didn’t help Meg’s love life that she spent every other weekend in Red River. But Brook’s birth was followed two years later by Phoebe’s, and Meg took such pleasure in her towheaded, laughter-prone nieces that she had a hard time staying away. Actually, Meg herself didn’t do much to help her love life. She was certainly pretty enough, and many men told her she was beautiful. They took one look at the soft, honey-colored blond hair; the reflective green-and-gold-flecked eyes; the slim, well-cared-for body; and mistook Meg Hardwick for someone who needed their protection. It never took long for the steel resolve, the take-no-prisoners ambition shimmering just beneath her surface loveliness to shine through.
“May I get a word in edgewise here?” The magazine sales representative (a dead ringer for Richard Gere) had asked her on their second date. “You know, I’ve had a day, too.”
Well, that was always the problem—Meg had little interest in sharing. She wanted to be admired, desired, and then pretty much left alone. For the first five or six years of her sister’s marriage Meg went through men faster than she did pantyhose. After one or two dates, she’d simply lose interest and find a way of disposing of the relationship. She was never less than kind, and often stayed friends with her growing cadre of former boyfriends; it was just that her heart never seemed to be in it. Sometimes she felt that most of her emotional life resided at her younger sister’s upstate household, and she didn’t really have enough left over for her time in New York City.
Meg founded her agency the year Phoebe was born. With her small savings, the profit-sharing proceeds from Y&R, and a carefully monitored line of credit from the bank, she opened up a one-room, two-person agency with one fashion account—a disgruntled ex-Y&R client who’d always liked her chutzpah. For the next year or two, so much of her energy was taken up with getting Hardwick and Associates off the ground that she barely realized how solitary her life had become, though she never felt lonely. With the exception of Lark and a few close friends, she had no one with whom to share her life, and her growing success. Before Fern was born, it didn’t matter. And then, for reasons Meg couldn’t rationally explain, even to herself, it suddenly did.
Lark and Ethan’s third daughter was born six years after Phoebe and, while not a mistake, she was certainly a surprise.
“Meggie, I’m pregnant again. Can you believe it?” Lark had confided one weekend when Meg was visiting. One long look at her glowing younger sister made Meg wonder why she hadn’t noticed Lark’s condition herself. Lark never looked lovelier than when she was pregnant.
“I’m so happy for you!” she had cried, hugging Lark to her. But her joy was weighted with a sadness that she couldn’t immediately identify. “Is Ethan thrilled?”
“Oh, of course,” Lark told her. “He’s sure it’s going to be a boy. But I know we’re going to have another girl…. I can always tell.”
During Lark’s pregnancy with Fern, Meg felt her depression deepening,
and finally faced up to what was really bothering her: This time, experiencing a birth and having a child through Lark was not enough for Meg. She wanted a baby—no, more—a good man and a family of her own. Typically, as soon as she identified a problem, she started to search for a solution. And, as usual, she welcomed her younger sister into the process. With Lark’s eager advice, Meg began to look around for an established, successful alpha male with whom to build a long-term relationship and, she hoped, a family. What she discovered, as had the multitude of single thirty-something women before her, was that once one seriously started to hunt for a man, the older, marriageable ones had pretty much become an endangered species.
There was the magazine senior editor who looked like Clint Eastwood, but who had the emotional maturity of Pee Wee Herman.
There was the television producer who, though recently divorced, spent most of his evenings with Meg talking longingly about his ex-wife and two kids.
And there was the sportscaster who advertised himself as single and available but who was not only married, Meg discovered, but appeared to have a girlfriend in every Major League city in the country.
“Ears as big as what?” Lark asked when Meg replayed for her yet another disastrous evening—this time a blind date, the cousin of a client who had been billed as “adorable.”
“Saucers. And not espresso either.”
“Doesn’t that supposedly indicate that something else is big as well?”
“No, baby, I think that’s the hands. Or feet. In any case, believe me, it was not worth sticking around to find out.”
And then Meg met Paul Stokes, and her long losing streak seemed to have finally come to an end.
“I know I always say this, but he sounds perfect for you,” Lark told her during one of their almost daily phone conversations. Ethan made fun of them for talking so much—“like teenagers, for chrissakes.” Lark, like every other happily married woman Meg knew, kept pushing her sister toward conjugal commitment, but she was as choosy about the potential mate as Meg was. “‘Lawyer. Millionaire. Philanthropist. Divorced’—I like that last attribute the best,” Lark had said, reading from the Wall Street Journal profile on Paul that Meg had somewhat proudly sent her.
Yes, things were going very well until Paul invited her to the annual corporate dinner of Straithorne, Riddick, and Cowles, the firm at which he was a managing partner. Black tie at one of New York’s top restaurants. She’d been treated with bland courtesy by the men who small-talked her about the fashion industry and with almost rude curiosity by the women, almost all of them full-time wives, wanting to know where to find Donna Karan wholesale. But then, over coffee and cigars (Meg was tempted to ask for one as a joke because the whole evening seemed so humorless), the talk veered suddenly to police brutality and Meg heard Paul say something about “the liberal press stirring up trouble yet again.”
Nobody seemed to find the comment offensive. Not the woman next to her who smiled sweetly at Meg and asked her how much she’d paid for the lavender strapless Scaasi she was wearing. Nor any of the men who nodded sagely into their tobacco smoke and pointedly ignored Meg’s angry retort.
“The fact is they shot a totally innocent young man who, not coincidentally, happened to be black!”
“Meg, I forgot to tell you—no liberal flag-waving at Partners’ Dinners,” Paul had told her with an apologetic laugh and a “When will they ever learn?” shrug to his colleagues. In the taxi afterward, it had taken exactly ten seconds for her to tell Paul what a bigoted ass he was and for him to tell her what a loudmouthed, bleeding-heart cunt she was. She asked to be let out at the nearest corner—Madison and Fifty-ninth. She was so angry that she walked all the way up to her co-op at Eighty-sixth and Riverside in her three-inch black velour Susan Bennis heels. The next morning, her toes were in tatters, but her heart was intact.
She was not exactly in a party frame of mind the following night for the opening of Ethan’s exhibition at the Hannah Judson Gallery in Chelsea. Ethan was pumped up with excitement about his first Manhattan showing and, Meg decided, would probably have enough enthusiasm for everyone. It didn’t help her mood that she had promised Lark she would be bringing Paul Stokes with her to the event. She wasn’t sorry that she’d kissed the son of a bitch good-bye, but at the same time she wasn’t looking forward to disappointing Lark again.
Deciding that all she really needed to do was put in a quick appearance, she worked until past seven o’clock and took a taxi downtown from the office. When she arrived at the Hannah Judson gallery at Eighteenth Street and Twelfth Avenue that evening she was still mentally rehearsing just how she was going to explain things to her sister. She knew that she’d built Paul Stokes up in Lark’s mind, as she had in her own. That she’d been so wrong about him revealed a serious flaw in her judgment, as well as an all-too-obvious eagerness to, this time, make a relationship work. She had always enjoyed her role as the older, wiser sister, the dispenser of advice, the woman of the world. Now, Meg worried that Lark was starting to guess how fragile her ego could be when it came to men. Worse, she dreaded the thought that her younger sister might actually start to pity her.
She wasn’t thinking about Ethan at all.
4
At first she actually didn’t recognize the man, dressed all in black, with the thick gray-streaked blond hair and Hollywood-style stubble of beard. He stood on the far side of the dimly lit and now nearly empty gallery, holding an Ethan McGowan original white-wine glass in his right hand. His left arm moved abruptly from the waist of the tall, platinum-haired woman standing next to him and he waved eagerly to someone. To her. What had she been thinking? It was Ethan, of course. She threaded her way toward them through the forest of black aluminum pedestals displaying Ethan’s primary-colored contortions of blown glass.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.” When Ethan kissed her on the forehead as he always did, she realized why he looked so different. He wasn’t wearing his round, rimless Lennon-style eyeglasses, without which he was basically blind. Obviously he’d switched to contacts at the same time he’d shaved his thick beard to get the younger-looking sandpaper affair he sported. Well, he definitely looked hipper if that was what he wanted. Meg was tempted to laugh and call him on this obvious bit of vanity. But this show of his “art pieces,” as he proudly called them, meant so damned much to him. Despite her irritation—after all, it was ridiculous for such an already good-looking man to preen—she kept her mouth shut.
“Sorry. It’s been one of those days. I was lucky to—” She’d been glancing around the two-room gallery. There were less than a dozen people left. “Where’s Lark? And the girls?”
“Fern’s sick again. Lark decided they should all stay home.”
“Damn,” Meg said, thinking first of herself. She’d been looking forward to having Brook and Phoebe stay with her. Ethan, Lark, and the baby Fern were to stay at the Windsor. They rarely came down to the city from Red River because of Lark’s feelings about the pollution and noise in Manhattan. But whenever Meg was able to get the two older girls to herself, they had an hilarious free-for-all. Meg delighted in indulging them with the Big Macs and Disney videos they were forbidden at home.
“But Fern’s okay?” Meg added.
“Of course. You know Lark.” Ethan smiled and shrugged. Yes, they both knew Lark. The original mother hen. Squawking with alarm at the least sign of danger to her chicks. Especially the youngest. Meg returned Ethan’s conspiratorial smile, thinking that he’d been right about the beard. He had a good strong jaw line and chin.
“Hannah, this is my sister-in-law, Meg Hardwick.” Ethan took a step back so that Meg now faced the woman whose waist Ethan had been holding when Meg first arrived.
The woman’s appearance gave her pause. Although Meg knew she herself was considered beautiful, she also knew that a lot of her allure was the result of hard work, an excellent fashion sense, and utter self-confidence. She started with what God had given her—a rather typical, fair-haired A
merican prettiness—and augmented it with every trick known to woman. It took a good two hours every other week for Manuel to maintain her hair’s deceptively casual, honey-colored look. A daily forty-minute work-out had become a form of religion. And so accustomed was she to seeing herself in full-court makeup, that she was often surprised to notice how wan and insignificant she looked in the mornings when her face was bare.
Hannah, on the other hand, though easily ten years Meg’s senior, was to the real thing. She was innately, hauntingly beautiful, with almond-shaped eyes and high, rounded cheekbones. Her hair, a shock of silver cut short against her skull, emphasized the expressiveness of her brows and the extraordinary sea green of her irises. Her long, athletic body was tailored in a severely cut black wool suit, the top two buttons left open to offer glimpses of the delicate apricot-colored lace of her camisole. If there was one flaw, it was her mouth. Her lips were thin and flat, and she did nothing to disguise the fact.
“Ah, yes … The beautiful Hardwick sisters,” Hannah’s handshake was strong to the point of pain, her voice plummy with lockjaw snobbishness: Haaaawdwick.
“You make us sound like a song-and-dance team,” Meg said, laughing.
“Well from what Ethan tells me you two could do just about anything. I’ve heard of your agency. Philip Jonas is a dear friend of mine.”
Meg’s biggest and most demanding account was Jonas Sportswear. You’re not really dressed unless you’re in a Jonas. She’d met the multimillionaire chairman Philip Jonas only twice in the five years she’d handled the account, and both times he’d been dismissive to the point of being rude.
