by Lois Cahall
Simone is a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a lawyer, and an entrepreneur. And me, like someone who has just fallen in love during one of those three minute dates, I’m anxious to explore this new relationship. But what I don’t yet know is how generous she can be. I don’t know she’s about to give me….
“Paris,” she says, handing me a glass. “I take back what I said before. I love New York, but ah, Paris. It was and always will be my first true love.”
“To Paris,” I say, my voice shaking a bit. Our glasses clink. My eyes tear up.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“No. Well, yes,” I say, trying to smile and wiping my tears.
She reaches into her purse and hands me a tissue. I dab my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just that Paris has been my dream destination my entire life. I had a plan and I can see I’m beginning to see the cracks in it.” She catches my quick glance toward Ben. She can sense that I don’t want him to see me from where he’s standing on the other side of the deck. Jean-Baptiste has stolen the fake mink shawl of some five-year-old party guest, and Jean-Christophe is tossing the model’s eye shadow kits over the banister.
“Oh, I see…” she says. “Your kids?”
“No. Mine are grown. Two daughters.”
“So these must be the stepsons…”
“Yes. And they’re father is for the most part wonderful. But his situation is holding me back.”
“So go…”
“I can’t completely go right now.”
“I mean go to Paris. Just for awhile. You said your girls are grown.”
“But the euro is so…”
“Use my place. It’s in St Germaine des Pres. It’s a fabulous - A Pied-a-terre. I’m never there. Use it. Just pay the cleaning lady when you’re done.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Stay as long as you want. Place could use a little TLC.”
“But I can’t…”
“Can’t what? It only costs the plane ticket. I’m offering; you take. Listen. I learned about wanting and getting something years ago. I wanted an apartment and wanting turned into looking. Then looking turned into buying… I should get their more often. I dream of staying a month sometime before I’m too old to climb the stairs.”
“You’re not too old.”
“But you’re young. Go climb the stairs for me.”
“Maybe, but I…”
“It’s in the 6th. One block from the Seine. Let me know the dates. Stay a month for all I care. Stay two!”
“This is so impulsive.”
“You wanted it. You got it,” she says and raises her glass again. I attempt to raise mine, certain it will crash to the terrace floor at the same moment that I fall, faint and then crack my head open from the shock of this conversation. What do you do when your dream comes true? Do you live the dream right then and run with it?
I watch Simone watching Ben’s sons and the other children at the party.
“You know, Libby, these kids today have it made. They can have what they want when they want. In my day you had to figure it out and find it. They just act on everything in an instant. We need to learn to be like that. When I’m on Nantucket I ask the cleaning girl what time Mass is at St. Mary’s. She goes on the internet and tells me two seconds later. Me? I would have picked up the phone and called the church.”
I laugh.
“You remind me of me when I was your age,” she says, sipping her drink and winking at me, and then someone catches her eye. “Oh, excuse me for a second, Libby. I see somebody I have to talk to before they leave.” She grabs my arm and leans in, “An old client that moved to Tuscany. I saved him a fortune in his divorce. He cashed it all in to bake bread in Florence.” And with that, Simone’s off to the living room. My new guardian angel.
“Has anybody seen Tamara?” screams Bebe, making her way through the party and then, thinking the unthinkable, peering over the ledge. “Libby, Tamara’s missing!” she says again, and by now, everybody had gathered round as panic sets in.
I snap into action like a cop with a search warrant, I check through the apartment, under the beds, behind the shower curtain, in the pantry, and in the linen closet. I notice the front door slightly ajar. “C’mon,” I say, grabbing Bebe by the hand. “Maybe she’s playing on the elevators. All those buttons would fascinate her.” We look up to see what floor the elevator has landed on “L.”
Seconds later we’re down at the lobby level and as the door dings open, we see Tamara in front of the doorman, her palm open and extended toward him. A fur-coated lady with a pill box hat and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel puppy on a diamond-studded leash is studying them, looking mortified. “She’s a beggar child!” the woman screams. Now Tamara moves her hand into the woman’s face, too. “One tenge, please. One tenge?”
Then Tamara turns back to the doorman and he reaches into his pocket for change, placing it in her outstretched little palm.
“Thank you,” she says in English, her accent heavy. “Two tenge?” she asks pushing her luck.
Bebe’s eyes open wide. “Tamara Simmons! What are you doing?” Bebe grabs her arm and scurries her along. “We don’t beg in the lobby.”
“It’s all right, Ms. Simmons,” says the doorman, tipping his hat.
“It’s not all right,” says Bebe. “Please do not give her tenges, er, money. You’re defeating my purpose.”
“Don’t be too upset, Bebe,” I say. “It’s what she knows.”
“Ever since Halloween she’s been begging door to door,” says Bebe. She figures if its acceptable to ask for candy that night, it’s okay to ask for money every other night.”
Tamara looks from her mother to me and then runs to my side. “Auntie Heylib.” I rub her head and mouth the words, “It’s okay. It’s really okay.” It’s been too much too soon for this child. Like a starving actor who becomes a movie star overnight and wins an Oscar.
There’s a shuffle at the entry and the doorman hurries to help a man struggling to make it through the side glass door.
Bebe turns to me pouting. “What am I doing, Lib? How will I do this alone?”
“You’ll be fine,” I say. “I’ll be there for you.”
“People always called me the ‘girl next door,’” says Bebe. “Now I’m trying to figure out… the girl next door — to what?”
The doorman is escorting a man with crutches through the entry. Within seconds we recognize Henry who is holding out a big, yellow, gift box. Bebe and I are speechless.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” says Henry, his eyes meeting Bebe’s, the two of them gazing at each other as if he were a soldier come home.
“Who — man — Mommy,” asks Tamara, tugging at Bebe. But Bebe doesn’t answer.
“Man good for tenge?” says Tamara, but Bebe runs to Henry’s side. He leans in to brush her cheek with his lips.
“Oh Henry!”
Chapter Twenty-four
“Watch where you’re going, lady!” A buggy driver screams at me because I have just almost lip-locked his horse in the middle of 8th Avenue, where he’s en route to Central Park to sell tourist rides.
“Sorry,” I say to the driver, barely addressing him, because I’m still busy arguing with Ben, who’s back at the corner waiting for the light to change from green to red. I stand in the middle of the street, dodging the horse and the approaching taxis as though I believed traffic would actually stop for me. And so help me if it doesn’t, then it’s well worth getting run over just for Ben to see my point.
“You’d be mad, too, if Darth Vader chased your tabby cat through the apartment,” I scream back at Ben as he steps from the curb. I had specifically told Ben “that dog is not allowed inside.” This rule was established just minutes before Darth Vader broke a crystal vase and several ceramic pieces by Otto Heino of Ojai, California, the man who spent ten years creating a long-lost Chinese-yellow glaze cherished by artists, and made popular during China’s Qin Dynasty.
> “…And besides, I didn’t sign up for this,” I yell. “Now we have a dog on weekends? I have a cat, remember? That dog is not our problem.”
“Rosemary’s interviewing dog nannies…” he says.
Dog nannies? Oh, sure, that answer will calm me down.
We fight all the way home past the front door, past the slipping-off of my shoes at the entry, right up until I stand arms folded in the center of the living room, emitting steam from the top of my head like a cartoon character.
The voicemail from Ben’s mother declaring that Rosemary would be spending Thanksgiving at their house in Montana only adds fuel to the already blazing inferno. “This is insane,” I say. “I’m the woman in your life! We live together!” Ben moves to the couch, drops his head into his hands, runs his fingers thru his hair and says nothing. “Ben, look,” I say, struggling to sound sane. “I completely understand that Rosemary was their daughter-in-law, and they should all be friends. If they want to invite her to things out of kindness, that’s fine, but does she always have to accept? Can’t she see them on her time? Where’s her dignity? They’re your parents, and you haven’t had a holiday with them in four years! And I’ve never even met them.”
Ben still says nothing, but my eyes demand more. Either agree with me or don’t, you moron. Doesn’t he know validation means everything to a woman? Validation and a shotgun! “Ben, I’m done proving myself to a man who supports another woman that never did a fucking thing to prove herself!”
“You don’t need to prove yourself,” he says.
Stupid answer. “And clearly she doesn’t, either. Life with Ben is all about getting a whole lot of something for a whole lot of nothing. I switch gears. “We’re dealing with a woman who had rusted food cans in her cupboard dating back to 1992!” I say. “When I first moved in here I didn’t know whether to ship Rosemary a case of fresh canned goods or call the DSS to have the children removed!”
“I know, I…”
“I can only imagine the condition of her Connecticut house, Ben.”
“It actually disgusts me.”
Okay, good answer. He’s managed to shovel dirt back into the deep hole he previously dug for himself.
But was I missing out on some secret that made me the stupid woman in his life? Maybe I was too available to men – to him. Certainly my years of hard work hadn’t paid off. But it had paid off big time for her. That woman gets more money in alimony in one month, than I bring home in six! What was I doing wrong?
Maybe the key to Rosemary’s routine, was no routine at all. In their ten year marriage she never cooked him a meal, never took an interest in his work, never attended his concerts or social functions. She never picked up a dustcloth to get clean, or dropped her drawers to get dirty. Maybe the key to a man’s heart isn’t through his stomach like my Grandma said. Maybe it’s just the opposite – no food, no sex, nothing. Maybe it’s just keeping him hoping for something he can never have.
“Do you know you could count on one hand the number of times I asked my ex-husband for anything after my divorce?” I say. “Come to think of it, the last time I asked him for anything was halfway through the movie ‘Billy Elliot.’ When I asked him for a divorce.”
“Billy Elliot? The movie?”
I nod. It was the story of a little boy who took a chance to be something different – a ballet dancer. For some reason it inspired me to either piss or get off the pot. So I got good and pissed and then I got off the pot. And I never sat back down. “Yvette at the shelter says that these women in Connecticut all raise their kids the same way. There’s no decorum, no gentility, no manners. It’s like their kids are accessories. Like pocket pooches. ‘Well, my son is doing such and such…’ and ‘my daughter takes piano, learned to water-ski at camp, designed a website.’ Sure, but can she brush her hair, make her bed and say please and thank you?”
“I agree, it’s all a little much,” he says, finally able to get a word in edgewise.
“It’s keeping up with the Joneses while completely exhausting the kids, Ben. Your boys just want to be with their mother, not shipped off to caretakers, sporting events and summer camps all the time.”
He says nothing, just nodding. But that’s not enough. This isn’t really about his kids or about him. It’s about me. It’s about finding what I really want. Maybe the sympathy route will work. “It’s like Rosemary is taken care of and I only get an occasional save.”
“Huh?”
“Rosemary’s on the yacht and I’m treading water. Every once in a while you throw me a life raft but then you take it away and I’m back to treading. That’s my life.”
“I don’t want you treading water. I want you on the boat with me. I love you.”
Now he’s cornered me into a weird spot, and I wince at his sense of defeat. My love for him pulls at my heart strings, because he never raises his voice and I don’t want to be arguing with myself. But like any woman in the middle of a bitching session, I’m determined to finish my point with the final word. “And the twins have too much of everything. They have two North Face jackets each. God, I can’t even afford one! If I could, I’d buy a North Face for my shelter girl, Shashona. Or donate to the New York Cares coat drive?!”
“I agree. I’m not the one buying the fancy jackets.”
“Then why don’t things ever change? Why does money get wasted on nonsense?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know, I….”
“For godsake, when we go on a vacation it’s because we paid for it with our money. We work. When she goes on a vacation it’s because we pay for it with our money and we work. That’s wrong.”
“I agree…I…”
“If you agree, then tell me what hold she has over you? What are you afraid of, Ben? What can she do to you? Threaten that if you don’t let her go to Thanksgiving she’ll let you stop paying alimony?”
“No. But it’s not up to me whether she goes to Thanksgiving if she’s been invited. I can’t make her suddenly graceful enough to bow out.”
“I mean, I feel like I’m Cinderella cleaning and working ten jobs while she’s at the ball.”
“You’re always invited to my events and social engagements.”
“But I can’t go because I’m working most nights. You know, Ben, I would love it if you had been married the kind of woman I can relate to.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Maybe it’s your fault because you’re a nice Jewish guy and nice Jewish guys treat their wives and ex-wives like gold.”
“Honey, the only thing Jewish about me is the size of my nose and the size of my cock.”
“Very funny,” I try not to grin, but I feel like he’s denser than a thick fog rolling in on Nantucket. I feel like I’m losing my worth. I feel like I’m a new automobile whose value plummets the moment it’s driven off the lot.
And worst of all, I feel like I’m disappearing.
Just then Brad Cat jumps on the couch and meows to be petted. Ben begins stroking him. “I’m not happy anymore,” I say, out of nowhere, like a town crier with an announcement in the village square. But it feels like ten pounds of dumbbell weights have been lifted from my chest. “Even my daughter – every time she comes here she says ‘mom, I don’t see you in this apartment someday. I see you in a floral kitchen.’ I’m not sure what she means and I always say to Madeline, ‘a floral kitchen?’ and she says ‘yeah, when you’re a grandma.’ Anyway, I don’t know what I’m saying but I know I can’t do this anymore. If somebody told me ten years ago that I’d be juggling a bunch of jobs in order for some rich woman to sit at home on her fat ass…”
“Our relationship has nothing to do with her.”
“Yes, it does, Ben, because her choice to do nothing financially trickles down to us – to me. And you taught me to enjoy life. We only have one. Remember? You said that.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Ben, this isn’t my definition of enjoyment.”
“Well, I’m happy with you here…”
/>
“Well, I’m leaving…” I say, with a sense of triumph laced with spite.
“Leaving?” He rises from the couch as though he’d just dodged a boomerang. “But you’re – well, you’re making a big mistake.”
“Oh really?”
“I’m not such a bad catch. I mean, what do I know? But a guy my age who’s working and half-sane. My friends say women would be lined up around the block.”
“Oh they’ll line up, all right. Have you seen your friend’s friends? Have you seen your friends? Most of them of the Easy Spirit shoes age. The only color in their wardrobe is black, and they wear it from the top of their neck to the tip of their toes,” I say. “You’re a cleavage guy, Ben. They don’t know from cleavage.”
“Yes, I am.”
I try not to crack a smile. “Ben, you know what really sucks? My daughters and I give you the respect you deserve. It’s very hard to stand back and watch your very own family treating you like something dragged in from the subway and stuck to the bottom of their shoe. I’m sorry. But I just can’t stand back and watch that happen to you anymore.”
“Libby, look, don’t threaten to go. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
There’s a long pause as I consider whether to break through to his side of the Red Rover line, or stay on my team.
“Ben, I love you. I want to stay, but I can’t. I don’t even have time to be me anymore. And I’m certainly not being me in this relationship. I want passion.”
“Libby, we have passion. You know that.”
“But lately it’s like Carly Simon used to sing. I don’t want a man who tiptoes up the stairs and grits his teeth to say ‘good morning dear!’ I want red-hot passion. I don’t want to play nicey-nice like everything is okay when it isn’t.”
“It’s okay if you’d let it be. Better than okay.”
“It’s not okay. I hate to tell you this Ben, but if I leave so will the next woman leave, too. Until you get your situation in check, no woman – not even the ones lined up around the block - is going to want this.”
“You’re blaming me for my kids – for the way their mother raises them…”
