Younger

by Pamela Redmond Satran

  We made love. Maybe, I thought, if Gary and I had smoked pot, our sex life might have been better. But then I thought, naaaaaah.

  Josh’s playfulness was what enchanted me more than anything, so that I felt like a child, not merely a young woman. In the middle of kissing, of touching, of the most intense passion, he’d say something that made me laugh so hard we’d have to stop whatever we were doing so I could lie back and chortle, a more intense release than any orgasm. The only thing we seemed to do more than touch each other was to laugh.

  The risotto burned, so we decided to ditch the plans for an elaborate sit-down dinner and eat in bed. Josh set down the pot holding the shrimp and the salad bowl directly on the sheets, handed me a fork, and suggested we dig in. It was delicious, the best dinner I’d ever eaten, it seemed. For dessert, instead of making the sundaes he’d planned, we fed each other ice cream and caramel sauce directly from the containers, and then squirted whipped cream into each other’s mouths.

  “Let’s play a game,” he said, after we were finished eating.

  “All right.” I stretched. “How about Scrabble?”

  He looked at me as if I’d suggested we play a little croquet, right there on the bed.

  “I had something electronic in mind,” he said. “Do you know Doom?”

  Oh, I knew Doom all right.

  “Not really.”

  “Final Fantasy?”

  “Nope.”

  “I know. I’ll just teach you the game I’ve been working on. My own design.”

  “I’d like that,” I said. “But I’ve never really played video games.”

  I don’t think he really understood what I meant by never, because he handed me the controls, gave me a brief tutorial, then seemed to think I’d know what to do. But my pathetic little guy kept getting instantly annihilated by the alien space guns, incapable of making even the feeblest attempt to get out of the way.

  “I know you don’t have any brothers,” Josh said, “but didn’t you have guys as friends? Boyfriends, maybe, who tried to teach you to play?”

  “No,” I said, attempting and failing yet again to get the little man to jump over the rock. “I never even tried to play one of these.”

  Josh shook his head and took the controller back. “You press X with your left hand and Right Arrow with your right, like this,” he said. The little man leaped handily into the air, only to encounter another rock.

  “Okay,” I said, taking the controller back. “I get it now.”

  The little guy slammed head-on into the rock, and the game evaporated him completely.

  “That’s it!” Josh cried, snatching the controller from me. “You’re banned!”

  Laughing, I grabbed for it.

  “Oh, no,” he said, holding it beyond my reach. When I lunged for it, he slid it across the floor and then clamped his hands over my wrists, wrestling me back onto the floor. I jerked my knee upward—a Krav Maga move—and managed to startle him onto his side, but he quickly recovered and rolled me over again onto my back, straddling me, breathing hard.

  “What have you been doing all these years?” he said.

  It sounded like teasing, but I could feel my guard go up. I wanted to tell Josh the truth. And I’d decided that when I couldn’t, I’d try not to say anything at all.

  “You know,” I said, my voice light and teasing.

  “No, I don’t,” he said seriously. “I know you went to Mount Holyoke. I know you spent some time traveling. But I don’t know how much time, or where you went, or what you did. And if you’re twenty-nine now, that leaves a lot of years unaccounted for.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Well, how did you get your name, anyway? Alice sounds so…old.”

  “I was named after my grandmother,” I said, relieved that he’d asked a question that allowed me to both reveal something about myself and answer honestly. “She was Italian—Alicea.”

  “Alicea. That’s pretty. Maybe I’ll call you that. Or Ali. You seem more like an Ali.”

  I made a face, remembering the horrible restaurant guy. “I really prefer Alice.”

  “What did you do for work before you got this publishing job?” Josh asked. He put down his game controller, his face suddenly serious.

  “I didn’t really work,” I told him. “I tried to write a bit, but it didn’t go anywhere.”

  “So what did you do?” he asked. “How did you support yourself?”

  “I didn’t support myself. I got money from my…family.”

  “From your mother.”

  “My mother paid for college,” I said truthfully. “But then I had other family money.” Namely, Gary’s money.

  “I’d like to meet your family,” he said.

  I laughed, until I realized he meant it.

  “But I told you. My father died when I was a child, and my mother died last summer. I’m pretty much on my own now.”

  “What about Maggie?” he said. “You always say that Maggie is like your family. Why can’t I meet her?”

  Maggie had actually expressed curiosity about meeting Josh, too, but I was afraid such a get-together would raise more issues than it would settle, with Josh wondering how I had gotten to be friends with someone “so old,” and Maggie getting way too much material for the boy-toy jokes she already teased me with.

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said.

  “Are you ashamed of me?” Josh asked.

  Ashamed? How could he imagine such a thing? I wanted to show him off to everyone I’d ever met in my entire life. In theory, of course.

  “Of course not,” I assured him.

  I stood up and walked across the room to the refrigerator, suddenly in need of a beer. Maybe, too, the sight of my naked body would serve to distract him.

  “Why all these questions?”

  “My parents were asking me,” he said. I could hear him pull in a shaky breath. “They want to meet you.”

  “No!” I squealed, clutching the cold beer to my heart.

  “Jesus, what’s the problem? They’re coming into the city, and they want to take me out to dinner, and they wondered whether you might like to come along. No big deal.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’m glad it’s no big deal. Because I don’t want to go.”

  “Why not? My parents are very nice people.”

  I was sure they were. He’d already told me they lived in Fairfield, Connecticut, that his father worked as a lawyer for the state and his mom had become a nursery school teacher once Josh and his sister were in high school. They had an old house—a lot like my house in Homewood, I’d bet—and his mother loved to garden. I’m certain she and I would have a lot in common, much more than Josh had ever bargained on.

  “Listen,” I told him. “I really like you. I want to be with you. But I thought the deal here was neither of us was interested in a commitment. You’re moving to Tokyo, Josh. From the very beginning, we knew this was a temporary thing.”

  “But why do you have to put all these limits on it? Even sometimes when we’re just talking, it’s like you have a limit on how much you’ll tell me—like you’re afraid you might give away too much.”

  There he was, the person I had been afraid of all along, the Harvard MBA lurking inside the gamer. “When I met you, you talked about how you didn’t want to get married,” I reminded him. “How you didn’t want to get serious about anything or anybody. That’s the only reason I wanted to go out with you in the first place.”

  Josh looked at me as if he were seeing me for the very first time. “That was the only reason?”

  I took his hand, softening. “No, of course not. Of course that wasn’t the only reason. I like you a lot, Josh.”

  If last week I felt twenty-eight or twenty-nine, tonight I felt fourteen.

  He breathed out through his nose and seemed vulnerable as a little boy—not, I must note, a real turn-on for me. But I had reduced him to this state.

  “But it’s because I li
ke you so much that I want to be sure we’re in agreement about how far this relationship is going to go,” I tried to explain. “I don’t want a big committed relationship right now. I need to be free to put my energy into my job, to put myself first. I haven’t done that for a long time.”

  Josh looked at me curiously. “Why not?”

  I shook my head as if to clear that statement from our collective memory. “This is about you too, Josh,” I reminded him. “You made this huge change in your life, went through all this pain to break commitments you’d made, so you would be free to go to Tokyo and study gaming. That’s got to be your priority.”

  “But I feel like I’m falling in lo—”

  “Stop!” I screamed. “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? Why can’t I say it? It’s what I feel.”

  “Because it scares me,” I told him. The truth.

  “Because it makes me want to run away.” The truth.

  And because it was only if he didn’t say it that I could let myself enjoy him feeling it, and that I was able to feel it myself.

  Chapter 13

  On Thursday morning, I sat at my desk, peering around the edge of my cubicle every few moments to check whether Teri might have somehow sneaked into her office without my spotting her. Maggie’s reassurances notwithstanding, I’d been trying to leave her place even earlier every morning than usual, so as not to collide with the adoption people. I used the time to work on my proposal, which was literally under my fingertips, awaiting Teri’s approval. I’d counted on having time for revisions before the meeting—not that Teri ever had anything to change or add. She simply okayed my work and put her name on it. But now, on the day of our big proposal, she was a full twenty minutes late.

  The phone on my desk trilled, making me leap off my chair. I was relieved, and then alarmed, to hear Teri’s voice.

  “My kids have the flu,” Teri said. “All three of them.”

  “But can’t the babysitter watch them?” I said. “I mean, at least long enough for you to get to the meeting.”

  “The babysitter has it too.”

  “The backup babysitter?” I gasped.

  In one of her lectures on working motherhood, Teri had told me that the key was having not merely reliable child-care help, but a rock-solid backup, “like hospitals have emergency generators in case of a blackout or an earthquake.”

  “She moved to Montana with the pizza guy,” said Teri. “But that’s not the point. The point is, I’m not coming in.”

  “But the meeting—,” I said.

  “We’re going to have to reschedule. Or postpone.”

  “All right,” I said, flustered. “What should I tell Mrs. Whitney?”

  “Tell her…shit,” Teri said. “This is a problem, not a solution. She’s not going to like this.”

  “No, she’s not,” I agreed.

  I felt my brain slipping into the high problem-solving gear that I’d perfected over my years of caring for a house and child. Furnace broken down/dinner burned/book report due by tomorrow morning? No matter how daunting the combination of problems, I could always come up with a dozen solutions.

  The trouble, right now, was that I wasn’t sure what the problem was. How to put off the meeting without ruffling Mrs. Whitney’s feathers? How to arrange child care so Teri could get to the meeting? Or how to conduct the meeting without Teri? Which, it was beginning to dawn on me, might mean I didn’t have a problem at all.

  “I could talk privately to Mrs. Whitney’s assistant—maybe this meeting isn’t even on Mrs. Whitney’s radar, and she won’t notice if we reschedule,” I said.

  “Mrs. Whitney told me yesterday how anxious she was to hear my plan,” Teri said.

  My plan, she’d said, not our plan, never mind your plan. Screw her, I thought. Her not being there was the best thing that could have happened to me. I’d go in there, do the presentation giving myself full credit, without having to suffer her angry looks.

  But as soon as those thoughts occurred to me, an arrow of guilt pierced my heart. It wasn’t Teri’s fault that her kids had gotten sick, that her babysitter was out of commission. In fact, for the first time she seemed fallible, sympathetic—downright human.

  “I know,” I said.

  Did I really want to say what I was thinking of saying? She didn’t deserve it. On the other hand, it was the right thing to do, the thing that, should I ever claw my way to a position like Teri’s, I’d want my assistant to do for me.

  “I could take the train out there,” I said. “I could babysit for you. I’ll bring the memo along so you can review it on the train back in, and then you can run the meeting yourself.”

  “Impossible,” Teri said, without even pausing to consider the offer. “There is absolutely no way you could handle three sick children.”

  “Really, I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “I’ve babysat before, lots and lots. I took care of this one little girl through the stomach flu, pneumonia, through the chicken pox, mono—”

  A procession of Diana’s sick faces, weak and pathetic, paraded across my mind.

  “I don’t know what kind of mother would leave a child that sick with a young babysitter,” Teri said. “It’s totally out of the question; you’d have no idea what to do. I’d feel more confident leaving you in charge of the meeting.”

  “Honestly,” I tried again. “I assure you—”

  “I’ve made my decision,” Teri said. “You will conduct the meeting, and just ignore my absence. In fact, tell Mrs. Whitney that I’ve delegated this project to you. That way, if it fails, it won’t be my fault.”

  “But I better tell you…,” I said. “You haven’t even seen…”

  There was a distant sound of retching, and then a bloodcurdling scream, followed by a hurried, “Oh, God,” from Teri.

  “E-mail me the proposal,” Teri snapped. “If I have any changes, I’ll send them to you. Just make sure it’s my name on the top of that report.”

  And with that she hung up.

  My hands were slick with sweat. My stomach was cramping. I had to force myself to pull in a long slow breath, and then consciously direct myself to let it out. I was so nervous, waiting my turn to present my report to Mrs. Whitney, that I thought I might collapse over the arm of my chair and throw up.

  Steady, I told myself. You’ve been waiting for this moment for more than twenty years. The only one who knows more than you about Gentility Press, the only one who believes more in Gentility Press, is Mrs. Whitney herself, and she’s right here, waiting to listen to you. She is a smart woman, she is a fair woman. Plus, as I knew from dissecting the historical sales figures, she was a desperate woman, her company on the edge of bankruptcy if somebody didn’t come up with a fresh marketing solution, fast.

  My idea was Gentility’s best hope, I was convinced of that. Yet I wished, perversely and fleetingly, that Teri was there to back up the ideas with her marketing expertise. But her name was on the proposal, I reminded myself—it just wasn’t on the portion of the presentation that was mine alone. Only Lindsay knew that I had prepared ideas with only my name on them, and from across the room she shot me an encouraging smile. She’d given Thad a sneak preview of my thinking, and even he had been impressed.

  “Alice Green?”

  Mrs. Whitney was looking around the room. I fumbled to my feet.

  “Here I am, Mrs. Whitney.”

  Florence Whitney looked hard at me.

  “We had another Alice Green who was here very briefly, years ago,” she said.

  I was stunned that the head of the company would have any recollection of my name. I felt the heat rise to my face.

  “Smart girl, bright career ahead of her,” Mrs. Whitney was saying, continuing to study me. “As I seem to recall, she left to have children. Utter shame.” She seemed to meditate for a moment on the tragedy of childbearing. Then she looked up at me sharply and said, “You look enough like her to be her daughter.”

  I burst into relieved laughter. “Wel
l, I’m not.”

  Mrs. Whitney’s memory of my long-ago self made me somehow feel less anxious, more substantial. I was not someone totally inexperienced, I reminded myself, someone just starting out. I’d been doing things, difficult and interesting things—including raising a child, which hadn’t been a shame at all—for over two decades.

  Drawing in one more deep breath, feeling at last like the oxygen was crossing into my cells and animating my brain, I moved around the room, passing out copies of the report to Lindsay, Thad, the sales director, the art director, the publicity person, a handful of other editorial staff, and Mrs. Whitney herself.

  “This is the report that Teri talked to you about, outlining our new ideas for marketing the classics line,” I said. “The last major change Gentility made in the line was ten years ago, when Teri came on board and did away with the introductions by the big women’s-lib writers from the sixties and seventies.”

  “Like me!” Mrs. Whitney laughed. “Yes, I’m afraid we’d become old hat. Teri argued that the women she was at college with didn’t think of themselves as feminists anymore. And your generation has never even heard of us, have they, Alice?”

  “I have,” I said. Though when I’d mentioned Why Men Must Die and similar titles to Lindsay and Josh, I’d been met with completely blank looks.

  I propped a chart that Josh had helped me devise on the computer against one wall.

  “Gentility’s strength in the women’s market has always been its female-centered viewpoint,” I said. “But we haven’t taken advantage of—”

  I stopped myself. I was putting it in terms of a problem. I began again.

  “It’s time we took advantage of the most recent phenomenon in books written for and marketed specifically to young women, with their bright sexy covers and lively writing. These books are selling millions of copies.”

  “I like those numbers,” said the sales manager. “But I don’t see how we can hope to do anything like that with Jane Austen.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Mrs. Whitney impatiently. “Where is the solution in this?”

  “I’m…we’re…proposing that we enlist the stars of the new generation of female writers to help sell our classics, just as we did with Mrs. Whitney and other famous writers of the feminist era,” I said. “A lot of those writers are fans of Austen’s and Wharton’s and the Brontës’ and would be honored to write an introduction to a book like Pride and Prejudice or The Age of Innocence.”