The Hot Flash Club

by Nancy Thayer

  Sharon shifted in her seat to face Marilyn. “Frankly, I’m worried about Teddy.”

  “Teddy!” Marilyn glanced at her sister in alarm. “Why?”

  “I don’t like his fiancée. I don’t trust her. I think she’s after Teddy for his money.”

  Relief made Marilyn laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous. Lila’s father’s a successful plastic surgeon! He’s got his own clinic just west of Boston!”

  “Marilyn. Listen to me. You know I love Teddy. But have you looked at him?”

  “Of course I have! I look at him all the time!”

  “All right, then, picture him in your mind’s eye. Then picture Lila. What’s wrong with this picture?”

  Marilyn thought. “Nothing. Lila’s a lovely girl.” “No, Marilyn. Lila’s not a ‘lovely girl.’ Lila is a drop-dead knockout beauty who wears Versace and Manolo Blahniks.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Oh, honey—” There was genuine anguish in Sharon’s voice.

  They reached the airline terminal. Marilyn found a space at the departure curb and angled into it. “Want me to come in with you?”

  “No. Just listen.” Sharon unfastened her seat belt and aimed her determined glare at her sister. “Marilyn. I love Teddy. I adore Teddy. But, honey, Teddy is—” She took a deep breath.

  “What? Teddy’s what?”

  “A geek. Teddy is a geek.”

  Marilyn stared at her sister, a red tide flushing her face.

  “A nerd,” Sharon said. “A twerp.”

  “All right, all right, I get the point.” Marilyn chewed her lip, then brightened. “But you know, Sharon, Teddy looks just like his father, and I fell in love with Theodore.”

  Sharon closed her eyes, seeming to pray for courage. When she opened them, she reached out and angled the rearview mirror toward Marilyn. “Yes. That’s true. And look at yourself.”

  Marilyn stared at her reflection, puzzled.

  “And please recall what you’ve spent your life looking at,” Sharon continued, reaching over the backseat to gather up her scarf, purse, and overnight bag. “Dead bugs.”

  “Trilobites,” Marilyn corrected with quiet dignity. Sharon never had respected her life’s work. Opening her door, she said, “I’ll get your suitcase from the trunk.”

  Standing behind the car, buffeted by fumes of passing buses, taxis, and cars, the two sisters scowled at each other.

  “I know you’re angry with me,” Sharon said. “But I had to say this. I’m afraid Lila’s marrying Teddy for his money.”

  “I’ve told you. Lila’s family has plenty of money.”

  “Do they? Perhaps they did, but do they now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that a lot of people have lost a ton of money in the stock market in the past year. I mean that you and Teddy and Theodore think that it’s normal to sit around the dinner table discussing genetic alterations that will make the corn borer’s stomach explode, but in fact, that’s not what most people consider dinner conversation. I mean that you fell in love with Theodore even though he’s short and fat and bald, because you truly live the life of the mind and don’t realize you go around looking like an extra from Lord of the Rings. I mean you love Theodore because you understand and admire his work. But Lila Eastbrook doesn’t have a clue about Teddy’s work, and she never will. Her deepest thought’s about Chanel’s newest lipstick shade. Marilyn, if you don’t watch out, your son and my nephew will get his darling heart broken, and Lila will make off with a lot of that lovely money you’ve forgotten you have.”

  “You’ve been here one week, you’ve seen Lila and Teddy two times, and you’ve deduced all that?”

  “Honey, I’m a headhunter. It’s my business to size people up quickly.”

  “Well, what can I do?”

  “Stall when they talk about the wedding. Convince them that next spring would be better than this fall. Get on the Internet, check out how Eastbrook’s clinic’s doing. Discuss it at dinner some night with Lila, see how she reacts. I’ll think about it and call you when I come up with some better ideas.”

  “I just can’t believe this.” Marilyn twisted her hands together.

  “Don’t look so worried. We’ll work it out. I wouldn’t mention it if I didn’t love Teddy so much. I want only the best for him. You’ve got to admit that your marriage with Theodore has lasted so well because you’re both scientists. Don’t you want a marriage like yours for Teddy? I mean, just imagine. Once they’re past the first sexual frenzy, what will Lila and Teddy even be able to talk about?” Sharon glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to run, or I’ll miss my plane. I’ll call you tonight. Love you.” She hugged her sister tightly, kissed her cheek, then grabbed her suitcases and rushed into the terminal.

  Marilyn stood gaping as her sister strode away. All human DNA was 99 percent the same. Only 1 percent of one’s DNA was different from any other human on the earth. How could it be, then, that she and Sharon, who shared not only the nature of DNA but the nurture of the same parents, the same home, the same education, could have turned out so differently? Life was such a mystery. In a microscope—

  A horn blasted through her thoughts.

  “Lady! You gonna stand there all day?” an irate cabby yelled.

  Marilyn blinked. What? Where? Forcing herself to focus, she remembered where she was and what she had to do. She got into her car and drove away from the terminal. She longed to head for the university and the refuge of the lab, where she was working on the meticulous extraction of a trilobite from a slab of Ordovician shale.

  Instead, she drove to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Its hushed, eccentric opulence always provided an atmosphere where she could think.

  As she drove she tried to look at the situation logically. First of all, she reminded herself, consider the source: Sharon was a loving sister, married for years, with her own thriving business and two grown, married children. She loved Marilyn and her family, so it was not with malicious intent that Sharon had stirred up this hornet’s nest in Marilyn’s heart.

  Blunt, practical, and honest, Sharon was a superb problem solver. Marilyn, in contrast, was dreamy-minded in an intellectual way. She tended to let the teakettle rattle dry as she stood two feet away, field glasses in her hands, watching crows feed in the backyard. Fortunately, her husband was just as preoccupied with his own thoughts about the mysterious puzzle of genetics. In fact, over the past few months, Theodore had taken to eating most of his meals out because it took too much time from his work to drive home to eat. Fine with Marilyn, who was delighted to be released from the kitchen; she had more time for her own research.

  Neither Theodore nor Marilyn had ever longed for riches or the luxurious life money could ensure. It was a passion for the scientific process that had driven Theodore to discover how to alter the gene of a parasite that killed expensive exotic fish so that the gene self-destructed before it could harm the fish. When a pharmaceutical company that sold, among other drugs, preventive medicine to the aquarium industry, bought Theodore’s formula for a staggering sum, Theodore and Marilyn had laughed and popped a bottle of champagne. Then they’d wandered back to their work, leaving the champagne to go flat. Their colleagues urged them to take a trip to some exotic place, but the thought of being away from their work horrified them, as did the suggestion that they dislodge their books and papers from their Victorian house near the university simply to move to a more prestigious address. They’d spoken, briefly, about hiring a housekeeper, so that Marilyn would have more time for her lab work, but her teaching was only part-time at the most, and they were terrified by the very thought of someone moving their papers and books around. In the end, they decided to send their laundry out and live with dust and clutter.

  Teddy took after both of them. When Teddy turned twenty-one, Theodore had given him a seven-figure check, as he did when Teddy won his doctorate in genetic biology at Harvard. Teddy had thanked his father, then stuck the money in the bank and con
tinued to live in a rented apartment near MIT. He was too busy with his own research for frivolous matters, and his parents understood that completely.

  Marilyn showed her pass, entered the Gardner, and settled on a bench in the sunny courtyard, filled with statuary and, today, a plethora of lilies and azalea. Hidden deep in the pots, beneath the leaves and showy blossoms, unseen minuscule creatures were busily going about their everyday work, waving their antennae, crawling, chomping, defecating, tunneling, mating—

  Teddy. Her son. Her wonderful brilliant son.

  What had Sharon called him? A dweeb. A nerd. A twerp.

  Rather unkind, but not inaccurate. Like his father, Teddy was portly, was losing his hair, and wore heavy, black-rimmed glasses. Yet it had never occurred to any of them that he could be unattractive. He’d always had girlfriends. He’d had a steady girlfriend in high school, dear little Ursula, who was ursine in appearance, squat and burly, low to the ground, with beady dark eyes, thick dark hair—on her arms and legs as well as her head—and an incipient mustache. Ursula played field hockey and the violin. Recently she’d married another violinist and moved somewhere in the Midwest.

  In college, there had been several girls. Candy had been Marilyn’s favorite, and Teddy had seemed very serious about their relationship, but after getting their doctorates, Candy had gone off to work for NASA while Teddy stayed on at MIT.

  After Candy, there hadn’t been anyone long-lasting until Lila. Even so, Teddy was not repulsive. He was not obese.

  Still, it was possible that Sharon had a point. Marilyn took off her horn-rimmed glasses and chewed on them as she thought. All Teddy’s former girlfriends had been, if not homely, exactly, then certainly dowdy. Marilyn was dowdy herself, as Sharon never failed to remind her, but she couldn’t get her mind to dwell on the mysteries of clothing, hair, and lipstick. Heaven knew that her beloved trilobites, dead in their rock coffins for 500 million years, didn’t know or care what Marilyn looked like as she bent over them, abrading away, with exquisite care, the dust of ages from their long, thin, cockroachlike bodies.

  Marilyn’s fingers twitched, longing to get back to work. She rose and walked through the museum, telling herself to stay on the subject for just a little longer.

  Now: Lila. What was different about her from Teddy’s other girlfriends?

  Most obvious: Lila was really beautiful. Even Marilyn had noticed that. Marilyn looked at the flamenco dancer in Sergeant’s painting and decided that Lila, though fair and petite, had the same flashing intensity. Yes, Lila was glamorous, but so what?

  True, Teddy hadn’t met Lila the same way he’d met his other girlfriends, in a science lab. Where had they met? Marilyn searched her memory. Hadn’t they—oh, yes. She remembered. Lila had tripped and fallen in the Bread & Circuses parking lot. She’d been wearing high heels. One of the heels had snapped off. For a moment she thought she’d broken her ankle. Teddy had been on his way to his car, and he’d seen her fall, and helped her up, and taken her for coffee. They’d liked each other at once and started dating, and now they were engaged.

  Could Lila have targeted Teddy and fallen on purpose?

  That was just ridiculous. She mustn’t let Sharon’s doubts turn her into a suspicious harpy.

  I mean, Marilyn asked herself, how would Lila even know that Teddy was wealthy?

  Well, she answered herself, there was that write-up in the Boston Globe.

  Marilyn paused in front of the tapestry hanging across from the steps to the second floor. Medieval, it depicted a rustic village scene, with peasants and farmers and cows and trees, and at the bottom, a pair of rabbits mating. A lusty scene, and lust was good. Certainly she had enjoyed it all those years ago, when she and Theodore had fallen in love. If they no longer felt lust for each other—and Marilyn couldn’t actually remember the last time they’d had intercourse—it could have been years— they always had so much reading piled next to their beds—if they no longer felt lust, they certainly did feel great affection for each other. Marilyn thought she and Theodore had a satisfactory marriage. She’d always assumed the same would be true for Teddy.

  Teddy might not be handsome, but he was brilliant, and kind, and good-natured, and sweet, and often funny. He was her darling son, even if he was twenty-nine years old.

  What if Sharon was right? What if Lila was after Teddy for his money? What if she was marrying him only to divorce him? Oh, what a dreadful thought. Marilyn knew she mustn’t let herself bury her head in the literal sand of her work. Somehow she had to find out about Lila and her family.

  But how?

  4

  ALICE

  Alice used to be beautiful, even first thing in the morning, waking up with her cheek creased from the pillow and her hair standing out from her head like a child’s drawing of the rays of the sun. She used to be able to sit naked in the full exposure of sunlight, stretching, yawning, her breasts full and high, her tummy sleek as a silk evening bag, every pocket of her body as glistening and fresh as a spring morning.

  Knowing this had given her a kind of power that had, along with her intelligence, ambition, and intuition, carried her up the ladder of corporate success. It was important to her work that she be attractive. No one said this, but it was true: The vice president in charge of administration for the TransContinent Insurance Corporation, especially if she was an African-American female, had to look good.

  And for years she’d looked great. All her life she’d been attractive, until a few years ago, when it began to take some amount of maintenance on her part— exercise, diet, hair color, makeup. After fifty, the effort was almost daunting, but she was determined. She looked more chic than sexy, but chic worked.

  Then, suddenly, it seemed, she woke up one morning to discover she was sixty-two.

  It was as if she were a tiger, powerful, sinuous, burning bright, padding majestically through the jungle of life. Pausing to look in the mirror, she discovered that somehow, overnight, she’d become a sheep. A gray, common, creaking sheep.

  Worse, other people saw her as a sheep.

  Sheep were easy prey for jackals, lions, and wolves.

  She cursed as she dressed for work. Her newest suit, for which she’d paid over a thousand dollars, was too tight at the waist. She could scarcely fasten it. After lunch, she’d be in agony and, unless she was lucky, the button would fly off during a conference and hit one of the new honchos in the eye. It was the style now for younger women to wear their shirts out over the waist rather than tucked in. When Alice tried it, she felt chubby and sloppy, and she remembered all those years of telling her sons to tuck their shirts in. Still, she left her white shirt out, pulled the suit jacket on, and left it unbuttoned. Not the best of looks, but it would do.

  As long as she didn’t have to raise her arms. The sleeves were suddenly too tight, pulling at her shoulders. It seemed, these days, she gained weight while simply breathing air.

  Now, shoes. The pair that coordinated with the suit had cost over four hundred dollars. Black, with a boxy three-inch heel, they made her legs look fabulous. The pleasure she got from the other corporate heads stealing glimpses of her legs almost offset the sheer torture of wearing them.

  God, she was vain, and she knew it! However, her vanity was not just a personal flaw, it was also a professional tool. Three months ago, TransContinent merged with Champion Insurance and became TransWorld. Its new, glittering headquarters towered in the heart of downtown Boston, only minutes from Alice’s condo on Boston Harbor. She could walk there easily, but she wasn’t going to today. Not in these shoes. She headed out to her sleek black Audi and entered the early-morning traffic.

  Alice’s job was to develop and implement umbrella policies for management information procedures, employee benefit policies, and human resource plans in and among the complicated network of offices.

  A lovely, fit, energetic, brilliant, cocky, younger woman had come from Champion to work with Alice as assistant to the vice president in charge of administration
.

  Alison Cummings. Thirty-two, unmarried, no children, a Harvard MBA.

  It bit Alice’s ass that this young princess was named Alison. Until her arrival, everyone had called Alice by the shortened version of her name. Going by Al had endowed her with the power of masculinity in written communications and online, as well as providing a slight frisson of sexuality in face-to-face meetings, because she was so obviously female. It had worked for her. But Alison also went by Al, and during their first superficially pleasant and deeply cold-blooded meeting, the two women had agreed with gritted teeth that both would give up the nickname and go by their full names, to avoid confusion. Alice had thought Alison should, because of Alice’s seniority, be respectful and extend to Alice the right to go by Al, but that thought didn’t seem to cross anywhere near the younger woman’s mind. She’d been more interested in measuring Alice’s corner office with calculating eyes. Her own office down the hall was almost as large, but not as prestigious.

  Alice steered her way into the TransWorld garage, parked in her reserved spot, and took the elevator to the thirtieth floor. Ruefully, she recalled that Alison Cummings had one thing working for her, literally: She’d brought her secretary with her during the merger. She had her guardian in place.

  Alice did not. Her own loyal and circumspect secretary, Eloise, in spite of Alice’s desperate pleas, had retired, leaving Alice personally bereft and professionally endangered. Eloise had been Alice’s watchdog and secret agent; Eloise could sense an office intrigue the moment it glinted in the conspirators’ eyes. Eloise would have helped Alice figure out just how determined Alison Cummings was to undermine her.

  Since Eloise’s defection, Alice was scrambling to find a new secretary, but it was tough. Enough drastic changes were taking place with the merger; Alice didn’t want to raid a junior officer’s staff and provoke someone’s resentment, but she didn’t want to have to train someone totally new to the industry, either. Right now Alice had a temp from the office secretarial pool.