The Men I Didn't Marry

by Janice Kaplan

  “Then we have to fight it,” I laugh. For a moment, I let myself feel close to Bill, and my spirits begin rising.

  But not too high. Bill’s cell phone rings and he glances at the number and grins. Flipping open the phone, he doesn’t even turn his back to me as he gushes into the receiver.

  “Hi, gorgeous. Great night, wasn’t it?” he says lustily, obviously to some woman. He pauses as she says something, then replies, “Of course you’re not interrupting anything, doll face. I’m just here all by myself. Nobody I’d rather talk to than you.” He winks at me then struts away to continue his conversation.

  I stare after him. How could I have allowed myself even forty-five seconds of feeling good about my deceiving ex-husband? I was right when I told Steff I could never trust him. Bill’s a jackass, but it’s really myself I’m annoyed with. By the time he comes back, I’m fuming.

  “Who was that?” I ask.

  “Nobody special. Just some woman I’m dating,” he says dismissively.

  “Bill, let me ask you something. What was that whole little game of yours on New Year’s Eve? Asking me to go out on a date, bringing me Dr Pepper. The whole bullshit about your wanting to move back.”

  “It was a definite possibility, but you didn’t seem too interested.”

  “I’ve got good judgment, don’t I?”

  “I don’t understand it, Hallie. We were married for years. I like you a lot. Why do you get so threatened just because I’m going out with other women?”

  Maybe if I weren’t so angry, I could laugh at what a self-serving moron he is. But at the moment, all I can think to do is toss down the present he wanted to buy and head out of the store. I don’t need his stupid tire gauge. My number-one enemy isn’t underinflation—it’s over-expectations.

  The next afternoon, it’s my turn to entertain the Chaddick pack and I’m glad for the diversion. They start to arrive promptly at four, and Bellini, more used to being fashionably late in Manhattan than anally on time in the suburbs, strolls in twenty minutes later.

  “This is such a great idea,” says Amanda. “A Sunday afternoon get-together. So decadent.”

  Bellini looks around, trying to figure out what could be decadent in a room of six properly dressed women. If she’s expecting a male stripper, I better warn her that the most shocking thing she’ll see today is a burnt quiche.

  “I never leave the twins on a Sunday. It’s always family day,” says Amanda, explaining why this gathering seems so illicit. “But I’m glad to get a break from the noise.”

  “And I’m glad to get a break from the quiet,” the recently separated Steff says mournfully.

  “Poor you,” says Rosalie sympathetically. “I can’t believe Richard left.”

  “Or that Bill left,” adds Amanda.

  “Every time we get together there’s one less husband to worry about,” says Darlie cheerfully. “It’s like an Agatha Christie novel—And Then There Were None.”

  Rosalie looks at me hopefully. “Any chance . . . ?”

  “No,” I say resolutely. “You can try and try to hold on to old things but at some point you have to clean the closets.”

  I stop there, not wanting to get into a lengthy explanation of what happened yesterday—how I wanted to see Bill, knew it was a bad idea, thought I owed it to both of us to try, and then discovered all over again why it wouldn’t work. I can’t let Bill trample my heart again. The world doesn’t have an unlimited supply of double-stuff Oreos.

  “Clean the closets,” I say, getting myself back on track. “Get rid of what doesn’t work anymore and try not to regret it.”

  “You always regret it a little,” says Bellini, jumping in to help me out. “But whether it’s a polyester wrap dress or a cheating man, you have to move on. And that’s what we’re doing today, right? At least with the wrap dresses.”

  “And I’m so excited!” says Rosalie clapping her hands, completely missing any of the poignant overtones of the conversation. “Wasn’t it clever of Hallie to invite us?”

  We all troop into the dining room, where the women had deposited their shopping bags on the way in. I’d invited them each to bring over at least one item of clothing they’d bought and never worn.

  “Here are the rules,” I say. “Everybody has that Big Mistake hanging in her closet with the price tag still attached. With luck, somebody else here will think it’s a Big Find. If not, we send it off to charity, and you never have to think about it again.”

  “I love this idea of Swap & Talk,” says Amanda.

  Bellini gives a little laugh. “When I told Hallie about this I said it was called a Switch & Bitch.”

  “This is the suburbs,” I chide her. “We don’t bitch.”

  “I bitch, and under the right circumstances, I might be available to switch,” says Darlie provocatively.

  “That’s a different kind of party, dear,” says Bellini, patting Darlie’s shoulder. “And it went out of style in the seventies.”

  Jennifer titters. “Well, speaking of going out of style, let me show you what I found.”

  She pulls out an orange velvet blazer with a sequined floppy flower sewn onto the lapel, and we’re off. The Big Mistakes—most of the women have brought several—spill out of the bags. Bellini takes Jennifer’s blazer, saying she could wear it to a club in the East Village. My boxy pleated suit finds no takers, even though it still has the tags on, because it makes everybody’s hips look big. We vote to send it to Teri Hatcher along with a chocolate triple layer cake. One way or another, Teri’d look better with a few pounds on her.

  The problem with the slinky cocktail dress Bellini’s brought isn’t that it makes her look too big. Rather, she bought the dress too small.

  “I found it at Roberto Cavalli right after I’d been on a grapefruit and cucumber diet for two weeks,” Bellini says, holding up the skinny mini. “Even then it barely fit, but I always figured it would someday. I’ve held on to it for two years for inspiration. But I had my real inspiration this morning when I realized screw this. Who needs to be that thin, anyway?”

  We all laugh in agreement and decide to put it in the Teri Hatcher care package.

  Amanda then shows us her big bargain, which was irresistible at the time. “It’s Moschino, marked down to thirty dollars from six hundred,” she says, displaying a white vinyl miniskirt with metal grommets at the hem. “But who’d ever wear something like this?”

  “Heather Locklear. Anna Nicole Smith. A well-dressed hooker on Forty-second Street. The patrons at Lucky Changs,” suggests Bellini.

  “And me,” says Darlie, snatching it from Amanda’s hand and obviously thinking she’s putting herself in good sartorial company. I don’t tell her that Lucky Changs is a famous downtown transvestite club.

  “How about you, Steff? What’s your Big Mistake?” I ask.

  “Buying this teddy and thinking Richard would care,” she says tossing a beautiful creamy silk Natori onto the table. Her eyes glisten with tears and she stares at the lacy confection. “Nobody will ever get to see it now. One of you might as well take it.”

  “I will,” says Darlie, grabbing again. She’s like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up everything she can find.

  “No, you won’t,” says Amanda snapping it out of her hand. A catfight over Natori? I start to step in and explain you can get them on sale at Bloomingdale’s, but Amanda has a different agenda.

  “You keep the teddy, Steff,” Amanda says firmly, giving it back to her. “Somebody will get to see it. There’ll be another guy. And then you’ll thank me.”

  Steff runs her fingers over the soft material. “I can’t imagine there’ll ever be someone else. Would you believe I’ve only slept with one man other than Richard? Just one other man.”

  “Where is he now?” I ask.

  “I have no idea,” says Steff, “but I’ll never forget him. Peter. Tall, broad-shouldered, and the sweetest person on earth. We’d stay up all night talking and we planned to have six children together.”<
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  “Thank God you didn’t marry him,” says Darlie. “Six children. Even if you stopped at five, think of the stretch marks.”

  “StriVectin for the stretch marks,” advises Jennifer.

  “I had a Peter, too,” says Amanda dreamily. “Didn’t we all?”

  “It’s a common name,” says Rosalie, as usual missing the point.

  Amanda laughs. “My Peter was named Jean-Paul. Very sexy, very French, very rich. I could be living in Paris right now. I mean, I’m happy right here in Chaddick, but think what my life could have been.” She trails off, obviously lost in reveries of being Madame Jean-Paul, eating croissants and Valrhona chocolate, one of those French women who never gets fat.

  “Even my mother had a Peter,” says Bellini. “I was looking through some old photo albums in her house a couple of months ago and found a faded black-and-white picture of some handsome blond guy on a beach in a tight bathing suit with his arm around her. I asked my mom who the guy was and she stared at the picture and got really flushed. ‘That’s the man I dated before your father. The man I didn’t marry.’ ”

  “How old’s your mother?” I ask curiously.

  “Sixty-five. Can you imagine? She knew this man more than forty years ago and she’s been happily married ever since. I asked her why she still keeps the picture and she said, ‘I like to think about him sometimes.’ ”

  We’re all quiet for a moment.

  “It freaked me out a little,” says Bellini. “What if my mother had married her light-haired hunk instead of my dad? The path not taken. I wouldn’t even exist.”

  “Or else you’d be a blonde,” suggests Darlie. “I mean, a natural blonde.”

  I laugh. “The thing about the path not taken is that you can sometimes stroll down it again. I did.”

  “Really?” asks Steff.

  “Really,” I say, and I begin slowly sharing the story of my post-Bill quest. Eric, Ravi, Kevin. The women look at me wide-eyed. Suddenly, I’m no longer Hallie the mother, Hallie the lawyer, Hallie the down-to-earth next-door neighbor. I’m Hallie the adventuress. From the stunned looks on their faces, I might as well be telling my friends that I went bungee jumping off the Empire State Building. And in a way, I did. I took a risk and bounced back.

  “Wow, what fun that must have been,” says Amanda, and from the glint in her eye, I have a feeling that she’s going to be Googling the French phone directory.

  “It was,” I say happily.

  “It would take me a lifetime to look up all the men I didn’t marry,” says Darlie.

  “Are there men you didn’t marry?” asks Steff sweetly, reflecting on Darlie’s four trips down the aisle.

  “Never mind that,” says Amanda. She picks up a crocheted vest that Rosalie has contributed and plays with the fringe of pom-poms. “There’s something appealing about looking at old things from a new perspective. I think it’s lovely you reconnected with your past boyfriends.”

  “You know what’s even lovelier?” I say thoughtfully. “I didn’t just see the men again—I got to remember who I was all those years ago. I’d been attracted to so many different kinds of men: the sensitive guy, the go-getter, and the bad boy. I guess it was part of figuring out who I am and trying on different selves.”

  “Which self wore that Laura Ashley blouse?” asks Steff, making fun of the primly bow-tied flower-print shirt I brought to the swap.

  “The one who wanted to get a job. But don’t forget I also wore this tight, fire-engine red knit dress,” I say, holding it up to my shoulders and wiggling.

  “Three men,” says Steff shaking her head, as if she can’t imagine such a thing. She rubs her hand over the silk teddy that Amanda insisted she keep. “Anybody else on your list?”

  I hesitate and bite a hangnail on my thumb. Anybody else?

  “No,” I say. “That’s it.”

  After all the other women have left, Bellini and I get busy bagging the extra clothes for charity. Just before I tie the package shut, Bellini decides to toss in the orange blazer she’d claimed, convinced there’s an eighteen-year-old somewhere who needs it more than she does.

  When we’re done, I make a fresh pot of tea and we flop on the sofa.

  “So,” says Bellini, taking a sip. “Now that it’s just us, I can say it. You weren’t quite honest when you said nobody else was on the list.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I know you, darling. You give yourself away when you bite a hangnail.”

  “Safer than using a scissors, you know. Cutting your cuticles can lead to infection or weaken the nail bed.”

  “Thank you, Sally Hansen.”

  In case my beauty advice hasn’t been enough to divert Bellini from asking about my list, I check the tea tray and notice that I’ve brought out lemon but not milk.

  “Whoops, what kind of hostess am I? Let me get the creamer,” I say, starting to head to the kitchen.

  Bellini grabs my arm. “I don’t like cream. I don’t like milk. I don’t even like cows. Sit down.”

  I sit. “Who doesn’t like cows? The Hindus revere them. But I have some powdered soy, if you prefer.”

  “Yummy. But stop trying to change the subject.”

  I sigh. “Bellini, I tell you everything. But this one’s just too painful.”

  “You have to face your pain to move on,” says Bellini, sounding like she swallowed one too many self-help books.

  “That’s the old-school therapy. New school believes in denial.”

  “When did it change?” asks Bellini.

  “Probably when health insurance stopped covering months of visits to your therapist.”

  “So how’s denial working for you?” asks Bellini.

  “Not that well,” I say with a shrug.

  “Who was it? Someone you really loved?” asks Bellini.

  “Someone who mesmerized me.” I stare off for a moment as the memory swirls back of my whirlwind three months with Dick. I was swept off my feet by his Southern gentility and sophisticated charm, not to mention his parents’ extravagant Nashville mansion and swanky parties. Nothing felt more worldly than standing on their veranda, drinking mint juleps. He declared he wanted me to be his wife a week after we met.

  “His name was Dick. I thought we were going to get married,” I tell Bellini.

  Bellini nods. “I know what you mean. I’ve had nine or ten men I thought I was going to marry.”

  “Yes, but for you, those were all first dates.”

  Bellini makes a face at me. “You’ve been so daring since Bill left. What could keep you from looking up this last guy?”

  I look out the window at the cold gray day. “He’s tied in with Amy.”

  “Your little sister who . . .”

  “Right,” I say.

  “Maybe it would help if you saw him again.”

  “I just don’t know. I’m not sure I can handle it. Sometimes when you fall in love you get hurt. But until the earth crumbles under your feet, you never really realize just how much hurt love can cause.”

  Chapter EIGHTEEN

  THE NIGHTMARES START AGAIN. For years after we broke up, Dick would float in and out of my dreams, and I’d wake up screaming. Now that I’ve said his name out loud to Bellini, it’s like I’ve raised the devil again. Night after night now, Dick haunts me, morphing from Don Juan to Satan, taking on lurid shapes, chasing me down alleys. One morning, I wake up disoriented, drenched in sweat. I stumble over to my bureau and take out the article I’d clipped from Time magazine mentioning Dick, who’s running in a special congressional race in Tennessee.

  Running for office? He should be ashamed to show his face in public, never mind plastering that face on campaign buttons. I study again the few sentences about the race. It’s a hotly contested seat and Dick Benedict is catching up to his opponent. If there were any justice in the world, instead of gaining ground, Dick would be under the ground. I can understand why nobody calls him Richard. His longtime nickname has always been more fi
tting: Tricky Dick, Dirty Dick, Dirty Trick Dick. I should write his election slogans and let the voters know who he really is.

  I make arrangements to fly down to Tennessee. I’m practically on automatic when I take the Delta flight, go to the Hertz counter, and drive to a vaguely familiar part of town. A few minutes later, I’m standing in a small office surrounded by four-foot-high posters of the man I’ve tried to erase from every corner of my mind. Why did I venture down here? My hands feel clammy and my heart is pounding.

  An enthusiastic young woman manning the front desk at Dick Benedict’s campaign headquarters jumps up when she sees me. “Hi, are you here to volunteer?” she asks excitedly.

  “Not exactly,” I say, wiping my sweaty palms on the edge of my cotton sweater. “I’ve come down from New York to see Mr. Benedict.”

  “New York money!” says the woman. “We’ve been trying to get donors from out of state. Do you know Donald Trump?”

  “Yes,” I say confidently, remembering that my friend Amanda’s mother-in-law’s cousin lives in one of his buildings. Less than six degrees of separation counts as a personal friend and I got there in five.

  “Will you call Mr. Trump for us?”

  “Only if you buzz Mr. Benedict immediately and tell him Hallie Lawrence is here.”

  The woman turns her back as she makes a call, but I clearly hear her saying, “Okay, I’ll tell her.”

  When she faces me again, her smile is a little less welcoming. “Mr. Benedict is tied up. He apologizes and suggests you leave a phone number.”

  “I’ll just wait,” I say.

  “He’ll be a long while.”

  “I have time.”

  “A very long time. Maybe even tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s good,” I say, taking a bottle of Poland Spring water from my bag to prove that I could survive here for as long as necessary. I snag a chocolate cookie from a plate on the table set out for volunteers and settle down into a folding chair.

  “You really have to leave, please,” says the young woman, nervously circling over to me.

  “Let me guess,” I say, “Icky Dicky Benedict told you he doesn’t want to see me.”