What Nora Knew (2 page)

After moving to Manhattan postcollege, I often suggested to my first New York City boyfriend, Clive the Actuary, that we buy tickets for a Broadway show, hear some tunes, see some stars, although his idea of great theater was the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. To be fair, he tried. We turned down a Memorial Day–weekend invitation to Fire Island so I
could see
The Producers
. (“The beach!” he said. “Nathan Lane!” I said.) As soon as I opened the program, twenty little sheets of white paper fluttered out, each saying that for that night’s performance, understudy so-and-so would be substituting for regular so-and-so. Clive shook his head. “Even Matthew Broderick would rather be out of town.”

Three weeks later we split up. Clive got custody of the Knicks. I got custody of Times Square.

I dated Vince, then Bobby, then Sean. I broke up with Vince, then Bobby, then Sean. I seemed to be on a six-month plan with each guy. We’d be moving along fine, and right about that six-month point I’d ask, “So, how do you think things are going with us?” and that would lead to a discussion and the discussion would lead to a realization and that’d be that. Just to be safe, I didn’t ask my next boyfriend, Brett the Paramedic, how things were going after six months. He asked me. And that was that.

I had no idea how other women did it, how’d they know what they were getting and love what they were getting. I just kept stumbling my way from one romance to the next. Of course, the relationships started out well. I wasn’t a masochist. But before long the initial fascination would wear off; the guy with the six-pack abs was never around because he was always at the gym; the man who made me feel needed was too needy; the guy who taught me the difference between Syrah and Shiraz was a closet alcoholic. By the time Evan showed up I didn’t trust myself to know what I was supposed to want. And what with everyone I ever met in my entire life, including
me, in awe of his charm and seduced by his magnetism, and saying I’d be out of my freaking mind if I let this one get away, well—suddenly I was registering at Bloomingdale’s.

Oh. And we were fabulous in the sack together. The dynamic duo. Scarlett and Rhett. Antony and Cleopatra. Tarzan and Jane. I’m sure I wasn’t the first woman to find herself wearing lace and tulle and standing with an armful of white lilies because of sex. Love may be blind, but great sex is the ultimate blindfold. I wanted Evan to be perfect, so I assumed he was. He gave me excuses; I’d give him the benefit of the doubt. He was my fiend with benefits.

After everything unraveled, I’d rerun the
Evan and Molly Show
in my head, searching for the missed signals. With the genius of hindsight I’d write lists filled with signals galore.

Five things about Evan Naboshek under the heading “I Should Have Known Better”:

1. Just because a man buys his socks at Barneys does not mean he won’t wear them
twice.

2. Cheap tipper when no one else is around. If he’s entertaining a client in a fancy-schmancy restaurant, he’ll be sure to lay on the 20 percent. But if some poor guy delivers spring rolls and moo shu pork on a freeze-your-ass-off night, Mr. Big Shot hands the guy a quarter.

3. Baby talk. There are some women in this world who are not comfortable being called Poopsum or Daddy’s Little Girl. I am one of them. “How’d you like the appellate judges of New York State to hear you talking like that?” I’d say, not that it did Poopsum any good.

4. Farts on cue. I suppose some people might consider this an admirable ability, people who are still in fraternities or under ten years old. “Pull my finger” is one of Evan’s favorite jokes. He can also wait an entire evening, getting through a cocktail party, dinner party, and after-dinner cocktails, saving all his best stuff until he gets home and lets her rip, often driving me out of our bedroom screaming into the night.

5. Always asks for a better restaurant table.
Always.
We were seated at the head table at our wedding and I was waiting for Evan to request a better table.

None of these are major enough reasons for breaking up, but all constitute possible lifetime annoyances.

And then there’s number six:

6. Left me for another woman.

That last one is a good reason for splitting up.

I found out about Evan’s messing around because he didn’t have the decency to shut down his home computer. E-mail messages with inappropriate subject headings from his legal secretary, Diane Forlenza—that was her name at the time, although now it’s Diane Forlenza Naboshek—were just sitting there right on the open screen where I couldn’t help but notice them while dusting. (I was a wife who actually cared enough to straighten out my husband’s desk and dust his keyboard and mouse. Can any woman have been a bigger fool? While I was dusting Evan’s pencil box, he was dusting Diane’s.) But she was always so
nice
to me when I called the office. So nice that Evan would come home from work and I’d be complimenting Diane: “You’re so lucky to have her.”

Oh, Molly, Molly, Molly.

To amp up the cheesy quotient, when I was emptying my dresser drawers and tossing shirts and skirts into my suitcase, bellowing, “Your secretary? Your secretary? What could be triter!”—he had the nerve to correct me and tell me she preferred to be called administrative assistant. Like the real problem was that I’d demoted her. Bags in tow, I grabbed a taxi to Penn Station and a train out to my parents’ house in Roslyn.

At night I’d read suicidal poems by Anne Sexton. Suicidal poems by Sylvia Plath. And cynical poems by Dorothy Parker. I’d pity myself. I’d berate myself. I’d pity myself. Back and forth in my head like a crazy woman, and when I was done with that routine, I’d cry into my pillow on the convertible couch in my former childhood bedroom that was now my mother’s arts-and-crafts room, and then I’d get mad at myself for crying because crying gives you wrinkles and someday I might want to start dating again. Although not any day soon. Maybe never.

How is it some people get their hearts trampled and they bounce right back and fall in love again, no questions asked. Is it because they
don’t
ask questions? I could no more easily figure out love than I could figure out the insides of a toaster. I longed to believe in romance and excitement and possibility. But deep-down love,
deep-in-the-ventricles-of-your-heart love, was something that happened to other people, make-believe people in fairy tales and movies.

I’d walk past the romance sections in bookstores gazing over all those covers of women faint with lust in the arms
of bare-chested pirates and sweaty slave masters, their eyes gleaming with passion.
Hey, ladies, have fun while you can.

I imagined their six-month talks:

DAMSEL
: Well, Sinbad, you’ve been ripping my bodice for half a year now and I was wondering just where this relationship is heading.

SINBAD
: Huh? I’m a pirate. Where the hell do you think it’s heading? I’m on the next ship outta town, baby.

My entire marriage lasted twelve days short of three years. It would have been our leather anniversary. I looked it up. To celebrate, I went out and bought myself a new wallet.

The divorce itself took four months to finalize, which in the State of New York with its archaic laws at the time (no no-fault, just
fault
fault) constituted some kind of legal miracle. (Unless, of course, a too-big-for-his-britches and often-not-in-his-britches lawyer pays off a few judges. Not that I’m insinuating anything.) To unload his guilty conscience along with his wife, Evan covered the security deposit and two years’ rent on a one-bedroom for me. My new apartment was only a block away from the puddle-laden street where we first met. I had a better view than from my pre-Evan apartment—but a more jaundiced view of love.

When Deirdre Dolson left a note on my desk requesting my presence in her office at 2:00 sharp, my first thought was
What did I do wrong?
My second thought was
Hey, maybe I’m getting a raise!
But that thought didn’t last as long as the first one.

You may have read about Deirdre in the gossip columns—she employs a personal publicist to make sure you read about her. Good for business, she likes to say, but really, it’s just good for Deirdre. She’s the editor in chief of the online newsmagazine
EyeSpy
. Gossip! News! Pop Culture and Reviews! And the reason I have dental and a 401(k).

The note was written in Deirdre’s signature purple ink. Her other signature is her headache-inducing perfume. She wears it by the gallon. I couldn’t tell if Deirdre personally deposited the message on my chair or if it was dropped off by her assistant, Gavin. Deirdre’s assistants are always male. I’ve worked
here four years now, since the year after my divorce, and in that time she’s been through half a dozen assistants, all male.

I got to the office around eleven, having written at home that morning. One of the perks of my job is you’re allowed to go off and be creative in other locales. Deirdre sees our main competitor as either
Gawker
or
Jezebel
; it’s hard to tell, but someone once told her that
Gawker
writers get to work at home, so now we get to do it, too.

When I walked in, ass-kissing, backstabbing Emily Lawler was sitting in her adjacent cubicle with her nose in a book. Usually, she’s poking her nose into my business. Emily has this really white skin and really dark hair and round, dark eyes. She looks like Snow White minus the dwarfs. After I stowed my purse in my file drawer, next to my backup heels and box of Lipton chicken-soup packets, Emily popped up, looming over me with that cutsie, sneery face of hers, and said, “Good thing you showed up before two,” which proves she didn’t have the decency to even
pretend
she didn’t read my note. “Gavin was asking where you were.”

“Oh, really?” I turned on my computer.

“I told him if there’s something Deirdre needed, that I’d be happy to help.” She smiled her fake sweet smile that’s not meant to be sweet, just fake.

“You’re a true pal, Emily.” I feigned intense typing to make my pal go away. “Must be nice to sit around reading all day.”

Emily’s got the all-time cushiest of cushy jobs. She writes book reviews for
EyeSpy
. She held up a novel,
Larceny among Lovers
. The cover had a cornball illustration of a man, in a
trench coat and fedora, standing in a doorway and casting a shadow across a dead woman’s legs.

“This guy had to grow up with a lot of sisters,” she said, pointing to the author’s name. “He really understands women.”

“Isn’t that a crime book?”

“Criminals have sisters.”

“Emily, can I
pay
you to go away?”

“You wish,” she said and disappeared behind our mutual wall.

When I first started at
EyeSpy,
we all had actual offices. Now only Deirdre and the CFO have offices. About a year ago they knocked down walls, squeezed us together, and knocked off a full floor’s rent. The official party line was that an open plan would foster communication and encourage rapport, but all that really happened was now everyone sits at their desk listening to iPods, blocking out any distractions and each other.

Maybe Deirdre wanted to meet to tell me what a commendable job I was doing. We’d discuss moving my office; she’d say I deserved any cubicle of my choice. Maybe she was so thrilled with me that I could request my own column again. I do that a lot. Request a column. And maybe this time she’d say yes!

Well, maybe.

Before
EyeSpy,
I was writing for
Hipp
magazine, which was anything but.
Hipp
’s readership was decent until the magazine industry went into the toilet, and even after that it was still semidecent, but their readers are aging—more
interested in hip replacements than hip nightclubs, a side effect of
Hipp
not converting to an online format. The good news was, the magazine was floundering enough that they pretty much let me do whatever I wanted, which is how I got to write a piece about a powerful, well-known, unnamed New York divorce attorney who cheated on his expense account and did unflattering impersonations of his clients.

Oh, and who’d recently dumped his journalist wife.

I still don’t know how Deirdre ended up reading the story—she must have been at her beauty salon or something—but she called me at
Hipp
and introduced herself. Like I wouldn’t know who she was!

“Loved your piece on Evan Naboshek,” she said. “You did to him what Nora Ephron did to Carl Bernstein.”

“Technically that piece wasn’t about my ex-husband; it was about—”

“Your ex?”

“My ex.”

“Did you hear from him?”

“A cease-and-desist order, although it was too late to cease or desist because the piece was already published.”

“You’d think he’d be a smarter lawyer than that.”

“You’d think.”

She asked me to send her my résumé. To say I hung up the phone and wanted to knock out a few cartwheels would be an understatement.

For years, my résumé was a testament to hyperbole, exaggeration, and creative fiction. Two days after graduating
college I moved to the city to be a famous writer, vowing to never end up in my family’s Long Island upholstery business. (Four generations of upholsterers—if you count my sister—a solid, successful business, and my worst nightmare.) Appalled to discover my journalism degree did not lead to offers to run the
New York Times
or write cover stories for
Time
magazine, I re-aimed my career goal to
paying the rent
.

I started with a job at Starbucks that came with a cute title but lousy pay. To compensate for the gaping hole in my budget,
Barista Molly
spent the next two years posing nude three nights a week at a SoHo art studio. I developed a talent for holding still without shifting or wobbling or needing to pee. During breaks I’d slip on my robe and walk from easel to easel to see how I’d turned out. Despite my lifelong desire to look mysterious and exotic, I am incorrigibly fresh-faced and all-American. Like somebody whose face belongs on a box of laundry detergent. Pretty enough to be pretty, but maybe not so pretty as to stand out in a crowd. Unless, of course, I’m the only naked person in the room. Then you might notice me.