Younger (3 page)

Though Maggie had always adored my daughter, it had been from a distance, sending her outrageously frilly dresses from Paris and taking her, once a year, to art galleries and some wildly unsuitable restaurant, where she would be aghast if Diana gagged on the eel. And she'd been asking me since the day I brought Diana home from the hospital when I was going back to work.

Now she stared at me, with a look I knew only too well. It was the look she got when she was going to say something that she knew I wasn't going to like.

“You mean like it's too late for you to get back into publishing?” she said. “Like it's too late for you to have a career?”

Now I was the one struggling not to cry. And it was Maggie's turn to reach out and squeeze my arm.

“I don't really believe that,” she said. “I
don't
think it's too late for you. That's exactly my point. We're not a couple of old ladies who should just fold up our tents and shuffle off to the nursing home. There's still plenty of time for both of us. Come on.”

 

Maggie wouldn't let me look in the mirror again until she was finished. She washed my hair and blow-dried it, spent forever working over me with her makeup brush, buckled me into some very extreme underwear, and zipped me into tight jeans. It was like we were teenagers again, swapping clothes and doing makeovers on each other.

“How come you have all this girlie stuff?” I asked Maggie.

“I'm a lesbian,” she said. “Not a man.” She spritzed some perfume on my neck and surveyed me.

“Okay,” she said, nodding decisively. “I think you're ready.”

Once again, she propelled me across the loft to the mirror.

I swear, at first I didn't recognize myself. I actually swiveled to look behind me, thinking somebody else may have walked into the place when I wasn't looking.

Somebody blond. Somebody hot. And somebody very, very young.

“I can't believe it,” I said, blinking hard.

Maggie grinned. “I'd take you for twenty-two!” she crowed.

I couldn't stop staring. Maggie had given me, in its most essential sense, my wish—my wish not merely to be younger but to go back in time and be reinvented as a different person. The woman in the mirror looked like me, sort of, but like a different version of me than had ever existed in real life. When I was really twenty-two, I was finishing up my study of Jane Austen and the Brontës at Mount Holyoke, with my hair scraped back in a ponytail and my body swathed in big baggy sweat clothes and my thick glasses perennially sliding down my unpowdered nose. When I was really twenty-four, I was the mother of a toddler, still wearing the ponytail and the glasses and the sweat clothes, except now they were even bigger and smelled vaguely of spit-up. At twenty-eight, I sometimes made a Big Effort and got myself into leggings and a voluminous sweater to man the kindergarten bake sale.

I had certainly never looked like this: buff and blond, wearing lipstick and baring cleavage and looking smart and a little bit slutty.

“Who is she?” I whispered.

But Maggie, who was busy checking her watch, didn't hear me. “It's almost midnight,” she said. “Time to take the new you out for a test run.”

T
he bar on Maggie's corner was packed with people, with more thronged out on the sidewalk, but the tall elegant woman barring the doorway to everyone else waved Maggie and me inside.

“She has a crush on me,” Maggie shouted in my ear.

“I hope my being here doesn't give her the impression that you're taken.”

“She knows you're straight.”

I looked quizzically at Maggie. “How does she know that?”

“She's psychic,” Maggie said, with a poker face. And then, “No, really, sweetheart. You could be wearing motorcycle boots and a Melissa Etheridge T-shirt, and you'd still look straight. It's just something about the vibe.”

Maggie began maneuvering us forward toward the bar, craning her neck to survey the room as we wound our way through all the people.

“Who do you want?” she said.

“Want?”

I must have looked even more alarmed than I felt, because Maggie burst out laughing. “To kiss!” she cried. “Do you see anybody you want to kiss at midnight?”

I'd been married so long that I couldn't remember ever considering this question. Last New Year's Eve, I had still been with Gary, at our friends Marty and Kathy's annual New Year's dinner party, and as always it had been Gary I'd turned to first. I'd had no idea that in twelve hours he'd tell me he wanted a divorce; never in a trillion years would have guessed that the next New Year's Eve, I'd be surveying the throng at a downtown Manhattan restaurant in search of a stranger to kiss.

And then I saw him. He was standing at the bar, half listening to a skinny redheaded guy talking on the stool beside him, but focusing more on looking around the room, a little half smile on his lips. His hair was long and dark, his skin pale. He looked to be medium height and medium build, but with extraordinarily broad shoulders, shoulders wide enough to ride on. His eyes seemed to be dancing, as if he'd just remembered a really good joke and couldn't wait to tell someone.

It was at that moment that he turned, as if I'd shouted that he could tell the joke to me, and looked directly into my eyes. His face broke into a grin, leaving me no choice but to smile back. It was like we were old friends, ex-lovers who'd parted on the friendliest of terms, recognizing each other in the crowd.

Then the redheaded man said something more insistent, and my man looked away.

“I'd kiss him,” I said to Maggie.

“Who?”

“At the bar,” I said. “Next to the redheaded guy. The one with the artsy hair.”

He looked at me again then, and Maggie started nudging me forward. Then, all at once, a shout went up and two televisions mounted above the bar flickered on. It was the Times Square ball, with an onscreen clock showing the minutes left until the new year: just under five.

“Perfect!” Maggie shouted in my ear as she propelled me along. “He's a baby!”

I stopped. “What do you mean?” Now I was trying to look at him without him seeing me. I hadn't exactly pegged him as middle-aged, but neither did he look like a college kid.

“He's definitely in his twenties,” Maggie said, poking me in the back.

I frowned. “I'd say thirties.”

“No way. Come on. We have to see if you pass.”

Move forward? Or run shrieking into the night? Maggie made the decision for me by giving me a major shove, practically right into Mr. Dancing Eyes' arms.

“Oh,” I said, my breasts jammed against the starched cotton of his shirt, the soapy smell of his neck filling my nose. “Sorry. My friend—”

“It's all right,” he said. “I was wondering whether I was going to be able to get close enough to talk to you. You look so familiar. Don't I know you from somewhere?”

Not unless you've been loitering at the Lady Fitness near my house in New Jersey, I wanted to say. Or attending meetings of the Homewood Garden Club.

Then again, he couldn't possibly know me from anywhere, because I'd never
been
anywhere—not the me that was standing in front of him, anyway.

“Ten,” the crowd started to chant. “Nine. Eight—”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“No?” He looked surprised.

“It's just—”

It was just that I could feel Maggie mere inches behind me, awaiting our kiss like some pimp with an overdue car payment. And I wanted to kiss him, but I was scared.

“Five. Four—”

Scared of kissing someone new, I mean
really
kissing someone
really
new, for the first time in twenty-three years. Scared I wouldn't remember how. Scared because it was clear, now that I was so close, that this guy had probably been a toddler the last time I'd done this. Scared that I didn't care.

There was shouting. There was cheering. I stared at him, feeling like a rabbit who'd come face-to-face with the fox. And also, a little bit like the fox. He looked back, his eyes sparkling with that joke again.

And then I realized something that, in my terror about going into the city and in my focus on making the right wish and throughout my overhaul by Maggie, had eluded me. The year was over. This moment marked the end of the worst year of my entire life—the year my husband left me and my mother died and my only child moved half the world away. It was done now, and it seemed as irrefutable as a law of the universe that the year that had just started could only be better.

I was filled with such a sense of joy and relief that I let out an enormous sigh and smiled at him, which was all the encouragement he needed to lean in and touch his lips to mine. The thing was, they fit so perfectly, his curved upper lip notching exactly into the space between my two, his lower lip landing neatly below my own. He tasted of sugar; I could feel the actual little grains.

When we finally pulled apart, I said the first thing that came to my mind: “Thank you.”

He burst out laughing. “You're very welcome, but let me tell you, that took a lot of effort.”

I felt my face begin to burn. “It's only—,” I said. “It's just that I mean—”

“That's okay,” he said softly, bringing his finger to my lips.

And then he moved as if to kiss me again.

“No!” I cried, springing backward.

He looked confused. “No?”

“I'm not interested in a relationship.”

He laughed again. “I'm not interested in a relationship either,” he said.

“You're not?”

“No,” he said. “I just broke off my engagement.”

“Just…,” I said, “…now?”

He smiled. He was big on eye contact, which was very nice but, in my experience, unusual in a man.

“Well, last June,” he said. “I realized I didn't want to get married, not yet, anyway. I'm not in any hurry to step onto that whole fast-track-career, mortgage, babies thing.”

“That's great,” I said.

All around us, people were cheering and throwing their arms around each other.

The dark-haired man leaned in closer to me, boring into me with those brown eyes. “You're serious? Because most girls I meet, I tell them that and they walk away. They're totally turned off.”

“No, I think that's really smart,” I said. “This is the one time in your life when you can be free, experiment, do whatever you want to do, and you should take advantage of that. Don't be in any rush to settle down.”

It was the same thing I'd told my daughter Diana, who'd taken my advice so seriously she'd moved five thousand miles away from me. Now he was talking to me again, but I'd become so lost in my thoughts of Diana that I seemed to have missed what he was saying. The only word I heard was “Williamsburg,” but he was obviously waiting for a response.

“All those weird costumes,” I said, remembering Diana's eighth-grade trip.

He looked at me strangely. “I know a great club there that should be quieter than this. I wondered whether you'd like to go.”

I couldn't believe it. “Go all the way to Virginia?” I said. “Tonight?”

A smile came over his face, and he shook his head. “I mean Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I live there.”

“Ohhhh,” I said, suddenly feeling as out of it as if I'd been wearing a flax apron and a mobcap.

“So what about it? Want to go?”

Did I want to go? Well, of course I'd want to go, if I was really the person that it apparently looked like I was. But in fact, I might as well have been this guy's mom. I didn't have the heart to tell him that, though, and ruin his year when it was only a few minutes old.

Where was Maggie when I needed her? I'd felt her hovering at my shoulder until the midnight kiss. Now, though, she was nowhere to be seen. Finally, I spotted her way over near the door, whispering in the ear of the lovely female bouncer. She was clearly going to be no help.

“I thought you didn't want to get into a relationship,” I said.

“This isn't a relationship,” he said. “It's just a…just a…”

“One-night stand?” I said. “Because I'm not interested in that either.”

I wasn't, was I?

“No,” he said. “I mean, if we wanted to hook up…”

His shoulders sagged, and he stared at the floor. Then he beamed in on me again.

“Listen,” he said. “I like you. That's all. I'd like to know you better.”

I hesitated. “I don't think you'd be happy with what you discovered.”

He moved a tiny bit closer, just enough to make me uncomfortable. “Why don't you let me decide that?”

I could feel something fluttering in my chest again, dangerously close to my heart. When I broke his gaze, I looked at his lips, and when I averted my eyes from his lips, they fixed on his shoulders, which were all too easy to envision naked. A year without any kind of sex, a year during which I'd finally made very good friends with the vibrator Maggie had long ago foisted upon me, had sent my fantasy life into high gear. Now that I'd become an expert at having an electronically fueled orgasm whenever I wanted—something I'd never accomplished with a real live human being—I thought I might have one right there on the spot.

I felt his hand on my hip. His hip pressed gently against mine.

But then the big steel clock above the bar gonged once—12:15—bringing me back to my senses.

I remembered something a few guys had said to me, something I'd always wanted to say to someone, except no one would ever have believed it. Now, though, I felt as if it might even be true. “Believe me,” I said, suddenly feeling cooler than I'd ever felt in my life. “I'm trouble.”

Rather than making him back off, however, my warning only seemed to pique his interest. Come to think of it, it had always had the same effect on me.

“Let me see your cell phone,” he said.

“I'm not going to give you my number.”

“Just let me see the phone.”

He held out his hand. I'd slipped the phone into the front pocket of the tight jeans Maggie had dressed me in, and I could feel it pressing against my thigh. Reluctantly, I took it out of my pocket and handed it to him.

“Wow,” he said, when he had flipped it open. “You have Tetris.”

That sounded like a disease. A disease of the cell phone.

He must have noticed the puzzled look on my face, because he explained, “It's one of the oldest video games. That's what I do. I'm a game designer. Or at least I'm learning to be.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling even more alarmed than I already had been. “You're still in…college?”

“I'm heading to Tokyo this spring for game design school,” he said. “But actually, I already have my MBA. Along with not getting married, I decided I didn't want to get a job in the corporate world. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What do you do?”

“Uhhhh,” I said, wondering if laundry, dusting, or unloading the dishwasher were worth mentioning. “Not much of anything, at the moment.”

“So you're in school?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I've been out of school for a long time.”

I kept telling myself that as long as I didn't tell him a direct lie, I wasn't doing anything wrong.

“So you've been…traveling?”

That was, if not exactly true, true-ish. I nodded. “I've been away.”

“In, like, France?”

“Somewhere like that.” Well, I told myself, there must be
someone
out there who thinks New Jersey is like France.

He began pressing the keys on my phone.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm putting my number into your phone book,” he said. “My name's Josh, by the way.”