Younger (8 page)

“Oh, no,” I said. “No, not at all.”

“Just some guy you have a date with.”

“Not really,” I said. “I didn't even remember about tonight. Obviously.”

“Oh,” Lindsay said. “Well, good. I mean, because I was going to ask you to come out for a drink with me and my boyfriend tonight, to celebrate the first day of your new job.”

“I'd love to,” I said. “But after that episode with the phone, I'm worried today may also be my last. Especially when I break it to Teri that I have to take off tomorrow morning for this medical thing that was scheduled before I knew I was going to be working here.”

“Don't worry,” said Lindsay. “I'll tell my boyfriend, who I really want you to meet, to fix everything with Teri.”

“What's he going to do?” I joked. “Threaten to beat her up?”

“No, silly,” said Lindsay. “He's
her
boss. Thad is the publisher of our division. But don't tell anybody we're going out. Our relationship's supposed to be this big secret.”

“Oh, okay,” I said.

“So you'll come out for a drink with us?”

“Sure.” How could I refuse, in the face of Lindsay's connections as well as her kindness? Though I couldn't help but wonder exactly why she was being so sweet and welcoming to me.

“Great. Don't give Teri another thought. Thad and I will make sure she doesn't give you a hard time, about today or tomorrow morning or anything else.”

 

Nearly two hours later, when Teri finally went home—without firing or indeed even speaking to me—I felt free at last to leave my desk. It was time to go meet Lindsay and the mysterious and all-powerful Thad at a bar a few blocks away.

I had genuinely forgotten about my theoretical date with Josh; I'd nearly forgotten about Josh completely in the life-capsizing events of the past weeks. Even if I had remembered I was supposed to meet him, even if I felt vaguely prepared to embark on a relationship with a guy twenty years younger than me, I was far too late.

Still, I couldn't resist stopping and peering in the window of Gilberto's, where I was stunned to see Josh sitting at the bar, his hand cupped around a glass that seemed to hold only ice. I hadn't really expected to see him there, had guessed I might not recognize him in any case, but he looked more familiar and more appealing than I thought he would, like an old friend that I was dying to see, and I nearly went through the door, if only to apologize and talk to him for a moment. Without the hubbub of New Year's all around, he looked older somehow, and more serious.

But he's not older, I told myself. At least, he's not old enough for you. A spontaneous kiss with a stranger on New Year's Eve was one thing; a deliberate meeting held a different level of intent, one I was afraid wasn't fair to either of us. Before Josh could see me, I reeled around and hurried away, darting around the corner to the bar where I was meeting Lindsay and Thad.

I had noticed Thad in the meeting in Mrs. Whitney's office—it was impossible not to notice any man in that sea of women—but I never would have picked him out as someone Lindsay would go out with. I had imagined, I realized, that he would look something like Josh—maybe like Josh if he were putting his MBA to use.

But this guy looked more like my ex-husband, more like all the boring husbands, the tedious men, I'd known in Homewood, the men who talked only to each other and then only about themselves. It wasn't that he was middle-aged, just that he aspired to be, with his clipped hair and his tightly knotted tie and his eyes full of judgment, as he looked me over and deemed me, I could tell, not worthy of his serious consideration. But this guy was my boss, I reminded myself; he was even
Teri's
boss. And he was the boyfriend of the only friend I had at Gentility.

“So, Alice,” he said. “Lindsay tells me this is your first publishing job.”

“I've never worked anywhere but Gentility,” I said.

“Really?” said Thad, assessing me. “Where did you go to school?”

He was the kind of guy, I knew, who if you asked him the same question, would say “Cambridge” or “New Haven,” wanting you to think he was modest because he hadn't said Harvard or Yale.

Try to like him, I told myself. At least, try to handle him. God knew after twenty years of practice at the swim club and on the suburban fund-raising circuit, I should know how to do that.

“I went to Mount Holyoke,” I said, reminding myself that Thad's favorite subject would almost certainly be Thad. “And what about you?”

“Cambridge,” he said.

“Oh.” I couldn't resist a dig. “MIT?”

He narrowed his eyes at me, obviously deciding, I was gratified to see, that maybe he'd underestimated me after all.

“No,” he said shortly. “I once dated a girl from Mount Holyoke, Hilary Davis. Maybe you knew her?”

“No,” I said, suddenly enormously thirsty. “What are you drinking, Lindsay?”

“Bombay Sapphire martini, extra dry, straight up with olives,” she said. “I used to drink mojitos, but Thad's converting me. Isn't that right, sweetie?”

“So what years were you at Mount Holyoke?” he persisted, ignoring Lindsay. “You must have crossed paths with Hilary at least part of the time.”

Maybe I'd underestimated Thad, too. He seemed to have a greater capability to focus outside himself than I'd given him credit for. I was obviously going to have to try harder.

“That's ancient history,” I said. “I'd love to hear about you, your thoughts about the line. Lindsay tells me you're the hottest publisher in the business.”

Lindsay, of course, had said no such thing, but she was pleased that he thought she had, and I'd finally diverted his attention away from me and when I had or hadn't gone to college.

“Suppose I am,” he said. “Rooster in the henhouse, and all that.”

Oh, yuck. Still, if I was going to be smart about my career, I should keep feeding Thad the flattery he so obviously relished, rather than treating him like the jerk he was.

“I hear you're the kind of publisher who's open to new ideas,” I told him, “who can recognize a real innovation when it comes along.”

“Well,” he said, swallowing the bait, “I definitely believe Gentility could use some changes.”

“You'll see,” said Lindsay, leaning in close to him, “Alice is just the person you need on your team. She has all these fabulous new ideas that are really going to shake up that marketing department.”

The memory of Teri Jordan's stony face across Mrs. Whitney's office when I'd dared to open my mouth was enough to make me want to divert Lindsay from that path.

“I'd love to do a good job for you,” I told Thad, “but I'm really just a beginner.”

“Don't worry. I'll break you in,” said Thad. “What was your major?”

“English,” I said.

“I knew it!” Lindsay cried. “You're really a writer!”

I had tried writing a novel when Diana was little, laboring under some vision of myself spinning out great prose while my child gamboled at my feet. The reality was that I had to stop so often to tend to my little girl's needs that I got very little written—or very little that was decent, anyway. When I'd finally, after months, finished a handful of pages, I'd given them to Gary to read. He was sorry to tell me, he said, that they weren't really very good. I'd put them away, mostly relieved not to have to push myself anymore.

“I used to want to write, but I gave it up,” I told Lindsay.

“What kind of stuff?” Thad asked. “Children's books?”

Apparently he considered me incapable of stringing together more than five words at a time.

“No, women's fiction.”

“Oh,” he said dismissively. “Romance.”

“If you ever want to show me anything you've written,” said Lindsay, “I'll be delighted to look at it.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Right now, I think I'm more interested in the kind of career that makes money.”

“That's cool,” said Lindsay, turning to Thad. “Didn't I tell you she was great, Thad? We should introduce her to Porter Fitch, don't you think? He likes to make money.”

“My college roommate,” explained Thad. “Big Wall Street job now. Never had a lick of an urge to give back, the way I did.”

So working in publishing was “giving back”? Maybe because it was women's publishing. I wanted to tell Thad that we women would probably be able to muddle along without his charity.

“We could have a real dinner party,” Lindsay said, growing more excited, “just like you've been wanting to, sweetie! I could even cook!”

I smiled weakly. Lindsay was so sweet, she reminded me so much of my own daughter, I found her utterly irresistible. Thad was another story, but he had a lot of power over me—and he was the first person I'd encountered who seemed not to automatically accept my age story.

“What do you think, Alice?” Lindsay said, eyes shining. “How's Saturday night?”

“Uh…,” I said. “Uh…”

The only thing I could do was nod, and figure I had five days to find a way out of it.

I
stood at the head of the examination table, gripping Maggie's hand. The doctor had just completed the procedure and left the room, and Maggie lay there with her bottom half draped in a sheet, her knees up, following instructions to lie as still as possible. The doctor had used a spotlight when he was working, but he'd turned it off and left us in the twilight of the candles Maggie had brought along.

“Very romantic,” I said.

“Try to play along.”

“Okay,” I said. “Darling, I'm so thrilled that you're having our baby.”

“My baby,” Maggie said. “I'm having
my
baby, I hope.” She made a face. “I don't know how you straight girls stand it, lying around with all this goop between your legs.”

I suddenly remembered something from the recesses of our childhood. “Remember when we used to kiss our arms?”

The summer we were ten or eleven, Maggie and I had spent days mashing our lips against our own forearms, trying to simulate the experience of making out with a guy. Or maybe, in Maggie's case, a girl. I remember, when she first came out to me, questioning for about a minute and a half whether I might be gay, too, since I'd been the one lying beside her while we dreamed about and practiced for love. But then I thought about Jimmy Schloerb, my crush du jour, and how he was only the latest in a long line of boys who'd set my heart aflutter since kindergarten, and realized I was straight as a needle.

“Oh, God,” Maggie said. “I'm not supposed to laugh.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Maybe if we visualize the sperm and the egg meeting and dividing, we'll help make it happen.”

Maggie looked at me as if I were insane. “Who told you that? Madame Aurora?”

I was stung. “It can't hurt to be optimistic.”

“Except when it blinds you to the reality of your situation,” said Maggie. “The doc told me that if this one doesn't take, he's only going to give me one more chance.”

“What about a donor egg?” I asked. “I'd give you one.”

“You may be looking pretty hot these days, sweetie,” said Maggie, “but your eggs are as old as mine.”

“Oh,” I said. “I forgot.”

“Plus it's not only your eggs that go, but this hormone that needs to be at a certain level to sustain a pregnancy,” Maggie said. “Mine's borderline right now, and the doctor said if it dips any lower, he wouldn't even attempt an insemination. So I've put my name in for a Vietnamese adoption.”

“Maggie, that's awesome!”

“Don't use that word around me, okay? I just felt I should cover all my bases. Plus, it seems even harder to adopt than to get pregnant. They do all these elaborate character checks.”

“I guess they want to be sure you'll be a good parent.”

“It's so ridiculous,” Maggie said, “that poor teenagers and alcoholics and child abusers can have babies whenever they feel like it, and someone like me, with money and love and attention to give, has to be monitored by teams of people who might decide I'm just not going to get a baby, and that will be it.”

I didn't think it necessary to point out that some of those people might sooner give a baby to a crack-smoking stripper than a lesbian. And that nature seemed out of step with modern society to make it easier for a fourteen-year-old to get pregnant than a forty-four-year-old. Instead, I smiled and squeezed her hand.

“I only wish I'd started this long ago,” Maggie said. “Did you know that fertility declines at thirty-five, not forty or forty-five, the way they told us when we were young?”

In fact, I did know that because Lindsay had told me so at the bar last night, when Thad went to find the men's room and she informed me that she was dying to marry him, the sooner the better.

When I asked Lindsay what her big rush was, she fed me the fertility and age statistics and said that if I were smart, I'd get busy looking for a husband and starting a family too.

“Otherwise you could find yourself forty-five and all alone,” she informed me.

“That could happen anyway,” I said.

She looked at me strangely. “Not if you play your cards right.”

That was an aspect of youth I didn't think, no matter how good my makeup or my acting skills, I'd be able to reclaim: the belief that if you were smart or ambitious or beautiful or together enough, you could make your life turn out exactly as you wanted.

“I saw that guy last night,” I told Maggie suddenly. Coming home from drinks, I'd told her all about Lindsay and Thad and Teri and my first day at work. But I'd forgotten to tell her about Josh. “You know, the guy from New Year's Eve.”

“Ohhhh,” Maggie said, remembering. “The kiss guy. Where did you see him?”

I realized I'd never told Maggie about the theoretical date, not having had any intention of keeping it. Now I told her about how he'd set my phone alarm and how the arrangement had totally slipped my mind. But also about how attractive he'd looked, sitting on the bar stool at Gilberto's.

“So why didn't you go in?” Maggie asked me.

“I was on my way to meet Lindsay and Thad. Plus, what would I have said? Hi, I wasn't going to come meet you, and I'm never going to see you again, but you looked so cute I just had to say hello?”

“How can you be so sure you never would have wanted to see him again?”

“Oh, come on, Mags. You said it yourself: He's a baby. I can't date a twenty-five-year-old.”

“Why not? I hear the older woman/younger man thing is very cool right now. You're both at your sexual peaks. Plus, no one needs to know you're older, not even him.”

I felt myself blush. “It makes me uncomfortable,” I said, “all this lying.”

Maggie raised her eyebrows. “It seems to me,” she said, “that you're wasting an opportunity if you don't at least carry this a little bit further. I mean, what can it hurt? You said you wanted to be younger, and now you got your wish. Make the most of it.”

“Lindsay wants to fix me up with some friend of her boring boyfriend's,” I said miserably.

“And you're going to let her do that?”

“They're really in a position to help me at work. They're why I get to be here this morning instead of acting as Teri Jordan's full-time barista.”

Last night, Lindsay had made Thad promise to tell Teri that he was sending me to a corporate orientation session.

“That doesn't mean you have to be their ho,” said Maggie. “Stand up for yourself! I thought that was what this whole younger thing was about!”

She was really agitated now, up on her elbows, wagging her head as she talked. Her earrings, a row of silver hoops getting bigger and bigger as they worked their way down to her shoulders, shimmied in the candlelight.

“Calm down,” I said, putting my hand on her arm and trying to ease her back onto the table. “Remember, you have to create a peaceful environment for the sperm and egg to meet.”

That, at least, persuaded Maggie to flop back down.

“I just think you have to be more assertive and do what you want, right from the beginning,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “How are you going to become a brand-new person if you keep acting like your same old self?”

 

It wasn't until Thursday and what I've come to think of as the Bikini Wax Incident, after the Krav Maga—a form of Israeli martial arts—class Lindsay dragged me to, that I got up the nerve to tell her I didn't want to go to the dinner at Thad's with Porter Swift.

It all started when I asked Lindsay whether she knew of a gym near the office that I might join. I'd gone for nearly a month without following my daily Lady Fitness routine, and I was afraid that any minute all the muscles in my new killer bod were going to give way, totally blowing my cover. In just four days of working for Teri Jordan, I'd found myself reverting to some of my old comfort-eating habits, hiding a bag of Hershey's Kisses in my desk drawer and whipping up a pot of creamy mashed potatoes before bedtime every night, spooning out a crater that I filled with molten butter and salt and then savoring the concoction under the covers in my tent.

Lindsay asked what kind of exercise I liked to do, and when I mentioned the elliptical trainer and hand weights, she looked at me as if I had said I did calisthenics under the tutelage of Jack LaLanne.

“That's kind of retro,” she said, giving the word a twist that made it impossible for me to tell whether she considered that a good or a bad thing. “Why don't you come with me Thursday night to my Krav Maga class? It's awesome.”

In the class, I felt as if I burned off the entire week's intake of chocolate kisses, along with learning to disable any terrorists I might encounter on the way home. In the plush locker room, I tried to follow Lady Fitness etiquette and keep my eyes averted, which was difficult, as Lindsay was standing beside me holding forth on the menu for her upcoming dinner party while completely and unself-consciously naked.

It was further difficult not to look because Lindsay's severe black clothing had been hiding several remarkable physical attributes. Her breasts, for instance, were so high that there was far more square inchage on the part below the nipple than above it. Was that normal for women in their twenties, I wondered—I mean for women in their twenties who weren't featured in the magazines I sometimes found when I cleaned under Gary's side of the bed? I couldn't remember, though the contrast with my own breasts, which until now I'd considered one of my best unclothed features, made me hunch over in shame.

Lindsay also sported several startling tattoos—a dragonfly on her shoulder, a snake at her hip, and what looked like a USDA symbol perched atop the crack of her butt—made all the more vivid by the contrast of their inkiness against her ethereally pale skin. And the color of the tattoos seemed to provide the only variation in the expanse of paleness: Lindsay's nipples were the faintest blush of pink, her pubic hair a thin strip of peach fuzz.

“Alice,” she said.

“Hmmmm?” I feigned nonchalance as I trained my eyes on my locker, pretending to rummage around for my bra, which I knew was hanging beside my sweater.

“What do you think I should make for dessert Saturday night? I was thinking about trying to do this amazing pear crostada that Thad had the other night at Craft.”

I pulled my bra out of the locker and fumbled to slip it on while keeping my body angled away from Lindsay's gaze, without making it seem like I was trying to keep it angled away.

“But then I was thinking,” Lindsay said, propping her hand on her hip, right beside the indigo snake, “that maybe I should just go with something simple, like a crème brûlée.”

I was about to answer that making crème brûlée was anything but simple when Lindsay let out a little scream and, pointing directly at my crotch, cried, “Ew! What is that?”

I looked down. Had my period started? Had she spotted a stretch mark? Had all those mashed potatoes waited until this moment to deposit themselves as a pad of fat atop my belly? But no, despite all the eating I'd done the past few days, my stomach was still taut from my year of exercising compulsively.

“That jungle of pubic hair!” she squealed. “It's practically down to your knees!”

“Oh,” I said. “Well…”

“Is that what they do where you were?”

“Where I was?”

“Wherever it was you were traveling,” she said. “Like you told Thad the other night.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

“So they just went all natural there?” Lindsay pressed. “Were you in, like, the Third World?”

“Sort of,” I said. Well, some Manhattanites consider New Jersey the Third World.

“We're going to have to do something about that,” Lindsay said, “before you hook up with Porter.”

“Do something?” I said.

I must have made a terrible face and cringed away from her, because she laughed and said, “Don't worry, I'm not going to whip out a straight razor. But tomorrow after work, I'm taking you to my waxing person, Yolanda, for a Brazilian.”

“A Brazilian?”

I tried to imagine it, but never having been to Brazil or known a Brazilian person, never mind glimpsed its native pubic hairstyle, all I came up with was something vaguely bikini shaped. Which is what I believed mine was to begin with.

“Like mine!” Lindsay cried, presenting the look with a flourish of her hands that reminded me of Vanna White directing the television viewers' attention to a new Buick.

“Oh,” I said, eyeing Lindsay's narrow strip of hair. “I don't know.”

“You have to!” Lindsay said. “None of the girls in New York go natural anymore. Porter would be shocked.”

Thad's friend. Saturday night. Dressed or undressed, hairy or plucked, I couldn't let this go on a minute longer.

“Lindsay,” I said. “You and Thad have been great to me, and I'm really glad we're becoming friends, but I'm not interested in hooking up with Porter.”