Meet Me in Venice (15 page)

Preshy managed a grin as she mopped her eyes prior to going inside and meeting her goddaughter. “Well, I’m in the right town for it,” she said, sniffing.

Lauren the Super-Kid, hurled herself at Preshy as soon as she stepped through the door. Preshy grabbed her, swinging her up high, groaning at how heavy she was getting. “You’re growing up on me, Super-Kid,” she complained, “and you promised you wouldn’t.”

“I’ll try, Aunt Presh, really I will,” Super-Kid said between giggles.

Tom was waiting for them, shabby as ever in that professorial style, in an old sweater and cords. Not only was Tom an esteemed physics professor, he was also a good cook and he had dinner ready and the table set with a mishmash of old dishes and paper napkins.

The great room that was the entire ground floor of the house with its inner walls removed to make a combined kitchen, dining and living area, was in its usual chaotic state, with coats flung where they had been taken off, kid’s wellies and toys scattered all around and a fine layer of dust over all. A fire burned in the grate with its carved white-painted surround, and Neil Young played on the stereo while Anderson Cooper mouthed silently on the turned-down TV.

Tom was opening a bottle of inexpensive Côtes du Rhône with an old-fashioned corkscrew, the bottle clamped between his knees. He pulled the cork out finally with a smart pop and grinned at Preshy.

“Welcome to the lovelorn,” he said, pouring her a glass and handing it to her. “Here, baby, drown your sorrows in this.”

“Oh, Tom . . .” She gazed at him, all wide teary eyes, and he shook his head.

“Gotta get over it, baby. Bennett’s not coming back and if he tried it would be over my dead body. Or his,” he added darkly, pouring wine for his wife and handing Super-Kid her orange juice.

“Here’s the deal,” Daria said, as Preshy moved a PlayStation and a couple of sweaters and plumped down on the sagging slip covered sofa. “We’ve decided to allow you exactly thirty ‘Pity Days.’ That means thirty days when you can cry and moan and complain and feel sorry for yourself. After that—it’s all over. Get it?” She moved the PlayStation further over and sat down next to her friend. “Get it, Presh? Thirty days to wallow in self-pity, then you’ve got to get on with things. Now, as they say, Deal? Or No Deal?”

Preshy glanced doubtfully at her. “Okay. I’ll try.”

“Trying is not enough. You
will
do this, Presh. You’ll survive. No one’s died, no one got hurt—only your pride and your feelings. You have a life, you
will
move on. Promise me that—and we promise to listen and be sympathetic for exactly thirty Pity Days. Okay?”

Preshy took a deep breath. She wasn’t sure she could live up to it but she promised anyway.

Tom raised his glass. “Bravo,” he said. “I’ll drink to that.” Then he took the pot of boeuf bourguignon off the stove, plonked it down on the trivet in the center of the table, sliced up a crusty loaf, took out the salad and said, “Come and get it, kids.”

Preshy thought it was the most comforting food she had ever eaten, right there with her true friends, surrounded by their love and free to weep into her wine on the first of her Pity Days.

DARIA AND SUPER-KID CERTAINLY KEPT
her busy on another more innocent level, taking her to the Montessori school and for walks by the Charles River, shopping in the Harvard Coop for sweatshirts and baseball caps, browsing in the book and CD stores. But when even that and the Pity Days got on top of her, she escaped alone to the tumbledown family cottage on Cape Cod with its youthful happy memories.

She walked the winter beach alone, staring at the crashing waves. And later, huddled on the deck, swathed in sweaters and
blankets to stave off the cold, she asked herself over and over how the man she believed loved her could do such a terrible thing.

But then she began to ask herself a few other questions. Like, did she really still love Bennett? Had she ever loved him? Or had she simply been “swept off her feet” by his looks, his charm and the sheer romance of their long-distance affair? Swept away by the telephoned “good night sleep wells,” from wherever he was in the world; by the flowers; the champagne; the country weekends; the engagement ring? Thinking about these things, she realized that Bennett had swept her along to their wedding so quickly she’d never seriously even thought of their lives together as a married couple. And thinking back, she did not really know that much about Bennett, only the things he’d told her—all of which she had believed.

For instance, the story of his childhood in the orphanage, and the reason for his lack of friends; and about the successful business he ran and that she’d understood made him a lot of money. She still didn’t even know his home address; all she’d ever had was his e-mail and his cell phone because he’d told her he was on the move all the time.

Thinking back, she knew she had been a fool. Much as she didn’t want to believe it, Bennett James, or whoever he really was, had never loved her and he’d only been marrying her for her supposed money. She didn’t know which hurt more. And unlike the woman in the novel
Washington Square,
she couldn’t lock him out of her home, because he’d simply disappeared into thin air. Or wherever men like him disappeared to. More like Marbella,
she thought bitterly. Wasn’t Spain where all good con men went to spend their ill-gotten gains?

Feeling a little better, she returned to Boston and told Daria she had come to terms with everything. She’d taken the punch and was back on her feet again, and the hell with Bennett James.

“You’ve still got some Pity Days left,” Daria reminded her, and as if on cue, she burst into tears, and sat weeping on the sofa.

“You’ve got to get a life, Presh,” Daria said, sadly. “It’s time to move on.”

PARIS

A
week later Preshy was back home. It was a bright December morning but the shutters were closed and she was lying on the sofa. There was no sound in the room. No phones ringing, no music playing, even the traffic on the rue Jacob was inaudible behind the closed shutters. Normally, she would have been taking her coffee and baguette at the café, but she couldn’t even face that. She was deep into day twenty of the thirty Pity Days Daria had allotted her. And deep into the same old questions. Was Bennett really that wicked? Had he really intended to marry her for her supposed inheritance? How could he do that? He was so nice, so loving, so charming.

Last night Aunt Grizelda had called, begging her to come and stay. “We could go skiing,” she promised, making Preshy laugh
because the idea of Aunt G skiing at her age (though she still didn’t know exactly what that was) was scary, and anyhow she knew it was an excuse and that her aunt simply wanted to keep an eye on her. “I want to make sure you don’t do anything ‘foolish,’ “ was what Aunt G had said.

“No man is worth doing anything ‘foolish’ for,” Preshy had promised her, but it still didn’t change the facts. It was stalemate with nowhere to go. Except, as Daria and Sylvie both told her,
Forward.

Sighing, she slid off the sofa and went and looked at herself in the ornate gilt-framed Louis XVI mirror over the mantelpiece. She did not like what she saw. Her unmade-up face was pale and splotchy, her eyes red-rimmed, her untrimmed hair a tangled mess. She dragged her fingers through it, skewering it away from her face, wondering why she had to have curls when the rest of the world had straight. Life just wasn’t fair, she thought, as a tear stole down her faded cheek. She stared at the horror reflected in the mirror.

“You idiot,” she told her image sternly.
“Wallowing
in self-pity. Do you think Bennett is doing this? Oh no. No, he’s certainly not.” She let her hair fall back around her face. “Well, I can’t do anything about Bennett,” she said out loud. “But I can do something about my hair.”

An hour later she was sitting in the chair at a salon on the boulevard St. Germain. “Cut it all off,” she told the stylist.

He picked up a curly lock, running it admiringly through his fingers. “Are you sure?” he asked. “We could maybe just cut it to
shoulder length, start there, see how you like it. Short is a drastic change.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” Preshy said firmly. “A drastic change. I want to look like Audrey Hepburn.”

Two hours later she didn’t look exactly like Audrey Hepburn, but it was certainly a drastic change. Her mane of curls was gone and in its place was a sleek copper-blond cap, short in the nape with deep bangs dangling in her eyes. She ran her hands through it, shook her head, fluffed it with her fingers. Somehow with the new haircut, she felt freed from the past, freed from the weak romantic woman she had once been.
This
was the new Preshy Rafferty.

As if to emphasize the point, she took the Métro to the boulevard Haussmann and Galeries Lafayette where she headed for the lingerie department. An hour there netted a treasure trove of pretty underthings that, even though she was the only one who was ever going to get to see them on, somehow made her feel better. Next, she tackled the cosmetics and perfume section. Sitting in a chair at the Chanel counter, she had her face made over by a dazzlingly chic young woman who looked at her coppery hair and insisted she buy a pink lipstick and a pink blusher. “It will make your skin glow,” she assured her. And longing for “a glow,” Preshy bought them.

Hovering over the perfumes she thought how long she’d been wearing her scent. Probably ten or twelve years. She’d always thought of it as
her
“signature” the way many women do, though of course it was worn by millions of others. Now she was about to change that too. Hermès was her choice. 24 Faubourg, it was
called, which was the Hermès address on the Faubourg St. Honoré. “It was Princess Diana’s favorite perfume,” the saleswoman told her, making Preshy wonder for a moment if she had made the right choice. After all, Princess Di hadn’t had too much luck with men, had she?

She thought about buying an expensive pair of shoes but decided it was the cliché “woman-scorned” purchase, and she definitely didn’t want to be a cliché, so instead she took a taxi over to Verlaine where she found Sylvie busy assembling her menu for the evening.

Sylvie looked up as Preshy pushed through the door and gave her a little twirl.

“Well?” Preshy asked.

“You look completely different. I don’t know whether it’s the hair or the pink lipstick, but I think I like it.”

“Think?”
Preshy’s face fell and she shoved her hands worriedly through the short cap of hair. “This is the new me and you’re not knocked out by it?”

Sylvie laughed. “Of course I am. It’s just that I hardly recognized you. After all, I’ve never seen you without that great cloud of hair. I can see your face now though and it looks pretty good.”

Preshy preened under her praise. “I took one look at myself in the mirror this morning and said, ‘This is it.’ I’m moving on.”

“I like that. Anyhow you’re almost at the end of your Pity Days, it’s time you got yourself together. Come on, let’s go get a cup of coffee and a sandwich. I’ll leave the boys in charge. They can’t do too much damage in half an hour. At least I don’t think so.”

•    •    •

IT WAS GOOD SPENDING TIME
with Sylvie, but later that night, alone again in her apartment, Preshy was back thinking about Bennett again, remembering the
Bateau Mouche
and the intimate dinners together at little neighborhood restaurants; remembering the way she would catch him looking admiringly at her; and the welcome whenever he came “home” to the rue Jacob.
Oh God,
she thought, hating the silence,
what am I going to do?

She was browsing the Internet when she came across a picture of a bunch of big-eyed, big-eared, skinny little kittens. She melted just a little, looking at their innocence. On an impulse she called the breeder, who said there were no kittens left but that she had a slightly older cat, nine months, who had been returned because the buyer was allergic to her.

“I’ll take her,” Preshy said immediately.

“Maybe you want to meet her first, see if you’re compatible,” the breeder said doubtfully, concerned that her cat was going to a good home.

“Oh, we are. I know we are,” Preshy replied. After all, hadn’t they
both
been rejected? Both been “returned to sender” so to speak. And so the seal point Siamese with the fancy kennel name of Mirande de la Reine d’Or became hers.

Preshy drove to pick her up the next day, a cream and chocolate beauty with eyes more glitteringly blue than any sapphires. She brought her home, safe, or so she thought, in a cardboard traveling box on the backseat. But she hadn’t reckoned with the
ingenuity of a Siamese determined to get out and, Houdini-like, soon the cat was sitting on her lap. “Maow,” the cat said, gazing earnestly into Preshy’s face at the red light.

“And Maow to you too,” she retorted, grinning. And so Maow the cat became.

And of course, Maow immediately knew all Preshy’s secrets. She confessed her troubles into her delicate chocolate ear and the cat gazed knowingly back, rumbling with faint purrs of sympathy.

The next day she bought a special and rather chic, and supposedly Houdini-proof, travel carrier and took the cat to visit the aunts in Monte Carlo.

Lalah and Schnuppi galloped, barking, toward her as she stood in the foyer clutching the carrier to her chest, while from behind the safety of the mesh door, Maow yowled and stared them down.

The Aunts watched, bemused, as their dogs, tails tucked under, ran and hid behind them.

“Of course the cat’s obviously a substitute for a man,” Aunt Grizelda said suspiciously.

“And what’s so wrong about that?” Preshy demanded. “At least I know where I am with her.”

And faced with that unblinking blue Siamese stare, the dogs went and sat quietly on the floor while Maow emerged and curled triumphantly on the sofa, in pride of place between the Aunts.

It was, Preshy thought, patting her new short hair that Grizelda said made her look like a shorn duck and smiling at the people she loved, a good new start.