The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (9 page)

“To Luke,” I said, raising my wineglass across the table and admiring his appeal, which was soft enough around the edges for me to believe that he was deep and sensitive. “And beautiful results.”

They were. The next week, when my magazine’s editor scrutinized our pictures, her praise was like a bath full of bubbles. “I don’t know why this Luke Delaney’s been wasting his time shooting fashion,” she declared. “Put him under contract before someone else does.”

By the end of the month she’d signed him. From then on, Luke and I weren’t just thrown together on shoots—we began speaking almost every day when we didn’t have an actual meeting. There was always a detail over which to obsess: South Beach or Belize? The fussy food stylist or the lazy one who plied us with charm and homemade pumpkin muffins? Brocade love seat or creamy Italian chaise?

This happened just as Brie abandoned modeling—and me, temporarily—for Columbia Law School. While she chewed through contracts and torts, our daily calls dwindled and Luke began standing in as my best friend. At least that’s what I told myself. He gave excellent text message and the two of us could soon be mistaken for juniors exchanging gossip in trigonometry class.

Through my rearview mirror, I see that as far as my marriage went, Barry and I were as close to bliss as we were ever going to come—if only I’d recognized it. He didn’t worship me, but then again, I didn’t see myself as worthy of adoration. He didn’t seek my opinions, and that offered a certain relief, since on many topics I’m not sure I would have been confident enough to voice any. He continued to point out flaws I never knew I had—my legs could have been longer from the knee to the ankle or my answers to people’s questions shorter. I usually could see his point. Barry and I settled into a routine that may have been a few hallelujahs short of ecstasy but riffed on movies, Sunday night Chinese at Kitty’s, and four-course dinners in the company of couples just like us, who owned ten place settings of barely used bone china and dreams to match. Only now do I realize that Barry and I spent virtually no time alone, face-to-face. Not counting bed.

I didn’t think of myself as unhappy. I thought of myself as adjusting, and on that I scored an A for effort. If Barry called to say that something had come up, that he’d need to miss dinner, for instance, I wouldn’t settle in with a soup bowl full of Raisinets and a large box of tissues. Instead, I’d read an intelligent novel while I ate lean grilled protein, a leafy green vegetable, and a complex carbohydrate. My life felt balanced and whole.

Then Luke got a girlfriend. She wasn’t just any girlfriend. Luke started seeing Treena, my assistant, a recent present the publisher wouldn’t let me exchange because she was his stepdaughter.

Treena was as fuckable as she was tall, with a jingly laugh you could hear down the hall. She had the kind of innate confidence that beauty breeds and money shines. Her wardrobe, which bore no relationship to her salary, was so ahead of the curve that the week after she broke out something new, which was often, all the other assistants copied her, generally with profoundly painful results. A rumor floated that Treena had a boyfriend, a hedge fund manager. This explains why I paid no heed to the giggly chitchat on her end of the phone whenever Luke called my office.

One night Barry and I were having dinner in the Village with another doctor and his doctor wife. It was a Friday in late June, when outdoor tables fill up first and New Yorkers try to pretend they aren’t living in the middle of a malodorous communal steam bath. After dinner, the four of us strolled by Da Silvano, and there was Luke, wound around Treena like a bandage.

“Molly!” Treena called, putting down her glass of prosecco so she could wave an artfully sculpted arm. On her wrist, at least twenty skinny Indian bracelets jangled and didn’t even look cheap. “Barry! Hello!” She may as well have been a hunter with a duck call and Barry a brain-damaged mallard. He walked straight toward her, while I lagged behind. Luke froze, or maybe he was simply comatose on account of being skunk drunk. I’ll never know, since my first impulse was to feel silly, as if everyone at a party had allowed me to walk around with a price tag hanging off my shirt.

“C’mon—have a drink!” Treena trilled. Luke didn’t say a word. I could see that Barry was ready to accept, although there was obviously no room for all of us around their table for two, under which I noticed Luke and Treena’s knees touching. But fortunately, our dinner companions had a babysitter at home who was charging more per hour than a plumber, and they weren’t eager to drag out the evening. After an exchange of glances with them—not me—Barry shrugged and said, “Another time.” There was then so much cheek kissing you’d have thought someone had won a Grammy.

After the goodnights, Barry and I walked to our car. “You never mentioned that your photographer buddy had hooked up with your assistant,” he said as we were driving home. His tone drifted in my direction with an edge of condescension overshadowed by curiosity.

“News to me,” I admitted. I tried to sound neutral, not furious, which I was slowly realizing I was.

“Lucky schmuck,” he said. “Could have sworn he was a
fagele
, though—what do you suppose she sees in him?”

While I tried to parse which part of Barry’s question was most offensive, I was asking it in reverse. I didn’t have to think hard. Treenas rule the earth.

In the middle of the night I woke from a dream, my teeth clenched so hard my jaw ached. I reached for Barry, and we made love with uncharacteristic roughness and abandon. I stared into his eyes. The face I was seeing was Luke’s.

“More, Molly, more!” Barry grunted with each thrust. “Yes, yes!”

No! I was thinking as I arched my back and rotated my hips.
No!

The next morning Barry brought me breakfast in bed—iced coffee and a chocolate croissant on our wedding china, its blue border perfectly matching a hyacinth in a bud vase.

I didn’t respond to Luke’s calls, text messages, or IMs on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. But on Thursday we had a meeting, where I acted so excruciatingly polite you’d have thought I was having tea with the First Lady. Afterward, Luke pointed this out. “Do you want to talk?” he asked.

“What’s there to say? You’re going out with my pea-brained assistant and, speaking of peas, didn’t have the balls to tell me.” I’d like to admit I only thought the second half of the speech, but I actually did say it.

“It just happened,” he said.

“Da Silvano takes planning,” I said. “Reservations are involved.”

“She asked me.”

“You didn’t say no,” I pointed out.

“I’m not sure why we are having this conversation.”

Because I want you all to myself, although I am married and you and I are just friends
. Because. Because. Because. Luke had given me an opening, but this was not a door I was ready to walk through. The only thing I was sure about was my own discomfort.

“No good reason, Luke,” I said, and forced a laugh, trying to pretend that I had recovered my sense of humor. “I’m being a possessive
bitch. But I wish you’d told me you were seeing Treena. Not that you don’t have every right to. But she is my own damn assistant.”

“Thank you, Molly Marx, for giving my social life your seal of approval.” He spoke this with a particularly corrosive brand of sarcasm.

“Luke, that’s enough,” I said. “Let’s agree I was a baby. A self-centered idiot. I’m sorry.”

“Unless you have something else in mind.” The expression on his face read,
I double-dog-dare you
.

“Such as?”

“The thing about you, Molly, is that you don’t know what you want or who you want it with.” He shrugged and walked away. Two days later, he sent a friendly enough text message, as if everything were back to normal. I knew, of course, it wasn’t. Everything had changed.

here’s Snuffleupagus, Mommy.” Whenever we passed the sprawling granite outcropping crouched over Central Park, Annabel pointed it out. But today, as she holds Delfina’s strong, slim hand, the beast who rules my daughter’s imagination doesn’t get as much as a glance. She soldiers ahead, silent and grim.

Delfina and Annabel enter the elevator at our synagogue, and the nursery school director swoops down to four-year-old level. “We’re so happy to have you back, Annabel,” she says. “We’ve missed you.”

Though Annabel used to greet this woman with a giddy grin, she bites her lip and says nothing. When she and Delfina reach the threshold of the classroom on the sixth floor, Annabel turns to Delfina. “Do I have to?” she asks.

“Your friends want to play with you,” Delfina says. “And school’s your job. We all have our jobs.”

Annabel’s face carries the worry of an old crone. I wait for tears.

“Your dolls?” Delfina asks. “You’re thinking about your dolls?”

Annabel nods.

Delfina bends to whisper. “Can you keep a secret? If you go to
school, when I pick you up we’ll eat with your friend Ella. It was going to be a surprise.”

Annabel allows a small smile to creep across her face and turns to search the classroom. She catches the eye of her best friend, who’s already in the playhouse. Ella sees Annabel and runs across the room on her chunky legs. “Annabel!” she shouts. “I’m making pizza. C’mon.” Ella towers over my daughter and, in the tradition of anatomy as destiny, considers herself older, wiser, and now responsible for looking after her friend whose mommy died by the river like a character in a goose-pimply Grimm’s fairy tale, the ones she won’t let her dad read to her anymore.

“See you later, alligator,” Delfina says to Annabel, and bends to give her a hug.

“After a while, crocodile,” Annabel says. One of her purple mittens is missing, but she hangs her red jacket with the furry trim in her cubby, which features a family picture—Barry, me, Annabel as a toothless baby. Every move is fluid and concise. I hope Barry remembers that I had planned to enroll her in ballet. I am positive she is on the Clara track for
The Nutcracker
.

“I’ll be the mommy,” Ella says, “and you’ll be the girl.” They play until the teacher asks all eighteen students to gather in their morning circle. Annabel walks with the rest to the center of the classroom.

“Good morning, class,” the teacher says.

“Good morning, Miss Rose,” the children sing out.

“Let’s talk about what we did this weekend,” she says. “Did anything interesting happen to anyone?” A girl raises her hand. “Emily?”

“I saw
Shrek
,” she says.

“Me too,” a few others yell.

“Class, we wait until we’re called on, remember?” A boy waves his hand as if he’s conducting an orchestra; with his wild curls he looks like a vest-pocket-size Simon Rattle. Miss Rose points in his direction.

“My gerbil died,” he says.

“Last month we had to put our dog to sleep,” another boy says. “He had bad cancer inside him.”

I beam down on Annabel, trying to absorb her pain. But Annabel does … nothing. She looks at the window and fixates on dust floating
in the brilliant morning sun. A few children turn in her direction, but soon Miss Rose calls on Ella. “My babysitter, Narcissa, let me stay up until eleven o’clock,” she says.

In the hallway, there’s a racket. A mother and child are late for school. “Kiss, kiss, Jordan,” the woman says to her son. He is a thin child with sad, deep-set blue eyes and wiry red hair cropped short. He pecks her cheek. The mother is a heavily highlighted brunette whose distinguishing characteristics are very large teeth, very long nails, and very high heels. “Kiss Mommy goodbye.” I listen closely. I know that nasal voice.

Stephanie.

I take another lingering peek at Annabel, and while I long to stay and watch her, I cannot resist getting a closer look at this woman who each evening is verbally tucking my husband into bed. I look closely to see if Stephanie was among the unknown bereaved rubbing away their mascara streaks at my funeral, but she looks only vaguely familiar, one of many faces I may have seen milling around the school, waiting to collect a child. Her son enters his classroom and she returns to the elevator.

Downstairs, Stephanie meets another woman, one who has apparently seen
Vertigo
one too many times. The companion has pulled her hair, bleached to platinum, into a French twist, and her sharply tailored gray wool gabardine skirt and jacket recall 1958. She is fiercely attractive, with porcelain skin and carefully reddened lips. Although the weather is brisk, the pair leave their coats open as they walk down the tree-lined street. The height of their heels doesn’t prevent them from quickly reaching a coffee shop four blocks away. As they settle into a table near the window, the light betrays Kim Novak. I can see that she is older than I’d estimated, probably early forties. Maybe ten years beyond Stephanie.

“Aren’t guys lucky?” Stephanie says. “They can be in the world’s worst marriages, but when they lose their wives, the universe genuflects at their doorstep.”

“At least you are,” the companion says. “What’s going on? Did he actually say his marriage sucked?”

Stephanie pauses, sits back in her chair, and looks her friend straight in the eye. “Not exactly, but how good could it have been if he’s
showing this much interest?” she says, and smiles as she stirs sweetener into her paper cup.