The Late, Lamented Molly Marx

by Sally Koslow

  “It just seems better this way,” I said. That sounded feeble. “But it would have been … fun.” Feebler still.

  “Well, good luck,” he said. “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.” I said it loudly, as much to remind myself I was married as to alert Luke in case he’d missed my rings.

  Eventually, the two of us boarded and were seated side by side. I debated whether to proceed with dabbing Neosporin in my ears and above my lip, my preferred retaliation against the germ warfare that is airplane air.

  The Neosporin stayed in the bag. Luke and I continued to chat, and somewhere above Greenland I discovered that he, too, was a twin, an identical twin. His brother, Micah, taught English at Dartmouth.

  “Maybe we should fix up your brother with my sister,” I said.

  “I think not,” he said. “My brother’s married. But why not me? That is,” he added, “if your sister’s anything like you.” The fourth glass of wine—or maybe it was the fifth—had erased the shy guy I thought I’d met earlier in the evening.

  It’s not as if the Virgin Mary appeared in my window to announce that this companion would ever be anyone important in my life, but at that moment I realized that even though I didn’t know what to do with Luke, I didn’t want to regift him, to my sister or to anyone else.

  “Why not, indeed?” I said. “I’ll get on it as soon as I’m back.”

  My first lie.

  Luke was dovetailing far too perfectly with my doubts. I needed to shut down, despite the fact that I would have happily jabbered all the way to England. “Better get some sleep,” I said. “Supposed to meet my staff tomorrow at eleven to go over two hundred shoot details.”

  “I’m a babbling idiot,” he said. “Sorry.” Still, he pulled out an eye mask and put it on. “Do I look like Zorro or just a pathetic perv?” he asked, turning toward me and speaking in a low Jeremy Irons growl. “Are you scared?”

  In my wine-addled haze, he looked cuter than a panda with an extra helping of testosterone. “Terrified,” I admitted as I burrowed beneath my pashmina tent.

  When I woke at dawn, I discovered Luke’s legs under the shawl, his feet—in red socks—touching mine. I faked sleep until the flight attendant rocked my shoulder to make sure I was alive.

  Those were the days.

  Ten

  DOO-DAH, DOO-DAH

  y mother, my father, and Lucy are gathered around the pine farm table in the kitchen, sipping their second cups of black coffee. Light snow stencils the patio and yard, and whatever sun shines over Illinois cowers under menacing clouds.

  Since my death, no one in the family has slept past dawn, even after Ambien—which, unfortunately, Costco does not sell over the counter in jars the size of buckets. Lucy took the commuter train north last night and slept in our childhood bedroom—a circa 1985 homage, lilac for me, aqua for her, Madonna posters, now faded, for both of us. She’s made this trip for the last two weekends and believes she’s here to console my parents, but it’s more the other way around. Lucy is alone; my parents have each other. They speak their grief wordlessly—in the car, while my mother massages my father’s neck; as he brings the morning newspaper to their bed; when they spoon through cold, fitful nights.

  “Don’t pick the crumbs off the crumb cake,” my mother says.

  “Don’t treat me like I’m ten.”

  “Don’t start, you two.”

  Don’t, don’t, don’t, you two, you two. The Divine family anthem. Doo-dah, doo-dah.

  “So, should I call Barry?” Lucy asks. She asked the same question last night at dinner. “I want to know if anything’s happened with the case that he hasn’t told us.”

  “No, honey,” my mother says. “Dad should do it.” I hear her worry that if Lucy asks, Barry will get his back up. Lucy can turn a chat about seasoning hamburger patties into a military engagement.

  “It’s too early to call New York,” my dad says, eyes on the sports pages. He dreads speaking to Barry. Putz, he’s thinking. My father, I have learned, is not quite the gentleman he presents to the world, but he tries hard to see Barry’s side. “Poor guy may be full of himself, but he’s still just lost his wife and has to raise a daughter alone,” he says to the women in his family, though I suspect it’s to convince himself to treat Barry with decency.

  The Divines are determined to have Annabel visit for Passover. For the last three years, Barry, Annabel, and I spent Thanksgiving with Kitty and Passover with my parents, so my parents and Lucy feel they own that holiday. Since shiva ended, they call Annabel every night on the dot of seven, but the conversations are as unsatisfying as tickling an insect bite.

  “Annabel would be up now,” my mother points out. “She’d be watching cartoons.”

  “But Barry might have gone back to sleep,” my father counters. “It’s Saturday. Give the guy a break.”

  “A break?” Lucy shrieks. “What about my sister?”

  My mother groans. “We can live without the melodrama, Lucy,” she says, looking down at her newspaper and pretending to read. Fatigue mutes her voice. “Dan, call at eight our time.”

  With deep affection, he salutes her. “Yes, Sarge,” he booms.

  My family returns to their breakfast, but after a minute Lucy pours her coffee down the drain. “I’m going for a run,” she announces, and bolts upstairs. From her small duffel, she plucks out sneakers and several layers of winter-ready sports clothes. While I left behind a wardrobe of girly gear—lace, chiffon, clingy cashmere, low-rise thongs, numerous garments constructed of fabrics better suited to gift wrap, and an unworn pink wool jacket trimmed in lace—Lucy believes in fibers built to withstand a trek from Kathmandu to Everest. If our father were president, her Secret Service code name would be Patagonia.

  Lucy pulls her curly hair, the color of dark maple syrup, into a ponytail that bobs beneath a snug knit cap. Its string ties dangle over her ears like the payes on a Hasidic rabbi. In a flash of black and purple, without saying goodbye, she’s out the door.

  Lucy’s completed several marathons, which is probably why my equally competitive husband has started training for one. Barry doesn’t especially like to run, but what he likes less is my sister outdoing him, and Luce loves to run—in any weather, at any time of day, her gait long and lithe. At a distance, under her gear, a casual observer wouldn’t know if she is male or female but would admire her grace.

  Sadly, the effect ends as soon as she stops, not so much because her walk is a sturdy clomp but because Lucy is the only person I know for whom exercise becomes foreplay to aggression. After a workout, when most people seem ready to nap, Lucy appears ripe for a fight. The more she runs, the less mellow she becomes.

  At least we can dismiss suicide, she thinks. No one would ever think my sister would or could kill herself. As she hits her stride, she synchronizes every thought with a footfall. Loved her Annie-bell too much. She repeats my daughter’s nickname in exactly the too-sweet voice I said it in. A lot to live for. She starts up a hill. But Barry could have driven her to it. She pushes harder. He’d drive me nuts—he could make any woman ride her bike into the water. She turns. Or off a cliff. She reaches the top. All marriages are like that. Picks up the pace. Men … morons. She’s going strong. Douche bags. Cretins. Fuckers.

  Wind whistles through bare trees as Lucy runs six miles, her mind circling in and out of possibilities. She whips past the diner where our parents treated us to blueberry pancakes every week after Sunday school. Two former high school friends wave—they’re continuing the Country Kitchen tradition with their own kids. Lucy looks through them.

  “We sent a hundred-dollar fruit basket,” one of the young matrons says. “She could at least stop to say hello.”

  “Run your butt off, Moosey,” the other one hisses softly. “If her sister hadn’t just died, I’d shout it,” she says to her friend.

  Lucy is in her own head and wouldn’t have heard. Pills, maybe. She starts to pant a bit as she begins her last mile. Or carbon monoxide.
She catches her breath on the home stretch. But not this way.

  Lucy charges back into the kitchen.

  “Where were you?” my mother asks. “You were gone almost an hour.”

  My sister ignores her as she unlaces her shoes and strips, layer by sweaty layer.

  “You’ll never guess who called,” my father says.

  Molly? Lucy thinks.

  “Barry’s mom,” my mother says. “Inviting us all to New York for the seder.”

  Lucy skewers our mother with a stare. “You declined, obviously.”

  “I thanked her. Said we’d let her know.”

  “Mom,” Lucy snaps. When her face contorts like a gargoyle’s, my sister must give her tiny students nightmares. “Why are you such a sucker? It’s manipulation. Can’t you see that? If Annabel doesn’t visit now, a precedent will be set and—”

  “Lucy, apologize,” my father interrupts, wishing he could be playing poker or listening to his vinyl LPs—Odetta, Buddy Holly, early Bob Dylan—or getting a massage at his golf club, and curses the fact that it’s closed through March. He’d like to be anywhere but here, with the difficult daughter, the daughter who rips and rumbles through life, no matter how much she means well, which she usually does.

  “Dan, calm down,” my mother says. “Lucy has a point. But Kitty claims the trip would upset Annabel. She thinks it’s too soon for her to travel, that it will disrupt her schedule. I want what’s best for our granddaughter.”

  “Barry!” Lucy bleats my husband’s name as if it’s profanity. She’s down to her silk long johns and the sports bra that compresses her DDs. My dad looks the other way. “What a wuss. Has his mommy call.”

  Lucy can’t get a rise out of my parents, who’ve seen it all before. My mother walks to her only living daughter and begins to stroke her matted hair. Lucy shakes off her hand. “I’m calling him myself,” she says.

  Eleven

  REARVIEW MIRROR

  n London, I loved that Luke was far more attentive than your usual photographer. He wasn’t afraid to ask my opinion, courtship more subtle and effective than roses or the occasional deep, meaningful gaze. “How do you want the shot set up?” “Here or there?” “Think we got it, or do we shoot another roll?” As he picked my brain he would casually touch my arm, the electric whisper of flesh brushing flesh ending almost before it began. He had to notice that I never pulled away.

  True to his word, Luke wasn’t a partier. Every night he bowed out early. Whether he took dinner in his room or got together with friends—or a woman—he’d never say, and only on the last night did Luke join our posse. “To Molly!” he toasted as the evening began. “Who allowed me to pass through this firing squad barely bruised.”

  “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.