by Sally Koslow
BS!
“C’mon. Your children attend the same school.”
“School’s a big place,” she answers, “where the nanny generally picks up Annabel Marx, who is not in the same class as my Jordan, and I’m not the room-mother type. No, we never met.” Molly Marx and I weren’t technically introduced—I’m not lying, Stephanie thinks while a memory flickers, an ember she stamps out in less time than it takes for her to blink. There was that shivery afternoon, murky as sludge. A day to forget.
“What did Dr. Marx say about his wife?” Hicks asks.
“Not much,” she answers.
“Oh, come on, Ms. Joseph. Did he deny that he was married?”
“For a while he let me think he was single, but when I asked him point-blank, he practically boasted about his good marriage.” Which I took as a challenge, she thinks.
“Did they have an understanding? Did she not get him?” Poor complicated schmuck, Hicks thinks.
“Actually,” she says, “Dr. Marx said he was very, very attracted to me.”
“Uh-huh,” Hicks says coolly. “So now that your memory’s returned, I’m wondering, where were you when Molly Marx was murdered?” The banter has turned as stiff as roadkill, and I believe his hushed tone is one of respect. Stephanie’s holding back. Hicks knows it as well as he knows that she’s not going to say any more. Not today. He can read it in the lightest twitch around her eye and the way she twists the silver ring that has replaced her wedding band.
“Who says she was murdered?” Stephanie asks.
“Ms. Joseph, the question,” Hicks says. “Answer it.”
“I must have been in town,” she says, “because I remember hearing about it on the news that weekend.”
“Dr. Marx says he saw you that night.”
Why would Barry admit that, Stephanie wonders, when we were both quite sure no one saw us and he paid for dinner in cash? “We might have seen each other that night,” she says.
“Might have? You don’t remember dinner at Landmarc with Barry Marx the night his wife was left to bleed to death by the side of the road?”
I can’t listen to this. But Bob gives me a look that says, If you stay you might learn something.
Lock me up for shagging and throw away the key, Stephanie thinks. “Okay, I had a bite with Dr. Marx. Very early in the evening. If we were trying to hide something, would we have gone to such a public place?” There’s a damn Whole Foods in the basement of the building, for God’s sake.
“Like I said, I’ll ask the questions. Where did Dr. Marx think his wife was at that point?”
“I didn’t ask.” I didn’t care, Stephanie thinks.
My bullshit detector, I’ve noticed, has stopped blaring.
“I think we’re through here,” Bob says kindly.
“I have to stay.” My voice is barely audible.
“Are you sure that you hadn’t met Mrs. Marx, ma’am?”
“Like I said, Detective, no.” Stephanie is sounding tired, short-tempered, less sure.
“Where were you when Mrs. Marx was out biking the day of her death?” he asks.
“With my child,” Stephanie answers. “At home.”
Hicks lets the bad cop hammer away. Stephanie might be telling the truth. He can’t prove otherwise.
“Please, Molly, can we leave?” Bob asks.
“Molly Marx has left the building.” My mind is back in February, trying to put together the pieces.
Twenty-eight
GIVING AS GOOD AS SHE GETS
s it possible that Barry and his mom had lunch this week at Bergdorf’s?” Brie asked when she called a few days after Barry had returned from San Francisco.
“He didn’t mention it,” I said. “But yes, probably.” Every few weeks, Barry and Kitty met at the tiny café folded as neatly as a pocket square into the third floor of the men’s store. In fact, he’d arrived home the other day with a navy duchesse satin tie with small red squares and another in plum and silver stripes. Both had Kitty written all over them. “Why do you ask?”
“You know our office manager, who went to Barry for a consultation?”
“The one who got burnt because he suggested she have not just her nose done but a full lift?”
“That one—and for the record, Barry was right.”
“So?”
“Barry didn’t seem to recognize her.”
“A lot of women go in and out of that office. Anyway, he waits for patients to say hello first. Confidentiality and all that. Your point is?”
“I overheard this woman giving a play-by-play to one of the secretaries all about the conversation Barry and Kitty supposedly had at Bergdorf’s.”
A wave of nausea rose in my stomach.
“Do you want to hear it?” Brie asked. Her voice had dropped.
No! “Sure, spill.”
“You won’t shoot the messenger?”
“Talk.”
I could hear Brie take a deep breath. “Kitty told Barry she thinks you are cheating—something about a man’s jacket squatting in your foyer like a dirty dog.”
“Go on,” I said as my queasiness built. I was afraid I was going to puke.
“Barry said something like, ‘News flash—we just had wild, animal sex six hours ago and everything’s fine in that department.” Then this woman started laughing so hard I could hardly understand her, but I think she said Kitty answered, ‘Now, there’s a snapshot for the family album,’ and ‘Barry Joshua, love, I’m afraid you’re missing the point.’
“Is that it?” I hoped it was.
“No, she scolded him like he was a little boy. That’s what this fly-on-the-wall thought was funniest. Said it was time for him to ‘grow up and be part of his marriage’—he had a wife and a child and if he didn’t pay attention, he was going to lose them both.”
“More?” I asked.
“Just that she said, ‘Don’t be a fool.’ Or something like that.”
Brie waited for me to respond. When I did not, she added, “Molly, this woman might have the wrong guy or made it all up. She’s the twit who started that rumor that I was dating one of the senior partners.”
Brie had been dating that senior partner. “You’re right. It could be some other Barry Joshua’s mom telling him off.”
“Does any of this make sense?”
“I’m not saying.” My synonym for Guilty, as charged.
“Okay,” Brie said, drawing out the word as if she were taking a long toke on a thick joint. “If you ever want to talk, you know I’m here. But Barry Joshua’s mother was right on one thing. Don’t be a fool.”
As soon as The Daily Show ended that night, I picked up New York. For two days, I’d been trying to finish an exposé on moms who anonymously rat out other families’ babysitters on isawyournanny.blogspot.com. I’d visited the site. Last time, one item was about a caregiver feeding kids Ho Hos instead of organic crackers, and another was about a nanny burping in restaurants like a twelve-year-old boy and coughing insults at fellow diners. But once in a while the description of a nanny’s behavior made me want to run to Annabel’s room, scoop her up, and promise that nothing bad would happen to her, ever. No bored, mean, trash-talking, cell-phone-obsessed nanny was going to swat my little girl.
“I pinch myself every day that we found Delfina,” I said, turning to Barry, but his eyes stayed married to Letterman. “She’s amazing, don’t you think?”
Barry ignored me. At midnight he flicked off his light without so much as a mumbled goodnight. I moved on to the magazine’s culture pages. After I’d started the same review three times, I put out my light as well, stretched under the freshly ironed white sheets, and rubbed my icy feet against Barry’s. He stayed as still as a corpse. Moving closer, I laid my arm around his shoulders. “Sweet dreams,” I murmured as I felt him shift away.
That morning married life had seemed copasetic, at least on the surface—a location from which our relationship too rarely experienced liftoff. Barry had arrived home late
Sunday from San Francisco, bearing gifts: a gold cable car to start a charm bracelet for Annabel, an Alcatraz mug for Delfina, and a small jade box for me. Late that evening, as we finished a pizza and emptied a bottle of Chianti, he’d admitted that he had been nervous about his speech. I found this endearing; I enjoyed my husband most when his guard was down, especially if his ardor was up. We made love that night, gently, and this morning, passionately. But whatever goodwill had existed between us had apparently washed away like a signature in the sand.
“Anything you want to tell me?” I said mildly, staring into the darkness.
“Or you tell me?” Barry answered a few moments later from the west coast of the bed, his voice low and controlled.
That I’m in a chronic state of being crazy pissed at you and disappointed by you, but I’ve forfeited my right to bitch by being a complete harlot, and on that count I am oozing—no, make that exploding—with regret for my appalling lack of judgment.
“You might want to know I am fully aware of the fact that you weren’t alone in San Francisco” was all I said. I despised myself for having the hubris to accuse Barry, especially since I wasn’t 100 percent certain about this.
“Come on! If you’re talking about the patient who coached me, she’s just a friend,” he said, as if he’d been expecting an attack. “She was out on the coast visiting her brother. I thought I should say thank you. I took her to dinner.” Big deal, his tone said.
I decided to drop my bomb. “One of many meals, I see, based on last year’s Amex. I’m especially intrigued about the bar bills on those nights when you told me you were chaperoning at the temple’s shelter. Was it Take a Homeless Guy to the Ritz-Carlton Month?”
“I can see where you’d want to steer the conversation away from yourself,” he said, drily, “given what went down here this weekend.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
Did he have Alphonso the doorman on the payroll? Much as he revered his mother, based on Brie’s recycled rumors I couldn’t believe that he didn’t have doubts.
“You said you wanted to talk,” I said, “so let’s. That is, unless you’d rather move on to your cell phone bills.”
Outside, I heard dogs barking. But in our bedroom there was only silence, not counting the thrum of rage and guilt that pulsed through my brain. Barry. Luke. Luke. Barry. The compartments each tidily lived in had collapsed. After minutes—two or ten, I couldn’t say—Barry turned on his lamp, walked to the closet, and from a sport coat hanging toward the back took out a pack of cigarettes. He returned to the bed, lit one, and inhaled, blowing blue smoke into the dim light.
“When did you start smoking again?”
“There are a lot of things you don’t know,” he said, and laughed. “Like that women throw themselves at me all the time. Patients, strangers, your friends.”
“You poor, defenseless guy.”
“Sometimes I respond, I admit it. But here’s the thing—it means nothing. Less than nothing. Zilch.”
“You’re telling me that being with other women is just some sort of uncontrollable tic, like cracking your knuckles?” I let indignation flood the room, while I tried to ignore another version of myself that circled above, chanting “hypocrite” at the angry, self-righteous wife sitting up in bed, her nightgown falling off one shoulder. That Luke meant something to me, that I thought I loved him—did any of this make it better or different? Holier, perhaps? As I started to shake, tears fell on the blanket.
Barry put out his cigarette in the silver dish he kept on his nightstand. He got up, walked around to my side, pulled me to his chest, and cleared his throat. “Here’s the only thing you need to know. You’re everything to me,” he said. “Correction. You and Annabel.” He started to stroke my hair. “Maybe I haven’t been the husband I should be. No, let me rephrase. I haven’t been the husband I should be. I’ve been a schmuck. What I need to know is, will you forgive me?”
I felt as ready for this confession as I might be for a full body search at the dry cleaner. Were his words hollow or sincere, true or false, a stall tactic or a miracle breakthrough?
“I’m not sure what I’d be forgiving you for, exactly,” I said, hiccupping.
“Don’t ask me to elaborate,” he said. “Tell me what you want from me, and I’ll come through.”
I thought I might be reading genuine anguish on Barry’s face. “What I want you to do is talk to me,” I pleaded. “To share a little of the real you”—whoever he is. Why didn’t all men realize that, at least for every woman I knew, being listened to and revealing a secret truth or two is always the ultimate aphrodisiac? Luke got this. Why didn’t my husband? Or did he share his dreams and hopes and fears and zany insights only with other women?
“We talk all the time,” he said.
“But we don’t,” I answered wearily. “I don’t know that we’ve ever had a real conversation that didn’t relate to your work or Annabel or if the steak should be medium or medium rare.”
“Oh, come on. Now you’re being ridiculous. Throw me a bone here.”
“It might take time,” I said. It was definitely not anguish, I decided, that I was reading on Barry’s face, at least not anymore. Could he be scared that I was going to blow his cover?
I’d suddenly become so tired I couldn’t say or listen to another word. From a few blocks away, the bell of the church chimed once. I stood and grabbed my pillow. “I’m sleeping in the other room,” I announced. Barry didn’t stop me.
I woke to the smell of freshly brewed hazelnut coffee. Barry was standing next to the couch with two steaming mugs in hand. “Good morning,” he said. He kissed me softly on the cheek. His hair was still wet from the shower, and in his face I could see the college senior I’d met almost seventeen years earlier.
“We need to get ourselves to a therapist.” The words tumbled out of me, unexpected. “I heard of someone who’s supposed to be good.” I’d been carrying Felicia Stafford’s name and number in my wallet for more than a year.
“If that’s what you want, I’m in,” Barry said. “Now get that adorable butt into the kitchen, or you’re going to miss my pancakes.”
Twenty-nine
KOI OR GIRL?
’ve decided,” Brie says. “I definitely want a baby.”
Isadora’s face, reflected in the glass of their kitchen cabinets, remains composed. As she reaches for the plates she keeps her back turned to Brie. “What makes you so sure you’ll be a good mama?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Brie admits.
I wish Brie knew, as I do, that she would be the finest of mothers. Before I died, Barry and I were still debating whom to pick to be Annabel’s legal guardian, and Brie was my first choice. I’d have lobbied harder on her behalf if my decision wouldn’t have insulted my parents and Lucy. I can’t think of better guardians than my parents, but they live far away. And Lucy? Her advanced degree in early childhood development not with standing, after a year with my sister, Annabel might require after-school psychotherapy instead of ballet.
Barry wanted Kitty to be Annabel’s guardian—“because Annabel’s life could continue as it is.” True, except that Kitty would send her to fat camp before she digested her first Oreo, and possibly destroy all proof that I was her mother. So the guardian issue remains unresolved. Like so much.
“What kind of mother do you think you’d be?” Brie asks.
Isadora takes two square black plates from the shelf and places them on the honed stone counter where Brie is sitting. From a metal basket she selects a large tangerine and starts to peel it with a sharp mother-of-pearl-handled knife. The rind, which perfumes the air with its fresh scent, snakes into a ribbon as she does the job with artistic precision. “Frightening,” she says. “I’m exacting, self-involved, and impatient. Isn’t that what you love about me?”
“Seriously, Isadora. You’re not hearing me. I want a baby.”
Isadora delicately dissects the denuded fru
it and begins to slice segments into bite-sized pieces. An amused smile remains on her ageless, symmetrical face. “Do you plan to jet off to Malawi and claw one out of some impoverished woman’s womb?”
“I want to get pregnant. That is, unless you’d rather carry our child.”
“Have you totally lost your mind?” I do love Isadora’s teeth—small, even, white as china. She laughed for so long I got an excellent view of them.
“You’re not too old—you’re only thirty-nine.”
“That’s the least of it. I’d rather have liposuction without anesthesia. The species will have to propagate without my help.”
“Then I’ll be the pregnant one—with your egg, if you want, implanted in my uterus. Done all the time.” Brie never stints on research.
“Mi amada,” Isadora says, and leans over to cup Brie’s firm, pointed chin, the type that gets called “stubborn.” “I love our life. Sleeping late, running away to Paris and Barcelona and Buenos Aires, me spoiling you, you spoiling me. Why give any of it up for a bebé? And what if that little egg and sperm grew a penis? Could you honestly see me as the mother of some midget jock? Go back to bed and wake up sane.”
Brie stands and washes her plate and coffee cup. Even without my powers I know her well enough to realize she’s going to table this topic—for now. “Maybe I’m just premenstrual,” she says lightly. “You’re right—I must be nuts to ever suggest bringing anything as messy as a third party into our life.” The remarkable thing is that Brie is able to speak without a scintilla of sarcasm while the words sybarite and indolent brat flip through her brain. She knows how to bide her time, something I never learned to do.
So I’m surprised when only two nights later she raises the topic again. The two of them are eating at Koi, where the ceilings are as high as the prices. They’re seated in a booth, taut thighs touching, ignoring the crowd. I find this hard to do, since obviously everyone here must pass a rigorous grooming and attractiveness test before they check their coats. At their banquette, Isadora selects a tiny rice block blanketed with very spicy, very fresh tuna—mercury levels be damned—and reaches to put the tiny orange delicacy into Brie’s mouth.