The Late, Lamented Molly Marx

by Sally Koslow

  “How so?” For the last few months, I’d felt as if I could have won Best Actress for my convincing portrayal of a contented wife and mother.

  “You forgot my birthday.”

  “No!” I said. But the next day was Thanksgiving, and Brie was born on November 17. Months earlier I’d bought her an antique magnifying glass hanging on a silver chain. I realized it remained stowed and wrapped, ready to present with a blank birthday card on which I had planned to copy a quote appropriate for a thirty-fifth birthday: “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”

  “I had to celebrate with Isadora,” Brie said, still playful. “Cocktail after cocktail. That’s how things got rolling, so if you don’t like it, blame yourself.”

  After I extravagantly apologized for the birthday gaffe, Brie moved on to a giddy account of the couple’s first kiss and how Isadora slept over. And over. Now she was moving in.

  “Enough about me—let’s get back to you,” Brie eventually said. “What’s going on?”

  I began regretting that I’d opened the door to talking about Luke. Brie was, I decided, too in the thrall of new romance, caught up with herself and herself alone. Not only did I doubt her current judgment, it also didn’t seem fair to try to dim her bright light. Besides, continuing to keep our relationship all my own allowed me to believe that Luke and I existed in an alternate universe with flattering light and an endless loop of mutual admiration. This was a place where I would prefer to stay.

  “Molly, what’s going on?” she repeated.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  Brie tilted back her sleek head and laughed. “We’ve established that it’s not nothing.”

  “Just forget it.”

  “Molly?”

  “Okay, I’m seeing another man.” As I blurted this out, my eyes fixed on an almost naked tree outside, I could swear that some other woman was speaking. “It started by accident.” I was feeling like quite the fool.

  Brie whistled softly. “Since when?”

  “Since a while ago.”

  “I get it. You’re not going to give me specifics. But play fair—tell me something.”

  I took a deep breath and exhaled words in a whoosh. “As long as it’s lasted, he’s made me feel like I am the most desirable woman on earth. When we’re together I feel beautiful and impossibly clever, like I’m starring in my own movie.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “An Irish poet.” Brie nodded in appreciation. “He takes away all my anxiety, all my depression.”

  “Other women go shopping for that.”

  “And did I mention the sex?”

  “But no, my friend has to get a little something on the side,” Brie interrupted again to say, not unkindly, “Is he anyone I know?”

  “No!” I lied. “Don’t ask for details. Please. And stop smiling—this isn’t as hilarious as you may think.”

  “Why are you offering up these crumbs now?”

  Brie wasn’t taking my confession nearly as seriously as I’d hoped and expected. I didn’t want to admit that the impulse to blab about Luke must have come straight from some misguided desire to show that I, too, had a reckless anything-for-love stripe.

  “You haven’t decided to leave Barry?” Brie asked. The unspoken words in that sentence were I hope.

  “Not at all,” I said. “I’ve never imagined that this man”—the thought of calling Luke my lover seemed beyond pretentious, as if this movie I was starring in were Italian—“and I will wind up together, much as I care about him, which I do.” Very much so, something Brie doesn’t seem to understand. “He’s not just a boy toy.”

  The afternoon sun was gone, and I could see myself, tense and trembling, reflected in the window glass.

  “Please don’t tell me this is the guy Kitty heard about,” Brie said, wincing. “Please.”

  I stared at Brie. “Do you think I’ve completely lost it?” Now I really wanted this conversation to end, even if I’d started it. Talking out loud about what I had with Luke had cheapened it.

  Brie didn’t speak for what felt like minutes. “You’re not asking me what I think, but I presume that’s why you’ve brought this up, so I won’t sugar-coat,” she said finally. “I believe you care about … him … and I know that things at home aren’t exactly in your target zone for perfection, but listen. An affair is never the answer. I say this from having been on the other side, numerous times.”

  I reached into my pocket and blotted my eyes with a tissue.

  “End it—you’ve had your fun.” Brie’s tone was gentle, yet unyielding. “You’ll kick yourself later if you make any other choice.”

  I’d counted on Brie for a warm, chummy response, maybe even a winking congratulation, not this. I felt as if she were adding two and two and insisting the answer was five. Didn’t she understand that removing Luke from my life right now would be like switching from color to black and white?

  “Get out,” Brie said, grasping my hand.

  Blinking with skepticism, I just looked outside.

  “You’ve done harder,” she said.

  I had no idea what she was talking about. Nothing in my life had felt nearly as hard as the idea of never again being with Luke.

  “We don’t pick the people we fall in love with,” Brie continued. “If this other man is the one you want to be with, I’m thrilled for you. Go ahead and blow up your life tomorrow to be with him. I’ll be there for you. But if you’re not willing to do that, your marriage can’t get better if he’s taking up all the space in your head.”

  No wonder Brie became a lawyer. She is painfully logical.

  This conversation had ended. The two of us started to weave back through the maze of galleries, down the grand steps toward the coat check. Usually we made an obligatory stop to gasp at the ten-foot urns of two-thousand-dollar seasonal flowers. Not today.

  I kissed Brie goodbye, hailed a taxi, and sleepwalked through Annabel’s dinner, bath, and bedtime story. While Barry howled at You Tube clips, I set the table for the next day’s parade-watching brunch, heaping branches and acorns into a centerpiece notches below my usual standard. The result all but screamed, Paging Martha Stewart. I gave thanks for the fact that the food for the brunch was being delivered, all the while trying to sell myself on cutting Luke loose. He would be arriving home that night, and in our last e-mails we’d made a date for Monday. I only had to pull the trigger.

  But I needed fortification, and regretted, not for the first time, that I wasn’t an alcoholic, a pillhead, or a follower of a calming New Age belief system. When I heard Barry start his shower, I decided to seek another opinion and picked up the phone.

  “Free at last?” I said.

  “Do you really have to ask that question of a teacher? Turkeys are gobbling in my dreams. Want to know what they’re saying?”

  “Save it—I only have two minutes and I need some instant advice.” I heard water blast in the bathroom and Barry belting out “A Hard Day’s Night,” but I whispered nonetheless. “Remember that other guy I told you about?”

  “The one I said you should stop seeing?”

  “I didn’t.” I told Lucy my guilt had been exploding—I couldn’t do this anymore.

  “You’re asking Lucy to open her psychiatric booth?” my sister said. “I’m honored.”

  Barry walked into the bedroom, a towel wrapped around his lean torso. “Who you talking to?” he mouthed.

  “Lucy.”

  “Hello, Moosey,” he shouted as he pulled on clean boxers and walked out of the room.

  “Do you realize how much I despise that husband of yours?” she said.

  “We don’t have much time. What would you do? Quick.”

  “I’d call it off,” she said. “Not worth it. At least, that’s what I would do.”

  On Thanksgiving afternoon, Isadora left by two and Brie finished helping me clean up after forty-two guests, half of whom were under the age of five and had perched on my windowsills to g
et eyeball to eyeball with Snoopy. When they saw the monster-sized balloons, only three children had complete meltdowns. Fortunately, this year Annabel was not among them.

  “I hope you don’t hate me for being frank the other day,” Brie said. “Was I a bitch?”

  “An honest, sensible bitch.” I surveyed my kitchen and tied the last gigantic bag of garbage, put my ceramic turkey-embossed platter on the highest shelf, and turned to hug Brie. “I just hate that you might be right.”

  Thirty-two

  A FINE KETTLE OF FISH

  uring the past week, Brie started dialing the number four times. Today she lets it ring twice before she once again aborts her mission. The moment she puts down the receiver, the phone trills.

  “What’s on your mind?” Hicks says when she picks up.

  “Detective?”

  “I figure that you and your lady either want to ask me to dinner”—or a threesome—“or you have something to confess.”

  “On the first count, my partner moved out two weeks ago,” Brie says as Jones stands before her, waiting for one more maniacal toss of his favorite chew toy. Brie flings the slimy hot dog across the room.

  Hicks feels a twinge of guilt about the fleeting threesome fantasy. “Sorry to hear that,” he says, shifting to strictly polite.

  “I’m not,” Brie says. She has empty spots in her cupboard and closet, but her heart is healing fast. “And on the second …” She looks at the picture of the two of us that she’s restored to the bookshelf after its Isadora-enforced hiatus. We were twenty-one, prettier than we realized, clinking Champagne flutes on a bateau-mouche. Big hair, big dreams. “There’s something that might be something. I was hoping we could meet. Please wait a second, and I’ll get my BlackBerry.”

  “Whoa, you’re going to squeeze me in between litigation and a manicure? I’ve got a case to solve, woman. What’s wrong with now?”

  Brie hadn’t expected now. Now, she tells herself, is overbooked. Brie believes she’s moved on from Isadora, and I can vouch for the fact that she’s willed herself not to think about her, a decision reinforced by staying as busy as possible. Now is when Brie had planned to take Jones to the dog run and also when she hasn’t yet washed her hair, since she’s just returned from ninety minutes at the gym with the trainer she’s booked, after which she visited three specialty grocers. All the ingredients for crawfish étouffée, starring a pound of startlingly pink crawfish she had FedExed from Louisiana, are waiting on the counter, since learning to cook is also on her agenda for now, along with calling her mother and reading last month’s issue of the Economist.

  “I’m waiting, Ms. Lawson,” Hicks says.

  Jones returns, panting for yet another toss. To make sure she gets the message, he barks, loudly and continuously.

  “Dog-sitting?”

  “No,” Brie says. “Jones is all mine. He’s the new love of my life, and he desperately needs to burn some energy.”

  “Same here,” Hicks answers. “I’ll meet you.”

  Hicks must be getting nowhere on Molly’s case if he’s this eager to see me, I hear Brie think. She almost feels sorry for the guy. Then her eye lands on our picture. Her mind switches to me and it makes her both happy and sad to think of meeting Hicks. “Can you be in Union Square at one?” she says.

  Hicks smiles; maybe he’ll get a break. He sees the pieces of my case spinning in midair, UFOs smacking him in the head. By default, it’s looking more and more to him as if my death was random rotten, an accident of dumb luck or the handiwork of a long-gone lunatic who ran me off the road. He’s ruled out suicide, which he doesn’t think I had the skill set, or sufficient torment, to implement.

  For the last week, at eight or nine o’clock, when Hicks turns off the light in his bare-bones office, he’s entertained cutting bait, thinking he’ll just have to move on and hope to be anointed supersleuth for some other case in the future. I have heard him apologize to me: “Sorry, Molly, no breakthroughs today.”

  Then all night I’m in his dreams, begging him to figure out how I wound up dead. Go, Hicks, I plead. Please! I’m counting on the Hiawatha Express. I’m praying for it. Someone has to figure out the whys and how-comes to explain why I now reside in the Duration. Down there, I can only hope that you and perhaps you alone are feeling my anger, which roils inside me along with guilt and pain and longing.

  During the night, Hicks wakes several times to read his latest library book—this week’s is by Cormac McCarthy—or to simply stare at the ceiling or out the window, toward the bodega where his friend Marco sells lottery tickets. The next day while Hicks shaves, he glances in the mirror and decides he looks like hell. Then he usually talks to me. “Molly Marx, tell me what happened, girl. There’s got to be an answer.” He’ll stop to buy his newspapers from Marco, takes the train to his office, and thinks the same thing while he tries to concentrate on the Post and the Daily News. When he walks into the precinct, he makes a fresh pot of coffee, chews through his files a few times, picks the brains of Detective Gonzalez and the other big and little kahunas nearby, and makes more calls, more appointments. Every few days he walks again down by the river, hoping to find some crumbs that will lead him to the answer.

  Hicks has been investigating my case for five months. He needs a break.

  “Deal,” he says to Brie. “I’ll meet you by Charlie, that cheese dealer from Rensselaer County.” Charlie’s a redneck who knows his Emmental from his Gruyère.

  “See you in forty-five minutes,” Brie says.

  On Saturday, as you stroll the Greenmarket, you can practically smell the succulent meals that will be prepared that night. I had forgotten how much I loved it here. The Marx family always ate well the day I pedaled to the Greenmarket. I’d fill my basket with round, crusty breads; sugar-sweet baby vegetables; buttery lettuces, good black earth still clinging to their leaves; tomatoes exploding with juice; oatmeal-raisin cookies the size of my hand; and always, a huge bouquet of whatever flowers sang out, Buy me, baby, buy me.

  Hicks gets there early, as I do. He is off duty, looking even more princely in cords and boots than in his finely tailored workaday clothes, the ones that are more expensive than the other guys on the force realize. He heads to one of the biggest stands, deliberates over seven kinds of potatoes, and finally buys fingerlings, selecting each slender, pale gold jewel one by one.

  “How are you going to cook those?” Brie asks, walking up beside him. Despite her firm hand on Jones’ leash, the pup jumps up and leaves a dirty paw print on Hicks’ heavy gray zippered sweater. “Oh, I am so sorry,” she says, yanking away Jones as she brushes the mud off his sweater.

  Hicks feels a spark of … something. My luck that she prefers women, he says to himself. Don’t think about her that way, fool.

  “This guy definitely needs a crash course at obedience school,” Brie says.

  Hicks laughs. “Don’t most men?” He strokes Jones’ warm, smooth back. “You like potatoes, huh, boy?”

  “He likes everything. He’s going to be a hippo when he grows up.”

  I doubt that, Hicks thinks. He considers how people choose animals that resemble them. This dog’s going to be long and leggy, like Brie Lawson, who he has decided looks a lot less brittle in a pair of faded Levi’s and a down vest than she does in her uptown attorney togs. “C’mon,” Hicks says. “I need some fresh herbs to roast these.”

  “Show me,” she says. “I know nothing.”

  “That I can’t believe, smart lawyer like you.”

  “Hey, if it wasn’t on the bar exam …”

  “So, you have something to tell me?” he says, leading Brie and Jones to a small booth for dainty, string-tied bunches of rosemary, oregano, and thyme. He lifts some rosemary to Brie’s nose and she breathes in its earthy fragrance.

  “I doubt it’s anything,” she says tentatively, her eyes fixed on the herbs. It’s hard for Brie to go on, because she has convinced herself that to share this information violates my precious memory and flawless
reputation, especially because she’s not even sure if she’s right. “But Molly,” Brie says, turning to look Hicks in the eye, “had a boyfriend.” She, of all people, speaks the word as if I had gonorrhea. Shame on you, Brie, but I know it’s your worry talking.

  That’s the big breakthrough? “Who was he?” he asks. Hicks already knows all about Luke, and hopes Brie will be talking about another guy.

  “Molly would never say, and I’m fairly sure she broke things off before she died. At least I told her to.” Okay, I’m arrogant, she thinks, but Molly usually followed my advice. “When I asked her about him, she’d always give me that don’t-go-there look. I’m thinking the person who might know more is Lucy. Have you asked her?”

  “Done,” Hicks says.

  “What does she know?”

  “Not much,” he says. What she had to say filled less than a page. As he leads Brie to the cheese seller, Hicks does exactly what Brie does as a lawyer—says little and hopes his prey will fill in the blanks. This time it works.

  “The only thought I have is that the guy might be the one she works with, Luke Delaney, who I’m sure you’ve talked to,” Brie says. “I’ve been with them together a few times, and you know how you can feel something about a couple?”

  He nods. I certainly do, Hicks think. I might be feeling it now.

  “I know Luke from years ago and thought I sensed it,” Brie says, “but when I asked Molly, she flat out denied it.” Twice.

  “Why didn’t you say anything sooner about this?”

  “I wasn’t sure. I’m still not. If Luke and Molly were involved, I couldn’t see why he’d deny it, and also, he’s a decent guy who I don’t want to get in trouble.” As soon as she finishes her sentences, she realizes it sounds ridiculous, as if she cared more about Luke than me, but she knows she’ll make it worse if she backtracks and tries to correct what she just said.

  Hicks turns his head to look at Brie for a full minute, which makes her extremely uncomfortable. Does he think I’m lying? she wonders. But that’s not what’s in Hicks’ head. She is relieved when he turns his attention to the guy behind the table.