by Jean Stone
“Maddie?”
Maddie blinked. She realized she was on the floor, that a hand was in front of her face, and that a bottle of … a bottle of Windex was under her nose. And then, dear God, she realized the voice belonged to Parker.
“Parker?” she murmured, then blinked again.
“She’s okay, Sophie,” Parker said, then braced Maddie’s back with his arm. “You fainted, Maddie. You’re okay now.”
She felt the strength of his arm behind her. Parker. He was holding her again—just as she’d dreamed. He was there, inches from her face, so close she could feel his breath. She wanted to reach up and touch his beard; she wanted him to draw her closer; she wanted his lips to meet hers. She closed her eyes.
“Can you sit up?” he asked.
Sit up? Could he kiss her better if she were sitting up?
“Madeline?” Sophie’s voice came now. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
She opened her eyes. Parker slowly pulled her to a sitting position. She looked down at her apple-green shirt, now covered with grease. Beside her lay the culprit turkey, now a mass of legs and wings strewn across the tile. Then Parker let go of her and backed away. He was not going to hold her. He was not going to kiss her.
“Geez, Mom,” Bobby said, stepping into view. “We walked in the door and you were sprawled on the floor. You scared the crap out of us.”
She wanted to correct him for saying “crap” but figured right now it wasn’t important. Behind Bobby, clinging to the doorway, stood Timmy, a look of fear on his face that was very, very real. Suddenly Maddie realized how ridiculous she must look.
“Would someone please tell me what the Windex is for?” she asked.
“Ammonia,” Sophie said, with a look as distressed as Timmy’s. “Windex has ammonia. I haven’t had smelling salts in the house for forty years.”
Maddie tried to make sense of that, then decided against it. “What happened?”
“You tell us,” Parker said. “You’re the one on the floor.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Everything got fuzzy. Everything went black.” Then she felt the pain in her palm again. “Ouch. I think I took off a few layers of skin.”
“I’ll get some ointment,” Sophie said, then added, “Come on boys, your father can take care of this.”
They went from the kitchen, leaving Maddie alone with Parker. Alone in the same room, for the first time since the divorce. It occurred to Maddie that perhaps she should have fainted sooner. Like half a dozen years ago.
“Well,” she said, trying to straighten the mess on her shirt. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked, settling into a cross-legged position on the floor in front of her in his gray flannel pants and light blue shirt—the light blue she’d always liked him to wear because it brought out the depths of his eyes. His eyes, however, looked older and his hair had more gray than was visible in the black-and-white photo stacks hidden in her studio.
“I’m fine. Honest. It’s just female stuff.”
He nodded. “You sure scared the boys.”
The boys? she wanted to ask. What about you? Did I scare you, too? Instead, she said, “I don’t expect it did much for Mother, either.”
“Lucky we came along when we did.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“No problem.”
The smells of turkey and ammonia, and hundreds of words unspoken, hung in the space between them.
“Well,” Parker said, rising from the floor and stepping close to her again, “can I give you a hand? I’d like to be sure you can stand up before I go.”
She took his hand the way she had a thousand times … when they crossed Fifth Avenue in the rain, when they walked through Greenwich Village on a lazy Sunday afternoon, when they stood in line at Madison Square Garden, waiting for the Elton John concert. It was dry and warm and safe. It was a hand that belonged to the man who loved her. Loved her, when she’d thought no man would. No man could. Because she was not pretty or graceful or rich. Because she was just … Maddie.
He helped her up, then awkwardly—with hesitation—let go of her hand.
“No permanent damage, I presume.”
She shook her head. If only he would put his arms around her. If only he would hold her and hug her and tell her how wrong he’d been, how much he loved her still.
“I’ve got to go,” he said, grabbing his jacket from the stool where he’d apparently tossed it.
“Must you?” she heard her voice ask. She still felt weak. She still felt …
“Sharlene’s in the car,” he said, putting on his coat.
“Oh,” Maddie answered.
And then he was gone.
“What is going on?” Kris demanded of Abigail once the guests had left and they were alone in the sitting room of the west wing—the guest wing—of the manor. She had pulled her long legs up beneath her on the sofa and stared at Abigail, who paced the oval, brocade-papered room. “A new venture? Going to be a little difficult to run if you’re living in Madrid.”
Abigail lit a cigarette. “I never said I planned to go to Madrid. And it’s nothing, really.”
“Have you had a change of heart?”
“About leaving? No. Never. Especially not after what’s happened.” She smoked hurriedly, as if she were sneaking a butt in the girls’ room at Arbor Brook, the way they had done so many times when they were twelve.
“Are you going to tell me?”
She stopped in front of a marble-topped oak chest and ran her hand across its smooth, cool surface. “It’s funny, Kris. You know I’ve been miserable. But until now I’ve never felt quite so … disparate.”
“Disparate,” Kris said. “That’s such a good word. It’s so close to ‘desperate’.”
“I am desperate.” She told Kris about the conversation between Larry and Sondra that she’d overheard. “All these years the son-of-a-bitch has despised me. Now he’s conspiring to take his cut of the Rupert’s deal and leave me high and dry,” She uttered a laugh that was laced with contempt.
“Excuse me,” Kris interrupted, “but you all seemed rather like one happy family tonight.”
“Oh, he has no idea that I know. Which only makes my revenge more pleasant. I was going to kill the Rupert’s deal. But I decided it would be more effective to let him think he’s getting his hands on the money. Once I disappear the deal will be dead, but my guess is he’ll have already spent the money before it reaches his pocket.”
“So you’ll ruin him.”
“An eye for an eye.”
“And Sondra?”
Abigail shrugged. “If she buys into his scheme, I’m afraid she’ll learn a lesson or two. But Edmund will take care of her.” She took another drag on the cigarette. “I’ve got to get out, Kris. Now more than ever. Now that you’re back …” She hesitated, then moved toward the sofa. “Oh, God, I’m such an ass, going on and on about me. What about you? You’re not pregnant …”
Kris shrugged. “UCLA wasn’t up to the challenge.”
“Are you giving up?”
It was Kris’s turn to grow somber. “I thought it would be easy. Shit. Everything has always been easy for me. You want a bestseller?” She snapped her fingers; “You get it. You want fame and fortune? Its yours. I sure didn’t think I’d get hung up having some stranger’s sperm inside me.” She laughed. “God knows, that part was nothing new.”
Abigail stubbed out her cigarette.
“Besides,” Kris continued, “maybe I really am too old.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
Smoothing the front of her cashmere dress, Kris paused before she replied. “They shot me up with some stuff guaranteed to make me produce more eggs. Improbably had a whole henhouse inside me, and the rooster wasn’t interested.”
Abigail sat beside her. “What are you going to do?”
Kris was unsure if Abigail was more concerned about her or about the vow not to leave un
til the birthday wishes came true. “I can’t speak for Maddie,” she said, “but as for me, you’re off the hook. There’s no point in you keeping your life on hold until I get pregnant. It may never happen.”
Lighting another cigarette, Abigail smiled. “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. Now let’s spend the weekend getting your shit together so you can get out of here.”
Damn. It just wasn’t fair. Maddie sat on her bed in the darkness—the same bed, in the same slant-roof room where she’d spent her childhood, where she’d passed so many nights looking out at the stars and wondering if she would ever be like Kris or Abigail … or even Betty Ann.
She thought about her old Mousketeer T-shirt, a long-ago treasure, then dust rag, then trash. Still, there were so many times she felt like that awkward, unhappy girl trying so hard to pretend that all was well, trying so hard to act as if she were having fun, trying so hard to make others like her. Things hadn’t changed. Aside from her mother and the twins—well, Timmy, anyway—there was no one who really cared.
Maybe life would have been easier if her father hadn’t died when she was so young. Other than Parker, Harvey Kavner was the only man who had ever held her hand, who had ever truly cared. At night, after dinner, they would go for walks—just Maddie and her father, hand-in-hand when she was small, then simply side-by-side. They rarely spoke much on their ritual jaunts; they just enjoyed being together, enjoyed being father and daughter, at peace with one another.
It had been so long now since he’d died that she barely remembered him, barely remembered his face, the sound of his voice, the touch of his fingers linked through hers.
She thought about the day of his memorial service. Climbing the steps of the synagogue, thirteen-year-old Maddie had linked her arm through her mother’s.
“What are we going to do without him, Mommy?”
“We’re going to be fine,” Sophie commented, patting her daughter’s hand. “We’re going to miss him like hell, but we’re going to be fine.”
It was the first time Maddie had heard her mother swear, and it implied to Maddie that they were not going to be fine at all—that the one man who loved them had abandoned them, that there was no chance of him coming back.
Three decades later another man had abandoned her, too. The two men in her life had packed up and left: one in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes; one in a satin-lined box. Of the two, she knew she could have counted more on her father. Yet he was the one she couldn’t win back.
When her father died, he had been her best friend. Well, there had been Abigail and Kris and Betty Ann, too. Then again, she thought now, maybe the girls would not have remained friends if he hadn’t died, if they hadn’t felt sorry for her.
Her thoughts drifted to them: she’d not spoken to Kris since coming back on the red-eye; Abigail hadn’t called to see how her date went. Years ago Maddie would have been on the phone to them both, pursuing the friendship without ever realizing that maybe it wasn’t what they wanted. That maybe they only tolerated her the way they tolerated Betty Ann, simply because she was there.
Despair, she’d read somewhere, was the fabric of self-pity.
Yet Maddie could not stop the warm tears from rolling down her cheeks. Even in the darkness, even with her new look, she knew what she was. She was the daughter of an introspective college professor, a matronly frump, nothing more. No one, certainly, at whom Parker would ever cast a side glance again.
Besides, Parker had had his chance tonight. But he’d put on his jacket and gone out the door, laughing at her perhaps, perhaps shaking his head, then getting into the car next to his young, gorgeous, blonde wife and secretly applauding himself for having had the sense to get out.
Menopause, Madeline. It’s part of life. Sophie’s words reverberated in her mind. Maddie took as deep a breath as she could and tried to determine how long menopause would last. She’d heard five years. She’d heard ten.
In five years Cody would be thirty-three. In ten, thirty-eight.
She sat up on the bed and pulled her torn chenille robe around her. Damn, she thought, why am I thinking of him?
“You are thinking of him because he makes you feel good,” she said to the darkness. Then she admitted that he did make her feel good. Like the new haircut. Like dropping the weight. Like looking like something other than a tearsheet from a decades-old Montgomery Ward catalog, or a poster child from Woodstock.
And maybe Abigail was right, that surely Parker would notice if she were with a younger man.
Quickly Maddie hauled herself from the bed and fumbled in the bag that was slung over the doorknob. From the bottom of the bag she dug out the crumpled napkin from Hilliard’s. Then she went over to the phone on the nightstand.
Crazy or not, she was going to do this. She didn’t care what anyone thought. Besides, Sophie had told her to distract herself. And Maddie had always tried to do what she was told.
She lifted the receiver before she could change her menopausally altered mind.
Abigail snapped off the reading lamp, pulled the thick comforter up under her chin, closed her eyes, and prepared to pretend she was asleep. From her bed she could hear Edmund using the steam room; though they hadn’t shared the same bed, the same room even, for many years, she did not want to encourage one of his infrequent conjugal visits tonight. The sex might be good—and then where would she be? Confused as hell and riddled with guilt and at risk of changing her mind.
No. There would be no sex, and she would not change her mind. She was going to be free. Free to be the Abigail Hardy she had never known—or whatever her new name would be.
Seattle. The name kept creeping back to her mind. It wasn’t as exotic as Madrid or Marseilles, but she’d had a lifetime of exotic, a lifetime of being where and doing what was expected. Seattle seemed so less … confrontational. A place where the people spoke English, where the money was in dollars, and where she could vanish among the lumber-jacks and other western pioneers—pioneers, like Great-Grandfather Hardy had once been, on a different coast, in a different time.
She’d heard Seattle was dreary—cold and rainy. But for some reason the image of rain on the roof of a log cabin and giant pines creaking outside in the darkness while Abigail was tucked inside beside a blazing fireplace, all snug and cozy and blessedly alone, seemed blissfully safe and very alluring.
Maybe she would even get a dog.
A big, furry dog who would curl up at her feet and keep her toes warm.
An island, she thought. An island off the coastline across from Seattle. She could have her solitude; she could have a city nearby in case she craved people. And in the meantime she would have nothing hut time to become who she was. A smile of peace inched over her lips.
“Honey? Are you awake?”
She forced away the smile. She squeezed her eyes. Go away, Edmund, she wanted to scream. Instead she did not answer. It didn’t matter. The sound of his footsteps moved closer to the bed.
“I just wanted to say it was a wonderful Thanksgiving. An excellent dinner.” The weight of his body sank onto the edge of the mattress.
The log cabin, the big, furry dog, and the island vanished, his words popping the bubble of her dreams.
“Thank Louisa for dinner,” she said, her eyes still closed. “I didn’t make it.” She wondered why everyone always thanked the hostess for dinner, when all the hostess did was pay the cook.
He shifted his weight on the mattress. “Everyone seemed to have a nice time, too.”
“Yes. I guess.”
“It was a wonderful idea to surprise everyone with your news.”
She opened her eyes.
“Even I didn’t know you’d made your decision.”
“I didn’t keep it from you on purpose,” she replied. “I didn’t think it much mattered to you.”
He began to fondle the edge of the comforter. “I’m sorry about our argument the other day. What you do does matter to me.”
Go away.
�
��Edmund,” she said, “I’m tired. Please go to bed.”
“I was hoping I’d be invited to sleep here.”
She closed her eyes again, pulled an arm from beneath the covers, and patted his hand. “Please understand. I’m really tired. And Kris is staying the weekend, so I’m sure we’ll be busy.”
He remained for a moment, not speaking, just breathing. Breathing the breath of a husband who didn’t know quite what to make of his wife. Finally he rose from the bed, his footsteps crossing the carpet and disappearing down the hall.
Larry’s dick had not been this hard since he was seventeen. He drizzled massage oil around the tip and rubbed it up and down the shaft.
This was a moment he wasn’t going to share with Grady. No, Larry deserved to keep this all to himself—a reward for his victory.
Fifteen-percent-of-ten-million-dollars victory. For finally Larry had won.
He smiled. He wondered what Abigail would think if she could see him now, see the pleasure it gave him that she had, in fact, just fucked herself.
He’d get Sondra now, too. Some way, somehow, he’d manage to win her over to his side. For things were at last going to go Larry Kaminski’s way.
And Mother would be so proud.
He stroked himself some more.
God, his dick was beautiful.
Kris lay under the huge comforter in the west wing at Windsor-on-Hudson and slowly rubbed the mound of black curls that “v’d” up from between her legs. It had been weeks since she’d had sex—not since that brief foray with Mo Gilbert, that unexpected, delicious romp that only a stranger can provide.
But tonight, sleeping in this house, this mansion, where her youth had slipped away, tonight she’d give anything to do more than hold a penis in her hand, to put it between her lips.
Tonight she’d give anything to feel … loved.
She thought about Abigail, who did not seem to know—or care—that she had a husband, a man who loved her.
Her thoughts turned to Edmund. What would it be like to be loved by a man like him? He was attractive in a conservative, upper-class way. Certainly he was interesting. He had warm, blue-gray eyes that looked caring and sensitive. And despite his age his body appeared firm, his hands looked strong.