Nine Women, One Dress

by Jane L. Rosen

  I quickly took off the shoes and the little black dress and put my burqa back on. I helped her pack up the bag. The phone rang, and somehow we knew it was the airline. We heard my mother coming up the stairs. Shireen was still wearing the Chanel suit. I quickly took her burqa off the bed and pulled it on over her head, over the suit. She laughed through watery tears. We zipped up the suitcase just as my mother came to the door to ask us about it.

  “Have you unpacked your suitcase, girls? The airline is looking for a lost bag!”

  “We have not,” I answered as she entered the room.

  That day marked the first time I had lied to my mother, and the last time I lied to myself.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Breakup

  By Arthur Winters, Attorney-at-Law

  It had been raining out when I’d walked into Sherri’s building an hour before, and now as I left the sun was peeking through the clouds. I saw it as some kind of sign from Marilyn that I was moving in the right direction. It only helped my case that I looked particularly ridiculous today. I was wearing a slim-cut sports jacket with paisley lining and skinny jeans that Sherri had convinced me to buy a few weeks back. She said I was very close to looking hip. I said I was very close to needing a hip replacement. We laughed together for probably the last time that I can remember. We rarely got each other’s jokes.

  My intention when I entered her apartment was to break up with her right away, but I soon came up with a bunch of excuses to delay it. She was a girl whose father had walked out on her, and she was making up for that loss with me. It wasn’t my money, although I’m sure that helped; it was my age—I was simply a stand-in father figure. This had a lot to do with the reason I hadn’t broken up with her sooner. I didn’t want to be another older man who left her. Plus I’d always hoped she would tire of me before this conversation would have to take place. I looked into her eyes and tried to gather my nerve.

  Her eyes were so young-looking; they were often the thing that embarrassed me most about our age difference. Not her girlish figure, her luminous smile, or her soft skin, which had seen nearly half the sunny days that mine had, with twice the sunblock. It was her eyes. She had yet to develop the tiny lines that eventually spring out from the corners of people’s eyes like sunbeams signaling age, but also life. Whoever named those lines crow’s feet did them a huge etymological disservice. If they called them eagle’s feet, maybe they’d be worn like a badge of honor. I’ve come to see that recently. I never thought about it with Marilyn—we grew older together. But I see more beauty in eyes that have seen things. When I looked into Sherri’s youthful eyes, I saw an old man with a girl half his age. I saw the truth. I liked Felicia’s eyes. I realized that was the gist of what I had to explain to her.

  She beat me to the punch. “Is something going on?” she asked, adding that she’d noticed that I had been distant lately. She’d have to be dense not to have noticed. I jumped on it, explaining to her, kindly, that I was worried I was wasting her time and that while I want to marry again, I want it to be to an equal, a teammate, not a trophy wife. Someone who’s at my stage in life, who’s had some of the same experiences, maybe. And then her young eyes started to cry and I felt bad. But she cried just a little bit, and really, just like that it was over. It was nothing compared to the histrionics that had surrounded that little black dress.

  I handed her my handkerchief and she wiped her eyes with it. Afterward she straightened it out and ran her fingers over my initials sewn into the corner.

  “Can I keep it?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I responded.

  I was surprised and touched by her sentiment, but as I left her building, the only real emotion I felt was relief.

  CHAPTER 24

  I Love New York!

  By Sally Ann Fennely, Runway Model/New New Yorker

  New York City had quickly grown on me, and as the rules of southern hospitality demanded, I returned the favor and grew on it right back. It wasn’t at all subtle, like the way you fall in love with the South, real slow on a hot August day, sipping sweet tea from a Mason jar. It was quick. Two shots of Patrón with a Red Bull chaser at the rooftop bar of the Standard Hotel and I was gone. And believe you me, this wasn’t just some one-night stand. It was reaffirmed at the corner bagel shop the next morning. True love schmeared between two halves of my first warm-from-the-oven everything bagel. So long, grits!

  From then on I fell in love on a near-daily basis. And lucky me, the feeling was mutual! I think New York City first started falling in love with me on account of my accent; the very accent that I had spent my first weeks swallowing with my morning coffee was just the thing that ended up making people fuss over me. Turns out that people weren’t as judgmental as I first thought. By and by, most folks that I came across found me entertaining. Delightful was actually the word they used most. “Your accent is delightful.” Sometimes it was refreshing, often charming, and once even enchanting.

  And just like that, New York was crushing on Sally Ann Fennely. Not on account of my long legs and perfect smile and wavy blond hair, though I’m sure all that opened doors. But it was what I said and how I said it that got me invited in. It meant so much to me to know that it wasn’t just on account of my looks. As soon as I realized it, I began to lay it on heavier than a cow in a cotton field. Sounds pretty charming, right? A cow in a cotton field? Well, guess what, that’s not even a thing. I just made it up right on the spot. That cow in that cotton field was just the kind of thing that had people going on about how refreshing and real I was.

  I first noticed the reaction at dinner in the women’s boardinghouse where I live. Yes, there are still women’s boardinghouses in New York City. When word first came in that I’d been accepted at the modeling agency, my mama, who had been pushing me all along, began to backpedal. Suddenly spooked at the reality of me living in the big city, she started Googling statistics on crime rates and the air-quality index—this from a woman who spent half her life with a cigarette dangling from her lips. But my grandma had a plan. She was a big Sylvia Plath fan and told us all about how when Sylvia Plath moved to New York she lived in a women’s boardinghouse, a safe place called the Barbizon. She even wrote about it in The Bell Jar. Somehow this risky analogy worked, as if suicidal Sylvia Plath had the makings of a role model.

  The Barbizon was long closed, but there were about ten others to choose from; I ended up renting a room at a boardinghouse on the Upper West Side that supplied two meals a day and had a house mother and a twenty-four-hour doorman. Plus there was a strict no-boys policy. Mama was thrilled, and to be honest, I was happy about it too. I didn’t feel any more grown up or capable of living alone than I had the day before finding out I would be a runway model. The whole setup sounded more like a college sorority than life in the big city—though when I got here, no one seemed very sisterly to me. Well, at least not straightaway.

  The first week at dinner I sat with the wrong girls—two other models, who barely introduced themselves and spent the entire meal discussing whether you can really wear black and navy together. (You can.) As the next week began I was late for dinner on account of my neighbor being busted for sneaking a boy up to her room. The matron was in the hallway pitching a conniption fit, and I was too frightened to try and slip by. When I finally made it down, I sat at the only seat available, between two smart-looking girls.

  I must have looked a fright, ’cause they came right out and asked me what was the matter. Forgetting my efforts to subdue my southern accent, I blurted out, “That matron is madder than a wet hen!” They started to laugh. At first I thought they were making fun of me. My blushing cheeks must have given it away, ’cause the dark-haired girl, Margot, jumped right in and turned it around.

  “What a great expression, ‘madder than a wet hen.’ I have to write that down!”

  Turns out that she and the other girl, Halle, worked at New York magazine as interns. They didn’t get paid much, but they were invited to everything. One was fro
m no farther away than Brooklyn, but her parents had wanted her to move out, and the other was from Boston.

  I don’t know if they were honing their journalistic skills or if they were just nosy, but they sure did ask a lot of questions. “Where are you from?” “Why is a wet hen so mad?” “What are southern boys like?” “What do you do for kicks in Alabama?” I tried to sound interesting, but it was real hard. I didn’t imagine that tales of cotton farming and Friday night football would interest them. Luckily they loved my accent. It seemed that listening to me talk and hearing about a place they’d never been interested them plenty. That was the first time that I thought maybe I would stay in this big noisy city with a zillion people in it. Friends can really make any place seem livable, I think. The trick is to find a few of your own, and by the end of that dinner I felt like I had.

  One night Margot got three seats to a Broadway musical through work and took Halle and me along. The first thing my grandma had said when we got word about me coming to New York was that I should go see a big musical on Broadway. She said it was something she had always wanted to do but she had never had the chance. I felt so grateful and excited to be going and a little bad that my grandma never had. I vowed to remember every last detail and relay them all to her on our Sunday call. My excitement was slightly squashed once we got to our seats. Turns out my friends’ editor’s son and a friend of his were in the seats next to us, and they were kind of cocky. Before the show even started they asked us to join them for dinner after at a famous old theater-district restaurant called Sardi’s. Thanks to Wikipedia and the crazy long line for the ladies’ room at intermission, I found out that Sardi’s is famous for having hundreds of stars’ caricatures on its walls. That sounded fine and all, but I really didn’t care for these two boys. The more they spoke, the stupider they seemed, like they didn’t even have the sense they were born with. Margot insisted we had to go on account of wanting to make a good impression on her boss, and Halle said we should go ’cause it would be fun. So we did. But it wasn’t.

  Halfway between the appetizers and the main course, and well on my way to the realization that I was the fifth wheel, I excused myself to “go tee-tee,” a line that usually had Margot and Halle in stitches, but this time they were so busy trying to impress these nincompoops that I got nothing. As I passed the bar, I decided to prolong my absence by sitting down and ordering a cosmopolitan. I didn’t even know what was in one, just that it was pink. Like most girls my age, the sum total of my knowledge of what to do in a Manhattan bar came from watching reruns of Sex and the City. The older man sitting next to me was dressed like he was someone important, but he was a bit liquored up. He was drawing a pitchfork and devil horns on a photo in New York.

  “My girlfriends work for New York,” I said, channeling my inner Carrie Bradshaw.

  “I have nothing against the magazine,” he said, slurring a little, “just this nightmare of a woman!” He shoved the picture toward me.

  Under his devil scrawls was, according to the caption, an actress from That Southern Play. But it was the strangest of coincidences. I looked closer. There was no question: the actress was wearing my dress! Well, not my dress, really, but the one that got my picture on the front of Women’s Wear Daily and a host of modeling jobs to boot.

  “That’s my dress!” I exclaimed proudly.

  He plopped down his glass for a refill, and the bartender reluctantly poured him another while explaining to me, “Don’t mind him—he produced what was to be the hottest play of the season and his actress flew the coop.”

  “That’s awful,” I said, ’cause it was.

  “She was awful,” he answered. “She did a horrible southern accent, and her reviews were dreadful. I hired her only because the investors pushed me to. I’ll never do that again.”

  “Like my grandma always says, you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.” I looked at the desecrated picture again and added, in full southern drawl, “Bless her heart.”

  Hearing my accent, he didn’t seem to know if I was for real or was just mocking him, so he asked me, “What are you doing at this bar? Did someone send you over here to audition?”

  “Audition? Why, no, sir. I’m just getting away from two boys who think the sun comes up just to hear ’em crow.”

  The producer’s eyes popped out. “Who sent you? Stephen Schwartz? Nathan Lane? That is quite a heavy accent you got there!”

  “Heavier than a cow in a cotton field!” I told him.

  And so it was that right there at Sardi’s I auditioned for my first part on the Broadway stage for the producer of That Southern Play. Soon I’ll make my Broadway debut! Not too shabby for an Alabama girl.

  I don’t mean to sound like a T-shirt, but really, I love New York!

  CHAPTER 25

  In Too Deep at the Ostrich Detective Agency

  By Andie Rand, Private Detective

  The tennis match at Grand Central was great in that we were perfectly matched. I wondered if John and Caroline played together. I thought of them playing on summer weekends wherever it is that they summer and a weird pang of jealousy followed. It took a lot of self-control not to ask him about it. Bringing her up as if I didn’t know her would make my deception feel even more appalling. I resisted the urge. He had to run afterward but asked to see me again.

  “I’m showing North by Northwest in class this week. You should come.”

  I responded with a quizzical look; I didn’t know what North by Northwest had to do with anything.

  “They spoke about it on our Grand Central tour, remember? Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint?” I didn’t, but his enthusiasm was catching and also quite adorable.

  I smiled. “Enough said.”

  *

  That’s how I found myself a couple of days later in a classroom for the first time in twenty years. It was fun—it made me feel like a college student again, when everything was ahead of me, no broken marriage behind me. John gave a brief introduction, then darkened the room, and as the opening credits started, he made his way up to where I was sitting and sat down right next to me. “Glad you could make it,” he whispered before settling down in his seat. I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to concentrate, sitting in the dark like this with John, but the movie sucked me right in. After it was over he mixed a few questions about Grand Central into his lecture—things we had learned on our tour. Each time, his eyes found mine, coaxing me to answer. And when I did, I felt such a strong connection to him, two people in a sea of strangers with a secret.

  “Which other Hitchcock film used both Grand Central and Penn Station?”

  “Spellbound!” I answered, barely waiting for him to call on me.

  I was so eager that a couple of students in the row ahead turned around to look at me, as though wondering what I was doing there. And when I saw their faces, I realized that I didn’t know what I was doing there myself. I shouldn’t have come. I was falling for a married man to whom I was being completely dishonest, and who’d repeatedly talked about his commitment to his (lying, cheating) wife. I decided I would not stick around for coffee after class, as I had promised, and vowed never to see him again.

  But two Sundays later I broke my vow. It was my weekend off, and damn if I wasn’t again sitting in my office following John Westmont’s whereabouts on my computer. Okay, if I’m totally honest, I’d checked in on him nearly every day since I had sworn I wouldn’t, but on the tracking device—I didn’t and wouldn’t go so far as to retrieve his e-mails from my junk folder. Obeying that one rule left me feeling less out of control. Still, he had become an obsession. More like an addiction. John Westmont was my heroin. Our few encounters had left me hooked and wanting more.

  That day he was walking the High Line. I know, you’re probably thinking this guy is really into landmarks, but I can tell you this is the only remotely touristy thing he had done over those past two weeks. Most nights he was home at his Fifth Avenue apartment, which by the way is so palatial
it covers two locations on the tracking device. It’s hard to imagine such a down-to-earth guy coming from such affluence. Most of his days were spent in or around Columbia University. Last Sunday he went to Madison Square Garden, for the Knicks game, I assume. Thursday he attended a conference at the Paley Center for Media, and this past Wednesday he saw the afternoon movie at the Paris Theatre. It took every bit of self-control I could summon not to show up in that balcony and casually sit next to him. I daydreamed about what I would say. Will you quit following me! Or Not you again! How he would offer me some of his popcorn and how my hand would brush against his when we inevitably reached into the bucket at the same time. Within minutes of reimagining the missed popcorn scenario I found myself on the street hailing a cab, like the junkie I am.

  A few years back the city reinvented the High Line, taking the abandoned elevated freight rail line and landscaping it, turning it into a long narrow stretch of park along the West Side of Manhattan. It’s a pretty great addition. The little green dot on my computer indicated that John had started at the 34th Street entrance and was heading downtown; therefore I would start in the meatpacking district at the Gansevoort Street entrance and head up. Eventually, if we both continued on our course, we would bump right into each other. If not, it was beautiful out, and a good walk and fresh air never hurt anyone. Or so I thought.

  About ten blocks in, I caught a glimpse of him. It made my heart gasp a bit. I wished I didn’t feel this way about this man I barely knew whom it could be a career-derailing disaster to have a relationship with. He was a good-looking guy in an everyday way. He looked like Gary Cooper or Greg Kinnear. He was sweet, very sweet and old-fashioned, which I loved. He was smart and very thoughtful. All those things are great—but as I watched him order ice cream from a vendor, I began to wonder whether I really liked him or just wanted to stick it to his cheating wife, thus indirectly sticking it to my cheating husband. The vendor handed him a cone. Could that be what this is all about: some kind of vindictive, psychological infidelity transference? Am I just feeling for him because he is about to experience the same pain that I did? I should have seen a shrink when everyone suggested it three years ago. “Don’t hang on to this anger,” they said. “Talk to someone.”