After the Reunion

by Rona Jaffe

  “I’ve decided it would be just as boring to be married to a famous man as to some jerk,” Kit said. “Except the celebrity might give better parties.”

  “You’d have to give the parties,” Emma said. “The wife entertains. The wife brings the Porthault pillowcases on location to put on the drool-stained pillows in the hotel.”

  “You still have the same disgusting turn of phrase,” Kit said affectionately.

  “I have to be observant. It’s my job.”

  “Like noticing Tip’s gun,” Kit said. “There must be a million things in that room and you zeroed right in on it.”

  “My talent,” Emma said calmly.

  “Did I ever tell you that my father chased my mother out of the house with a loaded gun?”

  “My God,” Emma said. “And you’re still not scared?”

  “What’s there to be scared of? He’s not my father and I’m not my mother.”

  On the other hand, she thought, it gave rise to a lot of interesting possibilities.…

  When Tip woke up he insisted on taking her and Emma to dinner, at a Mexican restaurant down by the Marina. They drank margaritas, hers and Emma’s without salt because they didn’t want to get bloated. Tip said they were ruining the drink by having it that way. What a civilian, Kit thought, irritated. He really doesn’t understand anything about me. Everything he said or did was beginning to annoy her lately. It was her usual reaction to feeling trapped.

  After dinner Emma had to go right home because she had to get up early. Kit and Tip went back to her house and had sex. That, at least, was still superior.

  “You were strange tonight,” he said afterward.

  “Strange when?”

  “At dinner.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Were you mad at me or something?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you mind that I invited your friend to come along on our one night alone?”

  “Emma?” she said incredulously. “Why should I be mad? She’s my only friend.”

  “I’m your friend,” Tip said, hurt.

  “That’s like apples and oranges,” Kit said distantly. She wished he would go away.

  “I start working days next week,” he said. “Then we’ll have nights together. Except the three nights I’ll have class, but then I come home early.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll be studying my law books, you’ll be preparing your scene for the next day, it’ll be nice. I’ll take care of you.”

  You make me sound like a geriatric case, she thought, but said nothing. She wanted to scream.

  The next day she made a couple of phone calls, surfacing for air. She found a party. When Tip was at work Kit went out, testing her old social life and finding it surprisingly exhilarating after all these months as a hermit. At first, walking into the beautiful house where the party was being held, she had the fear that she might run into her father again. But he wasn’t there. She decided that if she ever did catch him again she would let him see her, and then he would be so intimidated that he would be the one who had to lay low. She wasn’t going to allow him to ruin her fun.

  She saw Seth from class standing by the bar, holding a glass of something nonalcoholic and looking over the women. He was a combination of gorgeous and adorable, and incorrigibly priapic. Kit thought she was probably the only girl she knew who had continued to say no to him so far, but she was saving him for a rainy day. This was the rainy day.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Kit …” He put his arm around her, murmured her name, nuzzled her hair, the way anybody else would have shaken hands.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “I want to go home with you,” he murmured, giving her a winsome look. Sometimes she wondered if he knew how goofy he was and did it on purpose, acting outrageous when other people only felt that way and tried to cover it up with a semblance of prefuck conversation.

  “Dance with me,” she said, “and maybe I’ll say yes.”

  They danced, she had a glass of white wine, and he had his hands all over her. He had a nice touch, he was cuddly, and the girls from class said he was a terrific lay. It would be easy to find yourself aroused by him, she thought, and then allowed herself to be.

  “I just want to lick you all over,” he said in a little-boy voice. “Please …”

  “Okay,” Kit said.

  She gave him her address and he followed her in his car. At her house he put on some soft music, lit some candles. Then he took her clothes off, just like people were always doing in books and movies but never in real life, or at least not in her experience, which had been considerable. Then they went into the bedroom and he did indeed lick her all over, very slowly and patiently, with obvious enjoyment, until Kit decided she should have said yes to a session with him a long time ago. Then he did a lot of other things which she enjoyed just as much.

  After her fourth orgasm she was beginning to get a little sore. She glanced at the clock on the bedside table and figured Tip would be home in three hours. “How about we get some sleep?” she said.

  “Sleep?”

  She wondered if he was one of those guys who sneaked out in the middle of the night when you were sleeping. Nobody ever said he was; they said he was absolutely terrific. Guys who sneaked out were not terrific; they were total shits, and she had only met one of them and she thought he was probably bisexual. “Just for a while,” she said.

  He rolled over and put his arms and legs around her until she nearly disappeared. “Can you fall asleep like this?” he asked. “I want to hold you.”

  “I’ll try.”

  He was nibbling gently on her ear, but Kit was so tired she drifted right off to sleep. She slept lightly but pleasantly, dreaming she was sailing away in a balloon.

  She woke to the sound of Tip’s car pulling up, and then she heard the front door opening and closing quietly. The bedroom was softly golden from the morning sun seeping through the thick tan linen shades. Seth was still asleep and so was her arm. She curled up into a little ball and waited. She was excited, but she was not afraid. Her heart was pounding the way it did just before the camera started rolling. She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep.

  She opened her eyes and saw Tip standing in the doorway, still in his uniform; with his gun in its holster, big, black, and phallic. She didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything either, just stood there looking at her with an expression on his face she couldn’t read. He glanced at Seth and then looked away again at her, as if her bed partner were completely beneath contempt but she was the one with whom he was concerned.

  Then Seth woke up and turned dead white. The poor jerk thought this was some kind of a raid. He sort of gurgled.

  Then Tip just turned around without a word and walked out of the room and out of the house.

  And, it turned out later that day, out of her life. He came back when he knew she was at her yoga class (there was a hang-up on her answering machine and she knew it was him) and took all his clothes and stuff. He left her a note on the kitchen table. All it said was: You don’t want to be happy.

  Amateur psychiatrist, what did he know? She was rid of him and his dependency and demands and she felt perfectly fine. It was just what she wanted.

  It was only later that night, when she noticed her teddy bear propped up on the bedroom chair, that she got a lump in her throat. It was sad that things changed. She didn’t know what to do about it. She hid the teddy bear in the back of the closet and went out to meet Emma and a couple of guys who were friends of hers on the picture for dinner.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was nearly summer in New York, and Annabel found herself counting her blessings; not because she was happy but because it was the only way she could keep herself from becoming despondent. She felt she had come to a turning point in her life, as she had often before, but this time there was no action she could take. She could only wait.

  Now it was Chris who was going to
be starting an adventure, when the sales conference came up in late June. Emma was working, loving it, learning. Annabel saw her own summer looming ahead of her; planned, busy … lonely. In July she would start her summer sale. Then she would go to Europe for the collections. She could spend Sundays in the country with Chris and Alexander whenever she wanted to, and pretend with them that they had an ideal marriage. Other people might envy her for being beautiful and free, able to travel, to earn her own living, make her own choices. She wondered if they knew how limited her choices really were.

  The young girls came into the boutique to splurge on “something sexy” to wear for their summer weekends in the Hamptons, where they shared communal rented houses and looked for boyfriends who might last all during the week. The wives came in, many of them Annabel’s age, looking for something new to wear to the summer parties they would go to with their husbands, also in the country or at the beach, also on weekends. New York was a different city in the summer; everyone who could afford to escaped. The streets were filled with tourists in shorts, and the poor. Annabel thought of closing on Saturdays in August, but then she would have nothing to do. She didn’t want to become a fixture at Chris’s.

  She had never had a lot of friends. She’d always had Chris, and then Emma, and Max, of course. There had always been young lovers. There were the girls in the store to keep her laughing during the day, but Maria was married and Pamela was living with a man now, a hairdresser who sent her to work every week looking like somebody else. Max was gone. Emma was away, eagerly pursuing her own life. Chris had always been busy. There were no more young lovers. Annabel wasn’t sure she wanted another one. Wasn’t it enough to have a job and one best friend? Did other people have more?

  Yes they did: they had families.

  People with families, who often envied her independence, did not have long empty evenings. Neither did those young girls who came into the boutique for a dress some man would want to charm off them. Annabel knew it was possible for her to fill every evening with social events if she wanted to—she knew a lot of people; a lot of gay men, a lot of divorced and single women, and they went everywhere, enjoying the things the city had to offer. Maybe they didn’t want to stay home alone either.

  Sometimes she did go to publicity parties, or to dinner with someone she saw twice a year, but she couldn’t see it becoming her life. When she had been at Radcliffe she had gone to parties and dances to flirt and find romance, then when she was married she went to the country club because that was what everyone did, and then when she got divorced and moved to New York she lived every day as if it were an adventure, the way Emma did now. She had changed. She had finally become that Serious Person she had half-jokingly threatened Emma she would become, and although it had been the disaster she had predicted, she didn’t know what else to be.

  “I wish you would meet a divine man,” Emma said on the phone.

  “So do I,” Annabel said, pretending to be cheerful.

  “You always have a man whenever you want one,” Chris said when they were alone together.

  “Maybe I don’t want one,” Annabel said lightly.

  All she knew was that for the first time she wanted one her age. She wondered what kind of older man she would like. He would have to be attractive and sexy, bright and interesting. She saw dozens of men walking briskly up Madison Avenue after their work day, getting out of taxis, going into large apartment buildings and expensive townhouses. She saw them when she closed the shop for the night, and when she walked home. Some were well dressed, attractive, in good shape, the right age. All had the purposeful look of a man who has somewhere he wants to go. They were going home to their families.

  The men were her age, but unless they had married their college sweetheart their women were mostly younger. She saw those women with their husbands, and their children, and the women were always much younger. Younger than their husbands, younger than she was. Annabel wondered if they were second wives.

  She would be too old to be the second wife for a man her age. But who wanted a man her age who had never been married? A man could marry almost anybody. A nice-looking, successful man of forty-seven who was still a bachelor was always suspect. But if he was divorced after giving some woman a horrible life, society didn’t seem to mind. Her ex-husband had remarried a long time ago.

  Annabel supposed she had become fixated on much younger men after her bad experience with Bill Wood, and her rotten marriage. She had been afraid of permanence, or even the promise of it, because there was no such thing, and when you believed in it you got hurt. Even when you didn’t believe in it you got hurt.

  The evenings were longer and lonelier in the summer because it stayed light so long. In the winter you could hide at home and feel snug, cook something good, watch television. In the summer she was filled with an almost crazed nervous energy. So although she hated athletics, she began working out at a gym three evenings a week. At least it made her tired, and it was supposed to be virtuous.

  And even so, walking up Madison Avenue alone with her exercise bag in her hand, she still saw all those men going home. Some of them had been to their own gyms, some had been at business drinks, or perhaps out cheating on their wives; but they all had one thing in common: now they were going home to their lives.

  Chapter Twenty

  Chris, unpacking in her hotel room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, could not believe it had been only a year since the last sales conference of the Cameron magazines, the one where she had fled. It seemed an eternity, so much had happened to her. She looked around her room with the half-nervous, half-happy anticipation of a virgin bride. It was one of the special corner rooms in the “old wing,” which was actually the new wing now since it had been redecorated with central air conditioning, marble bathrooms, and flowered fabric on the walls. Her main view was of Rodeo Drive with its expensive shops, and the mountains beyond, purplish in the smoggy haze. She had a dressing room with a second telephone in it, and in the bedroom there was a king-size bed, an armoire with a television set and radio hiding inside, some other furniture, a small refrigerator, and a half bottle of champagne in a cooler with two glasses, and a basket of fruit, both sent by the management.

  The sales conference was to be held downtown, a half-hour’s drive away, and everyone could stay wherever they wished. People who wanted to play tennis or be seen at the Polo Lounge stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel; for romantic privacy it was the Bel-Air; if you were a dedicated New Yorker who wanted to be able to walk around in what passed for a city you stayed at the Beverly Wilshire; and if you wanted to fall out of bed and get right to the meetings you could stay downtown in the new Bonaventure. Chris had asked Cameron what he recommended, and he said he liked to stay at the Wilshire, so she said she would too.

  How much more obvious could she get? And yet, she told herself, he knew Los Angeles and she did not; it was a normal question. She hoped he would know she was being devious … she hoped he wouldn’t. She looked at the champagne and decided to save it for him, just in case …

  She had finished unpacking and had taken a shower when the phone rang. “Chris? Bill Cameron.”

  Instant replay.

  “I know,” she said, smiling.

  “I’m taking a few people for an early dinner at Chasen’s tonight at seven o’clock, and I wondered if you’d like to join us.”

  “I’d love to,” she said.

  Instant replay continues. But this time maybe a different team would win.

  Again, Cameron had invited four other people, and again he seated Chris next to him. No one could read her mind. They were relaxed and jolly. She was in a fog. The restaurant was all wood paneling and pink and glowing, there were celebrities, it was very expensive. Cameron had brought his guests there in a limousine. He said his magazines had done so well that he was going to start a new one, called Fashion and Entertainment West, and that he would talk more about it at the meeting tomorrow. He seemed so excited and pleased, s
o confident, so totally in control. Chris found it terribly attractive. It had been a long time since she had seen him with a group of people, taking over and leading them in that charming, interested way of his.

  She ordered dry broiled fish because she was still on her diet, and then she couldn’t eat it anyway because of all the emotions swirling around inside her.

  “Jet lag?” Cameron said kindly, noticing.

  “I guess so,” she lied.

  “We’ll make it an early evening. Everybody’s tired.”

  “I’m not,” she said bravely.

  “You will be. Trust me.”

  Yes she did, she trusted him. If this was to be an affair, she would let him orchestrate it. He had said he never gave up, and that it meant whatever she wanted it to; all she had to do now was indicate that she was ready.

  After dinner he took them all back to the hotel in the limousine. Everyone was feeling the three-hour time change, and tomorrow the meetings started at nine o’clock. Their rooms were on different floors (she knew Cameron had a suite), and he got off the elevator before her. “Goodnight,” he said cheerfully to everyone who was left. One flight below me, Chris thought. Easy to use the stairs. But she knew it wouldn’t be tonight.

  She had no messages, and it was too late to call New York. She didn’t want to anyway, in case Alexander had decided to stay over at James’s apartment. If he had, she didn’t want to know. A maid had turned down the bed and laid a breakfast menu on the pillow. She had also closed the drapes. Chris opened them again so she could see her view. Twinkling lights, mountains, a place far away from New York. A place where her adventure might begin. She wondered if Cameron would call. No, he wouldn’t, not tonight, but she hoped he was thinking about her. She got into bed and suddenly realized how exhausted she was. She was asleep in an instant, and her last thought was that he had been right as usual.