“No, no, nothing like that,” she said. “I just find as time goes on that I have less patience for doing anything I don’t really want to do. Life is too short, as they say.”
I took a deep breath. There was still the issue of the TV show. Though I felt even more nervous asking her about this now than I had when I walked in.
“There is something else,” I said. “I know in the past you haven’t been keen on this sort of thing, but Kelsey wants to turn Younger into a TV series.”
“Kelsey?” she said. “Our Kelsey?”
“Yes, she’s a producer in LA now.”
“She talked to me about that at the party,” Mrs. Whitney said. “Why someone with her intelligence and talent would go into the television business is beyond me.”
“I guess that’s where the money is,” I said awkwardly. I was already bracing myself for the third and final no.
“She mentioned she’d worked on a Jane Austen adaptation,” Mrs. Whitney said. “Is that the kind of thing she has in mind for Younger?”
I would really have liked to have been able to say yes. But I could not lie to my idol.
“I think she’s thinking of something more like a…” I was trying to think of another word for this but could not. “… situation comedy?”
Mrs. Whitney astonished me by breaking into applause.
“Would that be a popular show?” she asked eagerly. “The kind of show that could sell a lot of books?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
“Then I’m all for it,” said Mrs. Whitney. “Tell her the answer is yes.”
I was so relieved. I told Mrs. Whitney I’d been afraid she wouldn’t want to do the show. “Why on earth not?” she said.
“I thought you’d be worried it might sully your literary reputation?” I ventured. “Undermine how people would think of Empirical’s books in the future?”
“The future?” Mrs. Whitney said. “We can’t control the future. All we have is now.”
* * *
I didn’t even wait until I was out on the street to text Kelsey: Mrs. W said yes!
Kelsey responded immediately with enough thumbs up and hands clapping to fill my screen.
five
Josh invited me to meet at his office at five on Thursday.
Show you around, he texted. Catch up.
Being a mature, sensible person who was certainly capable of having a friendly relationship with her ex, I agreed.
It was a good thing we didn’t meet until five, because it took me all afternoon to get dressed. After never once wearing leather pants in my entire life, I now seemed to find them suitable for every occasion. I blow-dried my hair and put lipstick on, then wiped it off three times. Looking effortlessly hot took a lot more effort than it used to.
The problem with Josh was that he actually did look effortlessly hot. He was wearing an old tee shirt I’d personally slept with my nose pressed against, and the loose jeans that perennially looked as if they were about to slip off his slim hips. He also had on his studious, horn-rimmed James Dean glasses, which made him look the way they made James Dean look: even more heartbreakingly handsome than usual.
I reached out my hand to shake his.
“Come here,” he said, opening his arms. I walked into them like a zombie bride.
He felt so good, he looked so good, I wanted him like a chocolate chip cookie at the end of a long diet, and as with the cookie, I also knew that having him would be a huge mistake. Slippery slope.
Plus, I didn’t want him! I didn’t in theory and I didn’t even standing there in his arms. But I was craving him, and I knew being with him would feel so good. Did I want him because I was lonely, because I was angry, because I wanted to prove I could take him away from his young girlfriend? Yes, probably all of the above.
As he showed me around the office, I tried to focus on the huge arched windows that had been restored and on the specially polished concrete floors, but all I could really think about was how I wanted two very different relationships with the same person at the same time. I wanted, like some mythical villainess, to throw him down on the floor and have my way with him, then discard him to the fires of hell. But I also wanted to reclaim the easy camaraderie of old friends happy to be back in touch.
“So what do you think?” he said.
I nearly bumped into him. He stood there with a large goofy grin on his face.
“It’s… fantastic,” I said, hoping that was a reasonable response to whatever the hell he was talking about. “I’m just not sure I understand what exactly you do.”
Josh had traded tattoo artistry for digital startups when we were still together, but none of his businesses had ever made any sense to me.
To my relief, he laughed. I loved his laugh.
“We put all your information in your own hands,” he said. “Your data is out there, people are trading it, making money from it, but if anyone should be able to license it for profit, it’s you.”
I got a shiver. It was Etsy for the soul!
“You are going to be so fucking rich,” I said.
I wanted to marry him.
I wanted to punch him.
“Right now we’re testing a free model, like Unsplash,” he said, as if I should know what that meant. “We’ll give people free access to their information, if they let us use it to hyper-target advertising on our own site. Later we’ll introduce a paid model where you can track what’s happening with your data in real time, get alerts when new information about you is posted or accessed, and even auction your data to multiple bidders.”
“How much would somebody pay for the data of a lonely middle-aged woman with a thing for younger guys?” I joked.
Could somebody please just laser me unconscious?
“Uh, that could go for a lot,” he said, his cheeks tingeing pink. “Do you want to go up on the roof?”
Did a starving woman want a chocolate chip cookie?
The roof had a proper deck, with views of the harbor and the green glint of the Statue of Liberty peeking from the side of one of the new skyscrapers. There was also a mini fridge and a self-service bar and modern sofas angled to catch the setting sun.
Josh got out a bottle of champagne and approached the sofa, holding two champagne flutes. Holy shit, what was happening?
“I wanted to tell you how much I loved the book,” he said.
“Oh.” I felt relieved, and a little bit deflated. “So you were okay with the Josh character?”
Josh had made me promise, back when I first started writing, that if I ever wrote about him, I’d use his real name and tell the whole truth.
“Everything about me was fine,” he said. He handed me the flutes and began wrestling with the champagne cork. As it released with a soft pop, he said, “But there were some things in there I didn’t know about you.”
We’d gotten back together after our first breakup and lived together for two years. We’d planned to get married. I thought he’d known everything about me.
“Like what?” I said.
He filled both glasses, then set down the bottle and took one of the glasses for himself. I felt his pinky brush my hand.
“I had no idea you felt so terrible about lying to me,” he said, “or how much it hurt you to break up with me.”
“Come on,” I said. “You knew that.”
“I thought I was the only one who was hurting,” he said, his long fingers nervously twirling his glass, though he did not take a sip. “Maybe you were more stoic with me then, acting kind of like the grown-up not wanting to upset the kid by being upset. And maybe I was too young and dumb to see.”
He set down his glass and reached for my hand. “I thought maybe the ending of the book, with him in Tokyo and her in New York thinking about each other, was a message to me.”
“Um, no,” I said. Though now that he mentioned it, maybe?
“Last time we saw each other after being apart a long time, we fell back in love,” he said.
“So I thought maybe you were trying to tell me that you wanted us to see if that could happen again.”
He was still holding my hand and gazing lovingly at my face.
“Uh, no,” I said, snatching my hand away. Right?
“Then you invited me to your party,” he said.
“I thought it was time we were friendly.”
“That’s what you said last time. And half an hour later, we were tearing each other’s clothes off.”
I admit, I did want to tear his clothes off. But I also knew having sex with him could make me fall in love with him again, whether I thought it was a good idea or not. It was only by staying on this side of sex, well on this side of sex, that I had any hope of turning my fate around.
I’d only really loved one man in my entire life, and that was Josh. Oh, maybe I’d loved my husband back at the beginning of our relationship, but I was happier with Josh than I’d ever been with David. But Josh and I could never truly be happy together again. Therefore I had to make sure not to fall in love with him, which meant I should not have sex with him, which meant I should not be lounging on his private rooftop, drinking champagne.
I drained my glass. He still had not taken one swallow.
“I can’t be the reason somebody doesn’t have kids, Josh,” I said.
I confess: I had rehearsed that line alone in the Maine cabin many times.
“I didn’t just want kids! I wanted them with you!”
“And I didn’t want them at all. You knew that. Did you think you were going to change my mind?”
“I thought we’d discuss it, and if you still felt that way, we’d go on, happy as before.”
“But how could we be happy,” I said, “with that between us?”
“I could have been happy,” he said.
I wanted to believe that. I suppose I’d wanted to believe that all along, when I’d known deep down that the issue of children must be lurking somewhere for him and that, however strenuously he denied it, it would raise its head at some point and bite me.
He moved closer to me. Put his arms around me. And then he kissed me.
It felt so good, like falling into your own bed after being on the road for months, like turning your face to the sun after a long winter in a cold house. Did I really need to leave the past behind in order to move into the future?
But no, no. Even if getting back together with Josh was what I wanted, which it wasn’t (it wasn’t!), doing it this way made me feel really dirty, and not in a good way.
“Josh, aren’t you engaged?”
“Things aren’t great between me and Zen,” he mumbled.
That did not make me feel better. I had never seen Josh as a player. But if he could do it to her, couldn’t he do it to me? I’d been cheated on once, by my ex-husband, and that had been devastating. It felt cosmically wrong to do that to somebody else.
“I can’t get in the middle of that,” I said.
He edged closer. “You were here first,” he said, trying to slip his arms back around me.
I pushed him off and stepped back. “Stop!” I said. “You’ve got to figure out your relationship with Zen before you try to start anything between us.”
“If I break up with Zen, are you going to be there waiting?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Josh,” I said. “It’s like with having kids. You’ve got to resolve this for yourself first, and then we’ll see where I am.”
* * *
“How was it seeing Josh?” Maggie asked.
Everybody who lived at Maggie’s besides Maggie—Frankie, the kids, the nannies—had gone to bed. It was just the two of us face-to-face on the big carved-wood Indian sofas, each lounging against our personal pile of pillows. There was no place on earth I felt more comfortable.
I wanted to say it was fine, the way I’d been telling myself it would be fine, but I couldn’t lie, not to Maggie.
“It was really confusing,” I confessed. “I’m so attracted to him, but at the same time I don’t want to get back together with him. So the whole time I was torn between wanting to jump into his arms and run away screaming.”
“What do you think that’s about?” Maggie asked me.
“Part of it is just that he looks so damn good. The older he gets, the handsomer he looks.”
“When does that stop happening for men?” Maggie asked.
“Their eighties?” I ventured with a smirk.
“Whereas women are supposed to peak in their midtwenties and then go steadily downhill for the next sixty years.”
“I definitely cannot pass for twenty-six anymore,” I told Maggie.
“Oh, boo hoo. Poor baby only got to be in her twenties for two decades. Time to grow up, sweetie.”
“I don’t know if I even want to have a birthday party this year,” I told Maggie.
“We have to have one, it’s our centennial!”
Starting when we were eight and talked our mothers into throwing us a joint Sweet 16 party, Maggie and I had always celebrated our birthdays together. At fifteen, we wore tight black cocktail dresses and red lipstick to celebrate our thirtieth. When we were in college, we turned forty in our dorm room, dressed in vintage negligees and drinking chilled martinis. And we cheered ourselves up about really turning forty by hosting an eightieth while wearing gray wigs and adult diapers. That didn’t seem so funny, now that we were about to turn a collective 100.
“Aren’t you freaked out about turning fifty?” I asked her.
I certainly was. I may not have been faking my age anymore, but I was still living like a twenty-six-year-old, with no home, little savings, few responsibilities, and even less security. And a lot more fear than I’d had five years ago that I’d never be able to find those things.
“To be honest,” said Maggie, “I’m happier than I’ve ever been. My career is more satisfying and successful, I’m having the best sex of my entire life, and I think I look better than I’ve ever looked—or at least I feel better about how I look.”
“Well sure, I can see how you’d feel good about getting older,” I said. “You’re married to a wonderful person; your kids are little enough to adore you; you’ve got a booming career; plenty of money; a huge, beautiful home…”
“You could be married; you could have cute little kids,” Maggie said. “You could be living in a big loft; you could be writing full-time and still have plenty of money.”
“That’s not true,” I said, hearing the edge in my voice. “How could I have all those things?”
“You could have married Josh,” Maggie said.
I took a deep breath and fell back hard against the pillows. Right: Marry Josh and go back to square one, having babies and feeling torn about how I was spending every minute of every day for the next few decades. Or marry Josh and make him sacrifice one of the deepest pleasures of life.
“I didn’t want to marry Josh,” I finally said.
“Exactly,” said Maggie, as if that explained everything. “It was your choice, just like it was your choice to go to Maine and your choice to write a novel about being younger, and now it’s your choice to be back in New York doing, I hope, exactly what you want to do.”
“You make it sound like you choose everything that happens to you,” I said, making no effort to hide my annoyance. “Sometimes shit just happens.”
Maggie leaned eagerly forward and interrupted me. “Sure it does, but at this point you can’t just let shit happen, you’ve got to make it happen. It’s not about what you have or what you do, but whether you love your life. So, Liza, are you doing everything you can to live the life you want? And if you’re not, when are you going to start?”
six
Kelsey FaceTimed me a few nights later when the kids were still running around out in Maggie’s loft, but I was already under the covers in my narrow bed in my tiny room, communing with my dear laptop.
I had just googled Should you sleep with your ex? It
might not be such a bad idea, said most of the results on the first page. Now I was looking for something that would tell me why I shouldn’t do it.
“I’ve got awesome news!” Kelsey sang.
She was walking, maybe on a beach; the camera was jerking around too much to tell for sure. Her face was in shadow, backlit by the still-bright sun, hanging low in the sky behind her. I caught flashes of palm trees.
“Tell me!” I said, already excited.
“I sold the show!”
“What?” I said, my voice rising, my heartbeat quickening. “What happened?”
“Remember Stella Power?” she said.
The name rang a bright, sparkly bell, but one that was very far away.
“Was she in that teenage movie?”
“That thriller, back in the nineties, with the guy who later played James Bond.”
“Oh, right.” I could picture her now, as she had looked in the airbrushed poster that my brother and many other teenage boys in America had hung on their walls. A few years younger than me, she was the most famous young woman in America for a few minutes, with her huge, wavy golden hair and her long-legged, big-boobed Barbie body. She and her handsome costar boyfriend were pictured together at the Oscars, in London, on the beach in Mexico.
“Didn’t they date?”
“Back in the day. But now she’s married to Barry Whipple.”
“Barry Whipple?”
“The head of Whipple Studios! He’s one of the most powerful men in Hollywood.”
I guess I should have known that. There was a little edge to Kelsey’s voice, as if she was annoyed at me for not knowing who Barry Whipple was. But Hollywood was a world to me as mysterious as British politics or Paris fashion.
“Wow. Okay,” I said.
“They’ve been married for, like, ever, and they have something like six children.”
“Six children!”
“Some adopted, some biological, whatever. And they have this incredible compound in Malibu, which is where I just was, when Stella told me she wants to make Younger.”
“Wow, so, what does that mean?”
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