Goodbye To All That

by Judith Arnold

  She’d already told Jill she would be taking the eight a.m. bus and promised to call when it was about fifteen minutes away from the terminal so whoever was going to pick her up could time the short drive. She probably should have phoned Jill back and informed her of the change in transportation plans, but she hadn’t. She’d been pissed off by Jill’s imperiousness. So she and Luc would show up unannounced at Jill’s front door, and Jill would deal with it. Jill was a whiz when it came to dealing with things.

  Melissa and Luc had packed overnight bags, figuring they’d spend Saturday night in Massachusetts and drive home Sunday. If Jill didn’t want to put them up at her house—and Melissa could respect that; Abbie was twelve years old, and Jill might not want her spending the night under the same roof as an aunt engaging in premarital sex—then they could stay at Doug’s house. It had a zillion rooms, and the twins were too young to care who stayed in which room with whom.

  Or, if necessary, she and Luc could stay at her parents’ house. They hadn’t turned her bedroom into a study or a sewing room or a second den. Melissa’s childhood bedroom remained intact, the décor unchanged from the day she’d left for Brown University thirteen years ago. French provincial furniture, pink Swiss-dot curtains, rose-hued carpeting, a canopy bed—the room was a shrine to girlie-girl taste. One of these days Melissa would drop by and reclaim her stuffed animals. For her future children, of course, not for herself.

  If worse came to worst, she and Luc would get a room at a motel for the night. A bed-and-breakfast would be more romantic, but the autumn leaf season was in full swing, and most of the B-and-B’s in New England had been booked a year ago. She consoled herself with the thought that a motel would be cheaper. She really had to save money if she was serious about buying an apartment.

  Traffic was heavy on the Cross-Bronx—as if that was anything new. Cars, cabs, vans and eighteen-wheelers inched along, brake lights flashing like electrified rubies. Luc fiddled with the radio dial, gliding from one burst of static to the next. Apparently the radio didn’t work any better than the CD player. Melissa could attempt a conversation with him, but he didn’t look interested in chatting, so she focused instead on the folder of print-outs in her lap, each page describing a condo or co-op for sale. Kathy, the broker she was working with, had faxed them to her yesterday.

  One bedroom or two?

  Assuming she did wind up having children . . . and she really hoped she would in the not too distant future. She was already thirty-one years old and didn’t want to be one of those forty-something moms contending with colic and hot flashes at the same time. Plus, she wasn’t sure she should raise her offspring in the city. City-bred kids were so hard, so tough, so jaded, and you had to pay a fortune in tuition for a decent private school. So investing in an apartment big enough to include a nursery seemed pointless. Closets were far more practical.

  Still, it bothered Melissa that a one-bedroom apartment could cost as much as a two-bedroom. She compared two of the units Kathy had recommended, holding their sheets side by side on her knees. Both apartments were located in buildings in the same borderline neighborhood—not quite the Flatiron District, not quite Grammercy Park, not quite the northern edge of Greenwich Village. Closets were important, but did two huge closets equal one bedroom? And bottom line, did she want to spend close to seven figures for an apartment that wasn’t actually in a neighborhood?

  Setting those two pages aside, she lifted the next one from the pile and tried to read it as the paper trembled in her hand, picking up the car’s vibrations. Clinton—at least that was a real neighborhood, and nowadays Hell’s Kitchen, which overlapped with Clinton, was almost chic. Two bedrooms but tiny, tiny, tiny, if Kathy’s notes about the square footage were accurate. The second bedroom could easily pass for a walk-in closet. Melissa could move an armoire in front of the window. No one would have to know it was an actual room.

  She was so damned tired of renting. And if she bought an apartment, it would give her an excuse to move out of her ugly, boxy Upper East Side studio apartment, which cost an alarming amount in rent even though it had so little closet space she’d had to buy a coat tree for her jackets and raincoats.

  She glanced over at Luc, who’d landed the dial on a station playing an overblown metal song she didn’t recognize, which, while awful, was an improvement over the static. He looked dashing in his sunglasses. Slightly bored, perhaps a little too highly buffed, but gorgeous enough to spark a tremor of excitement low in her belly, a response which made her realize that taking a motel room tonight would be a wise move. Even in Doug and Brooke’s enormous house, Melissa wasn’t sure she and Luc would have enough privacy for her to feel comfortable jumping his bones.

  She wondered what her family would think of him. She wondered if this was an optimal time to invest in real estate. She wondered if she’d be able to push through a settlement with the purse counterfeiter her client had brought a suit against before their trial date, which was ten days away. It was a stupid case; the counterfeiter didn’t have a prayer of winning. But he kept balking at a settlement because settling would mean shutting down his business, and as long as he could delay that fateful step he could continue making money selling made-in-China rip-offs of her client’s expensive bags from folding card tables on street corners. It was going to take a judge’s order to force him out of business, which meant it was going to take a trial.

  Ten days. Shit.

  Forget about it, Melissa ordered herself. Forget about everything: the city’s real estate market, the looming trial, the sour aroma of truck exhausts, the fact that we still haven’t reached Connecticut because the traffic is moving so slowly. What the hell were so many long-haul truckers doing on the highway on a Saturday morning, anyway? Didn’t they get weekends off? The rig in front of them had license plates from Tennessee, West Virginia and Arkansas. She’d bet the driver was chewing tobacco and listening to a CD of some nasal-voiced singer with two first names.

  “What time do you think we’ll get there?” Luc asked.

  “If the traffic ever thins out, we might be able to do it in three and a half hours.”

  Luc made a face. Even pouting, he was adorable. He wore a black T-shirt that fit him just loosely enough not to be obscene, jeans faded to powder blue, a slate-gray blazer and tooled cowboy boots with silver tipping their toes. His black hair was short but well styled, his cheeks darkened by a stubble he’d trimmed to just the right length using a hair clipper. Melissa had always assumed guys got that kind of stubble by not shaving for a day. She hadn’t known they could actually create a day-old stubble with a grooming tool.

  She’d learned so much from Luc. She’d learned the importance of mixing lowlights with highlights to give her hair dimension, and she’d learned about a fantastic serum that cost eighty dollars an ounce but kept her hair from frizzing like nothing else she’d ever tried, and she’d learned that she did, indeed, have a g-spot.

  “You sure my being there isn’t going to be a problem?” Luc called over to her.

  “They’ll love you,” she said, hoping that uttering those words with conviction made them true. She hadn’t told anyone in her family about Luc, not because her social life wasn’t their business but because she didn’t want their input. She’d learned that if she mentioned she was seeing someone, they all inputted like yentas on meth.

  She’d met him in August when she’d splurged on a cut and color at Nouvelle Salon and Spa. Her friend Emily had recommended the place, and Emily’s hair always looked fabulous, so Melissa had thought, what the hell, it’s only money. Three hundred bucks of money, as it had turned out, but worth every penny. The stylist she’d been assigned to, a sexy guy with a sexy name—Luc, not Luke, because Lucas was spelled with a “c” and no “e,” as he’d explained to her once they’d reached that level of intimacy—and black hair and eyes the color of blue Curacao and a well-honed physique barely hidden by a dark T-shirt and jeans—much like the outfit he had on now, she realized—had whisked her
into a chair and asked what she’d like him to do for her. She’d stared at his reflection in the mirror as he hovered behind her, staring at her reflection. God, she’d thought, he’s gorgeous.

  “Make me a new woman,” she’d said.

  And he had.

  “So,” he said, inching Alan’s car close enough to the hillbilly rig for her to read the words fuck you which someone had rubbed into the layer of road dirt between the tail lights, “tell me about who’s going to be at this thing.”

  “My sister Jill, of course,” Melissa answered. “Our hostess. She’s very nice. Very calm and undemanding.” When she wasn’t busy bragging about how she was the only calm, undemanding member of the family. “You know how some people always make waves? She’s like oil on water. She calms the waves.” Even if she sometimes treated Melissa like a toddler. Actually, she also sometimes treated Doug, who was two years older than her, like a toddler.

  “Her hair could use some work,” she added, wondering if Luc might have an opportunity to assess Jill’s bland brown mop and come up with a few suggestions. A trim here, a snip there, move the part. Highlights. Lowlights. He could transform Jill from a dowdy housewife into a less dowdy housewife.

  And then Jill would love him. That would be one vote in favor.

  “Jill writes catalogue copy.”

  “Huh?”

  “The descriptive little blurbs that accompany the photos of clothing in catalogues. Someone has to write those things, and she’s that someone. She’s married to Gordon, who’s a high school English teacher,” Melissa continued, “and they have two children. Abbie’s twelve and Noah’s almost ten. Abbie’s bat mitzvah is coming up next spring. That’s kind of a big deal.”

  Would she and Luc would still be together next spring? Would she get to show up at the bat mitzvah with the most handsome man she’d ever dated hanging off her arm? If he accompanied her, she would have to buy a new dress for the occasion. She’d probably have to buy a new dress, anyway, but it would be fun to blame the extravagance on Luc.

  “How big a deal?” he asked. “Should I congratulate her or something?”

  It occurred to Melissa that he might not know what a bat mitzvah was, other than in the most general sense. He did all those bridal parties, sweeping into the Waldorf-Astoria or the Pierre to create magnificent coiffures for the bride and her attendants, but bat mitzvahs didn’t generally call for private sessions with a hair stylist. Frankly, she couldn’t imagine Abbie wanting anyone, professional or otherwise, messing with her hair. As far as Melissa could tell, Abbie considered winning a soccer game more important than looking beautiful.

  “No congratulations until after the bat mitzvah. I just thought I’d warn you—whenever the family gets together, that subject usually comes up. She’s the oldest grandchild, the first one. My parents are pretty excited about it.”

  “Okay.” Luc nodded.

  A jangle of clashing guitars blasted through the speakers, and Melissa turned down the radio’s volume. “Then there’s my brother Doug, who’s brilliant and arrogant. He does laser surgery on eyes. He has his own clinic and he’s mega-rich. A lot of people want perfect vision without glasses.”

  “I wouldn’t want to wear glasses,” Luc said. Of course he was wearing sunglasses, but that was different. Sunglasses you could hide behind. They were optional. Regular glasses were just plain dorky.

  Melissa knew this from personal experience; she’d replaced her glasses with contacts when she was sixteen. She’d love to have the corrective surgery done on her own myopic eyes, but it was expensive and she had to save for a down payment on a co-op or condo. She’d once asked Doug if he’d Lasik her eyes, figuring he’d give her a huge discount or maybe even do the job for free, but he’d said smart doctors never operated on their loved ones and he’d be happy to pass along the names of a few colleagues whose success rates he could vouch for. His colleagues would have charged her the usual fee, so she’d let the subject drop and tried not to resent him.

  He ought to do her eyes for her, though. He wasn’t that smart.

  “Doug is married to Brooke, who’s the sort of woman you’d expect to be married to a brilliant, arrogant doctor who earns tons of money.”

  “What does that mean?” Luc asked.

  Melissa shrugged. “When you meet her, you’ll know. She’s just . . . very polished. Polite and poised and kind of presumptuous. She takes things for granted.” Actually, she was probably like the majority of his clients at Nouvelle, the regulars who waltzed in every week and handed over hundreds of dollars to have him clip two or three wisps of hair when they were done with their facials and paraffin treatments.

  Fortunately, Luc didn’t subscribe to Doug’s theory about people not operating on their loved ones. Now that he and Melissa were a couple, he did her hair without charging her, although she had to pay for the coloring products and conditioners, which weren’t exactly cheap.

  “Doug and Brooke have twin daughters,” she went on. “Mackenzie and Madison. They’re six years old. No imminent bat mitzvahs for them, but let me tell you, once they reach the right age, nothing will be spared. Doug and Brooke’ll probably rent the entire Ritz-Carlton. Or maybe Symphony Hall. Or the U.S.S. Constitution. It will be an event, I promise you.”

  Luc nodded.

  “And then there are my parents. Ruth and Richard Bendel. They’re . . .” She hesitated. What could she say about her parents? They simply were. They loved her. They drove her crazy. They were strict. They were lenient. They could spend hours describing a ten-minute trip to the drug store. They thought rock and roll had peaked with the Beatles, or maybe Elton John, and had been on a long, sad decline since 1973.

  “They’re nice,” she finally said, then realized that was hardly adequate. “My father’s a cardiologist and my mother’s a housewife. They finish each other’s sentences. My mother knows when my dad wants her to pass him the salad dressing before he knows.”

  Luc said nothing. A couple of weeks ago, after they’d made loud, sweaty love at her apartment—they couldn’t do that at his apartment because Alan was there most of the time—she’d pestered him to tell her about his childhood. She’d figured she was entitled, after loud sweaty sex. Luc hadn’t been overly forthcoming, but he’d told her his parents had divorced when he was eight and his father had eventually moved to Las Vegas. Throughout his youth, Luc had visited his father every summer, and he’d seen shows featuring scantily clad dancers in rhinestone bras and feather headdresses and sneaked a few chips into the slot machines when the pit bosses weren’t watching. His mother had remarried and his step-father was “okay,” a word he’d said with a shrug, so Melissa wasn’t sure just how “okay” the guy was.

  In any case, Luc’s childhood clearly hadn’t fit the nuclear-family cliché like Melissa’s, with a nice house, a new car every few years and grandparents nearby. She and her siblings had all gone to the same high school, and all three of them had gone to college in New England. Now Doug and Jill both lived within ten miles of their parents’ house in the cozy suburbs west of Boston. To Melissa’s family, New York City was a foreign country, as alien as Las Vegas must have seemed to Luc the first time he’d visited his father there. “Yankees territory,” her father often muttered about Manhattan. The Bendels were, by birth and by blood, a Red Sox family.

  Melissa had moved to New York because she’d thought it would be more glamorous than Boston—which it was. The law firms were bigger there and the pay was higher, even if her paycheck magically disappeared every month, absorbed by rent, her MetroCard and the ridiculously high price of dirty martinis at marginally fashionable bars. Dinner out with friends? Bye-bye, eighty bucks. Tickets to a concert? Sayonara, a hundred. Even the museums cost too much money. And a woman needed clothes, for God’s sake. Especially if she was bucking for partner at a major law firm.

  But she probably would have moved to New York anyway, just to put a little distance between herself and her family. Just so she wouldn’t have them all n
osing into her business. Just so she could get away from a place where high school teachers used to tell her, “You’re smarter than your sister, but she was better behaved.”

  At last, they’d reached Connecticut. Melissa always expected something magical to happen when she crossed from one state to another. At the very least, she expected to see a heavy black line painted across the ground, denoting as clearly as a map where one state ended and the next began. Instead, most state borders were marked by a billboard not much more appealing than a highway exit sign saying, “Welcome to Whatever State,” with the governor’s name printed below. Sometimes the road’s pavement would change color at the state line, because God forbid New York’s highway budget should pay to resurface even an inch of Connecticut’s turf, and vice versa.

  Connecticut was progress, however. They were one state closer to their destination.

  She reopened the folder that had been resting in her lap. “What do you think makes more sense?” she asked. “A one-bedroom with lots of closets, or a two-bedroom that skimps on closets?”

  “Closets are good,” Luc answered.

  “If you were buying an apartment, you’d go for the one bedroom with lots of closets?”

  “If I were buying an apartment, I’d want a huge, gorgeous bathroom with lots of mirrors and primo lighting.”

  Of course he would. After all, a hair salon was really just a glorified bathroom with lots of mirrors and light, sculpted sinks, sleek counters and no visible toilets. She’d been so focused on the closet situation, she hadn’t really considered the bathrooms in the apartments Kathy had recommended. She’d be willing to bet that, despite their astronomical prices, the apartments wouldn’t have bathrooms that were huge and gorgeous.

  That thought depressed her. “Do you think the extra bedroom is a good idea?”

  “I don’t know. It’s up to you.” He shrugged. “I’m not buying any apartments in the near future. Not unless I hook up with a really rich chick.” He sent her a mischievous smile and added, “A sugar mommy.”