by Warren Adler
“What do you think would be a fairer settlement, Netta?”
“Five times at least. You cannot imagine what I have sacrificed for this man.”
“Can he handle that?” Gary asked.
“Yes.” She paused and gazed at each of them in turn. “You said come to you whenever I needed you. Well here I am.”
“This requires some thought, Netta,” Doris said.
“Yes, it does,” Gary said. Further discussion was obviously in order.
Netta narrowed her eyes and her complexion suddenly faded to dull beige.
“You’re kidding?” she said, turning to Doris. “You said anytime I needed you. Well I need you now. I thought you were my friends.”
“We are, Netta. We most certainly are,” Doris said. At that time Gary had decided in favor of Dimitri and he knew Doris would accede. Dimitri was a far bigger catch monetarily and socially. He was certainly worth the gamble.
“Take the money and run,” Gary said.
“Good advice,” Doris agreed.
“Settle for ten thousand dollars?”
Gary felt a sudden sense of panic. Beside him, Doris had turned ashen.
“Thousand?” Gary managed to say, his voice constricted.
“I wanted fifty. He could pay me in installments. Like twenty-five down and five a year. I would not have been completely satisfied, but at least it would be fair.”
Both Gary and Doris looked at her in horror. Thousands? The word hung in the air. Gary felt his stomach lurch.
“Is that your advice? Take peanuts?” Netta asked visibly astonished.
“He wasn’t in shipping?” Doris said, clearing her throat, barely able to talk.
Netta smiled and shrugged.
“In a way, I suppose. He was a maître d’ on a cruise ship. That’s how I met him. I was a waitress. I still am, in a very fine restaurant in Westchester. Who did you think he was, Onassis? God, are you people naïve! Okay, maybe he exaggerated. I’ll say this for him. He can charm the pants off anyone. Me, for starters. So we were a little bit theatrical. Actually, he never really lied, did he? So he didn’t say cruise shipping. Neither did I. You fussed over us so much. Tell you the truth, we thought you had become our true friends. Really true friends. That’s why I’m here.”
“I don’t believe this,” Doris muttered.
“I guess I came to the wrong place for help,” Netta said, glancing from face to face.
Gary had been too stunned to offer any comment. Finally, when he was able to speak, he turned toward Netta.
“Would you mind, Netta, if Doris and I consulted privately for a moment?”
Netta shrugged and nodded.
“Have I a choice?”
Closing the door to Gary’s office, they stood stiffly, facing each other, contemplating the potential consequences.
“This mustn’t get out,” Doris said, the first to speak. “We’ll look like idiots.”
“Down the chute,” Gary said, then paused, contemplating their potential exile.
“They were good. Smooth as silk,” Doris sighed.
“Con artists,” Gary said, shaking his head.
“Hustlers.”
“She’s got us over a barrel,” Gary said.
“I suppose in the scheme of things it’s a small price to pay.”
They came back to Doris’ office. Netta looked up. She had freshened her makeup and combed her hair.
“You are absolutely right,” Doris said. “After all, there is nothing more powerful than friendship. We will negotiate with Dimitri and take no fee for our services. Moreover we will guarantee the settlement. Ten thousand more today and six thousand a year for five years. We believe we have the negotiating skills to get Dimitri to agree.”
“Really, Doris,” Netta protested, although lightly. “I hadn’t expected such generosity.”
Oh, yes, you did, Gary thought. In his mind, he was already composing the paperwork. Still, he told himself, it was a small price to pay for silence.
“We were duped,” Gary said. “You were a couple of phonies.”
Netta stood up and looked at them with what Gary saw as naked contempt.
“Okay, I’ll buy that. And you?”
“We are lawyers,” Doris said indignantly, looking at her with clear contempt.
“So who are the bigger phonies? You or us?”
She offered a hollow laugh and left the office.
When she had left, Doris and Gary stared at each other in stunned silence.
“We are,” Gary muttered hoarsely after awhile.
“We are what?”
“The bigger phonies.”
“We’re lawyers,” Doris repeated.
“Maybe we should take a cruise on his ship?”
“We could use a vacation.”
“At least we might get a good table.”
They looked at each other and smiled grimly. Gary went back to his office.
A Little White Lie
They were six women sitting at a round table at Michael’s where they lunched together every week. Not everyone showed up each week. Some were still working women. Sara owned an art gallery. Karen designed jewelry at home. Joy was on a number of business boards. Pat was a freelance editor, Barbara wrote children’s books and Susan was on a number of non-profit boards.
What they had in common was that all were single and over sixty, self-supporting through inheritance or their own entrepreneurial skills. All were well coiffed and dressed, articulate, witty and bonded mostly by the luncheon group, which had been Pat’s idea. All agreed it was an important event in their lives and regretted when they missed a session.
As Joy defined it, they were not the “Ladies who Lunched” of the Sondheim lyric, a mostly sad commentary about women who had nothing “meaningful” to do in their lives. Two of the women were widowed, two had never married, and two had been divorced multiple times. The widows and divorcees had children and grandchildren, but they had agreed never to let that enter the conversation.
Although they socialized through the medium of this weekly luncheon, they did not socialize exclusively together in the evenings. They did meet sporadically at various events that punctuated New York’s busy social agenda. Susan, who had been a corporate wife almost all of her adult years, considered this luncheon group the absolute highlight of her present life.
Of all the women around the table she considered herself the least interesting. She had been married for thirty-seven years when her husband had died suddenly. Having grown up in Washington D.C., she had married a young Marine who had been a ceremonial attendant at the Kennedy White House and who later joined a multi-national corporation serving mostly in Washington, then New York.
She had been devoted and supportive of her husband’s career and had willingly accepted the role as wife, mother, organizer of their home life and social world, the latter built largely around her husband’s business environment and mostly for the purpose of his career advancement. She had pursued her role cheerfully, believing that she and her husband were a team and feeling no sense of remorse, jealousy or disappointment that she had missed out on not doing “her own thing.” She had been quite content in her role.
“My own thing is you,” Susan had told her husband numerous times. He often acknowledged his dependence on her and by any measure she was convinced she had a wonderful marriage. She adored her husband, had come to the marriage a virgin and had never been with another man.
His sudden death two years before had left her bereft but financially secure, and after a long mourning period she began to realize that she had to build a single life from scratch. She had been active in philanthropies, mostly because it helped advance her husband’s profile in the very competitive corporate world, and retained her ties to two non-profits, where she served in a largely honorary capaci
ty on their boards. Although a doting mother in her early years, her two children lived in other parts of the country, and, although dutiful and affectionate, pursued their lives independent of hers.
From her years as a corporate wife, Susan had learned how to socialize, work a room and engage in small talk. She knew people characterized her as vivacious and chirpy. She had long ago conquered her innate shyness and reserve and had developed an outgoing personality that made her popular among her husband’s colleagues and their wives. Now that that life was over, she realized how narrow it had been and she was forced to confront the fact that she had better develop a persona that was individualized for her own benefit as a single woman. After all, she could no longer be an adjunct and helpmate for a deceased husband. For the first time in her life, she realized the narrowness of her range of experience compared to the other women around the table.
Their lives had been far more adventurous and creative than her own. They had had lovers and multiple husbands. Even her sister in widowhood had been married before. They told wonderful stories, some quite racy, about their lives, sparing no details. She would listen to them intently, secretly shocked by their titillating details. It was hardly the conversation of the corporate community which she had inhabited. She loved hearing these stories and although she managed to appear equally “interesting” by the force of her outgoing personality and enthusiastic and perky charm, she felt intimidated by a feeling of inadequacy in comparison.
What she feared most was that these lively, intelligent and experienced women would ultimately discover that her life had been one big yawn and ultimately reject her from the group. Even the designation “corporate wife” was considered, in this company, a contemptuous slur, one rung below prostitution. Behind her façade of smiles, she was terrified that her luncheon companions would intuit the truth, her guilty secret. The fact was that deep in her soul she could define herself only as a once-loyal corporate wife with no compelling narrative that would interest and/or engage her luncheon companions.
Being asked to be part of this luncheon group by her friend Karen from whom she had bought jewelry was on the one hand a fantastic stroke of luck, but on the other hand it revealed her own sense of inferiority. Compared to them, I am a nothing, she told herself. Not that she regretted her earlier life. It did have its compensations. She had been secure, comfortable and, by the standards of her middle class upbringing, happy, even in retrospect. Despite this private rationalization, she could not chase away the thought that she was, by comparison, lesser, a crashing bore, not only in her own eyes but in theirs.
She would think about this often, recalling scattered mini-monologues of revelation from her tablemates. Like what Sara had told them at one of the lunches.
“I was broke and going to the Art Students League, hoping to be a female Picasso one day. There was a rich guy in my art class who had his own dreams of greatness. So I made this deal. You pay my tuition and the rent in my apartment and I’ll provide your sexual comfort. Like in Japan during the war, they called these little girls comfort maidens or some such, for the sexual gratification of the soldiers in the Japanese Army. All I had to do was put out for one guy. It was a good deal for both of us. To tell you the truth I got the better of the deal. He was really good in the sack, which was a bonus. The arrangement lasted for four years and got me through a real rough patch. Talk about unintended consequences. He was the best lover I ever had.”
“Of how many?” someone had asked.
“After the first dozen I stopped counting,” Sara answered laughing, completely at ease in the telling. It was just one of many stories that peppered Sara’s conversation about her life. They were always breezy, matter of fact, full of humor and irony.
Even in her widowhood, Susan had remained chaste, having still not found the courage to sleep with another man. She’d have to work that out one day, she promised herself. Her sex life with George had become more duty than pleasure. The truth was that even the pleasure was sporadic.
Joy, too, told some hair-raising stories of her own experiences. What struck Susan as unique about these luncheons was that there was no holding back, as if some mysterious confessional was taking place between the participants. She wished she had something juicy to confess.
“You can’t imagine what my early life was like,” Joy had told them in her soft lilting Southern accent. “I was abused by my stepfather. It wasn’t as if we were dirt poor scratching for money. My stepfather was a banker, pillar of the community, a man of parts he was called by the newspapers. I sure can tell you about one part. Can you imagine, he would slip into my room after my mother was asleep and force me, ask, cajole, whatever you call it, to kiss his thing. Hell, I was eleven years old and I had never seen a club-like thing like that. To me it was like a baseball bat. It was awesome. I thought he would slam me with it and I was too scared to refuse. After awhile he got bolder and asked me to do a lot more than kiss the damned thing. I refused and told my mother and she shot him. Imagine that. We lived in a little town not far from Birmingham and it did make the papers and Mom got two years and I went to live with an aunt up north. But it did lead to a lifetime distrust of men. Now don’t get me wrong. I like men. I like the whole nine yards, even that. I just can’t trust the bastards, which may account for my three divorces. All in all, though, I have no real regrets. Hell, I’m a rich woman because of them. And the first one was a great dad to my kids. But it does color one’s view of life, let me tell you.”
“So there are now no more men in your life?” someone asked. “You know what I mean.”
“Hell, I’ve got a stable. Just as long as I don’t have to live with them. I’m from the ‘bang bang thank you kind sir’ school.”
“Do they know your story?” another asked.
“Sure do. Turns them on.”
Susan would listen and search her own life for an episode, an incident, some narrative that might make her more interesting but always with little success. The inner search stimulated memories of her husband who had been a fly fisherman, a sport that had never interested her. In life as in fly-fishing, the reward comes only to those “who match the hatch.” Find the right fly to attract the fish. For this situation, the metaphor was certainly apt, only she couldn’t find the right fly.
Barbara, who wrote children’s books, told them what got her started on that career. She had a twin sister who was, as it was now described, mentally challenged with a span of concentration that hardly lasted for more than a minute or two. That is, until Barbara had discovered that her twin would respond to her made-up stories, always asking after almost every sentence of the story: “And then what happened?” It turned out that telling stories was the only way Barbara’s twin could be pacified and calmed.
“I would invent characters, many of them animals, since Stacy, my twin, had many stuffed animals and could relate to the stories. Although it was very trying and rather sad for me, I dug deep into myself and came up with these stories that later on I recycled and published. My contracts with my publisher were set up to share any royalties with her and to this day they pay for her to be well cared for. In many ways I owe my career to her. To this day when I see her, and she’s my age, remember, I still go through that routine. It’s as if God had ordained this to be. Can you imagine?”
“One never knows,” someone said.
Susan had seconded the comment, but she was even then thinking that she had nothing to tell that could possibly match such stories. Besides, she was an only child and had grown up in a very conventional and loving household. Her mother was a schoolteacher and her father was an accountant who worked for the Department of the Interior in Washington D.C. and her childhood and adolescence were hardly of interest to this group. Child abuse? Sibling problems? Sexual scandal? Personal achievement? Creative activity? She could not come up with anything unusual and certainly not bizarre. Her life was not remotely within the parameters of int
erest to these ladies.
Pat, too, had her stories. She had begun her career writing features for movie fan magazines and had interviewed many of the stars in the waning days of Hollywood’s golden years. She could spin yarns about the sexual orientation of Hollywood greats and keep the group mesmerized with tidbits about Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, who were supposedly lovers in Hollywood’s early days, and Paulette Goddard’s penchant for performing oral sex under tables in nightclubs. She could reel off names of stars and stories of famous Hollywood executives that could singe one’s scalp with hot material and keep her fellow diners glued to the edge of their seats in astonishment. In her repertoire were stories about backyard orgies and drunken and dope-drenched Hollywood parties that she had attended and whatever other intimate details she could dredge up about the stars in the golden age of tinsel land.
Susan listened to all these stories mesmerized and grew more and more depressed, although she was careful never to reveal the dark mood that often assailed her. Even her friend Karen, whose friendship she cherished and who had brought her into the group, had come up with life experiences that mustered the group’s concentration and interest.
Karen’s story was bizarre, even by the standards of the luncheon group. She had been married for a number of years when her husband had left her for another man.
“I knew he was bisexual since he had persuaded me to engage in threesome sex, meaning two males, a number of times. You see, I would have done anything to keep that marriage together. What tripped me up was that he fell in love with one of the participants and that was the end of the marriage. We’re still great friends. “
Aside from the nature of Karen’s story, what bothered Susan most was that Karen had never confided it to her alone, but provided it readily when the group was together at the weekly luncheon. She continued to live in dread that one day her luncheon companions would turn to her to confide her own intimate narrative. Her fear grew into an obsession. She would lie awake nights trying to concoct a story that would prove her bond with these women, illustrate her equality, prove her bona fides.