On Grace

by Susie Orman Schnall

  chapter eleven

  Darren takes me to Moderne Barn in Armonk. The restaurant has a great New York City vibe and it’s packed with a chic crowd. I love the decor of the dining room, which is lined with Roberto Dutesco’s stunning and evocative, oversize, black-and-white photographs of wild horses. I’m happy I decided to accept Darren’s invitation.

  After we’re seated and order drinks, a scotch for Darren and a glass of chardonnay for me, I excuse myself to the ladies’ room.

  “Hi, Grace,” a woman says as I open the door.

  I turn to see Margaret White, the HR Director who had so unceremoniously canned me from the Westchester Weekly, applying lip gloss.

  “Hi, Margaret, how are you?” I ask. She’s wearing a little, emphasis on little, black dress and black stilettos. She pulls them both off quite well. Her dark hair hangs pin-straight to her shoulders, and her legs are tanned and toned. She is as beautiful as I remember.

  “I’ve been better,” she says with a small smile. “I worked for the Weekly for nine years. It’s hard being on the job market again.” She turns back to her reflection and continues with the lip gloss.

  “I’m so sorry. I still can’t believe that Matthew sold the company. I thought it was doing so well.”

  Margaret looks under the bathroom stall doors, and when she confirms we’re alone, she leans into me and says, “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Yes,” I say, leaning in with anticipation, despite the strong smell of alcohol on her breath.

  “Matthew didn’t sell the company,” and here her voice gets sharp. “His ex-fucking wife, pardon my French, got her goddamn lawyer to take him for everything he had, including their house in Rye, their house in Aspen, and his magazine.”

  “So Monique owns the magazine?” I’m a little confused, and Margaret seems particularly emotional about this whole thing. But she did lose her job and all, so I guess that makes sense.

  “For now, I guess. But the goddamn bitch will probably sell the name and the holdings. She won’t even get that much money for it. She just closed the magazine out of spite because Matthew fell in love with someone else, and she couldn’t handle the humiliation.”

  “Wow, I don’t even know what to say.” I guess Ellen Statler’s account of the affair was true after all.

  “Anyway, you didn’t hear it from me. But it was good to see you, Grace. Good luck with everything. I better get back.” She sticks her lip gloss in her clutch, takes one final glance in the mirror, and turns to leave.

  “Thanks, Margaret. Good luck to you, too.”

  When I get back to the table, I tell Darren about what just went down in the bathroom.

  “That’s a coincidence. While you were in there, I was looking around, and I could have sworn I saw Matthew O’Donnell at the bar.” Darren takes a sip of his scotch and gestures toward the enormous bar that lines the entire right side of the restaurant.

  I follow his gaze and am shocked when I see Matthew sitting at the bar talking, and laughing, and, whoa, now kissing a woman with pin-straight dark hair and a little black dress.

  “Well, that explains everything, I guess.” I say this with a stilted laugh as I take a sip of my chardonnay.

  “Cheers,” Darren says. “I would like to make a toast.”

  I tilt my glass toward his and he continues.

  “I know that I dropped a bomb on you Tuesday night.”

  “To say the least,” I say.

  “Okay, let’s change that to an atomic bomb,” Darren says regretfully.

  “Let’s.”

  “And I just want to thank you for being here with me tonight, for hearing me out, for being fair,” he pauses, “and graceful.” He smiles. “Thank you for realizing that I love you, and for giving me another chance.” He clinks his glass against mine and starts to take a sip of his scotch.

  “I will drink to all of that, except the part about giving you another chance. I haven’t quite made up my mind on that one yet,” I say seriously.

  Tears well up again in Darren’s eyes as he lifts his glass in the air again and says, “Well, then, let’s toast to hope.”

  I decide that is a perfect thing to toast to, and I clink his glass and take a long, satisfying sip of my wine. I’m looking forward to it taking the edge off of what has been a stressful week.

  When our waiter comes around, I order the Caesar salad and almond-crusted cod, and Darren orders the beet and goat cheese salad and hanger steak. Darren also orders a side of the rosemary sea salt fries because he knows I love them. Again, got to give the guy props for trying so hard.

  “You look really pretty tonight,” Darren says, staring into my eyes.

  “Thanks,” I say, a bit sarcastically.

  “Why do you say it like that?” he asks, spreading butter on the bread the busboy just brought us.

  “Because, you don’t often tell me I look pretty, so when you do, I feel like you have an agenda.”

  “I do, too, tell you you look pretty.”

  “Not so much.”

  “Well, whether I say it or not, I always think you look pretty. I always have.”

  “Did you do it because of the butterflies?” I ask him, and I feel the warmth of the wine spreading through my body. It’s a welcome feeling.

  “What do you mean?” he asks, straightening up a bit.

  “I mean, did you sleep with the cocktail waitress because being with someone new gave you the butterflies? Did she make you feel attractive in a way that doesn’t happen anymore when you’ve been married for ten years?” It’s a bold question, but it gets to the heart.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe. I hadn’t really thought about it like that before.”

  “Do you ever long for the excitement of a new relationship? The butterflies?”

  “Do you?” he asks me as he creases his brow in a worried look.

  “I asked you first.” I take a bite of bread. I was going to try not to eat bread tonight, but the wine eliminated my willpower.

  “No.”

  Good answer.

  He continues, “When I met you, Grace, I was done with dating girls I didn’t see a future with. I was looking for a lasting relationship. I’m not interested in someone new just to have that feeling that never lasts anyway. I like what we have. It’s better.”

  “Do you remember the movie It’s Complicated?” I ask, as the waiter brings our first course.

  “Sure, with Meryl Streep and Billy Baldwin.”

  “Alec,” I say laughing. “You never could get those Baldwin brothers straight.”

  He laughs and takes a bite of his salad, “Yum, you want a taste?”

  “No, thank you. Anyway, Alec Baldwin leaves his wife and goes off for the hot, young thing and then realizes that he really misses the familiarity of his marriage and the maturity of his wife. He realizes that even though what he and Meryl had wasn’t ‘exciting’ anymore,” (I use my hands to make quotes in the air for emphasis), “what they had was even better. A lot of movies show men leaving their wives, but not too many show that the grass, though possibly better landscaped, is not always greener. Plus, what is new and exciting with the replacement woman will fade at some point anyway.”

  “Grace, I’m not interested in finding someone new. I’m interested in doing whatever I need to do to stay with you.”

  “I just wish you had thought of that before you seduced your cocktail waitress,” I say, with the intention to sting.

  “C’mon, that’s not fair,” Darren says sharply.

  “Really, since when did fairness become part of this situation?”

  “I thought you were trying here, Grace.”

  Seriously? Now I’m pissed.

  “Darren, I’m sorry if you haven’t noticed, but I’m trying really hard. I’m trying to sit here calmly when all I really want to do is punch you in the face. I’m trying not to tell the kids that their father fucked up, literally, and that now I have to forgive him or else they will grow up without a dad in their house.
I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt because you keep telling me that you love me. And all the while I’m doing all this trying so that you’ll be happy, I’m making myself absolutely crazy,” I say, with obvious frustration in my voice.

  “I know,” he says.

  “No, you don’t know. Because you’re not in my shoes right now. If you were, you’d know how damn much they hurt.”

  I flag down the waiter and order another glass of wine. Darren gets up to go to the bathroom, prompting a much-needed time-out. While he’s gone, my wine comes, and I take a few big sips. I just want to get out of my head. I decide to back off and just get through the rest of dinner. When Darren returns, we talk more about us, calmly. We talk about my job. We talk about the kids. We share a tiramisu. We even laugh a little. And when we get home, we make love. My wine-impaired brain convinces me that being intimate will make me feel closer to him. Afterward, he holds me and tells me he loves me. But when that part is over and we separate to our own sides of the bed, I turn away from him and quietly cry myself to sleep.

  The rest of the weekend passes uneventfully. We go to the movies with the boys on Sunday, and then Darren takes them to the market. Later, as Darren prepares his weekly Italian feast, the boys get their last fix of screens, and I put the finishing touches on my assignment. I’m not sure if it’s going to get me the job, but I think it’s pretty good. I’ve also made a list of ten ideas for additional articles. I print out the article, the ideas list, and my resume and put them neatly in a folder and then into my purse. I take another quick glance at the website to make sure I’m well versed in the company, and then head downstairs where Darren is carefully layering his lasagna and belting out The Barber of Seville.

  On Monday, I arrive at Nicole Winters’s office ten minutes early. My heart is beating wildly, but I’m not sure if I’m nervous or excited. Probably both. After I apply lipstick and recheck that the folder is in my purse, I head into the office building. It’s a small two-story building on one of Armonk’s side streets, not far from the Moderne Barn. I fantasize about staff lunches and after-work drinks at the bar.

  The lobby directory shows a mix of small businesses: an interior designer, a landscape architect, a speech therapist. I head to Well in Westchester’s office and knock on the door.

  “Come in!”

  I open the door slowly, and there’s a forty-something woman with an ill-fitting suit and an out-of-date hairstyle standing in front of me.

  “Grace May?” she asks curtly.

  “Yes,” I reply, wondering what I could have done in that one second to possibly offend her.

  “Nicole said you’d be coming. She ran out to get a coffee. Why don’t you sit right there? She’ll be back in a minute.” She gives me the once-over and gestures to a small conference table against the left wall of the large room.

  “Thank you,” I say politely and head over to the table to sit down.

  The office is one big rectangular room with a few offices on the side across from the door I just entered through. In the main room, there are five desks. The nameless woman who rudely greeted me sits at a desk facing the right wall. The other four desks are grouped together in the center of the room. I see that two of them are filled. The people turn to me, smile, and return to their work. The glass door to one of the offices is shut and a nameplate says Nicole Winters. Another office appears to be a storage area, and I recognize all the same “stuff” that used to pile up at the fitness magazine I worked at: exercise bands and balls, skin-care products, packaged health food, books, etc. I try to crane my neck to see what’s in the third room, and it looks like a little kitchen. The office is decorated in that hip modern look popular with web operations in New York City and San Francisco: simple white lacquer West Elm Parsons desks, ergonomic black chairs, raw wood floors, flat-screen computer monitors, exposed brick walls, and lots of natural light streaming through the many windows. It’s a beautiful space.

  The door opens, and Nicole walks in. She greets her staff and they respond cheerfully.

  “Grace, hi. So sorry I made you wait.”

  “Not a problem,” I say, smiling.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” she asks kindly, leading me into her office and gesturing to one of the white leather upholstered armchairs across from her desk. We sit down, she boots up her computer, takes a sip of her coffee, and turns to me.

  We talk about some of the same things we discussed at LPQ, and then she gets into more specifics about her expectations for the job. She would like the email editor, as she calls the position, to come in three days a week; take part in the weekly Monday staff meeting; brainstorm topics with the editorial director; coordinate art for the weekly email; work with the tech guy to arrange the distribution of the email; work with the ad sales rep to develop a sales sheet so she can sell incremental space on the email; etc. She reveals the salary she is offering, and I’m thrilled to hear it’s significantly more than I was going to make at the Westchester Weekly.

  “It sounds like a perfect opportunity for me,” I tell her, hoping to communicate that she should pick me, pick me.

  “It’s a small operation as you can see,” she says, “so you may be asked sometimes to do something not exactly in your job description.”

  “That won’t be a problem,” I say.

  “What is it about this job that appeals to you?” Nicole asks.

  “Well, so many things, really. I’ve spent a lot of time on your site, and I’m very impressed by the content, the design, the user interface, the community aspect. I have a lot of experience in this space, and I’m excited to jump in and use that to help build your product. I have the energy and the motivation to exceed your expectations in this job,” I say. And to top it all off, “I promise you won’t be disappointed in my work,” I say confidently, as I recross my legs and search her face to reveal what kind of impression I’m making.

  “Speaking of work, did you bring in the assignment I asked you to do?”

  I hand her the article and the idea list, and I watch her face as she reads my piece about meditation. I cited research about the benefits of meditation. I listed several meditation practices offered at yoga studios around the county. I highlighted two smartphone apps that provide guided meditation. And I gave tips on how to incorporate meditation into a busy lifestyle. All in 312 carefully selected words. When she finishes reading, I see a hint of a smile on her face that develops into a full smile as she looks at the second page and reads my ideas.

  “Well, I have to say, you did a really nice job on this. It’s on a relevant subject, it captures our voice, and you’ve tied it to the county nicely.”

  “Thank you,” I say beaming. This is why I need to go back to work. I don’t get this feeling at home. Not even when James sees a photo of Reese Witherspoon in People and asks me why I’m in a magazine.

  “Do you have any other questions?” she asks.

  I fear I’m opening a can of worms, but I can’t avoid the one thing that I hope isn’t a deal breaker. “What are the hours that you’re expecting the email editor to work?”

  “My staff typically works nine to five. I’m flexible when someone has an appointment or,” she laughs, “a Friday yoga class, but that’s usually what I aim for.”

  My heart sinks. The job at the Weekly would have allowed me to leave around 3:00 so that I would be able to get my kids off of the bus. If I get this job, I would have to arrange childcare three afternoons a week. I guess my face reveals what I’m thinking.

  “Would those hours be a problem for you?” Nicole asks.

  “I’m not sure,” I say honestly. “I guess I had assumed that I would be able to leave around three so I could be home to get my kids off the bus and be with them in the afternoon.” I’m hesitant to ask her for those hours because I haven’t been offered the job, and I don’t want to put my chances in jeopardy because I know she’s still considering other applicants, so I add quickly, “But I’m sure I could work something out.�
�� My heart sinks again.

  “Great,” she says and stands up. “It was nice talking to you, Grace. As I told you on Friday, I’m talking to a couple other people, but I plan on making my decision by Thursday afternoon. I’ll call you then to let you know.”

  “Thank you for your time,” I say also standing up. “I’m so glad Callie introduced us!”

  We make small talk as she walks me out of the office. When the door shuts behind me, I pray that I didn’t just screw that up.

  When I get home, I write Nicole a thank-you note on one of my charity-solicitation note cards. Then I realize that I’ve been out of the interviewing game for so long that I don’t know whether it’s proper etiquette to send a thank-you via email or snail mail. So I do both.

  I return Darren and Cameron’s emails asking how the interview went. I tell them it was great, that I think she really liked my piece, that I think I came off sounding both qualified for and interested in the job, but that the hours might hurt my chances. I tell them she might sense that I’m not committed and can’t put in the hours because of my kids. Or, if I get the job, I may need to turn it down because I hadn’t planned on hiring an afternoon babysitter. Or, maybe I’ll have to hire the sitter. Maybe, I realize, I’m kidding myself and I’m not even being seriously considered for the job, and she’s just going through the motions for Callie. I guess the easiest thing would have been to ask her if she’d consider shorter hours for me as long as I’m able to get all my work done. I bang the heel of my hand against my forehead and realize this is exactly the type of overthinking Cameron is trying to get me to stop doing. Turn off your brain, Grace. It just doesn’t stop.

  My email chimes. It’s Jake Doyle.

  hey grace. don’t know why but thinking of you. crazy, right? just double checking to make sure you don’t need me to break any legs. anyway ever since we chatted i can’t get you out of my mind. sorry i’m probably not supposed to say things like that to a married woman. man i really messed up in high school didn’t i? later, jake