by Rae Lawrence
“You look wonderful!” Neely cried when she got into the car at East Hampton. Neely was wearing black jeans and a low-cut yellow T-shirt. Her eyes were rimmed with navy-blue liner. “We are such babes!”
She leaned forward and gave the driver the address. “Love Shack” was playing on the radio. “And turn up the music!” she said.
“Here,” she said, handing Anne a businesss card for the car service. “In case we get separated. Dave’s account number is on the back, just give them a call. And also, just in case, take these.” She took out two condoms.
“I don’t think so!” Anne said. “You carry condoms?”
“Oh, baby, what planet are you living on. And I don’t carry them. I stole them from Dylan’s stash.” She giggled. “And he has quite the collection. My little heartbreaker. Just take them, you can always throw them out later.”
The party was in a sprawling modern house set back in the woods. It was noisy and crowded with hundreds of people Anne didn’t know, which made her first nervous, then relieved. The first vodka tonic went down quickly. Neely was dancing with a man in baggy surfer shorts. Anne sat on a window ledge, trying to make the final inch of her second drink last as long as possible.
A man came up holding two clear drinks with limes in them.
“Don’t I know you from the city?” he asked. He had curly black hair cropped close and a gold stud in his left ear. “Vodka or gin?” he asked, holding out both drinks.
“I don’t think so,” Anne said. “Vodka. Thank you.”
“Yeah, sure, I know I’ve seen you around. Maybe we work in the same neighborhood?” He named a large ad agency in the East Forties.
“No, I live out here year-round,” Anne said.
“No kidding. Well, you look like someone I know. Or maybe you look like someone I should know.” He smiled and sat down next to her. They made small talk for a few minutes, the man flirting, Anne resisting, until he finally gave up and left. Another man came over (“Haven’t we met somewhere? You’re a friend of Jeanine’s, right?”), and in five minutes he was gone, too.
Finally Neely returned, her brow damp with sweat.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “You’re having a terrible time.”
“No, this is nice. It’s fun just to watch.”
“Liar. I saw you giving guys the brush-off. Who were they?”
“Just guys.”
“Guys trying to pick you up?”
“I guess.” Anne sighed. “I’m sorry. This just isn’t my style.”
“Annie, there are at least fifty good-looking, totally respectable single guys at this party, guys who make good money, have good jobs, guys who, if we were in the city, women would be lined up to meet. What’s the problem?”
“It just isn’t—it just isn’t something I do.”
“You mean it just isn’t something you know how to do.”
“Maybe.”
“Listen to me. You don’t have to do anything. I was watching you. A guy gets a little aggressive, sits too close or whatever, and you pull away. You gotta flirt a little. Stare at his hands. Look at his mouth. Send him a signal. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Guys like this, they’ll do all the work. They’re on the hunt. You just gotta relax and let them take care of everything.” An old Rolling Stones song came over the sound system. “Oh man, come on, come dance with me.” She pulled Anne onto the dance floor.
They were surrounded by women dancing with each other. Anne couldn’t remember the last time she had danced at a party. The third drink had gone to her head. She felt herself loosening with the music, shaking her hips, moving her arms higher and higher. After the first couple of times, she didn’t bother to pull her tank top back over her bra straps.
“One more!” Neely mouthed when the music segued into an old disco hit. Anne was smiling now, tossing her hair back and forth. Men were coming onto the dance floor in pairs, joining the women. She could see them watching her, looking her up and down, and it felt wonderful. I still have it, she thought. Yes, oh yes, I still have it. She danced with one man, then another, eight songs in a row, and she felt as if she could dance all night. She looked around for Neely … where had she gone? A slow song came on, and a man reached out for her with two hands … people were coupling off … but she smiled and turned away. All she wanted was to shake and shake and shake to loud, fast music, to keep shaking until she could shake loose this little knot inside her, the knot that had been there ever since Lyon had gone.
She got another drink and went outside for fresh air. She lifted up her hair and let the wind blow cool against her damp neck.
“You’re a marvelous dancer,” someone said. He was tall, in a pressed chambray workshirt and baggy chinos. He looked to be somewhere in his early forties, with thick gray hair brushed straight back from a strong face.
“Thank you,” she said.
He offered her his right hand. “Patrick Weston. Friend of the host,” he said.
She shook his hand. “Anne Welles. I don’t think I’ve even met the host, but he throws a fabulous party.”
“We’re partners at the agency. Are you in advertising?”
“No, thank God.” She laughed. “Oh, I’m sorry, that came out wrong.”
He laughed along with her. “No, that’s okay, it’s a rotten business. I have to ask you, did you study dance?”
She shook her head.
“You move like a dancer. I could have watched you dance all night.” He moved closer.
“I didn’t see you out there.”
“No, I don’t dance, I just like to watch. I just like to watch beautiful women, actually.” She recognized his accent: prep school, money, the confidence that comes with years of getting what you want. “You don’t look like the kind of woman who usually comes to these parties,” he said.
“What do I look like?”
“Different.”
“Different how?”
“Just different. Have we met somewhere?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I’m sure I know you from somewhere.”
“No, I really don’t think so.” She shivered.
“Chilly?”
“I left my sweater inside.”
“Let me go get it for you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m going in anyway to get a drink. And then, you know what I’d like to do?” he asked. “I’d like to sit somewhere quiet and have a civilized conversation with a beautiful woman. What do you think?”
“I’m not really thinking about anything right now.”
He smiled. “Promise me you’ll wait right here.”
She described her sweater, found an empty bench, and sat in the cool dark. The music had gotten fast again, but all she could hear was the pounding bass. He came back, carrying her sweater and his jacket over one arm.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said.
“There’s nothing much to tell.”
“Okay, then I’ll tell you about myself.” He was from Vermont and had come to New York by way of Dartmouth and Wharton. He was divorced and lived in the East Nineties with a golden retriever, several good pieces of Stickley, and a collection of Civil War memorabilia that had been left to him by his grandfather. He touched her as he talked, on the arm, on the knee. She looked at his mouth: square jaw, narrow lips, a small scar across his chin.
They went for a walk. At the end of the street there was a little Cape Cod house painted gray with blue shutters.
“My place,” he said. “Nightcap?”
She felt the little knot seize up inside her. “Oh,” Anne said. “I don’t know.”
“No one ever knows,” Patrick said. “Close your eyes.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her softly, lips closed. “Nice,” he said. “I promise you, I’m the perfect gentleman.”
Inside there were old Persian carpets and paintings of sailboats. They sat together on the sofa, listening to a Louis Armstrong album.
“I’
m going to kiss you again,” he said. “If you want me to.”
She stared at his hands, watched him lift them into her hair. Her mouth fell open, and the kiss, the long, delicious kiss, sent something jumping inside her.
“Are you nervous?” he asked.
“It’s been … it’s been a really long time.”
“Ah. I see. Well, you’ve come to the right place. It’s been a long time for me, too. I don’t meet that many women who … who move me. We can take it slow. Tell me what you want.”
“What I want is …” she said. But she couldn’t figure out how to finish the sentence. She wanted him to take her in his arms and make the little knot go away. Because she knew what it was now: it was fear. “I have no idea what I want. I feel like, I feel like I don’t remember anything at all. About this.”
“Let me remind you,” he said. They kissed again. She leaned back into the sofa, felt his lips on her neck, his hand on her breast.
“What you want is to be seduced,” he said.
His bed was soft, the sheets white with blue scallops. She kept her eyes closed the whole time: as he lifted her shirt over her head, as he pulled open her jeans, as he warmed her up with his mouth, as he opened a drawer and got out a condom, as he kissed her on the ear and whispered, “Relax, relax, easy, easy does it.” When she came, she didn’t make a sound.
Afterward he lent her a T-shirt and made her chamomile tea. “Would you like to stay over?” he asked.
“What time is it?”
“Just after four. I’m hell in the morning. And I’m going to have a killer hangover.” He shook some aspirin out of a large bottle and offered her three. “But I do make a very good cup of coffee.”
“Thank you, but I should go,” Anne said. She didn’t want Jenn to wake up and find her gone. She called the car service and got dressed. In a cup at the edge of his bathroom sink, there were two well-used toothbrushes and two different brands of toothpaste. On the top shelf of his medicine chest, there were an eyelash curler, a tube of mascara, three lipsticks, a half-empty box of tampons, and a sample-size bottle of Shalimar.
In the doorway he kissed her, a friendly, sexless kiss, and tousled her hair. “You’re amazing,” he said. “I’ll call you.”
She smiled and waved goodbye. She knew he would never call. She would probably never see him again. Or she might run into him in the city; he’d be walking his dog and she’d be taking Jenn to school, and they would nod to each other, perhaps even wink. Or she’d see him at a party, let friends introduce them as if they were strangers, Anne-Welles-pleased-to-meet-you, he’d be with a woman who wore Shalimar—girlfriend? wife?—who looked a little tense around the eyes.
The way I used to look, Anne thought as the car pulled into her driveway. She knew she ought to feel guilty, but all she felt was happy, deliriously, deliciously happy, as if somehow her life were about to start all over again. For the first time in years, she fell asleep without even thinking of taking a pill. The little knot was gone. In her dreams she was dancing, to a song without words, to a song that never stopped.
1990.
Anne sat at her rented steel desk and watched the sun set over the Hudson. There weren’t many things to like about this suite of offices on the far side of Eleventh Avenue in the Fifties. The neighborhood was so dirty that each day when she arrived at work, she headed straight to the ladies’ room to brush flecks of soot from her face and clothes. It was dangerous after dark, and at the end of the day the women paired up to walk over to the subway stop on Eighth Avenue. There wasn’t anywhere decent to grab lunch. From the outside, the building still looked like what it had once been: an industrial warehouse used to store manufacturing equipment and automobile parts. Inside, the elevators were slow and creaky, the carpets mottled with mysterious stains.
But the sunsets were spectacular. A pink glow fell over Anne’s notes for the next day’s show. There were three guests on tomorrow’s schedule: a travel expert demonstrating how to pack for a two-week vacation using only one carry-on suitcase, a dermatologist explaining how to give yourself a facial using inexpensive products from the local supermarket, and a singer who had recently announced she was a victim of child abuse and had just published a ghostwritten memoir titled All There Is.
Jamie Walters came by, waving a sheaf of faxes.
“We did it!” he said. “The ratings are in, and we’re up by five points. Get your coat, let’s go out and celebrate.”
He took her to the Lancer Bar and ordered martinis for both of them.
“Five points. You know how many advertising dollars that translates to?” he asked.
“Does this mean I’m getting a raise?” Anne asked. Her current contract would be up for renewal in six months.
“It gets even better than a raise. You wouldn’t believe who called up today.” The local affiliate of one of the major networks had expressed interest in picking up the show. Jamie had set up a meeting for the next Friday. “They’re giving us exactly ten minutes to make our pitch. We’re talking real money, Anne. We’d be in every major market. And you know what kinds of guests you could get?” He snapped his fingers. “Anyone you want. They’d be lining up to get on. This is the big time.”
“But they already have perfectly good shows at both nine and ten A.M.,” Anne said.
“Annie, baby, what planet are you living on.” Jamie laid it out for her. The ratings of the nine A.M. show had been slipping for months, and the two co-hosts couldn’t bear to speak to each other off camera. The host of the ten A.M. show was going through a messy divorce and had gained so much weight, her producers had had to rebuild the set in an attempt to hide the bottom half of her body as much as possible.
“And you’re perfectly comfortable capitalizing on other people’s misfortunes,” Anne said.
“Listen, Annie. Good luck is just another name for someone else’s bad luck. This is television. They’re vulnerable, so I’m making my move. If it were the other way around, these people wouldn’t hesitate to make a move on me. Didn’t you learn anything at that agency?”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Show business doesn’t change. The only time you move up is when the other guy is on the way down.” He opened his wallet and handed her four new hundred-dollar bills.
“I want you to go to Saks and get yourself something nice for next week’s meeting.”
“I can wear my navy suit, it will work just fine.”
“Yeah, I know, but you need a new coat and some new shoes. These network guys are always checking out your shoes. When’s the last time you bought yourself a nice pair of shoes?”
“Shoes don’t show on camera,” Anne said.
“Well, get yourself a pair that looks expensive. We only have one shot.”
On Saturday Anne went to Saks and picked out a pair of black patent-leather Ferragamo pumps with little gold buckles and a wool-lined trench coat on markdown. With the leftover money, she picked up a red sweater and some clear lip gloss for Jenn. By Tuesday everyone in the office was buzzing about their meeting.
“How did you hear?” Anne asked one of the cameramen.
“Jamie’s so excited, he can’t stop talking about it. And a friend of mine at the station told me they all know about it over there, the tension’s so thick you could cut it with a knife.”
“Well, wish me luck.”
“You don’t need luck, you just gotta walk in and smile and let Jamie do the talking. And you better take me with you when you hit the big time!”
Anne told Jenn over dinner that night.
“I hope this means we can move out of this dump into a real apartment,” Jenn said.
“This is hardly a dump.”
“I don’t want to live in a loft anymore! I want a real bedroom, with real walls, not just dividers. And my own telephone. And I’d like to live someplace that wasn’t four million miles from my friends.”
“Even if I get this job, I’m not sure we’ll be able to afford the Upper
East Side again,” Anne said.
“But it isn’t fair!” Jenn cried, pouting. “No one wants to come all the way down here. If we stay here much longer, my life is going to be ruined.”
“I hardly think so.”
“Mom, you don’t get it! You don’t remember what it’s like to be thirteen!”
“It’s only November, you won’t be thirteen for another six weeks.”
“Well, I feel thirteen. All my friends are thirteen and some of them are even fourteen.”
Fourteen going on twenty-one, Anne thought. She was still shocked by the girls at Jenn’s school, what they wore, how they spoke, what their parents let them do. They wore sexy clothes and too much makeup, and some of them even snuck out to bars at night. Jenn had rolled her eyes when Anne gave her the lip gloss and the red cardigan, and she’d immediately taken the subway up to Saks to exchange them for light purple lipstick and a tight black turtleneck.
“Some of your friends are growing up a little too fast, if you ask me.”
“Mom, you act like this is still the fifties.”
“Thank you very much, but I’m not that old.”
“No, you just act like it!”
“And what does that mean.”
“You don’t let me … I don’t get to … I never get to …” Jenn was starting to cry now. “I don’t get to have any fun. You never let me do anything!”
“Jenn, name one thing I haven’t allowed you to do.”
“You didn’t let me stay over at Alice’s last month.”
“Her parents weren’t home. This is New York. You can’t stay over at someone’s house if her parents aren’t home.”
“And you didn’t let me go to Christopher’s birthday party.”