by Jill Kargman
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Jill Kargman
The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund
Momzillas
The Right Address (Co-Authored)
Wolves in Chic Clothing (Co-Authored)
DUTTON
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, May 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Jill Kargman
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kargman, Jill, 1974-
Arm candy / Jill Kargman.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-42943-3
1. Chick lit. I. Title.
PS3611.A783A89 2010
813’.6—dc22 2009047899
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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To my small band of true friends: I’d always rather be quirky us than the Beautiful People.
Why Forty Is the Ultimate F Word
1. You feel closer to the people in the Obits section than the Weddings section.
2. You are now in the same age bracket as people who may buy oil paintings of a dog with a monocle or attend a crafts fair.
3. You catch yourself telling young people, “When I was your age, there wasn’t any Internet.”
4. The reason you keep a diary is to remind yourself what you did yesterday.
5. You have to skip encores at rock concerts because you want to beat the stampede and get home at a reasonable hour.
6. The president of the United States is in your age group.
7. In the newspaper, you look at the real estate section before the party pictures.
8. Two words: sensible shoes.
9. When friends book a reservation for nine thirty p.m., you want to shoot them in the head.
10. Your kid thinks your vinyl records are “antiques from the olden days.”
11. You realize there are smart, grown-up people born in 1990.
12. Your joints and scars are starting to forecast rain better than the Doppler 7000 meteorologist Stan Storm.
13. You can admit that when you were your kid’s age, you carried a Walkman instead of an iPod, used pay phones instead of cell phones, and typed term papers on a typewriter or “word processor” instead of a computer.
14. You keep telling yourself laugh lines are sexy but then notice that no models have laugh lines.
15. You were once a model yourself, and now the beauty that the world valued you for is starting to fade. And you’re seized by the fear that you’ll never be able to find love again.
Preface
For Eden Clyde, there was nothing on planet Earth as nauseating as moving boxes. Starting over with new walls and an unfamiliar ceiling to stare at during sleepless nights stressed her out more than anything else. Well accustomed to cardboard paper cuts and packing-tape hell, the stunning but weary model sat, at thirty-nine years old, crying her green eyes out. It was as if she had a bungee cord harnessed around her and was about to take an emotional cliff dive. She didn’t know if she could stomach it.
Here we go again.
Despite her breathtaking looks—a more severe, sexier Audrey Hepburn meets a young Demi Moore meets those Sports Illustrated bikini girls you want to strangle—Eden Clyde was like so many beauties before her: lottery winner in all twenty-three chromosomes but unlucky in love. But she knew deep down it wasn’t so much about chance—it was also about the choices she had made, some of them at an age so tender she couldn’t fathom the consequences. But now, after nineteen years livin’ in sin (as her small-town, rectangular-shaped Red State neighbors would have scoffed), she sat brokenhearted with a giant hole punched through her chest. It was like someone had shot a cannon through her, but she miraculously lived, forced to walk the misty Manhattan streets feeling empty and miserable. And forty. Well, almost. Isn’t one’s entire thirty-ninth year by nature a reckoning of sorts? A fifty-two-week shado
w that is cast from the moment the candles are blown out?
Eden exhaled, her head bending down to her hands. Deep breaths, she instructed herself, eyes damp and closed against her thin, ringless fingers. You have to power through this. She had never been the religious type, but as they say, there are no atheists in the trenches. Life-changing moments will send even the least pious souls into prayer. A passenger on a turbulent flight or a mother about to give birth. For Eden, the piles of brown boxes were suddenly her unlikely steeple. Please, God, let me get through this. Please tell me that I will be happy again.
Eden was a beauty icon. Her career as a model and muse made her recognizable to the fashion and art world cognoscenti all over the globe. She received whistle blows from local construction workers and was the subject of schoolboy fantasies. But what would she do now that the one reason everyone worshipped her was slowly ebbing, day by day, from her without her control? She was hardly the crypt-keeper; it was forty looming, not eighty. But every New York minute, there were girls less than half her age hopping off the Greyhound, staring wide-eyed at the skyline outside Port Authority, just as she had, duffel bag in hand, hope in her heart. It felt like another life. And in many ways, it was.
1
Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
—Tom Stoppard
When Eden, née Szciapanski, hit her teen years, she really started to notice people noticing her. People on Main Street, men, women, children—everyone stared at her. As each pair of eyes gazed upon her, they lit a spark inside the girl from the dreary small town, making her feel special, different. Her confidence swelled as she blossomed more and more from gawky and lanky into a sexy, all-American girl, igniting an ambition deep within her soul. Maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t like everyone else in Shickshinny, population 3,274. Maybe there were bigger things out there for her.
Her mom, Carol, definitely thought so, a former beauty queen turned courtroom stenographer, whose splurge was weekly French-manicured gel tips. She praised Eden’s perfect features and encouraged her to raid her closet and “flaunt whatcha got.” Carol hoped Eden’s good looks would help her pole-vault out of their tin-rooftop town, bidding adieu to small minds, big asses, and aluminum siding for good.
“I shoulda left this goddamn town when I had the chance,” Carol lamented to herself one morning as Eden filled her backpack for school. Eden looked down at her sophomore social studies homework pages one last time and zipped up her bag as Carol stared out the rain-splattered window dreamily and took another drag of her cigarette.
“Let’s unpack the rest of those boxes tonight, Mom.” Eden and her mom had moved eight times in twelve years, all within town limits, whenever the rents would rise. Then they’d fold up their life, find a new place nearby, and unfold it again.
“Yeah, I can’t stand looking at ’em anymore,” Carol said, looking back at Eden. “Have a good day at school.”
“Thanks, Mom. You, too.”
“Jason picking you up?”
“Mm-hmm.” Eden smiled with an excited hair flip.
“Hold on to him, honey,” Carol said between puffs. “He’s got it all. The looks, the dough, and he’s a good kid.”
Eden smiled. She was crazy about Jason. He was romantic (long-stemmed roses in a box at each month’s anniversary), fun (surprise adventures like county fair opening night), had a warm smile, and gave the best bear hugs.
A honk sounded in the front yard of Eden’s quaint Edward Scissorhands-esque street, rows of little houses, except with no dinosaur topiaries and zero color, just white, white, white. The paint and the people.
“That’s him, gotta go,” Eden said while opening a beat-up umbrella to shield the perfectly groomed shiny, straight brown hair down her back.
Jason was the quarterback of the football team. He had the blond, rugged good looks of an Abercrombie kid, but with a subtle tinge of extra cheesiness. His charismatic dad owned the nearby mannequin factory, and his stay-at-home mom looked like one hot off the assembly line, thin with a platinum do and those fifties-style dresses, cinched at the waist. No stranger to hair products, Jason knew he was the shit. The stud of the town, the local hero. But as Carol had attested, he was also nice. Always the gentleman, he opened the passenger door for Eden and greeted her mom with his wide grin of white choppers that rivaled Nancy Kerrigan’s.
“Have a nice day,” he said with a wave.
Inside the car, after he’d kissed Eden hello, Jason turned on the radio as they drove in silence for a mile.
“Have you thought about the lake this weekend?”
“Mm-hmm,” she said, meeting his gaze. “The weather’s supposed to be nice. I’m psyched.”
“Me, too,” he said with a hungry wink. “I was thinking . . . it might be a good time for, you know . . .”
Eden looked at him and smiled. Jason had had sex before, and he was very gentle with Eden in his coaxing—never with the assholic pressure of a player out to punch her V-card. They’d done everything but the deed, and Eden couldn’t bring herself to grips with the pressure. But maybe he was right, maybe it was time.
They pulled into the high school, and Eden looked at Jason as he turned off the ignition.
“Have a great day, J,” she said, leaning in to kiss his warm cheek. He put his arm around her and kissed her back.
“You, too.”
Inside she met her best friend, Allison, by her locker, their daily meeting place for the morning’s goss, picking up right from where they left off gabbing on the phone the night before.
“So, E,” Allison said, flipping her blond hair with an arm of Madonna-circa-“Lucky Star” black rubber bracelets. “Whatdja decide? You guys gonna do it finally? At the lake?”
“Oh God, everyone’s asking! Why does anybody care?” Eden said, rolling her eyes.
“Because! They just do! I’m not gonna lie to you: Everyone’s talking about it. You guys are like the celebrities of the school. I mean you are totally overthinking this. Jesus, just let him perform the Hymen Maneuver already. I can’t wait to do it.”
“I know. I’m just scared. Megan said it hurts like hell. She said her bedsheet looked like the flag of Japan,” Eden said with a nervous laugh.
“It has to happen sometime! And hey, you’ll be in those waterproof sleeping bags this weekend. It’ll be perfect.”
“Do I want to do it in a tent, though?” Eden mused.
“Why not? It’s outdoors! The way nature intended.”
Eden grimaced and went off to history class as Allison gave her a teasing index-finger-through-hole hand sign that made Eden cringe. She walked down the long hall wondering what the future would bring. Not just the immediate future of the upcoming big weekend, but the real future, like . . . life.
She loved Jason. She had dated a bunch of guys when she’d started high school—all seniors, all gorgeous—the basketball forward, the soccer star, the hockey captain. But Jason was different, sweeter, less apt to pat her bum in the cafeteria or make out in the parking lot. She wondered if she’d marry him one day, if they’d be the dream couple forever. It certainly seemed like everyone in town hoped so.
Jason was headed for college at State, which was only twenty minutes away, and she couldn’t imagine life without him. If she could save enough money, she would follow him there. He was worth following. But she was also curious what the world outside her town, her state, held for someone like her.
Saturday night rolled around, and Eden and Jason and a bunch of kids loaded up their trucks, drove to a nearby national park, and pitched tents by the water’s edge. In the evening, Eden sat on Jason’s lap near a campfire, nestled in his arms by the bright orange glow of the flames in the center of the circle of friends. Eden caught Allison’s eye, sparkling with knowing mischief. She winked at Eden, as Eden bit her lip and smiled back nervously.
As the silver sliver of moon hung brightly pasted against a blanket of stars, the gang paired off toward the tents. Eden looked around at the hunter green
treetops and brightly lit cobalt sky and knew this was the perfect time; it was romantic after all.
Eden and Jason crawled into the tent and started kissing.
“I love you, Jason,” she said, searching for his ripped, muscular body. “I’m ready.”
“I love you, too. It’s gonna be great. Wait—I got music.”
He slid across the two red sleeping bags and retrieved a boom box from his older brother’s U.S. Army bag. He pressed the play button.
“I made a mix tape of all the songs that remind me of you,” he said, holding her face in his big hands. “I wanted you to lose it to something awesome.”
Inspired by Lloyd Dobler, he had selected “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel to commence the action. He was slow and gentle and while it was painful like Megan had described, it was hardly the crime scene she’d braced for.
“Eden,” he said, sweetly kissing her, “you’re the one.”
2
The “I just woke up” face of your 30’s is the “all day long” face of your 40’s.
—Libby Reid
Still together six months later, Eden spent every other weekend up in Jason’s college dorm room. When he had an away game one weekend and couldn’t see her, Eden decided to do a mini road trip somewhere fun with Allison rather than stick around in Shickshinny. Junior year sucked, and Eden’s restlessness was growing. But Allison was a little older and had scored her license, which provided some freedom for the duo.
They headed off an hour and a half away to some semblance of larger civilization, Prairie Falls, home to the Prairie Mall. Some malls euphemistically called themselves shopping centers, or worse, shopping centres. But this was not that—no marble, no waterfall centerpieces, no upscale boutiques. This was a straight-up mall: tacky, Bedazzled leggings stores, fanny packs galore, a couple movie theaters in desperate need of renovation, and Hot-Dog-on-a-Stick.