by Jane Heller
“Oh, honey, honey.” She sighed. “You know how angry we were, but what’s done is done and we can’t change it. What I’m saying is that you and Tara were like sisters once upon a time. You were joined at the hip. You loved each other. I remember that part, too.”
Well, she was right that Tara and I had been inseparable. Since I was an only child and my parents both worked, I was desperate for company, and Tara more than filled the bill with her golden looks and golden personality. My house was always so quiet, except when she breezed in to liven things up. It wasn’t very attractive, either—a fifties ranch on a postage-stamp piece of property, a house that lacked the elegance and graciousness of the Messers’ colonial across town. It was in their house that I’d longed to live. Tara had three siblings—an older brother and two younger sisters—so their place was raucous and entertaining and bustling with activity. I felt lucky to be included in their family outings and grateful that Tara had picked me as her bosom buddy, but that didn’t mean that now I had to forgive and forget the not so swell aspects of our friendship, did it?
The much-dreaded lunch date was the following Tuesday. With Scott holding down the fort at work, I made the half-hour hop up to the town of Mamaroneck in lower Westchester County. During the drive, I reminded myself over and over that Tara was just another author, not someone I cared about, and that I owed her my professional expertise, nothing more. She’ll never suck me in again, I vowed as I exited off the Hutchinson River Parkway. I’ll promote her book to the best of my ability, but that’s it.
Tara and Stuart, it turned out, lived in a grand Tudor-style manor house on three sumptuously landscaped acres overlooking Long Island Sound. I’m talking megaexpensive real estate here, with the taxes to match. As I pulled into the circular driveway, I realized that I was openmouthed. It wasn’t as if I’d never seen such opulence or even that I was awed by big houses in general. I’d outgrown my childhood fascination with the way people with money lived. It was the way these particular people with money lived that got to me. I guess it hadn’t dawned on me just how rich Stuart was.
His full name was Stuart Lasher, and he, along with his father and brother, owned Lasher’s Meats & Eats, a small chain of gourmet food stores with three outlets in the tristate area. Yes, of course, I knew he had money. As I’ve indicated, my engagement ring was worth enough to the diamond merchant who bought it from me to pay for my three years in therapy with Marianne. But until I drove up to his new digs and actually observed the grandeur, I suppose it hadn’t registered. I mean, Lasher’s Meats & Eats wasn’t exactly Wal-Mart. But what did I know? Maybe family businesses that sold ten different kinds of mushrooms were worth a fortune.
“Oh, Amy! Here you are,” said Tara, who swung open the front door the instant after I rang the bell. Before I could stop her, she drew me into a hug—not one of those air-kissy affairs where you don’t even brush up against the other person, but a hug. Imagine my surprise! When we’d had our chance meeting on the street, we hadn’t so much as shaken hands! It was one of the oddest moments of my life, partly because her arms were draped around my shoulders, while my arms were dangling at my sides, and partly because she smelled of apples. Ah, yes, I thought, recalling the section of Simply Beautiful where Tara advised us to simmer apple cider on the stove with some cinnamon, cloves, and tangerines, and then lean into the aromatic vapor, so our hair, our skin, and our clothes would take on the scent of home and hearth and—gag—honesty.
“Hi, Tara,” I said, extricating myself. “Nice to see you.” See her? I couldn’t miss her. Her Blondeness was a vision in the bright red sweater she wore with black jeans. I assumed she had chosen red because, as she asserted in her book, it’s the essential color when you want others to view you as a woman of action. What was even scarier than her little aphorisms was the fact that, the Hostess Diary aside, I had actually committed them to memory.
“Come in, come in,” she said, ushering me inside the house, the interior of which was straight out of Architectural Digest. For someone who was preaching simplicity, there was a lot of complicated decorating going on in there—from the array of lushly upholstered chairs and sofas in the living room, to the impeccably restored antique pieces in the dining room, to the wainscoted glass cabinets, the granite countertops, and the requisite super-duper appliances in the kitchen/family room, to the buttery leather furniture in the wood-paneled library, where, by the way, there was a crackling fire in the fireplace, even though it was a balmy sixty-eight degrees outside. “Let’s sit in the sunroom,” she said, just when I thought we’d run out of rooms.
“Oh, let’s,” I said as she kept leading me through the house and I kept trying not to stare at the silver-framed photos of her and Stuart that were virtually everywhere. There was a picture of them on a beach, sipping drinks with little umbrellas in them. There was a picture of them kissing in front of some castle in Scotland. There was a picture of them at the entrance to their own little castle in Mamaroneck (Stuart was carrying Tara over the threshold). And there was a picture—the one I was both looking forward to and hoping to avoid—of them feeding each other cake at their wedding. I felt a stab of jealousy, then reminded myself that I didn’t love Stuart and didn’t want to be his wife, no matter how much money he raked in.
Tara and I sat together on linen-cushioned rattan chairs in the sunroom, a glass-enclosed, tile-floored solarium that was ablaze with color, thanks to the profusion of flowers in pretty pottery vases. I commented that the tulips, in particular, were lovely.
“Fresh flowers are an essential part of the Simply Beautiful message,” she said, running her fingers through her still-stupefyingly great hair. “They provide nourishment for our homes. They’re a simple way to bring beauty into our lives.”
“Sort of like using multicolored paper clips instead of the plain old silver ones?”
“Wow, Amy. I’m so glad that my paper clip anecdote in chapter eleven resonated with you. And I’m impressed that you actually read the whole book.”
“That’s what I do, Tara. I read the books I’m assigned to promote, yours included.”
She smiled, flashing me the teeth that had been through braces and retainers and all the paraphernalia mine had. We’d gone to the same draconian orthodontist as teenagers. I couldn’t help remembering the day when I yawned in math class and one of those awful rubber bands flew out of my mouth and landed on the desk of Chuck Curley, the captain of the varsity football team. I was mortified, naturally, but Tara thought it was a riot. To prove it, she yanked one of her own rubber bands out of her mouth and flicked it onto Chuck’s desk. Everyone thought she was the coolest girl on the planet for doing that, and I was no exception. What I didn’t realize then was that she did it not to support me, but to steal the attention. And now here she was, grabbing the limelight again, only this time as some sort of spiritualist author/lady of the manor.
“Getting back to flowers,” she said, “I advocate that people should budget for them, the way they budget for food. Buying just one hyacinth or iris or black-eyed Susan and setting it on a table where you see it day in and day out can make the difference between feeling beautiful and feeling blah.”
Blah. Now there was an adjective I could certainly throw at the editor of the New York Times Book Review without embarrassment. “Why don’t you tell me how you came to write your book,” I said, pulling out my legal pad and a pen. “What inspired you to write it?”
“I wrote it at the urging of friends and family and, of course, Stuart,” she said. I only flinched slightly at the mention of his name. “They all kept telling me that I have a knack for making every day fun and special, whether it’s the way I dress, or apply my makeup, or arrange a platter of strawberries. I’m not much of a chef, as you probably remember, member, Amy, but I do know how food should look—how lots of things should look, I guess. So I decided to jot down my own personal guide for living beautifully, and it evolved into this book. My goal is to lift women up, to speak to their souls.”<
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As I nodded and made notes, trying not to roll my eyes, she went on about the simple beauty of butter sizzling musically in a frying pan; of a scented candle flickering in a darkened room; of a particular shade of lipstick showing up at a cosmetics counter after being out of stock. At a certain point, I nearly wilted from having my soul uplifted. Tara mistook my fatigue for hunger.
“Let’s see if Michelle, my cook, has our lunch ready,” she said, bouncing up from the chair.
Her “cook” did have our lunch ready, only she was actually her “part-time housekeeper.”
“Michelle comes in four days a week to clean,” Tara explained, “but she makes the most marvelous poached salmon for me whenever I have guests. Other entrées too, of course.”
Of course. “It’s delicious,” I said, barely tasting the fish, or the sprigs of dill that adorned it, or the dash of mint that floated in my iced tea. I was dying to eat a candy bar—anything that wasn’t garnished.
We continued to discuss the book over lunch. While I was bored stiff, I was relieved, too—relieved that Tara hadn’t once asked about my engagement. It occurred to me, as I chuckled silently, that I needn’t have worried about having to fess up about the Lie. She was far too self-involved to remember I’d even mentioned a fiancé. Besides, why would she care about my romantic life when she had Stu boy? According to her, they were as deliriously happy as two narcissists could be. Yes, in between her riffs on the profound pleasures to be discovered in rainbows and kittens and freshly laundered sheets, she wedged in a soliloquy about how loving Stuart was, how sensitive to her needs, how enthusiastic about her career, and how eager he was to have a baby and watch the little tyke grow up and assume his or her place at Lasher’s Meats & Eats.
At two o’clock, I’d had enough, and I announced that I had to drive back to the office.
“Is it because I’ve been talking about Stuart?” she asked. “I guess I shouldn’t have brought him up.”
“Stuart’s your husband,” I said, rising from my chair. “You’ve written about him in the book. He’s a major part of your life. I can’t ignore his existence, as much as I’d prefer to.”
She smiled. “He and I wondered how you would feel coming here today. We thought you might be upset, but you seem okay with everything. Tell the truth. This hasn’t been so bad with just the two of us chatting away like old times, right?”
Cardinal rule in publishing: Never tell an author the truth. “It’s been fine,” I said. “But I really do have to leave. I have other books to work on.”
“Of course,” she said. I walked toward the front door. She trailed after me. “It’s just that we haven’t talked about you, Amy. Now that we’re friends again, I was hoping you’d share a little bit about your life. How are your parents?”
We were not friends again, and why did she think we were? Because I was being polite? I was just doing my job, for God’s sake! “My parents are alive and well, thanks.”
“They’re still in Arizona?”
“Yep.” I didn’t ask about her parents or Stuart’s. I had to get out of there before she peppered me with more questions. We were standing at her door. I had one foot out the door, actually. “Listen, I appreciate the lunch and the tour of the house. It was very helpful. I have some good solid background information now, so I can sit down and turn out an effective press release. I’ll be in touch when there’s copy for you to look over.”
I headed for my car, my escape a tantalizing few seconds away.
“Wait!” she called out. “You didn’t tell me a single thing about your man.”
Damn! Damn! Damn! So she hadn’t forgotten. In a split second, having made the decision to feign ignorance, I said, “What man?”
She giggled. “Boy, you are into your job. I’m talking about your man, your honey, your fiancé.”
Quick. New strategy. “He’s great,” I said, ducking inside my car. “A really, really great guy. Successful, handsome, everything I could ever want, and, most important, the only man I’ve ever loved.” I had to slip in that last one, just so she’d get it that I wasn’t all broken up about losing Stuart.
“Well, you deserve him, because you’re a wonderful person,” she said, causing me to feel guilty all of a sudden. “And he’s a lucky, lucky guy to have you. Oh wow. I just remembered that you two are getting married in six months, which is around the same time that my book comes out. Promise me you won’t be on your honeymoon the day I’m making my national television debut on The View, okay?”
Scrap the guilt. She was thinking only of herself, as usual. “Actually, I could be on my honeymoon the day you’re on The View,” I said, digging myself a deeper hole but feeling a nice little buzz at the thought of giving her the jitters. “But I’m sure there won’t be a problem. My assistant is more than capable of taking you to all your appearances.”
“How about the wedding ceremony? Are you having big, small, formal, casual, what?”
I was about to toss out an answer—any answer—when it occurred to me that Tara would probably repeat whatever I said to Julie Farrell, her editor, who, of course, would know nothing about my impending marriage and start asking questions of her own. “As a matter of fact, my fiancé and I have been keeping a very low profile,” I explained. “We haven’t told anyone at Lowry and Trammell that we’re even a couple. We’re planning to have a small, very intimate wedding and then tell everyone, so I’d appreciate it if you’d keep all this to yourself for now.”
“Oh. Gosh. I’m incredibly flattered that you confided in me, that you trusted me, because it confirms that we’re friends again.” Wrong. “I won’t breathe a word, I swear, but why the hush-hush? Is it because your fiancé works at Lowry and Trammell, too, and they have a policy against interoffice romances?”
“Something like that,” I said. “Thanks for understanding. Well, gotta go.” I closed the car door, inserted my key in the ignition, and was ready to roll.
“Obviously, I’ve never worked in the corporate world the way you have,” she said while I started the car. “But I don’t think it’s fair the way they try to regulate people’s personal lives. It must be horrible to have to carry on a relationship in secret.”
“I bet it wasn’t so horrible for you and Stuart,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. Well, what did she expect? She had just given me an opening as big as her ego.
“Sorry. What did you say?” she asked, unable to hear me over the engine noise—or pretending she couldn’t.
“Never mind,” I said as I stepped on the gas and waved bye-bye.
6
When Tara called my office bright and early the next morning, I told Scott to tell her I was in a meeting. When she called again around noon, I told him to tell her I was on my way to lunch. When she called again later in the afternoon, I told him to tell her I was dead.
“She wants to speak to you, Amy, and she’s not going to be deterred,” said Scott. “I can feel her determination coursing through the phone lines.”
“She can wait,” I said. “I spent hours with her yesterday. There’s nothing more about her book that I need to hear right now.”
“She says she’s not calling about the book. She says it’s a personal matter.” He sniffed. “Apparently, you didn’t explain to her that there aren’t any personal matters you don’t share with me.”
There was one, and I couldn’t share it with Scott. Telling him about my supposed engagement would be like advertising on the Internet.
“She claims it’s urgent, too,” he added.
“All right, I’ll call her,” I said as Scott continued to hover. “After you’ve given me a little privacy.”
He sniffed again and left my office.
I called Tara, whose urgent private matter involved inviting me and my fiancé to dinner.
“I thought it would be fun for both of you,” she said. “Well, fun for Stuart and me, too, of course, but, more to the point, it’ll be an opportunity for you and your fiancé to socia
lize openly instead of having to sneak around. I still can’t get over that L and T has such a silly rule about coworkers not being allowed to date, because I always figured publishers to be so, you know, liberal. It must be incredibly frustrating that you two can’t be seen in public at the precise time in your relationship when you should be out there proclaiming your love to all the world.”
Sheesh. What had I done now? “It is frustrating that he and I have to stay undercover, so to speak,” I said, “but we’re both so busy with work that we just try to grab moments alone whenever we can. And speaking of work, I’ve got to rush into another—”
“Which is why I thought I’d give you a reprieve from all that,” she persisted. “You two can drive up and have dinner with us at the house without fear of getting caught. Nobody will bother you here—except the occasional deer frolicking amid our specimen plantings.”
You’ll bother me, I was dying to say, but I couldn’t risk offending an author and infuriating Betsy. Instead, I said, “Thanks for thinking of us, but we can’t come for dinner. Things are too hectic at work.”
“Oh.” She paused, as if regrouping for another go-round, which didn’t surprise me. This was the woman who never took no for an answer, because she never had to. “Okay, I get it now,” she said. “It isn’t about work at all, is it? It’s about Stuart.”
“Stuart?”
“Yes. After coming here yesterday and seeing what a happy life he and I have carved out for ourselves, you went home depressed about what might have been. But look, I don’t blame you at all—not for being depressed and not for being envious. It’s only natural. You were in love with Stuart. You were going to marry Stuart. Stuart’s an amazing man. Maybe you still care for him and you’re down on yourself for not being able to hold on to him and you’re worried that bringing your fiancé up here to meet him would only cause you to second-guess yourself. That’s it, isn’t it, Amy? That you’re just not over Stuart in spite of your efforts to move on with your life?”