“Just putting out the trash.”
“You’re all dressed up,” Diana pointed out.
She was standing in the open kitchen doorway, wearing her pajamas. When she’d gone to bed right after I got home from work—the jet lag had turned her schedule upside down—I waited a few hours and then figured I was safe to slip away to meet Josh. I’d already called and told him. In the morning when Diana noticed I was gone, she would assume I’d left for the office. I hadn’t counted on her seeing me like this.
Narrowing her eyes, she leaned toward me. “Are you wearing makeup?”
“Oh,” I said, my hand fluttering to my face as if I’d forgotten it was there. “Am I wearing makeup?”
I hated lying to my daughter. But I was even more loath to tell Diana the truth: “Oh, honey, I’m just running off to see my young lover. The sex is fantastic, and he’s just a few years older than you!”
“Yes, Mother, you’re wearing makeup. And high heels. And tight pants. What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying to look good,” I said, standing taller, feeling as if the person I was really trying to convince was myself. “Don’t you think I look good? You haven’t said anything about all the weight I’ve lost.”
“I didn’t want to say anything,” said Diana, making a face as if she were trying to keep from throwing up. “I thought you might have, like, an eating disorder.”
That kind of nasty adolescent comment at least made it easier for me to leave.
“Listen, I’m going,” I said.
“When will you be back?”
I hesitated. Josh would naturally expect me to stay the night. I wanted to stay the night.
“I’ll see you tomorrow after work,” I told her. “I’m just getting together with Maggie.”
“I want to see Maggie,” Diana said. “I’ll get dressed and come with you.”
“No!” I cried.
And then, at Diana’s shocked look, I hurried to explain, “Today was her final insemination attempt. She’s going to be flat on her back. She doesn’t even want me to be there.”
That part, at least, was true. Maggie’s apartment had passed muster with the adoption people, and her doctor had green-lighted one more round with the sperm bank. This time, she’d vowed to spend the entire weekend with her hips in the air, staying as still and quiet as possible to maximize the sperm’s chances of survival.
“But you are going to be there.”
“But I’m just going to help her,” I pointed out, deciding I needed to make the prospect even less appealing. “Emptying bedpans, cleaning toilets, that kind of thing.”
“Oh,” said Diana, looking as if she was about to cry. “Maybe another time.”
I was immediately overwhelmed with guilt. I’d never been able to say no to my daughter. And I hated lying to her.
“I don’t have to go,” I said. “I could stay here with you.”
“No, no, go ahead,” Diana said, retreating back into the house. “I don’t really want to hang out with a bunch of old people anyway.”
I hadn’t let myself remember how handsome Josh was. How sexy. How sweet. I had blocked out how crazy he was about me. And vice versa. Completely blocked the vice versa.
I hadn’t banked on Josh’s huge grin when he opened his door, on the pressure of his lips at the corner of my mouth, the feel of his hand against my hip, instantly inspiring my nipples to stand at attention. I hadn’t counted on how my entire body would melt under his gaze, how I would hear myself laughing and working to make him laugh, working to make him keep wanting me.
He was telling me about his preparations for Tokyo, something about his sublease, a mix-up over the apartment he thought he was getting in Japan, and all the while I was thinking: How am I ever going to tell him the truth?
There was simply no graceful moment, no easy transition. I couldn’t imagine how to get from his:
You wouldn’t believe the price of a tiny room in Tokyo.
To my:
God, that’s worse than New York. And guess what, I’m a forty-four-year-old housewife!
Not just a housewife, I reminded myself. Or even just a mother, or assistant to the marketing director from hell. A writer now too. At least that was something important about my life I could share with him.
“I’ve been working on a novel,” I told him.
His face lit up, and he threw his arms around me. “That’s so fantastic!” he said. “Tell me all about it.”
“Oh, there’s not much to tell,” I said. “I started it a long time ago, and just recently I found it again, and I’ve been working on it.”
“Where was it?” he asked, still grinning.
I looked at him, confused. “What do you mean?”
“Where did you find your novel? Was it in, like, a suitcase, or had you stored it somewhere in Maggie’s loft?”
“It was in a trunk,” I said, trying to avoid an out-and-out falsehood. “Stored.”
“Oh,” he said, looking as if he were going to ask me more but then shaking his head a little and, to my relief, deciding to pursue a different line of questioning.
“Can I read it?” he asked, with as much excitement as if I’d told him I’d resurrected a long-lost play of Shakespeare’s. “I’d love to read it.”
“No,” I said quickly.
“Okay, okay,” Josh said, laughing. “I understand. Just tell me what it’s about. What’s the title? Tell me everything.”
I hadn’t planned on telling him any of this. But as he pried one detail after another out of me, I found myself growing more and more animated. And with every detail I told him, he asked for more. What was the first sentence? How many chapters had I finished? What was the main character like? How had I written so much so quickly? Was he in it?
I felt myself blossom under Josh’s attention. This was the thing that made him so different from Gary, so much more appealing than all the older men I knew. It wasn’t his looks or his staying power in bed—though that was pretty remarkable, too. It was his willingness—no, his desire—to focus at least as much attention on me as on himself.
I wished I could pour my heart out to him about Diana. I didn’t want to burden Maggie with the perils of parenthood, not now when she needed to feel only optimistic. But Josh, I felt, would understand anything I told him. I’m so hurt that my daughter treats me like my greatest pleasure in life should be doing her laundry, I wanted to tell him. But the worse thing is, I see now that I made her like that! I made her like that by letting washing her socks be my greatest pleasure for far too many years!
I’m trying to be patient, I wanted to tell Josh. I’m still the mother; I’ve got to give her the time to adjust to a new way of being with me. I’ve got to show her the way.
And meanwhile, all I want to do is be here with you, jumping your bones.
As if reading my thoughts, he leaned over and kissed me softly on the lips.
“I’ve missed you,” he said.
“I’ve missed you too.”
Truth. Truth with cherries on top.
“I have something I have to tell you,” I said, feeling as if I were peering down from the top of a very high dive.
“Can’t you tell me in bed?” he asked. “If I don’t tear your clothes off and lie naked on top of you right this very minute, I will die.”
One last time, I told myself. I’ll sleep with him one last time. And then I’ll definitely tell him.
I lay naked and spread-eagled across the bed, breathing deeply, sweat coating my body. At the other end of the loft, I could hear Josh moving around, filling two glasses with ice, running the water so it could get cold, ice tinkling as he walked back across the room toward me. I could feel him standing beside the bed, imagined him holding the water out to me, but I felt incapable of so much as opening my eyes, never mind reaching up for the water.
“That was the best sex of my entire life.”
He laughed lightly. “Me, too.”
“Yes,” I sai
d. “But I’ve lived longer than you.”
He laughed again. “But that doesn’t mean you’ve had more sex.”
I was about to contradict him, but then I thought, he’s probably right. There had been only a handful of men before Gary, and I’d gotten pregnant so soon after our marriage, and then the threat of the miscarriage had ruled out intercourse for several months, so that we’d gone almost instantly from our brief honeymoon period to weekly sexual routine. Once a week for, say, twenty years. How many times was that? A thousand. That didn’t seem like very many, though throughout my marriage I’d always been maneuvering to do it less. Yet with Josh, I felt that if we made love a thousand times this year, I’d still crave more.
Now, my entire body was still vibrating, my lips swollen and tingling. I felt the bed dip under his weight as he sat down, and I rolled toward him, lazily opening my eyes. He was so beautiful, his skin so smooth and tight, his muscles so perfectly formed, as if he’d been created just this morning. I couldn’t resist reaching out and touching him, running my hand down his back to his waist and his hip. I wanted to commit this to memory, to make the memory powerful enough to last forever.
And then I surprised myself again by bursting into tears. I was curled on my side like a child, sobbing, yet every time I tried to gather myself together and apologize, I found myself crying all the harder. Josh finally set down the glasses of water he’d still been holding and lay down beside me, folding me in his arms. The smell of him enveloping me, the pressure of his fingers against my back, the weight of his leg draped over mine, only made me feel worse.
There was something I knew now that I didn’t know when I was in my twenties: relationships like ours were near-impossible to find. I might, with a great deal of luck, a long time from now, meet another man who was more appropriate for the real me. But I knew I was never going to find someone else as wonderful in exactly the same ways as Josh.
And what about him? Would he have the same trouble connecting with someone new the same way he did with me?
My first automatic response was, No, it would be easier for him, he was so much younger, his life was less complicated, and besides, he was a man, with a larger universe of women at his fingertips. When he was forty-four, his age would even be an advantage in attracting twenty-five-year-olds.
But for me, there would be no twenty-five-year-olds after Josh. Even Josh, so warm against me, his breath made manifest with the rise and fall of his chest against mine, seemed ephemeral. Any minute now, he would disappear. I could try to hold on: keep putting off telling him the damning truth, even follow him to Tokyo. But no matter what I did, time would keep passing, making it only more certain that he would no longer be mine.
Chapter 19
My heart lurched when I arrived at work early Monday morning to find Teri already there, standing by my desk.
“You’re in early,” I said, working to keep my tone unworried. “Is there a meeting this morning?”
“Come into my office,” Teri said, turning her back on me. Her hair had been freshly cut, coming to a sharp point at the nape of her neck. “I need to speak with you.”
I followed her into her office, feeling my breath catch in my throat. I had barely sat down when Teri said, “I’ve come across something very disturbing.”
She pushed a piece of paper across the desk at me: a copy of my application for the job at Gentility Press.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“You tell me,” Teri said coolly. “It seems that all is not accurate on this application.”
“What do you mean?” I was now barely able to speak.
“It seems you didn’t really graduate from Mount Holyoke with a degree in English literature, as you claimed.”
I let out my breath.
“Yes, I did,” I said.
I’d actually come across my diploma this weekend, while checking on the important documents I’d stored in the safe Gary had installed at home.
“I called Mount Holyoke myself,” Teri said. “I asked them to look through all their student records, not only for literature graduates but for all graduates, and you weren’t there.” She gave a triumphant little smile. “Not at all.”
“What years?” I managed to whisper.
“What?”
“What years?” I said more loudly, suddenly clear about what I was going to do. “What years did you check?”
“Yes, I noticed that you very cleverly left your graduation date off your résumé, which made my job a little harder,” said Teri. “But I had them look at their records for every year dating back to 1990. When you would have been, at my best estimation, roughly ten years old.”
“Thirty,” I said.
“What was that?”
“In 1990, I turned thirty,” I said, feeling, along with the fear, the release of telling the truth.
Teri opened her mouth, and then sat there staring. “I don’t believe you,” she said finally.
“It’s true. I graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1981.” I lifted the phone on Teri’s desk. “Go ahead, call them,” I said. “They’ll confirm it right now.”
Teri shut her mouth. “You still lied.”
“How did I lie?”
“You represented yourself as a recent graduate.”
“How so? There’s nothing on this résumé or application that says when I graduated or claims I’ve done anything I haven’t.”
“Exactly!” Teri said, slamming her hand on her desk. “It’s what you don’t say that’s inaccurate. If you graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1981, what have you been doing for the past twenty-something years? Surely you haven’t been ‘touring Europe,’ as you note here, for all that time.”
“I’ve been home raising a daughter. I’ve been home mopping floors and being the class mom and, I don’t know, baking hams. Or, as more than one personnel director called it when I went to job interviews with all the dates on my résumé, ‘doing nothing.’ ”
Teri stared at me. “You lied,” she said finally.
“I didn’t lie. I’m a mom, Teri, just like you. But when I tried to return to my career after staying home with my child, I found the door barred to me. So I simply omitted a piece of my history—a piece that wasn’t even relevant to my profession.”
I should have known Teri wouldn’t have any sympathy for the difficulty of reentering the workforce after being a stay-at-home mom.
“Other mothers keep working despite the sacrifices involved,” she said. “If you choose to sit at home, you have to be willing to pay the price.”
“But why should the price be eternal marginalization?” I began. “I’m ready to give my job my all now—”
“You’re dishonest,” she interrupted me. “You’re sneaky. This isn’t the only problem.”
I caught my breath. “You’re talking about the classics project.”
“Yes. You went behind my back on that. Tried to steal all my ideas.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. And then opened it again—very wide.
“How dare you,” I said. “You’re the one who’s been stealing my ideas from day one. And not only did you steal my ideas, you stole my exact words to express them with.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You know very well what I’m talking about. You even acknowledged it to my face—you remember, the whole ‘your ideas are my ideas’ thing. You just didn’t call it stealing.”
“It doesn’t matter what you say,” Teri said. “You’re a liar, and once what you’ve done comes out, no one will believe anything you say.”
“Lindsay already knows all about your taking my ideas,” I said. “Even Thad knows some of it. And Mrs. Whitney is undoubtedly putting two and two together, which is probably the real reason you need to get rid of me.”
I stood up then. I’d been so afraid, just a moment ago, that Teri was going to fire me. But now I knew what I wanted to do—had to do.
&nbs
p; “I love this company, I really do,” I told her. “I even love my job. But I can’t work for you anymore. I quit.”
“But,” Teri stammered, “I’m firing you.”
“There you go again,” I said, even managing a smile. “Trying to steal my ideas.”
I wished I could talk to Mrs. Whitney before I left, to make sure she knew my version of the truth, but that was going to have to wait for a calmer time. For now, the only person I had to see was Lindsay. The entire company would be buzzing with gossip about my real age within minutes, I knew, but I wanted Lindsay to hear the truth from me.
Lindsay’s assistant was away from her desk—probably in the ladies’ room, already getting the story on me—so instead of knocking, I opened Lindsay’s door and stepped inside her tiny office. She looked up and scowled: she was still unofficially not speaking to me. Before she could protest at my intrusion, I held up my hand.
“I’m just here to say good-bye,” I said. “I quit.”
Immediately a look of concern crossed over her face, which at least gave me hope that my friend was still in there somewhere.
“What happened?” she asked. “Did she try to take credit for your work again?”
“No. I mean, yes, that was part of the problem. But we had a confrontation because Teri found out that I—I guess you would call it, misrepresented myself on my résumé. That I wasn’t entirely truthful about my background.”
“Did you inflate your experience?” Lindsay asked. “Or expand the dates when you worked someplace? Because if it’s something bogus like that, I don’t care, I’ll talk to Thad myself—”
“It’s not that,” I interrupted. I drew in a deep breath. “I didn’t tell the truth about my age, Lindsay. To Gentility, to Teri, even to you.”
“To me? I don’t think you ever said exactly how old you were. I just assumed—”
“That’s the problem. I let everybody assume I was a few years out of school, somewhere in my twenties. But I’m not, Lindsay. I’m forty-four.”
Lindsay’s mouth dropped open, and she sat there staring at me, shaking her head. “How can that be?”
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