She was a terrible shrink. Even this list. It wasn’t like it was Jamie - it was like a textbook page. Delivered robot-y. Unfeeling. Like the woman was reading ingredients on the back of a cereal box. Jamie half expected her to say Riboflavin.
Jamie leaned her hand against Penny’s desk. Her heart was pounding.
She heard Penny Langston’s voice from far away.
“Jamie? Are you okay?”
“Yeah.. yes.” She heard herself say. Focus on something, she told herself.
The wooziness felt like it was starting to pass. Her heart slowing down. Jamie's gaze landed on three First Editions in between two antique book ends on Penny’s desk. She kept it there. A horizon to keep the ocean steady.
Henry James. Carson McCullers. And Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan. A book Jamie knew because the author had been 18 when she wrote it.
Jamie could feel her legs get stronger underneath her.
“Bonjour Tristesse...I love that book...” Jamie said quietly, distracting herself from her body. "The first line...something about a loneliness I can't name... Something like that. I love that book."
"I do as well."
She heard Penny speak again. Far away.
“Jamie. Are you okay? You look a little faint.”
She felt Penny's hand on her shoulder. Warm. Deliberate. Calming.
“Yes,” Jamie said.”Thank you. I’m – I think I just got a little overheated.”
And with that, she could breathe again. It passed.
Penny removed her hand. And Jamie felt the warmth where it had been.
Jamie turned to face Penny Langston. God, she was even more gorgeous up close.
Penny tilted her head, her eyes narrowed with concern. “Would you like some water?”
Jamie forced out a smile. Feeling completely embarrassed. “I’m okay. Thanks.”
Outside on Sixth Avenue, Jamie pushed through the glass door of the office building and breathed in some fresh-enough air.
She squinted into the blaring sunshine and slipped out of her Lord and Taylor blazer, draping it over her arm. She pulled a pack of Kool’s out of her blazer pocket, shook one out onto her lips, and slipped some matches out of her purse, lighting it up.
“That’s better…” she murmured, taking the smoke into her lungs and exhaling it out of her nose and mouth.
Jamie quickly counted up the ways she had probably let Penny Langston down. From the fact that Penny wasn't wild about The Readers, to the nearly fainting. Oh, and she hadn't actually written her manuscript yet!
"Well, that sucked,” Jamie whispered to herself.
She took another puff of her cigarette and watched a family of tourists buying hot dogs from a nearby cart.
Jamie felt a weight of sorrow and disappointment sink heavy on her heart. Like that scene from Dumbo when he’s sitting on a seesaw.
This meeting was a writer's dream come true, but here she was a writer who couldn't write anything beautiful anymore.
“Fuck…” she whispered.
She glanced across Sixth Avenue at the cabs and cars going by. Penny Langston is the biggest chance I’ll ever get and I am supremely fucking this up.
“Just start,” she whispered to herself. “That’s all I have to do is write five words. Five true words.”
- Whatever you can dream or do, begin it, boldness has genius and magic in it.
The words of Goethe she clung to these days when beginnings didn’t begin anymore.
Write five true words. Write them now.
A handsome Robert Redford lookalike forty-ish guy in a beige summer suit walked past her and smiled.
She smiled back. It was nice to be wanted. She was gay, not dead.
Five true words...
Jamie looked out at the traffic, absently letting her thoughts go.
Five true words...
“I.. am so... "
Two more words...
"Fucking... attracted to her.”
Oh Jesus...that’s not good.
Also.. she thought... that’s seven.
12
“Marketing research shows we’ve made a lot of headway in Erica Jong style, female-centered fiction...”
Penny was listening to Jim Santos, V.P. of Marketing. He was addressing the small handful of editors gathered in the glass-enclosed conference room.
She was listening but distracted. Something in her body was giving her away. She stared at the yellow legal pad where she had written today's date and no notes yet. This was the wrong place for some unnamed desire to have sex overtake her. What on earth? Was it Jim Santos? 30, unmarried and one of those stocky barrel chests like men from the 1950's. A twinkle in his eye.
It wasn't him. But it was something. Aroused wasn't a word she liked. But it was the only word that sprang to mind. And then the mental images to go with it.
I want to kiss her.
Press against her.
My hands on her body.
Penny snapped herself to attention. Oh god, no. It wasn't him. It had been her. That fiercely intelligent, shy young woman with her sweet smile and her sexy mouth.
That wasn't what gay looked like.
Her lips, her body. Think about something else. Anything else. She gazed out the window at the office building way across 57th street. Secretaries at typewriters. A grey-haired man at a desk on the phone.
But her mind would not stop.
Heat. Wetness. Tongues intertwined. Like with Davis but I’m on top. Like I’m him and she’s me.
Penny glanced down at her yellow legal pad, her face flushed with a shame no one else could see.
Good lord. I’m fucking married. And being with a woman is not my thing at all. I may love women as friends but I like sex with men. I am not a lesbian.
But she is.
Penny stared hard at the tri-color marketing chart on the easel at the front of the room. She squinted and tried to make sense of it. All the words were a jumble.
I want to kiss her.
“Penny? What do you think?”
Penny’s face flushed.
What had Francine and her asymmetrical haircut and her jangly bracelets and the coke snorting Penny had heard in the ladies room on Monday said?
Penny had nothing.
“I’m sorry?”
“Prep the galleys for a September release.”
“Yes,” Penny said. “September is a good idea.”
13
“My keys?”
“No earthly clue.”
7:15 p.m. Penny was standing at the stove in her architect-designed Scarsdale kitchen. She was still in her blouse and skirt from work, with a pan out about to sear a chicken breast.
“I’ll be back late.”
“Mm hmm…”
Her husband was making his way through the kitchen, smelling like his best aftershave. He had a navy blazer over his arm and was wearing a crisp white shirt and chinos. His salt and pepper hair, long and in his eyes lately, was brushed back. He had his tortoiseshell glasses on for the drive into the city. He looked handsome. Sexy even. But not for her.
On his way back into the city for some meeting. Which she knew wasn't for work. And was for sex.
She put the whole scenario out of her mind as she'd done so many times lately.
"I had an interesting day at work," Penny said.
Davis slid his silver watch on his wrist. He spoke as if he was the one who was beginning a conversation.
"Where's that parking lot on 72nd Street? The one with the Chinaman who parks the cars too close together? Is it Madison or Lexington... By the way, I'm thinking of selling part of the company to Magnit Press."
"Davis, good god. Chinaman?"
"Lexington?"
"Madison."
"Did you hear me?" he asked.
"Did you hear me?"
"You said Madison."
"Before that. I said I had an interesting day."
“And I said I was thinking of selling the company. That’s a really
big deal, Pen.”
She sighed. “Of course it is.”
“But if you don’t care…”
"Oh, god. Not this. Let me stop you there, please."
She was, in general, these days very tired of his conversational wizardry. The erudite emotional manipulation that left her in the dust.
“I’m sorry, babe. Finish what you were telling me,” Davis said with a hint of a sparkle in his eyes. "Sorry."
He came up behind her and slipped his arms around her as she was cooking. A sure sign that he was about to go into the city and have sex with someone else. She’d learned it all by now.
“You smell good,” he murmured.
“It’s the Crisco.”
Penny shook some pepper onto the chicken breast and ignored his hands on her body. She spoke as some better part of him would hear her.
"We won a bidding war for Richard Gilland's new manuscript,” Penny said. “Almost seven figures... And I got him for his next three books. Remember I told you how much I wanted to sign him?"
"No, but that’s great.”
Richard Gilland had written the best selling novel of 1976, In Danger's Wave. About a family mystery that takes place over a summer in Montauk. Penny had read it and wished she had edited it. She wanted his next book, and had made that happen.
"We closed the deal just before end of day today," she said.
Davis left what she’d come to recognize as ‘appropriate silence to indicate acknowledgment.’
"Hey, isn't that something," he said as he pulled away.
Jealousy? Dislike? Disinterest? What was it? She couldn't tell. Each possibility fraught with its own implications, so she decided she didn't care.
She turned to catch his expression. There wasn’t one.
Davis pulled his chunky car keys out of the kitchen everything drawer. “Ah… There we go. I have to talk to Jerry at the Shell station about getting the ragtop fixed on the M.G.. That fucking tree’s dripping sap on it again…"
No time like the present, Penny thought. Take this news into the city with you tonight.
“I’m not pregnant,” Penny said.
“What?”
“I thought I was pregnant. I’m not.”
“Oh. How do you know?”
“I went to the doctor. A few days ago.”
Davis’s eyebrows arched in a scowl. “Why didn’t you tell me then?”
“I’m telling you now.”
“I didn’t realize we were still trying.”
“When did we stop trying?”
She turned to face him. He looked relieved at the news. Which irritated her more.
“I thought we both wanted this, Davis.”
“Penny, don’t twist my words. We do.”
Penny slipped a chicken breast in the heated pan on the stove.
"None for me thanks," Davis said, sliding his blue blazer on.
"I didn't ask."
She felt the air stiffen.
"What's the matter with you?" he said.
"I didn't ask if you wanted dinner, so don't assume I'm cooking for you."
He chuckled as he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “I love you like this,” he said, “I've got to be in the city by 8:30. Should I take the Hutch?"
"Take the Bronx River Parkway."
"Don't wait up. I'll probably be late."
"Right."
Say hi to her for me.
Who.
Her.
Penny, you're being ridiculous.
She didn't even bother anymore.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them he was gone. She heard the sizzle of the chicken in the pan.
I'm fucking lonely. You make me lonely in my own body. But you're the only thing that makes me not completely alone in this fucking world. And where would I ever find another Davis Llewelyn? Brilliant, witty, worldly....
He was all she had known since she was 25. Her whole world.
Whenever Penny imagined a life without Davis, the world turned sideways like either it or she had vertigo.
Penny stared out the kitchen window as the chicken seared in the pan.
Jamie Brennan.
Her soft looking lips, the little bump at the bridge of nose where her nose was either made that way or broken that way, her warmth, the little scar on her chin, her sparkling intelligence.
God the whole thing was a turn on.
And if Penny was attracted to her physically, so what? Didn't all women find other women beautiful? She was being ridiculous.
Twenty minutes later, sitting out on their screen porch. her body humming from a double gin and tonic. As evening became night. Listening to the sound of cicadas, Penny finished the last of her chicken breast and asparagus and slid the plate onto the little glass table next to her wicker chair.
She glanced out across their side yard to the neighbor's house thirty feet away. She could hear the sounds of a cookout. Kids laughing. She could smell the barbecue. The chit chit chit sound of the lawn sprinklers nearby.
She gripped her rock glass filled with gin and tonic. Held it to her lips. Could smell the lime. Could feel the tonic bubbles bursting against her nose. A fizzy comfort. She had a grateful sip. It warmed her and calmed her.
She wondered how many other desperately lonely humans were in this town.
Sometimes she thought she and Davis should move back to the city. There was always something to do.
Jamie Brennan.
The thought of her arrived before Penny could put up the guardrail.
Alright, enough. I need to get my work done...
Penny picked up her plate, the clanking of the cutlery on the solo plate echoed in the side yard. The sound of loneliness was everywhere around her.
She stepped into the house letting the screen door slam. She always let it slam. It was a way of bringing a shock of life to this quiet house.
In the kitchen, she rinsed the plate until it looked new, then slid the plate into the dishwasher.
She reached into the freezer and dislodged two perfect ice cubes which she dropped into her glass with a chunkity chunk sound.
She twisted the top on the Sapphire Gin bottle, bypassed the jigger on the counter and filled up the glass halfway. Then she tilted the gold can of Schweppes Tonic Water over the glass for a fizzy top-up.
Mostly gin. Little bit of tonic.
If she couldn't be happy like other people, she could at least recreate the sensation with alcohol as she drank herself into a stupor nightly.
She gazed out the kitchen window at the pink and white petals of the dogwood tree silhouetting against the dusky evening sky in the backyard.
What’s the point of having a beautiful tree, she thought, to adorn a beautiful house? In a beautiful neighborhood that smelled like fresh cut grass and people's barbecues and sounded like cicadas on a hot June night? What was the point of any of it, if what was inside you was so fucking alone?
"Alone in crowds to wander on... "
The quote popped into her head. Thomas Moore.
Penny sometimes wished she'd retain cheerful quotes. But she didn't. She remembered the ones that sounded most like her.
She took a sip of her drink and could feel the hum of gin in her body making everything warmer and easier. There at the bottom of the second glass, was the little invisible sprite that sang hope into her heart on most evenings. Reassurance that everything would be alright. That it would get better. That good was coming.
Penny broke her stare and glanced over at her gleaming white Amana fridge with the two item grocery list on it. (Milano cookies and a Spanish onion.)
Jamie Brennan.
Penny bristled at her stupid, bored mind.
She tilted her gin and tonic to her lips and gulped down the rest of the glass.
14
“Jamie, when ya gonna marry me?”
“Well, Tony, as enchanting as that proposal is, there may be flaws.”
“Yeah? Like?”
“Your fiancée”<
br />
“She’d understand.”
Jamie Brennan was standing at the counter of Lou’s deli, down the street from the bookstore.
She had spent half her lunch hour dawdling on the way over here and had half an hour to spare. Time enough to grab a turkey sandwich and a Yoo Hoo and have some laughs with her pal Tony, the muscle-bound twenty-something Italian guy in the tight t-shirt who worked behind the counter.
Life wasn’t Mr. Rogers Neighborhood in New York, but you had your every day friends – the deli guy, the girl at the pizza place. The other pizza place girl. The guy from the other deli.
Tony was grinning at Jamie. “Come on, Jamie... I’m in love with you,” he winked, as he punched the till and handed an office lady her change. “There ya go, sweetheart...” he said to the lady.
Jamie heard a voice behind her.
"Yoo Hoo? That's a drink?"
Jamie glanced up and took in the tall drink of Guinness that was Belfast's Bridget Dwyer standing right behind her.
"It's delicious."
"Not embarrassed to buy a drink called Yoo Hoo?"
"Buying it proudly.”
Jamie’s heart started beating faster. Bridget Dwyer. Like an amazon in faded Levi's and combat boots. With a twinkle in her blue eyes and a secret smile curling on her lips at all times.
Wow. Jamie thought before she thought to think something else.
"Hiya, Jamie Brennan. How's the craic?" Bridget said, her lips curling into a half smile.
Her confidence was off the charts. It made Jamie get weak in the knees.
"I'm not sure what the ‘crack’ is but… good?"
"It's the fun. It's how's it goin'?"
"Yeah. Good. You?"
"Grand..." she grinned.
Behind the deli counter, Tony looked up from the cash and spotted Bridget.
"Awww, fuckin' Bridget. Be still my heart. When ya gonna run away with me?”
Jamie waved her Yoo Hoo. "Um… Cheating on me already, Tony?”
"Don't worry, Jamie, you're my first love. But Bridget's taken my heart."
Bridget Dwyer pressed her body against Jamie's hip as she leaned her hand down on the counter. It was sexy. Everything about her was.
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