“Both?”
“Good enough. So try me.”
Jamie stared at a couple’s initials scratched in the table. H.L.+ F.D.
“Who do you think they are?”
Bridget glanced at the initials. “Fuckin’ drunk plonkers.”
“Here’s one,” Jamie said. “I feel sometimes like I’ve got this scribble of sorrow over my head. Like people can see it. You ever feel like that?”
Bridget had a puff of her cigarette and exhaled the smoke from her nose and mouth. “That’s me every day.”
Jamie shook her head. “God, it’s brutal. How do you just - y’know - go on?”
“You mean about Billy?”
“Is it okay I asked?”
“Yeah. It’s okay. With you it is,” Bridget laughed. “Most people I just wanna punch them..”
Bridget tapped her cigarette in the ashtray.
“Ya just do. The clock turns. The days go by. The world spins. And you gotta keep movin’ or that spinnin’ world, it’ll knock ya the fuck over.”
“And hope tomorrow things’ll be better?”
“Sure,” Bridget laughed. “That.”
Jamie glanced around the bar. “Getting kinda crowded. You want to come back to my place?”
Bridget’s lips curled into a sexy smile. “So much for not a date.”
“I don’t mean it like -”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I just -”
“I get it.”
“Sometimes this city gets… I don’t know.”
Bridget laughed. “Soul crushingly lonely? Ach, I understand that, Jamie Brennan.”
She paused like she wanted to say something then didn’t.
“You miss Belfast?”
“Every second.”
“Why don’t you go home?”
“You trying to get rid of me?”
Bridget smiled. If this was another time and Jamie was another her, she might fall in love right about now. But that her had long gone.
“No. I don’t want to get rid of you.”
“You coming onto me?”
Jamie laughed. “No!”
“Why not? What’s wrong with me? What kind of a gay are ya?”
Jamie shook her head. “We were talking about Belfast. Don’t you want to go home?”
“I can’t go home.”
“Money?”
Bridget paused. “Yeah. Money.”
Jamie knew that wasn’t all. But let it lie.
When they got back to Jamie’s place, it was like two people who had known each other forever. The laughs. The sweetness. The easy silence. They watched TV sitting next to each other on Jamie’s couch at the front of the apartment.
At one point, Bridget reached over and took Jamie’s hand. She held it and they watched Johnny Carson.
“What the fuck’s with that Ed McMahon?” Bridget said, having a haul on her cigarette.
“Yeah,” Jamie laughed. “I don’t know.”
“Americans are an odd lot. Loud and brash and tan.”
“We are.”
“I like it.”
“Do you?”
Bridget shrugged. “Do I have a choice?” she smirked.
An hour later, in the bedroom area at the back of her apartment, with the sound of the fan whirring in the window at the front up by University Place, Jamie lay in bed next to Bridget. She had lent her a pair of gym shorts and a t-shirt to sleep in.
It was like they were a couple without being a couple. Without the stress. Without the neediness. Without the love. More than friends. Less than anything that required definition.
The fan was humming and blowing in the window up at the front. Bridget rolled onto her side and faced Jamie. She ran her fingertips down Jamie’s cheek.
“You are so beautiful, Jamie Brennan…”
Jamie thought of saying thank you. Thanks. Thank you. But it was like thank you pushed the words away. So instead she let the words lie there in herself and wondered if they were true.
Bridget leaned in and kissed her. She slipped her hand onto Jamie’s waist and up under her shirt.
Jamie felt different - this kiss - this wasn’t like when Bridget kissed her the first time, all filled with confidence and bravado. This was gentle. And sweet.
And it filled up Jamie’s body with a rush of tenderness, a gush of warmth and sex she’d long denied herself.
Jamie slid her hands up and down, exploring Bridget’s body as they kissed - gentle giving way to deeper, more passionate. Heat and immediacy.
Bridget looked into her eyes. “Do you mind if we go slow?” She smiled. “I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
“You want me to show you?”
Bridget nodded.
Jamie laughed. “I’m a little out of practice myself.”
Bridget ran her fingertips along Jamie’s lips.
“I love your mouth,” she whispered. Then her eyes met Jamie’s. Stayed there.
Jamie felt the inside of her get seen and approved of.
“There’s something about the way you look at me, Bridget Dwyer...”
“Something like...”
“I don’t know...” Jamie whispered. “Like you see everything I don’t want to tell you.”
“So tell me...”
“Let’s just…”
“Not?”
“Yeah.”
“Fair enough…” Bridget smiled.
Jamie slipped her own t-shirt over her head and tossed it off the bed. She pulled Bridget in to her body and kissed her. She felt Bridget’s tongue gently explore her mouth.
She ran her hands down along Bridget’s fit body. Everything was slow and gentle. Not fast and rushed. Easy, like falling into the water.
Bridget placed her lips next to Jamie’s ear and whispered.
“I want you, Jamie Brennan.”
And suddenly a wall in Jamie’s world fell down. And behind it was a new her. Ready. Scared. Opened up. Never to be the same again.
And maybe that was good.
22
"Good morning and welcome to Daitch Shopwell.”
The stilted manager’s voice crackled over the intercom.
“We’re having a special today on oranges in aisle eleven… Thirty-nine cents for two.”
Penny Langston had been standing in the same spot in Aisle 7 of Daitch Shopwell, the grocery store in downtown Scarsdale, for ten minutes on this rainy Saturday morning.
In between the Entemann's coffee cakes (she picked one up) and the Milano cookies (next on her list) she was suddenly struck by the feeling that perhaps everything she had dreamed of for her life was not going to happen.
A love to last a lifetime. A career with contribution and recognition. The soul, the intellect, the heart. A family of my own. More peanuts.
The last part was a private joke because she was sitting on an airplane when she wrote those words.
A list for her life she wrote out when she was eighteen years old. A week after her parents died. A dream to save her own soul written on a cocktail napkin on a British Airways flight. Flying from London back to school in Boston.
Because ten days earlier, her life as she knew it had ended on an October night with a phone call.
She’d been in her room at Radcliffe. She’d finally begun to fit in. Hit her stride. Find her friends. Find her voice.
The knock on the open dorm room door. Penny was reading a book, flopped on her bed on a Friday night.
“Penny! Phone…”
Penny had glanced up to see the wide grin of Georgia’s own 19-year-old Marg Cash from down the hall. Her perfect red dress for a perfect date that night.
“You look lovely, Marg.”
“I’ve got a date with Teddy Hollister. Harvard ‘62.” She twinkled.
All Marg’s suitors had wealthy last names and Harvard Graduating class years.
Marg Cash, nineteen years old, resided with Bunty Seward in room 115. They were fun and filled with life. They made gin ma
rtinis in the common room on Sunday nights. Both girls had enough family money to never work. But came to Radcliffe to get art history degrees and Harvard husbands.
Penny followed Marg down the hall to the payphone outside the common room.
“Sounds long distance… Intriguing!” Marg chimed.
Penny could hear the Friday night Bantram Hall sounds. Music on record players in rooms. Shouts of laughter and gossip.
She breathed in the smell of perfume and hairspray that filled the hallway.
A Friday evening where Penny was happier to lie on her bed and read a book. No shortage of Harvard suitors herself, Penny Langston had come to Boston to get a degree and then make a career for herself. Not get married. But there were plenty of handsome, brilliant boys with sleek suits and thoughts on Proust.
“Have a fun evening, Marg,” Penny smiled, as Marg tucked into her room to slip on her coat and shoes for her evening out.
“You too, Pen.”
Penny arrived at the pay phone on the wall by the common room on that October night. Saw the receiver dangling down from its wire coil as it did when someone called for one of the girls in the dorm. Usually their parents. Sometimes a boy. Sometimes an old high school friend. Calls that were filled with promise and possibility and eased homesickness
Penny picked up the clunky black receiver and held it to her ear.
“Hello?”
The sound immediately made her want to recoil. Backward down the hall, into her room, onto her bed, with that book in her hand, and stay there safe and warm.
“Penny.”
It was her uncle. Static on the line. He was sobbing. British people don’t sob. And her mother’s brother, Sir Graham Lennox was a Member of Parliament, not a sobber.
“Penny, something terrible has happened - there’s been an accident,” he said. “Your parents - ”
He may have uttered the rest, but Penny closed her eyes against the news and whispered, “No.”
Because she knew. She knew what her mother would have done. She hoped it wasn’t true. But his next words confirmed it.
“ - And the car somehow lost control and went into the oncoming traffic on the A1, they died instantly…”
“No,” she whispered again.
The threat that Penny’s mother made all those times driving Penny somewhere. “I should just drive into the lights. No one would miss us.”
Penny heard her uncle rambling words she wished he would stop saying.
“An accident… something happened… rain…oncoming traffic…”
Penny’s body went weak. She leaned against the wall where girls had cheerfully written random phone numbers in ballpoint pen or lipstick. She gripped the black phone that smelled like Chanel Number 9. Tears started to spill down her face.
Her mother had actually finally done it. Turned the wheel intentionally into oncoming traffic. Penny could never prove it, and maybe mercifully she was wrong. But it didn’t matter. It was done.
And the part Penny had never imagined — She took Penny’s father with her.
“They’re both dead,” her uncle choked out. “It was raining. Something must have happened.”
Penny squeezed her eyes shut.
She was silent for a minute.
“Penny? Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I heard you.”
“You need to come home.”
In that moment, a strength welled up inside her. One that never left since. And she decided two things - her homecoming would be the last time she ever went back to that home or that life.
And she would sell everything. Her father’s newspapers, the family home. Everything.
“I’ll fly back tomorrow. We can settle the affairs. Sell the house. But then I’m coming back here to Boston.”
“As you wish.”
It sounded like doubt in his voice. Not every man had her father’s sense of what women could do.
She flew back to England the next day, did all those things. Sold her father’s newspapers for thirty million pounds. Donated half to children’s charities and took the rest with her to Boston. Never to go back. And only to go on.
And on that plane ride back on that rainy night, next to that nice American businessman who showed her pictures of his kids, she wrote down on the cocktail napkin those things of which she would not settle for less. The things in this awful, empty moment and aching, cruel world that someday would save her.
It was all she had.
And she began, where she always began. With how she saw the world and the books she read. With love.
A love to last a lifetime. A career with contribution and recognition. The soul, the intellect, the heart. A family of my own.
And now she was standing in aisle 7 of Daitch Shopwell taking stock on this rainy Saturday morning. In a life of her making. Where love wasn’t love. And children wouldn’t come. Her career was fulfilling and nurturing. But everything else she’d dreamed, she instead got a not-enough version of.
And a husband who, no matter how much she loved him, would never love her enough to not sleep with other women.
She suddenly realized she forgot to write everything down on that list. Details like feeling alive. Details like fidelity.
Too much to write, it turned out - it was a cocktail napkin after all, not the fucking Dead Sea Scrolls.
Penny searched her mind for an antidote.
“Dinner party,” she whispered. “Maybe a dinner party. Bring some life to the house.”
It was something. A start. Waspy, yes. Scarsdale, yes. But she needed something to look forward to.
Fifteen minutes later, outside on Christie Place, Penny hunkered low, shielding herself from the drizzle, and slid the last of the paper grocery bags into the back seat of her light blue Audi 100.
She flipped the back door shut and opened the front door, sliding into the driver’s side and landing in the little square leather seat just as the rain started to pour. ‘Chucking it down’ as they used to say in London.
Penny slipped her key into the ignition and pulled her door closed with a chunk sound.
She stared ahead of her out the windshield onto the abandoned street and watched water river down the windshield. Becoming a colorful kaleidoscope lens of the red and blue cars on the street and the green of the park up by the post office.
She held her hand on the car key and didn’t feel like turning the ignition.
Instead, she stared through the blur of the windshield and listened to the echoey paradiddle of raindrops drumming on the metal roof.
There was something safe and comforting about just sitting here in her car. Looking at the blurs of color. Listening to the rain.
Davis would be wondering where she was. Good, let him wonder.
Davis. His latest idea, brought to her attention over coffee on their back patio this morning before the rain, made her furious, then silent.
“Let’s have a threesome.”
“I hope you’re fucking kidding.”
“Pen, we need to do something. I feel like we need something.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Davis. First of all - the kid next door is mowing the lawn and your voice at the best of times is a stage whisper they can hear in Battery Park,” she said. “And secondly - what on earth - man or a woman?”
“Woman.”
“Someone you know?”
He shook his head. “Someone we would pay.”
She rolled her eyes, folded shut the Weekend section of the New York Times and headed inside.
“I’m going grocery shopping,” was all she said in response.
The weird thing was - on her drive along Church Lane and Popham Road on her way downtown, looking at the Scarsdale houses and the lush trees and the occasional pond out of nowhere, she thought of how this stupid plan could do one of two things. One - Rule out if she had actual sexual feelings for another woman, i.e. Jamie Brennan.
Or Two - It could add some life to their marriage.
For now, their marriage would make do with this. It was something. A third person to breathe life into them.
A beautiful, sexually experienced, very expensive escort.
Some CPR for her soul. Life for their relationship.
Penny placed her fingertips on the key in the ignition and turned it clockwise. Her car started up with its familiar rumble and putting purr.
So that’s how it would be. Something new. Someone new.
She knew the words she’d say to Davis when she got home with the Daitch Shopwell bags of groceries. “Fine, but no dippy blond. I want beauty and brains.”
She slipped the car into drive and pulled out onto Christie Place towards home. The rain battering down. The windshield wipers flipping full tilt. Penny watched rain pouring down in front of her car like it could wash away everything that wasn't hopeful. Like it was wiping a slate.
A threesome with a beautiful paid escort.
As ridiculous as this plan might be, it suddenly injected her with the thrill of the forbidden. And, for now at least, she felt alive.
23
Penny heard the distant din of Manhattan nighttime traffic eight floors below, as she tilted her glass of white wine to her lips and took a sip.
Two days after the idea was proposed, the plans were made and here they were. In the living room of an elegant, one-bedroom suite at the Sherry Netherland. She and Davis and a statuesque, brunette beauty named Alyssa.
Penny stayed put on on the couch and drank wine.
She let Davis handle the formalities.
Alyssa had arrived a few minutes earlier. Younger than Penny would have planned. Maybe twenty-four. But apparently, according to whoever Davis dealt with for this sort of thing, in her real life a Ph.D candidate at Columbia.
Curvy body, luxurious chestnut brown hair, swept up in a chignon. She flashed a quick, beaming smile that revealed dimples. And there was twinkle in her hazel eyes that said this was fun and adventure.
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