Penny's whole body went numb. Her heart was thumping in her chest. Her mind filled with plans. Anything to make this not true.
Get a car. Get out to Westchester. Get to whatever hospital she's in.
“Joan, I had no idea," Penny said quickly. "I've been in a meeting for three fucking hours. Where is she? I'll get out there as soon as I can."
Joan shook her head. Her voice came out quietly.
”Penny, she died."
Penny felt herself leave her body.
This can't be true. It can’t.
She felt Joan’s hand on her shoulder.
She could hear a sound, far away. A woman crying. Down the hall? Someone was crying. Wailing.
She put her hands up to her face. The sound became louder.
She realized the person who was crying was her.
58
“Caught!”
4 p.m. Jamie stood at the counter of the bookstore. She stared at the headline in the special afternoon edition of The New York Post and flipped the pages of the paper.
Jamie glanced up from the counter. No one else working today. Jamie was on her own.
She listened to the air conditioner clunking in the corner, the sound of 10cc singing The Things We Do For Love coming through the one distant speaker.
Jamie flipped the pages of the Post. Seemed like the entire paper was about how they finally caught the .44 Caliber Killer, a.k.a Son of Sam.
That plus horoscopes.
She turned the page and saw a tiny article. “New York Editor Killed in Accident.”
Jamie’s heart started racing.
“A 29-year-old woman was killed when she jumped from a bridge in White Plains onto the highway below. She is survived by her husband and ten-month-old child. The woman, identified as Constance Pell, worked as an Editor at Peckham Press in Manhattan and had edited the latest bestseller from David Fitzgerald Patrick. There will be a private family funeral this Thursday in New Rochelle."
“Oh my god,” Jamie whispered. Connie.
She looked up from the counter. All she could think was finding Penny.
The awful impossible of what Connie had done whirred in her mind.
“God… No…Connie.”
She grabbed the counter telephone and punched in Penny’s number.
“Penny Langston’s office.”
“Cathy, it’s Jamie Brennan. I’m so sorry I just heard about Connie Pell.”
“Jamie, I know. It’s terrible.”
“Is Penny there?”
“No, sorry, hon. Penny’s gone home for the day.”
“Oh god – is she okay?”
“She’s pretty shaken up. Everyone is.”
Jamie stared out the window of the bookstore across the way. She saw a blue sky that shouldn't be blue. A white puffy cloud sitting there like this was any other day.
“Cathy - is there a way to get in touch with her? Could I get her a message?”
“I can give it to her when I see her.”
“Will she be in tomorrow?”
“To be honest, Jamie, I really don’t know,” she said. “I doubt it. She might be off for a bit.”
“Right. Well, please tell her I called. And I’m so sorry. And she can call me anytime.”
“I’ll let her know.”
“Thanks, Cathy,” Jamie said. “Oh - Cathy - is there a funeral?”
“There is... But it’s just family and close friends…”
“Of course. Thanks.”
Jamie hung up the phone and a helplessness washed over her like rain.
She didn’t know Penny’s home number. She didn’t even know where she lived. Scarsdale but that was about it.
How could she know her so well and not know these things? And what was she going to do, anyway? Ring the doorbell? Meet her husband? “Is Penny here?’
She felt her heart sink. Connie was gone. Fucking gone. This was awful.
Penny would be devastated.
Jamie searched her mind but it was done. She couldn’t help. She couldn’t get to her. And the truth was she was no one to Penny.
She was outside Penny’s world. And had only glimpsed in. One beautiful moment.
All she wanted to do in this moment was be there for her.
She was Popeye desperately trying to catch Swe’Pea crawling along a girder. But she couldn’t.
Connie had fucking killed herself. Penny was gone.
And there was nothing she could do.
59
Midafternoon was something Penny rarely saw in her backyard on a weekday. She couldn’t remember the last time she was home at 3:30. Never?
Penny was sitting out on her screen porch and had her gin and tonic next to her. She stared into the side yard.
This was a mistake, coming home. There was nothing she could do. She might as well be at work distracting herself. Her eyes were heavy and puffy from crying.
She was glad Davis wasn’t home when she got home. She called him at his office when she got to Grand Central.
“Aw, Babe… that’s fucking terrible. You okay?”
“Not really.”
“Aw, Pen.”
“Davis, I don’t even know what to do.”
“Go home. Just go home. That’s all you can do. I’ll see you later when I get there. It’ll be okay.”
“I’m at Grand Central now,” she said. “What time will you be home?”
“I’ve got a dinner at the 21 Club tonight so probably - ”
“Can’t you cancel it?”
There was a pause.
“I really can’t.”
“Wow.”
“Penny, I’m sorry. I wish - ”
“Davis, it’s fine. I’ll see you at home.”
She’d hung up the phone and looked across the concourse of Grand Central. The echoey afternoon distant voices bouncing across the vast marble concourse.
This world without Connie. No.
Penny felt all the strength leave her body and she leaned against the wall next to the pay phones.
A sob echoed out of her before she could even stop it. Sudden tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.
Unable to go anywhere before the tears took over, she put her face in her hands and cried.
Some other day, she’d be mortified. She’d be afraid people would stare. But at this moment she didn’t have it in her to give a shit.
But as it happened, no one cared. In the busy afternoon concourse, she let tears fall down her face and little sobs burst out from inside her she couldn’t stop and no one even seemed to notice.
Commuters walked past like, “Oh, just another sight in New York. A well dressed woman crying by the payphone”
And not one stopped to ask if she was okay.
She couldn’t tell if that was better or worse.
“Gin and tonic, please…”
Penny walked down the ramp to the waiting silver Conrail commuter train. She was standing in front of the red bow-tied bartender with his mini cart, who was there every commute home. Waiting to fill drink orders for commuters. For those who couldn’t wait for the bar car. Or like Penny right now, needed to drink and cry in peace.
The smell of train exhaust from inside the platform area filled her nose. She had her sunglasses on to hide her puffy eyes.
The bartender twisted open the airplane-sized bottle of gin and poured it into a little plastic cup with two ice cubes. Topping it up with the fizz of tonic.
She handed him a five dollar bill. He reached into his till to retrieve her change.
She waved her hand.
“Thank you.”
Penny sat in the window seat on the train as it shuffled along the tracks, watching the tunnel of Grand Central give way to the outside elevated rail line that ran past the tenement apartments in Harlem where you could see inside people’s homes: A sheet for curtains. A toddler playing by an open window.
Then up past 125th Street to Woodlawn in the Bronx, then Mount Vernon… New Rochelle… Tu
ckahoe, Crestwood, then as they got towards Scarsdale, her favorite part - the train shuffled past the streak of late summer woods with bald patches where you could see the Bronx River on the left and that golf course on the right.
Where she'd watch kids sleigh-riding in the winter. Distant, colorful solitary specks down wide, white hills.
But no kids today. This was summer. Just a fat golfer in yellow pants making a putt way in the distance.
She had a copy of the New Yorker open and unread on her lap.
Tears filled her eyes again. She shook the ice cubes in her empty gin and tonic glass.
No, she thought. No to this world without Connie Pell.
Absofuckinglutely not.
She disembarked the train at Scarsdale Station and walked across the footbridge to the circle by the record store where she parked her car.
She opened the door of her boxy blue Audi. Slid into the driver’s seat and immediately fell apart. Sobbing. Her heart aching with the loss of Connie.
Finally, a couple of kids whizzed through the circle on ten-speeds and she started the car.
Absofuckinglutely not. Not this world without Connie Pell.
But it was done.
60
The 8:15 a.m. sunlight streamed into her Scarsdale kitchen. An exhausted Penny was sitting at the kitchen table in her plaid robe. In the same spot where she had spent all night. Reading Connie's letter and Jamie's pages. Crying and drinking cups of tea she let get cold.
She read and re-read each of the words Connie asked her to remember.
Emma, Mansfield Park…. Eating a yogurt on the side of the fountain on Sixth Avenue. Fixing the problems of the world…
And then to give her heart moments of reprieve, Penny would sift through the typewritten Jamie Brennan pages. Thoughts, observations, fragments of short stories, poems, life. Funny, sweet, soulful. Perfect. It touched her heart when nothing could. And when she finished the stack, she read it all again.
She looked up. Davis appeared in the kitchen doorway. Cheerful and dressed for a Saturday in his blue golf shirt and chinos.
“Penny… Babe. Have you been sitting there all night?”
“So it would seem.”
“What time is the car coming for the funeral?” he said.
“9:30.”
“I’m going to make some coffee,” he said. “You want some?”
“Sure.”
He walked into the kitchen and kissed her on top of the head.
“How are you doing?”
“I’ve been better.”
He walked over to the counter, pulling the coffee can down from a shelf above the sink.
“Life doesn’t get rougher than this,” he said.
She nodded.
“Anything you need, my love?”
At least there was this. A constant. Him. Them.
“Not right now. Thanks.”
Davis filled the coffee pot with water. “Look, I was thinking,” he said. “Are you okay if I don’t go to this thing with you?”
Penny stared at him. Her eyes trying to focus. As much on his form as his words. She blinked a couple of times. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I have a meeting about selling the company. I mean it’s just her family and you. It’s not like they know me.”
Penny felt anger flare in her stomach. “I don’t even know what to say to that,” she said. “You don’t want to be inconvenienced by not knowing people?”
He scowled. “Don’t say that, Penny. It’s not like that.”
Some other time that wasn’t now she might have said, “Then what’s it like, Davis?” But not now.
And with that she knew.
Penny glanced down at her left hand. Staring at the one-carat antique engagement ring she wore every day since Davis had given it to her that Christmas Eve eleven years ago. And her thin gold band from their city hall ceremony.
This was like a stranger’s hand now.
And with his last words, she knew, this was no longer her life.
She gently slid the rings off her finger and placed them on the wooden kitchen table in front of her.
She stared at them sitting on the table. Glinting and glittering. A promise made. So broken in pieces. By his infidelity and her unbelonging heart.
She finally looked at him. He was staring at the rings on the table.
“Penny…”
“Davis, this isn’t working for me anymore.”
“Penny, hang on.”
She shook her head. “Davis, no.”
He crossed his arms. “Don’t I get a say?”
“Not now. You had every chance.”
He voice softened. “Babe. You’ve been through a lot. Let’s just give it time.”
She stared at her mug. Then back at him.
“I need to be someone else.”
His eyebrows raised. He stepped back and leaned against the counter. A laugh chuckled out of him.
“Well, that’s fucking ridiculous.”
There he was. The him she knew.
“And that,” Penny swirled her hand indicating ‘you’, “Is why this cannot sustain.”
His face hardened. “Don’t blame this all on me,” he said. “You cut me out years ago.”
Was he right? Had she? Did it even matter now? And what was she supposed to do when she knew he was sleeping with other women.
“Fine, Davis. Let that be your story.”
Penny rubbed her eyes. Every part of her body ached with exhaustion from crying last night.
“I’m going to go to the funeral, and then back to Connie’s house in New Rochelle to be with her husband and her family. Because Connie would want me to do that,” she said. She looked up at him. “And then I’m going to come home. And you and I are going to figure things out, Davis.” She paused. “Because this is over.”
“Penny…”
He stood there in his Saturday chinos and a navy golf shirt, his glasses on, his salt and pepper hair long and in his eyes. He was holding the Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee can and looking at her like she was from another planet.
“Don’t do this.”
“It’s done.”
“Is it someone else?”
Yes.
“No.”
“Is it?”
“I said no.”
He turned around to the counter and started fiddling with the coffee maker.
“Fine,” he said with a snap. “When are you back?”
“I don’t know. About 3.”
“Good. I’ll be gone by then.”
He yanked the coffee maker towards him. Opening the coffee can and scooping some into the filter. It always bothered her he didn’t measure it. His coffee was terrible.
She watched him clonking around, trying to pretend he couldn’t care less. Trying to hurt her one more time by not caring. But this time she didn’t feel hurt. She didn’t feel anything.
“Fine,” she said.
She stood up, scooping up the pages of typewritten writing that had comforted her last night.
Penny walked into the hallway and started heading up the stairs to have a shower. She glanced at the framed pictures on the wall as you went up the stairs. The photos now flanking her like a sad honor guard as she passed.
Her and Davis outside city hall on their wedding day. Penny at 19 with her friends at Radcliffe.
Her parents smiling at her from a photograph. Christmas in their London house.
Everything in her world had gone upside down when Connie Pell and her joy and her heart and humor and her freckles and her laugh died. Fucking needlessly.
But now there was a counterweight rising up inside Penny, bringing her back to level. It wasn’t a replacement or another person.
It was another her. The one who would leave him. The one who had the thought, maybe leaving town for awhile.
Another her. The real one.
The Me Nobody Knows.
That was the name of a Broadway show she and Davis had seen a few
years ago. And that’s what she felt like in this moment.
Leave him. Leave town for a month or two. And maybe it was never meant to happen with Jamie. Maybe it was a beautiful thing that built this her. Maybe that was best.
But either way, it was time for life after this moment to be a fuck of a lot different. Because it couldn’t remotely be the same.
She got to the top of the stairs and passed the last of the pictures like they were strangers. Or maybe she was. All she knew was, she wasn’t the her on these walls anymore.
The me nobody knows.
61
Two weeks after Connie Pell died, Jamie was standing in an echoey main floor gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Staring at a painting called Esther before Ahasuerus by a female Renaissance painter named Artemisia Gentileschi. A streak of red in Esther’s dress, the blacky blacks of the Caravaggio like background. A world to get lost in. And a week off from work.
Lynette had called when Jamie was home feeling sorry for herself and had said in capital letters, “GO LOOK AT ART!”
She was right.
So Jamie stood in this gallery in this museum staring at the blacks and reds and gold in this painting.
And longed for Penny.
Someone shouldn’t fill you up. Jamie knew it. But sometimes someone just did: Penny Langston and the way she kissed and the way she saw the world. With that brilliant mind that corralled words into beautiful shapes.
The painting was helping. Nothing filled the space. But some things at least acknowledged its existence.
But she needed more. So she kept walking, through the next gallery. Medieval Paintings. Always entertaining. The era when baby Jesus was painted flat and with a grown up's face. Still too dark. Not enough joy.
She turned left at the end of the gallery and bounded up the marble staircase. To another era.
"Yes," she whispered, walking into the room.
Her line of vision filled with purples and yellows. Wheat fields and colors that reminded her of the beautiful of life.
Impressionism. Much better.
Jamie breathed in the wooden, crisp smell of the gallery. She took a seat on a black leather bench in front of a painting by Monet. Each color reassured her that there was beauty somewhere. Maybe not right now in this town or in her heart. But maybe a hundred years ago in France in a hayfield. The peekaboo blue of the sky, the purply violet and red flowers on the yellow wheat colored field. The brushy green brush of evergreen green for the trees.
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