In Her Shoes

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Amy tells me you’re a lawyer,” he began. “You know, I’m having a bit of a legal problem myself.”

  Of course you are, Rose thought, her smile spackled to her face. She glanced at the clock. Almost eleven. Where was Jim?

  “There’s this tree,” the guy said. “It’s growing on my property, see? But the leaves fall mostly into my neighbor’s yard ...”

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, Rose thought. And you’re both too lazy to rake the goddamn leaves. Or he chopped the tree down without your permission. And instead of just talking about the tree like normal people, or, God forbid, actually hiring a lawyer of your own, you want to unload on me.

  “Excuse me,” Rose murmured, cutting the guy off midway through his saga, made her escape, and twisting through the crowd until she found Amy in the kitchen, leaning against the refrigerator, twirling a glass of wine in her fingers, head tilted back, laughing at whatever the guy in front of her was saying.

  “Hey, Dan,” Amy drawled. “This is my friend Rose.”

  Dan was tall, dark, and gorgeous. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. Rose gave him a weak smile, clutching her purse—and within it, her cell phone—tightly to her side. She needed to talk to Jim. He was the only person that could soothe her and make her smile and convince her that life wasn’t pointless and that the world wasn’t full of joke-spouting idiots and litigious tree owners. Where was he?

  She eased herself away from Dan and reached into her purse, but Amy was right behind her.

  “Forget it,” she said sternly. “Don’t chase. It’s not ladylike. Remember? Men like to be the hunters, not the prey.” Amy took the cell phone from Rose’s hand and replaced it with a slotted spoon. “Dumplings,” she said, pointing Rose toward the stove, and a pot of steaming water.

  “What have you got against Jim, anyhow?” Rose asked.

  Amy gazed at the ceiling, then leveled her eyes at Rose. “It’s not him, it’s you. I’m worried about you.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m worried that you’re more into it than he is. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  Rose opened her mouth, then shut it fast. How could she convince Amy that Jim was just as into it as she was when he wasn’t even here? And there was something else, something catching at the corner of her mind, something about the night he’d showed up late, with his arms full of flowers, and how he’d smelled of scotch, and rose blossoms, and, faintly, of something else. Perfume? she’d thought, and then stopped the thought in its tracks and built a wall around it, a wall composed largely of the word no.

  “And isn’t he your boss?”

  “Not exactly,” Rose said. Jim wasn’t her boss any more than any other partner was her boss. Which was to say, he was at least somewhat her boss. Rose swallowed hard, shoved that thought to its accustomed hiding place in the back of her head, and steamed a batch of shrimp dumplings. When Amy’s back was turned, she grabbed her purse again, hurried down a hallway lined with African masks, ducked into Amy’s downstairs bathroom, and dialed Jim’s work number. No answer. She dialed her own number. Maybe he’d misunderstood her and stopped by her house instead of heading straight to Amy’s.

  “Hello?”

  Drat. Maggie. “Hi,” said Rose. “It’s me. Did Jim call?”

  “Nuh-uh,” said Maggie.

  “Well, if he calls tell him . . . tell him I’ll see him later.”

  “I probably won’t be here. I’m on my way out,” said Maggie.

  “Oh,” Rose said. There were a dozen things she wanted to ask: Going where? With what friends? With what money? She bit down hard. Asking Maggie would only infuriate her, and sending an angry Maggie out on the town was a little like handing a loaded gun to a two-year-old.

  “Lock the door behind you,” she said.

  “I will.”

  “And please take off my shoes,” Rose said.

  There was a pause. “I’m not wearing your shoes,” said Maggie.

  Sure, because you just took them off, thought Rose. “Have fun,” she said instead. Maggie promised that she would. Rose splashed cool water on her cheeks and wrists and stared at herself in the mirror. She’d smeared her mascara. Her lipstick had evaporated. And she was stuck at a party, steaming dumplings, alone. Where was he?

  Rose opened the door and tried to edge past Amy, who was standing in the doorway with her long arms crossed on her bony chest. “Did you call him?” she demanded.

  “Call who?” asked Rose.

  Amy laughed. “You are just as crummy a liar as you were when you had a crush on Hal Lindquist.” She took a cocktail napkin and wiped mascara from underneath Rose’s eyes.

  “I did not have a crush on Hal Lindquist!”

  “Oh, sure. You just wrote down exactly what he was wearing every day in your math binder because you wanted future generations to have a record of what Hal Lindquist wore in 1984.”

  Rose smiled at herself. “So which one of these guys is your date?”

  Amy made a face. “Don’t ask. It was supposed to be Trevor.”

  Rose struggled to remember what Amy had told her about Trevor. “Is he here?”

  “Indeed he is not,” said Amy. “Check this out—we’re at dinner.”

  “Where?” Rose asked dutifully.

  “Tangerine. Very nice. And we’re sitting there, and the lights are low, and the candles are flickering, and I haven’t spilled any couscous on myself, and he tells me why he broke up with his last girlfriend. Evidently he’d developed certain interests.”

  “What interests?”

  “Shit,” said Amy, with an absolutely straight face.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Consenting acts of defecation.”

  “You’re kidding,” Rose gasped.

  “I shit you not,” Amy deadpanned. “And so I’m sitting there, absolutely horrified. Needless to say, I couldn’t eat another bite, plus I had to spend the rest of the meal making sure I didn’t fart, because he’d think I was flirting ...”

  Rose started laughing.

  “Come along,” said Amy, pocketing the napkin and thrusting a beer into Rose’s hand. “Join the party.”

  Rose went back to the kitchen, heated up artichoke dip, replenished the cracker basket, made conversation with another one of Amy’s wannabes, although at the end of it she couldn’t remember a word of what either one of them had said. She longed for Jim—who, based on the available evidence, was not longing for her.

  TEN

  Jim Danvers opened his eyes and thought the same thing that he thought every morning: today I will be good. Lead me not into temptation, he recited, dragging his razor over his jaw, staring at himself sternly in his bathroom mirror. Get thee behind me, Satan, he said, pulling on his pants.

  The trouble was, Satan was everywhere. Temptation lurked around every corner. Here it was, leaning against a building, waiting for the bus. Jim slowed his Lexus and grabbed an eyeful of the blond in tight jeans, wondering what her body looked like beneath her bulky winter coat, wondering how she’d move in bed, how she’d smell, how she’d sound, and what it would take to find out.

  Stop, he ordered himself, just stop, and punched the radio into life. Howard Stern filled the front seat, his tone leering, wise, and knowing. “Are those real, honey?” he inquired of the morning’s starlet. “Real silicone,” she giggled. Jim swallowed hard and switched to the classical station. It was so unfair. Ever since a wet dream on the third night of a Boy Scout camping trip at age twelve had heralded the advent of puberty, he’d dreamed of women with a concentrated fierceness, the abstract longing of a starving man stuck on an island with back issues of Bon Appetit. Blondes, brunettes, and redheads, small-breasted willowy girls and short bouncy curvy ones, black, Hispanic, Asian, white, young, old, and in between, and even, God help him, a cute girl in leg braces he’d glimpsed on the Jerry Lewis telethon—in his fantasy world, Jim Danvers was an equal opportunity employer.

  And he’d never been able to have them. Not at age twelve, when he was
short and pudgy and frequently out of breath. Not at fourteen, when he was still short and no longer pudgy but fat, and his face was riddled with what Dr. Guberman swore was the worst case of cystic acne he’d ever seen. At sixteen he shot up six inches, but the damage was done, and the nickname Fudgie the Whale unfortunately followed him to college. What followed was the classic vicious circle—he was miserable because of his weight. He ate to stanch his misery, feeding his pain with pizza and beer, which only made him bigger, which only pushed the women further away. He’d lost his virginity senior year to a prostitute who’d looked him up and down, cracking her gum in a meditative fashion before insisting that she be on top. “Not to criticize, hon,” she’d said, “but I think what we’ve got here is a liability issue.”

  Law school could have been different, he thought to the soothing strains of Bach. He’d gotten even taller, and after the embarrassing ten minutes with the prostitute he’d taken up jogging, tracing Rocky’s route through the Philadelphia streets (although he was pretty sure that even initially Rocky could make it farther than three blocks without having to stop and catch his breath). The weight came off. His skin cleared up, leaving behind only a fading webwork of interesting scars, and he’d gotten his teeth fixed. What remained was a crippling shyness, a paralytic lack of self-esteem. All through his twenties, through his years rising steadily through the ranks at Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick, whenever he’d heard women laughing he’d assumed they were laughing at, or about, him.

  And then, somehow, everything had changed. He remembered the night he’d made partner, how he’d joined three of his recently elevated colleagues at an Irish bar on Walnut Street. “It’s Nanny Night,” one of them had said, giving Jim a meaningful wink. Jim didn’t know what he meant, but he soon found out. The bar was packed with Irish lasses, blue-eyed Swedes, Finnish girls with French braids. A half-dozen lilting accents chimed over the brass-and-mahogany bar. Jim was stunned into speechlessness and immobility. He stood frozen in a corner and downed champagne and stout and lager long after his colleagues went home, staring helplessly as the girls giggled and complained about their charges. On his way to the men’s room, he’d bumped into a red-haired freckled girl with twinkling blue eyes. “Steady there!” she’d said, laughing as he mumbled an apology. Her name was Maeve, he’d learned, as she led him back to her table. “A partner!” she’d cooed, as her friends looked on approvingly. “Congratulations!” And somehow he’d wound up in her bed, spending a joyful six hours tasting her freckles, filling his hands with the crackling fire of her hair.

  Since then he’d turned into a slut. There really was no other word for it. He wasn’t a Don Juan or a Romeo; he wasn’t a stud or a cocksman. He was a slut, living out every one of the fantasies of his frustrated adolescence in a city that suddenly seemed full of good-natured girls in their twenties, all of them just as eager for a no-strings-attached romp as he was. He’d turned some kind of magical corner where what he was (and what he earned) had somehow trumped the way he looked. Or his looks had improved. Or, to women, the words “I’m a partner” sounded exactly like “take off your panties.” He couldn’t explain it, but suddenly there were nannies and students and secretaries, bartenders and baby-sitters and waitresses, and he didn’t even need to go to bars to find them. Why, right in the office there was a certain paralegal who’d be happy to stay late, to lock his office door behind her and take off everything except a lilac brassiere and a certain pair of sandals she had that laced around her calves, and . . .

  Stop, Jim told himself. It was unseemly. It was embarrassing. It had to stop. He was thirty-five and a partner. He’d gorged himself at the all-you-can-eat flesh banquet for the past year and a half, and it should have been enough. Think of the risks, he instructed himself. Disease! Heartbreak! Angry fathers and boyfriends! The three guys who’d made partner when he had were already married, and two of them were fathers, and although nothing explicit had ever been said, it was clear that they’d chosen the kind of lifestyles the firm’s powers approved of. Home and hearth, with possibly a discrete diversion on the side, that was the way to go, not these wild weekends of girls whose last names he didn’t always catch. His colleagues’ attitudes had already started to shift from awe to awed amusement. Soon they’d be looking at him with just amusement. And after that would come amused disgust.

  And there was Rose. Jim felt himself soften as he thought of her. Rose wasn’t the prettiest girl he’d ever been with, not the sexiest. She tended to dress like a repressed librarian, and her idea of sexy lingerie was when her cotton panties matched her cotton bra, but still, there was something about her that bypassed the hot wiring below his belt and grabbed directly at his heart. The way she looked at him! Like he was one of the coverboys from her romance novels come to life, like he’d left his white steed at a parking meter and had charged through a thicket of thorns to rescue her. He was surprised that the whole firm hadn’t figured out what was going on between them, in spite of the rules about partners dating associates. Then again, maybe he was being blind. Maybe everyone had figured it out already. And here he was, tempted a hundred times a day to break her heart.

  Sweet Rose. She deserved better than him, Jim thought, piloting his Lexus into the law firm’s garage. And for her, he’d try to be as good as he could be. Already he’d swapped his hot secretary for a sixtysomething motherly type who smelled of lemon Luden’s cough drops, and he’d stayed out of the bars for an unprecedented three weeks running. She was good for him, he told himself, stepping into the elevator that would take him to his office. She was sharp and smart and kindhearted; she was the kind of girl he could see growing old with, spending the rest of his life with. And for Rose he’d walk the straight and narrow, he vowed, looking over the trio of chattering secretaries who’d entered the elevator beside him before taking one last whiff of their mingled perfume, swallowing hard, and looking away.

  ELEVEN

  “Why do we have to do this again?” asked Maggie as she flung herself into the passenger’s seat. It was the same question she asked as they set out for every home football game. They’d been going once a year for almost twenty years, Rose thought, and the answer never changed.

  “Because our father is a very limited man,” she said, and started driving toward the Vet. “Are you going to be warm enough? You remember we’re playing Tampa, not going there.” Maggie had dressed for the football game in a black catsuit, black boots with chunky heels, and a cropped leather jacket with a fake fur collar. Rose, on the other hand, had on jeans and a sweater, plus a hat, a scarf, mittens, and an oversized yellow down coat.

  Maggie peered at Rose’s jacket. “You look like a mattress that someone peed on,” she said.

  “Thanks for sharing,” said Rose. “Fasten your seat belt.”

  “Fine,” Maggie replied, pulling a flask out of one of the jacket’s minuscule pockets. She took a swig and tilted it toward her sister. “Apricot brandy,” she said.

  “I’m driving,” said Rose, her mouth set in a tight line.

  “And I’m drinking,” said Maggie, and giggled. The sound of her sister’s laughter reminded Rose of every other football game they’d attended since her father, in a slightly misguided act of involved parenting, had bought the first set of season tickets in 1981.

  “We hate football,” Maggie had informed him with the absolute conviction of being ten years old and right about everything. Michael Feller’s face had gotten pale.

  “We do not!” Rose had said, and she’d given her sister a fast upper-arm pinch.

  “Ow!” said Maggie.

  “Really?” asked their father.

  “Well, we don’t like watching it on TV so much,” said Rose, “but we’d love to see a real game!” She’d given her sister an insurance pinch to make sure she wouldn’t say otherwise. And that was that. Every year, the three of them—eventually the four of them, once Sydelle appeared on the scene—would go to Eagles home games together. Maggie used to lay out her outfits days in advance
, mittens trimmed with fake fur and hats with fluffy pompoms, and once, if Rose remembered right, a miniature pair of tasseled cheerleader’s boots. Rose would make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and she’d put them in a lunch box, along with a thermos of hot chocolate. They’d bring blankets on the coldest days, and the three of them would huddle together, licking peanut butter off of their numb fingers, as their father would curse at every sack and fumble, then look guiltily at the girls and say, “Pardon my French.”

  “Pardon my French,” Rose murmured. Maggie looked at her curiously, then took another slip of her brandy and hunched herself lower into the seat.

  Their father and Sydelle were waiting for them by the ticket window. Michael Feller was dressed in jeans, an Eagles sweatshirt, and a down coat in the team colors of silver and green. Sydelle wore her customary look of icy discontent, a face full of makeup, and an ankle-length mink coat.

  “Maggie! Rose!” their father called out, handing them their tickets.

  “Girls,” said Sydelle, kissing the air three inches to the right of their cheeks, then reapplying her lipstick. Rose followed her stepmother up toward their seats. Listening to the click of Sydelle’s heels echo on the concrete, Rose wondered—and not for the first time—why in the world this woman had ever married her father. Sydelle Levine had been a divorcée in her mid-forties whose stockbroker husband had had the bad manners to leave her for his secretary. Très cliché, but Sydelle had survived the indignity, perhaps buoyed by the ample alimony payments her husband had eagerly agreed to (Rose imagined him thinking that even a million dollars a year was a small price to pay for years of Sydelle-free bliss). Michael Feller was eight years younger, a middle manager at a medium-sized bank. He’d be comfortable, but never rich. Plus, he had baggage—the dead wife, the daughters.

  What could the attraction have been? Rose had spent hours of her adolescence trying to puzzle it out in the years after Michael Feller and Sydelle Levine met in the Beth Shalom lobby (Sydelle had been on her way in for a five-hundred-dollar-a-plate fundraiser, and Michael had been on his way out of a Parents Without Partners meeting).