But no amount of self-reliance could help me a few weeks after I moved in and disaster hit.
It was a Saturday night and I was alone, naturally. Patty was off doing her thing and Steve was playing at a club that was way too loud and crowded with teenagers for me to consider visiting. I was in the dining room cutting out French toile curtains for the windows that face Mrs. Ipilito’s house and trying not to think about where Nick went on his date.
At least I was pretty sure it was a date. Around six, I heard him leave, taking the steps two at a time. He was whistling and he looked good. Freshly showered with damp hair. Denim shirt over khakis. Definitely date wear. Not that I was spying out my front window or anything.
Six turned into nine and nine turned into midnight. I had cut out all my curtains, plus linings, and had finished off an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Pistachio Pistachio on the theory that I hadn’t had any dinner, really, and it was hot. I refused to acknowledge that I was heartsick over the fact that Nick hadn’t returned, which meant he might be having fun with another woman.
I don’t know why it bothered me so much that night. Certainly, he’d gone out before. Yet before he had always returned around nine. If he saw my light on, he might stop by and help himself to whatever was in my fridge, make his usual perfunctory inquiries about Hugh (the going lie was that Hugh was rushing to finish the rough draft of his follow-up novel before our wedding and could not spare one minute of socializing). We’d chat about our days and then he’d look at his watch and leave.
I’d come to anticipate his visits, cherish them, even downing coffee so I could stay up way past my bedtime until I heard his knock. That night, though, I feared his knock might never come—ever.
Resigned, I slipped into a loose T-shirt, brushed my teeth, and went to bed only to be awakened by the creak of bedsprings above. Nick and whoever in the heat of passion, and quite a lot of passion at that.Throwing my pillow over my head, I tried to block out the sounds, tried not to imagine him with someone else, kissing her neck, moving his naked body against hers, wanting her, desiring her....
It was no use. I had to get out of there. I’d simply make myself a cup of tea, read a magazine in the living room, and wait for them to go to sleep. But no sooner did I turn on the kitchen light than I heard it. More than a drip, drip, drip. More like a gush, gush, gush. There was a leak. A serious leak at that.
My first thought was the freezer. Once when I was a teenager, I’d forgotten to close a basement freezer and it defrosted all over my parents’ basement floor. My freezer, however, was securely closed. Nor was it my sink or the bathroom. The leak was in the basement.
Sure enough, a pipe had burst. Already there was at least an inch of water on the floor. Water was creeping everywhere— around the washer and dryer, around the boiler. It had reached the bottom step and was climbing.
What to do? I couldn’t knock on Nick’s door and burst in on him with another woman. Not that I would have minded breaking them apart. But I had my dignity to consider and also Nick’s. This was truly a dilemma and I didn’t have the luxury of time to debate my options.
Finally, I had a stroke of brilliance. I could call him on the telephone.That way I wouldn’t actually have to see them together. So, I ran upstairs and did just that, listening to his phone ringing in the kitchen above me. No answer. Only his machine. I hysterically babbled something about an emergency with the pipes, hung up, and waited.
Nothing. He did not call me back and ask what was wrong. I did not hear him open his door and go to the basement. He didn’t even go to the kitchen to check the message. Now, I was no longer sad or embarrassed. I was infuriated. How could he ignore this crisis? How could he ignore me?
That was it. I had to go up there and get his help if I had to rip the door off the hinges myself. Loaded for bear, I dashed up to his apartment and banged like a fishwife.
“Open up, Nick. I know you’re in there. We have an emergency in the basement!”
After a few minutes came the sound of delicate footsteps and the click of his kitchen light going on.The door opened and there stood one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.Taller than I would have expected, but otherwise exactly as I imagined. Creamy white skin. Big pools of soft brown eyes. Black curling hair cascading over the shoulder of Nick’s T-shirt. I knew that T-shirt because it was the same one I borrowed the night I moved in. Only it was a bit larger on her.
“Elena,” I said.
She nodded, clearly pleased to be recognized. “Genie?”
Good. Nice to know that I was important enough for him to have mentioned me to his fiancée.
Fighting back my own flood of emotions, I said as calmly as possible, “I need to speak to Nick. We have an emergency in the basement.”
Elena blinked. “Genie?”
“Yes?”
“Genie. No Nick.”
Got that. I understood he wasn’t mine and never would be and that I felt as if my life, for now, had lost its spark. There was still the flooded basement to deal with. “I need Nick.” Gathering her English was about as good as my Greek, I pointed to the bedroom and added for emphasis, “In there.”
She shook her head. “No Nick.”
A man in the bedroom hollered something in Greek. Elena hollered back and suddenly Nick appeared in only his jeans. I was so mortified to have caught him in this intimate moment that I kept my gaze squarely on Elena.
“Genie,” he said. “Nick’s not here. I’m Adrien.”
Adrien? Taking a closer look, I realized the man in the jeans was not Nick, but a much younger version with a boyish lanky body and wild unkempt hair.
“Nick’s brother,” he said in flawless English. Like Nick, he spoke with hardly an accent. “What’s wrong?”
What’s wrong? I wanted to parrot back. You’re boinking your brother’s girlfriend, that’s what’s wrong.
Seeing my incomprehension, he said,“Nick let us use his place while Elena’s in town. I kidnapped her from her aunt’s.” He put his arm around Elena in the same loving way Nick sometimes puts his arm around me. “We’re not supposed to, uh, you know, until we get married next year. Elena comes from a very strict, very traditional Greek family.They’d disown her if they found out what we were doing here.”
She held up her hand, displaying a lovely sapphire-and-diamond ring. “Engaged!”
Yes, the one English word she knew. The one English word every woman knows, I suspected.
“You mean Nick’s not engaged to Elena?”
Adrien laughed. “Elena’s fifteen years younger than he is.” He translated this for her and she, too, laughed, shaking her head and saying, “Nick. Old.”
He was so not old. Nick was perfect. Handsome. Mature. Funny. Well read. Extremely sexy. He was fantastic!
Best of all, he was not engaged to Elena.
Adrien tapped me on the shoulder. “The emergency?”
Right. The emergency. "There’s a pipe in the basement that’s burst.Water’s rising.”
It didn’t matter anymore.The house could wash away for all I cared.Todd must have misunderstood. Nick was probably going to lease the apartment to Adrien after he fixed it up. And Patty was so busy with work, she didn’t pay attention to what I was saying when I asked about Nick’s fiancée.
The important thing was, Nick was free. Free!
Unless—awful thought—he was engaged to a different Elena.
No way to find out because Adrien was already talking to Nick on his cell. I could hear Nick spouting instructions as Adrien ran downstairs, leaving me alone with Elena in the kitchen.
“Does Nick have an Elena?” I asked.
She puzzled her brows, trying to comprehend.
“Nick,” I said. “Engaged?”
“No!” She shook her head vigorously. "No.” Then, tilting her head coyly, she asked, “You like Nick?”
What the heck. She didn’t understand English. “I do.”
She broke into a huge smile.“That’s good. Very
good for Nick. I’ll tell him.”
Chapter Twenty-three
The day after receiving the dean’s cake platter, I am at my desk when Alice barges in with another gift—this one in the form of a bombshell.
“You have to call me when Connie gets back to her office today. I wanna be here for that Kodak moment when she walks in and sees all these presents.”
“Connie’s coming back today?” I ask, trying to sound neither alarmed nor homicidal.
“Didn’t you know? She’s been home for weeks.”
“Let me guess. She flew in from London a month ago.”
Alice counts on her fingers. “Yeah. That would be right. Around the time when you moved to your new house. She hasn’t been to the office because of . . .Well, you know. It’s sort of embarrassing.”
“Right.” Alice and I have been operating on a nudge, nudge system. She pretends I know she knows I know and she pretends she knows I know she knows. It’s slightly confusing, but it’s best for avoidance of an all-out cat fight.
Well, I would cross the Connie bridge when I came to it. No point in working up a lather before then.
“By the way, your noon appointment called. She’s running on a tight schedule. A Kara Wesko from Bridgewater, New Jersey.”
Kara, the debate club captain who plans to be on the U.S. Supreme Court before she’s fifty. I’ve been looking forward to meeting her. No, really, I have.
The future Justice Wesko arrives at noon on the dot. Though a mere eighteen, she is in a full Prada suit, bag, and shoes, an outfit that by my estimation costs as much as my first car. Kara Wesko is going to be a laugh riot, I can tell.
“So nice to meet you.” She sticks out her hand and as I pop up to shake it I temporarily forget who is being interviewed—her or me. “Please, have a seat,” she says.
“Thank you,” I find myself replying and sit down.
As Kara clicks open her briefcase I catch her perfume—Chanel No. 5 and Clearasil.“About your pre-law program. I have concerns regarding the statistics course. Is that taught by a TA? Because I’ve read some very unflattering reviews online. It’s not easy learning statistics from someone whose native tongue is Polish.”
“You don’t have to take statistics if you don’t want to. Only economics majors are required.” Personally, you couldn’t make me take that damned course if you pulled out my fingernails. Also it was at 8:30 in the morning.This is college, for heaven’s sake.You’re supposed to sleep in.
“Statistics is essential for the upper-tier law schools like Stanford and Chicago.” She gives me a warning glare and makes a tick on her tablet. “You should have known that.”
I am about to automatically spout “sorry,” when I catch myself. I will not allow a kid who’s not even old enough to buy beer to assess my professional criteria.
“I see.” I counter with my own tick on a piece of scrap paper I was using to calculate the calorie content of the tuna salad I had for lunch.
Kara peers at my tick. “What are you doing?”
“This is a college interview, Kara. For some students it’s not important. For others, like you, it’s crucial.” Keep it snappy—the kid’s onto you, Genie. “Perhaps you can wow me with your renowned powers of persuasion, because, with only your application to go by, I have to say I’m not sure you’re right for Thoreau.”
“Not right for Thoreau?” She blows out her lips. “You’ve got to be kidding me.Thoreau’s my safety.”
We’ll just see about that. I slide out her essay and look puzzled. “You write here that you plan to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court by age fifty. How do you think you’ll be able to achieve that?”
“Quite easily. I have it completely planned out.” And from her briefcase, Kara produces a paper that she unfolds. It is a tidy timeline, typeset and everything, in the design of a yellow-brick road. “This is my life plan. Our guidance counselor encouraged us to make one up so that we could set goals.”
That Bridgewater, New Jersey, school system—literally laying out the path to success.
“See?” She is pointing to the drawing of an ivy-covered institution with the word Harvard written in crimson. “This is where I’ll go to undergrad.That is, if I get into my top choice.”
Yeah, yeah.You and every other senior in the top ten, I think, running my finger two steps down Kara’s yellow-brick road. I pass the U.S. Supreme Court clerkship and her inevitable stint at the U.S. Attorney’s Office to Darling, Smith & Kramer, a law firm that even I know is one of the top-grossing in Washington, D.C.
Patty, being Patty, had turned them down years before because of where they directed their political contributions. “What’s the deal with Darling, Smith & Kramer?”
“The deal is Darling, Smith & Kramer is the place to be. I’ll work my butt off there for fifteen years, make a name for myself and lots of money before I move on to circuit judge.”
I do the math in my head. “Which means you’ll work there from age twenty-five or so to age forty.”
Kara checks her timeline. "Exactly.”
“But it says here in your application that you plan on taking time off to have children—two, maybe three.”
“Because I don’t believe in day care. There’s no logic to having kids if you plunk them in day care when they’re three months old.”
I’m looking for clues in her expression. Does the future Ms. Sandra Day O’Connor not get it? “You can’t work for Darling, Smith & Kramer and take time off to raise kids.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll get fired, that’s why. What law firm wants to keep around an attorney who’s a no-show ten years running? Especially a firm that is regarded as a juggernaut.”
Kara bites her lip, then gets out her pen and starts erasing Circuit Judge,Third District after Darling, Smith & Kramer. “No problem. I’ll just have my kids after I’m forty.”
“When it’ll be harder to be pregnant.”
“Marcia Cross did it.”
I sigh. Marcia Cross. Sure. We all look up to Marcia Cross, married at forty-three, mother at forty-four. If she didn’t exist, we’d have to invent her.
“All I’m trying to show, Kara, is that life isn’t that easy to plan.
Nothing is guaranteed—nothing. So why not allow yourself some flexibility for all sorts of hurdles, like failure? Or like love? Or like not finding love between the ages of twenty-five and thirty?”
Kara is clearly hurt. Her eyes are scrunched up and her lower lip is pouting. Apparently, no one has dared to criticize her timeline before.
“I’m not doubting your capabilities, Kara,” I try to soothe. “I mean, we’re all redrawing the rules, we women. What was true for our grandmothers did not work for our mothers and probably won’t work for our daughters, either. There’s a good chance you won’t get married by age thirty. Actually, a big chance with the hours you’ll be working at Darling, Smith & . . .”
“Okay. I get it. I get it.” Kara holds up her hands. “Do you think I don’t know this? I know. But . . . it’s hard. What if I work too much and I never get married?”
Like the way you’re working now and have never had a date, I think. “So what?”
Kara blinks as if I’ve just trash-talked the pope. “So what?”
“Maybe you will get married. Maybe you won’t.That doesn’t mean your life will be a failure. As long as you’re doing what you love, as long as you don’t hold yourself back because you’re a single woman—and that’s sometimes what single women do, hold themselves back—you’ll have a fabulous, rich, fulfilling life ahead of you.”
Kara is silent.This is not what she expected from a college interview. I may even be holding her up from her appointment down the road. (Standard operating procedure—Thoreau as warm-up for Harvard.)
“Are you married?” she asks, swallowing tears.
“No.And I’m very happy. I have friends and a great job where I get to meet bright students like you. I almost have it all.” And I do—almost have it
all, that is. I have Nick and Patty and Todd and vacations on the Cape and nights out with Steve and my crazy family. "I even own a house. Part of a fabulous Victorian on a golf course with breathtaking views of the city.”
“Cool.”
“I bought it with a friend of mine. Actually, a guy who works with my brother.”
She shoots a glance at the photos of Hugh and me on my bookshelf. “Not your boyfriend?”
“No. Never. Ha!”Teenage girls. Such silly romantics.
“But you own a house with him?”
“As a matter of fact, he lives right upstairs.” I make another meaningless tick on my tablet.
“Is he cute?”
"Who, Nick? Oh my god, yes.” Crap! I can’t believe I just said that out loud. This is a student interview here. I have completely lost my senses. "I mean . . .”
“I know what you mean.” Kara smiles and begins to fold up her timeline.“I may be only a senior in high school, but you don’t have to tell me what’s really going on. I’ll remember that if I’m still unmarried and middle-aged like you, buy a house with a guy. Then get him hooked.”
"No . . . it’s not like that.” Hey! Did she just call me middle-aged?
That’s when I hear the high nasal giggle Connie emits only when she’s flirting. Which means she hasn’t come back to work all by herself.
I bet she’s brought Hugh.
Chapter Twenty-four
This is my resolution: I am not going to make a big deal about Connie and Hugh finally making their grand entrance as a couple. I mean, it had to happen eventually and now everyone will know at last that Hugh’s not marrying me, that he’s hooked up with Connie, who is no doubt flashing her ring, the huge Spencer diamond, and giggling about how Hugh swept her off her feet.
Yes. It’ll be fine. How can it not be?
Too bad I just spent $15 to FedEx him all the mementos he’d left behind at my old apartment—razor, toothbrush, shaving cream, a pair of shorts, his extra pair of glasses, his complete set of Nicholas Sparks novels (which he used for “inspiration” for Hopeful, Kansas), his Krups coffee grinder, and his seasoned Calphalon omelet pan (or, at least, it was seasoned until I stuck it in the dishwasher).
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