Herself

by Leslie Carroll

  David takes me into his arms. “I am so sorry, Tess.” I try not to ruin his linen shirt with my tears, then think oh, screw it, and let ’em rip. After all, he doesn’t care about breaking my heart; why should I give a damn about his designer shirt? “I’ve got to focus every ounce of energy on the re-election campaign,” he continues. “Suddenly, it’s not the walk in the park I had anticipated. And I do want you to be by my side for that. In fact, I don’t think I can win without you.”

  “You—what?” I think I know what he means by this last remark, but I still can’t believe my ears. “Are you really…you really have the balls to say to me right now…just after you tell me you want to break up…that you don’t have room on your plate, or your agenda, for a girlfriend—though you seemed to do just fine with one—me, I mean—during your last re-election campaign—but you want me to keep writing your speeches for you. That is what you just intimated, isn’t it?” I break our embrace to witness his red-faced ac knowledgment. Love and pity ebb from my heart as though someone had just yanked out a stopper.

  “My timing is horrid, I’ll admit, but you’re the best damn speechwriter I’ve ever had, and one of the best in the business. We’ve been a team for years. You know how I speak, how I think; you’re my other brain.”

  “If I were, I wouldn’t have just dumped me.”

  David releases an enormous sigh. I can see that he’s in pain, too. This isn’t easy for him either. “There’s nothing you could have done to change things, Tess. It’s me. I just can’t handle being in a relationship right now. I want time alone. Indefinite time. I’m not going to ask you to wait for me, because that’s another kind of cruel. It gives you hope when the truth is that I can’t give you any guarantees as to when, if ever, I will feel ready to have a lover again. You’re wonderful. You couldn’t be ‘better’ or ‘different’ in any way, expecting that might change things, because it’s not about you. And even if it did have something to do with your behavior in some way being incompatible with mine, people shouldn’t tie their personalities into pretzels because they think it’s who their partner wants them to be.”

  “You want to walk away from ‘us’ but you still want me to work with you nearly every day? Do you really think my heart can handle that? Seeing you all the time and not being able to kiss you any more, make love, feel your arms around me at the end of the day? Right this second I think it would be impossible.”

  David takes my hand in his, which serves to further reinforce my words. His touch, the feel of his skin against mine…never to experience that again feels huge right now; it trumps everything else.

  “Will you still work for me?” David asks softly. I find myself unable to slip my hand from his. I imagine it’s like knowing that you’re drinking a goblet of poison but it tastes sooo delicious that you can’t toss the glass aside. “You’re the best. Certainly the best for me.”

  A tiny, breathy snicker escapes my nostrils. “Best speechwriter, but not good enough to remain your lover. I know you said that your decision to end our relationship has nothing to do with me and everything to do with where your head is at, but right this minute it’s hard to really process and accept that.” Several moments of tense silence elapse. “I’ll have to hand you back your own words: I need time. And space. And after I take all the time and space I need—and I have no idea how long or how much that will be—I can’t guarantee you the response you want to hear. I haven’t entirely compartmentalized my personal and professional lives where you’re concerned. It started out that way, but by the time we were lovers for a while, the edges of everything became blurred, and black and white started bleeding into shades of gray, which is probably very unhealthy, except that I know that while I give my best to every client I’ve ever had, I love writing your speeches just that much more, in part because I also happen to love you. And…when you hand me wonderful gems of perspective like the subway stops from 110th Street to 50th Street equaling the three-mile cruise ship dumping limit, call me madcap, but I love you all the more.” I will myself not to burst into tears. “I love you because you see things the way I do—and I love you because you see things in ways I don’t.”

  We rise from the couch, and David gently kisses my forehead. I’ve always found that gesture terribly patronizing. “Take the time you need to reach a decision,” he says quietly. “Except that you know how fast the campaign has heated up, and I have a feeling Dobson is going to throw as many logs on the fire as he can afford. And the man’s a billionaire.”

  “You just squashed my heart like it was a cockroach, okay? I may be loyal but I’ve always felt that genuine loyalty is tied up with deep feelings for the person or cause that someone is loyal to. Please ignore that grammar,” I add, using the back of my hand to brush away the symmetrical floods of falling tears. “I’m not made of granite, David. Do me a favor,” I say, escorting him to the door. “Stay out of touch for a bit. Don’t call me. Don’t e-mail, don’t text me, don’t send me a letter. If I hear your voice or read your words, it will make my decision that much harder.”

  He leans in, as if he’s thinking of kissing me on the cheek, but I reel back slightly, avoiding it. If he touches me one more time, it will seem damn near impossible to piece together all the tiny shards of my shattered heart.

  I watch and wait until I can no longer hear his footsteps on the stairs. As I close my apartment door, it feels for all the world as though I’ve shut the book on a chapter of my life. History…her story…my story.

  I kick off my shoes and head up to my bedroom, throw myself onto the bed the way I did when I was a brokenhearted adolescent, and sob into the pillow as if someone very dear to me had just died.

  Hours later, long after daylight had turned to dusk, I am still fully clothed, lying face down on the duvet, though I’ve swapped my pillow for the drier one on the side of the bed that used to be David’s. I give myself permission to wallow in depression; after all, it’s healthier to grieve, to mourn the demise of a three-year relationship, than to soldier on as if nothing major has happened, right?

  When I awaken, still in my skirt and top, the sun and the exceptionally voluble birds on the tree outside my bedroom window mock me with their cheeriness. My mood is a lot more Ebenezer Scrooge than Little Mary Sunshine. About the only thing that would make me feel better this morning, apart from a few cups of strong black coffee, is a trip to Venus.

  Six

  Olivia deMarley is happily single and a bona fide heiress. She is also the only one of my four college suitemates with whom I have remained in touch all these years. She was known as “Livy” to her family and friends, but when she chose to turn her back on her trust fund in order to try an experiment in living the way she decided “real” people do, she took a nom de guerre for her day job—or rather night job—with which she put herself through Harvard, with a nice little nest egg to spare.

  “Venus” deMarley was born, not quite on a giant scallop shell—more like twined around a pole—at an unmarked boîte in Waltham called Pandora’s Box, where those in the know would pay a $35 cover with a two-drink minimum to see a rather striking array of exotic dancers, all culled from the dorm rooms of Boston’s nubile coeds. She brazenly began to call herself “Venus” full time after her father, a self-made millionaire with a heart condition who also owns a minor league baseball team—the Bronx Cheers—announced that she was dead to him. She continued to dance—heading out to Vegas for a while, and then moving from one upscale exclusive club to another in New York—until about eight years ago when she decided she’d had enough: enough gyrating in five-inch platform shoes (and not much else) for so many years, and more than enough money.

  Venus has the kind of looks that make grown men weak at the knees and give every female within a five-mile radius a severe case of Venus envy. She’s a whisper under six feet tall with a body like Julie Newmar in her Catwoman days and blazing red hair that nearly reaches her waist. She has never needed Botox and is in better physical shape than most M
arines. I love her because with me she has always been down to earth and has never pulled her punches. She’s the most sympathetic friend I’ve ever had, but also the most honest, with no qualms about telling me when she thinks I’ve blown something, whether it was my physics final, or attempting to convince a very drunk Paul Wilson that we were distantly related, which is why I couldn’t possibly date him. Pompous Paul and I, who were, of course, no relation to each other whatsoever, ended up going out for three weeks and four days of my junior year. I’m a terrible dissembler.

  “You sound like shit,” she says bluntly, upon hearing my voice on her answering machine. “Is everything okay, T?”

  “Not exactly.” Suddenly I burst into tears. Venus listens and patiently waits, knowing I will eventually say something once I manage to pull myself together. After about three to four minutes of gut-wracking sobs, I tell her about my conversation with David. “August sixth. It’s a bad karma date, you know. Remember Hiroshima. And the airline losing my bag on the first day of our big European vacation, remember: August sixth, 1986.”

  “But you said you didn’t expect David to drop that bomb on you yesterday? In retrospect, were there any signs? Any clues?”

  I think about her question for a moment. “Nothing. He’s been a bit wired about the ‘gay’ flap in the press, but so am I. Look…V…are you busy today? I really don’t want to rehash everything over the phone.” I glance at the model ship sitting atop my dresser. “And I can’t stand looking at this apartment. It feels like I haven’t been able to leave the scene of the crime.”

  Venus sighs apologetically. “I’m having the duplex painted, T. The place is covered with dropcloths and Poles.”

  I’m nonplussed at this comment. “V…you’re not turning your apartment into a private strip club, are you?”

  Venus laughs heartily. “Not poles. Poles. With a capital P. They’re the painters.” Suddenly she exclaims something in a foreign tongue.

  “Are you talking to me, V, because I don’t speak what ever that was?”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” she replies, and I’m still not sure if she’s talking to me. “I just told Ignatz, ‘Watch that roller; you’re dripping onto the floor.’ My Polish cleaning lady taught me a couple of important words and phrases when she found out that the workmen were from Lodz. Now they’re my new best friends. I discovered I really like the language—lots of shushing sounds—so I ordered the Berlitz CDs.”

  This bizarre conversation is at least entertaining. It’s taking my mind off my own mishegas—which reminds me—I owe my cousin Imogen a call. Whenever I talk to Imogen she always seems to be enmeshed in some sort of imbroglio. I have never known a woman to have so many life crises. Imogen has a way of magnifying a bee sting into a four-star disaster.

  “Tell you what,” Venus proposes. “I’ll come by this evening with a DVD and a bottle of something really good—make that two bottles. You supply the popcorn and the Chinese take-out menu.” Her cheer-up-Tessa tone shifts into sympathy. “Really, tell me if you’re not okay and I’ll send the Poles home. Can you hold out until this evening?”

  Suddenly I’m crying again. I was doing fine until she went back to being softly solicitous. “Yesh.” I snuffle. “I’b okay. Ride as raid.”

  “You’re not okay. You just lost your m’s, n’s, and t’s. Blow your nose, sweetie. I’ll wait.” Dutifully I reach for a Kleenex and comply. “Say something, T.”

  “I’ll see you this evening?”

  I can almost hear her smile. “Good girl. You didn’t say ‘evenig,’ so you’ve dried those tears. Any objection to Mouton Cadet?”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Imogen whines.

  “Actually, Imogen, I am calling you.”

  “Wait, let me put you on speakerphone.” I do. “You know what I mean,” she says, her volume adjusted so she can multitask. “Sorry, I’ve got a professional makeup artist here, and she can’t do her job while I’m holding the phone to my cheek.”

  “Oh. Cool. Do you have a special event to night?”

  “Nah…I’m going to get new passport pictures taken this afternoon.”

  “Imogen!”

  “What? You have to live with that photo for ten years! But we were talking about David. Why didn’t you call me as soon as he left the house last night?”

  “Because I didn’t have the strength,” I sigh. “You tend to be something of a force of nature.”

  “I know relationships,” she announces. “Do I know relationships or do I know relationships?”

  Being married for over twenty years might mean she knows something about her own relationship, but she didn’t know much about David and me, in fact. I tried to keep the two of them as far away from each other as possible. Imogen has never stopped talking about what a dish David is, what a catch; and how gorgeous our children would look. David considers Imogen to be just about the shallowest, most annoying person on the planet. Half the time I don’t know why I have anything to do with Imogen, but she’s my only relative who is more or less my age. In one way, we’ve sort of grown up together because we had no one else to play with at family gatherings like weddings and seders; but on the other hand, more often than not I feel like she and I are operating on different planets. At age twenty-three she married a Jewish guy—a wealthy periodontist from Great Neck—and squirted out three kids: Shauna is now about to enter Brandeis, and the twins, Jacob and Emily, are about to be bar/ bat mitzvahed. Imogen’s philosophy is that marriage is the cure for all ills; she is the self-proclaimed poster child for wedded bliss.

  I did give it my best shot, though the outcome was wildly different. At age twenty-six I married an Episcopalian scientist researching Down syndrome (sadly, the disease ran in his family) at the NIH until his program was drastically de-funded in 1991. We picked up everything and moved to Köln because Rob received a sizable grant from the University of Cologne. After a year there, despite my advanced degrees in history and poli-sci, I still was unable to get a decent job. The best I could do, having extremely limited German (the foreign language tapes just wouldn’t stick in my head), was a day job as a waitress at a Konditorei, hazardous duty, in fact, for it damaged both my waistline and my marriage.

  The language barrier and the capability of contributing only meager funds to our marital coffers took its toll. Soon, my disillusion was in real danger of becoming full-fledged depression. We never had kids because Rob was worried that they would end up with Down syndrome, and it broke his heart to see those poor babies and their families suffer so. Spending day and night in his university laboratory, his goal was to isolate the gene and find the cure. It was noble to say the least, and I wished him the very best (still do, actually); but there was nothing in Germany for me. I never saw him, had no kids, or even a pet, to care for, worked long hours on my feet for a pittance, and was developing a pot belly from noshing on nothing but pastries—not what I had envisioned doing with my Ivy League education.

  Rob and I began to quarrel regularly, mostly about money and my unhappiness with living in a country where I couldn’t get a job in any area remotely resembling my fields of study and past job experience. So with regrets, we agreed to legally call it a day, but I’ve been divorced for a decade and we still e-mail each other every now and then to say hello. Rob, marriage, the NIH, and Cologne now seem like another lifetime ago.

  “Why don’t I come into the city and cheer you up?” Imogen offers. “I could leave Sid with the kids and we could just have a girls’ night in. I tell you, I am so fried with the bar and bat mitzvah plans. Jacob wants either a basketball theme or something to do with Lord of the Rings. I told him the first was out of the question: The Musikoffs have already booked Madison Square Garden that weekend for Ben. Emily wants an equestrian theme, but we were thinking of renting the Temple of Dendur at the Met and they won’t let you bring horses into the museum. They’re trying my last nerve! I’m at my wits’ end. How am I supposed to settle on a venue when I can’t get the two of them to agre
e on anything? And by now, it’s impossible to get it together. You need time to plan these things. We started talking about it three years ago, like everyone else does, and somehow, the clock just ran down, and here I am with two squabbling twelve-year-olds who can’t even agree on a menu. I’ve hired a party planner but after months and months of wrangling we still have no venue, no theme, no caterer—at this rate I may have to print the invitations off the computer. It’s far too late to get something engraved. I’ll never live this down. You’ve never had kids, Tess, so you can’t understand my mortification. How am I going to show my face at the country club?”

  “Why don’t you just throw a luncheon by your pool after the synagogue ser vice?” I suggest.

  “What, are you kidding? You’re kidding, right? When was the last time you’ve been to a bar or bat mitzvah?”

  I give it barely a second’s consideration. “Shauna’s probably.”

  “Well, you remember what that was like? And no one rents out the Intrepid for bar mitzvahs anymore. That’s been passé for years.”

  “What do you care what anybody else does?”

  “You are kidding, right?” I really hope this isn’t her new catchphrase. Imogen tends to find a new one every six months or so. “I have to be on the Upper West Side late this afternoon anyway. I have an…appointment.”

  “Venus is coming over this evening,” I counter, knowing the two of them have never quite seen eye to eye on a number of subjects.

  “Oh, great!” Imogen crows. “I’ve been thinking about her lately. Do you think she would teach me how to pole dance? I saw a piece on the news—it’s supposed to be a hot new exercise craze. One of the women in my Torah study group swears by it. She lost thirty-five pounds and got her husband back after he’d been having it off with one of his paralegals. Whoops, that’s my other line. Gotta run! I’ll see you around seven-thirty!”